This was a low move from a company that previously has a great track record with developers
You are on the wrong track. Ask VB or web developers about their track records with MS.
VB developers had an extremely long and successful run of it and even now you can still developm in VB.net. And given that VB.net is basically a CLR compatible dialect it means you can work, reuse & integrate with every other.NET language and technology. That isn't to say developing in VB / VB.net was ever a rational or sane thing to do but I don't understand why anyone should complain about Microsoft's support over the years.
As for HTML development, well... If anyone was dumb enough to follow the corrupted version of HTML that Microsoft was promoting and not nimble enough to jump when MS finally adopted standards then more fool them.
Yes, and you think al Qaeda et al wouldn't expect that and use people who did not fall in this "high risk" group? You'd be spending most of your effort vetting the exact passengers who would never be chosen for a real attack and wavign through those who were in the real risk group. Any kind of ethnic profiling creates a corresponding loophole
Sure they would, if they could find such people. Chances are they'd soon get on the radar for other reasons. Even if they didn't it still wouldn't mean they'd waltz through security since other measures metal detectors, bag xrays, secondary random screening, behavioural analysis etc are unlikely to be waived.
At the end of the day it's a huge exercise in game theory. If you can score passengers by risk and sort them into groups such (for example) that group A would only contain 1 in 100 terrorists, group B would only contain 10 in 100 terrorists and group C would contain 89 out of 100 terrorists, would you miss more terrorists by screening all groups equally or screening groups B and C more rigorously than A. Sure some people might still slip through if you're looking at group C more than group A, but would it catch more than not sorting by group in the first place. That's the big question.
What's the point of that? How many times does it have to be pointed out that the 911 hijackers used clean, apparently legit, passports. Suicide bombers tend not to have criminal records. They can board the planes under their own names.
A fast track doesn't mean "no security" so your point is invalid. They would still pass through security checks and still be subject to random checks but some of the process could be automated. Chances are that non nationals would not be eligible as participants.
Just security theatre. Has a "high risk" passenger ever actually been found to be carrying a bomb or whatever/ It's basically ethnic profiling. Whites and Chinese will go through the quick low-risk lane, brown people will go through the more invasive high risk lane. Makes people FEEL safer, achieves nothing as far as security is concerned
If it hadn't escaped your notice, radical muslims tend on the whole to be from certain countries and have certain ethnic backgrounds. I see no issue with taking that into account when screening however disagreeable it may to be to the vast majority who are not radicals or terrorists. Not that the screening would necessarily work that way at least overtly but I would not be surprised if it did covertly scoring passengers on age / nationality / sex / manner of ticket purchase / travel history / watchlist names and other factors.
So,... Futuristic eye scanners will make this all better how exactly???
They'll make a difference because they authenticate that the person holding the passport is the person on the passport. Schipol airport has been running a eye scan fast track for years now. It requires a person to register and pay a fee for the service which people are happy to do when it means not standing in a queue for 20 minutes every time.
If you don't want to use the scheme you join the normal queue like everyone else. Of course you still benefit since participants aren't standing in the same queue as you are.
As for your other concerns, well it appears you're objecting about what happens at the moment, therefore I would have thought you would welcome anything that speeds your passage through the system and minimizes the need for patdowns or other measures which are often mandatory and supplemented by random extra measures at present. You think the TSA likes patting down kids and old ladies or forcing mothers to drink breast milk? I bet every airport security manager wishes they had greater flexibility and could focus more on the potentially high risk passengers and less on the low risk ones. If technology assists with that (a fact that would have to be demonstrated) then it will benefit everyone.
What's the problem if meets its stated goals of speeding up security without compromising it? Obviously that's a massive assumption which should be backed up by empirical study. It certainly isn't hard to see what a pain in the ass the current system is for passengers and staff. People don't like bullshit random patdowns or bag searches and I bet staff don't like doing it either when the security risk for certain passengers is minimal and their attentions should be focused elsewhere.
Do you mean to say that the fact that some people may use the millions of passwords that are out in the street if more far fetched than believing the system has been hacked?
I'd say it is debatable at best. As for your advice, since there are no evidence yet, I'd advise you to actually follow it.
I have no issue with the assertion that many people use the same password and id in various places. I do take issue in the automatic association of two hacks when no evidence or reason is known to think there is a connection. Perhaps if every single person reporting fraud says "yes I was a PS3 PSN account holder", the evidence might at least be circumstantial but at present it's just weak conjecture. It certainly doesn't make much sense to believe someone who might have stolen millions of accounts would use them to engage in some minor in-game billing fraud.
It's more likely to be a billing bug, or an exploit specific to the system and game in which it has occurred. The fact it's occuring in one game would suggest that someone is diddling the in-game purchase system. If purchase requests are sent from the client in the clear or some guessable cipher and items can be "gifted" from one iTunes user to another then it isn't hard to see how it may have occurred. I assume the in game points have some value to the scammer, either being a commodity that can be sold to other players or used to make other things that can then be sold.
More likely it is a vulnerability in the game or iTunes which is being exploited. No need to leap to more far fetched conclusions without some evidence to support it.
Just because an app is popular doesn't mean you shouldn't down vote it. Doing so will put pressure on manufacturers to fix any perceived flaws. Personally I don't see any reason that either Skype or Facebook should perform any worse under android than they do under any other smart phone OS. I know that Skype wants to run automatically at startup which is an annoying feature but it can be disabled.
I don't find it hard. Stick to the documented APIs and test your application with multiple display resolutions in the emulator, and it seems to me you'll be fine. Unless you're trying to modify the behaviour of system apps (something which, if you tried to do it, would get your app banned from the iOS app store).
About the only thing "hard" about Android is making layouts that scale properly for different DPI screens and also the rotation behaviour. I have never had to change actual program logic to cope with one device differently from another and I expect that's true for virtually every application except those like games. I doubt the situation with games on Android is any worse than it is for iOS either, given that different iPhones run at different speeds too.
It's not hard to develop apps for Android. And do you know what happens to apps that affect performance, crash or whatever? They get downvoted into oblivion and ignored.
There's no problem with that. Clearly your desktop is not performance driven and you don't need to compromise. People who do want those things, or media players, or games clearly do need performance and shouldn't have to compromise.
Sony should apologise (and have apologised) for lax security. They shouldn't need to apologise that a bunch of adolescents choose to make them the hack du jour. Any company the size of Sony would suffer the same problems if people were hammering on them and their subsiduaries. The assholes doing this will tire of hacking peripheral marketing websites and will move on, but hopefully not before a few of them get caught and thrown in the clink for it.
Well it's not just gaming. It's basically the entire desktop experience that benefits from better drivers. The likes of Ubunu and GNOME 3 make heavy use of GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap, clutter and OpenGL to produce a modern compositing desktop. If your graphics driver is non-optimal you're going to suffer an inferior experience.
In an ideal world perhaps everything is open source, but we're not in the ideal world. If I happen to have own some hardware which is better served by the closed driver than the open, I'll pick the closed every time. Of course I'd prefer the open source one if it worked but I'm not a masochist.
Yes, you can switch...after every bootup, because this is the default interface at bootup. Not to mention switching applications without using the taskbar will bring back this...hideous contraption. What would posses them to use such a garish color scheme. That is FAR too minimalistic, kinda like modern art...unsettling...
Default doesn't mean you can't configure it. I would be very surprised if you weren't able to switch it on or off. It may even be that if you flip to a desktop view it just remembers that state the next time you start.
Do you think these scammers would pay the slightest attention to what Apple thinks? They're already treading a fine line with legality (e.g. matrix sites are just pyramid schemes) already and it doesn't appear to bother them.
Yes you could do that if you're a masochist who wants to suffer an inferior, possibly unusable gaming experience. Meanwhile people who want to use their hardware to its potential rather than in some gimped, buggy form will take any driver that's going whether it is open or closed.
If I'm a radio station and I walk into an Apple store and buy 10 iPads as prizes, they are mine to do with as I see fit. If I run a competition where the prize is a free iPad then that's my choice. What the hell can Apple do about it? I expect the situation is a little more tricky for gift cards, but again it's not hard to buy gift cards from various places including online, so how are Apple supposed know?
Maybe their intent is to stop matrix scams, dutch auctions etc. but I don't see how it would help there either. People running these scams are hardly likely to care what Apple thinks.
Finally, if they're cracking down on the term "free", why not do it where everyone knows the term is abused - phone contracts. i.e. Get a FREE iphone when you sign up for some ludicrous 2 year contract and so on. In the example link's case the free phone merely requires the user pay £1512 to receive it and service, and that doesn't even include any data!
The problem is OpenOffice is hitting some url on the openoffice.org domain to check for updates. In order to push users into the new world you need the domain and that url to push an update. Once they get the update you can change the url or domain or even the product to anything you like. Though in truth I think OpenOffice is a far better name than LibreOffice.
It's not just the name that matters but the domain. I bet all those OpenOffice installs are phoning home looking for updates and not finding any. Libre Office might be known about by geeks but its doubtful that the more mainstream users of OpenOffice would know about it or have the confidence / intention of switching even if they did.
See comment on "testing" - if we simply targeted standards, we'd never deliver product.
BTW, this happens in other industries too. Life is harder than college - get used to it.
The correct way to develop web content is against the standards and make exceptions where necessary for a browser. It may be that QA sort browsers into various tiers so some browsers need more attention / hacks than others. But always code to the standard first. If it turns out IE has a problem with some CSS rule, or Firefox has a race condition for something else you can surgically deal with that one problem and leave the rest standard. AJAX tools like JQuery help too especially for perrenial headaches like XMLHttpRequest
I bet that now they wish they never made that deal with The Devil Microsoft.
I guess the time to draw that conclusion is next year when there are some handsets out that use MS phone software. If they still don't sell Nokia is in deep shit. If sales pick up and Nokia launches a brace of tablets & other WP7 devices to huge acclaim then it will look smart.
WindowBuilder is good and certainly better than nothing but as is common with Java visual editors, it is very easy to confuse, especially if you attempt relative layouts. Relative layouts are so frustrating to do with elements sticking to the wrong siblings that usually it's easier to avoid them altogether.
Java desperately needs something equivalent to partial classes, or a declarative UI language, or at least an enforced MVP pattern because these editors can be confused or broken easily because they generate code into the same file that users are editing by hand.
How about recognize this sort of thing is happening a lot of late (GWT, NaCl and others) and design a proper low level runtime and API set to properly accommodate it.
Slashdot Mirror
You are on the wrong track. Ask VB or web developers about their track records with MS.
VB developers had an extremely long and successful run of it and even now you can still developm in VB.net. And given that VB.net is basically a CLR compatible dialect it means you can work, reuse & integrate with every other .NET language and technology. That isn't to say developing in VB / VB.net was ever a rational or sane thing to do but I don't understand why anyone should complain about Microsoft's support over the years.
As for HTML development, well... If anyone was dumb enough to follow the corrupted version of HTML that Microsoft was promoting and not nimble enough to jump when MS finally adopted standards then more fool them.
Yes, and you think al Qaeda et al wouldn't expect that and use people who did not fall in this "high risk" group? You'd be spending most of your effort vetting the exact passengers who would never be chosen for a real attack and wavign through those who were in the real risk group. Any kind of ethnic profiling creates a corresponding loophole
Sure they would, if they could find such people. Chances are they'd soon get on the radar for other reasons. Even if they didn't it still wouldn't mean they'd waltz through security since other measures metal detectors, bag xrays, secondary random screening, behavioural analysis etc are unlikely to be waived.
At the end of the day it's a huge exercise in game theory. If you can score passengers by risk and sort them into groups such (for example) that group A would only contain 1 in 100 terrorists, group B would only contain 10 in 100 terrorists and group C would contain 89 out of 100 terrorists, would you miss more terrorists by screening all groups equally or screening groups B and C more rigorously than A. Sure some people might still slip through if you're looking at group C more than group A, but would it catch more than not sorting by group in the first place. That's the big question.
What's the point of that? How many times does it have to be pointed out that the 911 hijackers used clean, apparently legit, passports. Suicide bombers tend not to have criminal records. They can board the planes under their own names.
A fast track doesn't mean "no security" so your point is invalid. They would still pass through security checks and still be subject to random checks but some of the process could be automated. Chances are that non nationals would not be eligible as participants.
Just security theatre. Has a "high risk" passenger ever actually been found to be carrying a bomb or whatever/ It's basically ethnic profiling. Whites and Chinese will go through the quick low-risk lane, brown people will go through the more invasive high risk lane. Makes people FEEL safer, achieves nothing as far as security is concerned
If it hadn't escaped your notice, radical muslims tend on the whole to be from certain countries and have certain ethnic backgrounds. I see no issue with taking that into account when screening however disagreeable it may to be to the vast majority who are not radicals or terrorists. Not that the screening would necessarily work that way at least overtly but I would not be surprised if it did covertly scoring passengers on age / nationality / sex / manner of ticket purchase / travel history / watchlist names and other factors.
So,... Futuristic eye scanners will make this all better how exactly???
They'll make a difference because they authenticate that the person holding the passport is the person on the passport. Schipol airport has been running a eye scan fast track for years now. It requires a person to register and pay a fee for the service which people are happy to do when it means not standing in a queue for 20 minutes every time.
If you don't want to use the scheme you join the normal queue like everyone else. Of course you still benefit since participants aren't standing in the same queue as you are.
As for your other concerns, well it appears you're objecting about what happens at the moment, therefore I would have thought you would welcome anything that speeds your passage through the system and minimizes the need for patdowns or other measures which are often mandatory and supplemented by random extra measures at present. You think the TSA likes patting down kids and old ladies or forcing mothers to drink breast milk? I bet every airport security manager wishes they had greater flexibility and could focus more on the potentially high risk passengers and less on the low risk ones. If technology assists with that (a fact that would have to be demonstrated) then it will benefit everyone.
Just...wow...
What's the problem if meets its stated goals of speeding up security without compromising it? Obviously that's a massive assumption which should be backed up by empirical study. It certainly isn't hard to see what a pain in the ass the current system is for passengers and staff. People don't like bullshit random patdowns or bag searches and I bet staff don't like doing it either when the security risk for certain passengers is minimal and their attentions should be focused elsewhere.
The world is truly better off without H.264
Why? It's a good codec as demonstrated by its wide adoption.
Do you mean to say that the fact that some people may use the millions of passwords that are out in the street if more far fetched than believing the system has been hacked?
I'd say it is debatable at best. As for your advice, since there are no evidence yet, I'd advise you to actually follow it.
I have no issue with the assertion that many people use the same password and id in various places. I do take issue in the automatic association of two hacks when no evidence or reason is known to think there is a connection. Perhaps if every single person reporting fraud says "yes I was a PS3 PSN account holder", the evidence might at least be circumstantial but at present it's just weak conjecture. It certainly doesn't make much sense to believe someone who might have stolen millions of accounts would use them to engage in some minor in-game billing fraud.
It's more likely to be a billing bug, or an exploit specific to the system and game in which it has occurred. The fact it's occuring in one game would suggest that someone is diddling the in-game purchase system. If purchase requests are sent from the client in the clear or some guessable cipher and items can be "gifted" from one iTunes user to another then it isn't hard to see how it may have occurred. I assume the in game points have some value to the scammer, either being a commodity that can be sold to other players or used to make other things that can then be sold.
More likely it is a vulnerability in the game or iTunes which is being exploited. No need to leap to more far fetched conclusions without some evidence to support it.
Just because an app is popular doesn't mean you shouldn't down vote it. Doing so will put pressure on manufacturers to fix any perceived flaws. Personally I don't see any reason that either Skype or Facebook should perform any worse under android than they do under any other smart phone OS. I know that Skype wants to run automatically at startup which is an annoying feature but it can be disabled.
I don't find it hard. Stick to the documented APIs and test your application with multiple display resolutions in the emulator, and it seems to me you'll be fine. Unless you're trying to modify the behaviour of system apps (something which, if you tried to do it, would get your app banned from the iOS app store).
About the only thing "hard" about Android is making layouts that scale properly for different DPI screens and also the rotation behaviour. I have never had to change actual program logic to cope with one device differently from another and I expect that's true for virtually every application except those like games. I doubt the situation with games on Android is any worse than it is for iOS either, given that different iPhones run at different speeds too.
It's not hard to develop apps for Android. And do you know what happens to apps that affect performance, crash or whatever? They get downvoted into oblivion and ignored.
There's no problem with that. Clearly your desktop is not performance driven and you don't need to compromise. People who do want those things, or media players, or games clearly do need performance and shouldn't have to compromise.
Sony should apologise (and have apologised) for lax security. They shouldn't need to apologise that a bunch of adolescents choose to make them the hack du jour. Any company the size of Sony would suffer the same problems if people were hammering on them and their subsiduaries. The assholes doing this will tire of hacking peripheral marketing websites and will move on, but hopefully not before a few of them get caught and thrown in the clink for it.
In an ideal world perhaps everything is open source, but we're not in the ideal world. If I happen to have own some hardware which is better served by the closed driver than the open, I'll pick the closed every time. Of course I'd prefer the open source one if it worked but I'm not a masochist.
Yes, you can switch...after every bootup, because this is the default interface at bootup. Not to mention switching applications without using the taskbar will bring back this...hideous contraption. What would posses them to use such a garish color scheme. That is FAR too minimalistic, kinda like modern art...unsettling...
Default doesn't mean you can't configure it. I would be very surprised if you weren't able to switch it on or off. It may even be that if you flip to a desktop view it just remembers that state the next time you start.
Do you think these scammers would pay the slightest attention to what Apple thinks? They're already treading a fine line with legality (e.g. matrix sites are just pyramid schemes) already and it doesn't appear to bother them.
Or we could simply not use non-free code.
Yes you could do that if you're a masochist who wants to suffer an inferior, possibly unusable gaming experience. Meanwhile people who want to use their hardware to its potential rather than in some gimped, buggy form will take any driver that's going whether it is open or closed.
Maybe their intent is to stop matrix scams, dutch auctions etc. but I don't see how it would help there either. People running these scams are hardly likely to care what Apple thinks.
Finally, if they're cracking down on the term "free", why not do it where everyone knows the term is abused - phone contracts. i.e. Get a FREE iphone when you sign up for some ludicrous 2 year contract and so on. In the example link's case the free phone merely requires the user pay £1512 to receive it and service, and that doesn't even include any data!
The problem is OpenOffice is hitting some url on the openoffice.org domain to check for updates. In order to push users into the new world you need the domain and that url to push an update. Once they get the update you can change the url or domain or even the product to anything you like. Though in truth I think OpenOffice is a far better name than LibreOffice.
It's not just the name that matters but the domain. I bet all those OpenOffice installs are phoning home looking for updates and not finding any. Libre Office might be known about by geeks but its doubtful that the more mainstream users of OpenOffice would know about it or have the confidence / intention of switching even if they did.
See comment on "testing" - if we simply targeted standards, we'd never deliver product.
BTW, this happens in other industries too. Life is harder than college - get used to it.
The correct way to develop web content is against the standards and make exceptions where necessary for a browser. It may be that QA sort browsers into various tiers so some browsers need more attention / hacks than others. But always code to the standard first. If it turns out IE has a problem with some CSS rule, or Firefox has a race condition for something else you can surgically deal with that one problem and leave the rest standard. AJAX tools like JQuery help too especially for perrenial headaches like XMLHttpRequest
I bet that now they wish they never made that deal with The Devil Microsoft.
I guess the time to draw that conclusion is next year when there are some handsets out that use MS phone software. If they still don't sell Nokia is in deep shit. If sales pick up and Nokia launches a brace of tablets & other WP7 devices to huge acclaim then it will look smart.
Java desperately needs something equivalent to partial classes, or a declarative UI language, or at least an enforced MVP pattern because these editors can be confused or broken easily because they generate code into the same file that users are editing by hand.
How about recognize this sort of thing is happening a lot of late (GWT, NaCl and others) and design a proper low level runtime and API set to properly accommodate it.
Port the iOS APIs and run apps from any webhost. Obviously there would be limitations but I wonder what Apple could do about it.