"IT Guys" would really appreciate if they could have a) an App store of their own where they can put up their company local solutions and
They already can. Apple has solutions for enterprises.
That I know of; these come from third parties; require the device to be set up by the IT department (so don't apply easily to devices bought by employees) and they come with a whole heavy policy and management system. That is not a substitute for simply going into a settings menu and adding or deleting a repository.
b) ways to black or white list solutions from the Apple App store so that people don't install erotic applications on their work computer.
You mean give them more work to do. Rather than just accept that the Apple App Store already bans porn. They have playboy, but it's a version without so much as a naked breast.
Of course any device with a web browser can access hard core porn... Only way you can deal with that is disciplinary measures after it's been discovered.
I very specifically said "erotic" rather than "pornographic" the two words are different and pornographic is pretty much legally defined as "whatever we feel like today". There are plenty of apps like this one and this one and this one and this one (admittedly a podcast; but..) this one which would be considered pornographic in a Muslim country whilst many of the apps which have been banned would be considered acceptable on a work PC in Europe (they ban, for example, apps about breast feeding). If you think that picking a random, capricious, uptight Californian's idea of "pornographic" is going to be sufficient to cover your ass in a corporate environment then I have a training course you need to take.
One way or another ("I saw it in the app store; I thought that meant IT approved it"; "that application is required for our anti-discrimination training; how could you ban it") using the app store as a corporate standard without doing filtering is going to open you to lawsuits.
It's better than the passive-aggressive editorials (i.e., "It will be interesting to see if...") that are normally present in/. summaries.
This 150%. Everybody has a point of view, even if it's mostly belief in the existence of objective facts. We shouldn't try to pretend that objective reporting is impossible, but at the same time, it's much easier to understand where someone is coming from if they are up front and open about their opinion. Only idiots believe in 100% fair and balanced reporting.
I think it depends on what you mean by "less attractive to it's customers". I think that if, for example, making it less attractive to some developers meant making it more attractive to the "shiny shiny" brigade then Apple would be straight there because there are more "shiny shiny" people than developers, so they make more money that way. However, if they went far enough that the applications were reduced enough to make the platform unattractive to the non developers that would probably not be what they wanted and not be to their benefit. Getting rid of developers who make applications which are too complicated may actually be good for Apple short term since it means less chance of the non developers downloading something that confuses them.
Apple's problem is that this isn't a straight linear control and there's lots of intertia. It's perfectly possible that they start closing down their platform, there's no visible effect, and applications are still being produced. In the meantime the really interested CS types who are creating tools for producing applications have gone elsewhere. This will have a long delayed effect that fewer applications will be produced in five years time. However, by then it will be too late to get these tool people back. This means that it's perfectly possible for Apple to be acting against Apple's long term interest merely by acting in Apple's short term interest.
What Fmobus said, with two comments; firstly I have actually used various different versions of this configuration
take the distributor's release but filter it, e.g. manually copying after internal testing or using RedHat's SpaceWalk
take the distributor's release and just add a second external repository (e.g. CentOS + EPEL)
take the distributor's release and just add an internal (corporate) repository
In each case, whether you use DPKG or RPM for your packages, you just have to distribute public keys and URLs to your new repositories to each machine where you want to use them. You can also even delete the distribution's own public keys and replace them with your own and then insist on signing all of the distribution's packages before they are accepted onto your own systems.
Depending on circumstances (mission critical application / person who wants to have non standard multimedia / corporation with dedicated wierd applications) each of these options can be really really useful.
More like asking, "Why would I want a vehicle I can't use to bring groceries home?"
I think more like "Why would I want a vehicle I can't use for transporting radioactive materials?". It's true that some specialists need full Word documents and especially legacy marketing presentations which have to be rendered perfectly (serious marketing people have switched to iPads quite a while ago; they can't be seen to be out of touch; however they still keep a Mac with office available for special cases) but for 99.9% of the population Google apps is actually a better choice simply because it has fewer options to confuse them. Those people will be happier if they don't have to deal with the complexity of having two different kinds of application on one operating system.
You may not have guessed this, but there is more that one person posting to Slashdot. There are even some people who think that having a central place for applications (should we call it a "repository" since it'll be a place to keep all the software you haven't installed yet maybe we should have a tool for installing and managing software from it.. something like a "package manager", if you can imagine) is a good idea at the same time as thinking that handing over sole control of which applications can be in that repository to one single company is a bad idea.
If Apple supported having multiple app-stores set up on your computer, as Ubuntu does, and people could just choose who else to get software from, I guess everybody would be more than happy. In particular, "IT Guys" would really appreciate if they could have a) an App store of their own where they can put up their company local solutions and b) ways to black or white list solutions from the Apple App store so that people don't install erotic applications on their work computer.
Apple is not totally stupid. This will be done in the same way as cooking a frog in a pot, gradually raising the temperature until it's too late for the frog to jump. Of course a few will, but the only way developers jumping to other platforms will have a serious effect is if they jump en-masse to a proper free platform where their numbers can have a real effect. Even a big jump to Windows will have no influence since Microsoft is basically copying Apple with these ideas.
By a strange coincidence; the Register has a round up of four voice assistants for Android several of which are older than Siri (and so presumably where Apple copied the idea from, if we follow Apple's lawsuit logic) and several of which were better than Siri, at least in categories the register tested.
What's telling about this is how much the Apple / Microsoft press is coming out as if Siri was a big new thing. It's pretty clear that the big boys who divided up the computing market are out to get Google for disturbing the peace. This kind of false "Apple is an innovation leader" story is pretty clearly designed to play to the judges and juries in cases such as the ones about the Samsung tablets.
This is actually the most interesting. We know that treatment works; we know that sometimes screening finds cancer. We also know that people who are screened get more cancer even when people are a bit careful about the methodology. This means that, statistically, it seems screening causes cancer! Disturbing if true.
Humans are not a significant cause of Global Warming
Global Warming isn't bad
Global Warming only affects dark people.
Global Warming only affects working people and below.
The main one is probably the last one. There are a bunch of rich guys like the Koch brothers who own large parts of the politicians and believe that they will be able to buy their way through a global warming crisis. These are the ones who can pay for the lobbies and publicity people to get the scientifically ignorant to believe one of the other four.
It's like playing whack-a-mole.
Very few moles can afford their own police forces and can buy up armies of people to appear on TV as experts. The level of intimidation of climate scientists that goes on is amazing.
There are a bunch of zero rated AC comments replying to mine which seem to be under the impression that the statement I gave is my own idea. It isn't. I merely restated one point from the paper.
For the record I do think that providing an extremely low risk / extremely low interest rate investment facility is quite likely to be a worthwhile thing for a government to do. Many people who are incapable of understanding the full details of how markets work will need to be able to look after themselves when they will have gone beyond the stage of being able to earn. I can also even imagine that it's worthwhile doing the same for big companies since only the government can provide that safety. I have no idea if treasury bonds are needed for that or if other mechanisms (bank guarantees for normal people; bond guarantees and emergency loans for bigger ones??) might be better.
And finally, for this AC here; if the bonds exist then the debt has not gone. The bonds are debt as has been pointed out elsewhere. The question in the original paper is more or less "should we keep treasury bonds going even if we don't need them" and the answer given in the original paper is "yes". That is equivalent to "we should have some government debt, even if we don't actually need it".
Anonymous has been practising Darwinistic selection for some time. Those who currently survive are likely to be a bit more careful than those that have been caught so far.
I wouldn't like to accuse him of being an economist, but he's certainly been pretty professionally successful from predicting the downturn; let me present to you Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I especially like the fact that he actually made vast amounts of money by predicting the economic crisis. Of course, at any one time there are always tens of people predicting disaster so maybe he just got lucky?
Taking it that you are answering where to find safe investments; it's not just that we say that credit ratings are bullshit. Let's see what Standard and Poor say:
Standard & Poor's credit ratings are not intended to indicate the value, suitability, or merit of an investment
I would understand those 140k bonds as rather "these people are our particularly close friends". At the point where US treasury bonds start failing, I wouldn't be surprised if a vast amount of those 140k started failing too.
Godwin has clearly stated that his law doesn't apply to legitimate comparisons with Nazi Germany. At the point where the police are acquiring military grade spying equipment in a country where listening in on phone calls and using thermal cameras against citizens have been interpreted as not requiring judicial oversight I don't possibly see how you could Godwin this discussion.
It's worth noting that US treasuries and such were also AAA rated securities. And that society does not have an obligation nor the power to deliver risk free investment.
"Risk free" is of course relative. Tomorrow a near light speed rock thrown out of a distant supernova might suddenly crash through the earth destroying everything and so we might as well all get drunk today (this seems to be a major consideration in my investment planning).
Having said that what do you mean by "society does not have an obligation? The US constitution pretty much guarantees this. This is done for a very specific and somewhat good reason. Basically, the cost of debt is directly related to it's risk. By making the debt risk free, the US is able to pay much lower interest rates than almost anyone else and thus reduce taxation. Having made that promise, the US could be considered by some to have an "obligation" to keep it.
Could you elaborate why we need rock stable bonds to at all? Just so that very rich people can multiply their wealth?
Well, that's probably one of the main uses.
However, a key use was to allow little people like us to keep wealth from when they are working (and typically have more than they need) until when they retire (and typically have less). Basically, if you invest in stocks, the big people will rip you off since they all have insider information and so you need to be pretty knowlegdable to get a better return than a bond.
If there is no US debt, implying no need for Treasury bonds, that means there's nothing as clearly stable as Treasury bonds for people to invest in?
There FTFY. Suddenly if you actually read it the article doesn't seem as stupid as if you completely misrepresent it.
We are clearly going to get a big bunch of amateur economists commenting on this one. Lots of people who understand nothing of economics (and thus would be perfectly qualified to teach economics in most universities, it often seems). Given that this is a tech site and not an economics maybe let's at least try to read the article and then the Wikipedia article about whatever we are posting about and at least attempt to flame those that don't. Nobody up for that?
If we look at this a bit further, the obvious alternative to US treasuries would have been AAA rated securities, such as the collateralized debt obligations which more or less caused the current economic crisis. That makes this paper pretty foresighted.
Because it's a what if question which is close enough to reality that we might learn something interesting.
For example, a Slashdot poster might point out a modular extensible browser that was almost ready for an open source release but was killed by the open sourcing of Netscape. Alternatively, someone who was working at Microsoft at the time might post about how this completely screwed up their strategic plan for the next five years and lead to an argument between divisions which was what finally lead to the Vista debacle and Apple taking the lead in the personal computing market.
My wife doesn't use her HTC for email. In fact, she hardly uses it for anything except text message, phone calls,...
If this is true then it is an IOS fanboy's wet dream. Your wife would be better off with a Nokia series 40 phone and you are just proving Android tends to end up unused
Now, if this guy weren't such an obvious Apple fanboy and decided to do some real work instead of just one that shows what he wants it to show, he would track down a sample population and find out how many actually give a fuck.
We give a fuck because this tells us how out of date the installed base is and so, for example, how many vulnerabilities are likely out there.
What would be better would be if he mentioned
more models
what cygenomod version was available (e.g. blue rathern than yellow if the latest version of cygenomod was available.
Slashdot Mirror
"IT Guys" would really appreciate if they could have a) an App store of their own where they can put up their company local solutions and
They already can. Apple has solutions for enterprises.
That I know of; these come from third parties; require the device to be set up by the IT department (so don't apply easily to devices bought by employees) and they come with a whole heavy policy and management system. That is not a substitute for simply going into a settings menu and adding or deleting a repository.
b) ways to black or white list solutions from the Apple App store so that people don't install erotic applications on their work computer.
You mean give them more work to do. Rather than just accept that the Apple App Store already bans porn. They have playboy, but it's a version without so much as a naked breast.
Of course any device with a web browser can access hard core porn... Only way you can deal with that is disciplinary measures after it's been discovered.
I very specifically said "erotic" rather than "pornographic" the two words are different and pornographic is pretty much legally defined as "whatever we feel like today". There are plenty of apps like this one and this one and this one and this one (admittedly a podcast; but..) this one which would be considered pornographic in a Muslim country whilst many of the apps which have been banned would be considered acceptable on a work PC in Europe (they ban, for example, apps about breast feeding). If you think that picking a random, capricious, uptight Californian's idea of "pornographic" is going to be sufficient to cover your ass in a corporate environment then I have a training course you need to take. One way or another ("I saw it in the app store; I thought that meant IT approved it"; "that application is required for our anti-discrimination training; how could you ban it") using the app store as a corporate standard without doing filtering is going to open you to lawsuits.
It's better than the passive-aggressive editorials (i.e., "It will be interesting to see if...") that are normally present in /. summaries.
This 150%. Everybody has a point of view, even if it's mostly belief in the existence of objective facts. We shouldn't try to pretend that objective reporting is impossible, but at the same time, it's much easier to understand where someone is coming from if they are up front and open about their opinion. Only idiots believe in 100% fair and balanced reporting.
I think it depends on what you mean by "less attractive to it's customers". I think that if, for example, making it less attractive to some developers meant making it more attractive to the "shiny shiny" brigade then Apple would be straight there because there are more "shiny shiny" people than developers, so they make more money that way. However, if they went far enough that the applications were reduced enough to make the platform unattractive to the non developers that would probably not be what they wanted and not be to their benefit. Getting rid of developers who make applications which are too complicated may actually be good for Apple short term since it means less chance of the non developers downloading something that confuses them.
Apple's problem is that this isn't a straight linear control and there's lots of intertia. It's perfectly possible that they start closing down their platform, there's no visible effect, and applications are still being produced. In the meantime the really interested CS types who are creating tools for producing applications have gone elsewhere. This will have a long delayed effect that fewer applications will be produced in five years time. However, by then it will be too late to get these tool people back. This means that it's perfectly possible for Apple to be acting against Apple's long term interest merely by acting in Apple's short term interest.
What Fmobus said, with two comments; firstly I have actually used various different versions of this configuration
In each case, whether you use DPKG or RPM for your packages, you just have to distribute public keys and URLs to your new repositories to each machine where you want to use them. You can also even delete the distribution's own public keys and replace them with your own and then insist on signing all of the distribution's packages before they are accepted onto your own systems.
Depending on circumstances (mission critical application / person who wants to have non standard multimedia / corporation with dedicated wierd applications) each of these options can be really really useful.
More like asking, "Why would I want a vehicle I can't use to bring groceries home?"
I think more like "Why would I want a vehicle I can't use for transporting radioactive materials?". It's true that some specialists need full Word documents and especially legacy marketing presentations which have to be rendered perfectly (serious marketing people have switched to iPads quite a while ago; they can't be seen to be out of touch; however they still keep a Mac with office available for special cases) but for 99.9% of the population Google apps is actually a better choice simply because it has fewer options to confuse them. Those people will be happier if they don't have to deal with the complexity of having two different kinds of application on one operating system.
Their test equipment was also Good Stuff.
Their test equipment is still good stuff. It's just that HP is called Agilent nowadays.
You may not have guessed this, but there is more that one person posting to Slashdot. There are even some people who think that having a central place for applications (should we call it a "repository" since it'll be a place to keep all the software you haven't installed yet maybe we should have a tool for installing and managing software from it.. something like a "package manager", if you can imagine) is a good idea at the same time as thinking that handing over sole control of which applications can be in that repository to one single company is a bad idea.
If Apple supported having multiple app-stores set up on your computer, as Ubuntu does, and people could just choose who else to get software from, I guess everybody would be more than happy. In particular, "IT Guys" would really appreciate if they could have a) an App store of their own where they can put up their company local solutions and b) ways to black or white list solutions from the Apple App store so that people don't install erotic applications on their work computer.
Apple is not totally stupid. This will be done in the same way as cooking a frog in a pot, gradually raising the temperature until it's too late for the frog to jump. Of course a few will, but the only way developers jumping to other platforms will have a serious effect is if they jump en-masse to a proper free platform where their numbers can have a real effect. Even a big jump to Windows will have no influence since Microsoft is basically copying Apple with these ideas.
By a strange coincidence; the Register has a round up of four voice assistants for Android several of which are older than Siri (and so presumably where Apple copied the idea from, if we follow Apple's lawsuit logic) and several of which were better than Siri, at least in categories the register tested.
What's telling about this is how much the Apple / Microsoft press is coming out as if Siri was a big new thing. It's pretty clear that the big boys who divided up the computing market are out to get Google for disturbing the peace. This kind of false "Apple is an innovation leader" story is pretty clearly designed to play to the judges and juries in cases such as the ones about the Samsung tablets.
This is actually the most interesting. We know that treatment works; we know that sometimes screening finds cancer. We also know that people who are screened get more cancer even when people are a bit careful about the methodology. This means that, statistically, it seems screening causes cancer! Disturbing if true.
Are you saying that the entire scientific community is being intimidated..
this.
Actually there are several more, try this list
The main one is probably the last one. There are a bunch of rich guys like the Koch brothers who own large parts of the politicians and believe that they will be able to buy their way through a global warming crisis. These are the ones who can pay for the lobbies and publicity people to get the scientifically ignorant to believe one of the other four.
It's like playing whack-a-mole.
Very few moles can afford their own police forces and can buy up armies of people to appear on TV as experts. The level of intimidation of climate scientists that goes on is amazing.
There are a bunch of zero rated AC comments replying to mine which seem to be under the impression that the statement I gave is my own idea. It isn't. I merely restated one point from the paper.
For the record I do think that providing an extremely low risk / extremely low interest rate investment facility is quite likely to be a worthwhile thing for a government to do. Many people who are incapable of understanding the full details of how markets work will need to be able to look after themselves when they will have gone beyond the stage of being able to earn. I can also even imagine that it's worthwhile doing the same for big companies since only the government can provide that safety. I have no idea if treasury bonds are needed for that or if other mechanisms (bank guarantees for normal people; bond guarantees and emergency loans for bigger ones??) might be better.
And finally, for this AC here; if the bonds exist then the debt has not gone. The bonds are debt as has been pointed out elsewhere. The question in the original paper is more or less "should we keep treasury bonds going even if we don't need them" and the answer given in the original paper is "yes". That is equivalent to "we should have some government debt, even if we don't actually need it".
Yes; thanks for that one. It's cute.
Anonymous has been practising Darwinistic selection for some time. Those who currently survive are likely to be a bit more careful than those that have been caught so far.
I wouldn't like to accuse him of being an economist, but he's certainly been pretty professionally successful from predicting the downturn; let me present to you Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I especially like the fact that he actually made vast amounts of money by predicting the economic crisis. Of course, at any one time there are always tens of people predicting disaster so maybe he just got lucky?
Standard & Poor's credit ratings are not intended to indicate the value, suitability, or merit of an investment
I would understand those 140k bonds as rather "these people are our particularly close friends". At the point where US treasury bonds start failing, I wouldn't be surprised if a vast amount of those 140k started failing too.
How the HELL do you NOT Godwin this kind of crap?
Godwin has clearly stated that his law doesn't apply to legitimate comparisons with Nazi Germany. At the point where the police are acquiring military grade spying equipment in a country where listening in on phone calls and using thermal cameras against citizens have been interpreted as not requiring judicial oversight I don't possibly see how you could Godwin this discussion.
There are plenty of investment vehicles that are just as stable as treasury bonds.
Please name some. I'd honestly be interested to hear.
The thing you should have learned over the past few years is that credit ratings are total bullshit.
That was exactly what I was saying about CDOs. Those were the AAA rated things that collapsed causing the current economic crisis.
It's worth noting that US treasuries and such were also AAA rated securities. And that society does not have an obligation nor the power to deliver risk free investment.
"Risk free" is of course relative. Tomorrow a near light speed rock thrown out of a distant supernova might suddenly crash through the earth destroying everything and so we might as well all get drunk today (this seems to be a major consideration in my investment planning).
Having said that what do you mean by "society does not have an obligation? The US constitution pretty much guarantees this. This is done for a very specific and somewhat good reason. Basically, the cost of debt is directly related to it's risk. By making the debt risk free, the US is able to pay much lower interest rates than almost anyone else and thus reduce taxation. Having made that promise, the US could be considered by some to have an "obligation" to keep it.
Could you elaborate why we need rock stable bonds to at all? Just so that very rich people can multiply their wealth?
Well, that's probably one of the main uses.
However, a key use was to allow little people like us to keep wealth from when they are working (and typically have more than they need) until when they retire (and typically have less). Basically, if you invest in stocks, the big people will rip you off since they all have insider information and so you need to be pretty knowlegdable to get a better return than a bond.
If there is no US debt, implying no need for Treasury bonds, that means there's nothing as clearly stable as Treasury bonds for people to invest in?
There FTFY. Suddenly if you actually read it the article doesn't seem as stupid as if you completely misrepresent it.
We are clearly going to get a big bunch of amateur economists commenting on this one. Lots of people who understand nothing of economics (and thus would be perfectly qualified to teach economics in most universities, it often seems). Given that this is a tech site and not an economics maybe let's at least try to read the article and then the Wikipedia article about whatever we are posting about and at least attempt to flame those that don't. Nobody up for that?
If we look at this a bit further, the obvious alternative to US treasuries would have been AAA rated securities, such as the collateralized debt obligations which more or less caused the current economic crisis. That makes this paper pretty foresighted.
Because it's a what if question which is close enough to reality that we might learn something interesting.
For example, a Slashdot poster might point out a modular extensible browser that was almost ready for an open source release but was killed by the open sourcing of Netscape. Alternatively, someone who was working at Microsoft at the time might post about how this completely screwed up their strategic plan for the next five years and lead to an argument between divisions which was what finally lead to the Vista debacle and Apple taking the lead in the personal computing market.
We might even end up learning something.
My wife doesn't use her HTC for email. In fact, she hardly uses it for anything except text message, phone calls,...
If this is true then it is an IOS fanboy's wet dream. Your wife would be better off with a Nokia series 40 phone and you are just proving Android tends to end up unused
Now, if this guy weren't such an obvious Apple fanboy and decided to do some real work instead of just one that shows what he wants it to show, he would track down a sample population and find out how many actually give a fuck.
We give a fuck because this tells us how out of date the installed base is and so, for example, how many vulnerabilities are likely out there.
What would be better would be if he mentioned
In other words; if it's not offline then it isn't a backup. If your cloud provider tells you otherwise then fire your cloud provider.