You are clearly too young. The '80s (tailing off into early '90s) was full of casual hardware geeks, and real touchy-feely magazines to support those geeks' interests. The building of computers to control random devices was all the rage, and a kid from school wouldn't stop telling me about his speech-controlled curtains, light switches, etc. Who didn't build a makeshift keyboard controlled by tapping fingers/thumb together on a glove, so you could type anywhere?
To reiterate, Twitter/Facebook is for people who TALK LOUDLY ABOUT EVERY LITTLE THING THEY DO. And those who aren't paying attention might even be fooled into thinking these people are unique. See also Apple.
Packet radio was a greater bureaucratic mare in the UK, mind, and I wasn't licensed until years after I stopped taking a proper interest(!).
There's such an obvious difference between a satisfied customer and a fanboy that it takes an Apple fanboy to blur it.
I'm a satisfied customer of Microsoft as far as Windows 7 goes, but I am not "loyal" to Microsoft and I'm not a "fan"atic of the brand. If tomorrow they release another product, I'll wait and see and take advantage of any trials. Same applies to Apple. This simply doesn't fit in with pre-ordering or first month ordering frenzies.
or the introduction of the iPad which again went from 0 to todays 2 million in a matter of weeks.
That's the best evidence of good marketing I've come across. It's an unproven device which few people had even seen, let alone had the chance to try out, yet preorders and early orders came in by the hundreds of thousands.
People want to conform to a majority brand: the Apple brand offers social interoperability. No-one does real work on an Apple iDevice - they're for the guy in Starbucks always writing his first bestseller, taken mainstream. If you think you're the exception, you're on the spaceship with the management consultants (how I miss '70s and '80s Apple..).
Don't tell me you like the fact that if you want to start a radio station you need a certified course, a license...
Well, I have an amateur "radio station", though not a broadcast station, and indeed for it to be legal I had to pass some exams (no course) and obtain a free licence - the lower classes are a weekend's work from nothing. I certainly don't need sponsors, towers or a studio to speak to people in hundreds of countries across the world.
Your fiction of "two men with basic electronics knowledge" would land you in jail in every country on this planet.
For a broadcast station? No. For example, the FCC (US) and Radiocoms Agency (now Ofcom) used to care quite a lot about pirate stations - yet they still operated and became famous. Now they are much less concerned about pirate stations, and they continue to pop up.
But radio waves don't respect borders, and it's the stations hosted in a neighbouring country to which an unofficial blind eye is turned which have the most interesting status.
N:M isn't about what wikileaks tell you but about the fact that there can even be a wikileaks.
Wikileaks' troubled history has proven that there cannot be a Wikileaks. When it's actually up, we see it to contain mostly low-level tactical/technical sources and very little confirming strategy. Documents are demanded but not made fully available during endless funding drives, and money is channeled without the very transparency it expects from others.
Yes, all it needs is a mining operation, a billion dollar chip fab, ten thousand Chinese slave labourers, thousands of miles of cabling, routing hubs in every major city (often connected to mysterious boxes no-one's allowed to question), a few spacecraft, half a dozen multinationals, and the political stability and friendliness of all nations housing this equipment... for information to be "free".
No, if it's freedom you're worried about, give me radio any day. All you need is two men with basic electronics knowledge, a cupboard of old parts and a vague understanding of the ionosphere. Modern freedom of speech is nothing more than the freedom to speak sufficiently quietly that those with real power drown you out.
(For a case study in how much freedom the Internet really gives you, observe the history of Wikileaks. It's interesting to observe that, no matter how much people feel the Internet has opened our eyes and with the exception of a couple of web sites which can barely stay afloat, there's very little we couldn't have found from traditional well-known sources.)
As a radio ham and general "get off my lawn!" sort of person, I still feel guilty when I catch up to some TV programme online. There's something very wasteful (at an instant) about using a one-to-one link for what should have been multicast/broadcast.
It's really weird to see more recently arrived 'net users not even stop to contemplate bandwidth allocation. Or throw away food or packaging. The trend's reversing, but at a snail's pace. We can assume there is an infinite amount of sunlight (beyond Earth) - anything else is something we're quite fortunate to have right now.
As a mathematician, I find big endian to make no sense whatever.
Little endian is how bits in a byte work, brings uniformity, and allows me to do interesting conversions / extended arithmetic using that uniformity.
Big endian allows, in one particular way, byte order as stored in a computer to reflect "how some humans read". Big enders might as well argue for EBCDIC.
You're entirely correct, sorry! Inferring wrongly from a high-level flow diagram, I thought the second die was used for PCIe/memory, with graphics on the CPU die.
Which is the problem. Senior medical (doctor and nursing) staff have historically managed junior medical and paramedic staff in the NHS. Then it was discovered that people with a Business Studies degree from Ex-Polytechnic of Bumpton were much easier for government to manipulate as the NHS became a political vehicle for anything from PPP to immigration policy.
Hooray! I wouldn't say no to one, though I haven't read a copy for a while... a family member bought me a copy last time I was in hospital (see, I'm still on topic), helping me to maintain a smile at the "wrong" time.
What mainstream UK newspaper, when read seriously, does not imply that the reader is stupid? I'm not even sure what you mean by "seriously" - from time to time I read The Sun and The Guardian "seriously" in that I take their impacts seriously, their covered topics seriously and put some serious critical thought into their reporting and why they're expressing a particular angle.
But I don't have a mindless allegiance (which is I think what you mean by "seriously") to the editorial stance of either - I think they're both jokes. The loyal GROLIES would be worse, as it usually has a position in which it can do more harm.
It's also worth clarifying that they're not legislative documents in the formal sense, but they do form part of the legislative process. To not prepare such preliminary documents with care and attention at every stage inevitably means you'll end up with a bad legislative document.
It's not so vague - if the proposal were to merely consider "doing something", that's all the document would need to say.
Though yes, you're right, there was the intention to mislead, even if it was by taking advantage of laziness. As long as everyone is clear that they're equally to blame:-).
I maintain that it's needlessly complex - shouldn't the elected/Parliament/ propose then discuss legislation in conjuction with its constituents? The Commission's legislative roles make for a poor separation and needless complexity of (i.e. corruptibility of) powers. But I'm not looking for a debate on that right now.
If document B says, "extends document A with provisions C" and you sign it without reading document A and all A's dependencies, you aren't "misled"; you are lazy, incompetent and negligent. If the process is unnecessarily complex (and this is the EU, so that goes without saying), you simply refuse to consider the document on process grounds. You don't sign something because some words look vaguely appealing to lobbyists^Wvoters and those lobbyists^Wvoters told you to do so.
I expect I consider the Sun as much nonsense as you do but:
xenophobic mindset of the UK's unemployed/uneducated/unwashed masses
It is a hypocritical subset of the Guardian-reading middle class who manage (I'd hardly call it "employment") all the business and government schemes which create the society we live in while pretending to sympathise with the oiks they don't have to live near/help out anyway.
You might have been looking for working class rather than unemployed, and very misled on certain issues rather than unedcuated (recall what Feynman said about experts speaking outside their field?). I guess my point here is that there's nothing especially stupid about the Sun reader and nothing especially bright about the stereotypical opposite to the Sun reader - when us vs them gangs are formed, the real threat is ignored: useless power-hungry bureaucrats, per article topic.
the Sun newspaper ran a campaign where they published the names and addresses of registered sex offenders, with quotes like "Is your neighbour a child molester?".
Everyone who has browsed porn has at least one "she sure LOOKS under 18!" image on their hard drive. This is enough to make you a registered sex offender. Therefore everyone's freedom essentially hangs on whether the police want to investigate your computer and whether you can afford an excellent lawyer. IOW, the paedophile scare is a fallback method of eliminating anyone who becomes inconvenient to government, corporation or even a sufficiently devious neighbour.
It's been engineered very cleverly and it's not just Sun readers who are convinced their children are going to be raped on every street corner - the Sun's just combining this with the other tool of distracting people from uniting against import threats by divide and conquer techniques: turn readers on their own neighbourhood!
Ah, you're you on this thread too lol.. hello again! I'll finish off this one, since you had the courtesy to reply everywhere. After this post, it's good night from me.
The FUD to signal ratio here is literally 1:0. I thought you would be above that.
I don't think we agree on what FUD is. "Don't give all your business and pleasure information to one entity unless you trust that entity outright because they have the potential to abuse the information," is sound advice backed up by millennia of examples illustrating human nature. Are you the sort who would cry "FUD!" if I told you that compulsory ID cards would be harmful? Would it be wrong to use examples from history to show what happens when the government has the ability to track you and build databases about you, because somehow this ID card scheme is uncorruptible, unlike any other?
Actually, 2 baskets which is 1 more than most businesses.
True, and it's good to hear - but whether the basket simply broke would be the least of my worries, unless my data was very trivial. To take an example from long ago, I used to write time&billing software which was supplied to the Top 4 (excluding AA, not everyone's blind!) accounting firms. We'd happily bounce back and forth datasets representing hundreds of millions of dollars of work - "happily" because there was a clear trust that we saw it, they saw it, and no-one else would have the opportunity to see it.
I'd just like to imagine their faces for one moment if I said, "Oh, yeah, we're moving to the cloud, so all your stuff's on Google." Perhaps they had things they'd want to hide from *arbitrary entity dependent on where Google stores its data or has information sharing agreements with*, perhaps they had no reason to trust a third party with little to lose from fucking them over, or perhaps they just knew the principle of least disclosure. Today the Information Commissioner's Office would also throw a fit because I'm exporting certain personal data outside of the EU zone to an area with non-existent data protection legislation (or who knows where?). So you learn to take responsibility for the privacy of the data provided to you and generated by you, and you do so with integrity and honesty, knowing you're doing the best job possible for your client.
And, thing is, I try to respect the privacy of everyone's data as much as I respect those more strictly managed accounting records, because it's never my business to judge the sensitivity of someone else's data.
The beauty of Google Apps for Businesses (for us, anyway) is it actually enhances our Office experience. We saved millions in licensing fees vs upgrading to Office 2010. Collaborative editing has been a boon for our productivity. Our employees documents can be accessed anywhere, anytime by them on whatever device they happen to have.
This sounds like marketing spiel. Especially because "anywhere, anytime" is precisely not a description of the availability of the Internet, unless your employees do little more than move from well-connected office to city home. And "whatever device" better be a sufficiently modern device to handle the dynamic HTML Google Apps uses - I had a horrible experience even trying to send mail with GMail on a 4-year-old mobile device a couple of days ago. You'd hope for graceful degradation to an HTML4 form with a straight submit button, right? Ah well.
I do wonder why you panicked about upgrading to Office 2010 if you use so few office features that you could make do with Google Apps. Did you try Sharepoint, for example? I recognise within a few hours of using Google Apps that I'd be using hours of productivity over a week getting over its clunkiness, lack of features and other limitations inherent to running software in browser - it would worry me to hear of a business which invests "millions" in Office licences not taking account of the cost of productivity loss. Even open/quick check of something/close feels agonising when it can't be all over in 5 seconds - it's like I'm back at a 15 year old clunker.
I'll be sure to get the message to myself living in 2006 not to let anybody untrusted on the LAN. Again, how can this be exploited over the internet?
You asked for "remotely exploitable", so I gave you "remotely exploitable", i.e. not requiring physical access/login credentials. Try to be clear about what you mean in future. It's sweet that you never take your Mac out of "the LAN", but many people have laptops and wander around both with cables and wirelessly, connect directly to an ISP which provides IP information via DHCP on a virtual subnet (e.g. some cable services), etc. Just because your idea of cracking may be annoying the guy across the continent who just beat you at some FPS, for others it's the much more determined effort of exploiting one machine behind a company network to get at all the others.
I'll go forward one year: <a href="help:runscript=MacHelp.help/Contents/Resources/ English.lproj/shrd/OpnApp.scpt string='echo Insert command to add startup script to shell here">this link would have worked nicely around 2004</a> - can't do an automatic redirect on/. but you get the idea. But you're going to tell me somehow that that exploit's not valid either, right? Perhaps because I haven't actually typed out a malicious script in place of the 'echo'?
You just made my point for me. You freely admit that saying software is relatively unexploited because of its market share is a fallacy.
I've always limited my argument to client machines. Marketshare is a valid reason for targetting client machines, but not an established reason for targetting server machines. Stop generalising.
Doesn't mean jack until it's in the wild. A proof-of-concept set up in somebodies computer lab with controlled circumstances do not a real exploit make. Surely you realize this.
Completely incorrect - you're just annoyed because no-one's breaking the law for your pleasure. What differentiates us from the monkey is that we are able to think in the abstract. IOW, don't need a physical hammer in front of us to accept that one can exist and have an idea of how it works: we can be shown drawings or be given descriptions and use our cognitive skills to decide whether it is feasible.
I'm done with you. You maintained my interest for a while (thank you!), but you're veering off into jumping up and down with random "See and that means I've won the argument!!!!" and it makes you look silly. Quit while you're not ahead;-).
you get guarantees about the confidentiality of your documents
Just to check, what proportion of Google's yearly revenue comes from you? That may provide an accurate measure of how likely it is they'll help defend against private or government requests for data access. Or even hint to you that it's happened.
Also, how often are you allowed to audit their systems? See, most professional industries have independent external auditors/inspectors when third parties provide services, so it'd be almost insane if the answer were "never".
For all you know, I could be sitting right now with access to Google's intranet, having identified who you are by correlating your search behaviour with certain Slashdot postings, giggling at your porn browsing history and noting down some less-than-savoury links you clicked on. See, I might want to tip the police off if you ever happen to compete with my family's area of business (I mean, I could just look at your work directly to gain the upper hand, but then it might be too obvious what's going on - much better to get you discredited with the Sex Offender card).
Why exactly do you trust me not to do that? It's not as if I'm planting evidence - I'm just hypothetically pointing out one or two pictures you might accidentally still have in your cache because some bastard on some site posted something illegal and you didn't realise what the link pointed to. Once they've taken your computer as evidence and confirmed this, who is going to listen when you say, "The guy at Google was after me! It's a conspiracy!"
There'd be no conspiracy. It'd just be me, hypothetically destroying you, because I can, and because you thought it was wise to give so much personal and professional data (never mix...) to one organisation with 20,000 employees.
And that's before we get to how a corrupt government can do something similar if you dream of joining any protests, cooperating in any campaigns or writing in any significant political publications. So many eggs, so one basket!
I'm just pointing out that every one of your arguments applies to Windows. Your points may all be valid, and if you establish that they are, I may use them in advocating Windows.
Also, when is a virus not a trojan, precisely? IOW, on a computer not connected to a network, how could any malware be classified as a virus? Consider that every software product requires you to consciously run some software with an overt legitimate purpose. You do also realise that many trojans end up spamming computers with attachments containing malware, yes? Isn't self-replication the definition of a virus? Or is it only a virus if the receiver doesn't have to do anything to execute the malware? But then we're back to the initial problem that no virus can be received on a non-connected computer.
Perhaps you about to define a virus as, "something an OS X machine could never get".
Slashdot Mirror
Sir,
You are clearly too young. The '80s (tailing off into early '90s) was full of casual hardware geeks, and real touchy-feely magazines to support those geeks' interests. The building of computers to control random devices was all the rage, and a kid from school wouldn't stop telling me about his speech-controlled curtains, light switches, etc. Who didn't build a makeshift keyboard controlled by tapping fingers/thumb together on a glove, so you could type anywhere?
To reiterate, Twitter/Facebook is for people who TALK LOUDLY ABOUT EVERY LITTLE THING THEY DO. And those who aren't paying attention might even be fooled into thinking these people are unique. See also Apple.
Packet radio was a greater bureaucratic mare in the UK, mind, and I wasn't licensed until years after I stopped taking a proper interest(!).
You've obviously not been watching the last 20 to 30 years of military engagement. BP know exactly who owns the ocean - it's you who doesn't.
There's such an obvious difference between a satisfied customer and a fanboy that it takes an Apple fanboy to blur it.
I'm a satisfied customer of Microsoft as far as Windows 7 goes, but I am not "loyal" to Microsoft and I'm not a "fan"atic of the brand. If tomorrow they release another product, I'll wait and see and take advantage of any trials. Same applies to Apple. This simply doesn't fit in with pre-ordering or first month ordering frenzies.
or the introduction of the iPad which again went from 0 to todays 2 million in a matter of weeks.
That's the best evidence of good marketing I've come across. It's an unproven device which few people had even seen, let alone had the chance to try out, yet preorders and early orders came in by the hundreds of thousands.
People want to conform to a majority brand: the Apple brand offers social interoperability. No-one does real work on an Apple iDevice - they're for the guy in Starbucks always writing his first bestseller, taken mainstream. If you think you're the exception, you're on the spaceship with the management consultants (how I miss '70s and '80s Apple..).
Is Windows purchased because it is technically the best, or because it has the best marketing team aimed at the target market?
Ask yourself the same question about the iPad.
All Apple's taught us is that it's possible to market something so well that even "I gotta be different, man!" geeks are taken in.
Don't tell me you like the fact that if you want to start a radio station you need a certified course, a license...
Well, I have an amateur "radio station", though not a broadcast station, and indeed for it to be legal I had to pass some exams (no course) and obtain a free licence - the lower classes are a weekend's work from nothing. I certainly don't need sponsors, towers or a studio to speak to people in hundreds of countries across the world.
Your fiction of "two men with basic electronics knowledge" would land you in jail in every country on this planet.
For a broadcast station? No. For example, the FCC (US) and Radiocoms Agency (now Ofcom) used to care quite a lot about pirate stations - yet they still operated and became famous. Now they are much less concerned about pirate stations, and they continue to pop up.
But radio waves don't respect borders, and it's the stations hosted in a neighbouring country to which an unofficial blind eye is turned which have the most interesting status.
N:M isn't about what wikileaks tell you but about the fact that there can even be a wikileaks.
Wikileaks' troubled history has proven that there cannot be a Wikileaks. When it's actually up, we see it to contain mostly low-level tactical/technical sources and very little confirming strategy. Documents are demanded but not made fully available during endless funding drives, and money is channeled without the very transparency it expects from others.
Yes, all it needs is a mining operation, a billion dollar chip fab, ten thousand Chinese slave labourers, thousands of miles of cabling, routing hubs in every major city (often connected to mysterious boxes no-one's allowed to question), a few spacecraft, half a dozen multinationals, and the political stability and friendliness of all nations housing this equipment... for information to be "free".
No, if it's freedom you're worried about, give me radio any day. All you need is two men with basic electronics knowledge, a cupboard of old parts and a vague understanding of the ionosphere. Modern freedom of speech is nothing more than the freedom to speak sufficiently quietly that those with real power drown you out.
(For a case study in how much freedom the Internet really gives you, observe the history of Wikileaks. It's interesting to observe that, no matter how much people feel the Internet has opened our eyes and with the exception of a couple of web sites which can barely stay afloat, there's very little we couldn't have found from traditional well-known sources.)
As a radio ham and general "get off my lawn!" sort of person, I still feel guilty when I catch up to some TV programme online. There's something very wasteful (at an instant) about using a one-to-one link for what should have been multicast/broadcast.
It's really weird to see more recently arrived 'net users not even stop to contemplate bandwidth allocation. Or throw away food or packaging. The trend's reversing, but at a snail's pace. We can assume there is an infinite amount of sunlight (beyond Earth) - anything else is something we're quite fortunate to have right now.
Also BCD! The E and IC just slipped in there on the endians, I swear. Dunno what's wrong with me today.
As a mathematician, I find big endian to make no sense whatever.
Little endian is how bits in a byte work, brings uniformity, and allows me to do interesting conversions / extended arithmetic using that uniformity.
Big endian allows, in one particular way, byte order as stored in a computer to reflect "how some humans read". Big enders might as well argue for EBCDIC.
Were we only houhynhyms...
You're entirely correct, sorry! Inferring wrongly from a high-level flow diagram, I thought the second die was used for PCIe/memory, with graphics on the CPU die.
Just like my Core i3 sitting about 20 inches to the left, then. Yes, I know they're incorporating a better GPU, but they're touting too much as new.
Which is the problem. Senior medical (doctor and nursing) staff have historically managed junior medical and paramedic staff in the NHS. Then it was discovered that people with a Business Studies degree from Ex-Polytechnic of Bumpton were much easier for government to manipulate as the NHS became a political vehicle for anything from PPP to immigration policy.
I do have a subscription to Private Eye though.
Hooray! I wouldn't say no to one, though I haven't read a copy for a while... a family member bought me a copy last time I was in hospital (see, I'm still on topic), helping me to maintain a smile at the "wrong" time.
What mainstream UK newspaper, when read seriously, does not imply that the reader is stupid? I'm not even sure what you mean by "seriously" - from time to time I read The Sun and The Guardian "seriously" in that I take their impacts seriously, their covered topics seriously and put some serious critical thought into their reporting and why they're expressing a particular angle.
But I don't have a mindless allegiance (which is I think what you mean by "seriously") to the editorial stance of either - I think they're both jokes. The loyal GROLIES would be worse, as it usually has a position in which it can do more harm.
It's also worth clarifying that they're not legislative documents in the formal sense, but they do form part of the legislative process. To not prepare such preliminary documents with care and attention at every stage inevitably means you'll end up with a bad legislative document.
It's not so vague - if the proposal were to merely consider "doing something", that's all the document would need to say.
Though yes, you're right, there was the intention to mislead, even if it was by taking advantage of laziness. As long as everyone is clear that they're equally to blame :-).
I maintain that it's needlessly complex - shouldn't the elected /Parliament/ propose then discuss legislation in conjuction with its constituents? The Commission's legislative roles make for a poor separation and needless complexity of (i.e. corruptibility of) powers. But I'm not looking for a debate on that right now.
If document B says, "extends document A with provisions C" and you sign it without reading document A and all A's dependencies, you aren't "misled"; you are lazy, incompetent and negligent. If the process is unnecessarily complex (and this is the EU, so that goes without saying), you simply refuse to consider the document on process grounds. You don't sign something because some words look vaguely appealing to lobbyists^Wvoters and those lobbyists^Wvoters told you to do so.
I expect I consider the Sun as much nonsense as you do but:
xenophobic mindset of the UK's unemployed/uneducated/unwashed masses
It is a hypocritical subset of the Guardian-reading middle class who manage (I'd hardly call it "employment") all the business and government schemes which create the society we live in while pretending to sympathise with the oiks they don't have to live near/help out anyway.
You might have been looking for working class rather than unemployed, and very misled on certain issues rather than unedcuated (recall what Feynman said about experts speaking outside their field?). I guess my point here is that there's nothing especially stupid about the Sun reader and nothing especially bright about the stereotypical opposite to the Sun reader - when us vs them gangs are formed, the real threat is ignored: useless power-hungry bureaucrats, per article topic.
the Sun newspaper ran a campaign where they published the names and addresses of registered sex offenders, with quotes like "Is your neighbour a child molester?".
Everyone who has browsed porn has at least one "she sure LOOKS under 18!" image on their hard drive. This is enough to make you a registered sex offender. Therefore everyone's freedom essentially hangs on whether the police want to investigate your computer and whether you can afford an excellent lawyer. IOW, the paedophile scare is a fallback method of eliminating anyone who becomes inconvenient to government, corporation or even a sufficiently devious neighbour.
It's been engineered very cleverly and it's not just Sun readers who are convinced their children are going to be raped on every street corner - the Sun's just combining this with the other tool of distracting people from uniting against import threats by divide and conquer techniques: turn readers on their own neighbourhood!
That's a story about using your kid's unmanaged Windows PC for the first time to manage your finances.
MS security record is far less than impressive, but that's an awesome case of PEBCAK.
[OT]Oh god, I need to sleep but I keep getting given things to do. My fault for wasting half the afternoon on /..[/OT]
So you're apologising for being wrong and legitimately pointing out that you were at least trying to be reasonable (but still were wrong).
Nevertheless, apology accepted. Night night.
Ah, you're you on this thread too lol.. hello again! I'll finish off this one, since you had the courtesy to reply everywhere. After this post, it's good night from me.
The FUD to signal ratio here is literally 1:0. I thought you would be above that.
I don't think we agree on what FUD is. "Don't give all your business and pleasure information to one entity unless you trust that entity outright because they have the potential to abuse the information," is sound advice backed up by millennia of examples illustrating human nature. Are you the sort who would cry "FUD!" if I told you that compulsory ID cards would be harmful? Would it be wrong to use examples from history to show what happens when the government has the ability to track you and build databases about you, because somehow this ID card scheme is uncorruptible, unlike any other?
Actually, 2 baskets which is 1 more than most businesses.
True, and it's good to hear - but whether the basket simply broke would be the least of my worries, unless my data was very trivial. To take an example from long ago, I used to write time&billing software which was supplied to the Top 4 (excluding AA, not everyone's blind!) accounting firms. We'd happily bounce back and forth datasets representing hundreds of millions of dollars of work - "happily" because there was a clear trust that we saw it, they saw it, and no-one else would have the opportunity to see it.
I'd just like to imagine their faces for one moment if I said, "Oh, yeah, we're moving to the cloud, so all your stuff's on Google." Perhaps they had things they'd want to hide from *arbitrary entity dependent on where Google stores its data or has information sharing agreements with*, perhaps they had no reason to trust a third party with little to lose from fucking them over, or perhaps they just knew the principle of least disclosure. Today the Information Commissioner's Office would also throw a fit because I'm exporting certain personal data outside of the EU zone to an area with non-existent data protection legislation (or who knows where?). So you learn to take responsibility for the privacy of the data provided to you and generated by you, and you do so with integrity and honesty, knowing you're doing the best job possible for your client.
And, thing is, I try to respect the privacy of everyone's data as much as I respect those more strictly managed accounting records, because it's never my business to judge the sensitivity of someone else's data.
The beauty of Google Apps for Businesses (for us, anyway) is it actually enhances our Office experience. We saved millions in licensing fees vs upgrading to Office 2010. Collaborative editing has been a boon for our productivity. Our employees documents can be accessed anywhere, anytime by them on whatever device they happen to have.
This sounds like marketing spiel. Especially because "anywhere, anytime" is precisely not a description of the availability of the Internet, unless your employees do little more than move from well-connected office to city home. And "whatever device" better be a sufficiently modern device to handle the dynamic HTML Google Apps uses - I had a horrible experience even trying to send mail with GMail on a 4-year-old mobile device a couple of days ago. You'd hope for graceful degradation to an HTML4 form with a straight submit button, right? Ah well.
I do wonder why you panicked about upgrading to Office 2010 if you use so few office features that you could make do with Google Apps. Did you try Sharepoint, for example? I recognise within a few hours of using Google Apps that I'd be using hours of productivity over a week getting over its clunkiness, lack of features and other limitations inherent to running software in browser - it would worry me to hear of a business which invests "millions" in Office licences not taking account of the cost of productivity loss. Even open/quick check of something/close feels agonising when it can't be all over in 5 seconds - it's like I'm back at a 15 year old clunker.
I'll be sure to get the message to myself living in 2006 not to let anybody untrusted on the LAN. Again, how can this be exploited over the internet?
You asked for "remotely exploitable", so I gave you "remotely exploitable", i.e. not requiring physical access/login credentials. Try to be clear about what you mean in future. It's sweet that you never take your Mac out of "the LAN", but many people have laptops and wander around both with cables and wirelessly, connect directly to an ISP which provides IP information via DHCP on a virtual subnet (e.g. some cable services), etc. Just because your idea of cracking may be annoying the guy across the continent who just beat you at some FPS, for others it's the much more determined effort of exploiting one machine behind a company network to get at all the others.
I'll go forward one year: <a href="help:runscript=MacHelp.help/Contents/Resources/ English.lproj/shrd/OpnApp.scpt string='echo Insert command to add startup script to shell here">this link would have worked nicely around 2004</a> - can't do an automatic redirect on /. but you get the idea. But you're going to tell me somehow that that exploit's not valid either, right? Perhaps because I haven't actually typed out a malicious script in place of the 'echo'?
You just made my point for me. You freely admit that saying software is relatively unexploited because of its market share is a fallacy.
I've always limited my argument to client machines. Marketshare is a valid reason for targetting client machines, but not an established reason for targetting server machines. Stop generalising.
Doesn't mean jack until it's in the wild. A proof-of-concept set up in somebodies computer lab with controlled circumstances do not a real exploit make. Surely you realize this.
Completely incorrect - you're just annoyed because no-one's breaking the law for your pleasure. What differentiates us from the monkey is that we are able to think in the abstract. IOW, don't need a physical hammer in front of us to accept that one can exist and have an idea of how it works: we can be shown drawings or be given descriptions and use our cognitive skills to decide whether it is feasible.
I'm done with you. You maintained my interest for a while (thank you!), but you're veering off into jumping up and down with random "See and that means I've won the argument!!!!" and it makes you look silly. Quit while you're not ahead ;-).
you get guarantees about the confidentiality of your documents
Just to check, what proportion of Google's yearly revenue comes from you? That may provide an accurate measure of how likely it is they'll help defend against private or government requests for data access. Or even hint to you that it's happened.
Also, how often are you allowed to audit their systems? See, most professional industries have independent external auditors/inspectors when third parties provide services, so it'd be almost insane if the answer were "never".
For all you know, I could be sitting right now with access to Google's intranet, having identified who you are by correlating your search behaviour with certain Slashdot postings, giggling at your porn browsing history and noting down some less-than-savoury links you clicked on. See, I might want to tip the police off if you ever happen to compete with my family's area of business (I mean, I could just look at your work directly to gain the upper hand, but then it might be too obvious what's going on - much better to get you discredited with the Sex Offender card).
Why exactly do you trust me not to do that? It's not as if I'm planting evidence - I'm just hypothetically pointing out one or two pictures you might accidentally still have in your cache because some bastard on some site posted something illegal and you didn't realise what the link pointed to. Once they've taken your computer as evidence and confirmed this, who is going to listen when you say, "The guy at Google was after me! It's a conspiracy!"
There'd be no conspiracy. It'd just be me, hypothetically destroying you, because I can, and because you thought it was wise to give so much personal and professional data (never mix...) to one organisation with 20,000 employees.
And that's before we get to how a corrupt government can do something similar if you dream of joining any protests, cooperating in any campaigns or writing in any significant political publications. So many eggs, so one basket!
I'm talking about OSX, you veer off into Windows.
I'm just pointing out that every one of your arguments applies to Windows. Your points may all be valid, and if you establish that they are, I may use them in advocating Windows.
Also, when is a virus not a trojan, precisely? IOW, on a computer not connected to a network, how could any malware be classified as a virus? Consider that every software product requires you to consciously run some software with an overt legitimate purpose. You do also realise that many trojans end up spamming computers with attachments containing malware, yes? Isn't self-replication the definition of a virus? Or is it only a virus if the receiver doesn't have to do anything to execute the malware? But then we're back to the initial problem that no virus can be received on a non-connected computer.
Perhaps you about to define a virus as, "something an OS X machine could never get".