Most of the people who pirate music, movies, and games, are people that would never buy it in the first place. Claiming that you're out some amount of money because someone pirated your record or video game is patently absurd. If little Jonny hears your song on the radio and can't get the tune out of your head he'll go home and pick it up off Kazaa. In the process he'll likely find some of your other songs. If they're crappy rips or Jonny can't find a good copy of a song off your record he might go buy it. If your record is good you will get your money even if it is pirated. You've earned your money.
The RIAA business model however is all about tricking people into paying lots of money for crappy music they don't want. The typical CD has one or two good songs and the rest are tripe. Most artists are lucky to produce a handful of good songs in their entire careers. The RIAA's model wants people to pay $15 for a whole CD just to get a single song. That's why they're so afraid of file sharing on the internet. Their business model of selling tripe doesn't work when people can figure out there's only one good song on the record.
Without file sharing there's lots of bands that would end up with no buzz whatsoever. The record industry has a death grip on the radio broadcast industry and likewise the broadcast industry has the record industry in a chokehold. They're only out to fill their own coffers and give a damn about you as an artist. File sharing and the internet in general is the artist's way out of that mess. Instead of towing the company line you should figure out how to reach your audience directly and still make money. Don't sell the music itself, sell things that can't be easily trades on P2P networks. Hint: physical items.
'P2P does not stand for 'permission to pilfer,' Ashcroft said.
I bet he thinks he's so clever. However I find this story a little strange, the article claims that the five hubs each contained 40 petabytes (7200 Libraries of Congress) which at my count is about 160,000 250GB hard drives. That's ~$26m worth of hard drives per hub. The article is written in such a way to suggest these five hubs were run by people in their basements while the supposed retail value of their setups is anything but basementable.
I guess this shouldn't be surprising though. It is a well known fact al-Qaeda is trying to topple the American government by supporting music piracy over the internet. The RIAA member companies are practically bankrupt from their tremendous losses due to piracy. They're such excellent role models for young people, persevering in the face of such insurmountable odds. The movie industry is soon to be entirely out of business from online trading of hits like Gigli. I feel really bad for those gaffers that only make $250,000 a year that can barely make ends meet because someone downloaded a movie.
I use WEP on my home WiFi network despite it being a complete pain in the ass. No two vendors want to authenticate the same way so I have to jump through hoops to get a new system on my network. On my Powerbook with its AP Extreme card I have to use xwepgen to generate a hex key to input into the Airport settings. Trying to hook up a Windows system is ten times harder since different cards have different interfaces and not all of them work properly with Windows XP's native configuration.
If it was easier to implement WEP between different vendors' products more people would use it. Unfortunately the product lifetime of WiFi products is a whopping 6 months so drivers and firmwares are rarely updated significantly. If you want to switch from WEP to WPA, which is easier to work with between vendors, you usually have to buy a number of new devices. I'm not apt to plunk down $100+ every year on new WiFi equipment just to get it talking to other equipment. Vendors have no impetus to increase interoperability because they want you buying from a single source.
Man at Computer: Hey...what the hell? Dork Behind Him: What is the matter with you? Chick: Looks like he ran afoul of Star Force's copyright protection! Dork: Ha ha! Chick: *snicker* Man: Shut the hell up you two! Dork: OMG YOUR MEGAHURTZ HAS BEEN STOL3D!! Chick: All your CD-ROM belong to Star Force.
The idiot end-users shouldn't need an MCSE to run their computer without a metric assload of worms exploiting their computers and internet connections. People should be able to just fire up their web browser and go without the need for advance training beforehand. Some people have better things to do than learn the intricacies of Internet Zone settings on Internet Explorer or how best set up their firewall. Windows should be taking care of this stuff for people.
In the past few Windows XP SP2 threads there have been several people complaining about slashdites seemingly "picking" on Microsoft and celebrating any and all flaws the update has. I don't feel bad for Microsoft in the slightest at this point. They've been touting the security of Windows XP for years now and have done little to actually back up their claims. Sure some Windows XP system on a managed network with double filtered internet access and nightly reimaging might be pretty secure. In the home however Windows is simply a distaster waiting to happen.
While SP2 is more secure than the original release and SP1 that doesn't reduce the number of Blaster hits my firewall blocks. It also doesn't affect the 50% of Windows users that will never download the update and will continue to be hammered by viruses and worms. Microsoft's delays and incompatibility problems just exacerbate the matter.
It's good to see Microsoft taking real heat from the industry press over their problems in SP2. The industry as a whole rolling over for Microsoft is what led to the situation as it stands now. The original release of Windows XP was riddled with holes and and was summarily exploited. No one seriously called Microsoft on this fact and SP1 was little more than a collection of security patches and minor bug fixes. The changes made in SP2 should have come out years ago. Maybe then you could plug a Windows system into a cable modem and last more than twnety minutes without being exploited.
Linux is improving in the usability and management arena and MacOS X is gaining mindshare as Apple improves its hardware. Both of these OSes are designed much more securely yet have a high level of technical capability. I really hope people begin to see there are alternatives to Windows and they're not nearly as bad as Microsoft would have you believe. SP2 is going to teach their management a hard lesson; despite being a monopoly power in the industry they still have to improve and maintain their OS.
If you were as intelligent as you thought you were you'd be able to appreciate the analogy without assuming the theft aspect was the important part. If someone deprives you of capital (your TV) because you didn't take measures to protect it (a door and lock) it will get stolen evetually. Likewise if you don't protect your capital (your software product) with some means (CD key, etc.) it will get stolen.
The price of your television is measured in the amount of time it took you to earn enough money to buy it. Someone stealing your TV may very well be stealing days worth of your time. A software pirate is stealing the developers time and effort. Even if 80% of pirates never intended to buy the software in the first place the developer is still out the money from the remaining 20% who are simply cheapskates. The easier it is to pirate some software the more likely it is to happen and the less likely it is for those cheapskates to remain cheapskates.
The stealing of a television and the piracy of software is similar in that value was taken away from one group by another group. If it took a month of working overtime to buy your TV and I come along and take the TV you've lost all of that time. If it took you a month of working overtime to write a game and I turn around and distribute it for free you've also lost all of that time. Why would people buy from you what they can get for free from me? Some people might be morally opposed to downloading your software from me but most people won't be.
While strict protections can be a pain in the ass software developers have to implement some means to protect their time invested into development. You'd try to protect the investment of time that went into purchasing your television. Software piracy doesn't have a direct correlation in the material world but it is conceptually similar to other types of theft. Don't let your lack of imagination and understanding of language make you sound like an asshat.
You obviously don't understand the real reason behind such "copy protection". If your house doesn't have a front door you ought to expect all of your belongings to be gone when you get home. Sure most people will pass your house by and simply think "how dumb" but someone is going to stop by and see what sort of cool stuff you've got. If you do have a front door with a lock it isn't going to stop a true professional lockpick but it will stop the occassional jackass from walking off with your stereo.
The concept is the same with copy protection systems. With absolutely no copy protection there's nothing stopping people from randomly ripping off your software. A CD key or some such won't stop someone who knows what they're doing but it will curb some casual piracy. It also gives you a legal leg to stand on if you catch someone in the act of pirating your software.
Some companies use pain in the ass protection schemes which only gets them a bad reputation. Most however just want to ensure that there's a 1:1 sales/license ratio on the market. Upgrades can disable particular cracked keys and so now those people will be inconvenienced and hopefully some will simply buy the software instead of spend the time finding a new crack.
I find it amusing that Java is dying because it hasn't totally supplanted Win32 as a desktop application environment. More and more I'm seeing companies replacing their aging in-house applications with Java web services. Where several years ago an internal application might be a VB5 front-end to an Access database today is likely a full fledged web service running on a central server. Such applications are available over a VPN, dial-in modems, or even bridged networks with little trouble. The data is also centralized meaning there's no synch issues within the office. When Mary updates a record Sam gets that information immediately. These applications are also client agnostic so they'll run on just about anything with a web browser.
Centralized web services are capturing the hearts and minds of a lot of companies anymore. Clients for such services can be thin or fat and can run whatever OS is practical. An office full of iMacs can access a web service just as well as an office full of HPs running Linux. If Java is ditched down the road for Perl or Python the database server isn't going to go tits up.
Java's death never really happened, it's just that its success came from an area no one really expected early on. Perl's met with similar success. What started off as a language to parse server logs and turn huge data files into meaningful information became the premiere CGI language on the web. While a successful word processor might never be written in Java, the language and environment are far from dead.
For your purposes I don't think thin clients are the proper solution to your problem. On paper they look attractive but you lose a lot of flexibility with them. With thin clients the amount of utility you've got is directly related to the amount of power you've got on your server. When you add more clients you only stress the server's resources more. While web browsing might now be too intensive you're proposing having productivity apps running on the network.
The biggest feature of the thin clients is also a their biggest weakness down the road. The thin clients can't ever be removed from the network and their servers that make them useful. If you ever want to move them to a new branch you're either going to need a fat pipe between the multiple branches or added servers at an added cost. Fat clients can be moved all sorts of places and don't necessarily need high-speed network connections.
The X folks in their wisdom threw out everything that Apple had developed to make the machine easier to use. Amazing how with Rendezvous now you can just open a browser and find your printer! Heavens! Perhaps with future enhancements you'll be able to find them on other subnets! The Mac could do this in 1986, but the NeXTies threw it away. Then they can rediscover it later and look like geniuses.
For quite a few years AppleTalk was a pretty amazing protocol. Once AARP was implemented in the early 90s it became quite a bit more manageable even on larger networks. AppleTalk made networking computers and other devices relatively simple and very Mac-like. However cross-platform compatibility was not AppleTalk's forte. For as cool as AppleTalk is it requires too much hacking on non-Apple systems to get working properly.
Rendezvous is designed to solve the interoperability problem since it can run on top of TCP/IP which everyone else is comfortably running. While some individual developers might think Rendezvous is something magical they "invented" it is simply a good implementation of ZeroConf. The chide about finding services on other subnets is ill-placed since the DNS-SD aspect of Rendezvous can easily run over unicast DNS and according to the Rendezvous developer list will do this RSN.
How about the ability to share a folder on your hard drive over the network? Mac OS 7-9 could do it. Windows can do it. Mac OS X still can't do it. You can only share a certain folder in your home directory.
The choice here is easy to see from a network administrator point of view. In MacOS 7-9 it was entirely possible to share a folder containing files you weren't necessarily meant to share. The old sharing scheme while convenient was not safe and bad practice. The sharing scheme in OSX, which can be modified via third party tools, is more inherently secure from a confidentiality aspect and doesn't give users too much rope to hang themselves with. The sharing scheme in OSX also reinforces the idea that the root directory is not the proper place for individual user files no matter how old versions of MacOS used to work. The "Public" and "Sites" folders are regular and logical and it is easy to tell users to simply drop files into there they would like shared.
Oh man, all you had to do was go to a website not listed anywhere in a card's documentation to figure out how to get the card working. That's so easy Aunt Millie could even do it!
Installing a wireless card is not a piece of cake until you've spent a couple days finding and reading documentation. Then it is a piece of cake since you don't have to do it all over again.
With WiFi disabled I can get about five hours out of my battery on my 12" Powerbook. Once I turn the WiFi on my battery life drops to about 3.5 hours. I've got a low power (all network devices disabled) Network Location and using that while watching a DVD my battery does pretty well. I can get a full movie plus another hour or two or reading or writing on a single charge without WiFi.
I don't really see a need to wholly move away from HTTP and HTML. They're both extremely flexible and will likely be very useful for many years to come. They're both relatively basic systems that aren't terribly difficult to implement with a modicum of programming talent. They're also extremely lightweight which makes it much easier to use them on equipment with very little power of memory.
Because HTML is fairly verbose and well formed HTML is regularly laid out it isn't terribly difficult to parse. Computers with a fraction of the processing power and memory available to modern PCs can easily handle HTML files. Well formed HTML and especially XHTML documents are actually very useful because they can not only be easily parse but also easily handled by a variety of output devices. What is doubly useful about HTML is it can also point in an implementation neutral means to other documents. This is what hypertext is all about, text that can describe itself to anyone who is listening.
HTTP as a protocol is extremely useful because it is stateless and as such has very low overhead. Because of this it is very easy to implement and maintain. These features also make the protocol very robust and extensible. It can handle binary and textual data equally well and even tunnel other types of protocols inside of itself. These features that don't need to be replaced or necessarily enhanced.
Apple being pissed at Real has little to do with the iPod or iTunes. What this is really about is Quicktime. Quicktime is the reason Steve Jobs laughed at Glaser for wanting to license FairPlay. Quicktime is required to use iTunes and to play their protected AAC files. Allowing Real to use their AAC implementation will make iTunes and thus Quicktime entirely unneeded to own an iPod.
Apple is in competition with Real. The Quicktime format and exclusive codecs (Sorenson et al) is in competition with Real and Microsoft and their formats and exclusive codecs. Until the iTunes for Windows Quicktime was largely in decline on Windows. With fewer Quicktime users there's less demand for Quicktime formated content. Without Quicktime formated content Apple and their user base end up at the mercy of Real and Microsoft in the media realm. Microsoft has already essentially crippled WMP for the Mac, its only a matter of time before it is canceled entirely.
If Quicktime on Windows were to die the Quicktime user base would shrink precipitously. It would no longer be viable for media companies to use the format so they'd switch entirely to Real or Microsoft owned formats. Microsoft would surly kill WMP for the Mac at that point leaving Mac users unable to access vast amounts of online content. Without the ability to create widely accessible content on Macs (Windows Media) people would stop buying them for content creation. Eventually people would stop buying them entirely since they wouldn't be able to view anything but old Quicktime files.
Using the DMCA is a bit absurd in this case all else being said. Apple doesn't have any say in how exactly I use my iPod once I take it home after paying umpteen hundreds of dollars for it. If I want to go home and install Linux on it that is my prerogative. I can understand them not wanting RealMedia files on the iPod but they're going about this is a very bad way.
There is no super computer technology crisis, there is however a paradigm shift happening in the supercomputer market. Twenty years ago building your own supercomputer, even a loosely coupled cluster, was not a very viable option for most research institutions. Today this option is not only viable but often exercised.
Obviously the big SC vendors and designers seeing less business roll their way, why pay them tons of money when you can have grad students assemble your cluster for the price of some pizzas? That isn't to say SC clusters are the end-all be-all of computing but they're very useful and relatively inexpensive. Realistically they're simply an extension of what Cray started with their T3D supercomputer. The T3D was very impressive in its days but now the technology to build such systems is in the hands of just about everyone.
Taco: What the hell is up with the IT color scheme? This is even worse than the scheme for the Games section. I know the Slashdot editors don't actually read the site but other people try to and we're not all colorblind or reading from grayscale monitors.
I was going to mention that a good deal of blogging software produces very nice and maintainable code. I think it largely has to do with the fact most blogging packages are only a handful of years old and began life in the middle of the HTML 4.01 Transitional - XHTML 1.0 Transitional period. Designing an XHTML compliant engine from the ground up is a lot easier than backporting XHTML into an existing engine, especially one spitting layout elements all over the place.
I tend to believe another large issue has been the traditionally horrible CSS support in IE. Mozilla and other Gecko-based browsers are gaining ground but for the most part IE still rules the web. IE works much better with Microsoft's "standards" than it does with W3C specifications. If only the hours I've wasted tuning CSS to work in IE 5.5 were billable.
One huge problem I've encountered trying to switch pages from HTML 4.01 to XHTML is more established engines tend to hail from the HTML 3.2 days (Slashcode) and have not evolved much since. Forum software is often the worst in my experience, everything is littered with tables and fixed size elements. A lot of people host their sites on vhosts and many of those don't support things like HTML::Template, Mason, or Smarty. As such most coders just write their own template system which may or may not handle newer web standards.
Since many sites are using crappy HTML they want to spice up they tend to use equally crappy JavaScript to add little stylistic features. I think many people are surprised when they hit up a CSS tutorial and figure out they can replace their stylistic JavaScript with CSS and have much better performing web pages.
I'd love to see more sites using XHTML, even transitional XHTML, with CSS for styling and layout purposes. Documents end up much more flexible and quite a bit smaller. It is also easier for end users to override the page's CSS with their own to either make elements more legible or friendlier for their output device (PDA, cell phone, screen reader).
Coders of CMS engines: Please use sane template systems so it is easier for your poor end users to make their pages better comply with web standards. Also don't wrap stuff in tables, not everyone uses tables to lay out their pages! Presentation logic is fine and dandy but don't hard code layout elements, let the users decide! Thank You.
The HST's data archive is currently about 12TB. That data lone is going to provide grounds for scientific papers well into the future. This data archive grows by about 2TB every year. That is a lot of data out of one instrument. There's a lot of good science left in that data. Letting that tremendous data source fall prematurly into the ocean because the HST was abandoned would be monumentally stupid.
There's also quite a bit of money and resources already devoted to the HST. Instruments and components have been built and paid for and the work is already done. Letting it sit on a shelf indefinitely would be a magnificent waste. Besides the money already spent a mission will have to be sent up, automated or not, to de-orbit the HST.
NASA ought to bite the bullet and push the envelope a little bit. It doesn't matter that they would be using untested technologies. Fixing the HST would be the test. I have little doubt that it would be feasible to robotically service the HST. A small cadre of tool laden AIBOs with rocket packs should be able to do the trick. If NASA is too scared to send people into space they could at least send a few cute robot dogs.
The technology and techniques learned with the HST could be applied later with the ISS' construction or even an in-orbit repair of a Shuttle or other craft. Maybe we could even start designing satellites that are meant to be services by robots to extend their useful lifetimes. Companies would be much more likely to invest in satellites if its potential operational life of 20+ years instead of 12 if everything goes alright.
NASA's means of funding is to blame in this situation. Big science telescopes like Hubble, Chandra, and Spitzer are one-off affairs. They get built and that is that. Hubble is an odd case because it has been serviced by the STS. The ISS on the other hand has to be constructed and launched, slowly. The contractors putting together ISS components make a lot of money billing the government.
The Shuttle's design didn't originally include solid fuel rockets. This was later made a requirement as part of a compromise aimed at lowering the Shuttle's design and flight costs. The company that designed and built the SFRs was called Morton Thiokol, now called Cordant Technologies, which was based in Utah. Coincidentally this company had strong ties to the NASA's adminsitrator James Fletcher.
Fletcher built up political support for the Shuttle by throwing some aerospace jobs to Utah. The first US politician to fly aboard the Shuttle was none other than Senator Jake Garn of Utah in April of 1985.
This is the same reasoning behind many of the ISS decisions. NASA can't build something like the ISS without pretty hefty funding from Congress. In order to get funding they have to promise jobs and/or money to the constituencies of the legislators they're asking for money. NASA's administration also knows that if they promise individual companies contracts they can get them to make said legislators happy by writing them nice big campaign checks. Almost all government projects are based around this favor bartering system.
Space telescopes aren't very lucrative contracts so it is hard to sell them to aerospace companies and Congress. The umpteen billion dollar ISS on the other hand is an easy sell as long as the construction can go as slowly as possible.
1. You can distribute alternate browsers however you distribute other software. Windows, Linux, and MacOS X all have methods of centrally managing and distributing software to client systems on a network.
2. IE is a horrible bet from a security point of view right now. Six months down the road it will likely be just as bad. Mozilla on the other hand is much safer right now and will likely continue to be pretty safe six months down the road. Mozilla's also got quite a few features IE lacks entirely. Firefox also has a lot of features IE lacks entirely and is not a bloating application.
Both of your points are complete non-issues. Right now IE is an extremely bad browser and makes Windows systems more of a liability for companies to use. IE is tightly integrated with the Windows shell and provides a ridiculous amount of privileged access to the system. IE is designed to be used inside of managed environments first and on the internet second. This is obvious when considering many of its security holes are considered "features" by Microsoft because they're used by some of their other products. Most other browsers are not designed with other Microsoft products in mind and as such have far fewer design-related security holes.
This sort of bitching gets really old really fast. Panther was released in October of 2003, that was almost eight months ago. Tiger is only being previewed now, it won't even be released until 2005. You've still got at least six months to save your pennies for Tiger. That is of course assuming you do indeed upgrade.
There's no Apple militia that is going to break your door down and force you to buy and install Tiger, just like no one forced you into buying Panther. Jaguar had a slew of new features over 10.1 and 10.0 (Puma and Cheetah) that developers are just barely taking full advantage of now. As such there's going to be a lot of software that is only going to require Jaguar in order to run. Most of Apple's apps even still support Jaguar. While this won't be the case forever it is the case currently which means upgrading from Jaguar wasn't really necessary for most people.
Tiger has a lot of new features that don't have shiny icons and those will be utilized in Tiger-only applications. You can keep Panther until your primary applications move to be Tiger-only or you can just switch to applications that are Panther friendly. Honestly if you don't see a reason to shell out the $129 for Tiger you don't have to. Plenty of people today get by just fine running Jaguar.
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Most of the people who pirate music, movies, and games, are people that would never buy it in the first place. Claiming that you're out some amount of money because someone pirated your record or video game is patently absurd. If little Jonny hears your song on the radio and can't get the tune out of your head he'll go home and pick it up off Kazaa. In the process he'll likely find some of your other songs. If they're crappy rips or Jonny can't find a good copy of a song off your record he might go buy it. If your record is good you will get your money even if it is pirated. You've earned your money.
The RIAA business model however is all about tricking people into paying lots of money for crappy music they don't want. The typical CD has one or two good songs and the rest are tripe. Most artists are lucky to produce a handful of good songs in their entire careers. The RIAA's model wants people to pay $15 for a whole CD just to get a single song. That's why they're so afraid of file sharing on the internet. Their business model of selling tripe doesn't work when people can figure out there's only one good song on the record.
Without file sharing there's lots of bands that would end up with no buzz whatsoever. The record industry has a death grip on the radio broadcast industry and likewise the broadcast industry has the record industry in a chokehold. They're only out to fill their own coffers and give a damn about you as an artist. File sharing and the internet in general is the artist's way out of that mess. Instead of towing the company line you should figure out how to reach your audience directly and still make money. Don't sell the music itself, sell things that can't be easily trades on P2P networks. Hint: physical items.
I bet he thinks he's so clever. However I find this story a little strange, the article claims that the five hubs each contained 40 petabytes (7200 Libraries of Congress) which at my count is about 160,000 250GB hard drives. That's ~$26m worth of hard drives per hub. The article is written in such a way to suggest these five hubs were run by people in their basements while the supposed retail value of their setups is anything but basementable.
I guess this shouldn't be surprising though. It is a well known fact al-Qaeda is trying to topple the American government by supporting music piracy over the internet. The RIAA member companies are practically bankrupt from their tremendous losses due to piracy. They're such excellent role models for young people, persevering in the face of such insurmountable odds. The movie industry is soon to be entirely out of business from online trading of hits like Gigli. I feel really bad for those gaffers that only make $250,000 a year that can barely make ends meet because someone downloaded a movie.
I use WEP on my home WiFi network despite it being a complete pain in the ass. No two vendors want to authenticate the same way so I have to jump through hoops to get a new system on my network. On my Powerbook with its AP Extreme card I have to use xwepgen to generate a hex key to input into the Airport settings. Trying to hook up a Windows system is ten times harder since different cards have different interfaces and not all of them work properly with Windows XP's native configuration.
If it was easier to implement WEP between different vendors' products more people would use it. Unfortunately the product lifetime of WiFi products is a whopping 6 months so drivers and firmwares are rarely updated significantly. If you want to switch from WEP to WPA, which is easier to work with between vendors, you usually have to buy a number of new devices. I'm not apt to plunk down $100+ every year on new WiFi equipment just to get it talking to other equipment. Vendors have no impetus to increase interoperability because they want you buying from a single source.
Man at Computer: Hey...what the hell?
Dork Behind Him: What is the matter with you?
Chick: Looks like he ran afoul of Star Force's copyright protection!
Dork: Ha ha!
Chick: *snicker*
Man: Shut the hell up you two!
Dork: OMG YOUR MEGAHURTZ HAS BEEN STOL3D!!
Chick: All your CD-ROM belong to Star Force.
The idiot end-users shouldn't need an MCSE to run their computer without a metric assload of worms exploiting their computers and internet connections. People should be able to just fire up their web browser and go without the need for advance training beforehand. Some people have better things to do than learn the intricacies of Internet Zone settings on Internet Explorer or how best set up their firewall. Windows should be taking care of this stuff for people.
In the past few Windows XP SP2 threads there have been several people complaining about slashdites seemingly "picking" on Microsoft and celebrating any and all flaws the update has. I don't feel bad for Microsoft in the slightest at this point. They've been touting the security of Windows XP for years now and have done little to actually back up their claims. Sure some Windows XP system on a managed network with double filtered internet access and nightly reimaging might be pretty secure. In the home however Windows is simply a distaster waiting to happen.
While SP2 is more secure than the original release and SP1 that doesn't reduce the number of Blaster hits my firewall blocks. It also doesn't affect the 50% of Windows users that will never download the update and will continue to be hammered by viruses and worms. Microsoft's delays and incompatibility problems just exacerbate the matter.
It's good to see Microsoft taking real heat from the industry press over their problems in SP2. The industry as a whole rolling over for Microsoft is what led to the situation as it stands now. The original release of Windows XP was riddled with holes and and was summarily exploited. No one seriously called Microsoft on this fact and SP1 was little more than a collection of security patches and minor bug fixes. The changes made in SP2 should have come out years ago. Maybe then you could plug a Windows system into a cable modem and last more than twnety minutes without being exploited.
Linux is improving in the usability and management arena and MacOS X is gaining mindshare as Apple improves its hardware. Both of these OSes are designed much more securely yet have a high level of technical capability. I really hope people begin to see there are alternatives to Windows and they're not nearly as bad as Microsoft would have you believe. SP2 is going to teach their management a hard lesson; despite being a monopoly power in the industry they still have to improve and maintain their OS.
If you were as intelligent as you thought you were you'd be able to appreciate the analogy without assuming the theft aspect was the important part. If someone deprives you of capital (your TV) because you didn't take measures to protect it (a door and lock) it will get stolen evetually. Likewise if you don't protect your capital (your software product) with some means (CD key, etc.) it will get stolen.
The price of your television is measured in the amount of time it took you to earn enough money to buy it. Someone stealing your TV may very well be stealing days worth of your time. A software pirate is stealing the developers time and effort. Even if 80% of pirates never intended to buy the software in the first place the developer is still out the money from the remaining 20% who are simply cheapskates. The easier it is to pirate some software the more likely it is to happen and the less likely it is for those cheapskates to remain cheapskates.
The stealing of a television and the piracy of software is similar in that value was taken away from one group by another group. If it took a month of working overtime to buy your TV and I come along and take the TV you've lost all of that time. If it took you a month of working overtime to write a game and I turn around and distribute it for free you've also lost all of that time. Why would people buy from you what they can get for free from me? Some people might be morally opposed to downloading your software from me but most people won't be.
While strict protections can be a pain in the ass software developers have to implement some means to protect their time invested into development. You'd try to protect the investment of time that went into purchasing your television. Software piracy doesn't have a direct correlation in the material world but it is conceptually similar to other types of theft. Don't let your lack of imagination and understanding of language make you sound like an asshat.
You obviously don't understand the real reason behind such "copy protection". If your house doesn't have a front door you ought to expect all of your belongings to be gone when you get home. Sure most people will pass your house by and simply think "how dumb" but someone is going to stop by and see what sort of cool stuff you've got. If you do have a front door with a lock it isn't going to stop a true professional lockpick but it will stop the occassional jackass from walking off with your stereo.
The concept is the same with copy protection systems. With absolutely no copy protection there's nothing stopping people from randomly ripping off your software. A CD key or some such won't stop someone who knows what they're doing but it will curb some casual piracy. It also gives you a legal leg to stand on if you catch someone in the act of pirating your software.
Some companies use pain in the ass protection schemes which only gets them a bad reputation. Most however just want to ensure that there's a 1:1 sales/license ratio on the market. Upgrades can disable particular cracked keys and so now those people will be inconvenienced and hopefully some will simply buy the software instead of spend the time finding a new crack.
I find it amusing that Java is dying because it hasn't totally supplanted Win32 as a desktop application environment. More and more I'm seeing companies replacing their aging in-house applications with Java web services. Where several years ago an internal application might be a VB5 front-end to an Access database today is likely a full fledged web service running on a central server. Such applications are available over a VPN, dial-in modems, or even bridged networks with little trouble. The data is also centralized meaning there's no synch issues within the office. When Mary updates a record Sam gets that information immediately. These applications are also client agnostic so they'll run on just about anything with a web browser.
Centralized web services are capturing the hearts and minds of a lot of companies anymore. Clients for such services can be thin or fat and can run whatever OS is practical. An office full of iMacs can access a web service just as well as an office full of HPs running Linux. If Java is ditched down the road for Perl or Python the database server isn't going to go tits up.
Java's death never really happened, it's just that its success came from an area no one really expected early on. Perl's met with similar success. What started off as a language to parse server logs and turn huge data files into meaningful information became the premiere CGI language on the web. While a successful word processor might never be written in Java, the language and environment are far from dead.
For your purposes I don't think thin clients are the proper solution to your problem. On paper they look attractive but you lose a lot of flexibility with them. With thin clients the amount of utility you've got is directly related to the amount of power you've got on your server. When you add more clients you only stress the server's resources more. While web browsing might now be too intensive you're proposing having productivity apps running on the network.
The biggest feature of the thin clients is also a their biggest weakness down the road. The thin clients can't ever be removed from the network and their servers that make them useful. If you ever want to move them to a new branch you're either going to need a fat pipe between the multiple branches or added servers at an added cost. Fat clients can be moved all sorts of places and don't necessarily need high-speed network connections.
For quite a few years AppleTalk was a pretty amazing protocol. Once AARP was implemented in the early 90s it became quite a bit more manageable even on larger networks. AppleTalk made networking computers and other devices relatively simple and very Mac-like. However cross-platform compatibility was not AppleTalk's forte. For as cool as AppleTalk is it requires too much hacking on non-Apple systems to get working properly.
Rendezvous is designed to solve the interoperability problem since it can run on top of TCP/IP which everyone else is comfortably running. While some individual developers might think Rendezvous is something magical they "invented" it is simply a good implementation of ZeroConf. The chide about finding services on other subnets is ill-placed since the DNS-SD aspect of Rendezvous can easily run over unicast DNS and according to the Rendezvous developer list will do this RSN.
The choice here is easy to see from a network administrator point of view. In MacOS 7-9 it was entirely possible to share a folder containing files you weren't necessarily meant to share. The old sharing scheme while convenient was not safe and bad practice. The sharing scheme in OSX, which can be modified via third party tools, is more inherently secure from a confidentiality aspect and doesn't give users too much rope to hang themselves with. The sharing scheme in OSX also reinforces the idea that the root directory is not the proper place for individual user files no matter how old versions of MacOS used to work. The "Public" and "Sites" folders are regular and logical and it is easy to tell users to simply drop files into there they would like shared.
Oh man, all you had to do was go to a website not listed anywhere in a card's documentation to figure out how to get the card working. That's so easy Aunt Millie could even do it!
Installing a wireless card is not a piece of cake until you've spent a couple days finding and reading documentation. Then it is a piece of cake since you don't have to do it all over again.
No, Linux works alright.
With WiFi disabled I can get about five hours out of my battery on my 12" Powerbook. Once I turn the WiFi on my battery life drops to about 3.5 hours. I've got a low power (all network devices disabled) Network Location and using that while watching a DVD my battery does pretty well. I can get a full movie plus another hour or two or reading or writing on a single charge without WiFi.
I don't really see a need to wholly move away from HTTP and HTML. They're both extremely flexible and will likely be very useful for many years to come. They're both relatively basic systems that aren't terribly difficult to implement with a modicum of programming talent. They're also extremely lightweight which makes it much easier to use them on equipment with very little power of memory.
Because HTML is fairly verbose and well formed HTML is regularly laid out it isn't terribly difficult to parse. Computers with a fraction of the processing power and memory available to modern PCs can easily handle HTML files. Well formed HTML and especially XHTML documents are actually very useful because they can not only be easily parse but also easily handled by a variety of output devices. What is doubly useful about HTML is it can also point in an implementation neutral means to other documents. This is what hypertext is all about, text that can describe itself to anyone who is listening.
HTTP as a protocol is extremely useful because it is stateless and as such has very low overhead. Because of this it is very easy to implement and maintain. These features also make the protocol very robust and extensible. It can handle binary and textual data equally well and even tunnel other types of protocols inside of itself. These features that don't need to be replaced or necessarily enhanced.
Apple being pissed at Real has little to do with the iPod or iTunes. What this is really about is Quicktime. Quicktime is the reason Steve Jobs laughed at Glaser for wanting to license FairPlay. Quicktime is required to use iTunes and to play their protected AAC files. Allowing Real to use their AAC implementation will make iTunes and thus Quicktime entirely unneeded to own an iPod.
Apple is in competition with Real. The Quicktime format and exclusive codecs (Sorenson et al) is in competition with Real and Microsoft and their formats and exclusive codecs. Until the iTunes for Windows Quicktime was largely in decline on Windows. With fewer Quicktime users there's less demand for Quicktime formated content. Without Quicktime formated content Apple and their user base end up at the mercy of Real and Microsoft in the media realm. Microsoft has already essentially crippled WMP for the Mac, its only a matter of time before it is canceled entirely.
If Quicktime on Windows were to die the Quicktime user base would shrink precipitously. It would no longer be viable for media companies to use the format so they'd switch entirely to Real or Microsoft owned formats. Microsoft would surly kill WMP for the Mac at that point leaving Mac users unable to access vast amounts of online content. Without the ability to create widely accessible content on Macs (Windows Media) people would stop buying them for content creation. Eventually people would stop buying them entirely since they wouldn't be able to view anything but old Quicktime files.
Using the DMCA is a bit absurd in this case all else being said. Apple doesn't have any say in how exactly I use my iPod once I take it home after paying umpteen hundreds of dollars for it. If I want to go home and install Linux on it that is my prerogative. I can understand them not wanting RealMedia files on the iPod but they're going about this is a very bad way.
There is no super computer technology crisis, there is however a paradigm shift happening in the supercomputer market. Twenty years ago building your own supercomputer, even a loosely coupled cluster, was not a very viable option for most research institutions. Today this option is not only viable but often exercised.
Obviously the big SC vendors and designers seeing less business roll their way, why pay them tons of money when you can have grad students assemble your cluster for the price of some pizzas? That isn't to say SC clusters are the end-all be-all of computing but they're very useful and relatively inexpensive. Realistically they're simply an extension of what Cray started with their T3D supercomputer. The T3D was very impressive in its days but now the technology to build such systems is in the hands of just about everyone.
Taco: What the hell is up with the IT color scheme? This is even worse than the scheme for the Games section. I know the Slashdot editors don't actually read the site but other people try to and we're not all colorblind or reading from grayscale monitors.
I was going to mention that a good deal of blogging software produces very nice and maintainable code. I think it largely has to do with the fact most blogging packages are only a handful of years old and began life in the middle of the HTML 4.01 Transitional - XHTML 1.0 Transitional period. Designing an XHTML compliant engine from the ground up is a lot easier than backporting XHTML into an existing engine, especially one spitting layout elements all over the place.
I tend to believe another large issue has been the traditionally horrible CSS support in IE. Mozilla and other Gecko-based browsers are gaining ground but for the most part IE still rules the web. IE works much better with Microsoft's "standards" than it does with W3C specifications. If only the hours I've wasted tuning CSS to work in IE 5.5 were billable.
One huge problem I've encountered trying to switch pages from HTML 4.01 to XHTML is more established engines tend to hail from the HTML 3.2 days (Slashcode) and have not evolved much since. Forum software is often the worst in my experience, everything is littered with tables and fixed size elements. A lot of people host their sites on vhosts and many of those don't support things like HTML::Template, Mason, or Smarty. As such most coders just write their own template system which may or may not handle newer web standards.
Since many sites are using crappy HTML they want to spice up they tend to use equally crappy JavaScript to add little stylistic features. I think many people are surprised when they hit up a CSS tutorial and figure out they can replace their stylistic JavaScript with CSS and have much better performing web pages.
I'd love to see more sites using XHTML, even transitional XHTML, with CSS for styling and layout purposes. Documents end up much more flexible and quite a bit smaller. It is also easier for end users to override the page's CSS with their own to either make elements more legible or friendlier for their output device (PDA, cell phone, screen reader).
Coders of CMS engines: Please use sane template systems so it is easier for your poor end users to make their pages better comply with web standards. Also don't wrap stuff in tables, not everyone uses tables to lay out their pages! Presentation logic is fine and dandy but don't hard code layout elements, let the users decide! Thank You.
The HST's data archive is currently about 12TB. That data lone is going to provide grounds for scientific papers well into the future. This data archive grows by about 2TB every year. That is a lot of data out of one instrument. There's a lot of good science left in that data. Letting that tremendous data source fall prematurly into the ocean because the HST was abandoned would be monumentally stupid.
There's also quite a bit of money and resources already devoted to the HST. Instruments and components have been built and paid for and the work is already done. Letting it sit on a shelf indefinitely would be a magnificent waste. Besides the money already spent a mission will have to be sent up, automated or not, to de-orbit the HST.
NASA ought to bite the bullet and push the envelope a little bit. It doesn't matter that they would be using untested technologies. Fixing the HST would be the test. I have little doubt that it would be feasible to robotically service the HST. A small cadre of tool laden AIBOs with rocket packs should be able to do the trick. If NASA is too scared to send people into space they could at least send a few cute robot dogs.
The technology and techniques learned with the HST could be applied later with the ISS' construction or even an in-orbit repair of a Shuttle or other craft. Maybe we could even start designing satellites that are meant to be services by robots to extend their useful lifetimes. Companies would be much more likely to invest in satellites if its potential operational life of 20+ years instead of 12 if everything goes alright.
NASA's means of funding is to blame in this situation. Big science telescopes like Hubble, Chandra, and Spitzer are one-off affairs. They get built and that is that. Hubble is an odd case because it has been serviced by the STS. The ISS on the other hand has to be constructed and launched, slowly. The contractors putting together ISS components make a lot of money billing the government.
The Shuttle's design didn't originally include solid fuel rockets. This was later made a requirement as part of a compromise aimed at lowering the Shuttle's design and flight costs. The company that designed and built the SFRs was called Morton Thiokol, now called Cordant Technologies, which was based in Utah. Coincidentally this company had strong ties to the NASA's adminsitrator James Fletcher.
Fletcher built up political support for the Shuttle by throwing some aerospace jobs to Utah. The first US politician to fly aboard the Shuttle was none other than Senator Jake Garn of Utah in April of 1985.
This is the same reasoning behind many of the ISS decisions. NASA can't build something like the ISS without pretty hefty funding from Congress. In order to get funding they have to promise jobs and/or money to the constituencies of the legislators they're asking for money. NASA's administration also knows that if they promise individual companies contracts they can get them to make said legislators happy by writing them nice big campaign checks. Almost all government projects are based around this favor bartering system.
Space telescopes aren't very lucrative contracts so it is hard to sell them to aerospace companies and Congress. The umpteen billion dollar ISS on the other hand is an easy sell as long as the construction can go as slowly as possible.
Releasing a new iMac in September is not canceling it.
1. You can distribute alternate browsers however you distribute other software. Windows, Linux, and MacOS X all have methods of centrally managing and distributing software to client systems on a network.
2. IE is a horrible bet from a security point of view right now. Six months down the road it will likely be just as bad. Mozilla on the other hand is much safer right now and will likely continue to be pretty safe six months down the road. Mozilla's also got quite a few features IE lacks entirely. Firefox also has a lot of features IE lacks entirely and is not a bloating application.
Both of your points are complete non-issues. Right now IE is an extremely bad browser and makes Windows systems more of a liability for companies to use. IE is tightly integrated with the Windows shell and provides a ridiculous amount of privileged access to the system. IE is designed to be used inside of managed environments first and on the internet second. This is obvious when considering many of its security holes are considered "features" by Microsoft because they're used by some of their other products. Most other browsers are not designed with other Microsoft products in mind and as such have far fewer design-related security holes.
This sort of bitching gets really old really fast. Panther was released in October of 2003, that was almost eight months ago. Tiger is only being previewed now, it won't even be released until 2005. You've still got at least six months to save your pennies for Tiger. That is of course assuming you do indeed upgrade.
There's no Apple militia that is going to break your door down and force you to buy and install Tiger, just like no one forced you into buying Panther. Jaguar had a slew of new features over 10.1 and 10.0 (Puma and Cheetah) that developers are just barely taking full advantage of now. As such there's going to be a lot of software that is only going to require Jaguar in order to run. Most of Apple's apps even still support Jaguar. While this won't be the case forever it is the case currently which means upgrading from Jaguar wasn't really necessary for most people.
Tiger has a lot of new features that don't have shiny icons and those will be utilized in Tiger-only applications. You can keep Panther until your primary applications move to be Tiger-only or you can just switch to applications that are Panther friendly. Honestly if you don't see a reason to shell out the $129 for Tiger you don't have to. Plenty of people today get by just fine running Jaguar.