If I remember rightly, they didn't even drop the country from their name initially. They operated for a short while as America Online in the UK before completing the rebranding to the shorter title AOL.
The first came to my attention due to the "decency" controls which had amusing side-effects. Their online forms wouldn't let people from Scunthorpe join for instance.
I'm happy to be told that I'm technically incorrect on this, but I've always considered the base libraries and other ubiquitous parts of the software stack (those parts that are assumed to be present in some version from a clean install, which for iOS includes GUI libraries but for Linux distributions does not) to be part of what sits under the umbrella of "OS".
You seem to be making the common mistake of conflating "kernel" and "operating system" (as people often do with Linux).
While there is talk of efforts within Apple to homogenize the platforms eventually, the full stack of libraries and features is significantly different between OSX and iOS despite each having a kernel based on the same ancestry.
One of the key problems with anything like this (opt-in, opt-out, forced-opt-in if you are Chinese, or anything else) is the question of who gets to chose what should be blocked. Where should lines be drawn?
There are some very vocal groups who would have any information about family planning and sexual health blocked because they think that complete ignorance is going to save their kids' futures, which as you can tell from my wording I very much don't agree with.
Likewise by the same definitions religious groups would use to try classify content as sexual or violent (or both), the Bible should most definitely be banned. I'm guessing this double standard will be brushed under the carpet.
Beyond the specification question of how we classify the content: how do those rules get implemented? Any automated classification will produce masses of false positive while letting much "bad" content through, and will probably be quite easy for content providers to "game". Any system of human intervention will be costly (probably prohibitively so) in terms of employing those people and is similarly prone to bad decisions (though due to bias more than misunderstanding). Either way there would need to be some form of appeals process for the system to have any credence what-so-ever/ They could use existing content classification services of course - but can you name one that is does not suffer from the above problems?
No: if they were smart then they'd have other dumb criminals doing the work with enough indirection between them that they can't be reliably implicated by the authorities.
There are some very bright criminals out there. You usually don't hear about them because they are generally bright enough to stay far enough away from the front lines.
A fair amount over time, if you include their continued activity and the fact they get away with it encouraging others to try too. A lot of law "enforcement" is actually using people as examples to discourage non-compliance: they got caught and were given time, you might be too if you try the same thing.
Steve said outright he didn't believe in it. He might have said "we" rather than "I" and while he and what-ever his magic was were operational there was little difference between him and they, but a little time has passed and the markets are evolving.
I know quite a few people who want a 7"-or-there-abouts design, but don't yet trust Android to be what they want (especially as they have already invested in an iDevice and want to maintain good compatability). If people like that start jumping ship, or if people buying smaller Android tablets later want something bigger/smaller and decide to stick with Android for the same compatibility/familiarity reasons, Apple is going to lose some custom.
Maybe Jobs didn't believe there was a significant enough market for mid-sized devices. They may not have been one when he said that. But I think there is a growing interest in that size either as a main portable device or a secondary, and it wouldn't be the first time he changed his mind as the markets evolved. He wasn't stupid, and would change his mind if good evidence presented itself.
To be honest I think "we don't believe there is a market" means the same from him as it would from many others. That is "we can't make both (and do it well) right now so we've picked the one that will be most successful on its own - there might be a reasonable market for the other but we sure as hell aren't going to say so until we are not close to being present in that space".
In a million years: no I don't think that would be likely. Not impossible though. If we assume that our workings represent intelligence (rather than just one possible implementation thereof) so therefore to achieve our level another animal will need very similar mental apparatus, there are many mechanisms within our development that would need to become present (and dominant) in the cat's gene pool. If we remove outside interference such as experiments by ourselves, that statistical likelihood of that many particular mutations or equivalents happening in that time in circumstances where they represent enough of an advantage to hang around (or at least don't present any disadvantage, physically/socially/environmentally, so that they are not actively selected against).
A million years ago we had probably long since developed fairly complex language skills (much of which is currently thought to be related to key developments regarding the FOXP2 gene) and learned to control fire. Given the cat is a long way off that level of mental development it is unlikely they would catch up and push on to the level that you mention in just a million years.
Ten million years? More conceivable but still highly unlikely.
Fifteen? Getting warmer.
Twenty to twenty-five? I'd say definitely possible. Maybe even quite likely. assuming environmental conditions over the time are generally favorable to that sort of development.
Standard caveat: I'm no scientist. The semi-educated musings above may well be poppycock.
That is a fair point, though soon it'll be moot as (assuming what I've heard is correct) Apple is soon to release a 7" device to fill the gap between the iPod and iPad in their range.
They didn't just leave their door open. The opened the doors of many of their clients without their knowledge.
That doesn't make extortion right at all, of course, but looking at it the other way around: don't let the extortion attempt distract you from expecting the company in question to take more than a little flack for not being able to do their job (that part of the job which involves keeping their client's information secure) properly.
Model-Ts were "any color you like, as long as it's black". It was General Motors that started coloring things up
Actually, for the first half decade the model T was in a few colours: none of them black. The quote is correct though, but the all-black period is later in the car's life cycle.
IIRC the writers planned for one more season, and more-or-less been told they were going to get it hence ending S4 the way they did. When it looked like they might not get it, they instead asked for a "half" season but didn't even get that. The only reason the mini-series that closed it off happened at all was fan outcry. The reason that mini series seems so rushed in many places, good though it still managed to be, is because it *was* rushed: it tried to close in 2x90 mins the lose ends the half-series would have in 10x40 mins - even allowing for the half-season containing plenty of fluff and some of those 40 minutes each episode being taken up by "previously on Farscape", that was a tight squeeze.
The argument here isn't that is should have gone on for ever, but that is should have been given a better end.
Should we just let the problem get worse until we reach the breaking point?
That is better than opening it to legislation and the related lobbying. Just imagine all the time wasted as companies plough effort into trying to add/reword clauses such that they have a small advantage or just to water it down. The end result won't be pretty, and it would most likely be toothless (and therefore pointless) in the end anyway.
Breaking point will hopefully hit for the manufacturers before us as consumers, as networks and sites switch over to IPv6 there will be a point when not having it will be a disadvantage so the business of those not supporting it will suffer as people avoid those products for fear of compatibility issues.
It is a bigger deal than that. It isn't just if someone on the same service (or another service with a leak) happens to have the same password (so without a user-local salt portion have the same hash) - rainbow tables for the common hashes (MD5, SHA1) exist for a large portion of passwords. If your password is simple enough to be in one of those tables and it is stored hashed but without any salt, then it can be guessed very easily using the hash and a table. http://www.freerainbowtables.com/tables/ is the first hit when I search for them in Google, there may well be better/bigger/what-ever out there.
You are still (better) protected if you have a "secure enough" password, and have different passwords for each account, but there are many people who don't do either of these things so many are potentially at risk. "Why should I care?" I hear you ask: well if the fool that had bad passwords discovered that way had access to some power or public resource and was further daft enough to use similar (it doesn't have to be the same) passwords for said resource/access, then a leak of unsalted passwords could very much affect you or people you care about even if you purge from your life anyone who ever dares to use a simple password.
I suggest all premium users, who have paid for the service in some way or another, request some for of discount for a while. Any service that that effectively holds the keys to part of your public identity doesn't understand and implement basic credentials security (especially after the few high-profile cases that have hit in the few years prior to this incident) is simply not fit for purpose.
I wasn't meaning that you shouldn't have those limits in your contracts, both covering how much time is covered by support as well as what environments.
These things should be in the contract - leaving it to potentially argue out in court later could well be commercial suicide.
If the client refuses the support limitations, there is often some room for negotiation. Beyond that always remember that until a contract is signed you can say no to them as easily as they can say no to you - if their demands are unreasonable you generally don't want them as a client anyway (let them waste your competition's time instead).
I agree so much I feel Congress should enact a law mandating all cell phones to be IPv6 enabled by default.
Please no! We don't want technical issue to be subject to legislation unless absolutely necessary (or where the technical issue has public safety implications) - it will only complicate matters.
This of course is why many organisations run IE6 internally: they have software guaranteed to work on IE6 and don't have a support contract that would include free changes if needed for compatibility with other browsers.
If the client is not expecting this sort of limitation in your support agreements, they are deluded and/or being unreasonable.
If she was interested in modelling as a career it might not be a bad place to take her as an education point: "this is the sort of place you need to start, and many don't go far beyond these first steps". If it is enough to put her off then she wasn't going to make it far (unless through luck) in that sector anyway, and if she is still determined it might indicate a genuine passion that should be nurtured (rather than her seeing the career as an easy and/or entirely glamorous option).
At 15 the vast majority of girls are more than capable of dealing with "the way the world really works" lessons, including being exposed to an extent to the world's less attractive factors, and it is probably unhelpful (unhealthy even) and almost certainly impractical to try shield them from all that.
Most companies will probably keep their internal network on IPv4.
Which is fine. My IPv6 hosts don't need to care. Of course they'll eventually need to ensure that they have a reliable v4-to-v6 bridge setup either locally or at their ISP, but that will most likely be easier to setup than changing their whole network to IPv6 would be.
There's no way they're going to want all of their machines with an internet addressable location.
They won't any more than they do now. Public facing routers/firewalls will simply be set not to pass through any incoming connections unless otherwise instructed, just like IPv4 routers do. NAT is a read herring here - before NAT was common things worked fine much the same way as they will work under IPv6 (just with a much smaller address space) in that regard. Most big corporate networks control outgoing connections too (which an IPv4+NAT-only setup generally won't by default) so the one incoming default "block" rule is not going to be a significant amount of extra admin.
I think IPv6 does bring some usefulness, but I just don't foresee everybody changing how their internal networks operate.
Certainly some will, though not all that many in the near future. I suspect it will quickly become normal for new networks to be IPv6, and IPv4 will vanish that way rather than due to mass conversions.
It may not be the case here or where you are but it is already getting to the point in some parts of the world that people will have to be IPv6 all the way as their ISPs have too few IPv4 addresses to hand out to the connecting modems. Said ISPs use some form v6-to-v4 bridging so that IP4v-only servers will be contactable, but while your website will be fine not all protocols will work well through this arrangement. I don't know how common it is, but I know people who have been in Hotels out east where the provided network connections are IPv6 only (presumably with some 6-to-4 system in place so v4 only hosts can be contacted). IPv4 may not die any time soon, but that doesn't mean IPv6 use won't grow rapidly.
The big win I see is for mobile devices like phones - it will make the job of large network providers for those devices easier.
And I can also see a huge amount of consumer type stuff taking years before it has transitioned.
Which is rather unfortunate as these devices are where one of the key IPv4 problems exist (Including phones as mentioned above).
IPv4 isn't going to go away overnight.
No, but IPv6 might grow very rapidly so you can't avoid interacting with it for long even if you stick with IPv4 internally.
then it makes one wonder in which portion of the curve you write about you are...
I'm not on that particular curve as I'm not a Statesian.
As school I always tested ahead of the curve (sometimes by a statistically significant amount though often by so little it was as likely to be statistical error as anything else) on just about everything, aside from spelling and mental arithmetic.
unless this curve is so "skewed in the wrong direction", to use your words, that it got sheared...
Even if the bell curve is skewed in the wrong direction (I'm not saying it is but many people seem to think so) the shear number of people means that there are plenty in the population near the top end of the curve capable of great innovation and there are so many at "reasonable average" levels such there is brawn and brain power available to make innovations work for the economy and feed back into the population to complete the cycle (overpowering the effect of the agents at the lower end of the curve and/or giving them jobs that help fuel (or at least lubricate) the economy further).
Same reason China has grown so fast in recent decades: once a chunk of that massive population was actually put to useful work (from the point of view of the economy, local and global) big things started happening.
Throwing people at a hard problem is often counter productive, but throwing people at implementing the solution to a solved problem often is, so being ahead in the numbers games can be a significant advantage.
Slashdot Mirror
If I remember rightly, they didn't even drop the country from their name initially. They operated for a short while as America Online in the UK before completing the rebranding to the shorter title AOL.
The first came to my attention due to the "decency" controls which had amusing side-effects. Their online forms wouldn't let people from Scunthorpe join for instance.
Fairy enough.
I'm happy to be told that I'm technically incorrect on this, but I've always considered the base libraries and other ubiquitous parts of the software stack (those parts that are assumed to be present in some version from a clean install, which for iOS includes GUI libraries but for Linux distributions does not) to be part of what sits under the umbrella of "OS".
Perhaps platform is the term I should be using.
You seem to be making the common mistake of conflating "kernel" and "operating system" (as people often do with Linux).
While there is talk of efforts within Apple to homogenize the platforms eventually, the full stack of libraries and features is significantly different between OSX and iOS despite each having a kernel based on the same ancestry.
One of the key problems with anything like this (opt-in, opt-out, forced-opt-in if you are Chinese, or anything else) is the question of who gets to chose what should be blocked. Where should lines be drawn?
There are some very vocal groups who would have any information about family planning and sexual health blocked because they think that complete ignorance is going to save their kids' futures, which as you can tell from my wording I very much don't agree with.
Likewise by the same definitions religious groups would use to try classify content as sexual or violent (or both), the Bible should most definitely be banned. I'm guessing this double standard will be brushed under the carpet.
Beyond the specification question of how we classify the content: how do those rules get implemented? Any automated classification will produce masses of false positive while letting much "bad" content through, and will probably be quite easy for content providers to "game". Any system of human intervention will be costly (probably prohibitively so) in terms of employing those people and is similarly prone to bad decisions (though due to bias more than misunderstanding). Either way there would need to be some form of appeals process for the system to have any credence what-so-ever/ They could use existing content classification services of course - but can you name one that is does not suffer from the above problems?
No: if they were smart then they'd have other dumb criminals doing the work with enough indirection between them that they can't be reliably implicated by the authorities.
There are some very bright criminals out there. You usually don't hear about them because they are generally bright enough to stay far enough away from the front lines.
A fair amount over time, if you include their continued activity and the fact they get away with it encouraging others to try too. A lot of law "enforcement" is actually using people as examples to discourage non-compliance: they got caught and were given time, you might be too if you try the same thing.
Steve said outright he didn't believe in it. He might have said "we" rather than "I" and while he and what-ever his magic was were operational there was little difference between him and they, but a little time has passed and the markets are evolving.
I know quite a few people who want a 7"-or-there-abouts design, but don't yet trust Android to be what they want (especially as they have already invested in an iDevice and want to maintain good compatability). If people like that start jumping ship, or if people buying smaller Android tablets later want something bigger/smaller and decide to stick with Android for the same compatibility/familiarity reasons, Apple is going to lose some custom.
Maybe Jobs didn't believe there was a significant enough market for mid-sized devices. They may not have been one when he said that. But I think there is a growing interest in that size either as a main portable device or a secondary, and it wouldn't be the first time he changed his mind as the markets evolved. He wasn't stupid, and would change his mind if good evidence presented itself.
To be honest I think "we don't believe there is a market" means the same from him as it would from many others. That is "we can't make both (and do it well) right now so we've picked the one that will be most successful on its own - there might be a reasonable market for the other but we sure as hell aren't going to say so until we are not close to being present in that space".
In a million years: no I don't think that would be likely. Not impossible though. If we assume that our workings represent intelligence (rather than just one possible implementation thereof) so therefore to achieve our level another animal will need very similar mental apparatus, there are many mechanisms within our development that would need to become present (and dominant) in the cat's gene pool. If we remove outside interference such as experiments by ourselves, that statistical likelihood of that many particular mutations or equivalents happening in that time in circumstances where they represent enough of an advantage to hang around (or at least don't present any disadvantage, physically/socially/environmentally, so that they are not actively selected against).
A million years ago we had probably long since developed fairly complex language skills (much of which is currently thought to be related to key developments regarding the FOXP2 gene) and learned to control fire. Given the cat is a long way off that level of mental development it is unlikely they would catch up and push on to the level that you mention in just a million years.
Ten million years? More conceivable but still highly unlikely.
Fifteen? Getting warmer.
Twenty to twenty-five? I'd say definitely possible. Maybe even quite likely. assuming environmental conditions over the time are generally favorable to that sort of development.
Standard caveat: I'm no scientist. The semi-educated musings above may well be poppycock.
"the roar of Moses' Triumph is heard in the hills."
Though if such a god cared, you'd think he'd do something to defend his name. It isn't like he'd be new to the smiting game.
That is a fair point, though soon it'll be moot as (assuming what I've heard is correct) Apple is soon to release a 7" device to fill the gap between the iPod and iPad in their range.
Don't forget her five little sisters.
They didn't just leave their door open. The opened the doors of many of their clients without their knowledge.
That doesn't make extortion right at all, of course, but looking at it the other way around: don't let the extortion attempt distract you from expecting the company in question to take more than a little flack for not being able to do their job (that part of the job which involves keeping their client's information secure) properly.
Actually, for the first half decade the model T was in a few colours: none of them black. The quote is correct though, but the all-black period is later in the car's life cycle.
IIRC the writers planned for one more season, and more-or-less been told they were going to get it hence ending S4 the way they did. When it looked like they might not get it, they instead asked for a "half" season but didn't even get that. The only reason the mini-series that closed it off happened at all was fan outcry. The reason that mini series seems so rushed in many places, good though it still managed to be, is because it *was* rushed: it tried to close in 2x90 mins the lose ends the half-series would have in 10x40 mins - even allowing for the half-season containing plenty of fluff and some of those 40 minutes each episode being taken up by "previously on Farscape", that was a tight squeeze.
The argument here isn't that is should have gone on for ever, but that is should have been given a better end.
Should we just let the problem get worse until we reach the breaking point?
That is better than opening it to legislation and the related lobbying. Just imagine all the time wasted as companies plough effort into trying to add/reword clauses such that they have a small advantage or just to water it down. The end result won't be pretty, and it would most likely be toothless (and therefore pointless) in the end anyway.
Breaking point will hopefully hit for the manufacturers before us as consumers, as networks and sites switch over to IPv6 there will be a point when not having it will be a disadvantage so the business of those not supporting it will suffer as people avoid those products for fear of compatibility issues.
It is a bigger deal than that. It isn't just if someone on the same service (or another service with a leak) happens to have the same password (so without a user-local salt portion have the same hash) - rainbow tables for the common hashes (MD5, SHA1) exist for a large portion of passwords. If your password is simple enough to be in one of those tables and it is stored hashed but without any salt, then it can be guessed very easily using the hash and a table. http://www.freerainbowtables.com/tables/ is the first hit when I search for them in Google, there may well be better/bigger/what-ever out there.
You are still (better) protected if you have a "secure enough" password, and have different passwords for each account, but there are many people who don't do either of these things so many are potentially at risk. "Why should I care?" I hear you ask: well if the fool that had bad passwords discovered that way had access to some power or public resource and was further daft enough to use similar (it doesn't have to be the same) passwords for said resource/access, then a leak of unsalted passwords could very much affect you or people you care about even if you purge from your life anyone who ever dares to use a simple password.
I suggest all premium users, who have paid for the service in some way or another, request some for of discount for a while. Any service that that effectively holds the keys to part of your public identity doesn't understand and implement basic credentials security (especially after the few high-profile cases that have hit in the few years prior to this incident) is simply not fit for purpose.
I wasn't meaning that you shouldn't have those limits in your contracts, both covering how much time is covered by support as well as what environments.
These things should be in the contract - leaving it to potentially argue out in court later could well be commercial suicide.
If the client refuses the support limitations, there is often some room for negotiation. Beyond that always remember that until a contract is signed you can say no to them as easily as they can say no to you - if their demands are unreasonable you generally don't want them as a client anyway (let them waste your competition's time instead).
I agree so much I feel Congress should enact a law mandating all cell phones to be IPv6 enabled by default.
Please no! We don't want technical issue to be subject to legislation unless absolutely necessary (or where the technical issue has public safety implications) - it will only complicate matters.
This of course is why many organisations run IE6 internally: they have software guaranteed to work on IE6 and don't have a support contract that would include free changes if needed for compatibility with other browsers.
If the client is not expecting this sort of limitation in your support agreements, they are deluded and/or being unreasonable.
If she was interested in modelling as a career it might not be a bad place to take her as an education point: "this is the sort of place you need to start, and many don't go far beyond these first steps". If it is enough to put her off then she wasn't going to make it far (unless through luck) in that sector anyway, and if she is still determined it might indicate a genuine passion that should be nurtured (rather than her seeing the career as an easy and/or entirely glamorous option).
At 15 the vast majority of girls are more than capable of dealing with "the way the world really works" lessons, including being exposed to an extent to the world's less attractive factors, and it is probably unhelpful (unhealthy even) and almost certainly impractical to try shield them from all that.
Most companies will probably keep their internal network on IPv4.
Which is fine. My IPv6 hosts don't need to care. Of course they'll eventually need to ensure that they have a reliable v4-to-v6 bridge setup either locally or at their ISP, but that will most likely be easier to setup than changing their whole network to IPv6 would be.
There's no way they're going to want all of their machines with an internet addressable location.
They won't any more than they do now. Public facing routers/firewalls will simply be set not to pass through any incoming connections unless otherwise instructed, just like IPv4 routers do. NAT is a read herring here - before NAT was common things worked fine much the same way as they will work under IPv6 (just with a much smaller address space) in that regard. Most big corporate networks control outgoing connections too (which an IPv4+NAT-only setup generally won't by default) so the one incoming default "block" rule is not going to be a significant amount of extra admin.
I think IPv6 does bring some usefulness, but I just don't foresee everybody changing how their internal networks operate.
Certainly some will, though not all that many in the near future. I suspect it will quickly become normal for new networks to be IPv6, and IPv4 will vanish that way rather than due to mass conversions.
It may not be the case here or where you are but it is already getting to the point in some parts of the world that people will have to be IPv6 all the way as their ISPs have too few IPv4 addresses to hand out to the connecting modems. Said ISPs use some form v6-to-v4 bridging so that IP4v-only servers will be contactable, but while your website will be fine not all protocols will work well through this arrangement. I don't know how common it is, but I know people who have been in Hotels out east where the provided network connections are IPv6 only (presumably with some 6-to-4 system in place so v4 only hosts can be contacted). IPv4 may not die any time soon, but that doesn't mean IPv6 use won't grow rapidly.
The big win I see is for mobile devices like phones - it will make the job of large network providers for those devices easier.
And I can also see a huge amount of consumer type stuff taking years before it has transitioned.
Which is rather unfortunate as these devices are where one of the key IPv4 problems exist (Including phones as mentioned above).
IPv4 isn't going to go away overnight.
No, but IPv6 might grow very rapidly so you can't avoid interacting with it for long even if you stick with IPv4 internally.
then it makes one wonder in which portion of the curve you write about you are...
I'm not on that particular curve as I'm not a Statesian. As school I always tested ahead of the curve (sometimes by a statistically significant amount though often by so little it was as likely to be statistical error as anything else) on just about everything, aside from spelling and mental arithmetic.
unless this curve is so "skewed in the wrong direction", to use your words, that it got sheared...
That does sound somewhat like my home town...
No mystery. Numbers.
Even if the bell curve is skewed in the wrong direction (I'm not saying it is but many people seem to think so) the shear number of people means that there are plenty in the population near the top end of the curve capable of great innovation and there are so many at "reasonable average" levels such there is brawn and brain power available to make innovations work for the economy and feed back into the population to complete the cycle (overpowering the effect of the agents at the lower end of the curve and/or giving them jobs that help fuel (or at least lubricate) the economy further).
Same reason China has grown so fast in recent decades: once a chunk of that massive population was actually put to useful work (from the point of view of the economy, local and global) big things started happening.
Throwing people at a hard problem is often counter productive, but throwing people at implementing the solution to a solved problem often is, so being ahead in the numbers games can be a significant advantage.