I'm unpopular for this, but I like their "vendor lock-in". It ensures that they have a finite number of hardware test cases, and makes the Mac pretty stable overall. Yeah, because Apple would have to test non-supported configurations to make sure that they worked.
I don't understand this viewpoint. It would be like suggesting that Microsoft start supporting only Dell PCs and locking their OS to those machines in order to make the OS more stable.
Besides, with the Apple machines supporting Windows, there's no real vendor lock-in anymore. If Apple went out of business tomorrow, you'd still have a perfectly functional Windows machine. Right. That's why the lock-in refers to only being able to run OS X on machines which are produced by Apple.
Well, there's grudges, and then there's maintaining a monopoly that, over the past two decades, was built and maintained on anticompetitive practices. If Microsoft were showing signs of remorse--giving back to the community that they raped to get to where they are, then some forgiveness might be in order. They really show no signs of doing this, though--instead, holding patents over the head of GNU/Linux and implicitly threatening to file a big fat lawsuit if Linux gets too big, all the while refusing to disclose exactly which bits of code are infringing, or even which specific patents it believe Linux to be infringing.
No, I think that hating Microsoft is at least a little bit justified, both for past actions and for current ones.
Now hating Windows, that's a completely different beast, and probably even more subjective.
There are decent enough reasons to hate Apple. The arbitrary lock-in of the OS is a good place to start. The hypocrisy of wanting to strip DRM from the media they sell while keeping DRM on their own OS is another. iPod lock-in is yet another. And if you hold a grudge, the lawsuits they filed in the 80s over their look-and-feel is another (I only mention this because I hold a grudge against Microsoft for all of their anticompetitive practices of the past 20 years.)
The people buying the stuff probably aren't the same people complaining about the prices.
Look, once you've figured out the price-point that maximizes your profits, you sell at it. Businesses aren't charities. They could be making profits of 1000% and it would be reasonable to sell at that price if it was the maximum on the curve.
Figuring out that point, though--that's the tricky part.
These logs are valuable. If they develop a new algorithm to extract new information they can run it against their logs and pull out that additional information. Of course, they could do quite a bit of this anonymously. While they can get some information from the IP address, it's not nearly as useful as information from the Google Cookie. And the IP address can be made anonymous after a short period of time (its usefulness is significantly reduced if everyone behind it allows the Google Cookie, or after the IP address changes.)
Since the article is about collaboration tools (like Google Docs and mail), I certainly hope that Google is storing the relevant information!
As for other information (such as who is searching for what), well they're probably not storing significantly more than Yahoo or MSN. Google's just one of the more popular targets because they're pretty highly visible.
The Patriot act says that, under certain circumstances, a service provider may not notify its customers that they've released their records. That's one of the biggest issues here--companies want to know if their documents are being viewed.
I'm college educated. Those mistakes really irritate me, too. Nonetheless, I occasionally find myself typing pretty fast. It's a stream-of-consciousness straight from the right-half of my brain to my fingers, and sometimes I make these kinds of errors. Most of the time, I manage to correct them on the spot. Sometimes I correct them when I review the post before hitting "Submit." And sometimes they slip through (presumably.)
I think that the crux of the matter is that informal writing is just much more common these days than it used to be, which means that people 'practice' writing incorrectly much more (and sometimes earlier in life) than they practice writing correctly. Combined with an audience who largely doesn't care about these small mistakes, it's just something that's going to get worse and worse.
I think the feds have been entirely too chummy with Ma Bell (and the cablecos, and BigCorp in general) for the last several decades. However, I'm very skeptical that the answer to poor federal legislation is additional federal legislation. I think that the answer to poor federal legislation would be good federal legislation, but you're right that that's probably wishful thinking these days.
I guess the cure that I'd like to see is requirements that the line owners share their lines with competitors. In this way, at least competition has a shot at fixing the problem. We could examine alternatives later on, if that failed.
That's a fair point. Of course, the small packet example is not likely to help in the case of ISPs trying to reduce P2P, but there could be other solutions. Of course, in these cases, you run high risks of unintended consequences.
All of that is perfectly reasonable as long as there are alternatives that customers can choose. When it's a content provider, it's not hard to switch to a new ISP. When it's an end-user, it can be quite hard to switch to a new ISP (in some cases, there just aren't other choices--there are plenty of areas where there is a monopoly on broadband.)
The government's own actions to help secure that monopoly are part of the problem. Cable providers don't have to share their lines with competitors, despite having effectively secured a monopoly on cable lines from the government (through regulations on who can lay the lines, as well as financial incentives from the government for laying them in the first place.)
Then there are the anticompetitive concerns. Cable providers want people to consume entertainment that they provide. When they artificially restrict access to entertainment sites (such as Youtube), they increase the value of their own offerings to their own customers.
Then there's the issue of advertising. They advertise an internet connection. That's what I should get. Instead, I get a crippled Internet connection.
There are lots of things to consider when talking about Net Neutrality that go beyond, "It's my network, and I'll do what I want with it."
The problem with traffic shaping is that eventually, once everyone starts encrypting their data and using recognized ports (like 443) to pass non-standard traffic, you've got to start shaping just about everything. Shaping only works as long as you can recognize and classify the data.
Most people should be encrypting a large chunk of what goes across the Internet. Anything which sends a password or a session cookie should be encrypted. That's going to be fairly hard on traffic shapers.
Don't ISPs tend to pay by the amount of traffic (rather than just a connection fee, as most of their users pay?) This solution seems to be looking at the problem from the perspective that p2p users are harming bandwidth for casual users, instead of simply costing the ISPs more money due to the increased amount of data that they're pushing through their pipes.
To be fair, comparing a G4 to anything modern at the time is horribly unfair. The G4 wasa very old processor at the time, ad supposedly one of the reasons for moving to Intel had to do with IBM being unable or unwilling to create a moble G5.
As to the lying about the product release, every company does that. If you hate Apple for it, you'd better hate others for it, too.
Dell comes to mind, denying both that they'd use Linux and that they'd use AMD shortly before those respective products came out.
I really don't agree with your central point though; my brother just bought a new computer and paid around the $1300 for that Macbook I was talking about. For that same money he got the same amount of RAM but faster speeds, a fairly high-end graphics card, 2x250 GB SATA hard drives (compare to 1x160), same clock speed on the processor (listed speeds) except four cores instead of two, DVD-DL burner and a whompin' cooling system that lets him fairly seriously overclock that sucker and push the system that much further. Granted he built it himself which saves a bit of money in some cases, but these systems don't seem comparably spec'd to me. Not even close. They WERE comparably priced though. He built a notebook himself? Or are you just trolling by comparing a desktop to a notebook?
I was never a fan of Apple operating systems until OS X. I hope that they never significantly modify it.
The megahertz myth that you referenced, however, has some legitimacy. The biggest problem with the megahertz myth phenomenon is that prior to the Intel switch, there was no good way to measure it. You pretty much had to use two machines and decide whether one felt more sluggish--newsflash, though: most of the time, with desktop applications, the computer is waiting for the user to give it input. This is how Apple was able to keep the megahertz lower while claiming similar performance--it was true for people who do light computer work. Of course, do rendering or anything else highly CPU intensive, and it's harder to hide the performance differences. It's largely irrelevant, though. Most users just don't do those kinds of things, so it didn't matter.
Then the switch to Intel happened. Now we can directly compare performance--we've got the same version of the same OS running the same applications on two different hardware platforms of different speeds. You can't hide the fact that the Intel chip blows the PowerPC chip out of the water, so you change tack. You point out the differences in CPU-intensive applications. Instant win, except that you look like a hypocrite. But either perspective might have been true, depending upon how you wanted to use the computer.
This stream of consciousness brought to you by insomnia at 1:30am.
Macs aren't absurdly more expensive than comprably spec'd PCs. They're a little more expensive, generally, but not as much as most people think.
The problem is that they don't give you a lot of options per line, and they don't have much in the way of low-end lines comparable to, say, Dell PCs. When you look at the fact that you can get a PC notebook for around $400 these days, and the lowest end Macbook you can get is $1100, it looks pretty bad. When you start looking at the specs, things tend to even out.
In a nutshell, if you're getting a new PC, and the specs you want happen to match a Mac, you can get the mac for maybe $100-$200 more than the PC and get what many consider to be a superior OS to Windows (I prefer OS X, and I don't even own a Mac.)
I could believe that it's a a mistake, largely because the engine probably uses version numbers to determine which software is on the machine. I could easily imagine a scenario where someone accidentally coded the check such that "not installed" was equivalent to software version 0, in which case Safari 3.1 would match as a candidate for software to be downloaded.
I'm not in the "Apple can do no wrong" camp. I definitely think that this was handled poorly. But it wasn't a drive-by install, and it wasn't a virus that did it. If it was an accident, it's pretty unfortunate for Apple's reputation (at least amongst security professionals) and if it was intentional, then someone should probably be seriously reprimanded, but let's face it--the users had the option of unchecking that box before installing. That's more than people get when malware silently installs on their computer. It's just like when you install Flash and Adobe asks you if you want to install Google Toolbar, too--with an automatically checked checkbox.
In no way, shape, or form did I claim that it was justified. I just think that the issue of trust is overstated in the post to which I originally replied.
There are two major issues, here. One is trusting the vendor--I'll agree (for the most part) that if you trust the initial software, you probably should trust the updates*. The other issue is trusting your UI.
Trusting your UI is largely what I am concerned with, though I do think that people should be informed on what updates are doing. I don't want to tell people, "You can trust the Apple updater," only to have them click on a spoofed window that looks like it.
Of course, I also think that we're all overstating the issue of trust. Few end users are going to distrust Apple for this--mostly, that's the security folks.
* Of course, servers get compromised, updates have unintended effects, etc.
Please re-read the thread and practice your reading comprehension skills. I'm saying that the users should not blindly trust the dialog. Spoofed messages was one example of why.
And before you inevitably reply with "but a spoof would look different because X", yes, obviously. But if the user is trained to question what is presented to them, they might notice that it looks different. If not, they might click ok because "Apple's never done anything bad before," (even though Apple is not the one presenting this particular window.) It has nothing to do with what software is purported to be updated.
Apple is creating a situation where users have to worry about their trusted vendor doing something sneaky and that's bad for everyone. It'd be nice if we could always trust the vendor, but we simply can't. Updates periodically break things. Users need to be educated to determine whether or not an update is important enough to apply. This trust relationship everyone's talking about is what's silly. Users should trust their computers as little as possible. Just because it looks like the vendor's dialog box, don't assume that it is. You never know when the rules are going to change.
Anecdotally, and slightly off subject, back when I first got on the Internet, there were always lots of e-mails floating around saying, "If you get an e-mail with the subject \"Blah\", don't open it! If you do, your computer will be erased!" Every time one of these would float around, my family would send it to me, and then I'd reply back saying, "You can't get a virus just from opening an e-mail." I regret that more than a lot of things in my life, because it didn't take all that long for Outlook to be able to run macros, to do so by default, and to do so when just opening the e-mail. Turns out that I didn't anticipate that the game could change and gave some people bad advice--now, your computer could get infected simply by opening an e-mail, and all those people that I reprimanded in that way had to effectively be re-trained.
You completely missed the point and put words in my mouth that weren't there at all.
I did not say that Apple's actions were acceptable. I didn't pass judgment one way or another on them. What I said was that trust is not necessarily a good thing. We don't want users to trusting of their auto-updaters that they blindly click "OK" when prompted with one. The parent post to the one I replied to complained that the trust relationship comprised of the vendor, the updater, and the user was compromised in this incident--I'm arguing that such a relationship shouldn't exit. Users should question their software when it asks to install anything new.
The spoofing part of my post was to show one example of why a blind trust relationship is bad. A pop-up ad could be made to look like an Apple software update, for example. Those blindly trusting users see something that looks fairly similar to what they've seen before, so they click on it. That's not a situation we want.
Users shouldn't second guess themselves when clicking "OK" on a software update dialog. Probably the most ignorant comment disguised as an insightful comment I've ever seen on Slashdot.
Users should not be trained to click OK. In fact, that's exactly what's causing lots of iPod owners to suddenly have the Safari browser on their desktop. Users should be looking at the auto-update screen and saying, "Hmm. Does this look legitimate? Do I have this software on my computer? Why am I being prompted to update?"
Or do you think that spoofing of auto-update windows isn't ever going to be a threat? They already spoof "windows updates" in spam messages containing trojans.
Education and diligence is the key to safe computing. Users "not second-guessing themselves" before clicking OK is not.
I tried to come up with a number of adjectives to describe this action. It's not "bad" exactly, because it's a minor thing--an extra web browser taking up a few megabytes of hard drive space. It's not "stupid" because it gets the browser out there so that they get more marketshare. The best word I can come up with is "annoying" and even then, only to a fairly small subset of people. It's a move that makes me look up and wish that Apple were a friendlier company, but uproars? That's a bit much, I think.
As far as the iPod monopoly goes--it doesn't. iTunes (and Apple software) isn't the only way to manage your iPod, and Apple doesn't intentionally make it hard for other software to compete. iPods themselves aren't a monopoly, despite a fairly high marketshare, and they certainly aren't anticompetitive, as other music stores are able to compete just fine. iTMS could be considered anticompetitive, except that they're trying to move away from DRM on their music.
Your post sounds like a knee-jerk reaction to Apple fanboys.
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I don't understand this viewpoint. It would be like suggesting that Microsoft start supporting only Dell PCs and locking their OS to those machines in order to make the OS more stable. Besides, with the Apple machines supporting Windows, there's no real vendor lock-in anymore. If Apple went out of business tomorrow, you'd still have a perfectly functional Windows machine. Right. That's why the lock-in refers to only being able to run OS X on machines which are produced by Apple.
Well, there's grudges, and then there's maintaining a monopoly that, over the past two decades, was built and maintained on anticompetitive practices. If Microsoft were showing signs of remorse--giving back to the community that they raped to get to where they are, then some forgiveness might be in order. They really show no signs of doing this, though--instead, holding patents over the head of GNU/Linux and implicitly threatening to file a big fat lawsuit if Linux gets too big, all the while refusing to disclose exactly which bits of code are infringing, or even which specific patents it believe Linux to be infringing.
No, I think that hating Microsoft is at least a little bit justified, both for past actions and for current ones.
Now hating Windows, that's a completely different beast, and probably even more subjective.
There are decent enough reasons to hate Apple. The arbitrary lock-in of the OS is a good place to start. The hypocrisy of wanting to strip DRM from the media they sell while keeping DRM on their own OS is another. iPod lock-in is yet another. And if you hold a grudge, the lawsuits they filed in the 80s over their look-and-feel is another (I only mention this because I hold a grudge against Microsoft for all of their anticompetitive practices of the past 20 years.)
The people buying the stuff probably aren't the same people complaining about the prices.
Look, once you've figured out the price-point that maximizes your profits, you sell at it. Businesses aren't charities. They could be making profits of 1000% and it would be reasonable to sell at that price if it was the maximum on the curve.
Figuring out that point, though--that's the tricky part.
You're talking about standard throttling. Shaping involves prioritizing some traffic above others.
Since the article is about collaboration tools (like Google Docs and mail), I certainly hope that Google is storing the relevant information!
As for other information (such as who is searching for what), well they're probably not storing significantly more than Yahoo or MSN. Google's just one of the more popular targets because they're pretty highly visible.
The Patriot act says that, under certain circumstances, a service provider may not notify its customers that they've released their records. That's one of the biggest issues here--companies want to know if their documents are being viewed.
I'm college educated. Those mistakes really irritate me, too. Nonetheless, I occasionally find myself typing pretty fast. It's a stream-of-consciousness straight from the right-half of my brain to my fingers, and sometimes I make these kinds of errors. Most of the time, I manage to correct them on the spot. Sometimes I correct them when I review the post before hitting "Submit." And sometimes they slip through (presumably.)
I think that the crux of the matter is that informal writing is just much more common these days than it used to be, which means that people 'practice' writing incorrectly much more (and sometimes earlier in life) than they practice writing correctly. Combined with an audience who largely doesn't care about these small mistakes, it's just something that's going to get worse and worse.
I guess the cure that I'd like to see is requirements that the line owners share their lines with competitors. In this way, at least competition has a shot at fixing the problem. We could examine alternatives later on, if that failed.
That's a fair point. Of course, the small packet example is not likely to help in the case of ISPs trying to reduce P2P, but there could be other solutions. Of course, in these cases, you run high risks of unintended consequences.
All of that is perfectly reasonable as long as there are alternatives that customers can choose. When it's a content provider, it's not hard to switch to a new ISP. When it's an end-user, it can be quite hard to switch to a new ISP (in some cases, there just aren't other choices--there are plenty of areas where there is a monopoly on broadband.)
The government's own actions to help secure that monopoly are part of the problem. Cable providers don't have to share their lines with competitors, despite having effectively secured a monopoly on cable lines from the government (through regulations on who can lay the lines, as well as financial incentives from the government for laying them in the first place.)
Then there are the anticompetitive concerns. Cable providers want people to consume entertainment that they provide. When they artificially restrict access to entertainment sites (such as Youtube), they increase the value of their own offerings to their own customers.
Then there's the issue of advertising. They advertise an internet connection. That's what I should get. Instead, I get a crippled Internet connection.
There are lots of things to consider when talking about Net Neutrality that go beyond, "It's my network, and I'll do what I want with it."
The problem with traffic shaping is that eventually, once everyone starts encrypting their data and using recognized ports (like 443) to pass non-standard traffic, you've got to start shaping just about everything. Shaping only works as long as you can recognize and classify the data.
Most people should be encrypting a large chunk of what goes across the Internet. Anything which sends a password or a session cookie should be encrypted. That's going to be fairly hard on traffic shapers.
Don't ISPs tend to pay by the amount of traffic (rather than just a connection fee, as most of their users pay?) This solution seems to be looking at the problem from the perspective that p2p users are harming bandwidth for casual users, instead of simply costing the ISPs more money due to the increased amount of data that they're pushing through their pipes.
To be fair, comparing a G4 to anything modern at the time is horribly unfair. The G4 wasa very old processor at the time, ad supposedly one of the reasons for moving to Intel had to do with IBM being unable or unwilling to create a moble G5.
As to the lying about the product release, every company does that. If you hate Apple for it, you'd better hate others for it, too.
Dell comes to mind, denying both that they'd use Linux and that they'd use AMD shortly before those respective products came out.
I was never a fan of Apple operating systems until OS X. I hope that they never significantly modify it.
The megahertz myth that you referenced, however, has some legitimacy. The biggest problem with the megahertz myth phenomenon is that prior to the Intel switch, there was no good way to measure it. You pretty much had to use two machines and decide whether one felt more sluggish--newsflash, though: most of the time, with desktop applications, the computer is waiting for the user to give it input. This is how Apple was able to keep the megahertz lower while claiming similar performance--it was true for people who do light computer work. Of course, do rendering or anything else highly CPU intensive, and it's harder to hide the performance differences. It's largely irrelevant, though. Most users just don't do those kinds of things, so it didn't matter.
Then the switch to Intel happened. Now we can directly compare performance--we've got the same version of the same OS running the same applications on two different hardware platforms of different speeds. You can't hide the fact that the Intel chip blows the PowerPC chip out of the water, so you change tack. You point out the differences in CPU-intensive applications. Instant win, except that you look like a hypocrite. But either perspective might have been true, depending upon how you wanted to use the computer.
This stream of consciousness brought to you by insomnia at 1:30am.
Macs aren't absurdly more expensive than comprably spec'd PCs. They're a little more expensive, generally, but not as much as most people think.
The problem is that they don't give you a lot of options per line, and they don't have much in the way of low-end lines comparable to, say, Dell PCs. When you look at the fact that you can get a PC notebook for around $400 these days, and the lowest end Macbook you can get is $1100, it looks pretty bad. When you start looking at the specs, things tend to even out.
In a nutshell, if you're getting a new PC, and the specs you want happen to match a Mac, you can get the mac for maybe $100-$200 more than the PC and get what many consider to be a superior OS to Windows (I prefer OS X, and I don't even own a Mac.)
I could believe that it's a a mistake, largely because the engine probably uses version numbers to determine which software is on the machine. I could easily imagine a scenario where someone accidentally coded the check such that "not installed" was equivalent to software version 0, in which case Safari 3.1 would match as a candidate for software to be downloaded.
I'm not in the "Apple can do no wrong" camp. I definitely think that this was handled poorly. But it wasn't a drive-by install, and it wasn't a virus that did it. If it was an accident, it's pretty unfortunate for Apple's reputation (at least amongst security professionals) and if it was intentional, then someone should probably be seriously reprimanded, but let's face it--the users had the option of unchecking that box before installing. That's more than people get when malware silently installs on their computer. It's just like when you install Flash and Adobe asks you if you want to install Google Toolbar, too--with an automatically checked checkbox.
In no way, shape, or form did I claim that it was justified. I just think that the issue of trust is overstated in the post to which I originally replied.
There are two major issues, here. One is trusting the vendor--I'll agree (for the most part) that if you trust the initial software, you probably should trust the updates*. The other issue is trusting your UI.
Trusting your UI is largely what I am concerned with, though I do think that people should be informed on what updates are doing. I don't want to tell people, "You can trust the Apple updater," only to have them click on a spoofed window that looks like it.
Of course, I also think that we're all overstating the issue of trust. Few end users are going to distrust Apple for this--mostly, that's the security folks.
* Of course, servers get compromised, updates have unintended effects, etc.
And before you inevitably reply with "but a spoof would look different because X", yes, obviously. But if the user is trained to question what is presented to them, they might notice that it looks different. If not, they might click ok because "Apple's never done anything bad before," (even though Apple is not the one presenting this particular window.) It has nothing to do with what software is purported to be updated. Apple is creating a situation where users have to worry about their trusted vendor doing something sneaky and that's bad for everyone. It'd be nice if we could always trust the vendor, but we simply can't. Updates periodically break things. Users need to be educated to determine whether or not an update is important enough to apply. This trust relationship everyone's talking about is what's silly. Users should trust their computers as little as possible. Just because it looks like the vendor's dialog box, don't assume that it is. You never know when the rules are going to change.
Anecdotally, and slightly off subject, back when I first got on the Internet, there were always lots of e-mails floating around saying, "If you get an e-mail with the subject \"Blah\", don't open it! If you do, your computer will be erased!" Every time one of these would float around, my family would send it to me, and then I'd reply back saying, "You can't get a virus just from opening an e-mail." I regret that more than a lot of things in my life, because it didn't take all that long for Outlook to be able to run macros, to do so by default, and to do so when just opening the e-mail. Turns out that I didn't anticipate that the game could change and gave some people bad advice--now, your computer could get infected simply by opening an e-mail, and all those people that I reprimanded in that way had to effectively be re-trained.
You completely missed the point and put words in my mouth that weren't there at all.
I did not say that Apple's actions were acceptable. I didn't pass judgment one way or another on them. What I said was that trust is not necessarily a good thing. We don't want users to trusting of their auto-updaters that they blindly click "OK" when prompted with one. The parent post to the one I replied to complained that the trust relationship comprised of the vendor, the updater, and the user was compromised in this incident--I'm arguing that such a relationship shouldn't exit. Users should question their software when it asks to install anything new.
The spoofing part of my post was to show one example of why a blind trust relationship is bad. A pop-up ad could be made to look like an Apple software update, for example. Those blindly trusting users see something that looks fairly similar to what they've seen before, so they click on it. That's not a situation we want.
Users should not be trained to click OK. In fact, that's exactly what's causing lots of iPod owners to suddenly have the Safari browser on their desktop. Users should be looking at the auto-update screen and saying, "Hmm. Does this look legitimate? Do I have this software on my computer? Why am I being prompted to update?"
Or do you think that spoofing of auto-update windows isn't ever going to be a threat? They already spoof "windows updates" in spam messages containing trojans.
Education and diligence is the key to safe computing. Users "not second-guessing themselves" before clicking OK is not.
I tried to come up with a number of adjectives to describe this action. It's not "bad" exactly, because it's a minor thing--an extra web browser taking up a few megabytes of hard drive space. It's not "stupid" because it gets the browser out there so that they get more marketshare. The best word I can come up with is "annoying" and even then, only to a fairly small subset of people. It's a move that makes me look up and wish that Apple were a friendlier company, but uproars? That's a bit much, I think.
As far as the iPod monopoly goes--it doesn't. iTunes (and Apple software) isn't the only way to manage your iPod, and Apple doesn't intentionally make it hard for other software to compete. iPods themselves aren't a monopoly, despite a fairly high marketshare, and they certainly aren't anticompetitive, as other music stores are able to compete just fine. iTMS could be considered anticompetitive, except that they're trying to move away from DRM on their music.
Your post sounds like a knee-jerk reaction to Apple fanboys.
How shortsighted. Software would notify a client if he was trying to connect to a non-shared access point.