If you're comparing it only to Flash - and especially older Flash - you're not giving Adobe a fair shake.
Put briefly, Adobe Flex is in beta of it's 4th major version, and it's what Adobe is offering for programming targeting the Flash Player. For a programmer, it is worlds better than Flash.
Silverlight might be awesome, I haven't touched it, but everything you said about it are all the same improvements over Flash that Flex has been doing for years now.
Flash is an animation tool. People starting using it for applications, and starting in 2002 and again in 2004 Macromedia gave it real support as a programming language. This is all still true, and they've continued to improve that.
But we're now on version 2 (3 is in beta, 1.5 was a major version) of Adobe Flex, which should be considered the follow-on to Flash for programmers and applications. The Actionscript which underlies this is identical in the two platforms, although Flex is driving the new AS versions and Flash lags behind a bit. But Flex also removes all the major craziness that programmers hated in Flash - layout is in an MXML (specific kind of XML) file, there is no binary source file like a fla, and it has further strengthened the already-present OOP capabilities. They have a Dreamweaver-like WYSIWYG layout editor and IDE - and it's also an Eclipse plugin. But like Dreamweaver and unlike Flash, there's no requirement that you use that.
Oh, and if you don't mind command-line compilation and a text editor, the SDK is free.
And that's all only if you don't install the Flex server. It is ALSO a presentation layer server, and Flex Data Services have a bunch of really smooth ways to give shared persistence or to interact with any other application server you might have.
I don't know whether Silverlight also requires the server to support it - I imagine it must to have "a subset of.NET" available; Flex can definitely make standalone swf and can operate with it's full server installed. (The server can also compile on the fly)
REALLY, though, my big issue is mostly that I just do not trust Microsoft to make a good secure sandbox; they've shown no evidence of being able to pull this off in the past. Using something like this is inherently allowing complex arbitrary code to run... I'm sure this will be better than ActiveX, because it couldn't be worse...
An incomplete list of some important differences between the GPL and DRM:
The GPL is perpetual. A significant fraction of DRM can have privileges "revoked" afterward, whereas the whole point of the GPL is that no one can ever revoke those privileges.
The GPL is legal and may be sound; DRM is technical - and technically flawed. As this thread started with, all DRM can be defeated. If you can see it, you can copy it. It's POSSIBLE the GPL is flawed, but there is definitely not the certainty of that you have with DRM which, from a technical standpoint, MUST be flawed.
DRM breaks the ownership model over your whole computer. A basic problem with DRM is that it depends on the model that you have no right to any control over your computer, a device you bought and did not rent. If you rented iPods and could only play DRM music on them, so be it. But DRM has coopted ownership to the extent that it's in deep conflict with the right of first sale.
I'm in favor of alternative, renewable energy sources, but each source has varying degrees to which it is useful in particular situations for technology and production cost reasons. (For example, many places just don't make a good wind farm - and some places make an extremely mediocre and very expensive one.) I think we're going to have a bloom of much better solar at some point, but there's definitely still some room for improvement there.
I'm also certainly not supporting the current federal administration's energy policy, and I certainly do agree that a greater mix of power would be better.
However - despite repeatedly building coal fired plants that release literal tons of radioactive (definitively cancer causing) uranium into our air to be sucked up into our lungs - we're so afraid of anything called nuclear that to my knowledge we haven't issued a license to create a new nuclear plant in many years. I think we should wipe that kind of pollution from the map with large and increasing taxes that are specifically based on the pollution released. The only way we're going to do that in the short term would be to use more nuclear, not less, in combination with many other technologies.
So a lack of capacity is certainly not nuclear technology's fault. A reasonable answer to the GPs fears would be to have nuclear capacity spread out a little more so it wasn't so easily susceptible to drought, ANOTHER reasonable defense would be to have simply more average capacity, and a third defense would be to make plants which are more efficient - which would undoubtedly happen if we compared one we might build now to one decades old. Just look at the efficiency of cars from a similarly long time ago.
The article references a DOE article from decades ago - and clearly before the predominance of LCDs - and another article full of comments about how the tests didn't bear this out on LCDs.
And if you REALLY want to save money on your CRTs, this is small potatoes compared to having a power strip for you monitor so you can cut all power to it at night - modern CRTs have a very substantial residual drain to keep the heater warm.
And you can set your machine to monitor-off earlier than sleeping - and since it wakes up from this fast, there aren't a lot of downsides. (This helps CRTs and LCDs...)
Finally, in many LCDs you can simply turn down the backlight - this is generally the largest power component in an LCD.
First, the US regulators are in the pocket of big industry. The parent implied it, but I'm saying it - US cell phones and broadband suck because the people have allowed government to be coopted by big business so no one can enter the market.
Second the iPhone isn't just a phone. Yes, it makes calls. And yes, those other phones nominally do all those things. That's not why people buy a Mac, an iPod, or now an iPhone. There were MP3 players BEFORE the iPod... and they're cheaper. But the iPod seems better to use, nicer, more friendly, so people buy it. I have PC laptops that are definitely faster - but not as nice to use - as my older OS X one.
The iPhone is the coolest phone, for totally nontechnical reasons. And the coolest PDA. And the coolest micro-web browser. Maybe it's not even all of these things... but it's close, to a lot of people.
So you point about the cellphone market - and the broadband market - while completely true, is absolutely not the basis for the iPhone's success. The iPhone is successful on the Apple name and the Apple history of making things work NICELY.
"Besides, the DMCA is really about the copying of material that is already publicly available to anyone who wants to buy it."
That's just not true. The DMCA is so overbroad that it explicitly covers breaking anyone's encryption without their permission for any reason or creating or distributing a system that breaks the encryption. Ownership of the content is not relevant.
Your point about them having lots of money for lawyers is a good one to heed, though.
I do not have a Rolex. Perhaps I've never seen one; I'm not exactly the kind of person to have one. But I've heard a fair number of ads for them, and there seem to be some reasonable reasons why it might be worth a bit more than your average watch. (Which is not to say it justifies its cost!)
It's shiny metal that doesn't corrode easily. I like shiny metal.
At least one model is self-powered by your motion, so it never needs winding or a battery.
My impression is that they are wonderfully, elegantly engineered. Every little thing and button is done the best way, not the cheapest way.
It's rugged and damage resistant - I think most have a one-piece metal shell with the space for the action machined out of it, meaning there's no way for it to come apart except where the glass is set into the shell. I believe they're also waterproof.
It's elegant and goes with very formal attire.
All of these things exist in other watches. Those last two are very easy to find independently but harder to find together, because to some extent they tend to conflict.
If all of these qualities are accurate, I might be interested in this watch for, say, $100 instead of the $15 a watch usually is. If it costs $3000, it better have $2900 worth of platinum in it, at commodity prices:) But that's just me.
I don't know who they "should" have gone with, but we've been quite happy with Tmobile. My personal pet theory is that their coverage is quite mediocre but that the free phones have exceptionally good reception for free phones.
"Insurance" is about risk-pooling. This is a feature of most US health insurance policies, but it is not the largest feature to most people.
Most people have health insurance because of essentially monopolistic practices whereby the health insurance companies force the doctor's list price to be inflated in order for then to get 100% of a greatly reduced negotiated bulk price. So perhaps 40% of the bill disappears if you have health insurance.
I'm NOT talking about the part the insurance company actually pays, I'm just talking about the negotiated discount.
You can opt out of seatbelt laws when you have unlimited private medical insurance extending 100% coverage, WHO you've notified you don't wear your seatbelt AND that reimburses local governments for any additional expense for their EMTs. (The notification is because currently your policy rate depends on you being just as likely to wear it as everybody else)
Because until then, YOU not wearing your seatbelt means that you get more expensive emergency medical care whether you want it or not and affects MY pocketbook.
First, I think this and the parent are semiofftopic - this article is about languages that are EASIER than BASIC. But that's never stopped me before.
For an intro to programming for, say, someone with little background but reasonably good at abstract concepts. Having been through this process several times, I think once people are exposed to the web, web languages are a natural choice - and in many ways the distance to being able to do something very marginally useful is much lower than with most programming languages.
If I was going to pick an HTML-scripting (PHP-like) language, I'd definitely pick CFML (eg ColdFusion) because the syntax is much more naturally like HTML. (The CF developer edition is free.)
But the problem with a PHP-like language is that you have to at least learn PHP + HTML + CSS. And HTML rules and CSS rules, esp in a couple browsers, are themselves weird, but each differently weird. And then for most things people actually do you also need SQL and/or JavaScript - or at least you do to do things the way all the examples you're looking at do. You have to learn this whole stack of basically conceptually unrelated things to get anything done.
Recently I've started trying to introduce people to Flex instead. The Flex2 SDK is free, the MXML markup language is syntactically consistent and also relatively brief while at the same time being very powerful. You can also learn Actionscript if you want to do more hardcore stuff...
Personally, I believe this is a symptom of the way English is taught in America. Previously we taught phonics and sentence diagramming - rules for how English works and rules for dissecting long sentences and multiple clauses.
Recently (the last couple decades) the trend has been towards Whole Language. While most actual implementations are, thankfully, more moderate, taken to its extreme the Whole Language concept is basically that if you read something, it means whatever you feel like it means right after you read it.
It isn't just methodologically different, it's _philosophically_ different. All of the burden is on the author to "evoke" the right interpretation. It basically says that there isn't a right and wrong interpretation of a sentence, but that what you feel about it is right. For a poem, perhaps that's appropriate at least in some circumstances. For any kind of contract, it's preposterous.
But almost anybody who is quite literate and learned the phonics / diagramming way can, eventually, parse a contract - even if they have to look up some words. Whole Language leaves off tools for deconstruction, which is essential in any case where the overall idea doesn't immediately come through.
This seems to be part of a larger trend of sacrificing right and wrong in our educational system in favor of trying to ensure the self esteem of the students at all costs.
As an example, the American Association of English Teachers recommends avoiding sentence diagramming, and this has been their recommendation for quite a few years. Even in the late 80s this was generally not taught in public schools anymore.
[While I know I'm asking for it, please don't judge the English in _this_ post too harshly; I'm sick at the moment.]
Parent is perhaps the longest post I've seen on/. that I agree with completely.
I'd add that even agreeing that the Network Admin basically still has a job and still has to secure stuff, the life of the poor user could be very different if it was less vulnerable by design.
For instance, regular people who have Macs just do not have the kind of problems they do with Windows. The DLL-hell, the extreme problems migrating to a new hard drive, the need to reinstall the OS due to entropy, the need to reinstall all your apps if you reinstall the OS, the constant spyware.
For the most part, these things don't happen to _well maintained_ corporate networks in modern versions of Windows. But there are a LOT of people that doesn't cover!
So I JUST posted that message when I remembered: I also have VoIP through Speakeasy. (I did this very specifically because I believed they'd be best able to _rapidly_ transfer my POTS number.) I'm almost definitely going to switch that when my contract is up - the one other feature they said they offered isn't actually true (it doesn't perform upstream QoS itself.)
So if anyone has recommendations for a highly available VoIP provider, I'm all ears.
Before I had Speakeasy, I had Cyberonic. Originally they were MCI - this caused a big, horrible, unplanned outage while I was out of town that required my intervention and a sudden IP switch. They did not rise to the occasion, but the real problem was MCI stopping service.
Post-MCI, they were Covad.
The phone support wasn't nearly as good as Speakeasy. Not 24-7 even.
But the uptime was actually basically similar (speakeasy's hasn't been perfect, but I didn't know that then), it was actually cheaper, and the ports were all open. The policies were basically the same.
Step 1: Lower the physical sales taxes to be as low or lower than the online one. What, you don't pay Sales Tax online? Maybe the retail Sales Tax needs to go away. (As taxes go, it's both strongly regressive and strongly reduces trade...)
Step 2: To get that revenue back, increase oil taxes. In the US, our oil prices are still to _LOW_ to get us to make the appropriate and serious steps to reduce costs. Shipping and delivering stuff over the road and then by local truck uses a disproportionate amount of oil, 'causing a disproportionate amount of emissions. (Anybody remember trains? Boats?) Air freight is substantially _worse_ for the environment than the trucks. These taxes mean shipping one-box-at-a-time will be tend to be a bit more expensive.
Around here, lots of discount stores compete price-favorably with online retailers. I mean, the absolute cheapest price for a single item is usually online, but that's comparing a hundred local discount vendors to 10,000 online; it's just statistics. The cheapest price on, say, 10 items bought together is often local for me. (I live around Chicago, which I realize is both a major metro area with good competition AND doesn't have the same kind of localized inflation as certain other places.) Heck TigerDirect IS local to me. Online retailer or no, it's cheaper from them if I go pick it up.
On the other hand, of course, the boutique stores don't price compete favorably with anyone.
First, you missed the big point. Yes, some programs misbehave. True in XP. What we find is that in Vista you _can't_ make a program behave right. If Vista thinks you're an installer, you need to have admin no matter what you do. That is completely backwards. They are _prohibiting_ userland installers.
In a world where the average user installs dozens and dozens of applications, having them all be root is crazy.
"Yes, Windows still has its problems, but it comes right back to compatibility. They gotta make sure that the old programs run on the new operating system."
No, you don't.*
You have to make it POSSIBLE to run them. But you don't have to keep them from, say, throwing up a big "this software does not adhere to Vista coding standards and is a possible security risk" message. Or even better, how about "This software is trying to make changes to your system. If you do not completely trust this software vendor to completely control your computer, do not install it."
That sample warning is stern - and obviously they aren't going to do that if every piece of legit software has to go through it. Even though it's true for every installer. But if legitimately that kind of warning didn't happen for applications - which don't NEED to touch system stuff - then it would be reasonable. It would only happen for antivirus software, hardware tools and drivers, etc. And for your average user, that stuff is already installed by the OEM.
The idea that Microsoft can't make EVERY outside developer behave nicely is absolutely true. But the idea that they do not have the power to cause massive changes to the average Windows software is false.
*Yes, you'd have to phase in a plan like this and give a year or two for vendors to catch up. Yes, it would work much better if you could allow a reasonbly well behaved program to not get flagged - even if it did write to program files but as long as it created and didn't modfiy there, for instance.
If I came across that way, I certainly didn't mean to imply that no one at MS knows how permissions should be. NT was great for it's time - nothing had that combination of usability and stability for the cost. Linux
My best answer for Joe Sixpack is OS X, although primarily because everything in general configures more smoothly in my experience. But the security infrastructure is basically sudo. It is not harder for a novice to understand, unless that novice is substantially conditioned by Windows already and not a true novice. In OS X, if you do something, it usually works. If you need up-privs, it asks for your same pwd again. Period. But the vast majority of applications NEVER ask for your pwd, even at installation, unless you want them to decrypt passwds stored in the Keychain. (Which isn't mandatory.) And because none of them do, it's quite suspicious when a random application asks for it.
I'm not merely bashing "user or root" - it's a combination of things that make it ridiculous:
An application community where only running as the user who installed you is normal and that expects to often make admin changes without any particular rationale.
No system for having a normal user get enough permission to install something WITHOUT actually changing the "user who installed this" for the previous point.
Now, in Vista, it gets worse: Anything that seems to be an installer CAN'T behave nicely and not require admin privs. But just malicious code can. *sigh*
I do not expect that any large software undertaking will necessarily have holes the size, scope, frequency and importance of the Windows ones. Windows is not my stanard for things working correctly.
But if you've ever developed a large project, bugs happen. And to stop them requires spending an exponential fraction of time on stopping them compared to making new things work. In short, that level of perfection is not economically justifiable. And any live project is a moving target.
So if I've been brainwashed, I've been brainwashed not by Microsoft, who I wouldn't consider a model at all, but by Apple, various Linux distros, FreeBSD and a variety of good application vendors. Even OpenBSD has had holes. The world isn't perfect.
ActiveX - as it pertains to the user - is the Microsoft implementation of the idea that random web programmers should get approximately the same kind of access to your machine that a locally running program would.
That is brain-dead.
Any use of the same technology outside this realm - or even in an actually "Trusted Zone" setting, like using it to deploy software to machines from an intranet - isn't my problem.
I don't think you're right about people stripping away commercials meaning the model fails. You're never going to have a situation as bad as TiVo - where nontechnical people can watch stuff directly from your official network, using the front-end you intended, and still automatically strip away ads without doing anything, and do it forever. Because if that happens in the Internet world, you release a new slightly-different version of your client and a slightly different API. And then the people making the stripping clients race to catch up - but then everybody has to get the new stripping client from somewhere. (And that's leaving out the crazy DMCA, which means with a tiny bit of useless encryption you could sue everyone who does this.)
If you put out high quality video from a high quality network with a _moderate_ level of ads, people will watch the ads rather than go through the trouble of hunting for the newest uploaded version from unknown sources. (And remember, the easier it is for users to find it, the easier it is for YOU to find it. You don't have to wipe it off the net, you just have to make it slightly inconvenient to find compared to going to your site.)
This is even more true if you actually DO let them download the video in standard formats (ads included) - because if you only let them stream or only use a specific player then people have THAT as a reason to download the converted one - NOT the ads.
Ok. Maybe it's partially about safety, but I couldn't fit anything else in the subject. And I'm not trying to say he should get to do it and you can't, but:
Partially it's about revenue generation, everywhere I've ever seen.
Partially it's part of a long list of things they can pull you over for to SEE if they think you're dangerous. They decide you were drunk or impaired or too stupid and you get the ticket or go to jail. You might still get the ticket for revenue generation, of course.
Partially speed limits are set low because people don't listen to rules, so we have mild penalties for minor infractions, so we have to have artificially low limits so we can say how ridiculously over they were when they are speeding. And suburbs have wider roads and less traffic but LOWER speed limits - for an alert driver these speed limits are ridiculous.
And partially, of course, you have to remember that we accept driver's licenses from any state and some state's ACTUAL (due to testing budget limitations) driving tests involve being able to drive around the block, once, without actually crashing. Even the other ones, we don't know how to test at all, and we pass all sorts of people who can't see, can't think, can't tell which pedal they're pushing or just can't drive. I think Gran Turismo would be an improvement!
So what's not safe for your worst-case driver is probably quite safe for someone who has been through cop-driving school and is alert and healthy.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're comparing it only to Flash - and especially older Flash - you're not giving Adobe a fair shake.
.NET" available; Flex can definitely make standalone swf and can operate with it's full server installed. (The server can also compile on the fly)
Put briefly, Adobe Flex is in beta of it's 4th major version, and it's what Adobe is offering for programming targeting the Flash Player. For a programmer, it is worlds better than Flash.
Silverlight might be awesome, I haven't touched it, but everything you said about it are all the same improvements over Flash that Flex has been doing for years now.
Flash is an animation tool. People starting using it for applications, and starting in 2002 and again in 2004 Macromedia gave it real support as a programming language. This is all still true, and they've continued to improve that.
But we're now on version 2 (3 is in beta, 1.5 was a major version) of Adobe Flex, which should be considered the follow-on to Flash for programmers and applications. The Actionscript which underlies this is identical in the two platforms, although Flex is driving the new AS versions and Flash lags behind a bit. But Flex also removes all the major craziness that programmers hated in Flash - layout is in an MXML (specific kind of XML) file, there is no binary source file like a fla, and it has further strengthened the already-present OOP capabilities. They have a Dreamweaver-like WYSIWYG layout editor and IDE - and it's also an Eclipse plugin. But like Dreamweaver and unlike Flash, there's no requirement that you use that.
Oh, and if you don't mind command-line compilation and a text editor, the SDK is free.
And that's all only if you don't install the Flex server. It is ALSO a presentation layer server, and Flex Data Services have a bunch of really smooth ways to give shared persistence or to interact with any other application server you might have.
I don't know whether Silverlight also requires the server to support it - I imagine it must to have "a subset of
REALLY, though, my big issue is mostly that I just do not trust Microsoft to make a good secure sandbox; they've shown no evidence of being able to pull this off in the past. Using something like this is inherently allowing complex arbitrary code to run... I'm sure this will be better than ActiveX, because it couldn't be worse...
An incomplete list of some important differences between the GPL and DRM:
The GPL is perpetual. A significant fraction of DRM can have privileges "revoked" afterward, whereas the whole point of the GPL is that no one can ever revoke those privileges.
The GPL is legal and may be sound; DRM is technical - and technically flawed. As this thread started with, all DRM can be defeated. If you can see it, you can copy it. It's POSSIBLE the GPL is flawed, but there is definitely not the certainty of that you have with DRM which, from a technical standpoint, MUST be flawed.
DRM breaks the ownership model over your whole computer. A basic problem with DRM is that it depends on the model that you have no right to any control over your computer, a device you bought and did not rent. If you rented iPods and could only play DRM music on them, so be it. But DRM has coopted ownership to the extent that it's in deep conflict with the right of first sale.
Using this to impeach nukes is profoundly wrong.
I'm in favor of alternative, renewable energy sources, but each source has varying degrees to which it is useful in particular situations for technology and production cost reasons. (For example, many places just don't make a good wind farm - and some places make an extremely mediocre and very expensive one.) I think we're going to have a bloom of much better solar at some point, but there's definitely still some room for improvement there.
I'm also certainly not supporting the current federal administration's energy policy, and I certainly do agree that a greater mix of power would be better.
However - despite repeatedly building coal fired plants that release literal tons of radioactive (definitively cancer causing) uranium into our air to be sucked up into our lungs - we're so afraid of anything called nuclear that to my knowledge we haven't issued a license to create a new nuclear plant in many years. I think we should wipe that kind of pollution from the map with large and increasing taxes that are specifically based on the pollution released. The only way we're going to do that in the short term would be to use more nuclear, not less, in combination with many other technologies.
So a lack of capacity is certainly not nuclear technology's fault. A reasonable answer to the GPs fears would be to have nuclear capacity spread out a little more so it wasn't so easily susceptible to drought, ANOTHER reasonable defense would be to have simply more average capacity, and a third defense would be to make plants which are more efficient - which would undoubtedly happen if we compared one we might build now to one decades old. Just look at the efficiency of cars from a similarly long time ago.
mod parent up, a lot.
The article references a DOE article from decades ago - and clearly before the predominance of LCDs - and another article full of comments about how the tests didn't bear this out on LCDs.
And if you REALLY want to save money on your CRTs, this is small potatoes compared to having a power strip for you monitor so you can cut all power to it at night - modern CRTs have a very substantial residual drain to keep the heater warm.
And you can set your machine to monitor-off earlier than sleeping - and since it wakes up from this fast, there aren't a lot of downsides. (This helps CRTs and LCDs...)
Finally, in many LCDs you can simply turn down the backlight - this is generally the largest power component in an LCD.
First, the US regulators are in the pocket of big industry. The parent implied it, but I'm saying it - US cell phones and broadband suck because the people have allowed government to be coopted by big business so no one can enter the market.
Second the iPhone isn't just a phone. Yes, it makes calls. And yes, those other phones nominally do all those things. That's not why people buy a Mac, an iPod, or now an iPhone. There were MP3 players BEFORE the iPod... and they're cheaper. But the iPod seems better to use, nicer, more friendly, so people buy it. I have PC laptops that are definitely faster - but not as nice to use - as my older OS X one.
The iPhone is the coolest phone, for totally nontechnical reasons. And the coolest PDA. And the coolest micro-web browser. Maybe it's not even all of these things... but it's close, to a lot of people.
So you point about the cellphone market - and the broadband market - while completely true, is absolutely not the basis for the iPhone's success. The iPhone is successful on the Apple name and the Apple history of making things work NICELY.
"Besides, the DMCA is really about the copying of material that is already publicly available to anyone who wants to buy it."
That's just not true. The DMCA is so overbroad that it explicitly covers breaking anyone's encryption without their permission for any reason or creating or distributing a system that breaks the encryption. Ownership of the content is not relevant.
Your point about them having lots of money for lawyers is a good one to heed, though.
I do not have a Rolex. Perhaps I've never seen one; I'm not exactly the kind of person to have one. But I've heard a fair number of ads for them, and there seem to be some reasonable reasons why it might be worth a bit more than your average watch. (Which is not to say it justifies its cost!)
:) But that's just me.
It's shiny metal that doesn't corrode easily. I like shiny metal.
At least one model is self-powered by your motion, so it never needs winding or a battery.
My impression is that they are wonderfully, elegantly engineered. Every little thing and button is done the best way, not the cheapest way.
It's rugged and damage resistant - I think most have a one-piece metal shell with the space for the action machined out of it, meaning there's no way for it to come apart except where the glass is set into the shell. I believe they're also waterproof.
It's elegant and goes with very formal attire.
All of these things exist in other watches. Those last two are very easy to find independently but harder to find together, because to some extent they tend to conflict.
If all of these qualities are accurate, I might be interested in this watch for, say, $100 instead of the $15 a watch usually is. If it costs $3000, it better have $2900 worth of platinum in it, at commodity prices
I don't know who they "should" have gone with, but we've been quite happy with Tmobile. My personal pet theory is that their coverage is quite mediocre but that the free phones have exceptionally good reception for free phones.
Current US health insurance isn't a good example.
"Insurance" is about risk-pooling. This is a feature of most US health insurance policies, but it is not the largest feature to most people.
Most people have health insurance because of essentially monopolistic practices whereby the health insurance companies force the doctor's list price to be inflated in order for then to get 100% of a greatly reduced negotiated bulk price. So perhaps 40% of the bill disappears if you have health insurance.
I'm NOT talking about the part the insurance company actually pays, I'm just talking about the negotiated discount.
You can opt out of seatbelt laws when you have unlimited private medical insurance extending 100% coverage, WHO you've notified you don't wear your seatbelt AND that reimburses local governments for any additional expense for their EMTs. (The notification is because currently your policy rate depends on you being just as likely to wear it as everybody else)
Because until then, YOU not wearing your seatbelt means that you get more expensive emergency medical care whether you want it or not and affects MY pocketbook.
I'll bite, send me the study please : )
First, I think this and the parent are semiofftopic - this article is about languages that are EASIER than BASIC. But that's never stopped me before.
For an intro to programming for, say, someone with little background but reasonably good at abstract concepts. Having been through this process several times, I think once people are exposed to the web, web languages are a natural choice - and in many ways the distance to being able to do something very marginally useful is much lower than with most programming languages.
If I was going to pick an HTML-scripting (PHP-like) language, I'd definitely pick CFML (eg ColdFusion) because the syntax is much more naturally like HTML. (The CF developer edition is free.)
But the problem with a PHP-like language is that you have to at least learn PHP + HTML + CSS. And HTML rules and CSS rules, esp in a couple browsers, are themselves weird, but each differently weird. And then for most things people actually do you also need SQL and/or JavaScript - or at least you do to do things the way all the examples you're looking at do. You have to learn this whole stack of basically conceptually unrelated things to get anything done.
Recently I've started trying to introduce people to Flex instead. The Flex2 SDK is free, the MXML markup language is syntactically consistent and also relatively brief while at the same time being very powerful. You can also learn Actionscript if you want to do more hardcore stuff...
Personally, I believe this is a symptom of the way English is taught in America. Previously we taught phonics and sentence diagramming - rules for how English works and rules for dissecting long sentences and multiple clauses.
Recently (the last couple decades) the trend has been towards Whole Language. While most actual implementations are, thankfully, more moderate, taken to its extreme the Whole Language concept is basically that if you read something, it means whatever you feel like it means right after you read it.
It isn't just methodologically different, it's _philosophically_ different. All of the burden is on the author to "evoke" the right interpretation. It basically says that there isn't a right and wrong interpretation of a sentence, but that what you feel about it is right. For a poem, perhaps that's appropriate at least in some circumstances. For any kind of contract, it's preposterous.
But almost anybody who is quite literate and learned the phonics / diagramming way can, eventually, parse a contract - even if they have to look up some words. Whole Language leaves off tools for deconstruction, which is essential in any case where the overall idea doesn't immediately come through.
This seems to be part of a larger trend of sacrificing right and wrong in our educational system in favor of trying to ensure the self esteem of the students at all costs.
As an example, the American Association of English Teachers recommends avoiding sentence diagramming, and this has been their recommendation for quite a few years. Even in the late 80s this was generally not taught in public schools anymore.
[While I know I'm asking for it, please don't judge the English in _this_ post too harshly; I'm sick at the moment.]
Parent is perhaps the longest post I've seen on /. that I agree with completely.
I'd add that even agreeing that the Network Admin basically still has a job and still has to secure stuff, the life of the poor user could be very different if it was less vulnerable by design.
For instance, regular people who have Macs just do not have the kind of problems they do with Windows. The DLL-hell, the extreme problems migrating to a new hard drive, the need to reinstall the OS due to entropy, the need to reinstall all your apps if you reinstall the OS, the constant spyware.
For the most part, these things don't happen to _well maintained_ corporate networks in modern versions of Windows. But there are a LOT of people that doesn't cover!
Even when things move from the US _to_ the EU they get better there. For instance, soda in the EU is mostly sugar and NOT mostly corn syrup.
To my understanding the reason for this is US farmers pushing for high sugar tariffs, so sugar is relatively pricey in the US.
So I JUST posted that message when I remembered: I also have VoIP through Speakeasy. (I did this very specifically because I believed they'd be best able to _rapidly_ transfer my POTS number.) I'm almost definitely going to switch that when my contract is up - the one other feature they said they offered isn't actually true (it doesn't perform upstream QoS itself.)
So if anyone has recommendations for a highly available VoIP provider, I'm all ears.
Before I had Speakeasy, I had Cyberonic. Originally they were MCI - this caused a big, horrible, unplanned outage while I was out of town that required my intervention and a sudden IP switch. They did not rise to the occasion, but the real problem was MCI stopping service.
Post-MCI, they were Covad.
The phone support wasn't nearly as good as Speakeasy. Not 24-7 even.
But the uptime was actually basically similar (speakeasy's hasn't been perfect, but I didn't know that then), it was actually cheaper, and the ports were all open. The policies were basically the same.
Step 1: Lower the physical sales taxes to be as low or lower than the online one. What, you don't pay Sales Tax online? Maybe the retail Sales Tax needs to go away. (As taxes go, it's both strongly regressive and strongly reduces trade...)
Step 2: To get that revenue back, increase oil taxes. In the US, our oil prices are still to _LOW_ to get us to make the appropriate and serious steps to reduce costs. Shipping and delivering stuff over the road and then by local truck uses a disproportionate amount of oil, 'causing a disproportionate amount of emissions. (Anybody remember trains? Boats?) Air freight is substantially _worse_ for the environment than the trucks. These taxes mean shipping one-box-at-a-time will be tend to be a bit more expensive.
Around here, lots of discount stores compete price-favorably with online retailers. I mean, the absolute cheapest price for a single item is usually online, but that's comparing a hundred local discount vendors to 10,000 online; it's just statistics. The cheapest price on, say, 10 items bought together is often local for me. (I live around Chicago, which I realize is both a major metro area with good competition AND doesn't have the same kind of localized inflation as certain other places.) Heck TigerDirect IS local to me. Online retailer or no, it's cheaper from them if I go pick it up.
On the other hand, of course, the boutique stores don't price compete favorably with anyone.
Well, it was arguably offtopic. That's what I meant.
First, you missed the big point. Yes, some programs misbehave. True in XP. What we find is that in Vista you _can't_ make a program behave right. If Vista thinks you're an installer, you need to have admin no matter what you do. That is completely backwards. They are _prohibiting_ userland installers.
In a world where the average user installs dozens and dozens of applications, having them all be root is crazy.
"Yes, Windows still has its problems, but it comes right back to compatibility. They gotta make sure that the old programs run on the new operating system."
No, you don't.*
You have to make it POSSIBLE to run them. But you don't have to keep them from, say, throwing up a big "this software does not adhere to Vista coding standards and is a possible security risk" message. Or even better, how about "This software is trying to make changes to your system. If you do not completely trust this software vendor to completely control your computer, do not install it."
That sample warning is stern - and obviously they aren't going to do that if every piece of legit software has to go through it. Even though it's true for every installer. But if legitimately that kind of warning didn't happen for applications - which don't NEED to touch system stuff - then it would be reasonable. It would only happen for antivirus software, hardware tools and drivers, etc. And for your average user, that stuff is already installed by the OEM.
The idea that Microsoft can't make EVERY outside developer behave nicely is absolutely true. But the idea that they do not have the power to cause massive changes to the average Windows software is false.
*Yes, you'd have to phase in a plan like this and give a year or two for vendors to catch up. Yes, it would work much better if you could allow a reasonbly well behaved program to not get flagged - even if it did write to program files but as long as it created and didn't modfiy there, for instance.
If I came across that way, I certainly didn't mean to imply that no one at MS knows how permissions should be. NT was great for it's time - nothing had that combination of usability and stability for the cost. Linux
My best answer for Joe Sixpack is OS X, although primarily because everything in general configures more smoothly in my experience. But the security infrastructure is basically sudo. It is not harder for a novice to understand, unless that novice is substantially conditioned by Windows already and not a true novice. In OS X, if you do something, it usually works. If you need up-privs, it asks for your same pwd again. Period. But the vast majority of applications NEVER ask for your pwd, even at installation, unless you want them to decrypt passwds stored in the Keychain. (Which isn't mandatory.) And because none of them do, it's quite suspicious when a random application asks for it.
I'm not merely bashing "user or root" - it's a combination of things that make it ridiculous:
An application community where only running as the user who installed you is normal and that expects to often make admin changes without any particular rationale.
No system for having a normal user get enough permission to install something WITHOUT actually changing the "user who installed this" for the previous point.
Now, in Vista, it gets worse: Anything that seems to be an installer CAN'T behave nicely and not require admin privs. But just malicious code can. *sigh*
I do not expect that any large software undertaking will necessarily have holes the size, scope, frequency and importance of the Windows ones. Windows is not my stanard for things working correctly.
But if you've ever developed a large project, bugs happen. And to stop them requires spending an exponential fraction of time on stopping them compared to making new things work. In short, that level of perfection is not economically justifiable. And any live project is a moving target.
So if I've been brainwashed, I've been brainwashed not by Microsoft, who I wouldn't consider a model at all, but by Apple, various Linux distros, FreeBSD and a variety of good application vendors. Even OpenBSD has had holes. The world isn't perfect.
ActiveX - as it pertains to the user - is the Microsoft implementation of the idea that random web programmers should get approximately the same kind of access to your machine that a locally running program would.
That is brain-dead.
Any use of the same technology outside this realm - or even in an actually "Trusted Zone" setting, like using it to deploy software to machines from an intranet - isn't my problem.
I don't think you're right about people stripping away commercials meaning the model fails. You're never going to have a situation as bad as TiVo - where nontechnical people can watch stuff directly from your official network, using the front-end you intended, and still automatically strip away ads without doing anything, and do it forever. Because if that happens in the Internet world, you release a new slightly-different version of your client and a slightly different API. And then the people making the stripping clients race to catch up - but then everybody has to get the new stripping client from somewhere. (And that's leaving out the crazy DMCA, which means with a tiny bit of useless encryption you could sue everyone who does this.)
If you put out high quality video from a high quality network with a _moderate_ level of ads, people will watch the ads rather than go through the trouble of hunting for the newest uploaded version from unknown sources. (And remember, the easier it is for users to find it, the easier it is for YOU to find it. You don't have to wipe it off the net, you just have to make it slightly inconvenient to find compared to going to your site.)
This is even more true if you actually DO let them download the video in standard formats (ads included) - because if you only let them stream or only use a specific player then people have THAT as a reason to download the converted one - NOT the ads.
The key is not to be too greedy.
Ok. Maybe it's partially about safety, but I couldn't fit anything else in the subject. And I'm not trying to say he should get to do it and you can't, but:
Partially it's about revenue generation, everywhere I've ever seen.
Partially it's part of a long list of things they can pull you over for to SEE if they think you're dangerous. They decide you were drunk or impaired or too stupid and you get the ticket or go to jail. You might still get the ticket for revenue generation, of course.
Partially speed limits are set low because people don't listen to rules, so we have mild penalties for minor infractions, so we have to have artificially low limits so we can say how ridiculously over they were when they are speeding. And suburbs have wider roads and less traffic but LOWER speed limits - for an alert driver these speed limits are ridiculous.
And partially, of course, you have to remember that we accept driver's licenses from any state and some state's ACTUAL (due to testing budget limitations) driving tests involve being able to drive around the block, once, without actually crashing. Even the other ones, we don't know how to test at all, and we pass all sorts of people who can't see, can't think, can't tell which pedal they're pushing or just can't drive. I think Gran Turismo would be an improvement!
So what's not safe for your worst-case driver is probably quite safe for someone who has been through cop-driving school and is alert and healthy.