Google isn't going to let its foray into the most profitable market... possibly ever (sales of personal information of others), just fade off into obscurity.
Can you provide a single example where Google has ever sold personal information to any third party ever? I get that privacy is important and Google might be pushing the boundaries on it, but spreading FUD like this isn't helping your cause.
They don't sell the data directly, they sell *you* as targets to advertisers (96% of their revenue). And when Google controls your search, email, IM, social, video, phone, map, documents, and site analytics, them "selling" the information to different business areas within Google is just as bad. Facebook may have had their privacy issues in the past, but they're just one company that does one site (and does it well). With Google's new anti-privacy policy, they are explicitly reserving the right to take all that information and do whatever they want with it internally.
The vilification of Steve Jobs on Slashdot knows no bounds. Now he's getting blame for canceling Apple's dividend in 2005? That's a neat trick as he didn't return to Apple until 2007.
When you buy stock you own part of the company. Isn't it kind of silly to not take any of the profit out of the company you own once it's mature and has all the money it needs for operations into the indefinite future. Intentionally deciding not to get paid as the owner of a company seems silly.
In other words, if your server delivers a garbage or blank P3P header, the browser assumes there are no privacy implications? Sounds like a hole in the standard to me, such headers should be ignored IMO. Though Google really should have tested this properly with all browsers before deploying it in production it sounds to me like an oopsie, not at all like the Safari thing.
Google has been claiming "oopsies" almost weekly over the last couple months. In this case they put this in their policy: 'P3P: CP="This is not a P3P policy! See http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151657 for more info."' in what is meant to be a machine-readable field. Following the spec would have been easy-- omit the field altogether. Instead Google violates the spec in a way that benefits them. It's possible Google is just really incompetent over all these "oopsies", but they sure try to represent themselves as a company with above-average engineers. It has to be one or the other.
The fundamental difference, as I see it, is that a 5 year old PC still works perfectly fine and can run most modern programs now-a-days just fine (so long as you've taken decent care of keeping crud off it). Good luck doing the same thing with the iPad: assuming it still even works 5 years from now, the battery life will have decayed to the point where it will be barely usable, and if you think you will have the newest version of the OS available on it, excuse me while I laugh my ass of at your naiveté.
You're comparing apples to oranges. Most 5-year-old PCs won't run Windows 7 very well, if at all, and have no chance at Windows 8. Most iOS software doesn't require the very latest version of iOS to run, so it should remain a very useful device. Heck, iPod Touch 1st generation and original iPhones can only run up to iOS 3.x and still sell pretty well on eBay. They are almost 5 years old.
As for battery, just get it replaced for $99 if you still value your device, but I think "barely usable" is an exaggeration. Again, original iPhones are almost that old and retain over 50% of their battery life. A 5 year-old iPad isn't going to be a use-all-day-without-recharging thing, but it will still be a very usable device.
Allowing someone to patent an invention and then prevent anyone else from using it, while at the same time not using it themselves, does nothing to "promote the progress" of science and useful arts.
Not necessarily. Without patents, it is conceivable (some might say likely) that a given invention would never get published, but rather be kept as trade secrets in case they are useful later. Given a truly non-obvious invention, there is a benefit to society to see it published and its means of building/operating carefully documented. With the patent system, the idea is that everything is public and in return the company has some protection against competitors using the invention against them even if they themselves don't use it.
The real problem always, to me, boils down to the "obvious to a practitioner of the art" test. If the bar on that were much higher-- let's say such that only 1 out of 10 of today's patents would pass muster-- I think the anti-patent rhetoric would cool to imperceptible levels.
The interesting thing, though, is that Siri itself is NOT a bandwidth hog. Ars and others have tested it and it actually doesn't use much bandwidth at all. But it makes the phone SO much more useful that people are sucking down three times as much information if they have Siri to help them find it.
The pro abortion groups could be more constructive by trying to negotiate towards a time or state that the government will recognize that an embryo switches to being a baby.
I don't know anyone who is "pro abortion", but plenty who are "pro choice". Some alternatives have been proposed: pre-conception (Catholic), conception (fundamentalist/protestant), second trimester (Roe v. Wade), "Can survive outside the womb" (some medical definitions), or even "one month after birth" (Jewish law in Jesus' time which he didn't seem to have a problem with).
Actually, the opposite of what you say is true. That's the whole point of using the word "selection" in the phrase "natural selection". Anything that helps the organism survive and reproduce better in its environment is a selective pressure. So if you postulate that there exists somewhere on the planet where multi-cellularism is a selective force, then this experiment replicates those conditions.
I suspect that both C# and Objective-C market share will only continue - probably even taking the top spots. Windows Phone 7 uses mainly C# and so will Metro apps on Windows 8. Frankly, it is a really good language and beautiful to work with. Likewise Objective-C is strong because of iOS and OS X. Java is slowly dropping from enterprise usage and is being replaced by C#.
Your argument about C# is spot-on on the client side, but I have yet to see any significant movement from Java to C# on the enterprise side. If anything, enterprises are continuing to build larger and larger installed bases of Java software that's further locking them in. In addition, I see a general distrust of Mono and a liking for Linux that biases them against C#.
As a long-time Linux user, one of the best points is that everything comes without strings attached. I would say "the idea that apps should cost something" is questionable at best, but leave it to Apple and their users to advocate it.
Not to rain on your troll, but I think the whole point of the article is that Apple and their users AREN'T advocating it.
The parent's advice is almost correct... if you want to distribute under GPLv2, do *not* add the "or (at your option) any later version" or someone else could redistribute it as GPLv3 and then you wouldn't be able to re-integrate their changes into the GPLv2 baseline. If you like GPLv2, make sure you only distribute it under GPLv2 or you lose control.
I don't need a hammer that gets me. I need one I can accurately use. Natural language is very imprecise, a set list of commands makes things more precise.
I find this comment fascinating, and probably helps differentiate geek tools from mass-market tools. Most people prefer accuracy, but I think a lot of geeks really would prefer precision.
1,100 high-tech employees on the processor side of the fab, and more than that on the flash memory side. A $3.6 billion construction project. Yes, I'd say they will appreciate it.
What is the difference between using a TCP pipe and a DLL call from a design perspective. The GPL enforces less efficient engineering practices by its Copyright restrictions. If they'd just stick to something like the LGPL I think the world would have been a better place-- companies would be forced to contribute anything to a particular library they use, but it wouldn't have its "viral" nature that causes the immune reaction within the rest of the industry. Instead they moved in the other direction, and now companies like Apple won't even touch GPLv3 binaries, let alone libraries. (Thus their move from gcc to clang+llvm for all compiling in the latest releases of MacOS X and iOS, among other things.)
Nikon super-ISO modes are pretty awesome. But I still gotta give props to Canon for always having a $99 F/1.8 55mm lens available for any camera they make. The difference between your typical F/3.5 zoom versus an F/1.8 prime is like night and day (no pun intended). Too many people overspend on the body and underspend on the lens.
I think the person Time should have picked was Mohamed Bouazizi if they wanted to honor "The Protester". I think he was the spark in the tinder box around the world this year... forgive the metaphor...
I'm curious to know why Apple is never implicated in such privacy and tracking discussions considering how they lock you down to their own software and services.
It's pretty simple: because Apple doesn't do this. They had something that tracked recent position so a phone could home in on its current position on request faster, but when it was brought to light how long that cache was retained Apple fixed that bug. iOS now only keeps that information briefly.
Android is only "free" because it gets Google (an advertising company) information and opportunities to sell to advertisers. If you actually want to just buy the phone and use it as your own device, perhaps ironically Apple's controlled "walled garden" is a better choice. Apple's profit motive is not in the collecting of user information like Google's is, it's in the selling of devices. Anything that interferes with that, such as privacy concerns, is addressed.
Funny, when Apple released source code in this manner (big chunks all at once) the open source community was up in arms, claiming they weren't being good open-source citizens. Remember when KHTML folks were ranting about Apple's handling of WebKit? Unless Android development opens up, this is more of a "shared source" model than a real "open source" one.
What if electricity providers had to guarantee that every house in the country could consume the maximum current draw their connections are rated for at any given moment? I think the industry is young enough that everyone's still figuring out the right model under which to sell and provide service.
And the last 10 days actually warmed, so CO2 must not be heating the atmosphere at all! Great argument!
Your "10 years" number is actually a couple years out of date and no longer true. About 12 years ago there was one extremely hot year, so in 2009 you could use the "10 years" argument and show a flat average line. Of course, even then 12 years or 8 years would both show warming. But now here we are in 2011 and warming has continued, so the trend line for the last 10 years actually shows significant warming.
I know the trendy term is "crowdsourcing", but it's really just market theory. "Direct Democracy via crowdsourcing" is the same thing as saying "let the free markets decide everything" to my ears.
Windows 3.1 succeeded because it installed onto the dominant hardware platform of the day and because it was blessed by the dominant hardware maker. Unless they figure out how to get Windows 8 to run on an iPad, that advantage won't hold here.
I wouldn't bet on it. Its entirely possible to make the kernel limit what a user can do above and beyond a chroot jail - SELinux does it already.
So recompile the kernel without the restrictions. I think some people are forgetting that MacOS X's core is all open source. Don't conflate iOS's locked-down nature with MacOS X's extremely open nature.
Slashdot Mirror
I cancelled my G+ account today. The few things that get posted there aren't worth Google's new privacy policy.
Google isn't going to let its foray into the most profitable market... possibly ever (sales of personal information of others), just fade off into obscurity.
Can you provide a single example where Google has ever sold personal information to any third party ever? I get that privacy is important and Google might be pushing the boundaries on it, but spreading FUD like this isn't helping your cause.
They don't sell the data directly, they sell *you* as targets to advertisers (96% of their revenue). And when Google controls your search, email, IM, social, video, phone, map, documents, and site analytics, them "selling" the information to different business areas within Google is just as bad. Facebook may have had their privacy issues in the past, but they're just one company that does one site (and does it well). With Google's new anti-privacy policy, they are explicitly reserving the right to take all that information and do whatever they want with it internally.
The vilification of Steve Jobs on Slashdot knows no bounds. Now he's getting blame for canceling Apple's dividend in 2005? That's a neat trick as he didn't return to Apple until 2007.
When you buy stock you own part of the company. Isn't it kind of silly to not take any of the profit out of the company you own once it's mature and has all the money it needs for operations into the indefinite future. Intentionally deciding not to get paid as the owner of a company seems silly.
In other words, if your server delivers a garbage or blank P3P header, the browser assumes there are no privacy implications? Sounds like a hole in the standard to me, such headers should be ignored IMO. Though Google really should have tested this properly with all browsers before deploying it in production it sounds to me like an oopsie, not at all like the Safari thing.
Google has been claiming "oopsies" almost weekly over the last couple months. In this case they put this in their policy: 'P3P: CP="This is not a P3P policy! See http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=151657 for more info."' in what is meant to be a machine-readable field. Following the spec would have been easy-- omit the field altogether. Instead Google violates the spec in a way that benefits them. It's possible Google is just really incompetent over all these "oopsies", but they sure try to represent themselves as a company with above-average engineers. It has to be one or the other.
The fundamental difference, as I see it, is that a 5 year old PC still works perfectly fine and can run most modern programs now-a-days just fine (so long as you've taken decent care of keeping crud off it). Good luck doing the same thing with the iPad: assuming it still even works 5 years from now, the battery life will have decayed to the point where it will be barely usable, and if you think you will have the newest version of the OS available on it, excuse me while I laugh my ass of at your naiveté.
You're comparing apples to oranges. Most 5-year-old PCs won't run Windows 7 very well, if at all, and have no chance at Windows 8. Most iOS software doesn't require the very latest version of iOS to run, so it should remain a very useful device. Heck, iPod Touch 1st generation and original iPhones can only run up to iOS 3.x and still sell pretty well on eBay. They are almost 5 years old.
As for battery, just get it replaced for $99 if you still value your device, but I think "barely usable" is an exaggeration. Again, original iPhones are almost that old and retain over 50% of their battery life. A 5 year-old iPad isn't going to be a use-all-day-without-recharging thing, but it will still be a very usable device.
Allowing someone to patent an invention and then prevent anyone else from using it, while at the same time not using it themselves, does nothing to "promote the progress" of science and useful arts.
Not necessarily. Without patents, it is conceivable (some might say likely) that a given invention would never get published, but rather be kept as trade secrets in case they are useful later. Given a truly non-obvious invention, there is a benefit to society to see it published and its means of building/operating carefully documented. With the patent system, the idea is that everything is public and in return the company has some protection against competitors using the invention against them even if they themselves don't use it.
The real problem always, to me, boils down to the "obvious to a practitioner of the art" test. If the bar on that were much higher-- let's say such that only 1 out of 10 of today's patents would pass muster-- I think the anti-patent rhetoric would cool to imperceptible levels.
The interesting thing, though, is that Siri itself is NOT a bandwidth hog. Ars and others have tested it and it actually doesn't use much bandwidth at all. But it makes the phone SO much more useful that people are sucking down three times as much information if they have Siri to help them find it.
The pro abortion groups could be more constructive by trying to negotiate towards a time or state that the government will recognize that an embryo switches to being a baby.
I don't know anyone who is "pro abortion", but plenty who are "pro choice". Some alternatives have been proposed: pre-conception (Catholic), conception (fundamentalist/protestant), second trimester (Roe v. Wade), "Can survive outside the womb" (some medical definitions), or even "one month after birth" (Jewish law in Jesus' time which he didn't seem to have a problem with).
Actually, the opposite of what you say is true. That's the whole point of using the word "selection" in the phrase "natural selection". Anything that helps the organism survive and reproduce better in its environment is a selective pressure. So if you postulate that there exists somewhere on the planet where multi-cellularism is a selective force, then this experiment replicates those conditions.
I suspect that both C# and Objective-C market share will only continue - probably even taking the top spots. Windows Phone 7 uses mainly C# and so will Metro apps on Windows 8. Frankly, it is a really good language and beautiful to work with. Likewise Objective-C is strong because of iOS and OS X. Java is slowly dropping from enterprise usage and is being replaced by C#.
Your argument about C# is spot-on on the client side, but I have yet to see any significant movement from Java to C# on the enterprise side. If anything, enterprises are continuing to build larger and larger installed bases of Java software that's further locking them in. In addition, I see a general distrust of Mono and a liking for Linux that biases them against C#.
As a long-time Linux user, one of the best points is that everything comes without strings attached. I would say "the idea that apps should cost something" is questionable at best, but leave it to Apple and their users to advocate it.
Not to rain on your troll, but I think the whole point of the article is that Apple and their users AREN'T advocating it.
The parent's advice is almost correct... if you want to distribute under GPLv2, do *not* add the "or (at your option) any later version" or someone else could redistribute it as GPLv3 and then you wouldn't be able to re-integrate their changes into the GPLv2 baseline. If you like GPLv2, make sure you only distribute it under GPLv2 or you lose control.
I don't need a hammer that gets me. I need one I can accurately use. Natural language is very imprecise, a set list of commands makes things more precise.
I find this comment fascinating, and probably helps differentiate geek tools from mass-market tools. Most people prefer accuracy, but I think a lot of geeks really would prefer precision.
1,100 high-tech employees on the processor side of the fab, and more than that on the flash memory side. A $3.6 billion construction project. Yes, I'd say they will appreciate it.
What is the difference between using a TCP pipe and a DLL call from a design perspective. The GPL enforces less efficient engineering practices by its Copyright restrictions. If they'd just stick to something like the LGPL I think the world would have been a better place-- companies would be forced to contribute anything to a particular library they use, but it wouldn't have its "viral" nature that causes the immune reaction within the rest of the industry. Instead they moved in the other direction, and now companies like Apple won't even touch GPLv3 binaries, let alone libraries. (Thus their move from gcc to clang+llvm for all compiling in the latest releases of MacOS X and iOS, among other things.)
Nikon super-ISO modes are pretty awesome. But I still gotta give props to Canon for always having a $99 F/1.8 55mm lens available for any camera they make. The difference between your typical F/3.5 zoom versus an F/1.8 prime is like night and day (no pun intended). Too many people overspend on the body and underspend on the lens.
I think the person Time should have picked was Mohamed Bouazizi if they wanted to honor "The Protester". I think he was the spark in the tinder box around the world this year... forgive the metaphor...
I'm curious to know why Apple is never implicated in such privacy and tracking discussions considering how they lock you down to their own software and services.
It's pretty simple: because Apple doesn't do this. They had something that tracked recent position so a phone could home in on its current position on request faster, but when it was brought to light how long that cache was retained Apple fixed that bug. iOS now only keeps that information briefly.
Android is only "free" because it gets Google (an advertising company) information and opportunities to sell to advertisers. If you actually want to just buy the phone and use it as your own device, perhaps ironically Apple's controlled "walled garden" is a better choice. Apple's profit motive is not in the collecting of user information like Google's is, it's in the selling of devices. Anything that interferes with that, such as privacy concerns, is addressed.
Funny, when Apple released source code in this manner (big chunks all at once) the open source community was up in arms, claiming they weren't being good open-source citizens. Remember when KHTML folks were ranting about Apple's handling of WebKit? Unless Android development opens up, this is more of a "shared source" model than a real "open source" one.
What if electricity providers had to guarantee that every house in the country could consume the maximum current draw their connections are rated for at any given moment? I think the industry is young enough that everyone's still figuring out the right model under which to sell and provide service.
And the last 10 days actually warmed, so CO2 must not be heating the atmosphere at all! Great argument!
Your "10 years" number is actually a couple years out of date and no longer true. About 12 years ago there was one extremely hot year, so in 2009 you could use the "10 years" argument and show a flat average line. Of course, even then 12 years or 8 years would both show warming. But now here we are in 2011 and warming has continued, so the trend line for the last 10 years actually shows significant warming.
I know the trendy term is "crowdsourcing", but it's really just market theory. "Direct Democracy via crowdsourcing" is the same thing as saying "let the free markets decide everything" to my ears.
Windows 3.1 succeeded because it installed onto the dominant hardware platform of the day and because it was blessed by the dominant hardware maker. Unless they figure out how to get Windows 8 to run on an iPad, that advantage won't hold here.
I wouldn't bet on it. Its entirely possible to make the kernel limit what a user can do above and beyond a chroot jail - SELinux does it already.
So recompile the kernel without the restrictions. I think some people are forgetting that MacOS X's core is all open source. Don't conflate iOS's locked-down nature with MacOS X's extremely open nature.