Wasn't AOL/AIM also listed as one of the backers of the OpenID standard as well? So you can log into AIM using an open standard, then converse using an open standard. They now seem to be at least as open as Google about it all.
Yes, the AIM of old was very proprietary, but it seems to be "getting it" these days.
This is why we are still using countless seperate devices for our various everyday communication/information needs that can't communicate with each other
Are you really new to technology? Compared to 10, 20, and 30 years ago, it's amazing as to what devices can communicate to each other. When I started college there was no WWW. When I started high school BBSes were still popular and no one had e-mail outside universities or the military. Heck, when 9600bps came around half the MODEMS couldn't even talk to each other. And before that, I couldn't upload data off the paper we used at ALL!
The one thing I really think you CAN'T support is the arguement that our devices talk to each other worse than they used to.
Apple most definitely does NOT claim to include a DVD drive, nor do they use the DVD logo. They claim to have a "SuperDrive" in some models and a "Combo Drive" in other models which read discs of those formats.
The claims that Apple "mis labels" their drives are simply false.
For Java, he probably wouldn't be having this problem as acutely in the first place. The reduced syntax compared to C++ makes many of the hacker types hate Java, which makes Java twice as good in my book. It also makes everything a lot clearer. In addition, the dynamic nature of the language combined with the compact syntax means even the free tools like Eclipse have excellent analysis capability, and tools like IntelliJ offer phenomenal ability to introspect the code.
But yes, C is a few percent faster and lets the hackers go to town, so some companies still choose it.
Looks like MS may be crippling the Mac version to stop enterprises from moving on from Windows.
Vista needs some competitive advantage over MacOS X, I guess. Since OpenOffice supports it, though, I suspect most Mac users would rather give up MS Office than MacOS when possible. Considering the Mac is growing 2-3x the industry rate, tying Office to Windows in this manner is just Microsoft nailing one more nail in their own coffin.
DDE, OLE, COM and DCOM are fundamentally flawed models which were developed in a much less fraught security environment than we have now.
And in a much more resource-constrained environment. There were definitely models that worked much better, such as CORBA, SOM, etc., but doing things right consumes a lot more resources, so tends to be less performant. It's only when we got gobs of extra computing power, bandwidth, etc., that we're able to make interfaces that are both secure and performant. I suspect if we're ever constrained again, most folks will choose performance over security again, so I'm not really sure it's the security environment enabling the decisions, even now.
You're right, a virus that discourages users from hacking their iPhones and encourages them to download the latest firmware would be of absolutely no benefit to AT&T at all. I could never believe that they would have a role in such and anti-consumer move, what with the stalwart reputation for standing up for their customers' civil rights in the face of NSA and FBI threats.
I'm glad we agree that AT&T doesn't benefit. Viruses on AT&T iPhones does NOT benefit AT&T, its investment in the iPhone, or its brand. In fact, the MacOS's reputation for being completely virus-free would probably be an order of magnitude more valuable.
This trojan (I don't think it's a virus), by the way, doesn't seem to discourage users from hacking their iPhones, at least not that I can see. I don't know anyone whose minds were changed because of this. And a "hackable" iPhone really *is* just an iPhone where there is a known exploit/vulnerability in security. If you're worried about security, you've upgraded to the latest update for which there's no known jailbreak (because the security vulnerabilities have been patched).
Curious how this only affects unlocked iPhones. Just who is that to the benefit of?
The people writing the exploits. No one else benefits.
The "unlocking" is done through a buffer overflow vulnerability, which by definition is a security hole. If you've avoided the latest software updates because it "breaks" unlocking, what you're doing is avoiding the patch that "fixes" security.
So yes, if you intentionally leave security vulnerabilities open in your computers, then intentionally install this software (it apparently doesn't self-propogate), you'll get infected. That's not very surprising to me.
Yeah, Apple's speech recognizer has very dissimilar goals to Dragon's (although both, if I recall correctly, got their start at Carnegie Mellon's speech labs). Apple is trying to build a speaker-independent, no-training-required recognizer that can handle short commands. Dragon doesn't care as much about speaker-independent, but requires accuracy over sentences and paragraphs. Very different algorithmic, HCI and optimization problems.
Re:So why would SUN buy MYSQL - discussion!
on
Sun Buys MySQL
·
· Score: 1
Recently Sun has been open-sourcing all kinds of software to create an ecosystem of software over which they have influence. MySQL is one of the most influential and widespread database engines in existence. In fact, the only thing holding it back appears to be the bizarre licensing of its parent company. If Sun fixes the licensing issues they'll be a hero, be able to influence a major part of the net infrastructure, and have an easy-to-use little database to put in OpenOffice.
Gazillions sold when it starts at $1800? If this thing was $1k I might agree.
Apple's machine is hundreds of dollars cheaper than a comparable Sony machine. If you really want a super-light, small, reasonably performant laptop there aren't a huge number of choices. And Apple's is the cheapest I can find by a reasonable margin. I actually think the *low* price point is going to be a game-changer for those in this market. My guess is this single-handedly saves Apple's Japanese business unit, for one...
How often do business folks need more than 5 hours of battery life and/or can't afford the auto/plane power adapter after buying a laptop that starts at $1800?
Come on. Apple is going to sell gazillions of this thing. It will be to laptops what iPods were to all other MP3 players.
Components are, of course, going to obey the law of supply and demand, as well as having their value affect their price. HD DVD players are worth a lot less now, and are now priced accordingly. Eventually you'll see the "fire sale" where Toshiba sells out their inventory at sub-$100 prices at the end. What else are they going to do with their parts?
Secondly, I never expressed any such "goal of open source", don't know what kind of never-logic land you got that from.
You specifically used the phrase "historical insight", and was complaining that the open-sourcing of a SimCity implementation was useless without it. Or did I misunderstand you, and you find Klingon translations useful and was making a different analogy than I thought?
Actually, no offense, but I'm pretty sure you're completely wrong. If you try to sell a calendar full of Fords titled "Ford Cars (that I own)", Ford will successfully sue you for Trademark infringement. You are profiting off of their trademarks.
1. Ford is alleging Trademark violations, not Copyright, from what I've read. The distinction is pretty important when it comes to what rights you have to the pictures that you took (and therefore have copyright over). 2. If Ford doesn't defend their Trademarks, by law they lose them. Thus, the law compels companies to act like this, whether the companies like it or not. 3. There are exceptions in the law for works that are sufficiently derivative. If you're selling calendars of cars that look like they could have driven off the lot yesterday, that's obviously a violation of trademark even if you own the car-- you're clearly profiting directly from someone else's trademark. If the cars are heavily modified, though, they probably have a good case for the calendar. 4. Selling photography containing trademarks is definitely a tricky business, but the damage has long-since been done. Even worse, some folks have run into minor hot water when they replaced billboards in cityscapes with alternate billboards in television and photographs-- so NOT reproducing the trademark has also been problematic. It's definitely an area of law in need of refinement.
It is almost like they are separate identities, and his alleged criminal behaviour didn't introduce bugs into his code or something.
Uhhh, chip on your shoulder, any? I didn't say anything about Reiser the person. And I'm sure it wasn't his wife's murder that put all those bugs into ReiserFS, but it was sure SOMETHING.
From what I understand, a not-dissimilar experience is what kicked Richard Stallman off, as well. Basically, open source software will always serve as a foundation-- a level at which the state-of-the-art will never fall below again. With a few exceptions, it tends not to be the most innovative or best-of-breed in any market segment, but because of the reasons you mention it's what engineers can always fall back to when the proprietary stuff starts to disappear in acquisitions, bankruptcies, and ambiguous and frustrating IP situations.
You're referring to Blu-Ray the open standards-based format? The one that tends to push MP4 over Microsoft's VC-1? And uses Java (a FOSS technology) over a Microsoft-generated interactive media format?
I assume you mean that FOS software is hard to set-up or something, but I really haven't experienced that.
You probably have a higher tolerance for "hard" than the average user. My 90 year old grandmother owns a Mac and videoconferences with her great-grandkids on a regular basis. Typing "sudo port install gimp, then her password when prompted" is "hard to set up" for her, but that's probably the other extreme.
Basically, if you spend more than 0 minutes a day "fiddling" or doing anything other than content creation or consumption on your machine, that's time wasted. Depending on how valuable your time is, you can compute how much the FOSS software costed you. Many of the packages the parent poster mentions are good. GIMP is a good example in my book of awful FOSS from a "time wasted" point of view, as is your average laptop linux install.
The typical business model for FOSS appears to be "take the most difficult to use and obtuse software in a given market segment, give it away for free, then charge people for support". (With the notable exception of Apple, which only open-sources their low level code anyway.) If you were to make the most user friendly and transparent software possible, I don't see how it would be possible to build a business out of it. And if you're competing against someone who IS able to make money, they'll have more time to improve things faster.
I'm not saying FOSS is hopeless or always worse-- just that it's a difficult proposition to make both quality and profitable FOSS software. And even if developers donate tons of time, they have to pay the bills somehow, and their day jobs would seem to be just as at-risk from someone ELSE's open source project, leading to a race to the bottom. To break that cycle, FOSS developers have to get, IMHO, a little more creative than they've been lately.
I agree with NTFS, but I doubt ext3 is important to more than a tiny handful of Mac users, and I'm surprised *anyone*'s using Reiser anymore. While MacOS users have been able to read NTFS for years, it would be nice to be able to format external devices as NTFS and use them natively on MacOS. Of course, now that FUSE is ported to MacOS, word is that NTFS is pretty stable on it (more stable than this ZFS port, from what I've heard), if slow.
It's an interesting model... there's a lot of energy in these incoming hydrogen atoms, but adding extra gas between the stars-- especially if some coalesces-- could absorb some energy and keep it from the planet. It makes one wonder what effect it will have, and whether it's happened in the past. A few tens of millions of years is a flashbulb on the geologic time scale. (The amount of time between now and when it will "hit" is less than the amount of time since the dinosaurs.)
Imagine-- promoting FOSS because it actually works well. Who cares about the license? Most FOSS is only "free" if your time is worthless, especially compared to what I can get on my Mac. But there are some packages, and you mention many of them, that are honestly better and more convenient than their closed-source counterparts.
Slashdot Mirror
Wasn't AOL/AIM also listed as one of the backers of the OpenID standard as well? So you can log into AIM using an open standard, then converse using an open standard. They now seem to be at least as open as Google about it all.
Yes, the AIM of old was very proprietary, but it seems to be "getting it" these days.
This is why we are still using countless seperate devices for our various everyday communication/information needs that can't communicate with each other
Are you really new to technology? Compared to 10, 20, and 30 years ago, it's amazing as to what devices can communicate to each other. When I started college there was no WWW. When I started high school BBSes were still popular and no one had e-mail outside universities or the military. Heck, when 9600bps came around half the MODEMS couldn't even talk to each other. And before that, I couldn't upload data off the paper we used at ALL!
The one thing I really think you CAN'T support is the arguement that our devices talk to each other worse than they used to.
The formats in parens are the formats that the Combo Drive and/or SuperDrive support.
See for yourself right here
Apple most definitely does NOT claim to include a DVD drive, nor do they use the DVD logo. They claim to have a "SuperDrive" in some models and a "Combo Drive" in other models which read discs of those formats.
The claims that Apple "mis labels" their drives are simply false.
For Java, he probably wouldn't be having this problem as acutely in the first place. The reduced syntax compared to C++ makes many of the hacker types hate Java, which makes Java twice as good in my book. It also makes everything a lot clearer. In addition, the dynamic nature of the language combined with the compact syntax means even the free tools like Eclipse have excellent analysis capability, and tools like IntelliJ offer phenomenal ability to introspect the code.
But yes, C is a few percent faster and lets the hackers go to town, so some companies still choose it.
Looks like MS may be crippling the Mac version to stop enterprises from moving on from Windows.
Vista needs some competitive advantage over MacOS X, I guess. Since OpenOffice supports it, though, I suspect most Mac users would rather give up MS Office than MacOS when possible. Considering the Mac is growing 2-3x the industry rate, tying Office to Windows in this manner is just Microsoft nailing one more nail in their own coffin.
DDE, OLE, COM and DCOM are fundamentally flawed models which were developed in a much less fraught security environment than we have now.
And in a much more resource-constrained environment. There were definitely models that worked much better, such as CORBA, SOM, etc., but doing things right consumes a lot more resources, so tends to be less performant. It's only when we got gobs of extra computing power, bandwidth, etc., that we're able to make interfaces that are both secure and performant. I suspect if we're ever constrained again, most folks will choose performance over security again, so I'm not really sure it's the security environment enabling the decisions, even now.
and blame Apple for selling mislabeled drives
I don't see any "This drive conforms with the DVD Forum's guidelines" on my Mac. Anywhere!
which Apple dishonestly marketed as compliant.
Ooo... there's an accusation. Do you have any example of literature from Apple that says their DVD players were approved by the DVD Forum?
You're right, a virus that discourages users from hacking their iPhones and encourages them to download the latest firmware would be of absolutely no benefit to AT&T at all. I could never believe that they would have a role in such and anti-consumer move, what with the stalwart reputation for standing up for their customers' civil rights in the face of NSA and FBI threats.
I'm glad we agree that AT&T doesn't benefit. Viruses on AT&T iPhones does NOT benefit AT&T, its investment in the iPhone, or its brand. In fact, the MacOS's reputation for being completely virus-free would probably be an order of magnitude more valuable.
This trojan (I don't think it's a virus), by the way, doesn't seem to discourage users from hacking their iPhones, at least not that I can see. I don't know anyone whose minds were changed because of this. And a "hackable" iPhone really *is* just an iPhone where there is a known exploit/vulnerability in security. If you're worried about security, you've upgraded to the latest update for which there's no known jailbreak (because the security vulnerabilities have been patched).
Curious how this only affects unlocked iPhones. Just who is that to the benefit of?
The people writing the exploits. No one else benefits.
The "unlocking" is done through a buffer overflow vulnerability, which by definition is a security hole. If you've avoided the latest software updates because it "breaks" unlocking, what you're doing is avoiding the patch that "fixes" security.
So yes, if you intentionally leave security vulnerabilities open in your computers, then intentionally install this software (it apparently doesn't self-propogate), you'll get infected. That's not very surprising to me.
Yeah, Apple's speech recognizer has very dissimilar goals to Dragon's (although both, if I recall correctly, got their start at Carnegie Mellon's speech labs). Apple is trying to build a speaker-independent, no-training-required recognizer that can handle short commands. Dragon doesn't care as much about speaker-independent, but requires accuracy over sentences and paragraphs. Very different algorithmic, HCI and optimization problems.
Recently Sun has been open-sourcing all kinds of software to create an ecosystem of software over which they have influence. MySQL is one of the most influential and widespread database engines in existence. In fact, the only thing holding it back appears to be the bizarre licensing of its parent company. If Sun fixes the licensing issues they'll be a hero, be able to influence a major part of the net infrastructure, and have an easy-to-use little database to put in OpenOffice.
It makes a lot of sense to me.
Gazillions sold when it starts at $1800? If this thing was $1k I might agree.
Apple's machine is hundreds of dollars cheaper than a comparable Sony machine. If you really want a super-light, small, reasonably performant laptop there aren't a huge number of choices. And Apple's is the cheapest I can find by a reasonable margin. I actually think the *low* price point is going to be a game-changer for those in this market. My guess is this single-handedly saves Apple's Japanese business unit, for one...
How often do business folks need more than 5 hours of battery life and/or can't afford the auto/plane power adapter after buying a laptop that starts at $1800?
Come on. Apple is going to sell gazillions of this thing. It will be to laptops what iPods were to all other MP3 players.
Components are, of course, going to obey the law of supply and demand, as well as having their value affect their price. HD DVD players are worth a lot less now, and are now priced accordingly. Eventually you'll see the "fire sale" where Toshiba sells out their inventory at sub-$100 prices at the end. What else are they going to do with their parts?
Secondly, I never expressed any such "goal of open source", don't know what kind of never-logic land you got that from.
You specifically used the phrase "historical insight", and was complaining that the open-sourcing of a SimCity implementation was useless without it. Or did I misunderstand you, and you find Klingon translations useful and was making a different analogy than I thought?
Actually, no offense, but I'm pretty sure you're completely wrong. If you try to sell a calendar full of Fords titled "Ford Cars (that I own)", Ford will successfully sue you for Trademark infringement. You are profiting off of their trademarks.
1. Ford is alleging Trademark violations, not Copyright, from what I've read. The distinction is pretty important when it comes to what rights you have to the pictures that you took (and therefore have copyright over).
2. If Ford doesn't defend their Trademarks, by law they lose them. Thus, the law compels companies to act like this, whether the companies like it or not.
3. There are exceptions in the law for works that are sufficiently derivative. If you're selling calendars of cars that look like they could have driven off the lot yesterday, that's obviously a violation of trademark even if you own the car-- you're clearly profiting directly from someone else's trademark. If the cars are heavily modified, though, they probably have a good case for the calendar.
4. Selling photography containing trademarks is definitely a tricky business, but the damage has long-since been done. Even worse, some folks have run into minor hot water when they replaced billboards in cityscapes with alternate billboards in television and photographs-- so NOT reproducing the trademark has also been problematic. It's definitely an area of law in need of refinement.
It is almost like they are separate identities, and his alleged criminal behaviour didn't introduce bugs into his code or something.
Uhhh, chip on your shoulder, any? I didn't say anything about Reiser the person. And I'm sure it wasn't his wife's murder that put all those bugs into ReiserFS, but it was sure SOMETHING.
From what I understand, a not-dissimilar experience is what kicked Richard Stallman off, as well. Basically, open source software will always serve as a foundation-- a level at which the state-of-the-art will never fall below again. With a few exceptions, it tends not to be the most innovative or best-of-breed in any market segment, but because of the reasons you mention it's what engineers can always fall back to when the proprietary stuff starts to disappear in acquisitions, bankruptcies, and ambiguous and frustrating IP situations.
You're referring to Blu-Ray the open standards-based format? The one that tends to push MP4 over Microsoft's VC-1? And uses Java (a FOSS technology) over a Microsoft-generated interactive media format?
I assume you mean that FOS software is hard to set-up or something, but I really haven't experienced that.
You probably have a higher tolerance for "hard" than the average user. My 90 year old grandmother owns a Mac and videoconferences with her great-grandkids on a regular basis. Typing "sudo port install gimp, then her password when prompted" is "hard to set up" for her, but that's probably the other extreme.
Basically, if you spend more than 0 minutes a day "fiddling" or doing anything other than content creation or consumption on your machine, that's time wasted. Depending on how valuable your time is, you can compute how much the FOSS software costed you. Many of the packages the parent poster mentions are good. GIMP is a good example in my book of awful FOSS from a "time wasted" point of view, as is your average laptop linux install.
The typical business model for FOSS appears to be "take the most difficult to use and obtuse software in a given market segment, give it away for free, then charge people for support". (With the notable exception of Apple, which only open-sources their low level code anyway.) If you were to make the most user friendly and transparent software possible, I don't see how it would be possible to build a business out of it. And if you're competing against someone who IS able to make money, they'll have more time to improve things faster.
I'm not saying FOSS is hopeless or always worse-- just that it's a difficult proposition to make both quality and profitable FOSS software. And even if developers donate tons of time, they have to pay the bills somehow, and their day jobs would seem to be just as at-risk from someone ELSE's open source project, leading to a race to the bottom. To break that cycle, FOSS developers have to get, IMHO, a little more creative than they've been lately.
I agree with NTFS, but I doubt ext3 is important to more than a tiny handful of Mac users, and I'm surprised *anyone*'s using Reiser anymore. While MacOS users have been able to read NTFS for years, it would be nice to be able to format external devices as NTFS and use them natively on MacOS. Of course, now that FUSE is ported to MacOS, word is that NTFS is pretty stable on it (more stable than this ZFS port, from what I've heard), if slow.
Global Warming Crowd
aka "folks who believe in science"
will start yammering about Galaxy Warming
It's an interesting model... there's a lot of energy in these incoming hydrogen atoms, but adding extra gas between the stars-- especially if some coalesces-- could absorb some energy and keep it from the planet. It makes one wonder what effect it will have, and whether it's happened in the past. A few tens of millions of years is a flashbulb on the geologic time scale. (The amount of time between now and when it will "hit" is less than the amount of time since the dinosaurs.)
Imagine-- promoting FOSS because it actually works well. Who cares about the license? Most FOSS is only "free" if your time is worthless, especially compared to what I can get on my Mac. But there are some packages, and you mention many of them, that are honestly better and more convenient than their closed-source counterparts.