I'm not sure this is true... you could definitely write a Flash-based site that would look TERRIBLE on the iPhone. Just make it larger than the native resolution, for example, which is not really a stretch.
I do agree with you in part - if the iPhone or iPad had Flash, you could effectively do and end-run around the restrictions on their store. Apple won't let your VOIP application into their store? Code it up in Flash, and just have your users browse to your site and make calls.
Excellent point. My company is tragically going the same route. Because all of our major competitors have an iPhone app, we're working on building an iPhone app. In the meantime, the mobile version of our site is terrible, and the regular site is a bit too busy to use comfortably on a mobile device.
It's very frustrating. If we built a good mobile site, we'd give access to all devices - iPhone, Droids, Blackberries (generally valuable corporate types), etc. Hell, you can get all 7 Palm WebOS users as a bonus!
I've been thinking this for awhile. I'm sure executives at Google didn't love having to do censorship in China (it's gotta create a bunch of busywork for the developers, if nothing else), but they went along with it for awhile. However, if I was running a company in China, and it became painfully obvious that the government was trying to hack my systems to get the identities of protesters and try to steal my IP, and at the same time blatantly helping out my local competition... that sounds like a loosing game.
I'm guessing that somebody originally didn't want to go in to China, and only after the attacks could he get enough support to get others to agree to pull out.
So Flash 10 obviously isn't in this update. Has anybody heard any recent news on when this would be available? Last I heard, it was supposed to come out end of 2009...
I hate this argument, even though it is technically correct. Yes, Google pays Mozilla somewhere around $50 million a year to make Google the default search engine. It also specifically doesn't list Bing, but does include Yahoo. Of course, you can easily add Bing if you want to, although I'm sure a lot of users don't bother.
Microsoft, on the other hand, uses their existing business relationships to force users to only use Bing. Verizon went and updated Verizon Blackberries to only allow searches on Bing. Some Verizon guy advises that you go directly to google.com to search, otherwise enjoy your Bing searches. I can't find anything that details what sort of money changed hands, but I can't imagine Verizon made this change for the LOLz.
And that, to me, is a huge difference. On the one hand, you have Google, who openly supports an open-source web browser that has always pushed open standards and higher performance into the browser market. On the other hand you have Microsoft making back-room deals with another giant company to force all of its users onto Bing. To directly equate these two types of actions seems dishonest to me.
Caveat, I've never actually used cloud computing, just talked to people and seen presentations.
The story I got was from a guy who does IT consulting, and does a lot of prototyping for new/potential clients. He would use the Google or Amazon clouds to spin up an application, play with it, demo it to the clients, and then spin it down. If it went live, they could either leave it in the cloud, or capitalize a "real" hosting solution. He claimed that his bill some months for the cloud was less than $1.
And that's the point that I think people miss. If you're messing around with The Next Big Web 2.0 thing, but don't expect a lot of traffic to begin with, why go through the hassle of setting up a traditional hosting solution? How many racks will you need? How much bandwidth? How much memory and CPU? And if it gets suddenly more popular than you expect, how long does it take to get new servers online?
With cloud hosting, you can say "I want to pay, at most, $2000 a month." The service can then dynamically scale you up to your limit if you get on Slashdot or something. And if not, you just pay for what you're using, not for a rack of servers that are sitting 99% idle.
Has anybody in the Bay Area been on AT&T both before the iPhone, and after? How did the quality of the network change?
My point is, people keep claiming that the iPhone is beating the hell out of AT&T's network, especially the data service. As a long-time Verizon customer, I love the service, and I'm curious whether a really solid smartphone would kill Verizon too.
I don't remember hearing constant bitching about AT&T's network before the iPhone became widely popular. Just sayin'
You're on a business trip, and you leave the laptop locked up in your trunk. It gets stolen. It miraculously gets recovered by the police, who troll through it for evidence. On the hard drive is the business plan that you're working on, on your own time on "your" laptop, that competes with your company.
Isn't it possible that your company might try to sue, saying that the laptop is their property, and hence the idea is theirs? Just because there's no spyware on there, doesn't mean your private data will never come to light.
I think what will happen is that Disney will someday not be able to push it any more, and Mickey et. al. will fall into the public domain, and then we can set the copyright length back to something reasonable. 25 years or life of author, whichever comes first. You can transfer it to a 3rd party, but the 25 year clock is in effect. If you make a derivative work, that new work is newly copyrighted, but the old work will still expire after its original 25 years.
Serious question - does anybody besides us nerds and some media people care about copyright? I never hear anybody talking about it outside of Slashdot.
I vaguely remember that it works by basically looking for "holes" in the network. If you were listening to a particular cell tower, and the signal gets weirdly reflected or disappears, it might be a stealth plane.
The biggest problem with software is that it is easily malleable. We'd have far fewer bugs if it were treated like hardware that couldn't just be tweaked in the field if something is wrong; we'd be given more time to finish the designs and implementation, the testing would be built in and mandatory, nothing would be declared finished until several eyeballs looked it over and even then that would just be the initial prototype, and we'd have outside testing companies verify the solution for compliance with regulations.
Theoretically, there is nothing preventing you from treating software like it's hardware, and locking it down like you describe, but all of your competitors would eat your lunch. The malleability of software is sometimes its curse (just make it do this... by tomorrow) but it is also its blessing. If software was as hard to change as hardware, we wouldn't have the incredible diversity of programs, websites, etc that we have.
I think you're conflating two different issues. You can embrace software's ease of modification and still have good programing practices. A company can do new and innovative things with software, and still ship a stable, bug-free product. Just because some people do it wrong, doesn't mean we need to lock our software down, and enforce Nth degrees of software assurance like NASA does.
One of the most important parts of voting is that the electorate believes that the result is true and fair. We had elections in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) where the president-for-life regularly got 98% of the vote. Do you trust those results?
I am a Java software developer, I'm sure I know more about computer hardware and software than 70% of the US population, but I would find it very difficult to tell you with any confidence whether a voting machine that you set in front of me was going to count the votes accurately. Even if the voting code was open-source, are you sure you could spot a hidden back door in some gnarly C code? Instead, I have to depend on a small handful of researchers to verify the machines, or have the states do it with varying levels of competence.
On the other hand, my grandmother can sit at a card table and watch people count votes, and see if they're cheating or not. Doesn't that make more sense? Everyone is supposed to have the right to vote, shouldn't everybody be able to understand the process?
I would love to see an animation of the Apple logo being eaten. All white, then play a "crunch" noise, blacken out a bite-sized piece of the screen, repeat.
It's a cool-looking mod, I think, and since it's a screen it's instantly customizable to the user's preference. I'm honestly surprised that a laptop maker hasn't tried this before. A bendable e-Ink display could be applied to the back of the screen, allowing you to make your laptop look like anything you like, for instance, without draining power. I think we'll see a lot more of this in the future.
The thing you're not considering is vote buying/coercion. A gangster in your neighborhood comes by and "suggests" that you better vote for Vito. He'll be by next week to see you voting receipt. If you know what's good for you, it will show that you voted for Vito.
With anonymous voting, you can threaten me, I can vote against Vito anyway, and nobody can prove anything.
Check the University of Surrey link posted by RMH - their system tries to overcome this issue. If I remember correctly, you would have to go through "tellers", basically a hash held by a third party, to map my vote receipt with an actual vote. You could take 100 votes and check their authenticity and hence the validity of the ballot, but most people's votes would remain anonymous.
Agreed. We host an airline website, and have over 60 Weblogic application server instances running. I can't even imagine how much all of those licenses cost.
We're driving hard to move the site to Tomcat instead. Our margins will improve, without affecting performance.
Our company has a few OSS contributors, and everything's converting to Tomcat and other OSS solutions. This is only going to drive more OSS contributions.
This seems like a dubious argument. There are plenty of applications (especially email clients) that allow you to do things off-line. If someone was capturing my keystrokes, they could potentially have a record of me writing a batch of emails just before I dialed in and sent them out. Is that significantly different from "intercepting private communications?"
I was pretty young when Challenger exploded, so I never did get the whole story. I found this explanation from a class at Texas A&M.
It helps explain the article featured on Slashdot, showing how management at NASA allowed political pressures to override from their engineers. It's possible that NASA has leaned back too far the other way, into over-cautiousness, but it's understandable.
The TOS never explicitly says "pornography," but is does have this:
[you may not...]
7.1.2 post or transmit any unlawful, threatening, abusive, libelous, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, indecent, profane, hateful, bigoted or otherwise objectionable information of any kind . .."
Pornography can be regulated without violating free speech laws because it is considered obscene; that's part of the legal definition. Never mind that there is no objective definition for obscenity.
Which is what really bugs me about 7.1.2 -- these are all subjective descriptions. Guess who decides the definitions?
I hit the SETI@Home page tonight and discovered that they've upgraded the client _again_.
I was reading the note about their new client, which basically says that they've made the client slower.
Seems like they're running out of bandwidth on their server, so they've made the client do more research per packet in order to increase turnaround time, hence decreasing the rate that results are turned in.
It just seemed ironic in view of the 500,000 year announcement; SETI@Home has gotten too big for Berkeley's network.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure this is true ... you could definitely write a Flash-based site that would look TERRIBLE on the iPhone. Just make it larger than the native resolution, for example, which is not really a stretch.
I do agree with you in part - if the iPhone or iPad had Flash, you could effectively do and end-run around the restrictions on their store. Apple won't let your VOIP application into their store? Code it up in Flash, and just have your users browse to your site and make calls.
Excellent point. My company is tragically going the same route. Because all of our major competitors have an iPhone app, we're working on building an iPhone app. In the meantime, the mobile version of our site is terrible, and the regular site is a bit too busy to use comfortably on a mobile device.
It's very frustrating. If we built a good mobile site, we'd give access to all devices - iPhone, Droids, Blackberries (generally valuable corporate types), etc. Hell, you can get all 7 Palm WebOS users as a bonus!
I've been thinking this for awhile. I'm sure executives at Google didn't love having to do censorship in China (it's gotta create a bunch of busywork for the developers, if nothing else), but they went along with it for awhile. However, if I was running a company in China, and it became painfully obvious that the government was trying to hack my systems to get the identities of protesters and try to steal my IP, and at the same time blatantly helping out my local competition ... that sounds like a loosing game.
I'm guessing that somebody originally didn't want to go in to China, and only after the attacks could he get enough support to get others to agree to pull out.
So Flash 10 obviously isn't in this update. Has anybody heard any recent news on when this would be available? Last I heard, it was supposed to come out end of 2009 ...
I hate this argument, even though it is technically correct. Yes, Google pays Mozilla somewhere around $50 million a year to make Google the default search engine. It also specifically doesn't list Bing, but does include Yahoo. Of course, you can easily add Bing if you want to, although I'm sure a lot of users don't bother.
Microsoft, on the other hand, uses their existing business relationships to force users to only use Bing. Verizon went and updated Verizon Blackberries to only allow searches on Bing. Some Verizon guy advises that you go directly to google.com to search, otherwise enjoy your Bing searches. I can't find anything that details what sort of money changed hands, but I can't imagine Verizon made this change for the LOLz.
And that, to me, is a huge difference. On the one hand, you have Google, who openly supports an open-source web browser that has always pushed open standards and higher performance into the browser market. On the other hand you have Microsoft making back-room deals with another giant company to force all of its users onto Bing. To directly equate these two types of actions seems dishonest to me.
Am I the only one that's terrified to click on any links here?
Caveat, I've never actually used cloud computing, just talked to people and seen presentations.
The story I got was from a guy who does IT consulting, and does a lot of prototyping for new/potential clients. He would use the Google or Amazon clouds to spin up an application, play with it, demo it to the clients, and then spin it down. If it went live, they could either leave it in the cloud, or capitalize a "real" hosting solution. He claimed that his bill some months for the cloud was less than $1.
And that's the point that I think people miss. If you're messing around with The Next Big Web 2.0 thing, but don't expect a lot of traffic to begin with, why go through the hassle of setting up a traditional hosting solution? How many racks will you need? How much bandwidth? How much memory and CPU? And if it gets suddenly more popular than you expect, how long does it take to get new servers online?
With cloud hosting, you can say "I want to pay, at most, $2000 a month." The service can then dynamically scale you up to your limit if you get on Slashdot or something. And if not, you just pay for what you're using, not for a rack of servers that are sitting 99% idle.
In fact, forget about the intelligence scale!
My favorite part is the code:
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
document.write("NO");
} catch(err) {
document.write("YES");
}
</script>
Has anybody in the Bay Area been on AT&T both before the iPhone, and after? How did the quality of the network change?
My point is, people keep claiming that the iPhone is beating the hell out of AT&T's network, especially the data service. As a long-time Verizon customer, I love the service, and I'm curious whether a really solid smartphone would kill Verizon too.
I don't remember hearing constant bitching about AT&T's network before the iPhone became widely popular. Just sayin'
You missed a huge one: Bambi's mom! They gunned her down in the first half hour of that movie.
And then his dad just randomly shows up later in the movie, for one conversation. Bambi pretty much raised himself, in the mean meadows of his world.
Just an example:
You're on a business trip, and you leave the laptop locked up in your trunk. It gets stolen. It miraculously gets recovered by the police, who troll through it for evidence. On the hard drive is the business plan that you're working on, on your own time on "your" laptop, that competes with your company.
Isn't it possible that your company might try to sue, saying that the laptop is their property, and hence the idea is theirs? Just because there's no spyware on there, doesn't mean your private data will never come to light.
I think what will happen is that Disney will someday not be able to push it any more, and Mickey et. al. will fall into the public domain, and then we can set the copyright length back to something reasonable. 25 years or life of author, whichever comes first. You can transfer it to a 3rd party, but the 25 year clock is in effect. If you make a derivative work, that new work is newly copyrighted, but the old work will still expire after its original 25 years.
Serious question - does anybody besides us nerds and some media people care about copyright? I never hear anybody talking about it outside of Slashdot.
Yeah, it was an article on Scientific American, maybe. England is working on using cell networks as a way to track stealth planes.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=0009EAC2-0FF3-1E40-89E0809EC588EEDF
I vaguely remember that it works by basically looking for "holes" in the network. If you were listening to a particular cell tower, and the signal gets weirdly reflected or disappears, it might be a stealth plane.
The biggest problem with software is that it is easily malleable. We'd have far fewer bugs if it were treated like hardware that couldn't just be tweaked in the field if something is wrong; we'd be given more time to finish the designs and implementation, the testing would be built in and mandatory, nothing would be declared finished until several eyeballs looked it over and even then that would just be the initial prototype, and we'd have outside testing companies verify the solution for compliance with regulations.
Theoretically, there is nothing preventing you from treating software like it's hardware, and locking it down like you describe, but all of your competitors would eat your lunch. The malleability of software is sometimes its curse (just make it do this ... by tomorrow) but it is also its blessing. If software was as hard to change as hardware, we wouldn't have the incredible diversity of programs, websites, etc that we have.
I think you're conflating two different issues. You can embrace software's ease of modification and still have good programing practices. A company can do new and innovative things with software, and still ship a stable, bug-free product. Just because some people do it wrong, doesn't mean we need to lock our software down, and enforce Nth degrees of software assurance like NASA does.
One of the most important parts of voting is that the electorate believes that the result is true and fair. We had elections in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) where the president-for-life regularly got 98% of the vote. Do you trust those results?
I am a Java software developer, I'm sure I know more about computer hardware and software than 70% of the US population, but I would find it very difficult to tell you with any confidence whether a voting machine that you set in front of me was going to count the votes accurately. Even if the voting code was open-source, are you sure you could spot a hidden back door in some gnarly C code? Instead, I have to depend on a small handful of researchers to verify the machines, or have the states do it with varying levels of competence.
On the other hand, my grandmother can sit at a card table and watch people count votes, and see if they're cheating or not. Doesn't that make more sense? Everyone is supposed to have the right to vote, shouldn't everybody be able to understand the process?
I would love to see an animation of the Apple logo being eaten. All white, then play a "crunch" noise, blacken out a bite-sized piece of the screen, repeat.
It's a cool-looking mod, I think, and since it's a screen it's instantly customizable to the user's preference. I'm honestly surprised that a laptop maker hasn't tried this before. A bendable e-Ink display could be applied to the back of the screen, allowing you to make your laptop look like anything you like, for instance, without draining power. I think we'll see a lot more of this in the future.
The thing you're not considering is vote buying/coercion. A gangster in your neighborhood comes by and "suggests" that you better vote for Vito. He'll be by next week to see you voting receipt. If you know what's good for you, it will show that you voted for Vito.
With anonymous voting, you can threaten me, I can vote against Vito anyway, and nobody can prove anything.
Check the University of Surrey link posted by RMH - their system tries to overcome this issue. If I remember correctly, you would have to go through "tellers", basically a hash held by a third party, to map my vote receipt with an actual vote. You could take 100 votes and check their authenticity and hence the validity of the ballot, but most people's votes would remain anonymous.
Agreed. We host an airline website, and have over 60 Weblogic application server instances running. I can't even imagine how much all of those licenses cost.
We're driving hard to move the site to Tomcat instead. Our margins will improve, without affecting performance.
Our company has a few OSS contributors, and everything's converting to Tomcat and other OSS solutions. This is only going to drive more OSS contributions.
KPMG is still not at the top of the list.
Check it out:
Google Directory [directory.google.com]
This seems like a dubious argument. There are plenty of applications (especially email clients) that allow you to do things off-line. If someone was capturing my keystrokes, they could potentially have a record of me writing a batch of emails just before I dialed in and sent them out. Is that significantly different from "intercepting private communications?"
Something that can't be found on the web? Impossible! Sounds like a challenge.
She's not that hot, in my opinion. Here's some pictures anyways.
Oh, you meant those kinds of pictures. Oops.
It helps explain the article featured on Slashdot, showing how management at NASA allowed political pressures to override from their engineers. It's possible that NASA has leaned back too far the other way, into over-cautiousness, but it's understandable.
The TOS never explicitly says "pornography," but is does have this:
[you may not...]
7.1.2 post or transmit any unlawful, threatening, abusive, libelous, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, indecent, profane, hateful, bigoted or otherwise objectionable information of any kind . . ."
Pornography can be regulated without violating free speech laws because it is considered obscene; that's part of the legal definition. Never mind that there is no objective definition for obscenity.
Which is what really bugs me about 7.1.2 -- these are all subjective descriptions. Guess who decides the definitions?
I hit the SETI@Home page tonight and discovered that they've upgraded the client _again_.
I was reading the note about their new client, which basically says that they've made the client slower.
Seems like they're running out of bandwidth on their server, so they've made the client do more research per packet in order to increase turnaround time, hence decreasing the rate that results are turned in.
It just seemed ironic in view of the 500,000 year announcement; SETI@Home has gotten too big for Berkeley's network.