Honestly, this bug is not surprising. if MS were marketing to a technical crowd, the file system would be what they attacked. The file system in Mac OS X does suck a lot. Copying to USB drives takes forever. Encrypted volumes, with filevault, are very fragile. Network access is often very slow. IDisk has a habit of just flaking out.
To be fair, some of these are things that MS Windows does not do natively, so it is unclear how MS would leverage this error. In any case, since MS seems to market their product on cheapness, not quality, it isn't really an issue.
The difference is that some firms are using algae to create oils. Dow is going to open a algae biofuel plant in Freeport that will create ethanol. This should partially stem the hemorrhaging of jobs. Solazyme is producing75,000 litree of F-76 renewable fuel for the Navy.
The point is that this technology is being used, and the only big issue are some engineering problems, not physics problem as in fusion. Most of the negative reaction comes from the energy companies that want to keep the profits from fossil fuels. I read about this in Nature, which talks about the oversell of the technology. That is a valid criticism. It another recent issue, though, another article talked about the fall of a central american village. In this case, the authors surmised that this village went through all their easily available best wood, then all their second best wood, then all their reserve best wood. Then they did not have a back up plan.
I hope we have a backup plan, and I hope we have a range of options when it comes to energy and plastics production.
It will do no good. Murdoch lives in a fantasy world where one is not responsible for one's own actions. Just watch Fox News. When someone loses a job, it is the governments fault, and due to the fact that the person had no skills or chose to sell crappy products. The free market only works when the big business can do whatever they want, and smaller firms have to be subservient to them. The responsible free market solution is to at least block content from all users who are not subscribers, and at most put forth a competing search engine that requires a fee prior to linking to copyright information. but this would be the capatilist solution, which Murdoch would never go for. Instead he uses the socialist solution which is to have government pass more regulations which the tax payers then have to fund. It is like asking police to make sure that newspaper are read by only one person, then thrown away. I am sure he would love a law where our police would be responsible for arresting people who leave newspapers on park benches, or fining business who buy a personal subscription and then allow the customers to read it. Who cares if our taxes goes up. He doesn't pay them.
The idea of incremental plans is that there is some fixed costs, and then some additional costs as one uses more of the service. As it stands right now, all iPhone users buy a voice plan that covers a fixed number of minutes of calls. I suspect that many are like me and text or email quite a bit, so never use all the minutes. Texting plan, as has been pointed out,are pure profit and on the 3g phone are an additional expense. In addition to these expenses, there is the data plan.
I don't know if iPhone users really cause anything to run slower, or if this is just a myth put out to shift blame. My iPhone runs plenty fast over the cell network. What I do now that iPhones users pay for the bandwidth.
If a change is to made, then it needs to be made simpler. Realize that the iPhone may not be used as a phone, and therefore selling a voice plan as the basis may serve the customer. Or combine voice and data. One MB and one minute are perhaps the same thing. Sell 1000 units at the same cost as the basic package now. Get rid of charging for texting. I bet more people would text and not email if texting were cheaper.
I see this more about disclosure than about whether free calls exist on the iPhone(of course, over WiFi they do). Despite the clearly myopic tone of the article, the issue is disclosure.
For instance, a relative switched to VOIP due to significant costs saving. Though this relative is good at asking questions, several hidden and opportunity costs were never fully disclosed. This person still uses primarily a land line, so when the land line went out for several weeks due to a power disruption, there was very limited phone since she was not comfortable with a cell phone, and many friend in foreign land were never given this number. There there was the excessive costs to make foreign calls, and complex prepaid cards were not an option.
No matter what we think of Google, we have to admit they play fast and loose with their free services. Long outages, removal of service at the drop of hat by any arbitrary third party. The business model does not allow for end user services, since the end user is not the customer. If Google plays such a game with the phone app, who is going to be blamed? Not Google. Apple will have to take the calls.
In any case the point is moot. Android sales are expected to dwarf iPhone sales within a few years. There are expected to be many models out this year. Google can supply all these phones with Google Voice and prove that they can reliably serve customers needs. In fact, if Google Voice is as great as everyone says, it would likely be the killer app, the market differentiation, that would make Adroid phones an unbeatable value. Free phone calls. Free email. Why would anyone want anyone else. At that point, Apple would have to include the App.
How about open ended silly activities. Give them some dowels and have them build something. Select the most elegant design. Give them 50 words and have then write a story. At some schools, acceptance and scholarships are given on what a person can actually create, not what they can pay someone else to do.
The problem with all test is that they assess the rote knowledge, but not the creativity of the applicant. Even the GRE and tests like that test facts that can be recalled, albeit in an indirect manner, not ability to see solutions. This is why we have all these graduates from major colleges all saying that we can't possibly live without oil without severely impacting our standard of living. They can't see anymore than what is in front of them. They can't think of anyone that is not directly connected to their extremely myopic reality. Mostly they cannot imagine a world any different form what they were raised in.
Of course, since the people in charge are the exact same myopic people I speak of, the creative activity will be building a tower our newspaper. Something that looks creative but has little risk.
It could be that the cheaper labor, who can create a good enough product, does not have the resources to acquire a fully licensed MS platform. Instead, they may have grown up with older computers running Linux and open source tools. One can image a motivated student, who has been told that unlicensed software is stealing, and stealing is wrong, might choose to learn cheaper tools. One can also imagine a company, wary of the costs of a MS development solution, and able to hire local developers who are not MS only developers, might choose a cheaper route. The status quo right now is that low cost labor is most likely to know MS solutions, os if one wants a low cost solution, then MS is the way to go. The traditional problem with *nix is that the labor has a reputation of being expensive, arrogant, and difficult to manage. Maybe that is changing now that many kids are playing with low cost solutions, and do not have the experience of being the tyrant in the ivory tower.
This is pretty much what I was thinking, then I though the books hardly matter. In such a class, I would hope a wide variety of books would be exploited. I know that for some part of the course standard books must be chosen, so the class can discuss and the teacher can model what is expects. But after this is time, many lit courses just become indoctrination to the cannon of literature, which has it place but often just makes students bored.
The one place where the cannon should not exist is popular fiction. There is just too much of, all of rather equal quality, little of it stands well to the test of time. Even in what many would be considered in the Cannon of Science Fiction, books like Stranger in a Strange Land and the Gateway trilogy, and kindren are absent from so many lists. For sheer literary magnitude, we have Kim Stanley Robinson.
If I were teaching such a class, I hope I would have the courage to let the student read what they wanted and analyze for whatever social merits of commentary it might have. Sure, some might go through the entire Stainless Steel Rat series, but if such helped them reflect on various ethical systems, the was not the ends met? I would think so.
Such courses, though, are invariably about setting a community standard about what is a good book or a bad back. This is good literature, this is not. I would at least hope that such a course would include stories from the pulp magazines. Such stories show that writing, and the development of an art form, is a process. Many people honed their skills at a penny per word.
Absolutely, Any computer program is based on models, and those models are based on assumptions. While something like a physics engine can work because the assumptions in physics preclude most superstitions, the same cannot be said for economics.
Economics often, for instance, still talks about the invisible hand and the rational deterministic consumer. Economics still insists that there is one or a very small number of persons that can be successful, and therefore this one or very small number of people deserve huge compensation. We see these models fail regularly. People are not rational. The money multiplier is just an approximation. Banks do not lend equally to equally qualified applicants, people do not spend and save rationally.
While I agree that models can be learned through game economies, the damage occurs when people see these simulated economies in full simulation and begin to believe them. As it is, a rational person understands that economics is a very limited approximation, and real wold experience keeps it in check. But if they see it a computer, more people may believe the approximations are more valid than they are. It is like sports. People play the relatively insignificant game, with relatively simple and evenly applied rules, and then go out and believe that is the way the world actually works. They get upset when rules are not followed in the rule world. They get upset when adjustments need to made to allow for real world variation. Because in a game a winner or loser does not matter, but in the real world. sometimes a winner has be chosen not on arbitrary rules but for the needs on the public.
When the likes of the paid virus scanners bad mouth MS security tools, they are not thinking of those of us who use free security tools. We will continue to use the free tools, possibly supplemented with the MS tools.
The vendors spread FUD because they are afraid that customers will make the very reasonable decision that they do not need to buy security tools when MS is giving them away. This might be especially true in corporate environments trying to cut costs. One wonders if this is one way that MS claims corporate will save nearly $400,000 a year in reduced security, management, and energy costs... using MS Windows 7.
On my iphone, anytime an app wants to use my location I get a request to allow it to so do. If any app that uses the location service I know that it is happening. This is in fact what apple is supposed to be protecting us for in exchange for us agreeing that the iTunes App store is a good idea. Developers have to obey certain rules, and the user has some protection against mal ware.
So if this is happening, then it is a failure on Apples part. We do expect data on our phones to be private, and for Apple to protect that privacy.
Of course, one wonders if the phone number is private. If we make a call, that phone number is transmitted to the person we are calling. If we install an app on the iPhone, while all items on the phone we can expect to be private, I think a case can be made for and against the phone number. Of course, if there was no reason for the app to need the phone number, I would expect apple to vet for such code used to get the phone number. In this case, I can't see why they would need the number, but I don't see how it is despicable. I guess some people are just so frugal and introverted that any use of their time or minutes results in a temper tantrum, like some arrogant teenager when the unwashed have the audacity to talk to them.
I like to read about the protection and restoration of art. It seems that all art decays, and no matter what one does to it, at some point it will require a restoration. For instance, I have read the varnish put over painting is made to come off easily and leave the painting in tact for restoration. A painting left in the basement, never touch, will eventually decay to nothing.
So it with digital media. The nice thing with digital media are the copies are exact, with no generational loss. Therefore my suggestion would be a working copy and a backup. Backups are rotated to insure reliability. Working copies are kept until a new copy is made from a backup, in the same way we do in commercial environments.
There is no media that will last 100 years unchanged, and few media that will last 20 without care. Just because it is digital does not change the laws of thermodynamics.
was also interested in how the figured the costs. Computers are a fixed cost. Bandwidth tends to be fixed cost, or at lest generally has a small incremental cost. As high as the estimate is, one wonders if the government paid for subscription to the p0rn sites. On a certain level, any off task behavior can be considered a violation.
This to me seems like the typical waste we see in government. Not the act itself, but overreacting to the act and then wasting everyones time. These are adults for goodness sakes. If the sneak a penthouse in and spend a few minutes reading it are we going freak and call in the army? Are we so enamored with our technology and surveillance capability that we leave all other duties behind? What if they use the government desk phone to set up a date? Are we to ignore all other problems to prosecute the behavior?
Honestly, we are all a bunch or prudes with no perspective. People look at naughty pictures. That is why cosmo and maxim exist. People do not spend every minute of every day at work on task. Sometimes they may do appropriate things. Sane people tend not to look to hard, because it is more important to get the job done than micromanage personal behavior. When it effects performance, or if someone files a complaint, then maybe it might be an issue. But this is not just porn. If someone were always listening, for instance, to Hannity instead of working I would see that as just as bad.
One thing that many companies, including Apple, got wrong in the past is treating computing machinery as different devices. The nice thing about the old Palm is it became an extension of you computer. The bad thing about current phones is that they don't. Even in the 90's there was a demand for a mobile device that the extension of the higher powered computer. This was a major reason why some machines, like the newton, failed, and other, like the palm, succeeded.
We are now seeing large scale integration happening. One nice thing about the MS Windows is it can be deployed as a single large structure. It does not matter what machine one is on, essential data can be easily transferred and mounted to the machine. The computer itself is secondary to the job. MS has clearly not done a good job make MS Mobile intergrate seamlessly into windows. Other people have. Apple has made iPhone work seamlessly with the big OS.
Any open source phone is going to have integrate into some larger OS, be in *nix or MS Windows of OS X. Palm tired this, but chose the cheap right so Apple slapped them. Resources will not only have to be spent on the phone, but also integrated the protocols to communicate with other devices. On the OSS side, this might mean making decisions. For instance, google can provide a central contact management, but that is closed solution. Perhaps one selects a OSS online solution, then give people the choice or setting up their own server, or contracting with someone else.But then the desktop to phone conduit is controlled by a third party.
Some people like to shop, and feel ripped off if they haven't gone to ten stores, spent a week looking at products, and buying something on sale. Though this is good for some products, there is little that one can see in the store in electronics. It basically audio and video that one can see at the store.
Salespeople are trained to use this impulse. Some of what they do is valid, and some of what they do is deceptive. It is hard to say that, given people want this service, if what they do is bad. I mean if someone buys too much machine, but they feel they got a good deal because a salesman talked to them and it was on sale, is this a horrible thing. From my point of view yes, but I usually know what I want before I get to a store, and how much I need to spend.
So yes they know. And they get paid commissions, which everyone knows. They could probably pay a geek a flat $100 to help them buy a machine, but that is not the way the market is set up. It is set up so that the motivation of the sales staff is diametrically opposed to the needs of the consumer.
Except that we are not talking about OS X. We are talking about MS Windows, which does not come with Apache, so that is why it might be installed.I see not documentation on it being installed. I see a number of items that must be installed to support the utility.
This isn't really about taste. It is about consumers having confidence so that minimum time is spent making spending decisions to maximize the velocity of those transactions, and as a result the velocity of money. If we had to think about purchases, for instance if consumers actually took the time to read labels, then costs would increase and drive inflation and wages in the same way that many claim a forced health care regime would. This is a real threat. A coalition of food product manufacturers, for instance, has created the "Smart Choices"program to encourage shoppers to buy based on a check mark. In this way they do not have to read the label and realize that Froot Loop has the first ingredient as sugar, but can simply buy it based on the check mark.
If taste is the issue, lets take the example of ethylene glycol. It is sweet and would probably be a useful item in food products. In small quantities it is probably not that harmful. Yet we do not use Ethylene glycol. Likewise, alcohol tastes really good. In saner and more free market based countries, nobody is going freak about a kid having a bit of alcohol. Yet in the US we do, but seem to not freak out when a kid eats junk food every day, or when a parent provides 50% of the calories from sugar and fat. In one case we think of the children at the expense of free choice and free market, in the other we let the free market run rampant at the expense of the children.
I am not for politicians picking food, which is why the current situation is so wrong. Farm subsidies promote food not based on what we need, but what will make the politicians friends rich. A screwed up system where a bag of chips costs less than a piece of fruit. A salad costs more than a hamburger. The real issue is that government intervention has created a system where calories are cheap, but nutrition is expensive.
Which is why anyone who talks about government conspiracies is just silly. Oh one hand, we talk about how stupid the government is. On the other, we grant they the hyper intelligence to run a conspiracy. Just look a this example. One part of the government, the subsidies, the money that is forcefully taken from the tax payer and gives it to the corporation for doing nothing, supports the food we want. The other side,the side that suggests that we might want eat more healthy, does nothing but print propaganda. In other words, the politicians are already picking and perverting our food based on campaign contributions and kick backs. What most people want is a free market system where we get to choose our food based on preference.
In practice this is correct. OTOH, add an photocell and one could, at least in principle, power a device. Of course as others have mentioned running a wire as well as the fiber optic solves this problem.
Most people do not want to pay $300 for a video game console, and then $10-20 a week to rent games, or $50 to buy. Nor do they want to pay $1000 for a PC rig to play the advanced games. I myself preferred my gameboy for playing tetris or golf or other games. An advantage is that the games were very reasonably priced.
I think what apple is targeting is the cash strapped parent who kids want multiple mobile devices. Though $200 for an iphone or iPod touch might seem out of line for a kids first device, if it can serve as the personal computer for browsing, email, and reading, can text, take pictures and movies, and play some games, it might seem a good alternative to phone plus a psp plus a music player, etc.
Like the mac,which made graphic processing affordable, the advantage is likely to be short lived. It should be simple to get something like a PSP and add a phone and some other trinkets. If that can happen,then people will likely migrate to it. One thing that I am surprised to see is that MS is not integrating the Windows Mobile, xbox, and zune technology into single product. The fact that we are talking about MS Windows 7 and a new Zune to me is incompressible. A Zune that has and HDMI port, but cannot play games, is simply silly.
Because recent data shows that the opposition and governments will always reduce the crowd count by a factor of two to minimize the importance. In this way an officially counted crowd of ten thousand become one million, and a counted crowd of one hundred becomes ten thousand. Since we know that the government and New York times like(which listed the protest size at several thousand peaceful protestors) lie, then we know that the defenses were reasonable against the near million person violent crowd.
It is about money. Which is why some of these make good sense.
Patterns allow one to write in a standard form, which can save time and increase the ability to debug. If you don't think patterns make money, just look at The Simpsons. The downside is that patterns can result in some complex code that some may feel is not justified, at least in the short term. This is where experienced coders can help, but they cost money.
Unit testing is another judgement call. I have built very few unit tests, usually only for critical low level routines that have few other dependencies. Mostly what I find useful is code that detect and diagnose issues while the function is part of the larger applications. I can't tell you the number of weird bugs that are detected just by writing data to a file. I leave the code in but commented out. It is the same secondary benefits of unit tests. It documents expected behavior.
Agile programming is a matter of personality and style. forcing it onto people is just as bad as the more traditional cubicle model. Many of these ideas are good, but pushed by people who are trying to maximize the use to maximize profit. Just like SUVs were.
I think back to the advent of the IDE. In most ways it is a wonderful idea, and has increased efficiency. I am sure a number of people, though, think it made programmers dumb and cost more than it is worth.
If Cyanogen is "passing around Google's closed-source apps like Google Maps, Google Talk and Gmail", then google has every right, even a responsibility, to stop it. It does not matter that it only runs on google authorized hardware, Cyanogen has not been given the right to distribute the software. What happens if Cyanogen, or some other person, decided to modify the Talk so that all numbers dialed were reported to third party advertisers? Not only would google lose their share of the advertising dollars, but I am sure most would hold google liable. Same thing if maps intentionally lead people to drive off a cliff. Right holders have a obligation to control distribution, and I don't trust those who don't control distribution.
Leaving this issue aside, it does seem that Android is not the open savior that every thought it might be. Given that for a cell phone to work it must have towers, and that the towers are controlled by private enterprise in search of profit, and that large firms tend to sue each other as part of the competitive process, any completely open phone is unlikely to thrive in the marketplace. If google were no a commodity vendor, then I would say that an open phone might work. But given they want tens of millions of customers, there is going to be a compromise of open software and control.
I really wish MS would move from the US. No conservative US person would allow the country run on foreign software. This would mean that the federal government would run on Mac OS X or a custom US version of *nix.
And where would they go? Mexico, Russia, India? Canada? I wonder how the ultimate in American capatilism would do in the current socialist enemy number one of the United States.
First sentence of the summary implies this:
...make all published documents from Google Docs users crawlable, if the documents are linked from a public Web site
This means that the document is accessible to the public, and any web crawler can get to it, assuming that the crawler indexes google documents, and that google does not block these crawlers. If google is not indexing the documents, the google is not doing it's job, which is to index all online material.
Of course some firms that are looking for free hosting and does not understand the internet will object, as their 'private documents' now show up in searches. But this is just like some news organizations object that search engines index and link to content, or some lame firms object that people deep link. There are those that understand the technology, and those that choose to think technology does what they wish.
I do see this as different from the case of older versions of MS Windows automatically exposing documents on personal computers to the world. In that case there was an expectation for privacy. In this case there is not.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, some of these are things that MS Windows does not do natively, so it is unclear how MS would leverage this error. In any case, since MS seems to market their product on cheapness, not quality, it isn't really an issue.
The point is that this technology is being used, and the only big issue are some engineering problems, not physics problem as in fusion. Most of the negative reaction comes from the energy companies that want to keep the profits from fossil fuels. I read about this in Nature, which talks about the oversell of the technology. That is a valid criticism. It another recent issue, though, another article talked about the fall of a central american village. In this case, the authors surmised that this village went through all their easily available best wood, then all their second best wood, then all their reserve best wood. Then they did not have a back up plan.
I hope we have a backup plan, and I hope we have a range of options when it comes to energy and plastics production.
It will do no good. Murdoch lives in a fantasy world where one is not responsible for one's own actions. Just watch Fox News. When someone loses a job, it is the governments fault, and due to the fact that the person had no skills or chose to sell crappy products. The free market only works when the big business can do whatever they want, and smaller firms have to be subservient to them. The responsible free market solution is to at least block content from all users who are not subscribers, and at most put forth a competing search engine that requires a fee prior to linking to copyright information. but this would be the capatilist solution, which Murdoch would never go for. Instead he uses the socialist solution which is to have government pass more regulations which the tax payers then have to fund. It is like asking police to make sure that newspaper are read by only one person, then thrown away. I am sure he would love a law where our police would be responsible for arresting people who leave newspapers on park benches, or fining business who buy a personal subscription and then allow the customers to read it. Who cares if our taxes goes up. He doesn't pay them.
I don't know if iPhone users really cause anything to run slower, or if this is just a myth put out to shift blame. My iPhone runs plenty fast over the cell network. What I do now that iPhones users pay for the bandwidth.
If a change is to made, then it needs to be made simpler. Realize that the iPhone may not be used as a phone, and therefore selling a voice plan as the basis may serve the customer. Or combine voice and data. One MB and one minute are perhaps the same thing. Sell 1000 units at the same cost as the basic package now. Get rid of charging for texting. I bet more people would text and not email if texting were cheaper.
For instance, a relative switched to VOIP due to significant costs saving. Though this relative is good at asking questions, several hidden and opportunity costs were never fully disclosed. This person still uses primarily a land line, so when the land line went out for several weeks due to a power disruption, there was very limited phone since she was not comfortable with a cell phone, and many friend in foreign land were never given this number. There there was the excessive costs to make foreign calls, and complex prepaid cards were not an option.
No matter what we think of Google, we have to admit they play fast and loose with their free services. Long outages, removal of service at the drop of hat by any arbitrary third party. The business model does not allow for end user services, since the end user is not the customer. If Google plays such a game with the phone app, who is going to be blamed? Not Google. Apple will have to take the calls.
In any case the point is moot. Android sales are expected to dwarf iPhone sales within a few years. There are expected to be many models out this year. Google can supply all these phones with Google Voice and prove that they can reliably serve customers needs. In fact, if Google Voice is as great as everyone says, it would likely be the killer app, the market differentiation, that would make Adroid phones an unbeatable value. Free phone calls. Free email. Why would anyone want anyone else. At that point, Apple would have to include the App.
The problem with all test is that they assess the rote knowledge, but not the creativity of the applicant. Even the GRE and tests like that test facts that can be recalled, albeit in an indirect manner, not ability to see solutions. This is why we have all these graduates from major colleges all saying that we can't possibly live without oil without severely impacting our standard of living. They can't see anymore than what is in front of them. They can't think of anyone that is not directly connected to their extremely myopic reality. Mostly they cannot imagine a world any different form what they were raised in.
Of course, since the people in charge are the exact same myopic people I speak of, the creative activity will be building a tower our newspaper. Something that looks creative but has little risk.
It could be that the cheaper labor, who can create a good enough product, does not have the resources to acquire a fully licensed MS platform. Instead, they may have grown up with older computers running Linux and open source tools. One can image a motivated student, who has been told that unlicensed software is stealing, and stealing is wrong, might choose to learn cheaper tools. One can also imagine a company, wary of the costs of a MS development solution, and able to hire local developers who are not MS only developers, might choose a cheaper route. The status quo right now is that low cost labor is most likely to know MS solutions, os if one wants a low cost solution, then MS is the way to go. The traditional problem with *nix is that the labor has a reputation of being expensive, arrogant, and difficult to manage. Maybe that is changing now that many kids are playing with low cost solutions, and do not have the experience of being the tyrant in the ivory tower.
The one place where the cannon should not exist is popular fiction. There is just too much of, all of rather equal quality, little of it stands well to the test of time. Even in what many would be considered in the Cannon of Science Fiction, books like Stranger in a Strange Land and the Gateway trilogy, and kindren are absent from so many lists. For sheer literary magnitude, we have Kim Stanley Robinson.
If I were teaching such a class, I hope I would have the courage to let the student read what they wanted and analyze for whatever social merits of commentary it might have. Sure, some might go through the entire Stainless Steel Rat series, but if such helped them reflect on various ethical systems, the was not the ends met? I would think so.
Such courses, though, are invariably about setting a community standard about what is a good book or a bad back. This is good literature, this is not. I would at least hope that such a course would include stories from the pulp magazines. Such stories show that writing, and the development of an art form, is a process. Many people honed their skills at a penny per word.
Economics often, for instance, still talks about the invisible hand and the rational deterministic consumer. Economics still insists that there is one or a very small number of persons that can be successful, and therefore this one or very small number of people deserve huge compensation. We see these models fail regularly. People are not rational. The money multiplier is just an approximation. Banks do not lend equally to equally qualified applicants, people do not spend and save rationally.
While I agree that models can be learned through game economies, the damage occurs when people see these simulated economies in full simulation and begin to believe them. As it is, a rational person understands that economics is a very limited approximation, and real wold experience keeps it in check. But if they see it a computer, more people may believe the approximations are more valid than they are. It is like sports. People play the relatively insignificant game, with relatively simple and evenly applied rules, and then go out and believe that is the way the world actually works. They get upset when rules are not followed in the rule world. They get upset when adjustments need to made to allow for real world variation. Because in a game a winner or loser does not matter, but in the real world. sometimes a winner has be chosen not on arbitrary rules but for the needs on the public.
The vendors spread FUD because they are afraid that customers will make the very reasonable decision that they do not need to buy security tools when MS is giving them away. This might be especially true in corporate environments trying to cut costs. One wonders if this is one way that MS claims corporate will save nearly $400,000 a year in reduced security, management, and energy costs... using MS Windows 7.
So if this is happening, then it is a failure on Apples part. We do expect data on our phones to be private, and for Apple to protect that privacy.
Of course, one wonders if the phone number is private. If we make a call, that phone number is transmitted to the person we are calling. If we install an app on the iPhone, while all items on the phone we can expect to be private, I think a case can be made for and against the phone number. Of course, if there was no reason for the app to need the phone number, I would expect apple to vet for such code used to get the phone number. In this case, I can't see why they would need the number, but I don't see how it is despicable. I guess some people are just so frugal and introverted that any use of their time or minutes results in a temper tantrum, like some arrogant teenager when the unwashed have the audacity to talk to them.
So it with digital media. The nice thing with digital media are the copies are exact, with no generational loss. Therefore my suggestion would be a working copy and a backup. Backups are rotated to insure reliability. Working copies are kept until a new copy is made from a backup, in the same way we do in commercial environments.
There is no media that will last 100 years unchanged, and few media that will last 20 without care. Just because it is digital does not change the laws of thermodynamics.
This to me seems like the typical waste we see in government. Not the act itself, but overreacting to the act and then wasting everyones time. These are adults for goodness sakes. If the sneak a penthouse in and spend a few minutes reading it are we going freak and call in the army? Are we so enamored with our technology and surveillance capability that we leave all other duties behind? What if they use the government desk phone to set up a date? Are we to ignore all other problems to prosecute the behavior? Honestly, we are all a bunch or prudes with no perspective. People look at naughty pictures. That is why cosmo and maxim exist. People do not spend every minute of every day at work on task. Sometimes they may do appropriate things. Sane people tend not to look to hard, because it is more important to get the job done than micromanage personal behavior. When it effects performance, or if someone files a complaint, then maybe it might be an issue. But this is not just porn. If someone were always listening, for instance, to Hannity instead of working I would see that as just as bad.
We are now seeing large scale integration happening. One nice thing about the MS Windows is it can be deployed as a single large structure. It does not matter what machine one is on, essential data can be easily transferred and mounted to the machine. The computer itself is secondary to the job. MS has clearly not done a good job make MS Mobile intergrate seamlessly into windows. Other people have. Apple has made iPhone work seamlessly with the big OS.
Any open source phone is going to have integrate into some larger OS, be in *nix or MS Windows of OS X. Palm tired this, but chose the cheap right so Apple slapped them. Resources will not only have to be spent on the phone, but also integrated the protocols to communicate with other devices. On the OSS side, this might mean making decisions. For instance, google can provide a central contact management, but that is closed solution. Perhaps one selects a OSS online solution, then give people the choice or setting up their own server, or contracting with someone else.But then the desktop to phone conduit is controlled by a third party.
Salespeople are trained to use this impulse. Some of what they do is valid, and some of what they do is deceptive. It is hard to say that, given people want this service, if what they do is bad. I mean if someone buys too much machine, but they feel they got a good deal because a salesman talked to them and it was on sale, is this a horrible thing. From my point of view yes, but I usually know what I want before I get to a store, and how much I need to spend.
So yes they know. And they get paid commissions, which everyone knows. They could probably pay a geek a flat $100 to help them buy a machine, but that is not the way the market is set up. It is set up so that the motivation of the sales staff is diametrically opposed to the needs of the consumer.
Except that we are not talking about OS X. We are talking about MS Windows, which does not come with Apache, so that is why it might be installed.I see not documentation on it being installed. I see a number of items that must be installed to support the utility.
If taste is the issue, lets take the example of ethylene glycol. It is sweet and would probably be a useful item in food products. In small quantities it is probably not that harmful. Yet we do not use Ethylene glycol. Likewise, alcohol tastes really good. In saner and more free market based countries, nobody is going freak about a kid having a bit of alcohol. Yet in the US we do, but seem to not freak out when a kid eats junk food every day, or when a parent provides 50% of the calories from sugar and fat. In one case we think of the children at the expense of free choice and free market, in the other we let the free market run rampant at the expense of the children.
I am not for politicians picking food, which is why the current situation is so wrong. Farm subsidies promote food not based on what we need, but what will make the politicians friends rich. A screwed up system where a bag of chips costs less than a piece of fruit. A salad costs more than a hamburger. The real issue is that government intervention has created a system where calories are cheap, but nutrition is expensive.
Which is why anyone who talks about government conspiracies is just silly. Oh one hand, we talk about how stupid the government is. On the other, we grant they the hyper intelligence to run a conspiracy. Just look a this example. One part of the government, the subsidies, the money that is forcefully taken from the tax payer and gives it to the corporation for doing nothing, supports the food we want. The other side,the side that suggests that we might want eat more healthy, does nothing but print propaganda. In other words, the politicians are already picking and perverting our food based on campaign contributions and kick backs. What most people want is a free market system where we get to choose our food based on preference.
In practice this is correct. OTOH, add an photocell and one could, at least in principle, power a device. Of course as others have mentioned running a wire as well as the fiber optic solves this problem.
I think what apple is targeting is the cash strapped parent who kids want multiple mobile devices. Though $200 for an iphone or iPod touch might seem out of line for a kids first device, if it can serve as the personal computer for browsing, email, and reading, can text, take pictures and movies, and play some games, it might seem a good alternative to phone plus a psp plus a music player, etc.
Like the mac,which made graphic processing affordable, the advantage is likely to be short lived. It should be simple to get something like a PSP and add a phone and some other trinkets. If that can happen,then people will likely migrate to it. One thing that I am surprised to see is that MS is not integrating the Windows Mobile, xbox, and zune technology into single product. The fact that we are talking about MS Windows 7 and a new Zune to me is incompressible. A Zune that has and HDMI port, but cannot play games, is simply silly.
Because recent data shows that the opposition and governments will always reduce the crowd count by a factor of two to minimize the importance. In this way an officially counted crowd of ten thousand become one million, and a counted crowd of one hundred becomes ten thousand. Since we know that the government and New York times like(which listed the protest size at several thousand peaceful protestors) lie, then we know that the defenses were reasonable against the near million person violent crowd.
Patterns allow one to write in a standard form, which can save time and increase the ability to debug. If you don't think patterns make money, just look at The Simpsons. The downside is that patterns can result in some complex code that some may feel is not justified, at least in the short term. This is where experienced coders can help, but they cost money.
Unit testing is another judgement call. I have built very few unit tests, usually only for critical low level routines that have few other dependencies. Mostly what I find useful is code that detect and diagnose issues while the function is part of the larger applications. I can't tell you the number of weird bugs that are detected just by writing data to a file. I leave the code in but commented out. It is the same secondary benefits of unit tests. It documents expected behavior.
Agile programming is a matter of personality and style. forcing it onto people is just as bad as the more traditional cubicle model. Many of these ideas are good, but pushed by people who are trying to maximize the use to maximize profit. Just like SUVs were.
I think back to the advent of the IDE. In most ways it is a wonderful idea, and has increased efficiency. I am sure a number of people, though, think it made programmers dumb and cost more than it is worth.
Leaving this issue aside, it does seem that Android is not the open savior that every thought it might be. Given that for a cell phone to work it must have towers, and that the towers are controlled by private enterprise in search of profit, and that large firms tend to sue each other as part of the competitive process, any completely open phone is unlikely to thrive in the marketplace. If google were no a commodity vendor, then I would say that an open phone might work. But given they want tens of millions of customers, there is going to be a compromise of open software and control.
I am not saying this is not useful, simply that putting more stuff in does not make it better or more useful.
And where would they go? Mexico, Russia, India? Canada? I wonder how the ultimate in American capatilism would do in the current socialist enemy number one of the United States.
This means that the document is accessible to the public, and any web crawler can get to it, assuming that the crawler indexes google documents, and that google does not block these crawlers. If google is not indexing the documents, the google is not doing it's job, which is to index all online material.
Of course some firms that are looking for free hosting and does not understand the internet will object, as their 'private documents' now show up in searches. But this is just like some news organizations object that search engines index and link to content, or some lame firms object that people deep link. There are those that understand the technology, and those that choose to think technology does what they wish.
I do see this as different from the case of older versions of MS Windows automatically exposing documents on personal computers to the world. In that case there was an expectation for privacy. In this case there is not.