We, as consumers of the game certainly do not care. Hell, I love it when someone else buys my stuff for me. I would be happy if direct government payments were made so that more people could afford video games. I am sure that the businesses of America would be every bit as happy to fund such direct payments as they are to pay extra in licensing fees to fund MS giving away video consoles.
Is to win money. So why is winning money a crime? The player has to play fair, but the rules of fairness is set by gambling promoter. For instance, is it fair to sell loterry tickets when the real chance of winning is nill. Of course it is, because lottery tickets is gambling, and chance of anyone individual person winning is nill. The effect is the same. There is no reasonable chance that individual should expect to win. Over the aggregate, when millions of people play, someone typically wins, but that is not the point.
So, let take this further. Let's say that by some random chance cards are arranged and a particular player wins every hand of blackjack. Should that player be prosecuted? Let's say that a roulette wheel is defective, and players take advantage of the wheel? Should those players be prosecuted? Let's say that the person running a craps table does not know the rules, and is letting people win. Do the player get prosecuted?
No, because gambling is all about random events. That yoou might get a card, that you might hit a jackpot, that the dice rolls right. The random even that you might get a broken machine. The gambling promoter, OTOH, tries to prevent random events that they can control. The broken machine, the incompetent employee, the card counter walking into their legitimate business. They have the right and responsibility to control those things, but as gambling is about chance, and it about losing and winning on the basis of chance, there is no way that a gambling promoter can complain when the customer does the same thing as the promoter.
Remember the successful gambling promoter controls the random variables as much as is possible so they the average rate of win is skewed toward the establishment. There is nothing wrong with this. But when the gambling promoter makes a mistakes, that is just like a retailer making a mistake. If a retailer accidently sells a product for an unreasonable low price, or gives a refund that is too high, or packs double merchandise, the customer might have a moral imperative to be nice and tell the merchant of the mistake, but certainly we do not send police to pick up the customer.And so why the person in this story might be morally wrong, I do not that any laws were broken. Especially considered that a slot machine is not like an ATM, where the behavior is predictable and a reasonable person knows or should know when it is broken. It is supposed to random. If someone magically starts winning, why they hell not should they think they are just lucky? I know people who time trips to casino once a month, and they come back with hundreds of dollars. They are playing the odds, which is perfectly legal.
Most of the families I know have household incomes around the 100K mark or higher. Does that mean that most families in the US have 100K a year to spend? No, of course not. So what does it matter that one spammer makes lots of money. That is like saying that one pan handler makes a more than a living wage, so all pan handlers have more money than the average person. Some people are particularly good at what they do, and they know how to manage the economic forces,and can manage their scruples, so they do well.
The security of a browser still ultimately depends on how you use, and if it allows safe use. For instance, Consumer Reports found certain SUVs to be unsafe in standard use. While companies sued CU, the reality is that SUVs, if not used as people expect them to able to be used, are not safe. I see tipped over SUV every month that proves this point.
The problem with IE, was, for the longest time, that it did not provide standard protections. It always allowed the remote sever to control the users machines, and that control, though useful, lead to malicious use. The main thing that other browsers did, and plugins for IE, was allows user to limit the control that the remote site could exert on the local machine, thus increasing security. The user can now control everything, even the look and feel, which is problem for sites that require control of the user to generate revenue, but good for the user. For most users, the two major thing the user can't control or still need, the flash plugin and java script, are now arguably the major points of attack.
So what is the security issue in this case. It is that passwords are stored by the browser, inside the sand box, so to speak. This is bad. Passwords should be stored securely at the system level, available for applications to request, and with the user permission supplied. In other words, application password managers have to go.
Under the assumption that no one does nothing for nothing, this is good news as it indicates that the risk benifit curve has shifted so that selling a book is better money than spamming.
It is like those get rich quick schemes on paid TV. If it were so easy, then why is the promoter not making the million dollars a week instead of making cheesy commercials. If I made a million a week for a year, I certainly would not be on TV telling everyone about it, at the risk of reducing my real profit opportuities. I would hiding out in my fortress of richness and enjoying the money.
This also reinforces my assumption that for the most part spamming is just a way to make some easy money without much real work. Most people are not going to get rich off it, but if one is a country where a few thousand a year is good money, then hey, it beats doing honest work. It might even product the 20K a year one needs to live in the US. But like any organized crime, a few get insanely rich, and the rest get knocked off for pocket change.
Yes, if you write code and efficiently do such work, such hardware is going to be sufficient. I recall ging through megabytes of telemetry, seperating them, analyzing them, and graphing them on a 6800 with a tens megabytes of ram. I was ok.
But here is what I am see the average student told. You have to learn MS Office. IE is the interner. You have to turn your work in in office format. Employers will expect it. Sure, a kid could do a paper in a text editor. Most is more than sufficient for the task. On the make Textedit is more powerful than anything I used before I went to the college. But I am sure that teachers and peer pressure expects more.
Here is what I think about this machine. If it is a college machine, then they did not include MS Office because they know the kids that want it will get it somehow, legally payiing $50 at the school.Likewise, few kids are likely to download cygwin and program through emacs and gcc. They will get Visual studio. And these programs are bloat. Even if they do the OSS route, many of the OSS GUIS are based on Qt or the equivelent, which eat up resources as well.
Which is to say that ideally, yes, a hand me down laptop from 3 years ago should be enough for any student, but I increasingly see schools getting fanatic about the hardware, and letting the education go.
In summary, the exploit will generally be more valuable to the attacker than the defender, for many different reasons. Mainly, a baddie might buy a ten exploit for $150K, use one or 2, perhaps make 200K, and while the profit margin may not be great, a profit might at least be generated. On the other hand, MS might get those same exploits for $100K, but where is the upside? Did the exploits cost them anything? No, they externalize all those expenses to the government and the customer. Sure they can afford to lose that $100K, they probably lose that much every week on xBox, but unlike xBox buying exploits does not buy them marketshare, at least not yet.
Then we have more insidious versions of this story. Sell two low level exploits to MS, get 20K. Use the 20K to capatilize a third major exploit. Such a plan, in recursion, will finance quite a nice bot shop with no money down.
Ultimately, this is not something that will be solved by hiring people to chase the horses after the barn door has been left open. It is similiar to missle defense. In principle it is not all that hard(although in principle it is really hard), but even after solving the really hard physics issues, one realizes that, for instance, once the launch vehicle has released the payload, say 100 projectiles, only one of which is live, it becomes a numbers game of the defender having to pay for 100 live interceptors, while the attacker only has to pay for on one live munition.
So, we get back to the recommendation of writing good code. And good code is not code without errors. Good code is code in which errors can be fixed quickly, and the extent of the codebase effected by said changes are limited. What we see with MS is not that the code has bugs. All code has bugs. It is that bugs appear to be, at least in some cases, difficult to fix, and sometimes those fixes break things that should not necessarily be related.
But this is not just a matter of support. That is justifiable. If supporting mac or linux is going to cost 20%, and it will only bring in 10%, then you just let those people self support.
This is something different. Perhaps two things different. First it is about a allegedly professional organization not making professional customer support decisions. I would argue that there has never been a reason for a well funded web site to ever be IE only. Look at Amazon, Ebay, etc. Some functionality might be IE only, but not the site. To me this is increasingly the sign of an orgazanization I do not want to deal with as it indicates they skimp on other customer support issues.
The second thing is what many ISPs used to do, and perhaps Comcast does the same. Namely spyware. They want to check out what you are doing and install plug ins to help you. This, in itself, is not bad, but by making it mandatory for service one thinks that part of the business plan is to monetize the customer by selling data. Every modern OS includes IP technology. There is nothing basic to install. Not to be paranoid, but it lead me to believe SBC did not like my Mac because they could not control it.
I don't think it is so much a matter of polish, but of perceived training costs.
But before I get off on that, you mention UI, functionality, etc. All that has changed in the current release. Anyone who has been trained to use only MS product, and I will get back to that in a minute, is going to have be retrained to the current MS stuff. I see this often in training. The movement of a single selection item will cause a loss of production, which used to be the rational for not leaving MS.
So back to the original issue. A long time ago, when we were trained to use a typwriter, we mostly learned on the IBM Selectrics. This meant that most offices had IBM Selectrics. But we were also trained in basic principles of typing, and were not, at early stages of training, allowed to use specific features. This allowed us painlessly move to another typewriter that, say, might not have autocorrect. One upshot of this was that we mostly bought much cheaper typewriter for home use. In fact many offices used cheaper typewriters. Just imagine how happy IBM would have been if it could have used copyright, patent, and threats against vendors to insure that offices only bought Selectrics.
Now, this may be a trivial example, but the training for computers limits the ability of a person to use a computer, and in some ways this may be purposeful. For instance, when I was later trained on computers, I went through three differnt types of computers, and had to abstract the principles. So, for instance, for test editing I used a text editor, not what now everyone just calls notepad. For word processing I used a word processor, not what everyone now would just call Word. For spreadsheets I used a spreadsheet, not just Excel. I kid you not when I tell you there are test where the question is which office app would you use for presentation, and they list the apps in MS office, like that is all one needs to know. Or teacher that say open the internet by pressing the IE button.
This is why the interface and usability issues are such a red herring. Almost no one knows that one can use anything else to do common tasks. Even people who know better ask me why I use Emacs instead of Visual Studio. As has been mentioned, MS paid for the switch back to MS Office, and it was money well spent because the thing keeping MS on top is the ignorance that there are choices, just as is the case of any other monopoly. Do you think, for instance, that the monopoly know as the NFL could get away with the shenanigans it does if it actually had to complete?
I am not much of a gamer, but I did buy a Gameboy, mostly for Tetris. It is a solid machine. It was the original gameboy, and still works. I pull it out every one in while and play a game for old times sake.
I think for the casual gamer, Nintendo has an awesome product, and salute them for taking the risk of creating a new franchise. One of the biggest problem I see in any industry is trying to support new products on the back of old success rather than trying to create a self supporting new product.
Flash is relatively dangerous thing, mostly because it starts automatically and no one really knows where the flash originates. It is the last vestige from the bad old days when accidently going to a certain website could mean the hijacking or your computer. Windows popping up all over the place, and the only way to stop it was to turn off the computer. And, of course, the real exploit of Flash, the ability to secretely monitor your webcam and micocrophone, has not, as far as I know, been corrected.
Thanks for flashblock with allows me to install flash. Flashblock is now included in camino, and I would encourage Firefox and Safari to do the same. It is as essential as pop up blocking and image blocking in terms of user security. I won't even bother to think IE might include such a useful thing given it history of resisting security features. And no one can say, well, the user has to voluntarily install Flash, so why do we need a blocker. In most cases, flash is installed without the users knowledge of the negative effects.
I also recently discovered the online flash security setting. Why Adobe can't ship this with product, or have an off swithc for flash, i don't know. I guess such features prove the Flash is mostly annoy-ware, and perhaps spyware, and is only ancillary a useful product. I found it interesting how much history was recorded in the flash files. It made me even more reluctant to allow flash through.
I suppose I will be pedantic about this as I don't think we should minimize the creativity. I think of script kiddies as someone who takes existing tool, say some published code and MS Visual studio, and repackages it. They, in fact, just use scripts.
What this kid did was go into the the Apple internals and figure out how to do something himself. In hindsight it was not such a great feat, but is was a feat that was at least somewhat novel.
OTOH, kids have nothing but time on their hands and if the parents and schools don't keep them busy, then they find other ways to stay busy. The more cleaver one can produce some real havoc. What impresses me is the high school kid that does something creative and interesting with his or her free time, instead of being randomly malicious. The really good ones will go out and start applying their skills to the betterment of humanity, but really any bright kid that chooses a path that is not gratuitously destructive is a win in my opinion.
You have two separate issues here. The first is Apple lack of an global uninstaller. Yes it would be nice if there were a global uninstaller, particlarly to get rid of iWorks. However, for whatever usability reasons, Apple did not supply an uninstaller and most applications do not include one either. SO, yes you can remove the application, but not the library files. One could argue that since the bast majority of the code is in the app directory, and removing that directory is tantamount to removing the directory is enough, except is cases like garage band that installs a great deal of ancillary files in the library. On the startup disk. Always. But the fact remains that no installer exists.
The second issue is a necessary piece of software, needed because most windows apps leaves little pieces of themselves in random directories, and often purposefully hides pieces of themselves so they can auto reinstall later, does not work. To be clear, the installer does not work. It is not a case of an uninstaller utility not existing. It is a case of the uninstaller not functioning. Therefore, we are not in the realm of a missing feature, but of a broken important utility.
In any case, the whole having to buy software for the Mac is a bit disingenuous. I know that one reason that the Mac has a small marketshare is that one is expected to buy software for the Mac, but can usually steal software for a MS Windows machine, but I never understood why it is bad to give money to software developers. Next you will be complaining that we have to pay for the coffee in the morning.
And, if one is a geek, it is not too difficult to install stuff. Do a search on the name, and drag the files the trash. That is what I do.
Hello, doctor, I have a problem. Every tuesday i go out for ribs with my family and every Wedenesday I am late for to work because I was in so much pain overnight that I could not sleep.
Which of these does the doctor do
Prescribe a dosage of Nexium, Lunesta, and Tylenol with codeine
tell the patient not to eat ribs anymore
Clearly the former choice is the only rational one based on kickbacks from profitable drug companies. And while the later would be better for the patient's long term health, such a choice would not serve the interests of any relevant commercial enterprise or in fact be what the patient wanted, as the visit to the doctor implies that the patient is looking for a palliative rather than a cure.
But despite the pressures, it seems that an ethical doctor might at least suggest the cure before promoting the abuse of drugs.
Isn't the microkernel Darwin? Mac OS X is the more or less device independent higher level layers. This is why we could move Mac OS X so easily to the Intel platform. Even if it is the same codebase, it mast be a subset. For example, I can imagine Quaetz had to be modified to run on a smaller footprint.
I hope this is not the beginning of a rebranding thing, where everything apple sells runs OS X. If it is, people are going to by a new device expecting a certain level of functionality, and that level will not exist. Mac OS X, like MS Vista, will become have random service levels, except all at the same price.
Code is really a matter of design. What is important, the factors one wishes to stress, the pet peeves of the developers. For instance, recently there has been much talk about CSS and HTML and XHTML and what is acceptable where. The CSS fanatics will write unreadable code, where the XHTML fanatics will have a coronary if certain HTML is used, even where it makes total sense, i.e. where one is actually marking a peice of text to add to meaning.
I have worked on several projects in several languages. In general, the code I have been given is of high quality. I might not have written it that way, but I have never had a problem reverse engineering it, understanding the design decisions, and make the corrections. I suspect if code, as all designs, were approached by engineers and not critics we would have much better products.
In fact the only bad code, as far as i am concerned, is when someone is trying to apply the latest and greatest paradigms without thought or rationale. I have certainly been guilty of this, and have written stuff as bad as the design pattern in this thread. Cleaver code is for contents, not professional efforts.
I suspect that rather than looking for pretty code, looking for code that teaches a technique would be time better spent.
Really there has been little reason to use MS products for the past several years. The problem is that there are key things that can only be done cheaply within a MS setup, and there has been little reason to spend the money to do those things in a way that is no cheaper. Combine this with the evident kickbacks that MS gives the OEM people to make a MS machine cheaper than a naked machine, and one has a recipe for continuation of MS on the desktop, at least until MS runs out of money to subsidize the consumer.
But even then we still have some applications that require MS, and will until the vendors port them. I for instance, have not had to run MS products since NT 4.0, but soon will have to work off MS Windows XP. MS will be getting a little money from me simply because of legacy products.
Hey, it is important to memorize the general plot outlines of the stories that form our cultures. Don't you remember that ST:TNG in which Picard met the alien that only communicated through allegory. The only disappointing thing that I saw iin that episode is that old stories were considered more important than "I Love Lucy", which is in fact the only allegory we need to communicate any idea. Hey do you remember the episode where ricky had a rodeo show, and he thought it was a radio show, or the time when ricky and lucy were in europe. and they had to translate from english, to spanish, to french?
I think this is another case of bad marketing. While I don't quite understand these games, I do understand the typical role playing games, and the people who tend to play them. These are people who can pay for role playing book, for figures, and have the free time and income to play and pay. I don't see much difference in the likes of Second Life. Even only 40,000 people, most with a credit card and leisure time, is a good market. People pay good money to reach less.
So to me the question to ask is why does the model not work, and why do people attack the brands. Perhaps because second life is supposed to free to develop it own 'economy', and people do not want established brands interfering with their enterprise. Perhaps this is yet another artifact of a world in which the conventional rules and consequences do not exist, and if a major brand wants to exist, it must truly compete, and not depend on the vagaries of regulation to make it succesful.
I would say in the US one never has to give permission, add the legal consequences are necessarily limited. The miranda rights say I do not have tell the cops anything, and the 5th amendment says I can refuse to answer question that might tend to incriminate me. Now, the US government, by which I mean the people, has become quite aggressive in reducing those right in response to irrational fears. The include things such as locking up reporters, students, and other innocent citizens who wish to exercise those rights. What amazes me is that while the left is increasingly coming around on the follow of gun control, the right continues to remain in the same place on the issue of thought control.
It amazes me how technology magically appeared just recently. For instance, I hear that schools should use more technology, as if pencils and paper and mass produced books are not amazing learning tool in their own rights. I hear how no one can remember a telephone number, even though for years we have had these things called address books in which we wrote these things down in specifically because we could not, in general, remember all the information for all the people we knew. In fact the only reason we knew certain phones numbers was because the horrible user interface on the communication technology forced us to waste time memorizing numbers for all of our friends though the repeated dialing of said numbers. The reason many people no longer remember these anachronistic digits is because they are no longer slaves to the machines that force them to repeatedly dial numbers. Now we have a more friendly interfaces. Complaining that we don't know a telephone number is like complaining that we don't know how to use a quill pen, or we no longer know how to set a speed on a record player, or remember to yell gardy loo before emptying our chamber pots into the gutters on the streets below.
The reality is that the human story is all about using tools and technology to free our minds for more abstract purposes. If we can have the facts written in front of us, we are more likely to be able to draw defensible and novel inferences based on those facts. But the lack of importance of memorization comes directly from the work technology, which is really a systematic telling of how to do something, rather than merely memorizing a myriad of facts.
The truly disturbing thing about this story is that much research into cognitive development indicates that memorization is the lowest level of thinking, yet in average daily life memorization is overly prized and most people likely never advance beyond it. Stories like this, likely written to convince the masses that undated skills is unreasonable as the arbitrary skills of the past are always the best, merely perpetuates the myth that thinking is nor required and technology is something that happens once, and then nothing is ever discovered again. I am always very tickled when people say how fast technology is moving. Do we not consider the steam engine of 200 years ago? Or the printing press of 500 years ago? Or how about the stirrup 2000 years ago? All of these were disruptive influences which reduced the necessity of human effort for survival. Each of these offloaded some of our human effort onto machines, both physical and mental. For instance, the Jacquard loom automated not only the act of weaving, but the need to remember to switch our fibers. I am sure that all the skilled weavers who were put out of jobs decried that such a machine would be the end of civilization as we know it. And it thankfully was. I am very happy to have indoor plumbing and not have to pour my feces into the street.
The only problem is that you can't really blame it on MS. MS has a had a policy of effectively giving away software to students and teachers, and in fact, through recent changes in licensing, to employess of certain corporations. One might think that such dumping might get them into legal trouble, or cause the price of the software to fall, but it does not. The reason is that such transactions are not considered gifts, but part of the licensing agreement. In exchange for the school paying huge amount of money to license the academic machines, the student get a license for a personal machine.
This makes sense as MS is going to make money through two avenues. The first is corporate sales, the second is OEM sales. By giving away software to students, they not only help insure that the student will buy a MS based machine for school, but also that corporations will have cheap labor to operate the Windows machine. And I am not talking about the technical staff, which is cost effective to import from oversees, I am talking about the $8 an hour office staff.
So where does teh $3, or $40 in the US, come in. It is the media cost. The cost to copy distribute, and keep track of the licensing. It costs more in the US because labor costs more in the US and firms expect higher profit margins.
And, BTW, I do mean give away. !5 years ago it was more expensive to get the media through the schools than it is today. 15 years ago there was no free license under certain circumstances if one buys a license. The only thing MS is not giving away is Vista, and with XP ugrade at $100, I wonder how many vista licenses are really going to be sold.
I do not know if they are saying that the need for bandwidth is a good or bad thing. What I do know is that most people who sell stuff are not looking to sell less of it. They may package it so they sell less at a higher profit each time, but they are trying to sell more. For instance ATT is now trying to sell integrated packages to pay for all the cable they are laying out. These packages coincidentally are in some cases asking you to pay for stuff that you can get free on the internet. Additionally bandwidth is not so limited as to need be rationed during peak time, such as, for instance, is energy.
If ATT considers bandwidth to be a problem, here might be why. The baby bells as the 90's were ending felt the need to halt the progress that was being made on opening up the bandwidth market. They slashed prices on DSL and created real impediments to competitors. For instance, it is not always possible to have multiple third party services on one line. In the process they created a situation in which bandwidth was very cheap, and service was very bad. If the study is correct, I think we will find taht ATT is undersupplying the market in bandwidth, assuming that everyone will buy their new services. IN fact I would say it is, after only 7 years, nearly impossible to find a DSL plan that actually provide the level of service we were used to in the late 90's.
Certainly, when a law gets applied to people who wish to be above the law, such laws are sometime weakened. At other time, the laws remain the same, but the enforcement is weakened.
I have seen the later more than the former, especially on the parent example of drugs. The drug laws do appear to tilted toward heavier enforcement for lower class drugs. Likewise, I see many drug users who can't handle themselves in public school go to private school where they can be "protected", and go to expensive group activities where they can equally be protected. And even if we can see everywhere, are we really going to be looking too closely at the private clubs?
Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but increased incarceration is only going to cause a problem if the wrong type of people are incarcerated. The US already has a huge number of people in jail for no apparent reason. These people are not, as we read between the lines of the Libby commutation, a danger to society. Many could equally be punished with community service and probation, or weekend jail time. However, for some reason, we want to keep a large part of our population in jail, out of the job market, and off the voting roles. For some reason, this is valuable enough that we spend enormous amounts of money to support the system of incarceration.
You have 80 columns? Oh high an mighty person, I bet you just think you are at the top of the heap. Many of us learned on 40 columns with less that 25 lines.
To be serious though, there is a limit to how long a line can be and still be intelligible. I hate to think that kids who have 17 inches of space might believe that 200 character lines are acceptable.
Slashdot Mirror
We, as consumers of the game certainly do not care. Hell, I love it when someone else buys my stuff for me. I would be happy if direct government payments were made so that more people could afford video games. I am sure that the businesses of America would be every bit as happy to fund such direct payments as they are to pay extra in licensing fees to fund MS giving away video consoles.
So, let take this further. Let's say that by some random chance cards are arranged and a particular player wins every hand of blackjack. Should that player be prosecuted? Let's say that a roulette wheel is defective, and players take advantage of the wheel? Should those players be prosecuted? Let's say that the person running a craps table does not know the rules, and is letting people win. Do the player get prosecuted?
No, because gambling is all about random events. That yoou might get a card, that you might hit a jackpot, that the dice rolls right. The random even that you might get a broken machine. The gambling promoter, OTOH, tries to prevent random events that they can control. The broken machine, the incompetent employee, the card counter walking into their legitimate business. They have the right and responsibility to control those things, but as gambling is about chance, and it about losing and winning on the basis of chance, there is no way that a gambling promoter can complain when the customer does the same thing as the promoter.
Remember the successful gambling promoter controls the random variables as much as is possible so they the average rate of win is skewed toward the establishment. There is nothing wrong with this. But when the gambling promoter makes a mistakes, that is just like a retailer making a mistake. If a retailer accidently sells a product for an unreasonable low price, or gives a refund that is too high, or packs double merchandise, the customer might have a moral imperative to be nice and tell the merchant of the mistake, but certainly we do not send police to pick up the customer.And so why the person in this story might be morally wrong, I do not that any laws were broken. Especially considered that a slot machine is not like an ATM, where the behavior is predictable and a reasonable person knows or should know when it is broken. It is supposed to random. If someone magically starts winning, why they hell not should they think they are just lucky? I know people who time trips to casino once a month, and they come back with hundreds of dollars. They are playing the odds, which is perfectly legal.
Most of the families I know have household incomes around the 100K mark or higher. Does that mean that most families in the US have 100K a year to spend? No, of course not. So what does it matter that one spammer makes lots of money. That is like saying that one pan handler makes a more than a living wage, so all pan handlers have more money than the average person. Some people are particularly good at what they do, and they know how to manage the economic forces,and can manage their scruples, so they do well.
The problem with IE, was, for the longest time, that it did not provide standard protections. It always allowed the remote sever to control the users machines, and that control, though useful, lead to malicious use. The main thing that other browsers did, and plugins for IE, was allows user to limit the control that the remote site could exert on the local machine, thus increasing security. The user can now control everything, even the look and feel, which is problem for sites that require control of the user to generate revenue, but good for the user. For most users, the two major thing the user can't control or still need, the flash plugin and java script, are now arguably the major points of attack.
So what is the security issue in this case. It is that passwords are stored by the browser, inside the sand box, so to speak. This is bad. Passwords should be stored securely at the system level, available for applications to request, and with the user permission supplied. In other words, application password managers have to go.
It is like those get rich quick schemes on paid TV. If it were so easy, then why is the promoter not making the million dollars a week instead of making cheesy commercials. If I made a million a week for a year, I certainly would not be on TV telling everyone about it, at the risk of reducing my real profit opportuities. I would hiding out in my fortress of richness and enjoying the money.
This also reinforces my assumption that for the most part spamming is just a way to make some easy money without much real work. Most people are not going to get rich off it, but if one is a country where a few thousand a year is good money, then hey, it beats doing honest work. It might even product the 20K a year one needs to live in the US. But like any organized crime, a few get insanely rich, and the rest get knocked off for pocket change.
But here is what I am see the average student told. You have to learn MS Office. IE is the interner. You have to turn your work in in office format. Employers will expect it. Sure, a kid could do a paper in a text editor. Most is more than sufficient for the task. On the make Textedit is more powerful than anything I used before I went to the college. But I am sure that teachers and peer pressure expects more.
Here is what I think about this machine. If it is a college machine, then they did not include MS Office because they know the kids that want it will get it somehow, legally payiing $50 at the school.Likewise, few kids are likely to download cygwin and program through emacs and gcc. They will get Visual studio. And these programs are bloat. Even if they do the OSS route, many of the OSS GUIS are based on Qt or the equivelent, which eat up resources as well.
Which is to say that ideally, yes, a hand me down laptop from 3 years ago should be enough for any student, but I increasingly see schools getting fanatic about the hardware, and letting the education go.
Then we have more insidious versions of this story. Sell two low level exploits to MS, get 20K. Use the 20K to capatilize a third major exploit. Such a plan, in recursion, will finance quite a nice bot shop with no money down.
Ultimately, this is not something that will be solved by hiring people to chase the horses after the barn door has been left open. It is similiar to missle defense. In principle it is not all that hard(although in principle it is really hard), but even after solving the really hard physics issues, one realizes that, for instance, once the launch vehicle has released the payload, say 100 projectiles, only one of which is live, it becomes a numbers game of the defender having to pay for 100 live interceptors, while the attacker only has to pay for on one live munition.
So, we get back to the recommendation of writing good code. And good code is not code without errors. Good code is code in which errors can be fixed quickly, and the extent of the codebase effected by said changes are limited. What we see with MS is not that the code has bugs. All code has bugs. It is that bugs appear to be, at least in some cases, difficult to fix, and sometimes those fixes break things that should not necessarily be related.
This is something different. Perhaps two things different. First it is about a allegedly professional organization not making professional customer support decisions. I would argue that there has never been a reason for a well funded web site to ever be IE only. Look at Amazon, Ebay, etc. Some functionality might be IE only, but not the site. To me this is increasingly the sign of an orgazanization I do not want to deal with as it indicates they skimp on other customer support issues.
The second thing is what many ISPs used to do, and perhaps Comcast does the same. Namely spyware. They want to check out what you are doing and install plug ins to help you. This, in itself, is not bad, but by making it mandatory for service one thinks that part of the business plan is to monetize the customer by selling data. Every modern OS includes IP technology. There is nothing basic to install. Not to be paranoid, but it lead me to believe SBC did not like my Mac because they could not control it.
But before I get off on that, you mention UI, functionality, etc. All that has changed in the current release. Anyone who has been trained to use only MS product, and I will get back to that in a minute, is going to have be retrained to the current MS stuff. I see this often in training. The movement of a single selection item will cause a loss of production, which used to be the rational for not leaving MS.
So back to the original issue. A long time ago, when we were trained to use a typwriter, we mostly learned on the IBM Selectrics. This meant that most offices had IBM Selectrics. But we were also trained in basic principles of typing, and were not, at early stages of training, allowed to use specific features. This allowed us painlessly move to another typewriter that, say, might not have autocorrect. One upshot of this was that we mostly bought much cheaper typewriter for home use. In fact many offices used cheaper typewriters. Just imagine how happy IBM would have been if it could have used copyright, patent, and threats against vendors to insure that offices only bought Selectrics.
Now, this may be a trivial example, but the training for computers limits the ability of a person to use a computer, and in some ways this may be purposeful. For instance, when I was later trained on computers, I went through three differnt types of computers, and had to abstract the principles. So, for instance, for test editing I used a text editor, not what now everyone just calls notepad. For word processing I used a word processor, not what everyone now would just call Word. For spreadsheets I used a spreadsheet, not just Excel. I kid you not when I tell you there are test where the question is which office app would you use for presentation, and they list the apps in MS office, like that is all one needs to know. Or teacher that say open the internet by pressing the IE button.
This is why the interface and usability issues are such a red herring. Almost no one knows that one can use anything else to do common tasks. Even people who know better ask me why I use Emacs instead of Visual Studio. As has been mentioned, MS paid for the switch back to MS Office, and it was money well spent because the thing keeping MS on top is the ignorance that there are choices, just as is the case of any other monopoly. Do you think, for instance, that the monopoly know as the NFL could get away with the shenanigans it does if it actually had to complete?
I think for the casual gamer, Nintendo has an awesome product, and salute them for taking the risk of creating a new franchise. One of the biggest problem I see in any industry is trying to support new products on the back of old success rather than trying to create a self supporting new product.
Thanks for flashblock with allows me to install flash. Flashblock is now included in camino, and I would encourage Firefox and Safari to do the same. It is as essential as pop up blocking and image blocking in terms of user security. I won't even bother to think IE might include such a useful thing given it history of resisting security features. And no one can say, well, the user has to voluntarily install Flash, so why do we need a blocker. In most cases, flash is installed without the users knowledge of the negative effects.
I also recently discovered the online flash security setting. Why Adobe can't ship this with product, or have an off swithc for flash, i don't know. I guess such features prove the Flash is mostly annoy-ware, and perhaps spyware, and is only ancillary a useful product. I found it interesting how much history was recorded in the flash files. It made me even more reluctant to allow flash through.
What this kid did was go into the the Apple internals and figure out how to do something himself. In hindsight it was not such a great feat, but is was a feat that was at least somewhat novel.
OTOH, kids have nothing but time on their hands and if the parents and schools don't keep them busy, then they find other ways to stay busy. The more cleaver one can produce some real havoc. What impresses me is the high school kid that does something creative and interesting with his or her free time, instead of being randomly malicious. The really good ones will go out and start applying their skills to the betterment of humanity, but really any bright kid that chooses a path that is not gratuitously destructive is a win in my opinion.
The second issue is a necessary piece of software, needed because most windows apps leaves little pieces of themselves in random directories, and often purposefully hides pieces of themselves so they can auto reinstall later, does not work. To be clear, the installer does not work. It is not a case of an uninstaller utility not existing. It is a case of the uninstaller not functioning. Therefore, we are not in the realm of a missing feature, but of a broken important utility.
In any case, the whole having to buy software for the Mac is a bit disingenuous. I know that one reason that the Mac has a small marketshare is that one is expected to buy software for the Mac, but can usually steal software for a MS Windows machine, but I never understood why it is bad to give money to software developers. Next you will be complaining that we have to pay for the coffee in the morning.
And, if one is a geek, it is not too difficult to install stuff. Do a search on the name, and drag the files the trash. That is what I do.
Which of these does the doctor do
- Prescribe a dosage of Nexium, Lunesta, and Tylenol with codeine
- tell the patient not to eat ribs anymore
Clearly the former choice is the only rational one based on kickbacks from profitable drug companies. And while the later would be better for the patient's long term health, such a choice would not serve the interests of any relevant commercial enterprise or in fact be what the patient wanted, as the visit to the doctor implies that the patient is looking for a palliative rather than a cure.But despite the pressures, it seems that an ethical doctor might at least suggest the cure before promoting the abuse of drugs.
I hope this is not the beginning of a rebranding thing, where everything apple sells runs OS X. If it is, people are going to by a new device expecting a certain level of functionality, and that level will not exist. Mac OS X, like MS Vista, will become have random service levels, except all at the same price.
I have worked on several projects in several languages. In general, the code I have been given is of high quality. I might not have written it that way, but I have never had a problem reverse engineering it, understanding the design decisions, and make the corrections. I suspect if code, as all designs, were approached by engineers and not critics we would have much better products.
In fact the only bad code, as far as i am concerned, is when someone is trying to apply the latest and greatest paradigms without thought or rationale. I have certainly been guilty of this, and have written stuff as bad as the design pattern in this thread. Cleaver code is for contents, not professional efforts.
I suspect that rather than looking for pretty code, looking for code that teaches a technique would be time better spent.
But even then we still have some applications that require MS, and will until the vendors port them. I for instance, have not had to run MS products since NT 4.0, but soon will have to work off MS Windows XP. MS will be getting a little money from me simply because of legacy products.
Hey, it is important to memorize the general plot outlines of the stories that form our cultures. Don't you remember that ST:TNG in which Picard met the alien that only communicated through allegory. The only disappointing thing that I saw iin that episode is that old stories were considered more important than "I Love Lucy", which is in fact the only allegory we need to communicate any idea. Hey do you remember the episode where ricky had a rodeo show, and he thought it was a radio show, or the time when ricky and lucy were in europe. and they had to translate from english, to spanish, to french?
So to me the question to ask is why does the model not work, and why do people attack the brands. Perhaps because second life is supposed to free to develop it own 'economy', and people do not want established brands interfering with their enterprise. Perhaps this is yet another artifact of a world in which the conventional rules and consequences do not exist, and if a major brand wants to exist, it must truly compete, and not depend on the vagaries of regulation to make it succesful.
I would say in the US one never has to give permission, add the legal consequences are necessarily limited. The miranda rights say I do not have tell the cops anything, and the 5th amendment says I can refuse to answer question that might tend to incriminate me. Now, the US government, by which I mean the people, has become quite aggressive in reducing those right in response to irrational fears. The include things such as locking up reporters, students, and other innocent citizens who wish to exercise those rights. What amazes me is that while the left is increasingly coming around on the follow of gun control, the right continues to remain in the same place on the issue of thought control.
The reality is that the human story is all about using tools and technology to free our minds for more abstract purposes. If we can have the facts written in front of us, we are more likely to be able to draw defensible and novel inferences based on those facts. But the lack of importance of memorization comes directly from the work technology, which is really a systematic telling of how to do something, rather than merely memorizing a myriad of facts.
The truly disturbing thing about this story is that much research into cognitive development indicates that memorization is the lowest level of thinking, yet in average daily life memorization is overly prized and most people likely never advance beyond it. Stories like this, likely written to convince the masses that undated skills is unreasonable as the arbitrary skills of the past are always the best, merely perpetuates the myth that thinking is nor required and technology is something that happens once, and then nothing is ever discovered again. I am always very tickled when people say how fast technology is moving. Do we not consider the steam engine of 200 years ago? Or the printing press of 500 years ago? Or how about the stirrup 2000 years ago? All of these were disruptive influences which reduced the necessity of human effort for survival. Each of these offloaded some of our human effort onto machines, both physical and mental. For instance, the Jacquard loom automated not only the act of weaving, but the need to remember to switch our fibers. I am sure that all the skilled weavers who were put out of jobs decried that such a machine would be the end of civilization as we know it. And it thankfully was. I am very happy to have indoor plumbing and not have to pour my feces into the street.
This makes sense as MS is going to make money through two avenues. The first is corporate sales, the second is OEM sales. By giving away software to students, they not only help insure that the student will buy a MS based machine for school, but also that corporations will have cheap labor to operate the Windows machine. And I am not talking about the technical staff, which is cost effective to import from oversees, I am talking about the $8 an hour office staff.
So where does teh $3, or $40 in the US, come in. It is the media cost. The cost to copy distribute, and keep track of the licensing. It costs more in the US because labor costs more in the US and firms expect higher profit margins.
And, BTW, I do mean give away. !5 years ago it was more expensive to get the media through the schools than it is today. 15 years ago there was no free license under certain circumstances if one buys a license. The only thing MS is not giving away is Vista, and with XP ugrade at $100, I wonder how many vista licenses are really going to be sold.
If ATT considers bandwidth to be a problem, here might be why. The baby bells as the 90's were ending felt the need to halt the progress that was being made on opening up the bandwidth market. They slashed prices on DSL and created real impediments to competitors. For instance, it is not always possible to have multiple third party services on one line. In the process they created a situation in which bandwidth was very cheap, and service was very bad. If the study is correct, I think we will find taht ATT is undersupplying the market in bandwidth, assuming that everyone will buy their new services. IN fact I would say it is, after only 7 years, nearly impossible to find a DSL plan that actually provide the level of service we were used to in the late 90's.
I have seen the later more than the former, especially on the parent example of drugs. The drug laws do appear to tilted toward heavier enforcement for lower class drugs. Likewise, I see many drug users who can't handle themselves in public school go to private school where they can be "protected", and go to expensive group activities where they can equally be protected. And even if we can see everywhere, are we really going to be looking too closely at the private clubs?
Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but increased incarceration is only going to cause a problem if the wrong type of people are incarcerated. The US already has a huge number of people in jail for no apparent reason. These people are not, as we read between the lines of the Libby commutation, a danger to society. Many could equally be punished with community service and probation, or weekend jail time. However, for some reason, we want to keep a large part of our population in jail, out of the job market, and off the voting roles. For some reason, this is valuable enough that we spend enormous amounts of money to support the system of incarceration.
To be serious though, there is a limit to how long a line can be and still be intelligible. I hate to think that kids who have 17 inches of space might believe that 200 character lines are acceptable.