Here is a question that I would like to ask the conservative group who tend to complain that jury awards are too high, and that said awards should only cover actual damages, or perhaps a small multiple of damages. For instance, if someone gets injured, even inadvertently, by your product, and you stonewall, as it often the case, then the reward should only cover the extent of the damage, perhaps not even the lawyer fees, even though it was your stonewalling that generated those lawyers fee, and if you would have paid the $1000 up front the lawyers would have never gotten rich?
Contrast this philosophy with this case, which is largely enshrined by law passed over the past decade or so by conservatives. Here is an industry that generates 32 billion dollars a year. Even before the internet, even before it was easy to steal music, the industry never generated more than 25% more than that, so in round generous number let's say 50 billion. So, the damages of this music service is likely on the order of several billion, but a lawyer might be damages in the tens of billions. If we say that is some distress, such as the fact that artists have had breakdowns because they could not get another airplane, or executives did not have enough money to get their street drugs, then we could apply a multiplier. Such a multiplier might put in the few hundreds of billions. So there it is. Applying standard reasoning, we get to a number of perhaps, at the most $300 billion.
So why is it, the used the rules applied to the common person, who perhaps lost a loved one due to the negligence of a corporations, they may not even be able to get enough money to pay lawyers fees and rebuild their life, but these same lawmakers pass legislation that says irrespective of proven damages, a corporation can ask for 50X global sales.
There is a reason why the crooks were booted out on their asses.
You miss the point. The idea is that US culture is different enough from other cultures that it seems foreign. OTOH, many people in the US are culturally connected to European culture, so it is not so foreign, and is an enjoyable vacation for many.
Let's take this a step further. There are places in South and Central America that are safe and closer to many in the United States. Yet many in the US still prefer to take the European vacation. Why? The European vacation just seems more normal.
So lets put it another way. Much of this has been a form of isolationism. We are pretty secure in our little country, and when things start to get a bit dicey, we have a tendency to close off those borders. Most times we are protected from this overreaction because it does cost money, and as much as conservatives are fearful, they also like to make money. But sometimes the overreaction happens, and it costs us. For instance, we now require passports where they were not required previously, even though lack of passports was not an issue in the antecedent events. The passport office does not really have the funding to deal with the additional work, which means that our passports will become less secure. So we implemented a policy that will likely reduce security. Likewise, the more we check on every passenger, not only does it deter legitimate travel, it also creates a system that encourages costly bureacracy without providing additional benifits. I mean none of these advanced systems are needed to cath people with certain last names or people who believe that prayer to god is an important part of life, which is so American that many megachurches advacate praying before trips, important financial transactions, and even meetings.
In the end, the isolationist simply don't want interactions with the other. We can have illigal immigrant labor as long as we don't have to see, feed, house, treat, or education them. Anyone who is willing to be strip searched is free to come for a visit, but we don't need them.
The sad thing is that instead of letting the no longer needed airlines fail, the isolationist are asking for billions of dollars to subsidize them.
This is just another issue with standards, and lack of consumer demand to conform to standards. Today it is wireless cards, yesterday it was printers and cameras.
Building a standards compliant intelligent machine is often more expensive than building an ad hoc machine, if for no other reason than the cheapest parts can always be used, and there is no need to support all users. The flip side is that a specific driver must be created for each device.
I had an incident that nicely illustrated this point. I bought a very cheap digital camera a few couple years ago. Now, any standard camera with a USB port should work with my Mac with no additional drivers. Perhaps not all the bells and whistles, but the PTP should work. As it turned out, this camera was not standards based, and, even worse, had undergone a revision so, even thought the model number was the same, it did not work with the drivers I did have. There only way to determine that this camera was not in fact the same camera was to open the hermetically sealed bomb proof packaging, open the camera, and use a magnifying glass to inspect the product code.
Which just shows that if one wants the cheapest products, then MS Windows is the way to go. Manufacturers can design to the platform, write a few drivers, and sell to the masses. So the point of *nix, and perhaps the Mac,is not to provide the cheapest product, but instead long term stability. I have every reason to believe that Canon camera will work with my computer for a long time, because I am not going to lose connectivity when the next OS upgrade comes around. The standards will still be supported. I have SCSI devices from the OS 9 days that still work perfectly with OS X. I have no idea if those same devices, which required a special driver for MS Window, have continued support for current MS products.
So really all that can be said is don't buy the cheap products. If one has a choice between the standard printer and generic printer, pay the extra money for the generic printer. Support the standards that will allow *nix to prosper.
To specifically address the wireless thing, the standard is certainly in flux, and no one can be expected to support a standard that does not necessarily exist. That said, it should still be possible to assemble a standard compliant box that is not targeted towards the MS Windows OS, perhaps at additional costs.
Speech recognition is on of those anachronistic things from the days of the early and mid 20th century. At this time it was believed that the mundane tasks like cooking and cleaning and other menial takss would be handled by machines, and the complex tasks, like plotting courses for spaceships and other highly intelligent computations, would always be handled by men. To be sure, some cleaning tasks are no handled by machines, but almost all the computational work is handled by machines, which tends to indicate which requires a human level of creativity.
So, at this time, one job was the person who listened to a recording and transcribed the recording into written text, oftimes reformatting it in a prescribed fashion. Though the shuttle is piloted largely by three redundant computers, we still have people transcribing letters. To be sure, some of this has to do with the amount that is costs for a human to do each of these tasks, and the accuracy, but a lot has to do with the difficulty of automating creative tasks like cooking and cleaning and transcribing. Add to this that in many cases people wish these tasks to be done how they like at the moment, and not in an absolute prescribed form and the result is a huge engineering problem.
So, if we begin to live in the 21st century, and leave the bigoted preconceptions behind, then we see that speech recognition is a specific solution that efficiently utilizes a specific resource, the human brain. And, if like in flight, we do not try to emulate the flapping of the wings but the result of the flapping of the wings, then we might see that the keyboard based solution is in fact an efficient solution that utilizes the strengths of the current resource, the electronic computer.
This does not mean that speech recognition does not have its place. Apple uses it to allow the launching of applications and the like, which is useful for certain people. More advanced speech recognition is available for those who want it. However, spending time on this instead of say, a pseudo self organizing file system, seems quite pointless.
There are more shows out there now than ever before. In the long ago, when a few networks controlled the airwaves, and we had to watch the shows when we were told to, it was kind of important for the a particular series to produce many hours of programming. This resulted in many negative effects, due to the fact that the budget and staffing was not sufficient for the amount of content. This meant we got clip shows, elevator episodes, and other sub par content whose sole purpose was to fill time. Also, repetitive intros killed airtime. A recent example of this is Alias, in which the first season featured a clip show, and the introduction ate a few minutes of air time, not to mention the stock footage. The Original BSG was also guilty of this by indiscriminately reusing the sfx.
One nice thing about the new world is that enough networks are producing content that the crap that used to be required is no longer acceptable. Some cable stations make use of this new world well by producing few high quality episodes. Others, especially the old time networks, are still in the mode of overproducing content. Among the examples are thousands of version of CSI.
If Sci-Fi wants to succeed, they should have develop a number of different shows, produce 15-20 of each show each year, and run them at different times.
In any case the number of shows and the way they are shown are insignificant in the post tivo world. Instead of paying the cable fee of $1000+ dollars a year, one can use that money 30+ seasons on DVD, or just Netflix everything for 1/4 the price. I suppose if there is nothing to talk about except what is on tv, then watching it near real time is important. Otherwise, it is cheaper to wait.
The cool thing about science is that there is always something out there. In fact I would assert that training in math and science is specifically about seeing the somethings out there.
A professor of mine transformed a vacation in mexico into a paper on a novel pattern caused by the fraction of light through the swimming pool water. It is these kinds of observations that drive science. The pretty pictures and big machines are cool, but the discovery often happens in these moments of regular life, outside of the lab, by average people who wish to do above average things.
For a long time I think we were concerned with survival, food and shelter, and the technology was geared towards the basics, tools, clothing, light. Then, we began to have a reasonable guarantee of our survival, and the technology was directed to systematically categorize our world so that we can draw useful conclusions. This has happened at different times in different places. The end result is that we get so conformable, that our standard of living gets so above what is expected, that there seems little reason to explore.
This is what is probably happening. Many of us don't absolutely have to work but 30 hours a week if we didn't want to. The vast majority has enough food and shelter and safe water, at least in the western world. Where is the drive to advance? Where is the necessity to invent? In the fantasy Star Trek world, when all out needs are met, we become infinitely altruistic and explore the galaxy, create great art, and reach a hight of civilization. Yet as scientists we see little evidence of this. What we see are people who are engineered to compete for a social postion, if not survival, and if such an impetus does not exist, then we fail to advance.
Kind of conservative and blunt philosophy, but, for the most part, we work for reward, and if there is no need, there is much less work. And, if pay can be gotten without work, all the better. The current back dated option scandals proves that.
Boot Camp and Parallels are useful for a certain segment of mac users. Those that might have a site license for MS Windows and easy access to the media or other install material, or those that use MS Windows enough to justify the cost of paying for OS. This cost, which is already significant, is going to get even more significant due to the versions of Vista that we may legally install as a virtual machine.
What I would much prefer, as a casual user who needs to run minor MS Windows application, is the VMware solution. Note that this is also the type of solution many MS windows users employ to access a *nix type system. I would much rather Apple license a solution from VMWare and have virtualization for those that need it.
I really see this as a cost and performance issue. These was a time when one could buy a copy of MS Windows NT, but a copy of Connectix VPC, and have an inexpensive solution to an occasional problem. Now that Vista is going to a bloated and expensive hog, I don't see how anything but Boot Camp, for those few that really need it, or VMWare is going to be an effective solution.
I always hear about the competition, and I don't think that the iPod is all that great, but it is a good system for the average person. iTunes automagically loads CD, and stores them in a DRM free format. iTunes loads music onto the iPod. If you choose to use the store, it is easy to get the music, and will work with the iPod.
The biggest problem with the competition are two fold. First creative and Sandisk do not have a great reputation. I would never buy a creative again because I lost a $300 investment because of a cheap piece of plastic. I don't know about Sandisk, but they also seem more concerned about price than quality.
Second, there is a question about online purchased music. When purchasing music, people do seem want a format they can depend on. We have LPs, tapes, and CDs. There are arguable better formats, but the other formats never achieved critical mass. Likewise, the old formats die quickly. We still have cassette tapes, but how many 8-tracks do you see? The LP market is absolutely speciality. The advantange that Apple has is that is recognized the the DRM defined a format, and the format would drive the market. No one is going to buy an LP when all they have is a cassette player. Likewise, the mistake that MS made was to not take the format seriously. They have shot themselves int he foot by changing formats midstream. Who is going to trust them only to end up with useless content in a year?
So while other music players may be better in certain areas, like playing movies, they are not neccesarily better on the core needs, and importantly do not play the predominate only DRM format.
What kind of alternative reality have I arrived in where/. uses the words 'Microsoft' and 'Works' in the same sentence. Should I prepare for the endtime, or is this just a random aberration?
There are two additional considerations here. First, the vehicle will not be accelerating at an equal rate throughout the whole trip. The vehicle will in fact be accelerating to LEO, perhaps 100 miles or so, and then orbit with minimal power for 1/2 hour or so, then deorbit, which again will involve significant acceleration.
Second, the time in orbit does not necessarily depend solely on distance between the two points. One can adjust altitude, flight path, and in the process speed, to create an optimal profile. Perhaps an orbit will be completed, like the shuttle, in 90 minutes, so half way around the world in 45. Perhaps for shorter distances, like from New York to Paris, one might choose a higher orbit and slower orbital velocity.
So, I am not going through the calculations, but the idea is that you have to accelerate to perhaps 15,000 miles per hour over a distance of a few, or perhaps, several hundred miles. This might be done over a very long time, likE half an hour, in which case the force might be kept down to around a g. But frankly, if I understand the implication correctly, they plane to fly for a while to get to mach 5 or so (which can happen slowly), then use the scram jet to get to LEO and mach 20+(which will happen more quickly, and likely incur more g;s.
So, the gist is that there will be an acceleration profile that will have at least 5 distinct segments, and though the average acceleration might be very low, certain sections will necessarily have significant acceleration. The fastest commercial aircraft, the corcorde, only went aroung mach 2. We are talking about mach 5 using conventional propulsion.
I know that to win, one has to play aggressively, and there is a great benefit to controlling knowledge about internal company details, which can be quite difficult to do for a publicly traded company. That said, I do hope that all companies that lied about executive compensation get nailed to the wall, even Apple. Becoming a publicly traded company is choosing to be transparent to the public. The money that comes in with a stock offering is not free. That money cannot be arbitrarily spent as it might be in a private company. I have worked in private companies and the freedom is wonderful. I have worked in public company, and the transparency is a pain in the ass. But, again, the public money does not come for free. There is a price to be paid
The price is that executives can no longer spend company money on whatever they wish. Executives cannot arbitrarily set pay. What we have seen in the past twenty years is scam to increase executive pay while simultaneously decreasing exposure to risk, while in the truly private sector, the opposite is true. The stock option is the classic example. It is marketed as a method to align the executives interest with the stockholder interest. If the stock rises, the executive gets rewarded. In reality, just like bonuses, the behind the scene negotiations guarantees the money no matter the state of the company.
In reality, these new breeds of corporations, with their bloated bureaucracy, with no other purpose than to create meaningless work that justifies it's existence, and raise prices and cut research to free enough money to pay for these non productive agents, are indistinguishable from any other massively bloated public entity. The similarities to congress, who wants to vote in a pay raise every year, but can't complete the minimum job requirements like passing a budget, are amazing.
If blogging were journalism, then accepting the gift is unethical unless the bloggers revealed the gift, most appropriately in a blog entry titled "MS gave me kewl stuff! WOOT". This would allow all readers to better judge the writing of the blogger. This seems to be SOP for most reviews, which specify if the product was bought, loaned, or a gift from the manufacturer or an other third party.
What is disappointing is the naïveté of the public. Sure things have to be given away with no strings attached, but that does not mean that their is no effect. If there were no effect, then things would not be given away, even as thank you gifts. The corporate world has to work on a profit motive.
In the end, none of this matters, because, as was stated, blogging is not journalism. This is why few rational people take blogging seriously. At some point, when blogging develops an ethical basis, perhaps it will.
Moving from a few prototypes to full scale production is the definition of vaporware. This is exactly what is happening with the A380. They have a plane, but they can't build it full scale to deliver.
And the saga has been going on long enough to be compare with Duke Nukem, especially since no one seriously expected the next version. The A380 should have been delivered mid 2005. Now 8 months later they have apparently have a delivery of date of late 2007, with full production apparently delayed until 2009. This is not a production schedule that builds confidence, and certainly not a delivery schedule for a plane that already exists.
Of course, as has been widely reported, the wiring problems were that they wires were simply cut too short, and not one wanted to fix it.
The A380, even if they get a few dozen planes out, if going to be the vapor ware project that defined the first decade of this century. OTOH, when the 15th A380 is delivered, perhpas by the end of 2008, they will have shipped more A380s than Concordes.
We are not talking about hondas or toyotas that get 50 mpg. Every car I have ever owned has gotten around 30 mpg, so it is not technologically difficult to get 40mpg, if one pays for design and materials.
What the new rules are designed to do, and what the American car manufacturers is upset about, is to close a loophole that allows the American manufacturers to ignore minimum standards in the fuel consumption of the fleet. This is not an evil plot by the government, this is something that the government was forced to enact due to the repeated failure of the manufacturers to obey the spirit of the law.
Two examples. Cars had certain requirements to help protect our environment, but trucks necessarily did not. The manufactures created this loop hole by saying the farmers and small business could not afford the extra equipment and such equipment was not necessary if rural areas. The congress agreed. In response to this loophole the manufacturers started pushing the SUV because they did not have to put as much technology in it, and therefore the cost to produce was often cheaper. Then, due to certain vagaries in the tax law, they realized the could push really huge SUV and trucks, as the cost after tax deduction can actually be cheaper than smaller, better built, more fuel efficient vehicle. Such things forces responsible manufacturer, like subaru, to end up a competitive disadvantage when they build cars that won't kill the family of four in the Honda Cvcc.
Which brings us to today. The fuel consumption estimates for hybrids is a jake, and allows manufacturers to seriously underestimate the average fuel consumption for of their fleet. For example, for can use the wildly overestimated fuel consumption on the Hybrid escape to compensate for the fuel consumption on the Expedition, which, even though fuel saving technology increases every year, the fuel consumption does not get better. With the old rules this basically evened out, and the overall fuel consumption remained constant. However, with the new rules they are in trouble. Ford wants to blame the company trouble on health care of the line workers, but I bet it is more an issue of using funds for executive pay rather than R&D. Why else were they so afraid of disclosing executive pay, and why else would they be so happy that the SEC rescinded the requirement to fully disclose compensation. And the fact that the order came the day before christmas was even more interesting.
I will tell you what. Most websites are quite overengineered as a result of the compromise between usability and revenue generation. This is pretty much true of anything, but it is important to consider. In fact when evaluating an interface, the first thing that must be asked is what is the actual purpose of the interface.
Let's take the ATM machine for example. Initially the machine was created to reduce the load on tellers for easily automated tasks. These machines would often directly generate revenue by charging customers for the transactions. Therefore, these machines pretty quickly had well designed interfaces that allowed relatively rapid transactions. The rapid transactions were important because the higher the rate of transactions, the more money. As time went by, however, the charges for most transactions were eliminated, the marketing people realized that a person at an ATM machine was a captive audience, so the primary purpose of an ATM became to advertise services. The result is that the current generation of ATM have horrible interfaces in terms of customer usability and rapid transactions, which really puts the customer at a unnecessary risk, but wonderful a wonderful interface in terms of forces customers to view advertising. In terms of the purpose, aside from the fact that the customer is endangered, there is nothing wrong with the interface
Likewise, a web page has to be judged to it's purpose. If one is a newspaper, then one is going to want to present news, but equally important generate revenue to support the page. Therefore the page must be complicated not only to organize the news, but to display pictures, and to display enoug ad content to pay for the page. Much of the complexity of any commercial page in fact comes from the need to integrate ads and content.
So, if ads are not critical, and the content is straightforward, how complex does a page have to be, and is complexity itself a goal? I fear many believe that complexity is a virtue. On one intranet page I work with, at least a third of the real estate is wasted on branding and other non content. Often less that half the area is available for the content one is interested in. Nothing is linked properly. All the energy and money is spent on useless branding and cool design.
Now, look at useit.com again. The site itself is an ad, so needs no additional ads. The branding is clear, and avoids banner blindness by using text for the titles. Each section is clearly marked, and the one picture clearly promotes Nielsen. There are no other extraneous pictures to distract from this promotion. Since Nielsen offers tips on how to attract and keep customers through the user interface, and not the technical details on how to develop the interface, there is not benefit to whiz bang programming.
So here is the deal. The parent post is right and wrong. It is wrong to criticize the useit webpage, falling into the oft citing fallacy that a more complex web page is more usable. This fallacy will likely be the cause of the failure of many new web pages, and is already the cause of waste of million, if not billions, in public funds. However, the parent is correct that the minority report interface is not significantly defective, but not for the reasons cited. As a computer interface, it is probably lacking. However, the interface is not meant to be a communication protocol. Rather, it is a dramatic tool. Therefore, if Nielsen is judging is as a computer interface, then this is another example where Nielsen has completely missed the point. The only reasonable measure of success or failure can be if the interface communicated the intentions and results to the audience. And, as much as we hate the big login screen, it is what the audience needs.
It seems to me that any product will mold itself to the technological capabilities of the time, and a skilled producer will maximize the value of the technology, even if the use is gratuitous.
That said, many of these films, even though they are trite and in 5 years will seem dated, do appear to make every use of the technological innovation. Since the innovations are largely visual, the improvements are largely visual as well, which leads to the issue that money is spent on fx rather than writing dialog. This is probably similir to when entertainemnt went from radio to film and the dialog was depreciated, see for instance Metropolis. OTOH, it is completely different from when we went to talkies and dialog was the big thing, see Casablanca.
And these innovations also effect the necessary features of actors. What type of face and body will be needed to fill the screen? Will there be lots of closeup? It delivery important, or will the movie be carried by the body motion? Can we use the lighting excuse to cast most light complexioned people, or do we have the ability to film darker people? Do we need large or small features?
What is interesting, and what was started by Lucas, is that every movie is essentially becoming a computer generated animated feature. This makes sense because the new formats are perfectly designed for computer generated content, in which the fuzzy featured of real life, automatically averaged out on film, do not appear in animation, but the level of modeling is good enough to deliver significant fidelity. This is different from the similar Spielberg that were, in some sense, much more practical. As LOTR has shown, a combination of the practical and the animated can be very effective, and the digital, though in some ways inferior, provides significant benefits. Another good example of this is the completely practical film, 'Once Upon a Time in Mexico'.
So, while I agree that many of the films are not interesting to me, i appreciate that they are a product of the times. We can't just sit in 1950 and pretend that everything is perfect.
Outlook as a client is a real problem. In standard MS fashion, they put more effort into allowing the user to send pretty emails than they put into the utilitarian features.
The unfortunate thing is this is yet another instance of MS not serving the needs of it's customer. If there is one thing enterprise needs is a secure email system that is flexible enough to keep the employees from running to outside sources. The last thing I would if I ran a firm was for my employees to put all my trade secrets on gmail, where they might be indexed for all the world to see. An individual making a personal choice to trade privacy for email is one thing, but an individual should not have that luxury with corporate data.
Unfortunately, if one is going to get work done, one cannot rely on Outlook or any MS product. I myself am guilty on conducting certain matters on my personal account, simply because MS choses to set up the default mail client to IE only. Even though Yahoo, gmail, even MSN works perfectly on any browser, exchange server, at least in our configuration, does not. And ultimately, if you tell people to do the job or they will be fired, and you do not give them the proper tools, then they will certainly find other means to not get fired.
Depending on the cost, this might be what many of us has been waiting for: a reasonable priced way to get Dr. Who. So far the Doctor has been one show that has not been packages as a series. Rather episodes have been put together into show, and the shows has been sold as if they were feature length major movies, that is at $20 a pop. All this while other popular show, like Are You Being Served, are sold at $100 for the complete set of series.
I hope series are going to be put together into reasonably priced packages. Sometimes it seems like the BBC has one cash generating property, and they are going to milk it for all it is worth.
If IE is going to put a firm at a competitive disadvantage, the logical thing to do is target non-IE users, and, perhaps, run a non MS shop, that is if MS does not believe you are trustworthy.
Look at the demographics. Who are these non-IE users. Well, many of them are mac users with enough expendable income to buy a mac. Many are *nix users who like do it yourself projects. The independent minded window user cannot be ignored either.
It seems to me that many firms go under because they are all chasing the same market, and certainly the unsophisticated IE user is a good mark that is easily hoodwinked, so who can blame those that wish to separate this pitiful creature from his or her money. But why ignore the 10-30% of the customers that will not be effected by the possibly biased MS certification process? To me, if a firm can get some good cred on the boards, I will order from them even if they do not have the rock lowest price. This is much more valuable to me that the firms ability to pay MS to put a pretty color on IE.
Some bugs will result in the creation of security issues
Bugs that do not result in the creation of security issues or other user problems will be ignored
If an exploit does not exist in the wild, the developer will claim a fix for the bug can be deferred
if a developer is secretly altered of a bug, the developer will claim the fix can be deferred because the bug is secret
If a white hat hacker has found a bug, then someone else probably has as well
Just because a exploit is not known, does not mean that it does not exist and just waiting for release
Hackers that release bug lists are just looking for attention and friends
Given all of these varied assumption, there is no simple answer to the reporting of bugs. There is really no reason to keep the bugs secret, as that does a disservice to the customers and allows the manufacturer to postpone a fix. If the issue is serious, then it will get out anyway, and the sooner the fix the better. By making the bug public, the developer can openly discuss the issue and justify the action or inaction.
In the end the only shitty thing to do is sit on a bunch of bugs and then release then in mass. This of course is going to overwhelm the developer, and expose a bunch of issues that cannot be quickly be fixed. It is not only an attack on the developer, but an attack on the innocent users. I have no problem with hackers releasing bugs as they are found, but building up an arsenal is something that only black hats would do.
As far as if a particular OS is secure, this probably has more do with the quality of code rather than error rate. Even quality code will have errors. The difference is that quality code is written in such a way that side effects are minimized by clearly defined interfaces and domains of data. This leads to code that can be easily fixed without the problem of a change effecting many other unrelated systems. Ever since we were told that MS Windows can not function with IE or WMP, and it took 5 years to generate an upgrade, we are all very suspicious about the code quality of MS Windows.
The power situation for electronics is not as bad as it used to be. Standby power modes are becoming more effecient, so the electronics we leave on are becoming less wasteful. That said, there are a couple things to add to the article.
First, a dryer is in a class of it's own. It will suck electricity, but only when it is being used. Same things with lights. And both are very deterministic. If they are not being used, they will not use electricity. And often these things are not, in fact, being used. This is different from a cable box or stereo which often cannot be turned completely off, and goes into various modes that use various levels of electricity.
Second, for most people the biggest energy use is the heating and cooling, and the most dramatic gains in saving can come from reducing the need to heat and cool. So, if you move to cool fluorescent bulbs, you not only save by reducing the energy to run the bulbs, but also the energy needed to remove the heat of the bulbs. This applies to some electronics as well. The electronics are very efficient heat generators, basically converting much of the power directly to heat, which then needs to be removed. When it cold, this is a good thing, but not when it is hot.
I was going to read the article until the 5th cookie was set at which point i just assumed that the entire thing was an practical lesson. Be stupid enough to read an article about cookie abuse and get caught in the trap. Sort of like trying to find a windows virus filter only to find that the virus filter has infected you.
Oh well, I guess this is just another lesson in how marketers will shoot themselves in the foot. Animated gifs are abused, so i turn animation off. Cookies are abused, so i reject any cookie that is not obviously necessary. Flash is useful, but no way to request that it does not start automatically, so either I don't install it or install a hack to block it. I don't even see the product that is being advertised.
I hope this gets everyone off thier high horse, and realize that third party cookies should be rejected on all machines by default. What I really wish existed was a screen that popped up every time you went to a new site that informed the user of the site, and asked for a cookie preference for that site. That way, all cookies could be accepted at the corporate site, and no cookies might be accepted at google.
First, yes if a business wants to reach people using the most modern hardware and software then they are going to have to go out of their way to support a wide variety of standards and browsers.
On the other hand, if your browser isn't worth supporting from a dollars and cents point of view that is your problem, not theirs.
First, this really has nothing to do with Linux, GNU, FSS, etc. Opera, as far as I know, is closed source commercial software. It is a standards based, highly efficient, flexible browser. The only reason I don't use it is because the version for the Mac was not developed before Camino neé Chimera became an extremely good choice for the Mac.
So this is what the story is really about. Whether a public or private enterprise is going to make a honest effort to make information accessible. Given a reasonable budget, and reasonable developers, creating widely accessible web pages, even moderately complicated ones, is not that difficult. On the high end Google, Yahoo, Amazon, all have highly interactive web pages that work on any browser. As I said, I use Camino, not the most advanced browser, and have no problems. On the lower end, I do content stuff on a Wiki, and have no problems with any browser. Likewise, every blog works on every broswer. With the exception of some very high end application, where the browser is used as a front end, there seems little justification for incompatibility with the major browsers.
In fact, when one gets down to the brass tacks, it seems that incompatibility seems more of a design decision than a necessary evil. There appears to be little effort needed, outside of the hacks to make the page work in IE, to get a page to work reasonably well. OTOH, if one designs for incompatibility, then it is nearly impossible to get a page work in anything other than IE. This is illustrated best for me in one site I have to use for work. The designers, whose incompetence is clear shown in the fact that one has use 5-10 clicks to complete routine activities, has several controls that are incompatible with anything but IE. Now, these controls can easily be implemented using 5 year old generic technology. These controls can easily be implemented so that they are not only more accessible, but more convenient. However, because the design philosophy is not accessibility, but maximum use of MS technology, we end up with a web site that is not only inflexible, but, according to rough estimates I have run, wastes about a million dollars in tax payers money every year. Certainly is would have taken a million dollars more to design towards efficiency.
So here is the rub. This is not about whether a web page will run in a certain browser, it is about why a web page was purposefully designed to not be accessible to all taxpayers. To make an analogy using current event, the complaint is not that all documents are not printed in several different languages so that non english speakers can access the information. The complaint is not even why are the documents not printed in braille, or in the web pages organized in such a way, so that blind people can see them. The complaint is why was so much effort spent to print the documents in red ink on green paper, which is very festive, but can be really hard to read if your color sensitivity is not great, or it you have any vision problems. It might have been a cool idea, but not within the democratic or capitalistic ideals of the US.
I don't know how long 'Long ago' is, but the time from the 14th-20th century, at least for Europe, Asia, and India, seemed to be a time for very nasty diseases to sweep through the human population and kill a significant percentage of the local human population. It stands to reason that the people who were left would have some immunity to the disease. For instance, after the one third of the population is killed with black plague, it would seem reasonable to assume that the survivors are those that are not so easily susceptible to the plague. OTOH, the native Americans, how had not seem many of the European diseases, fell quickly to the like of small pox.
So, it may not be that out immune systems are overactive, just that they are tuned to these infections because those with immune systems that were not in general died. This also explains why we see new types of infections taking over. Exotic influenza's that our bodies have little experience with. CJD that does not respond to our normal infection fighting mechanism. AIDS that uses the immune system to survive.
All in all, the industrialized world is pretty infection free, mostly due to sanitation, immunization, medicine, and our built in defenses. But there are plenty of old rivals that even a good immune system does not defend well against. Malaria, Cholera, those icky worms that crawl into your body and grow inside of you and them either stay there or pop out. I am not one of those that believe our immune system is the latest and greatest, or that many of the problems, such as teenagers with diabetes or asthma, has to do with anything other than a diet of junk food and the habit of driving everywhere instead of walking.
but here is the rub. Poor college students, that cannot afford an iPod, will not be able to afford to buy music off iTunes either. So it does no good. In fact, the falling iPod prices has a lot to do with the falling ration of iTunes sales. I believe that the dominance of Windows environment does as well.
Let us take a look at what has happened. When iPods were new, people who bought them paid real money for them, and mostly had money to buy tunes as well. As the iPod became more fashionable, and the price hovered around $200, it then moved from a toy for people with their own money, to toy bought by parents for their kids, be they in school or university. What this did present the music player to a group, that on the whole, is much more likely to pirate music. I say pirate because students will burn a CD of songs and sell the CD for a few dollars. So, by making the iPod more affordable, they increased their market based, but killed the ratio of song sales to iPods.
So, many of us will buy CDs from the local store, but also from iTunes because the cost is really insignificant. If I want a few tracks, a few bucks is no big deal. It is not worth my time to look for the downloads that are 'real'. Also, since the iPods is a high fidelity device, we can burn it, and mostly not notice the loss on reimporting. This is the costliest part of the process, and oftimes not worth the bother.
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Contrast this philosophy with this case, which is largely enshrined by law passed over the past decade or so by conservatives. Here is an industry that generates 32 billion dollars a year. Even before the internet, even before it was easy to steal music, the industry never generated more than 25% more than that, so in round generous number let's say 50 billion. So, the damages of this music service is likely on the order of several billion, but a lawyer might be damages in the tens of billions. If we say that is some distress, such as the fact that artists have had breakdowns because they could not get another airplane, or executives did not have enough money to get their street drugs, then we could apply a multiplier. Such a multiplier might put in the few hundreds of billions. So there it is. Applying standard reasoning, we get to a number of perhaps, at the most $300 billion.
So why is it, the used the rules applied to the common person, who perhaps lost a loved one due to the negligence of a corporations, they may not even be able to get enough money to pay lawyers fees and rebuild their life, but these same lawmakers pass legislation that says irrespective of proven damages, a corporation can ask for 50X global sales.
There is a reason why the crooks were booted out on their asses.
Let's take this a step further. There are places in South and Central America that are safe and closer to many in the United States. Yet many in the US still prefer to take the European vacation. Why? The European vacation just seems more normal.
So lets put it another way. Much of this has been a form of isolationism. We are pretty secure in our little country, and when things start to get a bit dicey, we have a tendency to close off those borders. Most times we are protected from this overreaction because it does cost money, and as much as conservatives are fearful, they also like to make money. But sometimes the overreaction happens, and it costs us. For instance, we now require passports where they were not required previously, even though lack of passports was not an issue in the antecedent events. The passport office does not really have the funding to deal with the additional work, which means that our passports will become less secure. So we implemented a policy that will likely reduce security. Likewise, the more we check on every passenger, not only does it deter legitimate travel, it also creates a system that encourages costly bureacracy without providing additional benifits. I mean none of these advanced systems are needed to cath people with certain last names or people who believe that prayer to god is an important part of life, which is so American that many megachurches advacate praying before trips, important financial transactions, and even meetings.
In the end, the isolationist simply don't want interactions with the other. We can have illigal immigrant labor as long as we don't have to see, feed, house, treat, or education them. Anyone who is willing to be strip searched is free to come for a visit, but we don't need them.
The sad thing is that instead of letting the no longer needed airlines fail, the isolationist are asking for billions of dollars to subsidize them.
Building a standards compliant intelligent machine is often more expensive than building an ad hoc machine, if for no other reason than the cheapest parts can always be used, and there is no need to support all users. The flip side is that a specific driver must be created for each device.
I had an incident that nicely illustrated this point. I bought a very cheap digital camera a few couple years ago. Now, any standard camera with a USB port should work with my Mac with no additional drivers. Perhaps not all the bells and whistles, but the PTP should work. As it turned out, this camera was not standards based, and, even worse, had undergone a revision so, even thought the model number was the same, it did not work with the drivers I did have. There only way to determine that this camera was not in fact the same camera was to open the hermetically sealed bomb proof packaging, open the camera, and use a magnifying glass to inspect the product code.
Which just shows that if one wants the cheapest products, then MS Windows is the way to go. Manufacturers can design to the platform, write a few drivers, and sell to the masses. So the point of *nix, and perhaps the Mac,is not to provide the cheapest product, but instead long term stability. I have every reason to believe that Canon camera will work with my computer for a long time, because I am not going to lose connectivity when the next OS upgrade comes around. The standards will still be supported. I have SCSI devices from the OS 9 days that still work perfectly with OS X. I have no idea if those same devices, which required a special driver for MS Window, have continued support for current MS products.
So really all that can be said is don't buy the cheap products. If one has a choice between the standard printer and generic printer, pay the extra money for the generic printer. Support the standards that will allow *nix to prosper.
To specifically address the wireless thing, the standard is certainly in flux, and no one can be expected to support a standard that does not necessarily exist. That said, it should still be possible to assemble a standard compliant box that is not targeted towards the MS Windows OS, perhaps at additional costs.
So, at this time, one job was the person who listened to a recording and transcribed the recording into written text, oftimes reformatting it in a prescribed fashion. Though the shuttle is piloted largely by three redundant computers, we still have people transcribing letters. To be sure, some of this has to do with the amount that is costs for a human to do each of these tasks, and the accuracy, but a lot has to do with the difficulty of automating creative tasks like cooking and cleaning and transcribing. Add to this that in many cases people wish these tasks to be done how they like at the moment, and not in an absolute prescribed form and the result is a huge engineering problem.
So, if we begin to live in the 21st century, and leave the bigoted preconceptions behind, then we see that speech recognition is a specific solution that efficiently utilizes a specific resource, the human brain. And, if like in flight, we do not try to emulate the flapping of the wings but the result of the flapping of the wings, then we might see that the keyboard based solution is in fact an efficient solution that utilizes the strengths of the current resource, the electronic computer.
This does not mean that speech recognition does not have its place. Apple uses it to allow the launching of applications and the like, which is useful for certain people. More advanced speech recognition is available for those who want it. However, spending time on this instead of say, a pseudo self organizing file system, seems quite pointless.
One nice thing about the new world is that enough networks are producing content that the crap that used to be required is no longer acceptable. Some cable stations make use of this new world well by producing few high quality episodes. Others, especially the old time networks, are still in the mode of overproducing content. Among the examples are thousands of version of CSI.
If Sci-Fi wants to succeed, they should have develop a number of different shows, produce 15-20 of each show each year, and run them at different times.
In any case the number of shows and the way they are shown are insignificant in the post tivo world. Instead of paying the cable fee of $1000+ dollars a year, one can use that money 30+ seasons on DVD, or just Netflix everything for 1/4 the price. I suppose if there is nothing to talk about except what is on tv, then watching it near real time is important. Otherwise, it is cheaper to wait.
A professor of mine transformed a vacation in mexico into a paper on a novel pattern caused by the fraction of light through the swimming pool water. It is these kinds of observations that drive science. The pretty pictures and big machines are cool, but the discovery often happens in these moments of regular life, outside of the lab, by average people who wish to do above average things.
For a long time I think we were concerned with survival, food and shelter, and the technology was geared towards the basics, tools, clothing, light. Then, we began to have a reasonable guarantee of our survival, and the technology was directed to systematically categorize our world so that we can draw useful conclusions. This has happened at different times in different places. The end result is that we get so conformable, that our standard of living gets so above what is expected, that there seems little reason to explore.
This is what is probably happening. Many of us don't absolutely have to work but 30 hours a week if we didn't want to. The vast majority has enough food and shelter and safe water, at least in the western world. Where is the drive to advance? Where is the necessity to invent? In the fantasy Star Trek world, when all out needs are met, we become infinitely altruistic and explore the galaxy, create great art, and reach a hight of civilization. Yet as scientists we see little evidence of this. What we see are people who are engineered to compete for a social postion, if not survival, and if such an impetus does not exist, then we fail to advance.
Kind of conservative and blunt philosophy, but, for the most part, we work for reward, and if there is no need, there is much less work. And, if pay can be gotten without work, all the better. The current back dated option scandals proves that.
What I would much prefer, as a casual user who needs to run minor MS Windows application, is the VMware solution. Note that this is also the type of solution many MS windows users employ to access a *nix type system. I would much rather Apple license a solution from VMWare and have virtualization for those that need it.
I really see this as a cost and performance issue. These was a time when one could buy a copy of MS Windows NT, but a copy of Connectix VPC, and have an inexpensive solution to an occasional problem. Now that Vista is going to a bloated and expensive hog, I don't see how anything but Boot Camp, for those few that really need it, or VMWare is going to be an effective solution.
The biggest problem with the competition are two fold. First creative and Sandisk do not have a great reputation. I would never buy a creative again because I lost a $300 investment because of a cheap piece of plastic. I don't know about Sandisk, but they also seem more concerned about price than quality.
Second, there is a question about online purchased music. When purchasing music, people do seem want a format they can depend on. We have LPs, tapes, and CDs. There are arguable better formats, but the other formats never achieved critical mass. Likewise, the old formats die quickly. We still have cassette tapes, but how many 8-tracks do you see? The LP market is absolutely speciality. The advantange that Apple has is that is recognized the the DRM defined a format, and the format would drive the market. No one is going to buy an LP when all they have is a cassette player. Likewise, the mistake that MS made was to not take the format seriously. They have shot themselves int he foot by changing formats midstream. Who is going to trust them only to end up with useless content in a year?
So while other music players may be better in certain areas, like playing movies, they are not neccesarily better on the core needs, and importantly do not play the predominate only DRM format.
What kind of alternative reality have I arrived in where /. uses the words 'Microsoft' and 'Works' in the same sentence. Should I prepare for the endtime, or is this just a random aberration?
Second, the time in orbit does not necessarily depend solely on distance between the two points. One can adjust altitude, flight path, and in the process speed, to create an optimal profile. Perhaps an orbit will be completed, like the shuttle, in 90 minutes, so half way around the world in 45. Perhaps for shorter distances, like from New York to Paris, one might choose a higher orbit and slower orbital velocity.
So, I am not going through the calculations, but the idea is that you have to accelerate to perhaps 15,000 miles per hour over a distance of a few, or perhaps, several hundred miles. This might be done over a very long time, likE half an hour, in which case the force might be kept down to around a g. But frankly, if I understand the implication correctly, they plane to fly for a while to get to mach 5 or so (which can happen slowly), then use the scram jet to get to LEO and mach 20+(which will happen more quickly, and likely incur more g;s.
So, the gist is that there will be an acceleration profile that will have at least 5 distinct segments, and though the average acceleration might be very low, certain sections will necessarily have significant acceleration. The fastest commercial aircraft, the corcorde, only went aroung mach 2. We are talking about mach 5 using conventional propulsion.
The price is that executives can no longer spend company money on whatever they wish. Executives cannot arbitrarily set pay. What we have seen in the past twenty years is scam to increase executive pay while simultaneously decreasing exposure to risk, while in the truly private sector, the opposite is true. The stock option is the classic example. It is marketed as a method to align the executives interest with the stockholder interest. If the stock rises, the executive gets rewarded. In reality, just like bonuses, the behind the scene negotiations guarantees the money no matter the state of the company.
In reality, these new breeds of corporations, with their bloated bureaucracy, with no other purpose than to create meaningless work that justifies it's existence, and raise prices and cut research to free enough money to pay for these non productive agents, are indistinguishable from any other massively bloated public entity. The similarities to congress, who wants to vote in a pay raise every year, but can't complete the minimum job requirements like passing a budget, are amazing.
What is disappointing is the naïveté of the public. Sure things have to be given away with no strings attached, but that does not mean that their is no effect. If there were no effect, then things would not be given away, even as thank you gifts. The corporate world has to work on a profit motive.
In the end, none of this matters, because, as was stated, blogging is not journalism. This is why few rational people take blogging seriously. At some point, when blogging develops an ethical basis, perhaps it will.
And the saga has been going on long enough to be compare with Duke Nukem, especially since no one seriously expected the next version. The A380 should have been delivered mid 2005. Now 8 months later they have apparently have a delivery of date of late 2007, with full production apparently delayed until 2009. This is not a production schedule that builds confidence, and certainly not a delivery schedule for a plane that already exists.
Of course, as has been widely reported, the wiring problems were that they wires were simply cut too short, and not one wanted to fix it.
The A380, even if they get a few dozen planes out, if going to be the vapor ware project that defined the first decade of this century. OTOH, when the 15th A380 is delivered, perhpas by the end of 2008, they will have shipped more A380s than Concordes.
What the new rules are designed to do, and what the American car manufacturers is upset about, is to close a loophole that allows the American manufacturers to ignore minimum standards in the fuel consumption of the fleet. This is not an evil plot by the government, this is something that the government was forced to enact due to the repeated failure of the manufacturers to obey the spirit of the law.
Two examples. Cars had certain requirements to help protect our environment, but trucks necessarily did not. The manufactures created this loop hole by saying the farmers and small business could not afford the extra equipment and such equipment was not necessary if rural areas. The congress agreed. In response to this loophole the manufacturers started pushing the SUV because they did not have to put as much technology in it, and therefore the cost to produce was often cheaper. Then, due to certain vagaries in the tax law, they realized the could push really huge SUV and trucks, as the cost after tax deduction can actually be cheaper than smaller, better built, more fuel efficient vehicle. Such things forces responsible manufacturer, like subaru, to end up a competitive disadvantage when they build cars that won't kill the family of four in the Honda Cvcc.
Which brings us to today. The fuel consumption estimates for hybrids is a jake, and allows manufacturers to seriously underestimate the average fuel consumption for of their fleet. For example, for can use the wildly overestimated fuel consumption on the Hybrid escape to compensate for the fuel consumption on the Expedition, which, even though fuel saving technology increases every year, the fuel consumption does not get better. With the old rules this basically evened out, and the overall fuel consumption remained constant. However, with the new rules they are in trouble. Ford wants to blame the company trouble on health care of the line workers, but I bet it is more an issue of using funds for executive pay rather than R&D. Why else were they so afraid of disclosing executive pay, and why else would they be so happy that the SEC rescinded the requirement to fully disclose compensation. And the fact that the order came the day before christmas was even more interesting.
Which leads to today.
Let's take the ATM machine for example. Initially the machine was created to reduce the load on tellers for easily automated tasks. These machines would often directly generate revenue by charging customers for the transactions. Therefore, these machines pretty quickly had well designed interfaces that allowed relatively rapid transactions. The rapid transactions were important because the higher the rate of transactions, the more money. As time went by, however, the charges for most transactions were eliminated, the marketing people realized that a person at an ATM machine was a captive audience, so the primary purpose of an ATM became to advertise services. The result is that the current generation of ATM have horrible interfaces in terms of customer usability and rapid transactions, which really puts the customer at a unnecessary risk, but wonderful a wonderful interface in terms of forces customers to view advertising. In terms of the purpose, aside from the fact that the customer is endangered, there is nothing wrong with the interface
Likewise, a web page has to be judged to it's purpose. If one is a newspaper, then one is going to want to present news, but equally important generate revenue to support the page. Therefore the page must be complicated not only to organize the news, but to display pictures, and to display enoug ad content to pay for the page. Much of the complexity of any commercial page in fact comes from the need to integrate ads and content.
So, if ads are not critical, and the content is straightforward, how complex does a page have to be, and is complexity itself a goal? I fear many believe that complexity is a virtue. On one intranet page I work with, at least a third of the real estate is wasted on branding and other non content. Often less that half the area is available for the content one is interested in. Nothing is linked properly. All the energy and money is spent on useless branding and cool design.
Now, look at useit.com again. The site itself is an ad, so needs no additional ads. The branding is clear, and avoids banner blindness by using text for the titles. Each section is clearly marked, and the one picture clearly promotes Nielsen. There are no other extraneous pictures to distract from this promotion. Since Nielsen offers tips on how to attract and keep customers through the user interface, and not the technical details on how to develop the interface, there is not benefit to whiz bang programming.
So here is the deal. The parent post is right and wrong. It is wrong to criticize the useit webpage, falling into the oft citing fallacy that a more complex web page is more usable. This fallacy will likely be the cause of the failure of many new web pages, and is already the cause of waste of million, if not billions, in public funds. However, the parent is correct that the minority report interface is not significantly defective, but not for the reasons cited. As a computer interface, it is probably lacking. However, the interface is not meant to be a communication protocol. Rather, it is a dramatic tool. Therefore, if Nielsen is judging is as a computer interface, then this is another example where Nielsen has completely missed the point. The only reasonable measure of success or failure can be if the interface communicated the intentions and results to the audience. And, as much as we hate the big login screen, it is what the audience needs.
That said, many of these films, even though they are trite and in 5 years will seem dated, do appear to make every use of the technological innovation. Since the innovations are largely visual, the improvements are largely visual as well, which leads to the issue that money is spent on fx rather than writing dialog. This is probably similir to when entertainemnt went from radio to film and the dialog was depreciated, see for instance Metropolis. OTOH, it is completely different from when we went to talkies and dialog was the big thing, see Casablanca.
And these innovations also effect the necessary features of actors. What type of face and body will be needed to fill the screen? Will there be lots of closeup? It delivery important, or will the movie be carried by the body motion? Can we use the lighting excuse to cast most light complexioned people, or do we have the ability to film darker people? Do we need large or small features?
What is interesting, and what was started by Lucas, is that every movie is essentially becoming a computer generated animated feature. This makes sense because the new formats are perfectly designed for computer generated content, in which the fuzzy featured of real life, automatically averaged out on film, do not appear in animation, but the level of modeling is good enough to deliver significant fidelity. This is different from the similar Spielberg that were, in some sense, much more practical. As LOTR has shown, a combination of the practical and the animated can be very effective, and the digital, though in some ways inferior, provides significant benefits. Another good example of this is the completely practical film, 'Once Upon a Time in Mexico'.
So, while I agree that many of the films are not interesting to me, i appreciate that they are a product of the times. We can't just sit in 1950 and pretend that everything is perfect.
The unfortunate thing is this is yet another instance of MS not serving the needs of it's customer. If there is one thing enterprise needs is a secure email system that is flexible enough to keep the employees from running to outside sources. The last thing I would if I ran a firm was for my employees to put all my trade secrets on gmail, where they might be indexed for all the world to see. An individual making a personal choice to trade privacy for email is one thing, but an individual should not have that luxury with corporate data.
Unfortunately, if one is going to get work done, one cannot rely on Outlook or any MS product. I myself am guilty on conducting certain matters on my personal account, simply because MS choses to set up the default mail client to IE only. Even though Yahoo, gmail, even MSN works perfectly on any browser, exchange server, at least in our configuration, does not. And ultimately, if you tell people to do the job or they will be fired, and you do not give them the proper tools, then they will certainly find other means to not get fired.
I hope series are going to be put together into reasonably priced packages. Sometimes it seems like the BBC has one cash generating property, and they are going to milk it for all it is worth.
Look at the demographics. Who are these non-IE users. Well, many of them are mac users with enough expendable income to buy a mac. Many are *nix users who like do it yourself projects. The independent minded window user cannot be ignored either.
It seems to me that many firms go under because they are all chasing the same market, and certainly the unsophisticated IE user is a good mark that is easily hoodwinked, so who can blame those that wish to separate this pitiful creature from his or her money. But why ignore the 10-30% of the customers that will not be effected by the possibly biased MS certification process? To me, if a firm can get some good cred on the boards, I will order from them even if they do not have the rock lowest price. This is much more valuable to me that the firms ability to pay MS to put a pretty color on IE.
Given all of these varied assumption, there is no simple answer to the reporting of bugs. There is really no reason to keep the bugs secret, as that does a disservice to the customers and allows the manufacturer to postpone a fix. If the issue is serious, then it will get out anyway, and the sooner the fix the better. By making the bug public, the developer can openly discuss the issue and justify the action or inaction.
In the end the only shitty thing to do is sit on a bunch of bugs and then release then in mass. This of course is going to overwhelm the developer, and expose a bunch of issues that cannot be quickly be fixed. It is not only an attack on the developer, but an attack on the innocent users. I have no problem with hackers releasing bugs as they are found, but building up an arsenal is something that only black hats would do.
As far as if a particular OS is secure, this probably has more do with the quality of code rather than error rate. Even quality code will have errors. The difference is that quality code is written in such a way that side effects are minimized by clearly defined interfaces and domains of data. This leads to code that can be easily fixed without the problem of a change effecting many other unrelated systems. Ever since we were told that MS Windows can not function with IE or WMP, and it took 5 years to generate an upgrade, we are all very suspicious about the code quality of MS Windows.
First, a dryer is in a class of it's own. It will suck electricity, but only when it is being used. Same things with lights. And both are very deterministic. If they are not being used, they will not use electricity. And often these things are not, in fact, being used. This is different from a cable box or stereo which often cannot be turned completely off, and goes into various modes that use various levels of electricity.
Second, for most people the biggest energy use is the heating and cooling, and the most dramatic gains in saving can come from reducing the need to heat and cool. So, if you move to cool fluorescent bulbs, you not only save by reducing the energy to run the bulbs, but also the energy needed to remove the heat of the bulbs. This applies to some electronics as well. The electronics are very efficient heat generators, basically converting much of the power directly to heat, which then needs to be removed. When it cold, this is a good thing, but not when it is hot.
Oh well, I guess this is just another lesson in how marketers will shoot themselves in the foot. Animated gifs are abused, so i turn animation off. Cookies are abused, so i reject any cookie that is not obviously necessary. Flash is useful, but no way to request that it does not start automatically, so either I don't install it or install a hack to block it. I don't even see the product that is being advertised.
I hope this gets everyone off thier high horse, and realize that third party cookies should be rejected on all machines by default. What I really wish existed was a screen that popped up every time you went to a new site that informed the user of the site, and asked for a cookie preference for that site. That way, all cookies could be accepted at the corporate site, and no cookies might be accepted at google.
First, this really has nothing to do with Linux, GNU, FSS, etc. Opera, as far as I know, is closed source commercial software. It is a standards based, highly efficient, flexible browser. The only reason I don't use it is because the version for the Mac was not developed before Camino neé Chimera became an extremely good choice for the Mac.
So this is what the story is really about. Whether a public or private enterprise is going to make a honest effort to make information accessible. Given a reasonable budget, and reasonable developers, creating widely accessible web pages, even moderately complicated ones, is not that difficult. On the high end Google, Yahoo, Amazon, all have highly interactive web pages that work on any browser. As I said, I use Camino, not the most advanced browser, and have no problems. On the lower end, I do content stuff on a Wiki, and have no problems with any browser. Likewise, every blog works on every broswer. With the exception of some very high end application, where the browser is used as a front end, there seems little justification for incompatibility with the major browsers.
In fact, when one gets down to the brass tacks, it seems that incompatibility seems more of a design decision than a necessary evil. There appears to be little effort needed, outside of the hacks to make the page work in IE, to get a page to work reasonably well. OTOH, if one designs for incompatibility, then it is nearly impossible to get a page work in anything other than IE. This is illustrated best for me in one site I have to use for work. The designers, whose incompetence is clear shown in the fact that one has use 5-10 clicks to complete routine activities, has several controls that are incompatible with anything but IE. Now, these controls can easily be implemented using 5 year old generic technology. These controls can easily be implemented so that they are not only more accessible, but more convenient. However, because the design philosophy is not accessibility, but maximum use of MS technology, we end up with a web site that is not only inflexible, but, according to rough estimates I have run, wastes about a million dollars in tax payers money every year. Certainly is would have taken a million dollars more to design towards efficiency.
So here is the rub. This is not about whether a web page will run in a certain browser, it is about why a web page was purposefully designed to not be accessible to all taxpayers. To make an analogy using current event, the complaint is not that all documents are not printed in several different languages so that non english speakers can access the information. The complaint is not even why are the documents not printed in braille, or in the web pages organized in such a way, so that blind people can see them. The complaint is why was so much effort spent to print the documents in red ink on green paper, which is very festive, but can be really hard to read if your color sensitivity is not great, or it you have any vision problems. It might have been a cool idea, but not within the democratic or capitalistic ideals of the US.
So, it may not be that out immune systems are overactive, just that they are tuned to these infections because those with immune systems that were not in general died. This also explains why we see new types of infections taking over. Exotic influenza's that our bodies have little experience with. CJD that does not respond to our normal infection fighting mechanism. AIDS that uses the immune system to survive.
All in all, the industrialized world is pretty infection free, mostly due to sanitation, immunization, medicine, and our built in defenses. But there are plenty of old rivals that even a good immune system does not defend well against. Malaria, Cholera, those icky worms that crawl into your body and grow inside of you and them either stay there or pop out. I am not one of those that believe our immune system is the latest and greatest, or that many of the problems, such as teenagers with diabetes or asthma, has to do with anything other than a diet of junk food and the habit of driving everywhere instead of walking.
Let us take a look at what has happened. When iPods were new, people who bought them paid real money for them, and mostly had money to buy tunes as well. As the iPod became more fashionable, and the price hovered around $200, it then moved from a toy for people with their own money, to toy bought by parents for their kids, be they in school or university. What this did present the music player to a group, that on the whole, is much more likely to pirate music. I say pirate because students will burn a CD of songs and sell the CD for a few dollars. So, by making the iPod more affordable, they increased their market based, but killed the ratio of song sales to iPods.
So, many of us will buy CDs from the local store, but also from iTunes because the cost is really insignificant. If I want a few tracks, a few bucks is no big deal. It is not worth my time to look for the downloads that are 'real'. Also, since the iPods is a high fidelity device, we can burn it, and mostly not notice the loss on reimporting. This is the costliest part of the process, and oftimes not worth the bother.