A big advantage of statistics-based interfaces is that they automatically enforce correctness, because correct strings are more probable than incorrect ones.
Feed the entire contents of/usr/dict/words into a markov generator and you get pretty much the same thing. Random words which, whilst not having any meaning, are reasonably syntactically correct.
It's quite known that broken code runs quite well on IE.
Great, but then it also encourages people to write bad code - see all that code with broken tables and a million tags that remain unclosed?
You're confusing two seperate things here:
Broken HTML which doesn't render properly.
Broken HTML that causes corruptions, crashes and the potential for security issues.
This guy has been testing for (2) and not (1). Bad HTML should never cause crashes, memory corruption and buffer overflows. Period.
Finally, you can't go blaming the users for bad input. One of the golden rules of software design is that all software should either reject or handle gracefully bad input. Crashing is not graceful.
I'm still a little unsure how this will help customers. It's not as if either industry has been quick to pass on the savings to customers.
My guess is that the music industry will be forced to reduce their prices and Walmart will make a bigger profit.
Of course, I'm just being really cynical. In the long term it may work out better but for the moment, I'm saying pessimistic.
Re:support for open standards such as WMA...
on
Virgin's New iPod Rival
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"Hi! Use WMA! it gives you CHOICE over which online stores you use!"
I appreciate that the parent poster was joking but it is worth pointing out that if the Apple store starts to jack up the prices, there is nowhere else you can legimately purchase the AAC files that they sell.
On the other hand, if a WMA shop does the same, you simply shift to another one.
Finally, everyone likes to blame Microsoft for the DRM in WMA. However they completely forget that Microsoft just provided the capability - it is up to the content providers on whether or not they use it.
In sum: this idea sucks and a better one could be had.
A good point - but, you've completely forgotten a few things:
Hardware manufacturers design products 1-2 years in advance. Therefore for the implementation of an RFID chip, you're looking at at least a year.
A protocol would need to be devised that all the manufacturers agree on (both handsets and the systems that will trigger them)
People would need to purchase these phones. Typically they'd be on high tier phones first. A phones lifetime is approximately 18 months before they are on low tier (ie. your pay-as-you-go mass market) where adopotion is the greatest.
You'd need all the phones to adopt this before it would work. The first WAP phone I saw was in 1996 (and i'm pretty sure that they were around before then) and only now is it commonplace enough for companies to sell content through it. That is a lead time of 8 years.
So in short, it's a great idea, but you're looking at 8 years+ before its going to be installed on enough handsets to actually work in the cinema. What is the point of blocking 20% of the handsets, when its one of the other 80% that ring?
Alternativily you could implement signal blocking today which will work on every phone the moment it is turned on.
Sometimes the best ideas aren't the most practical to implement.
certainly the ability for a remote attacker to disable critical browser features like save, right-click, copy and cut against the user's wishes is a major security vulnerability in Moz/Firefox and should be fixed ASAP
Let me get this right. Website has javascript that requests browser disables "save", "cut", "paste" and a few others.
The browser disables the aforementioned buttons because the javascript requests it.
How exactly is that a "major security vulnerability"? It sounds more like a correct functional implementation which happens to do something which could be an annoyance to the end-user.
Seth Schoen has posted preliminary notes on some breaks to the DRM (beyond just automating a screenshotting process), including a proposal for a circumventing proxy that would fetch Google Print pages and strip out the DRM.
Whilst I'm all for breaking DRM that hinders the rights you have to use your content in the way you want - this just looks like breaking DRM to get stuff for free.
If that really is the case, then I'm extremely concerned that someone is doing this. Mainly because it adds extra ammunition to those who (wrongly) try to push the line that the only people who want to break DRM are those who want to rip people off.
When you said your company started putting "Best Viewed in Firefox/Mozilla" on your intranet, I knew that your developers missed the point of web standards and the browser wars entirely.
I'd rather that than the other way around.
I pointed out to our intranet developers that their site was a horrible mash of HTML mangled by Frontpage and, as such, looks terrible in Firefox. Their response? "Sorry, we develop for IE only".
Which I suppose explains why they never graduated to working on the main website...
Just watch Safari & Firefox development and imitate the functionality. Joe User then has no compelling reason to switch.
Which really isn't that much: tabbed browsing and an adblocker and some bug fixes on the CSS support and you're 90% there to most of the requirements that Joe User has.
Hell, Firefox out of the box doesn't come with an adblocker and the extension is not something my mother could configure, so MS probably don't need to have that either.
Not that its going to make me move back, I have far too many plug-ins installed, but I'm not your average surfer (and given that you're reading Slashdot, you probably aren't average either) but for the Mom and Pop, that'll probably do.
I'm not Apple watcher, in fact the best I get is actually wanting an iPod but I'm surprised that no-one has suggested that they'll release an updated version of the 4G iPod with the latest firmware and a 60 gig HD.
After dropping the 15 gig one (leaving only 20 and 40 gig), it doesn't seem too unreasonable to make a 60 gig one the new top of the range model - bringing you back to the three options you've had on most of the other generations.
..are nifty. They can catch all sorts of stuff and produce lovely reports - or, well, at least functional reports. And running them nightly - or hourly - helps to ensure the code won't get out of sorts.
Looks really good although I can't program in Java to save my life. As dumb as it sounds, do you know of one for Visual Basic? Google doesn't turn up much but would make my life a hell of a lot easier.
I know we'd like to think that it was all performed by some cool web-searching script, judging by the technical level I've seen of some sections of the music industry, it is entirely possible that they just recruited a whole bunch of temps with the mandate "find files which have our artists name in them" and left them to it.
In which case, human error (based on rubbish instructions) would be true.
"No really, it's a people problem, blame the user", they say. How lame can you get.
Try getting a job and moving out of your parents basement first.
When you enter the real world you'll find that things work just like that. As people have already mentioned, senior management demand everything and anything in stupid timescales, they don't know exactly what they want and it all gets horribly messy when the developer has no idea what they're trying to get the system to do and why.
Couple this with a tight timescale, a Project Manager who can't slip a project because its "just not acceptable" and code quality will slip. Now you've got stuff backing up into the testing cycle, UAT hasn't even begun yet and already the defects list is 100+ long... and still the deadline "must be met".
What you end up with is a release which is a patch job, held up with gaffer tape because of highly demanding deadlines. I know, I've been the one demanding it for a marketing release. I know the results aren't pretty, but when you have a million dollar campaign kicking off, then your hands are tied.
Finally, please don't use $ to indicate S'. Although I'm sure you think its kewl, it just makes things harder to read and re-inforces the opinion that you haven't left school yet.
What about Exchange replacements? One of the good things about Outlook in a corporate environment is that it works so well with Exchange.
If there were Outlook replacements and Exchange replacements, then corporations could swap out one or the other rather than having to jump immediately into the water.
Especially more so in the fact that if you swap out Exchange and keep Outlook 2000, then your IT department will have saved a bucket-load of cash end whilst the end-users will never know the difference and never need retraining.
According to Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft: "The most common format of music on an iPod is 'stolen'.
Pretty true. I'm sure that there will be 10 or so +5 rated posters who say that all the music on their iPod is legit, but Slashdot isn't indicative of the world and you'd be niave to think anything else.
He appears convinced Microsoft will lead the way in Digital Rights Management
Probably true. Microsoft have control of the desktop market and are playing into the content providers hands. They'll happily embrace anything which is stricter on the end-user in the name of revenues and he knows it.
also believes Microsoft will steal a march on Apple in making the digital home a reality because Apple "doesn't have the volumes".
Again probably true. Think a couple of years down the line when you either have a choice of 4 models supporting AAC+ or 150 products all supporting WMA.
Not forgetting the intense competition from both hardware manufacturers and those who run WMA music stores - in which both will be aiming to provide the best features and functionality for the best price. When Apple's only competition is themselves, then there is less of an incentive (look at Palm procrastinating for years as a fine example)
Generally I think he's pretty much on the ball, although I have no doubt that the predictable response from Slashbots will be "i won't buy from Microsoft" and "All my music is legit" - when, in fact, there are a lot of people who will and also have large numbers of music on their iPod which is legally questionable.
Yes it's a shame it has been killed off but had you read the article you would have seen:
Hard as it to believe, HP's grand wrapping of the smartest severs, storage, networking and software products on the planet could not find enough buyers.
So it was good technology, but they couldn't find enough buyers. So it was losing money. What do you propose they do with technology that no-one wants to buy? Keep it running and losing money just because it's "cool"?
You bitch about the music industry and their outdated business model yet it seems like this technology has an equally flawed one too (that is, no-one wanted to purchase it). Yes I'm being harsh, but unless I get any more facts I'm inclined to believe that Carly killed it off because it was losing more money than it was making.
Microsoft have enough cash in the bank to allow nearly all of their departments to make money - not everyone else has this luxury.
I know a LOT of really intelligent, well educated people, many of whom are programmers or use linux in a server environment, who still use IE / Outlook [Express] on their desktops.
This could be because those people have never been affected by all the exploits that are out there.
Think of it like a house with a dodgy lock, you don't bother getting around to changing it because it's the last thing on your mind. As soon as you get broken into, you'll fix it.
These people just haven't been given an incentive to change yet. They're happy with what they have and aren't interested in changing. Banks rely on this sort of apathy all the time - otherwise you'd get some decent competition when you're shopping around for a new current account.
Worried: MS has a history of hamstringing their good codecs with DRM and other crap too.
Actually Microsoft just provide the industry with the ability to DRM their content if they so wish. At no point does Microsoft force DRM upon you, this is a decision made by the content providers - not Microsoft.
The content providers could easily produce content in a Microsoft format with no DRM at all, if they wanted to.
gives you access to rather a lot of files. You can also replace mp3 with various other suffixes for added fun.
Don't forget that removing the filetype and including "site:yourdomain.com" will allow you to quickly check if any of your folders are visible to the world that shouldn't be.
here are far more people out there who will give up or accept a compromise after repeated failures than there are those who keep going until they get things working. I suspect a large number of "x doesn't work" entries are more likely to represent "I couldn't get x to work".
A very good point. As far as I am concerned an item of hardware "failed" if I plug it in, run some installer application and i am unable to sucessfully use it.
I, personally, am not prepared to spend the next 30 minutes fiddling around with settings, config files and other things just to get the thing actually working. If the configuration script/installer can't do that for me, then it is not suitable for a desktop.
But that is because I consider an operating system merely to be a tool to get other things done. However other people may be more willing to hack a it until it does - but frankly, I don't have the patience.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe they missed out understandably, unashamadily, unauthorized, unavoidably and 614 other possibilities!
Feed the entire contents of /usr/dict/words into a markov generator and you get pretty much the same thing. Random words which, whilst not having any meaning, are reasonably syntactically correct.
http://www.fourteenminutes.com/fun/words/.
Great, but then it also encourages people to write bad code - see all that code with broken tables and a million tags that remain unclosed?
You're confusing two seperate things here:
This guy has been testing for (2) and not (1). Bad HTML should never cause crashes, memory corruption and buffer overflows. Period.
Finally, you can't go blaming the users for bad input. One of the golden rules of software design is that all software should either reject or handle gracefully bad input. Crashing is not graceful.
My guess is that the music industry will be forced to reduce their prices and Walmart will make a bigger profit.
Of course, I'm just being really cynical. In the long term it may work out better but for the moment, I'm saying pessimistic.
I appreciate that the parent poster was joking but it is worth pointing out that if the Apple store starts to jack up the prices, there is nowhere else you can legimately purchase the AAC files that they sell.
On the other hand, if a WMA shop does the same, you simply shift to another one.
Finally, everyone likes to blame Microsoft for the DRM in WMA. However they completely forget that Microsoft just provided the capability - it is up to the content providers on whether or not they use it.
A good point - but, you've completely forgotten a few things:
- Hardware manufacturers design products 1-2 years in advance. Therefore for the implementation of an RFID chip, you're looking at at least a year.
- A protocol would need to be devised that all the manufacturers agree on (both handsets and the systems that will trigger them)
- People would need to purchase these phones. Typically they'd be on high tier phones first. A phones lifetime is approximately 18 months before they are on low tier (ie. your pay-as-you-go mass market) where adopotion is the greatest.
- You'd need all the phones to adopt this before it would work. The first WAP phone I saw was in 1996 (and i'm pretty sure that they were around before then) and only now is it commonplace enough for companies to sell content through it. That is a lead time of 8 years.
So in short, it's a great idea, but you're looking at 8 years+ before its going to be installed on enough handsets to actually work in the cinema. What is the point of blocking 20% of the handsets, when its one of the other 80% that ring?Alternativily you could implement signal blocking today which will work on every phone the moment it is turned on.
Sometimes the best ideas aren't the most practical to implement.
Let me get this right. Website has javascript that requests browser disables "save", "cut", "paste" and a few others.
The browser disables the aforementioned buttons because the javascript requests it.
How exactly is that a "major security vulnerability"? It sounds more like a correct functional implementation which happens to do something which could be an annoyance to the end-user.
Whilst I'm all for breaking DRM that hinders the rights you have to use your content in the way you want - this just looks like breaking DRM to get stuff for free.
If that really is the case, then I'm extremely concerned that someone is doing this. Mainly because it adds extra ammunition to those who (wrongly) try to push the line that the only people who want to break DRM are those who want to rip people off.
I'd rather that than the other way around.
I pointed out to our intranet developers that their site was a horrible mash of HTML mangled by Frontpage and, as such, looks terrible in Firefox. Their response? "Sorry, we develop for IE only".
Which I suppose explains why they never graduated to working on the main website...
Which really isn't that much: tabbed browsing and an adblocker and some bug fixes on the CSS support and you're 90% there to most of the requirements that Joe User has.
Hell, Firefox out of the box doesn't come with an adblocker and the extension is not something my mother could configure, so MS probably don't need to have that either.
Not that its going to make me move back, I have far too many plug-ins installed, but I'm not your average surfer (and given that you're reading Slashdot, you probably aren't average either) but for the Mom and Pop, that'll probably do.
After dropping the 15 gig one (leaving only 20 and 40 gig), it doesn't seem too unreasonable to make a 60 gig one the new top of the range model - bringing you back to the three options you've had on most of the other generations.
Looks really good although I can't program in Java to save my life. As dumb as it sounds, do you know of one for Visual Basic? Google doesn't turn up much but would make my life a hell of a lot easier.
In which case, human error (based on rubbish instructions) would be true.
Try getting a job and moving out of your parents basement first.
When you enter the real world you'll find that things work just like that. As people have already mentioned, senior management demand everything and anything in stupid timescales, they don't know exactly what they want and it all gets horribly messy when the developer has no idea what they're trying to get the system to do and why.
Couple this with a tight timescale, a Project Manager who can't slip a project because its "just not acceptable" and code quality will slip. Now you've got stuff backing up into the testing cycle, UAT hasn't even begun yet and already the defects list is 100+ long ... and still the deadline "must be met".
What you end up with is a release which is a patch job, held up with gaffer tape because of highly demanding deadlines. I know, I've been the one demanding it for a marketing release. I know the results aren't pretty, but when you have a million dollar campaign kicking off, then your hands are tied.
Finally, please don't use $ to indicate S'. Although I'm sure you think its kewl, it just makes things harder to read and re-inforces the opinion that you haven't left school yet.
Your post implies that Yahoo made Trillian crash when I would prefer to think that poor programming on Trillian's behalf caused it to crash.
If the data your application accepts causes it to crash, then its the applications fault, not the data.
If there were Outlook replacements and Exchange replacements, then corporations could swap out one or the other rather than having to jump immediately into the water.
Especially more so in the fact that if you swap out Exchange and keep Outlook 2000, then your IT department will have saved a bucket-load of cash end whilst the end-users will never know the difference and never need retraining.
Don't forget the hardware too for the USB connectivity. The Mac versions were Firewire.
But where exactly is the iPod-killer from Microsoft? Oh, that's right. There isn't one.
Microsoft don't want to produce an "iPod-killer", they want someone else to come up with that - just so long as it runs their software.
Far more money in it that way.
Sales of the Mac only iPod were pretty good but no-where near stellar until a PC version was released.
That is probably what Balmer is commenting on.
Pretty true. I'm sure that there will be 10 or so +5 rated posters who say that all the music on their iPod is legit, but Slashdot isn't indicative of the world and you'd be niave to think anything else.
He appears convinced Microsoft will lead the way in Digital Rights Management
Probably true. Microsoft have control of the desktop market and are playing into the content providers hands. They'll happily embrace anything which is stricter on the end-user in the name of revenues and he knows it.
also believes Microsoft will steal a march on Apple in making the digital home a reality because Apple "doesn't have the volumes".
Again probably true. Think a couple of years down the line when you either have a choice of 4 models supporting AAC+ or 150 products all supporting WMA.
Not forgetting the intense competition from both hardware manufacturers and those who run WMA music stores - in which both will be aiming to provide the best features and functionality for the best price. When Apple's only competition is themselves, then there is less of an incentive (look at Palm procrastinating for years as a fine example)
Generally I think he's pretty much on the ball, although I have no doubt that the predictable response from Slashbots will be "i won't buy from Microsoft" and "All my music is legit" - when, in fact, there are a lot of people who will and also have large numbers of music on their iPod which is legally questionable.
Hard as it to believe, HP's grand wrapping of the smartest severs, storage, networking and software products on the planet could not find enough buyers.
So it was good technology, but they couldn't find enough buyers. So it was losing money. What do you propose they do with technology that no-one wants to buy? Keep it running and losing money just because it's "cool"?
You bitch about the music industry and their outdated business model yet it seems like this technology has an equally flawed one too (that is, no-one wanted to purchase it). Yes I'm being harsh, but unless I get any more facts I'm inclined to believe that Carly killed it off because it was losing more money than it was making.
Microsoft have enough cash in the bank to allow nearly all of their departments to make money - not everyone else has this luxury.
Surely they should be encoding their date of birth on there and not age?
Otherwise, come the kids birthday, the token will need updating again.
This could be because those people have never been affected by all the exploits that are out there.
Think of it like a house with a dodgy lock, you don't bother getting around to changing it because it's the last thing on your mind. As soon as you get broken into, you'll fix it.
These people just haven't been given an incentive to change yet. They're happy with what they have and aren't interested in changing. Banks rely on this sort of apathy all the time - otherwise you'd get some decent competition when you're shopping around for a new current account.
Actually Microsoft just provide the industry with the ability to DRM their content if they so wish. At no point does Microsoft force DRM upon you, this is a decision made by the content providers - not Microsoft.
The content providers could easily produce content in a Microsoft format with no DRM at all, if they wanted to.
Sadly nearly all of them decide against that.
"Index of" mp3
gives you access to rather a lot of files. You can also replace mp3 with various other suffixes for added fun.
Don't forget that removing the filetype and including "site:yourdomain.com" will allow you to quickly check if any of your folders are visible to the world that shouldn't be.
A very good point. As far as I am concerned an item of hardware "failed" if I plug it in, run some installer application and i am unable to sucessfully use it.
I, personally, am not prepared to spend the next 30 minutes fiddling around with settings, config files and other things just to get the thing actually working. If the configuration script/installer can't do that for me, then it is not suitable for a desktop.
But that is because I consider an operating system merely to be a tool to get other things done. However other people may be more willing to hack a it until it does - but frankly, I don't have the patience.