If that's the case, and its not a problem, then why are these carriers/manufacturers locking the device down so much. You'd think they'd be happy to sell you a new phone.
Can a factory reset not fix it anyway, or would you need to blow a new rom onto it? If so, couldn't the manufacturer put a copy of the original roms in there too ready to copy over the new one - like my motherboard has.
ooh - taxman issued certs. There's nothing in the world that's not going to be given the same level of scrutiny as those guys.
The expense might not be a problem, once you've submitted your tax return, the taxman sends you a cert in return along with your bill. They could generate them easily enough, and deliver them as QR codes or on cd for extra cost.
In reality you just need to find a way that you trust the original delivery of the key, once you've done that all's good. So, what would you trust to get the key from your bank?
Obviously going to the bank's HQ and getting your cert on a gold bar would be best. How else would you know that the bank can safely keep your cash? Or mabe the government coudl start printing QR codes on banknotes - you trust the note in your wallet to be tradeable for stuff after all.
Other than that, would a 2-part of postal delivery of a CD alongside an email be ok for you? An attacker would have to compromise both, and that's not going to be too easy. Maybe a postal delivery of a CD, and a separately-sent phone number to phone to verify yourself and get the 2nd part of the key? They do that for credit cards don't they, is that good enough for you?
To guarantee secure comms with your bank's website after that, maybe you would have to send your key to them so every login attempt you make would have the bank authenticate you, would that be ok to guard against dodgy DNS entries? (ie you would never log in using only your userid, you'd automatically be registered with the bank so that it displays your name or special code or whatever on the home page in big letters - something a MitM attacker would not know).
At some point you're going to have to trust that the key was delivered safely, and in the real world that means you're going to have to accept a certain (but small) amount of risk traded against paranoia-busting security.
I don't think "tablets" are going to die outright, but I do think they're a passing fad
look, all I know is that Captain Picard has a tablet, and he lives in the 24th century or something, so they obviously can't be a fad. ok.
Its about time computers became consumer devices and not geek-only toys. This is probably the biggest reason why ordinary Joe Public likes them. Its probably the other reason why Windows Phone 7 havn't sold very well, everyone knows 'Windows' and associates it with 'PiTA'.
Tablets are a FAD... They have been working on tablets since the late 90's... They have been pushing people towards them for ages... They even developed a special build of Windows XP for them...
If you can't beat them.. make up stories saying they're no good and that you never wanted to be in the tablet marketplace anyway, and besides you could have done one if you wanted to.
I think that's the point. Who cares if you can port between two things that don't run the same kind of software?
erm.. isn't that the point of "easy portability" - you can take one thing and make it work on both platforms. that's what they're touting here after all.
the obfuscated coders problem is different to this - this is the dumbing down of programming as a skill, the coders you complain of are "too clever for their own good", but at least they are skilled. Someone just needs to tell them to stop playing with their toys and work towards a maintainable solution instead.
Even without any #define macros present, I still can't tell what a single snippet of C++ code is going to do. (Does the simple statement: C++; open a temporary file, and record the number of increments or throw an exception?
to be fair, all the other 'oo' languages don't let you do that either, and C can give you the same problems if you're using #defines (C's equivalent to operator overloading:) )
At least in C++, you can look at the header file for the class definition and see what its doing. In languages like C#, those overloads can be anywhere - not even associated with the class itself. Scripting languages can be the same,
Still, I don't think C++ needs more low-level features, it really needs a higher level library of useful stuff - like boost but even higher level than that. And you're right - it really needs more consistency, even if that means breaking a bit of older code. Your examples show that the language is dying of old age now, its not the lean and fit language of its youth, especially as they're adding more wrinkles to it now. This is the thing that worries me (as a C++ dev) most.
I think its more the modern-day version of 'VB devs are crap'.
Not that anyone doing.NET development is rubbish, its just that if you find someone with only.NET on his CV, chances are he's just a Visual-Studio point and clicker, not a "real" developer.
I think (or would hope) that he means that anyone trained in.NET development is the equivalent of the burger-button-pushers. They only know how to put the burger in the and press the lights,
That you can do more, or with different tools, isn't the point - it's that these devs are not trained to be that good.
This is perhaps the problem with the 'easy to use', 'developer productivity' languages. Whilst you'd never question that a dev who only know PHP is likely to be unable to turn his hand to the complex or unusual tasks, the same does apply a lot to the.NET devs too. Its not their fault, its not.NET's fault, its the way its designed. Its the way it's supposed to be as that's the design decisions that were made to make the language that gives you a lot of developer productivity.
However, I'd be more concerned about devs with *only*.NET on their CVs. They're not not going to worry about a C++ guy who has said he also did a bit of.NET, PHP, javascript, Ruby, Java, C, Smalltalk and Concurrent Euclid. Its the guys who only know how to drive Visual Studio that you do have to worry about.
You're confusing a specific tool (encryption) with the job (a browser establishing that a connection is sufficiently secure to justify displaying the "golden padlock" that non-technical users are told to look for before they enter their credit card details).
confusing a specific tool (encryption) with a different tool (authentication).
If you use a self-signed cert, you can guarantee that the guy sitting next to you using starbucks' wifi cannot read your 'hunnybunny' slashdot posts. You cannot guarantee that the website you're connected to is slashdot however, but you can't do that with plain http either.
So we have 3 desired scenarios, or which only 2 are provided for by the current systems: 1. plain old http where anyone can see what you're up to. 2. full-on https with encryption of all your traffic *and* certainty that the destination is who it says it is. 3. a middle ground of encryption where you trust the destination is ok (or you don't care so much if you are victim of a man-in-the-middle attack)
I'd say a system where the self-signed certs are not blown up as huge security risks, but gave you a warning and a red padlock or similar, then we'd get some benefit from the 3rd, middle-ground https.
I think the average user wouldn't understand it though - people who think the blue E is "the internet" - and for them, they've just about grasped the padlock concept. Telling them there's a third option would take some doing!
They have no demonstrated track record of developing a competent, competitive smartphone OS
whilst true, they did develop their own Linux-based OS for the Razr v8 (which I had), which provided many good features even though it effectively pre-dated today's 'smartphones'. I could read email and browse the web (even though I didn't as you couldn't get data plans back then).
So, I think they would probably do well developing their own, whether that's a good or bad thing for us geeks and consumers remains to be seen. Chances are they'll develop their own Linux-based phone OS, make it compatible with android apps (like WebOS has done) and then lock it down so tightly it'll squeak every time you take it out of your pocket.
I guess the reason they don;t want to help Google improve Android is that Android is not open enopugh for them - they'd effectively have to licence their own code back from Google once it had been folded into Android. If Andoid was a completely open-source app that required no licencing whatsoever, then improving it would be a terrific potential for all these companies.
I don't know nor care - corporate IT said "don't use it" so I'm not. I use Firefox so I really, really don't care.
The main apps we use are Siebel from Oracle, and Great Plains from Microsoft. Both are "enterprise" apps, if you know what I mean. I think there are some accounting-only apps that are similarly good.
hence my point that an option to control this behaviour would be a good thing.
Re:So is there a way to revert to the old layout y
on
Firefox 4, A Day Later
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Maybe the problem there is that the titlebar does have a use if you want to move the entire browser window about. In which case, its not unused, its a minefield of tabs to click on:)
Menu's are good, they provide a very consistent user interface to control an app. When you get rid of them, you end up in territory that can best be described as 'useless' - re the Microsoft Office 'orb'.
yes, I like the awesomebar too - my only gripe with it is that it stores every page I visit at a site, instead of storing only the top-level page. (ie so if I look at a shopping site that has a different product per page, I get lots of suggestions for the same site. You could say this is intentional, but I'd like to turn it off)
There's still no option to control that unfortunately.
no, he; actually says "Firefox took 2 years to go from version 3.5 to version 4", whereas Microsoft managed to put out a beta and a release candidate in that time - go microsoft devs!
I suppose he completely forgot about Firefox 3.6 while he was kissing Ballmer's shiny bum, and the 12 (?) beta releases that FF put out, or the 2 release candidates.
Not that I consider a beta or a RC a proper release - they're 'toys' for the early adopters to play with, but regardless of that, you cannot be considered a serious journalist if you don't compare the same way.
Incidentally, I can say that IE9 will not get a foothold too much - we've just had an email sent out from corporate IT saying "don't install it, it breaks all our lovely enterprise apps". So I could install it, but then I wouldn't be able to fill in my timesheet (I know, the pain) so I guess I'd better do as they say and continue all my usual surfing using FF4. I know my salesman has converted to Chrome and he barely knows what the internet is so I can't say IE9's future is as cheerleader-bright as he thinks it is.
and also because they have to get extra capacity to handle all the downloads, and if everyone in the world was told to download on monday at noon GMT, the servers would collapse and no-one would get it.
As it is, a couple of days staggered release suggests that the overall 'download experience' will not be totally disastrous.
now, if they bittorrented it, it'd be a different matter and I'd expect simultaneous releases then.
ah, you want a language that automatically frees your memory for you, but still requires you to manually manage handles, non-managed resources, references to live objects (*especially* event delegates), and any object that contains a long-lived or external item (such as a socket, DB connection or file).
Or you could use a language that gave you much better control over your memory and object lifetimes with features such as RAII and smart wrappers, and still provide C interface where needed.
I prefer to pick the platform where most consumers buy the stuff I write. The tool itself is really of secondary importance, unless I work for free.
What's wrong with Silverlight - well, to be fair to it, its not a language, its declarative XML-based markup that has C# behind it to do the good bits. Its a bit like HTML + javascript overall.
But my point is that I don't agree with the plethora of languages, frameworks and platforms that have appeared recently. I know MS is trying to provide a single, common platform based around.NET for all developers to use... the trouble is, that platform is common only for Windows developers, and I have issues with that kind of lock in. I disagree with objective-c for the same reason, we all spend our efforts writing code for 1 platform and than have to manage the pain of porting or rewriting for the others.
So, for Silverlight. what's wrong with it is that its a Microsoft only language. If I have to write a XML-based markup, I'd prefer it to be a more open, standard one like HTML5 with javascript, even if Silverlight+C# is 'better'. The disadvantages of it being a 'proprietary' platform outweigh the benefits to society.
You're quite right about them all being tools, and only bad programmers blame their tools:) but if I need a hammer, I want a lump of metal firmly attached to a lump of wood, not a super-charged hammering device that requires special batteries from the hammer corporation that will only bang in x-shaped nails that can be purchased only after signing a licencing agreement.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that would be an interesting development - Mono first embracing then extending .NET (you know what follows).
well, if you can fix that with a razor and start looking like Patrick Stewart then you'll be fighting the totty off.
And no, having your head patted doesn't make you go bald.
If that's the case, and its not a problem, then why are these carriers/manufacturers locking the device down so much. You'd think they'd be happy to sell you a new phone.
Can a factory reset not fix it anyway, or would you need to blow a new rom onto it? If so, couldn't the manufacturer put a copy of the original roms in there too ready to copy over the new one - like my motherboard has.
ooh - taxman issued certs. There's nothing in the world that's not going to be given the same level of scrutiny as those guys.
The expense might not be a problem, once you've submitted your tax return, the taxman sends you a cert in return along with your bill. They could generate them easily enough, and deliver them as QR codes or on cd for extra cost.
I suppose they could email it to you :)
In reality you just need to find a way that you trust the original delivery of the key, once you've done that all's good.
So, what would you trust to get the key from your bank?
Obviously going to the bank's HQ and getting your cert on a gold bar would be best. How else would you know that the bank can safely keep your cash? Or mabe the government coudl start printing QR codes on banknotes - you trust the note in your wallet to be tradeable for stuff after all.
Other than that, would a 2-part of postal delivery of a CD alongside an email be ok for you? An attacker would have to compromise both, and that's not going to be too easy.
Maybe a postal delivery of a CD, and a separately-sent phone number to phone to verify yourself and get the 2nd part of the key? They do that for credit cards don't they, is that good enough for you?
To guarantee secure comms with your bank's website after that, maybe you would have to send your key to them so every login attempt you make would have the bank authenticate you, would that be ok to guard against dodgy DNS entries? (ie you would never log in using only your userid, you'd automatically be registered with the bank so that it displays your name or special code or whatever on the home page in big letters - something a MitM attacker would not know).
At some point you're going to have to trust that the key was delivered safely, and in the real world that means you're going to have to accept a certain (but small) amount of risk traded against paranoia-busting security.
yeah, me too - I mean, I not only ignore TFA (as is customary), but now I think I shall ignore the summary too.
If this is successful (and frankly, I can't see why not) I think that I may start ignoring the title as well in future.
I don't think "tablets" are going to die outright, but I do think they're a passing fad
look, all I know is that Captain Picard has a tablet, and he lives in the 24th century or something, so they obviously can't be a fad. ok.
Its about time computers became consumer devices and not geek-only toys. This is probably the biggest reason why ordinary Joe Public likes them. Its probably the other reason why Windows Phone 7 havn't sold very well, everyone knows 'Windows' and associates it with 'PiTA'.
Tablets are a FAD... They have been working on tablets since the late 90's... They have been pushing people towards them for ages... They even developed a special build of Windows XP for them...
If you can't beat them.. make up stories saying they're no good and that you never wanted to be in the tablet marketplace anyway, and besides you could have done one if you wanted to.
I think that's the point. Who cares if you can port between two things that don't run the same kind of software?
erm.. isn't that the point of "easy portability" - you can take one thing and make it work on both platforms. that's what they're touting here after all.
the obfuscated coders problem is different to this - this is the dumbing down of programming as a skill, the coders you complain of are "too clever for their own good", but at least they are skilled. Someone just needs to tell them to stop playing with their toys and work towards a maintainable solution instead.
Even without any #define macros present, I still can't tell what a single snippet of C++ code is going to do. (Does the simple statement: C++; open a temporary file, and record the number of increments or throw an exception?
to be fair, all the other 'oo' languages don't let you do that either, and C can give you the same problems if you're using #defines (C's equivalent to operator overloading :) )
At least in C++, you can look at the header file for the class definition and see what its doing. In languages like C#, those overloads can be anywhere - not even associated with the class itself. Scripting languages can be the same,
Still, I don't think C++ needs more low-level features, it really needs a higher level library of useful stuff - like boost but even higher level than that. And you're right - it really needs more consistency, even if that means breaking a bit of older code. Your examples show that the language is dying of old age now, its not the lean and fit language of its youth, especially as they're adding more wrinkles to it now. This is the thing that worries me (as a C++ dev) most.
I can see why there's so much favour towards D.
I think its more the modern-day version of 'VB devs are crap'.
Not that anyone doing .NET development is rubbish, its just that if you find someone with only .NET on his CV, chances are he's just a Visual-Studio point and clicker, not a "real" developer.
I think (or would hope) that he means that anyone trained in .NET development is the equivalent of the burger-button-pushers. They only know how to put the burger in the and press the lights,
That you can do more, or with different tools, isn't the point - it's that these devs are not trained to be that good.
This is perhaps the problem with the 'easy to use', 'developer productivity' languages. Whilst you'd never question that a dev who only know PHP is likely to be unable to turn his hand to the complex or unusual tasks, the same does apply a lot to the .NET devs too. Its not their fault, its not .NET's fault, its the way its designed. Its the way it's supposed to be as that's the design decisions that were made to make the language that gives you a lot of developer productivity.
However, I'd be more concerned about devs with *only* .NET on their CVs. They're not not going to worry about a C++ guy who has said he also did a bit of .NET, PHP, javascript, Ruby, Java, C, Smalltalk and Concurrent Euclid. Its the guys who only know how to drive Visual Studio that you do have to worry about.
I'd put it slightly differently:
You're confusing a specific tool (encryption) with the job (a browser establishing that a connection is sufficiently secure to justify displaying the "golden padlock" that non-technical users are told to look for before they enter their credit card details).
confusing a specific tool (encryption) with a different tool (authentication).
If you use a self-signed cert, you can guarantee that the guy sitting next to you using starbucks' wifi cannot read your 'hunnybunny' slashdot posts. You cannot guarantee that the website you're connected to is slashdot however, but you can't do that with plain http either.
So we have 3 desired scenarios, or which only 2 are provided for by the current systems:
1. plain old http where anyone can see what you're up to.
2. full-on https with encryption of all your traffic *and* certainty that the destination is who it says it is.
3. a middle ground of encryption where you trust the destination is ok (or you don't care so much if you are victim of a man-in-the-middle attack)
I'd say a system where the self-signed certs are not blown up as huge security risks, but gave you a warning and a red padlock or similar, then we'd get some benefit from the 3rd, middle-ground https.
I think the average user wouldn't understand it though - people who think the blue E is "the internet" - and for them, they've just about grasped the padlock concept. Telling them there's a third option would take some doing!
They have no demonstrated track record of developing a competent, competitive smartphone OS
whilst true, they did develop their own Linux-based OS for the Razr v8 (which I had), which provided many good features even though it effectively pre-dated today's 'smartphones'. I could read email and browse the web (even though I didn't as you couldn't get data plans back then).
So, I think they would probably do well developing their own, whether that's a good or bad thing for us geeks and consumers remains to be seen. Chances are they'll develop their own Linux-based phone OS, make it compatible with android apps (like WebOS has done) and then lock it down so tightly it'll squeak every time you take it out of your pocket.
I guess the reason they don;t want to help Google improve Android is that Android is not open enopugh for them - they'd effectively have to licence their own code back from Google once it had been folded into Android. If Andoid was a completely open-source app that required no licencing whatsoever, then improving it would be a terrific potential for all these companies.
I don't know nor care - corporate IT said "don't use it" so I'm not. I use Firefox so I really, really don't care.
The main apps we use are Siebel from Oracle, and Great Plains from Microsoft. Both are "enterprise" apps, if you know what I mean. I think there are some accounting-only apps that are similarly good.
hence my point that an option to control this behaviour would be a good thing.
Maybe the problem there is that the titlebar does have a use if you want to move the entire browser window about. In which case, its not unused, its a minefield of tabs to click on :)
Menu's are good, they provide a very consistent user interface to control an app. When you get rid of them, you end up in territory that can best be described as 'useless' - re the Microsoft Office 'orb'.
yes, I like the awesomebar too - my only gripe with it is that it stores every page I visit at a site, instead of storing only the top-level page. (ie so if I look at a shopping site that has a different product per page, I get lots of suggestions for the same site. You could say this is intentional, but I'd like to turn it off)
There's still no option to control that unfortunately.
no, he; actually says "Firefox took 2 years to go from version 3.5 to version 4", whereas Microsoft managed to put out a beta and a release candidate in that time - go microsoft devs!
I suppose he completely forgot about Firefox 3.6 while he was kissing Ballmer's shiny bum, and the 12 (?) beta releases that FF put out, or the 2 release candidates.
Not that I consider a beta or a RC a proper release - they're 'toys' for the early adopters to play with, but regardless of that, you cannot be considered a serious journalist if you don't compare the same way.
Incidentally, I can say that IE9 will not get a foothold too much - we've just had an email sent out from corporate IT saying "don't install it, it breaks all our lovely enterprise apps". So I could install it, but then I wouldn't be able to fill in my timesheet (I know, the pain) so I guess I'd better do as they say and continue all my usual surfing using FF4. I know my salesman has converted to Chrome and he barely knows what the internet is so I can't say IE9's future is as cheerleader-bright as he thinks it is.
and also because they have to get extra capacity to handle all the downloads, and if everyone in the world was told to download on monday at noon GMT, the servers would collapse and no-one would get it.
As it is, a couple of days staggered release suggests that the overall 'download experience' will not be totally disastrous.
now, if they bittorrented it, it'd be a different matter and I'd expect simultaneous releases then.
you mean "dear Microsoft, we saw that you gave Nokia $1 billion to develop your phones for you, so we'd like that too. Cheque would be fine, thanks."
ah, you want a language that automatically frees your memory for you, but still requires you to manually manage handles, non-managed resources, references to live objects (*especially* event delegates), and any object that contains a long-lived or external item (such as a socket, DB connection or file).
Or you could use a language that gave you much better control over your memory and object lifetimes with features such as RAII and smart wrappers, and still provide C interface where needed.
I prefer to pick the platform where most consumers buy the stuff I write. The tool itself is really of secondary importance, unless I work for free.
What's wrong with Silverlight - well, to be fair to it, its not a language, its declarative XML-based markup that has C# behind it to do the good bits. Its a bit like HTML + javascript overall.
But my point is that I don't agree with the plethora of languages, frameworks and platforms that have appeared recently. I know MS is trying to provide a single, common platform based around .NET for all developers to use... the trouble is, that platform is common only for Windows developers, and I have issues with that kind of lock in. I disagree with objective-c for the same reason, we all spend our efforts writing code for 1 platform and than have to manage the pain of porting or rewriting for the others.
So, for Silverlight. what's wrong with it is that its a Microsoft only language. If I have to write a XML-based markup, I'd prefer it to be a more open, standard one like HTML5 with javascript, even if Silverlight+C# is 'better'. The disadvantages of it being a 'proprietary' platform outweigh the benefits to society.
You're quite right about them all being tools, and only bad programmers blame their tools :) but if I need a hammer, I want a lump of metal firmly attached to a lump of wood, not a super-charged hammering device that requires special batteries from the hammer corporation that will only bang in x-shaped nails that can be purchased only after signing a licencing agreement.
yes, quite right - 14 million for that quarter, not 40. sorry guys.