NT's security model is excellent. It just took MS a while to start enforcing its usage.
The NT security model is competitive with the Unix security model. But both of these models are out of date. Their fundamental flaw is that the program inherits the user's permission. That may have made sense in the 1970s on Unix when programs were a lot simpler, users were all reasonably experienced, and there was no such thing as downloading an.exe from the Internet. But it makes no sense now.
UAC has been successful in weeding out the worst excesses of programs requiring admin access when they really don't need it. It has made Windows systems safer. But there are still plenty of things a malicious application can do with only user-level access: spam, DDoS, steal or delete personal information, and so forth.
The Android security model is much better because it enforces permissions on the application level, rather than the user level. An application has to tell the OS what specific permissions it needs, and the OS won't let it do anything that isn't in the list. This at least opens the possibility that an alert user might notice malware asking for rights that it shouldn't need to have to fulfill its ostensible purpose.
It's just a formality that a judge is declaring email not electronic storage. They ALREADY have access to all electronic communications and all storage. They HAVE IT. They may or may not deny it.
No, it is not just a formality. They may have it anyway, but they can't use it as evidence in court if it is illegally obtained.
Also coming in Firefox 17 is support for Mozilla's "Social API." The announcement describes it thus: "Much like the OpenSearch standard, the Social API enables developers to integrate social services into the browser in a way that is meaningful and helpful to users. As services integrate with Firefox via the Social API sidebar, it will be easy for you to keep up with friends and family anywhere you go on the Web without having to open a new Web page or switch between tabs. You can stay connected to your favorite social network even while you are surfing the Web, watching a video or playing a game."
Can someone explain to me why crap like this is being incorporated into Firefox as a core feature, but if we want a traditional status bar or address bar, that has to be a plugin?
Am I missing something? Isn't this going to hurt Linux a lot more than it is going to hurt nVidia? Sure, it would be great if nVidia open-sourced their driver code, but it's pretty clear that this is not going to happen. What effect will this have other than to make Linux drivers for nVidia cards of inferior quality?
For Linux the religion, this is a triumph. For Linux the operating system, it is a major setback.
the transition to metric still isn't second nature, after almost two full years
About 25 years ago, when I was in elementary school, we were taught the metric system and told that the US would probably be transitioning Real Soon Now. When I told my parents, they laughed and said that they were told the same thing when they were in school.
Transition to metric in the US? Never gonna happen.
You're vaguely aware that the car isn't going to the freeway today â" there must have been a hack-cident â" and you feel irritation yet again at the arbitrarily low speed limits, wishing there was a way to ignore them.
First off, what kind of dumbass would make a driverless car that can be hacked from the outside? The worst an intruder without physical access to the vehicle should be able to do is jam GPS, and even then a well-designed system should be able to use cached map data.
Secondly, the reason speed limits are set arbitrarily low is so the cops can collect revenue from drivers. In a world of all driverless cars, speeding tickets go away and so does the rationale for these limits. With drivers (voters) complaining and the cops and local governments no longer raking in ticket money, raising the limits becomes a political no-brainer.
Walking into to your office, you drop your phone into its dock and flip on the display, thus interacting with the only two objects on your desk. The display, nearly five feet across (1.5 meters, you mean) scans your CID and instantly restores the projects you were working on yesterday. You notice a handful of button icons are different than they were before. There must have been an OS update overnight.
Good thing you're in advertising because I can't imagine anyone trying to get any real work done this way. The truth is that the desktop/laptop PC isn't going anywhere. It's being supplemented, not replaced. Tablets and phones are consumption devices. And no sensible IT department is going to let a third party vendor change user interfaces overnight with no time for training. That's a recipe for disaster. Whoever wrote this knows nothing about how corporate (or even small business) IT works.
The local police force has been tasked with controlling wireless transmissions, and they're being run ragged trying to construct monitoring stations and conduct wardriving patrols with limited manpower. Nobody is willing to take chances after last year's nuclear incident.
Is the premise here that everyone forgets everything they know about computer security in the next 15 years? Who exposed a nuclear system to the public Internet to the extent that some idiot could hack it via a WIRELESS connection?
soda is a rare treat these days, because of the tax
This kind of crap is very popular among a certain sector of policy wonks, but it will never happen because it's absolute political poison. No one who cares about re-election will propose it.
If you run any business beyond the level of a mom-and-pop restaurant, you are in the IT business whether you want to be or not. The only question is whether you will leverage IT as a strategic asset or be outcompeted by those who do.
Do you REALLY want to live in a world where what rights you have are decided by someone else? Granted by government? Taken away by government?
You already live in that world, and so does everyone else. You can claim all you want that your rights are granted by God or Nature, but see how much good it does you to petition God or Nature if and when they are taken away.
Under Lockean social contract theory, people relinquish some of their primeval rights to live more comfortably within a settled society. That more accurately describes how things work in most of the modern First World. "The Government" isn't supposed to be some alien being; it's supposed to be We, the People, acting collectively to provide the public goods set forth in the Preamble to the Constitution. If We the People decide that banning high-powered lasers without a license is necessary to "insure domestic Tranquility" then that is what is going to happen.
So, the US consumers (us) complain about scratches caused by rubbing keys on the iPhone 5, which probably caused the whole "stricter quality control" thing, and then turn around and complain about the stricter quality control thing?
Maybe part of the problem is that Foxconn's idea of 'quality control' is demanding workers work longer hours under worse conditions.
But that only works if you have a powerful redistributionist state. Otherwise, virtually all the productivity gains from automation are hoarded by the capitalist and managerial classes.
Any allocation of spectrum for analog broadcast radio seems difficult to justify in the modern era. No one would consider creating the AM or FM bands if we were setting up things from the ground up now.
Why haven't we repurposed the obsolete AM Radio band for long-range wireless Internet access? It's been technologically obsolete for many years; FM is far superior in terms of sound quality (though even it is getting long in the tooth) and FM is just as widely supported, if not more so. All it contains now is talk radio, and that kind of stuff can just as easily be done with webcasts or podcasts.
Without Apple, we very well still have floppy drives and serial connectors on our notebooks.
Floppy drives were already dying; due to their stagnant capacity of 1.44mb, very few people used them for actual data storage by the turn of the century. By the time Apple removed them, their function had been reduced to emergency booting (and, on Windows, loading SATA/SCSI/RAID drivers on install). The advent of cheap CD-R drives, combined with the ability to boot the system directly from a CD, made the floppy drive unnecessary on PCs as well, and thus it was gradually removed.
As for serial ports, Apple didn't remove them much earlier than most mainstream PC vendors. Once dial-up lost its popularity, the serial port was no longer needed for external modem support, and the number of serial mice dwindled to the point where the connector became an unnecessary cost.
There was a similar case in the UK a couple of years ago.
If it happened in the UK then it's not really a similar case, since the legal environment is completely different. The injunction you linked to would be absolutely impossible in the US, where "prior restraint" of speech is prohibited under virtually all circumstances. Furthermore, while the UK has some of the most plaintiff-friendly libel laws in the world (and is a prime destination for libel tourism as a result), the US has a high burden of proof for libel lawsuits.
Is it more valuable to preserve jurors' right to overrule government policies, at the expense of sometimes evil jurors rendering unjust verdicts? Some people see voir dire as a form of jury tampering.
There is some argument to be made for jury nullification in criminal cases. You can plausibly argue that the jury is supposed to be a bulwark against government power, and that if they can't get 12 random people to agree that the law is just, then it shouldn't be enforced.
But I can't see any plausible argument for jury nullification in civil cases, which this was. Civil cases don't involve the full might of the government against an individual; they are disputes between two or more citizens. (Or, in this case, two multinational corporations). That being the case, having a predictable body of law and precedent seems much more important than letting jurors do whatever they want. In fact, it's not clear to me that having juries in civil cases is even a good idea in the first place. I do not know why the framers put this in the Constitution, but after 225 years of mediocre results, perhaps this particular provision should be reconsidered.
Unfortunately nVidia cards are a bit better (support for PhysX) which AMD doesn't
Unless you really need PhysX (which is a niche feature), my opinion is that AMD video cards are better. The 7770 and 7870 have excellent price/performace ratios and no major weaknesses. In particular, thermals and power consumption are better than on corresponding nVidia cards.
You're right about AMD's uncompetitiveness against Intel in the CPU market, though.
And what is Motorola, LG, HTC, Nokia, RIMM etc in your analysis? If Samsung can require Apple get a separate license, they can force any other mobile manufacturer to do so. But they haven't. This move seems clearly a reaction to Apple's lawsuit.
How is that legally relevant? Patents aren't like trademarks: there is no "use-or-lose" requirement and no obligation to pursue all infringers equally. Maybe there should be, but this isn't how the law works now. Samsung is completely within its legal rights to play hardball only with the company that is causing trouble for them, and let others go. Besides, how do you know that Motorola, LG, HTC, et al. haven't paid license fees or signed cross-license agreements?
I can understand that, given the amount of publicity both nationally and worldwide, the government really had little choice but to enforce the probation terms once it came out who the filmmaker really was and that he must have violated the terms to go on YouTube to upload it.
But when is someone going to point out that probation terms like these are absurd on their face? The Internet is a basic part of modern life. Everyone uses it, and even someone who tries to avoid it might well find themselves violating the terms by accident. (For instance, is using a GPS device counted as using the Internet? From a technical standpoint, that's often what is happening.) Probation terms ordering people to stay away from computers might have made some sense back in the days of Kevin Mitnick and Captain Crunch, but they are utter nonsense in 2012. You might as well make a probation term telling someone they can't watch TV or read a newspaper.
No one outside the IT industry cares about the boundary between OS and applications. That's purely inside baseball. End users want their product to work in a user-friendly, integrated fashion.
I agree that that map app is flawed, but first releases of anything usually is.
That's acceptable if you're doing something really new and innovative that no one has done before – like the original iPhone itself, or the first release of Siri. On the other hand, if you're entering an existing marketplace, your first release had better be at least as good as the entrenched players, preferably better, or at least offer some substantial other benefit to offset that. (This is why I think Windows Phone 8 is going to be a massive flop.)
This goes double if you're replacing functionality in an existing product. You can't replace a fully-working utility with a buggy beta and expect users not to complain loudly.
There is no better beta test than a general release.
Using customers as beta testers is a sadly common practice in the IT industry, but one reason why Apple has been so popular with users is that they've avoided doing this – up until now.
I bet a substantial number of people would have used it if Apple paid bounties for reporting missing/incorrect data.
Yes, that would cost money, but it would be much more in keeping with the Apple user experience philosophy than shanghaiing paying customers as beta testers (which is what they did with iOS 6).
A lot of people are thinking that the Apple Maps errors are just going to be shrugged off – that in a few months or a few years, they'll reach "good enough" status, and everyone will just forget this embarrassing incident. But I think it goes deeper than that. A major part of Apple's appeal, one big reason why they have been able to charge premium prices and get people lining up to buy their stuff, is that their devices "Just Work." Other companies routinely used their customers as beta testers (this is why it's common knowledge that you never buy a new version of Windows or Office until at least the first Service Pack is out). But Apple avoided that.
No longer. For Apple Maps users *are* beta testers, make no mistake about it. Apple's primary method of map improvement is for users to report problems so they can be fixed. This is unpaid QA work. This is not what Apple's customers thought they were signing up for.
Add that to the fact that the new Lightning connector on the iPhone has an IC designed solely to prevent creation of compatible cables, and of course the numerous lawsuits against Android vendors. It's increasingly starting to look like the post-Jobs Apple is no longer putting the customer experience first. Oh, they always cared about making money, but they understood that their business model was to make money by making the customers happy. Even moves that could be seen as anti-competitive, like the walled garden, could be justified from a user experience perspective (non-technical users probably *shouldn't* be randomly downloading un-vetted executable code, for security reasons). But with Maps, for the first time, they are sacrificing a significant aspect of user experience to internal politics. It is an ill omen for the future. If they continue on this road, what separates them any more from Microsoft, except that MS has a bigger installed base of business users?
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NT's security model is excellent. It just took MS a while to start enforcing its usage.
The NT security model is competitive with the Unix security model. But both of these models are out of date. Their fundamental flaw is that the program inherits the user's permission. That may have made sense in the 1970s on Unix when programs were a lot simpler, users were all reasonably experienced, and there was no such thing as downloading an .exe from the Internet. But it makes no sense now.
UAC has been successful in weeding out the worst excesses of programs requiring admin access when they really don't need it. It has made Windows systems safer. But there are still plenty of things a malicious application can do with only user-level access: spam, DDoS, steal or delete personal information, and so forth.
The Android security model is much better because it enforces permissions on the application level, rather than the user level. An application has to tell the OS what specific permissions it needs, and the OS won't let it do anything that isn't in the list. This at least opens the possibility that an alert user might notice malware asking for rights that it shouldn't need to have to fulfill its ostensible purpose.
It's just a formality that a judge is declaring email not electronic storage. They ALREADY have access to all electronic communications and all storage. They HAVE IT. They may or may not deny it.
No, it is not just a formality. They may have it anyway, but they can't use it as evidence in court if it is illegally obtained.
Also coming in Firefox 17 is support for Mozilla's "Social API." The announcement describes it thus: "Much like the OpenSearch standard, the Social API enables developers to integrate social services into the browser in a way that is meaningful and helpful to users. As services integrate with Firefox via the Social API sidebar, it will be easy for you to keep up with friends and family anywhere you go on the Web without having to open a new Web page or switch between tabs. You can stay connected to your favorite social network even while you are surfing the Web, watching a video or playing a game."
Can someone explain to me why crap like this is being incorporated into Firefox as a core feature, but if we want a traditional status bar or address bar, that has to be a plugin?
Am I missing something? Isn't this going to hurt Linux a lot more than it is going to hurt nVidia? Sure, it would be great if nVidia open-sourced their driver code, but it's pretty clear that this is not going to happen. What effect will this have other than to make Linux drivers for nVidia cards of inferior quality?
For Linux the religion, this is a triumph. For Linux the operating system, it is a major setback.
government investigators believe many of the bags come from China
No shit.
the transition to metric still isn't second nature, after almost two full years
About 25 years ago, when I was in elementary school, we were taught the metric system and told that the US would probably be transitioning Real Soon Now. When I told my parents, they laughed and said that they were told the same thing when they were in school.
Transition to metric in the US? Never gonna happen.
You're vaguely aware that the car isn't going to the freeway today â" there must have been a hack-cident â" and you feel irritation yet again at the arbitrarily low speed limits, wishing there was a way to ignore them.
First off, what kind of dumbass would make a driverless car that can be hacked from the outside? The worst an intruder without physical access to the vehicle should be able to do is jam GPS, and even then a well-designed system should be able to use cached map data.
Secondly, the reason speed limits are set arbitrarily low is so the cops can collect revenue from drivers. In a world of all driverless cars, speeding tickets go away and so does the rationale for these limits. With drivers (voters) complaining and the cops and local governments no longer raking in ticket money, raising the limits becomes a political no-brainer.
Walking into to your office, you drop your phone into its dock and flip on the display, thus interacting with the only two objects on your desk. The display, nearly five feet across (1.5 meters, you mean) scans your CID and instantly restores the projects you were working on yesterday. You notice a handful of button icons are different than they were before. There must have been an OS update overnight.
Good thing you're in advertising because I can't imagine anyone trying to get any real work done this way. The truth is that the desktop/laptop PC isn't going anywhere. It's being supplemented, not replaced. Tablets and phones are consumption devices. And no sensible IT department is going to let a third party vendor change user interfaces overnight with no time for training. That's a recipe for disaster. Whoever wrote this knows nothing about how corporate (or even small business) IT works.
The local police force has been tasked with controlling wireless transmissions, and they're being run ragged trying to construct monitoring stations and conduct wardriving patrols with limited manpower. Nobody is willing to take chances after last year's nuclear incident.
Is the premise here that everyone forgets everything they know about computer security in the next 15 years? Who exposed a nuclear system to the public Internet to the extent that some idiot could hack it via a WIRELESS connection?
soda is a rare treat these days, because of the tax
This kind of crap is very popular among a certain sector of policy wonks, but it will never happen because it's absolute political poison. No one who cares about re-election will propose it.
They are a finance company. Not an IT one
If you run any business beyond the level of a mom-and-pop restaurant, you are in the IT business whether you want to be or not. The only question is whether you will leverage IT as a strategic asset or be outcompeted by those who do.
Do you REALLY want to live in a world where what rights you have are decided by someone else? Granted by government? Taken away by government?
You already live in that world, and so does everyone else. You can claim all you want that your rights are granted by God or Nature, but see how much good it does you to petition God or Nature if and when they are taken away.
Under Lockean social contract theory, people relinquish some of their primeval rights to live more comfortably within a settled society. That more accurately describes how things work in most of the modern First World. "The Government" isn't supposed to be some alien being; it's supposed to be We, the People, acting collectively to provide the public goods set forth in the Preamble to the Constitution. If We the People decide that banning high-powered lasers without a license is necessary to "insure domestic Tranquility" then that is what is going to happen.
So, the US consumers (us) complain about scratches caused by rubbing keys on the iPhone 5, which probably caused the whole "stricter quality control" thing, and then turn around and complain about the stricter quality control thing?
Maybe part of the problem is that Foxconn's idea of 'quality control' is demanding workers work longer hours under worse conditions.
But that only works if you have a powerful redistributionist state. Otherwise, virtually all the productivity gains from automation are hoarded by the capitalist and managerial classes.
Any allocation of spectrum for analog broadcast radio seems difficult to justify in the modern era. No one would consider creating the AM or FM bands if we were setting up things from the ground up now.
Why haven't we repurposed the obsolete AM Radio band for long-range wireless Internet access? It's been technologically obsolete for many years; FM is far superior in terms of sound quality (though even it is getting long in the tooth) and FM is just as widely supported, if not more so. All it contains now is talk radio, and that kind of stuff can just as easily be done with webcasts or podcasts.
Without Apple, we very well still have floppy drives and serial connectors on our notebooks.
Floppy drives were already dying; due to their stagnant capacity of 1.44mb, very few people used them for actual data storage by the turn of the century. By the time Apple removed them, their function had been reduced to emergency booting (and, on Windows, loading SATA/SCSI/RAID drivers on install). The advent of cheap CD-R drives, combined with the ability to boot the system directly from a CD, made the floppy drive unnecessary on PCs as well, and thus it was gradually removed.
As for serial ports, Apple didn't remove them much earlier than most mainstream PC vendors. Once dial-up lost its popularity, the serial port was no longer needed for external modem support, and the number of serial mice dwindled to the point where the connector became an unnecessary cost.
When Jobs died, he was compared to Edison and Henry Ford and to Disney.
That sounds about right to me. Those guys could be spectacular assholes, too.
There was a similar case in the UK a couple of years ago.
If it happened in the UK then it's not really a similar case, since the legal environment is completely different. The injunction you linked to would be absolutely impossible in the US, where "prior restraint" of speech is prohibited under virtually all circumstances. Furthermore, while the UK has some of the most plaintiff-friendly libel laws in the world (and is a prime destination for libel tourism as a result), the US has a high burden of proof for libel lawsuits.
Is it more valuable to preserve jurors' right to overrule government policies, at the expense of sometimes evil jurors rendering unjust verdicts? Some people see voir dire as a form of jury tampering.
There is some argument to be made for jury nullification in criminal cases. You can plausibly argue that the jury is supposed to be a bulwark against government power, and that if they can't get 12 random people to agree that the law is just, then it shouldn't be enforced.
But I can't see any plausible argument for jury nullification in civil cases, which this was. Civil cases don't involve the full might of the government against an individual; they are disputes between two or more citizens. (Or, in this case, two multinational corporations). That being the case, having a predictable body of law and precedent seems much more important than letting jurors do whatever they want. In fact, it's not clear to me that having juries in civil cases is even a good idea in the first place. I do not know why the framers put this in the Constitution, but after 225 years of mediocre results, perhaps this particular provision should be reconsidered.
Unfortunately nVidia cards are a bit better (support for PhysX) which AMD doesn't
Unless you really need PhysX (which is a niche feature), my opinion is that AMD video cards are better. The 7770 and 7870 have excellent price/performace ratios and no major weaknesses. In particular, thermals and power consumption are better than on corresponding nVidia cards.
You're right about AMD's uncompetitiveness against Intel in the CPU market, though.
I can't speak for others, but 1080p on an 11.6" screen sounds next to impossible to read on without magnifying everything.
This is why Windows has a setting to change the DPI.
And what is Motorola, LG, HTC, Nokia, RIMM etc in your analysis? If Samsung can require Apple get a separate license, they can force any other mobile manufacturer to do so. But they haven't. This move seems clearly a reaction to Apple's lawsuit.
How is that legally relevant? Patents aren't like trademarks: there is no "use-or-lose" requirement and no obligation to pursue all infringers equally. Maybe there should be, but this isn't how the law works now. Samsung is completely within its legal rights to play hardball only with the company that is causing trouble for them, and let others go. Besides, how do you know that Motorola, LG, HTC, et al. haven't paid license fees or signed cross-license agreements?
In a dense area...
We're talking about Nebraska here.
I can understand that, given the amount of publicity both nationally and worldwide, the government really had little choice but to enforce the probation terms once it came out who the filmmaker really was and that he must have violated the terms to go on YouTube to upload it.
But when is someone going to point out that probation terms like these are absurd on their face? The Internet is a basic part of modern life. Everyone uses it, and even someone who tries to avoid it might well find themselves violating the terms by accident. (For instance, is using a GPS device counted as using the Internet? From a technical standpoint, that's often what is happening.) Probation terms ordering people to stay away from computers might have made some sense back in the days of Kevin Mitnick and Captain Crunch, but they are utter nonsense in 2012. You might as well make a probation term telling someone they can't watch TV or read a newspaper.
No one outside the IT industry cares about the boundary between OS and applications. That's purely inside baseball. End users want their product to work in a user-friendly, integrated fashion.
I agree that that map app is flawed, but first releases of anything usually is.
That's acceptable if you're doing something really new and innovative that no one has done before – like the original iPhone itself, or the first release of Siri. On the other hand, if you're entering an existing marketplace, your first release had better be at least as good as the entrenched players, preferably better, or at least offer some substantial other benefit to offset that. (This is why I think Windows Phone 8 is going to be a massive flop.)
This goes double if you're replacing functionality in an existing product. You can't replace a fully-working utility with a buggy beta and expect users not to complain loudly.
There is no better beta test than a general release.
Using customers as beta testers is a sadly common practice in the IT industry, but one reason why Apple has been so popular with users is that they've avoided doing this – up until now.
How many people would really have used it though?
I bet a substantial number of people would have used it if Apple paid bounties for reporting missing/incorrect data.
Yes, that would cost money, but it would be much more in keeping with the Apple user experience philosophy than shanghaiing paying customers as beta testers (which is what they did with iOS 6).
A lot of people are thinking that the Apple Maps errors are just going to be shrugged off – that in a few months or a few years, they'll reach "good enough" status, and everyone will just forget this embarrassing incident. But I think it goes deeper than that. A major part of Apple's appeal, one big reason why they have been able to charge premium prices and get people lining up to buy their stuff, is that their devices "Just Work." Other companies routinely used their customers as beta testers (this is why it's common knowledge that you never buy a new version of Windows or Office until at least the first Service Pack is out). But Apple avoided that.
No longer. For Apple Maps users *are* beta testers, make no mistake about it. Apple's primary method of map improvement is for users to report problems so they can be fixed. This is unpaid QA work. This is not what Apple's customers thought they were signing up for.
Add that to the fact that the new Lightning connector on the iPhone has an IC designed solely to prevent creation of compatible cables, and of course the numerous lawsuits against Android vendors. It's increasingly starting to look like the post-Jobs Apple is no longer putting the customer experience first. Oh, they always cared about making money, but they understood that their business model was to make money by making the customers happy. Even moves that could be seen as anti-competitive, like the walled garden, could be justified from a user experience perspective (non-technical users probably *shouldn't* be randomly downloading un-vetted executable code, for security reasons). But with Maps, for the first time, they are sacrificing a significant aspect of user experience to internal politics. It is an ill omen for the future. If they continue on this road, what separates them any more from Microsoft, except that MS has a bigger installed base of business users?