just buy the model you want from whoever happens to make it. they all source parts from same companies and past performance on not having exploding caps(or other quality issues) is no guarantee whatsoever that the next batch they buy is any better, as shown by dell and others. acer used to have all their hinges break from their laptops for a year, but that again could not be guessed by looking at their models prior and after those.
what I'm trying to say is that brand loyalty is just a recipe for the brand to sell you shit.
I agree about not having "brand loyalty", but disagree about all being the same in terms of quality. In my experience the Lenovo Thinkpads fx are certainly more consistently solidly built and have less issues than other PC laptops. A long time ago Toshiba had a similar thing going for it, but lost it. If Samsung should prove to be able to step up (they are making good attempts in their top end), I'd be happy to switch to Samsung over Lenovo, so not married to Lenovo by any means.
Even as a PC user I admit that same argument can be made for Macbooks, even if they too are just using standard PC components and Chinese production, there is a build quality difference vs the cheapest PCs.
Actually if Windows could 100% reliably sleep/hibernate AND 100% reliably wakeup then boot times are irrelevant. One of the significant attractions for me to move to using a Mac laptop is that I never have to turn it off - closing the lid sleeps instantly and wakeup is almost as fast and 100% reliable. It also has a practical (long enough) battery life to not be tied to the AC power supply, and in the event that the battery does run flat when asleep it will hibernate automatically. After many years using several different laptop brands and Windows versions I never got to the point where I could trust a Windows laptop to sleep and re-awake with 100% reliability, so I never took the risk. (I did use hibernate reliably on some machines but always invoked it manually). If power management on laptops works correctly in Win8 (the only Windows version I have not used on a laptop) then who cares about boot time?
Windows 8 sleep/resume on a modern ultrabook is in my experience just as quick and stable as OS-X on Macbook Air. And if you look at the comments by Win8 users here, most mention sleep/resume improvements at the same time they mention boot times, but the replies go off on the boot tangent only, ignoring the sleep/resume improvements called out.
Bingo. It takes a day or so to explore the new interface and do some research on the web to find out how to use it and a week or so to become used to it. One is forced to assume that the complainers are drooling morons who would be unable to cope with learning anything new without being spoon-fed. Heaven help these people if they had to learn something as complicated as a new programming language.
That used to be the kind of response uncomfortable newbies trying a new system used to get from some Linux users 10yrs ago that gave them a bad reputation for being elitist arrogant pricks.
I find it funny that the elitist arrogant pricks are now the early adopters of a new Windows version chiding those others that aren't so comfortable with the changes. And now the whining from longer term Linux users is now about hating recent desktop changes.
How times change.
Actually, I'm not sure this has changed that much. There has always been a strong push-back to changes in known UX and use on geek sites like Slashdot. The Windows XP UI got endless scorn when launched, now it is heralded as how things should stay by many. We sometimes post these arguments using "average Joe" as an excuse, but it seems to me that it is us geeks who are more set in our ways than casual users.
I still remember there being a very prevalent opinion on Slashdot that smartphones were a stupid development, a) because a phone was a device to call with, period, and b) it was much better to have multiple devices (MP3 player, compact camera, PDA/laptop, etc.) than combine it on a phone, and c) who would want greasy finger marks all over their phone screen?
Is there really a technical reason why it's not possible for them to dig in deeper into an android device assuming the user gives permission (as per the article)?
Yes.
In addition to the standard Linux security model, Android has an Application Sandbox which assigns a unique user ID (UID) to each app when it is run. The apps run as that UID, and can only interact with other apps through secure inter-app process communications.
There have been several well known (some even presented at Black Hat) ways of breaking out of the Android sandbox, and Linux privilege escalation exploits, to completely compromise an Android phone. The biggest problem with Android security though is that even Google has been good at adding security features and fixing vulnerabilities, most of the user base is on older vulnerable versions, with added "functionality" from handset makers and operators undermining security further.
Nowadays, if W8/Metro is what Microsoft expects the planet to use, they may be in for a shock. No serious enterprise will touch it (outside of certain "Platinum Partners" who drink Redmond-flavored koolaid by the tanker-truck), since it (currently) hampers the hell out of work. When home users buy a PC, they want a frickin' PC - and not some over-spec'd tablet with a keyboard lashed onto it.
How does replacing a pop-up start menu with a full page start menu, but otherwise make the OS faster in every way (boot, sleep/resume, use) and fully backwards compatible "hamper the hell out of work". I get that the new start menu can be jarring, and that the need to click once to get to traditional desktop mode can be irritating, but I'm really lost in the Slashdot hyperbole of how extremely bad this is. I agree that metro and desktop could have smoother co-existence, and better defaults to stay with one or the other for the people who want that. But as I have and use Win8 on a new non-touch laptop, I think the exaggerations are ridiculous.
And it is not all due to trust (or not) and maturity, so that bitcoin will eventually achieve the same. Major traditional currencies are so stable because there is major active intervention to stabilize them (among other things against the effects of attempted speculation), from national banks and monetary policies. Bitcoins don't have this, so won't be as stable. It will be much more speculative than traditional currencies, and more similar to having your savings in speculative stocks.
If you are thinking on the order of a year or two, I'd have to agree with you. ...
It will be interesting to see where Bitcoins will be in a hundred years, and in what state the U.S. Dollar and the Euro are going to be like in the same time frame.
What happens in 100 years is very theoretical. What happens this year and next with my money isn't. This was exactly my point. People need to understand the extreme short term risk involved, and not underplay that even if we like the concept.
NO, it hasn't been getting bad reviews, it has had some negative press based on some dodgy tests that try to use essentials for something it isn't really meant for. They throw zero day malware to test its heuristics, which are not wonderful. however in known malware (the stuff 99.9% of people need protection against) it is exceptionally good.
This is considered the leading AV review site in the world, not achieving their "certification" (the icon in the third column) in test is certainly a bad review, most well known security software manage to exceed that threshold. MSE didn't in the last two tests.
I think you are seriously mistaken there. It might be hard to imagine for a "power user", but lots of people right now are perfectly happy with a Chromebook already. The web as an application platform is a revolution which is just getting started, but already lots of people are using their computer mostly for the web and not much else.
The problem with a Chromebook though is the exact same as for the always-on game fiasco's of late. Sometimes you don't have a reliable connection, but still want to work/play.
The great thing about HTML5 is that it runs on many devices unlike Silverlight. With HTML5, there is a chance that I can actually stream content on my tablet, *BSD or Linux computer, Windows, Mac, iPhone, or consoles in my home. Netflix managed to get Wii, PS3, iPhone, iPad, etc. to stream their content so obviously they can already do it without silverlight. With both flash and silverlight dying, netflix has to find a solution to this problem.
A chance is exactly the right word. With the use of HTML5 Netflix is talking about you will be able to stream Netflix to all platforms that Netflix develop and distribute a HTML5 CDM plugin for.
Agree with much of what you are saying. Except that I think you do have too narrow definition of marketing. In product marketing, collecting user and market feedback, market requirements, identify opportunities and guide engineering in designing the product and UX *is* part of the responsibility in many organizations. I agree with the parent who said that iPhone was designed by marketing (and by designed I don't only mean the pretty looks) and that Apple is run by marketing, including the products.
The summary says: "It was the malware which affected as many Apple computers as the Conficker worm affected Windows PCs..."
This is obviously inaccurately rewritten from what Krebs said, which is "...Flashback [was] roughly as common for Macs as the Conficker Worm was for Windows PCs."
Those are not equivalent statements. The summary is equating raw numbers, while TFA is equating percentages.
Sorry, I just read that sentence and thought "no way in hell is that true." As confirmation, Wikipedia says Flashback hit 600,000 Macs, while Conficker infected between 9 and 15 million PCs.
You are right the summary can be interpreted as meaning actual numbers and not percentages. I didn't read it that way but maybe because I knew from before that Mac Flashback is the biggest malware epidemic in modern times in terms of percentage of user base affected (most accounts actually have it "beating" Conficker on Windows).
Of course the Windows user base is much bigger. But percentage of user base affected is the right metric to use if you want to look at risk of infection and infectability on a platform. This is still not a comparison Windows vs Mac in general, just the worst case from each platform. Windows currently has a longer tail of other cases of course. But it should be a much bigger wake-up call to the "Mac can't be infected" people than it was. Later versions of Mac Flashback did completely silent drive-by infection just by visiting a web page, not needing user interaction or admin password, something many Mac people still today seem to think only happens on Windows.
Um, that's a BIT of scaremongering... Did this idiot somehow confuse Google with Facebook? Yes, Google has had some minor screwups (and some, such as the Street View mess, could barely be considered a screwup but more of FUD from clueless users who don't understand that ANYONE can see the MAC address of a wifi AP...), but nothing as major and spectacular as Facebook's routine privacy screwups.
And yes, overall - I trust Google, as do MANY other people.
Google has admitted to collecting from peoples WiFi networks “URLs of requested Web pages, partial or complete email communications, and any confidential or private information being transmitted to or from the network user while the Street View cars were driving down streets.” One of many sources on this.. They call it an accident, but this data they have admitted to collecting is quite a bit more than MAC addresses.
Some people - especially here on Slashdot -- also seem to believe Google came clean on this on their own. When in fact they first guaranteed the German authorities (the first to pressure them on this) that they were not collecting anything. And first after the German authorities despite this assurance still demanded a full audit of the data anyway, did Google do their disclosure. This sequence of events was covered extensively in European press (one of many sources), and I don't know how mostly US geek sites ended up with an alternative impression.
It still can perfectly well be ascribed to a screw-up on Google's part (although in the FCC investigation report it is claimed the Google engineer who wrote the code knew about the collection and told colleguages about it). I'm not even sure how major I think it is, but it shouldn't be downplayed and described inaccurately either.
it's all minority report. every place you look, google glass will pop up a virtual billboard for you to see.
I don't get this kind of reaction. So what if the one out of the box does this? We'll just learn to jailbreak it (if needed) and install an adblocker, or how to install Linux on it or whatever.
Sometimes I have the impression technophiles' "think of the privacy implications!" is their own version of technophobes' "think of the children!" Me, I can't wait for this kind of think to come fast enough. I've grown reading and watching science fiction showing wearable computing, bionic implants, predictive smart assistants, 24/7 in-brain HUDs etc., and dreaming of it all. Now that part of it is becoming reality, and much earlier than I thought would happen thanks to Moore's Law, all I see in technology forums is FUD, FUD, FUD. What happened that caused technologists to becomes so damn cynical since just a few years ago? Is that just old age kicking in? *sigh*
You mean you have skipped all the darker Orwellian surveillance no more privacy sci-fi stories? Because there is quite a lot of them too..;) Problem is, doesn't help if you jailbreak and ad block yours, if you are filmed by all around you, feeding into a facial recognition capable search and tracking engine... But then, it very well might be that technology will make the notion of privacy something we have to forego, Google has already predicted this, but that sure makes some of the other discussions we have here about online privacy and anonymity rights quite meaningless.
I can opt out of wearing the goggles, so I don't have to be concerned with google pushing ads into my eyeballs. I can't opt out of other people capturing me with their goggles, but this is hardly different than people collecting video in public spaces with cameraphones or more traditional video capture devices. Google themselves could pay people to wander around public spaces and collect video, surreptitiously or otherwise.
I don't really get the controversy.
I wouldn't say it is exactly the same as camera phones, it is usually quite noticeable if someone is walking around using it as a camcorder. And they don't all feed into the same centralized Google search engine with facial recognition capability.
It is possible to use various "spy" cameras and techniques, but I would also frown upon people doing this too. But again, they don't all feed into the same massive data-aggregation/tracking engine. And this will never be comparable in volume of use to having a lot of people everywhere (if this catches on) potentially capturing you on film, even if mostly unintentionally.
That said, it might be that we have to completely give up the notion of privacy, as Google has claimed all along. As in the story The Light of Other Days, by Stephen Baxter/Arthur C. Clarke.
It's not webkit - all browsers on iOS are required to be thin wrappers around Safari. For example, Chrome is Safari with Chrome's tabs and branding.
Uhm, no, it is webkit that is the requirement. The phrase "thin wrappers around Safari" does not even make sense. Safari is a complete application, not a framework/library; there is no way on iOS to create an app that is a "thin wrapper" around another app.
This is incorrect. The requirement is that alternative browsers use the *built in* webkit and javascript engine. This is a very important distinction. Chrome on iOS is not allowed to supply and use its own webkit and javascript engine that Chrome is using on all other platforms, on iOS it is using the ones built in to iOS. Apple do not allow anyone to supply a rendering engine and javascript engine to iOS, regardless if it is webkit or not. This is why some call them just gui wrappers to the built on browser, which is basically what they are.
Because someone claiming to remember seeing you doing something stupid in that bar one time is the same as being filmed, tagged and published searchable on the net?
Many of them hardcoded launching IE because they were certain it was on the machine, rather than using any mechanism to launch a preferred browser.
Developers did it because MS encouraged them to. Thus reinforcing the lock in which is what the whole point of the EU complaint. Even if you went to a great deal of trouble to extirpate IE from your PC, you'd install some program and it would auomatically reinstall the fucking thing to take you to their fucking website or show you a help page. Or it would fail to install at all if you didn't let it.
The "integration" of IE/Trident in modern versions of Windows is exactly the same as the "integration" of Safari/Webkit on OS X. The rendering engine is a system control that the system and 3rd party apps depend on being there, and thus can't be "fully removed" (people making fun of this display technical ignorance). The browser front-end can though (and is then not used by the system), and you can install another browser that uses its' own rendering engine for web, but the built-in OS render control will still (have to) be there for help files, in-app HTML rendering, etc.
I moved my mom from SuSE to a Mac. Best thing ever.
The very few support calls I can solve with Teamviewer from work or home.
Windows isn't a system for the casual home-user. It only works reliably when an army of competent sysadmins pamper it daily. There's no point in giving a relative a Windows PC or laptop if you have to maintain it yourself.
I don't get paid enough at work to use Windows - I certainly don't want to play Windows sysadmin for free.
So, I really don't understand this (the highlighted part). I've not only run Windows fairly trouble free myself, but I "admin" it for a number of family and friends, and don't find it difficult at all. I guess you know what you know, but I would strongly contest that Linux or Mac is any easier. I've been running Linux as well since years and years, now it is Ubuntu, very early on I was running Red Hat.
After trying several different hand-me-downs over the years including a 486, original iMacs (Lemon-lime), and a recent desktop Apple, I've concluded that the next machine will be the iPad with the largest display that I can find.
Consuming content - check
App in the same place as it was before - check
buttons and menus not moved around even inadvertently - check
My mom loves seasonal wallpapers and screensavers - fuck you mom. Check.
Those are pretty poor examples. Almost any optical drive, barcode scanner or digital camera that will work without drivers on windows would do the same on OSX.
What? That was some twist to the conversation, look at this again:
Surface Pro at $100 less has no ethernet port
Neither do Macbook Air
or usb port
Yes it does.
or real keyboard?
Reviewers actually rate it as quite good, I haven't tried, have you? And you can of course add any external keyboard you want
Can't plug in an optical drive or barcode reader or digital camera?
Yes you can, all of that. As external (but that would also be the case with the Macbook Air
So? Google can hardly be held responsible for search engines being hard to build. And anti trust is meant to protect customers and consumers - not competition.
Bottom line - if customers don't like what Google is doing, they can move away at the click of a button. What more is there to be said about this?
I wasn't really arguing anti trust or not. Just pointing out that there is a problem with the "move away at a click of a button" argument if there is nothing to move to. I do believe people very seriously underestimate the insane table stake investments needed to build a competitor, even if Google did slack of and deserve competition. Again, not saying this alone is reason for anti trust regulation.
Microsoft was making it difficult for a customer to purchase a PC without Windows installed. It was also making life difficult for third party browsers. All of which limited customer choice.
In the search market, customers have all the choice in the world. No lock in. No costs of switching. Nothing.
All the choice in the world? How many full-functional general purpose search engines do you know that don't get data from either Google or Bing?
The barrier to competition on search is not the cost of switching to users, but the insane cost of building something that competes with Google. This is today a really hard problem, and Microsoft is spending billions of dollars per quarter on it.
Slashdot Mirror
just buy the model you want from whoever happens to make it. they all source parts from same companies and past performance on not having exploding caps(or other quality issues) is no guarantee whatsoever that the next batch they buy is any better, as shown by dell and others. acer used to have all their hinges break from their laptops for a year, but that again could not be guessed by looking at their models prior and after those.
what I'm trying to say is that brand loyalty is just a recipe for the brand to sell you shit.
I agree about not having "brand loyalty", but disagree about all being the same in terms of quality. In my experience the Lenovo Thinkpads fx are certainly more consistently solidly built and have less issues than other PC laptops. A long time ago Toshiba had a similar thing going for it, but lost it. If Samsung should prove to be able to step up (they are making good attempts in their top end), I'd be happy to switch to Samsung over Lenovo, so not married to Lenovo by any means.
Even as a PC user I admit that same argument can be made for Macbooks, even if they too are just using standard PC components and Chinese production, there is a build quality difference vs the cheapest PCs.
Actually if Windows could 100% reliably sleep/hibernate AND 100% reliably wakeup then boot times are irrelevant. One of the significant attractions for me to move to using a Mac laptop is that I never have to turn it off - closing the lid sleeps instantly and wakeup is almost as fast and 100% reliable. It also has a practical (long enough) battery life to not be tied to the AC power supply, and in the event that the battery does run flat when asleep it will hibernate automatically. After many years using several different laptop brands and Windows versions I never got to the point where I could trust a Windows laptop to sleep and re-awake with 100% reliability, so I never took the risk. (I did use hibernate reliably on some machines but always invoked it manually). If power management on laptops works correctly in Win8 (the only Windows version I have not used on a laptop) then who cares about boot time?
Windows 8 sleep/resume on a modern ultrabook is in my experience just as quick and stable as OS-X on Macbook Air. And if you look at the comments by Win8 users here, most mention sleep/resume improvements at the same time they mention boot times, but the replies go off on the boot tangent only, ignoring the sleep/resume improvements called out.
That used to be the kind of response uncomfortable newbies trying a new system used to get from some Linux users 10yrs ago that gave them a bad reputation for being elitist arrogant pricks.
I find it funny that the elitist arrogant pricks are now the early adopters of a new Windows version chiding those others that aren't so comfortable with the changes. And now the whining from longer term Linux users is now about hating recent desktop changes.
How times change.
Actually, I'm not sure this has changed that much. There has always been a strong push-back to changes in known UX and use on geek sites like Slashdot. The Windows XP UI got endless scorn when launched, now it is heralded as how things should stay by many. We sometimes post these arguments using "average Joe" as an excuse, but it seems to me that it is us geeks who are more set in our ways than casual users.
I still remember there being a very prevalent opinion on Slashdot that smartphones were a stupid development, a) because a phone was a device to call with, period, and b) it was much better to have multiple devices (MP3 player, compact camera, PDA/laptop, etc.) than combine it on a phone, and c) who would want greasy finger marks all over their phone screen?
Is there really a technical reason why it's not possible for them to dig in deeper into an android device assuming the user gives permission (as per the article)?
Yes.
In addition to the standard Linux security model, Android has an Application Sandbox which assigns a unique user ID (UID) to each app when it is run. The apps run as that UID, and can only interact with other apps through secure inter-app process communications.
http://source.android.com/tech/security/
There have been several well known (some even presented at Black Hat) ways of breaking out of the Android sandbox, and Linux privilege escalation exploits, to completely compromise an Android phone. The biggest problem with Android security though is that even Google has been good at adding security features and fixing vulnerabilities, most of the user base is on older vulnerable versions, with added "functionality" from handset makers and operators undermining security further.
Nowadays, if W8/Metro is what Microsoft expects the planet to use, they may be in for a shock. No serious enterprise will touch it (outside of certain "Platinum Partners" who drink Redmond-flavored koolaid by the tanker-truck), since it (currently) hampers the hell out of work. When home users buy a PC, they want a frickin' PC - and not some over-spec'd tablet with a keyboard lashed onto it.
How does replacing a pop-up start menu with a full page start menu, but otherwise make the OS faster in every way (boot, sleep/resume, use) and fully backwards compatible "hamper the hell out of work". I get that the new start menu can be jarring, and that the need to click once to get to traditional desktop mode can be irritating, but I'm really lost in the Slashdot hyperbole of how extremely bad this is. I agree that metro and desktop could have smoother co-existence, and better defaults to stay with one or the other for the people who want that. But as I have and use Win8 on a new non-touch laptop, I think the exaggerations are ridiculous.
And it is not all due to trust (or not) and maturity, so that bitcoin will eventually achieve the same. Major traditional currencies are so stable because there is major active intervention to stabilize them (among other things against the effects of attempted speculation), from national banks and monetary policies. Bitcoins don't have this, so won't be as stable. It will be much more speculative than traditional currencies, and more similar to having your savings in speculative stocks.
If you are thinking on the order of a year or two, I'd have to agree with you.
...
It will be interesting to see where Bitcoins will be in a hundred years, and in what state the U.S. Dollar and the Euro are going to be like in the same time frame.
What happens in 100 years is very theoretical. What happens this year and next with my money isn't. This was exactly my point. People need to understand the extreme short term risk involved, and not underplay that even if we like the concept.
NO, it hasn't been getting bad reviews, it has had some negative press based on some dodgy tests that try to use essentials for something it isn't really meant for. They throw zero day malware to test its heuristics, which are not wonderful. however in known malware (the stuff 99.9% of people need protection against) it is exceptionally good.
This is considered the leading AV review site in the world, not achieving their "certification" (the icon in the third column) in test is certainly a bad review, most well known security software manage to exceed that threshold. MSE didn't in the last two tests.
http://www.av-test.org/en/tests/test-reports/
Of course you can not produce unbiased reviews that actually say this...
Actually, the leading security software reviewer site, AV-Test, gave MSE a bad review in the last round, they did not pass "AV-Test certification".
I think you are seriously mistaken there. It might be hard to imagine for a "power user", but lots of people right now are perfectly happy with a Chromebook already. The web as an application platform is a revolution which is just getting started, but already lots of people are using their computer mostly for the web and not much else.
The problem with a Chromebook though is the exact same as for the always-on game fiasco's of late. Sometimes you don't have a reliable connection, but still want to work/play.
True, but gone are the days when everybody rushed out to get the latest and greatest as soon as it was released.
Whens the last time you ever heard anyone say "You HAVE to try the new Windows"?
Microsoft has NEVER been cool, and I dont know that many people have cared enough about their computer to care what version MS released.
Actually, I remember iPhone-like midnight queues for Windows 95 launch (yes, that old).
The great thing about HTML5 is that it runs on many devices unlike Silverlight. With HTML5, there is a chance that I can actually stream content on my tablet, *BSD or Linux computer, Windows, Mac, iPhone, or consoles in my home. Netflix managed to get Wii, PS3, iPhone, iPad, etc. to stream their content so obviously they can already do it without silverlight. With both flash and silverlight dying, netflix has to find a solution to this problem.
A chance is exactly the right word. With the use of HTML5 Netflix is talking about you will be able to stream Netflix to all platforms that Netflix develop and distribute a HTML5 CDM plugin for.
Agree with much of what you are saying. Except that I think you do have too narrow definition of marketing. In product marketing, collecting user and market feedback, market requirements, identify opportunities and guide engineering in designing the product and UX *is* part of the responsibility in many organizations. I agree with the parent who said that iPhone was designed by marketing (and by designed I don't only mean the pretty looks) and that Apple is run by marketing, including the products.
The summary says: "It was the malware which affected as many Apple computers as the Conficker worm affected Windows PCs..." This is obviously inaccurately rewritten from what Krebs said, which is "...Flashback [was] roughly as common for Macs as the Conficker Worm was for Windows PCs."
Those are not equivalent statements. The summary is equating raw numbers, while TFA is equating percentages.
Sorry, I just read that sentence and thought "no way in hell is that true." As confirmation, Wikipedia says Flashback hit 600,000 Macs, while Conficker infected between 9 and 15 million PCs.
You are right the summary can be interpreted as meaning actual numbers and not percentages. I didn't read it that way but maybe because I knew from before that Mac Flashback is the biggest malware epidemic in modern times in terms of percentage of user base affected (most accounts actually have it "beating" Conficker on Windows).
Of course the Windows user base is much bigger. But percentage of user base affected is the right metric to use if you want to look at risk of infection and infectability on a platform. This is still not a comparison Windows vs Mac in general, just the worst case from each platform. Windows currently has a longer tail of other cases of course. But it should be a much bigger wake-up call to the "Mac can't be infected" people than it was. Later versions of Mac Flashback did completely silent drive-by infection just by visiting a web page, not needing user interaction or admin password, something many Mac people still today seem to think only happens on Windows.
Um, that's a BIT of scaremongering... Did this idiot somehow confuse Google with Facebook? Yes, Google has had some minor screwups (and some, such as the Street View mess, could barely be considered a screwup but more of FUD from clueless users who don't understand that ANYONE can see the MAC address of a wifi AP...), but nothing as major and spectacular as Facebook's routine privacy screwups.
And yes, overall - I trust Google, as do MANY other people.
Google has admitted to collecting from peoples WiFi networks “URLs of requested Web pages, partial or complete email communications, and any confidential or private information being transmitted to or from the network user while the Street View cars were driving down streets.” One of many sources on this.. They call it an accident, but this data they have admitted to collecting is quite a bit more than MAC addresses.
Some people - especially here on Slashdot -- also seem to believe Google came clean on this on their own. When in fact they first guaranteed the German authorities (the first to pressure them on this) that they were not collecting anything. And first after the German authorities despite this assurance still demanded a full audit of the data anyway, did Google do their disclosure. This sequence of events was covered extensively in European press (one of many sources), and I don't know how mostly US geek sites ended up with an alternative impression.
It still can perfectly well be ascribed to a screw-up on Google's part (although in the FCC investigation report it is claimed the Google engineer who wrote the code knew about the collection and told colleguages about it). I'm not even sure how major I think it is, but it shouldn't be downplayed and described inaccurately either.
it's all minority report. every place you look, google glass will pop up a virtual billboard for you to see.
I don't get this kind of reaction. So what if the one out of the box does this? We'll just learn to jailbreak it (if needed) and install an adblocker, or how to install Linux on it or whatever.
Sometimes I have the impression technophiles' "think of the privacy implications!" is their own version of technophobes' "think of the children!" Me, I can't wait for this kind of think to come fast enough. I've grown reading and watching science fiction showing wearable computing, bionic implants, predictive smart assistants, 24/7 in-brain HUDs etc., and dreaming of it all. Now that part of it is becoming reality, and much earlier than I thought would happen thanks to Moore's Law, all I see in technology forums is FUD, FUD, FUD. What happened that caused technologists to becomes so damn cynical since just a few years ago? Is that just old age kicking in? *sigh*
You mean you have skipped all the darker Orwellian surveillance no more privacy sci-fi stories? Because there is quite a lot of them too.. ;) Problem is, doesn't help if you jailbreak and ad block yours, if you are filmed by all around you, feeding into a facial recognition capable search and tracking engine... But then, it very well might be that technology will make the notion of privacy something we have to forego, Google has already predicted this, but that sure makes some of the other discussions we have here about online privacy and anonymity rights quite meaningless.
I can opt out of wearing the goggles, so I don't have to be concerned with google pushing ads into my eyeballs. I can't opt out of other people capturing me with their goggles, but this is hardly different than people collecting video in public spaces with cameraphones or more traditional video capture devices. Google themselves could pay people to wander around public spaces and collect video, surreptitiously or otherwise.
I don't really get the controversy.
I wouldn't say it is exactly the same as camera phones, it is usually quite noticeable if someone is walking around using it as a camcorder. And they don't all feed into the same centralized Google search engine with facial recognition capability.
It is possible to use various "spy" cameras and techniques, but I would also frown upon people doing this too. But again, they don't all feed into the same massive data-aggregation/tracking engine. And this will never be comparable in volume of use to having a lot of people everywhere (if this catches on) potentially capturing you on film, even if mostly unintentionally.
That said, it might be that we have to completely give up the notion of privacy, as Google has claimed all along. As in the story The Light of Other Days, by Stephen Baxter/Arthur C. Clarke.
It's not webkit - all browsers on iOS are required to be thin wrappers around Safari. For example, Chrome is Safari with Chrome's tabs and branding.
Uhm, no, it is webkit that is the requirement. The phrase "thin wrappers around Safari" does not even make sense. Safari is a complete application, not a framework/library; there is no way on iOS to create an app that is a "thin wrapper" around another app.
This is incorrect. The requirement is that alternative browsers use the *built in* webkit and javascript engine. This is a very important distinction. Chrome on iOS is not allowed to supply and use its own webkit and javascript engine that Chrome is using on all other platforms, on iOS it is using the ones built in to iOS. Apple do not allow anyone to supply a rendering engine and javascript engine to iOS, regardless if it is webkit or not. This is why some call them just gui wrappers to the built on browser, which is basically what they are.
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Because someone claiming to remember seeing you doing something stupid in that bar one time is the same as being filmed, tagged and published searchable on the net?
Many of them hardcoded launching IE because they were certain it was on the machine, rather than using any mechanism to launch a preferred browser.
Developers did it because MS encouraged them to. Thus reinforcing the lock in which is what the whole point of the EU complaint. Even if you went to a great deal of trouble to extirpate IE from your PC, you'd install some program and it would auomatically reinstall the fucking thing to take you to their fucking website or show you a help page. Or it would fail to install at all if you didn't let it.
The "integration" of IE/Trident in modern versions of Windows is exactly the same as the "integration" of Safari/Webkit on OS X. The rendering engine is a system control that the system and 3rd party apps depend on being there, and thus can't be "fully removed" (people making fun of this display technical ignorance). The browser front-end can though (and is then not used by the system), and you can install another browser that uses its' own rendering engine for web, but the built-in OS render control will still (have to) be there for help files, in-app HTML rendering, etc.
I moved my mom from SuSE to a Mac. Best thing ever.
The very few support calls I can solve with Teamviewer from work or home.
Windows isn't a system for the casual home-user. It only works reliably when an army of competent sysadmins pamper it daily. There's no point in giving a relative a Windows PC or laptop if you have to maintain it yourself.
I don't get paid enough at work to use Windows - I certainly don't want to play Windows sysadmin for free.
So, I really don't understand this (the highlighted part). I've not only run Windows fairly trouble free myself, but I "admin" it for a number of family and friends, and don't find it difficult at all. I guess you know what you know, but I would strongly contest that Linux or Mac is any easier. I've been running Linux as well since years and years, now it is Ubuntu, very early on I was running Red Hat.
After trying several different hand-me-downs over the years including a 486, original iMacs (Lemon-lime), and a recent desktop Apple, I've concluded that the next machine will be the iPad with the largest display that I can find.
Consuming content - check App in the same place as it was before - check buttons and menus not moved around even inadvertently - check
My mom loves seasonal wallpapers and screensavers - fuck you mom. Check.
Those are pretty poor examples. Almost any optical drive, barcode scanner or digital camera that will work without drivers on windows would do the same on OSX.
What? That was some twist to the conversation, look at this again:
Neither do Macbook Air
Yes it does.
Reviewers actually rate it as quite good, I haven't tried, have you? And you can of course add any external keyboard you want
Yes you can, all of that. As external (but that would also be the case with the Macbook Air
Less so than Macbook Air it seems.
So? Google can hardly be held responsible for search engines being hard to build. And anti trust is meant to protect customers and consumers - not competition.
Bottom line - if customers don't like what Google is doing, they can move away at the click of a button. What more is there to be said about this?
I wasn't really arguing anti trust or not. Just pointing out that there is a problem with the "move away at a click of a button" argument if there is nothing to move to. I do believe people very seriously underestimate the insane table stake investments needed to build a competitor, even if Google did slack of and deserve competition. Again, not saying this alone is reason for anti trust regulation.
Microsoft was making it difficult for a customer to purchase a PC without Windows installed. It was also making life difficult for third party browsers. All of which limited customer choice.
In the search market, customers have all the choice in the world. No lock in. No costs of switching. Nothing.
All the choice in the world? How many full-functional general purpose search engines do you know that don't get data from either Google or Bing?
The barrier to competition on search is not the cost of switching to users, but the insane cost of building something that competes with Google. This is today a really hard problem, and Microsoft is spending billions of dollars per quarter on it.
Not according to DuckDuckGo itself. If you have citations to offer, I'd be curious to see them.
The first listed source on that page is Yahoo, which is Bing.