It's funny that you mention him, as I'd been looking at his website a few days ago and thinking that while he's clearly excellent at creating visual displays of mathematical data, his (and/or Dariane Hunt's) web design leaves something to be desired.
If you look at the different between the alt tags and the images used in it, the alt tags are almost completely lowercase. On the other hand, the images use all caps. There's also the issue of "Ask E.T." and "ET Writings..."
It's hard to tell due to the anti-aliasing, but to me the kerning looks a little off in some of the buttons.
The "New" icon does not look solidly attached to the "ET Writings..." so it's hard to tell what is new. Skipping the graphic aspect and calling it "Recent Writings..." would be clearer to me.
Drop shadows are used inconsistently, in that the majority (but not all) of the book cover images have them while the page images do not. His right margin is different on the main page than on the subpages, which makes the navigation look out of alignment on the main page.
The site inconstently switches between placing a comma before and/or in a three+ item lists.
But that's all minor nitpicky stuff.
However, there is something badly broken about the navigation bar's using images for everything (besides the fact it's horrible for people with bad vision who need to enlarge the font in order to be able to read). While it does include alt tags for each, all of the spacing is built into the images, not the HTML code, so the navigation looks like:
"Homebookscoursesposters and graph paperfine..."
Then there's what I consider to be the major gotcha of the design - the way he lays out the different books he's written. When I first looked at the page, I thought he'd only written a single book. Then I noticed that there were links to six other pages.
First, this is different than the other categories on his site. Clicking on Fine Art or Posters and Graph Paper, you get a list of each item in that category. While I might argue that a splash page for each category with a thumbnail and abstract of each with a link to a more detailed view might be better, it works. The books page in non-obvious to a casual viewer and breaks from the rest of the site. It also annoyingly jumps around to different locations on each page, rather than remaining in a static position the way a key navigation tool should. In the worst case, it doesn't appear on the first page worth of display, even at 1600x1200 resolution. Users should not have to scroll to find basic navigation.
This leads to another inconsistency - the books section treats his four books, a textbooklet, an essey, and Ms. Tufte's book all as the category of books. The checkout page, however groups his four books together, and the other three scattered in separate locations on the page.
Lastly, his course page looks like it was designed to be a nice poster, not a web page.
The four cover images are not the same height and the difference jumps out to me. (Nitpicking again)
More importantly is the two column design looks like a throwback to being limited to a single piece of paper rather than embracing the possibilities that hypermedia offers. The second column is distracting when first trying to read the page, due to the business it adds to the page as well as the fact it contains a number of attention drawing red links. That content could easily have been moved onto a separate registration page, simplifying the main course page and adding useful white space and space where additional information could have been added.
Do I think he's eminently qualified to speak and write on visual design a
If there's a yellow lock icon in the status bar, everything is good, otherwise something is wrong.
I don't have it handy, but there was a study that came out around last summer that showed that the average user doesn't have a decent grasp of that. Many of the users could be fooled into thinking that a site was secure by things like putting a picture of a yellow lock icon on the page itself. Even fewer people know how to see if a web site's security cert specifies that it is the site they are trying to use. I had one of my site's certs expire while I was waiting on the replacement and for several days users were getting a popup saying that the cert was expired. Not one of them e-mail me to check what was going on or to ask what it meant.
It doesn't help that banks take some bizzare delight in shuffling around their website addresses in such a way that consumers can easily get confused. If I attempt to go to Citi's credit card site by entering www.accountonline.com, I get directed to an insecure www.citicards.com page which sends a secure POST to www.accountonline.com. My credit union is worse - accessing credit card information or submitting for a loan from within their secure site involves being sent to completely different websites. While this is understandable and unavoidable, there's not a bit of information on the credit union page saying that you should expect to have the address change completely.
I'd say they ARE appropriate for a social networking site. They're even relatively cheap -- PayPal is now offering something similar for only $5. (Of course, it might get a bit hairy if you had a different hardware authenticator for each web site, but if myspace really was serious about security, they could offer it to people that felt the need for it and it would be appropriate now.
The problem is that people wouldn't use it and were it required, it would kill off casual social networking sites. People are willing to use it for things like Paypal (although I suspect a large number of people won't use it until forced) because it affects them financially. I could see users of more technology oriented sites like LinkedIn being interested in greater security, but I'd bet that if MySpace/LiveJournal were to require them, a large number of users would leave for a site that was similar but didn't.
The problem isn't the people who feel the need for it - they prolly have a halfway decent password to begin with and aren't going to send it to a random phishing site. The problem is the low hanging fruit, and places like MySpace are going to have an awful lot of them.
Take responsibility for your security being laughable, fire the people responsible, and secure your own shit before flinging it at others?
The passwords in question were obtained by phishing. The quality of MySpace's security (short of one-time scratch off keys, biometrics, or synced key generators - none of which are currently appropriate for a social networking site) has nothing to do with this. When your users cheerfully give our their user name and password, there's little that a social networking site can do other than to lock the accounts. The various posters are correct that MySpace and GoDaddy did not behave appropriately, but your post adds nothing useful to the conversation. If you're going to slag on MySpace, do so for valid reasons.
In a library you can go to a book you know, and without knowledge of titles or authors find topic-similar texts. You can quickly grab them, view them, and if necessary stroll down the aisle to find more distantly related texts. It's probably not best to envision this as a "real world" library rendered in 3d, but rather as a series of shevles located on a plain grouped by relevance.
What you're describing is the advantages of semantic searching and well organized metadata, which is a backend and user content creation/management advantage, not a 3D advantage.
With this kind of format you would go to the "shelf" create a "book" and insert it in the proper section of the library.
Again, that's all about the meta, not about whether or not it's presented in a flat text format or a 3D rendered one.
As a final comment, I don't find the comparison to VRML compelling - that software was clunky, the enviroments were not compelling in the mode of modern MMORPGs, and the systems of the time couldn't run VRML code at reasonable speed - it was an idea far before its time that was poorly implemented and baddly marketed.
Virtually everything in computer interface development started clunky, uncompelling, and slow. Everything you said above is true of HTML circa 1994 compared to today's slick Web 2.17232(beta) pages. But the standard form has lasted because it was possible to create useful pages and applications in it. Had 3-dimensionality provided any actual advantage, it would have survived and evolved. 3D is good for simulating environments (games, tour $LOCATION, architecture) or representing physical objects that you _need_ perspective on to appreciate. It's terrible for presenting text information.
There are reasons to promote the "freeing" of a generic 3d world interface.
Other than as a virtual meeting place, not really.
Imagine logging into a library as a floating eye-ball (not graphically, but just limiting the avatar to a floating camera). Ctrl-F to bring up a search window. Type in name of author or title.. boom, the camera jumps to the shelf that has a visiual representation of your file.. which you download by double-clicking on it. Around that file are visual representations of other files matching author or subject - just like a real library.
Other than the keyboard shortcut to bring up the search, why do you think this is any better than a well done web front end of a library in a web browser? The reason that 3D languages such as VRML fail is because it's a really poor metaphor translation that gives you the worst of both physical and virtual realities. Why would I want to spend time downloading and rendering room information when all I really want to see if the metatdata of the book, perhaps images of the cover, and text from inside the book. The 3D metaphor adds nothing but slows down the process and make it more annoying. The power of computers is that they mean we no longer have to walk down the stacks of a library to find a book and reach out and pick it up to read the dust jacket. Why would we want to bring that back in a pretend world?
It's the sort of thing that a small subection of HCI geeks love and the public has uniformly rejected again and again.
you dont really want to draw and play music that badly, because you gave up before you learned how
Humans are not blank slates that have an equal chance of being good at anything they put their mind to.
Most things, but particularly artistic endevours, require a combination of practice, education, and natural talent. To a degree, you can substitute have lots of one to balance a deficiency in another. But only to a degree. Someone will no natural talent for music or who is tonedeaf cannot simply learn or practice the ability into themselves. That's not to say that they can't play or sing and have an enjoyable time doing so, but from an objective perspective, they will never be good at it. Some people are happy to do something as best as they can and others want to do things _well_.
Doing something well doesn't mean that you're copping out and just doing the easy things, it means that you're excelling at something rather than doing a medicore to tolerable job at something you don't have a natural inclination to. The fact that I do things like write Fugues rather than scratch out attempts at drawings means that I do what I'm well suited to. My sister doesn't have the desire to compose music, but she's a much better performer than I am. So it goes.
I work with OS X, Linux, and Windows. The laptops that I have used on a regular basis are an Inspiron 8500, Toshiba Tecra M4, 12" Powerbook, 17" Powerbook, and a Macbook Pro. And pretty much every Gseries and Intel series Apple in the past 5 years and the usual slew of Intel/AMD Windows/Linux boxes.
1) Do I need to install Linux to make it useful? I.e., on a Windows machine I install Cygwin and lots of Unix-like tools such as bash, gvim, putty, perl.
You get a full bash shell with pretty much all of the goodies.
2) What's the performance under Java like? On dual proccy machines (my Opteron, Core2Duo), Java screams. Can I expect the same performance under OSX?
I've not used much Java on my systems, but OS X's memory management is signficantly worse than Windows or Linux. If you start using lots of memory, expect performance to go down compared to Linux. That said, my MBPro has 1GB and doesn't do all that bad. But my 678 MHz 12" PB with 640 MB of RAM would crumble under the same load that my P3 1GHz W2K machine with 384 MB RAM would shrug off.
3) How stable is it.
The Mac fanatics will no doubt either downmod me or tell you I'm wrong, but stability as a desktop is only OK. Much better than OS 9, but I get a few random reboots and panics every month. At the very least, you will need to reboot when an update is issued, so figure at least once a month. OS X Server, on the other hand, has been much more reliable. Whether this is a matter of hardware quality or usage is unknown.
I don't know if it was 10.4 or the Intel conversion, but quality slipped between 10.3 on my 12" and 10.4 on my MBP on stuff like DVD Player - it randomly crashes on a regular basis. QuickTime has stopped giving error messages half the time... little stuff, but it makes me worry about what's going on with their coding culture and how it's affecting their important software.
4) How much Free software is available? Can GNU/Open/Free programs be compiled easily and natively? I'd think because it's more consistent than the hundreds of Linux distros, this would be true...
Just about all the GNU/Open/Free software can be compiled on OS X, but there's no built in packaging system. There's various bolt-on packaging systems such as fink.
5) How solid is the workmanship.
My 12" required two repairs in the first year, but is still running at 3.5 years old. My Inspiron 8500 never needed a repair until it completely died at 3.2 years old. Both exteriors got flakey and ugly as time went on, the 12" moreso than the Dell. Mac laptops are much less pleasant to repair yourself than Dells. Obscure or non-standard screws, lots to take apart to get to small things.
Both my 12" and MBP optical drives have had major problems with plain old CDs and DVDs that my other systems have been just fine with. And because it's slot loaded, you can't just eject them, you have to wait on the system to give up on it (sometimes having to kill iTunes or DVD player) before you can eject it and try again.
My MBP is an early one, so they may have improved, but it runs hot and has annoying noises. The high end Dell screens are nicer than the MBP, but not horribly so. Battery life is pretty bad.
6) How fast is it?
Again, memory management will drive it down compared to other OSes, but quite usable. For servers, I only use OS X for the few pieces of software that will only run under it. Linux is faster, stays up longer, and has a better bang for the buck.
7) How does the two-finger trackpad stack up against real buttons?
I can't stand it, but that's me. I also find the lack of dedicated pageup/down/home/end buttons very annoying.
As far as the OS, I just generally dislike it. If you want to use your computer the way Steve Jobs thinks you should use your computer, your set. If you like configuring and tweaking your user environment, not so much. There's no equivilent of alt-tab ala Windows/default KDE/G
Why is it (generally in the minds of non-gamers) that time spent with the TV is somehow "better" than time spent gaming?
I'm a non-gamer, non-TV owner (and no, I don't claim that makes me better than you or anyone else, just the choices I've made) so I can't answer the exact question you asked, but here's some differences:
TV is more or less an extension of the passive entertainment offered by reading. There's not much correlation between the nominal effort you put into it and what you get out of it - in the case of a few shows (Farscape) you have to make some kind of commitment to watching and understanding the entire ark, but most TV shows you can watch any one episode and generally understand what's going on. MMORPGs on the other hand, by their very nature, tend to reward the amount of time spent on them. Someone who plays one hour a week will be much worse off in the game world than someone who spends one hour a day. This leads to a different relationship to the user where people who have self control issues (very often the types drawn to MMOs) can be sucked into online games in ways that interfere with what society has deemed "normal" life.
TV uses the normal human cues for non-verbal expression - eyes, facial expressions, tone of voice, etc. MMOs lack subtle non-audio signals and the audio quality I've heard for the voice discussions on WoW have left me unimpressed to the point I suspect that it masks some important tonal information. I've had friends who I've known exclusively online for fifteen years or so and place great value on the electronic communication that allows those relationships, but I also recognize that we miss out on a great deal of the subtle nuances of human expression, that TV at least offers a faximily of.
In what I consider a plus for gaming, TV is a passive activity, while MMOs allow interactivity with hundreds and thousands of other people. Most of my friends that game do so as much to interact with friends who are physically distant as much as they do to play a game per say.
Lastly, MMOs allow for addictive escapism in a way that TV doesn't. TV enables viewers to ignore their lives and daydream about how they could be different, but MMOs allow users to actively create an alternate persona that fills in voids in their life or covers over their own flaws. Whether this is a good thing or not is a matter of debate. On the one hand, I don't necessarily view it as worse than someone who comes home from work and drinks to escape their problems, but on the other, any tactic that allows someone to ignore the problems of their life is problematic to me in that it encourages people to not actually deal with their issues.
But as I said, it's just a matter of the choices we all make for ourselves.
Yahoo's cache can be addressed at rds.yahoo.com (compared to Google's cache, which uses IP addresses with no associated hostnames). Thus, all the various message boards that use the slashdot style of putting the domain name of the host will show yahoo.com even if it might be serving up an IE exploit that was hosted at mynastystuff.ru, increasing chances of click through. MSN uses a resolvable name for their cache as well, but it's at least identifiable as msncache.com rather than just msn.com.
They have been distributing Firefox for years in the same way they distribute other open source software.
They intentionally modified a build switch that exists explicitly as part of Firefox's trademark protection/openness system. That makes it a bit different than their distribution of Apache, Linux, etc. While the Debian devs feel they had permission to do so, there are three basic issues that spring out at me:
1. If you're mucking around with trademarks, get it in writing. Some guy at some organization posting something to a listserv does not necessarily represent a legally binding agreement. 2. If the mark holder disagrees with what you believe, unless you have it in writing with legal backing of your interpretation, you are in the wrong; do what it takes to comply. 3. Even if Debian had permission to use the name Firefox without the artwork, breaking the build switch in the publically released version of the software is a very bad thing (tm), as it introduces legal risk to downstream users (unless the agreement specified them as well). If I were to fork Debian, I would be out of compliance with the FF/Debian agreement. If Debian wishes to be ultrapure in their free-as-in-freedom policy they have to reject any kind of agreement that specifies Debian alone.
Debian asked "could we at least get a stay of execution? Etch is going into deep freeze in less than a month. Would it be possible to resolve this after the release?"
If you felt someone was abusing nmap against your terms, would you let them wait until after a major release and tens of thousands of CDs/DVDs had been pressed and hundreds of thousands of installations had been done or would you try to get it fixed before that? Particularly given that this is a branding issue, I have little problem with Mozilla saying that it has to be fixed before Etch comes out.
If you say Firefox to virtually anyone on a college campus, they will know what it is. A substantial portion of the older generation who did not grow up with computers as a personal device know what it is as well. OpenOffice? Not so much.
How is it a stupid idea? It is the standard operating procedure of most admins--if it is secure, use it--it may be more stable, better able to perform on old machines, and you won't surprise users with an unneeded update.
With servers, I completely agree - I expect to be able to deploy them and have them run for 5+ years on the same software. A web browser, however, does not fall into the same category I put apache/$DATABASE/$FILESERVER/$MAILSERVER etc. into. Forcing a major upgrade to those critical applications is quite likely to break things, often unexpectedly. However, I don't see any compelling reason not to move 4 year old Debian systems to a modern version of the web browser rather than trying to backport fixes, which as mentioned can be quite extensive in their scope.
You _might_ have a few edge cases where some intranet application relies on some CSS/Javascript bug that gets fixed in the more recent version. But realistically, how many locations do you think there are the use nothing but Debian (as the other distros/OSes aren't so fanatical about backporting) that rely on some defect in old versions of Firefox? You might also have some dumb software that hard codes that accepted web browsers are IE6 and FF1.x so FF2.x would break it, but really, Debian types aren't the people who run that kind of software (the majority of which demand Red Hat Enterprise) and even if they did, Debian would provide the proper fix for the server.
I would far rather the dev hours be put into finding and fixing new bugs or adding features. Of course, you and Debian are free to disagree on this point, which is fine with me and Mozilla - all they're asking Debian to do is to not call it Firefox if they're going to branch it.
If they... know that many people wish to use older versions
Just how many people do you think wish to run older versions? I deal with college students who prolly represent a large portion of the worldwide Firefox userbase. When I tell them to make sure they get updated because of the latest security fixes, they never say, "Damn it, I was just getting settled into version 1.0.7." My parents, who still run Win98, have never called me asking how to prevent Firefox from auto-updating periodically. Chances are, they barely notice. If I tried to get them to upgrade to a newer version of Windows, it would involve a tremendous amount of kicking and screaming, but changes to web browsers are just part of life.
Linux users make up a small portion of non-server computer users. Debian users make up a small portion of Linux users. Debian users who either care if there's a trademarked/copywritten image or want to run old versions of FF on their systems are a portion (couldn't tell you how small) of those. Small groups of people using free (as in beer) software aren't all that likely to be catered to when the developer decides something isn't worth doing.
I don't like to think that it has been squandered on legal infighting
I don't see a whole lot of money and time being wasted on Mozilla's part. They sent a basic message saying that Debian was quite intentionally out of compliance with the trademark terms and to please either become compliant or not use the trademark. The Debian folk then proceeded to be the ones that waste everyone's time bickering on the subject.
I thought "zero-day" meant you have something effective before release
In exploit terms, n-day means the number of days after a fix is released for the problem exploited by the attack. Most notable worms of the past have been n >= 1 (often much more) attacks - either someone deduces the flaw based on the patch release or the flaw was already known but only guardedly used in order to do high level target attacks while it was still unknown to the public.
Zero day refers to attacks that are released before the flaw is publically known. It's based on the specific flaw, not the application in general. Zero day attacks are nasty on two fronts - first, no one has specific protection or detection available for it, second, as mentioned, they are sometimes used on very specific targets. There was a recent string of what appears to be industrial espionage where very specific people have been sent MS Office attachments with previously unknown exploits in them.
As the second and third world countries continue to develop, they will increasingly use computers. Apple's market strategy cannot support that need - a company whose main desktop starts at $2500 just can't work in a country where the average worker makes that in a year. Even a Mac Mini is far beyond the reach of most people and companies in that area. On the other hand, those people will be far more likely to use recycled low-end x86 systems and inexpensive RISC systems (China's homegrown chip springs to mind) and the OS of choice on those systems will be Windows (quite likely pirated), Linux, or xBSD. That will create both a huge user and developer base for Linux.
The article also fails to explain why companies such as IBM and HP, who've invested much in the server side of Linux, would just walk away from that investment. I'm sure that IBM consultants will sell Apple products in the times where they are the exclusive fit for the need, but they can't control or steer Apple's direction the way they can Linux, which is one reason they push it so hard.
Would someone with more knowledge than me explain the term "zero day"?
N (where N >=1) day exploits refer to the number of days after a vulnerability and/or patch is made available that it takes for exploits to occur. If Microsoft releases a patch on the 12th and an exploit is written on the 15th, that would be 4 day exploit. Some people would consider it to be a 3 day exploit, not counting the day of the announcement.
Zero day refers to an exploit that uses a previously unknown vulnerability in software, or in some special cases, finds a way to turn a previously known flaw from something that wasn't considered bad enough to patch to a dangerous situation. Zero day exploits are dangerous in that there are no patches for them, although in some cases it can be prevented/mitigated by firewalls or Intrusion Prevention Systems. On the other hand, zero day exploits are often held closely by the people who discover them in order to gain the maximum advantage from it. For example, the exploit used on debian.org a few years ago was not disclosed in order to use it to penetrate several huge names in the open source community. Once a zero day exploit is made public knowledge, it will be focused on and patched.
There is also an archaic use of the term from the old days of pirate BBSes - back when delivery of cracked software was slow, difference BBSes would have better priority on getting delivery of that software. The most important ones would get the software the day it was released by the cracking group and would be described as having 0 day warez. Broadband/P2P/etc. has made the use of this term out of date, although it's entirely possible that some people still use it in this context.
I thought it was fairly well-established that Microsoft has LOST money on the Xbox venture so far.
That's not the point. As I said, MS has money to burn if they want to. The point is that they were a non-entity in the console world and now they're one of the top players.
I would hardly call combining all that with a bit of hardware from established vendors much outside Microsoft's core compentency.
Microsoft has made a lot of money by on Windows and Office. That's a very different world than video game consoles. Completely different distribution system, different market, different model. They make money selling Windows and their position is propped up by the fact that other people writes software for it. With a console, you have to convince people to pay you money to release software on your platform.
And as you noted, they haven't exactly been a financial sucess in the the field.
I wonder how long it will be before one of them cuts out the RIAA entirley and starts signing up artists directly.
In a sense, they already are - there are already a bunch of self funded artists available on iTunes, Napster, etc. One of my buddies is available on virtually every electronic download/streaming service. I think his most recent count was around $12 after over a year.
The artists selling thousands of tracks are virtually all recorded and marketed at great expense. The public (and the money) follow what's presented to them. The charts on the unlimited music services (Napster, Rhapsody, et al) show that even when it doesn't cost a penny more to go exploring, the vast majority of the people stick with marketed music (even if it's what they hear in Starbucks rather than on MTV).
A really good recording session is not cheap. Shooting a video is not cheap. Marketing an artist is not cheap. For every artist that goes big and sells a million copies, there's dozens that fail. That's part of the recording business, and that's part of what the record labels deal with.
Consider for a moment - you can let someone else do the hard work and assume the risk and personally make five cents off of every track sold (and no matter who come out on top, someone's going to sell a bunch of tracks - you don't have to care who it is), or front the money for the recording, the promotion, all in hopes of making 70 cents per track. Now, also take into consideration that choosing artists and marketing them is far outside of your core competency (do you really want the guy that came up with with the Ellen Feiss campaign chosing what music should be recorded? Or Steve "Developers!" Balmer?). Why assume the risk, when someone else is willing to do so and let you skim a few cents off of millions of sales instead?
Remember, most businesses that expand from doing one thing really well into completely different markets tend to do really, really badly (MS and the Xbox are an exception to this, but MS also has a gajillion bucks to dump into projects. But they've not done very well in expanding other new markets). Google and Yahoo are all about finding and delivering digital content, not creating it. And Apple is all about facilitating a particular digital experience, specifically consuming it (and to a lesser extent, creating it).
Actually, it really does. More accurately, it doesn't lock the user in, but it locks the competition out. First, many users are too disinterested or technically unskilled to install other media players and will default to whatever is preinstalled. Second, in business environments, many users do not have administrative rights on their computers, and either I.T. will not install media players or it is a hard enough process that the users will again, fall back to what's preinstalled. This creates a tremendously difficult environment for any competition.
Please note that I understand the author is making a sorta joke with his furries comment BUT the old fact remains. Either you defend everyones freedom or you give up on freedom.
Except that the original poster didn't suggest banning furries or taking away their freedoms, merely stated that he didn't mind offending them. And the power to offend is rather crucial to this whole freedome of speech thing.
They are anti-free market devices used to reduce competition in the market place.
Perhaps at this point. The theory that applied fairly well to mechanical devices and such was that it would encourage competition by increasing the chance of licensing new technology to your competition. Without a patent, if I design a clever new thing, I have no reason to let anyone else know how it works because (assuming it's not reverse engineerable and I can keep out industrial spies), I have a monopoly on the market. Even with patents, there are major companies and technologies in use today that have not been patented specifically because the company that created the idea are confident that they can keep the secret longer than the length of a patent. With patents, I'm given the choice of keeping that secret, or chosing to license it to whoever wants to pay. So rather than having a monopoly selling 100,000 widgets with my exclusive technology at a profit of $10 each, I could be getting $1 each from 100,000,000 widgets being sold, AND someone else takes the financial risk of creating those products and brining them to the market.
Supporting increased "Intellectual Property" rights is not a conservative economic position, it is definitely a socialist position that believes the government is better at picking winners and losers in the market place than market forces are.
I do not think that word means what you think it means. Socialism believes that the ownership of production belongs to all people/citizens of the country/world/whatever. There is no need for patents in socialism, because it doesn't matter if a given factory is making something with new fangled technology foo or not. If it provides a benefit to the people, it should be used elsewhere.
Also, "Intellectual Property" is a rather large term, as we will see in a moment.
Pure capitalism without regulation is pretty much a disaster. Pure capitalism supports shooting your competition, using slave labour, dumping pollutants into the environment, beating strikers, false advertising, etc.
If you support increases in patents copyrights and trademarks, you support liberal economic theories.
Woah, hold on there, cowboy. Trademarks are completely different than copyrights and patents. The creation of a distinctive mark being protected is a very good one, even if it has been allowed to grow too far recently. MS owning a trademark on the term "Windows" relating to computer operating systems is a good thing. MS owning a trademark on the term "Windows" related to everything is a bad thing. Trademarks help enable that consumers get what they think they're purchasing. Imagine if thirty different companies named 'Sony' all put out a product called a 'Playstation Portable' - and all but one was a piece of junk? How would consumers know which one to purchase?
If you apply a Microsoft patch for something that is never likely to affect you, you're taking a bigger risk by applying the patch!
There's very few updates that are pushed as "must install" downloads via Windows Update that aren't likely to pose a threat to the system. IE is so tied into the system and other software that keeping it patched is important even if you don't do web browsing on the system. Many of the other vulnerabilities may not seem like they're important behind a firewall, but firewalls fail or can be worked around.
Most people here should be aware that applying a Microsoft patch is likely to screw something up -- something Microsoft has become renowned for.
To be fair, every major vendor I can think of has released a patch or ten that screwed something up. The MS faulty patches have gotten better and with less significant problems.
Monopolies in industries with high barriers to entry usually are harmful.
The problem isn't the services that ride in on telcos, the problem is that there are very few ways to get data pipes into your home or business because they are entrenched monopolies with extremely high barriers to entry. I have two options for non-business class (and price) high speed internet for my home - the monopoly of the phone company and the monopoly of the cable company. There's little competition between the two of them, and it doesn't matter if I can chose between five VOIP companies if the two companies that can permit their packets to reach my home have the ability to try to block them or charge either myself or the VOIP company extra to ensure that the service actually works.
Even if I had millions of dollars, it's unlikely that I could create a fiber/copper delivery system to consumers. There's just too much public space that would have to be intruded upon. That's why phone and cable are supposed to be regulated - they were given a monopoly on that public access. But no one's watching the watchers it seems.
The idea of Google etc. using dark fiber and a wireless network to bypass the proposed tiered internet is cute, but at least a decade away from working for people like me in a small town. And I'd just as soon rather not have Google datamining everything I do online.
Still, you've got to admit that this would be a huge psychological deterant.
On the other hand, most of these systems basically fire a shotgun in the direction of the incoming RPG. If you can set it up your attack so that the system took out [the defender's own] infantry in the process of defending the vehicle, that would be one hell of a psychological weapon against the defender in the type of situation the U.S. is in right now where the general public hates any loss of its own life, particularly from friendly fire. The desctruction of a tank would be really bad publicity, but having one of your own soldiers shreded by a tank would be even worse. Not to mention the death of any non-US forces that firing weapons like this in an urban environment might cause.
The computer is supposed to determine if the projectile is actually a threat or not before shooting at it. Additionally, reactive armour is generally only effective on the front and rear of heavy tanks. This could theoretically defend the sides as well as lighter vehicles. It's still not a stinking force field though.
Slashdot Mirror
It's funny that you mention him, as I'd been looking at his website a few days ago and thinking that while he's clearly excellent at creating visual displays of mathematical data, his (and/or Dariane Hunt's) web design leaves something to be desired.
This is the link labeled Books takes you here:
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi
First, his navigation isn't consistent.
If you look at the different between the alt tags and the images used in it, the alt tags are almost completely lowercase. On the other hand, the images use all caps. There's also the issue of "Ask E.T." and "ET Writings..."
It's hard to tell due to the anti-aliasing, but to me the kerning looks a little off in some of the buttons.
The "New" icon does not look solidly attached to the "ET Writings..." so it's hard to tell what is new. Skipping the graphic aspect and calling it "Recent Writings..." would be clearer to me.
Drop shadows are used inconsistently, in that the majority (but not all) of the book cover images have them while the page images do not. His right margin is different on the main page than on the subpages, which makes the navigation look out of alignment on the main page.
The site inconstently switches between placing a comma before and/or in a three+ item lists.
But that's all minor nitpicky stuff.
However, there is something badly broken about the navigation bar's using images for everything (besides the fact it's horrible for people with bad vision who need to enlarge the font in order to be able to read). While it does include alt tags for each, all of the spacing is built into the images, not the HTML code, so the navigation looks like:
"Homebookscoursesposters and graph paperfine..."
Then there's what I consider to be the major gotcha of the design - the way he lays out the different books he's written. When I first looked at the page, I thought he'd only written a single book. Then I noticed that there were links to six other pages.
First, this is different than the other categories on his site. Clicking on Fine Art or Posters and Graph Paper, you get a list of each item in that category. While I might argue that a splash page for each category with a thumbnail and abstract of each with a link to a more detailed view might be better, it works. The books page in non-obvious to a casual viewer and breaks from the rest of the site. It also annoyingly jumps around to different locations on each page, rather than remaining in a static position the way a key navigation tool should. In the worst case, it doesn't appear on the first page worth of display, even at 1600x1200 resolution. Users should not have to scroll to find basic navigation.
This leads to another inconsistency - the books section treats his four books, a textbooklet, an essey, and Ms. Tufte's book all as the category of books. The checkout page, however groups his four books together, and the other three scattered in separate locations on the page.
Lastly, his course page looks like it was designed to be a nice poster, not a web page.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/courses
The four cover images are not the same height and the difference jumps out to me. (Nitpicking again)
More importantly is the two column design looks like a throwback to being limited to a single piece of paper rather than embracing the possibilities that hypermedia offers. The second column is distracting when first trying to read the page, due to the business it adds to the page as well as the fact it contains a number of attention drawing red links. That content could easily have been moved onto a separate registration page, simplifying the main course page and adding useful white space and space where additional information could have been added.
Do I think he's eminently qualified to speak and write on visual design a
If there's a yellow lock icon in the status bar, everything is good, otherwise something is wrong.
I don't have it handy, but there was a study that came out around last summer that showed that the average user doesn't have a decent grasp of that. Many of the users could be fooled into thinking that a site was secure by things like putting a picture of a yellow lock icon on the page itself. Even fewer people know how to see if a web site's security cert specifies that it is the site they are trying to use. I had one of my site's certs expire while I was waiting on the replacement and for several days users were getting a popup saying that the cert was expired. Not one of them e-mail me to check what was going on or to ask what it meant.
It doesn't help that banks take some bizzare delight in shuffling around their website addresses in such a way that consumers can easily get confused. If I attempt to go to Citi's credit card site by entering www.accountonline.com, I get directed to an insecure www.citicards.com page which sends a secure POST to www.accountonline.com. My credit union is worse - accessing credit card information or submitting for a loan from within their secure site involves being sent to completely different websites. While this is understandable and unavoidable, there's not a bit of information on the credit union page saying that you should expect to have the address change completely.
I'd say they ARE appropriate for a social networking site. They're even relatively cheap -- PayPal is now offering something similar for only $5. (Of course, it might get a bit hairy if you had a different hardware authenticator for each web site, but if myspace really was serious about security, they could offer it to people that felt the need for it and it would be appropriate now.
The problem is that people wouldn't use it and were it required, it would kill off casual social networking sites. People are willing to use it for things like Paypal (although I suspect a large number of people won't use it until forced) because it affects them financially. I could see users of more technology oriented sites like LinkedIn being interested in greater security, but I'd bet that if MySpace/LiveJournal were to require them, a large number of users would leave for a site that was similar but didn't.
The problem isn't the people who feel the need for it - they prolly have a halfway decent password to begin with and aren't going to send it to a random phishing site. The problem is the low hanging fruit, and places like MySpace are going to have an awful lot of them.
Take responsibility for your security being laughable, fire the people responsible, and secure your own shit before flinging it at others?
The passwords in question were obtained by phishing. The quality of MySpace's security (short of one-time scratch off keys, biometrics, or synced key generators - none of which are currently appropriate for a social networking site) has nothing to do with this. When your users cheerfully give our their user name and password, there's little that a social networking site can do other than to lock the accounts. The various posters are correct that MySpace and GoDaddy did not behave appropriately, but your post adds nothing useful to the conversation. If you're going to slag on MySpace, do so for valid reasons.
In a library you can go to a book you know, and without knowledge of titles or authors find topic-similar texts. You can quickly grab them, view them, and if necessary stroll down the aisle to find more distantly related texts. It's probably not best to envision this as a "real world" library rendered in 3d, but rather as a series of shevles located on a plain grouped by relevance.
What you're describing is the advantages of semantic searching and well organized metadata, which is a backend and user content creation/management advantage, not a 3D advantage.
With this kind of format you would go to the "shelf" create a "book" and insert it in the proper section of the library.
Again, that's all about the meta, not about whether or not it's presented in a flat text format or a 3D rendered one.
As a final comment, I don't find the comparison to VRML compelling - that software was clunky, the enviroments were not compelling in the mode of modern MMORPGs, and the systems of the time couldn't run VRML code at reasonable speed - it was an idea far before its time that was poorly implemented and baddly marketed.
Virtually everything in computer interface development started clunky, uncompelling, and slow. Everything you said above is true of HTML circa 1994 compared to today's slick Web 2.17232(beta) pages. But the standard form has lasted because it was possible to create useful pages and applications in it. Had 3-dimensionality provided any actual advantage, it would have survived and evolved. 3D is good for simulating environments (games, tour $LOCATION, architecture) or representing physical objects that you _need_ perspective on to appreciate. It's terrible for presenting text information.
There are reasons to promote the "freeing" of a generic 3d world interface.
Other than as a virtual meeting place, not really.
Imagine logging into a library as a floating eye-ball (not graphically, but just limiting the avatar to a floating camera). Ctrl-F to bring up a search window. Type in name of author or title.. boom, the camera jumps to the shelf that has a visiual representation of your file.. which you download by double-clicking on it. Around that file are visual representations of other files matching author or subject - just like a real library.
Other than the keyboard shortcut to bring up the search, why do you think this is any better than a well done web front end of a library in a web browser? The reason that 3D languages such as VRML fail is because it's a really poor metaphor translation that gives you the worst of both physical and virtual realities. Why would I want to spend time downloading and rendering room information when all I really want to see if the metatdata of the book, perhaps images of the cover, and text from inside the book. The 3D metaphor adds nothing but slows down the process and make it more annoying. The power of computers is that they mean we no longer have to walk down the stacks of a library to find a book and reach out and pick it up to read the dust jacket. Why would we want to bring that back in a pretend world?
It's the sort of thing that a small subection of HCI geeks love and the public has uniformly rejected again and again.
you dont really want to draw and play music that badly, because you gave up before you learned how
Humans are not blank slates that have an equal chance of being good at anything they put their mind to.
Most things, but particularly artistic endevours, require a combination of practice, education, and natural talent. To a degree, you can substitute have lots of one to balance a deficiency in another. But only to a degree. Someone will no natural talent for music or who is tonedeaf cannot simply learn or practice the ability into themselves. That's not to say that they can't play or sing and have an enjoyable time doing so, but from an objective perspective, they will never be good at it. Some people are happy to do something as best as they can and others want to do things _well_.
Doing something well doesn't mean that you're copping out and just doing the easy things, it means that you're excelling at something rather than doing a medicore to tolerable job at something you don't have a natural inclination to. The fact that I do things like write Fugues rather than scratch out attempts at drawings means that I do what I'm well suited to. My sister doesn't have the desire to compose music, but she's a much better performer than I am. So it goes.
I work with OS X, Linux, and Windows. The laptops that I have used on a regular basis are an Inspiron 8500, Toshiba Tecra M4, 12" Powerbook, 17" Powerbook, and a Macbook Pro. And pretty much every Gseries and Intel series Apple in the past 5 years and the usual slew of Intel/AMD Windows/Linux boxes.
1) Do I need to install Linux to make it useful? I.e., on a Windows machine I install Cygwin and lots of Unix-like tools such as bash, gvim, putty, perl.
You get a full bash shell with pretty much all of the goodies.
2) What's the performance under Java like? On dual proccy machines (my Opteron, Core2Duo), Java screams. Can I expect the same performance under OSX?
I've not used much Java on my systems, but OS X's memory management is signficantly worse than Windows or Linux. If you start using lots of memory, expect performance to go down compared to Linux. That said, my MBPro has 1GB and doesn't do all that bad. But my 678 MHz 12" PB with 640 MB of RAM would crumble under the same load that my P3 1GHz W2K machine with 384 MB RAM would shrug off.
3) How stable is it.
The Mac fanatics will no doubt either downmod me or tell you I'm wrong, but stability as a desktop is only OK. Much better than OS 9, but I get a few random reboots and panics every month. At the very least, you will need to reboot when an update is issued, so figure at least once a month. OS X Server, on the other hand, has been much more reliable. Whether this is a matter of hardware quality or usage is unknown.
I don't know if it was 10.4 or the Intel conversion, but quality slipped between 10.3 on my 12" and 10.4 on my MBP on stuff like DVD Player - it randomly crashes on a regular basis. QuickTime has stopped giving error messages half the time... little stuff, but it makes me worry about what's going on with their coding culture and how it's affecting their important software.
4) How much Free software is available? Can GNU/Open/Free programs be compiled easily and natively? I'd think because it's more consistent than the hundreds of Linux distros, this would be true...
Just about all the GNU/Open/Free software can be compiled on OS X, but there's no built in packaging system. There's various bolt-on packaging systems such as fink.
5) How solid is the workmanship.
My 12" required two repairs in the first year, but is still running at 3.5 years old. My Inspiron 8500 never needed a repair until it completely died at 3.2 years old. Both exteriors got flakey and ugly as time went on, the 12" moreso than the Dell. Mac laptops are much less pleasant to repair yourself than Dells. Obscure or non-standard screws, lots to take apart to get to small things.
Both my 12" and MBP optical drives have had major problems with plain old CDs and DVDs that my other systems have been just fine with. And because it's slot loaded, you can't just eject them, you have to wait on the system to give up on it (sometimes having to kill iTunes or DVD player) before you can eject it and try again.
My MBP is an early one, so they may have improved, but it runs hot and has annoying noises. The high end Dell screens are nicer than the MBP, but not horribly so. Battery life is pretty bad.
6) How fast is it?
Again, memory management will drive it down compared to other OSes, but quite usable. For servers, I only use OS X for the few pieces of software that will only run under it. Linux is faster, stays up longer, and has a better bang for the buck.
7) How does the two-finger trackpad stack up against real buttons?
I can't stand it, but that's me. I also find the lack of dedicated pageup/down/home/end buttons very annoying.
As far as the OS, I just generally dislike it. If you want to use your computer the way Steve Jobs thinks you should use your computer, your set. If you like configuring and tweaking your user environment, not so much. There's no equivilent of alt-tab ala Windows/default KDE/G
Why is it (generally in the minds of non-gamers) that time spent with the TV is somehow "better" than time spent gaming?
I'm a non-gamer, non-TV owner (and no, I don't claim that makes me better than you or anyone else, just the choices I've made) so I can't answer the exact question you asked, but here's some differences:
TV is more or less an extension of the passive entertainment offered by reading. There's not much correlation between the nominal effort you put into it and what you get out of it - in the case of a few shows (Farscape) you have to make some kind of commitment to watching and understanding the entire ark, but most TV shows you can watch any one episode and generally understand what's going on. MMORPGs on the other hand, by their very nature, tend to reward the amount of time spent on them. Someone who plays one hour a week will be much worse off in the game world than someone who spends one hour a day. This leads to a different relationship to the user where people who have self control issues (very often the types drawn to MMOs) can be sucked into online games in ways that interfere with what society has deemed "normal" life.
TV uses the normal human cues for non-verbal expression - eyes, facial expressions, tone of voice, etc. MMOs lack subtle non-audio signals and the audio quality I've heard for the voice discussions on WoW have left me unimpressed to the point I suspect that it masks some important tonal information. I've had friends who I've known exclusively online for fifteen years or so and place great value on the electronic communication that allows those relationships, but I also recognize that we miss out on a great deal of the subtle nuances of human expression, that TV at least offers a faximily of.
In what I consider a plus for gaming, TV is a passive activity, while MMOs allow interactivity with hundreds and thousands of other people. Most of my friends that game do so as much to interact with friends who are physically distant as much as they do to play a game per say.
Lastly, MMOs allow for addictive escapism in a way that TV doesn't. TV enables viewers to ignore their lives and daydream about how they could be different, but MMOs allow users to actively create an alternate persona that fills in voids in their life or covers over their own flaws. Whether this is a good thing or not is a matter of debate. On the one hand, I don't necessarily view it as worse than someone who comes home from work and drinks to escape their problems, but on the other, any tactic that allows someone to ignore the problems of their life is problematic to me in that it encourages people to not actually deal with their issues.
But as I said, it's just a matter of the choices we all make for ourselves.
Blah
Yahoo's cache can be addressed at rds.yahoo.com (compared to Google's cache, which uses IP addresses with no associated hostnames). Thus, all the various message boards that use the slashdot style of putting the domain name of the host will show yahoo.com even if it might be serving up an IE exploit that was hosted at mynastystuff.ru, increasing chances of click through. MSN uses a resolvable name for their cache as well, but it's at least identifiable as msncache.com rather than just msn.com.
They have been distributing Firefox for years in the same way they distribute other open source software.
They intentionally modified a build switch that exists explicitly as part of Firefox's trademark protection/openness system. That makes it a bit different than their distribution of Apache, Linux, etc. While the Debian devs feel they had permission to do so, there are three basic issues that spring out at me:
1. If you're mucking around with trademarks, get it in writing. Some guy at some organization posting something to a listserv does not necessarily represent a legally binding agreement.
2. If the mark holder disagrees with what you believe, unless you have it in writing with legal backing of your interpretation, you are in the wrong; do what it takes to comply.
3. Even if Debian had permission to use the name Firefox without the artwork, breaking the build switch in the publically released version of the software is a very bad thing (tm), as it introduces legal risk to downstream users (unless the agreement specified them as well). If I were to fork Debian, I would be out of compliance with the FF/Debian agreement. If Debian wishes to be ultrapure in their free-as-in-freedom policy they have to reject any kind of agreement that specifies Debian alone.
Debian asked "could we at least get a stay of execution? Etch is going into deep freeze in less than a month. Would it be possible to resolve this after the release?"
If you felt someone was abusing nmap against your terms, would you let them wait until after a major release and tens of thousands of CDs/DVDs had been pressed and hundreds of thousands of installations had been done or would you try to get it fixed before that? Particularly given that this is a branding issue, I have little problem with Mozilla saying that it has to be fixed before Etch comes out.
How come OpenOffice.org has never had to do it?
... know that many people wish to use older versions
If you say Firefox to virtually anyone on a college campus, they will know what it is. A substantial portion of the older generation who did not grow up with computers as a personal device know what it is as well. OpenOffice? Not so much.
How is it a stupid idea? It is the standard operating procedure of most admins--if it is secure, use it--it may be more stable, better able to perform on old machines, and you won't surprise users with an unneeded update.
With servers, I completely agree - I expect to be able to deploy them and have them run for 5+ years on the same software. A web browser, however, does not fall into the same category I put apache/$DATABASE/$FILESERVER/$MAILSERVER etc. into. Forcing a major upgrade to those critical applications is quite likely to break things, often unexpectedly. However, I don't see any compelling reason not to move 4 year old Debian systems to a modern version of the web browser rather than trying to backport fixes, which as mentioned can be quite extensive in their scope.
You _might_ have a few edge cases where some intranet application relies on some CSS/Javascript bug that gets fixed in the more recent version. But realistically, how many locations do you think there are the use nothing but Debian (as the other distros/OSes aren't so fanatical about backporting) that rely on some defect in old versions of Firefox? You might also have some dumb software that hard codes that accepted web browsers are IE6 and FF1.x so FF2.x would break it, but really, Debian types aren't the people who run that kind of software (the majority of which demand Red Hat Enterprise) and even if they did, Debian would provide the proper fix for the server.
I would far rather the dev hours be put into finding and fixing new bugs or adding features. Of course, you and Debian are free to disagree on this point, which is fine with me and Mozilla - all they're asking Debian to do is to not call it Firefox if they're going to branch it.
If they
Just how many people do you think wish to run older versions? I deal with college students who prolly represent a large portion of the worldwide Firefox userbase. When I tell them to make sure they get updated because of the latest security fixes, they never say, "Damn it, I was just getting settled into version 1.0.7." My parents, who still run Win98, have never called me asking how to prevent Firefox from auto-updating periodically. Chances are, they barely notice. If I tried to get them to upgrade to a newer version of Windows, it would involve a tremendous amount of kicking and screaming, but changes to web browsers are just part of life.
Linux users make up a small portion of non-server computer users. Debian users make up a small portion of Linux users. Debian users who either care if there's a trademarked/copywritten image or want to run old versions of FF on their systems are a portion (couldn't tell you how small) of those. Small groups of people using free (as in beer) software aren't all that likely to be catered to when the developer decides something isn't worth doing.
I don't like to think that it has been squandered on legal infighting
I don't see a whole lot of money and time being wasted on Mozilla's part. They sent a basic message saying that Debian was quite intentionally out of compliance with the trademark terms and to please either become compliant or not use the trademark. The Debian folk then proceeded to be the ones that waste everyone's time bickering on the subject.
I thought "zero-day" meant you have something effective before release
In exploit terms, n-day means the number of days after a fix is released for the problem exploited by the attack. Most notable worms of the past have been n >= 1 (often much more) attacks - either someone deduces the flaw based on the patch release or the flaw was already known but only guardedly used in order to do high level target attacks while it was still unknown to the public.
Zero day refers to attacks that are released before the flaw is publically known. It's based on the specific flaw, not the application in general. Zero day attacks are nasty on two fronts - first, no one has specific protection or detection available for it, second, as mentioned, they are sometimes used on very specific targets. There was a recent string of what appears to be industrial espionage where very specific people have been sent MS Office attachments with previously unknown exploits in them.
As the second and third world countries continue to develop, they will increasingly use computers. Apple's market strategy cannot support that need - a company whose main desktop starts at $2500 just can't work in a country where the average worker makes that in a year. Even a Mac Mini is far beyond the reach of most people and companies in that area. On the other hand, those people will be far more likely to use recycled low-end x86 systems and inexpensive RISC systems (China's homegrown chip springs to mind) and the OS of choice on those systems will be Windows (quite likely pirated), Linux, or xBSD. That will create both a huge user and developer base for Linux.
The article also fails to explain why companies such as IBM and HP, who've invested much in the server side of Linux, would just walk away from that investment. I'm sure that IBM consultants will sell Apple products in the times where they are the exclusive fit for the need, but they can't control or steer Apple's direction the way they can Linux, which is one reason they push it so hard.
Here's the debian.org listserv postmortum. They subsequently discovered an error in do_brk(), which is described in eweek and has the CVE of CVE-2003-0961. Slashdot discussion here.
Would someone with more knowledge than me explain the term "zero day"?
N (where N >=1) day exploits refer to the number of days after a vulnerability and/or patch is made available that it takes for exploits to occur. If Microsoft releases a patch on the 12th and an exploit is written on the 15th, that would be 4 day exploit. Some people would consider it to be a 3 day exploit, not counting the day of the announcement.
Zero day refers to an exploit that uses a previously unknown vulnerability in software, or in some special cases, finds a way to turn a previously known flaw from something that wasn't considered bad enough to patch to a dangerous situation. Zero day exploits are dangerous in that there are no patches for them, although in some cases it can be prevented/mitigated by firewalls or Intrusion Prevention Systems. On the other hand, zero day exploits are often held closely by the people who discover them in order to gain the maximum advantage from it. For example, the exploit used on debian.org a few years ago was not disclosed in order to use it to penetrate several huge names in the open source community. Once a zero day exploit is made public knowledge, it will be focused on and patched.
There is also an archaic use of the term from the old days of pirate BBSes - back when delivery of cracked software was slow, difference BBSes would have better priority on getting delivery of that software. The most important ones would get the software the day it was released by the cracking group and would be described as having 0 day warez. Broadband/P2P/etc. has made the use of this term out of date, although it's entirely possible that some people still use it in this context.
I thought it was fairly well-established that Microsoft has LOST money on the Xbox venture so far.
That's not the point. As I said, MS has money to burn if they want to. The point is that they were a non-entity in the console world and now they're one of the top players.
I would hardly call combining all that with a bit of hardware from established vendors much outside Microsoft's core compentency.
Microsoft has made a lot of money by on Windows and Office. That's a very different world than video game consoles. Completely different distribution system, different market, different model. They make money selling Windows and their position is propped up by the fact that other people writes software for it. With a console, you have to convince people to pay you money to release software on your platform.
And as you noted, they haven't exactly been a financial sucess in the the field.
I wonder how long it will be before one of them cuts out the RIAA entirley and starts signing up artists directly.
In a sense, they already are - there are already a bunch of self funded artists available on iTunes, Napster, etc. One of my buddies is available on virtually every electronic download/streaming service. I think his most recent count was around $12 after over a year.
The artists selling thousands of tracks are virtually all recorded and marketed at great expense. The public (and the money) follow what's presented to them. The charts on the unlimited music services (Napster, Rhapsody, et al) show that even when it doesn't cost a penny more to go exploring, the vast majority of the people stick with marketed music (even if it's what they hear in Starbucks rather than on MTV).
A really good recording session is not cheap. Shooting a video is not cheap. Marketing an artist is not cheap. For every artist that goes big and sells a million copies, there's dozens that fail. That's part of the recording business, and that's part of what the record labels deal with.
Consider for a moment - you can let someone else do the hard work and assume the risk and personally make five cents off of every track sold (and no matter who come out on top, someone's going to sell a bunch of tracks - you don't have to care who it is), or front the money for the recording, the promotion, all in hopes of making 70 cents per track. Now, also take into consideration that choosing artists and marketing them is far outside of your core competency (do you really want the guy that came up with with the Ellen Feiss campaign chosing what music should be recorded? Or Steve "Developers!" Balmer?). Why assume the risk, when someone else is willing to do so and let you skim a few cents off of millions of sales instead?
Remember, most businesses that expand from doing one thing really well into completely different markets tend to do really, really badly (MS and the Xbox are an exception to this, but MS also has a gajillion bucks to dump into projects. But they've not done very well in expanding other new markets). Google and Yahoo are all about finding and delivering digital content, not creating it. And Apple is all about facilitating a particular digital experience, specifically consuming it (and to a lesser extent, creating it).
Bundling a media player doesn't lock you in
Actually, it really does. More accurately, it doesn't lock the user in, but it locks the competition out. First, many users are too disinterested or technically unskilled to install other media players and will default to whatever is preinstalled. Second, in business environments, many users do not have administrative rights on their computers, and either I.T. will not install media players or it is a hard enough process that the users will again, fall back to what's preinstalled. This creates a tremendously difficult environment for any competition.
Please note that I understand the author is making a sorta joke with his furries comment BUT the old fact remains. Either you defend everyones freedom or you give up on freedom.
Except that the original poster didn't suggest banning furries or taking away their freedoms, merely stated that he didn't mind offending them. And the power to offend is rather crucial to this whole freedome of speech thing.
They are anti-free market devices used to reduce competition in the market place.
Perhaps at this point. The theory that applied fairly well to mechanical devices and such was that it would encourage competition by increasing the chance of licensing new technology to your competition. Without a patent, if I design a clever new thing, I have no reason to let anyone else know how it works because (assuming it's not reverse engineerable and I can keep out industrial spies), I have a monopoly on the market. Even with patents, there are major companies and technologies in use today that have not been patented specifically because the company that created the idea are confident that they can keep the secret longer than the length of a patent. With patents, I'm given the choice of keeping that secret, or chosing to license it to whoever wants to pay. So rather than having a monopoly selling 100,000 widgets with my exclusive technology at a profit of $10 each, I could be getting $1 each from 100,000,000 widgets being sold, AND someone else takes the financial risk of creating those products and brining them to the market.
Supporting increased "Intellectual Property" rights is not a conservative economic position, it is definitely a socialist position that believes the government is better at picking winners and losers in the market place than market forces are.
I do not think that word means what you think it means. Socialism believes that the ownership of production belongs to all people/citizens of the country/world/whatever. There is no need for patents in socialism, because it doesn't matter if a given factory is making something with new fangled technology foo or not. If it provides a benefit to the people, it should be used elsewhere.
Also, "Intellectual Property" is a rather large term, as we will see in a moment.
Pure capitalism without regulation is pretty much a disaster. Pure capitalism supports shooting your competition, using slave labour, dumping pollutants into the environment, beating strikers, false advertising, etc.
If you support increases in patents copyrights and trademarks, you support liberal economic theories.
Woah, hold on there, cowboy. Trademarks are completely different than copyrights and patents. The creation of a distinctive mark being protected is a very good one, even if it has been allowed to grow too far recently. MS owning a trademark on the term "Windows" relating to computer operating systems is a good thing. MS owning a trademark on the term "Windows" related to everything is a bad thing. Trademarks help enable that consumers get what they think they're purchasing. Imagine if thirty different companies named 'Sony' all put out a product called a 'Playstation Portable' - and all but one was a piece of junk? How would consumers know which one to purchase?
If you apply a Microsoft patch for something that is never likely to affect you, you're taking a bigger risk by applying the patch!
There's very few updates that are pushed as "must install" downloads via Windows Update that aren't likely to pose a threat to the system. IE is so tied into the system and other software that keeping it patched is important even if you don't do web browsing on the system. Many of the other vulnerabilities may not seem like they're important behind a firewall, but firewalls fail or can be worked around.
Most people here should be aware that applying a Microsoft patch is likely to screw something up -- something Microsoft has become renowned for.
To be fair, every major vendor I can think of has released a patch or ten that screwed something up. The MS faulty patches have gotten better and with less significant problems.
Monopolies in industries with high barriers to entry usually are harmful.
The problem isn't the services that ride in on telcos, the problem is that there are very few ways to get data pipes into your home or business because they are entrenched monopolies with extremely high barriers to entry. I have two options for non-business class (and price) high speed internet for my home - the monopoly of the phone company and the monopoly of the cable company. There's little competition between the two of them, and it doesn't matter if I can chose between five VOIP companies if the two companies that can permit their packets to reach my home have the ability to try to block them or charge either myself or the VOIP company extra to ensure that the service actually works.
Even if I had millions of dollars, it's unlikely that I could create a fiber/copper delivery system to consumers. There's just too much public space that would have to be intruded upon. That's why phone and cable are supposed to be regulated - they were given a monopoly on that public access. But no one's watching the watchers it seems.
The idea of Google etc. using dark fiber and a wireless network to bypass the proposed tiered internet is cute, but at least a decade away from working for people like me in a small town. And I'd just as soon rather not have Google datamining everything I do online.
Still, you've got to admit that this would be a huge psychological deterant.
On the other hand, most of these systems basically fire a shotgun in the direction of the incoming RPG. If you can set it up your attack so that the system took out [the defender's own] infantry in the process of defending the vehicle, that would be one hell of a psychological weapon against the defender in the type of situation the U.S. is in right now where the general public hates any loss of its own life, particularly from friendly fire. The desctruction of a tank would be really bad publicity, but having one of your own soldiers shreded by a tank would be even worse. Not to mention the death of any non-US forces that firing weapons like this in an urban environment might cause.
The computer is supposed to determine if the projectile is actually a threat or not before shooting at it. Additionally, reactive armour is generally only effective on the front and rear of heavy tanks. This could theoretically defend the sides as well as lighter vehicles. It's still not a stinking force field though.