It is a vendor lock in attempt. Try to sell the original part cheaply to win a customer, then milk the customer when he got the item and needs "fuel" to keep it running.
Except that this isn't what TFA describes. The company sold a product, and then quietly sabotaged their customers' purchased products. This is something very different from trying to "milk" customers for some consumable "fuel". They intentionally damaged the equipment so it couldn't be used in the way it was advertised and the customer was using it.
To use the wornout auto analogy, it's more like your auto dealer sent people around to your house in the middle of the night to sabotage your car, in an attempt to increase your repair bills or persuade you to do a trade-in. Except that in this case, the saboteurs were all too clearly in the pay of the company that sold you the goods.
I do wonder if this is legal in Canada or BC. You'd think that there'd be some laws that would cover such sabotage. With all the laws on the books, was this sort of crime somehow missed?
Installing new software through an "Update" is of course about the same thing Real was doing with RealPlayer spyware couple of years ago.
It's funny to see RealPlayer mentioned in this discussion. Are people aware that RealPlayer comes with its own browser? The browser doesn't seem to be an option; it's simply installed. For all I know, it may be the same binary as RealPlayer, with behavior dependent on how it's called. I've played with it a bit, and it's not what you'd call a really advanced browser, but its usable. It seems to lack things like tabs. Presumably its main advantage is that it often plays "Real" videos a bit better than most other browsers do, and this is probably because it contains all the video stuff directly linked in instead of as a plugin of some sort.
So far, I haven't seen anyone complaining about the way the RealPlayer automatically includes a browser as part of its installation. Possibly it's because nobody noticed.
What I'd worry about is whether a new Safari digs in and overrides your default handlers for any file types. Anyone know if it does this? I only have Safari on my Mac, don't have a Windows machine, and as far as I know, Safari isn't available for my linux system. If it were, I'd probably install it, because I do a lot of web testing, and I like to have lots of browsers on every machine.
(Yes, I've tested my stuff against the RealPlayer browser. It does OK, but I rarely do anything very tricky.;-)
If a copy of Office 2008 for OSX installed Windows Media Player to fight off iTunes then slashdot would melt from the outrage.
And, of course, that's exactly how WMP got distributed during its early years, when people had older Windows systems from before WMP was available. I had a number of friends who were Windows users, who were really bothered by this. When they installed various commercial software packages, including things like office and tax packages, WMP silently got installed along with them. And when WMP started up, it did a search-and-destroy on many of the other audio/video players that were already in use. My friends found that they had to reinstall their previous players to get them to work again, and whenever WMP got triggered (because it installed itself as the preferred player), the other players again stopped working and had to be reinstalled.
Eventually, they just gave up and used WMP. Except for the real audiophiles, who now have Macs or linux machines and get angry looks on their faces whenever someone mentions Windows. And the ones who tried developing audio/video software for Windows have abandoned the idea, sticking to OSX and linux.
OTOH, I haven't yet heard reports that Apple's software hunts down competitors and kills them. I have a Mac sitting next to my linux box, and the Mac has about a dozen browsers installed. They all work fine, and I've seen no evidence that any Apple software has interfered with them. It's handy to have a versatile test machine like this if you're developing web software, and if Apple started killing off Safari's competition like Microsoft software tends to do, it would seriously decrease the value of the Mac as a web test machine.
Now we just need to get Safari and a few of the other "less popular" browsers for linux. I don't have a dozen browsers on that machine, because there don't seem to be quite that many available (though I've probably missed a few) (and my latest upgrade to Opera doesn't seem to work, but that's a different story;-).
You could start out next door to your destination and it may take you a day-and-a-half of travel to finally wind up there as you tour all over the city.
Well, here in the Boston metro area, that's a fairly normal occurrence. OK, maybe not a day and a half, but I've seen situations where a destination was in the next block, but to get there (legally) required several miles of driving. It's not unusual to see a lot of sequential side streets that are all one way the same way. (This happens on Rte 16 in west Somerville, for instance.) And I've seen several cases of one-way dead-end streets.;-)
Of course, in a street system like this, the problem's assumptions aren't satisfied, so some other heuristic is needed. I do have a Garmin GPS gadget; it sometimes gives routes that cause onlookers to break out laughing. And all too often, its route is indeed the best one, despite the laughter.
Then there was the time that I was in east Newton, and it told me to drive on local streets north to Rte 9 and turn left. Ummm... That barrier down the middle of Rte 9 has been there for over a quarter century, long enough for it to develop visible rust spots.
Oh, well, maybe next the graph theorists will start working on the problem of finding a route through a graph when the mapmakers lied to you about some of the connectivity details.
Hmmm... Maybe I should publish that puzzle. Get it named after me.
And most Americans would agree saying "why would you block the camera if you didn't have something to hide?"
I doubt that. We are talking the living room here.
Um, no we're not. Quite a lot of Americans also have TV sets in their bedrooms. It might be interesting to see the reactions of people when told that at least one cable company is "experimenting" with "camera technologies" inside the set-top box. Many of them will instantly start to imagine the footage that it might be collecting.
You don't have the Estonian language pack installed, do you???:-)
No, but I do have Finnish Extended and Swedish Pro, which are pretty similar. (Some linguists argue that Estonian is a dialect of Finnish, but the Finns insist it isn't because Estonian is incomprehensible to them.;-) I also have Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek (Polytonic), and 3 Chinese packs. I wonder if this might cause problems? I know that I'm constantly stumbling across inexplicable, spontaneous switches of language. This is especially annoying when it switches to Swedish or Finnish, because they're nearly the same as U.S. Extended, and it sometimes takes me a while to realize why things aren't working right.
Some IceWeasel Bug ID #400704 commentary points to not having a home page defined;...
It's defined here, as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random, which is one of my favorite "pages".... under about:config, there is an entry called browser.sessionstore.enabled. Try checking it and turn it on if it's off.
It's there, and it was on.
Maybe I'll try experimenting some more. I did ask google, of course, and while it finds lots of pages that mention undoing a tab delete in firefox, the first couple dozen don't seem to mention how they do it. They just say how useful it is, which I'd agree with, because I'm always closing the wrong tab. It probably has a lot to do with having a dozen browsers installed (for web testing purposes), and no two of them handle tabs quite the same.
Hmmm... I went to a FF window, opened up a new tab, clicked on it's tab to verify that it was a real tab, closed it - and the tab bar disappeared. Oops!
OK, so I opened a different window that already had more than one tab open, and opened a new tab. I then closed it, and tried a right-click (actually ctrl-click, since I happened to be using my Mac PB) in the tab bar, and saw the "Undo Close Tab", so I selected it. It opened a new tab, but it contained contents that I'd read a couple of hours ago, not the tab that I just closed. Oops!
So how do I tell it to re-open the tab that I just closed? Or, since it obviously remembered a tab's contents from earlier than that, is there some way to select a specific closed tab? The ctrl-click menu on the tab bar doesn't show me any choices, so I'm guessing not.
Not joking at all. I've seen that "Recently Closed Tabs" entry in the History menu, but it's always greyed out and unusable. I just tested it by opening a new tab, selecting it to verify that it was a real tab, and closing it. The "Recently Closed Tabs" menu entry is still greyed out, although I just closed a tab. I've also had a number of other tabs open during the day, and closed them, and that "Recently Closed Tabs" thingy is always greyed out when I check it.
So how does one enable it?
(This is on a Mac Powerbook with OSX 10.4.11, if that matters. I've also seen that menu item with FF on my linux box and my wife's NT and Vista systems, and it was also greyed out there. So I'm baffled. What good is it if it can't be used?;-)
I think a much better test would be to see a single window with 30 tabs.
Something I discovered some years ago is that the mozilla-suite browsers all seem to have problems somewhere around 16 tabs. The bugs are difficult to characterize; the browser just slowly goes insane. The solution is to keep the number of tabs less than 16 in each window. I don't know if FF3 has fixed this problem. (The latest SeaMonkey certainly hasn't, and Camino seems to have similar problems.;-)
Does anyone use windows rather than tabs to manage their browsing?
Another common lesson that lots of people have learned is that it's best to use a set of tabs for a single site (or a very few closely-related sites). The reason is that a lot of sites use pages that are "designed" for a certain size, and to get them to render sensibly, you have to resize the window that their preferred size. Thus, if you open a link to a different site in a new tab, all too often you find that you have to resize the window for that page, and this screws up the rendering of the other tabs in that window. So a link to a different site should be opened in a different window, while a new page from the same site can usually be safely opened in a new tab in the same window.
In general, tabs are most useful for collecting a small set of closely-related pages, from one site or a few closely-related sites. If you're dealing with a lot of different sites, you're usually better off using separate windows.
It might be interesting to hear others' takes on these problems...
Really? I can't find any clue that it's possible, much less how to do it. Is it documented somewhere, or is it an "Easter egg" that you just have to stumble across accidentally (or learn from someone else)?
... it is more like "you were a naughty little kid in the past, so you are a suspect now."
Well, that's partly true, but it can't be the whole story. If that were the reasoning, then why would they want DNA records? What they'd want is the behavioral history of those naughty little kids. But they're not asking for a behavioral database; they're asking for a DNA database. This isn't because they enjoy reading strings of millions of A's, C's, G's and T's. It's that they believe that if they know your DNA, they can use it to predict your behavior.
It's really a lot like predicting your future from the bumps on your head or the positions of the planets when you were born. Except DNA is so much more scientific, y'know, so it must be correct.
knowing which sequences will say cause teenage onset diabetes could lead to a new class of medicines to try and prevent diabetes from even forming..
Actually, this is an excellent example of the major problem, though perhaps not as you intended. It's widely understood that certain genes "cause" diabetes. But it isn't true. Those variant genes only predispose people to diabetes, and it takes a number of other contributing factors for the disease to actually develop. The common belief that diabetes has "a genetic cause" is not only wrong; it leads to seriously wrong actions by people who believe it, such as attempting to treat the disease rather than prevent it by going after the entire set of factors.
One of the main problems with the idea of DNA fingering "potential offenders" is the same mistaken belief that DNA causes behavior. It does no such thing, no more than those genetic mutations cause diabetes. DNA might produce a slight predisposition to certain behavior, but believing behavior is caused by genes inevitably leads to people "treating" the future criminal behavior in the obvious sense, rather than taking steps to prevent it via proper education.
There's a serious prospect that such a DNA database would lead to young children being classified as criminals before they've ever done anything. And from what we know of the guiding influence of parents' and teachers' expectations on children's behavior, the result is predictable: Children classified as potential criminals would have little choice other than to become criminals.
Unless we hear a public discussion (and/. probably doesn't qualify;-) of this problem, we should probably assume that this is what the proponents of this database are actually proposing. The poorer people in the UK (or various other countries considering similar databases) have very good reason to see this as a threat to their children's futures. It's all too easy for poor people to be labelled criminals, and once it happens, the label never goes away.
Oh, and despite the alarmist news media, "election fraud" is hardly a rampant problem.
And how would we know that? Consider that a lot of the new "electronic" voting equipment isn't auditable, not even by the people running the election. If the actual votes are in a form that can be easily and undetectably erased, it's not obvious how we could ever know how much election fraud has taken place.
Considering the high value of winning elections, the default assumption in such situations should always be that non-auditable equipment is bought because it can be used to commit undetectable election fraud. Anything else is just naive. At the very least, the people who signed off on using such equipment should be considered ipso facto guilty of election fraud.
Nobody thinks their precious little snowflake is going to be caught by that, so they want to defend their child against the evil little children.
Actually, I'd guess that there are a good number of people who are afraid that their own kid just might get caught by it, so they'll resist getting into the DNA database. The reason is that humanity has a long, sorry history of looking for this sort of magic test that will lighten the tough load of good police work, and let the authorities just go out and arrest people who show some physical features that are listed as sure signs of criminality.
The classical physical features are race-related, of course. Lots of Americans "know" that dark-skinned people are all criminals who haven't yet been caught. In Europe, the victim groups are sometimes different, the they've always existed. In northern Europe, it's people from southern Europe. In southern Europe, it's people from Africa or the East. And everywhere, it's gypsies. If a person in the wrong group is anywhere near the scene of a crime, they get arrested and charged with the crime. It's a lot easier than the hard work of finding the actual culprit, y'know.
It wasn't so long ago that having the wrong bumps on your head made you a "potential criminal". We know now that that was pseudo-science, but enough people believed it that the police could use it as a way of avoiding the hard police work. Lately, we've had a few people pointing out that fingerprinting has never been scientifically tested, is at most useful for rejecting suspects whose prints don't match, and textbooks go into great detail about the situations where matching isn't even possible. But the technical skeptics are ignored, because it simplifies the job of picking someone to arrest (and Hollywood has told us that it works).
And in general, the poorest people are always "potential criminals". I suppose the reasoning is that they are the ones with the strongest motive to be criminals. And, of course, if you can't get a job because you didn't get a good education because your parents couldn't afford to pay for good schools, you may find that a criminal life is the only one open to you.
Anyway, I'd guess that in most of the world, there's a good-sized underclass that will instantly understand what this latest "potential offender" test means. It means that their DNA will be the type classified as potential offenders. Being on the list will eliminate most of their job opportunities, and will lead to arrests any time they happen to be near a crime scene. If your kids are on the list, they'll never have a good job and will be repeatedly arrested no matter what they do or how they live.
With the stage of our current DNA understanding, this is just another in the long line of pseudo-scientific tests for criminality. Anyone with a good understanding of what DNA is and how it works is going to be highly skeptical. DNA may influence your behavior; it certainly doesn't determine your behavior. But we can expect that the politicians and police won't pay attention to geeky technical skeptics. Not when they've got the latest high-tech excuse to avoid the hard police work and just arrest someone nearby with the wrong DNA. Especially not when the database "proves" that it's mostly the "wrong people" who are criminals, just like we knew all along.
The Microsoft Fanboys say that the number of successfully attacked Microsoft Windows XP desktops is due to the relative installation base (and they are correct).
No, the installation base explains only the number of attacks. The number of successful attacks is explained by the relative security of the various systems. And you really should distinguish successful attacks on the basic software from the successful attacks that exploit misconfigured sites or add-on software. Otherwise you're lumping together successful attacks on software that comes from different sources.
If you don't make such distintions, I can "demonstrate" the poor security of your favorite web server (or OS) by simply installing a CGI script that accepts any string and evals it.
On a side note, why do some people use commas to delimit sets of 10^3 and others use decimal points? And moreover which one is more correct, localization issues not withstanding?
If the author is in North America, the comma is correct. If the author is in Europe, the period is (mostly) correct.
And, of course, if you're the reader, you usually can't know where the author was, so you have no clue.
Ain't standards wonderful? The phrase "divided by a common language" comes to mind.
(And if you do figure out a reliable solution to this puzzle, your next task is to find a reliable way to decode dates and convert them to the ISO standard date format. Start with "What date is 2/4/6?" If you solve that one, you can advance to the next puzzle: figuring out the time zone of the writer.;-)
... It doesn't tell us that Apache or IIS or Windows or Linux is more secure than something else. It tells us users suck at security and programmers suck at making security simple.
True, perhaps. But what it also tells me is that regardless of OS, the software's documentation sucks, especially on security issues. While it may be true that there are lots of idiot users who'll never learn, I think most of us here have also found themselves frustrated by the sorry state of the documentation on their favorite system. I know, as a longtime unix/linux user, I agree fully with the ongoing criticism of the sketchy nature of much of the documentation. Much of what I know, I learned by experimenting, or by asking others who have learned by experimenting. Sometimes, I've also dug into the source code, which is more possible on linux systems than on others, but that's difficult and time consuming, and also doesn't usually lead to full understanding.
As long as software producers insist on keeping their users ignorant of how to use the software correctly, you can't fully blame the users for their ignorance.
Security is especially a problem. I learned the hard way that, if you ask security questions, you tend to rapidly get a "hacker" reputation. So it's common to not pry too deeply into security, but to rather sit at the side and try to learn by osmosis. This is not especially effective. But in most organizations, it's safer for your professional reputation if you don't become known as the one who's constantly prying into security issues.
I'd say that a great deal of users' ignorance of security issues is due to a combination of the general refusal to fully document security issues, and the punishment brought down on users who try too openly to learn about security.
That, and the idiocy of a large fraction of the users, of course.
Some years ago, in the late 1980s if I remember right, someone explained something to me that I've remembered ever since: Everything on a computer, especially the programming languages, can be best understood as a video game. The way the game works is that when the computer does what you intended, you get a point. When it finds some way to misinterpret your command (or find it impossible for some internal, unexplained reason) and do something other than what you intended, the people who build the software get a point. A good programmer or an experienced user wins if they get more than half the points. When I first stumbled across unix systems, I found that I was winning overwhelmingly within only a few days of first cracking open "The C Programming Language". I'd never had that experience before, and I never have since on any non-unix computer system.
I heard this sometime after I'd been using unix systems for a few years, and it made a lot of sense. I could explain very simply why I preferred unix to all the other computer systems I'd ever used: On a unix systems, I usually won. When I told it to do something, it almost always did what I wanted it to do. Granted, there were occasional problems with running out of resources, and no OS can prevent that. But even then, it happened at a much later stage than on other systems, because unix tools were mostly small and sleek, and didn't hog resources.
Linux is just the current favorite in a long chain of unix-like system that let me win in both the programming and computer-user games.
I've used OSX a bunch, and in fact I'm typing this on a Mac Powerbook. I like to work on different computers occasionally, to keep up to date on what they do well or poorly. But I don't win nearly as often on OSX as I do on linux, for a lot of reasons. It's always doing something bizarre, and when I investigate, I usually find that the bizarreness was intentional in the design. And it's full of little time-wasting gotchas that aren't nearly as common in linux apps.
Of course, as with any system, you do have to learn its basic tools to get anything done. Most of the non-linux users I know use this as their excuse. They "know" Windows or Macs, and they aren't about to learn some other system. So they're stuck forever in a computer game that's designed to lower their score at every opportunity. When I watch over their shoulders, I have to keep my mouth shut about how painful it is to watch them laboriously fighting with their computer to do the simplest tasks. But I generally don't say anything unless they ask, because I don't want to insult them. And telling them how much easier it could be would be an insult, because I'd be telling them how much of their lives they've wasted on zillions of little time-wasting design snafus.
The only reason I'd even bother mentioning it here is to see the reaction of other linux (or solaris or whatever) users. How many of you have heard this video-game model applied to all computer use and programming? Does it really have the explanatory power that it seems to have, or do you really have some other basic motivation to use what you do?
Effective January 1, 1984, AT&T's local operations were split into seven independent Regional Holding Companies, also known as Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), or "Baby Bells". Afterwards, AT&T, reduced in value by approximately 70%, continued to operate all of its long-distance services, although in the ensuing years it lost portions of its market share to competitors such as MCI and Sprint."
It's not clear to me how this did anything at all about the monopoly. To almost every US phone customer, all this did was replace their previous monopoly AT&T phone service with monopoly phone service through exactly one of the "Baby Bells". If you didn't like your local Baby Bell, your choices were to have no phone service, or to move to where another Baby Bell ran the monopoly phone busines.
This is still true in most of the US, especially if you want a land line. Hereabouts, the phone wires coming to our house are owned by Verizon, and it's illegal for anyone else to install phone lines. This is true almost everywhere; the only difference is that the local monopoly has a different name.
It's true that we now have cell phone service, which provides somewhat of an alternative. But cell phones weren't a result of the breakup of AT&T in 1984, and they're not really that much of a competitor for wired phones. To use the old, worn auto analogy, motorcycles really aren't competitors for automobiles. If your local government only permitted one brand of motorcycle and one brand of automobile on its streets (with perhaps cross-licensing for motorcycles), the result would be similar to the phone situation.
And in much of the US, there is either one or zero cell-phone services available for a given home. This isn't much of a competitive market. A duopoly isn't usually much better than a monopoly, because if there are only two companies, they tend to us "gentlemens' agreements" to restrict the local market by providing similar crappy products at similar high prices.
If you want to argue for a "market solution", you first have how a market can develop. This hasn't much happened in the telecom business in the US. Local governments cooperate with one or a few big corporations to restrict the market and lock out competitors, giving local customers few or no choices. The 1984 breakup of AT&T did little if anything to affect this, and local governments mostly cooperate with maintaining the restricted local market.
This is why I'd love to see us make inroads on cheap, easy to use wireless mesh routers.... The difficulties of such a mesh are mind-boggling, of course.... It's definitely a utopian libertarian dream, but it is one that has always fascinated me.
Funny, but it's not just utopian libertarians with such dreams. If you dig up the docs from the earliest days of the ARPAnet, back in the 1960s, you'll find that the US Dept of Defense had exactly the same dream. Except theirs was a battle field scenario, with all of their mobile equipment and soldiers connected via a wireless network. That network shouldn't have any central routers, because those are instant targets, and taking them out kills your network. The idea was that all the equipment supported dynamic routing, with all but the endpoints doing routing, and if any of the routers were taken out, the rest would instantly reconfigure the routing tables. The idea was that as long as an electronic path between two nodes exists, those nodes can communciate.
This was how the Internet was supposed to work. The wired version was an interim kludge for development purposes, to be phased out as wireless equipment became available. Central routine nodes and organizations like ISPs that are chokepoints were allowed because the routing protocols hadn't been worked out yet, but eventually they should be supplanted by a fully distributed routing system with maximal interconnection, so that an enemy couldn't take it all down with a few well-placed shots.
Somehow the commercial Internet didn't see it that way. They much prefer minimal hardware with tree-structured, heirarchical connectivity, and chokepoints everywhere, without alternate routes to handle failure.
(OTOH, the new OLPC XO implements something very similar to what the DoD proposed 40 years ago. There's some sort of historical irony here, with people building a computer for young children doing something that the entire commercial economy has failed to deliver for decades. Maybe the children will lead us into this libertarian/military utopia that we've dreamed of.;-)
I haven't experienced any of this slow down or even ask other comments have suggested the "end packets" or whatever that mess up my downloads. Perhaps it happens to be the fact that I live in a smaller metropolitan area that the rest of the/.'ers?
Perhaps. But more likely it's just that you're not living in one of their test areas. You see, they knew quite well that their packet-forging "traffic management" technique would be controversial, and probably illegal. Before they extend it to the rest of the network, they first need to determine what sort of fines the FCC will impose. If the fines are low enough to qualify as a "business expense", you can expect their new, improved traffic management techniques to be introduced to your area some time in the next year. You'll be billed a minor surcharge for pleasure of this improved service.
We can also trust that the other ISPs are watching carefully to determine whether they should be introducing similar traffic management tools.
The guy could easily have created Wikipedia as a for-profit enterprise.
Hindsight's 20/20.
Also, that's been done. Ask google about "online encyclopedia". Even Britannica is online.
The interesting thing about wikipedia from the start was that it was an experiment in not-for-profit, unpaid-editor publishing. Jimmy Wales set his goal as an encyclopedia, which was reasonable as that would potentially attract a motley crowd of people interested in writing about all sorts of unrelated topics. The results of this experiment have been interesting and useful. And it seems to have surpassed the many for-profit online encyclopedias in both usefulness and public recognition.
Given the radical differences in Internet "publishing" from older methods, it seems reasonable that people should experiment with different ideas. Jimmy's idea was a wild experiment, and nobody had any idea how successful it would be. Many of us are sorta glad he decided to try it and see what happened.
I'd think that, given the multitude of for-profit encyclopedias online, we shouldn't try to convert wikipedia to that model. I'd much rather see the experiment run for another decade or so.
Also, if it does get taken over by advertisers, as some fear, we can also expect that a few people would get together and fork it. I sorta wish that had been done years ago, to see what happened with a different try with different policies. We really don't know how much better or worse wikipedia might have been if some of its policies had been different.
Of course, it's not too late. And other kinds of online encyclopedias are being tried with different policies. It'll be interesting to see the results of the experiments that have a limited set of "expert" editors. You'd think that they'd be better than wikipedia, but my wild guess is that they won't. (And I won't put any money on such a prediction.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
It is a vendor lock in attempt. Try to sell the original part cheaply to win a customer, then milk the customer when he got the item and needs "fuel" to keep it running.
Except that this isn't what TFA describes. The company sold a product, and then quietly sabotaged their customers' purchased products. This is something very different from trying to "milk" customers for some consumable "fuel". They intentionally damaged the equipment so it couldn't be used in the way it was advertised and the customer was using it.
To use the wornout auto analogy, it's more like your auto dealer sent people around to your house in the middle of the night to sabotage your car, in an attempt to increase your repair bills or persuade you to do a trade-in. Except that in this case, the saboteurs were all too clearly in the pay of the company that sold you the goods.
I do wonder if this is legal in Canada or BC. You'd think that there'd be some laws that would cover such sabotage. With all the laws on the books, was this sort of crime somehow missed?
Blame MIT... blame MIT... ... to the tune of Blame Canada.
;-)
(Hey, someone had to post it.
Installing new software through an "Update" is of course about the same thing Real was doing with RealPlayer spyware couple of years ago.
;-)
It's funny to see RealPlayer mentioned in this discussion. Are people aware that RealPlayer comes with its own browser? The browser doesn't seem to be an option; it's simply installed. For all I know, it may be the same binary as RealPlayer, with behavior dependent on how it's called. I've played with it a bit, and it's not what you'd call a really advanced browser, but its usable. It seems to lack things like tabs. Presumably its main advantage is that it often plays "Real" videos a bit better than most other browsers do, and this is probably because it contains all the video stuff directly linked in instead of as a plugin of some sort.
So far, I haven't seen anyone complaining about the way the RealPlayer automatically includes a browser as part of its installation. Possibly it's because nobody noticed.
What I'd worry about is whether a new Safari digs in and overrides your default handlers for any file types. Anyone know if it does this? I only have Safari on my Mac, don't have a Windows machine, and as far as I know, Safari isn't available for my linux system. If it were, I'd probably install it, because I do a lot of web testing, and I like to have lots of browsers on every machine.
(Yes, I've tested my stuff against the RealPlayer browser. It does OK, but I rarely do anything very tricky.
If a copy of Office 2008 for OSX installed Windows Media Player to fight off iTunes then slashdot would melt from the outrage.
;-).
And, of course, that's exactly how WMP got distributed during its early years, when people had older Windows systems from before WMP was available. I had a number of friends who were Windows users, who were really bothered by this. When they installed various commercial software packages, including things like office and tax packages, WMP silently got installed along with them. And when WMP started up, it did a search-and-destroy on many of the other audio/video players that were already in use. My friends found that they had to reinstall their previous players to get them to work again, and whenever WMP got triggered (because it installed itself as the preferred player), the other players again stopped working and had to be reinstalled.
Eventually, they just gave up and used WMP. Except for the real audiophiles, who now have Macs or linux machines and get angry looks on their faces whenever someone mentions Windows. And the ones who tried developing audio/video software for Windows have abandoned the idea, sticking to OSX and linux.
OTOH, I haven't yet heard reports that Apple's software hunts down competitors and kills them. I have a Mac sitting next to my linux box, and the Mac has about a dozen browsers installed. They all work fine, and I've seen no evidence that any Apple software has interfered with them. It's handy to have a versatile test machine like this if you're developing web software, and if Apple started killing off Safari's competition like Microsoft software tends to do, it would seriously decrease the value of the Mac as a web test machine.
Now we just need to get Safari and a few of the other "less popular" browsers for linux. I don't have a dozen browsers on that machine, because there don't seem to be quite that many available (though I've probably missed a few) (and my latest upgrade to Opera doesn't seem to work, but that's a different story
You could start out next door to your destination and it may take you a day-and-a-half of travel to finally wind up there as you tour all over the city.
;-)
... That barrier down the middle of Rte 9 has been there for over a quarter century, long enough for it to develop visible rust spots.
... Maybe I should publish that puzzle. Get it named after me.
Well, here in the Boston metro area, that's a fairly normal occurrence. OK, maybe not a day and a half, but I've seen situations where a destination was in the next block, but to get there (legally) required several miles of driving. It's not unusual to see a lot of sequential side streets that are all one way the same way. (This happens on Rte 16 in west Somerville, for instance.) And I've seen several cases of one-way dead-end streets.
Of course, in a street system like this, the problem's assumptions aren't satisfied, so some other heuristic is needed. I do have a Garmin GPS gadget; it sometimes gives routes that cause onlookers to break out laughing. And all too often, its route is indeed the best one, despite the laughter.
Then there was the time that I was in east Newton, and it told me to drive on local streets north to Rte 9 and turn left. Ummm
Oh, well, maybe next the graph theorists will start working on the problem of finding a route through a graph when the mapmakers lied to you about some of the connectivity details.
Hmmm
Um, no we're not. Quite a lot of Americans also have TV sets in their bedrooms. It might be interesting to see the reactions of people when told that at least one cable company is "experimenting" with "camera technologies" inside the set-top box. Many of them will instantly start to imagine the footage that it might be collecting.
I could see a new reality tv show being started from just grabbing peoples' recorded activities and sending them $5 in the mail.
Heh. More likely, they'd send you a video of some of your activities, and tell you that for $10,000, they won't show it on their new reality show.
You don't have the Estonian language pack installed, do you??? :-)
;-) I also have Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek (Polytonic), and 3 Chinese packs. I wonder if this might cause problems? I know that I'm constantly stumbling across inexplicable, spontaneous switches of language. This is especially annoying when it switches to Swedish or Finnish, because they're nearly the same as U.S. Extended, and it sometimes takes me a while to realize why things aren't working right.
...
... under about:config, there is an entry called browser.sessionstore.enabled. Try checking it and turn it on if it's off.
No, but I do have Finnish Extended and Swedish Pro, which are pretty similar. (Some linguists argue that Estonian is a dialect of Finnish, but the Finns insist it isn't because Estonian is incomprehensible to them.
Some IceWeasel Bug ID #400704 commentary points to not having a home page defined;
It's defined here, as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random, which is one of my favorite "pages".
It's there, and it was on.
Maybe I'll try experimenting some more. I did ask google, of course, and while it finds lots of pages that mention undoing a tab delete in firefox, the first couple dozen don't seem to mention how they do it. They just say how useful it is, which I'd agree with, because I'm always closing the wrong tab. It probably has a lot to do with having a dozen browsers installed (for web testing purposes), and no two of them handle tabs quite the same.
Hmmm ... I went to a FF window, opened up a new tab, clicked on it's tab to verify that it was a real tab, closed it - and the tab bar disappeared. Oops!
OK, so I opened a different window that already had more than one tab open, and opened a new tab. I then closed it, and tried a right-click (actually ctrl-click, since I happened to be using my Mac PB) in the tab bar, and saw the "Undo Close Tab", so I selected it. It opened a new tab, but it contained contents that I'd read a couple of hours ago, not the tab that I just closed. Oops!
So how do I tell it to re-open the tab that I just closed? Or, since it obviously remembered a tab's contents from earlier than that, is there some way to select a specific closed tab? The ctrl-click menu on the tab bar doesn't show me any choices, so I'm guessing not.
Not joking at all. I've seen that "Recently Closed Tabs" entry in the History menu, but it's always greyed out and unusable. I just tested it by opening a new tab, selecting it to verify that it was a real tab, and closing it. The "Recently Closed Tabs" menu entry is still greyed out, although I just closed a tab. I've also had a number of other tabs open during the day, and closed them, and that "Recently Closed Tabs" thingy is always greyed out when I check it.
;-)
So how does one enable it?
(This is on a Mac Powerbook with OSX 10.4.11, if that matters. I've also seen that menu item with FF on my linux box and my wife's NT and Vista systems, and it was also greyed out there. So I'm baffled. What good is it if it can't be used?
I think a much better test would be to see a single window with 30 tabs.
;-)
...
Something I discovered some years ago is that the mozilla-suite browsers all seem to have problems somewhere around 16 tabs. The bugs are difficult to characterize; the browser just slowly goes insane. The solution is to keep the number of tabs less than 16 in each window. I don't know if FF3 has fixed this problem. (The latest SeaMonkey certainly hasn't, and Camino seems to have similar problems.
Does anyone use windows rather than tabs to manage their browsing?
Another common lesson that lots of people have learned is that it's best to use a set of tabs for a single site (or a very few closely-related sites). The reason is that a lot of sites use pages that are "designed" for a certain size, and to get them to render sensibly, you have to resize the window that their preferred size. Thus, if you open a link to a different site in a new tab, all too often you find that you have to resize the window for that page, and this screws up the rendering of the other tabs in that window. So a link to a different site should be opened in a different window, while a new page from the same site can usually be safely opened in a new tab in the same window.
In general, tabs are most useful for collecting a small set of closely-related pages, from one site or a few closely-related sites. If you're dealing with a lot of different sites, you're usually better off using separate windows.
It might be interesting to hear others' takes on these problems
Firefox 2 lets you reopen closed tabs, ...
Really? I can't find any clue that it's possible, much less how to do it. Is it documented somewhere, or is it an "Easter egg" that you just have to stumble across accidentally (or learn from someone else)?
... it is more like "you were a naughty little kid in the past, so you are a suspect now."
Well, that's partly true, but it can't be the whole story. If that were the reasoning, then why would they want DNA records? What they'd want is the behavioral history of those naughty little kids. But they're not asking for a behavioral database; they're asking for a DNA database. This isn't because they enjoy reading strings of millions of A's, C's, G's and T's. It's that they believe that if they know your DNA, they can use it to predict your behavior.
It's really a lot like predicting your future from the bumps on your head or the positions of the planets when you were born. Except DNA is so much more scientific, y'know, so it must be correct.
knowing which sequences will say cause teenage onset diabetes could lead to a new class of medicines to try and prevent diabetes from even forming..
/. probably doesn't qualify ;-) of this problem, we should probably assume that this is what the proponents of this database are actually proposing. The poorer people in the UK (or various other countries considering similar databases) have very good reason to see this as a threat to their children's futures. It's all too easy for poor people to be labelled criminals, and once it happens, the label never goes away.
Actually, this is an excellent example of the major problem, though perhaps not as you intended. It's widely understood that certain genes "cause" diabetes. But it isn't true. Those variant genes only predispose people to diabetes, and it takes a number of other contributing factors for the disease to actually develop. The common belief that diabetes has "a genetic cause" is not only wrong; it leads to seriously wrong actions by people who believe it, such as attempting to treat the disease rather than prevent it by going after the entire set of factors.
One of the main problems with the idea of DNA fingering "potential offenders" is the same mistaken belief that DNA causes behavior. It does no such thing, no more than those genetic mutations cause diabetes. DNA might produce a slight predisposition to certain behavior, but believing behavior is caused by genes inevitably leads to people "treating" the future criminal behavior in the obvious sense, rather than taking steps to prevent it via proper education.
There's a serious prospect that such a DNA database would lead to young children being classified as criminals before they've ever done anything. And from what we know of the guiding influence of parents' and teachers' expectations on children's behavior, the result is predictable: Children classified as potential criminals would have little choice other than to become criminals.
Unless we hear a public discussion (and
"Interesting"???? Jeez; whaddaya gotta do to get a "funny" around here?
Oh, and despite the alarmist news media, "election fraud" is hardly a rampant problem.
And how would we know that? Consider that a lot of the new "electronic" voting equipment isn't auditable, not even by the people running the election. If the actual votes are in a form that can be easily and undetectably erased, it's not obvious how we could ever know how much election fraud has taken place.
Considering the high value of winning elections, the default assumption in such situations should always be that non-auditable equipment is bought because it can be used to commit undetectable election fraud. Anything else is just naive. At the very least, the people who signed off on using such equipment should be considered ipso facto guilty of election fraud.
Nobody thinks their precious little snowflake is going to be caught by that, so they want to defend their child against the evil little children.
Actually, I'd guess that there are a good number of people who are afraid that their own kid just might get caught by it, so they'll resist getting into the DNA database. The reason is that humanity has a long, sorry history of looking for this sort of magic test that will lighten the tough load of good police work, and let the authorities just go out and arrest people who show some physical features that are listed as sure signs of criminality.
The classical physical features are race-related, of course. Lots of Americans "know" that dark-skinned people are all criminals who haven't yet been caught. In Europe, the victim groups are sometimes different, the they've always existed. In northern Europe, it's people from southern Europe. In southern Europe, it's people from Africa or the East. And everywhere, it's gypsies. If a person in the wrong group is anywhere near the scene of a crime, they get arrested and charged with the crime. It's a lot easier than the hard work of finding the actual culprit, y'know.
It wasn't so long ago that having the wrong bumps on your head made you a "potential criminal". We know now that that was pseudo-science, but enough people believed it that the police could use it as a way of avoiding the hard police work. Lately, we've had a few people pointing out that fingerprinting has never been scientifically tested, is at most useful for rejecting suspects whose prints don't match, and textbooks go into great detail about the situations where matching isn't even possible. But the technical skeptics are ignored, because it simplifies the job of picking someone to arrest (and Hollywood has told us that it works).
And in general, the poorest people are always "potential criminals". I suppose the reasoning is that they are the ones with the strongest motive to be criminals. And, of course, if you can't get a job because you didn't get a good education because your parents couldn't afford to pay for good schools, you may find that a criminal life is the only one open to you.
Anyway, I'd guess that in most of the world, there's a good-sized underclass that will instantly understand what this latest "potential offender" test means. It means that their DNA will be the type classified as potential offenders. Being on the list will eliminate most of their job opportunities, and will lead to arrests any time they happen to be near a crime scene. If your kids are on the list, they'll never have a good job and will be repeatedly arrested no matter what they do or how they live.
With the stage of our current DNA understanding, this is just another in the long line of pseudo-scientific tests for criminality. Anyone with a good understanding of what DNA is and how it works is going to be highly skeptical. DNA may influence your behavior; it certainly doesn't determine your behavior. But we can expect that the politicians and police won't pay attention to geeky technical skeptics. Not when they've got the latest high-tech excuse to avoid the hard police work and just arrest someone nearby with the wrong DNA. Especially not when the database "proves" that it's mostly the "wrong people" who are criminals, just like we knew all along.
The Microsoft Fanboys say that the number of successfully attacked Microsoft Windows XP desktops is due to the relative installation base (and they are correct).
No, the installation base explains only the number of attacks. The number of successful attacks is explained by the relative security of the various systems. And you really should distinguish successful attacks on the basic software from the successful attacks that exploit misconfigured sites or add-on software. Otherwise you're lumping together successful attacks on software that comes from different sources.
If you don't make such distintions, I can "demonstrate" the poor security of your favorite web server (or OS) by simply installing a CGI script that accepts any string and evals it.
On a side note, why do some people use commas to delimit sets of 10^3 and others use decimal points? And moreover which one is more correct, localization issues not withstanding?
;-)
If the author is in North America, the comma is correct. If the author is in Europe, the period is (mostly) correct.
And, of course, if you're the reader, you usually can't know where the author was, so you have no clue.
Ain't standards wonderful? The phrase "divided by a common language" comes to mind.
(And if you do figure out a reliable solution to this puzzle, your next task is to find a reliable way to decode dates and convert them to the ISO standard date format. Start with "What date is 2/4/6?" If you solve that one, you can advance to the next puzzle: figuring out the time zone of the writer.
... It doesn't tell us that Apache or IIS or Windows or Linux is more secure than something else. It tells us users suck at security and programmers suck at making security simple.
True, perhaps. But what it also tells me is that regardless of OS, the software's documentation sucks, especially on security issues. While it may be true that there are lots of idiot users who'll never learn, I think most of us here have also found themselves frustrated by the sorry state of the documentation on their favorite system. I know, as a longtime unix/linux user, I agree fully with the ongoing criticism of the sketchy nature of much of the documentation. Much of what I know, I learned by experimenting, or by asking others who have learned by experimenting. Sometimes, I've also dug into the source code, which is more possible on linux systems than on others, but that's difficult and time consuming, and also doesn't usually lead to full understanding.
As long as software producers insist on keeping their users ignorant of how to use the software correctly, you can't fully blame the users for their ignorance.
Security is especially a problem. I learned the hard way that, if you ask security questions, you tend to rapidly get a "hacker" reputation. So it's common to not pry too deeply into security, but to rather sit at the side and try to learn by osmosis. This is not especially effective. But in most organizations, it's safer for your professional reputation if you don't become known as the one who's constantly prying into security issues.
I'd say that a great deal of users' ignorance of security issues is due to a combination of the general refusal to fully document security issues, and the punishment brought down on users who try too openly to learn about security.
That, and the idiocy of a large fraction of the users, of course.
Some years ago, in the late 1980s if I remember right, someone explained something to me that I've remembered ever since: Everything on a computer, especially the programming languages, can be best understood as a video game. The way the game works is that when the computer does what you intended, you get a point. When it finds some way to misinterpret your command (or find it impossible for some internal, unexplained reason) and do something other than what you intended, the people who build the software get a point. A good programmer or an experienced user wins if they get more than half the points. When I first stumbled across unix systems, I found that I was winning overwhelmingly within only a few days of first cracking open "The C Programming Language". I'd never had that experience before, and I never have since on any non-unix computer system.
I heard this sometime after I'd been using unix systems for a few years, and it made a lot of sense. I could explain very simply why I preferred unix to all the other computer systems I'd ever used: On a unix systems, I usually won. When I told it to do something, it almost always did what I wanted it to do. Granted, there were occasional problems with running out of resources, and no OS can prevent that. But even then, it happened at a much later stage than on other systems, because unix tools were mostly small and sleek, and didn't hog resources.
Linux is just the current favorite in a long chain of unix-like system that let me win in both the programming and computer-user games.
I've used OSX a bunch, and in fact I'm typing this on a Mac Powerbook. I like to work on different computers occasionally, to keep up to date on what they do well or poorly. But I don't win nearly as often on OSX as I do on linux, for a lot of reasons. It's always doing something bizarre, and when I investigate, I usually find that the bizarreness was intentional in the design. And it's full of little time-wasting gotchas that aren't nearly as common in linux apps.
Of course, as with any system, you do have to learn its basic tools to get anything done. Most of the non-linux users I know use this as their excuse. They "know" Windows or Macs, and they aren't about to learn some other system. So they're stuck forever in a computer game that's designed to lower their score at every opportunity. When I watch over their shoulders, I have to keep my mouth shut about how painful it is to watch them laboriously fighting with their computer to do the simplest tasks. But I generally don't say anything unless they ask, because I don't want to insult them. And telling them how much easier it could be would be an insult, because I'd be telling them how much of their lives they've wasted on zillions of little time-wasting design snafus.
The only reason I'd even bother mentioning it here is to see the reaction of other linux (or solaris or whatever) users. How many of you have heard this video-game model applied to all computer use and programming? Does it really have the explanatory power that it seems to have, or do you really have some other basic motivation to use what you do?
Effective January 1, 1984, AT&T's local operations were split into seven independent Regional Holding Companies, also known as Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), or "Baby Bells". Afterwards, AT&T, reduced in value by approximately 70%, continued to operate all of its long-distance services, although in the ensuing years it lost portions of its market share to competitors such as MCI and Sprint."
It's not clear to me how this did anything at all about the monopoly. To almost every US phone customer, all this did was replace their previous monopoly AT&T phone service with monopoly phone service through exactly one of the "Baby Bells". If you didn't like your local Baby Bell, your choices were to have no phone service, or to move to where another Baby Bell ran the monopoly phone busines.
This is still true in most of the US, especially if you want a land line. Hereabouts, the phone wires coming to our house are owned by Verizon, and it's illegal for anyone else to install phone lines. This is true almost everywhere; the only difference is that the local monopoly has a different name.
It's true that we now have cell phone service, which provides somewhat of an alternative. But cell phones weren't a result of the breakup of AT&T in 1984, and they're not really that much of a competitor for wired phones. To use the old, worn auto analogy, motorcycles really aren't competitors for automobiles. If your local government only permitted one brand of motorcycle and one brand of automobile on its streets (with perhaps cross-licensing for motorcycles), the result would be similar to the phone situation.
And in much of the US, there is either one or zero cell-phone services available for a given home. This isn't much of a competitive market. A duopoly isn't usually much better than a monopoly, because if there are only two companies, they tend to us "gentlemens' agreements" to restrict the local market by providing similar crappy products at similar high prices.
If you want to argue for a "market solution", you first have how a market can develop. This hasn't much happened in the telecom business in the US. Local governments cooperate with one or a few big corporations to restrict the market and lock out competitors, giving local customers few or no choices. The 1984 breakup of AT&T did little if anything to affect this, and local governments mostly cooperate with maintaining the restricted local market.
This is why I'd love to see us make inroads on cheap, easy to use wireless mesh routers. ... The difficulties of such a mesh are mind-boggling, of course. ... It's definitely a utopian libertarian dream, but it is one that has always fascinated me.
;-)
Funny, but it's not just utopian libertarians with such dreams. If you dig up the docs from the earliest days of the ARPAnet, back in the 1960s, you'll find that the US Dept of Defense had exactly the same dream. Except theirs was a battle field scenario, with all of their mobile equipment and soldiers connected via a wireless network. That network shouldn't have any central routers, because those are instant targets, and taking them out kills your network. The idea was that all the equipment supported dynamic routing, with all but the endpoints doing routing, and if any of the routers were taken out, the rest would instantly reconfigure the routing tables. The idea was that as long as an electronic path between two nodes exists, those nodes can communciate.
This was how the Internet was supposed to work. The wired version was an interim kludge for development purposes, to be phased out as wireless equipment became available. Central routine nodes and organizations like ISPs that are chokepoints were allowed because the routing protocols hadn't been worked out yet, but eventually they should be supplanted by a fully distributed routing system with maximal interconnection, so that an enemy couldn't take it all down with a few well-placed shots.
Somehow the commercial Internet didn't see it that way. They much prefer minimal hardware with tree-structured, heirarchical connectivity, and chokepoints everywhere, without alternate routes to handle failure.
(OTOH, the new OLPC XO implements something very similar to what the DoD proposed 40 years ago. There's some sort of historical irony here, with people building a computer for young children doing something that the entire commercial economy has failed to deliver for decades. Maybe the children will lead us into this libertarian/military utopia that we've dreamed of.
I haven't experienced any of this slow down or even ask other comments have suggested the "end packets" or whatever that mess up my downloads. Perhaps it happens to be the fact that I live in a smaller metropolitan area that the rest of the /.'ers?
Perhaps. But more likely it's just that you're not living in one of their test areas. You see, they knew quite well that their packet-forging "traffic management" technique would be controversial, and probably illegal. Before they extend it to the rest of the network, they first need to determine what sort of fines the FCC will impose. If the fines are low enough to qualify as a "business expense", you can expect their new, improved traffic management techniques to be introduced to your area some time in the next year. You'll be billed a minor surcharge for pleasure of this improved service.
We can also trust that the other ISPs are watching carefully to determine whether they should be introducing similar traffic management tools.
Also, that's been done. Ask google about "online encyclopedia". Even Britannica is online.
The interesting thing about wikipedia from the start was that it was an experiment in not-for-profit, unpaid-editor publishing. Jimmy Wales set his goal as an encyclopedia, which was reasonable as that would potentially attract a motley crowd of people interested in writing about all sorts of unrelated topics. The results of this experiment have been interesting and useful. And it seems to have surpassed the many for-profit online encyclopedias in both usefulness and public recognition.
Given the radical differences in Internet "publishing" from older methods, it seems reasonable that people should experiment with different ideas. Jimmy's idea was a wild experiment, and nobody had any idea how successful it would be. Many of us are sorta glad he decided to try it and see what happened.
I'd think that, given the multitude of for-profit encyclopedias online, we shouldn't try to convert wikipedia to that model. I'd much rather see the experiment run for another decade or so.
Also, if it does get taken over by advertisers, as some fear, we can also expect that a few people would get together and fork it. I sorta wish that had been done years ago, to see what happened with a different try with different policies. We really don't know how much better or worse wikipedia might have been if some of its policies had been different.
Of course, it's not too late. And other kinds of online encyclopedias are being tried with different policies. It'll be interesting to see the results of the experiments that have a limited set of "expert" editors. You'd think that they'd be better than wikipedia, but my wild guess is that they won't. (And I won't put any money on such a prediction.