Probably not fair to all of the quote sources
on
Tech That Failed To Fail
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· Score: 3, Insightful
To be fair, a lot of the quote sources are businesspeople being dismissive of their competitors. That doesn't necessarily mean they believe what they're saying: of course Microsoft is going to say that Apple isn't a competitor. Doing anything other than that would give Apple an advantage in the marketplace.
True. But the remote server could broadcast the first frame with a little extra effort. Additionally, there is no reason why some receivers have to block for input until the channel is decoded.
My wife and I have 2g and 3g iPhones. Apple began blocking the installation of higher iOS systems at the end of the 3.1.3 and 4.2.2 lines, respectively. Since this is a global liability, will Apple update these old phones as well? Or do they remain an outstanding liability?
The system is not still down for forensic or investigational issues, its down because they haven't figured out how to bring it back up.
Generally, the worst attacks are the ones when you can't figure out how much access people still have, what they did while they were there, and whether or not it is safe to bring the system back online. If someone got root on Sony's update servers, you'd better believe those are staying offline. A problem there could leave Sony on the hook for the cost of 50 million very expensive plastic bricks. Similarly, someone with deep PSN access might be able to leverage that into accessing Sony's other internal systems, which could include things like VAIO firmware, manufacturing robots, sony picture entertainment, and baseball fields full of money.
Keep 'em down for a few days to do your security homework, or suffer a bigger break later.
This post is currently being written on a netbook that costs approximately 1/3rd of what an iPad 2 costs, and also happens to have actual development tools.
The iPad 2 might be faster and have a more obvious availability of "edutainment" software, but you can do actual coding on netbooks for around 1/3rd of the cost.
Having spent many years on the "Oh gods what will the ESRB think" side of things, it will be nice to have some Actual criteria for judgement laid out. Right now, you have absolutely no idea if a piece of content is going to hit the rating that you think it will. Is X too gross? Is Y unacceptable to middle america? Even genuinely important things like having a single person die in a sad and impactful way will effect your rating, because the more you grip the reviewer, the more likely it is to be adult rated. And, the reviewers don't actually play the games, they just watch a video of the bad bits. So if you create a game that is 40 hours of important, genuine emotional content, with 5% interspersed violence, all the reviewer is going to see is a wall of violence. Imagine Shindler's List compressed into 5 minutes of Germans torturing Jews. That's all the reviewer sees.
And you never know who your reviewer is going to be. You might get someone from Los Angeles, who happens to love blood and gore but can't stand any romance. You might get someone from New York, who doesn't like blood but could watch people kissing aliens and pets and desk chairs all day. You might get someone for whom horrific violence is AOK, but only horrific violence against "bad people." And when you get the review back, you don't get a solid grounding in *why* the game got the review it did. You just get a couple of guidelines and make some cuts. Then you have to argue with your handler that the cuts did exactly what they were supposed to do, and just give it the rating you want without cycling through the system again. The larger publishers with more clout win this argument, and get to put out titles under lower ratings than they perhaps should, and everyone else gets to start all over again blindly.
I remember working on a non-violent game and spending two weeks and going through about five different gestures of displeasure before finally finding one that we thought was close enough to a middle finger to be culturally recognizable, but not so close as to harm our rating. Then we found a violent game that used the middle finger with exactly the same rating we were going for.
You can't make titles without clear criteria, and the lack of clear criteria out of the ESRB has definitely helped dumb down gaming. Complex emotional subjects or unique takes are more likely to draw the dreaded M rating. If you need to make your T or E rating, it's far better to stick to established subjects that the ESRB has already rated.
The funny thing is, this wouldn't be an issue at all if digital copies of games had at least price parity with hard copies. But right now the downloadable full retail titles on PSN, for example, generally maintain full list price while Amazon.com has many retailers willing to sell far below that. If a new physical copy was 60, and a new digital copy was 40, the re-sale market would dry up rather quickly. As it stands, they're trying to use digital to both raise the average price floor and remove second-hand sales. That doesn't seem like a winning strategy.
The RIM CEO killed the interview because he can't assure users in the Middle East and Asia that their blackberry experience is secure. The CEO of a multinational corporation ended an interview because he can't assure users of his product's security. What discussion is there to be had?
The RIM CEO killed the interview because he realized that the interviewer had gone hostile, and probably had intended to go hostile the entire time. And when faced with a hostile interviewer, you end the interview. I don't care how good your reasoning is, if it becomes clear that the person who gets to edit the interview has decided to show you in a negative light, nothing you can say will help. You walk away. Interviewing 101.
In a lot of ways, Blackberry did the responsible thing: they told their customers what was happening. Customers who need security from government snooping can take additional precautions, while the average businessman can continue to use their Blackberries in said countries. As these are by and large blanket government mandates, making a stand of "Let's boycott this horrible regime!" would have just driven their customers to someone else who also has to install government backdoors. Singling out RIM for this is foolish.
Saying that Blackberry is insecure because of this is disengenious. It could potentially be very secure. It's just the people who it is secure to may not be the people that you want it to be, and they are very upfront about that.
But more than that, when the interviewer goes hostile, walk away. Having been on both sides of the equation, arguing with the interviewer will never help. The direction of the segment has been decided, and all you're doing is giving the editor fodder. That's just how it goes. Walk away.
I definitely think the British system of asking hard questions is usually superior to the American system of being desperately afraid of offending their guests. But in this case, it was clearly framed in a sensationalist and unfair way.
Complaints about Western companies enabling repressive governments is completely legitimate. If the interviewer had asked "How do you plan on guaranteeing privacy to your customers in the territories that have demanded universal access?" that might be legitimate. If the interviewer initiated a legitimate discussion about the requirements of balancing customer and government requirements in oppressive regimes, it would have been a great segment.
That's not what the interviewer asked. The interviewer asked, for a minute and a half, over and over in a hostile cross-examination fashion, if they were going to fix their "security problems." And all of the comments here are along the line of "RIM decided to screw their customers for massive piles of cash!" That's not a discussion, and that's not adding anything to the overall knowledge pool.
We all know your automatic evil guns of death should be written on QNX. But after the corporate committee is done with it, it will probably just be a Silverlight plug-in.
If a website has an IPv4 address, it may want to maintain that. If it doesn't, and the IPv4 addresses have dried up, it may not be possible to get one (or at least, it may be royally expensive). Similarly, tunneling from IPv6 to IPv4 is still very imperfect, meaning that once new devices and connections are on IPv6, your incentive to serve IPv6 is to not tick off your new users (which are usually the most profitable).
I suspect we will hit a tipping point, where new devices and connections happen via IPv6, so content providers all dual-stack. IPv4 users will find themselves tunneling through an IPv6 world. Electronics have a 5 year lifespan anyway, so within half a decade IPv4 will have faded.
Really, it all depends on the pain. When does IPv4 not just run out, but get painfully expensive to acquire?
The RIM CEO called an end to an interview when he realized (after a minute and a half) that he was just being ambushed with a combative line of questioning. The interviewer had no interest in him answering the questions, he just wanted to make the CEO look bad in order to get ratings. This is, unfortunately or fortunately, rather common in british television. But in this case, it does seem genuinely unfair.
The interviewer knows that governments demand access to people's communications. All American telcos give call logs and e-mail histories pretty regularly to the government. Same with British ones. In this case, *we* don't trust the Saudi's with our communications, yet we somehow trust the US government with them.
Blackberry spent a lot of money building up a successful business in the middle east. Then they had to take their entire business offline while they added these backdoors for the government. When the king holds your entire business for ransom, with the requirement that you do for them what you do for every other government out there, you do it. Whining and complaining about RIM's "security problems" is just childish. And ambushing the CEO on film in an attack segment to make him look bad for something that he, and everyone else was forced to do, is definitely not fair.
It's easier than that. Just figure out how much energy a hamster consumes walking a mile in the tubes. Weigh them when you send them out, and weigh them again when they come back.
Let's just all agree to have all important things fall on symmetrical dates. "On 5/5/2011, it will be a frigidly cold -40 degrees at 0 longitude. Ex-president Bush says this has him 'Literally Chuffed.'"
So, exactly how is BHO "head and shoulders above GWB"?
He has only gotten us in 1 war, which is reasonably tractable, and under completely truthful pretenses. He didn't establish "free speech zones," whereby protesters outside of free speech zones can be arrested. While he hasn't closed Gitmo, he hasn't opened any new ones either.
Because life is not an int that can just be increased? "Life Extension" is largely a sham promoted by con artists?
It's not like most geeks are against medicine, living well, reducing unnecessary risks, etc. But to say that you're researching "Life Extension" is like saying that you're researching "engineering bigger things" or "making fast stuff." Sure, someone doing research biology into the breakdown of DNA over time can be said to be doing "life extension." But anyone who says that they're doing life extension is probably an Israeli microcorp that releases 6 months of press releases, then disappears leaving nothing behind but bewildered investors and a badly dated looking website.
What? Netscape and Mozilla were originally kept separate because Netscape was dying and wanted free development but didn't want to relinquish the valuable "Netscape" name. Mozilla and Netscape were almost identical except for the branding. Mozilla was also huge and massively bloated. This bloat was the reason why a splinter offshoot, Firefox, was created. Firefox became so popular that it overtook the Mozilla suite. And, of course, Netscape just died.
So while sveltness is a wonderful goal, we are talking about a foundation named after a 50 story radioactive japanese mega-monster.
If you're relying upon the ISP to have backups, you don't have backups. What if that ISP goes under? Gets hit with a flood? Servers locked up by an FBI investigation? Or, as in this case, an employee goes on a deleting rampage?
Don't just backup your data. Backup your providers. Backups are about redundancy.
And never personally verifying that the ISP had backups? They might as well have used prayer as a data-protection methodology.
I'm not a statistician or current researcher, though I did usability research (and some market research) for years.
IDC Sells reports about markets to Managers who need "facts" to convince boards to go with their impulses. WAG predictions like this grab headlines, and therefore sell more reports. It's marketing, pure and simple.
Most paid market research houses are actually pretty accurate about the stuff they charge for. If there was any accuracy or value to the information, they wouldn't have given it away as self-promotion.
You're forgetting that all Google services, from Gmail to Google Voice, integrate well with Android. And there are a lot more people on Gmail these days than Hotmail. Plus while Office online compatibility is basically miserable, Google Docs has the potential to integrate with phones very well.
I'd disagree. When you need really precision aiming, which clicking an icon doesn't, you need a higher-resolution than normal sensor. Anyone who has gamed in a 3d environment for any length of time in a twitch or action title will tell you that. Get a higher-resolution mouse, and your scores go up a little.
For pulling down menus and clicking icons my trackball beats the pants off of most people's mice. But it's terrible for precision aiming in gaming. The testing methodology here is similarly testing the wrong thing.
People who follow cell phone plans closely (crazy as they are) usually get excited about changes in privacy policies, etc, as it gives a window to change carriers without suffering Early Termination Fees. However, merging itself might not be enough, as the hybrid carrier is likely to continue to maintain both sets of contracts for existing customers.
Most GPS devices are touchscreen based. Anywhere that you have an abstracted interface that can change, knobs and buttons don't work. You have to look at the screen. At least with touchscreens you can just poke at what you're not supposed to be paying attention to.
On a side note, I'd love it if the engine, wheels, steering, etc was modifiable. Software mods of existing cars are a common way of boosting performance. You'd probably want standards, a whole lot of vetting, and a great fallback system. But downloadable softmods to tune ride characteristics would be amazing.
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To be fair, a lot of the quote sources are businesspeople being dismissive of their competitors. That doesn't necessarily mean they believe what they're saying: of course Microsoft is going to say that Apple isn't a competitor. Doing anything other than that would give Apple an advantage in the marketplace.
True. But the remote server could broadcast the first frame with a little extra effort. Additionally, there is no reason why some receivers have to block for input until the channel is decoded.
My wife and I have 2g and 3g iPhones. Apple began blocking the installation of higher iOS systems at the end of the 3.1.3 and 4.2.2 lines, respectively. Since this is a global liability, will Apple update these old phones as well? Or do they remain an outstanding liability?
The system is not still down for forensic or investigational issues, its down because they haven't figured out how to bring it back up.
Generally, the worst attacks are the ones when you can't figure out how much access people still have, what they did while they were there, and whether or not it is safe to bring the system back online. If someone got root on Sony's update servers, you'd better believe those are staying offline. A problem there could leave Sony on the hook for the cost of 50 million very expensive plastic bricks. Similarly, someone with deep PSN access might be able to leverage that into accessing Sony's other internal systems, which could include things like VAIO firmware, manufacturing robots, sony picture entertainment, and baseball fields full of money.
Keep 'em down for a few days to do your security homework, or suffer a bigger break later.
This post is currently being written on a netbook that costs approximately 1/3rd of what an iPad 2 costs, and also happens to have actual development tools.
The iPad 2 might be faster and have a more obvious availability of "edutainment" software, but you can do actual coding on netbooks for around 1/3rd of the cost.
Having spent many years on the "Oh gods what will the ESRB think" side of things, it will be nice to have some Actual criteria for judgement laid out. Right now, you have absolutely no idea if a piece of content is going to hit the rating that you think it will. Is X too gross? Is Y unacceptable to middle america? Even genuinely important things like having a single person die in a sad and impactful way will effect your rating, because the more you grip the reviewer, the more likely it is to be adult rated. And, the reviewers don't actually play the games, they just watch a video of the bad bits. So if you create a game that is 40 hours of important, genuine emotional content, with 5% interspersed violence, all the reviewer is going to see is a wall of violence. Imagine Shindler's List compressed into 5 minutes of Germans torturing Jews. That's all the reviewer sees.
And you never know who your reviewer is going to be. You might get someone from Los Angeles, who happens to love blood and gore but can't stand any romance. You might get someone from New York, who doesn't like blood but could watch people kissing aliens and pets and desk chairs all day. You might get someone for whom horrific violence is AOK, but only horrific violence against "bad people." And when you get the review back, you don't get a solid grounding in *why* the game got the review it did. You just get a couple of guidelines and make some cuts. Then you have to argue with your handler that the cuts did exactly what they were supposed to do, and just give it the rating you want without cycling through the system again. The larger publishers with more clout win this argument, and get to put out titles under lower ratings than they perhaps should, and everyone else gets to start all over again blindly.
I remember working on a non-violent game and spending two weeks and going through about five different gestures of displeasure before finally finding one that we thought was close enough to a middle finger to be culturally recognizable, but not so close as to harm our rating. Then we found a violent game that used the middle finger with exactly the same rating we were going for.
You can't make titles without clear criteria, and the lack of clear criteria out of the ESRB has definitely helped dumb down gaming. Complex emotional subjects or unique takes are more likely to draw the dreaded M rating. If you need to make your T or E rating, it's far better to stick to established subjects that the ESRB has already rated.
The funny thing is, this wouldn't be an issue at all if digital copies of games had at least price parity with hard copies. But right now the downloadable full retail titles on PSN, for example, generally maintain full list price while Amazon.com has many retailers willing to sell far below that. If a new physical copy was 60, and a new digital copy was 40, the re-sale market would dry up rather quickly. As it stands, they're trying to use digital to both raise the average price floor and remove second-hand sales. That doesn't seem like a winning strategy.
The RIM CEO killed the interview because he can't assure users in the Middle East and Asia that their blackberry experience is secure.
The CEO of a multinational corporation ended an interview because he can't assure users of his product's security.
What discussion is there to be had?
The RIM CEO killed the interview because he realized that the interviewer had gone hostile, and probably had intended to go hostile the entire time. And when faced with a hostile interviewer, you end the interview. I don't care how good your reasoning is, if it becomes clear that the person who gets to edit the interview has decided to show you in a negative light, nothing you can say will help. You walk away. Interviewing 101.
In a lot of ways, Blackberry did the responsible thing: they told their customers what was happening. Customers who need security from government snooping can take additional precautions, while the average businessman can continue to use their Blackberries in said countries. As these are by and large blanket government mandates, making a stand of "Let's boycott this horrible regime!" would have just driven their customers to someone else who also has to install government backdoors. Singling out RIM for this is foolish.
Saying that Blackberry is insecure because of this is disengenious. It could potentially be very secure. It's just the people who it is secure to may not be the people that you want it to be, and they are very upfront about that.
But more than that, when the interviewer goes hostile, walk away. Having been on both sides of the equation, arguing with the interviewer will never help. The direction of the segment has been decided, and all you're doing is giving the editor fodder. That's just how it goes. Walk away.
I definitely think the British system of asking hard questions is usually superior to the American system of being desperately afraid of offending their guests. But in this case, it was clearly framed in a sensationalist and unfair way.
Complaints about Western companies enabling repressive governments is completely legitimate. If the interviewer had asked "How do you plan on guaranteeing privacy to your customers in the territories that have demanded universal access?" that might be legitimate. If the interviewer initiated a legitimate discussion about the requirements of balancing customer and government requirements in oppressive regimes, it would have been a great segment.
That's not what the interviewer asked. The interviewer asked, for a minute and a half, over and over in a hostile cross-examination fashion, if they were going to fix their "security problems." And all of the comments here are along the line of "RIM decided to screw their customers for massive piles of cash!" That's not a discussion, and that's not adding anything to the overall knowledge pool.
We all know your automatic evil guns of death should be written on QNX. But after the corporate committee is done with it, it will probably just be a Silverlight plug-in.
If a website has an IPv4 address, it may want to maintain that. If it doesn't, and the IPv4 addresses have dried up, it may not be possible to get one (or at least, it may be royally expensive). Similarly, tunneling from IPv6 to IPv4 is still very imperfect, meaning that once new devices and connections are on IPv6, your incentive to serve IPv6 is to not tick off your new users (which are usually the most profitable).
I suspect we will hit a tipping point, where new devices and connections happen via IPv6, so content providers all dual-stack. IPv4 users will find themselves tunneling through an IPv6 world. Electronics have a 5 year lifespan anyway, so within half a decade IPv4 will have faded.
Really, it all depends on the pain. When does IPv4 not just run out, but get painfully expensive to acquire?
The RIM CEO called an end to an interview when he realized (after a minute and a half) that he was just being ambushed with a combative line of questioning. The interviewer had no interest in him answering the questions, he just wanted to make the CEO look bad in order to get ratings. This is, unfortunately or fortunately, rather common in british television. But in this case, it does seem genuinely unfair.
The interviewer knows that governments demand access to people's communications. All American telcos give call logs and e-mail histories pretty regularly to the government. Same with British ones. In this case, *we* don't trust the Saudi's with our communications, yet we somehow trust the US government with them.
Blackberry spent a lot of money building up a successful business in the middle east. Then they had to take their entire business offline while they added these backdoors for the government. When the king holds your entire business for ransom, with the requirement that you do for them what you do for every other government out there, you do it. Whining and complaining about RIM's "security problems" is just childish. And ambushing the CEO on film in an attack segment to make him look bad for something that he, and everyone else was forced to do, is definitely not fair.
If it increases marketing responses by even 0.1%, you know it will be standard on every single web ad served up in three years.
It's easier than that. Just figure out how much energy a hamster consumes walking a mile in the tubes. Weigh them when you send them out, and weigh them again when they come back.
Let's just all agree to have all important things fall on symmetrical dates. "On 5/5/2011, it will be a frigidly cold -40 degrees at 0 longitude. Ex-president Bush says this has him 'Literally Chuffed.'"
So, exactly how is BHO "head and shoulders above GWB"?
He has only gotten us in 1 war, which is reasonably tractable, and under completely truthful pretenses. He didn't establish "free speech zones," whereby protesters outside of free speech zones can be arrested. While he hasn't closed Gitmo, he hasn't opened any new ones either.
And constantly updating it? Data doesn't feed itself.
Because life is not an int that can just be increased? "Life Extension" is largely a sham promoted by con artists?
It's not like most geeks are against medicine, living well, reducing unnecessary risks, etc. But to say that you're researching "Life Extension" is like saying that you're researching "engineering bigger things" or "making fast stuff." Sure, someone doing research biology into the breakdown of DNA over time can be said to be doing "life extension." But anyone who says that they're doing life extension is probably an Israeli microcorp that releases 6 months of press releases, then disappears leaving nothing behind but bewildered investors and a badly dated looking website.
What? Netscape and Mozilla were originally kept separate because Netscape was dying and wanted free development but didn't want to relinquish the valuable "Netscape" name. Mozilla and Netscape were almost identical except for the branding. Mozilla was also huge and massively bloated. This bloat was the reason why a splinter offshoot, Firefox, was created. Firefox became so popular that it overtook the Mozilla suite. And, of course, Netscape just died.
So while sveltness is a wonderful goal, we are talking about a foundation named after a 50 story radioactive japanese mega-monster.
If you're relying upon the ISP to have backups, you don't have backups. What if that ISP goes under? Gets hit with a flood? Servers locked up by an FBI investigation? Or, as in this case, an employee goes on a deleting rampage?
Don't just backup your data. Backup your providers. Backups are about redundancy.
And never personally verifying that the ISP had backups? They might as well have used prayer as a data-protection methodology.
I'm not a statistician or current researcher, though I did usability research (and some market research) for years.
IDC Sells reports about markets to Managers who need "facts" to convince boards to go with their impulses. WAG predictions like this grab headlines, and therefore sell more reports. It's marketing, pure and simple.
Most paid market research houses are actually pretty accurate about the stuff they charge for. If there was any accuracy or value to the information, they wouldn't have given it away as self-promotion.
- C
You're forgetting that all Google services, from Gmail to Google Voice, integrate well with Android. And there are a lot more people on Gmail these days than Hotmail. Plus while Office online compatibility is basically miserable, Google Docs has the potential to integrate with phones very well.
I'd disagree. When you need really precision aiming, which clicking an icon doesn't, you need a higher-resolution than normal sensor. Anyone who has gamed in a 3d environment for any length of time in a twitch or action title will tell you that. Get a higher-resolution mouse, and your scores go up a little.
For pulling down menus and clicking icons my trackball beats the pants off of most people's mice. But it's terrible for precision aiming in gaming. The testing methodology here is similarly testing the wrong thing.
People who follow cell phone plans closely (crazy as they are) usually get excited about changes in privacy policies, etc, as it gives a window to change carriers without suffering Early Termination Fees. However, merging itself might not be enough, as the hybrid carrier is likely to continue to maintain both sets of contracts for existing customers.
Most GPS devices are touchscreen based. Anywhere that you have an abstracted interface that can change, knobs and buttons don't work. You have to look at the screen. At least with touchscreens you can just poke at what you're not supposed to be paying attention to.
On a side note, I'd love it if the engine, wheels, steering, etc was modifiable. Software mods of existing cars are a common way of boosting performance. You'd probably want standards, a whole lot of vetting, and a great fallback system. But downloadable softmods to tune ride characteristics would be amazing.