Yeah, they got their publicity. And Apple asked for it back. And Gizmodo gave it to them.
And if you buy something off of the back of a truck from a guy who refuses to show his face, by law that's enough proof that you knew it was stolen. One would have to jump through an *awful* lot of mental gymnastics to think this guy who admitted to finding it in a bar was the rightful owner. Right there, ownership does not change hands until it is declared abandoned property by a proper authority.
We need one more player with BUCKS to Show them how it's done and shut these guys up.
Bucks usually means investors, and investors means doing the safe thing. We need one hundred more players with very little money, and one hundred odd new ideas about how we can interact.
But union officials say that the field technicians and call center workers generally earn $60,000 to $77,000 before overtime and that benefits come to well under $50,000 a year.
While that doesn't seem crazy, that's pretty darned good. Still, if an executive is going to demand paycuts from their workers, they should include themselves, especially when making more than 10 million a year.
Most successful revolutions and class wars, despite popular sentiment, seem to rise from the middle class. They are the ones who have the luxury of fighting and the resources to fight with. They are also the ones who have an established idea of what life should be like, and who fight against it eroding. Look at the headlining figures of the US revolution, for example.
I suspect the next decade of the US will be defined as a conflict between those who feel oppressed by corporations, and those who feel corporations are the way out. The real truth is probably tangential to both arguments.
The Xbox 360 D-pad has endemic design issues with diagonals. The Sega Master System also had atrocious diagonals, as did Game.com. The 5200, while technically a stick design, featured a non-re-centering joystick. Which meant you needed to estimate where neutral was, and hope you were right. The CDi's gamepad felt like / was a bad PC 3rd party knockoff of a Gravis PC Gamepad. It felt sloppy and loose. The PS1 gamepad had far less of the "rocker" design to the d-pad, resulting in lots of precise presses needed for any action.
If we're talking terrible peripherals, the U-Force has to top the list for least-likely-to-ever-respond-to-input-correctly. The NES Max worked fine, if you completely ignored the disk in the middle of the D-pad (the whole point of the Max). And in the early days of Street Fighter, a lot of the arcade owners converted older machines into SF machines, including ones with fixed 4 directional inputs that couldn't do diagonals.
iPods, when they first hit the market and made it big, were the first HDD-based MP3 player to actually fit in a pocket. I was a longstanding Archos fan, with upgradeable laptop based hard drives and hackable firmware. But even I had to admit that putting an MP3 player in your pocket was long overdue. The RIO's, etc of the time had about `128 MB of available space (I had 3 of 'em)... about enough for a CD.
Also most mp3 players were shipping with godawful earbuds at the time, which manufacturers expected people to replace immediately... but everyone used as default anyway. Apple had a strong edge in "how it sounds" to the average person in no small part because they shipped moderately adequate earbuds.
Creative Labs puts out some great-sounding modern MP3 players. And Zunes are totally serviceable. But Apple does keep putting out new and impressive devices. They were first with a searchable database system (artist, song, album, etc). Then the easy and fast touchwheel. They had the first flash-machine-with-a-real-screen in the Mini. The Touch is a pretty good MP3 Player / Video Game device. And, of course, they're now integrated into the iPhone... not the first phone to feature an MP3 player (even my old Treo could do that) but the first one that wasn't horribly tacked on.
You also need that lust factor. That one amazing thing that will make it worth overcoming all of the transition problems. That could be a low, low price. But it could also be a really well integrated feature that nobody has thought of, of a completely new way of looking at computing (which is what the iPad was).
If you can get a consumer to lust after your device, it will sell.
The question ultimately is "What does the user DO to bypass these measures." In any of these cases, the user downloads and runs a small script, once. This makes getting illicit material a 2-step process, up from a 1 step one. The technical details of the script are so obvious that any coder could write it. That's better, but still a barrier so small you could trip over it. The past has proven that installing BitTorrent, Kazaa, or another single piece of software is no real barrier to anyone.
By comparison, Adobe's Creative Suite is pirated all of the time, but it is rather difficult to do so. You have to register with your e-mail address, and download a demo. You need to run a keygen. You have to modify your hosts files. You have to setup custom firewalls. Some software has to be allowed to connect to some addresses and not others. It's an actual preventative measure that requires constant vigilance from the end-user, and is quite the pain to attempt to defeat.
I'm all for technological measures to prevent casual piracy. But don't sacrifice infrastructure stability for a measure that has little chance of being effective. I'm sure we can come up with something better.
The guy is "a hobbyist, not a sysadmin" and is looking for a self-hosted alternative webmail. The thing is, unlike a lot of other parts of life, mail hosting is basically a sewer of pain. Potholes and pitfalls are absolutely everywhere. To make a bad analogy, the guy basically posted "I'd like to be more independent. So I've decided to learn to fix my car, start growing some vegetables in my backyard. And, oh yes, have a baby. Are babies hard?" All of those are valid goals, that people everywhere should aspire to. But, as the germans say, he needs to be aware of the commitment and Kindersheisse of maintaining a mail server.
And I've been on both sides of the "black-hole everyone's mail" problem. If a server is sending out spam, a single server can easily be sending out hundreds of pieces of spam to each and every one of your users per day. Chances are, that "server" is a hacked Windows XP box someone in their IP block left online (there really aren't anything other than hacked Windows XP boxes online these days). Or a server with inadequate protections that is being maliciously harnessed. Or someone put the address into a blacklist wrong. Either way, without these blacklists e-mail service as we know it would be over. And, unfortunately, there are people profiting from spam, fighting every bit as hard as the legitimate users to get off of the blacklists.
And that's without taking into account the basic technological issues, like needing redundancy and response significantly higher than take-it-or-leave-it services. If your docs server is down, you have to wait a bit to access your documentation. If your mail server is down for long enough, you lose all of those messages. Also, all of your clients get messages that your system is down, but you don't. You get hit constantly by volumes of spam, leading to waves of DDOSing. People don't back any mail up, but require it to be available forever. And, this may just be personal perception, but I swear that all mail servers are coded to be suicidal.
So yes, the effort put out to host one's own mail server is disproportional to the payoff in terms of personal information security. Because it's not building a server. It's committing to hosting an ongoing part of the mail ecosystem.
Second this. The #1 thing you get through GMail is a spam filter maintained by many, many people, and filtered through literally billions of messages and millions of users every day. Spam filters need constant maintenance, you users will flame you for every false positive, scummy mail admins will flame you for every correct positive, people will start blocking you for spam that you had nothing to do with... It's a bloody mess.
Even when I was hosting my own, everything got filtered out and back through GMail for spam purposes.
Considering the FBI and MI6 don't have jurisdiction in Oslo, very probably.
Also, why would terrorist cells communicate via secret text in 1,500 page manifestos? It just doesn't make any sense. Encode some data into witty photos posted on Reddit photoshop contests. Mix some in torrents. Or, gasp, talk to people. Let's be honest here, most terrorists don't communicate by massively arcane technological methods. Most just talk on forums, make phone calls, or chat through chat programs.
Anything embedded secretly in a 1500 page highly public manifesto is basically advertising intended to keep people excited and talking about the manifesto. And at that, the nutjob wins. But the idea of some form of meaningful project-based communication between terrorists happening secretly via 1500 page manifestos is ascribing a degree of power to them that I personally have trouble stomaching.
Any future employer is not going to want an employee that has sent negative letters to the customers of a previous employer. Period. Debate it, bring in a lawyer, litigate it, fine. The moment you go after the customers, you are no longer hireable.
You'd have to see his employment contract to see that for sure. More contracts than should specify that anything created on personal time related to the work of the company becomes the company's property.
Or, that the kind of people who score higher on standardized IQ tests are the kind that are likely to interact with people who talk about alternatives to default. Or that technical web developers generally score higher on IQ tests, and they tend to use Opera for flexibility and power. Or that people in cities make IQ tests, and people in cities tend to use other browsers. Or that Opera is has become so damned complicated that only the super freaking brilliant would willingly subject themselves to it.
It's probably the speed of the technique that makes it attractive to game developers.
But that having been said, the reason why Supersampling is expensive is because you measure a lot of spots per pixel, average them together, and display that as the pixel. This technique takes lots of pixels and averages them together in bigger pixels. The technique is faster, but all it is doing is dropping the effective resolution from 1080p to 540p. At that point you might as well render to a lower resolution backbuffer and let the hardware handle the scaling.
Actually, you can use other bookstores with the Kindle. It's fully endorsed by Amazon, and won't violate your TOS. No cracking / hacking / jailbreaking required. Just buy an ebook from wherever, and copy them over using USB. You can also use Amazon's own Whispernet, but there are potential data charges.
Actually, if you want to use Apple's system, you pay Apple. If you don't want to use Apple's system, you can't sell digital items through your app. These vendors were only kicking you out to Safari because they had to in order to avoid Apple's 30% credit card processing fee (most processing fees are on the order of 1.5 - 2%). Before Apple launched their system, there were apps that accepted credit cards just fine. You can buy with a credit card in Amazon's integrated shopping app, just like any other Amazon service, because they sell physical goods. The experience is fine. But digital goods Apple takes a cut of (and doesn't even provide download hosting).
The worst abuse comes from iBooks specifically. Say that a publisher offers an ebook version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows wholesale for 10 dollars. And don't think you can argue them down: all of the major ebook retailers have clauses in their contracts that specify that publishers can't sell to other people for less than they're selling to them. So that's 10$. Say that a company needs to make 1$ per transaction to survive as a business.
Apple is charged the usual credit card processing rate of 2%. Therefore, they sell their copies of Harry Potter at $11.25. You, on the other hand, have to pay Apple (your competitor) a credit card processing fee of 30%. Therefore, you have to sell your copy of Harry Potter at $14.30. Even if you squeezed your 10% margin down to nothing, you couldn't come close to competing with Apple's prices. And if you did, you'd just be sending money off to your competitor, who could plow that back into improving their ebook store.
The same is true of iTunes, and anything else that Apple decides they might like to sell on their phones. They already have the built-in advantages of being able to pre-load whatever they'd like onto your phone, and being able to tailor the OS to suit their apps. Any e-market that Apple enters on the iPhone is basically owned by Apple.
It's not Apple's phone. It's your customer's phones. They buy them, pay for them. Apple isn't pre-loading your app or anything like that, they're just making it available on the customer's request. And they ban your customers from getting your app any other way. They even have the legal power to arrest people for getting your app in other ways, though they have yet to do this.
Google and Amazon take about 30% of apps that are purchased directly on their stores. They don't get a 30% cut of in-app purchase transactions that don't involve them. They also both allow other stores / marketplaces onto their devices... The Amazon marketplace is available from WITHIN the Google marketplace, for example.
Now, a lot of what is in the Android Marketplace is ad-supported, with ads being Google's specialty. But that's an optional thing.
No, actually. By Apple decree, you must keep the same or lower prices on all in-app purchases that users could purchase on other platforms. Amazon could raise ALL of their prices by 30%, or they can attempt to eat the difference, or they can hide the in-app purchase option on some hideously obscure menu option. Or, as is the american way, they can sue.
I suspect the response will be a combination of things, but especially the suing.
Like RAM in the 90's, the limiting reagent for a lot of server rooms is the strength of your AC. I wonder if we'll see major leaps forward in computer cooling, or oil-bath server rooms, or server rooms perpetually doused in extra dense gas.
All 1st year college students are glorified high school students. I didn't mean to single out athletes in that regard. The point is that they're in a position in their development where they need to be making their own decisions and their own mistakes. And being watched and guarded (and sheltered) continuously during that time is basically the opposite of what they need to do to cross over into adulthood.
And yeah, University Professors being judged by how many papers they publish is also a misappropriation of value.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead, we saw what happened.
Yeah, they got their publicity. And Apple asked for it back. And Gizmodo gave it to them.
And if you buy something off of the back of a truck from a guy who refuses to show his face, by law that's enough proof that you knew it was stolen. One would have to jump through an *awful* lot of mental gymnastics to think this guy who admitted to finding it in a bar was the rightful owner. Right there, ownership does not change hands until it is declared abandoned property by a proper authority.
We need one more player with BUCKS to Show them how it's done and shut these guys up.
Bucks usually means investors, and investors means doing the safe thing. We need one hundred more players with very little money, and one hundred odd new ideas about how we can interact.
But union officials say that the field technicians and call center workers generally earn $60,000 to $77,000 before overtime and that benefits come to well under $50,000 a year.
While that doesn't seem crazy, that's pretty darned good. Still, if an executive is going to demand paycuts from their workers, they should include themselves, especially when making more than 10 million a year.
And thank you for the real links.
Most successful revolutions and class wars, despite popular sentiment, seem to rise from the middle class. They are the ones who have the luxury of fighting and the resources to fight with. They are also the ones who have an established idea of what life should be like, and who fight against it eroding. Look at the headlining figures of the US revolution, for example.
I suspect the next decade of the US will be defined as a conflict between those who feel oppressed by corporations, and those who feel corporations are the way out. The real truth is probably tangential to both arguments.
The Xbox 360 D-pad has endemic design issues with diagonals.
The Sega Master System also had atrocious diagonals, as did Game.com.
The 5200, while technically a stick design, featured a non-re-centering joystick. Which meant you needed to estimate where neutral was, and hope you were right.
The CDi's gamepad felt like / was a bad PC 3rd party knockoff of a Gravis PC Gamepad. It felt sloppy and loose.
The PS1 gamepad had far less of the "rocker" design to the d-pad, resulting in lots of precise presses needed for any action.
If we're talking terrible peripherals, the U-Force has to top the list for least-likely-to-ever-respond-to-input-correctly. The NES Max worked fine, if you completely ignored the disk in the middle of the D-pad (the whole point of the Max). And in the early days of Street Fighter, a lot of the arcade owners converted older machines into SF machines, including ones with fixed 4 directional inputs that couldn't do diagonals.
iPods, when they first hit the market and made it big, were the first HDD-based MP3 player to actually fit in a pocket. I was a longstanding Archos fan, with upgradeable laptop based hard drives and hackable firmware. But even I had to admit that putting an MP3 player in your pocket was long overdue. The RIO's, etc of the time had about `128 MB of available space (I had 3 of 'em)... about enough for a CD.
Also most mp3 players were shipping with godawful earbuds at the time, which manufacturers expected people to replace immediately... but everyone used as default anyway. Apple had a strong edge in "how it sounds" to the average person in no small part because they shipped moderately adequate earbuds.
Creative Labs puts out some great-sounding modern MP3 players. And Zunes are totally serviceable. But Apple does keep putting out new and impressive devices. They were first with a searchable database system (artist, song, album, etc). Then the easy and fast touchwheel. They had the first flash-machine-with-a-real-screen in the Mini. The Touch is a pretty good MP3 Player / Video Game device. And, of course, they're now integrated into the iPhone... not the first phone to feature an MP3 player (even my old Treo could do that) but the first one that wasn't horribly tacked on.
You also need that lust factor. That one amazing thing that will make it worth overcoming all of the transition problems. That could be a low, low price. But it could also be a really well integrated feature that nobody has thought of, of a completely new way of looking at computing (which is what the iPad was).
If you can get a consumer to lust after your device, it will sell.
The question ultimately is "What does the user DO to bypass these measures." In any of these cases, the user downloads and runs a small script, once. This makes getting illicit material a 2-step process, up from a 1 step one. The technical details of the script are so obvious that any coder could write it. That's better, but still a barrier so small you could trip over it. The past has proven that installing BitTorrent, Kazaa, or another single piece of software is no real barrier to anyone.
By comparison, Adobe's Creative Suite is pirated all of the time, but it is rather difficult to do so. You have to register with your e-mail address, and download a demo. You need to run a keygen. You have to modify your hosts files. You have to setup custom firewalls. Some software has to be allowed to connect to some addresses and not others. It's an actual preventative measure that requires constant vigilance from the end-user, and is quite the pain to attempt to defeat.
I'm all for technological measures to prevent casual piracy. But don't sacrifice infrastructure stability for a measure that has little chance of being effective. I'm sure we can come up with something better.
The guy is "a hobbyist, not a sysadmin" and is looking for a self-hosted alternative webmail. The thing is, unlike a lot of other parts of life, mail hosting is basically a sewer of pain. Potholes and pitfalls are absolutely everywhere. To make a bad analogy, the guy basically posted "I'd like to be more independent. So I've decided to learn to fix my car, start growing some vegetables in my backyard. And, oh yes, have a baby. Are babies hard?" All of those are valid goals, that people everywhere should aspire to. But, as the germans say, he needs to be aware of the commitment and Kindersheisse of maintaining a mail server.
And I've been on both sides of the "black-hole everyone's mail" problem. If a server is sending out spam, a single server can easily be sending out hundreds of pieces of spam to each and every one of your users per day. Chances are, that "server" is a hacked Windows XP box someone in their IP block left online (there really aren't anything other than hacked Windows XP boxes online these days). Or a server with inadequate protections that is being maliciously harnessed. Or someone put the address into a blacklist wrong. Either way, without these blacklists e-mail service as we know it would be over. And, unfortunately, there are people profiting from spam, fighting every bit as hard as the legitimate users to get off of the blacklists.
And that's without taking into account the basic technological issues, like needing redundancy and response significantly higher than take-it-or-leave-it services. If your docs server is down, you have to wait a bit to access your documentation. If your mail server is down for long enough, you lose all of those messages. Also, all of your clients get messages that your system is down, but you don't. You get hit constantly by volumes of spam, leading to waves of DDOSing. People don't back any mail up, but require it to be available forever. And, this may just be personal perception, but I swear that all mail servers are coded to be suicidal.
So yes, the effort put out to host one's own mail server is disproportional to the payoff in terms of personal information security. Because it's not building a server. It's committing to hosting an ongoing part of the mail ecosystem.
Second this. The #1 thing you get through GMail is a spam filter maintained by many, many people, and filtered through literally billions of messages and millions of users every day. Spam filters need constant maintenance, you users will flame you for every false positive, scummy mail admins will flame you for every correct positive, people will start blocking you for spam that you had nothing to do with... It's a bloody mess.
Even when I was hosting my own, everything got filtered out and back through GMail for spam purposes.
The lost race of the Grammar People.
Considering the FBI and MI6 don't have jurisdiction in Oslo, very probably.
Also, why would terrorist cells communicate via secret text in 1,500 page manifestos? It just doesn't make any sense. Encode some data into witty photos posted on Reddit photoshop contests. Mix some in torrents. Or, gasp, talk to people. Let's be honest here, most terrorists don't communicate by massively arcane technological methods. Most just talk on forums, make phone calls, or chat through chat programs.
Anything embedded secretly in a 1500 page highly public manifesto is basically advertising intended to keep people excited and talking about the manifesto. And at that, the nutjob wins. But the idea of some form of meaningful project-based communication between terrorists happening secretly via 1500 page manifestos is ascribing a degree of power to them that I personally have trouble stomaching.
Excel is pretty much a programming language, just a really bad one. Embedding a better one within it just makes sense.
How exactly is this extortion?
Any future employer is not going to want an employee that has sent negative letters to the customers of a previous employer. Period. Debate it, bring in a lawyer, litigate it, fine. The moment you go after the customers, you are no longer hireable.
You'd have to see his employment contract to see that for sure. More contracts than should specify that anything created on personal time related to the work of the company becomes the company's property.
Or, that the kind of people who score higher on standardized IQ tests are the kind that are likely to interact with people who talk about alternatives to default. Or that technical web developers generally score higher on IQ tests, and they tend to use Opera for flexibility and power. Or that people in cities make IQ tests, and people in cities tend to use other browsers. Or that Opera is has become so damned complicated that only the super freaking brilliant would willingly subject themselves to it.
Correlation != causation
It's probably the speed of the technique that makes it attractive to game developers.
But that having been said, the reason why Supersampling is expensive is because you measure a lot of spots per pixel, average them together, and display that as the pixel. This technique takes lots of pixels and averages them together in bigger pixels. The technique is faster, but all it is doing is dropping the effective resolution from 1080p to 540p. At that point you might as well render to a lower resolution backbuffer and let the hardware handle the scaling.
Sadly, I fear that the DNC response is probably "We need to figure out how to do that too."
Actually, you can use other bookstores with the Kindle. It's fully endorsed by Amazon, and won't violate your TOS. No cracking / hacking / jailbreaking required. Just buy an ebook from wherever, and copy them over using USB. You can also use Amazon's own Whispernet, but there are potential data charges.
http://www.geardiary.com/2010/02/06/alternative-ebook-sources-for-your-kindle-plus-bonus-book-review/
Actually, if you want to use Apple's system, you pay Apple. If you don't want to use Apple's system, you can't sell digital items through your app. These vendors were only kicking you out to Safari because they had to in order to avoid Apple's 30% credit card processing fee (most processing fees are on the order of 1.5 - 2%). Before Apple launched their system, there were apps that accepted credit cards just fine. You can buy with a credit card in Amazon's integrated shopping app, just like any other Amazon service, because they sell physical goods. The experience is fine. But digital goods Apple takes a cut of (and doesn't even provide download hosting).
The worst abuse comes from iBooks specifically. Say that a publisher offers an ebook version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows wholesale for 10 dollars. And don't think you can argue them down: all of the major ebook retailers have clauses in their contracts that specify that publishers can't sell to other people for less than they're selling to them. So that's 10$. Say that a company needs to make 1$ per transaction to survive as a business.
Apple is charged the usual credit card processing rate of 2%. Therefore, they sell their copies of Harry Potter at $11.25. You, on the other hand, have to pay Apple (your competitor) a credit card processing fee of 30%. Therefore, you have to sell your copy of Harry Potter at $14.30. Even if you squeezed your 10% margin down to nothing, you couldn't come close to competing with Apple's prices. And if you did, you'd just be sending money off to your competitor, who could plow that back into improving their ebook store.
The same is true of iTunes, and anything else that Apple decides they might like to sell on their phones. They already have the built-in advantages of being able to pre-load whatever they'd like onto your phone, and being able to tailor the OS to suit their apps. Any e-market that Apple enters on the iPhone is basically owned by Apple.
It's not Apple's phone. It's your customer's phones. They buy them, pay for them. Apple isn't pre-loading your app or anything like that, they're just making it available on the customer's request. And they ban your customers from getting your app any other way. They even have the legal power to arrest people for getting your app in other ways, though they have yet to do this.
Google and Amazon take about 30% of apps that are purchased directly on their stores. They don't get a 30% cut of in-app purchase transactions that don't involve them. They also both allow other stores / marketplaces onto their devices... The Amazon marketplace is available from WITHIN the Google marketplace, for example.
Now, a lot of what is in the Android Marketplace is ad-supported, with ads being Google's specialty. But that's an optional thing.
No, actually. By Apple decree, you must keep the same or lower prices on all in-app purchases that users could purchase on other platforms. Amazon could raise ALL of their prices by 30%, or they can attempt to eat the difference, or they can hide the in-app purchase option on some hideously obscure menu option. Or, as is the american way, they can sue.
I suspect the response will be a combination of things, but especially the suing.
Like RAM in the 90's, the limiting reagent for a lot of server rooms is the strength of your AC. I wonder if we'll see major leaps forward in computer cooling, or oil-bath server rooms, or server rooms perpetually doused in extra dense gas.
Judging by the article, MLAA is actually just a technique that looks for jagged edges, and blurs them.
How this is better than just blurring the whole thing is beyond me. Those images look terrible.
All 1st year college students are glorified high school students. I didn't mean to single out athletes in that regard. The point is that they're in a position in their development where they need to be making their own decisions and their own mistakes. And being watched and guarded (and sheltered) continuously during that time is basically the opposite of what they need to do to cross over into adulthood.
And yeah, University Professors being judged by how many papers they publish is also a misappropriation of value.