Agreed.
What gets forgotten in the debate is that Java is a reference implementation of all true OOP constructs:
Interface
Abstract Class
Class
Which when applied judiciously, allow u to do things like inversion of control, dependency injection and test driven development in a strongly-typed environment, and this strongly-typed nature, when properly embraced, makes it easier to write software which you can refactor as often as you desire with orders of magnitude less risk than with "fsck-all-typed" languages like ruby or JavaScript.
So, if your application does little more than pushing data into and reading data from some storage engine, then okay, JavaScript is an okay choice.
If your application is growing into having significant business logic, then JavaScript will turn into thousands of lines of spaghetti untraceable closure hell , whereby each refactoring attempt will almost certainly have catastrophic consequences in production down some obscure execution path in some anonymous callback function you couldn't be bothered unit testing because how the fsck do you write a unit test against that anonymous function?
There's not a concept of a Class in JavaScript. Sure you can mimmick inheritance patterns with prototypes with albeit some unintended consequences (hasOwnProperry) and encapsulated properties by having your closures reference variables from their enclosing context etc, but those techniques are what i call "expressively contrived"
Strongly-typed OOP languages have very-well established tried and true patterns for writing test-driven code
Ruby while not strongly typed, at least has a concept of Class/methods/inheritance/polymorphism . Problem with Ruby is as i am writing things TDD in it, the first half of my tests are there to ensure that my methods behave correctly when i pass them arguments of the wrong types, and my methods are littered with lines of code ensuring that my arguments have the expected properties. Totally retarded. And Ruby doesn't know anything about an Interface, but that's okay because it's got "fsck-all-typing" so it's not like you would even try to enforce modicums of contracts.
Anyway, as applications grow in complexity, building things TDD in strongly-typed OOP languages leads to more fun, and frequent refactoring which makes ur code more stable instead of more brittle.
I've written a crap ton of JS code. Java code too. And PHP. And a minimal amount of Ruby: I've appreciated their strengths. And drawbacks.
Feel free to learn the same thing I have the hard way: this panacea mentality to stacks is just one big circle jerk. If you think JS, in its current form, is the only true way to build web applications, then by all means, keep that head firmly planted in the sand while the rest of the World out innovates you with a blend of languages and platforms best-suited for their use-cases.
well, that too. They just need to find some other open DNS server. And that shouldn't be too hard. Or they can just run their own. Incidentally, Mac OS X ships with BIND/named. Its configuration just isn't surfaced in a GUI unless you're running the "Server" edition of OS X. I've used DNSEnabler.app for quick/easy config of BIND on a stock version of Tiger/Client. That's just because i didn't feel like messing with named.conf, and a myriad of db files for some domains i run.
i'll tell you exactly how many: the number of earthlink customers that have the foggiest notion of what a DNS server is, and how to setup their own bind/named or djbdns instance, is equal to the number of earthlink customers who actually care about this issue, and don't actually want to be presented with relevant ads/search results. It's that easy.
All the companies you mentioned, in fact, have their tier 1 and 2 tech support outsourced. They may have sales still in the U.S.. So does EarthLink. Because sales positions can still be measured against revenue-generating metrics. That's what you're calling "Customer Service". It's the sad reality, but it's true.
Wait. You mentioned SUN? As in Sun Microsystems? These guys are not in the business of selling service to what i call "end-users". They sell to niche markets within the IT sector. You can still manage to have in-house support staff when you're dealing with a highly-targeted, tech-savvy market. Because your customers understand and pay for the value of support. Not so when it comes to Internet services.
There's no way in hell having in-house tech support would have allowed earthlink to grow. earthlink had to 1) cut costs 2) invest beyond dialup to allow for growth in a distant future. If you look at the last couple of years earnings reports, you'll notice that revenues have been constantly declining, while profits are still showing small increases. How are those numbers "met" quarter after quarter? cost-cutting. It started with the support staff. Now you can be pretty sure all elnk employees are just about required to generate their own electricity. Imagine an army of geeks on static cycles, cranking code day-in day-out. During the crazed dotcom days, most tech companies were bloated and spent money like crazy, earthlink was no exception, and it showed in its stock. Times have changed. So has earthlink.
its growth will come from new lines of business, that harness the power of the Internet to bring to consumers more powerful and cost-effective forms of communication, and information consumption. That is *if* earthlink manages to execute in this most cut-throat market, going after entrenched monopolies out to keep us stuck in the broadband stone-age, while France, UK, South Korea, and Japan, are already enjoying IP-powered communications and media, at speeds ranging from 24Mbps (ADSL2 in europe) to Gigabit (Fiber, Japan).
Believe it or not, if it wasn't for the thread of various municipal WiFi initiatives around the country, Verizon would further be dragging its feet in starting its fiber roll-outs in some of the most affluent communities in california.
GoogLink, if anything, just might help further disrupt a few things to keep the telcos on their toes.
earthlink was one of the last U.S. companies to have any phone-bound staff in-house, and i'm not just talking about ISPs.
Offering free technical support to customers was a losing proposition in the first place, if manned in-house. You can be a small ISP and hire a few folks in-house to do this, but as soon as you reach a certain critical mass of typical end-users, you've got everyone calling you about teaching them how do use their computers.
Here's a news flash: teaching somebody how to use their computer should not be a free service. But hey, AOL had already been doing it for decades, at ultra low-cost out of India, so what's a company to do to remain competitive and acquire some sort of financial health? Eventually, the same thing.
If people calling the call-centers were all people with reasonable problems, costs of operating call-centers in-house would have remained marginally low. But 99.9% of the time, somebody calls because their computer feels slow, because they've loaded every piece of spyware-ladden "free" junk out there.
I blame end-users for not enrolling at their local community college and learning how to use a computer before getting online. EarthLink even had at some point a premium tier of access, with premium support. Had people actually bothered buying this package, this would have subsidized a few more U.S. workers' salaries. But noooo, people just HAD to get the $20 package with unlimited access and unlimited free support.
The key to providing internet services while retaining your staff in-house is to market your services primarily to the Tech-Savvy niche. They'll keep your costs low. Speakeasy understands that. But for the rest of the unwashed masses, do you really want AOL, Verizon and SBC to be their only alternatives?
i do have some good friends who are now engineers there. I've been on their campus, met and spoken to some. they're all hardcore passionate geeks who live and breathe what they do, working 15 hour days, not because they have to, but because they want to.
where google stands apart from other companies is that google is, at its core, a company built by engineers, for engineers. engineers drive innovation, product roadmaps. The main campus with all the goodies is primarily reserved for engineers. you'll find management in satellite buildings.
if *any* company can deliver on the whole "don't be evil" mantra, i'm pretty damned sure Google can.
I too find people's lashing out at Google regarding their China bid, excessive. The press is always hungry for controversy and "gotchas", so they sure had a field day pointing out that 1) Google refused to disclose personal data about their users to U.S. Govt and 2) Google was okay playing ball with China government.
What these pundits out for sensationalistic blood don't realize is that 1) and 2) are two completely different situations. Google is not out to change the world through foreign policing. It's not Google's place to tell a foreign government how to treat their citizens. It's got absolutely zero leverage over China, because guess what, should China give Google the boot, China would still be the same, because hey, there already isn't any Google there. Now, can you imagine the U.S. without Google? I uh, can't. That's leverage over the U.S. Govt.
Is it ethical for Google to even be doing business with China then? It's at least as ethical as most of the western world businesses having just about everything they make manufactured in China. Do you think for a second western companies give a flying fsck about the civil liberties of the people who work in those factories? You bet your life they don't. Then why the double-standards?
If anything, Google's presence in China just might be a stealthy backdoor for information hunger.
mac users believe they're not vulnerable to harm: that's utter bull-crap. But it does come down to relative statements. We're not 100% safe. We're relatively safER than our windows-using counterparts. For one, Mac OS X has ALWAYS shipped with ZERO service enabled. Until XP Service Pack 2, Windows consistently shipped with at least one or two services listening on a given port. One MAJOR attack vector of a windows system, was simply opening-up your brand new DELL PC, plug it into your DSL modem and get infected within seconds by Sasser even before you could patch yourself. That's because Windows had some service turned-on BY DEFAULT. That's always been an incredibly retarded thing for Microsoft to do, and which they've done since at least Windows 95, and the principal attack vector of most virulent worms to date. The other thing that makes mac relatively more secure is that yes, indeed, there are not as many macs on networked computers than there windows machines. Diversity is a good thing, and plays well in mac users' favor. Then i won't even start touching on the myriad of security holes with Microsoft's integration of core operating system hooks into its web and email technologies, such as Internet Explorer and Outlook, favoring convenience with security being only a mere afterthought. And then there's ActiveX.
The other assumption that bothers me is that effective protection HAS to come from 3rd-party software solutions. Guess what, if you don't have any services running, there's no point in having a "firewall". An antivirus software isn't all that useful when they're reactive solutions. Effective anti-virus software will try to detect suspect behavior, but then again, Mac OS X has a lot of hooks in place that perform a lot of these tasks: All passwords are stashed-away in the Mac OS X keychain, access to the keychain by any application must be explicitly authorized by the user, Mac OS X warns the user each time an application is being run for the very first time, Mac OS X warns the user after the download of an Application from its main web browser, Safari, etc. Spending money and wasting CPU cycles on 3rd-party software solutions, at this point in time, isn't necessarily the most effective way to keep our macs safe. Users should, for now, abide by the BEST PRACTICES Mac OS X is trying to get them to adhere to.
what, in the x86 migration, makes you think Apple's going to attain a sudden, dramatically greater market share? It bewilders me that people keep equating x86 chips to Apple suddenly getting into the commodity hardware business. It's just a processor switch. In fact, Apple's making higher margins on the G5 today than it likely will on x86. Apple's in the business of superior computing, with the costs that go along with that. It will continue to build higher-end machines, with higher margins.
If you tell me "The Mac Mini will cause a gain in market share", then yeah, you have more of a point.
The fact is, you can correlate obesity to just about anything that characterizes a sedentary lifestyle. In the end, we're drawn to escapism. Some people make it a priority in their lives to balance various activities to maintain mental and physical health, others will seek out whichever mean of sedentary escapism is available to them. It might be online gaming. It might be online dating. It might be pr0n surfing. It might be reading comics. Playing chess. Reading books. Drinking at bars with "buddies from work". Take just about any non-physical activity, take it to an extreme, and you bet your life you can instantly correlate it to obesity. It's just that watching TV is the form of sedentary "activity" that has the lowest barrier to entry and that is performed by the vast majority of populations of highly sedentary societies.
The answer is not "kill TV, hate TV, hate and kill big evil money-grubbing corporations who advertise on TV", the answer is "choose your lifestyle well". No need to troll around on slashdot, just start with yourself, and your immediate family.
The fact is, fewer people are giving TV their undivided attention. You'll find people tooling around on a computer, or otherwise multitasking with TV as a background noise. As a result, TV ads are losing some of their effectiveness, while a lot of advertising dollars are now being shifted to the Web. So they cram more ads on TV to keep revenues healthy. Fair enough.
Ads on TV are not the cause of our sedentary lifestyle. They merely do their best to monetize it. All we have to do is stop watching too much TV and strive toward more balance. You, tomhudson, are not revealing some hidden truth.
You're no more "enlightened" than the rest of us, who have already adopted a balanced, TiVo-powered approach to TV, and realize that in the end, if there was no TV, people would find other means to sit at home on their lazy asses, get fat, while putting "finishing touches" on their butt-ugly myspace.com homepage.
the problem with.kids is that it puts an arbitrary constraint in the DNS, for a given site to be considered kid-safe. how do you define a kid? how do you define what's safe? the concept of "kid" tries to arbitrarily group *prospective consumers* versus trying to qualify *content*. ".xxx" qualifies content as "hey you'll see tits and @ss". it's up to consumers to decide whether or not they consider it "safe" or whether or not they'd want to show it to "kids", according to whichever definition a "kid" might fit in a given culture or country.
To illustrate some issues with.kids, i would want my kids to access wikipedia.org as early as cognitively possible.
don't feel too bad about smallville. Kristin Kreuk is like crack to me. they need to come-up with a TV show where all she does is just stare at the camera for one hour. that'd also make me happy.
valid points. I would however point out that i do value my own time, and time spent a the computer. Ripping DVDs, compressing, and managing those files is a cumbersome process, that takes-up too much my precious time, and eventually clobbers my hard drive far more than what i'll get off iTunes.
but in the end, i need Apple to come-up with something similar to/better than Windows Media Center, i need a reasonably cheap external device where all that "Media" will live.
Actually, you know very-well how much easier it has been to corrupt a windows machine via normal web surfing: Because of ActiveX and the browser's tight integration with the operating system.
microsoft shipped a long time ago the ability to run and install software from a web document without thoroughly thinking through the vast array of possible social engineering exploits this would open hapless end-users to. For one, an ActiveX warning box would show-up each and every single time you'd load a web document. Navigating through sites overzealous ad banners instantly becomes hell, and many people WILL click "Yes" to "make those annoying messages go away". In those instances, installing and running software on one's computer is no-longer a conscious, educated choice. It is a byproduct of trying to improve one's browsing experience.
Not to mention the many security flaws that were found throughout the years to completely bypass ActiveX warning dialogs.
Saying "Don't download and install random shit off the 'Net" has actually far better chances of being a successful message to keep Mac users out of trouble, because Apple has worked very hard to make the only way to "install and run shit" the result of an effectively educated, conscious choice. When you "install and run shit" on a Mac, you know you're "installing and running shit".
On Windows, there have been, and continue to be, a number of user interface and security flaws that make the message you outline an ineffective message to most average/novice users. Granted, throughout recent Windows XP patches, a lot of these issues are slowly going away. I still think ActiveX needs to die or far more seriously rethought.
i'll further emphasize your point by slightly correcting this statement of yours: "The ports that don't need to be on, are off, by default"
Actually, a default installation of the end user version of Mac OS X does not have a single port opened. Run nmap on your LAN against a freshly-installed Mac, you won't find a single port opened. It has always been the way of Mac OS X, since its very inception. There is absolutely no valid reason for a default installation of an end-user version of an operating system to be listening on any port. Apple grokked that. Duh.:)
A malicious program can be written for any platform. An actual virus will successfully spread itself. I wish crackers good luck with that on OS X.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. What gets forgotten in the debate is that Java is a reference implementation of all true OOP constructs: Interface Abstract Class Class Which when applied judiciously, allow u to do things like inversion of control, dependency injection and test driven development in a strongly-typed environment, and this strongly-typed nature, when properly embraced, makes it easier to write software which you can refactor as often as you desire with orders of magnitude less risk than with "fsck-all-typed" languages like ruby or JavaScript. So, if your application does little more than pushing data into and reading data from some storage engine, then okay, JavaScript is an okay choice. If your application is growing into having significant business logic, then JavaScript will turn into thousands of lines of spaghetti untraceable closure hell , whereby each refactoring attempt will almost certainly have catastrophic consequences in production down some obscure execution path in some anonymous callback function you couldn't be bothered unit testing because how the fsck do you write a unit test against that anonymous function? There's not a concept of a Class in JavaScript. Sure you can mimmick inheritance patterns with prototypes with albeit some unintended consequences (hasOwnProperry) and encapsulated properties by having your closures reference variables from their enclosing context etc, but those techniques are what i call "expressively contrived" Strongly-typed OOP languages have very-well established tried and true patterns for writing test-driven code Ruby while not strongly typed, at least has a concept of Class/methods/inheritance/polymorphism . Problem with Ruby is as i am writing things TDD in it, the first half of my tests are there to ensure that my methods behave correctly when i pass them arguments of the wrong types, and my methods are littered with lines of code ensuring that my arguments have the expected properties. Totally retarded. And Ruby doesn't know anything about an Interface, but that's okay because it's got "fsck-all-typing" so it's not like you would even try to enforce modicums of contracts. Anyway, as applications grow in complexity, building things TDD in strongly-typed OOP languages leads to more fun, and frequent refactoring which makes ur code more stable instead of more brittle. I've written a crap ton of JS code. Java code too. And PHP. And a minimal amount of Ruby: I've appreciated their strengths. And drawbacks. Feel free to learn the same thing I have the hard way: this panacea mentality to stacks is just one big circle jerk. If you think JS, in its current form, is the only true way to build web applications, then by all means, keep that head firmly planted in the sand while the rest of the World out innovates you with a blend of languages and platforms best-suited for their use-cases.
i think what we need here ... is a group hug.
The New York Time article very-much outlines why AT&T might one day, hopefully sooner than later, embrace VoIP on the iPhone.
Convergence of IP-powered and Cell-Tower telephony is coming, has been for some time now. The big question remains who will be first to market.
Regardless, if Apple comes through on my prediction, remember where you read it first.
someone please mod parent up.
mmMmm. There appears to be a zune.net.
imagine a wirelessly-connected beowulf cluster of these!
well, that too. They just need to find some other open DNS server. And that shouldn't be too hard. Or they can just run their own. Incidentally, Mac OS X ships with BIND/named. Its configuration just isn't surfaced in a GUI unless you're running the "Server" edition of OS X. I've used DNSEnabler.app for quick/easy config of BIND on a stock version of Tiger/Client. That's just because i didn't feel like messing with named.conf, and a myriad of db files for some domains i run.
i'll tell you exactly how many: the number of earthlink customers that have the foggiest notion of what a DNS server is, and how to setup their own bind/named or djbdns instance, is equal to the number of earthlink customers who actually care about this issue, and don't actually want to be presented with relevant ads/search results. It's that easy.
All the companies you mentioned, in fact, have their tier 1 and 2 tech support outsourced. They may have sales still in the U.S.. So does EarthLink. Because sales positions can still be measured against revenue-generating metrics. That's what you're calling "Customer Service". It's the sad reality, but it's true.
Wait. You mentioned SUN? As in Sun Microsystems? These guys are not in the business of selling service to what i call "end-users". They sell to niche markets within the IT sector. You can still manage to have in-house support staff when you're dealing with a highly-targeted, tech-savvy market. Because your customers understand and pay for the value of support. Not so when it comes to Internet services.
There's no way in hell having in-house tech support would have allowed earthlink to grow. earthlink had to 1) cut costs 2) invest beyond dialup to allow for growth in a distant future. If you look at the last couple of years earnings reports, you'll notice that revenues have been constantly declining, while profits are still showing small increases. How are those numbers "met" quarter after quarter? cost-cutting. It started with the support staff. Now you can be pretty sure all elnk employees are just about required to generate their own electricity. Imagine an army of geeks on static cycles, cranking code day-in day-out. During the crazed dotcom days, most tech companies were bloated and spent money like crazy, earthlink was no exception, and it showed in its stock. Times have changed. So has earthlink.
its growth will come from new lines of business, that harness the power of the Internet to bring to consumers more powerful and cost-effective forms of communication, and information consumption. That is *if* earthlink manages to execute in this most cut-throat market, going after entrenched monopolies out to keep us stuck in the broadband stone-age, while France, UK, South Korea, and Japan, are already enjoying IP-powered communications and media, at speeds ranging from 24Mbps (ADSL2 in europe) to Gigabit (Fiber, Japan).
Believe it or not, if it wasn't for the thread of various municipal WiFi initiatives around the country, Verizon would further be dragging its feet in starting its fiber roll-outs in some of the most affluent communities in california.
GoogLink, if anything, just might help further disrupt a few things to keep the telcos on their toes.
earthlink was one of the last U.S. companies to have any phone-bound staff in-house, and i'm not just talking about ISPs.
Offering free technical support to customers was a losing proposition in the first place, if manned in-house. You can be a small ISP and hire a few folks in-house to do this, but as soon as you reach a certain critical mass of typical end-users, you've got everyone calling you about teaching them how do use their computers.
Here's a news flash: teaching somebody how to use their computer should not be a free service. But hey, AOL had already been doing it for decades, at ultra low-cost out of India, so what's a company to do to remain competitive and acquire some sort of financial health? Eventually, the same thing.
If people calling the call-centers were all people with reasonable problems, costs of operating call-centers in-house would have remained marginally low. But 99.9% of the time, somebody calls because their computer feels slow, because they've loaded every piece of spyware-ladden "free" junk out there.
I blame end-users for not enrolling at their local community college and learning how to use a computer before getting online. EarthLink even had at some point a premium tier of access, with premium support. Had people actually bothered buying this package, this would have subsidized a few more U.S. workers' salaries. But noooo, people just HAD to get the $20 package with unlimited access and unlimited free support.
The key to providing internet services while retaining your staff in-house is to market your services primarily to the Tech-Savvy niche. They'll keep your costs low. Speakeasy understands that. But for the rest of the unwashed masses, do you really want AOL, Verizon and SBC to be their only alternatives?
i do have some good friends who are now engineers there. I've been on their campus, met and spoken to some. they're all hardcore passionate geeks who live and breathe what they do, working 15 hour days, not because they have to, but because they want to.
where google stands apart from other companies is that google is, at its core, a company built by engineers, for engineers. engineers drive innovation, product roadmaps. The main campus with all the goodies is primarily reserved for engineers. you'll find management in satellite buildings.
if *any* company can deliver on the whole "don't be evil" mantra, i'm pretty damned sure Google can.
I too find people's lashing out at Google regarding their China bid, excessive. The press is always hungry for controversy and "gotchas", so they sure had a field day pointing out that 1) Google refused to disclose personal data about their users to U.S. Govt and 2) Google was okay playing ball with China government.
What these pundits out for sensationalistic blood don't realize is that 1) and 2) are two completely different situations. Google is not out to change the world through foreign policing. It's not Google's place to tell a foreign government how to treat their citizens. It's got absolutely zero leverage over China, because guess what, should China give Google the boot, China would still be the same, because hey, there already isn't any Google there. Now, can you imagine the U.S. without Google? I uh, can't. That's leverage over the U.S. Govt.
Is it ethical for Google to even be doing business with China then? It's at least as ethical as most of the western world businesses having just about everything they make manufactured in China. Do you think for a second western companies give a flying fsck about the civil liberties of the people who work in those factories? You bet your life they don't. Then why the double-standards?
If anything, Google's presence in China just might be a stealthy backdoor for information hunger.
The Apple Blog has a parody of the Dvorak piece.
this is too freakin' good. Please oh please mod parent up. i beg you :)
mac users believe they're not vulnerable to harm: that's utter bull-crap. But it does come down to relative statements. We're not 100% safe. We're relatively safER than our windows-using counterparts. For one, Mac OS X has ALWAYS shipped with ZERO service enabled. Until XP Service Pack 2, Windows consistently shipped with at least one or two services listening on a given port. One MAJOR attack vector of a windows system, was simply opening-up your brand new DELL PC, plug it into your DSL modem and get infected within seconds by Sasser even before you could patch yourself. That's because Windows had some service turned-on BY DEFAULT. That's always been an incredibly retarded thing for Microsoft to do, and which they've done since at least Windows 95, and the principal attack vector of most virulent worms to date. The other thing that makes mac relatively more secure is that yes, indeed, there are not as many macs on networked computers than there windows machines. Diversity is a good thing, and plays well in mac users' favor. Then i won't even start touching on the myriad of security holes with Microsoft's integration of core operating system hooks into its web and email technologies, such as Internet Explorer and Outlook, favoring convenience with security being only a mere afterthought. And then there's ActiveX.
The other assumption that bothers me is that effective protection HAS to come from 3rd-party software solutions. Guess what, if you don't have any services running, there's no point in having a "firewall". An antivirus software isn't all that useful when they're reactive solutions. Effective anti-virus software will try to detect suspect behavior, but then again, Mac OS X has a lot of hooks in place that perform a lot of these tasks: All passwords are stashed-away in the Mac OS X keychain, access to the keychain by any application must be explicitly authorized by the user, Mac OS X warns the user each time an application is being run for the very first time, Mac OS X warns the user after the download of an Application from its main web browser, Safari, etc. Spending money and wasting CPU cycles on 3rd-party software solutions, at this point in time, isn't necessarily the most effective way to keep our macs safe. Users should, for now, abide by the BEST PRACTICES Mac OS X is trying to get them to adhere to.
what, in the x86 migration, makes you think Apple's going to attain a sudden, dramatically greater market share? It bewilders me that people keep equating x86 chips to Apple suddenly getting into the commodity hardware business. It's just a processor switch. In fact, Apple's making higher margins on the G5 today than it likely will on x86. Apple's in the business of superior computing, with the costs that go along with that. It will continue to build higher-end machines, with higher margins.
If you tell me "The Mac Mini will cause a gain in market share", then yeah, you have more of a point.
booh-fscking-hooh?
The fact is, you can correlate obesity to just about anything that characterizes a sedentary lifestyle. In the end, we're drawn to escapism. Some people make it a priority in their lives to balance various activities to maintain mental and physical health, others will seek out whichever mean of sedentary escapism is available to them. It might be online gaming. It might be online dating. It might be pr0n surfing. It might be reading comics. Playing chess. Reading books. Drinking at bars with "buddies from work". Take just about any non-physical activity, take it to an extreme, and you bet your life you can instantly correlate it to obesity. It's just that watching TV is the form of sedentary "activity" that has the lowest barrier to entry and that is performed by the vast majority of populations of highly sedentary societies. The answer is not "kill TV, hate TV, hate and kill big evil money-grubbing corporations who advertise on TV", the answer is "choose your lifestyle well". No need to troll around on slashdot, just start with yourself, and your immediate family. The fact is, fewer people are giving TV their undivided attention. You'll find people tooling around on a computer, or otherwise multitasking with TV as a background noise. As a result, TV ads are losing some of their effectiveness, while a lot of advertising dollars are now being shifted to the Web. So they cram more ads on TV to keep revenues healthy. Fair enough. Ads on TV are not the cause of our sedentary lifestyle. They merely do their best to monetize it. All we have to do is stop watching too much TV and strive toward more balance. You, tomhudson, are not revealing some hidden truth. You're no more "enlightened" than the rest of us, who have already adopted a balanced, TiVo-powered approach to TV, and realize that in the end, if there was no TV, people would find other means to sit at home on their lazy asses, get fat, while putting "finishing touches" on their butt-ugly myspace.com homepage.
the problem with .kids is that it puts an arbitrary constraint in the DNS, for a given site to be considered kid-safe. how do you define a kid? how do you define what's safe? the concept of "kid" tries to arbitrarily group *prospective consumers* versus trying to qualify *content*. ".xxx" qualifies content as "hey you'll see tits and @ss". it's up to consumers to decide whether or not they consider it "safe" or whether or not they'd want to show it to "kids", according to whichever definition a "kid" might fit in a given culture or country.
To illustrate some issues with .kids, i would want my kids to access wikipedia.org as early as cognitively possible.
don't feel too bad about smallville. Kristin Kreuk is like crack to me. they need to come-up with a TV show where all she does is just stare at the camera for one hour. that'd also make me happy.
valid points. I would however point out that i do value my own time, and time spent a the computer. Ripping DVDs, compressing, and managing those files is a cumbersome process, that takes-up too much my precious time, and eventually clobbers my hard drive far more than what i'll get off iTunes.
but in the end, i need Apple to come-up with something similar to/better than Windows Media Center, i need a reasonably cheap external device where all that "Media" will live.
no. but it will on iPico :o
Make better use of our home broadband connectivity?. I'm seeing few people addressing the costs and practicality of hosting all this new content.
Actually, you know very-well how much easier it has been to corrupt a windows machine via normal web surfing: Because of ActiveX and the browser's tight integration with the operating system.
microsoft shipped a long time ago the ability to run and install software from a web document without thoroughly thinking through the vast array of possible social engineering exploits this would open hapless end-users to. For one, an ActiveX warning box would show-up each and every single time you'd load a web document. Navigating through sites overzealous ad banners instantly becomes hell, and many people WILL click "Yes" to "make those annoying messages go away". In those instances, installing and running software on one's computer is no-longer a conscious, educated choice. It is a byproduct of trying to improve one's browsing experience.
Not to mention the many security flaws that were found throughout the years to completely bypass ActiveX warning dialogs.
Saying "Don't download and install random shit off the 'Net" has actually far better chances of being a successful message to keep Mac users out of trouble, because Apple has worked very hard to make the only way to "install and run shit" the result of an effectively educated, conscious choice. When you "install and run shit" on a Mac, you know you're "installing and running shit".
On Windows, there have been, and continue to be, a number of user interface and security flaws that make the message you outline an ineffective message to most average/novice users. Granted, throughout recent Windows XP patches, a lot of these issues are slowly going away. I still think ActiveX needs to die or far more seriously rethought.
i'll further emphasize your point by slightly correcting this statement of yours: "The ports that don't need to be on, are off, by default"
Actually, a default installation of the end user version of Mac OS X does not have a single port opened. Run nmap on your LAN against a freshly-installed Mac, you won't find a single port opened. It has always been the way of Mac OS X, since its very inception. There is absolutely no valid reason for a default installation of an end-user version of an operating system to be listening on any port. Apple grokked that. Duh. :)
A malicious program can be written for any platform. An actual virus will successfully spread itself. I wish crackers good luck with that on OS X.
a beowulf cluster of these !@