With web-based apps, lock-in comes from not even having to distribute the app, and by holding data on a central server.
This lock in is also likely to be harder to sell in the first place. Because the problems associated with having your entire business controlled by a third party are easier to explain to management. Especially since in many cases simply using such systems within your business involves breaking the law. Not only is sending confidential data to some third party rather daft it is in many cases illegal.
If anything the proliferation of devices is making the desktop more important - not less. We are starting to see a network effect. It easy to have the PC as the hub because its a standard platform in which everything can interact.
At least this is the case in theory. In practice there can be all sorts of problems. Including drivers for devices being mutually exclusive (tough luck if you have the "wrong" combination of devices and a proprietary OS.) There are also some strange quirks in Windows USB which can lead to requests to for drivers which are already installed. By the looks of things Windows is storing information about which USB socket a device has been plugged into. Informantion which is at best useless.
Investors seem completely ignorant of this. They always want their portfolio companies to reinvent themselves when the market shifts. It's just not good to serve a new market through an old mature company serving an old mature market. New companies that don't come with baggage do it better. Do you think Microsoft can focus on the super-cheap cell phone OS market once it starts eating into Vista profits?
This example is probably even worst (for Microsoft) than the "serve a new market through an old mature company serving an old mature market". It could easily be a repeat of the xbox idea. Are Microsoft (games console devision) actually making money yet?
It goes beyond the fact that Microsoft has lost its ability to innovate, though that is a significant portion.
Actually innovation rarely tends to come out of "industry leaders" in the first place. Microsoft has also always been a somewhat extreme example of "Embrace Extend Extinguish", (hence the Bill Borg icon).
Real-ID requires a minimum level of security on the ID,
How exactly would this be the case.
which IMPROVES PROTECTION AGAINST IDENTITY THEFT which would seem
Except that cetralised and overloaded identity document concepts make "identity theft" considerably easier.
Real-ID requires the sharing of databases between states. OK they are worried about the detriment of centralized databases, but show me where any other country gets attacked for requiring a centralized database for drivers licenses. They don't.
The problem isn't if such a database is national or not. The problem is that using said database for anything unrelated to driving on public roads is a stupid idea. Which includes using drivers licences as identity documents. The worst that should possibly be able to happen if someone steals yours is that you have to take a driving test before you are allowed to drive again.
If things don't drastically change, the citizens of those states will have to have passports to fly, since their state issued Drivers license will not meet the needs of federal identification at airports.
Which most people flying would need anyway. The only situation where such a non passport US ID would make any sense at all is for a flight which will always be within US airspace under any situation possible. Even for those flights the simplist option would be for the US Federal Government to be issuing the whatever.
Your way of dismissing this fact is to allege that the youth of today are indifferent about politics, that they will just use the donkey vote or something like that. Firstly, I find that grossly offensive, prejudiced and ignorant.
There also appears to be a common assumption that "donkey votes", "spoiled ballots", low turnouts, etc. are entirely due to voters. Whereas they could just as easily imply a "problem" with candidates. e.g. lack of diversity, candidates being out of touch with the public, etc.
You see, with these filters the government is in a broad stripe classifying lots of stuff which it is saying, basically "You shouldn't be seeing this. Even the stuff we're blocking that we can't explicitly make illegal, we still think it is wrong and you're going to hell for looking at it."
With it being unclear even who this "we" actually are. Possibly even unclear to the politicans who wanted this in the first place. Or does the good Senator intend that any maintanance of filtering lists is exclusivly controlled by named Australian citizens?
However it isn't either of these things, its a filter for things including legal pornography
Actually it's a lot worst than that. It isn't that uncommon for filters which supposedly block "pornography" to have false positives which have no rational connection with any kind of pornography. Not even bad regular expression matching with avian flight muscules, latin phrases, fastenings for wood/metal, builders of power stations, top floor apartments, etc. i.e. none of "computer finds smut where no human would" type cases.
It's the job of the owner of the computer to decide how and what to filter if there even needs to be any filtering at all.
Just so that nobody is in any doubt where the user is a child they are unlikely to be the owner. If they are using a computer at home that is likely to be their parent/guardian if they are using a computer at school then they arn't the owner. Even if, by some quirk, they do own the computer it's unlikely that they own the Internet connection at home and never the case at school. One fundermental problem with a third party (including ISP) filtering system is that it may or may not actually meet the owner's needs. It's quite likely that when government sticks its oar in and mandates/blesses some specific solution the result will be poor...
Schools already employ filters so either people should be outraged over that (I've yet to hear anyone outraged) or they shouldn't care. While ever its optional for home users, who cares?
If a school filter has the correct criteria the same filtering criteria will be appropriate for exactly zero home users. It's quite likely that a school in Darwin and one in Hobart would have differing filtering requirements. A big problem of this provide at ISP attitude is that it leads to a "one size fits all" approach, which is inappropriate to all. Similar issues apply to all commercial packages, even if eliminating "foreign" and "produced by nutters", actually leaves you with anything.
Speaking as an Australian though, I'm not surprised this is happening. We've had a moral minority making a fuss for the last ten years, and the internet is still seen as a trivial geek toy. These sort of laws are seen as a way of winning the moral vote without actually affecting Australia's society or economy.
Nice to see that the average Aussie recognises these people for unrepresentative few that they actually are. Though the problem with just about any political lobbying group is that these people tend to be completly obsessive about their issue. Unless they either manage to forget to eat/drink for a few days or are literally forced to do something else you might just as well try to compete with an android.
I'm a knee-jerk anti-censorship advocate, but if the "safe content" filter is only an option - think "disney channel" - than I'm not so sure I can disagree with the move.
Actually the only "safe content" is no content at all. Pick anything you like and even with only just under 20.5 million chances to find it "highly offensive" the odds arn't too good (they get a lot worst when you have 6.6 billion...) Even without that problem "safe" is not a synonym for "appropriate". e.g. should school students to spend all day watching "disney channel"? On the other hand schools may want to block lots of "safe" stuff (especially if their students are attracted to it) so that they have some chance of learning. i.e. "inappropriate" in the context of school Internet access includes websites which are of little educational relevence, even if they are "safe", "inoffensive", even in some cases specifically targeted at children that age.
I'm aghast at the general ignorance abounding in today's media about pornography, homosexuality and the like - usually in "new world" countries. Studies have been around since the 1970's and are available to all; for easy reading, Pease's "Why Men don't Listen and Women Can't read Maps", a layman-language book based on aforementioned psychiatric/electroencephalography research. There you'll see that not only is sexual orientation not "groomed", but you'll understand where our even "proper" urges come from.
Also those who argue that sexual orientation "grooming" exists tend not to understand the logical conclusions of their arguments:)
As far as I can tell from TFA it's going to cover anything 'inappropriate', although the good Senator does use kiddie porn to shut down the freedom of speech angle.
Thing is that this means just about anything. Who's going to decide what is and isn't "appropriate" (and to whom are they accountable). Odds on that even if a majority of Australians consider Senator Controy (or Kevin Rudd or even the entire ALP) to be 'inappropriate' they won't be restricted.
Just to make some general comments on the story - the intro says "online pornography and violent websites", then it says "pornography and inappropriate material", and then we get the comment about child porn. I wonder which we are talking about? Adult porn or fictional violence isn't the same thing at all as child porn (though in both cases, I'm not too bothered if they filter them for schools); "inappropriate material" could be anything.
More to the point "inappropriate material" in the context of schools and homes is undoubtedly not the same thing. There are plenty of websites which you don't want children wasting time on in school or because there are liability issues for the school. Yet it probably wouldn't be appropriate to block all game sites and webmail which allowed arbitary user signup for home users. Conversely there can be sites which are highly likely to offend whilst at the same time being highly relevent to part of the curriculum.
It's unclear whether this is simply mandatory for ISPs to optionally provide, or whether it will be mandatory to use. Even with the former, there are the issues that it may be on by default, or some ISPs might not bother with the hassle of allowing you to opt-out, or it will be advertised as a "child porn" filter even if it filters much more.
In practice such a "filter" would probably let through quite a bit of child porn and "false positive" in non randomly, but without any political adgendas being that explicit.
Happy living with yourself when you break someones neck on impact after making that decision. Oh, you only ever drive? Dang it.
Ironically the most talked about death due to someone failing to wear a seat belt involves a (rear seat) passenger. The passenger in the front seat, who was wearing a seat belt, being the only survivor.
Okay, instead of a wall at the bottom of your driveway you have a motorized gate with a numeric keypad. You need a code to open the gate so you can drive your car, but the people who own the road won't give it to you. You could easily download a road-gate-code-cracker, but that's been made illegal.
The good news is that they want to get rid of the keypad. The bad news is that their planned replacement system involves calling them up and explaining why you need to travel. (If you are North of the Equator you need to call their Wellington office, if you are in the South you call their Oslo office)...
I live in Seattle, according to antennaweb.org I have 8 digital stations available with just a medium multi directional antenna. And an additional 4 if I want to bother with a specialty antenna. I barely get any digital signal at all in the basement, and I'm less than 5 miles away from 7 stations.
You are lacking signal strength in what is probably the most well shielded part of your house... Have you tried the old fashioned low tech solution? i.e. put the antenna where you have the highest signal strength (generally on top of the roof) and run cable(s) to your receiver(s).
I don't know about the US, but here in the UK a lot of TVs are still 4:3. Most people upgrade their television around once a decade (if that) and even three years ago when my stepfather bought the new one the 4:3 was a lot cheaper than 16:9 (and most TV was still broadcast in 4:3).
It's also interesting that the cost of a TV with a "digital tuner" is often considerably more than one without plus an external box...
Although there may be some that can't tell the difference in quality, I think a far larger proportion of people just don't care about the increase in quality (myself included). I've seen demos in stores. I've seen a Sony disc that tries to show the difference side-by-side on the same movie (splitting the screen of a scene to show the left side as DVD and the other as Blu-Ray). Yeah, it's way better, but I don't give a crap! I don't have the cash, or the desire, to upgrade my television.
This is one of the major issues, in order for you to even have a chance of seeing any difference in picture quality you need to spend a lot of money buying new hardware. Whereas in the case of changing from VHS to DVD generally all you needed to buy was one machine.
DVD is good enough for me, and will be for a long, long time. I do not have interest in paying one cent more for the better quality video.
Which also has the additional "cost" of more DRM. No doubt more viewer annoyance along the "you must watch this" theme too.
for example, my bank sends me an sms with a code to complete all online transfers to new billers, rendering fishing useless. the only way to change the mobile number is to answer 2 very personal security questions, and even then the system alerts me of the change.
Actually you probably don't want to be using personal information for bank security questions at all.
I think the next step forward for CC's is one time numbers and photo ID on the card itself. shouldn't be very hard, have it operate just like login tokens do now and require the code for online transactions, and when swiping the pyhsical card the photo is looked at to id that it belong to the right person.
IIRC cardholder photos have been tried withough much sucess.
Makes you wonder how much of the Info "stolen" off "the computer" or "the internet" was really just thrown into a dumpster don't it.
Most of which may well have been "in a computer" before being printed...
I have been fighting with people at work to shred everything if they shred anything.
Let me guess, instead they want some policy for only shredding the stuff which matters. (It also dosn't help that there are some strange attitudes towards paper recycling around.)
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With web-based apps, lock-in comes from not even having to distribute the app, and by holding data on a central server.
This lock in is also likely to be harder to sell in the first place. Because the problems associated with having your entire business controlled by a third party are easier to explain to management. Especially since in many cases simply using such systems within your business involves breaking the law.
Not only is sending confidential data to some third party rather daft it is in many cases illegal.
If anything the proliferation of devices is making the desktop more important - not less. We are starting to see a network effect. It easy to have the PC as the hub because its a standard platform in which everything can interact.
At least this is the case in theory. In practice there can be all sorts of problems. Including drivers for devices being mutually exclusive (tough luck if you have the "wrong" combination of devices and a proprietary OS.) There are also some strange quirks in Windows USB which can lead to requests to for drivers which are already installed. By the looks of things Windows is storing information about which USB socket a device has been plugged into. Informantion which is at best useless.
Investors seem completely ignorant of this. They always want their portfolio companies to reinvent themselves when the market shifts. It's just not good to serve a new market through an old mature company serving an old mature market. New companies that don't come with baggage do it better. Do you think Microsoft can focus on the super-cheap cell phone OS market once it starts eating into Vista profits?
This example is probably even worst (for Microsoft) than the "serve a new market through an old mature company serving an old mature market". It could easily be a repeat of the xbox idea. Are Microsoft (games console devision) actually making money yet?
It goes beyond the fact that Microsoft has lost its ability to innovate, though that is a significant portion.
Actually innovation rarely tends to come out of "industry leaders" in the first place. Microsoft has also always been a somewhat extreme example of "Embrace Extend Extinguish", (hence the Bill Borg icon).
Microsoft's biggest enemy, at the moment is its self.
After Vista they proved they've gotten far to large a head count to innovate.
They are also their own worst enemy in the sense of XP competing with Vista.
Real-ID requires a minimum level of security on the ID,
How exactly would this be the case.
which IMPROVES PROTECTION AGAINST IDENTITY THEFT which would seem
Except that cetralised and overloaded identity document concepts make "identity theft" considerably easier.
Real-ID requires the sharing of databases between states. OK they are worried about the detriment of centralized databases, but show me where any other country gets attacked for requiring a centralized database for drivers licenses. They don't.
The problem isn't if such a database is national or not. The problem is that using said database for anything unrelated to driving on public roads is a stupid idea. Which includes using drivers licences as identity documents. The worst that should possibly be able to happen if someone steals yours is that you have to take a driving test before you are allowed to drive again.
If things don't drastically change, the citizens of those states will have to have passports to fly, since their state issued Drivers license will not meet the needs of federal identification at airports.
Which most people flying would need anyway. The only situation where such a non passport US ID would make any sense at all is for a flight which will always be within US airspace under any situation possible. Even for those flights the simplist option would be for the US Federal Government to be issuing the whatever.
Your way of dismissing this fact is to allege that the youth of today are indifferent about politics, that they will just use the donkey vote or something like that. Firstly, I find that grossly offensive, prejudiced and ignorant.
There also appears to be a common assumption that "donkey votes", "spoiled ballots", low turnouts, etc. are entirely due to voters. Whereas they could just as easily imply a "problem" with candidates. e.g. lack of diversity, candidates being out of touch with the public, etc.
You see, with these filters the government is in a broad stripe classifying lots of stuff which it is saying, basically "You shouldn't be seeing this. Even the stuff we're blocking that we can't explicitly make illegal, we still think it is wrong and you're going to hell for looking at it."
With it being unclear even who this "we" actually are. Possibly even unclear to the politicans who wanted this in the first place. Or does the good Senator intend that any maintanance of filtering lists is exclusivly controlled by named Australian citizens?
However it isn't either of these things, its a filter for things including legal pornography
Actually it's a lot worst than that. It isn't that uncommon for filters which supposedly block "pornography" to have false positives which have no rational connection with any kind of pornography. Not even bad regular expression matching with avian flight muscules, latin phrases, fastenings for wood/metal, builders of power stations, top floor apartments, etc. i.e. none of "computer finds smut where no human would" type cases.
It's the job of the owner of the computer to decide how and what to filter if there even needs to be any filtering at all.
Just so that nobody is in any doubt where the user is a child they are unlikely to be the owner. If they are using a computer at home that is likely to be their parent/guardian if they are using a computer at school then they arn't the owner. Even if, by some quirk, they do own the computer it's unlikely that they own the Internet connection at home and never the case at school.
One fundermental problem with a third party (including ISP) filtering system is that it may or may not actually meet the owner's needs. It's quite likely that when government sticks its oar in and mandates/blesses some specific solution the result will be poor...
Schools already employ filters so either people should be outraged over that (I've yet to hear anyone outraged) or they shouldn't care. While ever its optional for home users, who cares?
If a school filter has the correct criteria the same filtering criteria will be appropriate for exactly zero home users. It's quite likely that a school in Darwin and one in Hobart would have differing filtering requirements.
A big problem of this provide at ISP attitude is that it leads to a "one size fits all" approach, which is inappropriate to all. Similar issues apply to all commercial packages, even if eliminating "foreign" and "produced by nutters", actually leaves you with anything.
Speaking as an Australian though, I'm not surprised this is happening. We've had a moral minority making a fuss for the last ten years, and the internet is still seen as a trivial geek toy. These sort of laws are seen as a way of winning the moral vote without actually affecting Australia's society or economy.
Nice to see that the average Aussie recognises these people for unrepresentative few that they actually are. Though the problem with just about any political lobbying group is that these people tend to be completly obsessive about their issue. Unless they either manage to forget to eat/drink for a few days or are literally forced to do something else you might just as well try to compete with an android.
The only way to come close is to base net access on a white list, meaning that all of the internet is not accessible.
:)
There you go fixed it
I'm a knee-jerk anti-censorship advocate, but if the "safe content" filter is only an option - think "disney channel" - than I'm not so sure I can disagree with the move.
:)
Actually the only "safe content" is no content at all. Pick anything you like and even with only just under 20.5 million chances to find it "highly offensive" the odds arn't too good (they get a lot worst when you have 6.6 billion...)
Even without that problem "safe" is not a synonym for "appropriate". e.g. should school students to spend all day watching "disney channel"? On the other hand schools may want to block lots of "safe" stuff (especially if their students are attracted to it) so that they have some chance of learning. i.e. "inappropriate" in the context of school Internet access includes websites which are of little educational relevence, even if they are "safe", "inoffensive", even in some cases specifically targeted at children that age.
I'm aghast at the general ignorance abounding in today's media about pornography, homosexuality and the like - usually in "new world" countries. Studies have been around since the 1970's and are available to all; for easy reading, Pease's "Why Men don't Listen and Women Can't read Maps", a layman-language book based on aforementioned psychiatric/electroencephalography research. There you'll see that not only is sexual orientation not "groomed", but you'll understand where our even "proper" urges come from.
Also those who argue that sexual orientation "grooming" exists tend not to understand the logical conclusions of their arguments
As far as I can tell from TFA it's going to cover anything 'inappropriate', although the good Senator does use kiddie porn to shut down the freedom of speech angle.
Thing is that this means just about anything. Who's going to decide what is and isn't "appropriate" (and to whom are they accountable). Odds on that even if a majority of Australians consider Senator Controy (or Kevin Rudd or even the entire ALP) to be 'inappropriate' they won't be restricted.
Just to make some general comments on the story - the intro says "online pornography and violent websites", then it says "pornography and inappropriate material", and then we get the comment about child porn. I wonder which we are talking about? Adult porn or fictional violence isn't the same thing at all as child porn (though in both cases, I'm not too bothered if they filter them for schools); "inappropriate material" could be anything.
More to the point "inappropriate material" in the context of schools and homes is undoubtedly not the same thing. There are plenty of websites which you don't want children wasting time on in school or because there are liability issues for the school. Yet it probably wouldn't be appropriate to block all game sites and webmail which allowed arbitary user signup for home users. Conversely there can be sites which are highly likely to offend whilst at the same time being highly relevent to part of the curriculum.
It's unclear whether this is simply mandatory for ISPs to optionally provide, or whether it will be mandatory to use. Even with the former, there are the issues that it may be on by default, or some ISPs might not bother with the hassle of allowing you to opt-out, or it will be advertised as a "child porn" filter even if it filters much more.
In practice such a "filter" would probably let through quite a bit of child porn and "false positive" in non randomly, but without any political adgendas being that explicit.
Happy living with yourself when you break someones neck on impact after making that decision. Oh, you only ever drive? Dang it.
Ironically the most talked about death due to someone failing to wear a seat belt involves a (rear seat) passenger. The passenger in the front seat, who was wearing a seat belt, being the only survivor.
Okay, instead of a wall at the bottom of your driveway you have a motorized gate with a numeric keypad. You need a code to open the gate so you can drive your car, but the people who own the road won't give it to you. You could easily download a road-gate-code-cracker, but that's been made illegal.
The good news is that they want to get rid of the keypad. The bad news is that their planned replacement system involves calling them up and explaining why you need to travel. (If you are North of the Equator you need to call their Wellington office, if you are in the South you call their Oslo office)...
I live in Seattle, according to antennaweb.org I have 8 digital stations available with just a medium multi directional antenna. And an additional 4 if I want to bother with a specialty antenna. I barely get any digital signal at all in the basement, and I'm less than 5 miles away from 7 stations.
You are lacking signal strength in what is probably the most well shielded part of your house... Have you tried the old fashioned low tech solution? i.e. put the antenna where you have the highest signal strength (generally on top of the roof) and run cable(s) to your receiver(s).
I don't know about the US, but here in the UK a lot of TVs are still 4:3. Most people upgrade their television around once a decade (if that) and even three years ago when my stepfather bought the new one the 4:3 was a lot cheaper than 16:9 (and most TV was still broadcast in 4:3).
It's also interesting that the cost of a TV with a "digital tuner" is often considerably more than one without plus an external box...
Although there may be some that can't tell the difference in quality, I think a far larger proportion of people just don't care about the increase in quality (myself included). I've seen demos in stores. I've seen a Sony disc that tries to show the difference side-by-side on the same movie (splitting the screen of a scene to show the left side as DVD and the other as Blu-Ray). Yeah, it's way better, but I don't give a crap! I don't have the cash, or the desire, to upgrade my television.
This is one of the major issues, in order for you to even have a chance of seeing any difference in picture quality you need to spend a lot of money buying new hardware. Whereas in the case of changing from VHS to DVD generally all you needed to buy was one machine.
DVD is good enough for me, and will be for a long, long time. I do not have interest in paying one cent more for the better quality video.
Which also has the additional "cost" of more DRM. No doubt more viewer annoyance along the "you must watch this" theme too.
Why don't Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Diners etc start putting pressure on companies to keep credit card numbers more secure
Including the most secure method, not storing them at all. Also in order for a company to store numbers they should need a special merchant account.
for example, my bank sends me an sms with a code to complete all online transfers to new billers, rendering fishing useless. the only way to change the mobile number is to answer 2 very personal security questions, and even then the system alerts me of the change.
Actually you probably don't want to be using personal information for bank security questions at all.
I think the next step forward for CC's is one time numbers and photo ID on the card itself. shouldn't be very hard, have it operate just like login tokens do now and require the code for online transactions, and when swiping the pyhsical card the photo is looked at to id that it belong to the right person.
IIRC cardholder photos have been tried withough much sucess.
Makes you wonder how much of the Info "stolen" off "the computer" or "the internet" was really just thrown into a dumpster don't it.
Most of which may well have been "in a computer" before being printed...
I have been fighting with people at work to shred everything if they shred anything.
Let me guess, instead they want some policy for only shredding the stuff which matters. (It also dosn't help that there are some strange attitudes towards paper recycling around.)