Perhaps if, instead of fear-mongering for political gain, we educated people about which threats are real and which are imagined, the psychological effect brought upon us by exaggerated dangers of radiation exposure would be entirely negated. Just as informed people no longer believe their shadows are demons to be feared, people might use their reason instead of their feelings in response to terrorism.
Do you have nothing to hide in the bathroom when taking a shower? Do you have nothing to hide when you are making love with your spouse in your bedroom? If you have nothing to hide, you should not mind some cameras in there, right?
There is no improvement here over biometrics or other credentials falling into the “something you are” category. How do you revoke this credential? How do you limit its scope? I would even argue this is worse than a password because it is not easily changed, and worse, your signature is very public. Consider how many documents you have floating around with your hand-written signature on it. You really want to use something that can be learned and easily reproduced as a secret? Nonsense. We need real solutions (OpenID is a start), not rehashes or regressions of old schemes.
If my understanding is correct, OS/2 was provided its own implementations of Windows APIs. This is unsustainable and the cost easily overcomes the benefits of the platform. In the Apple scenario, the virtualized environment is the real thing, third parties provide that environment, and Apple continues to develop their platform in blissful ignorance while end-users get a universal platform. I would otherwise be very much inclined to agree with you, but I think these subtle differences will cause a positive outcome (depending on how you look at it).
Is it a gross simplification to state that using encryption would have rendered both mistakes harmless?
Is this really so hard for IT departments to set up PGP or one of its clones? Same goes for disk encryption? I have argued with people up and down who claim this is too hard to deploy, but I say that something is better than nothing, even if it nothing more than checking “encrypted folder” on your NT system.
These tools have gotten so easy to use these days and while I understand this is largely a social and policy problem, there is plenty of low-hanging fruit that can help mitigate the damage.
I think Dvorak was right, although maybe not for the correct reasons or based on solid evidence. That changed yesterday.
Comments that talk about how Safari on Windows is a quality product meant to drive the halo effect or that Apple is hypocritical for pushing their own design standards on Windows completely miss the point. Safari on Windows is not about the browser, it is for driving and course-correcting efforts to bring the Apple development platform to Windows. Why? So they can adopt it if necessary.
Some background first. The recent D5 hosted Jobs-Gates interview had both participants talking about ongoing partnership. Jobs stated repeatedly that Apple is a software company and he described how the software in the user space (e.g., iLife, iWork, Finder) is what people are buying into on the Mac. Value delivered by Apple comes in the form of good design and polish sense, not what kernel their software runs on.
When you look at iTunes and Safari on Windows, what do you see? Apple (not native Windows) font rendering, Core Animation effects (Cover Flow), compositing effects (inline find with Safari 3). There is a lot of infrastructure coming over to Windows from Mac OS X to support these products. (I believe such an assumption is valid because the smartest way to develop cross-platform applications is to minimize differences in the code base, keeping impedance matching in abstraction layers.) Now that Vista is a technical match (and goes beyond in some cases) for OS X with features Apple cares about (e.g., WPF), how long will it be until Apple can deliver a complete platform on both operating systems? As they do this, they increasingly marginalize the significance of what you find under the hood. No mainstream user is going to care if Finder runs on a FreeBSD or NT derivative.
As Microsoft has already done a lot of work bringing Vista on-par with OS X, it makes little sense for Apple to continue investing money in duplicating the effort. Their sobering strategy may be to focus on dealing directly with users and leave the operating system drudgery to another company with resources to burn. If they continue on this path, the remaining technical barriers will be gone. For a long time, it was processor architecture. Now they are chipping away library and framework barriers by introducing what amounts to a Macintosh application runtime environment on Windows. Given enough time and real-world experience porting their frameworks, it could eventually come down to another check-box option for universal binaries.
When they reach that point, Mac OS XI could very easily be NT under the covers.
So tired of cop-out arguments invoking “shiny”, “eye-candy”, or similar comments.
You do not have an argumentive leg to stand on if this is your reduction of any hardware. Or if you are speaking to certain features of Apple products, you are terribly lacking in objectivity. Apple is popular largely in part to useful polish, not because it amounts to little more than chrome.
Of course, you could always clarify what you define as “shiny crap”, and if I understood correctly, I will gladly reply with why the unique nuances are practical, not just pretty.
Too expensive and too departed from it's original design.
$500 amortized over 24 months of the contract comes out to just under $21 a month. Considering typical monthly service plan fees, that is not so bad. I started off with a Treo 650 a few years ago for which I paid around $350 ($15 a month). Not so huge a difference.
Care to share the original design with us?
I just don't need a wannabe PDA mini multimedia gadget phone
My advice then would be not to get one.
I need a phone that is comfortable, gets good reception, has great battery life and is built for punishment.
Oh, well yes. Assuming, of course, that the iPhone is uncomfortable, gets poor reception, has bad battery life, and is built for gentle handling. But wait, how can you know that assumption is true?
The iPhone will be the gimicky phone of the city, but for actually making calls I can't see how it's even meant for that.
I would suspect that, considering the built-in phone and software for managing contacts, making calls, and browsing voice mail, the device is meant for making calls.
Even the commercial bothers to list the phone feature as the last and least impressive looking thing the gadget can do. The interface seems smooth, just not for being used as a phone so much as some type of multimedia pda.
Maybe because they want to emphasize that it does more than make calls? Notice how car commercials focus on leather seats, powerful stereos, and sexy design? (Oh, and you can even drive with this!) So what if you could also call it a PDA. That is, very obviously, the whole point and the iPhone is entering the market of smartphones by improving on and building upon features already available in other products.
This just isn't going to work.
Okay, you are absolutely right. Apple better close-up shop.
People want to make calls on their phones and no HAVE to get bluetooh for it to be comfortable.
Where is your evidence for this? You must be in some position of privilege to have used the iPhone so much ahead the rest of us.
The cell phone market is too fast paced for the iPhone to be anything but a trend.
I might agree for the lower-end market where the phones are all but free and considered disposable. For smartphones, changes come much more slowly. My Treo 650 is pushing nearly four years now, yet there is little to distinguish it from cutting-edge models.
The money is in selling millions of units and securing a great model phone that can be used all over the globe.
And there is a good chance Apple will do just that: sell millions of units. We have no sales data yet. Can you guess why? And of all the most successful phones in the United States, how many can be used outside globally?
Cell phone sales profit margins are small, so unless AT&T actually thinks many people will change their service over just to get an iPhone I don't see how this could really work.
Mobile phones themselves usually have no profit. Most phones are subsidized by the carriers because the huge profit comes in offering over-priced service plans using an existing infrastructure at little to no extra cost.
Apple just put a lot of time and money into a product that can't even remotely sell as well as an iPod which more or less had no real competition. Apple isn't going to be able to hang in such a fast paced market when they are used to dictating their own pace in the market. That strategy isn't working for the iPod or their iTunes store.
I hate spam as much as the next guy. That being said, 65 years in jail and a quarter million in fines (even assuming he gets half of that) is just too much. This is the sort of sentence you should impose on murderers, not electronic irritants who use a system designed specifically to allow anyone to said pretty much anything to whoever they please. In short: hurt him, but not too much.
After re-reading the article and your comment, I was reminded of this unfortunate fact. Speculating on the reasons, I am not so convinced it is a matter of competitive advantage (as suggested by StorageMojo). Even if someone else set up shop with massive storage using GFS, they still would not offer the services Google provides. And with the exception of Gmail (whose limitless storage is not the most compelling feature), end-users (typically?) do not consider how Google stores data. If I am right, it may only be a matter of time before Google makes GFS available to the masses.
Google have a great solution that focuses on the “cheap” part without compromising much the latter two. If you have not read up on the Google Filesystem, definitely take the time to. At the very least, it seems to call into question the need to shell out tens of thousands for high-end storage solutions that promise reliability in proportion to the dollar.
If you want to convince people, how about trying something a bit more scientific?
Forgive me if I am overshooting or being pretentious with this remark. One does not simply “try” being more scientific when attempting to persuade. Science depends entirely on experimentation to disprove an assertion. It seeks evidence and tests that evidence against a hypothesis, doing so until a reasonably exhausting sources of evidence or when the hypothesis is contradicted by evidence, in which case the hypothesis is either modified to fit the contrasting evidence or discarded entirely. To the best of my knowledge, and I would enjoy being corrected, there are no scientific studies that rigorously test how video games affect behavior. We do have high level observations, anecdotes, and experience that suggest there is no real impact that directs players towards violence, but without a properly controlled study, we cannot make conclusions. I should point out that I am not disagreeing, as I think (as opposed to believing) that video games are harmless when played by people with no preexisting psychiatric anomalies.
Adding new features is not automatically a bad thing. It does not intrinsically slow down a program or make it cumbersome. Of course, these are two possible side-effects, but are not always certain. With good practices and architecture, new features are a boon, not a bust. Also, think of all the things the computer on your desktop does right now. Would you rather it have the functionality of a machine from a few decades ago because people complained that expanding its usefulness was counter-productive? Let products evolve, let engineers innovate, and let the process for coping with the consequences work.
I cannot believe some of the mundane topics Slashbots will harp on these days. Get over it and try adding some useful dialogue to the stories instead of bitching about things you do not understand or understand only as a result of experience with one particular vendor in Redmond.
All posts resembling the pattern “why don't they fix this problem instead!?” are off the mark, irrelevant, and just plain whiny. Just because some new feature is being added does not mean your pet peeve is going completely ignored. There is more than one person working on this thing, and as remarkable as it may seem, many software development tasks can be done in parallel! Imagine that: doing more than one thing at once on a project!
Well good! Continue being an atheist. Instead being able to claim it as a miricle, we now know that if there is any truth to the virgin birth story in Christianity, it can be rationally explained without invoking supernatural causes.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps if, instead of fear-mongering for political gain, we educated people about which threats are real and which are imagined, the psychological effect brought upon us by exaggerated dangers of radiation exposure would be entirely negated. Just as informed people no longer believe their shadows are demons to be feared, people might use their reason instead of their feelings in response to terrorism.
Do you have nothing to hide in the bathroom when taking a shower? Do you have nothing to hide when you are making love with your spouse in your bedroom? If you have nothing to hide, you should not mind some cameras in there, right?
See http://consumerist.com/consumer/cellphones/cancel- sprint-without-early-termination-fee-over-roaming- rate-change-267570.php for details. In short, Sprint is increasing their roaming fees. If you do not have unlimited roaming on your service plan, this applies to you.
Posting random comment to undo accidental Offtopic moderation I made. This comment is Informative. Stupid instant moderation system!
There is no improvement here over biometrics or other credentials falling into the “something you are” category. How do you revoke this credential? How do you limit its scope? I would even argue this is worse than a password because it is not easily changed, and worse, your signature is very public. Consider how many documents you have floating around with your hand-written signature on it. You really want to use something that can be learned and easily reproduced as a secret? Nonsense. We need real solutions (OpenID is a start), not rehashes or regressions of old schemes.
Well, I believe that completely invalidates my argument. Thank you! Now if only reverse that insightful moderation on my comment.
If my understanding is correct, OS/2 was provided its own implementations of Windows APIs. This is unsustainable and the cost easily overcomes the benefits of the platform. In the Apple scenario, the virtualized environment is the real thing, third parties provide that environment, and Apple continues to develop their platform in blissful ignorance while end-users get a universal platform. I would otherwise be very much inclined to agree with you, but I think these subtle differences will cause a positive outcome (depending on how you look at it).
Yes.
Is it a gross simplification to state that using encryption would have rendered both mistakes harmless?
Is this really so hard for IT departments to set up PGP or one of its clones? Same goes for disk encryption? I have argued with people up and down who claim this is too hard to deploy, but I say that something is better than nothing, even if it nothing more than checking “encrypted folder” on your NT system.
These tools have gotten so easy to use these days and while I understand this is largely a social and policy problem, there is plenty of low-hanging fruit that can help mitigate the damage.
Just be sure not to piss off the local, crystalline, computer-like life-forms inhabiting the crust, you ugly bags of mostly water.
But Independence is rolled with love .
You did, in fact, just positively smack the shit out of that n00b. Well done.
I think Dvorak was right, although maybe not for the correct reasons or based on solid evidence. That changed yesterday.
Comments that talk about how Safari on Windows is a quality product meant to drive the halo effect or that Apple is hypocritical for pushing their own design standards on Windows completely miss the point. Safari on Windows is not about the browser, it is for driving and course-correcting efforts to bring the Apple development platform to Windows. Why? So they can adopt it if necessary.
Some background first. The recent D5 hosted Jobs-Gates interview had both participants talking about ongoing partnership. Jobs stated repeatedly that Apple is a software company and he described how the software in the user space (e.g., iLife, iWork, Finder) is what people are buying into on the Mac. Value delivered by Apple comes in the form of good design and polish sense, not what kernel their software runs on.
When you look at iTunes and Safari on Windows, what do you see? Apple (not native Windows) font rendering, Core Animation effects (Cover Flow), compositing effects (inline find with Safari 3). There is a lot of infrastructure coming over to Windows from Mac OS X to support these products. (I believe such an assumption is valid because the smartest way to develop cross-platform applications is to minimize differences in the code base, keeping impedance matching in abstraction layers.) Now that Vista is a technical match (and goes beyond in some cases) for OS X with features Apple cares about (e.g., WPF), how long will it be until Apple can deliver a complete platform on both operating systems? As they do this, they increasingly marginalize the significance of what you find under the hood. No mainstream user is going to care if Finder runs on a FreeBSD or NT derivative.
As Microsoft has already done a lot of work bringing Vista on-par with OS X, it makes little sense for Apple to continue investing money in duplicating the effort. Their sobering strategy may be to focus on dealing directly with users and leave the operating system drudgery to another company with resources to burn. If they continue on this path, the remaining technical barriers will be gone. For a long time, it was processor architecture. Now they are chipping away library and framework barriers by introducing what amounts to a Macintosh application runtime environment on Windows. Given enough time and real-world experience porting their frameworks, it could eventually come down to another check-box option for universal binaries.
When they reach that point, Mac OS XI could very easily be NT under the covers.
So tired of cop-out arguments invoking “shiny”, “eye-candy”, or similar comments.
You do not have an argumentive leg to stand on if this is your reduction of any hardware. Or if you are speaking to certain features of Apple products, you are terribly lacking in objectivity. Apple is popular largely in part to useful polish, not because it amounts to little more than chrome.
Of course, you could always clarify what you define as “shiny crap”, and if I understood correctly, I will gladly reply with why the unique nuances are practical, not just pretty.
$500 amortized over 24 months of the contract comes out to just under $21 a month. Considering typical monthly service plan fees, that is not so bad. I started off with a Treo 650 a few years ago for which I paid around $350 ($15 a month). Not so huge a difference.
Care to share the original design with us?
My advice then would be not to get one.
Oh, well yes. Assuming, of course, that the iPhone is uncomfortable, gets poor reception, has bad battery life, and is built for gentle handling. But wait, how can you know that assumption is true?
I would suspect that, considering the built-in phone and software for managing contacts, making calls, and browsing voice mail, the device is meant for making calls.
Maybe because they want to emphasize that it does more than make calls? Notice how car commercials focus on leather seats, powerful stereos, and sexy design? (Oh, and you can even drive with this!) So what if you could also call it a PDA. That is, very obviously, the whole point and the iPhone is entering the market of smartphones by improving on and building upon features already available in other products.
Okay, you are absolutely right. Apple better close-up shop.
Where is your evidence for this? You must be in some position of privilege to have used the iPhone so much ahead the rest of us.
I might agree for the lower-end market where the phones are all but free and considered disposable. For smartphones, changes come much more slowly. My Treo 650 is pushing nearly four years now, yet there is little to distinguish it from cutting-edge models.
And there is a good chance Apple will do just that: sell millions of units. We have no sales data yet. Can you guess why? And of all the most successful phones in the United States, how many can be used outside globally?
Mobile phones themselves usually have no profit. Most phones are subsidized by the carriers because the huge profit comes in offering over-priced service plans using an existing infrastructure at little to no extra cost.
Are you crazy or am
I get the strong feeling this story should have tags “hilary” and “clinton”.
I hate spam as much as the next guy. That being said, 65 years in jail and a quarter million in fines (even assuming he gets half of that) is just too much. This is the sort of sentence you should impose on murderers, not electronic irritants who use a system designed specifically to allow anyone to said pretty much anything to whoever they please. In short: hurt him, but not too much.
Maybe something interesting will happen here: http://code.google.com/p/netgfs/
After re-reading the article and your comment, I was reminded of this unfortunate fact. Speculating on the reasons, I am not so convinced it is a matter of competitive advantage (as suggested by StorageMojo). Even if someone else set up shop with massive storage using GFS, they still would not offer the services Google provides. And with the exception of Gmail (whose limitless storage is not the most compelling feature), end-users (typically?) do not consider how Google stores data. If I am right, it may only be a matter of time before Google makes GFS available to the masses.
Google have a great solution that focuses on the “cheap” part without compromising much the latter two. If you have not read up on the Google Filesystem, definitely take the time to. At the very least, it seems to call into question the need to shell out tens of thousands for high-end storage solutions that promise reliability in proportion to the dollar.
Forgive me if I am overshooting or being pretentious with this remark. One does not simply “try” being more scientific when attempting to persuade. Science depends entirely on experimentation to disprove an assertion. It seeks evidence and tests that evidence against a hypothesis, doing so until a reasonably exhausting sources of evidence or when the hypothesis is contradicted by evidence, in which case the hypothesis is either modified to fit the contrasting evidence or discarded entirely. To the best of my knowledge, and I would enjoy being corrected, there are no scientific studies that rigorously test how video games affect behavior. We do have high level observations, anecdotes, and experience that suggest there is no real impact that directs players towards violence, but without a properly controlled study, we cannot make conclusions. I should point out that I am not disagreeing, as I think (as opposed to believing) that video games are harmless when played by people with no preexisting psychiatric anomalies.
Adding new features is not automatically a bad thing. It does not intrinsically slow down a program or make it cumbersome. Of course, these are two possible side-effects, but are not always certain. With good practices and architecture, new features are a boon, not a bust. Also, think of all the things the computer on your desktop does right now. Would you rather it have the functionality of a machine from a few decades ago because people complained that expanding its usefulness was counter-productive? Let products evolve, let engineers innovate, and let the process for coping with the consequences work.
I cannot believe some of the mundane topics Slashbots will harp on these days. Get over it and try adding some useful dialogue to the stories instead of bitching about things you do not understand or understand only as a result of experience with one particular vendor in Redmond.
All posts resembling the pattern “why don't they fix this problem instead!?” are off the mark, irrelevant, and just plain whiny. Just because some new feature is being added does not mean your pet peeve is going completely ignored. There is more than one person working on this thing, and as remarkable as it may seem, many software development tasks can be done in parallel! Imagine that: doing more than one thing at once on a project!
Considering the relations Jesus had with Mary Magdalene, I would say the Christian church now has to willingly accept homosexuality.
Well good! Continue being an atheist. Instead being able to claim it as a miricle, we now know that if there is any truth to the virgin birth story in Christianity, it can be rationally explained without invoking supernatural causes.