If they have any sense they'll ghost the names in as 30percent grey text behind the real ad, so that you can read them, but they're not getting in the way.
That way they get across the fact that they are a community effort with broad support while still having space to make a few points about their focus on security and standards.
What are you doing posting on a forum hosted on the internet - whose infrastructure is supported mostly by US Government funded institutions? Using HTML, created in an institution ( CERN ) funded by many governments. Dialling in on a telephone/ADSL line, the infrastructure for which was created by the Govt.?
For that matter, why are you using a computer? Stick to your log cabin and complaining about the new railroad : )
Yet here was Andreessen publicly proclaiming in the summer of 1995 that Netscape's plan was to reduce Windows to "a poorly debugged set of device drivers." "They didn't save it up," Myhrvold said. "They fucking pulled up alongside us and said, 'Hey, sorry, that guy's already history.'"
"The tactic drove Redmond into a rage. The day after Andreessen's quote appeared in the press, John Doerr, the prominent venture capitalist and Netscape board member, received a chilling email from Jon Lazarus, one of Gates' key advisers. In its entirety, it read: "Boy waves large red flag in front of herd of charging bulls and is then surprised to wake up gored."
At the point where they attempt to 'cut off the oxygen supply' of competitors, using any means necessary.
At the point where they take over and then strangle whole markets, just to maintain their dominance in others. (Internet explorer versus Mozilla being the perfect example, promoted heavily for free, then dropped when dominance was established). Watch out for an attempt at more of the same with XAML.
At the point where they attempt to force partners to sign exclusive and secret contracts locking out competition (BeOS).
At the point where they deliberately keep their protocols and formats closed to keep customers locked in. (Word and office suite).
Market share does not make a monopolist, abuse of market share does.
Yes people shouldn't blindly accept everything google does, or allow themselves to be locked into services with them, but that shows no sign of happening as yet.
At which point, I predict a lot more trojaned machines sending spam out through the users ISP.
If the ISP requires authentication, then the person with the infected machine will be easy to find after a spam complaint and shut down for a few days till they clean up their machine.
They'll also start receiving loads of bounces from incorrect email addresses from all the spams going out, and will therefore have a huge incentive to fix their machine...
While I was impressed by the lockdown of interface to the local machine, this is easily compromised. In an hour or two I created a VBScript class that could host on the user's machine and use local HTTP to access this data. This means that spyware could be created that allow remote access to the otherwise ironclad cache. This is obviously bad since you could just start searching for passwords and possibly get them.
Well, the thing is, if spyware is installed, it already has access to all the user's files, so it has no need of the google cache to locate the ones it wants. How exactly could they prevent access for a local program? I can't see a suggestion in your post. I suppose they could encrypt it but this would hit performance in a serious way.
All your other points are interesting, and it's nice to see someone looking at this critically - in particular it'd be nice if they added the ability for the user to add other file types (many of which are just text anyway), but I'm sure that will come in time. The security problems you mention are mostly a result of windows security policy though aren't they?
It has a powered firewire port (6 pin), but that's for charging the ipod. It's not designed for the kind of draw a camera running all the time would take (those isights get hot), and you'd likely flatten the ipods battery in 5 minutes flat (see battery problems with flash card readers for example). If you had an external power source, perhaps not, but if you have that, why not just carry a small ibook with you instead.
Quite apart from that the combo of ipod and isight would be an awkward thing to carry around, with no handle on the isight (which gets hot), and the other hand occupied with trying to hold the ipod. Anyone taking a serious film would be better to borrow a video camera and do it properly, or if they must plug in the isight to a small laptop and wander about with that.
HTML doesn't have to mean that the sender has exclusive control over styling. Think out of the box a little. If a lot of people start using HTML email you'll be able to do cool things like 'only show heads in this message', 'only show quotes', 'don't show images', etc with user style-sheets.
Granted, this isn't the kind of thing you can do right now, but it has a lot of possibilities that haven't yet been touched upon, from searching for metadata (all links from Joe etc, etc etc) to greater control over formatting for the end user. It could even stop the glut of.doc attachments which people send just for styled text. Again, with a user style sheet you could make BIG RED LETTERS disappear if you wish.
Yes HTML email has dangers, same as surfing the web has dangers, and clients should do an awful lot more to pre-empt those, by stripping out javascript and not downloading remote resources from unknown senders, just for example.
Imagine the web with plain text and no formatting, would you prefer it that way too?
"You could have used the software that came with the CD burner, or downloaded a demo of nero and done it in 10 minutes instead of dicking around with the windows inbuilt "feature"
I think the point he was trying to make was that most things on OS X work as you'd expect them to. With windows you will often have to fiddle with options hidden in a contextual menu or click through 10 screens of a wizard to perform a simple task (eg Burn a CD). Yes you can find software to do it, but it's a bit more painful than it should be.
hmm, devious and odious at the same time? Quite a good word for Saddam. Still, it would be sensible to admit, if you'd like to talk about chemical weapons, that Saddam was supported by the US (and many countries in Europe) in the 80s, while he was torturing his people and sending millions off to die in the Iran/Iraq war, which was by far the most genocidal, dirty conflict in the region for many years. Millions died in that war, and we backed both sides and sold them arms. It's only when he turned his attention to Kuwait (ie obedient oil-bearing regime) that we got worried, and started to attempt to kill off the Frankenstein child we'd created.
Some of the same people (Rumsfeld other Republicans) were involved in Iraq at the time. Here's a little video Rumsfeld would rather you forgot
So we (the west) created and helped nurture the regime in Iraq for many years, then we act surprised when it went sour. You'd think we'd have learned from all the previous mistakes (Chile on Sept.11, Iran, Afghanistan (pre-Taliban)). The real answer to this kind of problem is to stop selling arms to everyone round the world, discourage others from doing so, and treat regimes *consistently* with respect according to how they act, not according to their perceived 'strategic interest'.
Is Word a true replacement for a CMS ? Shouldn't 'real businesses' be buying a CMS solution which will keep their information in a format that is easy to access, easy to search, and easy to move between different processes - ie presentation/email/database/html? One that includes true version control, rights management, and open storage.
Word binary files are most definitely not a part of an 'integrated' solution - you can't even read the documents with any other tool but Word!
Care to provide a quote that backs this up? You can't be talking about Marx, who I believe popularised the idea of Capital and a system driven by the bourgeois. You seem to redefine that as corporatism? Or do you mean 20C economic theory, or even North American society when you talk about capitalism?
In fact Marx held that capital(ism) would eventually implode under the weight of its own internal contradictions, as the relations between producer and owner of production were stretched to breaking point, precisely because capital does *NOT* follow need. Anyway, here's a nice quote from the communist manifesto.
"The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind."
So I'm not sure what you call capitalism, but it seems to be a word with a lot of different definitions, you're also using it as if it means the same thing as efficient!
Free market capitalism, or regulated capitalism, may be the best system we in the west can find (or perhaps it's just beyond our control?) but it's hardly efficient or without flaws.
I'm glad you're happy. Thank you for telling us about them : )
Some people aren't buying a computer for their office. Some people don't need more than 80GB of internal drive space right now. Some people would prefer an LCD to two huge, cheap monitors. Some people wouldn't even consider opening the case. Some people want to use OS X.
Population growth is neither inexorable, nor a worry in the developed world. The population of Europe and to a lesser extent the US is projected to fall over the next century, as families have less children. The population of these countries is rising more due to immigration than the birth rate, thus they're absorbing some of the growth elsewhere.
The problem is developing countries just now, which will hopefully even out as they become more prosperous and it is no longer financially advantageous to have large families.
I'm not sure you know, but I think, just maybe, perhaps, the ISPs in the UK ARE NOT THAT STUPID. They're talking about shutting down sites that are obviously peddling illegal items via spam.
Spam from RedHat (or any large company) would not be very convincing, and I seriously doubt it's the sort of site that the ISPs are thinking of targeting. The ISPs know who is behind most of the spam, and it's fairly easy to pinpoint the most egregious sites (one selling v1Agru is never legit) and close them down.
Leave off the conspiracy theories till you see it happening, then start complaining. Yes this is a stopgap measure, but it's better than nothing for now.
The 'killer app' (shouldn't that be enabling feature?) is video chat, it just isn't widespread enough yet because not many people have cameras. When the cameras get cheaper and nice ones like the iSight come over to the PC, this might become a lot more widespread.
Didn't think it'd be that useful, but I use it a lot now.
Well, what they could do is just store a cookie on each users computer (which they do already), and use that to count the user's visits.
Then the only inaccuracy would be from people clearing cookies and being counted twice, or refusing cookies, but that wouldn't be such a big deal given the volume of users.
If this plays out correctly in around 20 years the U.S.A. will have another somewhat friendly nation in that region, along with Afganistan and Israel.
heh heh. Good luck with that. Things are going from bad to worse at the moment, what makes you think they're going to take a turn for the better?
After all that's happened, a democracy in Iraq would mean no American troops there (see Turkey for example). Most 'friendly' nations in the region for the US are dictatorships like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
Unfortunately our electorates (I'm from one of the countries in Europe that supported the Iraq war) will show no compulsion about dropping the nation building as soon as our troops come home and the TV news has found a new tragedy to follow in minute detail for a few months. We're already defaulting on military and financial aid in Afghanistan, and Iraq will be the same in a few years.
Sad thing is, nation-building elsewhere is just too hard and boring for our democracies to stick with it in the long term. It doesn't even cost a fraction of war, but it's not as interesting it seems.
And why would IE for Windows be necessary (or even desirable)?
If a standards compliant browser (Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE for mac, IE for Windows (almost)) can't browse your web pages, you have a problem with the web pages, not with the browser.
Perhaps it's time to step back and question those assumptions, after all, they're not even at the building/buying stage. Choosing IE for Windows is basically choosing windows, which as you point out, makes the question almost a non-question - they may as well go back to continual problems trying to keep the systems up, up to date and hardened, which is precisely what the poster wanted to avoid.
My point was you should put desktop anti-virus on the clients which are likely to be affected. Mac mail programs (mail.app for example) will warn about suspicious attachments which could do damage on *that* system (.app, scripts etc). For now what's more important is to educate users about what to trust and what not to.
I'm sure anti-virus software will be necessary on mac desktops someday soon, but until there is at least *one* virus in the wild it seems a bit pointless to have it running. On PC desktops right now of course it's a must.
Slashdot Mirror
What percent of users (NB, not slashdot readers) would even *consider* turning off Javascript in their browser?
If they have any sense they'll ghost the names in as 30percent grey text behind the real ad, so that you can read them, but they're not getting in the way.
That way they get across the fact that they are a community effort with broad support while still having space to make a few points about their focus on security and standards.
What are you doing posting on a forum hosted on the internet - whose infrastructure is supported mostly by US Government funded institutions? Using HTML, created in an institution ( CERN ) funded by many governments. Dialling in on a telephone/ADSL line, the infrastructure for which was created by the Govt.?
For that matter, why are you using a computer? Stick to your log cabin and complaining about the new railroad : )
That's nothing to do with copyright law, it's because they have strict laws against inciting racial hatred, which extend to the internet.
Yet here was Andreessen publicly proclaiming in the summer of 1995 that Netscape's plan was to reduce Windows to "a poorly debugged set of device drivers." "They didn't save it up," Myhrvold said. "They fucking pulled up alongside us and said, 'Hey, sorry, that guy's already history.'"
"The tactic drove Redmond into a rage. The day after Andreessen's quote appeared in the press, John Doerr, the prominent venture capitalist and Netscape board member, received a chilling email from Jon Lazarus, one of Gates' key advisers. In its entirety, it read: "Boy waves large red flag in front of herd of charging bulls and is then surprised to wake up gored."
from Wired
At the point where they attempt to 'cut off the oxygen supply' of competitors, using any means necessary.
At the point where they take over and then strangle whole markets, just to maintain their dominance in others. (Internet explorer versus Mozilla being the perfect example, promoted heavily for free, then dropped when dominance was established). Watch out for an attempt at more of the same with XAML.
At the point where they attempt to force partners to sign exclusive and secret contracts locking out competition (BeOS).
At the point where they deliberately keep their protocols and formats closed to keep customers locked in. (Word and office suite).
Market share does not make a monopolist, abuse of market share does.
Yes people shouldn't blindly accept everything google does, or allow themselves to be locked into services with them, but that shows no sign of happening as yet.
At which point, I predict a lot more trojaned machines sending spam out through the users ISP.
If the ISP requires authentication, then the person with the infected machine will be easy to find after a spam complaint and shut down for a few days till they clean up their machine.
They'll also start receiving loads of bounces from incorrect email addresses from all the spams going out, and will therefore have a huge incentive to fix their machine...
While I was impressed by the lockdown of interface to the local machine, this is easily compromised. In an hour or two I created a VBScript class that could host on the user's machine and use local HTTP to access this data. This means that spyware could be created that allow remote access to the otherwise ironclad cache. This is obviously bad since you could just start searching for passwords and possibly get them.
Well, the thing is, if spyware is installed, it already has access to all the user's files, so it has no need of the google cache to locate the ones it wants. How exactly could they prevent access for a local program? I can't see a suggestion in your post. I suppose they could encrypt it but this would hit performance in a serious way.
All your other points are interesting, and it's nice to see someone looking at this critically - in particular it'd be nice if they added the ability for the user to add other file types (many of which are just text anyway), but I'm sure that will come in time. The security problems you mention are mostly a result of windows security policy though aren't they?
You're wrong, but right.
It has a powered firewire port (6 pin), but that's for charging the ipod. It's not designed for the kind of draw a camera running all the time would take (those isights get hot), and you'd likely flatten the ipods battery in 5 minutes flat (see battery problems with flash card readers for example). If you had an external power source, perhaps not, but if you have that, why not just carry a small ibook with you instead.
Quite apart from that the combo of ipod and isight would be an awkward thing to carry around, with no handle on the isight (which gets hot), and the other hand occupied with trying to hold the ipod. Anyone taking a serious film would be better to borrow a video camera and do it properly, or if they must plug in the isight to a small laptop and wander about with that.
HTML doesn't have to mean that the sender has exclusive control over styling. Think out of the box a little. If a lot of people start using HTML email you'll be able to do cool things like 'only show heads in this message', 'only show quotes', 'don't show images', etc with user style-sheets.
.doc attachments which people send just for styled text. Again, with a user style sheet you could make BIG RED LETTERS disappear if you wish.
Granted, this isn't the kind of thing you can do right now, but it has a lot of possibilities that haven't yet been touched upon, from searching for metadata (all links from Joe etc, etc etc) to greater control over formatting for the end user. It could even stop the glut of
Yes HTML email has dangers, same as surfing the web has dangers, and clients should do an awful lot more to pre-empt those, by stripping out javascript and not downloading remote resources from unknown senders, just for example.
Imagine the web with plain text and no formatting, would you prefer it that way too?
"You could have used the software that came with the CD burner, or downloaded a demo of nero and done it in 10 minutes instead of dicking around with the windows inbuilt "feature"
I think the point he was trying to make was that most things on OS X work as you'd expect them to. With windows you will often have to fiddle with options hidden in a contextual menu or click through 10 screens of a wizard to perform a simple task (eg Burn a CD). Yes you can find software to do it, but it's a bit more painful than it should be.
odveausly
hmm, devious and odious at the same time? Quite a good word for Saddam. Still, it would be sensible to admit, if you'd like to talk about chemical weapons, that Saddam was supported by the US (and many countries in Europe) in the 80s, while he was torturing his people and sending millions off to die in the Iran/Iraq war, which was by far the most genocidal, dirty conflict in the region for many years. Millions died in that war, and we backed both sides and sold them arms. It's only when he turned his attention to Kuwait (ie obedient oil-bearing regime) that we got worried, and started to attempt to kill off the Frankenstein child we'd created.
Some of the same people (Rumsfeld other Republicans) were involved in Iraq at the time. Here's a little video Rumsfeld would rather you forgot
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/
So we (the west) created and helped nurture the regime in Iraq for many years, then we act surprised when it went sour. You'd think we'd have learned from all the previous mistakes (Chile on Sept.11, Iran, Afghanistan (pre-Taliban)). The real answer to this kind of problem is to stop selling arms to everyone round the world, discourage others from doing so, and treat regimes *consistently* with respect according to how they act, not according to their perceived 'strategic interest'.
The majority of the 1st world working class has moved to China and South-East Asia, you just didn't notice.
Look at the labels on all your clothes, your crockery, your hifi, your computer, even your books are very likely printed in China.
That division is not going away very quickly, and will remain for quite some time.
Is Word a true replacement for a CMS ? Shouldn't 'real businesses' be buying a CMS solution which will keep their information in a format that is easy to access, easy to search, and easy to move between different processes - ie presentation/email/database/html? One that includes true version control, rights management, and open storage.
Word binary files are most definitely not a part of an 'integrated' solution - you can't even read the documents with any other tool but Word!
Capitalism says that capital follows need
Care to provide a quote that backs this up? You can't be talking about Marx, who I believe popularised the idea of Capital and a system driven by the bourgeois. You seem to redefine that as corporatism? Or do you mean 20C economic theory, or even North American society when you talk about capitalism?
In fact Marx held that capital(ism) would eventually implode under the weight of its own internal contradictions, as the relations between producer and owner of production were stretched to breaking point, precisely because capital does *NOT* follow need. Anyway, here's a nice quote from the communist manifesto.
"The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind."
So I'm not sure what you call capitalism, but it seems to be a word with a lot of different definitions, you're also using it as if it means the same thing as efficient!
Free market capitalism, or regulated capitalism, may be the best system we in the west can find (or perhaps it's just beyond our control?) but it's hardly efficient or without flaws.
I'm glad you're happy. Thank you for telling us about them : )
Some people aren't buying a computer for their office. Some people don't need more than 80GB of internal drive space right now. Some people would prefer an LCD to two huge, cheap monitors. Some people wouldn't even consider opening the case. Some people want to use OS X.
Most people are not like you.
A Mac waking from sleep takes around 4 seconds to be fully functional (waiting for network etc) - is that not quick enough for you?
I've had problems with hibernation on PCs, but never had a problem after waking from sleep on my iBook.
Population growth is neither inexorable, nor a worry in the developed world. The population of Europe and to a lesser extent the US is projected to fall over the next century, as families have less children. The population of these countries is rising more due to immigration than the birth rate, thus they're absorbing some of the growth elsewhere.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3560433.stm
http://esa.un.org/unpp/
The problem is developing countries just now, which will hopefully even out as they become more prosperous and it is no longer financially advantageous to have large families.
I'm not sure you know, but I think, just maybe, perhaps, the ISPs in the UK ARE NOT THAT STUPID. They're talking about shutting down sites that are obviously peddling illegal items via spam.
Spam from RedHat (or any large company) would not be very convincing, and I seriously doubt it's the sort of site that the ISPs are thinking of targeting. The ISPs know who is behind most of the spam, and it's fairly easy to pinpoint the most egregious sites (one selling v1Agru is never legit) and close them down.
Leave off the conspiracy theories till you see it happening, then start complaining. Yes this is a stopgap measure, but it's better than nothing for now.
The 'killer app' (shouldn't that be enabling feature?) is video chat, it just isn't widespread enough yet because not many people have cameras. When the cameras get cheaper and nice ones like the iSight come over to the PC, this might become a lot more widespread.
Didn't think it'd be that useful, but I use it a lot now.
Well, what they could do is just store a cookie on each users computer (which they do already), and use that to count the user's visits.
Then the only inaccuracy would be from people clearing cookies and being counted twice, or refusing cookies, but that wouldn't be such a big deal given the volume of users.
If this plays out correctly in around 20 years the U.S.A. will have another somewhat friendly nation in that region, along with Afganistan and Israel.
heh heh. Good luck with that. Things are going from bad to worse at the moment, what makes you think they're going to take a turn for the better?
After all that's happened, a democracy in Iraq would mean no American troops there (see Turkey for example). Most 'friendly' nations in the region for the US are dictatorships like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
Unfortunately our electorates (I'm from one of the countries in Europe that supported the Iraq war) will show no compulsion about dropping the nation building as soon as our troops come home and the TV news has found a new tragedy to follow in minute detail for a few months. We're already defaulting on military and financial aid in Afghanistan, and Iraq will be the same in a few years.
Sad thing is, nation-building elsewhere is just too hard and boring for our democracies to stick with it in the long term. It doesn't even cost a fraction of war, but it's not as interesting it seems.
And why would IE for Windows be necessary (or even desirable)?
If a standards compliant browser (Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE for mac, IE for Windows (almost)) can't browse your web pages, you have a problem with the web pages, not with the browser.
Perhaps it's time to step back and question those assumptions, after all, they're not even at the building/buying stage. Choosing IE for Windows is basically choosing windows, which as you point out, makes the question almost a non-question - they may as well go back to continual problems trying to keep the systems up, up to date and hardened, which is precisely what the poster wanted to avoid.
ruminescing == ruminating reminiscences?
My point was you should put desktop anti-virus on the clients which are likely to be affected. Mac mail programs (mail.app for example) will warn about suspicious attachments which could do damage on *that* system (.app, scripts etc). For now what's more important is to educate users about what to trust and what not to.
I'm sure anti-virus software will be necessary on mac desktops someday soon, but until there is at least *one* virus in the wild it seems a bit pointless to have it running. On PC desktops right now of course it's a must.