This approach may or may not solve click fraud, but it certainly doesn't solve the wider problem of proving that it's a human performing some action instead of a computer - and that one definitely needs to be nailed.
There seem to be at least two alternatives - you could use a chain-of-trust type model such as TCPA to be able to remotely prove that [a] this packet is coming from [b] this program that is [c] digitally signed by this party who [d] asserts that it only accepts input from humans when run on [e] an operating system that will ignore [f] debuggers and [g] un-approved input devices. But this seems unworkable and contrary to the spirit of open computing.
A better solution might be some kind of fingerprint reader that generates digitally signed "proof of life" which can be demanded by remote sites. For instance if you want to post a blog comment you have to touch your finger against the reader which is now 'charged' with 10 proofs - enough that a legit user probably won't be bothered again for some time, but not enough to make automatic spamming profitable.
I don't know of anybody developing such a thing though.
It doesn't seem to make any difference. We care, because we're really great at this stuff, but marketing trumps usability every time.
MySpace is well designed, you just can't see the forest for the trees.
Firstly, go read this article which talks about what geeks call "marketing", which is often used as a throwaway term for all the parts of running a software business that the programmers don't really understand or care about. MySpace has not done any serious marketing. It grew entirely through word of mouth.
Next, go actually look at MySpace, and do it through the eyes of a non-technical young person. I don't mean a 16 year old, though I'm sure there are lots there, I mean anybody under 35. MySpace offers the following things:
It's distracting and fun. It has lots of features that let people spend their time just faffing around - redesigning their profile yet again, finding cool bands, seeing who their friends friends are, writing on peoples walls etc. If there's nothing good on TV and they don't have much energy it's an easy way to be entertained.
It lets people express themselves. Ever wondered why almost every MySpace profile page is customised? Well, people just love to express themselves. How many people live in a room with no ornaments or posters or personal artifacts? Hardly anybody right? Why do people blow 8mb of memory on a wallpaper that will sit under their copy of Word for 90% of the day? Why do people use annoying custom ringtones that they change every few weeks? People like to customise their personal space, it's just a part of who we are, and MySpace allows you to do that.
It's a quick and easy way for musicians to get their music out to the masses. See the example of Lily Allen in the UK for somebody who made it big via MySpace. Ditto for I think the Arctic Monkeys.
It can be used as a dating site even though it's not marketed that way.
It used to be that people met through local institutions... if you go back and ask your grandmother how she met your grandfather I wouldn't be surprised to hear an answer like "we went to the same church" or "he worked in a local shop and I saw him every day when buying groceries". This sort of thing is now very uncommon. People live more isolated lives, and it's often hard to date people you meet through work due to workplace politics - this is especially true of slightly older types who are in management.
So it's not surprising that surveys and studies everywhere show that use of internet dating is way, way up and growing all the time. But it still has some social stigma attached to it. MySpace lets you search peoples profiles by region and easily contact them, which is all you really need to have a "dating site", except anybody who is on there can simply say they are there because their friends are there, because they like the bands etc. And for people looking it's better too, as people tend to post (mostly) real photos and don't just make stuff up, because they know their friends might see it.
It has lots and lots and lots of people
Some things MySpace doesn't have: technical sophistication, robustness, speed - all the things geeks value. These things do matter, look at how totally Facebook has crushed MySpace amongst those who have access to it. But never discount the value of a good social design, because these sites aren't tech demos, they are social networking sites.
It's my understanding that myspace is riddled with holes, bugs, etc.
I guess the fact that this has nothing to do with MySpace and is a problem with the design of Windows Media DRM escaped you? MySpace is being targetted because it's the culture there to put free videos of stuff you like on your profile page. There's actually nothing MySpace can do to stop this as far as I can see as the "problem" is simply that they make it easy for people to publish videos they like using Windows Media Player. Short of banning it this one sits in Microsofts problem pile.
Don't trsut them with all this information about yourself. They intend to use it commercailly and there are NO limits on what they can do.
You mean knowing that I like cheese sandwiches, live in England and have a friend called Theresia will let them take over the world?! OMG you are right. There are no limits to what they can do now. Mind control is nothing next to this.
Kinda hard to extrapolate from a sample size of two. Some companies, Google springs to mind, seem to have a lot of women at the top, yet aren't management disasters.
They've had a lot of people leave lately to other companies (eg the guy who was running Avalon) or retire. The "MS brain drain" is probably hurting them quite significantly by now.
That's what the Secure Video Path in Vista is designed to do. The idea of using Print-Screen is stupid anyway; how exactly do you get the audio, subtitles, extras or indeed anything except raw frame data?
And what exactly defines an "administrative task"? On MacOS X and Linux today (but not Vista) you can trivially watch for the root password dialog and then instantly place your own over the top of it to capture the password. On some Linux distros you can also attach a debugger to the password dialog and suck the entered data straight out of it.
Since when have Microsoft OSs not been slow and resource-hungry? And when did Apple ever not prioritize elegance and performance?
I think this statement I take issue with - Windows has always had pretty good performance as things go. Windows XP boots pretty fast, it took a long time for Apple to match it, Linux still hasn't. Windows 95 ran in only 4mb of RAM, an astonishing feat of optimisation given how much it did. And when MacOS X first came out, it was slow as molasses - even to this day it has the occasional problem with the spinning beach ball of doom.
If you read up on the internals of Windows and blogs like Raymond Chens you can see the ways in which the Windows team often bent over backwards to speed things up. Some of the weirdest and worst hacks inside Windows are there for performance reasons in fact.
Meanwhile OS X usually gets its ass handed to it on a plate in any kind of serious benchmark.
Linux (free, doesn't have to worry about profits or budgets, has been eating MS's lunch for years on the server-side, and is starting to make some moves on the desktop side, has had several high-profile Apple fans defect to it in the last couple of months alone).
On the other hand, the main problem Linux has is obscurity - there are no equivalents to the Apple stores where you can walk in and play with it, there are hardly any laptops you can buy where it's preinstalled and guaranteed to work, and no big names behind it. If Linux was as easy to get into as Firefox is it might start taking off, but that would require major changes and sacrifices.
To be honest I can't see either Apple nor Linux really making a dent in Windows in their current forms. Apple has glitz and style going for it, Linux has price and enterprise respectability. Neither has any particularly compelling "must have" features over Windows so both are promoting security.
Apple is further worsening its reputation for smug arrogance with this tack; OS X is not significantly more secure in its architecture than Windows and despite being much younger already has dumb hacks like the first-time application launch warning. The usability of this is terrible. There is no ASLR, a feature Linux has had for a year or so and Microsoft introduced with Vista. Privilege separation is a joke, apps running as regular users still have huge numbers of privileges that can be abused - all the juicy profitable stuff like dumping encrypted form transmissions can be done easily on OS X. They are sloppy with security updates. Meanwhile their advertising is increasingly a repeat of the "PowerPC supercomputer" type claims; lots of hyperbole about their merits with no solid engineering underlying it. Who will trust Apple marketing about security when right up until the Intel transition they were telling the world how wonderful PowerPC was?
Linux isn't that much better unfortunately. SELinux has the right idea but is a disaster zone usability-wise and is not something that could ever be deployed to non-gurus in its current form. In fact it routinely foxes die hard Linux experts. AppArmor is a credible alternative but not developed at all on the desktop. Advantages like openly reviewable code and some kind of solid central update system cut both ways and can also be disadvantages. Etc Etc.
Basically I'd put a hefty wager on Windows still having 80%+ of the market 10 years from now.
I don't see why Apple would become worth significantly more in future unless they introduce a new product line. The Mac is going nowhere fast - people have been arguing with some merit that it's been superior to the "PC Experience" for years, yet, its market share sits fatly below 5% and goes upwards at a snails pace. Lots of people are pinning their hopes on it because they want an alternative to Windows, but it's just not delivering the goods. It's like wanting an alternative to petroleum powered cars. Sure, they exist, but replacing an infrastructure just doesn't happen fast. If the Mac was a smart business to be in, there'd be other companies trying the integrated hardware/OS combo. It's not a smart business to be in, hence, no competition.
The iPod is a smart business to be in, because there's standardisation thanks to MP3, most people didn't already have an MP3 player when it first came out, it is high margin and has minimal R&D costs (relative to the Mac). But the iPod seems to be running out of steam and faces increasing competition from MP3 capable phones.
iTunes music store is questionable as it's done simply as a break-even incentive to buy an iPod.
So where is AAPL growth coming from? It ain't gonna come from the Mac - something like 70-80% of computers are in offices and business, not the lifestyle conscious consumer with lots of cash that Apple target right now. The Mac hardly has a business story at all, doesn't really appeal to hardcore gamers and is going through a badly planned architecture transition (see what the Microsoft/Adobe developers have been saying to see what I mean). I'm sure they can boost their market share a bit but if you look at the fate of Firefox you can see why I'm sceptical. It's struggling to get above 15% despite it being free, having tiny switching costs and a huge grassroots marketing campaign.
Apple shares would be a great buy if you have reason to believe they're going to come out with a competent new piece of consumer electronics. The iPhone would be a good candidate and is somewhat credible. If they're simply going to continue peddling the Mac and the iPod, and a bunch of products they artificially tie to those things, I don't see it being a high growth stock.
That's pretty cool. I know several people like you.
The problem is, I know about 3 times more people who aren't, people who often don't have that much money anyway and would rather spend what they have on booze or new toys rather than TV they already watched. So whilst this sort of thing is a nice anecdote, and I'm sure we all either do this or know people who do, the problem here is that many, many others don't. And expecting them to change is no solution.
The question should not be weather the 99.999999% of the human population on this planet are not being prosecuted for piracy, it should be why 0.000001% of the population are entitled to hold back innovation with the likes of the DMCA and to pillage the rest of the population with monopoly rents.
My brother works in the music industry as a composer and tech in the studio. So he's not gonna be in the next Westlife, he'll be writing and recording the songs in the next Westlife. He earns peanuts. Literally, he hardly has enough to live on. We - his family - sub him so he keeps his head above water whilst waiting for times to improve.
Except they aren't improving. The industry is shrinking: there are no jobs so the only people who can find work are those who already have been doing it for years. They aren't hiring new writers or recording artists because there isn't enough work for them.
This stupid, ridiculous stereotype some posters here have of the music industry being full of fat cats getting rich off the back of copyright is a fantasy born of a desire to rationalise downloading shit off BitTorrent. Are there are a few unbelievably wealthy fat cats? Yes - and then a million more struggling artists you never hear about. Sometimes they surface in the next big hit or box office sellout and they "make it", often if you read inteviews with them after about 10 years of being waiters and pimping their music to anybody who will take it.
If you think you are being "pillaged" by the current system then you are deluded and living in some black/white fantasy world where it's the big bad music companies vs The People. Well, it's not. The "big bad music companies" are guys like my brother, mostly getting shat on because an already tiny industry is shrinking and can't afford to take risks anymore.
And do you understand that whole huge swaths of the tech sector have been brought to a standstill...
That's total crap and if you were actually in said industry you'd know it. Is the DMCA a bad law? Yes. Has it caused the loss of "trillions of dollars of economic growth"? No, there just isn't "trillions of dollars" to be made in circumventing DRM.
To everybody who is bashing copyright here, I want an answer to this simple question:
What's your plan?
Unacceptable answers are ones in which anybody producing non-physical goods like books, music, movies or software has to do it "for the love of it" and not make any money. That would decimate a huge part of our economy overnight and make anything more complex than your average home video or TuxRacer extremely rare. If you want the world to revert to mediaeval levels of entertainment be my guest, but a whole bunch of people such as myself like modern creative works.
Another unacceptable answer is "I dunno, I just know I should be able to download shit for free". There's no point sticking it to the man unless you have a better idea of what to do. Otherwise you just look like an asshole.
A final unacceptable answer is to say, there should be copyright but no way to enforce it (like the DMCA). We have police exactly because merely saying "don't do that" isn't enough. So to claim DRM isn't necessary or shouldn't be used, you need some alternative to copyright in which it's not necessary and needn't be used.
But you know what? I never saw a credible alternative. Just a bunch of people whining that the current system isn't good enough.
Yeah, they are. In fact "Tom" recently put out a site-wide bulletin asking for.NET developers. I think they are/were clearly way over their heads - for everything the site gets socially correct (like giving everybody a friend to start with via Tom) it gets something technical wrong. The site is a buggy unstable piece of crap codewise, and the fact that Mr DeWolfe writes this off as "we get a lot of flack from the blog-o-sphere but it's worked out well" doesn't surprise me. NO IT HAS NOT WORKED OUT WELL MR DEWOLFE. The reason they get slated by bloggers is because their site has tons of problems, the fact that it's still popular is more to do with the network effects than a quality product.
I'm curious why a photo imaging SW should burn CD's, all it may have to do is create ISO format through a free library. Yet I can't believe Picasa has blog SW integrate or ever need to know on which browser it work. Does this mean Picasa can't work with Safari or Opera?
Picasa depends on Internet Explorer for its blog integration and hosts its own CD burner drivers which are loaded directly into the kernel. So yes it's very heavily dependent on Windows.
The type system of Haskell doesn't let you prove anything radically more interesting than that of Java or C++ to be honest. Also Haskell mixes up a bunch of other random ideas with that type system so you have to take the bad from the good - eg lazyness and the unusual syntax.
Hardly. The trend has been fewer dedicated processors in recent years, not more. Sound cards rarely have hardware mixing anymore except at the high end, instead the operating system is expected to do it. Physics processors are too early to call but a bunch of people seem to think they aren't necessary given that video cards can do a lot of similar work. Modems lost a lot of their circuitry to software. Etc. The only real dedicated chip that came into its own lately is the GPU, and that's because it has a very different general structure to a CPU.
Look, I understand you want to promote wxWidgets but that doesn't change the fundamental economics of the situation - there is no wxCDBurner or wxPicasaBlogIntegration or wxInternetExplorerOnTopOfMozilla class and if you're going to rewrite a ton of code it doesn't matter what framework you use. It'll still suck up huge amounts of capital and time, for no gain whatsoever.
Virtually no "native" apps on Linux are based on wxWidgets so there's no gain to be had from using that over Wines own toolkit implementation. The benefit of using native UI and guidelines is that it fits in with a particular desktop. WX doesn't fit in anywhere. And yes I know it sits on top of GTK but sorry, I've used WX apps and they didn't feel native at all.
Incidentally I did read the Picasa slashdot discussion of course and I remember it being pretty positive; there have also been a raft of reviews from Linux news publications and peoples blogs that were positive overall.
Any Wine application is still an ordinary Windows application following the Windows design and UI guidelines.
This isn't correct. I didn't work on the Picasa port very much but had access to its internal development for a while. I can't give many details for all the usual reasons, but I hate to see Wine trashed like this in public.
The first thing you should know is that we did actually have a GTK2 based version of Picasa up and running at one point. I wrote a bunch of patches to give it some simple native UI that followed the GNOME HIG. It was still running on top of Wine but had some dialog boxes/windows and the file picker using GTK2 and not Wines own versions. In the end it didn't make sense to roll with that for this version, but there's no fundamental reason why a Wine based app should look or feel different to a native app. If you want to port your app to Linux and have it look and feel like the most native open source program there is, it can be done. Just ask for it. Most of the programs ported using Wine don't have this because, well, the companies paying for the work didn't really feel it was worth the time and cost.
Just go back and look at the discussion about Google's Picasa here at Slashdot. No sensible person is satisfied with it, all it achieves is showing Google's incompetence to produce real Linux applications. Releasing a Wine solution just shows that Google capitulated from being able to build ordinary Linux applications.
This is clearly not true, many people have written positive reviews of Picasa for Linux. Remember that this is an app that largely uses its own UI toolkit anyway, so it doesn't look native on any platform, not even Windows. It certainly has nothing to do with "incompetence" - the fact that Picasa has far, far more OS-dependent features than Google Earth was a big reason, so a lot more time would have to have been spent rewriting its features like screensaver/movie creation, blog integration, photo upload, file monitoring, and probably more I've forgotten. Picasa does a ton of stuff. Google Earth was also already based on Qt whereas Picasa was not.
The sad truth is that Win32 is so deeply embedded in most apps that they will never be natively ported. Ever. Once you have seen the code to many well established commercial/proprietary apps, you will accept this fundamental truth and see things in a different light. To be portable, an app usually has to be written that way from the start or a huge amount of work will be involved to make it so later. Work that is hardly ever economic to do.
It's for this reason that Wine is crucial. It got a bad rap due to the very old WordPerfect port but that was then and this is now - modern apps that run on a commercially supported Wine (most of which are not consumer apps so you won't encounter them) are rock solid and fast. Usually they don't look native because rewriting the entire GUI of a complex scientific application or internal accountancy package just makes no sense at all. But again that's not some fundamental thing, it's just a matter of economics.
Re:Two Business Models: One for the rich and one .
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I should note that it's easy to upgrade capacity to something less poxy but I never bothered. Half a gig is enough for now.
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I don't think that's true. MP3 phones weren't really common a few years ago. I use a Sony Ericsson W800i, which can store about half a gig of music and has a reasonably competent music player implementation. An iPod would do it better, but why bother when a phone already cost me what an iPod would yet does so much more? If you look at the W800i it's definitely pocket sized, and in the UK SE seem to be gaining dominance (whereas internationally their market share is still quite low).
Re:Two Business Models: One for the rich and one .
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The fact that they're technically similar doesn't mean they are similar businesses in similar markets. Clearly the Mac is in a very different kind of market to the iPod, as evidenced by one having like 3% market share and one having 50%+... and that's what matters to the shareholders.
Shareholders should really have this information; the iPod is going to start facing tough competition from the mobile phone manufacturers soon, and knowing how much they could slash prices by to maintain market share is important. I myself use my phone rather than a dedicated mp3 player these days.... the iPod is probably a better music playing device but it's not that much better, and it's not worth it to me to carry about two devices when one + a pair of headphones is nearly as good. And the phones will only improve.
What makes you think "abuse" was involved? When I was a kid one of the most effective punishments was to see my normally serene parents or teachers totally flip my lid. When you are 10 the sight of a fully grown adult screaming and yelling in anger is really scary.
Other thing to consider is that for a long time you needed to get a Hotmail account to use MSN Messenger. They lifted that restriction a few years ago but to this day I have a Hotmail account I never use, simply to sign into MSN Messenger with.
That said a metric ton of non-geeks, especially teenagers, use Hotmail because it's what they know. So I can quite believe that Hotmail still beats the snot out of their competitors through inertia alone. This is especially true as you still need invites for GMail and people whos circle of friends doesn't include a resident geek won't be able to get one (the idea of searching the web to get an invite off a stranger won't occur to a lot of people).
I'm not sure that's true, though I've only been using these services for a short while.
GMail has gained quite a few features, including web based chat and integration with the calendar service. They have a "new features" link that appears occasionally. And of course space available constantly increases, which you could count as a feature.
Google Video has gained a ton since its launch as a basic Flash frontend to crawled videos. They got video categories, labelling, ratings, pay-for videos, improved format/codec support, downloads and your assertion that it doesn't include mobile devices is wrong - you can download videos for the iPod and Sony PSP. I don't know how you'd download a video to TiVo - the one my family has doesn't allow you to download videos to it (though it's an old model).
I don't use Froogle and only rarely use News so can't comment there. As you say, Maps benefitted from the new satellite imagery which is truly great, but apart from that it doesn't seem to have changed much. Google Earth still looks better but has useless search, Google Maps has great search and a sorta lame UI (thanks to browser limitations). Yahoo Maps is very slick I will agree but it's also quite slow due to its reliance on Flash and once you get over the smoother zooming it doesn't seem to add much. At least I tried it and didn't feel any particular need to change to it, when I use it.
It's amazing to me that a company with as many employees as Google
According to the article Google only has about 5000 employees. Not as many as I'd thought it'd be.
Slashdot Mirror
This approach may or may not solve click fraud, but it certainly doesn't solve the wider problem of proving that it's a human performing some action instead of a computer - and that one definitely needs to be nailed.
There seem to be at least two alternatives - you could use a chain-of-trust type model such as TCPA to be able to remotely prove that [a] this packet is coming from [b] this program that is [c] digitally signed by this party who [d] asserts that it only accepts input from humans when run on [e] an operating system that will ignore [f] debuggers and [g] un-approved input devices. But this seems unworkable and contrary to the spirit of open computing.
A better solution might be some kind of fingerprint reader that generates digitally signed "proof of life" which can be demanded by remote sites. For instance if you want to post a blog comment you have to touch your finger against the reader which is now 'charged' with 10 proofs - enough that a legit user probably won't be bothered again for some time, but not enough to make automatic spamming profitable.
I don't know of anybody developing such a thing though.
MySpace is well designed, you just can't see the forest for the trees.
Firstly, go read this article which talks about what geeks call "marketing", which is often used as a throwaway term for all the parts of running a software business that the programmers don't really understand or care about. MySpace has not done any serious marketing. It grew entirely through word of mouth.
Next, go actually look at MySpace, and do it through the eyes of a non-technical young person. I don't mean a 16 year old, though I'm sure there are lots there, I mean anybody under 35. MySpace offers the following things:
It's distracting and fun. It has lots of features that let people spend their time just faffing around - redesigning their profile yet again, finding cool bands, seeing who their friends friends are, writing on peoples walls etc. If there's nothing good on TV and they don't have much energy it's an easy way to be entertained.
It lets people express themselves. Ever wondered why almost every MySpace profile page is customised? Well, people just love to express themselves. How many people live in a room with no ornaments or posters or personal artifacts? Hardly anybody right? Why do people blow 8mb of memory on a wallpaper that will sit under their copy of Word for 90% of the day? Why do people use annoying custom ringtones that they change every few weeks? People like to customise their personal space, it's just a part of who we are, and MySpace allows you to do that.
It's a quick and easy way for musicians to get their music out to the masses. See the example of Lily Allen in the UK for somebody who made it big via MySpace. Ditto for I think the Arctic Monkeys.
It can be used as a dating site even though it's not marketed that way.
It used to be that people met through local institutions ... if you go back and ask your grandmother how she met your grandfather I wouldn't be surprised to hear an answer like "we went to the same church" or "he worked in a local shop and I saw him every day when buying groceries". This sort of thing is now very uncommon. People live more isolated lives, and it's often hard to date people you meet through work due to workplace politics - this is especially true of slightly older types who are in management.
So it's not surprising that surveys and studies everywhere show that use of internet dating is way, way up and growing all the time. But it still has some social stigma attached to it. MySpace lets you search peoples profiles by region and easily contact them, which is all you really need to have a "dating site", except anybody who is on there can simply say they are there because their friends are there, because they like the bands etc. And for people looking it's better too, as people tend to post (mostly) real photos and don't just make stuff up, because they know their friends might see it.
It has lots and lots and lots of people
Some things MySpace doesn't have: technical sophistication, robustness, speed - all the things geeks value. These things do matter, look at how totally Facebook has crushed MySpace amongst those who have access to it. But never discount the value of a good social design, because these sites aren't tech demos, they are social networking sites.
I guess the fact that this has nothing to do with MySpace and is a problem with the design of Windows Media DRM escaped you? MySpace is being targetted because it's the culture there to put free videos of stuff you like on your profile page. There's actually nothing MySpace can do to stop this as far as I can see as the "problem" is simply that they make it easy for people to publish videos they like using Windows Media Player. Short of banning it this one sits in Microsofts problem pile.
You mean knowing that I like cheese sandwiches, live in England and have a friend called Theresia will let them take over the world?! OMG you are right. There are no limits to what they can do now. Mind control is nothing next to this.
I proudly present the worlds newest conspiracy theory. May it live long and become ever more unlikely in the telling.
Kinda hard to extrapolate from a sample size of two. Some companies, Google springs to mind, seem to have a lot of women at the top, yet aren't management disasters.
They've had a lot of people leave lately to other companies (eg the guy who was running Avalon) or retire. The "MS brain drain" is probably hurting them quite significantly by now.
That's what the Secure Video Path in Vista is designed to do. The idea of using Print-Screen is stupid anyway; how exactly do you get the audio, subtitles, extras or indeed anything except raw frame data?
And what exactly defines an "administrative task"? On MacOS X and Linux today (but not Vista) you can trivially watch for the root password dialog and then instantly place your own over the top of it to capture the password. On some Linux distros you can also attach a debugger to the password dialog and suck the entered data straight out of it.
I think this statement I take issue with - Windows has always had pretty good performance as things go. Windows XP boots pretty fast, it took a long time for Apple to match it, Linux still hasn't. Windows 95 ran in only 4mb of RAM, an astonishing feat of optimisation given how much it did. And when MacOS X first came out, it was slow as molasses - even to this day it has the occasional problem with the spinning beach ball of doom.
If you read up on the internals of Windows and blogs like Raymond Chens you can see the ways in which the Windows team often bent over backwards to speed things up. Some of the weirdest and worst hacks inside Windows are there for performance reasons in fact.
Meanwhile OS X usually gets its ass handed to it on a plate in any kind of serious benchmark.
On the other hand, the main problem Linux has is obscurity - there are no equivalents to the Apple stores where you can walk in and play with it, there are hardly any laptops you can buy where it's preinstalled and guaranteed to work, and no big names behind it. If Linux was as easy to get into as Firefox is it might start taking off, but that would require major changes and sacrifices.
To be honest I can't see either Apple nor Linux really making a dent in Windows in their current forms. Apple has glitz and style going for it, Linux has price and enterprise respectability. Neither has any particularly compelling "must have" features over Windows so both are promoting security.
Apple is further worsening its reputation for smug arrogance with this tack; OS X is not significantly more secure in its architecture than Windows and despite being much younger already has dumb hacks like the first-time application launch warning. The usability of this is terrible. There is no ASLR, a feature Linux has had for a year or so and Microsoft introduced with Vista. Privilege separation is a joke, apps running as regular users still have huge numbers of privileges that can be abused - all the juicy profitable stuff like dumping encrypted form transmissions can be done easily on OS X. They are sloppy with security updates. Meanwhile their advertising is increasingly a repeat of the "PowerPC supercomputer" type claims; lots of hyperbole about their merits with no solid engineering underlying it. Who will trust Apple marketing about security when right up until the Intel transition they were telling the world how wonderful PowerPC was?
Linux isn't that much better unfortunately. SELinux has the right idea but is a disaster zone usability-wise and is not something that could ever be deployed to non-gurus in its current form. In fact it routinely foxes die hard Linux experts. AppArmor is a credible alternative but not developed at all on the desktop. Advantages like openly reviewable code and some kind of solid central update system cut both ways and can also be disadvantages. Etc Etc.
Basically I'd put a hefty wager on Windows still having 80%+ of the market 10 years from now.
I don't see why Apple would become worth significantly more in future unless they introduce a new product line. The Mac is going nowhere fast - people have been arguing with some merit that it's been superior to the "PC Experience" for years, yet, its market share sits fatly below 5% and goes upwards at a snails pace. Lots of people are pinning their hopes on it because they want an alternative to Windows, but it's just not delivering the goods. It's like wanting an alternative to petroleum powered cars. Sure, they exist, but replacing an infrastructure just doesn't happen fast. If the Mac was a smart business to be in, there'd be other companies trying the integrated hardware/OS combo. It's not a smart business to be in, hence, no competition.
The iPod is a smart business to be in, because there's standardisation thanks to MP3, most people didn't already have an MP3 player when it first came out, it is high margin and has minimal R&D costs (relative to the Mac). But the iPod seems to be running out of steam and faces increasing competition from MP3 capable phones.
iTunes music store is questionable as it's done simply as a break-even incentive to buy an iPod.
So where is AAPL growth coming from? It ain't gonna come from the Mac - something like 70-80% of computers are in offices and business, not the lifestyle conscious consumer with lots of cash that Apple target right now. The Mac hardly has a business story at all, doesn't really appeal to hardcore gamers and is going through a badly planned architecture transition (see what the Microsoft/Adobe developers have been saying to see what I mean). I'm sure they can boost their market share a bit but if you look at the fate of Firefox you can see why I'm sceptical. It's struggling to get above 15% despite it being free, having tiny switching costs and a huge grassroots marketing campaign.
Apple shares would be a great buy if you have reason to believe they're going to come out with a competent new piece of consumer electronics. The iPhone would be a good candidate and is somewhat credible. If they're simply going to continue peddling the Mac and the iPod, and a bunch of products they artificially tie to those things, I don't see it being a high growth stock.
That's pretty cool. I know several people like you.
The problem is, I know about 3 times more people who aren't, people who often don't have that much money anyway and would rather spend what they have on booze or new toys rather than TV they already watched. So whilst this sort of thing is a nice anecdote, and I'm sure we all either do this or know people who do, the problem here is that many, many others don't. And expecting them to change is no solution.
My brother works in the music industry as a composer and tech in the studio. So he's not gonna be in the next Westlife, he'll be writing and recording the songs in the next Westlife. He earns peanuts. Literally, he hardly has enough to live on. We - his family - sub him so he keeps his head above water whilst waiting for times to improve.
Except they aren't improving. The industry is shrinking: there are no jobs so the only people who can find work are those who already have been doing it for years. They aren't hiring new writers or recording artists because there isn't enough work for them.
This stupid, ridiculous stereotype some posters here have of the music industry being full of fat cats getting rich off the back of copyright is a fantasy born of a desire to rationalise downloading shit off BitTorrent. Are there are a few unbelievably wealthy fat cats? Yes - and then a million more struggling artists you never hear about. Sometimes they surface in the next big hit or box office sellout and they "make it", often if you read inteviews with them after about 10 years of being waiters and pimping their music to anybody who will take it.
If you think you are being "pillaged" by the current system then you are deluded and living in some black/white fantasy world where it's the big bad music companies vs The People. Well, it's not. The "big bad music companies" are guys like my brother, mostly getting shat on because an already tiny industry is shrinking and can't afford to take risks anymore.
That's total crap and if you were actually in said industry you'd know it. Is the DMCA a bad law? Yes. Has it caused the loss of "trillions of dollars of economic growth"? No, there just isn't "trillions of dollars" to be made in circumventing DRM.
To everybody who is bashing copyright here, I want an answer to this simple question:
Unacceptable answers are ones in which anybody producing non-physical goods like books, music, movies or software has to do it "for the love of it" and not make any money. That would decimate a huge part of our economy overnight and make anything more complex than your average home video or TuxRacer extremely rare. If you want the world to revert to mediaeval levels of entertainment be my guest, but a whole bunch of people such as myself like modern creative works.
Another unacceptable answer is "I dunno, I just know I should be able to download shit for free". There's no point sticking it to the man unless you have a better idea of what to do. Otherwise you just look like an asshole.
A final unacceptable answer is to say, there should be copyright but no way to enforce it (like the DMCA). We have police exactly because merely saying "don't do that" isn't enough. So to claim DRM isn't necessary or shouldn't be used, you need some alternative to copyright in which it's not necessary and needn't be used.
But you know what? I never saw a credible alternative. Just a bunch of people whining that the current system isn't good enough.
Yeah, they are. In fact "Tom" recently put out a site-wide bulletin asking for .NET developers. I think they are/were clearly way over their heads - for everything the site gets socially correct (like giving everybody a friend to start with via Tom) it gets something technical wrong. The site is a buggy unstable piece of crap codewise, and the fact that Mr DeWolfe writes this off as "we get a lot of flack from the blog-o-sphere but it's worked out well" doesn't surprise me. NO IT HAS NOT WORKED OUT WELL MR DEWOLFE. The reason they get slated by bloggers is because their site has tons of problems, the fact that it's still popular is more to do with the network effects than a quality product.
Picasa depends on Internet Explorer for its blog integration and hosts its own CD burner drivers which are loaded directly into the kernel. So yes it's very heavily dependent on Windows.
The type system of Haskell doesn't let you prove anything radically more interesting than that of Java or C++ to be honest. Also Haskell mixes up a bunch of other random ideas with that type system so you have to take the bad from the good - eg lazyness and the unusual syntax.
Hardly. The trend has been fewer dedicated processors in recent years, not more. Sound cards rarely have hardware mixing anymore except at the high end, instead the operating system is expected to do it. Physics processors are too early to call but a bunch of people seem to think they aren't necessary given that video cards can do a lot of similar work. Modems lost a lot of their circuitry to software. Etc. The only real dedicated chip that came into its own lately is the GPU, and that's because it has a very different general structure to a CPU.
Look, I understand you want to promote wxWidgets but that doesn't change the fundamental economics of the situation - there is no wxCDBurner or wxPicasaBlogIntegration or wxInternetExplorerOnTopOfMozilla class and if you're going to rewrite a ton of code it doesn't matter what framework you use. It'll still suck up huge amounts of capital and time, for no gain whatsoever.
Virtually no "native" apps on Linux are based on wxWidgets so there's no gain to be had from using that over Wines own toolkit implementation. The benefit of using native UI and guidelines is that it fits in with a particular desktop. WX doesn't fit in anywhere. And yes I know it sits on top of GTK but sorry, I've used WX apps and they didn't feel native at all.
Incidentally I did read the Picasa slashdot discussion of course and I remember it being pretty positive; there have also been a raft of reviews from Linux news publications and peoples blogs that were positive overall.
This isn't correct. I didn't work on the Picasa port very much but had access to its internal development for a while. I can't give many details for all the usual reasons, but I hate to see Wine trashed like this in public.
The first thing you should know is that we did actually have a GTK2 based version of Picasa up and running at one point. I wrote a bunch of patches to give it some simple native UI that followed the GNOME HIG. It was still running on top of Wine but had some dialog boxes/windows and the file picker using GTK2 and not Wines own versions. In the end it didn't make sense to roll with that for this version, but there's no fundamental reason why a Wine based app should look or feel different to a native app. If you want to port your app to Linux and have it look and feel like the most native open source program there is, it can be done. Just ask for it. Most of the programs ported using Wine don't have this because, well, the companies paying for the work didn't really feel it was worth the time and cost.
This is clearly not true, many people have written positive reviews of Picasa for Linux. Remember that this is an app that largely uses its own UI toolkit anyway, so it doesn't look native on any platform, not even Windows. It certainly has nothing to do with "incompetence" - the fact that Picasa has far, far more OS-dependent features than Google Earth was a big reason, so a lot more time would have to have been spent rewriting its features like screensaver/movie creation, blog integration, photo upload, file monitoring, and probably more I've forgotten. Picasa does a ton of stuff. Google Earth was also already based on Qt whereas Picasa was not.
The sad truth is that Win32 is so deeply embedded in most apps that they will never be natively ported. Ever. Once you have seen the code to many well established commercial/proprietary apps, you will accept this fundamental truth and see things in a different light. To be portable, an app usually has to be written that way from the start or a huge amount of work will be involved to make it so later. Work that is hardly ever economic to do.
It's for this reason that Wine is crucial. It got a bad rap due to the very old WordPerfect port but that was then and this is now - modern apps that run on a commercially supported Wine (most of which are not consumer apps so you won't encounter them) are rock solid and fast. Usually they don't look native because rewriting the entire GUI of a complex scientific application or internal accountancy package just makes no sense at all. But again that's not some fundamental thing, it's just a matter of economics.
I should note that it's easy to upgrade capacity to something less poxy but I never bothered. Half a gig is enough for now.
I don't think that's true. MP3 phones weren't really common a few years ago. I use a Sony Ericsson W800i, which can store about half a gig of music and has a reasonably competent music player implementation. An iPod would do it better, but why bother when a phone already cost me what an iPod would yet does so much more? If you look at the W800i it's definitely pocket sized, and in the UK SE seem to be gaining dominance (whereas internationally their market share is still quite low).
The fact that they're technically similar doesn't mean they are similar businesses in similar markets. Clearly the Mac is in a very different kind of market to the iPod, as evidenced by one having like 3% market share and one having 50%+ ... and that's what matters to the shareholders.
Shareholders should really have this information; the iPod is going to start facing tough competition from the mobile phone manufacturers soon, and knowing how much they could slash prices by to maintain market share is important. I myself use my phone rather than a dedicated mp3 player these days .... the iPod is probably a better music playing device but it's not that much better, and it's not worth it to me to carry about two devices when one + a pair of headphones is nearly as good. And the phones will only improve.
What makes you think "abuse" was involved? When I was a kid one of the most effective punishments was to see my normally serene parents or teachers totally flip my lid. When you are 10 the sight of a fully grown adult screaming and yelling in anger is really scary.
Other thing to consider is that for a long time you needed to get a Hotmail account to use MSN Messenger. They lifted that restriction a few years ago but to this day I have a Hotmail account I never use, simply to sign into MSN Messenger with.
That said a metric ton of non-geeks, especially teenagers, use Hotmail because it's what they know. So I can quite believe that Hotmail still beats the snot out of their competitors through inertia alone. This is especially true as you still need invites for GMail and people whos circle of friends doesn't include a resident geek won't be able to get one (the idea of searching the web to get an invite off a stranger won't occur to a lot of people).
I'm not sure that's true, though I've only been using these services for a short while.
GMail has gained quite a few features, including web based chat and integration with the calendar service. They have a "new features" link that appears occasionally. And of course space available constantly increases, which you could count as a feature.
Google Video has gained a ton since its launch as a basic Flash frontend to crawled videos. They got video categories, labelling, ratings, pay-for videos, improved format/codec support, downloads and your assertion that it doesn't include mobile devices is wrong - you can download videos for the iPod and Sony PSP. I don't know how you'd download a video to TiVo - the one my family has doesn't allow you to download videos to it (though it's an old model).
I don't use Froogle and only rarely use News so can't comment there. As you say, Maps benefitted from the new satellite imagery which is truly great, but apart from that it doesn't seem to have changed much. Google Earth still looks better but has useless search, Google Maps has great search and a sorta lame UI (thanks to browser limitations). Yahoo Maps is very slick I will agree but it's also quite slow due to its reliance on Flash and once you get over the smoother zooming it doesn't seem to add much. At least I tried it and didn't feel any particular need to change to it, when I use it.
According to the article Google only has about 5000 employees. Not as many as I'd thought it'd be.