Just off the top of my head it seems that he is merely the facilitator and not the perpetrator.
I think if Blizzard keeps up this behaviour then a few rogue programmers might launch a free bot that truly makes the game unfair. It's a bit of the "nice virtual world you have here, shame if something were to happen to it".
Just a note about webkit(safari) and opera, while they are both scoring very high, they aren't ready for release yet. Webkit is taking a while on a few portions of the test(i.e some bugs) and opera is kind-of-hacked right now to get the 100%. Neither are suitable for mass-release, but both are incredibly promising to web developers. All we need now is firefox to catch up(not too far behind) and there will be significant reason to embrace the new standards.
I recall apple was quite unpopular in the mainstream, with what was seen as overpriced and underpowered computers. The iPod did a lot to change people's perceptions of the company(as did OS X), far more than the gumdrop shaped iMac running OS9.
I was thinking this is more of a defensive patent for google. A policy against targetting children (perhaps by enforcing this patent) is a good way to stave off government internet regulation
I think the major difference between "now" and "then" is that there is some kind of prompting system to tell you that something might not be right. (With Leopard making it more obvious to an everyday user.) While in the past it was curiousity killing the cat.
It's because you need a perfect storm of failures to make this work. First the user needs to double click the file, which might be displaying a.app extension if the user has extensions visible.(Meaning they'd realise it wasn't a.doc file.)
Secondly they'd need to not realise that their.doc file isn't opening in Word or a similar program, but rather in a new program that is for some reason asking them to authenticate.
Thirdly they'd then need to enter in a username and their password(if they are even the account holder who knows it/remembers it) to give the software permission to alter critical files on their system - all while not seemingly realising that their file isn't opening in Word/text editor.
This kind of virus is akin to dragging all your files to the trash, emptying it and claiming it was a virus.
Now take the case of windows. "www.porn.com" is a perfectly accepted file name for an executable. It too can have a little icon of something pornographic. Meanwhile, all a Windows person need do is double click it and it's game over. (Or if you're a Vista user, you'd need to choose accept from a dialog window - which the OS has already trained you to click blindly.)
If you're comparing Vista to Mac OS 10.5, then the moment you received this ".doc" file, whether from an email attachment, chat or website, the OS will alert you when you're opening it to where the file has come from, what time you received it, from what program and even what user sent it to you - and most importantly what kind of file it -really- is. This particular attack vector has been addressed extensively. It will as a minimum stall or prevent the creation of a botnet using Mac OS computers.
I believe what we're witnessing isn't so much the jobsian irrational behaviour(although seen plenty of that in the past), but rather business tactics.
Just like DRM was to music, Apple first needed to prove to the music industry that a lock down was ineffectual. Only then would the music industry begin to release it's grip, well after they've grown accustomed to the new digital music model. (As were consumers, hence the decline of the CD.)
This is analogous to the mobile carrier industry. First they need to be cooed with promises of a phone locked to their network. Then over time release that as it's proven ineffective.
Thirdly we have shareholders and wall-street who need to see all this iphone development going into something that will make apple mega-bucks. Then over time we'll see that lapse. Overall you have apple's one true goal: Product sales. iPods, iPhones and Macs.
In business it's all really about seeing what you can get away with.
I used to have a system with a hdd activity led. It was useful in the old days of DOS or Windows 3.1 when a sudden freeze could be attributed to either HD activity or a crash. Overtime I got used to not having that LED to diagnose if there was a system fault, but instead by hearing the noise of the HDD activity (which in a way is similar to how I change gears in a car.)
Not having either of these anymore doesn't really discourage me, because HDDs seem to be constantly buzzing these days between caching, pre-emptive multitaking and the ever referenced swap space.
They're TBA still. The code is still in there, but they're needing a bit more ripening for reliability purposes. I notice a lot of the anti-phishing tools aren't overtly effective.. probably something that the webkit team are improving on.
While I agree that anti-phishing features would be a plus for Safari.(go download an extention like you do for any other browser) I think the problem should be addressed on the Paypal end. After all their website, links to ebay and methods are severly lacking as is it - even when you aren't diverted to a phishing scam there are a whole list of reasons not to use paypal.
Computing is a boon to the consumer-based society.(Not entirely helpful while ploughing a field for example.) In a consumer-based society products are propagated by sellers.(Computer stores in this case.) When a product/service is good, the penetration of a product/service is directly proportional to number of sellers.(Think iPods) The number of sellers is maximised and thus achieved by the ease of profitability of the good/service sold. Items which can be sold as-is attract both small and large resellers who market and profit from the good/service directly.(It's easier to sell something as-is, then have to think of something to bundle it with to make it profitable.) Remove the sale price and the result is instead of being the sold item, it merely becomes a tool to sell another kind of product/service.(Usually as a value themed bundle - such as services or hardware, think IBM or Walmart.)
Additionally, selling it cheaply doesn't solve the problem either, as there needs to be significant profit for sellers to be bothered.(Why you will find windows and not linux in the local computer store.)
Free items are rarely marketed to consumers for these reasons, marketing costs money, marketing is mostly to generate sales uplift. Marketing is paid for by revenue. The end result is that there is limited mass-market penetration, and it's propagated almost entirely by skilled persons or word of mouth.
I just think they were stuck for things to talk about... when you spend a paragraph detailing how a different laptops power adaptor doesn't fit in the unit, or that if you have dirty/sweaty wrists you'll have to clean the unit (unlike any other material?) - then it just sounds like you've got nothing to really complain about.
Another interesting point is that while one Windows install could mean a whole family... one linux server install could mean a whole IT department who had worked on it. The comparison really isn't apples with apples.
Let's look at linux, OSX and a few of the other open source based operating systems. All of these systems share a bit of code. So when a bug is found, it's a plus 1 for each of these operating systems. Bugs are found because between all of these operating systems, there is quite a high aggregate number of users(it's pretty stupid to count them as completely separate install bases) - many of these users fit well into the venn diagram for: IT informed & technical persons who are able to find such flaws and bugs in software.
This contrasts significantly with the majority Windows user base, most people are first greeted by Windows because their computer came with it pre-installed.. They generally don't know much about programming and certainly aren't responsible for programming the operating system they're using. They buy software which they learn just well enough to get by; But there are also many Windows users who are quite savvy.. and many of those have downgraded to the arguably more suitable Windows XP OS.
So even though Microsoft can easily cook the numbers. Let's look at a few more realities. In the world of open source, there is no hiding your vulnerability tally - because everyone sees the code and can check it. There is no such thing as the creative multiple patching of entire subsystems which are counted as a sole vulnerability. Which is very easy to do when you hide your source code from the public.
Microsoft is a company who has a real marketing benefit for showing (read: or pretending) that the overall number of vulnerabilities is lower over the first year. When this creative-counting is already under scrutiny, as there is no held standard for counting vulnerabilities and there is especially no transparency in how Microsoft validate what is a serious vulnerability and what is not.
Now since Windows recycles so much code, you can also argue that of course Vista would have less vulnerabilities than XP, after all the entry-level security bugs should all be caught by now, with only newer features having the baptism of fire. This is why userbase makes a difference.
Also webhit tallies from a particular research service provider are useless, as linux machines tend to power the web - and not surf it. (When you're powering a website, e.g. banking, you are more concerned about vulnerabilities than say a mother who just bought her family a computer. So in this example - coders are actively looking for bugs, go figure they find more - that's what happens when you look for something.)
Finally slashdotters do argue that exploits are targetted at larger OS market shares (naturally they want the largest possible penetration.) They don't however say that the bug count is similarly controlled: Bugs found = number of unfound bugs * proficiency of the people looking for them.
Also your figures for computer adoption are incorrectly used. (as was most of your data - you tend to convey more from the data than what it factually states.)
Unsurprisingly NBC want that 14M they made when they were distributing through iTunes. NBC also were surprised that giving away shows for free was not a great business model.
Apple pretty much did this rental thing just to win back the motion picture industry that were worried that Apple would become too powerful, as it has with music.
In a way they already do something similar when they sell one chip with various clock speeds. Artificial limitations are nothing new to the tech industry.
I throughly enjoyed the deliberate apple dig included in this summary: it was clearly for the sole purpose of getting more attention and almost entirely unrelated to the topic. Factually however, clueful people have not bricked their equipment. You can brick your microwave with the stupidities that people have been up to with their iPhones. (One of the hacks involved opening the unit and then using a soldering iron.)
I actually only checked this thread just to see how many people noticed what an obvious dig it was.
I do quite a bit of sourcing from China, I can assure two things: China isn't a counterintuitive country where they sell everything below cost, you get what you pay for (and often quite less); and one such item are those cheap chinese "MP4 players", they are anything but an MPEG4 video player - they usually use a proprietry format called AMV and include a piece of software to convert AVI to AMV(most product documentation will say you can play AVI, then state that you need to use the included software to convert AVI to AMV.)
As these products aren't sold to major retail chains they've managed to get away with using name "MP4 Player" without actually having to play any mpeg video formats whatsoever. So don't expect xvid or any other mpeg 4 like content on it. Expect an audio track synced to a rapidly re-addressing frame buffer.
You can't even encrypt your own music even if you wanted to.. unlike say Windows media player which used to lock your music to your computer by default.
I think these issues will pretty much disappear once the pricing structure comes out. I doubt this is something airlines are going to offer for free. Price sensitive consumers will option it out of their ticket price. Or charging by the kilobyte will entice users to be sparing with the service.
The flipside of course is that everyone is on for free and the plane is slashdotted by anonymised porn.
..well maybe not a thousand times, but maybe I should. Security of software isn't just a product of how many flaws found. Rather it's an equation of how many people looking for flaws, the nature of the flaw and the reluctance of the company to report it (rather than just silently patching it, or worse just removing the evident symptoms but not the flaw at all.) We all know who I'm talking about with each argument.. Open source, where all changes are viewable, listed (and so on) is much more trustworthy than completely private software where the public discretion comes about from a marketing department. Additionally where the seriousness of a flaw can be completely downgraded by sole discretion.
I seriously doubt they'll even consider Windows. Noting here that Steve Jobs also offered Mac OSX for the project for free, but they rejected that offer due to what would be the same reasons. Not enough source code is visible, and they want no-single-entity in control of the direction of the project.
Slashdot Mirror
I think if Blizzard keeps up this behaviour then a few rogue programmers might launch a free bot that truly makes the game unfair. It's a bit of the "nice virtual world you have here, shame if something were to happen to it".
Just a note about webkit(safari) and opera, while they are both scoring very high, they aren't ready for release yet. Webkit is taking a while on a few portions of the test(i.e some bugs) and opera is kind-of-hacked right now to get the 100%. Neither are suitable for mass-release, but both are incredibly promising to web developers. All we need now is firefox to catch up(not too far behind) and there will be significant reason to embrace the new standards.
I recall apple was quite unpopular in the mainstream, with what was seen as overpriced and underpowered computers. The iPod did a lot to change people's perceptions of the company(as did OS X), far more than the gumdrop shaped iMac running OS9.
I was thinking this is more of a defensive patent for google. A policy against targetting children (perhaps by enforcing this patent) is a good way to stave off government internet regulation
I think the major difference between "now" and "then" is that there is some kind of prompting system to tell you that something might not be right. (With Leopard making it more obvious to an everyday user.) While in the past it was curiousity killing the cat.
Secondly they'd need to not realise that their
Thirdly they'd then need to enter in a username and their password(if they are even the account holder who knows it/remembers it) to give the software permission to alter critical files on their system - all while not seemingly realising that their file isn't opening in Word/text editor.
This kind of virus is akin to dragging all your files to the trash, emptying it and claiming it was a virus.
Now take the case of windows. "www.porn.com" is a perfectly accepted file name for an executable. It too can have a little icon of something pornographic. Meanwhile, all a Windows person need do is double click it and it's game over. (Or if you're a Vista user, you'd need to choose accept from a dialog window - which the OS has already trained you to click blindly.)
If you're comparing Vista to Mac OS 10.5, then the moment you received this ".doc" file, whether from an email attachment, chat or website, the OS will alert you when you're opening it to where the file has come from, what time you received it, from what program and even what user sent it to you - and most importantly what kind of file it -really- is. This particular attack vector has been addressed extensively. It will as a minimum stall or prevent the creation of a botnet using Mac OS computers.
Just like DRM was to music, Apple first needed to prove to the music industry that a lock down was ineffectual. Only then would the music industry begin to release it's grip, well after they've grown accustomed to the new digital music model. (As were consumers, hence the decline of the CD.)
This is analogous to the mobile carrier industry. First they need to be cooed with promises of a phone locked to their network. Then over time release that as it's proven ineffective.
Thirdly we have shareholders and wall-street who need to see all this iphone development going into something that will make apple mega-bucks. Then over time we'll see that lapse. Overall you have apple's one true goal: Product sales. iPods, iPhones and Macs.
In business it's all really about seeing what you can get away with.
Not having either of these anymore doesn't really discourage me, because HDDs seem to be constantly buzzing these days between caching, pre-emptive multitaking and the ever referenced swap space.
They're TBA still. The code is still in there, but they're needing a bit more ripening for reliability purposes. I notice a lot of the anti-phishing tools aren't overtly effective.. probably something that the webkit team are improving on.
In a consumer-based society products are propagated by sellers.(Computer stores in this case.)
When a product/service is good, the penetration of a product/service is directly proportional to number of sellers.(Think iPods)
The number of sellers is maximised and thus achieved by the ease of profitability of the good/service sold.
Items which can be sold as-is attract both small and large resellers who market and profit from the good/service directly.(It's easier to sell something as-is, then have to think of something to bundle it with to make it profitable.)
Remove the sale price and the result is instead of being the sold item, it merely becomes a tool to sell another kind of product/service.(Usually as a value themed bundle - such as services or hardware, think IBM or Walmart.)
Additionally, selling it cheaply doesn't solve the problem either, as there needs to be significant profit for sellers to be bothered.(Why you will find windows and not linux in the local computer store.)
Free items are rarely marketed to consumers for these reasons, marketing costs money, marketing is mostly to generate sales uplift. Marketing is paid for by revenue. The end result is that there is limited mass-market penetration, and it's propagated almost entirely by skilled persons or word of mouth.
I'd laugh if the chinese shot it down first in one of their ever-more-regular displays of belligerence.
If you want to hack this together, buy some x10 units (which happen to have web interfaces) write up some perl and glue it to an iphone app.
I just think they were stuck for things to talk about... when you spend a paragraph detailing how a different laptops power adaptor doesn't fit in the unit, or that if you have dirty/sweaty wrists you'll have to clean the unit (unlike any other material?) - then it just sounds like you've got nothing to really complain about.
Another interesting point is that while one Windows install could mean a whole family... one linux server install could mean a whole IT department who had worked on it. The comparison really isn't apples with apples.
This contrasts significantly with the majority Windows user base, most people are first greeted by Windows because their computer came with it pre-installed.. They generally don't know much about programming and certainly aren't responsible for programming the operating system they're using. They buy software which they learn just well enough to get by; But there are also many Windows users who are quite savvy.. and many of those have downgraded to the arguably more suitable Windows XP OS.
So even though Microsoft can easily cook the numbers. Let's look at a few more realities. In the world of open source, there is no hiding your vulnerability tally - because everyone sees the code and can check it. There is no such thing as the creative multiple patching of entire subsystems which are counted as a sole vulnerability. Which is very easy to do when you hide your source code from the public.
Microsoft is a company who has a real marketing benefit for showing (read: or pretending) that the overall number of vulnerabilities is lower over the first year. When this creative-counting is already under scrutiny, as there is no held standard for counting vulnerabilities and there is especially no transparency in how Microsoft validate what is a serious vulnerability and what is not.
Now since Windows recycles so much code, you can also argue that of course Vista would have less vulnerabilities than XP, after all the entry-level security bugs should all be caught by now, with only newer features having the baptism of fire. This is why userbase makes a difference.
Also webhit tallies from a particular research service provider are useless, as linux machines tend to power the web - and not surf it. (When you're powering a website, e.g. banking, you are more concerned about vulnerabilities than say a mother who just bought her family a computer. So in this example - coders are actively looking for bugs, go figure they find more - that's what happens when you look for something.)
Finally slashdotters do argue that exploits are targetted at larger OS market shares (naturally they want the largest possible penetration.) They don't however say that the bug count is similarly controlled: Bugs found = number of unfound bugs * proficiency of the people looking for them.
Also your figures for computer adoption are incorrectly used. (as was most of your data - you tend to convey more from the data than what it factually states.)
Apple pretty much did this rental thing just to win back the motion picture industry that were worried that Apple would become too powerful, as it has with music.
In a way they already do something similar when they sell one chip with various clock speeds. Artificial limitations are nothing new to the tech industry.
I actually only checked this thread just to see how many people noticed what an obvious dig it was.
As these products aren't sold to major retail chains they've managed to get away with using name "MP4 Player" without actually having to play any mpeg video formats whatsoever. So don't expect xvid or any other mpeg 4 like content on it. Expect an audio track synced to a rapidly re-addressing frame buffer.
Here is a popular one that sells for around $20 (and unsurprisingly it looks like a 1st gen ipod nano) http://www.made-in-china.com/showroom/dellking/product-detailPqSnYWHcaEVi/China-1-8-Inch-Nice-Design-Mp4-Player-Super-Slim-OD-1-8-.html
Here is the wiki article on AMV if you're unfamiliar with just how dodgey a video format this is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMV_video_format
You can't even encrypt your own music even if you wanted to.. unlike say Windows media player which used to lock your music to your computer by default.
The flipside of course is that everyone is on for free and the plane is slashdotted by anonymised porn.
..well maybe not a thousand times, but maybe I should. Security of software isn't just a product of how many flaws found. Rather it's an equation of how many people looking for flaws, the nature of the flaw and the reluctance of the company to report it (rather than just silently patching it, or worse just removing the evident symptoms but not the flaw at all.) We all know who I'm talking about with each argument.. Open source, where all changes are viewable, listed (and so on) is much more trustworthy than completely private software where the public discretion comes about from a marketing department. Additionally where the seriousness of a flaw can be completely downgraded by sole discretion.
I particularly liked: Aquatic ambience from DKC
I seriously doubt they'll even consider Windows. Noting here that Steve Jobs also offered Mac OSX for the project for free, but they rejected that offer due to what would be the same reasons. Not enough source code is visible, and they want no-single-entity in control of the direction of the project.