In essence, this whole mess is the advertising industries own fault, not the fault of the makers of ad blocking software.
That people has an oversimplified way to look at the world. They like to see themselves as business experts (heck, one I know call himself a "strategy consultant") but they lack the analytical tools to analyze a business, even if that business is their own. And they even have the audacity to put the blame on the software because it poses a risk to their business model -- which was already flawed to start with.
Agreed. He's using a bad analogy to spread FUD. It even seems that he never tried AdBlock or, if he did, he's trying to scare consumers away by constructing an analogy based on a false statement on how AdBlock works. Anyway, more FUD.
For the analogy to be complete, if there was an AdBlock for newspapers, my local newspaper sunday edition would get up to 60% LIGHTER! - a lot less paper and junk!
Imagine this: AdBlock being considered "environmentally friendly" because it prevented unnecessary tree cutting!!
And Google will bring DoubleClick to its knees, not AdBlock, as this story (and DoubleClick execs) says.
I like the idea, though. Web sites will be paid for the actual traffic they generate, instead of being paid by those intermediaries based on some stupid, marketing exec-made metric of website populariy (which, alas, is not verifiable or auditable so advertisers are at the complete mercy of DoubleClick et al)
Websites, in turn, could use advertiser-generated revenue to provide rebates to people who browse through their pages, so as to improve clickthrough. In the other hand, excessive advertising does scare users away, so websites have two choices: 1) try to find the balance between useful stuff and ads, or 2) start *paying* people to browse their pages. Of course, the second option wouldn't last long as the market would take care of correcting that situation very quickly. In the long run, everyone will strive to get the balance in point #1, which will be awesome!
While the page is loading, press: Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start.
Works best if you're on a 56k connection. If you're on DSL or faster, try to memorize the trick beforehand so you can input it quickly!
Reviewing the book or showing off geekiness?
on
Data Crunching
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Similarly, one of the examples in the chapter on regular expressions uses a regular expression to check to see if a string contains a valid IP address (pages 65-66). After showing how to use a regular expression to scan a dotted quad of digits, the text then admits that using a regular expression alone would lead to too much complexity, since it's hard to use a regular expression to check to see if a 1 to 3 digit number is less than 255 (or 127, which is what he uses in his code). So the example on page 66 ends up compiling and matching a regular expression like this:
pat = re.compile("(\\d{1,3})\\.(\\d{1,3})\\.(\\d{1,3})\\.(\\d{1,3})")
Actually, that example is safer than just invoking text.split, as that long regex can shield you from injection attacks and help you enforce numeric IPs in one single command.
In the end, it is a matter of style, but just invoking text.split and trusting user input is... naive?!
Sxip Identity provides identity management solutions that leverage the Sxip Network and drive Identity 2.0 infrastructure.
So.... you mean that.... Sxip does... oh, it needs more Sxip stuff to work...? huh?
Sxip empowers individuals to create and manage their online digital identities and enables enterprises to instantly provision and manage their users.
In other words, Sxip provide a branded CMS?? What's hot about this?
I still do not understand why VC companies use all this wording to convey simple concepts. I think they believe that investors and banks need to be amazed by their wording, since that is, in most cases, all they will see for a long, long time until the actual stuff comes out from development. And they'll realize they put a lot of $$$ to get a closed-source Xaraya or Mambo look-alike. Pffft.
Heck, Gentoo is the only distro where the author mentions that "more experienced" users left it but still recommend it to newbs as a learning experience.
But he fails to mention where those "advanced" users went and why it would make sense to recommend a potentially more complex distro to new non-Linux savvy users.
Being a Gentoo user myself, I agree that Gentoo is not a dpkg/rpm-based distro, and that it can take ages to compile stuff, but this blatant bias is just completely partial. He was somewhat neutral on other distros (the ones he mentioned, never mind the ones he just ignored, like Mepis), he even showed some ignorance on Slack, but Gentoo did not deserve those lines, imho!
If you mean the amount involved in the fraudulent transaction, then it might be true.
but credit card companies might face legal action as well, with amounts that exceeds many times the cost of the actual transaction so that in the long run they can lose, too.
START RANT
in the short term, however, managers and directors of those companies do not usually worry because this impact rarely shows up in the end of the current fiscal year (legal action takes time to happen and eventual losses were already forwarded to the merchants, remember). that people can still meet their profit forecasts and wall street analysts (the ones who looks at balances and think they understand the inner workings of an individual company) get happy and excited about these execs.
what do they do in the following fiscal year, you might ask. well, some of them who are luck or well-connected enough can actually go to work in some other corporation, leaving the mess to the newcomer.
that's why, imho, they do not really care at all.
in the other hand, making them fully accountable would just increase those executive's compensation by a lot, since they would face the risk of going to jail or something like it due to something they never really knew (management tends to hide those kinds of stuff from the next higher hierarchical level and so on), but i fail to see if they can be actually held responsible to these security problems without blaming someone else (attorneys can be very persuasive in court sometimes). anyway, as a result, they would get paid a lot more to take that risk and the cost of credit would increase. security, however, would stay laughable as it is today.
upon public indignation, the government steps in and recognizes this fact and implements some stupid, ineffective piece of legislation to appease stockholders, requiring a lot of static, law-mandated checks in an ever-changing environment (security) and the cycle never ends.
as said before, costs to the consumer only go up and up, because corporations might contract insurance against those unknown risks (its way easier to do a financial settlement with an insurance co than carrying a fully-fledged change management program in a large-size corp) and because legislation usually requires yet another layer of auditors who are contracted just to make sure that the company is in compliance with something hackers circumvented long ago.
END RANT
there's a more polished treatment of this kind of reasoning under the name "agency theory", so this is not entirely based on paranoia, but if you think all this is just too stark and cynical, i am not ashamed to agree with you.
mandatory or not, CC companies might actually get insurance since a lot of their processes are outsourced and they just cannot possibly ensure that each one of their outsourcees comply to security norms (PHBs actually like to come up with or use a provider of some standardized security test which mean absolutely nothing, since the PHBs themselves do not know what to look for).
in the end, insurance or not, expect the cost of credit to increase in the future. take note: the interest rate spread will increase!!!!
Their UI concept is bound to be incomplete until they get that same concept into the applications themselves.
See, their desktop UI solution does not span into applications. Mozilla continues to have menus, submenus. So does OOo. The old way of doing things -- including those tricky context menus, which are completely counter-intuitive -- are not gone. They just aren't used in the desktop layer.
However, I applaud their artistic skills. There's a lot of well-round and tasteful SVGs in the screenshots, they get proportion and design right.
Most programmers aren't able to do that. See the visual hell that is KDE, with bouncing cursors and generalized visual information overflow. Worse, they have those small, 2 sq-pixel thingies to click to get additional functionality, which are absolutely cruel to the user -- user interfaces should feel good not only to one's eyes and brains (i.e., look good and make sense), but to their arms and wrists as well (does not worsen user's physical limitations). KDE guys have a design that values clutter and über-geeky-coolness that is hermetic to their own userbase.
Getting back to the subject at hand, it's a shame that Symphony devs cannot play along with other distros. In the other hand, I just hope their experience serves as inspiration for other teams, so that they can design better interfaces.
In the other hands, financial institutions are already excessively burdened with bureaucratic monstrosities like Sarbannes-Oxley (which created yet another revenue stream for auditors).
The lawmaker's ability to entirely miss the point never ceases to impress me!
Now that the "m" series has been discontinued for quite a long time, they decided to replace defective units (well, there was indeed a class action but lets ignore this for now).
So the question is: when is Palm going to fix/replace my Zire? It has two well-known problems:
Really irritating, high-pitched, brain drilling, directional noise coming off the screen This issue has been around the Palm forums for quite a long time now, but Palm continues to dismiss it as "normal". Maybe they do not have ears, but the noise - non-audible when fresh new - grows over time, and is very, very annoying.
Weird, fast, sudden and utterly complete and irreversible battery drainage if you use the Zire security features Palm says nothing more than "yeah, that's the way that is" and goes on recommending that the user either neve use the feature or (worse) use a third-party application to get security timed locking to work properly. They had a now legendary KB article on this subject, that stated exactly what I said, but the said article has vanished mysteriously. That article number is just no more.
<angry-rant> Palm should have a better customer support but I suspect that the Harvard-CEO-type-of-mentality must dictate that its better to wait until users get organized and push a class action than just releasing a fix for software problems (point #2), because the latter would hurt the company's image (as if the class action wasn't bad enough). <\angry-rant>
I remember ID4, when the character player by Jeff Goldblum flew into the main ship to spread a computer virus into their network...
The funny thing is that he's using a PowerBook or some other Apple notebook and he issues an ftp command from an Unix shell.
I suppose that Jeff's character, being a hardcore scientist, coded the virus in plain C.
Therefore, the problem isn't that alien technology is so easily owned but that they haven't been able to come up with something better than ftp and vulnerability to buffer overruns!!!!
I just lost faith in extraterrestrial intelligent life by watching that movie....
Maybe the reason the studios are so worried about losses due to piracy is that it might cause them to have to worry about silly things like artistry and solid writing.
Uhhh... Taking this back to the subject of this particular thread, when was the last time I found these on pr0n?
Slashdot Mirror
Most companies deal with IT security in secrecy, only disclosing new attacks and vulns right before they're ready to release a patch.
By the time it hits the news outlet, they'll be just too old for security professionals to be deemed useful.
That people has an oversimplified way to look at the world. They like to see themselves as business experts (heck, one I know call himself a "strategy consultant") but they lack the analytical tools to analyze a business, even if that business is their own. And they even have the audacity to put the blame on the software because it poses a risk to their business model -- which was already flawed to start with.
For the analogy to be complete, if there was an AdBlock for newspapers, my local newspaper sunday edition would get up to 60% LIGHTER! - a lot less paper and junk!
Imagine this: AdBlock being considered "environmentally friendly" because it prevented unnecessary tree cutting!!
I like the idea, though. Web sites will be paid for the actual traffic they generate, instead of being paid by those intermediaries based on some stupid, marketing exec-made metric of website populariy (which, alas, is not verifiable or auditable so advertisers are at the complete mercy of DoubleClick et al)
Websites, in turn, could use advertiser-generated revenue to provide rebates to people who browse through their pages, so as to improve clickthrough. In the other hand, excessive advertising does scare users away, so websites have two choices: 1) try to find the balance between useful stuff and ads, or 2) start *paying* people to browse their pages. Of course, the second option wouldn't last long as the market would take care of correcting that situation very quickly. In the long run, everyone will strive to get the balance in point #1, which will be awesome!
While the page is loading, press: Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start.
Works best if you're on a 56k connection. If you're on DSL or faster, try to memorize the trick beforehand so you can input it quickly!
In the end, it is a matter of style, but just invoking text.split and trusting user input is... naive?!
I still do not understand why VC companies use all this wording to convey simple concepts. I think they believe that investors and banks need to be amazed by their wording, since that is, in most cases, all they will see for a long, long time until the actual stuff comes out from development. And they'll realize they put a lot of $$$ to get a closed-source Xaraya or Mambo look-alike. Pffft.
But he fails to mention where those "advanced" users went and why it would make sense to recommend a potentially more complex distro to new non-Linux savvy users.
Being a Gentoo user myself, I agree that Gentoo is not a dpkg/rpm-based distro, and that it can take ages to compile stuff, but this blatant bias is just completely partial. He was somewhat neutral on other distros (the ones he mentioned, never mind the ones he just ignored, like Mepis), he even showed some ignorance on Slack, but Gentoo did not deserve those lines, imho!
If you mean the amount involved in the fraudulent transaction, then it might be true.
but credit card companies might face legal action as well, with amounts that exceeds many times the cost of the actual transaction so that in the long run they can lose, too.
START RANT
in the short term, however, managers and directors of those companies do not usually worry because this impact rarely shows up in the end of the current fiscal year (legal action takes time to happen and eventual losses were already forwarded to the merchants, remember). that people can still meet their profit forecasts and wall street analysts (the ones who looks at balances and think they understand the inner workings of an individual company) get happy and excited about these execs.
what do they do in the following fiscal year, you might ask. well, some of them who are luck or well-connected enough can actually go to work in some other corporation, leaving the mess to the newcomer.
that's why, imho, they do not really care at all.
in the other hand, making them fully accountable would just increase those executive's compensation by a lot, since they would face the risk of going to jail or something like it due to something they never really knew (management tends to hide those kinds of stuff from the next higher hierarchical level and so on), but i fail to see if they can be actually held responsible to these security problems without blaming someone else (attorneys can be very persuasive in court sometimes). anyway, as a result, they would get paid a lot more to take that risk and the cost of credit would increase. security, however, would stay laughable as it is today.
upon public indignation, the government steps in and recognizes this fact and implements some stupid, ineffective piece of legislation to appease stockholders, requiring a lot of static, law-mandated checks in an ever-changing environment (security) and the cycle never ends.
as said before, costs to the consumer only go up and up, because corporations might contract insurance against those unknown risks (its way easier to do a financial settlement with an insurance co than carrying a fully-fledged change management program in a large-size corp) and because legislation usually requires yet another layer of auditors who are contracted just to make sure that the company is in compliance with something hackers circumvented long ago.
END RANT
there's a more polished treatment of this kind of reasoning under the name "agency theory", so this is not entirely based on paranoia, but if you think all this is just too stark and cynical, i am not ashamed to agree with you.
and damn, that was a long rant.
in the end, insurance or not, expect the cost of credit to increase in the future. take note: the interest rate spread will increase!!!!
- They must pay someone to use Bluetooth and that price tag might not be that friendly
- There's already a lot of RF coming out of the laptop
- You have to charge both the laptop and its Bluetooth-enabled peripherals, which can prove to be a major hassle
- A combination of all previous reasons
That kinda sounds plausible...But it breaks vi! What's the point??????
Sounds like good advice to me!
So, x86 is the pinnacle of arch development? The climax of human achievement in computing?
When was the last time we've seen protesters taking off their clothes because they do not like Teflon-coated frying pans?
Quick! Spread the word!
See, their desktop UI solution does not span into applications. Mozilla continues to have menus, submenus. So does OOo. The old way of doing things -- including those tricky context menus, which are completely counter-intuitive -- are not gone. They just aren't used in the desktop layer.
However, I applaud their artistic skills. There's a lot of well-round and tasteful SVGs in the screenshots, they get proportion and design right.
Most programmers aren't able to do that. See the visual hell that is KDE, with bouncing cursors and generalized visual information overflow. Worse, they have those small, 2 sq-pixel thingies to click to get additional functionality, which are absolutely cruel to the user -- user interfaces should feel good not only to one's eyes and brains (i.e., look good and make sense), but to their arms and wrists as well (does not worsen user's physical limitations). KDE guys have a design that values clutter and über-geeky-coolness that is hermetic to their own userbase.
Getting back to the subject at hand, it's a shame that Symphony devs cannot play along with other distros. In the other hand, I just hope their experience serves as inspiration for other teams, so that they can design better interfaces.
Users (including the usual PHBs) got used to that paradigm and now do not value a proper web server setup!
And people think something does not work when a link points to "C:\Dave\Projects\budget.xls" does not work on their computers!
Where? At 8484 Wilshire Blvd.? :^)
The lawmaker's ability to entirely miss the point never ceases to impress me!
don't they even care for encrypting data in removable media?
that's so lame!
So the question is: when is Palm going to fix/replace my Zire? It has two well-known problems:
<angry-rant>
Palm should have a better customer support but I suspect that the Harvard-CEO-type-of-mentality must dictate that its better to wait until users get organized and push a class action than just releasing a fix for software problems (point #2), because the latter would hurt the company's image (as if the class action wasn't bad enough).
<\angry-rant>
The funny thing is that he's using a PowerBook or some other Apple notebook and he issues an ftp command from an Unix shell.
I suppose that Jeff's character, being a hardcore scientist, coded the virus in plain C.
Therefore, the problem isn't that alien technology is so easily owned but that they haven't been able to come up with something better than ftp and vulnerability to buffer overruns!!!!
I just lost faith in extraterrestrial intelligent life by watching that movie....
Uhhh... Taking this back to the subject of this particular thread, when was the last time I found these on pr0n?
Oh, wait...
:^)