"Overall he said, the advertising industry in china is quite nascent, so there are very small amounts of revenue at stake...He said the embargo there hasn't worked, with Castro still in power, and with the Cuban people living with technology form the 1950s."
"I remember when the standards were defined by Netscape and IE, basically any new feature one implemented, the other copied, and voila, a standard... Whatever happend to that type of development? It benefited everyone."
I take it you're a bit too young to remember when IE invented the "strong" tag to break the "b" tag. (If you ever tried to create "cross-browser" Javascript, especially around 2000, you'd also feel differently.)
"If you think, however, that the software industry is dominated by major players like Microsoft, Adobe, Google or Symantec, consider the top downloads list on Download.com and then see how many of popular products in that list are made by the companies that you might have never heard of."
4 of the top 10 downloads (including #1) are anti-spy applications. In other words, automatic ways to clean out all the other crap you've caught from surfing download.com are download.com's biggest application.
I thought they tried this a few years ago with Unisys. Long story short, it was supposed to be a 32-processor version of Windows on Unisys iron. AFAIK it went nowhere. (This was about the time that Unisys was pitching connecting web servers running on mainframes to the Internet.)
Yeah, Microsoft finally added AES to its core crypto stuff back in 2003 (I think), but for some odd reason they didn't extend support into the areas that would have used it most: SSL for IIS and SSL for IE. (Dunno if Outlook Express would have used it...probably.)
So, you claim the NSA asked Microsoft to not put AES in IE? This doesn't make much sense either. Like I said, almost every other browser, client or server already supports AES on SSL (including those offered by IBM). It's just weird that Microsoft lags so far behind.
I believe Microsoft DOES support 3DES on SSL. My "FIPS 140-1" configurations require it. Look for this key in your windows registry - if you have this key, your SSL does 3DES:
HHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contr ol\SecurityProviders\SCHANNEL\ciphers\Triple DES 168/168
Anyone ask why SSL still doesn't do AES? I mean it's 2006 and Microsoft is really the only vendor who DOESN'T do AES or 256-bit encryption in SSL. (I know, they said they'd put it in Vista, but that doesn't help the millions of Windows XP users or Windows 2003 administrators out there.)
"Nikesh Arora, head of Google's European arm, said in an interview with the FT that Google wanted companies in retail - and possibly sectors such as real estate - to submit details of their goods and prices. Google would index and package the information into a consumer-friendly search engine, giving its users a virtual supermarket across a number of retail brands."
Typical Retail Executive: "Yes, thank you, Google, for offering me an easy way to redefine the retail brand I've been building for years as just another price player. Would you like me to send over demographics of my key customers and how we reach them via advertising too? Yes? OK, I'll get right on that. (click)"
This man will lose his job within a week. Pretend you're IBM, a tech company that just got done telling everyone it could in the last decade that it's not a dinosaur. Then this guy opens his big fat yap and undoes three years of work in Asia.
(Yes, I'm also an IBM stockholder. Don't laugh; I've made money.)
#1: a more interesting debate taking place today regards how much power various devices draw when in standby mode. I've seen estimates that from 5% of 13% of all U.S. power consumption is pissed away in various standby modes.
#2. if you own a house you can just walk out to the electric meter to see what's going on. (Shut down all circuits but one and only draw on one device for a while.)
I'd have to say Sony is playing this rather smart. Whether they wanted to or not, they avoided the Christmas 2005 ("Q3/Q4") season, traditionally the biggest hype and buy time of the year. Fortunately for Sony, the XBox360 has been relatively uninspiring so far. Console players are typically kids (or people with lots of free time on their hands), so things like "spring break" and "summer break" are good times to get your marketing message out.
This the second crappy article from this rag today. The first one was full of crap about video games being educational. This one is full of crap about there not being copy protection in the 80s and 90s. Believe me, we know better. For the love of all that is holy, please stop linking to stories in this "next-gen" POS rag.
(And another thing...why don't the links in the story teasers have the "bracket site" tags next to them?)
"1. Promote the ratings system. It worked for movies, the recording industry and TV."
The TV ratings are bullshit. During G-rated shows I've watched with my kids I've seen:
1) life on earth wiped out by fires caused by meteors (Disney Channel - "Dinosaur")
2) promotions for other shows that featured naked people screwing in bed
(Fox - don't remember the show)
3) graphic decapitations of live animals
(Animal Planet - Animals Behaving Badly)
"Evangelize the benefits of videogames. Book: Everything Bad is Good for You, by Stephen Johnson. Videogames not only help children to compete more effectively, they make kids more intelligent."
This may be true for older kids, but all the children I know who started playing before the age of five are borderline retarded. Also, the "compete more effectively" thing seems to overdone - the hardcore online adult gamers I know are complete pansies in real life.
The server appears to be Apache 1.3.3.3, one version behind the current release. The 1.3.3.4 release has a fix for this item, which would be my favorite vector, but I doubt that this server has an application that uses chunked encoding (often used for file uploads).
*) SECURITY: core: If a request contains both Transfer-Encoding and
Content-Length headers, remove the Content-Length, mitigating some
HTTP Request Splitting/Spoofing attacks. This has no impact on
mod_proxy_http, yet affects any module which supports chunked
encoding yet fails to prefer T-E: chunked over the Content-Length
purported value. [Paul Querna, Joe Orton]
"It's a fact that Internet Explorer is inferior to Firefox..."
I'll only believe that IE is inferior to Firefox for end user applications if lots and lots of end users agree.
"...does the community need to resort to using third-class promotional tactics with total downloads number?"
Well, if 150 million end users agree IE is inferior to Firefox for end user applications, then I would tend to agree with them, especially given the extra download Firefox users must perform to install Firefox on their desktop.
So...the answer would appear to be "Yes, Firefox is doing the correct thing by posting usage and adoption numbers." Can I help you with anything else today?
"...when people switch providers, they will switch to the lowest-cost (or greatest price-feature) provider, not the one with the best quality of service."
Often this is not the case. As a part-time marketeer, I can tell you that often what I do to lure customers away from my competition is:
1) "educate" my target segment to expect a higher level of service (change their expectations)
2) tell my competitor's customers that my competitor does not offer that higher level of service (given the new expectations, make them feel unhappy with their current provider)
3) make damn sure my own company offers the higher level of service when my competitor's now-unhappy customers go looking
4) don't compete on price; higher service can demand equal or higher price
5) repeat as necessary
Believe me - I'm not the only out there doing this either.
"...evidence is growing that great service is essential for long-term customer retention..."
The author is thirty years behind if this the first time he's run across this idea. There have been shitloads of studies done over and over again that show that most (i.e., >50%) people leave/switch because of shitty service from their existing supplier/provider/brand/etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Wasn't that just on Cinemax?
Example #1: Slashdot itself.
"Overall he said, the advertising industry in china is quite nascent, so there are very small amounts of revenue at stake...He said the embargo there hasn't worked, with Castro still in power, and with the Cuban people living with technology form the 1950s."
I take it you're a bit too young to remember when IE invented the "strong" tag to break the "b" tag. (If you ever tried to create "cross-browser" Javascript, especially around 2000, you'd also feel differently.)
4 of the top 10 downloads (including #1) are anti-spy applications. In other words, automatic ways to clean out all the other crap you've caught from surfing download.com are download.com's biggest application.
That's funny. My customers react the same way to my products' release notes. Or at least they would if they ever read them.
I thought they tried this a few years ago with Unisys. Long story short, it was supposed to be a 32-processor version of Windows on Unisys iron. AFAIK it went nowhere. (This was about the time that Unisys was pitching connecting web servers running on mainframes to the Internet.)
Yeah, Microsoft finally added AES to its core crypto stuff back in 2003 (I think), but for some odd reason they didn't extend support into the areas that would have used it most: SSL for IIS and SSL for IE. (Dunno if Outlook Express would have used it...probably.)
So, you claim the NSA asked Microsoft to not put AES in IE? This doesn't make much sense either. Like I said, almost every other browser, client or server already supports AES on SSL (including those offered by IBM). It's just weird that Microsoft lags so far behind.
I believe Microsoft DOES support 3DES on SSL. My "FIPS 140-1" configurations require it. Look for this key in your windows registry - if you have this key, your SSL does 3DES:
r ol\SecurityProviders\SCHANNEL\ciphers\Triple DES 168/168
HHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Cont
Anyone ask why SSL still doesn't do AES? I mean it's 2006 and Microsoft is really the only vendor who DOESN'T do AES or 256-bit encryption in SSL. (I know, they said they'd put it in Vista, but that doesn't help the millions of Windows XP users or Windows 2003 administrators out there.)
Typical Retail Executive: "Yes, thank you, Google, for offering me an easy way to redefine the retail brand I've been building for years as just another price player. Would you like me to send over demographics of my key customers and how we reach them via advertising too? Yes? OK, I'll get right on that. (click)"
This man will lose his job within a week. Pretend you're IBM, a tech company that just got done telling everyone it could in the last decade that it's not a dinosaur. Then this guy opens his big fat yap and undoes three years of work in Asia.
(Yes, I'm also an IBM stockholder. Don't laugh; I've made money.)
Some people have free time to burn...
#1: a more interesting debate taking place today regards how much power various devices draw when in standby mode. I've seen estimates that from 5% of 13% of all U.S. power consumption is pissed away in various standby modes.
#2. if you own a house you can just walk out to the electric meter to see what's going on. (Shut down all circuits but one and only draw on one device for a while.)
I think most Zelda fans are already quite proficient at wielding their wands, thank you very much.
I'd have to say Sony is playing this rather smart. Whether they wanted to or not, they avoided the Christmas 2005 ("Q3/Q4") season, traditionally the biggest hype and buy time of the year. Fortunately for Sony, the XBox360 has been relatively uninspiring so far. Console players are typically kids (or people with lots of free time on their hands), so things like "spring break" and "summer break" are good times to get your marketing message out.
This the second crappy article from this rag today. The first one was full of crap about video games being educational. This one is full of crap about there not being copy protection in the 80s and 90s. Believe me, we know better. For the love of all that is holy, please stop linking to stories in this "next-gen" POS rag.
(And another thing...why don't the links in the story teasers have the "bracket site" tags next to them?)
"1. Promote the ratings system. It worked for movies, the recording industry and TV."
The TV ratings are bullshit. During G-rated shows I've watched with my kids I've seen:
1) life on earth wiped out by fires caused by meteors (Disney Channel - "Dinosaur")
2) promotions for other shows that featured naked people screwing in bed (Fox - don't remember the show) 3) graphic decapitations of live animals (Animal Planet - Animals Behaving Badly)
"Evangelize the benefits of videogames. Book: Everything Bad is Good for You, by Stephen Johnson. Videogames not only help children to compete more effectively, they make kids more intelligent."
This may be true for older kids, but all the children I know who started playing before the age of five are borderline retarded. Also, the "compete more effectively" thing seems to overdone - the hardcore online adult gamers I know are complete pansies in real life.
Traditional media, including newspapers, magazines and especially the local TV news do the same thing every day.
See this: http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=179501&t hreshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=14866045# 14866379
The server appears to be Apache 1.3.3.3, one version behind the current release. The 1.3.3.4 release has a fix for this item, which would be my favorite vector, but I doubt that this server has an application that uses chunked encoding (often used for file uploads).
*) SECURITY: core: If a request contains both Transfer-Encoding and
Content-Length headers, remove the Content-Length, mitigating some
HTTP Request Splitting/Spoofing attacks. This has no impact on
mod_proxy_http, yet affects any module which supports chunked
encoding yet fails to prefer T-E: chunked over the Content-Length
purported value. [Paul Querna, Joe Orton]
I'll only believe that IE is inferior to Firefox for end user applications if lots and lots of end users agree.
"...does the community need to resort to using third-class promotional tactics with total downloads number?"
Well, if 150 million end users agree IE is inferior to Firefox for end user applications, then I would tend to agree with them, especially given the extra download Firefox users must perform to install Firefox on their desktop.
So...the answer would appear to be "Yes, Firefox is doing the correct thing by posting usage and adoption numbers." Can I help you with anything else today?
Often this is not the case. As a part-time marketeer, I can tell you that often what I do to lure customers away from my competition is:
1) "educate" my target segment to expect a higher level of service (change their expectations)
2) tell my competitor's customers that my competitor does not offer that higher level of service (given the new expectations, make them feel unhappy with their current provider)
3) make damn sure my own company offers the higher level of service when my competitor's now-unhappy customers go looking
4) don't compete on price; higher service can demand equal or higher price
5) repeat as necessary
Believe me - I'm not the only out there doing this either.
The author is thirty years behind if this the first time he's run across this idea. There have been shitloads of studies done over and over again that show that most (i.e., >50%) people leave/switch because of shitty service from their existing supplier/provider/brand/etc.
Google Desktop = Classic Spyware + Brand Name
Spyware generally...
- Offers one or two features (like "plays music")
- Ships a lot of information about you or your activities to the home office
Google Desktop fits this model perfectly, except that it's also marketed by a healthy brand name.