Just as Microsoft drifts along in a sort of commercial terminal velocity, so too will Apple.
Tech companies that size can't do anything dramatically good or bad in the short to medium term because of their size. There are no dramatic systemic risks in their business model or market either - unlike oil companies with their exploding wells, or pharma companies with their lethal drugs.
Few companies last more than a couple of generations in any case. I would expect Apple to be around in a quasi-zombie state for about another 30 years or so before being broken up into a bunch of smaller obscure entities - a bit like IBM probably. Or Standard Oil... Kodak... Rockwell...
If it's any help (and if you're referring to desktop Windows computers behind standard domestic NAT-ed router/firewalls), then with the exception of WSE since it came out (WinVista?), I've *never* run anti-virus on any Windows installation in our 4-person home in over 20 years.
About once a year I boot each machine from something like Trinity Rescue Disk and run a sweep using two or three different anti-virus packages. This might come up with perhaps one or two low-risk infections (usually Java), but that's it.
I assume therefore that if the people using the machines are not in the habit of visiting certain types of website, and aren't inclines to open attachments they're not expecting, then all will be well.
"Just wish we would just scrap the elections and just sell the elections to the highest bidder at this point."
I'm too lazy to Google for it now, but I quite liked the idea of giving all voters in elections a fixed number of "tokens" which they could give to candidates who stood for office. The tokens could then be redeemed by the candidates for funding from the state for their subsequent election campaigns. A sort of pre-election election. Think that guy looks interesting? Toss him one of your tokens and see if he comes up with a compelling campaign to persuade him to vote for you.
I have nine amalgam fillings given to me when I was between the ages of 6 and 9 by a private dentist in the USA. I then went to school in the UK and had checkups twice a year on the NHS, and not a single filling installed since then. I'm 49 now, and with the exception of a recent chip out of the back of a molar, I've been fine. I haven't seen a dentist once in over 20 years.
the very first thing that should have been done is write a spike card or cards to find ways to break that down to digestible components.
But really, why bother? Why not just say "Well, this is a large task - prolly take a few weeks. Let's get going." How does time spent breaking things down into small bits ahead of time actually help anything beyond allowing you to play the game of "fit the task into the sprint so we can get on with the work"? With or without a sprint-based method, you'll naturally break stuff down as you get into the task anyway.
When done right, scrum is fantastic methodology. I know this from my own experience. However, I have not see many teams master it.
A "fantastic methodology" would probably have implementability as a fairly fundamental property. Not being able to do scrum right kinda blows the lid on that, wouldn't you say?
FTA "It's also worth exploring the question of why Twitter hasn't already disabled these accounts, and why intelligence agencies haven't done anything about them, if they're so easy to find."
It's not just Twitter accounts, it seems to be a common pattern whenever most perpetrators of hate or terrorist attacks are analysed - at least some of the those involved have been under surveillance, known to law enforcement, or otherwise under suspicion already. I can understand this being the case once in a while, but it seems like pretty much every time.
Why is this? It is fear of false positives? Wanting to use known suspicious actors to reveal accomplices? Lack of police resources on the ground? What?
Perhaps it was the UI (and they certainly didn't experiment much with that before they canned it), but to be fair, voice control is only really viable if you're on your own. And unlike phones, where input can be tricky, the keyboard is likely quicker and more accurate in pretty much every circumstance.
Well yes, runtime costs of encryption might be an issue, but that's sort of what I meant when I said nobody seems to be phased by SSL and how that works with trusted keys, etc. In short, why can't all data (like medical records) be encrypted inside systems that are incapable of exporting the plain text and can't be accessed by anything that doesn't have the cryptographic ability to do so?
Obviously, and attacker could steal the keys and write an application that read that data and then exported it as plain text. But encrypting by default would seem to a good way of preventing accidental or just stupid data breaches as so often seem to be perpetrated by idiots.
Why does plain text still exist? Or put it another way, why is anyone who has data they must protect able to put such data into a program that will export, import or otherwise be accessed by an external system *without* an encryption key?
I know it's a stupid question, but being able to just dump a database to text is just totally wrong, no? Nobody seems to be phased by SSL over HTTP, after all. Excel, Outlook, Oracle, MySQL, etc. - stop the madness!
"Chief executive and co-founder Steve Huffman told users: 'We've spent the last few days here discussing...'
There it is. If you've ever wondered how any repressive regime started with perfectly good intentions and ended putting humans through meat grinders, then there it is.
Imagine the scene: the great and the good at Reddit discussion what to do about revenge porn, swastikas and confederate flags in a plush air-conditioned office. They all have beautiful wives and young kids at home. Who, just who among them will seriously make any point about how Reddit is part of the fabric of free speech and that all they should do is give the community the tools to deal with it?
Nobody will. They don't want to come across as some swivel-eyed libertarian loon! We all know evil when we see it after all!
That's why I like Slashdot. Look at the length of my ID: I have never in all that time ever seen a swastika or any hate speech at all. I'm sure it exists though.
I'm afraid the burden of proof is on you to show the results of all your experiments proving climate change is not happening. The overwhelming evidence we have is that *is* occurring - so any disproof of this needs presenting far more than any more corroboration.
"For decades, AM/FM radio has used whatever music it wants without paying a cent to the musicians"
That is completely false. They pay to ASCAP and BMI, who in turn pay to the musicians. That is why those organisations exist.
The real issue here is that those organisations are shameless parasites who take almost all the money for themselves before passing anything to the people they claim to represent.
A finer example of how utterly venal the music business is. Any musician who deals with them gets what they deserve, in my opinion.
While I agree that putting the fabric inside a coat demonstrates a naive view of human factors (you can't wash the coat, you have to wear it all the time, etc.), I wonder if this might simply be the first idea they had after developing the invention?
Fabric generating power from movement would seem to have applications in other places: sails on boats; flags flying on buildings; tarpaulins on trucks, maybe quite a few others if the fabric is sufficiently robust enough.
I'm from the UK and I'm having a hard time understanding this. What are these gentlemen trying to do? What is the context around blocks of aluminium being made into guns? What problem does that solve?
As another poster pointed out, it is perfectly viable for a literate - or just sensible - individual to not use an antivirus. For more than 20 years, and for various reasons (monetary, but also relating to general hassle), I have been running my family's Windows computers without any AV save for MSE in the last few years. I have yet to have any significant problems in doing so. My parents, my wife and my son (although he just uses and iPad now) are perhaps unusual in not surfing pr0n or not clicking links on emails that tell them to re-set passwords, etc. Gmail is pretty good at filtering out these in any case.
When I've mentioned this to others, it's a bit like saying you don't eat breakfast. The reaction is variously like I've broken some taboo, or that I'm risking the health of the Internet by allowing malware to botnet my machines to hell (which they aren't BTW, since I do the occasional scan using a LiveCD from time to time).
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that comparisons to the Holocaust and world wars are in fact quite appropriate when discussing the magnitude of what Microsoft did to the history of computing, and by extension to human history overall.
The reason for this is simple. The effect of the Microsoft monopoly lasted so long and was so stultifying that it meant we will never know what a different word processor might be like. We will never know if spreadsheets or email might be more usable or efficient. We will never know (at least not in our lifetime) what an operating system or software might be like that doesn't use the conventions laid down by a company that had no incentive to make anything better, no need to design anything more than barely adequate, or to listen to its customers. Yet all these things are of fundamental importance to our lives - far, far too important to have suffered under a brutal, money-grubbing monopoly.
Despite (very) small innovations, Apple was not and is not a counter-balance because they were forced to ape the conventions that the Microsoft juggernaut had laid down with it's 95% market share. Jobs knew as well as anyone that it would be suicide to create anything that the market place was not already at least partially familiar with.
In the final analysis, the Microsoft era was a massive failure of free market capitalism that left us all driving Trabants while thinking they were the best that we could have. The blame lies of course with politicians and industry regulators who had no clue what an immense influence personal computing would have on society until it was too late. But it is too late. The die has been cast for personal computing for generations to come, and that is an utter and maddening tragedy for all of us.
The issue is of course far bigger than just one man, but holy mother of god do I hate what Bill Gates did to all of us.
Use the Slashdot poll for something useful for a once.
Looks like Beta has hidden the comments on the polls. Coincidence?
Joking apart, putting up a list of features to vote on will just be chaotic. Better to put a list of high-level principles up first. For example:
1. Slashdot is about commenting on stories. 2. Slashdot is about finding out about new stuff in tech 3. Slashdot is about creating a community of like-minded people
etc.
Which one of those gets the most votes sets the direction for any re-design. Discreet functions like "mod up" or "quote OP" would just wear everyone down I think.
Slashdot Mirror
I've worked at Apple three times, starting back in 2002
When was the last time you were there? 2002 is a looong time ago.
Just as Microsoft drifts along in a sort of commercial terminal velocity, so too will Apple.
Tech companies that size can't do anything dramatically good or bad in the short to medium term because of their size. There are no dramatic systemic risks in their business model or market either - unlike oil companies with their exploding wells, or pharma companies with their lethal drugs.
Few companies last more than a couple of generations in any case. I would expect Apple to be around in a quasi-zombie state for about another 30 years or so before being broken up into a bunch of smaller obscure entities - a bit like IBM probably. Or Standard Oil... Kodak... Rockwell...
If it's any help (and if you're referring to desktop Windows computers behind standard domestic NAT-ed router/firewalls), then with the exception of WSE since it came out (WinVista?), I've *never* run anti-virus on any Windows installation in our 4-person home in over 20 years.
About once a year I boot each machine from something like Trinity Rescue Disk and run a sweep using two or three different anti-virus packages. This might come up with perhaps one or two low-risk infections (usually Java), but that's it.
I assume therefore that if the people using the machines are not in the habit of visiting certain types of website, and aren't inclines to open attachments they're not expecting, then all will be well.
"Just wish we would just scrap the elections and just sell the elections to the highest bidder at this point."
I'm too lazy to Google for it now, but I quite liked the idea of giving all voters in elections a fixed number of "tokens" which they could give to candidates who stood for office. The tokens could then be redeemed by the candidates for funding from the state for their subsequent election campaigns. A sort of pre-election election. Think that guy looks interesting? Toss him one of your tokens and see if he comes up with a compelling campaign to persuade him to vote for you.
I have nine amalgam fillings given to me when I was between the ages of 6 and 9 by a private dentist in the USA. I then went to school in the UK and had checkups twice a year on the NHS, and not a single filling installed since then. I'm 49 now, and with the exception of a recent chip out of the back of a molar, I've been fine. I haven't seen a dentist once in over 20 years.
Mod parent up!
the very first thing that should have been done is write a spike card or cards to find ways to break that down to digestible components.
But really, why bother? Why not just say "Well, this is a large task - prolly take a few weeks. Let's get going." How does time spent breaking things down into small bits ahead of time actually help anything beyond allowing you to play the game of "fit the task into the sprint so we can get on with the work"? With or without a sprint-based method, you'll naturally break stuff down as you get into the task anyway.
I dunno. Just seems like weird voodoo to me.
When done right, scrum is fantastic methodology. I know this from my own experience. However, I have not see many teams master it.
A "fantastic methodology" would probably have implementability as a fairly fundamental property. Not being able to do scrum right kinda blows the lid on that, wouldn't you say?
... But if you don't even have the basics, it's not going to help very much
But if you don't even have the basics, it's going to make everyone's life hell.
Fixed that for you.
FTA "It's also worth exploring the question of why Twitter hasn't already disabled these accounts, and why intelligence agencies haven't done anything about them, if they're so easy to find."
It's not just Twitter accounts, it seems to be a common pattern whenever most perpetrators of hate or terrorist attacks are analysed - at least some of the those involved have been under surveillance, known to law enforcement, or otherwise under suspicion already. I can understand this being the case once in a while, but it seems like pretty much every time.
Why is this? It is fear of false positives? Wanting to use known suspicious actors to reveal accomplices? Lack of police resources on the ground? What?
Perhaps it was the UI (and they certainly didn't experiment much with that before they canned it), but to be fair, voice control is only really viable if you're on your own. And unlike phones, where input can be tricky, the keyboard is likely quicker and more accurate in pretty much every circumstance.
What was the Nvidia video driver doing on a server?
Well yes, runtime costs of encryption might be an issue, but that's sort of what I meant when I said nobody seems to be phased by SSL and how that works with trusted keys, etc. In short, why can't all data (like medical records) be encrypted inside systems that are incapable of exporting the plain text and can't be accessed by anything that doesn't have the cryptographic ability to do so?
Obviously, and attacker could steal the keys and write an application that read that data and then exported it as plain text. But encrypting by default would seem to a good way of preventing accidental or just stupid data breaches as so often seem to be perpetrated by idiots.
Why does plain text still exist? Or put it another way, why is anyone who has data they must protect able to put such data into a program that will export, import or otherwise be accessed by an external system *without* an encryption key?
I know it's a stupid question, but being able to just dump a database to text is just totally wrong, no? Nobody seems to be phased by SSL over HTTP, after all. Excel, Outlook, Oracle, MySQL, etc. - stop the madness!
A good point, and well made.
"Chief executive and co-founder Steve Huffman told users: 'We've spent the last few days here discussing...'
There it is. If you've ever wondered how any repressive regime started with perfectly good intentions and ended putting humans through meat grinders, then there it is.
Imagine the scene: the great and the good at Reddit discussion what to do about revenge porn, swastikas and confederate flags in a plush air-conditioned office. They all have beautiful wives and young kids at home. Who, just who among them will seriously make any point about how Reddit is part of the fabric of free speech and that all they should do is give the community the tools to deal with it?
Nobody will. They don't want to come across as some swivel-eyed libertarian loon! We all know evil when we see it after all!
That's why I like Slashdot. Look at the length of my ID: I have never in all that time ever seen a swastika or any hate speech at all. I'm sure it exists though.
I'm afraid the burden of proof is on you to show the results of all your experiments proving climate change is not happening. The overwhelming evidence we have is that *is* occurring - so any disproof of this needs presenting far more than any more corroboration.
Which is how science works, BTW.
"For decades, AM/FM radio has used whatever music it wants without paying a cent to the musicians"
That is completely false. They pay to ASCAP and BMI, who in turn pay to the musicians. That is why those organisations exist.
The real issue here is that those organisations are shameless parasites who take almost all the money for themselves before passing anything to the people they claim to represent.
A finer example of how utterly venal the music business is. Any musician who deals with them gets what they deserve, in my opinion.
While I agree that putting the fabric inside a coat demonstrates a naive view of human factors (you can't wash the coat, you have to wear it all the time, etc.), I wonder if this might simply be the first idea they had after developing the invention?
Fabric generating power from movement would seem to have applications in other places: sails on boats; flags flying on buildings; tarpaulins on trucks, maybe quite a few others if the fabric is sufficiently robust enough.
I'm from the UK and I'm having a hard time understanding this. What are these gentlemen trying to do? What is the context around blocks of aluminium being made into guns? What problem does that solve?
As another poster pointed out, it is perfectly viable for a literate - or just sensible - individual to not use an antivirus. For more than 20 years, and for various reasons (monetary, but also relating to general hassle), I have been running my family's Windows computers without any AV save for MSE in the last few years. I have yet to have any significant problems in doing so. My parents, my wife and my son (although he just uses and iPad now) are perhaps unusual in not surfing pr0n or not clicking links on emails that tell them to re-set passwords, etc. Gmail is pretty good at filtering out these in any case.
When I've mentioned this to others, it's a bit like saying you don't eat breakfast. The reaction is variously like I've broken some taboo, or that I'm risking the health of the Internet by allowing malware to botnet my machines to hell (which they aren't BTW, since I do the occasional scan using a LiveCD from time to time).
Copyright was a very minor factor in Microsoft's exclusion of effective competition and suppression of any real innovation in software design.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that comparisons to the Holocaust and world wars are in fact quite appropriate when discussing the magnitude of what Microsoft did to the history of computing, and by extension to human history overall.
The reason for this is simple. The effect of the Microsoft monopoly lasted so long and was so stultifying that it meant we will never know what a different word processor might be like. We will never know if spreadsheets or email might be more usable or efficient. We will never know (at least not in our lifetime) what an operating system or software might be like that doesn't use the conventions laid down by a company that had no incentive to make anything better, no need to design anything more than barely adequate, or to listen to its customers. Yet all these things are of fundamental importance to our lives - far, far too important to have suffered under a brutal, money-grubbing monopoly.
Despite (very) small innovations, Apple was not and is not a counter-balance because they were forced to ape the conventions that the Microsoft juggernaut had laid down with it's 95% market share. Jobs knew as well as anyone that it would be suicide to create anything that the market place was not already at least partially familiar with.
In the final analysis, the Microsoft era was a massive failure of free market capitalism that left us all driving Trabants while thinking they were the best that we could have. The blame lies of course with politicians and industry regulators who had no clue what an immense influence personal computing would have on society until it was too late. But it is too late. The die has been cast for personal computing for generations to come, and that is an utter and maddening tragedy for all of us.
The issue is of course far bigger than just one man, but holy mother of god do I hate what Bill Gates did to all of us.
Nice to see my mum's allotment garden on /. :-)
Use the Slashdot poll for something useful for a once.
Looks like Beta has hidden the comments on the polls. Coincidence?
Joking apart, putting up a list of features to vote on will just be chaotic. Better to put a list of high-level principles up first. For example:
1. Slashdot is about commenting on stories.
2. Slashdot is about finding out about new stuff in tech
3. Slashdot is about creating a community of like-minded people
etc.
Which one of those gets the most votes sets the direction for any re-design. Discreet functions like "mod up" or "quote OP" would just wear everyone down I think.