The sad thing is, you could say the exact same things about the DRM in the iPod:
"It seems most of the media has missed the significance of Apple Music's recent partnership with Apples hardware division to put Fairplay on iPods. If all the iPod players adopt Fairplay, that gives Apple access to a significant chunk of the portable player market. Couple this with the more recent insert any iTunes promo here announcement and you've got Apple set to own the DRM space - at least on portable players - by stealth."
And this has come to pass. Apple good, Microsoft bad. Linux better! Nice and easy to remember I suppose.
And a word on the M$ DRM...don't panic. M$ have millions of mobile devices out there already on three separate OS platforms; Windows Mobile 2002/2003, and Windows Mobile 5. Each of these operating systems ships with Windows Media Player as standard, and can play wma/wmv files. HOWEVER, and this is a BIG however; it doesn't work with the Windows Media DRM. Not even in the slightest. If it has DRM of any form it won't play. Anyone marketing WMA media for mobile devices is targeting a tiny marketplace. And they aren't all that popular as a platform anyway, compared to other popular phone product lines. This future DRM-ed device is in a market that is a subset of a subset.
So, I wouldn't worry about MS owning the mobile media space any time soon.
Bull. Any of those purchased tracks can be burned right back to CD-R to stop generational loss and preserve the purchase.
And are you going to show these people how to do that? Many of whom think the blue e is "the internet"? I'm not being insulting here, but buring 50+ disks of CD-Rs then re-encoding to transfer a music library is well beyond most people. We'd script it some way I'm sure, for them it's a manual process if they even realise it's possible.
I still can't believe iTunes fans use this as a retort for the interoperability issues. It's not a managable solution. I've got 80 gig of mp3s here, some 400+ disks I would estimate. With a ten minute cycle, thats 66 hours of continuous burning/ripping. And your standing there with a straight face suggesting this as an option? Maybe 20 disks or less at a push, but who has only 20 cds? And why do they have iPods if they do?;-)
Where did I argue that AAC 128kbps files sounded especially good?
That wasn't my point. What I was trying to get across is that once you have media on a particular format, that media will influence your next purchase. It's probably the biggest feature in that aspect.
People who had 8-track libraries stuck with the technology as long as they could. Apple are going to do very out of this, and it's not accidental.
This consistency has allowed Apple to increase the rate of repeat sales
Of course, that has nothing to do with the fact that the iPod is the only player that will touch the media they have bought. By that logic, 8-tracks are the peak of audio fidelity, as those with a large library of 8-track media continue with "repeat sales".:-)
This consistency has allowed Apple to increase the rate of repeat sales and take advantage of trendiness - but it's ridiculous to discount the iPod's other advantages and write the success of Apple's products off as a 2-year-long mega-fad driven by clever marketing alone.
Sure, I'd agree with that. It is a beautiful device. The UI is easy to use. But it's not for me. I'd rather have a more functional UI, at the expense of ease of use. There's a number of other features that it doesn't have that put me off, but now is not the time to go into them.
But it was mostly driven via a very successful ad campaign. It was a good campaign, very memorable. The number of parodies is testament to that. The fact that to most consumers mp3==iPod speaks volumes. They simply weren't aware of the alternatives.
If you're using your computer speakers, it's more than likely that the person at the other end is hearing their own voice too, fed back into your microphone, and delayed by half a second or so.
That's my experience. Both parties need a headset or even an old fashioned handset to prevent this feedback. Otherwise it's unusable.
One step further would be to extend (free) wireless LAN coverage and put WLAN adapters and VoIP software into cell phones - voila: free cell phone airtime!
Yawn, have you been under a rock for a year or two?;-) Cellphones with WiFi and Skype are old news, I've personally had one for 18 months.
What is needed to "make it work" is the equivalent of push-email, but for VoIP. You can't keep a mobile device turned on an listening all day without tying it to the wall with a power cable.
You know what? Apple did a better job of making stuff people want.
Em, no. Apple did a better marketing job. The people don't want DRM, they don't want iTunes upgrades removing features. They do want to pay an extra 25% just to have the white headphones and look trendy.
The iPod was not sold on it's technical merits.
it's not clear that the 80% of the.mp3 player market buying iPods would have bought any other kind of music player.
IMHO, most would not have have. They would have never heard of the new portable devices had Apple not marketed them. These people are not reading slashdot or engadget.
Are you trolling?;-) For me, it was the number of syntax gotchas that pissed me off. You'd have to think about variable declaration formats, what's that all about? Plus, IMHO, it's a very ugly language. Don't get me wrong, the conditional structures have a lovely retro charm, but it doesn't cut the mustard now. Using For/Next/Step makes you yearn for "Goto".
The Chinese have no concept of copyright and patent restrictions like Americans do.
I suggest you pick up a history book and start reading about these "Americans". They did the exact same with British (and other) IP during their fledling years. China is no different, they are just a century or two behind.
There is no way other than the use of industrial espionage to explain the short amount of time China took in developing its space program and supercomputer capabilities.
Pot. Kettle. Black. The Ruskies got the first orbit, first satellite, the first lifeform in space, the first human in space and the first space dock between two vehicles. Then a couple of years later the US combines all of these and puts a man on the moon. I call shenanegins!!
What is especially sad to me is that we have allowed the terrorists to win.
Please please please stop perpetuating that lie. Especially if the results of it are ticking you off.
Never have the terrorists said they want to remove your freedom. Consistently they have said they want your country to stop meddling in theirs. That's all their is to it, and it's not in our leaders interests for us to realise that.
However, when thousands of people die in an attack on our soil, people want something done.
At least 32,000 civilians have been proven beyond all doubt to have died due to that "something done" in Iraq. What is fair retaliation I wonder? Or are their lives worth less than ours?
This is something I've considered. Isn't the US election date etched in law somewhere and cannot be changed no matter what happens? I remember reading about this during the 2004 election, hot on the tails of the "terrorist threat".
* it was surprisingly hard to find any link to this in the mainstream press. I had hoped to link a CNN article or similar, but google just wasn't helping me. You can make up your own mind on the non-reporting of this major law change, but IMHO it simply backs up the point of this story. People just aren't bothered.
A friend of mine, a bit of a tinfoil hat person (but not a geek) maintains that this is already the case and that most US presidents of the past 100 years or so are all in some way related to each other. Is there any truth to this, or is it as far fetched as it sounds?
Part of the problem is that our history teaches us constently about how perfect our government is (and was) and leaves people with a complete and utter trust of the current government. People seem to forget that dice have no memory and that a good foundation can easily be brought down by all that is built on top of it.
As far as I'm concerned, the terrorists have won. I'm sure this turned out better than Bin Laden ever imagined.
Despite Bush and Blair's lies, attacking our personal freedom was never their objective. They really don't give a shit what we do in our own countries. Their stated aim is to stop us meddling in theirs and with that objective they have completely and utterly failed. We meddle more now. The UK got it's first Islamic attack ever after joining in on Iraq, again the bombers stated their reasons and again it was censored from our media. I'm not feeling any safer now, are you?
PCs, or more specifically, Windows PCs have all that. And just like the Apple incarnations, you are restricted to using their own stuff in every case. With Outlook, Exchange and home directories, you get all that you are talking about. Instead of an iPod, you get a mobile phone that can play media and syncs your contacts/appointments. This is nothing new.
Show me a system where I can connect Apple mail to a Linux server and have it sync to a Microsoft phone. Then I'll be impressed. Otherwise, it's just Apple software talking to Apple software, no better than anything MS has put out.
XForwarding is only good on a reliable local network. If you are using it to a remote site and the link goes down EVERY SINGLE ONE of your apps (even the desktop) crashes and terminates uncleanly. This makes running long jobs a bit of a no-no.
And as the other poster said, VNC can be faster in many situations.
Not neccessarilly. WEP isn't all that bad if you update your firmware and change keys periodically. The updated firmwares avoid the weak keys that lead to the vunerability.
MAC filtering is pointless with encyption. Faking a MAC is childs play, all you'd need to do is break the encryption and sniff for a MAC address that was allowed. MAC filtering is only useful when you don't want encryption at all but still want some kind of rudamentary access control. Easilly broken by someone who wants it enough, but OK to keep the casual drive-bys away.
I'd rather add proper SSL with certificate verifications and all to the applications. It's not even hard actually thanks to the OpenSSL libraries. It's also more secure and cleaner.
It's not more secure at all. By allowing new services to listen on publicly accessible ports it is impossible to be more secure. You can only increase security by taking away services. By definition, adding more is adding vunerabilites.
If SSH is your first line and you use tunnels to get at everything else, no one can access your resources without breaking the SSH security. You could say that the "all your eggs in one basket" approach is normally wrong, but in security it's the opposite. You only need one hole to get in. Make only one way in and make sure it's as secure as you can get it.
Your idea of using SSL wrapped connections, in this case with VNC, is precisely the thing that this vunerablity would exploit. The exploit is an issue in the authentication. I'm going to stick with SSH's well known, tested and peer reviewed authentication methods for now.
By the way, my VNC password is usually "password". If you are connecting behind my firewall, my security is already broken.
If you don't spend any month on the card every month, that looks like nothing, and will not raise your score, or lower it.
While I'm more familiar with the UK credit report companies (who do yours as well), I think that many people misunderstand how the scoring works.
As I understand it, there is no such thing as a credit score. You have a credit report that lists all the credit you (and your dependant family) have ever had. In this report it marks the dates and loan amounts, with repayment details. Depending on the company, this looks something like "0, 1-2, 3-4, default", each with their own int value. Each month a payment hits the account (even if it's the minimum on a Visa and you haven't borrowed any more), the bin it goes into increments by one. So, by just not being late ever, you get "points" or more accurately: the lack of negative points. The numbers refer to how late the payment was (months), with default being a default on the entire loan. The report also carries "current balance" entries, but no spending history.
When a lender accesses your credit report, they add these details up using their own custom formula. This cuts down fraud as people can't milk the system too much (security thru obscurity). It also allows companies to focus on different markets; some low interest ones only lend to the most reliable, while other high-interest (rip-off) companies don't mind the risk of those who are late from time to time. I've got a few lates on one of my credit card, just through a manual payment system and lazyness, and they've never posed a problem
Personally, I got screwed over with incorrect data several years ago, and I had to sort it out and learn something in the process.
The $30k car is likely to be in better condition, will have a resale value, and loan is less likely to be abandoned.
Also, should you default the loan company take ownership of the car, which holds it's value better. This is why it's real easy to get a $100,000 mortgage on a $200,000 house. Default and the bank keep the lot with quite a large profit, easily offseting the cost of foreclosure.
The platform has been cursed with crappy tools (especially GUI editors) for too long and it will have to pull its socks up if it wants to compete with Visual Studio.
I find what you say there interesting. I've used vi then Netbeans in the early days, and Eclipse exclusively for the past two. Recently I had to pick up Visual Studio 2005 to do some.dot and VB hacking of some existing code we had in the office.
I was not impressed. It completely lacks features that I use almost every five minutes in Eclipse. Refactoring mainly; it lacks the ability to move/rename classes and make those changes for you in all references. The debugging wasn't as intuative as, nor did it seem as well featured. Little things, like the display window where you can execute code at debug runtime, just aren't there. I use the code-generation in Eclipse quite a lot; auto-creation of constructors, methods, assignments of parameters to fields and so on. It sounds cumbersome at first, but once you know the shortcuts you can spin off classes at crazy speeds. Visual Studio just didn't seem to have any of that. It was like a merge of notepad, a compiler and a debugger and that's yer lot.
Little things as well, Eclipse has great intergration with javadoc. VS had some docs, but they were harder to find and less detailed.
Maybe it was my lack of experience with the VS platform, but in all honesty I could not wait to get back into the Java world and Eclipse.
Well said. There's a reason companies like FedEx have "special relationships" with the worlds custom agents. For example, FedEx will automatically pay customs duty (here in the UK) and bill the customer directly. This enables them to get their shipments through customs quickly and on to your doorstep.
When I used to import DVDs (for personal viewing, not trade), I avoided companies like FedEx because of this. You were guaranteed getting hit with import taxes every time.
The idea that they would work together to slow down shipments is a bit unlikely, though perhaps they would only use it with packages coming from monitored sources as opposed to random checks.
They frequently discuss how voice quality of phones has dropped significantly as the cell phone networks went all digital
Whoever said that must have NEVER used an analogue cell phone. It's no better than AM radio and the signal fades in and out as you move around coverage. Hop in your time machine and go back to the early 90s if you don't believe me. I got one of the first GSM phones and it was WAY better than any analogue device.
And land lines went to digital packet switching / time slicing a long time ago, they've been "cramming in conversations" a lot longer. Methinks these people are winging for the sake of it. In my day we were down the mine at six, AND we were grateful.
Slashdot Mirror
And this has come to pass. Apple good, Microsoft bad. Linux better! Nice and easy to remember I suppose.
And a word on the M$ DRM...don't panic. M$ have millions of mobile devices out there already on three separate OS platforms; Windows Mobile 2002/2003, and Windows Mobile 5. Each of these operating systems ships with Windows Media Player as standard, and can play wma/wmv files. HOWEVER, and this is a BIG however; it doesn't work with the Windows Media DRM. Not even in the slightest. If it has DRM of any form it won't play. Anyone marketing WMA media for mobile devices is targeting a tiny marketplace. And they aren't all that popular as a platform anyway, compared to other popular phone product lines. This future DRM-ed device is in a market that is a subset of a subset.
So, I wouldn't worry about MS owning the mobile media space any time soon.
And are you going to show these people how to do that? Many of whom think the blue e is "the internet"? I'm not being insulting here, but buring 50+ disks of CD-Rs then re-encoding to transfer a music library is well beyond most people. We'd script it some way I'm sure, for them it's a manual process if they even realise it's possible.
I still can't believe iTunes fans use this as a retort for the interoperability issues. It's not a managable solution. I've got 80 gig of mp3s here, some 400+ disks I would estimate. With a ten minute cycle, thats 66 hours of continuous burning/ripping. And your standing there with a straight face suggesting this as an option? Maybe 20 disks or less at a push, but who has only 20 cds? And why do they have iPods if they do? ;-)
Where did I argue that AAC 128kbps files sounded especially good?
That wasn't my point. What I was trying to get across is that once you have media on a particular format, that media will influence your next purchase. It's probably the biggest feature in that aspect.
People who had 8-track libraries stuck with the technology as long as they could. Apple are going to do very out of this, and it's not accidental.
Of course, that has nothing to do with the fact that the iPod is the only player that will touch the media they have bought. By that logic, 8-tracks are the peak of audio fidelity, as those with a large library of 8-track media continue with "repeat sales". :-)
This consistency has allowed Apple to increase the rate of repeat sales and take advantage of trendiness - but it's ridiculous to discount the iPod's other advantages and write the success of Apple's products off as a 2-year-long mega-fad driven by clever marketing alone.
Sure, I'd agree with that. It is a beautiful device. The UI is easy to use. But it's not for me. I'd rather have a more functional UI, at the expense of ease of use. There's a number of other features that it doesn't have that put me off, but now is not the time to go into them.
But it was mostly driven via a very successful ad campaign. It was a good campaign, very memorable. The number of parodies is testament to that. The fact that to most consumers mp3==iPod speaks volumes. They simply weren't aware of the alternatives.
That's my experience. Both parties need a headset or even an old fashioned handset to prevent this feedback. Otherwise it's unusable.
Yawn, have you been under a rock for a year or two? ;-) Cellphones with WiFi and Skype are old news, I've personally had one for 18 months.
What is needed to "make it work" is the equivalent of push-email, but for VoIP. You can't keep a mobile device turned on an listening all day without tying it to the wall with a power cable.
Em, no. Apple did a better marketing job. The people don't want DRM, they don't want iTunes upgrades removing features. They do want to pay an extra 25% just to have the white headphones and look trendy.
The iPod was not sold on it's technical merits.
it's not clear that the 80% of the .mp3 player market buying iPods would have bought any other kind of music player.
IMHO, most would not have have. They would have never heard of the new portable devices had Apple not marketed them. These people are not reading slashdot or engadget.
And Java trounces most of them. You can get OSS libraries for just about anything you'd ever need to interface with.
Are you trolling? ;-) For me, it was the number of syntax gotchas that pissed me off. You'd have to think about variable declaration formats, what's that all about? Plus, IMHO, it's a very ugly language. Don't get me wrong, the conditional structures have a lovely retro charm, but it doesn't cut the mustard now. Using For/Next/Step makes you yearn for "Goto".
I suggest you pick up a history book and start reading about these "Americans". They did the exact same with British (and other) IP during their fledling years. China is no different, they are just a century or two behind.
Pot. Kettle. Black. The Ruskies got the first orbit, first satellite, the first lifeform in space, the first human in space and the first space dock between two vehicles. Then a couple of years later the US combines all of these and puts a man on the moon. I call shenanegins!!
Please please please stop perpetuating that lie. Especially if the results of it are ticking you off.
Never have the terrorists said they want to remove your freedom. Consistently they have said they want your country to stop meddling in theirs. That's all their is to it, and it's not in our leaders interests for us to realise that.
Who needs RFID?? You have a cell phone, right?
However, when thousands of people die in an attack on our soil, people want something done.
At least 32,000 civilians have been proven beyond all doubt to have died due to that "something done" in Iraq. What is fair retaliation I wonder? Or are their lives worth less than ours?
It's interesting, especially given recent "doomsday laws"* passed recently by the US Government
* it was surprisingly hard to find any link to this in the mainstream press. I had hoped to link a CNN article or similar, but google just wasn't helping me. You can make up your own mind on the non-reporting of this major law change, but IMHO it simply backs up the point of this story. People just aren't bothered.
A friend of mine, a bit of a tinfoil hat person (but not a geek) maintains that this is already the case and that most US presidents of the past 100 years or so are all in some way related to each other. Is there any truth to this, or is it as far fetched as it sounds?
Part of the problem is that our history teaches us constently about how perfect our government is (and was) and leaves people with a complete and utter trust of the current government. People seem to forget that dice have no memory and that a good foundation can easily be brought down by all that is built on top of it.
Despite Bush and Blair's lies, attacking our personal freedom was never their objective. They really don't give a shit what we do in our own countries. Their stated aim is to stop us meddling in theirs and with that objective they have completely and utterly failed. We meddle more now. The UK got it's first Islamic attack ever after joining in on Iraq, again the bombers stated their reasons and again it was censored from our media. I'm not feeling any safer now, are you?
According to the article linked, it sounds more like a software problem in bootcamp. Repartitioning is always risky, on any platform.
Show me a system where I can connect Apple mail to a Linux server and have it sync to a Microsoft phone. Then I'll be impressed. Otherwise, it's just Apple software talking to Apple software, no better than anything MS has put out.
And as the other poster said, VNC can be faster in many situations.
Not neccessarilly. WEP isn't all that bad if you update your firmware and change keys periodically. The updated firmwares avoid the weak keys that lead to the vunerability.
MAC filtering is pointless with encyption. Faking a MAC is childs play, all you'd need to do is break the encryption and sniff for a MAC address that was allowed. MAC filtering is only useful when you don't want encryption at all but still want some kind of rudamentary access control. Easilly broken by someone who wants it enough, but OK to keep the casual drive-bys away.
It's not more secure at all. By allowing new services to listen on publicly accessible ports it is impossible to be more secure. You can only increase security by taking away services. By definition, adding more is adding vunerabilites.
If SSH is your first line and you use tunnels to get at everything else, no one can access your resources without breaking the SSH security. You could say that the "all your eggs in one basket" approach is normally wrong, but in security it's the opposite. You only need one hole to get in. Make only one way in and make sure it's as secure as you can get it.
Your idea of using SSL wrapped connections, in this case with VNC, is precisely the thing that this vunerablity would exploit. The exploit is an issue in the authentication. I'm going to stick with SSH's well known, tested and peer reviewed authentication methods for now.
By the way, my VNC password is usually "password". If you are connecting behind my firewall, my security is already broken.
While I'm more familiar with the UK credit report companies (who do yours as well), I think that many people misunderstand how the scoring works.
As I understand it, there is no such thing as a credit score. You have a credit report that lists all the credit you (and your dependant family) have ever had. In this report it marks the dates and loan amounts, with repayment details. Depending on the company, this looks something like "0, 1-2, 3-4, default", each with their own int value. Each month a payment hits the account (even if it's the minimum on a Visa and you haven't borrowed any more), the bin it goes into increments by one. So, by just not being late ever, you get "points" or more accurately: the lack of negative points. The numbers refer to how late the payment was (months), with default being a default on the entire loan. The report also carries "current balance" entries, but no spending history.
When a lender accesses your credit report, they add these details up using their own custom formula. This cuts down fraud as people can't milk the system too much (security thru obscurity). It also allows companies to focus on different markets; some low interest ones only lend to the most reliable, while other high-interest (rip-off) companies don't mind the risk of those who are late from time to time. I've got a few lates on one of my credit card, just through a manual payment system and lazyness, and they've never posed a problem
Personally, I got screwed over with incorrect data several years ago, and I had to sort it out and learn something in the process.
The $30k car is likely to be in better condition, will have a resale value, and loan is less likely to be abandoned.
Also, should you default the loan company take ownership of the car, which holds it's value better. This is why it's real easy to get a $100,000 mortgage on a $200,000 house. Default and the bank keep the lot with quite a large profit, easily offseting the cost of foreclosure.
I find what you say there interesting. I've used vi then Netbeans in the early days, and Eclipse exclusively for the past two. Recently I had to pick up Visual Studio 2005 to do some .dot and VB hacking of some existing code we had in the office.
I was not impressed. It completely lacks features that I use almost every five minutes in Eclipse. Refactoring mainly; it lacks the ability to move/rename classes and make those changes for you in all references. The debugging wasn't as intuative as, nor did it seem as well featured. Little things, like the display window where you can execute code at debug runtime, just aren't there. I use the code-generation in Eclipse quite a lot; auto-creation of constructors, methods, assignments of parameters to fields and so on. It sounds cumbersome at first, but once you know the shortcuts you can spin off classes at crazy speeds. Visual Studio just didn't seem to have any of that. It was like a merge of notepad, a compiler and a debugger and that's yer lot.
Little things as well, Eclipse has great intergration with javadoc. VS had some docs, but they were harder to find and less detailed.
Maybe it was my lack of experience with the VS platform, but in all honesty I could not wait to get back into the Java world and Eclipse.
When I used to import DVDs (for personal viewing, not trade), I avoided companies like FedEx because of this. You were guaranteed getting hit with import taxes every time.
The idea that they would work together to slow down shipments is a bit unlikely, though perhaps they would only use it with packages coming from monitored sources as opposed to random checks.
Whoever said that must have NEVER used an analogue cell phone. It's no better than AM radio and the signal fades in and out as you move around coverage. Hop in your time machine and go back to the early 90s if you don't believe me. I got one of the first GSM phones and it was WAY better than any analogue device.
And land lines went to digital packet switching / time slicing a long time ago, they've been "cramming in conversations" a lot longer. Methinks these people are winging for the sake of it. In my day we were down the mine at six, AND we were grateful.