Apple (Read Jobs and handlers) left out lynx, Opera, FF, tinybrowser, etc out of the presentation because the end result would have looked much more visually confusing that they wanted, IMO.
TFS/TFA make a critical logical error. They state that nothing Jobs does in these presentations is accidental, because we all know how meticulously planned they are. Therefore, if nothing is accidental, then the omission must be a sign of Apple's malevolence toward open source. QED!
Bullshit. The graph doesn't necessarily 'betray the way Apple looks at the world', it betrays they way apple wants the shareholders, newspapermen and fans to look at the world. Their ongoing conceit (diff than deceit) has always (From the late 90's on) been, we are competing against this giant monopoly, here we are, the valiant underdogs. True or not, this is the image (RDF) that has been provided. Apple's recent success may cause people to forget this, to assume that the marketing message is different now. An assumtpion like that would have to come butressed with facts, not shoddy logic.
Does this mean that Apples wants to make nie with open source, or acknowledge the contributions of open source, etc? Of course not. But that doesn't mean that a graph is really a coded browser battle plan to get rid of FF. Apple would be perfectly happy competing for a plurality in browser market share, especially if it meant that users would/could be intimately familiar w/ the iphone interface out of the gate.
Most of the keyboards out there are cheap enough that you'll spend a good deal of time reattaching keys to them after you've dug them out of the bottom of the dishwasher. SOME of the keyboards will be onhappy that you've soaked the solid state bits in detergent and hot tap water (basically) and refuse to work afterwards, but this should occur more with older keyboards than with newer ones. Some of the newer keyboards just encase the electonics in a plastisol (ish) blister like calculators. You can eventually corrode contacts and damage other parts, but you aren't going to unseat socketed chips.
The short answer is probably not. Don't fall for the GIGANTIC CAN OF SPECIAL COMPUTER COMPRESSED AIR, or the computer wipes and that garbage. Take regular rubbing alcohol, cut it by half (so 1/4 cup rubbing alcohol, 1/2 cup water). Get a lint free cloth (not a paper towel or a rag)--lens cleaning towels from camera shops work great, and are reusable. Then remove the keys and wipe down the accesible parts.
The rubbing alcohol will evaporate quickly, and you just wipe up the very small amounts of water left.
Alternately, you can buy Flexible Keyboard, but it isn't as cool as you would hope it is.
Gpl3 is divisive, but correct in this case. Companies like Tivo benefit from the OSS model of tinker/hack/remake and still restrict users in doing the same. The same privileges that are extended to end users with the source code should be established with the freedom to tinker.
If Tivo feels that DRM is worth more than continued use of GPL software, so be it.
Reviewers are just like political parties, insofar as they help distill a vast amount of information in order to allow us to actually make some decisions. The point of political parties isn't to provide perfect information to the voter, the point is to allow the voter to reduce the complexities of the ballot when necessary.
Before you guys get out of hand in the comments, by that I mean that it is functionally impossible for us as voters (in any country) to vet EVERYONE, from the county clerk to the State Senator (Okay, sorry, I don't have a region agnostic example, deal). We may decide on the president based on our input from non-party sources, but the other 18 names on the ballot don't rise to the same threshold. Parties allow us to make an assumption that a representative will align to the basic ideas that we are interested in.
Reviewers serve the same function. I may decide that I 'trust' a particular game or movie reviewer. As a result, I can presume that his/her views on a game are a good proxy for my own. This allows me to narrow the field of games I might be interested in without covering every demo, every press release, and every industry whisper--not to mention playing the game. In this sense, reviewers are even more necessary, because in order for me to make an adequate decision about a game in the absence of press, I would have to play it (or a demo, but even that isn't perfectly enlightening, see Lost Planet). That, of course, would obviate the need for the review.
In this case, just like political parties, we learn to accept bias in our reviewers. In most cases, the biases are benign--we share them. We like that Rogert Ebert doesn't like M. Night Shyamalan, because we don't (obviously only speaking for some of us). We like that the Onion (and pretty much everyone else) hates Uwe Boll, because we hate him. The same thing with the Democratic and Republican (insert Labour/conservative, etc) parties. We accept their biases (when we do) because we share them to some extent.
The case of bias in favor of a game publisher is a little more insidious, and is something that the game press will have to work out, and I suspect that it won't work itself out by eliminating the review. I suspect that certain reviewers (Ars, to name one) will gain greater acceptance as the rest of them keep shilling for bullshit. The same thing happened to the Democrats in the South. The south changed (beyond racism/segreation, which really only explain the first 10-15 years of that seismic shift), becoming more religious, individualistic and pro-business and the Democrats didn't adapt, so the south moved on to the republicans.
All of these were the 'next' newton at one point or another. I can't stress enough, that apple has a habit of picking markets where the higher price point is not well established and dominating that sector. Simply opining that because the iPhone will cost a significant amount more than a vanilla cell phone as an alternative, therefore it will be rejected by the populace is ahistorical and ridiculous. The iPhone is not going to cure cancer, it is not going to revolutionize the cell phone market, but I will be the farm that it will sell 10M units within a year, at least.
The armchair economists hard at work here seem to forget that apple (until recently) has made a business of selling branded, exclusive products at a hefty premium. To own a mac you had to be willing to part with more than a few hundred extra dollars, but for whatever reason, it was worth it. Whatever that reason may be: actual performance gains, better UI, susceptability to the RDF, who cares. It doesn't matter if 10M customers take leave of their senses and buy a 600 dollar phone with a cingular contract because of apple branding and market power or if they do so because it is a fundamentally better option. Either way, we are looking at a repeat of apple's succesful past history.
The Navy can afford to keep a carrier at sea and can claim high reliability with regard to the engine room because they have TWO reactors, not because they have nuclear power. I agree with you that the economics of nuclear power tend to lean toward larger ships allowing for reactors while smaller ships don't necessitate it, but the reliability factor isn't there because of nuclear power.
A carrier battle group consists of the carrier, destroyers, two submarines, a cruiser and support ships (Oilers, etc). Only the carrier and the submarines are nuclear powered. If the carrier wants to stay at sea indefinetly, it is afforded that opportunity by the support ships, not the nuclear reactor. Remember that a carrier still carries hundreds of thousands of gallons of JP-5 for aircraft, and that Gas Turbine engines could burn JP-5 just as easily (the navy runs everything it can on JP-5 just to standardize the supply line). The refueling process that occurs can and is done at sea regularly.
Eh. The reasons for dropping nuclear powered surface ships were that the regulatory and maintenance costs didn't justify the independence that nuclear fuel offered. Also, in the wake of TMI, cruisers like the Long Beach found fewer and fewer foreign ports willing to invite them.
The Navy keeps nuclear power on submarines because the air independence is too valuable (notwithstanding the nuke/diesel arguments) and on carriers because it makes for a ready source of steam (think catapults), hot water, etc.
Power required in electrical form was never really an issue. Modern gas turbines can produce power more quickly and in a denser fashion (think fuel + turbine + cables vs a whole steam engine room) than naval nuclear reactors.
Unless they decide on HUGE engine rooms and prioritize power use, i wouldn't see nuclear powered sruface ships coming back.
this is an issue that simply must not be decided by the people whom it has been entrusted to. In this case, the vested interests that will lobby congress, pay for legal teams, and write friend of the court briefs are not the whisleblowers and the security researchers. There are HUGE industries where the economic incentive is to ignore problems, rely on obscurity for security, and prosecute those who would expose vulnerabilities.
Each time an exploit comes out, the pattern is the same. the company doesn't announce it, anti-virus makers are either paid off (as in 'approved' spyware and/or rootkits) or not kept informed, and once the story breaks, the public relations machine starts. The researcher is vilified as a hacker, the problem is denied or minimized, and the prospect of a patch is left moot because this would require accepting that a huge problem exists. Most of us scream that this is ridiculous, companies should tell everyone when an exploit shows up, and patch it as soon as possible. More to the point, they should expose their source code to scrutiny in order to better provide services to their customers.
Are you sitting down? good. They won't and they don't care. The first rule in the PR handbook is to deny and put off realization. If the big front is that there isn't a problem, or that a crack of a voting machine can only be done in a lab, and months down the road, the company quietly sues the researcher or releases a patch, they win. People have a limited attention span and fatigue quickly in the face of fear and hysteria. As long as your company's admission of guilt comes well after the original problem, or not at all, people are happy.
With this in mind, let's look at the law. thankfully, whistleblowers have some protection, and some internal voices about code might not be silenced, especially if the review takes place within the judicial system, and not through a new law. Of course, corporate secrecy, as in the case of Apple and HP, is pretty extreme, and most employees wouldn't risk the civil consequences of voicing a problem that doesn't rise to the level of a public safety hazard.
Outside researchers are in more and more trouble, and this really only leads to problems for the customer base as a whole. We rely on sites like MOAB to shame companies into action. We also rely on OSS competition in order to make products like IE better--Firefox gives an economic incentive to Microsoft to improve their product, otherwise, security development would have languished.
Very few analogues exist in the places where this is critically important: commercial and banking software. CITIbank suffers a classbreak and doesn't bother informing their customers. Security conscious customers can voice their discontent and move to another bank, but we have to trust that the new bank is as averse to security breaches as we are. For the rest of the millions of customers, security will not improve. Since identity theft costs are largely borne by the customers, the banks don't care. because the banks don't care, it is much easier, and better in their eyes, to make publishing voulnerabilities like this one illegal and trust that their customers will never be the wiser.
As much as I hate to say it, the casting will probably be terrible. It's a SCI-FI channel miniseries, so they've almost completely threatened it with irrelavence. I'm not saying it needs to be a movie (it's a little too long and/or anti-climactic for that), but the record of the sci-fi channel is not that sterling. I appreciate when that accept orphaned shows from other networks, but thier original miniseries are normally plagued by production issues, terrible direction, and bad casting.
The Diamond Age deserves a careful treatment, eager to blend ractive fiction with the world, but soft on glossy CGI and eye-candy. I'm afraid it won't quite get it here.
how does limiting sale to the developing world prevent abuse? Do the contracts associated with the laptops prevent arbitrage (resale)? Is there any enforcement mechanism that you can think of that would ensure this, even if they did?
Pound for pound, these probably aren't worth it (even without the buy 2 get one 1) to purchase and use as a network of computers to defraud people. Much easier just to buy used, steal via bots, or spoof ips for that.
How does selling to the developed world (in terms of security only) do anything but expose OLPC to to rigorous security attention from a comunity that is interested and commited?
More to the point, freedom does prevent abuse. Transparency is the key here. Those computers will get hacked if they are insecure, no doubt about it. Whether they get hacked by people intent on exploring or exploiting is up to the OLPC makers.
Why can we not solve any of the other problems in the third world for fear of dependency, but it is okay for us to give them education? In this case, are we creating a dependency on teachers (as in the Peace Corps), or teaching supplies (as in OLPC)?
Second, why is education the only solution to the world's problems?
This is an important assertion if it is true, but you haven't made any statement of fact telling me why it is. Education is unimportant if heavy metal contamination lowers retention abilities, raises child mortality, etc, for a small environmental example. Even more directly, if the kleptocratic governments depend upon stealing resources, killing people and repressing freedom, then what does education bring to the mix? I'm not suggesting that education is worthless, or that, all things being equal, it isn't better to have more rather than less. What i am suggesting is that the notion of establishing the primacy and efficacy of granting eduction is flawed.
On a very cynical note, education is one of the hardest of services to deliver, and is impacted my multisystem flaws and problems, so claiming that education is the key may be a way to forestall admission of failure. As long as education isn't there, then shipments of food might go uneaten, or what have you. I'm not that cynical, but I'll leave it to the conspiracy theorists.
The "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" argument doesn't hold a lot of water either. In order for that to work, we've got to waive public health issues, financing issues, security, etc. There are a host of third party problems that individual people are faced with that are in extremis in the third world. These are not issues that are solved by good ole' stick-to-it-ive-ness. These are issues that are solved by revamping public health, moving government out of the business of thievery and providing for security.
There is a big difference, as certain rules in Adblock will cause it to freeze or load pages slowly. Adblock plus works a little faster, but has the downside of not being as well coupled with filterset.G. Try switching to AdblockPlus and see if that does anything.
Exactly. The key complaint about the iPod was that it was too expensive. That no one would buy one when they could have a Creative r579X250 or whatever instead. i'm amazed that these complaints KEEP showing up. Apple is in the business of selling people hardware/software combos at a premium. it is WHAT THEY DO. The powerbook and ibook lines were both much more expensive than the direct competition, but they sold poorly when the software/hardware mix was diluted or uncompelling (early/mid nineties) and exceptionally well when the mix was more distinct
The iPhone will be the same way. This isn't apple fanboyism, this is grudging respect. look at the iPod. look at the cheif complaints about mobile phones in general. Not the slashdot complaints, but the complaints among the predominance of users.
1. Poor UI
2. Poor or shoddy design.
3. inability to use features on the phone, or limitations on the interoperability of those features.
Apple fixes these problems for a living. They fix them and then establish the solution at a high pricepoint, and people pay for it. No. it's not going to be unlocked, it's not going to run linux, it's probably only going to support limited software development, if any at all. But people will buy it, at least 10 million people, if not more.
I figure the same arguments are going to be dredged up about how Disney can't succeed in the MMO field:
1. The market is too crowded.
2. Disney won't make a successful MMO until the master "X" esoteric element of the genre (e.g. economy, novel server design, etc.)
3. It won't work because Disney is for kids, and so on.
The real limitations here aren't those above, and they aren't the story, exactly. The pretense of strong and powerful game world characters can do serious damage to an MMO where the "story", or whatever you might want to call the pretense for interaction, is based on a number of roughly equally powerful customers. if the universe permits power held by a single person to affect others disproportionately, then you will find it is very difficult to manage. SWG failed for this reason, the world was replete with common interactions with chracters who were only common in the universe of film and movies because of necessity--the only reason we followed R2-D2 and C3PO in the movies were because they were witness to events of great gravity. If they were just droids, they would make for a boring narrative. MMO's provide just the opposite. No one is the hero of the game, the game is in interaction and struggle by everyone. The whole notion of persistence on a world shows that one character CANNOt be the hero of his own story.
As for the three arguments presented above, they are all silly:
1. WoW came along when the market for MMO's was saturated with hundreds of thousands of EQ, AO, and DAOC customers. Before EQ, there were claims that UO customers could not be lured away. When it premiered, there were dozens of other 3D MMO's in development or released that were clamoring for marketshare. There is some truth to the notion that the market is squeezed more tightly now than in 2001, but the dymanics are the same. The presense of a crowded market does not always eliminate the prospect of success.
2. The "silver bullet" argument is one deployed most often by armchair MMO developers. Pick a facet of an MMO that most annoys/interests you and declare that without the perfection of this facet, that MMO is doomed. The dictum is as useless as it is arbitrary. UO had a non-functioning economy and still attracted and kept a huge player base, even in the face of EQ. EQ lacked PvP in any real sense and was derided for this but still managed to become wildly succesful. The real trick to success is that there isn't one trick. It helps to have great IP, recognizable to casual gamers and MMO players (WoW). It helps to have an innovative world (Eve). It helps to be first--or close enough (EQ). It also helps to be lucky. That is a huge factor in this industry but goes unsaid because no analyst would keep his job if he told the newspapers that X company cornered the widget market through sheer chance
3. Disney's IP. Microsoft loved to deride nintendo as being for aged 6-18, and the XBOX for more mature gamers--the logic goes that everyone gets older, and "we'll just take them when they turn 18." Oops. Turns out that Nintendo is microsoft's serious rival in the console world and that cartoons and adolescent friendly characters have some traction. look at the sales for kingdom hearts, for Zelda (even Windwaker). Nintendo and Disney know what the ciggarette companies have always known. Hook them when they are young, and they'll stick around for the rest of their lives. Don't count Disney out here.
So don't look at the standard reasons for rejection! Think about the problem and the real troubles will appear soon enough.
This isn't necessarily off-topic, although it would benefit from an explanation that the new acronym used in the article and the story may be confused by those in the weapons industry for something else....for about 5 seconds.
At what point is it too much to bear the oblique references (well, not that oblique) to cookies, diets, etc? I know kitchy metaphors are the stock in trade (there's another one) of the lazy newspaperman, but it's aggrivating that the online world bear so many more of them.
Information superhighway, chip on his shoulder, etc.
One of the problems with using humans is that they are expensive--the other is that they become bored easily. It isn't like the defense establishment isn't using human translators, the NSA is the largest employer of translators in the world. They use humans in every listening post out there, but for the same reasons that humans make lousy airport security sceeners, they make poor translators AND intelligence analylists.
This isn't saying that machine translators are a panacea, but they can solve a small section of the problem that we have been trying to solve with a very human capital intensive solution for years now.
No, this is the guy who donated enough money to have a tenured position named after him. The real prevailing factors here are money and some sufficient amount of respectability--Oxford wasn't waiting around for Ghandi, but the chair wasn't to be named after Pauli Shore.
Simply adding up Gateway's 7800 some-odd PC's across the nation doesn't explain the whole problem. The issues of network hierarchy, bottlenecks and multi-processor computing are legion, especially across the nation. Setting up a program like seti@home or folding@home would be feasable, but describing storefront PC's as one supercomputer is erroneous.
that is unless they want to set up a FNN (remember KLAT 2?) all the way across the country... YIKES.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple (Read Jobs and handlers) left out lynx, Opera, FF, tinybrowser, etc out of the presentation because the end result would have looked much more visually confusing that they wanted, IMO.
TFS/TFA make a critical logical error. They state that nothing Jobs does in these presentations is accidental, because we all know how meticulously planned they are. Therefore, if nothing is accidental, then the omission must be a sign of Apple's malevolence toward open source. QED!
Bullshit. The graph doesn't necessarily 'betray the way Apple looks at the world', it betrays they way apple wants the shareholders, newspapermen and fans to look at the world. Their ongoing conceit (diff than deceit) has always (From the late 90's on) been, we are competing against this giant monopoly, here we are, the valiant underdogs. True or not, this is the image (RDF) that has been provided. Apple's recent success may cause people to forget this, to assume that the marketing message is different now. An assumtpion like that would have to come butressed with facts, not shoddy logic.
Does this mean that Apples wants to make nie with open source, or acknowledge the contributions of open source, etc? Of course not. But that doesn't mean that a graph is really a coded browser battle plan to get rid of FF. Apple would be perfectly happy competing for a plurality in browser market share, especially if it meant that users would/could be intimately familiar w/ the iphone interface out of the gate.
Haha. Yup. Proportions are my friend.
Most of the keyboards out there are cheap enough that you'll spend a good deal of time reattaching keys to them after you've dug them out of the bottom of the dishwasher. SOME of the keyboards will be onhappy that you've soaked the solid state bits in detergent and hot tap water (basically) and refuse to work afterwards, but this should occur more with older keyboards than with newer ones. Some of the newer keyboards just encase the electonics in a plastisol (ish) blister like calculators. You can eventually corrode contacts and damage other parts, but you aren't going to unseat socketed chips.
The short answer is probably not. Don't fall for the GIGANTIC CAN OF SPECIAL COMPUTER COMPRESSED AIR, or the computer wipes and that garbage. Take regular rubbing alcohol, cut it by half (so 1/4 cup rubbing alcohol, 1/2 cup water). Get a lint free cloth (not a paper towel or a rag)--lens cleaning towels from camera shops work great, and are reusable. Then remove the keys and wipe down the accesible parts.
The rubbing alcohol will evaporate quickly, and you just wipe up the very small amounts of water left.
Alternately, you can buy Flexible Keyboard, but it isn't as cool as you would hope it is.
Gpl3 is divisive, but correct in this case. Companies like Tivo benefit from the OSS model of tinker/hack/remake and still restrict users in doing the same. The same privileges that are extended to end users with the source code should be established with the freedom to tinker.
If Tivo feels that DRM is worth more than continued use of GPL software, so be it.
Reviewers are just like political parties, insofar as they help distill a vast amount of information in order to allow us to actually make some decisions. The point of political parties isn't to provide perfect information to the voter, the point is to allow the voter to reduce the complexities of the ballot when necessary.
Before you guys get out of hand in the comments, by that I mean that it is functionally impossible for us as voters (in any country) to vet EVERYONE, from the county clerk to the State Senator (Okay, sorry, I don't have a region agnostic example, deal). We may decide on the president based on our input from non-party sources, but the other 18 names on the ballot don't rise to the same threshold. Parties allow us to make an assumption that a representative will align to the basic ideas that we are interested in.
Reviewers serve the same function. I may decide that I 'trust' a particular game or movie reviewer. As a result, I can presume that his/her views on a game are a good proxy for my own. This allows me to narrow the field of games I might be interested in without covering every demo, every press release, and every industry whisper--not to mention playing the game. In this sense, reviewers are even more necessary, because in order for me to make an adequate decision about a game in the absence of press, I would have to play it (or a demo, but even that isn't perfectly enlightening, see Lost Planet). That, of course, would obviate the need for the review.
In this case, just like political parties, we learn to accept bias in our reviewers. In most cases, the biases are benign--we share them. We like that Rogert Ebert doesn't like M. Night Shyamalan, because we don't (obviously only speaking for some of us). We like that the Onion (and pretty much everyone else) hates Uwe Boll, because we hate him. The same thing with the Democratic and Republican (insert Labour/conservative, etc) parties. We accept their biases (when we do) because we share them to some extent.
The case of bias in favor of a game publisher is a little more insidious, and is something that the game press will have to work out, and I suspect that it won't work itself out by eliminating the review. I suspect that certain reviewers (Ars, to name one) will gain greater acceptance as the rest of them keep shilling for bullshit. The same thing happened to the Democrats in the South. The south changed (beyond racism/segreation, which really only explain the first 10-15 years of that seismic shift), becoming more religious, individualistic and pro-business and the Democrats didn't adapt, so the south moved on to the republicans.
Chorizo is Spanish for Sausage. It's a bit like saying Veal Marsala.
All of these were the 'next' newton at one point or another. I can't stress enough, that apple has a habit of picking markets where the higher price point is not well established and dominating that sector. Simply opining that because the iPhone will cost a significant amount more than a vanilla cell phone as an alternative, therefore it will be rejected by the populace is ahistorical and ridiculous. The iPhone is not going to cure cancer, it is not going to revolutionize the cell phone market, but I will be the farm that it will sell 10M units within a year, at least.
The armchair economists hard at work here seem to forget that apple (until recently) has made a business of selling branded, exclusive products at a hefty premium. To own a mac you had to be willing to part with more than a few hundred extra dollars, but for whatever reason, it was worth it. Whatever that reason may be: actual performance gains, better UI, susceptability to the RDF, who cares. It doesn't matter if 10M customers take leave of their senses and buy a 600 dollar phone with a cingular contract because of apple branding and market power or if they do so because it is a fundamentally better option. Either way, we are looking at a repeat of apple's succesful past history.
A carrier battle group consists of the carrier, destroyers, two submarines, a cruiser and support ships (Oilers, etc). Only the carrier and the submarines are nuclear powered. If the carrier wants to stay at sea indefinetly, it is afforded that opportunity by the support ships, not the nuclear reactor. Remember that a carrier still carries hundreds of thousands of gallons of JP-5 for aircraft, and that Gas Turbine engines could burn JP-5 just as easily (the navy runs everything it can on JP-5 just to standardize the supply line). The refueling process that occurs can and is done at sea regularly.
you're right, it should have been the damned enterprise.
Also, the catapult technology is moving to magnetically coupled catapults, rather than steam driven.
Eh. The reasons for dropping nuclear powered surface ships were that the regulatory and maintenance costs didn't justify the independence that nuclear fuel offered. Also, in the wake of TMI, cruisers like the Long Beach found fewer and fewer foreign ports willing to invite them.
The Navy keeps nuclear power on submarines because the air independence is too valuable (notwithstanding the nuke/diesel arguments) and on carriers because it makes for a ready source of steam (think catapults), hot water, etc.
Power required in electrical form was never really an issue. Modern gas turbines can produce power more quickly and in a denser fashion (think fuel + turbine + cables vs a whole steam engine room) than naval nuclear reactors.
Unless they decide on HUGE engine rooms and prioritize power use, i wouldn't see nuclear powered sruface ships coming back.
Each time an exploit comes out, the pattern is the same. the company doesn't announce it, anti-virus makers are either paid off (as in 'approved' spyware and/or rootkits) or not kept informed, and once the story breaks, the public relations machine starts. The researcher is vilified as a hacker, the problem is denied or minimized, and the prospect of a patch is left moot because this would require accepting that a huge problem exists. Most of us scream that this is ridiculous, companies should tell everyone when an exploit shows up, and patch it as soon as possible. More to the point, they should expose their source code to scrutiny in order to better provide services to their customers.
Are you sitting down? good. They won't and they don't care. The first rule in the PR handbook is to deny and put off realization. If the big front is that there isn't a problem, or that a crack of a voting machine can only be done in a lab, and months down the road, the company quietly sues the researcher or releases a patch, they win. People have a limited attention span and fatigue quickly in the face of fear and hysteria. As long as your company's admission of guilt comes well after the original problem, or not at all, people are happy.
With this in mind, let's look at the law. thankfully, whistleblowers have some protection, and some internal voices about code might not be silenced, especially if the review takes place within the judicial system, and not through a new law. Of course, corporate secrecy, as in the case of Apple and HP, is pretty extreme, and most employees wouldn't risk the civil consequences of voicing a problem that doesn't rise to the level of a public safety hazard.
Outside researchers are in more and more trouble, and this really only leads to problems for the customer base as a whole. We rely on sites like MOAB to shame companies into action. We also rely on OSS competition in order to make products like IE better--Firefox gives an economic incentive to Microsoft to improve their product, otherwise, security development would have languished.
Very few analogues exist in the places where this is critically important: commercial and banking software. CITIbank suffers a classbreak and doesn't bother informing their customers. Security conscious customers can voice their discontent and move to another bank, but we have to trust that the new bank is as averse to security breaches as we are. For the rest of the millions of customers, security will not improve. Since identity theft costs are largely borne by the customers, the banks don't care. because the banks don't care, it is much easier, and better in their eyes, to make publishing voulnerabilities like this one illegal and trust that their customers will never be the wiser.
check out this article:
[PDF] Why information security is hard
As much as I hate to say it, the casting will probably be terrible. It's a SCI-FI channel miniseries, so they've almost completely threatened it with irrelavence. I'm not saying it needs to be a movie (it's a little too long and/or anti-climactic for that), but the record of the sci-fi channel is not that sterling. I appreciate when that accept orphaned shows from other networks, but thier original miniseries are normally plagued by production issues, terrible direction, and bad casting.
The Diamond Age deserves a careful treatment, eager to blend ractive fiction with the world, but soft on glossy CGI and eye-candy. I'm afraid it won't quite get it here.
how does limiting sale to the developing world prevent abuse? Do the contracts associated with the laptops prevent arbitrage (resale)? Is there any enforcement mechanism that you can think of that would ensure this, even if they did?
Pound for pound, these probably aren't worth it (even without the buy 2 get one 1) to purchase and use as a network of computers to defraud people. Much easier just to buy used, steal via bots, or spoof ips for that.
How does selling to the developed world (in terms of security only) do anything but expose OLPC to to rigorous security attention from a comunity that is interested and commited?
More to the point, freedom does prevent abuse. Transparency is the key here. Those computers will get hacked if they are insecure, no doubt about it. Whether they get hacked by people intent on exploring or exploiting is up to the OLPC makers.
Why is education singled out here?
Why can we not solve any of the other problems in the third world for fear of dependency, but it is okay for us to give them education? In this case, are we creating a dependency on teachers (as in the Peace Corps), or teaching supplies (as in OLPC)?
Second, why is education the only solution to the world's problems?
This is an important assertion if it is true, but you haven't made any statement of fact telling me why it is. Education is unimportant if heavy metal contamination lowers retention abilities, raises child mortality, etc, for a small environmental example. Even more directly, if the kleptocratic governments depend upon stealing resources, killing people and repressing freedom, then what does education bring to the mix? I'm not suggesting that education is worthless, or that, all things being equal, it isn't better to have more rather than less. What i am suggesting is that the notion of establishing the primacy and efficacy of granting eduction is flawed.
On a very cynical note, education is one of the hardest of services to deliver, and is impacted my multisystem flaws and problems, so claiming that education is the key may be a way to forestall admission of failure. As long as education isn't there, then shipments of food might go uneaten, or what have you. I'm not that cynical, but I'll leave it to the conspiracy theorists.
The "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" argument doesn't hold a lot of water either. In order for that to work, we've got to waive public health issues, financing issues, security, etc. There are a host of third party problems that individual people are faced with that are in extremis in the third world. These are not issues that are solved by good ole' stick-to-it-ive-ness. These are issues that are solved by revamping public health, moving government out of the business of thievery and providing for security.
There is a big difference, as certain rules in Adblock will cause it to freeze or load pages slowly. Adblock plus works a little faster, but has the downside of not being as well coupled with filterset.G. Try switching to AdblockPlus and see if that does anything.
Or....just get gmail?
Exactly. The key complaint about the iPod was that it was too expensive. That no one would buy one when they could have a Creative r579X250 or whatever instead. i'm amazed that these complaints KEEP showing up. Apple is in the business of selling people hardware/software combos at a premium. it is WHAT THEY DO. The powerbook and ibook lines were both much more expensive than the direct competition, but they sold poorly when the software/hardware mix was diluted or uncompelling (early/mid nineties) and exceptionally well when the mix was more distinct
The iPhone will be the same way. This isn't apple fanboyism, this is grudging respect. look at the iPod. look at the cheif complaints about mobile phones in general. Not the slashdot complaints, but the complaints among the predominance of users.
1. Poor UI
2. Poor or shoddy design.
3. inability to use features on the phone, or limitations on the interoperability of those features.
Apple fixes these problems for a living. They fix them and then establish the solution at a high pricepoint, and people pay for it. No. it's not going to be unlocked, it's not going to run linux, it's probably only going to support limited software development, if any at all. But people will buy it, at least 10 million people, if not more.
This is an excellent point.
I figure the same arguments are going to be dredged up about how Disney can't succeed in the MMO field:
1. The market is too crowded.
2. Disney won't make a successful MMO until the master "X" esoteric element of the genre (e.g. economy, novel server design, etc.)
3. It won't work because Disney is for kids, and so on.
The real limitations here aren't those above, and they aren't the story, exactly. The pretense of strong and powerful game world characters can do serious damage to an MMO where the "story", or whatever you might want to call the pretense for interaction, is based on a number of roughly equally powerful customers. if the universe permits power held by a single person to affect others disproportionately, then you will find it is very difficult to manage. SWG failed for this reason, the world was replete with common interactions with chracters who were only common in the universe of film and movies because of necessity--the only reason we followed R2-D2 and C3PO in the movies were because they were witness to events of great gravity. If they were just droids, they would make for a boring narrative. MMO's provide just the opposite. No one is the hero of the game, the game is in interaction and struggle by everyone. The whole notion of persistence on a world shows that one character CANNOt be the hero of his own story.
As for the three arguments presented above, they are all silly:
1. WoW came along when the market for MMO's was saturated with hundreds of thousands of EQ, AO, and DAOC customers. Before EQ, there were claims that UO customers could not be lured away. When it premiered, there were dozens of other 3D MMO's in development or released that were clamoring for marketshare. There is some truth to the notion that the market is squeezed more tightly now than in 2001, but the dymanics are the same. The presense of a crowded market does not always eliminate the prospect of success.
2. The "silver bullet" argument is one deployed most often by armchair MMO developers. Pick a facet of an MMO that most annoys/interests you and declare that without the perfection of this facet, that MMO is doomed. The dictum is as useless as it is arbitrary. UO had a non-functioning economy and still attracted and kept a huge player base, even in the face of EQ. EQ lacked PvP in any real sense and was derided for this but still managed to become wildly succesful. The real trick to success is that there isn't one trick. It helps to have great IP, recognizable to casual gamers and MMO players (WoW). It helps to have an innovative world (Eve). It helps to be first--or close enough (EQ). It also helps to be lucky. That is a huge factor in this industry but goes unsaid because no analyst would keep his job if he told the newspapers that X company cornered the widget market through sheer chance
3. Disney's IP. Microsoft loved to deride nintendo as being for aged 6-18, and the XBOX for more mature gamers--the logic goes that everyone gets older, and "we'll just take them when they turn 18." Oops. Turns out that Nintendo is microsoft's serious rival in the console world and that cartoons and adolescent friendly characters have some traction. look at the sales for kingdom hearts, for Zelda (even Windwaker). Nintendo and Disney know what the ciggarette companies have always known. Hook them when they are young, and they'll stick around for the rest of their lives. Don't count Disney out here.
So don't look at the standard reasons for rejection! Think about the problem and the real troubles will appear soon enough.
This isn't necessarily off-topic, although it would benefit from an explanation that the new acronym used in the article and the story may be confused by those in the weapons industry for something else....for about 5 seconds.
That sorta sounds like coverage to me...
At what point is it too much to bear the oblique references (well, not that oblique) to cookies, diets, etc? I know kitchy metaphors are the stock in trade (there's another one) of the lazy newspaperman, but it's aggrivating that the online world bear so many more of them.
Information superhighway, chip on his shoulder, etc.
argh
One of the problems with using humans is that they are expensive--the other is that they become bored easily. It isn't like the defense establishment isn't using human translators, the NSA is the largest employer of translators in the world. They use humans in every listening post out there, but for the same reasons that humans make lousy airport security sceeners, they make poor translators AND intelligence analylists. This isn't saying that machine translators are a panacea, but they can solve a small section of the problem that we have been trying to solve with a very human capital intensive solution for years now.
No, this is the guy who donated enough money to have a tenured position named after him. The real prevailing factors here are money and some sufficient amount of respectability--Oxford wasn't waiting around for Ghandi, but the chair wasn't to be named after Pauli Shore.
Simply adding up Gateway's 7800 some-odd PC's across the nation doesn't explain the whole problem. The issues of network hierarchy, bottlenecks and multi-processor computing are legion, especially across the nation. Setting up a program like seti@home or folding@home would be feasable, but describing storefront PC's as one supercomputer is erroneous.
that is unless they want to set up a FNN (remember KLAT 2?) all the way across the country... YIKES.