All things GNU are going GPLv3, as is Samba. That's a pretty big and influential body of code, and it hasn't been established under the new license for very long. I'd give it time and I think you'll find version 2 will become more of a minority license. It could take years, and it will never be 100%, but I'd hardly call it a rift.
I'm sure Steve Ballmer discussed this with Rupert Murdoch over drinks.
"So how are profits from your MySpace purchase, Rupe?"
"Oh, well..." said Murdoch, looking nervous. "Actually, great. Great! It's going to be worth billions real soon now." He laughed icily at his own irony.
"Really? Because we were thinking of buying a stake in Facebook at Microsoft."
"Oh, you should totally do it," said Murdoch, grinning wildly.
"Yeah, we thought the developers would love using it on a sort-of group connection to MSDN."
"Do it! There's nowhere for these social sites to go but up."
"And we're thinking of extending the Welcome to the Social campaign to include it."
But Murdoch was laughing to hard to hear the rest.
Yes, I think in the case of the BBC site if I were to bookmark the resultant page I'd be able to find it directly again. The BlackBerry provides a list of recently-entered URLs and "news.bbc.co.uk" is still there from when it used to work. Yes, their page might be noticing the BlackBerry in the UserAgent string where they wouldn't have noticed your device - or maybe your bookmark helps.
BlackBerrys use a lot less bandwidth than standard POP3 or IMAP (or HTTP) connections, which is one of the things people like about them. There are advantages and disadvantages, but generally I like the service (and the device).
A host of services have sprung up that allow two sites -- one for mobile users, one for PC users -- to coexist at the same URL, with the browser's user agent string distinguishing between the two.
Don't I know it. I use a BlackBerry to surf the web most mornings on the train, and I see these all the time. I've learned to avoid some links specifically because I don't want to waste my time trying to navigate a crappy mobile version of a site. For example, I no longer click on any Reuters or USA Today news links on Slashdot or Digg, because rather serve me the article I asked for, these sites entirely ignore the URL I sent it and drop me on their mobile page, from which (I guess) I'm expected to navigate to the thing I originally wanted. Unfortunately the mobile page contains links to news categories and a list of the most popular stories, and it's usually impossible to find the one I wanted. Many news sites use similar services. The big provider seems to be Crisp Wireless, which proudly announces its responsibility for this crapiness at the bottom of each mobile page.
My newest pet peeve is the BBC News site. If I type "news.bbc.co.uk" in my desktop browser I get the BBC News page. But on my BlackBerry the site ignores the URL and "helpfully" redirects me to a page where I can select whether I want their Mobile or Desktop edition. It's nice that I at least get an option, but it adds a page load to the process of simply reading the news. And when I select the Desktop link they send me to the main BBC site, not the News site, so I get to make a third page load when I click on the News link to visit the page I originally requested about a minute ago.
How are these mobile sites supposed to help us again?
"... when Bill Gates became the (richest), most aspirational, coolest guy in the world."
Even if you really like Bill Gates, that's a pretty bold statement. I certainly don't mean to disparage the guy, but I don't think he's the coolest guy in the world. There is no objective metric for such a position, and if you look at it relatively it still makes no sense. Cooler than James Dean? Cooler than Martin Luther King? Laurence Fishburne? Ridley Scott? Name a few thousand more well-known personalities and they're probably "cooler" than Bill, who isn't noteworthy for being cool, but rather for being rich, philanthropic and rather clever.
I really appreciate that he admits he was wrong, and admits it in writing.
But I have to wonder: How many of you really got a kick out of Fake Steve and started reading it regularly? And how many stopped going there as frequently when you found out it was written by Lyons? And how many of you read TFA and kind of feel like Fake Steve deserves a second chance...?
Very true, there are some benefits. The main people it sucks for are people who need to spend money from a USD account overseas (as in your imports example). I know this because I live in the UK, where the dollar hit half a pound a few months ago (it used to be £1.65 when I first started traveling to the UK - oh how things have changed). Spending dollars here is not recommended if you can avoid it.
Of course while this affects Americans who want to travel or live abroad, it makes tourism to America a lot cheaper. So if you don't mind waiting in abysmal lines to be fingerprinted and harassed by the DHS, seeing the Grand Canyon and going on shopping sprees just got cheaper. That could be a nice side benefit for the US.
Lots of Mac and Linux users are going to be disappointed.
On the contrary: lots of Mac, Linux and Windows users were using Bittorrent anyway, and NBC is encouraging this approach by tightening the clamps, so it actually sounds like this will result in more satisfied pirates than ever before.
The only disappointed people will be those who insist on doing things legally, but fortunately for the pirate world the industry has been trying to punish loyal customers for years. In this new punishment users are being restricted to a single platform, made to watch ads despite having paid for the content, and will have the content 'expire' after a few days. Sounds like anyone posting a comment on this site is more qualified to run a profitable digital television distribution system than these clowns.
Yes, I was thinking about the fragility of the cables, but for internal components like a desktop hard disk it wouldn't matter all that much. Maybe in five years we'll be buying desktops with a terabyte of storage spread across USB 3 solid state hard disks in RAID 5. That would be fun.
Interesting. That should put the last nail into Firewire's coffin (and FW 800's). I wonder if we'll see USB 3.0 eat into SATA's market with internal USB3 drives on desktop and laptop machines. That could make desktops cheaper - ditching the IDE/SATA controller means one less component.
Forget TFA. All you need to know to write a gut-reaction reply is contained in the wonderful phrase 'annihilation gamma ray laser.' Let's start: Have scientists gone too far? Could this be used as a weapon? Could it fall into the wrong hands? React away.:-)
If you don't want to RTFA about the presentation app, the example presentation is still reasonably worth checking out. It's impressively like viewing a PowerPoint doc in a browser. The ability to easily publish on the web like this is kinda neat, and the source code of the presentation is surprisingly tidy.
Notepad comes with Windows, so it's as much a part of the OS as, say, Kate or Gedit is a part of a common Linux distribution (in other words, you're right or wrong depending upon who you ask). Fair point about Outlook. I'll make up for it:
Why doesn't Windows copy my files in alphabetical order so I can easily resume manually if I need to cancel? Why are all of the default settings (e.g., the Start menu's Personalized menus, or Explorer's tendency to hide files) so brain-dead? Why doesn't Windows come with any decent software? Considering that it doesn't come with any decent software, why is it so big? Why does it still rely upon file extensions to determine file types (OS X and Linux have been using meta data for years). And finally, why does the Desktop take so long to load after logging in? I don't have that problem when I use OS X or Linux machines.
My point is that Windows is not ready for the desktop on as many criteria as Linux is not ready. But Windows has advantages that mitigate this - and that's part of the reason it takes so long for Microsoft to improve it.
Linux is really awesome for certain uses, but it lacks the fit and polish of an OS that's had hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on smoothing out rough edges and strongarming hardware makers.
The sad thing is that Linux has been "almost there" for years
I call bullshit. You can say the same exact things about Windows. No, seriously. Why does the copy dialog simply fail midway through a multi-gigabyte file copy operation, yet not allow me to skip the single problematic file and move on? Why is network browsing so slow, and why do all my Explorer windows go into synchronized convulsions while I'm doing it? Why does the command line suck? Why does Notepad still delete the entire rest of a line when I Ctrl-Del, and why does it still only support one Undo level? Why does Outlook freeze its entire UI when I click on a link in an e-mail? Windows has been behind OS X and Linux for years, rather than the other way around, depending on which annoyances you decide to complain about. There's plenty in every OS. Linux is not less ready than Windows.
The real reason Windows remains successful is compatibility with existing Win32 software, the OEM supply chain, FUD, and sheer momentum. The "not ready" song and dance is disconnected from reality, and hasn't described the real situation for the past four or five years.
I was really into these books for a few years, dutifully buying each new book in hardcover. I'd say it was great up until around book seven. The world was extremely well realized and Jordan left tantalizing clues as to what the world's past was like through the world's present cultures. So much history had been lost that there were deep mysteries Jordan kept hinting at. People had theories about the mythology, almost like people get obsessed about shows like Lost today (my take was always that the series took place in the distant future, and that the Age of Legends in the mythical past was actually our own high-tech utopian future). The series remained relatively consistent and culturally fascinating for many books, offering many revelations as Jordan peeled away the layers of the world one by one. At the culmination of one of the books a group of rebels finally laid siege to the corrupt Tar Valon, the Aes Sedai city...
... and then the books suddenly collapsed. In the very next one, where you'd expect a battle to ensue, nothing happened. The rebel Aes Sedai waited around in their camp while laying siege to the city. And did the same in the next book. And the next one. After years of seeing major events unfold in each tome, suddenly Jordan became obsessed with the minutiae of minor characters he'd introduced relatively recently, while ignoring progress on the major events. And then he prolonged the agony by writing a prequel to the first book instead of another book in the series, and I gave up.
I feel terribly that he died and wish the best for those who survived him, but I hope they leave this unfinished and just publish his notes or something to let us know what he was getting at all those years.
Let me get this straight by paraphrasing: Column databases are the wave of the future, says a column database distributor on his new column database blog. And Red Hat would recommend you run your new column database on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, perhaps? I wonder what brand of kit Dell would recommend I run RHEL on...
Wow, a hardware producer is opening up the specs of their graphics chips. There's a longtime gripe solved. Tomorrow on Slashdot...
... same thing, but for NVidia. ... same thing, but for all wireless chipsets. ... the RIAA will give up on lawsuits and DRM, realizing that both are ultimately ineffective and bad for their business, and promote a prepaid, peer-to-peer approach to music distribution. They will also rename themselves the Recording Industry Cartel of America. ... President Bush will sign the Software Patent Invalidation Act, which will have cruised through the House, Senate, and Ways and Means Committee overnight, effectively ending patent protection for software ideas. A small town in Texas will immediately go bankrupt. ... Having signed the act and finding nothing else important to do, the president will resign. ... Microsoft will cave in and adopt ODF for Word. Features in OOXML that they want to keep will be carefully documented and formally submitted for inclusion in the ODF 2.0 standard.
NetApp's legal attack against Sun's open source ZFS solution which is freely available in the marketplace is a clear indication that NetApp considers Sun technology a threat, and is a direct attack on the open source community. ZFS is the fastest growing storage virtualization technology in the marketplace, and NetApp's attempt to use patent litigation to inhibit the meteoric rise of open source technologies like ZFS is tantamount to being unhappy with gravity. As Sun knows well, and NetApps' customers obviously recognize, innovation works better than litigation.
Many of the claims raised in the lawsuit are factually untrue. For example, it was NetApp who first approached Sun seeking to acquire the Sun patents NetApp is now attempting to invalidate. It is unfortunate that NetApp has now resorted to resolving its business issues in a legal jurisdiction (East Texas) long favored by 'patent trolls.'
Bottom line, Sun indemnifies its customers, and stands behind the innovations we deliver to the marketplace.
So the summary so far is the following:
NetApp: Sun is a patent troll. They struck first and we had to respond. Sun: NetApp is the real patent troll. They struck first and we had to respond. Also, they are stinking liars.
At least one of these companies must be lying, so I'd expect the list of claims to be augmented with a defamation claim of some kind, by one or both parties.
Hey, I don't know if anyone else has mentioned this but the title actually says "on" Windows, rather than "in" it. Just in case no one else replies to tell you.:)
His points are good, and they underscore why I rarely use the latest web apps, but nevertheless am amused by them (Flash-based image editing online!). Still, while we should show his level of skepticism toward many of these apps, the fact is that network-based app delivery still has many advantages. The main one is that you can update software for all your users in one place, and not care as much about the state of the client machines. As a recent Mac convert you'd think Dvorak would particularly like this, since he can do the same things as a web client on a Mac as on Windows or Linux.
Despite the stupidity of some online apps, I can think of a lot of examples of software I would definitely rather have on the web - e-mail (think Gmail or other webmail, which almost everyone uses to some extent), a trouble ticketing system for a helpdesk, a custom database used within a company (most of these are centralized), etc. Onlime apps particularly make sense where the data is centralized as well. That's worth emphasizing: Google Docs and Spreadsheets may be nifty, as well as cheaper than MS Office, but they won't catch on until people see the value in storing the actual files centrally as well, just as they store e-mail centrally when using a service like Hotmail.
Sorry, I'm originally from the United States and am therefore confused by this article. It looks a bit like the government in the UK has opted for a well-reasoned, balanced public policy rather than simply doing what a couple large industry cartels were asking them to. How exactly did this happen? Were any campaign donations (or, failing that, bribes) made to members of Parliament by the recording and film industries? I'm trying to figure out what went wrong but TFA doesn't give any details.
I'm not entirely sure it is the site's responsibility. Or rather, who you choose to blame depends a great deal on how much you value your passwords. This warning inherent in this vulnerability isn't really intended for webmasters, but rather for browser users. And even if as a browser user you think you're safe, keep in mind that sites get hacked. Even if you trust a site, anyone who hacks it can start harvesting login credentials. Scary.
You're telling me - rants drive me absolutely nuts, especially on this site. They don't make good reading, they pointlessly waste your time, and they use up valuable screen real estate that could be occupied by other, more interesting stories. The methodology behind rants us usually utterly broken but, for reasons unclear to anyone, are regarded as 'postable material' on all too many sites. I mean, let's not draw the line at Slashdot. Rants show up on:
Slashdot
Digg
Kuro5hin
Wired
People's stupid blogs
... and like a zillion other sites I have to put up with.
That we obviously need to abandon rants is clear, because they're almost always pointless, but there are so many of them these days that it gets to the point where the only metric you're using to compare sites is the quality of its rants. This is entirely flawed and meaningless, and leaves me wanting a stiff drink. Still, don't get me started on their frequency on/. You're all Slashdot readers, most of you just go ahead and prove my point anyway.
So say you go to some random site and end up reading a rant. What have you learned. After you close your browser, are you any more complete as a person? Have you grown intellectually. Let me think: no... no. I'm not some some expert on rants and why I'm writing about them is very confusing, but I think I have as much to say about the dumb things as anyone. And if that bothers people, at least I got the point across.
Here's the problem: rants don't work. If you RTFA, and start with a place I'm very familiar with (namely Slashdot) like a quarter of you write rants anyway. And that's not even talking about the fact that any rant, and not all posts are rants, is going to take up people's time and not get modded very well anyway. How many Slashdot readers would mod a rant up? You either? Big surprise. Because of who we are, and what it is, our population will self select out of consideration.
Did you know rants can get posted by ANYONE? How about Anonymous Cowards? Now personally I'm glad of that, free speech and all. But anyway, those are my (heavily edited) thoughts on this.
Slashdot Mirror
All things GNU are going GPLv3, as is Samba. That's a pretty big and influential body of code, and it hasn't been established under the new license for very long. I'd give it time and I think you'll find version 2 will become more of a minority license. It could take years, and it will never be 100%, but I'd hardly call it a rift.
I'm sure Steve Ballmer discussed this with Rupert Murdoch over drinks.
"So how are profits from your MySpace purchase, Rupe?"
"Oh, well ..." said Murdoch, looking nervous. "Actually, great. Great! It's going to be worth billions real soon now." He laughed icily at his own irony.
"Really? Because we were thinking of buying a stake in Facebook at Microsoft."
"Oh, you should totally do it," said Murdoch, grinning wildly.
"Yeah, we thought the developers would love using it on a sort-of group connection to MSDN."
"Do it! There's nowhere for these social sites to go but up."
"And we're thinking of extending the Welcome to the Social campaign to include it."
But Murdoch was laughing to hard to hear the rest.
Yes, I think in the case of the BBC site if I were to bookmark the resultant page I'd be able to find it directly again. The BlackBerry provides a list of recently-entered URLs and "news.bbc.co.uk" is still there from when it used to work. Yes, their page might be noticing the BlackBerry in the UserAgent string where they wouldn't have noticed your device - or maybe your bookmark helps.
BlackBerrys use a lot less bandwidth than standard POP3 or IMAP (or HTTP) connections, which is one of the things people like about them. There are advantages and disadvantages, but generally I like the service (and the device).
Don't I know it. I use a BlackBerry to surf the web most mornings on the train, and I see these all the time. I've learned to avoid some links specifically because I don't want to waste my time trying to navigate a crappy mobile version of a site. For example, I no longer click on any Reuters or USA Today news links on Slashdot or Digg, because rather serve me the article I asked for, these sites entirely ignore the URL I sent it and drop me on their mobile page, from which (I guess) I'm expected to navigate to the thing I originally wanted. Unfortunately the mobile page contains links to news categories and a list of the most popular stories, and it's usually impossible to find the one I wanted. Many news sites use similar services. The big provider seems to be Crisp Wireless, which proudly announces its responsibility for this crapiness at the bottom of each mobile page.
My newest pet peeve is the BBC News site. If I type "news.bbc.co.uk" in my desktop browser I get the BBC News page. But on my BlackBerry the site ignores the URL and "helpfully" redirects me to a page where I can select whether I want their Mobile or Desktop edition. It's nice that I at least get an option, but it adds a page load to the process of simply reading the news. And when I select the Desktop link they send me to the main BBC site, not the News site, so I get to make a third page load when I click on the News link to visit the page I originally requested about a minute ago.
How are these mobile sites supposed to help us again?
Even if you really like Bill Gates, that's a pretty bold statement. I certainly don't mean to disparage the guy, but I don't think he's the coolest guy in the world. There is no objective metric for such a position, and if you look at it relatively it still makes no sense. Cooler than James Dean? Cooler than Martin Luther King? Laurence Fishburne? Ridley Scott? Name a few thousand more well-known personalities and they're probably "cooler" than Bill, who isn't noteworthy for being cool, but rather for being rich, philanthropic and rather clever.
I really appreciate that he admits he was wrong, and admits it in writing.
But I have to wonder: How many of you really got a kick out of Fake Steve and started reading it regularly? And how many stopped going there as frequently when you found out it was written by Lyons? And how many of you read TFA and kind of feel like Fake Steve deserves a second chance ...?
Very true, there are some benefits. The main people it sucks for are people who need to spend money from a USD account overseas (as in your imports example). I know this because I live in the UK, where the dollar hit half a pound a few months ago (it used to be £1.65 when I first started traveling to the UK - oh how things have changed). Spending dollars here is not recommended if you can avoid it.
Of course while this affects Americans who want to travel or live abroad, it makes tourism to America a lot cheaper. So if you don't mind waiting in abysmal lines to be fingerprinted and harassed by the DHS, seeing the Grand Canyon and going on shopping sprees just got cheaper. That could be a nice side benefit for the US.
On the contrary: lots of Mac, Linux and Windows users were using Bittorrent anyway, and NBC is encouraging this approach by tightening the clamps, so it actually sounds like this will result in more satisfied pirates than ever before.
The only disappointed people will be those who insist on doing things legally, but fortunately for the pirate world the industry has been trying to punish loyal customers for years. In this new punishment users are being restricted to a single platform, made to watch ads despite having paid for the content, and will have the content 'expire' after a few days. Sounds like anyone posting a comment on this site is more qualified to run a profitable digital television distribution system than these clowns.
Yes, I was thinking about the fragility of the cables, but for internal components like a desktop hard disk it wouldn't matter all that much. Maybe in five years we'll be buying desktops with a terabyte of storage spread across USB 3 solid state hard disks in RAID 5. That would be fun.
Interesting. That should put the last nail into Firewire's coffin (and FW 800's). I wonder if we'll see USB 3.0 eat into SATA's market with internal USB3 drives on desktop and laptop machines. That could make desktops cheaper - ditching the IDE/SATA controller means one less component.
Forget TFA. All you need to know to write a gut-reaction reply is contained in the wonderful phrase 'annihilation gamma ray laser.' Let's start: Have scientists gone too far? Could this be used as a weapon? Could it fall into the wrong hands? React away. :-)
If you don't want to RTFA about the presentation app, the example presentation is still reasonably worth checking out. It's impressively like viewing a PowerPoint doc in a browser. The ability to easily publish on the web like this is kinda neat, and the source code of the presentation is surprisingly tidy.
Notepad comes with Windows, so it's as much a part of the OS as, say, Kate or Gedit is a part of a common Linux distribution (in other words, you're right or wrong depending upon who you ask). Fair point about Outlook. I'll make up for it:
Why doesn't Windows copy my files in alphabetical order so I can easily resume manually if I need to cancel? Why are all of the default settings (e.g., the Start menu's Personalized menus, or Explorer's tendency to hide files) so brain-dead? Why doesn't Windows come with any decent software? Considering that it doesn't come with any decent software, why is it so big? Why does it still rely upon file extensions to determine file types (OS X and Linux have been using meta data for years). And finally, why does the Desktop take so long to load after logging in? I don't have that problem when I use OS X or Linux machines.
My point is that Windows is not ready for the desktop on as many criteria as Linux is not ready. But Windows has advantages that mitigate this - and that's part of the reason it takes so long for Microsoft to improve it.
I call bullshit. You can say the same exact things about Windows. No, seriously. Why does the copy dialog simply fail midway through a multi-gigabyte file copy operation, yet not allow me to skip the single problematic file and move on? Why is network browsing so slow, and why do all my Explorer windows go into synchronized convulsions while I'm doing it? Why does the command line suck? Why does Notepad still delete the entire rest of a line when I Ctrl-Del, and why does it still only support one Undo level? Why does Outlook freeze its entire UI when I click on a link in an e-mail? Windows has been behind OS X and Linux for years, rather than the other way around, depending on which annoyances you decide to complain about. There's plenty in every OS. Linux is not less ready than Windows.
The real reason Windows remains successful is compatibility with existing Win32 software, the OEM supply chain, FUD, and sheer momentum. The "not ready" song and dance is disconnected from reality, and hasn't described the real situation for the past four or five years.
I was really into these books for a few years, dutifully buying each new book in hardcover. I'd say it was great up until around book seven. The world was extremely well realized and Jordan left tantalizing clues as to what the world's past was like through the world's present cultures. So much history had been lost that there were deep mysteries Jordan kept hinting at. People had theories about the mythology, almost like people get obsessed about shows like Lost today (my take was always that the series took place in the distant future, and that the Age of Legends in the mythical past was actually our own high-tech utopian future). The series remained relatively consistent and culturally fascinating for many books, offering many revelations as Jordan peeled away the layers of the world one by one. At the culmination of one of the books a group of rebels finally laid siege to the corrupt Tar Valon, the Aes Sedai city ...
... and then the books suddenly collapsed. In the very next one, where you'd expect a battle to ensue, nothing happened. The rebel Aes Sedai waited around in their camp while laying siege to the city. And did the same in the next book. And the next one. After years of seeing major events unfold in each tome, suddenly Jordan became obsessed with the minutiae of minor characters he'd introduced relatively recently, while ignoring progress on the major events. And then he prolonged the agony by writing a prequel to the first book instead of another book in the series, and I gave up.
I feel terribly that he died and wish the best for those who survived him, but I hope they leave this unfinished and just publish his notes or something to let us know what he was getting at all those years.
Let me get this straight by paraphrasing: Column databases are the wave of the future, says a column database distributor on his new column database blog. And Red Hat would recommend you run your new column database on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, perhaps? I wonder what brand of kit Dell would recommend I run RHEL on ...
Good point. I guess there is no such crime as Blog Perjury.
Wow, a hardware producer is opening up the specs of their graphics chips. There's a longtime gripe solved. Tomorrow on Slashdot ...
... same thing, but for NVidia.
... same thing, but for all wireless chipsets.
... the RIAA will give up on lawsuits and DRM, realizing that both are ultimately ineffective and bad for their business, and promote a prepaid, peer-to-peer approach to music distribution. They will also rename themselves the Recording Industry Cartel of America.
... President Bush will sign the Software Patent Invalidation Act, which will have cruised through the House, Senate, and Ways and Means Committee overnight, effectively ending patent protection for software ideas. A small town in Texas will immediately go bankrupt.
... Having signed the act and finding nothing else important to do, the president will resign.
... Microsoft will cave in and adopt ODF for Word. Features in OOXML that they want to keep will be carefully documented and formally submitted for inclusion in the ODF 2.0 standard.
Sun's reply, from the article in The Register:
So the summary so far is the following:
NetApp: Sun is a patent troll. They struck first and we had to respond.
Sun: NetApp is the real patent troll. They struck first and we had to respond. Also, they are stinking liars.
At least one of these companies must be lying, so I'd expect the list of claims to be augmented with a defamation claim of some kind, by one or both parties.
Hey, I don't know if anyone else has mentioned this but the title actually says "on" Windows, rather than "in" it. Just in case no one else replies to tell you. :)
His points are good, and they underscore why I rarely use the latest web apps, but nevertheless am amused by them (Flash-based image editing online!). Still, while we should show his level of skepticism toward many of these apps, the fact is that network-based app delivery still has many advantages. The main one is that you can update software for all your users in one place, and not care as much about the state of the client machines. As a recent Mac convert you'd think Dvorak would particularly like this, since he can do the same things as a web client on a Mac as on Windows or Linux.
Despite the stupidity of some online apps, I can think of a lot of examples of software I would definitely rather have on the web - e-mail (think Gmail or other webmail, which almost everyone uses to some extent), a trouble ticketing system for a helpdesk, a custom database used within a company (most of these are centralized), etc. Onlime apps particularly make sense where the data is centralized as well. That's worth emphasizing: Google Docs and Spreadsheets may be nifty, as well as cheaper than MS Office, but they won't catch on until people see the value in storing the actual files centrally as well, just as they store e-mail centrally when using a service like Hotmail.
You've had trouble installing Flash huh? Have you tried the instructions in this video?
Sorry, I'm originally from the United States and am therefore confused by this article. It looks a bit like the government in the UK has opted for a well-reasoned, balanced public policy rather than simply doing what a couple large industry cartels were asking them to. How exactly did this happen? Were any campaign donations (or, failing that, bribes) made to members of Parliament by the recording and film industries? I'm trying to figure out what went wrong but TFA doesn't give any details.
I'm not entirely sure it is the site's responsibility. Or rather, who you choose to blame depends a great deal on how much you value your passwords. This warning inherent in this vulnerability isn't really intended for webmasters, but rather for browser users. And even if as a browser user you think you're safe, keep in mind that sites get hacked. Even if you trust a site, anyone who hacks it can start harvesting login credentials. Scary.
You're telling me - rants drive me absolutely nuts, especially on this site. They don't make good reading, they pointlessly waste your time, and they use up valuable screen real estate that could be occupied by other, more interesting stories. The methodology behind rants us usually utterly broken but, for reasons unclear to anyone, are regarded as 'postable material' on all too many sites. I mean, let's not draw the line at Slashdot. Rants show up on:
That we obviously need to abandon rants is clear, because they're almost always pointless, but there are so many of them these days that it gets to the point where the only metric you're using to compare sites is the quality of its rants. This is entirely flawed and meaningless, and leaves me wanting a stiff drink. Still, don't get me started on their frequency on /. You're all Slashdot readers, most of you just go ahead and prove my point anyway.
So say you go to some random site and end up reading a rant. What have you learned. After you close your browser, are you any more complete as a person? Have you grown intellectually. Let me think: no ... no. I'm not some some expert on rants and why I'm writing about them is very confusing, but I think I have as much to say about the dumb things as anyone. And if that bothers people, at least I got the point across.
Here's the problem: rants don't work. If you RTFA, and start with a place I'm very familiar with (namely Slashdot) like a quarter of you write rants anyway. And that's not even talking about the fact that any rant, and not all posts are rants, is going to take up people's time and not get modded very well anyway. How many Slashdot readers would mod a rant up? You either? Big surprise. Because of who we are, and what it is, our population will self select out of consideration.
Did you know rants can get posted by ANYONE? How about Anonymous Cowards? Now personally I'm glad of that, free speech and all. But anyway, those are my (heavily edited) thoughts on this.