Give FB users the option of paying 1 dollar per month (okay...99 cents) for the service. Offer premium options.
Lord know they have plenty of well paid staff on board to build the option.
Roll experimental services (that annoy people) out to all non-paying members, explain that they can avoid all such issues by paying the nominal fee. The 12.00 per year will give you some form of SLA and a requirement by FB to conform to some other norm. Paying clients will appreciate the extra voice they have, because they are paying customers.
if FB fails to comply, they've set the paid service bar high enough that other services will start charging, making other options viable.
If you pay for your data, you can also truly "own" it, and likely pay for the option to dump it all and move on.
Oh, and FB could well raise another 100-200 million a year this way, which gives a potential IPO some heft.
I'm paying decent monthly fees to several services now. I prefer to pay for my social networks now that I've experienced the underbelly of free service SLAs.
They actually do that now. It's called a fecal transplant and it helps people recover from massive intestinal infections where subsequent antibiotic routines have wiped out all the good flora/bacteria. Sounds weird but true!
I'm not sure what you mean by "basic functionality".
My iPhone isn't broken and I have tethering enabled. Sounds like your problem is with AT&T. I'm in Canada under Fido/Rogers so YMMV.
With "both" companies my tethering is enabled with a quick call. My provider asserts that my data plan must be 1 GB or higher, but this is largely to protect me from ignorantly going over my data plan usage allowances. I go to my settings and turn on tethering. There is no step three;)
As for "applications that Apple doesn't [sic] like", you must mean malware, trojans, and data theft mechanisms. If you want to run those by all means do so. You could save yourself some trouble and just write your date of birth and credit card numbers on a placard and hang that around your neck when you head to the mall.
I think everyone missed my point. The internet as a whole is being attacked by systems loosely guarded by their owners due to onerous and obtuse support requirements and maintenance routines. The fact that there is even an antivirus industry speaks volumes about where we are now.
Windows PC make up the bulk, if not all of all botnets (please cite for me any unix/linus/macos x desktop botnet that's been discovered that isn't just focused on weak LAMP setups)
In the "developing" world we might see corruption that is culturally endemic, such as when a police oficer takes a bribe for processing a complaint, or a train conductor taking a bribe for helping you get to your destination. Yet we pay a stipend to a windows desktop software industry that by all accounts would almost disappear tomorrow if everyone switched en masses to Unix, Linux, or OS X...even temporarily. We pay off an entire sector that by all rights should be working towards its own demise as soon as possible. That it's not working to it's demise, but growing, tells me that we need to inoculate the internet, not just locally treat the infections. I am speaking of general user desktop security here, not firewalls and banking systems or high stakes e-commerce or government portals.
That's why I think the solution proposed, while draconian, in ways does make sense. That my comment is modded troll, so that we can cite the one-in-a-million windows users who succeed in locking down their setup without A/V tells us again that there is a problem. For expert users windows is as fine as any other OS. I don't suspect that it makes sense anymore to say to people that they are just idiots because they don't know how to run windows update, but then do NOTHING to stop the problem by letting them back online.
Yes there would be widespread unemployment, but we could get back to work as *use* the internet. if we could lose the 90+ % of email traffic devoted to spam derived from botnets what else could we do with those savings?
I dunno...it's a dumb idea, yes, but all the others ain't working.
Oddly enough that's close enough to a decent solution to work.
How about we START with that, and work our way back to allowing pre-vetted workstations back onto the interwebs. I like the idea of running a simple system checking script though a web browser based internet portal the same way you must login to a hotspot to gain access to the internet.
Make that kind of access a precondition for users who were deemed to be hosting malware/bots and go from there. Once confirmed as clean the portal requirement disappears. The portal software will have to be hosted by a non-profit with government oversight for obvious reasons.
Of course I'm OK if that software isn't particularly Mac compatible;)
They are not warrantied if you have to crack the case to service them, and Apple hasn't come up to snuff with data recovery options if a TC fails entirely.
So if, say, files are deleted from the TC that you need back you must take the HD out to access the files natively - poof, your warranty is void. Deleting files from a local volume puts the files in the trash. Deleting them from a networked location deletes them right away. You must be bale to access the Hard Disk from time to time as a matter of course.
I find this combo works best:
1 x Apple Airport extreme 1 x USB powered hub n x external USB Drive cases + high quality SATA drives (choose how many you need). I have one running for my wife's macBook, and use an internal 1TB drive for my Mac Pro. I can add as many extra USB drives to that Airport Extreme any time I like...2, 3 TB if I like. So form time to time I can take a Time Machine back up offline and toss it on the shelf for the yearly protected backup in case the live backup dies for any reason.
TC does not give you that flexibillity and couple that with Apple's lack of support for failed TC's other than to wholly replace them - what about your data! God forbid your laptop/desktop AND the TC die the same time...I've been through it once with a client and Apple's Genius bar staff did not handle it well in my mind.
I remember putting forward a thesis in an old GIS class that was a bit too grand for the time I was able to spend flwshing out the particulars, but it was essentially to start creating a map layer for the North America (yes Canada and Mexico too, cuz pollution travels no?) that we could then query for whole categories of pollutants and land use restrictions. One purpose was to make the data saleable to insurance industry for rate adjustments (yes they screw people over for where they live, but they pay good money for the data too), and have publicly available data to show what kinds of pollution was airborne vs ground-situated...accounting for such things as subsurface hydrogeology etc, etc...lots of fun to be had!
But seriously, these days, with PlaceBase being bought up by Apple, wouldn't it be nice to have a single large repository of data that federal/state/provincial/Municipal agencies could use to scope out where the next location would be for that great Green project that keeps running into NIMBY restraints?
I find that that data is well guarded when it makes no sense to do anything but open it up, let the public know what's in the ground and in the air...and to move on to either fixing it up or using the areas for other projects.
In our environment, a large government shop, our data volumes are capped at around 1 TB of storage for that very reason. Between the SAN, and the tape backups...they just simply have to create a physical cutoff point for data storage due to those onerous recovery periods.
There is nothing wrong in our shop with having TWO 1 TB volumes, but you will never get approved to have one single 2TB. Problem solved...at least for file storage. Database backups are managed via other mechanisms like replication.
I find it's the other way around for me. One reason: VM usage. I can trick out my machine with as much RAM as I need in order to run the various Virtual Machine scenarios I am working with...Windows 2008 AD setup tests, Visual Studio compatibility testing etc. I have 8GB of Ram and can go up to 32 GB if I like. We can't even use that much on our test builds of Windows at work unless we go Win Server. Keep in mind I'm trying to stay with desktop OSs
The one machine is so productive for me now, that I've just packed up four windows PCs and a Compaq Server (pre-HP, yes old) with an external drive tower and gave it all away. I have so much shelf space left now that I don't need to keep a lab around. I would have done the same with a windows box doing VM work...but quite frankly there were limitations in performance when using more than four VMs on anything other than a bare bones Windows Server setup. I'm a windows systems admin in a large windows shop by day, so there's no fanboy to yell at.
Another perspective might be that Mac users are connoisseurs of the the OS, preferring to taste multiple experiences, and are far more proficient at the tools unique to each platform, whereas pure windows users are, well unilingual.
Unless of course it turns out that many of them actually start lots of large companies that employ lots and lots of people. Nah...I guess that never happens eh?
Here's a nice link that easily explains how immigrants only ever take away jobs.
I'm a Firefox / Chrome fan and I just installed the Google Chrome Frame to see how it behaves. I installed Windows XP SP2 less than 24 hours ago and since then I've only installed my drivers, Firefox and the Google Chrome Frame; I went to a couple of innocent websites with IE6 and they both crashed the browser.
PS: Web developer here - Yes, IE6 sucks but it is not THAT unstable.
Which web sites? I'd love to test your observation as I have multiple VMs with various IE versions installed on various WinXP flavours.
"...the colors corresponded to the skin colour taht the terrorists would most likely be on a given day." "And I remember an intern at the time that said "wouldn't it be problem if you printed it out on a piece of paper and it was a white terrorist?" " A white terrorist...'"
Well the obvious solution to that is that everyone respect and honor as best as possible the established standards. It makes backwards compatibility far easier if a browser must "flip modes" to respect say, current or past specs, rather than worrying about version "x" of browser "y" etc.
IE is moving towards that now, thankfully, but it also creates the awkward backwards looking issues you describe. The solution? For you possibly this: http://www.vmware.com/products/thinapp/using.html
You can package older or newer versions of IE inside a standalone EXE, and run that as needed. Very handy. Licensing costs I can't cite, but I've seen the demos working for FireFox and MS Office and it's super useful.
Perhaps...but in MacOS X, the bastion of QuickTime, I have Perian and Flip4Mac WMV codecs installed that , voila, make QuickTime play everything under the sun. I too thought there were perhaps shortcomings but the whole setup merely adds the plugins to Quicktime that are required. Who knew you only needed a plugin? So hard!
It's there, so it must be possible. I suspect noone has bothered to do the same on windows, ergo it's not "possible" to do now, but not impossible to implement.
What I was referring to with regards to the player has to do with video manipulation of existing and readable files. regardless of the codec support, Quicktime *handles* video playback better than many other options out there.
I can run any internet app or network protocol handler on a mac (from OS 9 to 10!) and that app will "own" the protocol just as I want. That's why MS was sued...they prevented you from using any other protocol helper by tying you to theirs. That's monopolistically anti competitive. It was wrong, and will always be wrong.
Apple has a revenue model tied to a device that could not go to market unless the INDUSTRY providing the content was provided a pound of flesh - as in DRM. Steve Jobs stands alone in the wilderness having PUBLICLY espoused dropping ALL DRM in favour of open formats (pick your poison) that were not locked. What you are complaining about sir, is that we could have had a world where Apple was forced to use *your* choice of format (say, DRM'd wmv?) and pay a royalty to MS, or to Real, or to whomever, Borg Inc? They chose to usurp the world order in favour of a dominant model that was won fair and square, and now they want to kill all DRM forever, which means that you can buy music from whomever, and play it on whatever. All Apple requires is that you use iTunes to manage your Apple devices. boo hoo...now that you can buy MP3s on iTunes you can move that music to whatever other program you like and then play it on the device you like. Inconvenience? Yes, but it's Apple's playground. They helped tear down the fence that kept you locked in. They are under no obligation to makes iTunes sync with any other device. Although it'd be rally nice.
You have your wires crossed. You just argued in favour of the BORG instead of against it.
That just might make up for all the years tha MS crippled QuickTime on windows, throwing up all kinds of fake and mishandled errors. I still get the "QuickTime sucks" line from many IT pros in my workplace despite there being no reasonable method to scrub through video frame by frame in WMV formats.
But yes...it's a sad tactic if it turns out to be so.
I'm treading on the absurd but your comment stood out.
Tools you suggest in order of appearance:
> 1 humongous ship (It could just be used once in awhile)
> smaller boats (to the coast)...btw "to the coast is still ~1000km
> the hawaiian volcanos (I know it might be a bit costly)
> a military helicopter (the ones without a bottom)
Wow....seriously? You are a closeted comedy writer BTW.
There is no landfill on the planet that could hold all of this debris. Just how big of a boat were you positing we'd use? Don't get me started on airlifting.
The garbage comes from the continental runoff of every landmass that bounds the pacific. That's a lot of material accumulated over many decades. I know the *bits* seem small but you're talking some seriously gigantic masses when the material is aggregated...not to mention so finely dispersed that the fineness of a net or sieve required to scoop up the material would ensnare all of the plankton and fish along with it.
Essentially we'd have to denude the Pacific ocean of life wherever we're collecting this material. There would be no food left for the fish or whales after we did the cleanup. Even if we could conceivably find a way to build a, oh I don't know, 20-30 km long/wide ship to *try* to tackle the problem. Maybe if we have Beowulf cluster of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Give FB users the option of paying 1 dollar per month (okay...99 cents) for the service. Offer premium options.
Lord know they have plenty of well paid staff on board to build the option.
Roll experimental services (that annoy people) out to all non-paying members, explain that they can avoid all such issues by paying the nominal fee. The 12.00 per year will give you some form of SLA and a requirement by FB to conform to some other norm. Paying clients will appreciate the extra voice they have, because they are paying customers.
if FB fails to comply, they've set the paid service bar high enough that other services will start charging, making other options viable.
If you pay for your data, you can also truly "own" it, and likely pay for the option to dump it all and move on.
Oh, and FB could well raise another 100-200 million a year this way, which gives a potential IPO some heft.
I'm paying decent monthly fees to several services now. I prefer to pay for my social networks now that I've experienced the underbelly of free service SLAs.
They actually do that now. It's called a fecal transplant and it helps people recover from massive intestinal infections where subsequent antibiotic routines have wiped out all the good flora/bacteria. Sounds weird but true!
Time to go back to school! The bell curve is going to heavily favour those of us who know how to write...and spell.
http://secunia.com/advisories/27213/2/
Yeah that is ancient news my friend. It was patched with OS version 1.1.2. in 2007 if my information is correct.
iPhones and iPods can now run OS version 3.1+
I would say that pretty much anyone going online has patched as version 3 of the OS brought copy/paste functions.
I can't imagine using my iPhone or iPod without copy/paste.
I'm not sure what you mean by "basic functionality".
My iPhone isn't broken and I have tethering enabled. Sounds like your problem is with AT&T. I'm in Canada under Fido/Rogers so YMMV.
With "both" companies my tethering is enabled with a quick call. My provider asserts that my data plan must be 1 GB or higher, but this is largely to protect me from ignorantly going over my data plan usage allowances. I go to my settings and turn on tethering. There is no step three ;)
As for "applications that Apple doesn't [sic] like", you must mean malware, trojans, and data theft mechanisms. If you want to run those by all means do so. You could save yourself some trouble and just write your date of birth and credit card numbers on a placard and hang that around your neck when you head to the mall.
But I keed.
I think everyone missed my point. The internet as a whole is being attacked by systems loosely guarded by their owners due to onerous and obtuse support requirements and maintenance routines. The fact that there is even an antivirus industry speaks volumes about where we are now.
Windows PC make up the bulk, if not all of all botnets (please cite for me any unix/linus/macos x desktop botnet that's been discovered that isn't just focused on weak LAMP setups)
In the "developing" world we might see corruption that is culturally endemic, such as when a police oficer takes a bribe for processing a complaint, or a train conductor taking a bribe for helping you get to your destination. Yet we pay a stipend to a windows desktop software industry that by all accounts would almost disappear tomorrow if everyone switched en masses to Unix, Linux, or OS X...even temporarily. We pay off an entire sector that by all rights should be working towards its own demise as soon as possible. That it's not working to it's demise, but growing, tells me that we need to inoculate the internet, not just locally treat the infections. I am speaking of general user desktop security
here, not firewalls and banking systems or high stakes e-commerce or government portals.
That's why I think the solution proposed, while draconian, in ways does make sense. That my comment is modded troll, so that we can cite the one-in-a-million windows users who succeed in locking down their setup without A/V tells us again that there is a problem. For expert users windows is as fine as any other OS. I don't suspect that it makes sense anymore to say to people that they are just idiots because they don't know how to run windows update, but then do NOTHING to stop the problem by letting them back online.
Yes there would be widespread unemployment, but we could get back to work as *use* the internet. if we could lose the 90+ % of email traffic devoted to spam derived from botnets what else could we do with those savings?
I dunno...it's a dumb idea, yes, but all the others ain't working.
Oddly enough that's close enough to a decent solution to work.
How about we START with that, and work our way back to allowing pre-vetted workstations back onto the interwebs. I like the idea of running a simple system checking script though a web browser based internet portal the same way you must login to a hotspot to gain access to the internet.
Make that kind of access a precondition for users who were deemed to be hosting malware/bots and go from there. Once confirmed as clean the portal requirement disappears. The portal software will have to be hosted by a non-profit with government oversight for obvious reasons.
Of course I'm OK if that software isn't particularly Mac compatible ;)
Even better idea: NO TimeCapsule.
They are not warrantied if you have to crack the case to service them, and Apple hasn't come up to snuff with data recovery options if a TC fails entirely.
So if, say, files are deleted from the TC that you need back you must take the HD out to access the files natively - poof, your warranty is void. Deleting files from a local volume puts the files in the trash. Deleting them from a networked location deletes them right away. You must be bale to access the Hard Disk from time to time as a matter of course.
I find this combo works best:
1 x Apple Airport extreme
1 x USB powered hub
n x external USB Drive cases + high quality SATA drives (choose how many you need). I have one running for my wife's macBook, and use an internal 1TB drive for my Mac Pro. I can add as many extra USB drives to that Airport Extreme any time I like...2, 3 TB if I like. So form time to time I can take a Time Machine back up offline and toss it on the shelf for the yearly protected backup in case the live backup dies for any reason.
http://www.apple.com/airportextreme/features/harddrivesharing.html
TC does not give you that flexibillity and couple that with Apple's lack of support for failed TC's other than to wholly replace them - what about your data! God forbid your laptop/desktop AND the TC die the same time...I've been through it once with a client and Apple's Genius bar staff did not handle it well in my mind.
Regards.
JB
I remember putting forward a thesis in an old GIS class that was a bit too grand for the time I was able to spend flwshing out the particulars, but it was essentially to start creating a map layer for the North America (yes Canada and Mexico too, cuz pollution travels no?) that we could then query for whole categories of pollutants and land use restrictions. One purpose was to make the data saleable to insurance industry for rate adjustments (yes they screw people over for where they live, but they pay good money for the data too), and have publicly available data to show what kinds of pollution was airborne vs ground-situated...accounting for such things as subsurface hydrogeology etc, etc...lots of fun to be had!
But seriously, these days, with PlaceBase being bought up by Apple, wouldn't it be nice to have a single large repository of data that federal/state/provincial/Municipal agencies could use to scope out where the next location would be for that great Green project that keeps running into NIMBY restraints?
I find that that data is well guarded when it makes no sense to do anything but open it up, let the public know what's in the ground and in the air...and to move on to either fixing it up or using the areas for other projects.
Twould be nice.
In our environment, a large government shop, our data volumes are capped at around 1 TB of storage for that very reason. Between the SAN, and the tape backups...they just simply have to create a physical cutoff point for data storage due to those onerous recovery periods.
There is nothing wrong in our shop with having TWO 1 TB volumes, but you will never get approved to have one single 2TB. Problem solved...at least for file storage. Database backups are managed via other mechanisms like replication.
I find it's the other way around for me. One reason: VM usage. I can trick out my machine with as much RAM as I need in order to run the various Virtual Machine scenarios I am working with...Windows 2008 AD setup tests, Visual Studio compatibility testing etc. I have 8GB of Ram and can go up to 32 GB if I like. We can't even use that much on our test builds of Windows at work unless we go Win Server. Keep in mind I'm trying to stay with desktop OSs
The one machine is so productive for me now, that I've just packed up four windows PCs and a Compaq Server (pre-HP, yes old) with an external drive tower and gave it all away. I have so much shelf space left now that I don't need to keep a lab around. I would have done the same with a windows box doing VM work...but quite frankly there were limitations in performance when using more than four VMs on anything other than a bare bones Windows Server setup. I'm a windows systems admin in a large windows shop by day, so there's no fanboy to yell at.
Cheers!
Another perspective might be that Mac users are connoisseurs of the the OS, preferring to taste multiple experiences, and are far more proficient at the tools unique to each platform, whereas pure windows users are, well unilingual.
Unless of course it turns out that many of them actually start lots of large companies that employ lots and lots of people. Nah...I guess that never happens eh?
Here's a nice link that easily explains how immigrants only ever take away jobs.
http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/249/Why-Immigrants-Are-More-Likely-To-Start-Companies.aspx
I'm a Firefox / Chrome fan and I just installed the Google Chrome Frame to see how it behaves. I installed Windows XP SP2 less than 24 hours ago and since then I've only installed my drivers, Firefox and the Google Chrome Frame; I went to a couple of innocent websites with IE6 and they both crashed the browser.
PS: Web developer here - Yes, IE6 sucks but it is not THAT unstable.
Which web sites? I'd love to test your observation as I have multiple VMs with various IE versions installed on various WinXP flavours.
Please tell us.
http://www.zefrank.com/redalert/index_better.html
My favourite.
"...the colors corresponded to the skin colour taht the terrorists would most likely be on a given day."
"And I remember an intern at the time that said "wouldn't it be problem if you printed it out on a piece of paper and it was a white terrorist?"
" A white terrorist...'"
JB
Well the obvious solution to that is that everyone respect and honor as best as possible the established standards. It makes backwards compatibility far easier if a browser must "flip modes" to respect say, current or past specs, rather than worrying about version "x" of browser "y" etc.
IE is moving towards that now, thankfully, but it also creates the awkward backwards looking issues you describe. The solution? For you possibly this: http://www.vmware.com/products/thinapp/using.html
You can package older or newer versions of IE inside a standalone EXE, and run that as needed. Very handy. Licensing costs I can't cite, but I've seen the demos working for FireFox and MS Office and it's super useful.
JB
You heard it here first.
Now please discuss.
What, no third option? There is no third option!
With apologies to the iMac setup adverts.
Funny you say that...I just ponied up for the pro options. For 19 bucks more I have MPEG 2 support and everything is pretty grand.
I agree nagware is pretty silly in this day and age...perhaps Apple will douse it.
Perhaps...but in MacOS X, the bastion of QuickTime, I have Perian and Flip4Mac WMV codecs installed that , voila, make QuickTime play everything under the sun. I too thought there were perhaps shortcomings but the whole setup merely adds the plugins to Quicktime that are required. Who knew you only needed a plugin? So hard!
It's there, so it must be possible. I suspect noone has bothered to do the same on windows, ergo it's not "possible" to do now, but not impossible to implement.
What I was referring to with regards to the player has to do with video manipulation of existing and readable files. regardless of the codec support, Quicktime *handles* video playback better than many other options out there.
and what is the alternative you propose?
Apples, Oranges.
I can run any internet app or network protocol handler on a mac (from OS 9 to 10!) and that app will "own" the protocol just as I want. That's why MS was sued...they prevented you from using any other protocol helper by tying you to theirs. That's monopolistically anti competitive. It was wrong, and will always be wrong.
Apple has a revenue model tied to a device that could not go to market unless the INDUSTRY providing the content was provided a pound of flesh - as in DRM. Steve Jobs stands alone in the wilderness having PUBLICLY espoused dropping ALL DRM in favour of open formats (pick your poison) that were not locked. What you are complaining about sir, is that we could have had a world where Apple was forced to use *your* choice of format (say, DRM'd wmv?) and pay a royalty to MS, or to Real, or to whomever, Borg Inc? They chose to usurp the world order in favour of a dominant model that was won fair and square, and now they want to kill all DRM forever, which means that you can buy music from whomever, and play it on whatever. All Apple requires is that you use iTunes to manage your Apple devices. boo hoo...now that you can buy MP3s on iTunes you can move that music to whatever other program you like and then play it on the device you like. Inconvenience? Yes, but it's Apple's playground. They helped tear down the fence that kept you locked in. They are under no obligation to makes iTunes sync with any other device. Although it'd be rally nice.
You have your wires crossed. You just argued in favour of the BORG instead of against it.
That just might make up for all the years tha MS crippled QuickTime on windows, throwing up all kinds of fake and mishandled errors. I still get the "QuickTime sucks" line from many IT pros in my workplace despite there being no reasonable method to scrub through video frame by frame in WMV formats.
But yes...it's a sad tactic if it turns out to be so.
Or a music scene on the west coast...
I'm treading on the absurd but your comment stood out.
...btw "to the coast is still ~1000km
Tools you suggest in order of appearance:
> 1 humongous ship (It could just be used once in awhile)
> smaller boats (to the coast)
> the hawaiian volcanos (I know it might be a bit costly)
> a military helicopter (the ones without a bottom)
Wow....seriously? You are a closeted comedy writer BTW.
There is no landfill on the planet that could hold all of this debris. Just how big of a boat were you positing we'd use? Don't get me started on airlifting.
The garbage comes from the continental runoff of every landmass that bounds the pacific. That's a lot of material accumulated over many decades. I know the *bits* seem small but you're talking some seriously gigantic masses when the material is aggregated...not to mention so finely dispersed that the fineness of a net or sieve required to scoop up the material would ensnare all of the plankton and fish along with it.
Essentially we'd have to denude the Pacific ocean of life wherever we're collecting this material. There would be no food left for the fish or whales after we did the cleanup. Even if we could conceivably find a way to build a, oh I don't know, 20-30 km long/wide ship to *try* to tackle the problem. Maybe if we have Beowulf cluster of them.
Big numbers people. Water flows.
http://www.ted.com/talks/capt_charles_moore_on_the_seas_of_plastic.html Interesting stuff in here. Also good to show people who think that humans can't possibly have an "impact" on the biosphere. I can't add much to what's already in this talk...go take a peek.