I guess you and I will have to disagree on this one. And that's OK. Maybe OpenOffice isn't a good example, since the small form factor is limiting the usefulness for it.
IMNSHO, it's still not a general computing device because:
Remote connections to a system so you can run custom software remotely only work when you can remotely connect to the system. If you're away from your Wi-Fi access point or outside a 3G service area you're shit-out-of-luck... why can't you run it on the device itself?
Jail Breaking is not a valid option for most (non-technical) people, not the least because it invalidates your warranty.
Signing-up to be an Apple Developer so I can write my own apps for it is not acceptable. (a) I've been a registered Apple Developer before and it yielded me no additional benefits (compared to being completely freelance), it actually restricted me more due to NDAs and Licensing Agreements, and Apple treats their developer community like crap. (b) You don't have to be a registered Microsoft Developer to develop for Windows, or a registered nVidia Developer to write GPU software, or a registered OpenGL developer to write the next Lunar Lander flypass in OpenGL. Why should you have to be a registered Apple Developer to write for Apple devices?
You shouldn't have to go to Apple to get the software YOU want on the device YOU paid for. It's a physical piece of hardware you own, it's not like a piece of software you've just "licensed" to borrow for a while. Could you imagine the uproar in the computer industry if, in an overnight change of business model, you had to go to the manufacturer of your desktop or laptop computer to buy every little piece of software you wanted to use?
I don't understand people that claim somehow the iPad isn't real computing.
It's not about the processing power under the hood. Can you install OpenOffice on it, or any other application that hasn't been given the "Ok" by Apple to be distributed through the iTunes App Store? No.
The iPod, iPhone and iPad are just terminals into Apple's closed application repository. Although developers can create pretty much whatever they want and submit it for the App Store, Apple has final approval thus making it a closed environment. And Apple has the power to revoke any application at any time for whatever reason it sees fit.
I can't help but wonder how long it will be before Apple rejects the Opera browser from the iPhone, because "it duplicates existing iPhone functionality" (Safari) which is also one of the SDK agreement clauses, and its reason for blocking the Google Voice apps.
So are you going to block all image/jpeg and image/png, which is probably 60% of the static images on the web (including GIF), because you know there's at least one exploit for each out there? Your idea of the web suddenly becomes very dull and useless - you might as well convert all text/html to text/plain while you're at it.
Plain text doesn't cut it for everybody, I'm afraid.
We have scientific users exchanging data and views over e-mail as part of their job. The single largest selling point of formatted e-mail for them is being able to insert a diagram or an example table of data in-context (instead of a crappy XLS spreadsheet attachment that you have to open up separately to the e-mail and go find the tab that they're talking about).
Maybe you should educate your problem users about what's acceptable and what's not in e-mail - or restrict them to a client that can't generate pretty fonts and colours in their e-mail.
Seriously? Mozilla, what flavour crack are you guys smoking this month?
There's already plenty of address book add-ons for Firefox and Mozilla, we don't need you guys adding another one to Firefox that will allow web sites to harvest contact info. If you want to do something address book-like, why don't you fix-up your LDAP support in Thunderbird so that it can actually create and update LDAP contacts - like you were supposed to have done in Thunderbird 2!
Most "spam" that gets delivered is actually from sites that the user has dealt with. *
* Citation needed.
Whenever I'm required to register an e-mail address for access to a web site I use [their domain name]@[my domain name], since I have my own domain. I've only ever had two of those addresses attract spam, and that's because both sites involved had their (fairly crappy) user databases compromised.
The majority of spam I see comes from addresses I've shared with groups of friends and relatives, and those "friends" have had their address books harvested by worms and trojans. Every couple of years I change the primary e-mail address I communicate to people with and/dev/null the old one.
Actually, when Mozilla started implementing WebGL for Firefox last year they found a number of Intel cards don't have OpenGL drivers available for them. Users finding themselves in this position can use Mesa (software rendering) drivers instead, albeit slower. Users of Safari, which also has a WebGL implementation, won't have that issue since OSX has such good OpenGL support for Apple hardware.
“There is increasing concern,” declared epidemiologist John Ioannidis in a highly cited 2005 paper in PLoS Medicine, “that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims.”
One has to wonder, though: how much of that is due to misuse of statistics and how much is because it's paid research expected to get certain results in favour of those paying for the research?
The scrapped electric vehicles story is well-known and well-documented. That's what happens when fossil-fuel companies own shares in vehicle manufacturing companies.
Yes, Portal works under Linux (using wine). Barely. Just running the Steam front-end with wine is pitiful, slow, full of drawing issues, and likely to halt or crash unexpectedly. It was not an enjoyable experience for me and I had none of these issues when I was playing WoW.
Portal is the only thing that my four-year-old Windows XP notebook gets used for. I would hope that Steam gets seriously revised and becomes more wine-friendly when Portal2 is released.
Absolutely agree on this one. At work we use QuickPar to create Reed-Solomon checksum files for all sorts of things.
It has especially saved us heaps of pain when downloading 2GB+ (compressed) database backups over the intertubes, only to find some kind of corruption in the middle that prevents decompression and restoration. For a 10% overhead of the checksums (the default) we've been able to recover every single time instead of downloading the whole thing again and hoping that it will succeed.
I think this is a great idea: increase corporate taxes on each hardware and software vendor every time their products are exploited. This pushes the costs of clean-ups onto those who've caused them, instead of those who have been violated by them. Eventually companies like Microsoft will be taxed out of existence.
The in-browser translation option interests me, too. I've had Firefox plug-ins in the past that help me translate Japanese pages. From TFA, though:
Wieland Holfelder, Google 's Engineering Director in Munich, said: "... The translate feature will hopefully open up the web for people to discover new, compelling content - no matter what language it's written in".
How will people discover this new content unless some translation is going on in the search engine as well? For example, if I type "red bird" into Google search, will it also find French pages containing "rouge oiseau"?
There's not as much redesigning going on as you'd like to think. A lot of times these chips are just design blocks thrown together for a silicon order (think Lego). It's only newer technologies (like adding SATA 6G, for example) that have any real design work involved to make them into a new block.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess you and I will have to disagree on this one. And that's OK. Maybe OpenOffice isn't a good example, since the small form factor is limiting the usefulness for it.
IMNSHO, it's still not a general computing device because:
I don't understand people that claim somehow the iPad isn't real computing.
It's not about the processing power under the hood. Can you install OpenOffice on it, or any other application that hasn't been given the "Ok" by Apple to be distributed through the iTunes App Store? No.
The iPod, iPhone and iPad are just terminals into Apple's closed application repository. Although developers can create pretty much whatever they want and submit it for the App Store, Apple has final approval thus making it a closed environment. And Apple has the power to revoke any application at any time for whatever reason it sees fit.
Want proof? Apple blocks iPhone security software; Apple Removes Wi-Fi Finders From App Store; Apple Bans Sexy Apps, Developers Upset; Apple Bans Jailbreakers From The App Store; Apple Censors Dalai Lama iPhone Apps in China; Commodore 64 Runs Again On The iPhone (after Apple pulled it from the App Store until the developer changed it); Apple Kills Google Voice Apps On The iPhone; and my favourite, because it shows Apple's double-standards, Licensed C64 Emulator Rejected From App Store, because Apple claims Emulators are against its SDK agreement, but still allows Sega game emulators.
I can't help but wonder how long it will be before Apple rejects the Opera browser from the iPhone, because "it duplicates existing iPhone functionality" (Safari) which is also one of the SDK agreement clauses, and its reason for blocking the Google Voice apps.
So are you going to block all image/jpeg and image/png, which is probably 60% of the static images on the web (including GIF), because you know there's at least one exploit for each out there? Your idea of the web suddenly becomes very dull and useless - you might as well convert all text/html to text/plain while you're at it.
Plain text doesn't cut it for everybody, I'm afraid.
We have scientific users exchanging data and views over e-mail as part of their job. The single largest selling point of formatted e-mail for them is being able to insert a diagram or an example table of data in-context (instead of a crappy XLS spreadsheet attachment that you have to open up separately to the e-mail and go find the tab that they're talking about).
Maybe you should educate your problem users about what's acceptable and what's not in e-mail - or restrict them to a client that can't generate pretty fonts and colours in their e-mail.
I'll get off your damn lawn now.
It's easier on Linux and MacOS, but it is still a problem.
I'm sure you meant to say "Mac OSX". MacOS died years ago and I took great pleasure from dancing on its grave. (Now there was an insecure OS.)
I think there's a market for a tablet that acts as a portable display (+touchscreen) for a bigger machine nearby.
Bookmark you post in case we need prior-art later.
Sorry, already been done.
Seriously? Mozilla, what flavour crack are you guys smoking this month?
There's already plenty of address book add-ons for Firefox and Mozilla, we don't need you guys adding another one to Firefox that will allow web sites to harvest contact info. If you want to do something address book-like, why don't you fix-up your LDAP support in Thunderbird so that it can actually create and update LDAP contacts - like you were supposed to have done in Thunderbird 2!
Most "spam" that gets delivered is actually from sites that the user has dealt with. *
* Citation needed.
Whenever I'm required to register an e-mail address for access to a web site I use [their domain name]@[my domain name], since I have my own domain. I've only ever had two of those addresses attract spam, and that's because both sites involved had their (fairly crappy) user databases compromised.
The majority of spam I see comes from addresses I've shared with groups of friends and relatives, and those "friends" have had their address books harvested by worms and trojans. Every couple of years I change the primary e-mail address I communicate to people with and /dev/null the old one.
Actually, when Mozilla started implementing WebGL for Firefox last year they found a number of Intel cards don't have OpenGL drivers available for them. Users finding themselves in this position can use Mesa (software rendering) drivers instead, albeit slower. Users of Safari, which also has a WebGL implementation, won't have that issue since OSX has such good OpenGL support for Apple hardware.
From TFA:
One has to wonder, though: how much of that is due to misuse of statistics and how much is because it's paid research expected to get certain results in favour of those paying for the research?
I think it's meant to give you a nice, warm feeling just like on those hot summery days.
I know it's a typo, but for some reason I immediately thought of submarines farting underwater.
There, fixed that for you. Not all hacking is bad, nor is all hacking criminal activity.
The scrapped electric vehicles story is well-known and well-documented. That's what happens when fossil-fuel companies own shares in vehicle manufacturing companies.
And, the "100 million lines of code" quote never came from Toyota - it came from Any Chou at Coverity (an software and security analysis company) who got it from Robert N. Charette at IEEE Spectrum.
It was also really short, so it pretty much a rip-off at $20.
You got seriously ripped-off. I bought the whole Orange Box for $9.99 in a Valve special last April just so I could play Portal.
Yes, Portal works under Linux (using wine). Barely. Just running the Steam front-end with wine is pitiful, slow, full of drawing issues, and likely to halt or crash unexpectedly. It was not an enjoyable experience for me and I had none of these issues when I was playing WoW.
Portal is the only thing that my four-year-old Windows XP notebook gets used for. I would hope that Steam gets seriously revised and becomes more wine-friendly when Portal2 is released.
It's more likely retrievable through the OBD-II connector, which is required to be fitted in all new vehicles sold in the US.
Absolutely agree on this one. At work we use QuickPar to create Reed-Solomon checksum files for all sorts of things.
It has especially saved us heaps of pain when downloading 2GB+ (compressed) database backups over the intertubes, only to find some kind of corruption in the middle that prevents decompression and restoration. For a 10% overhead of the checksums (the default) we've been able to recover every single time instead of downloading the whole thing again and hoping that it will succeed.
Down the line, they expect the technology could even print directly into the body, bypassing the in-vitro portion of the current process.
Ow! Paper jam!
Dell
I think this is a great idea: increase corporate taxes on each hardware and software vendor every time their products are exploited. This pushes the costs of clean-ups onto those who've caused them, instead of those who have been violated by them. Eventually companies like Microsoft will be taxed out of existence.
Oh, he probably meant tax the citizens.
The in-browser translation option interests me, too. I've had Firefox plug-ins in the past that help me translate Japanese pages. From TFA, though:
Wieland Holfelder, Google 's Engineering Director in Munich, said: "... The translate feature will hopefully open up the web for people to discover new, compelling content - no matter what language it's written in".
How will people discover this new content unless some translation is going on in the search engine as well? For example, if I type "red bird" into Google search, will it also find French pages containing "rouge oiseau"?
It's not incandescent light, it's incident light. sigh.
There's not as much redesigning going on as you'd like to think. A lot of times these chips are just design blocks thrown together for a silicon order (think Lego). It's only newer technologies (like adding SATA 6G, for example) that have any real design work involved to make them into a new block.