No one thinks its a bad for a start up company with limited resources to put all its eggs in the Microsoft Windows basket.
Microsoft can't demand you pay them 30% of your revenue if you want to sell stuff on Windows. They might buy you out or give away a competing product, but everyone who develops for Windows knows that.
But...according to the Washington Post, there is an "e-book gold rush" going on right now.
Which is why a distributor like Apple wouldn't want apps to be able to compete with them by offering higher royalties. If a company offers writers 80% royalties selling through their app while Apple only offers 70% selling through their store, then writers won't be using Apple's store.
This should have been pretty obvious to anyone with any business sense.
I believe Apple gives 70% royalties to anyone selling ebooks through their service. So if anyone selling ebooks through apps has to pay 30% to Apple, there's no way they can compete unless they can get writers to accept lower royalties than they would get by selling direct through Apple.
Which is possible: trade publishers have been giving 15% royalties to writers while collecting 70% from Amazon, but they need to provide something that makes writers think that giving away lots of money is worthwhile (trade publishers will at least do some marketing, editing, etc).
Even once you decide to pay for it, compare this to approaches like Steam -- the instant gratification of having a game right now with the rest of it progressively downloaded as needed, versus waiting a few hours for it to download, and that's on my 100 mbit fiber connection.
Kind of like Guild Wars, you mean? An installer that's a couple of megabytes and downloads the rest as required?
GPU shaders have no access to main memory so where is the attack vector ?
GPUs have access to main memory, quite possibly the entire address space of the machine (I only briefly worked on Vista drivers so I'm not sure how they compare to XP). The shaders may not be able to access memory directly through a pointer, but if you can somehow exploit a driver bug to get a texture configured to use an arbitrary system memory address, then they could potentially access any memory on the machine.
Of course that's physical memory, so you'd need an exploit which can also map logical to physical memory addresses to determine which place to configure the texture at.
Indeed, it's insane. My old domain was a word trademarked by several different companies in several different countries; how could anyone other than a court decide whether it violated any of their trademarks and, if so, which one of them had the right to it?
I may have missed something, but are you saying manmade climate change isn't happening?
Considering that they can't even decide whether 'manmade climate change' would cause drier winters or wetter winters, I think the answer is an obvious yes.
It's still one pretty damn good distro, feature rich and all, just change the default f*ckin session to Ubuntu classic and you're back as you were, only better.
Except:
1. All my Compiz configuration disappeared between 10.04 and 11.04. 2. We've still got the crappy new scrollbars, even in 'Classic' mode. 3. Gnome 2 is going away in the next Ubuntu release, so the choice will be between two klunky new interfaces or older interfaces that aren't as flexible as Gnome 2 was.
Linux does not have the home userbase Linux proponants like to think it does.
Yes it does. But since Windows is preinstalled on most new PCs anyway, dual-booting into Windows to play a game is better than waiting a year for a Linux version and being expected to pay $50 for it when the Windows version is $5.
Plus closed-source Linux software normally expects me to run an installer as root and installs its own copies of numerous libraries which probably have security holes; in some cases it even wants to add them to LD_LIBRARY_PATH by default, which is a crazy security risk.
I'd rather just keep a separate Windows PC or partition for games and do anything important in Linux.
Netflix streaming still doesn't work - that alone is a total showstopper for many people.
While I agree with much of your post, you can hardly blame Ubuntu for not playing Neftlix video when Netflix chose to use a Windows-only format wihch can't be duplicated on Linux as open source due to DRM.
Perhaps the reasons too few people care about US foreign policy, Wikileaks information, and voting is because they're busy playing Farmville or catching up on the lasted Royal Wedding details.
I suspect it's more that they've tried voting for people who promise Change! and discovered that it makes no difference.
One of the main problems with keys is that they're much too long for most users to remember, so they almost always end up stored in a file or database of some sort. This act alone reduces the overall security far, far more than the risk of a brute-force attack.
Uh, no it doesn't. You not only have to get into my machine to find the key file, you also have to break the passphrase on that key file.
So at worst it's no less secure than a password, and at best it's far more secure.
Except that any decent wireless sniffer will find: 1. Your wireless network 2. Any MAC address that is on #1 making a whitelist irrelevant.
Anyone who brings their own personal hardware to work, somehow doesn't realise it's not allowed and then finds it won't connect because the MAC address is wrong will probably stop at that point. Anyone who runs a wireless sniffer and fakes a MAC address so they can use the WLAN can hardly complain when they're laid off for breaking security policy.
The point of this notation is to include units in variable names. For example, you might prefix a length with m or ft to indicate the units, or an index with row or col. It's then completely obvious that an expression like mHeight -= ftDistance is wrong. This is a very sensible convention and eliminates some very expensive yet simple to fix bugs.
No, it's retarded. We already have a solid method for ensuring that people don't combine data types incorrectly: it's called data types.
You create a Feet type and a Meters type, and then the compiler will guarantee that you cannot combine them incorrectly. Using variable names to try to enforce type safety when you can get the compiler to do it for you is retarded.
Not to mention that if at some point in the future you decide that you should use meters instead of feet, you either have to go through all the code changing the name of the variable everywhere it's used, or end up with a 'ftHeight' variable which is actually meters.
It made a limited amount of sense in the distant past when we were writing C code with minimal type checking, but it's intensely dumb in a modern language with strong types and an efficient compiler.
If it means you don't see some dancing walrus but your machine doesn't end up with a keylogger sending your bank password to Nigeria, that's probably an OK tradeoff for most people.
If the economy is so dependent on this that we would all suffer tremendously if they had to stop, how did we ever manage to do anything before this capability arrived?
Fifty years ago people had real jobs making real stuff that people wanted. If this does bring on the Apocalyse for online advertisers, then people might have to actually go back to doing that.
'Opt-out' is kind of pointless anyway because it will require a cookie to say you've opted out, which can be used to track you. The only law which would make sense is requiring people to opt-in to being tracked.
Slashdot Mirror
No one thinks its a bad for a start up company with limited resources to put all its eggs in the Microsoft Windows basket.
Microsoft can't demand you pay them 30% of your revenue if you want to sell stuff on Windows. They might buy you out or give away a competing product, but everyone who develops for Windows knows that.
I don't think you can blame them for thinking that Apple would never go quite *that* far.
Uh, this is Apple we're talking about. Anyone who didn't think they'd go that far can't be paying too much attention
But...according to the Washington Post, there is an "e-book gold rush" going on right now.
Which is why a distributor like Apple wouldn't want apps to be able to compete with them by offering higher royalties. If a company offers writers 80% royalties selling through their app while Apple only offers 70% selling through their store, then writers won't be using Apple's store.
This should have been pretty obvious to anyone with any business sense.
Then change your pricing structure, QED.
I believe Apple gives 70% royalties to anyone selling ebooks through their service. So if anyone selling ebooks through apps has to pay 30% to Apple, there's no way they can compete unless they can get writers to accept lower royalties than they would get by selling direct through Apple.
Which is possible: trade publishers have been giving 15% royalties to writers while collecting 70% from Amazon, but they need to provide something that makes writers think that giving away lots of money is worthwhile (trade publishers will at least do some marketing, editing, etc).
Even once you decide to pay for it, compare this to approaches like Steam -- the instant gratification of having a game right now with the rest of it progressively downloaded as needed, versus waiting a few hours for it to download, and that's on my 100 mbit fiber connection.
Kind of like Guild Wars, you mean? An installer that's a couple of megabytes and downloads the rest as required?
GPU shaders have no access to main memory so where is the attack vector ?
GPUs have access to main memory, quite possibly the entire address space of the machine (I only briefly worked on Vista drivers so I'm not sure how they compare to XP). The shaders may not be able to access memory directly through a pointer, but if you can somehow exploit a driver bug to get a texture configured to use an arbitrary system memory address, then they could potentially access any memory on the machine.
Of course that's physical memory, so you'd need an exploit which can also map logical to physical memory addresses to determine which place to configure the texture at.
Particularly if they're CFLs, which die fast if you keep turning them on and off for short periods.
Indeed, it's insane. My old domain was a word trademarked by several different companies in several different countries; how could anyone other than a court decide whether it violated any of their trademarks and, if so, which one of them had the right to it?
I may have missed something, but are you saying manmade climate change isn't happening?
Considering that they can't even decide whether 'manmade climate change' would cause drier winters or wetter winters, I think the answer is an obvious yes.
They really are getting desperate, aren't they?
BTW, wasn't Britain supposed to get drier winters with no snow because of 'global warming', not wetter ones? When did that change?
It's still one pretty damn good distro, feature rich and all, just change the default f*ckin session to Ubuntu classic and you're back as you were, only better.
Except:
1. All my Compiz configuration disappeared between 10.04 and 11.04.
2. We've still got the crappy new scrollbars, even in 'Classic' mode.
3. Gnome 2 is going away in the next Ubuntu release, so the choice will be between two klunky new interfaces or older interfaces that aren't as flexible as Gnome 2 was.
Linux does not have the home userbase Linux proponants like to think it does.
Yes it does. But since Windows is preinstalled on most new PCs anyway, dual-booting into Windows to play a game is better than waiting a year for a Linux version and being expected to pay $50 for it when the Windows version is $5.
Plus closed-source Linux software normally expects me to run an installer as root and installs its own copies of numerous libraries which probably have security holes; in some cases it even wants to add them to LD_LIBRARY_PATH by default, which is a crazy security risk.
I'd rather just keep a separate Windows PC or partition for games and do anything important in Linux.
Netflix streaming still doesn't work - that alone is a total showstopper for many people.
While I agree with much of your post, you can hardly blame Ubuntu for not playing Neftlix video when Netflix chose to use a Windows-only format wihch can't be duplicated on Linux as open source due to DRM.
I'm yet to find anybody who like Unity outside of Ubuntu development.
It's better than standard Gnome on a netbook. But the pre-Unity Ubuntu netbook interface was better still.
The problem is trying to push a netbook/tablet interface onto desktop machines that have big screens and are used for real work.
Perhaps the reasons too few people care about US foreign policy, Wikileaks information, and voting is because they're busy playing Farmville or catching up on the lasted Royal Wedding details.
I suspect it's more that they've tried voting for people who promise Change! and discovered that it makes no difference.
One of the main problems with keys is that they're much too long for most users to remember, so they almost always end up stored in a file or database of some sort. This act alone reduces the overall security far, far more than the risk of a brute-force attack.
Uh, no it doesn't. You not only have to get into my machine to find the key file, you also have to break the passphrase on that key file.
So at worst it's no less secure than a password, and at best it's far more secure.
Except that any decent wireless sniffer will find:
1. Your wireless network
2. Any MAC address that is on #1 making a whitelist irrelevant.
Anyone who brings their own personal hardware to work, somehow doesn't realise it's not allowed and then finds it won't connect because the MAC address is wrong will probably stop at that point. Anyone who runs a wireless sniffer and fakes a MAC address so they can use the WLAN can hardly complain when they're laid off for breaking security policy.
The point of this notation is to include units in variable names. For example, you might prefix a length with m or ft to indicate the units, or an index with row or col. It's then completely obvious that an expression like mHeight -= ftDistance is wrong. This is a very sensible convention and eliminates some very expensive yet simple to fix bugs.
No, it's retarded. We already have a solid method for ensuring that people don't combine data types incorrectly: it's called data types.
You create a Feet type and a Meters type, and then the compiler will guarantee that you cannot combine them incorrectly. Using variable names to try to enforce type safety when you can get the compiler to do it for you is retarded.
Not to mention that if at some point in the future you decide that you should use meters instead of feet, you either have to go through all the code changing the name of the variable everywhere it's used, or end up with a 'ftHeight' variable which is actually meters.
It made a limited amount of sense in the distant past when we were writing C code with minimal type checking, but it's intensely dumb in a modern language with strong types and an efficient compiler.
If it means you don't see some dancing walrus but your machine doesn't end up with a keylogger sending your bank password to Nigeria, that's probably an OK tradeoff for most people.
Sadly, I don't think you know 'most people'.
Try YesScript. You can blacklist sites that cause problems while letting the rest through without having to explicitly whitelist them.
Great idea. Then I can blacklist www.thissiteissafehonest.com _AFTER_ it's used Javashit to download malware to my computer.
Disabling Javashit by default is the only safe way to browse the web these days.
It's useful when used correctly. But when all of the links are JS and I can no longer middle click to open in new window I get annoyed.
And I really hate sites which break the back button because the site is all Javashit. Hotmail is a glaring example.
We have some very high traffic sites, and outside of web crawlers, I don't believe we've seen it blocked, ever.
NoScript claims to have downloaded 84,000,000 times, so I can only presume that people running it are unlikely to visit your sites.
The best minds of our generation are occupied finding the best ways to leverage advertising revenue.
Could be worse: at least they're not becoming lawyers.
If the economy is so dependent on this that we would all suffer tremendously if they had to stop, how did we ever manage to do anything before this capability arrived?
Fifty years ago people had real jobs making real stuff that people wanted. If this does bring on the Apocalyse for online advertisers, then people might have to actually go back to doing that.
'Opt-out' is kind of pointless anyway because it will require a cookie to say you've opted out, which can be used to track you. The only law which would make sense is requiring people to opt-in to being tracked.