And what do you mean by "at your own expense"? Can't these kinds of skills be learned for free from any computer with an Internet connection?
Penny-wise, pound-foolish. (Is that cent-wise dollar-foolish in the US?)
Most things are learnable from the internet. But mostly I find it's more efficient to learn from a book - physical or eBook. They cost a little money, but they are likely to be more than paid back in time saved.
If you watch the stream of questions coming in to StackOverflow for example, you'll see so many people who are clearly trying to learn by doing and asking questions, and searching the internet, and getting stuck on stuff that would be covered in an early chapter of any book on the topic.
We support the rights of the individual and (most of us) dismiss or at least skeptical of the suggestion that we need to give those up to make it easier for law enforcement.
There's no such right. Police with a search warrant are allowed to search your possessions, your documents, your computers. There's nothing special about mobile phones that protect them from the general right of search with a warrant.
OK, thanks for that. So basically no phone is safe, if you're trying to hide it's data from the police.
And most people would say that's not a bad thing. Though Slashdot posters are more likely to err on the side of the criminal than the law, there being a lot of libertarians here.
Apple can't "undo" encryption. But a lockscreen pin code is 4 digits long. Guess how many tries they on average and as a maximum in order to brute-force it?
Reduce that average time, because some passcodes are used more often than others. (0000,9999,1234, numbers that spell out various 4 letter words)
After 6 attempts, you have to wait a minute before trying again. At some point there will be a complete lockout, but even that can be reset via iTunes.
So brute-forcing is by no means impossible. But it will take time and, realistically, automation. Hence why law enforcement have to wait once they've issued Apple with a warrant.
Those who are Android fans should bear in mind that Google will also retrieve data from Android devices if the Police issue them with a warrant.
The smartphone of choice for those people who need to protect their phone data from the Police is still the Blackberry.
There's no guarantee they'll support Linux. But they won't change to drop Mac.
I'm just going on the theory that an open standard makes it easier for them to support Linux. But still they won't do it if the costs of doing so outweigh the revenue they expect from it. Whether they develop in-house or via third-party.
"This is a false dichotomy." Perhaps, but it has been demonstrated true by every iteration of DRM ever tried.
Huh? How can a false dichotomy be true?
Then you link me to another slashdot story that includes the sentence: "DRM is working really well in the video and book space."
It takes a different track about why it's working, but it agrees it's working. I'd say there's some truth in that angle, but it's a smaller element than the one I described.
A premium brand requires the features people expect. It doesn't require to be cutting edge. Premium brands are sold on quality, not novelty.
To take your example, if you look at the news Mercedes is reporting, what's prominent: testing, association with Formula 1 and Golf. http://news.mercedes-benz.co.uk/
To go back to smartphones, feature-led Samsung ends up with things that don't work well. Facial recognition security, tilt to scroll and air gestures. This is not the stuff of premium brands. Premium brands take on features if and when they work.
Not to say Apple always gets it right. They've slipped on their premium brand promise on occasion by shipping features that weren't ready. Apple Maps being the stand out example.
Neither Canalys nor the poster you replied to said it was smart phones. It's "mobile devices".
Look, I'm with you that I don't think lumping notebooks in with tablets and smartphones is particularly useful. Perhaps they have a client that wanted that. But no one misrepresented it, if you thought it was only smartphones, that was your own assumption.
As I said Canalys have a good, long track record as a reputable market analyst. They are not some random website trolling for clicks. The websites reporting their figures may be though...
And what? Some poster on Slashdot knows better? When they are the ones what have all the data. They're not blind here. They're not guessing. People here are.
The source is Canalys, and I've followed their data from more than a decade. It's very credible as a company.
The surprisingly large Microsoft share in this particular analysis is because they are including notebook PCs as "mobile devices". It shows how much of a PC world we're in that Microsoft comes out so low.
And it's not at all surprising that RIM and Blackberry are hidden in a 9.6% others, they really are tiny now.
It's the Apple figure that is surprisingly low here. And I think the surprise comes from most analyses being either US only, or at least biased towards US figures because they are US analysts. Canalys takes the world markets more seriously.
Android does so well because it's the default that people will end up with if they walk into a phone store, and accept whatever it is that the clerk recommends. They're cheap and cheerful, and there's always some staff bonus available on one model or another.
Unfortunately for you the fact is that Samsung spends 10 times as much on marketing as Apple does. If marketing is a sign of an audience that doesn't know any better, then that's Samsung users.
You're confusing marketing with having a desirable brand. And desirable brands come about as a result of a history of selling high quality products. Not by marketing.
A disappointing OS UI has nothing to do with the economics of applying DRM.
And yet, it's still fundamentally true with the economics of Windows. Microsoft wouldn't continue producing Windows versions if Windows didn't make them money. They've got a miss with this particular version, but they've had misses before and still made money on both that version itself and on subsequent versions.
It's less bad, but it's still bad. It defines no width for the text, allowing a single column to go right across the monitor for a maximized window. 30 words per line on my 13" laptop!
Sure, I COULD resize my window to suit. But the fact that I have to is a big flaw of the website.
Then there's the issue that it's ugly and has nothing to draw people in.
Then, the "Site Map" link is broken. And the domain itself has no index, dumping you at an Apache file browser.
It's a piece of shit, made to seem only slightly acceptable by comparison with the appalling examples I posted myself.
It's fantastic that the web isn't much like that any more.
because it worked so poorly for Apple too. they locked everyone in, a company that was about to fold, and then all hell broke loose. audio files that couldn't play on any other device are what killed the iPod's early years, and iTunes, and a phone that can only have apps that are bought through a closed store, of which the developers have to share money with Apple and can't have payments not through the store... it's just obvious that be being closed they strangled the industry. the app boom never happened, the smart phone market failed, and digital music services never took off.
I suspect the people that modded your post insightful didn't get that you were being sarcastic. Well done!
What's to say that Netflix wont choose an encryption scheme that has a Microsoft Windows only CDM?
Because they wouldn't want to lose their existing Mac users. If their existing solution was based on Silverlight, that would explain why access was limited to just Windows and Mac. Microsoft's limitation, not Netflix's.
Given an open solution such as this, Netflix gets a better choice as to what platforms they support. And if they judge they'll get enough business from Linux users to make it worth their while, then they'll surely support it.
Have they not learned that DRM only hurts the honest people? The pirates will get their crappy content anyways.
This is a false dichotomy. Whilst there are people that only ever use legally acquired stuff at one end of the scale, and people that always pirate non-free stuff at the other end, the vast majority lie in the middle of those extremes, pirating if it's easy and the result is good enough for them, buying when that's easier, or has the quality they require and is within their budget.
DRM doesn't come free for the industry. It would be cheaper to ship without DRM than with. The areas where DRM doesn't help the media industry's bottom line, such as songs, has already been abandoned. Areas where they keep investing in DRM, they do so because it works well enough to raise their bottom line vs not doing it.
If it didn't work, they wouldn't put money into it.
"You (Basil) are willing to believe the conclusionS from MULTIPLE studIES you HAVE read.
"I (TsuruchiBrian) am not willing to believe a conclusion made by an article on a study I have not read. AND AM IGNORING THE FACT THAT THERE ARE OTHER STUDIES TOO.
"One of these is reasonable. One is not.
Yes, one is reasonable, one is not. Yours is not reasonable.
I just think it is entertaining how retarded you are.
You seem to be confusing professional with academic. It's hardly a big surprise you used LaTeX at college. It would be a lot more surprising if you'd been a professional using it.
Slashdot Mirror
And what do you mean by "at your own expense"? Can't these kinds of skills be learned for free from any computer with an Internet connection?
Penny-wise, pound-foolish. (Is that cent-wise dollar-foolish in the US?)
Most things are learnable from the internet. But mostly I find it's more efficient to learn from a book - physical or eBook. They cost a little money, but they are likely to be more than paid back in time saved.
If you watch the stream of questions coming in to StackOverflow for example, you'll see so many people who are clearly trying to learn by doing and asking questions, and searching the internet, and getting stuck on stuff that would be covered in an early chapter of any book on the topic.
We support the rights of the individual and (most of us) dismiss or at least skeptical of the suggestion that we need to give those up to make it easier for law enforcement.
There's no such right. Police with a search warrant are allowed to search your possessions, your documents, your computers. There's nothing special about mobile phones that protect them from the general right of search with a warrant.
OK, thanks for that. So basically no phone is safe, if you're trying to hide it's data from the police.
And most people would say that's not a bad thing. Though Slashdot posters are more likely to err on the side of the criminal than the law, there being a lot of libertarians here.
Apple can't "undo" encryption. But a lockscreen pin code is 4 digits long. Guess how many tries they on average and as a maximum in order to brute-force it?
Reduce that average time, because some passcodes are used more often than others. (0000,9999,1234, numbers that spell out various 4 letter words)
After 6 attempts, you have to wait a minute before trying again. At some point there will be a complete lockout, but even that can be reset via iTunes.
So brute-forcing is by no means impossible. But it will take time and, realistically, automation. Hence why law enforcement have to wait once they've issued Apple with a warrant.
Those who are Android fans should bear in mind that Google will also retrieve data from Android devices if the Police issue them with a warrant.
The smartphone of choice for those people who need to protect their phone data from the Police is still the Blackberry.
There's no guarantee they'll support Linux. But they won't change to drop Mac.
I'm just going on the theory that an open standard makes it easier for them to support Linux. But still they won't do it if the costs of doing so outweigh the revenue they expect from it. Whether they develop in-house or via third-party.
"This is a false dichotomy."
Perhaps, but it has been demonstrated true by every iteration of DRM ever tried.
Huh? How can a false dichotomy be true?
Then you link me to another slashdot story that includes the sentence:
"DRM is working really well in the video and book space."
It takes a different track about why it's working, but it agrees it's working. I'd say there's some truth in that angle, but it's a smaller element than the one I described.
A premium brand requires the features people expect. It doesn't require to be cutting edge. Premium brands are sold on quality, not novelty.
To take your example, if you look at the news Mercedes is reporting, what's prominent: testing, association with Formula 1 and Golf.
http://news.mercedes-benz.co.uk/
Dig into the first news item about a new car, and you have to get to paragraph 6 before any features are mentioned. Before that it's all qualitative descriptions of it's form.
http://news.mercedes-benz.co.uk/products/mercedes-benz-concept-gla-arriving-soon.html
To go back to smartphones, feature-led Samsung ends up with things that don't work well. Facial recognition security, tilt to scroll and air gestures. This is not the stuff of premium brands. Premium brands take on features if and when they work.
Not to say Apple always gets it right. They've slipped on their premium brand promise on occasion by shipping features that weren't ready. Apple Maps being the stand out example.
Neither Canalys nor the poster you replied to said it was smart phones. It's "mobile devices".
Look, I'm with you that I don't think lumping notebooks in with tablets and smartphones is particularly useful. Perhaps they have a client that wanted that. But no one misrepresented it, if you thought it was only smartphones, that was your own assumption.
As I said Canalys have a good, long track record as a reputable market analyst. They are not some random website trolling for clicks. The websites reporting their figures may be though...
And what? Some poster on Slashdot knows better? When they are the ones what have all the data. They're not blind here. They're not guessing. People here are.
I'm willing to bet $50 that the 'statistics' provided are made up from thin air*.
I'd be more than happy to take that bet. See my comment here:
http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3738737&cid=43696787
The source is Canalys, and I've followed their data from more than a decade. It's very credible as a company.
The surprisingly large Microsoft share in this particular analysis is because they are including notebook PCs as "mobile devices". It shows how much of a PC world we're in that Microsoft comes out so low.
And it's not at all surprising that RIM and Blackberry are hidden in a 9.6% others, they really are tiny now.
It's the Apple figure that is surprisingly low here. And I think the surprise comes from most analyses being either US only, or at least biased towards US figures because they are US analysts. Canalys takes the world markets more seriously.
Android does so well because it's the default that people will end up with if they walk into a phone store, and accept whatever it is that the clerk recommends. They're cheap and cheerful, and there's always some staff bonus available on one model or another.
Unfortunately for you the fact is that Samsung spends 10 times as much on marketing as Apple does. If marketing is a sign of an audience that doesn't know any better, then that's Samsung users.
You're confusing marketing with having a desirable brand. And desirable brands come about as a result of a history of selling high quality products. Not by marketing.
I'd have respect for your point if you pointed out all the times Apple's shares doubled on the way up. But you didn't, did you.
Premium doesn't mean "comes with the most features". Not at all. Premium is a quality thing, not a features thing.
As soon as this conversation loses it's entertainment value, I will just stop talking to you.
Funny you should say...
A disappointing OS UI has nothing to do with the economics of applying DRM.
And yet, it's still fundamentally true with the economics of Windows. Microsoft wouldn't continue producing Windows versions if Windows didn't make them money. They've got a miss with this particular version, but they've had misses before and still made money on both that version itself and on subsequent versions.
It's less bad, but it's still bad. It defines no width for the text, allowing a single column to go right across the monitor for a maximized window. 30 words per line on my 13" laptop!
Sure, I COULD resize my window to suit. But the fact that I have to is a big flaw of the website.
Then there's the issue that it's ugly and has nothing to draw people in.
Then, the "Site Map" link is broken. And the domain itself has no index, dumping you at an Apache file browser.
It's a piece of shit, made to seem only slightly acceptable by comparison with the appalling examples I posted myself.
It's fantastic that the web isn't much like that any more.
because it worked so poorly for Apple too. they locked everyone in, a company that was about to fold, and then all hell broke loose. audio files that couldn't play on any other device are what killed the iPod's early years, and iTunes, and a phone that can only have apps that are bought through a closed store, of which the developers have to share money with Apple and can't have payments not through the store... it's just obvious that be being closed they strangled the industry. the app boom never happened, the smart phone market failed, and digital music services never took off.
I suspect the people that modded your post insightful didn't get that you were being sarcastic. Well done!
Be careful what you wish for. Here's some typical 90s style web sites.
http://www.dokimos.org/ajff/
http://www.partytentcity.com/
http://www.dpgraph.com/
What's to say that Netflix wont choose an encryption scheme that has a Microsoft Windows only CDM?
Because they wouldn't want to lose their existing Mac users. If their existing solution was based on Silverlight, that would explain why access was limited to just Windows and Mac. Microsoft's limitation, not Netflix's.
Given an open solution such as this, Netflix gets a better choice as to what platforms they support. And if they judge they'll get enough business from Linux users to make it worth their while, then they'll surely support it.
Have they not learned that DRM only hurts the honest people? The pirates will get their crappy content anyways.
This is a false dichotomy. Whilst there are people that only ever use legally acquired stuff at one end of the scale, and people that always pirate non-free stuff at the other end, the vast majority lie in the middle of those extremes, pirating if it's easy and the result is good enough for them, buying when that's easier, or has the quality they require and is within their budget.
DRM doesn't come free for the industry. It would be cheaper to ship without DRM than with. The areas where DRM doesn't help the media industry's bottom line, such as songs, has already been abandoned. Areas where they keep investing in DRM, they do so because it works well enough to raise their bottom line vs not doing it.
If it didn't work, they wouldn't put money into it.
People need to realize that nothing that you send to another person can ever be guaranteed to "self-destruct".
Sure it can. I've seen it on Mission Impossible.
Let me fix that for you:
"You (Basil) are willing to believe the conclusionS from MULTIPLE studIES you HAVE read.
"I (TsuruchiBrian) am not willing to believe a conclusion made by an article on a study I have not read. AND AM IGNORING THE FACT THAT THERE ARE OTHER STUDIES TOO.
"One of these is reasonable. One is not.
Yes, one is reasonable, one is not. Yours is not reasonable.
I just think it is entertaining how retarded you are.
Reasonable?
You seem to be confusing professional with academic. It's hardly a big surprise you used LaTeX at college. It would be a lot more surprising if you'd been a professional using it.
"Don't go confusing the rightwingers with facts. If they actually had any facts, they'd be insufferable."
Interesting, as I could say the same about "leftwingers" and their "emotional" arguments.
"Don't go confusing leftwingers with emotions. If they actually had any emotions, they'd be insufferable."
Leftwingers arguments are a mixture of progress, empathy and facts.
Rightwingers arguments are a mixture of fear, selfishness and belief.