No, the real question is "why should they help only well-known commercial artists?" Don't the well-known artist producers already have ad budgets where they actually pay for that sort of thing, unlike lesser-known artists who may be self-producing with no budget? And here Google is favoring the big names for free. Or is RIAA feeding some payola to Google now? Perhaps Google simply sees the ad revenue $$$ based on interest in popular music-- but at the expense of those who produce music that hasn't made it to "popular."
In general, the websites you are looking for, given the right search terms, come up in the first few search results,...
I wish this were true. In fact, it might be true if there weren't so many people trying to game the search engines. However, the way it is now, if you don't take steps to keep your ranking in shape you'll find the gamers will have pushed you off into the back pages...
Looks like it could be a weak link...
on
Internet Immunization
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It seems to me that it would be possible for a virus writer to:
1) Identify one of the honeypot machines - there's probably a couple of ways to do that...
2) Target this honeypot machines by sending it an endless array of viruses with different signatures, thereby keeping all the systems using it for security darn busy updating their definitions -- DoS...
3)...
4) Profit!
--
This is a very serial oriented approach. Consider if you were able to group the collection of serialized events you do routinely, rearranging their ordering so that like tasks are accomplished together-- like an assembly line. The script is merely the facilitating conveyor belt.
But perhaps you'll never have your Henry Ford moment, preferring to assemble one car after another each plodding along from start to finish. Maybe you have plenty of time for that, so you don't care much about streamlining the process. Maybe you see yourself as a craftsman who likes to put his personal signature on each and every element. That's all very well and good, but it's a mistake to assume that everyone chooses to work that way...
Likely this is just flamebait, as no one so ignorant as this would be likely to find their way to slashdot. Be that as it may...
No, the future will hold at least two separate classes of end-user machines. Limited, easy for morons to use, and something for power users. And the "for dummies" machines have not really arrived yet at all. I expect there will be significant improvements in interface over the next 20 or so years, at least.
My 80 year old mother is a good example-- she has a computer but the toughest part for her is the mouse. She learned to touch-type years ago, and like me, she has 10 fingers that she knows how to use, not just one. The Mouse interface is confusing for many people because the motion you are making is not where the action is, you can't "point-and-click" at what you want, you have to point and click way down and to the right (or left, if you've configured your system for a southpaw) of what it is you are actually looking at. That is not intuitive for many people, it requires the development of some relatively new hand-eye coordination skills. Mom learned to touch-type in her 20's however, so that's not a new skill she needs to learn. Sure, the young won't have that problem, and by the time they get old they'll know how to use a mouse, but mouse-based interfaces remain clumsy, just the same. It's a make-shift solution, not by any means the most efficient, and likely to be a temporary one because of it.
Besides the cognitive disconnect between the intended action and the intending action, there are many shortcomings to the mouse/GUI interface. Among other things, Mouse-based GUI interfaces make you wait for them to finish, while even the old tried-and-true text interfaces didn't make you wait to input, they have a liberating feature known as type-ahead. Even text based menu systems have it-- as you learn the menu options or command line commands, you can type keys far in advance of where the computer is and then walk away, rather than having to wait for the display to come up so you can click on some stupid thing just to get it to go ahead. Future interface designs will no doubt be far more asynchronous, not forcing you to interact with them at their rate, instead interacting with them at your rate. Why not let the computer catch up when it gets around to it rather than slave yourself to its pacing?
Most command line systems have another powerful feature, scripting. The exception to this is Windows, whos native scripting capabilities have been positively Neandertal. And pre OS-X, scripting on the Mac was mostly non-existent. With good scripting capabilities such as on Unix, you can connect together unconnected utilities and iterate, not just macro a sequence of mouse clicks or keyboard entries, or something limited to one application. Need to do something 10,000 times? A recipe for repetitive stress injuries-- start clicking, idiot. Familiarity with command line allows me to do things like that routinely in a short loop. Mice were designed to make the computer "easy-to-use," not because it was a particularly powerful means of control. And while there currently may be many non-textual tasks they are better at, many of those tasks were made non-textual simply because of the mouse/GUI attempt at "easy-to-use." Many of those tasks existed before GUIs, where you didn't need a mouse to perform them. And other tasks such as graphic arts are better performed by a flat panel and pen combination where your action and the computer's reaction are a little more logically connected-- many people are already using them. Mice may seem easy now, but that's because they're pretty simple-minded-- they really don't do all that much and what they do is better tuned for novice tasks, not power-user tasks. But note-- a novice won't necessarily stay a novice forever.
Missing GUI features that are routine in Unix for example-- I can instantly ctl-C interrupt anything that I started running and abort it. Ever accidentally
Well, there is something to be said for giving the people what they need, even if it's not what they want. While producers of "reality TV," Oprah, Phil and the like may argue they're just giving the people what they want, the same can be said of crack dealers.
Part of the original point of NEA, NPR, PBS etc., is the realization that there are valuable things that ought to be available even if they cannot pay for themselves, or our culture suffers. "Give the people what they want," is pure democracy in action and is a prime example of what's wrong with pure democracy. We're raising a generation of TV-crack babies and will get what we paid for-- ignorance, superstition, no attention span and an inordinate fascination for the lurid and purient. And these kids are going to be in charge of your government during your old and infirm days...
It's the very ban of nudity in US television that makes the "indecent" channels so popular. It creates an atmosphere that "all nudity is sex" that trumps up the interest in it. Consequently, this plan of individual channel selection will only increase the profits of the "indecent" industry, they won't have a problem with it and Joe Righteous thinks he wants it, so it's on a fast track, I'd say...
You'd think enough cop-killer movies would get some flak like the "indecent" bits do. How non-sexy and ultraviolent could a movie possibly get before the "Think of the Children(TM)!" folks will stand up? They do seem to have some issues with video game content, but until the hidden sex scenes were uncovered it didn't seem much would get done about it.
Some producer really ought to test the envelope-- some nonstop super violent massacre flick that takes it to the furthest possible limit-- do you suppose something like that could ever wake up the FCC or "Joe Righteous?"
Funny thing is, it'll backfire. Do you really think it's the indecent channels that need extra support? In fact, more likely it's the other channels that are sponging off of the indecent channels successes. Who'll squeal about censorship the loudest when the marginal "clean" channels start losing support, or have to resort to aggressive new techniques to stay alive?
Not that I think this trend is particulary a good thing, I'm not at all convinced that it is. But I only pay for cable TV channels because it saves me $5 on my cable internet costs. But Joe Righteous may just find out their preferences aren't quite as popular as they have convinced themselves they are...
I don't read comments. It's been my experience they're often wrong, or left over from some previous incarnation of the code where they might have been accurate but are now irrelevant.
If you can't read code, perhaps you should consider some other line of work.
I would think the source would necessarily be in Assembler, as otherwise the differences in various compilers and compiler optimizations could undermine his carefully coded enhancements. At the very least he may have to keep close control on how it is compiled if he were using a higher level language compiler. Also, he may be using a macro assembler of his own choosing that isn't readily available, and presumably a variety of assemblers if he has versions for different platforms.
Consequently, it does not seem particularly surprising that the source is not available, even if you had it you might not be able to do much with it. Also, I would think that an open source version of his library in C or something might not perform quite as well, and therefore those who want to squeeze out the last ounce of performance might still prefer the library as constructed by him.
People who sell hardware love it when a new MS OS comes out that requires upgrades. They are far more likely to push the latest MS OS, as along with it goes more hardware sales. MS has used that strategy in the past, requiring more memory, more hard disk, etc., virtually every release. Consequently, that it won't run on anything but the latest gear, is not a bug but a feature.
One wonders about their motives for this news release, though...
Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is it specifically notes that it leaves no trace. Consequently, you can't know that it's hit you. Enough to make you all paranoid? Perhaps many of these agencies WANT people to think they are under constant and detailed surveillance, whether they are or not as it tends to keep them on their best behavior?
Then again, it could cause a backlash-- everyone can now assume that anything they are doing on a computer anywhere has been recorded and analyzed by spooks. Even the spooks themselves (by other spooks). And certainly every non-US citizen around the world will be completely convinced of that in any event. Whether or not this software actually exists and is being used, the announcement of it will have only the effect of suggesting that eveyone is being watched.
Do you have any idea what how slim the chances really are to be killed by terrorists in the US? Even after 9/11 it's next to none. You are far more likely to be in a car accident, die of cancer, get a heart attack or being shot by a family member. This terrorist "threat" is no reason to take away our freedoms and slowly install a police state where the citizens are the "threat". Sure we cannot just ignore the threat but I for one prefer a little "unsafer" world over privacy invading security.
Yeah, but if you're a politician the odds go up as you are higher up the ladder, and they are the ones making these decisions......
But ID doesn't say that this higher power guided evolution! No, Intelligent Design rejects evolution entirely, albeit not in so many words. Because if you have evolution but then take away natural selection (in favor of "intelligent") and random mutation (in favor of "design"), then you no longer really have evolution, do you?
Yes, ID apparently claims that the "Intelligent Designer" was not powerful enough to create a system that evolves, and therefore must have micro-managed everything.
Until every byte of code verifies for itself that it is running on genuine Apple hardware before it will execute, I'm not sure if Apple can ever close this door.
Seems to me that essentially, a CPU that decrypts all the code that it executes while it's executing it with a passkey imbedded in the chip, might just be the equivalent to what you are suggesting here. You could copy the OS, but unless you have a CPU with the right key, you won't be able to run it. A public key algorithm could make it easy to create code for the box, but not so easy to run that code elsewhere after it's encoded.
I can think of only a few approaches to cracking such a system, all of them pretty tough and getting tougher:
1. Someone with a electron microscope might be able to tear the chip open and figure out what the embedded key is by inspecting the chip substrate
2. Cracking the encryption algorithm using the code from the media.
3. Running some code in an authorized CPU that attempts to use the chip itself to decrypt the data to be saved unencrypted. Of course, if the CPU architecture can't execute data and can't load instructions into data registers, decrypted results could be inaccessible.
4. Statistical analysis of the chips operation. It might be possible to determine that a jump instruction or whatever has a certain behaviour that can be deduced from things like radio signals emitted, or other external effects of the chips internal operations.
5. Exploiting flaws in the encryption. For example, very small encrypted programs might be more vulnerable to certain brute-force attacks.
Hacker's have had a field day up to now, as code has been wide open accessible and gets updated constantly with bugs creeping in at every step. However, it is possible to create a platform so secure as to make it prohibitive, at least in the short term to modify. Sure, anything may be theoretically hackable, but all a secure system needs to be is practically unhackable for a moderate time period. We're not there yet, but it's obviously being worked on.
I concure that symlinks are an implemention hack. And they we're never meant to be anything else. They stuck around because fixing the real problem was too hard/slow, like so many things we have to deal with now.
Yes, my favorite is the fact that we have to reuse asterisk and slash in math expressions for most computer languages because we don't routinely have more explicit multiply and divide symbols available. I mean, how lame can you get?
I, and everyone else I knew, started using google as soon as it consistently started returning better search results than every other search engine at the time.
Yes, it was better. But it was better for simple, non-technical reasons, not technical ones. One, the interface was faster-- not pushing a lot of silly graphics and excess junk at you. And the search was mostly better because it didn't tend to return erroneous results in a desperate attempt to keep your eyeballs glued to the ads.
I remember at the time experiencing much frustration with Yahoo. Back then, you put in a search in yahoo, and they would vector you through an intermediate page, with a "breakdown" of the results. This was obviously to keep you on Yahoo as long as possible before you went to your target page because they could keep your eyeballs with them a page longer. So I went to AltaVista. But you had to quote everything or add plus signs on every word to keep it from returning results from a subset of your terms. At the time I developed a simple test for a "preferred" result that I tested the engines on. Enter a common word, and then a completely nonsense word. If you don't get 0 hits, the engine is spamming you. Google got me 0 hits, so I immediately switched (altavista now looks more like google, but you still don't get zero hits). It's as important that the engine doesn't give you an answer as if it does, if "nothing" is the right answer. A simple, non-technical enhancement that Yahoo or Altavista could easily have done if they weren't intent on being so conniving-- but it has a HUGE effect on users-- they notice that it's "better" even if they haven't figured out why. It's not so much better search technology as it is a better understanding of the customer experience and not letting their marketdroids run roughshod over that...
Could you pls. enlighten me then why M$ Windoze is the most used OS and M$ Office is the most used office pack ??
Windows is the most used OS because MS Office is the most used office pack.
Very few customers bought their OS because of what the OS itself could do or how good it was-- they bought their OS because the applications they wanted ran on it. And Word has been an application that for the most part has given people what they wanted out of it-- it's more stable than the OS is, at any rate. If it wasn't for Word, MS likely would have died off by now.
And originally, using Word was a cheaper option than MacWrite, which is what influences a lot of buyers, especially large corporate buyers who needed to by a crapload of them for their employees. At the time, security wasn't an issue and the reliability of an OS not under constant virus and spam attacks was seemingly bettter.
Most people don't care about the ethics behind the services they use or the products they buy - remember, those of us on Slashdot tend to represent a minority.
I completely agree. However, given a choice, people will tend to prefer a company that gives them what they want without contrived encumberances. It's not relevant that attempts to lock-in your customer is unethical, it's simply not as pleasant an experience for the customer as it is of a product that doesn't try to trap you into extra crap you don't want. It's spam of a different sort and we're getting it from everywhere. Remember when the promise of Cable TV was no commercials? Not anymore. You get bombarded by commercials now even at the gas station and the grocery checkout. Everywhere you look there's some idiot company with some lurid visual or other hook yelling "me! me! buy from me!" At Google these things are conspicuous by their relative absence. Services that care about the customer experience instead of what dirty trick a company can think of to capture your business, are more likely to produce a better customer experience. But market-protecting tyrants like Gates can't bring themselves to operate without some special "edge,"-- they're always looking for a cheat-- a strategy by which they can pull one over on their competitors. It sometimes works, but again-- once given the option, the difference in a customer's experience of a company that doesn't try to cheat their competitors out of their business eventually becomes apparent. Tyrannical companies are spending too much time focussed on their competitors instead of their customers-- thinking of them simply as "consumers," completely oblivious of the difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you know how the black & white world works, one is incapable of differentiating belief in the lack of with lack of belief.
Why should they help you as an artist?
No, the real question is "why should they help only well-known commercial artists?" Don't the well-known artist producers already have ad budgets where they actually pay for that sort of thing, unlike lesser-known artists who may be self-producing with no budget? And here Google is favoring the big names for free. Or is RIAA feeding some payola to Google now? Perhaps Google simply sees the ad revenue $$$ based on interest in popular music-- but at the expense of those who produce music that hasn't made it to "popular."
In general, the websites you are looking for, given the right search terms, come up in the first few search results,...
I wish this were true. In fact, it might be true if there weren't so many people trying to game the search engines. However, the way it is now, if you don't take steps to keep your ranking in shape you'll find the gamers will have pushed you off into the back pages...
It seems to me that it would be possible for a virus writer to: 1) Identify one of the honeypot machines - there's probably a couple of ways to do that... 2) Target this honeypot machines by sending it an endless array of viruses with different signatures, thereby keeping all the systems using it for security darn busy updating their definitions -- DoS... 3) ...
4) Profit!
--
This is a very serial oriented approach. Consider if you were able to group the collection of serialized events you do routinely, rearranging their ordering so that like tasks are accomplished together-- like an assembly line. The script is merely the facilitating conveyor belt.
But perhaps you'll never have your Henry Ford moment, preferring to assemble one car after another each plodding along from start to finish. Maybe you have plenty of time for that, so you don't care much about streamlining the process. Maybe you see yourself as a craftsman who likes to put his personal signature on each and every element. That's all very well and good, but it's a mistake to assume that everyone chooses to work that way...
Time to buy some stock. The spooks'll likely upgrade and spend a few $$$ on new ones...
Likely this is just flamebait, as no one so ignorant as this would be likely to find their way to slashdot. Be that as it may...
No, the future will hold at least two separate classes of end-user machines. Limited, easy for morons to use, and something for power users. And the "for dummies" machines have not really arrived yet at all. I expect there will be significant improvements in interface over the next 20 or so years, at least.
My 80 year old mother is a good example-- she has a computer but the toughest part for her is the mouse. She learned to touch-type years ago, and like me, she has 10 fingers that she knows how to use, not just one. The Mouse interface is confusing for many people because the motion you are making is not where the action is, you can't "point-and-click" at what you want, you have to point and click way down and to the right (or left, if you've configured your system for a southpaw) of what it is you are actually looking at. That is not intuitive for many people, it requires the development of some relatively new hand-eye coordination skills. Mom learned to touch-type in her 20's however, so that's not a new skill she needs to learn. Sure, the young won't have that problem, and by the time they get old they'll know how to use a mouse, but mouse-based interfaces remain clumsy, just the same. It's a make-shift solution, not by any means the most efficient, and likely to be a temporary one because of it.
Besides the cognitive disconnect between the intended action and the intending action, there are many shortcomings to the mouse/GUI interface. Among other things, Mouse-based GUI interfaces make you wait for them to finish, while even the old tried-and-true text interfaces didn't make you wait to input, they have a liberating feature known as type-ahead. Even text based menu systems have it-- as you learn the menu options or command line commands, you can type keys far in advance of where the computer is and then walk away, rather than having to wait for the display to come up so you can click on some stupid thing just to get it to go ahead. Future interface designs will no doubt be far more asynchronous, not forcing you to interact with them at their rate, instead interacting with them at your rate. Why not let the computer catch up when it gets around to it rather than slave yourself to its pacing?
Most command line systems have another powerful feature, scripting. The exception to this is Windows, whos native scripting capabilities have been positively Neandertal. And pre OS-X, scripting on the Mac was mostly non-existent. With good scripting capabilities such as on Unix, you can connect together unconnected utilities and iterate, not just macro a sequence of mouse clicks or keyboard entries, or something limited to one application. Need to do something 10,000 times? A recipe for repetitive stress injuries-- start clicking, idiot. Familiarity with command line allows me to do things like that routinely in a short loop. Mice were designed to make the computer "easy-to-use," not because it was a particularly powerful means of control. And while there currently may be many non-textual tasks they are better at, many of those tasks were made non-textual simply because of the mouse/GUI attempt at "easy-to-use." Many of those tasks existed before GUIs, where you didn't need a mouse to perform them. And other tasks such as graphic arts are better performed by a flat panel and pen combination where your action and the computer's reaction are a little more logically connected-- many people are already using them. Mice may seem easy now, but that's because they're pretty simple-minded-- they really don't do all that much and what they do is better tuned for novice tasks, not power-user tasks. But note-- a novice won't necessarily stay a novice forever.
Missing GUI features that are routine in Unix for example-- I can instantly ctl-C interrupt anything that I started running and abort it. Ever accidentally
Well, there is something to be said for giving the people what they need, even if it's not what they want. While producers of "reality TV," Oprah, Phil and the like may argue they're just giving the people what they want, the same can be said of crack dealers.
Part of the original point of NEA, NPR, PBS etc., is the realization that there are valuable things that ought to be available even if they cannot pay for themselves, or our culture suffers. "Give the people what they want," is pure democracy in action and is a prime example of what's wrong with pure democracy. We're raising a generation of TV-crack babies and will get what we paid for-- ignorance, superstition, no attention span and an inordinate fascination for the lurid and purient. And these kids are going to be in charge of your government during your old and infirm days...
It's the very ban of nudity in US television that makes the "indecent" channels so popular. It creates an atmosphere that "all nudity is sex" that trumps up the interest in it. Consequently, this plan of individual channel selection will only increase the profits of the "indecent" industry, they won't have a problem with it and Joe Righteous thinks he wants it, so it's on a fast track, I'd say...
You'd think enough cop-killer movies would get some flak like the "indecent" bits do. How non-sexy and ultraviolent could a movie possibly get before the "Think of the Children(TM)!" folks will stand up? They do seem to have some issues with video game content, but until the hidden sex scenes were uncovered it didn't seem much would get done about it.
Some producer really ought to test the envelope-- some nonstop super violent massacre flick that takes it to the furthest possible limit-- do you suppose something like that could ever wake up the FCC or "Joe Righteous?"
Well, maybe not...
Funny thing is, it'll backfire. Do you really think it's the indecent channels that need extra support? In fact, more likely it's the other channels that are sponging off of the indecent channels successes. Who'll squeal about censorship the loudest when the marginal "clean" channels start losing support, or have to resort to aggressive new techniques to stay alive?
Not that I think this trend is particulary a good thing, I'm not at all convinced that it is. But I only pay for cable TV channels because it saves me $5 on my cable internet costs. But Joe Righteous may just find out their preferences aren't quite as popular as they have convinced themselves they are...
Looks like the indecent channels then won't have to subsidize all that "family friendly" content anymore...
I don't read comments. It's been my experience they're often wrong, or left over from some previous incarnation of the code where they might have been accurate but are now irrelevant.
If you can't read code, perhaps you should consider some other line of work.
I would think the source would necessarily be in Assembler, as otherwise the differences in various compilers and compiler optimizations could undermine his carefully coded enhancements.
At the very least he may have to keep close control on how it is compiled if he were using a higher level language compiler. Also, he may be using a macro assembler of his own choosing that isn't readily available, and presumably a variety of assemblers if he has versions for different platforms.
Consequently, it does not seem particularly surprising that the source is not available, even if you had it you might not be able to do much with it. Also, I would think that an open source version of his library in C or something might not perform quite as well, and therefore those who want to squeeze out the last ounce of performance might still prefer the library as constructed by him.
--
People who sell hardware love it when a new MS OS comes out that requires upgrades. They are far more likely to push the latest MS OS, as along with it goes more hardware sales. MS has used that strategy in the past, requiring more memory, more hard disk, etc., virtually every release. Consequently, that it won't run on anything but the latest gear, is not a bug but a feature.
The site looks better on a 40 column display...
One wonders about their motives for this news release, though...
Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is it specifically notes that it leaves no trace. Consequently, you can't know that it's hit you. Enough to make you all paranoid? Perhaps many of these agencies WANT people to think they are under constant and detailed surveillance, whether they are or not as it tends to keep them on their best behavior?
Then again, it could cause a backlash-- everyone can now assume that anything they are doing on a computer anywhere has been recorded and analyzed by spooks. Even the spooks themselves (by other spooks). And certainly every non-US citizen around the world will be completely convinced of that in any event. Whether or not this software actually exists and is being used, the announcement of it will have only the effect of suggesting that eveyone is being watched.
Do you have any idea what how slim the chances really are to be killed by terrorists in the US? Even after 9/11 it's next to none. You are far more likely to be in a car accident, die of cancer, get a heart attack or being shot by a family member. This terrorist "threat" is no reason to take away our freedoms and slowly install a police state where the citizens are the "threat". Sure we cannot just ignore the threat but I for one prefer a little "unsafer" world over privacy invading security.
Yeah, but if you're a politician the odds go up as you are higher up the ladder, and they are the ones making these decisions......
One of Linux's great strengths is the flexibility of changing to meet new needs and not being hobbled by rigid backwards compatibility.
Yeah, let's hobble it with dependency hell instead.
But ID doesn't say that this higher power guided evolution! No, Intelligent Design rejects evolution entirely, albeit not in so many words. Because if you have evolution but then take away natural selection (in favor of "intelligent") and random mutation (in favor of "design"), then you no longer really have evolution, do you?
Yes, ID apparently claims that the "Intelligent Designer" was not powerful enough to create a system that evolves, and therefore must have micro-managed everything.
Until every byte of code verifies for itself that it is running on genuine Apple hardware before it will execute, I'm not sure if Apple can ever close this door.
Seems to me that essentially, a CPU that decrypts all the code that it executes while it's executing it with a passkey imbedded in the chip, might just be the equivalent to what you are suggesting here. You could copy the OS, but unless you have a CPU with the right key, you won't be able to run it. A public key algorithm could make it easy to create code for the box, but not so easy to run that code elsewhere after it's encoded.
I can think of only a few approaches to cracking such a system, all of them pretty tough and getting tougher:
1. Someone with a electron microscope might be able to tear the chip open and figure out what the embedded key is by inspecting the chip substrate
2. Cracking the encryption algorithm using the code from the media.
3. Running some code in an authorized CPU that attempts to use the chip itself to decrypt the data to be saved unencrypted. Of course, if the CPU architecture can't execute data and can't load instructions into data registers, decrypted results could be inaccessible.
4. Statistical analysis of the chips operation. It might be possible to determine that a jump instruction or whatever has a certain behaviour that can be deduced from things like radio signals emitted, or other external effects of the chips internal operations.
5. Exploiting flaws in the encryption. For example, very small encrypted programs might be more vulnerable to certain brute-force attacks.
Hacker's have had a field day up to now, as code has been wide open accessible and gets updated constantly with bugs creeping in at every step. However, it is possible to create a platform so secure as to make it prohibitive, at least in the short term to modify. Sure, anything may be theoretically hackable, but all a secure system needs to be is practically unhackable for a moderate time period. We're not there yet, but it's obviously being worked on.
I concure that symlinks are an implemention hack. And they we're never meant to be anything else. They stuck around because fixing the real problem was too hard/slow, like so many things we have to deal with now.
Yes, my favorite is the fact that we have to reuse asterisk and slash in math expressions for most computer languages because we don't routinely have more explicit multiply and divide symbols available. I mean, how lame can you get?
I, and everyone else I knew, started using google as soon as it consistently started returning better search results than every other search engine at the time.
Yes, it was better. But it was better for simple, non-technical reasons, not technical ones. One, the interface was faster-- not pushing a lot of silly graphics and excess junk at you. And the search was mostly better because it didn't tend to return erroneous results in a desperate attempt to keep your eyeballs glued to the ads.
I remember at the time experiencing much frustration with Yahoo. Back then, you put in a search in yahoo, and they would vector you through an intermediate page, with a "breakdown" of the results. This was obviously to keep you on Yahoo as long as possible before you went to your target page because they could keep your eyeballs with them a page longer. So I went to AltaVista. But you had to quote everything or add plus signs on every word to keep it from returning results from a subset of your terms. At the time I developed a simple test for a "preferred" result that I tested the engines on. Enter a common word, and then a completely nonsense word. If you don't get 0 hits, the engine is spamming you. Google got me 0 hits, so I immediately switched (altavista now looks more like google, but you still don't get zero hits). It's as important that the engine doesn't give you an answer as if it does, if "nothing" is the right answer. A simple, non-technical enhancement that Yahoo or Altavista could easily have done if they weren't intent on being so conniving-- but it has a HUGE effect on users-- they notice that it's "better" even if they haven't figured out why. It's not so much better search technology as it is a better understanding of the customer experience and not letting their marketdroids run roughshod over that...
Could you pls. enlighten me then why M$ Windoze is the most used OS and M$ Office is the most used office pack ??
Windows is the most used OS because MS Office is the most used office pack.
Very few customers bought their OS because of what the OS itself could do or how good it was-- they bought their OS because the applications they wanted ran on it. And Word has been an application that for the most part has given people what they wanted out of it-- it's more stable than the OS is, at any rate. If it wasn't for Word, MS likely would have died off by now.
And originally, using Word was a cheaper option than MacWrite, which is what influences a lot of buyers, especially large corporate buyers who needed to by a crapload of them for their employees. At the time, security wasn't an issue and the reliability of an OS not under constant virus and spam attacks was seemingly bettter.
Most people don't care about the ethics behind the services they use or the products they buy - remember, those of us on Slashdot tend to represent a minority.
I completely agree. However, given a choice, people will tend to prefer a company that gives them what they want without contrived encumberances. It's not relevant that attempts to lock-in your customer is unethical, it's simply not as pleasant an experience for the customer as it is of a product that doesn't try to trap you into extra crap you don't want. It's spam of a different sort and we're getting it from everywhere. Remember when the promise of Cable TV was no commercials? Not anymore. You get bombarded by commercials now even at the gas station and the grocery checkout. Everywhere you look there's some idiot company with some lurid visual or other hook yelling "me! me! buy from me!" At Google these things are conspicuous by their relative absence. Services that care about the customer experience instead of what dirty trick a company can think of to capture your business, are more likely to produce a better customer experience. But market-protecting tyrants like Gates can't bring themselves to operate without some special "edge,"-- they're always looking for a cheat-- a strategy by which they can pull one over on their competitors. It sometimes works, but again-- once given the option, the difference in a customer's experience of a company that doesn't try to cheat their competitors out of their business eventually becomes apparent. Tyrannical companies are spending too much time focussed on their competitors instead of their customers-- thinking of them simply as "consumers," completely oblivious of the difference.