I was under the impression that Quicktime 7 on handled H.264 encoded data. So, if you use H.264, you're fine, and you don't even need Quicktime to view it.
Well, final it is then. That's fine and this will be short as well.
1) Who's Twitter? I don't care, really but that's a seriously disingenious way to attempt to libel by association - a good tactic when you're out of facts. Does that sound like someone you know?
2) The Active X framework sucks. Arguing otherwise with no facts is precisely what you're accussing me of. Being how pretty much everyone, including MS, have acknowledge that ActiveX is insecure, I believe the ball's in your court on this one. This does not mean that a specific individual ActiveX control is dangerous/insecure. That's like saying an individual driver is a bad driver because some drivers are bad drivers. But it is comparing the ActiveX framework to our road system in general, which is dangerous, otherwise 40+K people a year wouldn't die on them in the US alone. ActiveX is the equivalent of giving everyone 20 year old ill-maintained yugos with no seatbelts and forcing them to drive 100mph in the rain at night.
But, don't let the facts get in the way of your stated opinion, they haven't yet.
I mentioned Orwellian because 1) I worked at one, and 2) I have several friends who worked at financial institutions with similar setups. BTW, the proxy lock-down was in a windows centric environment.
As for people getting around your limitations, note that you'll have little to no way of tracking that. Well, not entirely true, I suppose, as you could be sniffing for SSH or "SSL" traffic as well.
You wouldn't happen to be working for BoA would you? Because I know 2 folks that used to work there, and chafed significantly at the restrictions. Their computers were off the network, and interestingly enough they never mentioned access to secondary PCs for internet activity. They both found work elsewhere within 12 months, despite the decent pay rate.
Who knows, maybe you don't mind no internet access, but for programmers et al, it certainly makes life much easier to be able to research issues and keep up with new solutions, so much so that people will leave.
lastly, "secondary" PCs for internet access = okay, who do we layoff this round?
Of course there is, for at least some of those, and perhaps all of them. Start by implementing a company proxy server and redirect all other outbound 80/443 to the server for auto-proxying. That will be a huge start. You can redirect anyone with the improper browser version to an update page. Yes, I've worked at such an Orwellian outfit. Do realize that anyone sufficiently knowledgeable will get around anything you set up, and, not only that, they might even get that little extra prod they need to go work for someone that appreciates them.
But, for argument's sake: let's see - that handles patching, upgrading, management and limiting. All without having to deal with AD, IE, or MS.
Perhaps you should poke your head outside mikeysoft's world sometime and see what else is out there. You might like it.
CEO: So we're down. What's the problem? Boss: This new cross-site scripting worm exploit infected our entire system and all of our servers, and possibly some of our customers. CEO: So, how'd this infect our system so quickly? Boss: Our intranet apps use Active X, and it exploited a security hole. CEO: So MS is at fault? Have you contacted them about a fix? Boss: umm, well, they don't have a fix.... CEO: What? Well tell them to find one! Boss:... <squirms> well, umm, their fix is to disable Active X.... CEO: Really?!? And how long has that been known? Boss: About 5 years..... CEO: And why haven't we fixed this? Boss: <seriously sweating and squirming now>well, it would have cost $150K to upgrade the system... CEO: what? Only $150K!?!?!?! We're losing millions an hour right now!!!! How long till you have it fixed? Boss: well, it'll be about 3 days before the external systems are all back up and we'll lose about 4 days of historical data....
<Just picture the CEO's face at about this point....>
Well, I believe it was 1800flowers.com that used to use a frontpage driven website (it's been 2 years, I don't recall the specifics, but it was definitely while trying to order some flowers...) The interface was horrible. Web page session were a massive joke. It used direct from DB created dynamic pages for standard catalog content. Links would not work outside of the session, so no sending a link to a friend, spouse, whatever. The entire site is now a struts driven app. I couldn't imagine what the maintenance on that beast must have cost.
Agreed, but most businesses don't develop their own software, they use a COTS package, and the COTS developers tend to use the fastest/easiest devlopment path. Guess what browser that approach uses? The several I've seen or know of had a common path: the survivors wound up rewriting their entire site. The rest of them failed sooner or later.
You apparently don't work in the real world where your paychecks are determined by having your website viewable by the largest possible audience. You have no idea what you're talking about. I do work in the real world, and I explicitly developed websites for the largest possible audience: that includes IE, Netscape, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. (Why not Konquerer et al too? Because we developed with Firefox, and tweaked for IE, everything else was shown to largely work because we didn't employ lots of "neat" tricks. Hence a working website that supported browsers all the way back to Netscape 4.7x and IE 4.)
So, you can continue to develop for your less than the largest possible audience. I'll take those extra percentage points and add them to the bottom line.
I'm aware of several organizations that foolishly listened to MS on how coding to their browser using their tools would save them money. Apparently not. The initial roll-out of a POC was seemingly fast, but then came real requirements, and the cost of dev quickly came on par to writing the app to standards in the first place. Then came the quirks, and the company, now x$'s into the program, mandated a homogeneous browser installation on all equipment so the broken app could work. Now MS comes along and forces you to update and you'll have to rewrite those apps yet again.
FF 2.x is worse than the other iterations. You can turn off spell check, that helps some. There's some tuning parameters you can set to release memory/pages in cache and limit it to those in the browser currently. Other than that, the core problem with all browsers is that the JS engine in them sucks rocks, and the single threaded nature of that beast is what kills performance when you have lots of plugins or heavy JS pages.
FF 3.0 reportedly is much lighter in memory and faster in performance, but I've not tried it yet. I downloaded it this weekend, and will try to find some time to install it shortly.
Active X should be banned across the board in any company that even remotely considers security an issue. Intranet apps of the type you talk about need to be reprogrammed, because they probably won't be maintainable even in the short term.
Well, anyone running Win2K in a corporate setting will have turned off Windows Update and done pushes via corporate owned SMS solutions or some other corporate mechanism.
Anyone that runs XP with Update disabled I would hope would be running Firefox or Opera anyways. If you're smart enough to do one, surely you'd do the other too?
That's why you don't implement for IE at all. You build for Firefox, Opera, Safari, or something else that supports standards, and then make little tweaks to fix IE displays. Doing anything else puts you in a world of hurt.
Disabling Boot Camp was unnecessary, but you didn't have to upgrade to 10.4.11. I've tended to only upgrade when I think I need it, not whenever Apple has it ready to go. There's always some early adopters out there who can't wait to play with the latest release of anything - I'll let them test it and make statements.
And what prevents you from plugging in an nVidia card into last year's Mac Pro? (Unless the MB firmware doesn't accept it, that's a different issue)
But, the pattern I notice is that of a hardware company starting to notice that HEY, software can make money too!
Well, after I get my suite of 4 or 5 open source projects all interacting seamlessly with one another (SSO) and management unified under the portal server, my next step may very well be to merge all that with OpenID, as it may in the end simplify my tasks. Meanwhile, getting the 4 current systems to work seamlessly together has been painful enough. The question of whether I can donate back the modified code is potentially questionable unless and until we start selling licensed copies. And in short, the modifications to the sources are minor, as it's a separate framework much lighter than CAS (that's a seriously clunky SSO solution, yick).
... the real problem - users who don't care how much bandwidth they use. Why would I care? I paid for "unlimited" bandwidth at a maximum of 6Mbps download and 256 upload (I've since left, since they couldn't even deliver these anemic rates for just minutes a day....)
Eventually, I may go with my own partial T1 or full T1, and maybe split it among a couple of neighbors. The entire ISP situation is getting way out of hand.
My quick searches through both the UK and German amazon sites indicate numerous duplicate entries for both. So those numbers are quite misleading, as there certainly are not 'x' number of unique movies. Their might be a German, French, UK, and US release listed.
What's really interesting though is the movies that exist in one format or the other on one or both of those sites. I'm about to go fishing and view amazon's other European sites.
I should have been proof read that: it is effectively stripped.
I agree with you, remove it entirely, it is not needed nor does it do anything other than annoy people.
Actually, along that line, the most annoying thing on any type of optical disk with commercial content is the UPA (User Prohibited Actions) feature. I don't know what dipshit thought that up, but it's my disk, my time, and they certainly don't have any right to force me to do anything. Speaking on that note, I'll note that the Screen Gems (Sony) HD DVD of Underworld (German import) has no UPAs and you can skip right through the copyright warning. Sweet! (And hopefully you caught the irony there on many levels;)
If Paramount and Universal are truly behind the spec, then get moving on producing as many HD titles as possible on HD and get them out the door.
Toshiba needs to advertise to the public and keep low prices on hardware. Also, release HD DVD burners. Also improving the start up time of their players would be good - perhaps an S3 like sleep state with rare reboots?
The amateur community needs to be made aware that their current DL burners can burn HD DVD spec disks using standard DVDs.
Those things alone would go far in promoting HD DVD. It's a better overall spec, pure size on disk arguments aside.
It pretty much is already stripped of the DRM, so all they need to do is stop adding it to new titles. (BD is also cracked, but BD+ still has a challenge or two, but it probably won't last much longer either)
The funny thing is I now own about 50 HD DVD titles. I'll probably start burning my own HD DVDs soon (HD DVD9 with home video of course) That's pretty cool in and of itself: MPEG4 on regular DL DVDs.
Only in North America. In some other parts of the world Disney titles (at least some of them) are HD-DVD, due to different agreements with local distributers. And HD-DVD has no region encoding. You have a link to a list? I might be interested in one or more of those. Underworld looks great in HD DVD.
They're only 30. They have at least another 10 years to change their minds. I know of at least 3 instances where that has happened to people with the exact same thoughts. All now have 1 child each.
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I was under the impression that Quicktime 7 on handled H.264 encoded data. So, if you use H.264, you're fine, and you don't even need Quicktime to view it.
Well, final it is then. That's fine and this will be short as well.
1) Who's Twitter? I don't care, really but that's a seriously disingenious way to attempt to libel by association - a good tactic when you're out of facts. Does that sound like someone you know?
2) The Active X framework sucks. Arguing otherwise with no facts is precisely what you're accussing me of. Being how pretty much everyone, including MS, have acknowledge that ActiveX is insecure, I believe the ball's in your court on this one. This does not mean that a specific individual ActiveX control is dangerous/insecure. That's like saying an individual driver is a bad driver because some drivers are bad drivers. But it is comparing the ActiveX framework to our road system in general, which is dangerous, otherwise 40+K people a year wouldn't die on them in the US alone. ActiveX is the equivalent of giving everyone 20 year old ill-maintained yugos with no seatbelts and forcing them to drive 100mph in the rain at night.
But, don't let the facts get in the way of your stated opinion, they haven't yet.
I mentioned Orwellian because 1) I worked at one, and 2) I have several friends who worked at financial institutions with similar setups. BTW, the proxy lock-down was in a windows centric environment.
As for people getting around your limitations, note that you'll have little to no way of tracking that. Well, not entirely true, I suppose, as you could be sniffing for SSH or "SSL" traffic as well.
You wouldn't happen to be working for BoA would you? Because I know 2 folks that used to work there, and chafed significantly at the restrictions. Their computers were off the network, and interestingly enough they never mentioned access to secondary PCs for internet activity. They both found work elsewhere within 12 months, despite the decent pay rate.
Who knows, maybe you don't mind no internet access, but for programmers et al, it certainly makes life much easier to be able to research issues and keep up with new solutions, so much so that people will leave.
lastly, "secondary" PCs for internet access = okay, who do we layoff this round?
...your situation cannot happen with IT administrators who know what they're doing.... I think you just made my argument for me. Thanks.Oh, and ActiveX is, in general, a massive sucking security hole.
Of course there is, for at least some of those, and perhaps all of them. Start by implementing a company proxy server and redirect all other outbound 80/443 to the server for auto-proxying. That will be a huge start. You can redirect anyone with the improper browser version to an update page. Yes, I've worked at such an Orwellian outfit. Do realize that anyone sufficiently knowledgeable will get around anything you set up, and, not only that, they might even get that little extra prod they need to go work for someone that appreciates them.
But, for argument's sake: let's see - that handles patching, upgrading, management and limiting. All without having to deal with AD, IE, or MS.
Perhaps you should poke your head outside mikeysoft's world sometime and see what else is out there. You might like it.
.... some time later...
... <squirms> well, umm, their fix is to disable Active X....
CEO: So we're down. What's the problem?
Boss: This new cross-site scripting worm exploit infected our entire system and all of our servers, and possibly some of our customers.
CEO: So, how'd this infect our system so quickly?
Boss: Our intranet apps use Active X, and it exploited a security hole.
CEO: So MS is at fault? Have you contacted them about a fix?
Boss: umm, well, they don't have a fix....
CEO: What? Well tell them to find one!
Boss:
CEO: Really?!? And how long has that been known?
Boss: About 5 years.....
CEO: And why haven't we fixed this?
Boss: <seriously sweating and squirming now>well, it would have cost $150K to upgrade the system...
CEO: what? Only $150K!?!?!?! We're losing millions an hour right now!!!! How long till you have it fixed?
Boss: well, it'll be about 3 days before the external systems are all back up and we'll lose about 4 days of historical data....
<Just picture the CEO's face at about this point....>
Well, I believe it was 1800flowers.com that used to use a frontpage driven website (it's been 2 years, I don't recall the specifics, but it was definitely while trying to order some flowers...) The interface was horrible. Web page session were a massive joke. It used direct from DB created dynamic pages for standard catalog content. Links would not work outside of the session, so no sending a link to a friend, spouse, whatever. The entire site is now a struts driven app. I couldn't imagine what the maintenance on that beast must have cost.
So, you can continue to develop for your less than the largest possible audience. I'll take those extra percentage points and add them to the bottom line.
You've been served.
I'm aware of several organizations that foolishly listened to MS on how coding to their browser using their tools would save them money. Apparently not. The initial roll-out of a POC was seemingly fast, but then came real requirements, and the cost of dev quickly came on par to writing the app to standards in the first place. Then came the quirks, and the company, now x$'s into the program, mandated a homogeneous browser installation on all equipment so the broken app could work. Now MS comes along and forces you to update and you'll have to rewrite those apps yet again.
Will they learn? Sadly, probably not.
FF 2.x is worse than the other iterations. You can turn off spell check, that helps some. There's some tuning parameters you can set to release memory/pages in cache and limit it to those in the browser currently. Other than that, the core problem with all browsers is that the JS engine in them sucks rocks, and the single threaded nature of that beast is what kills performance when you have lots of plugins or heavy JS pages.
FF 3.0 reportedly is much lighter in memory and faster in performance, but I've not tried it yet. I downloaded it this weekend, and will try to find some time to install it shortly.
Active X should be banned across the board in any company that even remotely considers security an issue. Intranet apps of the type you talk about need to be reprogrammed, because they probably won't be maintainable even in the short term.
Well, anyone running Win2K in a corporate setting will have turned off Windows Update and done pushes via corporate owned SMS solutions or some other corporate mechanism.
Anyone that runs XP with Update disabled I would hope would be running Firefox or Opera anyways. If you're smart enough to do one, surely you'd do the other too?
That's why you don't implement for IE at all. You build for Firefox, Opera, Safari, or something else that supports standards, and then make little tweaks to fix IE displays. Doing anything else puts you in a world of hurt.
Disabling Boot Camp was unnecessary, but you didn't have to upgrade to 10.4.11. I've tended to only upgrade when I think I need it, not whenever Apple has it ready to go. There's always some early adopters out there who can't wait to play with the latest release of anything - I'll let them test it and make statements.
And what prevents you from plugging in an nVidia card into last year's Mac Pro? (Unless the MB firmware doesn't accept it, that's a different issue)
But, the pattern I notice is that of a hardware company starting to notice that HEY, software can make money too!
Low id's aren't indicative of anything other than 1) having signed up early or 2) bought an id on ebay. Either way, neither confers automatic wisdom.
Well, after I get my suite of 4 or 5 open source projects all interacting seamlessly with one another (SSO) and management unified under the portal server, my next step may very well be to merge all that with OpenID, as it may in the end simplify my tasks. Meanwhile, getting the 4 current systems to work seamlessly together has been painful enough. The question of whether I can donate back the modified code is potentially questionable unless and until we start selling licensed copies. And in short, the modifications to the sources are minor, as it's a separate framework much lighter than CAS (that's a seriously clunky SSO solution, yick).
... the real problem - users who don't care how much bandwidth they use. Why would I care? I paid for "unlimited" bandwidth at a maximum of 6Mbps download and 256 upload (I've since left, since they couldn't even deliver these anemic rates for just minutes a day....)Eventually, I may go with my own partial T1 or full T1, and maybe split it among a couple of neighbors. The entire ISP situation is getting way out of hand.
On 3), I have a friend right now that is somewhat upset about giving up his phone number of 20+ years.
My quick searches through both the UK and German amazon sites indicate numerous duplicate entries for both. So those numbers are quite misleading, as there certainly are not 'x' number of unique movies. Their might be a German, French, UK, and US release listed.
What's really interesting though is the movies that exist in one format or the other on one or both of those sites. I'm about to go fishing and view amazon's other European sites.
I should have been proof read that: it is effectively stripped.
I agree with you, remove it entirely, it is not needed nor does it do anything other than annoy people.
Actually, along that line, the most annoying thing on any type of optical disk with commercial content is the UPA (User Prohibited Actions) feature. I don't know what dipshit thought that up, but it's my disk, my time, and they certainly don't have any right to force me to do anything. Speaking on that note, I'll note that the Screen Gems (Sony) HD DVD of Underworld (German import) has no UPAs and you can skip right through the copyright warning. Sweet! (And hopefully you caught the irony there on many levels;)
HD DVD can "win" by a couple of simple steps.
If Paramount and Universal are truly behind the spec, then get moving on producing as many HD titles as possible on HD and get them out the door.
Toshiba needs to advertise to the public and keep low prices on hardware. Also, release HD DVD burners. Also improving the start up time of their players would be good - perhaps an S3 like sleep state with rare reboots?
The amateur community needs to be made aware that their current DL burners can burn HD DVD spec disks using standard DVDs.
Those things alone would go far in promoting HD DVD. It's a better overall spec, pure size on disk arguments aside.
It pretty much is already stripped of the DRM, so all they need to do is stop adding it to new titles. (BD is also cracked, but BD+ still has a challenge or two, but it probably won't last much longer either)
The funny thing is I now own about 50 HD DVD titles. I'll probably start burning my own HD DVDs soon (HD DVD9 with home video of course) That's pretty cool in and of itself: MPEG4 on regular DL DVDs.
Only in North America. In some other parts of the world Disney titles (at least some of them) are HD-DVD, due to different agreements with local distributers. And HD-DVD has no region encoding. You have a link to a list? I might be interested in one or more of those. Underworld looks great in HD DVD.
They're only 30. They have at least another 10 years to change their minds. I know of at least 3 instances where that has happened to people with the exact same thoughts. All now have 1 child each.