Actually, I'd say that you've exposed a further dimension to what was a somewhat over-simplified account on my part, but your point doesn't really dispute what we've said per se, it just goes along to justify waiting on applying the patches because of your own logistical constraints. What you're saying about applying 20 patches at once vs. 1 at a time seems reasonable enough given the hoops you need to jump through, but still, given those, would you prefer that the software vendors sit on the patches and not make them public to the likes of you until there's a publicly disclosed exploit for the bugs the patches cover? Remember, then you'd be even more under the gun because you'd have to rush each of the bureaucratic hoop-jumping monkey dance sessions and that'd get old real quick...
Even if I were in your position, I'd still much much rather have the patches available to me so that I could begin the process of clearing them for use, even if I decided that I'd make that a weekly, bi-weekly or even monthly thing... it'd still be my choice and my timeline to adjust as I saw fit...rather than being bushwacked by zero-day exploits that get patched on day 5 and then cleared for use by day 10, in house or whatever because the software vendor didn't want to rock the boat and get the patch out earlier than it *had to*.
I guess I agree with you, but that's because I, like you, am pretty good about keeping important things patched and up to date... so it becomes, in part, an argument pitting the needs/wants of the vigilant vs. the needs/best interests of the lazy and uninformed masses (of course, there is a gradient between those two extremes and one may be in one group one day and the other on another day, yadda yadda, but the distinction is still valid).
So, of course, being a regular patcher, I'd prefer that they patch the bugs sooner rather than later, as long as resources allow them to get it right the first time...
I second that sentiment. I'm not a mac-fanboy (well, I guess I play one on/. from time to time) -- I'm just constantly amazed at how Dvorak can be so wrong and yet so... noticed.
Funny. I brought my camera and I DID take better photos than the pros. More funny? You don't get it -- part of the joy is knowing YOU took THAT photo. That's part of what makes them better, btw...
If you want something done right for your business, you always have the responsibility to make some attempt to verify the quality of the service beyond such naive methods, IMHO.
The last time I used an Apple Authorised Service provider, they took a month to replace the hard drive of my iBook...
Okay, well, that is an unfortunate story -- but the point I made was that you should find a good Apple Authorised Service provider that is focused on business and business level care (and has a track-record to prove it). They exist -- and FirstTech was an excellent example of such a place.
Did you do that legwork in this case or did you just pop in to the nearest place with an Apple sticker on the window?
The above suggestions are great -- another option is to find a Apple Authorized Service provider that has been around for a while. For example, when I was in Minneapolis and working for a small business (that was all mac shop at the time), I found FirstTech and they were fantastic about getting machines turned around quickly for me with a minimum of hassle. They made business customers a priority and it showed... I'm sure there have to be similar places in other major metro areas...
It seems as though some people monitoring the sun do seem to believe (or at least did in 2003) that the solar output has been increasing.
Also, it's pretty well known that many simple lab experiments don't generalize well to larger, complex (real-world) systems. Some do, some don't. A great example of this are the numerous anti-cancer agents that work in vitro but fail to kill cancer in vivo.
I'm aware of this -- the more power the federal government takes, the less the states or the people have and that eventually negates the concept of federalism... But much more importantly, going with your point, the beautiful part is that the constitution can be amended if something in it is lacking. On the other hand, nothing can expected if the constitution is ignored and our rights are arbitrarily abridged -- and that's exactly the direction that the AG is going with ideas such as those in question.
Can you cite a recent peer reviewed study? -- I'm not trying to flame you here, but your comment made me do a bit of digging and the most recent study that I could find was Breckenkamp, et al., "Biological effects on human health due to radiofrequency/microwave exposure: a synopsis of cohort studies." published in 2003 in Radiation and Environmental Biophysics, 2003 Oct;42(3):141-54. and their conclusion was:
In most of the studies, an increased risk for various types of cancer was found in exposed study participants, although in different organs. The overall results were, however, inconsistent. The most important limitations of the studies were the lack of measurements referring to past and current exposures and, thus, the unknown details on actual exposure, the use of possibly biased data as well as the lack of adjustment for potential confounders and the use of indirect standardization techniques. Due to these limitations and the inconsistencies of the results it has to be concluded that the studies give no evidence of high frequency emissions causing cancer.
Basically, while you can point to individual studies that show exposure increases cancer risk, there is no over-arching pattern that has been reproduced from one study to the next and therefore it becomes a real possibility that methodological errors may have caused incorrect results in those studies. At the very least, it means that the story isn't as simple as you're portraying it and more research clearly needs to be done.
While I believe the views expressed by the above poster are extreme (that's not a comment on their correctness, simply a comment on how they compare to the popular mode of thinking), in no way do I think that the "troll" moderation is fair -- it's a valid opinion, even if you don't agree with it. If I had the mod points...
Seriously? Was that just some sort of test to see if the committee was listening? Or if the people of America are listening? The Attorney General ought to be removed from his position for such a clearly unconstitutional view... I mean, really, amendments IX and X are pretty damned clear on this matter.
When will we (as a people) care that our rights are very very quickly being crushed under the thumb of our government?
Well, that's not the physics I was taught...velocity is a vector quantity and speed is a scalar quantity... essentially velocity without a direction. That doesn't make it any less real -- it makes it less informative, sure, but no less real. A rate of change is a rate of change, regardless -- the sign (i.e. +/-) or direction, as those can be arbitrary in some cases and in most others, it's only important that they're correct relative to other related rates.
Hardly -- the statement is a little stupid because it doesn't mention the constant c nor "the speed of light in a vacuum", it simply says "the speed of light" -- most people will recognize the error, but it's still an error.
But at the same time, pre-employment psychological profiling is allowed in many states -- personality profiling, IQ tests and the like, so I think this system is comparable to using a psychological inventory -- especially if the raw answers are not kept for the people making the hiring decisions, but only the composite/scaled scores... I'm betting a legal team has had this run by them if Google's making it system-wide.
You seem to be dismissing Apple's high survey scores based on speculation that Apple's unusually passionate user-base is unfairly biasing the score in apple's favor. But the simple question comes out in all this -- why are Apple users so passionate about the product? Either you have to dismiss them as all being sheep who love surveys (an odd combination) or you need to conclude that there's something about the whole Apple product ownership experience that really does bring about that passion.
For me, I've found Apple's customer service to be no worse than any other major company, and in many cases better -- and I've had to deal with Apple service (or their authorized service centers) at least 20-30 times over the last 15 years (of course, I've tipped my hand here that I've worked supporting a bunch of macs in an business environment, but I've also helped friends and family and dealt with my own machines over the years as well.) Pretty consistently, I've found Apple employees willing to go the extra mile for me both as a business customer and as a private customer. Sure, I've had one or two less than perfect experiences, but on the whole, Apple's product quality and customer service has been great. Compare that to my experiences with Dell, Microsoft, Ford, Toyota, Subaru, Frigidaire, Sony, FedEx, UPS, Target, Marshall Fields, Amazon.com and a whole bunch more companies of size similar to or larger than Apple's, and I can honestly say that while not perfect, Apple has done better than any other large company as far as my customer service experiences go over the last 15 years, period.
So, just as you've had awful experiences with them, I've had good ones.
The point is that the people who've had bad experiences can (and often do) make a lot of noise in online forums (as well they should if they think they've been wronged) but those of us who've had decent experiences rarely seek out public forums to discuss the satisfactory (or better) service. Alternatively, customer satisfaction surveys aim to get a random sampling/even cross-section of the user/consumer base and when those surveys show one company to be highly rated, consistently, that should carry more weight than anecdotal evidence from the web where a limited few are able to bias the whole discussion if they're noisy enough.
Well, this sort of thing certainly wouldn't stop them from fixing bugs and it'd likely put more pressure on Apple to fix a bug or two, so I don't see how it'll end up worse for users and developers, unless Apple really doesn't care about their code quality, in which case, this'll illustrate it well enough that we'll all hear it loud and clear (assuming serious bugs are discovered in this process).
(I'm not a mac fanboy, but I play one on slashdot)
I also think the quality of the bugs will be interesting. If all 30 bugs are show stoppers, then there are some serious underlying issues that should be addressed. And I totally agree. If there are bugs, better to have them out there and then fixed than it is to have them be obscure pieces of knowledge that a motivated few will use for their gain.
In the end, a month of OS X bugspotting can only be a good thing, IMHO.
Plus, a technical detail is hardly "ancillary" for a technical website
By that logic, any incorrect detail, no matter how tangential, in any article would invalidate everything else they did say. And, while sweeping indictments of that sort are sometimes a handy way of winning the opinion of the masses -- lawyers and politicians are frequent users of such tactics, and they work, even if they're not really right.
If you bother to read the story you're citing, you'd see that, for that story and the point they're making, saying that LAME is also an MP3 player (after correctly stating that it's an encoder) is, in fact, an unimportant detail (mistake or not) inasmuch as that mistake doesn't alter the main point of the story -- if they simply said "The software, developed by British software firm First4Internet, was found to contain source code from the open-source project LAME" and left it at that, the story wouldn't have been lacking.
You're right, it is a mistake, but it's not the crucial, story invalidating mistake you seem to take it to be -- it ends up being more telling that you're hung up on that extraneous detail in a single story and that you're not willing to base your statements on recent pieces, such as the one referenced here in this story. You admit that you stopped reading Ars over a year ago. Right there you disqualified yourself as someone who could comment on recent quality, in your own words.
I'm all for getting facts straight and you're right, it's a mistake that shouldn't have been made, but failing to see the quality of the majority of the pieces, especially the longer/more substantial write-ups and the overall ability of ars' writers to distill complex issues into understandable, yet technical explanations makes them worthy of praise. I read news.com as well, but they're different beasts and it's pretty clear you're not interested in seeing the difference. Your loss.
Um, yeah, they say " LAME, an MP3 encoder and player" So, first and foremost it's an encoder, even by their description. Second, if you have to resort to cherrypicking an example from over a year ago about a small, ancillary detail (again, they correctly stated that it's an MP3 encoder, first), then you're kinda proving my point. Lastly, I'm sure that if you bothered to look, almost any other news-source, particularly in the old-media, has as much if not more of a track record of mistakes with technical (as in specific) details. But hey, you're bothered by it? That's cool, don't read ars.
What I love is that they argue that they should be exempt from any sort of local regulation/control and yet lobby hard to regulate and restrict local municipalities from competing with them (by running their own fiber networks). Pure and simple, this is a contradiction.
Perhaps this is a bit off-topic, but I really think this story is an excellent example of the high quality journalism that is popping up at arstechnica. This is a very real issue that may well effect a huge number of people and it's good to see an informed, well written bit of investigative journalism coming from a new(ish) source. (read: not the old-media). Bravo to all the folks over at Arstechnica!
Technological solutions are imperfect and so are human solutions (i.e.: have a neighbor stop in every few days -- a lot of damage can happen in that time) -- so do both. The sources of error/failure aren't coupled, so they'll help much more in concert than they would alone.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I'd say that you've exposed a further dimension to what was a somewhat over-simplified account on my part, but your point doesn't really dispute what we've said per se, it just goes along to justify waiting on applying the patches because of your own logistical constraints. What you're saying about applying 20 patches at once vs. 1 at a time seems reasonable enough given the hoops you need to jump through, but still, given those, would you prefer that the software vendors sit on the patches and not make them public to the likes of you until there's a publicly disclosed exploit for the bugs the patches cover? Remember, then you'd be even more under the gun because you'd have to rush each of the bureaucratic hoop-jumping monkey dance sessions and that'd get old real quick...
Even if I were in your position, I'd still much much rather have the patches available to me so that I could begin the process of clearing them for use, even if I decided that I'd make that a weekly, bi-weekly or even monthly thing... it'd still be my choice and my timeline to adjust as I saw fit...rather than being bushwacked by zero-day exploits that get patched on day 5 and then cleared for use by day 10, in house or whatever because the software vendor didn't want to rock the boat and get the patch out earlier than it *had to*.
I guess I agree with you, but that's because I, like you, am pretty good about keeping important things patched and up to date... so it becomes, in part, an argument pitting the needs/wants of the vigilant vs. the needs/best interests of the lazy and uninformed masses (of course, there is a gradient between those two extremes and one may be in one group one day and the other on another day, yadda yadda, but the distinction is still valid).
So, of course, being a regular patcher, I'd prefer that they patch the bugs sooner rather than later, as long as resources allow them to get it right the first time...
I second that sentiment. I'm not a mac-fanboy (well, I guess I play one on /. from time to time) -- I'm just constantly amazed at how Dvorak can be so wrong and yet so... noticed.
Funny. I brought my camera and I DID take better photos than the pros. More funny? You don't get it -- part of the joy is knowing YOU took THAT photo. That's part of what makes them better, btw...
If you want something done right for your business, you always have the responsibility to make some attempt to verify the quality of the service beyond such naive methods, IMHO.
Okay, well, that is an unfortunate story -- but the point I made was that you should find a good Apple Authorised Service provider that is focused on business and business level care (and has a track-record to prove it). They exist -- and FirstTech was an excellent example of such a place.
Did you do that legwork in this case or did you just pop in to the nearest place with an Apple sticker on the window?
The above suggestions are great -- another option is to find a Apple Authorized Service provider that has been around for a while. For example, when I was in Minneapolis and working for a small business (that was all mac shop at the time), I found FirstTech and they were fantastic about getting machines turned around quickly for me with a minimum of hassle. They made business customers a priority and it showed... I'm sure there have to be similar places in other major metro areas...
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/sun_output_0 30320.html
It seems as though some people monitoring the sun do seem to believe (or at least did in 2003) that the solar output has been increasing.
Also, it's pretty well known that many simple lab experiments don't generalize well to larger, complex (real-world) systems. Some do, some don't. A great example of this are the numerous anti-cancer agents that work in vitro but fail to kill cancer in vivo.
I'm just saying is all...
I'm aware of this -- the more power the federal government takes, the less the states or the people have and that eventually negates the concept of federalism... But much more importantly, going with your point, the beautiful part is that the constitution can be amended if something in it is lacking. On the other hand, nothing can expected if the constitution is ignored and our rights are arbitrarily abridged -- and that's exactly the direction that the AG is going with ideas such as those in question.
Basically, while you can point to individual studies that show exposure increases cancer risk, there is no over-arching pattern that has been reproduced from one study to the next and therefore it becomes a real possibility that methodological errors may have caused incorrect results in those studies. At the very least, it means that the story isn't as simple as you're portraying it and more research clearly needs to be done.
While I believe the views expressed by the above poster are extreme (that's not a comment on their correctness, simply a comment on how they compare to the popular mode of thinking), in no way do I think that the "troll" moderation is fair -- it's a valid opinion, even if you don't agree with it. If I had the mod points...
Seriously? Was that just some sort of test to see if the committee was listening? Or if the people of America are listening? The Attorney General ought to be removed from his position for such a clearly unconstitutional view... I mean, really, amendments IX and X are pretty damned clear on this matter.
When will we (as a people) care that our rights are very very quickly being crushed under the thumb of our government?
Well, that's not the physics I was taught...velocity is a vector quantity and speed is a scalar quantity... essentially velocity without a direction. That doesn't make it any less real -- it makes it less informative, sure, but no less real. A rate of change is a rate of change, regardless -- the sign (i.e. +/-) or direction, as those can be arbitrary in some cases and in most others, it's only important that they're correct relative to other related rates.
Hardly -- the statement is a little stupid because it doesn't mention the constant c nor "the speed of light in a vacuum", it simply says "the speed of light" -- most people will recognize the error, but it's still an error.
But at the same time, pre-employment psychological profiling is allowed in many states -- personality profiling, IQ tests and the like, so I think this system is comparable to using a psychological inventory -- especially if the raw answers are not kept for the people making the hiring decisions, but only the composite/scaled scores... I'm betting a legal team has had this run by them if Google's making it system-wide.
Virtue comes in knowing when not to exercise your right to speak/act/etc. as often as it comes from the doing (dare I say 'acting')...
You seem to be dismissing Apple's high survey scores based on speculation that Apple's unusually passionate user-base is unfairly biasing the score in apple's favor. But the simple question comes out in all this -- why are Apple users so passionate about the product? Either you have to dismiss them as all being sheep who love surveys (an odd combination) or you need to conclude that there's something about the whole Apple product ownership experience that really does bring about that passion.
For me, I've found Apple's customer service to be no worse than any other major company, and in many cases better -- and I've had to deal with Apple service (or their authorized service centers) at least 20-30 times over the last 15 years (of course, I've tipped my hand here that I've worked supporting a bunch of macs in an business environment, but I've also helped friends and family and dealt with my own machines over the years as well.) Pretty consistently, I've found Apple employees willing to go the extra mile for me both as a business customer and as a private customer. Sure, I've had one or two less than perfect experiences, but on the whole, Apple's product quality and customer service has been great. Compare that to my experiences with Dell, Microsoft, Ford, Toyota, Subaru, Frigidaire, Sony, FedEx, UPS, Target, Marshall Fields, Amazon.com and a whole bunch more companies of size similar to or larger than Apple's, and I can honestly say that while not perfect, Apple has done better than any other large company as far as my customer service experiences go over the last 15 years, period.
So, just as you've had awful experiences with them, I've had good ones. The point is that the people who've had bad experiences can (and often do) make a lot of noise in online forums (as well they should if they think they've been wronged) but those of us who've had decent experiences rarely seek out public forums to discuss the satisfactory (or better) service. Alternatively, customer satisfaction surveys aim to get a random sampling/even cross-section of the user/consumer base and when those surveys show one company to be highly rated, consistently, that should carry more weight than anecdotal evidence from the web where a limited few are able to bias the whole discussion if they're noisy enough.
It would be, if ever Apple actually fixed bugs.
Well, this sort of thing certainly wouldn't stop them from fixing bugs and it'd likely put more pressure on Apple to fix a bug or two, so I don't see how it'll end up worse for users and developers, unless Apple really doesn't care about their code quality, in which case, this'll illustrate it well enough that we'll all hear it loud and clear (assuming serious bugs are discovered in this process).
(I'm not a mac fanboy, but I play one on slashdot)
I also think the quality of the bugs will be interesting. If all 30 bugs are show stoppers, then there are some serious underlying issues that should be addressed.
And I totally agree. If there are bugs, better to have them out there and then fixed than it is to have them be obscure pieces of knowledge that a motivated few will use for their gain.
In the end, a month of OS X bugspotting can only be a good thing, IMHO.
Plus, a technical detail is hardly "ancillary" for a technical website By that logic, any incorrect detail, no matter how tangential, in any article would invalidate everything else they did say. And, while sweeping indictments of that sort are sometimes a handy way of winning the opinion of the masses -- lawyers and politicians are frequent users of such tactics, and they work, even if they're not really right. If you bother to read the story you're citing, you'd see that, for that story and the point they're making, saying that LAME is also an MP3 player (after correctly stating that it's an encoder) is, in fact, an unimportant detail (mistake or not) inasmuch as that mistake doesn't alter the main point of the story -- if they simply said "The software, developed by British software firm First4Internet, was found to contain source code from the open-source project LAME" and left it at that, the story wouldn't have been lacking. You're right, it is a mistake, but it's not the crucial, story invalidating mistake you seem to take it to be -- it ends up being more telling that you're hung up on that extraneous detail in a single story and that you're not willing to base your statements on recent pieces, such as the one referenced here in this story. You admit that you stopped reading Ars over a year ago. Right there you disqualified yourself as someone who could comment on recent quality, in your own words. I'm all for getting facts straight and you're right, it's a mistake that shouldn't have been made, but failing to see the quality of the majority of the pieces, especially the longer/more substantial write-ups and the overall ability of ars' writers to distill complex issues into understandable, yet technical explanations makes them worthy of praise. I read news.com as well, but they're different beasts and it's pretty clear you're not interested in seeing the difference. Your loss.
Um, yeah, they say " LAME, an MP3 encoder and player" So, first and foremost it's an encoder, even by their description. Second, if you have to resort to cherrypicking an example from over a year ago about a small, ancillary detail (again, they correctly stated that it's an MP3 encoder, first), then you're kinda proving my point. Lastly, I'm sure that if you bothered to look, almost any other news-source, particularly in the old-media, has as much if not more of a track record of mistakes with technical (as in specific) details. But hey, you're bothered by it? That's cool, don't read ars.
What I love is that they argue that they should be exempt from any sort of local regulation/control and yet lobby hard to regulate and restrict local municipalities from competing with them (by running their own fiber networks). Pure and simple, this is a contradiction.
Perhaps this is a bit off-topic, but I really think this story is an excellent example of the high quality journalism that is popping up at arstechnica. This is a very real issue that may well effect a huge number of people and it's good to see an informed, well written bit of investigative journalism coming from a new(ish) source. (read: not the old-media). Bravo to all the folks over at Arstechnica!
Technological solutions are imperfect and so are human solutions (i.e.: have a neighbor stop in every few days -- a lot of damage can happen in that time) -- so do both. The sources of error/failure aren't coupled, so they'll help much more in concert than they would alone.
I found many many such solutions....with the first query string that came to mind after reading your post...
+ flood+alarm&btnG=Google+Search )
t -Three-501572782/prices-htmlo m.asp?productID=1115
( http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=cabin+winter
Here are two selected more or less at random...
http://www.nextag.com/RELIANCE-CONTROLS-PhoneAler
http://www.norcoalarms.com/ezStore123/DTProductZo