It's well and good for us Westerners to wag our fingers at them, but we're not the ones sharing borders with their potentially hostile neighbors (Pakistan, China).
Ya know, I just had an epiphany on outsourcing to India...
We all know the popular press about issues regarding process, quality, et al. with Indian Outsourcing. However: I recall that once upon a time, Japanese manufacturing was the butt of many a joke until the early 1970s.
Just saying, I would suggest that any smirking in the direction of the Indian Outsourcing phenomenon is a little premature because I imagine it is inevitable that these issues will eventually be worked out.
Is there anyplace we can get a somewhat technical explanation of why this is a benefit to us C2D owners? I'll admit to being intrigued by this. I also admit to having waited specifically for a C2D knowing that it was a true 64-bit processor. So what's the dirt on what we can expect?
I don't think anyone is going to "buy" Vista. At least, not in a fundamental sense. Certainly, corporations won't... most large companies are just moving from 2000 to XP, and that's only because Microsoft has pulled the support rug from under them. For the average company there is not one compelling reason to move forward quickly.
It's not like this is rocket science. Large companies were still running Windows 3.1 until 1997, and then moved to Windows NT 4. The move from that to 2000 was about five years ago. The move from Windows 3.1 to NT was obviously needed due to sheer obsolescence; the move from NT to 2000 was the same, albeit to a smaller degree (USB support, AD support).
Vista is really an OS for consumers and to ensure Microsoft has a new product as promised. I see nothing good coming from Vista in the end. In many ways, it is the new ME: a stop-gap OS...
It's not cashflow per se which determines the viability of a business; but in the world of finance cashflow will help determine exactly how liquid an operation is. His metaphor is, admittedly, a bit stretched... but when you compare the mindshare and proposed prospects these companies PR and Financial Advisors snow you in with, he is using a decidely utilitarian and "Old Economy" (note, this is no longer disparaged) method of determining potential for future health.
You see: CASHFLOW is the incomings and outgoings on a day-to-day basis. If you have healthy cashflow, well, you can live on a small margin; you merely push product. This is why the Wal-Marts crushed the K-Marts, and the Best Buys crushed all the local electronics chains that once existed back in the 80s (like Crazy Eddies). Cashflow is a good initial predictor of the future health of a business. Since this is a commodity model we are all following, healthy cashflow means you can constantly freshen and upgrade and moreover bargain for your next deliverables. In the end, cashflow is vital. If cashflow chokes, commodity models self-destruct. This too is why Wall Street is wary of Wal-Mart's recent rumblings about retail; and again, why all those 80s electronics chains folded dramatically and everywhere at the end of the decade.
Furthermore, cashflow is most heavily influenced by direct receipts collected by a company. Lack of cashflow suggests a potentially imperilled business model. And to be frank, I remember online advertising being the end-all and be-all for most sites by mid-2000. Advertising, however is cyclical: companies advertise if consumers are spending and pull back if they are not.
In the end, sites like those are never receiving much cash from their consumers; most of their users are "free" users. This is okay for a collosus like MySpace; they will inevitably monetize it, but if not, so what? With Fox as corporate parent, they are essentially an advertising subsidiary anyway: just one in the new media arena. Just as you don't pay for your Fox affiliates programming, you don't pay for MySpace's programming.
What these sites face without deep pockets is a sudden implosion once cashflow becomes the slightest bit restricted. This was the failure of the Web 1.0 companies. Many of these new ones are not as free-spending but have only marginally more secure business models. Yes, Technorati, I'm looking at you and your refrigerator salesman.
That's why a fleet of lawyers is spending night and day to ensure that Steve Jobs has a cloak of plausible deniability. I'm not going to speculate on what he knows--that would be crass, and although Jobs is a sharp strategist (and corporate icon) I am not certain he would choose to understand any details of the alleged financial chicanery--nonetheless, should Apple be forced to oust him again for bureaucratic reasons it would be an ill-timed morale blow to Apple.
I imagine this will eventually settle under a legal tarpulin of promises and the obligatory fine. Still, any cracks in the Apple empire are sure to be more and more exploited by a press hungry for material. This is all we are seeing; it only matters for Apple because people pretend Apple is a "good" company, unlike say, Marsh and McLennan...
1) IE7 is a separate application. I believe this means Microsoft finally realized that having a vector of attack directly integrated into the OS might be... dumb. But only in retrospect as it sure helped murder Netscape!
2) Remember, Firefox is merely a patched and (somewhat) streamlined code-base which is in reality, Netscape 5.0. As such, it already had "mindshare" to carry it back into the fight. Let's face it, a lot of us remember Netscape's brief moment as the "Google" of the mid-90s, and still give a descendant like this one the benefit of the doubt just by that mere fact alone.
3) Firefox, like IE7 (now), is a separate application; furthermore, it abstracts out from the OS in a way that merely makes it less vulnerable by fiat, not by design per se.
4) I think we can all clearly see now that IE5-6 and virus/spyware hell is the plainest demonstration of that old saw, "He who sows the wind reaps the whirlwind". Law of unintended consequences: if Microsoft hadn't been so blindly focused on crushing Netscape completely within Windows, IE might have had less top-down mandates that forced it to integrate wholly into the Windows OS. I would imagine there were a few techies in MS who told people point-blank of things like the ActiveX peril.
5) So was the IE-integration issue a real problem? No... Netscape died, Mozilla took years to take on a workable form (I first used an M7 build in May 2001--it wasn't really "usable" for another year; and it took two more for the Phoenix project to gain enough headway by dispensing with the silly XUL interface and the bloat from the "Communicator" days) and Microsoft had squelched a serious threat to their business model. Of course, enter Google stage left...
Erm... no, you can't. All the PPC upgrades were 601 upgrades, and were sold for a specific subset of models. Apple stopped supporting those with MacOS 8.5; OS X has always only run on G3+ hardware. There are some hacks to do this, but it would fall back into the "hobbyist" category.
I do agree with this. Narrowly focused pseudo-vocational (i.e. "technical" in the pure sense) training is not a substitute for getting students to understand things at a conceptual level. When a person has a conceptual understanding of something (as opposed to a purely "technical" understanding of that thing), they can leverage that understanding to solving problems before they arise, from the basic ("how do I use this") to the complex ("how do I do this").
I remember still being 12 years old and taught how to use computers in middle school... with some old 286s and some bizarre word-processing program. I suppose that would have prepared us for the future. Only thing, that particular word processor I never saw again.
Often, when educational persons think of "learning how to use computers" they are really thinking "learning how to use Microsoft Office", or the equivalent.
This is not the solution; ergo, it is part of the problem...
You keep changing tack[sic] all over the place - the point has been well established that inviting people to use a service gives explicit permission to USE that service, additionally there may be conditions of use however this is not required.
Erm... I was not the one changing tact all over the place. The original poster presented the moving target.
Regardless, the point "well-established" is only "well-established" to people who have a firm conviction of what you just said. I am trying to open their minds that "geek convention" is not necessarily societal convention.
I'll reiterate one more time: a technical argument is not a worthwhile argument in the normal, average, day-to-day sphere. Preaching to the choir may be satisfying, but if you change churches, expect a different response.
The only reason the job titles are "obsolete" is because in your average business environment well-defined roles have gone the way of the do-do, and everyone has become some sort of jack-of-all-trades. The truth is most people are still trained to be specialists but end up with titles which define only their salary grade. That's if they even have any "official" title!
Seriously, talk to some old-timers about those titles. Then, appreciate what the gutting of corporate IT since the 80s has meant in creating the disarray in which it is easy to presume those titles are "out-of-date".
So you wish to share your own WAP. Congratulations. I wish you all the best. However, I was not referring to your specific situation. I was referring to the desire for persons to presume that in any given situation, an open WAP=free to use.
Go ahead, and share your WAP. Again, excellent, great, godspeed. But you cannot automatically presume that anyone else has the same intention if their own WAP is open.
Gifts get pretty high esteem in most "legal, moral, and cultural" systems, thank you very much. Do you really want to outlaw them?
C'mon, keep the reductio ad absurdum comin'. LIke Mickey D's, I'm lovin' it!
If more technical know-how is required to set up a secure network than an insecure one then it is the access point manufacturer who is guilty of negligence.
You're preaching to the choir on this point--I'm in total agreement that WAP manufacturer negligence is the primary cause for this issue. Seems like the "third way" would be requiring manufacturers to sell these device pre-configured for WPA (of which I know I will now be attacked on the details regarding this). But that is a side-issue.
No... To extend your (terrible) analogy, it is like your neighbour parking his car on the street with the keys in the ignition and a sign in the window saying "free for anyone to use" - remember that you don't have to go down the street trying doors and picking locks to find an open access point, it's actually broadcasting an invitation for you to use it.
Sticks and stones. Any analogy can be accused of being terrible. It's an illustration to make a point. You and your ilk always follow a path of reductio ad absurdum with these things, because the issue is intractably linked to your desire to justify your position.
As I said before: I, too, have tasted the forbidden fruit of the unsecured wireless network. But to presume that merely because you can connect to it that it is the quivalent of hanging a sign saying "USE ME" is again, pure sophism. You cannot come to that conclusion logically.
Look, in the end, all of your arguments are technical arguments. But as much as you want to hide under "that's the way it works (technically)"... you are avoiding the legal, moral, and cultural precepts which surround this issue. All of those say, quite simply, "don't take that which is not yours i.e. don't steal".
Everything you say is well and good, but it is splitting hairs to justify a position which has no moral, ethical, cultural or legal high-ground.
You also don't look around for an "OK to drink" sign before you use a public drinking fountain.
I've never seen such sophistry.
Look, in the case of a drinking fountain, it's quite implicit what the case might be. It's a horrendous analogy, of the ilk used by mediocre trial lawyers. There are norms and conventions. As wireless access is "new", norms and conventions (AKA "precedent") have yet to exist.
The real issue is presuming, in the vacuum of these norms, on the "provider" doing so in good faith and with no issue... defies logic.
The people who want closed networks already have methods available to them. It's trivial to mark a network as not being available...
Again, you are presuming on a level of technical sophistication which is simply not verifiable for any given connection and for any given wireless "free hotspot". It's well and good to presume on their good faith, but it's a bit like saying that cos your neighbor prefers to park his car on the (public) street rather than his (private) driveway, he is making it freely available for use. Norms and conventions and legal precedent say no. It is unlikely that the courts whom will eventually decide these issues will say "caveat WAP-tor".
The problem here is that many people purposfully leave their wireless open so that others can use it.
Two questions for you:
Do you do the same?
Do you really believe your average person whom buys a wireless router--of which it is unprotected by default--is really "letting people use it freely"?
I've heard this argument made a lot by the "free wireless" persons, but I have yet to see anyone claim that they make their network freely available. That is, certainly not a quorum of them.
N.B.: I've utilized other persons' wireless connections in a pinch, so I'm hardly blameless. But I've never deluded myself into thinking that they were "happy to help"; I recognize that they are most likely ignorant of WPA et al. like most average persons would be.
I would like to point out one hole in your theory. You state that your engineers speak a different body language, i.e. they are competent in body language but "differently abled". I'd like to draw your attention to some scholarly research on the subject: here.
The point of the article is that even if you perceive yourselves to be competent in a thing, the less competent you indeed are, the less likely you will be to judge it accurately.
Slashdot Mirror
India spends a lot of effort on developing military capabilities. Feeding their people is obviously not a priority.
Again: see my first post on this.
It's well and good for us Westerners to wag our fingers at them, but we're not the ones sharing borders with their potentially hostile neighbors (Pakistan, China).
Yes, but you are presuming a causal linkage between the two if you suggest this (i.e. Money for Space = No Money for Food for the Poor).
I'm certain that a few things are on the mind of those who advocate the Space Program for India:
In the end, I think India is reaching for the stars to make sure there is a way for those people to be fed.
Ya know, I just had an epiphany on outsourcing to India...
We all know the popular press about issues regarding process, quality, et al. with Indian Outsourcing. However: I recall that once upon a time, Japanese manufacturing was the butt of many a joke until the early 1970s.
Just saying, I would suggest that any smirking in the direction of the Indian Outsourcing phenomenon is a little premature because I imagine it is inevitable that these issues will eventually be worked out.
Exactly what I thought. Which is why I challenged his assertion...
Erm... I was not asking for marketing material off Apple's site. I was asking for a technical explanation.
Is there anyplace we can get a somewhat technical explanation of why this is a benefit to us C2D owners? I'll admit to being intrigued by this. I also admit to having waited specifically for a C2D knowing that it was a true 64-bit processor. So what's the dirt on what we can expect?
Erm... this is a RTFA moment. The source is British, hence the usage of quid...
I don't think anyone is going to "buy" Vista. At least, not in a fundamental sense. Certainly, corporations won't... most large companies are just moving from 2000 to XP, and that's only because Microsoft has pulled the support rug from under them. For the average company there is not one compelling reason to move forward quickly.
It's not like this is rocket science. Large companies were still running Windows 3.1 until 1997, and then moved to Windows NT 4. The move from that to 2000 was about five years ago. The move from Windows 3.1 to NT was obviously needed due to sheer obsolescence; the move from NT to 2000 was the same, albeit to a smaller degree (USB support, AD support).
Vista is really an OS for consumers and to ensure Microsoft has a new product as promised. I see nothing good coming from Vista in the end. In many ways, it is the new ME: a stop-gap OS...
Heh... this is true. I still use my college email, which went live in early 1992.
It doesn't get spammed quite as heavily as it once did, but I'd say 30 emails a day.
If only we knew back then...
It's not cashflow per se which determines the viability of a business; but in the world of finance cashflow will help determine exactly how liquid an operation is. His metaphor is, admittedly, a bit stretched... but when you compare the mindshare and proposed prospects these companies PR and Financial Advisors snow you in with, he is using a decidely utilitarian and "Old Economy" (note, this is no longer disparaged) method of determining potential for future health.
You see: CASHFLOW is the incomings and outgoings on a day-to-day basis. If you have healthy cashflow, well, you can live on a small margin; you merely push product. This is why the Wal-Marts crushed the K-Marts, and the Best Buys crushed all the local electronics chains that once existed back in the 80s (like Crazy Eddies). Cashflow is a good initial predictor of the future health of a business. Since this is a commodity model we are all following, healthy cashflow means you can constantly freshen and upgrade and moreover bargain for your next deliverables. In the end, cashflow is vital. If cashflow chokes, commodity models self-destruct. This too is why Wall Street is wary of Wal-Mart's recent rumblings about retail; and again, why all those 80s electronics chains folded dramatically and everywhere at the end of the decade.
Furthermore, cashflow is most heavily influenced by direct receipts collected by a company. Lack of cashflow suggests a potentially imperilled business model. And to be frank, I remember online advertising being the end-all and be-all for most sites by mid-2000. Advertising, however is cyclical: companies advertise if consumers are spending and pull back if they are not.
In the end, sites like those are never receiving much cash from their consumers; most of their users are "free" users. This is okay for a collosus like MySpace; they will inevitably monetize it, but if not, so what? With Fox as corporate parent, they are essentially an advertising subsidiary anyway: just one in the new media arena. Just as you don't pay for your Fox affiliates programming, you don't pay for MySpace's programming.
What these sites face without deep pockets is a sudden implosion once cashflow becomes the slightest bit restricted. This was the failure of the Web 1.0 companies. Many of these new ones are not as free-spending but have only marginally more secure business models. Yes, Technorati, I'm looking at you and your refrigerator salesman.
That's why a fleet of lawyers is spending night and day to ensure that Steve Jobs has a cloak of plausible deniability. I'm not going to speculate on what he knows--that would be crass, and although Jobs is a sharp strategist (and corporate icon) I am not certain he would choose to understand any details of the alleged financial chicanery--nonetheless, should Apple be forced to oust him again for bureaucratic reasons it would be an ill-timed morale blow to Apple.
I imagine this will eventually settle under a legal tarpulin of promises and the obligatory fine. Still, any cracks in the Apple empire are sure to be more and more exploited by a press hungry for material. This is all we are seeing; it only matters for Apple because people pretend Apple is a "good" company, unlike say, Marsh and McLennan...
1) IE7 is a separate application. I believe this means Microsoft finally realized that having a vector of attack directly integrated into the OS might be... dumb. But only in retrospect as it sure helped murder Netscape!
2) Remember, Firefox is merely a patched and (somewhat) streamlined code-base which is in reality, Netscape 5.0. As such, it already had "mindshare" to carry it back into the fight. Let's face it, a lot of us remember Netscape's brief moment as the "Google" of the mid-90s, and still give a descendant like this one the benefit of the doubt just by that mere fact alone.
3) Firefox, like IE7 (now), is a separate application; furthermore, it abstracts out from the OS in a way that merely makes it less vulnerable by fiat, not by design per se.
4) I think we can all clearly see now that IE5-6 and virus/spyware hell is the plainest demonstration of that old saw, "He who sows the wind reaps the whirlwind". Law of unintended consequences: if Microsoft hadn't been so blindly focused on crushing Netscape completely within Windows, IE might have had less top-down mandates that forced it to integrate wholly into the Windows OS. I would imagine there were a few techies in MS who told people point-blank of things like the ActiveX peril.
5) So was the IE-integration issue a real problem? No... Netscape died, Mozilla took years to take on a workable form (I first used an M7 build in May 2001--it wasn't really "usable" for another year; and it took two more for the Phoenix project to gain enough headway by dispensing with the silly XUL interface and the bloat from the "Communicator" days) and Microsoft had squelched a serious threat to their business model. Of course, enter Google stage left...
Erm... no, you can't. All the PPC upgrades were 601 upgrades, and were sold for a specific subset of models. Apple stopped supporting those with MacOS 8.5; OS X has always only run on G3+ hardware. There are some hacks to do this, but it would fall back into the "hobbyist" category.
Almost as funny (for different reasons) was this guy selling a PS3.
Check out some of the pictures. What's with the fish?
I do agree with this. Narrowly focused pseudo-vocational (i.e. "technical" in the pure sense) training is not a substitute for getting students to understand things at a conceptual level. When a person has a conceptual understanding of something (as opposed to a purely "technical" understanding of that thing), they can leverage that understanding to solving problems before they arise, from the basic ("how do I use this") to the complex ("how do I do this").
I remember still being 12 years old and taught how to use computers in middle school... with some old 286s and some bizarre word-processing program. I suppose that would have prepared us for the future. Only thing, that particular word processor I never saw again.
Often, when educational persons think of "learning how to use computers" they are really thinking "learning how to use Microsoft Office", or the equivalent.
This is not the solution; ergo, it is part of the problem...
You keep changing tack[sic] all over the place - the point has been well established that inviting people to use a service gives explicit permission to USE that service, additionally there may be conditions of use however this is not required.
Erm... I was not the one changing tact all over the place. The original poster presented the moving target.
Regardless, the point "well-established" is only "well-established" to people who have a firm conviction of what you just said. I am trying to open their minds that "geek convention" is not necessarily societal convention.
I'll reiterate one more time: a technical argument is not a worthwhile argument in the normal, average, day-to-day sphere. Preaching to the choir may be satisfying, but if you change churches, expect a different response.
That is my point, and it always was.
Which part of this text you don't [sic] get it [sic]?
Pretty much all of it. I would think English is not your first language...
Now that's what you call "honest packaging"!
The only reason the job titles are "obsolete" is because in your average business environment well-defined roles have gone the way of the do-do, and everyone has become some sort of jack-of-all-trades. The truth is most people are still trained to be specialists but end up with titles which define only their salary grade. That's if they even have any "official" title!
Seriously, talk to some old-timers about those titles. Then, appreciate what the gutting of corporate IT since the 80s has meant in creating the disarray in which it is easy to presume those titles are "out-of-date".
So you wish to share your own WAP. Congratulations. I wish you all the best. However, I was not referring to your specific situation. I was referring to the desire for persons to presume that in any given situation, an open WAP=free to use.
Go ahead, and share your WAP. Again, excellent, great, godspeed. But you cannot automatically presume that anyone else has the same intention if their own WAP is open.
Gifts get pretty high esteem in most "legal, moral, and cultural" systems, thank you very much. Do you really want to outlaw them?
C'mon, keep the reductio ad absurdum comin'. LIke Mickey D's, I'm lovin' it!
If more technical know-how is required to set up a secure network than an insecure one then it is the access point manufacturer who is guilty of negligence.
You're preaching to the choir on this point--I'm in total agreement that WAP manufacturer negligence is the primary cause for this issue. Seems like the "third way" would be requiring manufacturers to sell these device pre-configured for WPA (of which I know I will now be attacked on the details regarding this). But that is a side-issue.
No... To extend your (terrible) analogy, it is like your neighbour parking his car on the street with the keys in the ignition and a sign in the window saying "free for anyone to use" - remember that you don't have to go down the street trying doors and picking locks to find an open access point, it's actually broadcasting an invitation for you to use it.
Sticks and stones. Any analogy can be accused of being terrible. It's an illustration to make a point. You and your ilk always follow a path of reductio ad absurdum with these things, because the issue is intractably linked to your desire to justify your position.
As I said before: I, too, have tasted the forbidden fruit of the unsecured wireless network. But to presume that merely because you can connect to it that it is the quivalent of hanging a sign saying "USE ME" is again, pure sophism. You cannot come to that conclusion logically.
Look, in the end, all of your arguments are technical arguments. But as much as you want to hide under "that's the way it works (technically)"... you are avoiding the legal, moral, and cultural precepts which surround this issue. All of those say, quite simply, "don't take that which is not yours i.e. don't steal".
Everything you say is well and good, but it is splitting hairs to justify a position which has no moral, ethical, cultural or legal high-ground.
You also don't look around for an "OK to drink" sign before you use a public drinking fountain.
I've never seen such sophistry.
Look, in the case of a drinking fountain, it's quite implicit what the case might be. It's a horrendous analogy, of the ilk used by mediocre trial lawyers. There are norms and conventions. As wireless access is "new", norms and conventions (AKA "precedent") have yet to exist.
The real issue is presuming, in the vacuum of these norms, on the "provider" doing so in good faith and with no issue... defies logic.
The people who want closed networks already have methods available to them. It's trivial to mark a network as not being available...
Again, you are presuming on a level of technical sophistication which is simply not verifiable for any given connection and for any given wireless "free hotspot". It's well and good to presume on their good faith, but it's a bit like saying that cos your neighbor prefers to park his car on the (public) street rather than his (private) driveway, he is making it freely available for use. Norms and conventions and legal precedent say no. It is unlikely that the courts whom will eventually decide these issues will say "caveat WAP-tor".
The problem here is that many people purposfully leave their wireless open so that others can use it.
Two questions for you:
I've heard this argument made a lot by the "free wireless" persons, but I have yet to see anyone claim that they make their network freely available. That is, certainly not a quorum of them.
N.B.: I've utilized other persons' wireless connections in a pinch, so I'm hardly blameless. But I've never deluded myself into thinking that they were "happy to help"; I recognize that they are most likely ignorant of WPA et al. like most average persons would be.
I would like to point out one hole in your theory. You state that your engineers speak a different body language, i.e. they are competent in body language but "differently abled". I'd like to draw your attention to some scholarly research on the subject: here.
The point of the article is that even if you perceive yourselves to be competent in a thing, the less competent you indeed are, the less likely you will be to judge it accurately.