Overall, this seems like a way to make the customer pay again for the CA's own bad practices.
That pretty much sums up this garbage. This is what SSL is supposed to already be, but as anyone who has filed for an SSL certificate already knows the whole thing pretty much works as a handshake... you're who, yes, ok, credit card with that name please, great, here you go.
And what about this "standardized across the industry"... I bought an SSL certificate from a 3rd party because they're in the Firefox/Opera/IE default trust lists, and because they cost $40 a year instead of $400, is this really a new industry standard or is this just Verisign's way of artificially creating a new market now that there's too much competition?
And on top of the author has a very strange definition of "trivial"... just download the song from apple, burn it to CD, reimport it to your playlist as an MP3. As compared to download the song, convert the song. That middle step is slow, not scalable, and just plain wasteful.... so yeah, you're right, he's starting from a bad place logically, and ending in a worse one.
Typhoid mary... An Apple product (the iPod) is apparently a susceptible vector (duh they're basically just a harddrive) for Windows viruses. Furthermore, Apple did not take appropriate steps to protect its customers from this.
What's so hard to understand about that being a bad thing? Wait, here's a mental excercise... replace iPod with Zune and see which of the Apple defenders in this thread keep defending.
Very good point in my opinion. I'd like to add that their choice to skip on these features combined with their market share and length of time on top has created an insanely vibrant after-market add-on feature. I was a die-hard iRiver H140 user until I recently killed it and it was time to replace. I went with the 80GB ipod, and have already spent half the cost again on add-ons.... the iRiver, I upgraded the headphones, other than that everything I wanted was built in or shipped with the case.
yes apparenlty since I disagree with you I haven't used it... please. I've used it and I dislike it. What you're saying is only true for the graphical interfaces, for the shell you're forever typing sudo and re-entering the password.... oviously there are ways around this and re-instating the root account which is what I do on my ubuntu boxes.
I tried it to see if my software would work with it... I want to like it, so I'm biased, but not in the direction you're thinking.
I personally think MS gave up two of their biggest advantages, it won't wrong legacy software easily & it doesn't feel like Windows. I imagine alot will get fixed before release... but as of yet, it's been a pain in my rear.
Even running it as admin I got lots of Access denied in the command prompt. The installer for my software failed, but for some reason Vista hid the failure so it continued on to the "Install Successul!" message. Then the software ran fine, but couldn't write to the ProgramData\MyCompany folder (the new equivalent to AppData)
I wanted to turn on my second monitor, so I tried to right click the desktop, didn't work had to go to the control panel... at which point it worked fine.
Anyway, I ran it for all of an hour, downloading RC2 now to install tomorrow, curiou to see the changes & delve into it more. I really wish they'd've made running as Admin harder, then really made it an Admin account instead of this split authentication concept... I'm strongly in favor of the standard Linux approach to security (Even Ubuntu's sudo crap drives me crazy), but I'll keep giving it chances since I write software for commercial use and I need to make sure it works for all my customers... otherwise my general impression is I'd stay on XP or 2k for awhile longer.
As far as the SVN GUI, I can't say I'm a big fan of any source control GUI's I've used. (Rational, MKS & Prosomething I forget.) But I use TortoiseSVN since most of my coding is in Windows, and it's shell extensions are great, the GUI portions, mediocre. In regards to the google comments, nothing for my company gets stored on any one elses servers... especially not email, I offer privacy policies and such to my customer's which don't mesh with the ones on Google's site, even if I don't ever expect it to be an issue I can't take that risk... and a Calendar which is only available online isn't an option for me, gotta synch with my Treo. And as far as the Project & Visio replacements, you and others in the thread have given me a lot to look at, thanks.
Re:Why would you want an RFID blocking wallet??
on
Top Ten Geek Wallets
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· Score: 1
Well, it wouldn't be under my dime, seeing as it is that the EZ-link card is not linked to anything else. You "top-up" value into a card upfront; when you pay for a ride, the price of that ride gets debitted from your card.
If it works like the cards here the value is usually stored someone besides the card, so it can be replaced if lost, and because it's just alot easier, RFID's are good at transmitting a single value over and over, but not so much designed to be updated frequently.... so if they're retransmitting your value over and over, you're both debitting the same account, though granted in such an example we're probably not ruining anyone's livelihood.
I've never gotten around to learning how to setup an X Server appropriately, so I can't really speak well to it, but one comment and one question Comment: Doesn't do Windows, I use VNC to help support/train clients when I'm not there Question: What if I wanted to share the desktop with the guy sitting there? Is that possible?
I don't really buy that argument, though... lots of people download closed source software without paying. The ones that need support, or want to support the company for whatever reason, are the ones that pay. At this point, OSS just doesn't have the user base it needs to make cheaper prices profitable, but that's not because of people who download it for free. It's because the ones who need support for it aren't very plentiful at the moment.
Not the kind of stuff this guy is talking about though. Personally I think the problem is he's comparing apples to oranges... I don't have numbers, and I'm not going to go get them, but let me point out a few of the obvious flaws in the summary IMO.
RHE to WinXP OEM: Uh, no... Ubuntu to WinXP OEM, RHE to Win2k3 Server
QT to MSVS2005: Why not go GTK+ vs. C# Express, both free
Embedded Linux... that's about volume, if you're embedding linux you should be saving a small fortune per appliance vs. putting WinCE on each of them, but yeah, the development aint cheap.
Cygwin commercial vs. Windows Unix tools, I think you're mis-understanding what each of those can do.
Right tool for the job, sometimes it's OSS, sometimes it's not... but the above post is like me complaining about the cost of steel vs. plastic because a caterpillar bulldozer is pricier than my nephew's sand bucket.
Like what? I am not being a smartass, I am truly curious what you business folks need.
I run a small business... so let me answer your question, but I disagree with the grandparent, so I'll also include some answers, though he's right that there are big gaps.
Accounting: GnuCash is good, I can't use it because my accountant doesn't support it.
Some kind of basic organization ala MS Project... dunno personally, but MSProject sucks too.
Visio equivalent... dunno
Defect tracking: Bugzilla
Source Control: SVN Obliterates some of the 6 figure competitors IMHO
Email: Thunderbird
Contact management: Yes, we have choices, but the propertiary ones are better IMHO
Inventory: Dunno, can't say the commercial ones are any good either, guess that's why I'm writing one right now
Scheduler... sorry Sunbird & the like aren't up to part yet... still gotta give Evolution an install, but I'm busy
Backup solutions: OSS is way ahead of the commercial ones here IMHO
Databases: PostgreSQL is a winner for me
An OS that supports my eight monitor setup easily, stuck on windows
Remoting software: Putty is the best CLI one I've ever seen, TightVNC is good for most of my stuff, but I prefer to use RemoteDesktop when appropriate (when I can lock the screen.. yes I know rdesktop is great, not a server tho)
Internal chat network: OSS slaughters propertiary
List goes on and on I imagine, every small business needs something a little different, that's why the economy loves us so much, we put a huge percentage of our income back into operating costs. But, as you might have determined from my disjointed comments, my customers love me because I employ the best tool for the job philosophy... I ask two questions, and in this order: Can it do the job well? What's it cost? Often OSS is better, often it's not.
Re:Why would you want an RFID blocking wallet??
on
Top Ten Geek Wallets
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· Score: 1
[1] - I mean, YES if you were smart about it, and would like to snoop, you can possibly know where I've been last night, for instance. Which, of course, gives me ideas, hmmmmmm.
The snoop part is nothing to laugh about if it's in the hands of say a government who wants to know who attended a rally... but personally I'd worry more about the theft, some enterprising individual should be able to bump into you in line, clone your card, and be riding the train on your dime.
Re:Why would you want an RFID blocking wallet??
on
Top Ten Geek Wallets
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Sure, for your office key that makes sense... but what about your passport. Just leave it at home when you travel? And what if states start putting it in your drivers license?
Or have you considered that if you take your office card with an RFID tag out to the local park for some coffee, an enterprising individual with a scanner could walk close, clone the card, then get in? Really... paranoid kinda stuff that is not a problem for 99% of us (including me), but it is not absurd either.
And the people who created all this content got paid how exactly?
Well it was a whole different system, people then got paid primarily by two venues... wealthy patrons paid them to create and they were paid for performances. The difficulty in reproduction gave a painting, statue or concerto a value that doesn't work the same in today's day and age. But also, the wealthy Patron's "giving back" to create an art world isn't something our society considers anymore either, and why would the artists, that's only a way to make a good living, you'll never be a mega-millionaire because of it.
Probably as long as programming has been a profession, someone has predicted that in 10-15 years, programmers wouldn't be needed anymore.
And the funny thing is that no one realizes how many times it's happened to different degrees.
"You'll just describe your problem to the computer"
Sure, current languages aren't exactly plain english descriptions, but if described to someone writing assembly code or laying out punch cards years ago they'd probably view it as darn close.
Languages like Prolog take the concept even farther for problems that fall in the right set, feed it rules, ask it questions, get answers.
To me the question isn't if we can keep approximating (the human language of your choice) better in our programming, it's if we can do it and keep generating machine code which is efficient enough for us.
I personally got a chuckle out of the repetitive use of judiciously... why thank you Microsoft, I thought it would've been better to use certain functionallity foolishly!
Also, a video game seems "worth" more to the average person - you can get more out of it. A song is entertaining for the 3 minutes its playing.
I think it's more about time. I buy a game, I expect to get a few dozens/hundreds of hours of enjoyment from it, then I shelve it, and that's pretty much it. Maybe I pull it off for a nostalgic moment a few years later, but that's too likely... and I certainly am not planning it when I make my purchase.
Music is totally different to me though, I fully expect to have it at my disposal as soon as I download it, next week, next month, my next car, my next home stereo, my next portable, the whole next medium which will be invented by some kid who's currently in pre-school, whatever. Given the lossless reproducability that the CD age introduced, I really do expect all of this... sure some of my favorites may get re-bought if they're remastered in 47 channels in 2039, but for the most part I don't expect to lose any music I bought.
But now introduce music as software, and a close sourced DRM solution at that, I feel like a certain permanance is no longer there.
So far, this is not much different from music right? True.
I disagree... this is alot different than music. One of the big gripes for years before iTunes showed up was "Bands just don't release good albums anymore, I just want tracks 3 and 9 from that album... why should I spend $11.99 for the whole CD?", and iTunes said fine, $1.98 and you can have tracks 3 & 9.
There's no analog to that for movies, and in my opinion that combined with the portability were the killer features that pushed iTunes to success.
Movies, you're going to be adding portability (which no one really seems to be asking for) and convenience of not leaving your chair, and a short download wait... nice features certainly, but I have my doubts that they'll be big enough motives to make this more than a tiny add-on to iTunes/Amazon's bottom lines.
That third mouse button is a complete mystery to me. It's very hard to use, and doesn't do anything you can't do with page-up and page-down. Now if there were a wheel....
Completely disagree here... I've remapped mine to be "middle click" (an option in the setup, nothing fancy) as opposed to scrolling and it's great. I can cut'n'paste using emacs properly again, I can middle click to open in a tab, it still works for scrolling in firefox combined with the trackpoint (tho it's brutal in Opera).
For me the three button trackpoint is way at the top of my list of laptop requirements.
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Overall, this seems like a way to make the customer pay again for the CA's own bad practices.
That pretty much sums up this garbage. This is what SSL is supposed to already be, but as anyone who has filed for an SSL certificate already knows the whole thing pretty much works as a handshake... you're who, yes, ok, credit card with that name please, great, here you go.
And what about this "standardized across the industry"... I bought an SSL certificate from a 3rd party because they're in the Firefox/Opera/IE default trust lists, and because they cost $40 a year instead of $400, is this really a new industry standard or is this just Verisign's way of artificially creating a new market now that there's too much competition?
And on top of the author has a very strange definition of "trivial"... just download the song from apple, burn it to CD, reimport it to your playlist as an MP3. As compared to download the song, convert the song. That middle step is slow, not scalable, and just plain wasteful.... so yeah, you're right, he's starting from a bad place logically, and ending in a worse one.
Typhoid mary... An Apple product (the iPod) is apparently a susceptible vector (duh they're basically just a harddrive) for Windows viruses. Furthermore, Apple did not take appropriate steps to protect its customers from this.
What's so hard to understand about that being a bad thing? Wait, here's a mental excercise... replace iPod with Zune and see which of the Apple defenders in this thread keep defending.
Very good point in my opinion. I'd like to add that their choice to skip on these features combined with their market share and length of time on top has created an insanely vibrant after-market add-on feature. I was a die-hard iRiver H140 user until I recently killed it and it was time to replace. I went with the 80GB ipod, and have already spent half the cost again on add-ons.... the iRiver, I upgraded the headphones, other than that everything I wanted was built in or shipped with the case.
I went back to Debian etch, I'm happier there... but nice troll.
yes apparenlty since I disagree with you I haven't used it... please. I've used it and I dislike it. What you're saying is only true for the graphical interfaces, for the shell you're forever typing sudo and re-entering the password.... oviously there are ways around this and re-instating the root account which is what I do on my ubuntu boxes.
I tried it to see if my software would work with it... I want to like it, so I'm biased, but not in the direction you're thinking.
I personally think MS gave up two of their biggest advantages, it won't wrong legacy software easily & it doesn't feel like Windows. I imagine alot will get fixed before release... but as of yet, it's been a pain in my rear.
Even running it as admin I got lots of Access denied in the command prompt. The installer for my software failed, but for some reason Vista hid the failure so it continued on to the "Install Successul!" message. Then the software ran fine, but couldn't write to the ProgramData\MyCompany folder (the new equivalent to AppData)
I wanted to turn on my second monitor, so I tried to right click the desktop, didn't work had to go to the control panel... at which point it worked fine.
Anyway, I ran it for all of an hour, downloading RC2 now to install tomorrow, curiou to see the changes & delve into it more. I really wish they'd've made running as Admin harder, then really made it an Admin account instead of this split authentication concept... I'm strongly in favor of the standard Linux approach to security (Even Ubuntu's sudo crap drives me crazy), but I'll keep giving it chances since I write software for commercial use and I need to make sure it works for all my customers... otherwise my general impression is I'd stay on XP or 2k for awhile longer.
As far as the SVN GUI, I can't say I'm a big fan of any source control GUI's I've used. (Rational, MKS & Prosomething I forget.) But I use TortoiseSVN since most of my coding is in Windows, and it's shell extensions are great, the GUI portions, mediocre. In regards to the google comments, nothing for my company gets stored on any one elses servers... especially not email, I offer privacy policies and such to my customer's which don't mesh with the ones on Google's site, even if I don't ever expect it to be an issue I can't take that risk... and a Calendar which is only available online isn't an option for me, gotta synch with my Treo. And as far as the Project & Visio replacements, you and others in the thread have given me a lot to look at, thanks.
Well, it wouldn't be under my dime, seeing as it is that the EZ-link card is not linked to anything else. You "top-up" value into a card upfront; when you pay for a ride, the price of that ride gets debitted from your card.
If it works like the cards here the value is usually stored someone besides the card, so it can be replaced if lost, and because it's just alot easier, RFID's are good at transmitting a single value over and over, but not so much designed to be updated frequently.... so if they're retransmitting your value over and over, you're both debitting the same account, though granted in such an example we're probably not ruining anyone's livelihood.
I've never gotten around to learning how to setup an X Server appropriately, so I can't really speak well to it, but one comment and one question
Comment: Doesn't do Windows, I use VNC to help support/train clients when I'm not there
Question: What if I wanted to share the desktop with the guy sitting there? Is that possible?
I haven't tried either, and I appreciate the suggestions.
My mistake.
Not the kind of stuff this guy is talking about though. Personally I think the problem is he's comparing apples to oranges... I don't have numbers, and I'm not going to go get them, but let me point out a few of the obvious flaws in the summary IMO.
- RHE to WinXP OEM: Uh, no... Ubuntu to WinXP OEM, RHE to Win2k3 Server
- QT to MSVS2005: Why not go GTK+ vs. C# Express, both free
- Embedded Linux
... that's about volume, if you're embedding linux you should be saving a small fortune per appliance vs. putting WinCE on each of them, but yeah, the development aint cheap. - Cygwin commercial vs. Windows Unix tools, I think you're mis-understanding what each of those can do.
Right tool for the job, sometimes it's OSS, sometimes it's not... but the above post is like me complaining about the cost of steel vs. plastic because a caterpillar bulldozer is pricier than my nephew's sand bucket.I run a small business... so let me answer your question, but I disagree with the grandparent, so I'll also include some answers, though he's right that there are big gaps.
- Accounting: GnuCash is good, I can't use it because my accountant doesn't support it.
- Some kind of basic organization ala MS Project... dunno personally, but MSProject sucks too.
- Visio equivalent... dunno
- Defect tracking: Bugzilla
- Source Control: SVN Obliterates some of the 6 figure competitors IMHO
- Email: Thunderbird
- Contact management: Yes, we have choices, but the propertiary ones are better IMHO
- Inventory: Dunno, can't say the commercial ones are any good either, guess that's why I'm writing one right now
- Scheduler... sorry Sunbird & the like aren't up to part yet... still gotta give Evolution an install, but I'm busy
- Backup solutions: OSS is way ahead of the commercial ones here IMHO
- Databases: PostgreSQL is a winner for me
- An OS that supports my eight monitor setup easily, stuck on windows
- Remoting software: Putty is the best CLI one I've ever seen, TightVNC is good for most of my stuff, but I prefer to use RemoteDesktop when appropriate (when I can lock the screen.. yes I know rdesktop is great, not a server tho)
- Internal chat network: OSS slaughters propertiary
List goes on and on I imagine, every small business needs something a little different, that's why the economy loves us so much, we put a huge percentage of our income back into operating costs. But, as you might have determined from my disjointed comments, my customers love me because I employ the best tool for the job philosophy... I ask two questions, and in this order: Can it do the job well? What's it cost? Often OSS is better, often it's not.[1] - I mean, YES if you were smart about it, and would like to snoop, you can possibly know where I've been last night, for instance. Which, of course, gives me ideas, hmmmmmm.
The snoop part is nothing to laugh about if it's in the hands of say a government who wants to know who attended a rally... but personally I'd worry more about the theft, some enterprising individual should be able to bump into you in line, clone your card, and be riding the train on your dime.
Sure, for your office key that makes sense... but what about your passport. Just leave it at home when you travel? And what if states start putting it in your drivers license?
Or have you considered that if you take your office card with an RFID tag out to the local park for some coffee, an enterprising individual with a scanner could walk close, clone the card, then get in? Really... paranoid kinda stuff that is not a problem for 99% of us (including me), but it is not absurd either.
And the people who created all this content got paid how exactly?
Well it was a whole different system, people then got paid primarily by two venues... wealthy patrons paid them to create and they were paid for performances. The difficulty in reproduction gave a painting, statue or concerto a value that doesn't work the same in today's day and age. But also, the wealthy Patron's "giving back" to create an art world isn't something our society considers anymore either, and why would the artists, that's only a way to make a good living, you'll never be a mega-millionaire because of it.
Probably as long as programming has been a profession, someone has predicted that in 10-15 years, programmers wouldn't be needed anymore.
And the funny thing is that no one realizes how many times it's happened to different degrees.
"You'll just describe your problem to the computer"
Sure, current languages aren't exactly plain english descriptions, but if described to someone writing assembly code or laying out punch cards years ago they'd probably view it as darn close.
Languages like Prolog take the concept even farther for problems that fall in the right set, feed it rules, ask it questions, get answers.
To me the question isn't if we can keep approximating (the human language of your choice) better in our programming, it's if we can do it and keep generating machine code which is efficient enough for us.
I personally got a chuckle out of the repetitive use of judiciously... why thank you Microsoft, I thought it would've been better to use certain functionallity foolishly!
And people who leave the default password likely aren't going to change their ways until they get robbed once.
You give people too much credit, I'd say twice.
Also, a video game seems "worth" more to the average person - you can get more out of it. A song is entertaining for the 3 minutes its playing.
I think it's more about time. I buy a game, I expect to get a few dozens/hundreds of hours of enjoyment from it, then I shelve it, and that's pretty much it. Maybe I pull it off for a nostalgic moment a few years later, but that's too likely... and I certainly am not planning it when I make my purchase.
Music is totally different to me though, I fully expect to have it at my disposal as soon as I download it, next week, next month, my next car, my next home stereo, my next portable, the whole next medium which will be invented by some kid who's currently in pre-school, whatever. Given the lossless reproducability that the CD age introduced, I really do expect all of this... sure some of my favorites may get re-bought if they're remastered in 47 channels in 2039, but for the most part I don't expect to lose any music I bought.
But now introduce music as software, and a close sourced DRM solution at that, I feel like a certain permanance is no longer there.
So far, this is not much different from music right? True.
I disagree... this is alot different than music. One of the big gripes for years before iTunes showed up was "Bands just don't release good albums anymore, I just want tracks 3 and 9 from that album... why should I spend $11.99 for the whole CD?", and iTunes said fine, $1.98 and you can have tracks 3 & 9.
There's no analog to that for movies, and in my opinion that combined with the portability were the killer features that pushed iTunes to success.
Movies, you're going to be adding portability (which no one really seems to be asking for) and convenience of not leaving your chair, and a short download wait... nice features certainly, but I have my doubts that they'll be big enough motives to make this more than a tiny add-on to iTunes/Amazon's bottom lines.
Agreed there aren't alot, but when one happens to be Firefox I think it makes a useful argument.
That third mouse button is a complete mystery to me. It's very hard to use, and doesn't do anything you can't do with page-up and page-down. Now if there were a wheel....
Completely disagree here... I've remapped mine to be "middle click" (an option in the setup, nothing fancy) as opposed to scrolling and it's great. I can cut'n'paste using emacs properly again, I can middle click to open in a tab, it still works for scrolling in firefox combined with the trackpoint (tho it's brutal in Opera).
For me the three button trackpoint is way at the top of my list of laptop requirements.
Did you read the last post? It's not an issue of ease, it's an issue of permanance.
Or is a revised 4 button press boot sequence something you just consider normal?