Industrial product design matters. Marketing too. I'm not a fan of Apple's policies, but they get quite a few things right while the competition seems mired in stupidity and copycat disease land.
- Decent quality control (iphone4 attena aside)
- Great marketing/PR/Hype
- Extremely nice looking products
Apple does these things well and makes great devices. They now even have an army of good developers thanks to a platform that caters to people willing to spend money. In the meantime, the competition seems to sometimes innovate, and other times gets stuck copying, confused, and greedy. Looking at the Nexus S -- it looks to be almost a clone of an IPhone 3G? What is Samsung thinking? At the same time Samsung has the tablet which looks to be pretty nice and more original. Verizon is a great example too: first they hyped the Droid to huge success, but then they decided to start putting Bing on phones and open their own app store.
Still, it's great that Google seems to be adding serious competition to this market, but they seem to fail to grasp that they CAN'T hand control back to carriers and win this race. Giving up on the Nexus One right out of the gate was a bad move. Consumers dont want to go back to the flip phone days with $2.99 30 second vcast ringtones.
Apple will see continued success due to all these issues regardless, at least in the near future. However if Google steps up it's game and does the following:
1) Streamlined patch/update process
2) Making manufacturer skins removable
3) limitation on how manufacturers and carriers can lock down devices. (ie no forcing specific apps on the user).
That's when things will get interesting. If Google can silence the fragmentation trolls, and keep the carrier greed in check, there is hope for this market, and especially a bright future for consumers. There is even room for carriers to still add value. But if they FORCE it on people, they will all lose to Apple.
You'd think they have no standing though. If they are suing on the grounds you describe, the injured party would be the client who bought the $20 book.
I'd say BP hurt it's employees. But the real reason there are no boycott campaigns is that people don't make big moral decisions when the SUV is nearing E. Some dont care, others probably think all oil companies are likely as bad, but I'd guess the majority just want a tank of gas.
I think you've misunderstood. The very existence of such a preference indicates that they know full well how to separate UI threads from processing threads. In fact, they seem to have even made it configurable, though I'm unsure why. This preference appears to be there in case, for some strange reason, you want to turn off the interrupting. Perhaps they have it as an option for developer testing and debugging. And what kind of awful computer slows down on the awesome bar search?
Another nitpick: those are estimates and they show great shakeup in the market. While Nokia was down 40% in profit, HTC was up 33%. Apple does indeed make a boatload of cash but Android is what is currently shaking up the market.
Back on topic though I wonder why MS isn't suing themselves, since they seem so keen on paying Verizon money to put Bing on Android.
It's not just the tracking that's bad, it's all the problems that come with having an extra middle man and not being able to see what you are clicking. Certainly Google doesn't protect everyone from all malware that shows up in search results, there's no reason to think they can here (I think they do a good job considering, but malware is still hugely pervasive). It also breaks the move to a more semantic web. Just look at Slashdot's URL for this story and you can see what the story is about, what category it's in and when it was posted.
In my opinion URL shortening is bad for the web, and bad for usability. It's also something pretty easily created by any website on their own if they really need it.
It's unrelated to cookie tracking was the point. You also seem to have fallen victim to the article's sensationalism. y8.com might be a bad site but WSJ used the weasel words that y8.com "has had ties to a pornography site, xnxx.com, according to Internet registration records." and you added your own conclusion that they were forwarding perverts from xnxx to y8. For all we know it could be they used the same hosting or registrar or had the same domain squatter.
I wouldn't blame you for sticking to pbs, and avoiding sites like this (hell, I would too) but you're (and the WSJ is) playing fast and loose with the facts.
I just used it and they said they put opt-out cookies. Which is fine as long as the opt-out cookies have a generic ID like 000, and not a GUID.
I actually just checked too, and in the process cleared all my cookies by accident. So I went to re-opt-out, and it did indeed put a ton of cookies on my drive that look at a cursory checking of about 15 of the ~100 or so, were all generic values and did not contain a GUID. I did not check them all, however.
An excellent point but I think that's been a staple of human beings throughout history. On a brighter note, so have things like sharing and working co-cooperatively. To me there is some solace in the fact that we recognize this as what it is though, and that we are able to here discuss it, and shine the light of day on such activities. Though the pessimist in me wonders how much it can have real impact. Slashdot is excellent at being a real technology influencing discussion site though, IMO.
You gotta love that they also tossed in "one of the kids sites used to be a porn site!" which is almost wholly irrelevant to the story. It's basically a "bad people are on the internet! someone think of the children!" story, with a dash of "who would have thought Google was involved with bad people?" And very light on any actual understanding of the tech.
In this case I dont think it's that nefarious. I think it's easily many layers of middle managers trying to do a bit better than the last guy tossing on one more layer of tracking until you get a hairball of cookies, HTML5 DBs, Flash LSOs, etc. Most do not seem particularly intrusive alone, but added together the big picture is kinda creepy.
Still the WSJ article makes it sound like 50 mom and pop web sites using Google Analytics. They don't seem to differentiate that two cookies does not equal twice the tracking. One cookie is all you need to track many metrics.
Now this isn't just cookies on facebook, but actually recoding how long people talk on the phone to identify them as "influencers".
Between things like Radian6, Experian/Equifax/TansUnion, and RingLeaderDigital, there is some very shady tracking going on. And some of the companies are most definitely trying to tie in personally identifiable information. Certainly, the credit unions are committed to keeping just about every fact they can about you. They mine publicly available court records, work with your credit card companies, and they would love to know your browsing history. Their whole purpose it to create as complete a profile of you as possible. They say they delete the info in 10 years but I think some have been caught being less than diligent.
It's called cooperation. I don't get this kind of reaction; how do you "appear" to be doing "anything meaningful"? Is it not better to actually be working on a fix, than to appear to be working on a fix?
I don't see how this turns into "someone else cleaning up your mess while you stand around, thumb up ass." Any security fix takes time -- the question is how fast should the response be? If your argument that 3 weeks is too long, that would certainly be a valid opinion. (Adobe's bulletin notes they are planning the update for October 4th). But since you dont mention that you think they are taking too long, the comment just reads as flippant immature Anti-adobe hate. Like you're just judging them on some impossible appearance criteria. You can hate on them for taking too long, or hate on them for creating the bug, but WTF has slashdot come to where we hate on them for not being good at PR?
I think there is also a distinction made between targeting via aggregate groups, ie "those that have visited gaming sites" versus keeping perpetual specific data on an individual. Google *I think* leans more towards the aggregate, but the more ways you think of to target, the more specific info you will want to see, so that you can determine if the person matches the aggregate target. This is why retention plays a big role in Google's privacy policies.
Still, I'm sure they gobble a ton of data, and I know despite promises of erasing certain things (IP address after 6 months* for instance), the question also becomes do they retain that label they made for you such as "this person is a gamer, we don't have his website history to prove it but we previously have reports of his gaming interests." I'm kinda oversimplifying but the creepy stuff goes way beyond this too. Look at the credit reporting companies like Experian as some of the scary/invasive data miners.
*not sure if it's six months, just used number as a ballpark example
How are the realities of an industry orthogonal? I'm not arguing for or against prostitution, just saying that the world is not the black and white version you see. The point was, and still is, not all prostitutes are there by choice and they face unique challenges due to the nature of the industry. Any legalization of such a business needs to take that into account. Personally, I think I lean towards legalizing it, but with strong worker protections, and stronger efforts put into breaking up human trafficking rings.
The issue just isn't as simple as "hookers like being hookers" or "McDonalds employees hate McDonalds." Either way, you're clearly intelligent but your intellect isn't dizzying either, the guy made a fair point.
That's not really fair - economic pressure is only one of many coercive elements that could be driving someone to prostitution. Some could be slaves/indentured servants from a foreign country, some probably have language barriers etc. I think the GP's point was that there isn't any evidence proving one way or another how voluntary the 'employment' is. While you have a point, maybe a closer analogy would be undocumented migrant workers. The dizzying intellect thing was kinda over the top.
Slashdot Mirror
Industrial product design matters. Marketing too. I'm not a fan of Apple's policies, but they get quite a few things right while the competition seems mired in stupidity and copycat disease land.
- Decent quality control (iphone4 attena aside)
- Great marketing/PR/Hype
- Extremely nice looking products
Apple does these things well and makes great devices. They now even have an army of good developers thanks to a platform that caters to people willing to spend money. In the meantime, the competition seems to sometimes innovate, and other times gets stuck copying, confused, and greedy. Looking at the Nexus S -- it looks to be almost a clone of an IPhone 3G? What is Samsung thinking? At the same time Samsung has the tablet which looks to be pretty nice and more original. Verizon is a great example too: first they hyped the Droid to huge success, but then they decided to start putting Bing on phones and open their own app store.
Still, it's great that Google seems to be adding serious competition to this market, but they seem to fail to grasp that they CAN'T hand control back to carriers and win this race. Giving up on the Nexus One right out of the gate was a bad move. Consumers dont want to go back to the flip phone days with $2.99 30 second vcast ringtones.
Apple will see continued success due to all these issues regardless, at least in the near future. However if Google steps up it's game and does the following:
1) Streamlined patch/update process
2) Making manufacturer skins removable
3) limitation on how manufacturers and carriers can lock down devices. (ie no forcing specific apps on the user).
That's when things will get interesting. If Google can silence the fragmentation trolls, and keep the carrier greed in check, there is hope for this market, and especially a bright future for consumers. There is even room for carriers to still add value. But if they FORCE it on people, they will all lose to Apple.
You'd think they have no standing though. If they are suing on the grounds you describe, the injured party would be the client who bought the $20 book.
I believe they said "worlds largest creative software company"
Actually, Slashdot posted it yesterday: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/11/26/1450257/US-Government-Seizes-Torrent-Search-Engine-Domain
The same day as your link.
Slashdot may have political bias, but when it comes to tech, no party or ideology gets off the hook.
I'd sooner suspect your bias, for linking to TheHill, than Slashdot's.
I'd say BP hurt it's employees. But the real reason there are no boycott campaigns is that people don't make big moral decisions when the SUV is nearing E. Some dont care, others probably think all oil companies are likely as bad, but I'd guess the majority just want a tank of gas.
I think you've misunderstood. The very existence of such a preference indicates that they know full well how to separate UI threads from processing threads. In fact, they seem to have even made it configurable, though I'm unsure why. This preference appears to be there in case, for some strange reason, you want to turn off the interrupting. Perhaps they have it as an option for developer testing and debugging. And what kind of awful computer slows down on the awesome bar search?
People bash FF for the strangest things.
Another nitpick: those are estimates and they show great shakeup in the market. While Nokia was down 40% in profit, HTC was up 33%. Apple does indeed make a boatload of cash but Android is what is currently shaking up the market.
Back on topic though I wonder why MS isn't suing themselves, since they seem so keen on paying Verizon money to put Bing on Android.
It's not just the tracking that's bad, it's all the problems that come with having an extra middle man and not being able to see what you are clicking. Certainly Google doesn't protect everyone from all malware that shows up in search results, there's no reason to think they can here (I think they do a good job considering, but malware is still hugely pervasive). It also breaks the move to a more semantic web. Just look at Slashdot's URL for this story and you can see what the story is about, what category it's in and when it was posted.
interesting blog post i read a few months back about some of the pitfalls
In my opinion URL shortening is bad for the web, and bad for usability. It's also something pretty easily created by any website on their own if they really need it.
I clicked your link and it asked me to input "brainz"
Posted in the comments at ars:
===================
SpinyNorman | Thu Sep 30, 2010 8:08 am | permalink
I wish you chaps would link through to your sources.
[edit] ah, here we go:http://appanalysis.org/pubs.html
No details on which apps did what, only summary information. These were the apps:
The Weather Channel (News & Weather);
Cestos, Solitaire (Game);
Movies (Entertainment);
Babble (Social);
Manga Browser (Comics)
Bump, Wertago (Social);
Antivirus (Communication);
ABC — Animals, Traffic Jam, Hearts,Blackjack, (Games);
Horoscope (Lifestyle);
3001 Wisdom Quotes Lite, Yellow Pages (Reference);
Dastelefonbuch, Astrid (Productivity),
BBC News Live Stream (News & Weather);
Ringtones (Entertainment)
Layer (Productivity);
Knocking (Social);
Barcode Scanner, Coupons (Shopping);
Trapster (Travel);
Spongebob Slide (Game);
ProBasketBall (Sports)
MySpace (Social);
ixMAT (Shopping)
Evernote (Productivity)
Last edited by SpinyNorman on Thu Sep 30, 2010 8:23 am
To be fair metrometro was corrent, mea culpa: google site search shows the links
To be fair, the article on MIT's site is dated "September 7, 2010."
Naturally the only logical conclusion for the dupe is that MIT News hired some Slashdot editors.
It's unrelated to cookie tracking was the point. You also seem to have fallen victim to the article's sensationalism. y8.com might be a bad site but WSJ used the weasel words that y8.com "has had ties to a pornography site, xnxx.com, according to Internet registration records." and you added your own conclusion that they were forwarding perverts from xnxx to y8. For all we know it could be they used the same hosting or registrar or had the same domain squatter.
I wouldn't blame you for sticking to pbs, and avoiding sites like this (hell, I would too) but you're (and the WSJ is) playing fast and loose with the facts.
I just used it and they said they put opt-out cookies. Which is fine as long as the opt-out cookies have a generic ID like 000, and not a GUID.
I actually just checked too, and in the process cleared all my cookies by accident. So I went to re-opt-out, and it did indeed put a ton of cookies on my drive that look at a cursory checking of about 15 of the ~100 or so, were all generic values and did not contain a GUID. I did not check them all, however.
An excellent point but I think that's been a staple of human beings throughout history. On a brighter note, so have things like sharing and working co-cooperatively. To me there is some solace in the fact that we recognize this as what it is though, and that we are able to here discuss it, and shine the light of day on such activities. Though the pessimist in me wonders how much it can have real impact. Slashdot is excellent at being a real technology influencing discussion site though, IMO.
You gotta love that they also tossed in "one of the kids sites used to be a porn site!" which is almost wholly irrelevant to the story. It's basically a "bad people are on the internet! someone think of the children!" story, with a dash of "who would have thought Google was involved with bad people?" And very light on any actual understanding of the tech.
Indeed, TFA was sensationalist tripe.
In this case I dont think it's that nefarious. I think it's easily many layers of middle managers trying to do a bit better than the last guy tossing on one more layer of tracking until you get a hairball of cookies, HTML5 DBs, Flash LSOs, etc. Most do not seem particularly intrusive alone, but added together the big picture is kinda creepy.
Still the WSJ article makes it sound like 50 mom and pop web sites using Google Analytics. They don't seem to differentiate that two cookies does not equal twice the tracking. One cookie is all you need to track many metrics.
The stuff I find really unnerving is the social network mining and analysis. The economist had a great story on it: http://www.economist.com/node/16910031?story_id=16910031
Now this isn't just cookies on facebook, but actually recoding how long people talk on the phone to identify them as "influencers".
Between things like Radian6, Experian/Equifax/TansUnion, and RingLeaderDigital, there is some very shady tracking going on. And some of the companies are most definitely trying to tie in personally identifiable information. Certainly, the credit unions are committed to keeping just about every fact they can about you. They mine publicly available court records, work with your credit card companies, and they would love to know your browsing history. Their whole purpose it to create as complete a profile of you as possible. They say they delete the info in 10 years but I think some have been caught being less than diligent.
Anyways, for SOME of the more reputable* ad companies you can opt-out here: http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp.
*Relative term
The situation when you are worse off is when they set the i5 price at 250 and i7 at 300 but upgrade costs $129.99
I Agree.
1) It's unnecessary to use 3 systems to achieve the same end
2) Using three systems to do the same thing over and over again is redundant
3) There really doesn't have to be 3 methods of accomplishing the same task
It's called cooperation. I don't get this kind of reaction; how do you "appear" to be doing "anything meaningful"? Is it not better to actually be working on a fix, than to appear to be working on a fix?
I don't see how this turns into "someone else cleaning up your mess while you stand around, thumb up ass." Any security fix takes time -- the question is how fast should the response be? If your argument that 3 weeks is too long, that would certainly be a valid opinion. (Adobe's bulletin notes they are planning the update for October 4th). But since you dont mention that you think they are taking too long, the comment just reads as flippant immature Anti-adobe hate. Like you're just judging them on some impossible appearance criteria. You can hate on them for taking too long, or hate on them for creating the bug, but WTF has slashdot come to where we hate on them for not being good at PR?
Webkit doesn't disallow plugins, apple does.
I think there is also a distinction made between targeting via aggregate groups, ie "those that have visited gaming sites" versus keeping perpetual specific data on an individual. Google *I think* leans more towards the aggregate, but the more ways you think of to target, the more specific info you will want to see, so that you can determine if the person matches the aggregate target. This is why retention plays a big role in Google's privacy policies.
Still, I'm sure they gobble a ton of data, and I know despite promises of erasing certain things (IP address after 6 months* for instance), the question also becomes do they retain that label they made for you such as "this person is a gamer, we don't have his website history to prove it but we previously have reports of his gaming interests." I'm kinda oversimplifying but the creepy stuff goes way beyond this too. Look at the credit reporting companies like Experian as some of the scary/invasive data miners.
*not sure if it's six months, just used number as a ballpark example
Slashdot didn't properly detect it as a story. Probably due to methodology.
How are the realities of an industry orthogonal? I'm not arguing for or against prostitution, just saying that the world is not the black and white version you see. The point was, and still is, not all prostitutes are there by choice and they face unique challenges due to the nature of the industry. Any legalization of such a business needs to take that into account. Personally, I think I lean towards legalizing it, but with strong worker protections, and stronger efforts put into breaking up human trafficking rings.
The issue just isn't as simple as "hookers like being hookers" or "McDonalds employees hate McDonalds." Either way, you're clearly intelligent but your intellect isn't dizzying either, the guy made a fair point.
That's not really fair - economic pressure is only one of many coercive elements that could be driving someone to prostitution. Some could be slaves/indentured servants from a foreign country, some probably have language barriers etc. I think the GP's point was that there isn't any evidence proving one way or another how voluntary the 'employment' is. While you have a point, maybe a closer analogy would be undocumented migrant workers. The dizzying intellect thing was kinda over the top.