The real annoyance for me is the version numbering / compatibility scheme.
I agree. The problem isn't numbering per se, but more the fact that the version number changes triggers a bunch of notifications and may disable add-ons. Chrome has gotten away with fast full-number version changes because the changes are basically transparent.
Did you know that Chrome is on verions 23 right now? Well actually it's probably not. I have no idea what version number Chrome is on, and there is no real reason for me to know. They could be on version 15 or 30 for all I know. I just know that it was v12 the last time I checked, which is a while ago, so it must be higher than that.
But I know Firefox is on v11. Something popped up when it upgraded, I think, and whatever it was it prompted me to think, "Wait, it's v11 now?" I remember the same thing happened at v10 and v9.
It's hard, but if the major manufacturers came together and agreed to build open standards, it wouldn't be impossible. There are problems involving patents and licenses and copyrights and trade secrets. There would be technical disagreements about which methods and practices are best. There are disagreements about moving forward with new standards vs. legacy support. There are companies whose business models would be threatened. There's the presence of Microsoft to contend with-- a company that exerts a lot of control in the tech industry and whose business interests could be undermined by open drivers.
There are lots of problems, but many of them somehow come back to issues like desire for control, aversion to change, and fear of loss. Imagine you're running a company that is currently successful in working with hardware and drivers. Someone suggests a change in your operations that will change the way you do business and take control out of your hands. Do you want to take the risk? It's probably easier to quibble over details than push ahead with a solution.
One of the big problems here is that many businesses don't really want things to be open. Openness runs contrary to control, and even if the result is a net gain by every measure, people *hate* to give up control-- especially when it's a PHB who does nothing but meddle, and that accounts for most decision-makers.
It has long been held by philosophers and courts that one of the keys to "free speech" is the option of anonymous speech. If you can't give your opinion anonymously, then there's no way you can be sure there will be no retribution.
Maybe it's fallen out of style, but even in Android and OSX, many of the exploits require you actively install something instead of "whoops, I visited a website." In reality, though, we should be blaming application developers for a fair amount of the problem. The exploits are often in PDF/Flash, MS Office, the web browser, etc.
On the other hand, even if application developers are to blame, it still pushes some of the blame back onto the OS vendors. Because Windows doesn't have a centralized update utility, each application vendor gets their own little updater. So the user logs in, and they have 7 different Windows pop up that say, "Adobe Reader needs to be updated" and "Adobe Flash needs to be updated" and "Windows needs to be updated" and "Java needs to be updated". Bla bla bla. So many prompts. This leads to one of 2 things-- either (a) the user ignores them, which leads to unpatched vulnerabilities, or (b) the user just clicks "OK" on whatever pops up, including the window that says, "Do you want to install a virus?"
Some people want to say it's Microsoft's fault, and other people want to say it's not Microsoft's fault. The truth is, it's not *all* Microsoft's fault, but Microsoft still stinks.
Why do they need to "win the war"? We don't need software monoculture. We need interoperability. Redhat is successful and doing well in a market where others are also doing well.
I've thought for a long time that we should at least consider a simple law/regulation that says the following: The same company is forbidden from being an Internet/Infrastructure provider as well as being a content/service provider.
So if Comcast wants to run a network to your house and provide internet access, then great, but they can't also sell TV services, TV internet services, VoIP, etc. They also cannot own NBC or any other content owners/distributors. They can only provide infrastructure, and their dealings must be open-- any deal they make with one company must be available to all. Comcast can't make a special deal with Netflix to give them additional access or cheaper access to their subscribers without making the terms public and offering the same deal to everyone.
If, on the other hand, they want to own/distribute content, they cannot act as an ISP.
Making a regulation like this would remove so many perverse incentives.
Of course, you're assuming that these media companies would actually pay him. It's more likely that they'd rig the contracts to make sure megaupload never got paid, the same way they do with directors, actors, and bands. "Yes, you'll get X% after the costs of Y are recouped. Unfortunately, Y has an infinite cost and will never be recouped, because I pay myself out of Y."
My understanding (which may be wrong) is that it basically boils down to, "We don't know how to make good games that captures the public interest, but we can keep churning out Call of Duty and Modern Warfare games and keep making money. Let's devote money there instead of anything riskier."
Maybe. I played all of them, and at least in WC3 and WC4, the only frustratingly difficult missions were the escort missions. Everything else felt like I just barely made it out in one piece, but I mostly finished the missions on the first try. Maybe I was really good at it, or maybe I just had it set to an easier difficulty than you. Hard to say since it's been so long.
Still, I would totally play WC3 again if it were remade with an upgraded engine.
I'll have to try this out, but I sure loved the old Wing Commander games. I haven't replayed them to see how they hold up, but they did a pretty good job of balancing difficulty so that you could almost always succeed, but you always *felt like* you just barely succeeded.
It's been a long time since I've played a flight/space combat game that hooked me enough to play more than a couple missions. I hope this game finds some success.
Yes, that is the point of the warning, but now that I've been warned, what's the proper next step?
"OK, so I'm connecting to a server that I don't admin using SSH, and I don't already have the public key stored. So how do I know there's not a MITM attack going on?"
Well the hitch to your view comes when we hit a point where you can provide a wireless connection that is as robust and reliable as a wired one more cheaply than a wired connection. People mention rural areas all the time as a good market for using cell networks for last-mile internet, but even in NYC, stringing cables is a problem. There are all kinds of other infrastructure in the way, and current lines go through private property where the owners are not allowing Verizon access. Current Internet connections are terrible in NYC. Most places can't get Verizon or even DSL, but are instead reliant on cable operators, who provide terrible service and slow upload speeds. This hinders both personal and business use of the Internet.
If the technology is really there to provide even 100MB connections to the Internet over cell networks for a decent price, it could solve lots of problems. Of course, the cell phone networks are all terrible and expensive too, so I don't think the current cell phone carriers are up to the task.
Didn't watch, but he's saying people buy smaller TVs than they need? Most of the TVs that I see for sale these days are 40" or larger. As someone who had a 19" TV for several years and felt lucky for it, I feel downright decadent with my 32" LCD TV, which is now several years old.
Even setting aside the question of whether anyone "needs" a TV, nobody needs a 40" TV. It's all luxury.
Yeah, in my view, there's a simple time-tested method for managing your data: Get a centralized storage medium big enough to hold it all, move everything to it, and then back that up. Your backup medium should be at least twice as big as your storage medium-- for example, if you have a 2TB drive that you're storing everything on, you should have a backup device that can hold at least 4TB.
But it seems like he's saying, "I want to store everything and back it up, but I'm unwilling to pay for the storage media. Does anyone have a solution where I get things for free?"
Spend millions of dollars on advertising and even more in subsidies to hardware manufacturers (or like Apple make your own hardware.)
I don't agree that this is the key thing. The much bigger issue continues to be hardware and software support. Can I install Linux on my random computer and trust that it will detect my dual-display video card and wifi card without problems? Can I install Adobe Creative Suite? Can I install Steam games?
Those are the problems that lead even savvy people to use MacOS or Windows. Personally, I really like Macs if only for one simple reason: you can install MacOS on any Mac from the last few years and trust that it will work, without problems. No driver conflicts. No unsupported hardware. I can even copy the contents of that hard drive to another Mac and run the system without any special tricks, and without installing any new drivers.
If Dell or HP could manage something similar with their own Linux distro, I would be interested to try it out.
But then from your argument we could not ever declare anything a felonious act, not even 1st degree murder...
No, not really. "First degree murder" is already defined by the circumstances of the crime. It's the context of the act that distinguishes first degree murder from second degree murder or manslaughter. Ending another person's life can even be considered to not be a crime at all, as in military conflict or self defense.
Yes, that's why I used those examples. I've heard both of them cited by people I know and by people on TV as "self-made men" who brought themselves up from nothing. Trump has implied it about himself. But neither one exactly came from poverty, and both had a lot of help and luck along the way.
In a way, I kind of like the idea of recording everything I say and do in a comprehensive way, stored in a big database for later retrieval. However, three problems jump out at me.
First and most importantly, if the data exists, it's only a matter of time before someone forces you to share it. The police will get ahold of it, or Microsoft will have the Windows 9 ToS include a passage that gives them rights to mine the data. Maybe Facebook will have a super fun game that can only be played if you give them access to that data. Whatever it is, we will be pushed to allow this data out, and that's dangerous.
My second objection is related to the first, and it's that I'm sure there is information that I wouldn't want to store and share. There a funny things, like I once bought an album on iTunes for a friend, of a band that I don't like, and ever since then Apple insists on recommending similar albums to me. Similarly, Spotify really wants to share what music you're listening to on Spotify, which I sort of like the idea of, except that I don't want people to know what music I listen to. I listen to crappy music, and I listen to the same song 5 times in a row. I don't need a record of that, and I don't need everyone I know to be informed of it. After listening to that same track 30 times, I'm tired of it and I might never want to listen to it again, so I don't need it stored and recommended back to me later on. In fact, I don't even like that iTunes keeps track of how many times I've listened to each track. It makes me feel weird to even see for myself that I've listened to this song 120 times when I know it's a terrible song, but even worse, I don't want anyone else stumbling across that information.
My third objection is largely a technological issue, and it may be fixed some day. However, for the time being, I still don't the we have the technology to sort through massive amounts of data effectively. I don't know about you, but I get lost searching through my own iPhoto library. It seems like everyone wants to collect all the information we can and store it all in a huge opaque database, but in practice, it doesn't work very well for me. I can't find what I'm looking for using Apple's spotlight, and Windows indexing is constantly breaking. OSX Lion has introduced a new smart folder called "my files" or something like that, with the apparent intention of making it easier to find all of your documents through this one smart folder. However, I find it often shows a ton of documents I don't care about (e.g. Outlook contacts), and it's simpler for me to just navigate the directory structure I set up in the first place. For now, this stuff still doesn't quite work.
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The real annoyance for me is the version numbering / compatibility scheme.
I agree. The problem isn't numbering per se, but more the fact that the version number changes triggers a bunch of notifications and may disable add-ons. Chrome has gotten away with fast full-number version changes because the changes are basically transparent.
Did you know that Chrome is on verions 23 right now? Well actually it's probably not. I have no idea what version number Chrome is on, and there is no real reason for me to know. They could be on version 15 or 30 for all I know. I just know that it was v12 the last time I checked, which is a while ago, so it must be higher than that.
But I know Firefox is on v11. Something popped up when it upgraded, I think, and whatever it was it prompted me to think, "Wait, it's v11 now?" I remember the same thing happened at v10 and v9.
It's hard, but if the major manufacturers came together and agreed to build open standards, it wouldn't be impossible. There are problems involving patents and licenses and copyrights and trade secrets. There would be technical disagreements about which methods and practices are best. There are disagreements about moving forward with new standards vs. legacy support. There are companies whose business models would be threatened. There's the presence of Microsoft to contend with-- a company that exerts a lot of control in the tech industry and whose business interests could be undermined by open drivers.
There are lots of problems, but many of them somehow come back to issues like desire for control, aversion to change, and fear of loss. Imagine you're running a company that is currently successful in working with hardware and drivers. Someone suggests a change in your operations that will change the way you do business and take control out of your hands. Do you want to take the risk? It's probably easier to quibble over details than push ahead with a solution.
Contrary to popular belief, businesses don't simply rationally maximize profit or ROI.
One of the big problems here is that many businesses don't really want things to be open. Openness runs contrary to control, and even if the result is a net gain by every measure, people *hate* to give up control-- especially when it's a PHB who does nothing but meddle, and that accounts for most decision-makers.
It has long been held by philosophers and courts that one of the keys to "free speech" is the option of anonymous speech. If you can't give your opinion anonymously, then there's no way you can be sure there will be no retribution.
Sorry, but blaming Windows holes has become passe
Maybe it's fallen out of style, but even in Android and OSX, many of the exploits require you actively install something instead of "whoops, I visited a website." In reality, though, we should be blaming application developers for a fair amount of the problem. The exploits are often in PDF/Flash, MS Office, the web browser, etc.
On the other hand, even if application developers are to blame, it still pushes some of the blame back onto the OS vendors. Because Windows doesn't have a centralized update utility, each application vendor gets their own little updater. So the user logs in, and they have 7 different Windows pop up that say, "Adobe Reader needs to be updated" and "Adobe Flash needs to be updated" and "Windows needs to be updated" and "Java needs to be updated". Bla bla bla. So many prompts. This leads to one of 2 things-- either (a) the user ignores them, which leads to unpatched vulnerabilities, or (b) the user just clicks "OK" on whatever pops up, including the window that says, "Do you want to install a virus?"
Some people want to say it's Microsoft's fault, and other people want to say it's not Microsoft's fault. The truth is, it's not *all* Microsoft's fault, but Microsoft still stinks.
Why do they need to "win the war"? We don't need software monoculture. We need interoperability. Redhat is successful and doing well in a market where others are also doing well.
I've thought for a long time that we should at least consider a simple law/regulation that says the following: The same company is forbidden from being an Internet/Infrastructure provider as well as being a content/service provider.
So if Comcast wants to run a network to your house and provide internet access, then great, but they can't also sell TV services, TV internet services, VoIP, etc. They also cannot own NBC or any other content owners/distributors. They can only provide infrastructure, and their dealings must be open-- any deal they make with one company must be available to all. Comcast can't make a special deal with Netflix to give them additional access or cheaper access to their subscribers without making the terms public and offering the same deal to everyone.
If, on the other hand, they want to own/distribute content, they cannot act as an ISP.
Making a regulation like this would remove so many perverse incentives.
What if this isn't after a period of maintenance? What if you don't control where the service is hosted?
This isn't really a solved problem, so I can't blame you for not having a better answer.
Of course, you're assuming that these media companies would actually pay him. It's more likely that they'd rig the contracts to make sure megaupload never got paid, the same way they do with directors, actors, and bands. "Yes, you'll get X% after the costs of Y are recouped. Unfortunately, Y has an infinite cost and will never be recouped, because I pay myself out of Y."
And if that's not an option?
My understanding (which may be wrong) is that it basically boils down to, "We don't know how to make good games that captures the public interest, but we can keep churning out Call of Duty and Modern Warfare games and keep making money. Let's devote money there instead of anything riskier."
Even if they do make a new one, it'll probably be optimized for consoles and made for 7 year-olds.
Maybe. I played all of them, and at least in WC3 and WC4, the only frustratingly difficult missions were the escort missions. Everything else felt like I just barely made it out in one piece, but I mostly finished the missions on the first try. Maybe I was really good at it, or maybe I just had it set to an easier difficulty than you. Hard to say since it's been so long.
Still, I would totally play WC3 again if it were remade with an upgraded engine.
I'll have to try this out, but I sure loved the old Wing Commander games. I haven't replayed them to see how they hold up, but they did a pretty good job of balancing difficulty so that you could almost always succeed, but you always *felt like* you just barely succeeded.
It's been a long time since I've played a flight/space combat game that hooked me enough to play more than a couple missions. I hope this game finds some success.
Well good for you. You're a 1337 h4x0rz, I guess. There are still some people in the world who are just getting their feet wet.
Yes, that is the point of the warning, but now that I've been warned, what's the proper next step?
"OK, so I'm connecting to a server that I don't admin using SSH, and I don't already have the public key stored. So how do I know there's not a MITM attack going on?"
Well the hitch to your view comes when we hit a point where you can provide a wireless connection that is as robust and reliable as a wired one more cheaply than a wired connection. People mention rural areas all the time as a good market for using cell networks for last-mile internet, but even in NYC, stringing cables is a problem. There are all kinds of other infrastructure in the way, and current lines go through private property where the owners are not allowing Verizon access. Current Internet connections are terrible in NYC. Most places can't get Verizon or even DSL, but are instead reliant on cable operators, who provide terrible service and slow upload speeds. This hinders both personal and business use of the Internet.
If the technology is really there to provide even 100MB connections to the Internet over cell networks for a decent price, it could solve lots of problems. Of course, the cell phone networks are all terrible and expensive too, so I don't think the current cell phone carriers are up to the task.
Didn't watch, but he's saying people buy smaller TVs than they need? Most of the TVs that I see for sale these days are 40" or larger. As someone who had a 19" TV for several years and felt lucky for it, I feel downright decadent with my 32" LCD TV, which is now several years old.
Even setting aside the question of whether anyone "needs" a TV, nobody needs a 40" TV. It's all luxury.
Yeah, in my view, there's a simple time-tested method for managing your data: Get a centralized storage medium big enough to hold it all, move everything to it, and then back that up. Your backup medium should be at least twice as big as your storage medium-- for example, if you have a 2TB drive that you're storing everything on, you should have a backup device that can hold at least 4TB.
But it seems like he's saying, "I want to store everything and back it up, but I'm unwilling to pay for the storage media. Does anyone have a solution where I get things for free?"
Spend millions of dollars on advertising and even more in subsidies to hardware manufacturers (or like Apple make your own hardware.)
I don't agree that this is the key thing. The much bigger issue continues to be hardware and software support. Can I install Linux on my random computer and trust that it will detect my dual-display video card and wifi card without problems? Can I install Adobe Creative Suite? Can I install Steam games?
Those are the problems that lead even savvy people to use MacOS or Windows. Personally, I really like Macs if only for one simple reason: you can install MacOS on any Mac from the last few years and trust that it will work, without problems. No driver conflicts. No unsupported hardware. I can even copy the contents of that hard drive to another Mac and run the system without any special tricks, and without installing any new drivers.
If Dell or HP could manage something similar with their own Linux distro, I would be interested to try it out.
But then from your argument we could not ever declare anything a felonious act, not even 1st degree murder...
No, not really. "First degree murder" is already defined by the circumstances of the crime. It's the context of the act that distinguishes first degree murder from second degree murder or manslaughter. Ending another person's life can even be considered to not be a crime at all, as in military conflict or self defense.
My overall point still stands: there could be a doubt whether it's a felonious act. It depends on the context in which the act was committed.
Yes, that's why I used those examples. I've heard both of them cited by people I know and by people on TV as "self-made men" who brought themselves up from nothing. Trump has implied it about himself. But neither one exactly came from poverty, and both had a lot of help and luck along the way.
In a way, I kind of like the idea of recording everything I say and do in a comprehensive way, stored in a big database for later retrieval. However, three problems jump out at me.
First and most importantly, if the data exists, it's only a matter of time before someone forces you to share it. The police will get ahold of it, or Microsoft will have the Windows 9 ToS include a passage that gives them rights to mine the data. Maybe Facebook will have a super fun game that can only be played if you give them access to that data. Whatever it is, we will be pushed to allow this data out, and that's dangerous.
My second objection is related to the first, and it's that I'm sure there is information that I wouldn't want to store and share. There a funny things, like I once bought an album on iTunes for a friend, of a band that I don't like, and ever since then Apple insists on recommending similar albums to me. Similarly, Spotify really wants to share what music you're listening to on Spotify, which I sort of like the idea of, except that I don't want people to know what music I listen to. I listen to crappy music, and I listen to the same song 5 times in a row. I don't need a record of that, and I don't need everyone I know to be informed of it. After listening to that same track 30 times, I'm tired of it and I might never want to listen to it again, so I don't need it stored and recommended back to me later on. In fact, I don't even like that iTunes keeps track of how many times I've listened to each track. It makes me feel weird to even see for myself that I've listened to this song 120 times when I know it's a terrible song, but even worse, I don't want anyone else stumbling across that information.
My third objection is largely a technological issue, and it may be fixed some day. However, for the time being, I still don't the we have the technology to sort through massive amounts of data effectively. I don't know about you, but I get lost searching through my own iPhoto library. It seems like everyone wants to collect all the information we can and store it all in a huge opaque database, but in practice, it doesn't work very well for me. I can't find what I'm looking for using Apple's spotlight, and Windows indexing is constantly breaking. OSX Lion has introduced a new smart folder called "my files" or something like that, with the apparent intention of making it easier to find all of your documents through this one smart folder. However, I find it often shows a ton of documents I don't care about (e.g. Outlook contacts), and it's simpler for me to just navigate the directory structure I set up in the first place. For now, this stuff still doesn't quite work.