I'd like to suggest that it's more a matter of taste than you're implying. For example:
The Witcher 3, while not without occasional technical issues (albeit much less severe than Fallout 4's) was jaw-dropping.
I played a bit of it. Found it boring. Didn't want to continue. "Oh, look at me, I'm Mr. Toughguy-ponytail-douchebag. I have a gruff voice and a bad attitude, and I show sex scenes, so that 13 year-old boys think I'm the coolest guy ever!" Combat was boring hack-and-slash. I don't want to make potions. I don't want to worry about repairing weapons or whatever. I don't want to play card games in my RPGs.
I didn't play Bloodborne, but I didn't care for Dark Souls. Maybe it's just because I don't have the time or interest to "get good" at games, but it just felt like a repetitive grindy game where I had no idea who I was, where I was, what I was trying to do, or why I should care about any of it. I bought it, played for several hours, and promptly forgot about it.
I guess my point is, there's a consensus among a lot of people talking on websites that Fallout sucks, and Witcher 3 and Dark Souls are the best games ever. I'll probably get modded down for suggesting otherwise. When share the opinion that's popular on the Internet, it's easy to think that you're just unquestionably correct. However, it's possible that not everyone agrees with you.
Well if it's not your real keyboard capable of inputting text, then plug in your real keyboard first.
What, is that enough to make you retreat into a corner to pout? Security is often inconvenient. In the rare cases that someone has some kind of non-standard device that registers as a keyboard, they would be asked to plug in their real keyboard first. If they don't want to keep a real keyboard plugged in, they would have to temporarily plug in a keyboard while setting up the other device. For anyone who has done a day's work in IT, this is not the most inconvenient and stupid hoop you've had to jump through.
And I'm not even saying that this is a great solution. It's just a solution that I could come up with after 30 seconds of thought, given that I'm not really a security expert and I'm also assuming that no specialty hardware changes can be made. If smart people had a couple of years to develop a solution, I'm sure a really convenient method of handling this could be devised. It's not an unsurmountable problem.
If the average man on the street has no expectation of privacy, then most assuredly neither should any politician.
I've argued (admittedly somewhat rhetorically) that lawmakers that vote for government spying on private citizens should be required to have all of their phone calls, text messages, IM logs, and emails published immediately on public websites and licensed to the public domain. If the argument is, "Your privacy should be sacrificed for the benefit of the public welfare," and "If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear," then it should work both ways.
They'll argue that the can't have their communications be public, that they're conducting sensitive business, that they deserve to have a private life, that leaking their communications could cause embarrassment to themselves and their loved ones, etc. And they're not wrong in those arguments. It's just that all of those arguments should apply to my private communications as well.
How about any unrecognized keyboard pops up with a window that says in big-bright letters, "You've just plugged in a new keyboard. Please type the following randomly-generated code into your keyboard to verify that you want to use this keyboard." It may be a bit annoying, but it only happens the first time you plug in a keyboard. In order for a malicious fake-keyboard to be recognized, the user either needs to type in the code anyway (which requires a certain level of stupidity) or the fake-keyboard needs to somehow read the dialog box displayed on the screen.
There may be some other security hole here, but someone really clever could figure out a way to do it.
That's clever, but the attack isn't going to be extremely simple to pull off. First, you have to know what kind of system you're plugged into-- what keyboard shortcuts will get you to a command line, what commands can be run at that command line. If the system is slower than you expect, if it takes too long to execute something, your input might not go where you expect it to. If the user is sitting in front of the computer at the time, there will be a limited span of time to execute what you want to, since the user can type something else, change which window is active, or do any number of things to interrupt your process.
I've had some experience in trying to make macros that would replay keyboard/mouse input in order to run certain applications and execute commands, and it's amazing the kinds of things that can throw it off, even when you're working on a known/controlled system. I bet it'd be possible to make one that, to give an example, if you knew exactly what OS you were using, it would launch the CLI and delete the current user's home folder. I wouldn't bet on getting reliable results doing anything much more complicated than that.
We anthropomorphize things. More than that, we empathize with things, and assume other beings/objects feel, think, and behave the way we do. We show this in our language when we say things like, "nature abhors a vacuum". In our interpersonal relationships, we try to "put yourself in the other person's shoes". When we're deciding how to act with people, it's largely based on imagining that they would feel the same way that you imagine you'd feel in that situation. Even when I'm writing this, to some degree I'm imagining what it would be like if I were another person reading this. This way of thinking about things is complex and interesting, but it's something that we rely on constantly in order to navigate the world.
So when presented with a robot that's shaped like a person, our interaction with it is going to be largely governed by our assumption that it thinks and feels something similar to what we think and feel, even when we know it's not the case. The way we treat things is not about the things themselves, but about our natural tendency to reflect our own feelings onto objects.
Also note that most GPS speak by default using a female (higher pitch) voicepack, and are clearly giving order using imperative forms to the driver.
Also (and I'll admit this is hearsay because I won't be able to find a link) I've read an article that explained that part of the reason these systems use female voices is that old research found more people were likely to listen to them. There were a few different attempts to explain then phenomenon, whether it was "female voices are more pleasant" or "male voices sounded too competitive or challenging" or "our hearing is more attuned to the pitch of a female voice", Whether you're talking about subway system announcements or military computer systems, when the same commands/instructions were given in a male-sounding voice, people were less likely to hear it and more likely to ignore it.
At least, that's according to some random article... maybe in New Scientist or someplace like that... We have female voices in these systems because we're more likely to listen to a female voice.
This mostly sounds like BB trying like hell to stay relevant.
And it doesn't seem like it will be at all successful. I work with a lot of companies, and I haven't heard anyone mention RIM/Blackberry in the past few years, except as a joke.
The kind that enforces mandatory password changes every 30 business days...
That's the sort of thing I mean by "security theater" actually. Overly strict password policies can actually worsen security. I've seen a company where some management guy insisted that everyone reset their password every 30 days (but it would start warning you 2 weeks early, so it would actually prompt you to reset your password every 16 days or so), then password had to be 14 characters long, can't be any of your last 14 passwords, and needs to have a capital letter, lower-case, number, and symbol. Half the people had a post-it on their monitor with their password. The other half used passwords like "P@ssw0rd9!!!!!"
Or to give another example that I've described here on Slashdot before: I once worked at a company where one of the doors needed a 4-digit key code to enter. In order to make it more secure, they started resetting the code every few months. It was a pretty high-traffic door, though, and people kept forgetting the code. First, someone had the bright idea to put up a sign telling people what the code was, right next to the door. When management said they couldn't do that, people started propping the door open with a door-stop. Eventually they realized that rotating the code wasn't actually improving security, so they stopped.
The summary says that many view security as an "IT problem", but it probably fits into the category of IT problems where the real problem is the company's management.
As someone who has worked in IT for decades, I don't think that I've ever seen a security initiative where the biggest challenge wasn't persuading management. The first task is persuading management that security is important enough to even consider. The second is persuading them that it's worth spending any amount of money on, rather than asking IT to do what they can without additional resources of any kind. The next challenge is getting management to listen to security experts rather than going off the CEO's half-baked misunderstandings of how security works. The fourth is convincing them to enforce security policies even in cases when the employees don't like them. Finally, you need to get management to follow the security policies themselves, rather than requiring IT to carve massive holes in the security policy for the CEO's convenience.
In my experience, it's pretty rare that IT departments can make it past the second hurdle-- being able to allocate money/resources to security. Even when they do, the security that gets implemented is often porous and full of security theater.
When you pre-emotively tell people 'if we delete this, it means we got something we can't tell you about', when you delete it... its effectively telling them right, we all know thats what it means, right?
That doesn't mean that a lawyer can't argue it. You can say, "Sure, you're not technically telling them outright, but you're telling them..." but sometimes law is all about those little technicalities.
Exactly how is the message posted? In what context? Like maybe if you put the word "safe" on your websites front page and say, "I'm going to change this to unsafe if we get a warrant!" and then you change it to "unsafe", then maybe that's not legal because it's on your front page, it's clearly serving no other purpose than being a canary, and you're making an addition by adding "un-" to the word. However, what if it just disappears instead of being changed to "unsafe"? What if you don't explicitly tell people that it's a canary? What if it's not directly on the front page, but it's part of a monthly privacy report that you generate, and every month you say, "We haven't received warrants from the government," and then one month you just leave that part out?
Do these changes make a difference? I don't know, but law is all about these kinds of technicalities, and sometimes a very small change puts you on the other side of the law.
I disagree. I joined Netflix for the same reason you did, and grew concerned as copyright holders became intent on denying Netflix quality content. When they started producing their own content, I thought, "That's smart. Even if you just come up with a couple shows, it could spur interest."
After a couple years of new Netflix content, they produce a couple of my favorite shows. I definitely do not want them to stop. What's more, I do subscribe to HBO, and it's largely so that I can view their original programming. I also subscribe to Hulu. None of these has anything resembling a complete catalog, but putting them all together, I get to watch most of what I'd want to watch.
I think this is the right move forward-- not a good endpoint, but a good "next logical step". Streaming services with limited catalogs and great original programming will continue to hammer away at traditional TV, and you'll see more and more cord-cutters. I don't know how long it will take, but eventually the situation will become dire enough for traditional networks that they'll have to make their properties available on streaming services to make any money off of them. It'll be the Spotifycation of TV.
Give that a few years, and you'll see some method arise where you can pay a single subscription and get everything you want-- a complete back-catalog plus HBO/Netflix/Hulu originals. Now, that might be by some arrangement where these major providers agree on some common platform, or it may just be licensing deals (e.g. "Netflix pays HBO to get all their programming on a 1-year delay."). But that's the endpoint we want, and I still think it's going to happen.
Why the actual FUCK would you even do what they're offering here instead of just running Ubuntu instead?
Well let's say you had to run Windows for whatever particular reason. Let's say you have a business critical app that runs on Windows, doesn't run in WINE-- it doesn't really matter what. But you want to run some bash scripts and make use of linux utilities. Now you will be able to, without using cygwin (and they say it will work better than cygwin).
It seems like that's why you'd want this. I administer a lot of Macs and Windows machines, and it would be nice to be able to write one bash script that will run on both. Even if I need to detect the OS and set some variables based on that, having the ability to do that is preferable to not having the ability to do that.
Isn't uTorrent adware verging on malware? Maybe I'm confusing it with another product, but a lot of the bittorrent software that has been available over the years has had problems with that kind of thing.
Transmission, at least, is completely free and open source. I feel like that should be worth something. Also, I think Transmission does have a web interface available. Admittedly I'm not 100% sure because I don't see the point in having a web interface, but whatever floats your boat.
I'm sure that they will, for a fee, do the same for large corporate clients.
If they're already developing an alternative version with fewer embedded apps and more management features, why can't they just make that available to people? Why should we need to pay a separate bribe to Microsoft, above and beyond the licensing costs, to get a product that's already been developed?
I maintain that eating fruit is normally better than drinking just the juice.
I don't think that's in dispute. My point was that as critical as you might want to be about the healthiness of fruit juices, there's likely to be even more reason to be critical of fruit "drinks".
I'm not saying that Apple stuff isn't sometimes overhyped. But for example, the thing about not wanting pens-- I think that's fair to say that tablets and smartphones needed to move away from the stylus. Apple was right about that. The idea of having a little stylus you have to pull out to navigate your tablet or smartphone was just a poor implementation. There's a time and place for a stylus, specifically when you want to draw rather than just navigate the UI.
So I don't necessarily know what you're harping on about there. It's one example, but Apple was right to point out that the stylus implementations sucked 10 years ago, and people didn't want to use a stylus. But now, 10 years later, they develop a better stylus with more accuracy that's useful to particular things, and you still don't need it for basic navigation. This would be a good example to support my point: sometimes what separates "gimmicky" from "not gimmicky" is a good implementation.
When Samsung does something, it's a gimmick. When Apple does the same thing a couple of years later, it's a "wild new feature", "spectacular", and "highly innovative".
To be fair, the quality of the implementation is important. The same basic feature can be either gimmicky or useful depending on what it's used for and how it's implemented. Sometimes the innovation is in figuring out how to make the gimmick work.
Even fruit drinks aren't as good as, well, eating the fruit involved because there's lots of nutrients you're losing out on that was in the pulp of the fruit, and besides, the pulp has carbs and fiber that help you feel 'full', which the juice alone will shoot through your system and not satiate you.
Well also they're talking about fruit drinks, not fruit juice. Whenever you see something labelled "fruit drink", it should trigger alarm bells and the question, "why aren't they calling it juice?"
Even things labelled "juice" sometimes have additives, including additional sugar. When it's labelled a "fruit drink", it means that they've doctored it so much and added so much sugar that they're not allowed to call it "juice" anymore. It's sort of like if you go to a mexican restaurant and the stuff they put in the tacos is referred to as something like, "beef-based taco filling." That should immediately make you question what that stuff is.
I was speaking generally. Of course there were secure computing systems, but most of what you saw wasn't very secure. Even if the OS itself was secure, the apps and services running on them may not have been.
The continuing popularity of the language proves it.
There may be circumstances where the language is very useful, but there should not be any desktop software distributed that requires the user to install any kind of Java plugin or development kit. There's just no excuse for that kind of stupidity.
If someone can take this code and use it to build native apps, I'd be excited to try it out.
I have never understood why macros need access to the Internet or to run an external program.
A lot of these things started back before people expected malicious hackers. Early email systems didn't even have passwords. Even in the 90s, Mac OS and Windows didn't really have the ability to password protect the system. When Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer, Microsoft went through a lot of trouble to make sure that the web browser could access the filesystem and control the system, going as far as having their patching/updating mechanism run from a web page. We're still struggling with the effects of putting encryption on email and on our filesystems.
Basically, computer stuff engineered longer than 15 years ago was aimed at increasing the capabilities, without regard for security. In that context, having omnipotent macros enabled people to do all kinds of crazy things that office applications were not designed to do. Businesses and industries built themselves up around Microsoft Word and Excel documents that acted as full on applications of their own. Now we all see how stupid it is, but yanking that functionality would disrupt a lot of people's work, because they on a collection of Franken-documents that are really complex applications, but nobody has the budget to rebuild them as a proper application.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to suggest that it's more a matter of taste than you're implying. For example:
The Witcher 3, while not without occasional technical issues (albeit much less severe than Fallout 4's) was jaw-dropping.
I played a bit of it. Found it boring. Didn't want to continue. "Oh, look at me, I'm Mr. Toughguy-ponytail-douchebag. I have a gruff voice and a bad attitude, and I show sex scenes, so that 13 year-old boys think I'm the coolest guy ever!" Combat was boring hack-and-slash. I don't want to make potions. I don't want to worry about repairing weapons or whatever. I don't want to play card games in my RPGs.
I didn't play Bloodborne, but I didn't care for Dark Souls. Maybe it's just because I don't have the time or interest to "get good" at games, but it just felt like a repetitive grindy game where I had no idea who I was, where I was, what I was trying to do, or why I should care about any of it. I bought it, played for several hours, and promptly forgot about it.
I guess my point is, there's a consensus among a lot of people talking on websites that Fallout sucks, and Witcher 3 and Dark Souls are the best games ever. I'll probably get modded down for suggesting otherwise. When share the opinion that's popular on the Internet, it's easy to think that you're just unquestionably correct. However, it's possible that not everyone agrees with you.
Well if it's not your real keyboard capable of inputting text, then plug in your real keyboard first.
What, is that enough to make you retreat into a corner to pout? Security is often inconvenient. In the rare cases that someone has some kind of non-standard device that registers as a keyboard, they would be asked to plug in their real keyboard first. If they don't want to keep a real keyboard plugged in, they would have to temporarily plug in a keyboard while setting up the other device. For anyone who has done a day's work in IT, this is not the most inconvenient and stupid hoop you've had to jump through.
And I'm not even saying that this is a great solution. It's just a solution that I could come up with after 30 seconds of thought, given that I'm not really a security expert and I'm also assuming that no specialty hardware changes can be made. If smart people had a couple of years to develop a solution, I'm sure a really convenient method of handling this could be devised. It's not an unsurmountable problem.
He's living consequence-free in Putin's Russia
I fail to see how being forced to flee his home and live in Putin's Russia is the same as "consequence-free".
If the average man on the street has no expectation of privacy, then most assuredly neither should any politician.
I've argued (admittedly somewhat rhetorically) that lawmakers that vote for government spying on private citizens should be required to have all of their phone calls, text messages, IM logs, and emails published immediately on public websites and licensed to the public domain. If the argument is, "Your privacy should be sacrificed for the benefit of the public welfare," and "If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear," then it should work both ways.
They'll argue that the can't have their communications be public, that they're conducting sensitive business, that they deserve to have a private life, that leaking their communications could cause embarrassment to themselves and their loved ones, etc. And they're not wrong in those arguments. It's just that all of those arguments should apply to my private communications as well.
Then you can input the info from your already-logged-in keyboard.
How about any unrecognized keyboard pops up with a window that says in big-bright letters, "You've just plugged in a new keyboard. Please type the following randomly-generated code into your keyboard to verify that you want to use this keyboard." It may be a bit annoying, but it only happens the first time you plug in a keyboard. In order for a malicious fake-keyboard to be recognized, the user either needs to type in the code anyway (which requires a certain level of stupidity) or the fake-keyboard needs to somehow read the dialog box displayed on the screen.
There may be some other security hole here, but someone really clever could figure out a way to do it.
I've had some experience in trying to make macros that would replay keyboard/mouse input in order to run certain applications and execute commands, and it's amazing the kinds of things that can throw it off, even when you're working on a known/controlled system. I bet it'd be possible to make one that, to give an example, if you knew exactly what OS you were using, it would launch the CLI and delete the current user's home folder. I wouldn't bet on getting reliable results doing anything much more complicated than that.
We anthropomorphize things. More than that, we empathize with things, and assume other beings/objects feel, think, and behave the way we do. We show this in our language when we say things like, "nature abhors a vacuum". In our interpersonal relationships, we try to "put yourself in the other person's shoes". When we're deciding how to act with people, it's largely based on imagining that they would feel the same way that you imagine you'd feel in that situation. Even when I'm writing this, to some degree I'm imagining what it would be like if I were another person reading this. This way of thinking about things is complex and interesting, but it's something that we rely on constantly in order to navigate the world.
So when presented with a robot that's shaped like a person, our interaction with it is going to be largely governed by our assumption that it thinks and feels something similar to what we think and feel, even when we know it's not the case. The way we treat things is not about the things themselves, but about our natural tendency to reflect our own feelings onto objects.
Also note that most GPS speak by default using a female (higher pitch) voicepack, and are clearly giving order using imperative forms to the driver.
Also (and I'll admit this is hearsay because I won't be able to find a link) I've read an article that explained that part of the reason these systems use female voices is that old research found more people were likely to listen to them. There were a few different attempts to explain then phenomenon, whether it was "female voices are more pleasant" or "male voices sounded too competitive or challenging" or "our hearing is more attuned to the pitch of a female voice", Whether you're talking about subway system announcements or military computer systems, when the same commands/instructions were given in a male-sounding voice, people were less likely to hear it and more likely to ignore it.
At least, that's according to some random article... maybe in New Scientist or someplace like that... We have female voices in these systems because we're more likely to listen to a female voice.
This mostly sounds like BB trying like hell to stay relevant.
And it doesn't seem like it will be at all successful. I work with a lot of companies, and I haven't heard anyone mention RIM/Blackberry in the past few years, except as a joke.
The kind that enforces mandatory password changes every 30 business days...
That's the sort of thing I mean by "security theater" actually. Overly strict password policies can actually worsen security. I've seen a company where some management guy insisted that everyone reset their password every 30 days (but it would start warning you 2 weeks early, so it would actually prompt you to reset your password every 16 days or so), then password had to be 14 characters long, can't be any of your last 14 passwords, and needs to have a capital letter, lower-case, number, and symbol. Half the people had a post-it on their monitor with their password. The other half used passwords like "P@ssw0rd9!!!!!"
Or to give another example that I've described here on Slashdot before: I once worked at a company where one of the doors needed a 4-digit key code to enter. In order to make it more secure, they started resetting the code every few months. It was a pretty high-traffic door, though, and people kept forgetting the code. First, someone had the bright idea to put up a sign telling people what the code was, right next to the door. When management said they couldn't do that, people started propping the door open with a door-stop. Eventually they realized that rotating the code wasn't actually improving security, so they stopped.
The summary says that many view security as an "IT problem", but it probably fits into the category of IT problems where the real problem is the company's management.
As someone who has worked in IT for decades, I don't think that I've ever seen a security initiative where the biggest challenge wasn't persuading management. The first task is persuading management that security is important enough to even consider. The second is persuading them that it's worth spending any amount of money on, rather than asking IT to do what they can without additional resources of any kind. The next challenge is getting management to listen to security experts rather than going off the CEO's half-baked misunderstandings of how security works. The fourth is convincing them to enforce security policies even in cases when the employees don't like them. Finally, you need to get management to follow the security policies themselves, rather than requiring IT to carve massive holes in the security policy for the CEO's convenience.
In my experience, it's pretty rare that IT departments can make it past the second hurdle-- being able to allocate money/resources to security. Even when they do, the security that gets implemented is often porous and full of security theater.
When you pre-emotively tell people 'if we delete this, it means we got something we can't tell you about', when you delete it ... its effectively telling them right, we all know thats what it means, right?
That doesn't mean that a lawyer can't argue it. You can say, "Sure, you're not technically telling them outright, but you're telling them..." but sometimes law is all about those little technicalities.
Exactly how is the message posted? In what context? Like maybe if you put the word "safe" on your websites front page and say, "I'm going to change this to unsafe if we get a warrant!" and then you change it to "unsafe", then maybe that's not legal because it's on your front page, it's clearly serving no other purpose than being a canary, and you're making an addition by adding "un-" to the word. However, what if it just disappears instead of being changed to "unsafe"? What if you don't explicitly tell people that it's a canary? What if it's not directly on the front page, but it's part of a monthly privacy report that you generate, and every month you say, "We haven't received warrants from the government," and then one month you just leave that part out?
Do these changes make a difference? I don't know, but law is all about these kinds of technicalities, and sometimes a very small change puts you on the other side of the law.
The next step for Netflix may be to produce major motion pictures, release in theaters then exclusively on NF.
That's sort of already happened.
I disagree. I joined Netflix for the same reason you did, and grew concerned as copyright holders became intent on denying Netflix quality content. When they started producing their own content, I thought, "That's smart. Even if you just come up with a couple shows, it could spur interest."
After a couple years of new Netflix content, they produce a couple of my favorite shows. I definitely do not want them to stop. What's more, I do subscribe to HBO, and it's largely so that I can view their original programming. I also subscribe to Hulu. None of these has anything resembling a complete catalog, but putting them all together, I get to watch most of what I'd want to watch.
I think this is the right move forward-- not a good endpoint, but a good "next logical step". Streaming services with limited catalogs and great original programming will continue to hammer away at traditional TV, and you'll see more and more cord-cutters. I don't know how long it will take, but eventually the situation will become dire enough for traditional networks that they'll have to make their properties available on streaming services to make any money off of them. It'll be the Spotifycation of TV.
Give that a few years, and you'll see some method arise where you can pay a single subscription and get everything you want-- a complete back-catalog plus HBO/Netflix/Hulu originals. Now, that might be by some arrangement where these major providers agree on some common platform, or it may just be licensing deals (e.g. "Netflix pays HBO to get all their programming on a 1-year delay."). But that's the endpoint we want, and I still think it's going to happen.
Why the actual FUCK would you even do what they're offering here instead of just running Ubuntu instead?
Well let's say you had to run Windows for whatever particular reason. Let's say you have a business critical app that runs on Windows, doesn't run in WINE-- it doesn't really matter what. But you want to run some bash scripts and make use of linux utilities. Now you will be able to, without using cygwin (and they say it will work better than cygwin).
It seems like that's why you'd want this. I administer a lot of Macs and Windows machines, and it would be nice to be able to write one bash script that will run on both. Even if I need to detect the OS and set some variables based on that, having the ability to do that is preferable to not having the ability to do that.
Isn't uTorrent adware verging on malware? Maybe I'm confusing it with another product, but a lot of the bittorrent software that has been available over the years has had problems with that kind of thing.
Transmission, at least, is completely free and open source. I feel like that should be worth something. Also, I think Transmission does have a web interface available. Admittedly I'm not 100% sure because I don't see the point in having a web interface, but whatever floats your boat.
I'm sure that they will, for a fee, do the same for large corporate clients.
If they're already developing an alternative version with fewer embedded apps and more management features, why can't they just make that available to people? Why should we need to pay a separate bribe to Microsoft, above and beyond the licensing costs, to get a product that's already been developed?
I maintain that eating fruit is normally better than drinking just the juice.
I don't think that's in dispute. My point was that as critical as you might want to be about the healthiness of fruit juices, there's likely to be even more reason to be critical of fruit "drinks".
I'm not saying that Apple stuff isn't sometimes overhyped. But for example, the thing about not wanting pens-- I think that's fair to say that tablets and smartphones needed to move away from the stylus. Apple was right about that. The idea of having a little stylus you have to pull out to navigate your tablet or smartphone was just a poor implementation. There's a time and place for a stylus, specifically when you want to draw rather than just navigate the UI.
So I don't necessarily know what you're harping on about there. It's one example, but Apple was right to point out that the stylus implementations sucked 10 years ago, and people didn't want to use a stylus. But now, 10 years later, they develop a better stylus with more accuracy that's useful to particular things, and you still don't need it for basic navigation. This would be a good example to support my point: sometimes what separates "gimmicky" from "not gimmicky" is a good implementation.
When Samsung does something, it's a gimmick. When Apple does the same thing a couple of years later, it's a "wild new feature", "spectacular", and "highly innovative".
To be fair, the quality of the implementation is important. The same basic feature can be either gimmicky or useful depending on what it's used for and how it's implemented. Sometimes the innovation is in figuring out how to make the gimmick work.
Even fruit drinks aren't as good as, well, eating the fruit involved because there's lots of nutrients you're losing out on that was in the pulp of the fruit, and besides, the pulp has carbs and fiber that help you feel 'full', which the juice alone will shoot through your system and not satiate you.
Well also they're talking about fruit drinks, not fruit juice. Whenever you see something labelled "fruit drink", it should trigger alarm bells and the question, "why aren't they calling it juice?"
Even things labelled "juice" sometimes have additives, including additional sugar. When it's labelled a "fruit drink", it means that they've doctored it so much and added so much sugar that they're not allowed to call it "juice" anymore. It's sort of like if you go to a mexican restaurant and the stuff they put in the tacos is referred to as something like, "beef-based taco filling." That should immediately make you question what that stuff is.
I was speaking generally. Of course there were secure computing systems, but most of what you saw wasn't very secure. Even if the OS itself was secure, the apps and services running on them may not have been.
The continuing popularity of the language proves it.
There may be circumstances where the language is very useful, but there should not be any desktop software distributed that requires the user to install any kind of Java plugin or development kit. There's just no excuse for that kind of stupidity.
If someone can take this code and use it to build native apps, I'd be excited to try it out.
I have never understood why macros need access to the Internet or to run an external program.
A lot of these things started back before people expected malicious hackers. Early email systems didn't even have passwords. Even in the 90s, Mac OS and Windows didn't really have the ability to password protect the system. When Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer, Microsoft went through a lot of trouble to make sure that the web browser could access the filesystem and control the system, going as far as having their patching/updating mechanism run from a web page. We're still struggling with the effects of putting encryption on email and on our filesystems.
Basically, computer stuff engineered longer than 15 years ago was aimed at increasing the capabilities, without regard for security. In that context, having omnipotent macros enabled people to do all kinds of crazy things that office applications were not designed to do. Businesses and industries built themselves up around Microsoft Word and Excel documents that acted as full on applications of their own. Now we all see how stupid it is, but yanking that functionality would disrupt a lot of people's work, because they on a collection of Franken-documents that are really complex applications, but nobody has the budget to rebuild them as a proper application.