Aside from the "Widget" vulnerability, which you mention and further Apple patched in a week, would you please enumerate this litany of shame which has totally destroyed Apple's credibility as a maker of secure software?
Their new portable bus-powered firewire drives are highly recommended (you can preorder them now; the previous models of these they were selling were absolutely required equipment for sound designers.)
"We *will* be putting these movies on iTunes at $9 a pop, and if you don't like it, go form your own animation studio"
Interesting. We would note at this point that this was the general attitude of all movie studios (s/iTunes/Movie Theaters) until the Paramount Decrees of 1948. In that case, the supreme court decided that when movie studios and their theater chains were vertically-integrated, it violated the existing anti-trust laws and that the studios would have to sever themselves from their exhibitors.
In '48, there were several movie studios each aligned with their chains, either owning them (like Paramount) or being owned by them (in the case of MGM). The studios would routinely block-book their theaters with crap (this has alot to do with where "B" movies come from), so that an independent film studio/producer couldn't get their films in. I am somewhat doubtful that our presently-constituted supreme court would make a similar ruling no matter what happens over the next decade (the studio-theater system existed for 50 years before the Paramount decrees).
The point is, though, that it did happen eventually, and that vertically-integrated entertainment companies, involved in industrial media production, can be expected to become exclusionary. At some point the corporations that own their distribution channel start making bad decisions about content, just to save the system they have; witness Sony's continual incompentence at "killing" the iPod, on account of their need to protect their recording label from piracy.
Also, consider this fact in the context of MS recently cutting itself out of the management of MSNBC. They took this step possibly to give themselves a free hand when developing new DRM technologies (they don't have to worry about NBC being cool with their tech, after all, they destribute thru iTunes.)
I have a 300 VA UPS on my DSL modem, VOIP adapter, and telephone (I have a cordless phone). If I notice I'm having an outage, I unplug the phone and plug it in only when I want to make an outgoing call. The whole assembly lasts about 2-4 hours like this, which seems quite short, but since I have a cellphone too, it's not such a big problem.
Alot of people would be concerend that a power outage would cut their phone service, but I bet alot of people have a cordless phone system (like me), and they'd be phoneless in an outage, regardless of their service, VOIP or POTS.
In short, the Secret Service knocks over a game publisher (micro-TSR-style games, such as Illuminati) and attempts to prove that D&D'ers taught David Lightman how to use a Shlitz pulltab to hack into the 911 system. Courts decide Secret Service was completely unjustified, award court fees to SJG. The legal team/computer activists that coalesced around the issue became the EFF.
the last thing they wanted to be making and selling was a product that could be used to illegally trade mp3's
This is an important point that doesn't get much attention, but shows how huge amalgamated corporations are seriously in trouble when it comes to innovations. Sony didn't want to build an MP3 player increasing the ubiquity of MP3s threatened its music label, Sony Records. Sony made several iPod killers, such as the "Network Walkman" etc, but usually they were crippled by requiring ATRACS files (ATRACS being Sony's inhouse and generally-considered-awful compression format, which is lossy and does a bad job reencoding MP3s, naturally requiring the ripping person to own the CD). ATRACS is also used as the compression format for Sony MiniDisks, and also in Sony's SDDS digital theater sound system, which is only mixed for films produced by Sony's movie studio... see the pattern?
As long as computer/electronics companies are owned by companies that own record labels/movie studios/television studios, they will generally be the last to the table in new distribution technology. This has been a big loss for Sony, and will probably be a loss for others in the future. Perhaps this is why Microsoft has recently shed itself of MSNBC?
hey must allow their own gravitons to interact with nearby objects
Gravitons are hypothetical; no one has ever observed a graviton. Gravitons, if they exist, allow their force to escape black holes, which would seem to imply that gravitons do not act on each other (since they are not pulling themselves into the black hole).
IANA theoretical physicist, would one please chime in?
TFA cites a particular NSA biometric identification program which has "0.00" errors per KSLOC.
Now, this got me thinking. It is completely possible for a biometric identification program to identify two different individuals as the same person (like identical twins), or for it give a false negative identification (dirt on a lense, etc). Is this a bug? The code is perfect: no memory leaks, the thing never halts or crashes or segfaults, all the functions return what they should given what they are.
I think the popular definition of "bug" tends to catch too many fish, in that it seems to include all the behaviors a computer has when the user "didn't expect that output," what a more technical person might call a "misfeature." TFA outlines a working pattern to avoid coding errors, not user interface burps -- like for example, giving a yes/no result for a biometric scan, when in fact it's a question of probabilities and the operator might need to know the probabilities. Such omissions (the end user would call this a 'bug'), are solved thru good QA and beta-testing, but TFA makes no mention of either of these things, and seems to think that good coding is the art of making sure you never dereference a pointer after free()'ing it. It does mention formal specification, but that is only half the job, and alot of problems only become clear when you have the running app infront of you.
Discussion of TFA has its place, but it promises zero-defect programming, which is impossible without working with the users.
You're right, but then again, big gobs of Unix code can be compiled without modification on Mac OS X, and it provides just about all the services a Unix app or user might want.
Also, by your standard, Linux is not a Unix OS, while Linux also is generally compatible with Unix sources. Software platforms, which is what the conversation is about, are duck typed, not statically typed. If your platform looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck, until it isn't, which applies to Unixes, too.
I have downloaded programs to friends' OSX boxes, and run them, and gotten no such prompt. In which cases does the OS ask you this?
Are you talking about execution with no user intervention, or execution by double-clicking on an application? If you're surfing the internet on OS X with safari or FF (or even IE I believe), there is nothing you can click on a web page that will cause an application to download and then execute. The most that can happen is that it will download; Safari has no hook to run an application directly. There was an exploit discovered a few years ago where you could write a malicious application that would register itself as a URL handler for a particular scheme, and then a malicious website would send Safari a redirect to a resource in that scheme, causing OS X to delegate the URL to the malicious app, opening it automatically. But Apple patched that in a week, and we've heared nothing since-- the fix was: If Safari gets redirected to a scheme supported by an app you've never run before, you will get an allow/deny prompt.
OTOH, the computer will not warn you if you double-click to open an app for the first time. Really, what would it say? Something like "You're running this app I haven't seen before. I don't know where it came from, and Alan Turing says it's impossible for me to predict what it will do. Are you sure you wanted to double-click on it?" Warning prompts should only be for side effects of a users action, things that they would not resonably expect to occur from an action; clicking on a link should not run an application, thus we prompt for it. Doubleclicking on an app should do nothing but run an application, thus we do not prompt for it.
It's a hazy user-interface issue, but you have to draw the line and give your user a bit of credit. If the affirmatively want to open an app, trojan or not, the computer cannot nursemaid them.
Sony already has good usage of blueray, take a look at the broadcast market, their XDCams
Well, to this day, when I order dupes of projection reels I get them as Beta SP. Of course, they have to be dubbed from there to VHS in order to be played on any VCR any normal person owns.
Professional adoption != consumer adoption.
Of course, many of the studios have come out in favor of blu-Ray (after some dithering), as well as Sony and Apple. It's completely possible that HD-DVD will become the standard on the desktop but Blu-Ray will become the standard in your TV hutch, putting a knife in livingroom convergence but guarenteeing everybody their own happy little fiefdom and making ripping a thing of the past, except for the specially equipped individual who happens to own a soon-to-be-freakish blue-ray computer drive.
Hehe...thanks for the laugh. \n Rails is basically a hobby-ist environment
Trolling, but you find a more conciliatory tone towards the end for whatever reason, though I think you may be misunderstanding the use case for Rails.
Firstly, I've used basecamp for my projects for a few months now, and despite their many many users I've never appreciated any problems with its perfromance. As well, the rails main site never seems to get slashdotted when it gets linked. IMHO it's too early for anybody to say what scale rails can work on, we have not yet seen the triple-digit-blade load-balanced rails application (which the framework does support, theoretically).
Secondly, rails for a developer like me has been fantastic because I have zero formal CS education, and for years I have been making "a couple of internal projects" in things like FoxPro, Paradox, 4th Dimension and Filemaker Pro -- these are the real targets of Ruby on Rails. There are alot of functions in any company that might be automated through a web application -- simple billing and invoices, job tickets, things that were specific to their business -- and now they can just do it, without having to buy anything, and it'll work on the web.
I work in film sound, and I've been writing a web app for ADR, a process that has alot of special data requirements and has untiil very recently been done on paper, or in filemaker databases, or in some god-awful dongled 4th Dimension app some guy wrote and wants $600 for. I able to do it in my free time (when I'm not submitting to/.). There's a huge demand for small web apps that do what filemaker and it kin have been taking care of up until now.
While I don't concede that rails can't power a 1000-hit-per-second website, I don't believe that's what all the exitement is about, either. I would never go back to filemaker, and frankly if you're good at FMP and you can write HTML, you can code rails.
Ah, yes, large obnoxious and bandwidth heavy graffical ads...the bane of sites being posted on/.!
Indeed. Imagine the wonderful advertising that will be possible with those new user interfaces. 3-D ads! Spyware that reads your mind -- maybe not perfectly, but well enough to target ads at you (certain agencies already do functional MRI scans on focus groups... too lazy to find the link).
OTOH, the ads will be the first people to show us how to write useful web apps in neural-AJAX.
When is Ruby on Rails getting its own slashdot icon? Every other frickin' web development story is either "Rails is great" or "Watch the J2EE-Rails-Python flamewar"
Re:Lies, Damned lies and Statistics
on
Java Is So 90s
·
· Score: 1
Parent is almost certainly referring to the recent upswing at O'Reilly, on the order of some thousands of percent, in the sale of Ruby and Ruby on Rails books, while Python remains flatish.
There is no definition of what is "sexual" - Is a woman breastfeeding "sexual"? What about just the breast? If she's giving herself a mamogram? If she's showering? If she's playing with it? Where do they draw the line? They don't tell anyone.
There is, in fact, no line to speak of, since the whole matter is subjective, and you seem to be getting at this, but the perhaps we should go over how the classification and ratings system works.
Big movie studios, distributors, and exhibitors are members of the MPAA, a large industry consoritum which operates as a political interface for the film industry. The MPAA and its predecessor, the MPPDA, were formed for the original and explicit purpose of instituting voluntary censorship among large film producers. They do this for a couple reasons, none of which are evil:
In the 20's, many low-rent filmmakers were attmepting to pass-off pornography (by 1920s standards), or at least clearly explotive, low-quality material, as suitable public entertainment; 'white slavery' and incest were surprisingly popular themes in popular media in the 20s. Parents needed to have a sort of "truth-in-advertising" guarantee that they would be able to show up at the theater and the film would always meet a certain "community standard," to use the modern term. To screen the film before they showed it to their kids was -- and still is -- quite impractical (it is supposed to be entertainment, after all, and making parents worried and nervous is very unshowmanly).
A more modern reason: As we have seen with the Parents Television Council and other entities, it only really takes 10 well-paid crackpots and e-mail relay to get Congress to start talking about censorship. Censorship was seriously discussed both in the 20s and in the 60s when the ratings system was established. The ratings system is far superior to government censorship, which in the US would absolutely happen in its absence.
So, the MPAA rates films by taking a film submitted by a producer and screening it for a panel of half parents
(otherwise unaffiliated with filmmaking) and half industry people -- the panel is a standing commitee of 8-12 people who do the job full time and are paid by the MPAA. They vote, and will give specific comments to the filmmakers about what makes them vote a certain way, and if the rating isn't what the producer wanted, the producer does the cuts and get the "better" (lower, bigger audience) rating. This is self-censorship, but an MPAA rating is a cricital part of marketing the film to parents, so they do it.
I'm sure that they'll claim the "I know it when I see it" standard.
That is eactly how it works, since they are not identifying immorality or obscenity, but suitability of a particular film for a particular audience. Let's say they did spell out the rules, so that, for example:
"The depiction of frontal female nudity, where the dimensions of the genitals on-screen occupy 20% or more screen area (at 1.85:1 aspect) for a duration exceeding one-half second, shall automatically cause a film tor receive an R-rating."
That sort of thing seems to be what you are asking for. Of course, is the depiction artistic, as in a scene of people scketching a nude, or is it clearly sexual? And if so, is it two unmarried people, or married people? Exceptions would be made for various circumstances, and each of these would be an absolute judgement of moral value, and further it would be an implicit message to parents that if they allow their younger child to see X image or acitivity, when the MPAA specifically classes them out of it, they are bad parents. As the system is, a few letters in an MPAA label is not a moral statement, but attaching qualifications or a point system to it would surely put it on the road to being one.
he courts are real good about protecting Goliath from David
Luckily, in this case Goliath doesn't give a fuck about your angry anti-globalization documentary, and you are free t
Slashdot Mirror
Did anyone else get the sudden urge to open Klondike when they read the headline?
Not at all, we'll have Mark Cuban to take over.
Mod this funny.
Aside from the "Widget" vulnerability, which you mention and further Apple patched in a week, would you please enumerate this litany of shame which has totally destroyed Apple's credibility as a maker of secure software?
Lacie.
Their new portable bus-powered firewire drives are highly recommended (you can preorder them now; the previous models of these they were selling were absolutely required equipment for sound designers.)
Interesting. We would note at this point that this was the general attitude of all movie studios (s/iTunes/Movie Theaters) until the Paramount Decrees of 1948. In that case, the supreme court decided that when movie studios and their theater chains were vertically-integrated, it violated the existing anti-trust laws and that the studios would have to sever themselves from their exhibitors.
In '48, there were several movie studios each aligned with their chains, either owning them (like Paramount) or being owned by them (in the case of MGM). The studios would routinely block-book their theaters with crap (this has alot to do with where "B" movies come from), so that an independent film studio/producer couldn't get their films in. I am somewhat doubtful that our presently-constituted supreme court would make a similar ruling no matter what happens over the next decade (the studio-theater system existed for 50 years before the Paramount decrees).
The point is, though, that it did happen eventually, and that vertically-integrated entertainment companies, involved in industrial media production, can be expected to become exclusionary. At some point the corporations that own their distribution channel start making bad decisions about content, just to save the system they have; witness Sony's continual incompentence at "killing" the iPod, on account of their need to protect their recording label from piracy.
Also, consider this fact in the context of MS recently cutting itself out of the management of MSNBC. They took this step possibly to give themselves a free hand when developing new DRM technologies (they don't have to worry about NBC being cool with their tech, after all, they destribute thru iTunes.)
Two points about UPSs:
Steve Jackson Games
EFF's SJG Archive
SJG's Opinion of the whole thing
In short, the Secret Service knocks over a game publisher (micro-TSR-style games, such as Illuminati) and attempts to prove that D&D'ers taught David Lightman how to use a Shlitz pulltab to hack into the 911 system. Courts decide Secret Service was completely unjustified, award court fees to SJG. The legal team/computer activists that coalesced around the issue became the EFF.
This is an important point that doesn't get much attention, but shows how huge amalgamated corporations are seriously in trouble when it comes to innovations. Sony didn't want to build an MP3 player increasing the ubiquity of MP3s threatened its music label, Sony Records. Sony made several iPod killers, such as the "Network Walkman" etc, but usually they were crippled by requiring ATRACS files (ATRACS being Sony's inhouse and generally-considered-awful compression format, which is lossy and does a bad job reencoding MP3s, naturally requiring the ripping person to own the CD). ATRACS is also used as the compression format for Sony MiniDisks, and also in Sony's SDDS digital theater sound system, which is only mixed for films produced by Sony's movie studio... see the pattern?
As long as computer/electronics companies are owned by companies that own record labels/movie studios/television studios, they will generally be the last to the table in new distribution technology. This has been a big loss for Sony, and will probably be a loss for others in the future. Perhaps this is why Microsoft has recently shed itself of MSNBC?
FD. I am currently employed by Sony Pictures.
I think the post needs a correction. It should probably read:
maybe even edging out hard drives in some PAINFULLY SLOW products in the next few yearsGravitons are hypothetical; no one has ever observed a graviton. Gravitons, if they exist, allow their force to escape black holes, which would seem to imply that gravitons do not act on each other (since they are not pulling themselves into the black hole).
IANA theoretical physicist, would one please chime in?
The mini doesn't come with Front Row, only iMac's do.
TFA cites a particular NSA biometric identification program which has "0.00" errors per KSLOC.
Now, this got me thinking. It is completely possible for a biometric identification program to identify two different individuals as the same person (like identical twins), or for it give a false negative identification (dirt on a lense, etc). Is this a bug? The code is perfect: no memory leaks, the thing never halts or crashes or segfaults, all the functions return what they should given what they are.
I think the popular definition of "bug" tends to catch too many fish, in that it seems to include all the behaviors a computer has when the user "didn't expect that output," what a more technical person might call a "misfeature." TFA outlines a working pattern to avoid coding errors, not user interface burps -- like for example, giving a yes/no result for a biometric scan, when in fact it's a question of probabilities and the operator might need to know the probabilities. Such omissions (the end user would call this a 'bug'), are solved thru good QA and beta-testing, but TFA makes no mention of either of these things, and seems to think that good coding is the art of making sure you never dereference a pointer after free()'ing it. It does mention formal specification, but that is only half the job, and alot of problems only become clear when you have the running app infront of you.
Discussion of TFA has its place, but it promises zero-defect programming, which is impossible without working with the users.
Well, if you're using PHP, I know exactly how I'd vote:
Etc...
You're right, but then again, big gobs of Unix code can be compiled without modification on Mac OS X, and it provides just about all the services a Unix app or user might want.
Also, by your standard, Linux is not a Unix OS, while Linux also is generally compatible with Unix sources. Software platforms, which is what the conversation is about, are duck typed, not statically typed. If your platform looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck, until it isn't, which applies to Unixes, too.
A technical point: Perl, Python and Ruby are all installed on Mac OS X, which though being only one Unix, has the largest installed base of any Unix.
Are you talking about execution with no user intervention, or execution by double-clicking on an application? If you're surfing the internet on OS X with safari or FF (or even IE I believe), there is nothing you can click on a web page that will cause an application to download and then execute. The most that can happen is that it will download; Safari has no hook to run an application directly. There was an exploit discovered a few years ago where you could write a malicious application that would register itself as a URL handler for a particular scheme, and then a malicious website would send Safari a redirect to a resource in that scheme, causing OS X to delegate the URL to the malicious app, opening it automatically. But Apple patched that in a week, and we've heared nothing since-- the fix was: If Safari gets redirected to a scheme supported by an app you've never run before, you will get an allow/deny prompt.
OTOH, the computer will not warn you if you double-click to open an app for the first time. Really, what would it say? Something like "You're running this app I haven't seen before. I don't know where it came from, and Alan Turing says it's impossible for me to predict what it will do. Are you sure you wanted to double-click on it?" Warning prompts should only be for side effects of a users action, things that they would not resonably expect to occur from an action; clicking on a link should not run an application, thus we prompt for it. Doubleclicking on an app should do nothing but run an application, thus we do not prompt for it.
It's a hazy user-interface issue, but you have to draw the line and give your user a bit of credit. If the affirmatively want to open an app, trojan or not, the computer cannot nursemaid them.
Well, to this day, when I order dupes of projection reels I get them as Beta SP. Of course, they have to be dubbed from there to VHS in order to be played on any VCR any normal person owns.
Professional adoption != consumer adoption.
Of course, many of the studios have come out in favor of blu-Ray (after some dithering), as well as Sony and Apple. It's completely possible that HD-DVD will become the standard on the desktop but Blu-Ray will become the standard in your TV hutch, putting a knife in livingroom convergence but guarenteeing everybody their own happy little fiefdom and making ripping a thing of the past, except for the specially equipped individual who happens to own a soon-to-be-freakish blue-ray computer drive.
Trolling, but you find a more conciliatory tone towards the end for whatever reason, though I think you may be misunderstanding the use case for Rails.
Firstly, I've used basecamp for my projects for a few months now, and despite their many many users I've never appreciated any problems with its perfromance. As well, the rails main site never seems to get slashdotted when it gets linked. IMHO it's too early for anybody to say what scale rails can work on, we have not yet seen the triple-digit-blade load-balanced rails application (which the framework does support, theoretically).
Secondly, rails for a developer like me has been fantastic because I have zero formal CS education, and for years I have been making "a couple of internal projects" in things like FoxPro, Paradox, 4th Dimension and Filemaker Pro -- these are the real targets of Ruby on Rails. There are alot of functions in any company that might be automated through a web application -- simple billing and invoices, job tickets, things that were specific to their business -- and now they can just do it, without having to buy anything, and it'll work on the web.
I work in film sound, and I've been writing a web app for ADR, a process that has alot of special data requirements and has untiil very recently been done on paper, or in filemaker databases, or in some god-awful dongled 4th Dimension app some guy wrote and wants $600 for. I able to do it in my free time (when I'm not submitting to /.). There's a huge demand for small web apps that do what filemaker and it kin have been taking care of up until now.
While I don't concede that rails can't power a 1000-hit-per-second website, I don't believe that's what all the exitement is about, either. I would never go back to filemaker, and frankly if you're good at FMP and you can write HTML, you can code rails.
Interesting point... s/Java/COBOL
Don't be so sure of that.
Yours,
The NSA
Indeed. Imagine the wonderful advertising that will be possible with those new user interfaces. 3-D ads! Spyware that reads your mind -- maybe not perfectly, but well enough to target ads at you (certain agencies already do functional MRI scans on focus groups... too lazy to find the link).
OTOH, the ads will be the first people to show us how to write useful web apps in neural-AJAX.
Maybe I'm kidding.
When is Ruby on Rails getting its own slashdot icon? Every other frickin' web development story is either "Rails is great" or "Watch the J2EE-Rails-Python flamewar"
Parent is almost certainly referring to the recent upswing at O'Reilly, on the order of some thousands of percent, in the sale of Ruby and Ruby on Rails books, while Python remains flatish.
An awed hush falls over the crowd assembled, and then Mr. Gates speaks:
"Is it imperative that we crush this rebellion before the start rainy season! And a shiny new donkey to whomever brings me the head of Eric Schmidt!"
There is, in fact, no line to speak of, since the whole matter is subjective, and you seem to be getting at this, but the perhaps we should go over how the classification and ratings system works.
Big movie studios, distributors, and exhibitors are members of the MPAA, a large industry consoritum which operates as a political interface for the film industry. The MPAA and its predecessor, the MPPDA, were formed for the original and explicit purpose of instituting voluntary censorship among large film producers. They do this for a couple reasons, none of which are evil:
So, the MPAA rates films by taking a film submitted by a producer and screening it for a panel of half parents (otherwise unaffiliated with filmmaking) and half industry people -- the panel is a standing commitee of 8-12 people who do the job full time and are paid by the MPAA. They vote, and will give specific comments to the filmmakers about what makes them vote a certain way, and if the rating isn't what the producer wanted, the producer does the cuts and get the "better" (lower, bigger audience) rating. This is self-censorship, but an MPAA rating is a cricital part of marketing the film to parents, so they do it.
I'm sure that they'll claim the "I know it when I see it" standard.
That is eactly how it works, since they are not identifying immorality or obscenity, but suitability of a particular film for a particular audience. Let's say they did spell out the rules, so that, for example:
That sort of thing seems to be what you are asking for. Of course, is the depiction artistic, as in a scene of people scketching a nude, or is it clearly sexual? And if so, is it two unmarried people, or married people? Exceptions would be made for various circumstances, and each of these would be an absolute judgement of moral value, and further it would be an implicit message to parents that if they allow their younger child to see X image or acitivity, when the MPAA specifically classes them out of it, they are bad parents. As the system is, a few letters in an MPAA label is not a moral statement, but attaching qualifications or a point system to it would surely put it on the road to being one.
he courts are real good about protecting Goliath from David
Luckily, in this case Goliath doesn't give a fuck about your angry anti-globalization documentary, and you are free t