I work in the IT group of a Fortune 100 company, and to be honest, I see little difference between using Gmail and other third-party companies. For example, we use Symantec as our mail filtering/virus scanning company. Every e-mail that comes to and goes from our company goes through servers located physically on their premises, and as far as we're concerned, it's a "black box" of a scanner--we don't know all the nitty-gritty details of what all they do when they're scanning our mail, we just know the end result. And it's a lot of mail--just the other day, our gateway crashed for a couple of hours, and they held over 14,000 e-mails for us while we worked on getting it back up.
Granted, I don't know what legal agreements we have in place with Symantec, but if you want to be paranoid, you could imagine all sorts of evil things they could be doing with all of that e-mail, and there are no telling what kind of sensitive information is being misclassified by the users and sent completely free and clear through their system.
At some point, though, unless you want to literally do everything in-house and never take advantage of the value-added services that third parties can provide, you have to suck it up and trust them not to screw you over. If nothing else, Google should know that all it would take is one major data loss or one gross breach of corporate privacy, and their Gmail service would pretty much be dead. Just as if we find out that Symantec has done something evil with our e-mail--even something that is legally allowed in the contracts--that their business would suffer a nasty hit.
At some point, the benefits of using a service like Gmail outweigh the risks that Google, a company with an excellent reputation, suddenly turns evil. As a CTO, your job isn't to sit around and dream up reasons why you'll never trust a third party; it is to assess those risks, reasonably compare them with the benefits, and decide whether it's worth it or not.
As a side note, I'm actually part of a large team of people who were recently outsourced by my former employer to a third-party IT services provider to handle all of the IT services for that former employer. So now, I'm on the direct opposite side of the coin that you're mentioning here. It's pretty well understood that if we do something to screw over my former employer--now our client--that it would not only cost us our careers, but likely cost all of our friends and coworkers their careers, too. We still have and require root access to almost every server and network device across the world. If you start dreaming up things that could happen in that situation without considering what you're getting in exchange for that risk, it seems on the surface a pretty stupid thing to do, but it's actually working really well.
And when you really think about it, just about anything you could dream up a third-party provider doing to you, I could dream up much, much worse your own internal people, with even less motivation, doing to you.
The Pirate Bay's contention was that they were not breaking the law, that hosting an index of torrents was legal, and that other people uploading trackers of infringing material were the ones who were breaking the law. Personally, I think they're right. Obviously, the courts disagreed.
Plus, please do not forget that there were plenty of people using The Pirate Bay perfectly legally. I obtained a few Linux distributions off of there. Also, some people--independent musicians and the like--uploaded stuff to which they own the rights, and that was legal, too. Last, but not least, laws vary from place to place. Maybe uploading a tracker for Steamboat Willie is illegal in the United States, but not in Namibia.
That's the trouble with going after sites like The Pirate Bay. Sure, most of the stuff on there was illegal. But where do you draw the line? Are you going to put the onus of determining what is and isn't legal on everyone who hosts anything?
Or put another way, just because someone can record something illegally on a VCR, does that mean that we have to outlaw VCRs? Hasn't that battle already been fought and won?
Why would you use a signed integer for a value like this?
An honest, practical answer:
Because most people who develop software link to other libraries, and many of those libraries don't have overloaded functions that take unsigned ints as parameters.
For example, C#'s String.Substring function takes Int32s as parameters. So if you're using an UInt32 called x to hold some kind of index that you want to use in that function, you have to 1) check to see if x is less than zero (or better yet, less than UInt32.MinValue), and if so, throw an exception, then 2) cast x to an Int32, which takes a miniscule amount of time and resources.
It's much easier just to define x as an Int32, even if you never intend for it to be negative.
In the case of Bejewelled, I can only guess as to what dependencies might exist. Maybe the graphics routine to display the score on the screen is some kind of DisplayNumber(Int32 number,...) function that is generic enough so that they can write the function to display any number, positive or negative, and not have to build and maintain (and risk breaking when the code is updated) yet another function to do the same thing with uints because some weird bizarre edge cases exist where people use numbers > 2^31 but for whatever reason can't just use an Int64 instead.
Centuries start on the "01" year rather than the "00" year, so shouldn't decades start on the "x1" year as well? Meaning, right now we're in the LAST year of this decade.
I never recognized that convention. But then, I've been a computer sciency geek as long as I can remember, so I started counting at year zero. It's still 2009 to me.
Seriously, though, although you're technically right, practically speaking, I accept that most people think of 2010 as the first year of the '10s, just as most people thought of 2000 as the first year of the new millennium. Yeah, pedantically speaking they're wrong, but it doesn't really make a difference and people tend to hate "that guy" who feels the compulsive need to correct everyone.
If you're programming software that has to calculate time differentials across the BC/AD boundary, then by gummy, have at it. But otherwise, my advice is to not make an issue of it. Choose more worthwhile battles to fight, lest people not pay attention to you when you are arguing about something important because you make all skirmishes into full-scale battles.
It's all relative. Your average American pays $50 to $60 for cable service that doesn't allow them to watch back episodes, then tacks on hefty additional fees if you want something like a DVR that will allow you to watch shows independently of their normal timeslot.
Is it less than ideal? Yeah. But as long as Big Content is involved, "ideal" is a pipe dream, and Hulu is a hell of a lot better than what we've got now. I'll probably be signing up.
This is beyond awesome, it's a game-changer. Google is one of those rare companies that singularly has the power to move markets, and it is revolutionary to see it do so in favor of consumers as it has. I understand the reasons why it has preferred H.264 over Theora, but it is really nice to see that it also understands the reasons why we should be preferring an open format instead. It's especially nice in an age of companies wanting to lock everything down and be the gatekeeper to everything, the major player in technology is pushing yet again to open things up.
Sometimes I think that Google is about the only company that "gets it." They understand that more people using the Internet translates to more money in their pocket. Even if those people are not using Google's services directly, they are increasing the market such that collectively, it has more opportunity, which in turn translates into more $$$. They seem to not really care if other people are making more money as well, which really separates them in my mind from other companies, who are of the "it is not enough that I succeed, but everyone else must fail" mentality.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand, one reason I've seen people regurgitate in why H.264 is the right way to go is because it is supported on hardware. Congratulations to Google on working to negate that argument.
And what Mozilla and the Theora-or-nothing crowd are missing is that even staying with Evil H.264, the video-tag/HTML5 is still a huge moral win over Evil Proprietary Flash.
I'm sorry, but I just plain don't see it that way. It is simply substituting one proprietary format with another. In fact, using the "technically better is better, period" argument of the poster above you, because Flash includes more features than simple video, we should be striving against having a video tag and just continue using Flash.
The GIF argument just isn't applicable. When everyone standardized on GIF, there really wasn't a viable alternative that worked nearly as well. There is a viable alternative to H.264. Also, keep in mind that when GIF became a de facto standard, the legal environment surrounding patents was much different. It was a time when there was question over whether a compression algorithm could even be patented, and the chance that anyone would actually sue over it was virtually nil. Now, the sue 'em all strategy is actually a lucrative business model.
Come to think of it, didn't we go through many of these same arguments around 10 years after GIF became the de facto standard? Wasn't the questionability of the patent-encumbering of it a primary driver behind the development of the free PNG format? Didn't it take around like two friggin' decades for PNG to be as widely supported because we didn't really know better in making GIF the de facto format?
Don't you agree it's pretty damned stupid to repeat that exact mistake yet again under the whole "fool me once, fool me twice" tenet?
Yup, I've seen it, too. I run a gaming web site that gets around 2 million page loads a month. A long time ago, I made a deliberate decision not to run ads. My rationale at the time was that I didn't mind paying the hosting cost because it's my hobby. Some people pay a lot on woodworking, some people pay a fortune on golf. My hobbyist indulgence is paying the monthly fee for a VPS to host the site.
A while back, when I needed more power for the site and the hosting costs went up, I made a deal to move the site (which was a MediaWiki-based wiki) to Wikia. They promised me that there would only be one ad on the site, that it would never be injected in the content, that it wouldn't be obtrusive, and other such things. After the site was moved, they proceeded to go back on these promises, and several more.
After less than a year, the other administrators and I decided to re-host the site ourselves, and ask for donations. Again, we don't run ads, and thanks to donations, I'm almost breaking even on the hosting costs.
Recently, someone pointed me back to Wikia's site. It is a tragedy. Aside from being woefully out of date, there were six or eight ads, including javascript and Flash ads that obscure parts of the screen and injected into the articles. Worst of all, some of the "malvertising" discussed in this article.
Here's what's kind of bad. Because Wikia uses SEO crappy games, their site still comes up on top of the search results in Google. (You should see the page titles, they're 10 or 15 words long.) I recently posted a message on the game's official forums warning people of the malevolent advertising, because I wanted to make sure people used the right URL for our wiki, and it was a good chance to reiterate how important it is to us to keep the site ad-free.
A week or so ago, one of the guys at Ars Technica ranted in an article about how people who use ad blocking are stealing content. It's the same argument I've seen higher profile people (Rubert Murdoch, I'm looking at you...) make the same claim. I said then, and I still maintain, that using ad blocking and Flash blocking is not just a matter of convenience, but a matter of maintaining the security of my system.
Fortunately, I like sites like Ars Technica, because they provide an alternate means of reading their content without "stealing" it, and I have a paid subscription to the site. However, as long as a site's only business model is advertising, I don't feel one iota of guilt in protecting my system. If they block content if ad blockers are being used, more power to them, I'll find another site to read.
But stories like this, stories I've actually felt first-hand, are why I support sites without advertising, I do what I can to opt out of advertising, and I don't force advertising on visitors to sites I run myself.
I am living in the first house I ever bought. When I bought it, I didn't realize what idiots HMAs are. If I ever buy another house, I am going to tell my realtor that I specifically want a house in a neighborhood in which there is no HMA, period.
About once every three or four months, I get nastygrams for stupid-ass made-up stuff. My shrubs are too high. (They aren't.) My mailbox pole is leaning. (It's not.) I need new pine straw around my house. (I don't.)
I came to the conclusion a long time ago that no matter how much I spend, no matter how well-kept my house is, I'm still going to get a nastygram for something. After all, the HMA management company must send these things out periodically to prove that they're worth being paid. So now, whenever I get a letter from them, I simply throw it away, sight unseen. I don't give a rat's ass what they have to say.
Every once in a blue moon, I actually consider running for president of our HMA. It's a job that no one really wants, and I'm pretty sure that if I made half an effort to convince my neighborhood that I want the job, I could get it. And then once I win, my first formal action would be to fire our HMA management company and tell everyone else that unless someone tries to do something like pave over their yard or put a jalopy up on blocks in the driveway, leave everyone the hell alone.
So, I'm stupid because I have a world view that I, not Obaman, own my body.
No, you're stupid because you think that this bill is going to take away your ability to make decisions regarding your own health care. Or a liar. Which do you prefer?
The truth is that we desperately need a single-payer system, just like every industrialized country in the world that realized a long time ago that health care is a basic infrastructure need for a productive, thriving population.
Yes, because people are dropping dead left and right around me. It's a picture straight out of "Zombieland"
There, I highlighted the part you deliberately overlooked to create your strawman. It's not a matter of people dying in the street, it's a matter of people going bankrupt because they have a screwed up gene, they fall down, they get into an auto accident, the get pneumonia,...
When we set up this country, you know, with that silly "Constitution" and all, they enumerated some things that the government would be responsible for.
You mean things like, "promote the general Welfare?" (Right there in the first sentence, in case you weren't paying attention.) Or maybe you're referring specifically to the enumerated power of Congress to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States?" Inconvenient it is, that zany Constitution, isn't it?
And now, you demonstrate what a simpleton you are. It isn't just some lone mechanic having to buy a new set of wrenches. It is about replacing trillions of dollars worth of machine tools...
This idiot doesn't understand a simple metaphor and calls me a simpleton. That's golden. Anyway, it shows the amazing arrogance of these idiots, that they completely neglect the fact that the entire rest of the world somehow managed to do it, a combined economy that is emphatically much larger than ours. But then, most of the rest of the world isn't so boneheaded that, when they see a much better idea, they deliberately run away from it. There are exceptions, of course--witness Myanmar--but then it's sheer lunacy to sit here declaring, "Yeah, we want to be like them!"
It's because people here are stupid. They are so desperate to avoid any trappings of Socialism that they'd rather die because they can't get medical care than to let Big Evil Government help them out.
The truth is that we desperately need a single-payer system, just like every industrialized country in the world that realized a long time ago that health care is a basic infrastructure need for a productive, thriving population. But the American people are collectively so scared, stupid, and easily swayed, even by outright lies ("Death panels! Federally funded abortion! Rampant costs! Elderly care cuts!") posted on bumper stickers, they they would literally show up with torches and pitchforks in Washington if Congress actually did what is right.
The funny thing to me is that these stupid people who are so quick to bash Socialism are usually fanboys of one of the most huge, expensive Socialist organizations in the entire world: the U.S. military. Now, I'm not bashing the military, I have a lot of respect for it, Socialist as it is and everything. But it's just kind of funny how when George Bush sunk trillions of dollars into it, you didn't see these idiots showing up in Washington with caricatures of him as Hitler.
Maybe I'll post more later. I really could write a book about this, but I've got to go to work.
But consider this. The U.S. is the only country, other than Myanmar, that still has not converted to the metric system. If this country is so stubborn and stupid as to not do things the right way just to spite those damn commies in Europe (and not have to buy a new set of wrenches), seriously, what hope do we ever have of really moving to a single-payer health care system?
So why didn't EFF save themselves and the taxpayers some time and money and just go to the Apple developer site and hit ctrl-c?
Because then Apple would have sued them, probably under the theory that the EULA is a copyrighted document, and the EFF infringed said copyright by publishing it against the terms under which it was disclosed to them.
This way, everything is legal and above-board, and the EFF is free and clear of liability. If Apple goes after anyone, it will have to be NASA. And if they choose to do so, for one thing, most judges would simply throw the case out, as there is no legal obligation for the government to allow itself to be sued, and for another, even if the case were allowed, the U.S. government is likely much better prepared in terms of deep pockets to defend itself against Apple's corporate lawyers than the EFF is.
...Now help standardize on non-proprietary codecs.
on
What To Expect From HTML5
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Let's not kid ourselves. Apple isn't trying to pull people away from Flash because they're big-hearted. They're pulling people away from Flash because they want to be the gateway to Internet content, via the sweet deal with MPEG LA (who owns the H.264 patent) that will keep other players--especially open source software--out of the market.
If Apple really had our best interests at heart, they would be either 1) pushing Ogg Theora as a baseline video standard, or 2) working to release H.264 into the public domain so that everyone can use the arguably "better" codec.
In fact, speaking of an unencumbered codec, have you noticed that Safari, by deliberate choice, does not support Ogg Theora? I mean, I can understand them implementing H.264, if they think it's a better codec. Google does too, and they've said on record that they think that H.264 is superior. Nevertheless, Chrome does also support Ogg Theora. Opera supports Ogg Theora. Firefox, of course supports Ogg Theora, and due to its open source nature, can't support H.264 unless it's released to the public domain. Microsoft is blissfully quiet on the matter and doesn't support either yet. But Safari? The odd man out, the only browser that could support both and has chosen not to.
I (and I think I speak for many people here) do not have a problem with adds per say. What I have a problem with is intrusive adds. Google style adds don't bother me a bit, I click them all the time. Sometimes I'm looking for a product, or am just plain interested, and then I click. It is not for these adds that people like me run add blockers. The problem is obnoxious advertising. It's like those television adds where a guy just yells the whole time. Adds like this make me willing to invest the time, money, and effort in a TIVO style box. You would think other advertisers would be trying to stop this sort of thing to preserve their own revenue! Can you imagine how pissed you'd be if your add screened after screaming man? It's these guys that motivate people to find a way to turn it off! If an add move blinks, etc, I find it very distracting and will leave a site. I will not visit your sight again, and I use add blockers to avoid this kind of thing in general browsing. The submitter admits to intrusive adds, so your site would be on my shit list. It's nothing personal, it's just that if you want traffic from people like me, just don't do intrusive adds.
I'm really sorry in advance, because I try really, really hard not to be a pedantic ass, but after reading what you had to say and agreeing with most of it and thinking that it's a relevant point, I just have to get this off my chest and out into the open:
For god's sake, man, it's ad, not "add." It stands for advertisement, with just one d. "Add" is what people do to numbers to produce a sum. "Ad" is what people do to some to produce numbers.
I consider it irresponsible not to browse the web with a really good ad/Flash/javascript blocker. Not just because of the annoyance factor, but because it is a significant vector of malicious code attacks. This isn't just hypothetical; in the recent past, sites such as Wikia and a gaming site I visit injected malicious code and infected users' machines. The site hosts were completely unaware of it; the code was being injected through a third-party ad provider. Fortunately, I found out about this through someone else when they brought it to my attention, because the code never made it to my browser.
Ars raises a good point, but the simple truth is that given the choice between having less content available or putting my system's security at risk, I'll choose the first option any day. I'm sorry--I really am, because I know that it is devastating to sites such as theirs, and I'd gladly whitelist their site but for the risk. I don't blame reputable sites like Ars, I blame a decade and a half of abuse by ad companies. But such is the state of affairs.
Plus, please keep in mind that a lot of sites I visit are new to me, and they're sites that I don't know whether or not they're reputable. Many of them engage in what I consider an "ad assault" on me, barraging me with all sorts of annoyances for content that is of little to no value. When I'm just puttering around the Internet without visiting one of my usual haunts, most of the content means so little to me that until I have a chance to evaluate whether or not it's worth it and whether or not they advertise in some sane, responsible manner, I feel fully justified in not letting them force feed such annoyances to me.
For what it's worth, he is right, I'm glad they brought the issue up in a tactful manner, and I'm going to subscribe to Ars since I do indeed find its content of high value. When sites I value provide such an alternate business model for paying for their existence, I do try to do my part to support them.
Dude, I'm glad I wasn't drinking anything when I read that. It is quite possibly the funniest thing I've ever read on Slashdot. Okay, second funniest. But definitely in the top two.
The Robots exclusion standard. Not that it will stop them; as others have pointed out, if they think they're "doing the right thing," I'm sure they will not be concerned about such a standard.
The worry here really isn't so much for the people who are hosting sites with infringing content. I'm sure a moral argument could be made that Attributor is well within the right to disregard the wishes of those who are breaking copyright law. However, I run several sites that have no infringing content whatsoever, sites with things that have content that, while not private, I don't particularly want spiders crawling. I'm not so naive to think that they don't do it anyway; I have server logs proving that they do. However, in this case, we have a company that is claiming to be legitimate completely ignoring my--someone who is not infringing--wishes and doing it.
Put another way, by convention, my neighbors don't use binoculars to peer into my house windows to see what I'm doing although there's currently not really anything stopping them from doing so. Even though I don't particularly have anything to hide, if I find that they are violating our polite social contract, then I'll put up shades just because it's none of their damn business.
I don't think that the robots.txt convention will be the thing that stops Attributor. I think that it will be that it won't take long for web site authors to figure out what user agents, IP address, etc. that Attributor is using and will block access from Attributor to their sites. Like I said, I have no infringing content on my sites, but if Attributor is going to ignore me politely asking their robots not to scan my sites, then I'm fully in the right to take further steps to forcibly prevent them from doing so.
"Wait now, we spent how much licensing/writing this scheme to restrict digital rights for people? And it was cracked when!!?"
My line of thought would be: How much profit would we make selling a game without Digital Rights Restrictions versus how much would we make selling a game with Digital Rights Restrictions? Well, let's see, there's the obvious direct cost of licensing/creating the system that we would save. Plus, it doesn't do any good anyway, because the so-called "pirates" are going to crack the system anyway and the vast majority of people who were going to buy the game before are still going to buy the game. Also, we don't risk the PR nightmare of the Digital Rights Restrictions having a bug that could negatively affect their gameplay. Oh, and we can actually use it as a marketing point in selling the game.
Not imposing Digital Rights Restrictions is win-win proposition for both the company and the consumer. The only people who lose out are the people who write Digital Rights Restrictions systems, and as a board member of a company that now has nothing to do with them, I couldn't care less.
The only thing that I'm surprised about is that companies remain so obstinately stupid in trying to implement Digital Rights Restrictions.
Anyone who has ever been involved in software development knows that even when it comes to relatively simple systems, all it takes is one minor SNAFU, one little bug, for the whole thing to be laid bare before skilled hackers. And it doesn't even have to be a problem with your code; it can be in anything from firmware to the operating system to libraries you've linked to to the compiler you used. Add to this the fact that Digital Rights Restriction systems are hardly anything but relatively simple; they typically encompass very complex encryption, heavy duty mathematics, picky dependencies on very specialized hardware and/or software and/or connectivity requirements, etc.
Also, how many people did it take to write your Digital Rights Restrictions system, and how smart were they? Let me tell you, it's not like there's just one guy holed up in a basement somewhere working on cracking the Digital Rights Restrictions of a popular game. There are thousands, maybe tens of thousands. And they all want that reputation boost (or sometimes even financial gain) of being The One Who Cracked [insert game title here]. Oh, and maybe your people are smart, but these people are frickin' brilliant.
Yet still, these companies are under the delusion that after decades of abject failure after abject failure by companies much bigger and more motivated than they are to stop software theft, they're going to be the ones that come up with the magic bullet, that special recipe that will keep their software locked. So sure of it, in fact, that they're continually willing to invest a lot of time, money, and effort into their futile pursuit. The reality of the situation is that all it takes is one. One hacker, one flaw, and every cent you poured into your Digital Rights Restrictions system is *poof!* gone.
I'd like them to hire me to create the Digital Rights Restrictions system they use for their next game. I'll charge them a few thousand dollars and put a text file on the root of the installation media that says, "It would really mean a lot to us if you would not copy this game illegally, so please don't. Thanks!" Now, I know you're probably thinking, "But Skippus, people would be able to copy the game from day one!" My contention is that I've saved them tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars and my Digital Rights Restrictions system lasted just one day less than the one they would have otherwise spent so much money on.
I find myself in similar situations every day, where I see a lot of inefficient and wasteful decisions and policies.
The thing is, you have to choose your battles. Ask yourself a brutally realistic question: Do you think you can make a difference? Is there any chance at all that you could change someone's mind about this?
The bad news is, probably not. And if you're not willing to work hard for it, you're really better off just sucking it up and going along with it, no matter how brainless the edicts are. Play it safe, keep your job, don't make waves.
The good news is, if you are willing to pitch this battle, if you are willing to work hard, putting together the necessary information and documentation in such a way to actually demonstrate to the powers-that-be that there is a Better Way, possibly even volunteering to take on a huge chunk of the work yourself, and do your damned best to ensure that your bosses look really good in the process, that you can not only get what you want, but you can look really good in a highly visible way in the process. That's how to get promoted into places where you're not just fighting these battles, but actually making the decisions.
Or you may get fired because someone can't handle you disagreeing with them, no matter how stupid they're being. That's the gamble, the risk versus reward. I can't tell you which path to take, because I don't know all of the politics of your particular situation, but I hope it all turns out well, no matter which road you go down.
As to goal... I tend to have a lot of software/game disc images, movies, and TV shows sitting around on my PC
Use your SSD for the stuff that needs lightning fast access: your OS and a small subset of your applications that you use frequently.
If you are keeping software/game disc images to mount and use, just copy the source for a few of the ones you use most often to your SSD and leave the rest on regular storage. If you are keeping them as an archive to burn another disk if your master gets screwed up, don't even think of putting it on an SSD. The price per GB is way to high to use it as a warehouse.
You really don't need to keep media on an SSD. Just how fast to you plan to watch that movie or television show, anyway? Traditional media WAY more than suffices to stash your terabytes of audio and/or video. You can put the media application (e.g. Windows Media Player, VLC, whatever) on your SSD so that it launches and responds quickly, but putting the media itself on your SSD is a colossal waste. (With one possible exception: if you are editing media files, it might be worth having a workspace on your SSD.)
My suggestion is to buy one SSD and install your OS and essential applications on it. The contents on this drive should remain relatively stable. Also install a pair of large traditional media drives in a redundant configuration (RAID 1) and store all of your data (including SSD backups!) on it. Whenever you upgrade your OS or install new software on the SSD, create an image of it using something like Acronis or PING. If you're paranoid, keep an extra SSD on-hand in case the one you installed fails, so that you can get back up and running quickly.
You get the best of all worlds. Speed, redundancy, and not spending as much as your car costs to have a terabyte of storage. A few hundred bucks should be plenty.
You sure earned that Insightful mod. I can honestly say that's the first time I've thought about that, and now that I have, it makes an incredible amount of sense. That sounds exactly like something the government would pull. They know that they can't just slap limitations on the Internet, there has to be a "the terrorists are coming" (or "think of the children," or both) aspect to it.
I can hear the speeches now. "Not passing this bill will amount to giving al Qaeda all of our passwords to our e-mail, banks, Social Security accounts... everything!"
Slashdot Mirror
I work in the IT group of a Fortune 100 company, and to be honest, I see little difference between using Gmail and other third-party companies. For example, we use Symantec as our mail filtering/virus scanning company. Every e-mail that comes to and goes from our company goes through servers located physically on their premises, and as far as we're concerned, it's a "black box" of a scanner--we don't know all the nitty-gritty details of what all they do when they're scanning our mail, we just know the end result. And it's a lot of mail--just the other day, our gateway crashed for a couple of hours, and they held over 14,000 e-mails for us while we worked on getting it back up.
Granted, I don't know what legal agreements we have in place with Symantec, but if you want to be paranoid, you could imagine all sorts of evil things they could be doing with all of that e-mail, and there are no telling what kind of sensitive information is being misclassified by the users and sent completely free and clear through their system.
At some point, though, unless you want to literally do everything in-house and never take advantage of the value-added services that third parties can provide, you have to suck it up and trust them not to screw you over. If nothing else, Google should know that all it would take is one major data loss or one gross breach of corporate privacy, and their Gmail service would pretty much be dead. Just as if we find out that Symantec has done something evil with our e-mail--even something that is legally allowed in the contracts--that their business would suffer a nasty hit.
At some point, the benefits of using a service like Gmail outweigh the risks that Google, a company with an excellent reputation, suddenly turns evil. As a CTO, your job isn't to sit around and dream up reasons why you'll never trust a third party; it is to assess those risks, reasonably compare them with the benefits, and decide whether it's worth it or not.
As a side note, I'm actually part of a large team of people who were recently outsourced by my former employer to a third-party IT services provider to handle all of the IT services for that former employer. So now, I'm on the direct opposite side of the coin that you're mentioning here. It's pretty well understood that if we do something to screw over my former employer--now our client--that it would not only cost us our careers, but likely cost all of our friends and coworkers their careers, too. We still have and require root access to almost every server and network device across the world. If you start dreaming up things that could happen in that situation without considering what you're getting in exchange for that risk, it seems on the surface a pretty stupid thing to do, but it's actually working really well.
And when you really think about it, just about anything you could dream up a third-party provider doing to you, I could dream up much, much worse your own internal people, with even less motivation, doing to you.
The Pirate Bay's contention was that they were not breaking the law, that hosting an index of torrents was legal, and that other people uploading trackers of infringing material were the ones who were breaking the law. Personally, I think they're right. Obviously, the courts disagreed.
Plus, please do not forget that there were plenty of people using The Pirate Bay perfectly legally. I obtained a few Linux distributions off of there. Also, some people--independent musicians and the like--uploaded stuff to which they own the rights, and that was legal, too. Last, but not least, laws vary from place to place. Maybe uploading a tracker for Steamboat Willie is illegal in the United States, but not in Namibia.
That's the trouble with going after sites like The Pirate Bay. Sure, most of the stuff on there was illegal. But where do you draw the line? Are you going to put the onus of determining what is and isn't legal on everyone who hosts anything?
Or put another way, just because someone can record something illegally on a VCR, does that mean that we have to outlaw VCRs? Hasn't that battle already been fought and won?
An honest, practical answer:
Because most people who develop software link to other libraries, and many of those libraries don't have overloaded functions that take unsigned ints as parameters.
For example, C#'s String.Substring function takes Int32s as parameters. So if you're using an UInt32 called x to hold some kind of index that you want to use in that function, you have to 1) check to see if x is less than zero (or better yet, less than UInt32.MinValue), and if so, throw an exception, then 2) cast x to an Int32, which takes a miniscule amount of time and resources.
It's much easier just to define x as an Int32, even if you never intend for it to be negative.
In the case of Bejewelled, I can only guess as to what dependencies might exist. Maybe the graphics routine to display the score on the screen is some kind of DisplayNumber(Int32 number,...) function that is generic enough so that they can write the function to display any number, positive or negative, and not have to build and maintain (and risk breaking when the code is updated) yet another function to do the same thing with uints because some weird bizarre edge cases exist where people use numbers > 2^31 but for whatever reason can't just use an Int64 instead.
I never recognized that convention. But then, I've been a computer sciency geek as long as I can remember, so I started counting at year zero. It's still 2009 to me.
Seriously, though, although you're technically right, practically speaking, I accept that most people think of 2010 as the first year of the '10s, just as most people thought of 2000 as the first year of the new millennium. Yeah, pedantically speaking they're wrong, but it doesn't really make a difference and people tend to hate "that guy" who feels the compulsive need to correct everyone.
If you're programming software that has to calculate time differentials across the BC/AD boundary, then by gummy, have at it. But otherwise, my advice is to not make an issue of it. Choose more worthwhile battles to fight, lest people not pay attention to you when you are arguing about something important because you make all skirmishes into full-scale battles.
It's all relative. Your average American pays $50 to $60 for cable service that doesn't allow them to watch back episodes, then tacks on hefty additional fees if you want something like a DVR that will allow you to watch shows independently of their normal timeslot.
Is it less than ideal? Yeah. But as long as Big Content is involved, "ideal" is a pipe dream, and Hulu is a hell of a lot better than what we've got now. I'll probably be signing up.
Sounds like in this case, that's not the body part that needs to be wrapped in tinfoil.
Um... Nowhere to be found?
This is beyond awesome, it's a game-changer. Google is one of those rare companies that singularly has the power to move markets, and it is revolutionary to see it do so in favor of consumers as it has. I understand the reasons why it has preferred H.264 over Theora, but it is really nice to see that it also understands the reasons why we should be preferring an open format instead. It's especially nice in an age of companies wanting to lock everything down and be the gatekeeper to everything, the major player in technology is pushing yet again to open things up.
Sometimes I think that Google is about the only company that "gets it." They understand that more people using the Internet translates to more money in their pocket. Even if those people are not using Google's services directly, they are increasing the market such that collectively, it has more opportunity, which in turn translates into more $$$. They seem to not really care if other people are making more money as well, which really separates them in my mind from other companies, who are of the "it is not enough that I succeed, but everyone else must fail" mentality.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand, one reason I've seen people regurgitate in why H.264 is the right way to go is because it is supported on hardware. Congratulations to Google on working to negate that argument.
I'm sorry, but I just plain don't see it that way. It is simply substituting one proprietary format with another. In fact, using the "technically better is better, period" argument of the poster above you, because Flash includes more features than simple video, we should be striving against having a video tag and just continue using Flash.
The GIF argument just isn't applicable. When everyone standardized on GIF, there really wasn't a viable alternative that worked nearly as well. There is a viable alternative to H.264. Also, keep in mind that when GIF became a de facto standard, the legal environment surrounding patents was much different. It was a time when there was question over whether a compression algorithm could even be patented, and the chance that anyone would actually sue over it was virtually nil. Now, the sue 'em all strategy is actually a lucrative business model.
Come to think of it, didn't we go through many of these same arguments around 10 years after GIF became the de facto standard? Wasn't the questionability of the patent-encumbering of it a primary driver behind the development of the free PNG format? Didn't it take around like two friggin' decades for PNG to be as widely supported because we didn't really know better in making GIF the de facto format?
Don't you agree it's pretty damned stupid to repeat that exact mistake yet again under the whole "fool me once, fool me twice" tenet?
Yup, I've seen it, too. I run a gaming web site that gets around 2 million page loads a month. A long time ago, I made a deliberate decision not to run ads. My rationale at the time was that I didn't mind paying the hosting cost because it's my hobby. Some people pay a lot on woodworking, some people pay a fortune on golf. My hobbyist indulgence is paying the monthly fee for a VPS to host the site.
A while back, when I needed more power for the site and the hosting costs went up, I made a deal to move the site (which was a MediaWiki-based wiki) to Wikia. They promised me that there would only be one ad on the site, that it would never be injected in the content, that it wouldn't be obtrusive, and other such things. After the site was moved, they proceeded to go back on these promises, and several more.
After less than a year, the other administrators and I decided to re-host the site ourselves, and ask for donations. Again, we don't run ads, and thanks to donations, I'm almost breaking even on the hosting costs.
Recently, someone pointed me back to Wikia's site. It is a tragedy. Aside from being woefully out of date, there were six or eight ads, including javascript and Flash ads that obscure parts of the screen and injected into the articles. Worst of all, some of the "malvertising" discussed in this article.
Here's what's kind of bad. Because Wikia uses SEO crappy games, their site still comes up on top of the search results in Google. (You should see the page titles, they're 10 or 15 words long.) I recently posted a message on the game's official forums warning people of the malevolent advertising, because I wanted to make sure people used the right URL for our wiki, and it was a good chance to reiterate how important it is to us to keep the site ad-free.
A week or so ago, one of the guys at Ars Technica ranted in an article about how people who use ad blocking are stealing content. It's the same argument I've seen higher profile people (Rubert Murdoch, I'm looking at you...) make the same claim. I said then, and I still maintain, that using ad blocking and Flash blocking is not just a matter of convenience, but a matter of maintaining the security of my system.
Fortunately, I like sites like Ars Technica, because they provide an alternate means of reading their content without "stealing" it, and I have a paid subscription to the site. However, as long as a site's only business model is advertising, I don't feel one iota of guilt in protecting my system. If they block content if ad blockers are being used, more power to them, I'll find another site to read.
But stories like this, stories I've actually felt first-hand, are why I support sites without advertising, I do what I can to opt out of advertising, and I don't force advertising on visitors to sites I run myself.
I am living in the first house I ever bought. When I bought it, I didn't realize what idiots HMAs are. If I ever buy another house, I am going to tell my realtor that I specifically want a house in a neighborhood in which there is no HMA, period.
About once every three or four months, I get nastygrams for stupid-ass made-up stuff. My shrubs are too high. (They aren't.) My mailbox pole is leaning. (It's not.) I need new pine straw around my house. (I don't.)
I came to the conclusion a long time ago that no matter how much I spend, no matter how well-kept my house is, I'm still going to get a nastygram for something. After all, the HMA management company must send these things out periodically to prove that they're worth being paid. So now, whenever I get a letter from them, I simply throw it away, sight unseen. I don't give a rat's ass what they have to say.
Every once in a blue moon, I actually consider running for president of our HMA. It's a job that no one really wants, and I'm pretty sure that if I made half an effort to convince my neighborhood that I want the job, I could get it. And then once I win, my first formal action would be to fire our HMA management company and tell everyone else that unless someone tries to do something like pave over their yard or put a jalopy up on blocks in the driveway, leave everyone the hell alone.
No, you're stupid because you think that this bill is going to take away your ability to make decisions regarding your own health care. Or a liar. Which do you prefer?
There, I highlighted the part you deliberately overlooked to create your strawman. It's not a matter of people dying in the street, it's a matter of people going bankrupt because they have a screwed up gene, they fall down, they get into an auto accident, the get pneumonia,...
You mean things like, "promote the general Welfare?" (Right there in the first sentence, in case you weren't paying attention.) Or maybe you're referring specifically to the enumerated power of Congress to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States?" Inconvenient it is, that zany Constitution, isn't it?
This idiot doesn't understand a simple metaphor and calls me a simpleton. That's golden. Anyway, it shows the amazing arrogance of these idiots, that they completely neglect the fact that the entire rest of the world somehow managed to do it, a combined economy that is emphatically much larger than ours. But then, most of the rest of the world isn't so boneheaded that, when they see a much better idea, they deliberately run away from it. There are exceptions, of course--witness Myanmar--but then it's sheer lunacy to sit here declaring, "Yeah, we want to be like them!"
It's because people here are stupid. They are so desperate to avoid any trappings of Socialism that they'd rather die because they can't get medical care than to let Big Evil Government help them out.
The truth is that we desperately need a single-payer system, just like every industrialized country in the world that realized a long time ago that health care is a basic infrastructure need for a productive, thriving population. But the American people are collectively so scared, stupid, and easily swayed, even by outright lies ("Death panels! Federally funded abortion! Rampant costs! Elderly care cuts!") posted on bumper stickers, they they would literally show up with torches and pitchforks in Washington if Congress actually did what is right.
The funny thing to me is that these stupid people who are so quick to bash Socialism are usually fanboys of one of the most huge, expensive Socialist organizations in the entire world: the U.S. military. Now, I'm not bashing the military, I have a lot of respect for it, Socialist as it is and everything. But it's just kind of funny how when George Bush sunk trillions of dollars into it, you didn't see these idiots showing up in Washington with caricatures of him as Hitler.
Maybe I'll post more later. I really could write a book about this, but I've got to go to work.
But consider this. The U.S. is the only country, other than Myanmar, that still has not converted to the metric system. If this country is so stubborn and stupid as to not do things the right way just to spite those damn commies in Europe (and not have to buy a new set of wrenches), seriously, what hope do we ever have of really moving to a single-payer health care system?
Because then Apple would have sued them, probably under the theory that the EULA is a copyrighted document, and the EFF infringed said copyright by publishing it against the terms under which it was disclosed to them.
This way, everything is legal and above-board, and the EFF is free and clear of liability. If Apple goes after anyone, it will have to be NASA. And if they choose to do so, for one thing, most judges would simply throw the case out, as there is no legal obligation for the government to allow itself to be sued, and for another, even if the case were allowed, the U.S. government is likely much better prepared in terms of deep pockets to defend itself against Apple's corporate lawyers than the EFF is.
Let's not kid ourselves. Apple isn't trying to pull people away from Flash because they're big-hearted. They're pulling people away from Flash because they want to be the gateway to Internet content, via the sweet deal with MPEG LA (who owns the H.264 patent) that will keep other players--especially open source software--out of the market.
If Apple really had our best interests at heart, they would be either 1) pushing Ogg Theora as a baseline video standard, or 2) working to release H.264 into the public domain so that everyone can use the arguably "better" codec.
In fact, speaking of an unencumbered codec, have you noticed that Safari, by deliberate choice, does not support Ogg Theora? I mean, I can understand them implementing H.264, if they think it's a better codec. Google does too, and they've said on record that they think that H.264 is superior. Nevertheless, Chrome does also support Ogg Theora. Opera supports Ogg Theora. Firefox, of course supports Ogg Theora, and due to its open source nature, can't support H.264 unless it's released to the public domain. Microsoft is blissfully quiet on the matter and doesn't support either yet. But Safari? The odd man out, the only browser that could support both and has chosen not to.
So yeah, no thanks, Apple. At least, not yet.
I'm really sorry in advance, because I try really, really hard not to be a pedantic ass, but after reading what you had to say and agreeing with most of it and thinking that it's a relevant point, I just have to get this off my chest and out into the open:
For god's sake, man, it's ad, not "add." It stands for advertisement, with just one d. "Add" is what people do to numbers to produce a sum. "Ad" is what people do to some to produce numbers.
I posted this there, and I'll post it here, too.
I consider it irresponsible not to browse the web with a really good ad/Flash/javascript blocker. Not just because of the annoyance factor, but because it is a significant vector of malicious code attacks. This isn't just hypothetical; in the recent past, sites such as Wikia and a gaming site I visit injected malicious code and infected users' machines. The site hosts were completely unaware of it; the code was being injected through a third-party ad provider. Fortunately, I found out about this through someone else when they brought it to my attention, because the code never made it to my browser.
Ars raises a good point, but the simple truth is that given the choice between having less content available or putting my system's security at risk, I'll choose the first option any day. I'm sorry--I really am, because I know that it is devastating to sites such as theirs, and I'd gladly whitelist their site but for the risk. I don't blame reputable sites like Ars, I blame a decade and a half of abuse by ad companies. But such is the state of affairs.
Plus, please keep in mind that a lot of sites I visit are new to me, and they're sites that I don't know whether or not they're reputable. Many of them engage in what I consider an "ad assault" on me, barraging me with all sorts of annoyances for content that is of little to no value. When I'm just puttering around the Internet without visiting one of my usual haunts, most of the content means so little to me that until I have a chance to evaluate whether or not it's worth it and whether or not they advertise in some sane, responsible manner, I feel fully justified in not letting them force feed such annoyances to me.
For what it's worth, he is right, I'm glad they brought the issue up in a tactful manner, and I'm going to subscribe to Ars since I do indeed find its content of high value. When sites I value provide such an alternate business model for paying for their existence, I do try to do my part to support them.
Dude, I'm glad I wasn't drinking anything when I read that. It is quite possibly the funniest thing I've ever read on Slashdot. Okay, second funniest. But definitely in the top two.
The Robots exclusion standard. Not that it will stop them; as others have pointed out, if they think they're "doing the right thing," I'm sure they will not be concerned about such a standard.
The worry here really isn't so much for the people who are hosting sites with infringing content. I'm sure a moral argument could be made that Attributor is well within the right to disregard the wishes of those who are breaking copyright law. However, I run several sites that have no infringing content whatsoever, sites with things that have content that, while not private, I don't particularly want spiders crawling. I'm not so naive to think that they don't do it anyway; I have server logs proving that they do. However, in this case, we have a company that is claiming to be legitimate completely ignoring my--someone who is not infringing--wishes and doing it.
Put another way, by convention, my neighbors don't use binoculars to peer into my house windows to see what I'm doing although there's currently not really anything stopping them from doing so. Even though I don't particularly have anything to hide, if I find that they are violating our polite social contract, then I'll put up shades just because it's none of their damn business.
I don't think that the robots.txt convention will be the thing that stops Attributor. I think that it will be that it won't take long for web site authors to figure out what user agents, IP address, etc. that Attributor is using and will block access from Attributor to their sites. Like I said, I have no infringing content on my sites, but if Attributor is going to ignore me politely asking their robots not to scan my sites, then I'm fully in the right to take further steps to forcibly prevent them from doing so.
I am thinking exactly like a board member.
"Wait now, we spent how much licensing/writing this scheme to restrict digital rights for people? And it was cracked when!!?"
My line of thought would be: How much profit would we make selling a game without Digital Rights Restrictions versus how much would we make selling a game with Digital Rights Restrictions? Well, let's see, there's the obvious direct cost of licensing/creating the system that we would save. Plus, it doesn't do any good anyway, because the so-called "pirates" are going to crack the system anyway and the vast majority of people who were going to buy the game before are still going to buy the game. Also, we don't risk the PR nightmare of the Digital Rights Restrictions having a bug that could negatively affect their gameplay. Oh, and we can actually use it as a marketing point in selling the game.
Not imposing Digital Rights Restrictions is win-win proposition for both the company and the consumer. The only people who lose out are the people who write Digital Rights Restrictions systems, and as a board member of a company that now has nothing to do with them, I couldn't care less.
The only thing that I'm surprised about is that companies remain so obstinately stupid in trying to implement Digital Rights Restrictions.
Anyone who has ever been involved in software development knows that even when it comes to relatively simple systems, all it takes is one minor SNAFU, one little bug, for the whole thing to be laid bare before skilled hackers. And it doesn't even have to be a problem with your code; it can be in anything from firmware to the operating system to libraries you've linked to to the compiler you used. Add to this the fact that Digital Rights Restriction systems are hardly anything but relatively simple; they typically encompass very complex encryption, heavy duty mathematics, picky dependencies on very specialized hardware and/or software and/or connectivity requirements, etc.
Also, how many people did it take to write your Digital Rights Restrictions system, and how smart were they? Let me tell you, it's not like there's just one guy holed up in a basement somewhere working on cracking the Digital Rights Restrictions of a popular game. There are thousands, maybe tens of thousands. And they all want that reputation boost (or sometimes even financial gain) of being The One Who Cracked [insert game title here]. Oh, and maybe your people are smart, but these people are frickin' brilliant.
Yet still, these companies are under the delusion that after decades of abject failure after abject failure by companies much bigger and more motivated than they are to stop software theft, they're going to be the ones that come up with the magic bullet, that special recipe that will keep their software locked. So sure of it, in fact, that they're continually willing to invest a lot of time, money, and effort into their futile pursuit. The reality of the situation is that all it takes is one. One hacker, one flaw, and every cent you poured into your Digital Rights Restrictions system is *poof!* gone.
I'd like them to hire me to create the Digital Rights Restrictions system they use for their next game. I'll charge them a few thousand dollars and put a text file on the root of the installation media that says, "It would really mean a lot to us if you would not copy this game illegally, so please don't. Thanks!" Now, I know you're probably thinking, "But Skippus, people would be able to copy the game from day one!" My contention is that I've saved them tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars and my Digital Rights Restrictions system lasted just one day less than the one they would have otherwise spent so much money on.
I find myself in similar situations every day, where I see a lot of inefficient and wasteful decisions and policies.
The thing is, you have to choose your battles. Ask yourself a brutally realistic question: Do you think you can make a difference? Is there any chance at all that you could change someone's mind about this?
The bad news is, probably not. And if you're not willing to work hard for it, you're really better off just sucking it up and going along with it, no matter how brainless the edicts are. Play it safe, keep your job, don't make waves.
The good news is, if you are willing to pitch this battle, if you are willing to work hard, putting together the necessary information and documentation in such a way to actually demonstrate to the powers-that-be that there is a Better Way, possibly even volunteering to take on a huge chunk of the work yourself, and do your damned best to ensure that your bosses look really good in the process, that you can not only get what you want, but you can look really good in a highly visible way in the process. That's how to get promoted into places where you're not just fighting these battles, but actually making the decisions.
Or you may get fired because someone can't handle you disagreeing with them, no matter how stupid they're being. That's the gamble, the risk versus reward. I can't tell you which path to take, because I don't know all of the politics of your particular situation, but I hope it all turns out well, no matter which road you go down.
Use your SSD for the stuff that needs lightning fast access: your OS and a small subset of your applications that you use frequently.
If you are keeping software/game disc images to mount and use, just copy the source for a few of the ones you use most often to your SSD and leave the rest on regular storage. If you are keeping them as an archive to burn another disk if your master gets screwed up, don't even think of putting it on an SSD. The price per GB is way to high to use it as a warehouse.
You really don't need to keep media on an SSD. Just how fast to you plan to watch that movie or television show, anyway? Traditional media WAY more than suffices to stash your terabytes of audio and/or video. You can put the media application (e.g. Windows Media Player, VLC, whatever) on your SSD so that it launches and responds quickly, but putting the media itself on your SSD is a colossal waste. (With one possible exception: if you are editing media files, it might be worth having a workspace on your SSD.)
My suggestion is to buy one SSD and install your OS and essential applications on it. The contents on this drive should remain relatively stable. Also install a pair of large traditional media drives in a redundant configuration (RAID 1) and store all of your data (including SSD backups!) on it. Whenever you upgrade your OS or install new software on the SSD, create an image of it using something like Acronis or PING. If you're paranoid, keep an extra SSD on-hand in case the one you installed fails, so that you can get back up and running quickly.
You get the best of all worlds. Speed, redundancy, and not spending as much as your car costs to have a terabyte of storage. A few hundred bucks should be plenty.
It sure pays a lot more than "hell, no" does.
You sure earned that Insightful mod. I can honestly say that's the first time I've thought about that, and now that I have, it makes an incredible amount of sense. That sounds exactly like something the government would pull. They know that they can't just slap limitations on the Internet, there has to be a "the terrorists are coming" (or "think of the children," or both) aspect to it.
I can hear the speeches now. "Not passing this bill will amount to giving al Qaeda all of our passwords to our e-mail, banks, Social Security accounts... everything!"