For example: before you deployed your wiki (assuming, for the sake of argument, that it was the first thing deployed) what was the risk to your organisation of an apache vulnerability being discovered (assuming that it is not used by your IT department as you implied)? The answer is none, now the risk is that the sensitive information may be disclosed.
First, the risk from putting up that wiki was negligible, not because Apache is perfect, but because the odds that someone will bypass our VPN, and have an apache exploit at the same time are probably less than the odds of someone finding one of our laptops forgotten in a cafe, which would have all the data as the alternative. I think your problem is you are not considering overall risks, only one particular risk. What is more detrimental someone outside the company getting sensitive information or engineers inside the company not having the information they need to do their jobs and the company going under? Putting up data or not putting it up is not a one sided equation where only putting it up is a risk.
You may even be managing the risk by patching it quickly and segmenting the network, but the risk is not eliminated.
Again, you have to look at the alternatives. Is putting our info on an apache server hosted behind a VPN more or less secure than hosting that same data on a publicly accessible portal, reachable only via IE?
Either intuitively or through formal assessment the IT department has a view that the risk profile is based around their infrastructure, while you and your department are deploying technology outside of that. How are the owner's, investors and customers supposed get comfort that as an organisation risks are being managed appropriately?
Is it our job to reassure investors/executives that their incorrect hiring and purchasing decisions were the right ones, or is it our job to get our work done as securely as possible? You can coat it with as much "assurance" or "paradigms" or other marketing speak that you want, but the end result is greater overall security by bypassing incompetent IT and that has happened one too many times for it to be an uncommon state of affairs in modern IT. Working for a company that sells security products I could (aside from my NDA) tell you unbelievable horror stories about what "IT security professionals" have done is some of the largest and most well respected enterprise businesses. Yeah lets open up telnet with no IP access rules on this publicly accessible machine that has direct access to all our core routers (no I don't mean core of their network, I mean core of the national backbone). If investors want to be reassured, they should hire competent people, otherwise they are simply being given false assurances and that isn't good for anyone.
You sound like you have an IT department that is run by the muppets (wrong 1)
From what I've seen, this is about 85% of IT departments, who think Windows is all there is and wouldn't know real security if it bit them.
Your team then go and implement IT solutions that are outside of your mandate and that do not follow corporate standards or processes (wrong 2)
It's not so much that we go outside our mandate, we just keep using resources that were set up before we had an IT department because they work, unlike the servers set up by IT. We go through normal channels to purchase new servers and the like, the problem (or benefit) is when they need fixing we don't call IT, we see who is on IRC that happens to have an admin account on that server (usually whoever set it up and one or two other people).
Have you and your guys introduced more risk to the business because of your actions?
I'm not sure this is true. Does keeping a lot of engineering data only on our internal, well protected apache hosted wiki reachable only via a VPN tunnel mean the company has more or less risk than if we all used IE to connect to some god-awful active X filled publicly reachable Web portal?
Possibly, however I doubt you can substantiate that without being part of a corporate risk assessment, which you cann't do when flying below the radar.
I'm not sure much flies "beneath the radar." We sell really expensive network intrusion detection and prevention applications and we run them internally and everyone has an account. The last time a virus got into our network everyone got an e-mail notification it had been detected and isolated and we made fun of the sales engineer for a week. The last time I had a poorly configured e-mail account that was trying both encrypted and plaintext communication with a server, I got an e-mail about it within hours of my client "upgrade."
Still if I was CIO / CSO I would fire your asses!:-)
Firing the guys that make all the money would be pretty interesting, but it would not be the first time I was at a company where all the people that made our products were let go, while management stayed on for a while. The real point I was trying to make is a lot of IT people are "muppets" in your terminology while a lot of engineers are not. If IT is in conflict with users, that does not necessarily mean IT is doing the right thing and often it means they are doing the wrong thing and need to be fixed/fired/replaced/castigated/or something.
Why is it that people feel they have a right to do the work of or intefere with the work of their IT departments? It is my responsibility, not yours to run IT. I don't go around other peoples desks mucking about with their jobs because I know a bit about finance, or sales or whatever.
As a company or organization, most groups have a goal. Theoretically it is the job of IT to facilitate that goal. Far too often, IT decides their job is to interfere with people getting their work done, or to make themselves gatekeepers so they can have more power within the company, at the expense of slowing down real work. Hopefully as an IT person you do go talk to finance when you need approval for purchases to determine budget and what is the best risk/reward for those purchases. Hopefully you do consult legal about policies. If people are coming to you in IT and telling you how to do your job it is probably because you are failing to facilitate them doing their jobs.
I see a few examples of people proudly demonstrating how they have circumvented what they perceive as some form of restrictive IT policy - it my opinion you should be sacked.
In my opinion if people are able to, or motivated to bypass restrictive security, maybe both they and IT should be sacked. At the very least someone should look into the policies and see if it is costing the company money because IT went overboard.
A company bans wireless for legitimate reasons, smart arse users install a "secret" AP, company gets owned.
What is a legitimate reason to ban wireless in most environments? We installed wireless everywhere years ago, an official and well secured wireless network, so users had functionality and security. If users are so in need of wireless that they pay for gear out of pocket and it is a common problem, maybe your assessment of whether or not it should be banned was a steaming pile.
Many complaints about IT are of course completely legitimate as are complaints about any other area of business. If there is a problem with your IT groups or you need some tool or change to IT operating practices then use the right channels.
If you have to go through official channels to get things done, the chances are the network infrastructure is too brittle and is resulting in greatly slowing down the operation of regular business. Incompetent IT has been the bane of my existence for years. I once got an e-mail that read, "everyone please stop using and mail clients except exchange, any web browser other than IE, and stop using any freeware that has not been explicitly approved by IT, effective immediately. " Gee, brilliant, especially in a UNIX development shop with no Windows machines or copies of said software and where every tool we used was un-approved freeware. IT is, for the most part, a roadblock in the way of getting things done and mandates less secure methods more often than more secure ones. Maybe in some toy company they are the bastion of security, but if they are the same quality of IT as I've seen, then those companies are barely ahead of the game. In technical industries, they seem to be a weak link that is always slowing things down, getting in the way of work, or implementing another useless or counter productive "security" measure.
The simple fact is most users think they know what they are doing, but the lack the skills to adequately assess the risks of their actions. That is why they need to have rules around acceptable use and security policies to protect them from their own idiocy.
Where I work is probably not representative of the industry as a whole, but IT and their policies result in less security and functionality than letting the users run amok. We started out as an engineering organization, a start up. Think a couple of network engineering experts and a few security guys. Add in a hundred more coders and 100 more business people (selling security tools). The engineering half of the organization goes out of our way to bypass IT as much as possible because they were hired by business majors with no clue. They implement things like an exchange server, Windows desktops, and an intranet Web portal that cost a fortune but only works in IE (engineering desktops run OS X, Linux, or a BSD). We actually (with no official IT on our side) maintain our own mail and IM and Web and fileservers.
Now if this were an isolated case I might be willing to say, yeah that never happens, but this is about the 3rd place I've worked where IT was a bunch of clueless people that knew how to set up Windows servers and basically nothing else. Within the security industry, IT is often the weakest link.
Note, some IT people are versatile and brilliant hackers that can put together a secure server from spare parts and OSS and fix my weird networking issues. Hail to them! Would that they were the norm in my experience.
I would be 7 kinds of mad if anyone was using gmail and IM in my office... But even if you aren't a company with such a strong need for data protection... well actually there is no such thing.
Welcome to this decade. IM has been a vital sales tool for many years now in some industries. That means non-encrypted communication with the outside world using AIM or something. It is no more dangerous that unencrypted e-mail which is, sadly, still a requirement for doing business with most of the world.
Anyone placing data that hasn't been cleared for release (even by the very informal process of being sent out on purpose) onto services run by people with whom you have no contract and no reasonable expectation of integrity is, frankly, no better than the idiots who don't back up their data and are then surprised to find out that MTBF is not a guarantee.
Employees need to be mindful of what they send out via any unencrypted channel and what they log internally encrypted or not. Removing access to communication tools, however, often means losing sales and that means the company and everyone in it suffering. No thanks.
I know it's been said before, but think what that would do for Apple's market share! Through the roof!
Their market share of the home computer market would be through the floor, just like the last time they licensed their OS to third parties. Their market share of desktop OS's would go up a little, but then MS would re-negotiate their Windows OEM license and Dell would have to choose between being priced out of their primary business and betting the farm on OS X, or dropping OS X. At that point do they choose to be completely at the mercy of MS (as they are now) or completely at the mercy of Apple (who is also competing with them in the hardware market and who has already killed off one such licensing scheme and several hardware companies along with it)? Assuming, for the moment they go with Apple and Apple does not shut them down to save their hardware sales (almost 50% of Apple's revenue) Apple is suddenly making almost 50% less money and shareholders are likely to fire whoever is in charge. Assuming, again, that they don't, where is Apple going to cut the budget in order to become profitable again? Will OS X development be greatly slowed?
All of the above makes Apple doing what you propose unfeasible. It is a huge risk for what? In the best case scenario they become one of many players in a non-monopolized market after spending huge amounts of money in order to break the monopoly on that market. It is a lousy investment and they'd be better off (financially speaking) putting their money into a normal market. This is what a lot of people don't understand about monopoly abuse. It doesn't have to make some market impossible to enter. It just has to make it more expensive than other markets so that no investor in their right mind would think the investment/risk/reward scenario made sense. Apple will unbundle their OS and hardware right after MS's monopoly is broken resulting in a normal, competitive market where they have to unbundle these two items in order to compete. Doing it before then would be an absurdly risky venture and a stupid investment of resources, possibly to the point of being legally actionable negligence from the shareholders.
You are claiming to know what is going on in their head and making a generalization that they take choices away from other people. Maybe that's not a straw man, but it sure is a poor argument. You invented an outcome based on your bias of said people and no facts.
No, this is called an example. I actually know two people who do have "pro-choice" bumper stickers, but argued with me personally in favor of passing a state law to ban hunting a particular, non-endangered animal because they said it was "the democratic process" for the majority to tell the minority what is ethical to do.
You are missing a key point. There are natural limits to freedom just like there are natural limits to population, or a limit to how much water you can put in a glass.
This is bullcrap. There are no natural limits to freedom. There are simply judgments as to when what is more important when one person's freedoms conflict with another person's. And that is not even what we're talking about here. We're talking about people's perception of taking away the rights of others that do not conflict with another person's rights, based upon their belief that taking away freedom by using laws to impose "correct" behavior is ethical. That is a belief that does not value freedom.
You told me to move somewhere else if I don't like your right to stay up all night with loud music. So you are taking away my rights. So I don't have the right to be left alone according to you.
The "right to be left alone?" That is very imprecise. You have the right to act as you like just as I do. Assuming we both own property, I have the right to play music on mine, while you have the right to put up sound barriers on yours. There is a potential argument about my influencing air molecules on your property, but this is getting to be a pretty blurry case. It is also way, way off topic. The original topic was that people do not value the underlying freedom as much as other aspect, like the right to be "left alone" whatever that is. People value the ability to buy guns or the ability to stop other people from getting guns more than they value the freedom of individuals to choose for themselves if they will buy guns.
You always take away someone else's freedom in your pursuit to be free.
Two homosexual men have intercourse in their own home and no one but them ever knows about it. How, exactly, does their freedom to do this take away anyone else's freedom in any way? Do explain. And yet, many of the people arguing laws about this very topic value their ability to stop these people from doing this, more than the freedom of each individual to choose for themselves what they will do.
My gun example was perfect and you avoided it because it pokes a hole in your argument. Why don't I have the right to shoot you if you keep me up?
Every human rights organization I've ever heard of recognizes the right to live as a precursor to all other rights. By shooting me your right to fire a gun strongly conflicts with my right to do every other thing, making this a pathetically weak example.
Do you not see how those two are the same, albeit extreme examples?
When rights conflict, the law is supposed to mediate that conflict. It is arguable that playing a stereo might possibly be infringing on some right of your which you have not been able to name in a meaningful way. Shooting a person conflicts with their rights in a very well defined an drastic way. Understand?
You are grossly idealizing freedom without realizing the practical obstacles to it.
I'm not idealizing freedom. I'm simply stating that it used to be a very important value for Americans and now it is much less so, as you have demonstrated by arguing against it so vocally. You are a great illustration of my point. It is clear you've never thought through "freedom" as a value or as it applies to current legislature and your arguments in favor of or in opposition to those bits of legislati
It isn't pressure from Microsoft, it's the fact that they make so much money from the extra crap they install on Windows before they ship. They can't exactly install the 30-day trial of McAffee antivirus on Ubuntu now, can they?
That is certainly one reason, but i they can sell a machine minus the cost of a Windows OEM license, that sort of balances out. Another thing to consider is, increasing Linux market share in the home market means virgin soil for Linux crapware, with Dell positioned to create their own options and take a greater chunk of those profits. All of this is sort of academic. Even if Dell can ship Linux machines and make twice as much in crapware and don't have to eat the cost of a Windows license, Microsoft will kill them with discriminatory pricing so it is not a viable business venture for an established player.
Linux will come to the home market in one of several ways. Either the third world will adopt in en masse, making the US a technological backwater until we catch up or Businesses will adopt it for security, customizability, and manageability and it will then trickle into the home market. Alternately, it could enter the home market directly if pushed by market domination from a different market. Walmart might be able to swing it if they were determined. I can tell you it won't be Dell though; the guy with the pistol jammed in his mouth is unlikely to rescue you from the mugger.
I'm not seeing your point. Incompatible hardware is only a problem if you have an existing computer, and you want to run a different OS on it. If you're building the machine, as Dell is, it doesn't make any sense to purposely choose hardware that's incompatible with the OS most people (buying these machines) want to use.
Dell's supply chain is something I don't think you've taken into account. You're thinking of a supply chain like Lenovo, where they spec out a machine, pick component suppliers for a revision, test it and ship. In that case, you certainly can test to make sure the components are Linux compatible, and it probably is not even very hard. Dell, however, does not pick component suppliers when they spec out a revision. They just buy lots of whatever is cheapest and throw them in. If you've ever ordered a lot of 100 machines from then and looked inside, they don't all have the same components inside. They will almost certainly have different hard drives and may well have different video cards, sound cards, ethernet cards, etc. We were bitten by this years ago when building a testlab running Linux and NetBSD. First, it was cheaper to buy hundreds of Windows licenses and discard them then to buy blank machines. Next, although the machines we purchased were theoretically all the same model, only about 2/3 of them had a video card that supported NetBSD.
I do think Dell would incur real costs to make sure their machines all ran Linux unless they simply issued a blanket notice to all bidders that everything had to run Linux or it was going to be dismissed immediately. They have the pull to do it, but given that they exist only at MS's sufferance, I doubt it will ever happen.
Um, no. That patently false - most TiVo owners are actually end users buying them despite the cable systems' pushing other, crappy DVRs.
Read what I wrote. Just because most Tivo are used by individual buyers does not mean individual buyers are their biggest customers. Any given retail store or even store chain sells fewer units than Comcast alone, or Cablevision. As a result, Tivo seems willing to make compromises for those buyers.
Parent needs to be heavily modded as "Troll."
Yeah, because making 30 second skip so hard to access and adding DRM so some shows can't be saved for too long, and making it so hard to export to normal, non-drmed formats or burning DVDs is definitely in the best interests of their individual customers. And don't give me any crap about how they were forced to by some law. There are other systems for sale that provide all those functions and have no legal problems. It is sad that people like you are so desperate to defend a bad purchase decision that they are unwilling to look at actual facts, but instead must grasp at some sort of faith that Tivo was and always will be acting in their best interests.
TV is a passive experience. People (like me) want to flip channels until I settle on something interesting. I do not have a list of shows I want to watch, and I don't want the experience you describe.
The same could have been said about music playlists versus the radio a few years back, but a I know an awful lot of people who don't listen to the radio anymore and who just start up an mp3 playlist when they want music. I do think there will be a place for TV "channels" much as there is a place for streaming radio broadcasts over IP, but I think, in general, people will move more towards playlists of TV shows. My Netflix cue right now is full of movies and TV shows and I just play whichever one I have or am in the mood for. Given the chance to pick from the list, I think I'd be happier yet. For people like you, there will always be "channels" of video with a theme.
Besides, an ad supported model like this wouldn't fly. The advertising, on a global or even national scale, is too hard to sell.
Why can't they customize the ads as part of the p2p network, adding them in on your client and based upon your recent Google searches? Heck, they might even be ads for things you actually want, instead of random feminine hygiene products and pharmaceuticals of uncertain purpose.
Conventional passive "push" tv is here to stay.
In the US, this will probably be true for quite a while, simply because the established players have too much influence on the government and ability to lock people in via cartels and monopolies. Elsewhere the winds are already changing.
They can have my TiVo when they pry it from my cold dead hands.
A few years back I was looking at a device to record TV and basically function as a Tivo. I looked at MythTV, Tivo, Windows Media Edition, and a couple of others. When I looked into Tivo, I was pretty disappointed. They want you to pay a monthly subscription or a big chunk of change up front, with no guarantee the service will be any good in future. You have to jump through hoops to enable the skip ahead/back and the times are not easily configurable? There is no easy way to easily export the video to my laptop for viewing on the plane, and burning DVDs and VCDs is a pain. The interface was okay, but it seemed like some of the these features were no-brainers. What was going on? A little research showed Tivo's biggest customers are cable providers who ship them as cable boxes. Suddenly it made sense. They were not making features customers wanted easy, because it was not something their big partners wanted. That's a smart business move, but sure does not make me want one.
For the same reason I'm somewhat skeptical that Apple will ever ship a good PVR. They are also partners with some of the same content providers. I ended up going with an Elgato EyeTV unit. I had an old mac sitting around as a Web and media server already, so adding the functionality was cheap by comparison. It lets me skip commercials nicely without any easter eggs and burning a DVD of a show I want to archive is as easy as selecting the export menu item and dropping a blank DVD in. If I want to save some shows as mpegs for my next plane ride, it is easy as cake. I can pick from a variety of scheduling services, including free ones so there is no monthly fee.
I understand people who really liked Tivo back in the day, but isn't it clear by now that they sold out and are no longer doing what is best for users, in favor of doing what is most profitable for cable companies? Brand loyalty i something I'll never really get I suppose.
indexed searching, so you can search for terms within some file types, relatively quickly and globally
an attempt at proper admin and user account separation to try and gain some of the security benefits
quick access mini-apps
more included applications like a DVD burning app, picture viewer/organizer, backup utility, chat/video client, etc.
parental controls
speech recognition
better encryption integration/ease of use
A lot of these features have been on other OS's for quite a while, but they are welcome additions to Windows for people who are used to them on other platforms, but need to use Windows occasionally. In a year or so once it is stabilized and third parties have things together, it will probably be an improvement on XP
I agree, but there is a complication. hugh speed Internet access in the US is a pile of dog crap. The only reasonable choice I have is to go with my local cable provider (half the price of DSL). Cable internet+basic TV service is $10 cheaper than just cable internet access; so I'm forced to buy programming to get internet. Downloadable television may cut out the middle man, but for many people like myself, only after they've already been paid once.
Here's how I see the market changing. Right now the US is the center of content creation. Slowly, other countries with affordable, non-monopolized internet access will get more and more TV and movies over IP and more of it will be locally and tailored to them. Eventually, a significant amount of content will only be available this way and US citizens will be paying for that content separately, or it will be licensed to TV channels who will rerun it. A lot of that content will be free or ad supported so some people will not wait and will view it via a Web interface. After a decade of this, the US will finally catch up enough in the network space via wireless or something, by which time we'll be way behind the curve on both content creation and the technological delivery mechanisms, effectively ceding our dominance in both those spaces and putting the momentum behind foreign companies. Once again US laws written by greedy corporations will have squashed innovation here and resulted in the US losing another huge market and slipping a little further away from being the biggest economic powerhouse as China, India, and the EU take over.
How is this better than the following workflow...* Watch on your TV (via any network-attached device or stand-alone DVD player that supports lots of codecs and can be controlled with a remote)
Currently most people don't have an easy way to perform this step. Most people do not have their computer connected to their TV. Geeks like us do, normal people don't. Most people don't want to burn a DVD or VCD every time they want to watch something. Apple's device is a way to connect the computer to the TV, without burning DVDs or any other nonsense.
...see them get their exisiting line of notebooks to work without problems or failures before they add more to the market.
Currently the reliability of their hardware, including notebooks, is among the best in the industry as evaluated by consumer reports.
I am sad to say, especially with the Mac Book Pros, it seems like they've taken a few steps back with regards to reliability.
Whenever any manufacturer releases a new hardware line they take a few steps back with regard to reliability. Invariably there are some problems with the hardware that don't show up until it is in real world use for a while, and they fix those in later revisions. This is why most purchasing guides always recommend you wait 6 months or so for the rev B of some new machine.
[your anecdotal evidence here]
The number of people in line or what happened with your machine and your mom's machine is not a useful sample set and is pretty much meaningless. We've kept track of hardware failures here (Apple and Lenovo notebooks) for the past few years and Apple is just a bit ahead, which is not unexpected since both are regularly independently reviewed as among the best in the industry. That is a few hundred machines and is still pretty small for a valid sample.
Expand the line, but fix the problems first- not after their in the wild.
In most cases there is not a lot you can do to fix hardware you already shipped. You revise the next manufacturing run with small tweaks. Every company does this. Maybe you stay with Apple because if you try another vendor, better results would simply be a statistical anomaly.
Any way that the open source community could embrace and extend Open XML?
It is doubtful that anyone other than MS will ever be able to even implement OpenXML completely (since it would require reverse engineering old versions of Word, something that has never been 100%) and some of the functions within it are patented while MS provides only limited patent protection. OpenXML is not an open standard as such, but a way for MS to trick enough people into thinking their new.doc format meets the same requirements OpenDocument does. See they both have "Open" in the name? See?
Call me crazy but having two different standards doesn't really capture the idea of having Standards at all. I thought the point of standards was to make it so we (the developers) only have to implement one thing.
I disagree. I don't think there is any problem with having multiple OPEN standards because it is easy to translate between them and it allows competition among them for the best feature set and easiest to use, etc. The fundamental objection is what MS has come up with that they claim is an open standard. We've seen this same crap from them many times. Customers demand feature/behavior X because they want certain benefits it brings to them that do not benefit the software developer. Eventually, to keep customers from moving to something else to get those benefits, MS releases their own version of feature/behavior Y that has some of the same characteristics of feature/behavior X and which someone who does not understand the benefits or how those benefits come about might mistake for the same thing. At the same time this feature/behavior Y undermines and removes as many of the benefits that are not in MS's best interests as possible, then spends millions on marketing to try to tell people they are the same thing or that feature/behavior Y is better. Half the people that were demanding feature/benefit X have enough people in their organization confused that the move to feature/benfit X does not take place. MS does not want to give customers features, they want to give them bullet points.
In this particular example, why do people want an open standard document format? Why are customers and governments demanding it in the first place? What are the benefits? Well, first it means you can't be locked in by a vendor and multiple companies can all easily create tools, with different specialties that can interoperate and compete. This means lower prices and more innovation. Since it is a standard, you no longer have to worry that different versions of the software will be unable to read one another's documents.
Okay, lets look at MS's "Open"XML. The standard is very large, which makes it harder to implement exhaustively, meaning different version of software may well have incompatibilities. More importantly, the spec does not define all the behavior of all the things contained within it, instead referencing outside, closed software behaviors that have to be reverse engineered and which can never be done perfectly. When it says, make this table behave like Word98, no one but MS know what that means, meaning no one else can completely adhere to the spec so things are likely to break when moving between different software. That means it costs extra money when moving to a different tool, in order to fix incompatibilities. Many of the features are coded to be tool specific for interoperability with one specific program instead of generically with programs of that type, thus making it hard for users of the spec to interoperate with anyone but MS's partners. Finally, the last I heard MS's license still only specified vendors are protected from patent lawsuits when they are providing the current, latest version of the OpenXML spec, thus creating tools that are backwards compatible with old files and programs is dependent upon MS's behaving well, which no one in their right mind should expect. Does that pretty much castrate all the reasons people want to move to an open standard in the first place?
This is just like their "shared source" initiative. Customers demanded open source because that development method provided significant benefits. One benefit was many people reviewed the code for security holes One was all the "free" features that were added to the software by other companies and hobbyists. One was the fact that the code could fork, preventing lock in by one vendor. What did MS produce in order to confuse customers? Shared Source. Only people who pay and sign NDAs can see it, removing the benefit of many eyes. Only MS can contribute removing the benefit of free code. Only MS cont
It's sick and sad when people make straw-man arguments to defend a weak position about generalization of rights and what is a "right".
Are you sure you understand what a straw man argument is?
I'm pro-choice, pro-gun, pro-red-meat. (Bet that hurts your head.) But I don't claim my one anecdotal position defines every pro-choice person.
I'm sorry, would you mind copying the part of my original post where I claimed this example defines every person who is pro-choice? Oh, I didn't say that? Now you know what a straw man argument is.
the hypothetical pro-choicers pro-animal-rights people you despise have generalized the notion of rights much more broadly than your mind can handle. If you listen to animal rights groups, they believe the same rights we afford humans we should extend to animals.
I understand what a lot of these people think and their reasoning, but you're missing a vital piece of the pie. There is a difference between having a belief, and trying to enforce actions or restrictions on actions using laws based on the assumption that your belief is correct and everyone else's belief is wrong. Freedom is each person deciding for themselves what is right and what is wrong and acting on those beliefs. When I decide I think animals have rights I'm free to act on that. When I get a law passed that means if other people try to act differently because they have different beliefs someone with a gun comes up and throws them in a cage, that is not freedom. The essence of personal freedom is the recognition that other people must be free to make choices I think are wrong and that means not trying to hold a gun to their head and force them to act in some manner.
And there are even anti-abortion pro-animal-rights supporters, I just hope that fact doesn't make your head explode.
Sure there are. I have no problem with people who are for abortions or against abortions. I have a problem with people who claim they are for personal choice, when they are actually against personal choice in general, but in favor of abortion of even that particular choice. Perhaps you're not understanding what exactly my objection is. My objection is that people in general seem to think it is okay to restrict the personal freedoms of others to make choices, if the choices those people are making disagree with their opinions.
I think what you are having trouble understanding is not some kind of hypocrisy, but rather: how does a system resolve two conflicting rights? e.g, the right for you to play your stereo at 3am full-blast vs. the right for me to have a good night's sleep vs. the right for me to put a gun to your forehead if you don't turn it down.
All laws that are not "legislating morality" are resolving the conflict of rights between individuals. What I object to is laws that do not resolve a conflict of rights, or which enforce one particular right over another based upon a subjective judgement or opinion.
Do you know if fetuses have a soul? Do you know if souls exist at all? Do you have concrete proof? Do you know if fetuses can think? Do they have functioning brains? Can you prove it? Basing a law on the unproven belief that fetuses have souls, and then restricting another person's actions on the strength of that belief removes that person's freedom to decide for themselves.
the right for you to play your stereo at 3am full-blast
This is called freedom of expression.
the right for me to have a good night's sleep
What is stopping you from going elsewhere? I don't think this right is recognized by any human right's organization.
the right for me to put a gun to your forehead if you don't turn it down.
Do I even need to go into this?
In any case, thanks for illustrating my point. You seem to value opinions "pro-gun" over choice. I'm not pro-gun or anti-gun. I'm opposed to gun control laws because I think every person should decide for themselves. This is called pro-freedom. The fact that you don't even seem to see this as an issue is exactly what I was addressing.
What makes me think that? Nothing really...always made sense to me though considering more buisneses and consumers use closed-source software compared to open-source...90% is a rather fat piece of pie, you know...
I think you're confusing using software with developing software. Most companies use software, open and closed source. A few companies develop software. Some might develop exclusively closed source, but so much mainstream software includes open source components that someone works on. That someone is usually a programmer paid to fix something because the users need it. Take a look at big companies, like Ford, for example. They develop open source software and contribute to Linux, simply because they use that software for some things and need it working.
There is a significant difference. THe phone company doesnt list your age and gender....
Suppose I list a business number as Paul's Adult Entertainment, but I'm only 13 and my real name in Cindy? Should the phone company check to see if I'm an adult male? Do they have to?
...nor does it do peer to peer networking.
The phone company does peer-to-peer networking as much as MySpace does.
My only dismay at this judgement is that that the reason is interferring with MySpaces business, rather than assert user responsibility.
Responsibility lies with the creep that molested people.
The 13 year holds some responsibility and that should be noted.
Ethically, perhaps, but legally this is not so. 13 year olds have no legal rights, thus have no legal responsibilities. Until they are granted the right to free speech, and the right to sleep with anyone they want, and the right to go wherever they want, you can't hold them legally responsible for saying the wrong thing, going somewhere they should not, or having sex.
As for the ethics, I'm of the opinion that it is all of society's responsibility to protect and teach children until such a time as they can take responsibility for themselves. The responsibility in this case is with the parents of this child, who are supposed to be responsible for them and with the molester.
I'm not denying the commercial nature that Linux has taken, however I can assure you that Linux development comes more from the community in general rather than major software companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Novell, Norton, etc.
The Linux "community" is mostly made up of developers working at different companies. Not all that many of them are hobbyists, and those hobbyists don't have the time paid developers do. Where I work we contribute to Linux OpenBSD, Apache, Snort, MySQL, and hundreds of other packages. The last company I worked at contributed to dozens of different projects as well. This is normal in the computer industry. People fix things in Linux because they use Linux to get things done, usually at work. People add things in Linux because they want Linux to do those things, usually for some work related task.
There are far more corporations working on closed-source software than those that are working on open source software.
Really? What makes you think that? A huge number of companies do both, including everywhere I've ever worked. Writing some closed source application that runs on Linux often means you have to fix some bug in Linux to get the best results.
After a couple of "sky is falling posts" I've read, I have an alternative theory for you. Soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use these boxes in that order.
What are you talking about and what does this have to do with my post? My assertion was that personal freedom is no longer an important value for Americans and I gave examples to back that up. Your alternative is empty rhetoric, not an alternative or even anything that contradicts what I wrote. Are you a script or something?
Honestly, if it gets THAT bad, then even "normal" people will rise up.
If what gets that bad? Our society? "Bad" is a relative term. What our grandparents would have considered terrible we think is just fine, and what we think is terrible they thought was normal and okay. I spoke about how our society is changing, not what is "good" or "bad."
Think France a la 1700's. We are way early on the road to tyrrany and trust me, it can get MUCH worse before things change. But, if it gets too bad, we just scrap the whole thing and start over. It's been done before and it will be done again.
The government produced by the constitution was better than anyone anticipated. It was more stable and resistant to tyranny. Perhaps the decline is inevitable. Can you imagine, however, what type of government would be created and supported by the average American today? I shudder to think. If the US government is overthrown, the chances of us getting a reasonable replacement instead of a series of violent, bloody tyrannies that promote human suffering for long periods of time, is rather slim. Salvaging this one would probably result in a lot less pain and be better for everyone, if people can be educated and motivated and it is not too late.
You know how people usually think when they see a company is "non-profit" that instantly makes them somehow better? The same thing holds true for open source.
You're right, most people do assume open source developers are instantly better, just like most people assume being a non-profit instantly makes them better. Both are, of course, incorrect.
A corporate programmer is a whore. An open source programmer is a slut.
Most open source coders get paid (by a corporation) to develop open source code. Why is it that people assume open source, means non-profit? Do you honestly think most contributions to GNU/Linux come from hobbyists working in their spare time? A whole lot of people are paid to work on commercial enterprises that are built on Linux. They improve and fix it because they are being paid to. They are paid to because it is part of what needs to be done for the company to make money. Some of them enjoy it to and contribute in ways that don't directly benefit their company, but make no mistake, Linux has been a commercial venture for a decade now.
Is the phone company responsible for verifying the age of people talking so a 19 year old can't lie to a 13 year old and then commit a crime? How about newspaper personal ads, are the newspaper's responsible? What ISPs who provide e-mail accounts? You know those companies that create voice boxes for people with throat cancer? Are they responsible for verifying the age of the person using them so they cannot be misused for this same purpose?
Blaming the medium or the tools is just plain stupid. This was, of course, a correct decision
Slashdot Mirror
For example: before you deployed your wiki (assuming, for the sake of argument, that it was the first thing deployed) what was the risk to your organisation of an apache vulnerability being discovered (assuming that it is not used by your IT department as you implied)? The answer is none, now the risk is that the sensitive information may be disclosed.
First, the risk from putting up that wiki was negligible, not because Apache is perfect, but because the odds that someone will bypass our VPN, and have an apache exploit at the same time are probably less than the odds of someone finding one of our laptops forgotten in a cafe, which would have all the data as the alternative. I think your problem is you are not considering overall risks, only one particular risk. What is more detrimental someone outside the company getting sensitive information or engineers inside the company not having the information they need to do their jobs and the company going under? Putting up data or not putting it up is not a one sided equation where only putting it up is a risk.
You may even be managing the risk by patching it quickly and segmenting the network, but the risk is not eliminated.
Again, you have to look at the alternatives. Is putting our info on an apache server hosted behind a VPN more or less secure than hosting that same data on a publicly accessible portal, reachable only via IE?
Either intuitively or through formal assessment the IT department has a view that the risk profile is based around their infrastructure, while you and your department are deploying technology outside of that. How are the owner's, investors and customers supposed get comfort that as an organisation risks are being managed appropriately?
Is it our job to reassure investors/executives that their incorrect hiring and purchasing decisions were the right ones, or is it our job to get our work done as securely as possible? You can coat it with as much "assurance" or "paradigms" or other marketing speak that you want, but the end result is greater overall security by bypassing incompetent IT and that has happened one too many times for it to be an uncommon state of affairs in modern IT. Working for a company that sells security products I could (aside from my NDA) tell you unbelievable horror stories about what "IT security professionals" have done is some of the largest and most well respected enterprise businesses. Yeah lets open up telnet with no IP access rules on this publicly accessible machine that has direct access to all our core routers (no I don't mean core of their network, I mean core of the national backbone). If investors want to be reassured, they should hire competent people, otherwise they are simply being given false assurances and that isn't good for anyone.
You sound like you have an IT department that is run by the muppets (wrong 1)
From what I've seen, this is about 85% of IT departments, who think Windows is all there is and wouldn't know real security if it bit them.
Your team then go and implement IT solutions that are outside of your mandate and that do not follow corporate standards or processes (wrong 2)
It's not so much that we go outside our mandate, we just keep using resources that were set up before we had an IT department because they work, unlike the servers set up by IT. We go through normal channels to purchase new servers and the like, the problem (or benefit) is when they need fixing we don't call IT, we see who is on IRC that happens to have an admin account on that server (usually whoever set it up and one or two other people).
Have you and your guys introduced more risk to the business because of your actions?
I'm not sure this is true. Does keeping a lot of engineering data only on our internal, well protected apache hosted wiki reachable only via a VPN tunnel mean the company has more or less risk than if we all used IE to connect to some god-awful active X filled publicly reachable Web portal?
Possibly, however I doubt you can substantiate that without being part of a corporate risk assessment, which you cann't do when flying below the radar.
I'm not sure much flies "beneath the radar." We sell really expensive network intrusion detection and prevention applications and we run them internally and everyone has an account. The last time a virus got into our network everyone got an e-mail notification it had been detected and isolated and we made fun of the sales engineer for a week. The last time I had a poorly configured e-mail account that was trying both encrypted and plaintext communication with a server, I got an e-mail about it within hours of my client "upgrade."
Still if I was CIO / CSO I would fire your asses! :-)
Firing the guys that make all the money would be pretty interesting, but it would not be the first time I was at a company where all the people that made our products were let go, while management stayed on for a while. The real point I was trying to make is a lot of IT people are "muppets" in your terminology while a lot of engineers are not. If IT is in conflict with users, that does not necessarily mean IT is doing the right thing and often it means they are doing the wrong thing and need to be fixed/fired/replaced/castigated/or something.
Why is it that people feel they have a right to do the work of or intefere with the work of their IT departments? It is my responsibility, not yours to run IT. I don't go around other peoples desks mucking about with their jobs because I know a bit about finance, or sales or whatever.
As a company or organization, most groups have a goal. Theoretically it is the job of IT to facilitate that goal. Far too often, IT decides their job is to interfere with people getting their work done, or to make themselves gatekeepers so they can have more power within the company, at the expense of slowing down real work. Hopefully as an IT person you do go talk to finance when you need approval for purchases to determine budget and what is the best risk/reward for those purchases. Hopefully you do consult legal about policies. If people are coming to you in IT and telling you how to do your job it is probably because you are failing to facilitate them doing their jobs.
I see a few examples of people proudly demonstrating how they have circumvented what they perceive as some form of restrictive IT policy - it my opinion you should be sacked.
In my opinion if people are able to, or motivated to bypass restrictive security, maybe both they and IT should be sacked. At the very least someone should look into the policies and see if it is costing the company money because IT went overboard.
A company bans wireless for legitimate reasons, smart arse users install a "secret" AP, company gets owned.
What is a legitimate reason to ban wireless in most environments? We installed wireless everywhere years ago, an official and well secured wireless network, so users had functionality and security. If users are so in need of wireless that they pay for gear out of pocket and it is a common problem, maybe your assessment of whether or not it should be banned was a steaming pile.
Many complaints about IT are of course completely legitimate as are complaints about any other area of business. If there is a problem with your IT groups or you need some tool or change to IT operating practices then use the right channels.
If you have to go through official channels to get things done, the chances are the network infrastructure is too brittle and is resulting in greatly slowing down the operation of regular business. Incompetent IT has been the bane of my existence for years. I once got an e-mail that read, "everyone please stop using and mail clients except exchange, any web browser other than IE, and stop using any freeware that has not been explicitly approved by IT, effective immediately. " Gee, brilliant, especially in a UNIX development shop with no Windows machines or copies of said software and where every tool we used was un-approved freeware. IT is, for the most part, a roadblock in the way of getting things done and mandates less secure methods more often than more secure ones. Maybe in some toy company they are the bastion of security, but if they are the same quality of IT as I've seen, then those companies are barely ahead of the game. In technical industries, they seem to be a weak link that is always slowing things down, getting in the way of work, or implementing another useless or counter productive "security" measure.
The simple fact is most users think they know what they are doing, but the lack the skills to adequately assess the risks of their actions. That is why they need to have rules around acceptable use and security policies to protect them from their own idiocy.
Where I work is probably not representative of the industry as a whole, but IT and their policies result in less security and functionality than letting the users run amok. We started out as an engineering organization, a start up. Think a couple of network engineering experts and a few security guys. Add in a hundred more coders and 100 more business people (selling security tools). The engineering half of the organization goes out of our way to bypass IT as much as possible because they were hired by business majors with no clue. They implement things like an exchange server, Windows desktops, and an intranet Web portal that cost a fortune but only works in IE (engineering desktops run OS X, Linux, or a BSD). We actually (with no official IT on our side) maintain our own mail and IM and Web and fileservers.
Now if this were an isolated case I might be willing to say, yeah that never happens, but this is about the 3rd place I've worked where IT was a bunch of clueless people that knew how to set up Windows servers and basically nothing else. Within the security industry, IT is often the weakest link.
Note, some IT people are versatile and brilliant hackers that can put together a secure server from spare parts and OSS and fix my weird networking issues. Hail to them! Would that they were the norm in my experience.
I would be 7 kinds of mad if anyone was using gmail and IM in my office... But even if you aren't a company with such a strong need for data protection... well actually there is no such thing.
Welcome to this decade. IM has been a vital sales tool for many years now in some industries. That means non-encrypted communication with the outside world using AIM or something. It is no more dangerous that unencrypted e-mail which is, sadly, still a requirement for doing business with most of the world.
Anyone placing data that hasn't been cleared for release (even by the very informal process of being sent out on purpose) onto services run by people with whom you have no contract and no reasonable expectation of integrity is, frankly, no better than the idiots who don't back up their data and are then surprised to find out that MTBF is not a guarantee.
Employees need to be mindful of what they send out via any unencrypted channel and what they log internally encrypted or not. Removing access to communication tools, however, often means losing sales and that means the company and everyone in it suffering. No thanks.
I know it's been said before, but think what that would do for Apple's market share! Through the roof!
Their market share of the home computer market would be through the floor, just like the last time they licensed their OS to third parties. Their market share of desktop OS's would go up a little, but then MS would re-negotiate their Windows OEM license and Dell would have to choose between being priced out of their primary business and betting the farm on OS X, or dropping OS X. At that point do they choose to be completely at the mercy of MS (as they are now) or completely at the mercy of Apple (who is also competing with them in the hardware market and who has already killed off one such licensing scheme and several hardware companies along with it)? Assuming, for the moment they go with Apple and Apple does not shut them down to save their hardware sales (almost 50% of Apple's revenue) Apple is suddenly making almost 50% less money and shareholders are likely to fire whoever is in charge. Assuming, again, that they don't, where is Apple going to cut the budget in order to become profitable again? Will OS X development be greatly slowed?
All of the above makes Apple doing what you propose unfeasible. It is a huge risk for what? In the best case scenario they become one of many players in a non-monopolized market after spending huge amounts of money in order to break the monopoly on that market. It is a lousy investment and they'd be better off (financially speaking) putting their money into a normal market. This is what a lot of people don't understand about monopoly abuse. It doesn't have to make some market impossible to enter. It just has to make it more expensive than other markets so that no investor in their right mind would think the investment/risk/reward scenario made sense. Apple will unbundle their OS and hardware right after MS's monopoly is broken resulting in a normal, competitive market where they have to unbundle these two items in order to compete. Doing it before then would be an absurdly risky venture and a stupid investment of resources, possibly to the point of being legally actionable negligence from the shareholders.
You are claiming to know what is going on in their head and making a generalization that they take choices away from other people. Maybe that's not a straw man, but it sure is a poor argument. You invented an outcome based on your bias of said people and no facts.
No, this is called an example. I actually know two people who do have "pro-choice" bumper stickers, but argued with me personally in favor of passing a state law to ban hunting a particular, non-endangered animal because they said it was "the democratic process" for the majority to tell the minority what is ethical to do.
You are missing a key point. There are natural limits to freedom just like there are natural limits to population, or a limit to how much water you can put in a glass.
This is bullcrap. There are no natural limits to freedom. There are simply judgments as to when what is more important when one person's freedoms conflict with another person's. And that is not even what we're talking about here. We're talking about people's perception of taking away the rights of others that do not conflict with another person's rights, based upon their belief that taking away freedom by using laws to impose "correct" behavior is ethical. That is a belief that does not value freedom.
You told me to move somewhere else if I don't like your right to stay up all night with loud music. So you are taking away my rights. So I don't have the right to be left alone according to you.
The "right to be left alone?" That is very imprecise. You have the right to act as you like just as I do. Assuming we both own property, I have the right to play music on mine, while you have the right to put up sound barriers on yours. There is a potential argument about my influencing air molecules on your property, but this is getting to be a pretty blurry case. It is also way, way off topic. The original topic was that people do not value the underlying freedom as much as other aspect, like the right to be "left alone" whatever that is. People value the ability to buy guns or the ability to stop other people from getting guns more than they value the freedom of individuals to choose for themselves if they will buy guns.
You always take away someone else's freedom in your pursuit to be free.
Two homosexual men have intercourse in their own home and no one but them ever knows about it. How, exactly, does their freedom to do this take away anyone else's freedom in any way? Do explain. And yet, many of the people arguing laws about this very topic value their ability to stop these people from doing this, more than the freedom of each individual to choose for themselves what they will do.
My gun example was perfect and you avoided it because it pokes a hole in your argument. Why don't I have the right to shoot you if you keep me up?
Every human rights organization I've ever heard of recognizes the right to live as a precursor to all other rights. By shooting me your right to fire a gun strongly conflicts with my right to do every other thing, making this a pathetically weak example.
Do you not see how those two are the same, albeit extreme examples?
When rights conflict, the law is supposed to mediate that conflict. It is arguable that playing a stereo might possibly be infringing on some right of your which you have not been able to name in a meaningful way. Shooting a person conflicts with their rights in a very well defined an drastic way. Understand?
You are grossly idealizing freedom without realizing the practical obstacles to it.
I'm not idealizing freedom. I'm simply stating that it used to be a very important value for Americans and now it is much less so, as you have demonstrated by arguing against it so vocally. You are a great illustration of my point. It is clear you've never thought through "freedom" as a value or as it applies to current legislature and your arguments in favor of or in opposition to those bits of legislati
It isn't pressure from Microsoft, it's the fact that they make so much money from the extra crap they install on Windows before they ship. They can't exactly install the 30-day trial of McAffee antivirus on Ubuntu now, can they?
That is certainly one reason, but i they can sell a machine minus the cost of a Windows OEM license, that sort of balances out. Another thing to consider is, increasing Linux market share in the home market means virgin soil for Linux crapware, with Dell positioned to create their own options and take a greater chunk of those profits. All of this is sort of academic. Even if Dell can ship Linux machines and make twice as much in crapware and don't have to eat the cost of a Windows license, Microsoft will kill them with discriminatory pricing so it is not a viable business venture for an established player.
Linux will come to the home market in one of several ways. Either the third world will adopt in en masse, making the US a technological backwater until we catch up or Businesses will adopt it for security, customizability, and manageability and it will then trickle into the home market. Alternately, it could enter the home market directly if pushed by market domination from a different market. Walmart might be able to swing it if they were determined. I can tell you it won't be Dell though; the guy with the pistol jammed in his mouth is unlikely to rescue you from the mugger.
I'm not seeing your point. Incompatible hardware is only a problem if you have an existing computer, and you want to run a different OS on it. If you're building the machine, as Dell is, it doesn't make any sense to purposely choose hardware that's incompatible with the OS most people (buying these machines) want to use.
Dell's supply chain is something I don't think you've taken into account. You're thinking of a supply chain like Lenovo, where they spec out a machine, pick component suppliers for a revision, test it and ship. In that case, you certainly can test to make sure the components are Linux compatible, and it probably is not even very hard. Dell, however, does not pick component suppliers when they spec out a revision. They just buy lots of whatever is cheapest and throw them in. If you've ever ordered a lot of 100 machines from then and looked inside, they don't all have the same components inside. They will almost certainly have different hard drives and may well have different video cards, sound cards, ethernet cards, etc. We were bitten by this years ago when building a testlab running Linux and NetBSD. First, it was cheaper to buy hundreds of Windows licenses and discard them then to buy blank machines. Next, although the machines we purchased were theoretically all the same model, only about 2/3 of them had a video card that supported NetBSD.
I do think Dell would incur real costs to make sure their machines all ran Linux unless they simply issued a blanket notice to all bidders that everything had to run Linux or it was going to be dismissed immediately. They have the pull to do it, but given that they exist only at MS's sufferance, I doubt it will ever happen.
Um, no. That patently false - most TiVo owners are actually end users buying them despite the cable systems' pushing other, crappy DVRs.
Read what I wrote. Just because most Tivo are used by individual buyers does not mean individual buyers are their biggest customers. Any given retail store or even store chain sells fewer units than Comcast alone, or Cablevision. As a result, Tivo seems willing to make compromises for those buyers.
Parent needs to be heavily modded as "Troll."
Yeah, because making 30 second skip so hard to access and adding DRM so some shows can't be saved for too long, and making it so hard to export to normal, non-drmed formats or burning DVDs is definitely in the best interests of their individual customers. And don't give me any crap about how they were forced to by some law. There are other systems for sale that provide all those functions and have no legal problems. It is sad that people like you are so desperate to defend a bad purchase decision that they are unwilling to look at actual facts, but instead must grasp at some sort of faith that Tivo was and always will be acting in their best interests.
TV is a passive experience. People (like me) want to flip channels until I settle on something interesting. I do not have a list of shows I want to watch, and I don't want the experience you describe.
The same could have been said about music playlists versus the radio a few years back, but a I know an awful lot of people who don't listen to the radio anymore and who just start up an mp3 playlist when they want music. I do think there will be a place for TV "channels" much as there is a place for streaming radio broadcasts over IP, but I think, in general, people will move more towards playlists of TV shows. My Netflix cue right now is full of movies and TV shows and I just play whichever one I have or am in the mood for. Given the chance to pick from the list, I think I'd be happier yet. For people like you, there will always be "channels" of video with a theme.
Besides, an ad supported model like this wouldn't fly. The advertising, on a global or even national scale, is too hard to sell.
Why can't they customize the ads as part of the p2p network, adding them in on your client and based upon your recent Google searches? Heck, they might even be ads for things you actually want, instead of random feminine hygiene products and pharmaceuticals of uncertain purpose.
Conventional passive "push" tv is here to stay.
In the US, this will probably be true for quite a while, simply because the established players have too much influence on the government and ability to lock people in via cartels and monopolies. Elsewhere the winds are already changing.
They can have my TiVo when they pry it from my cold dead hands.
A few years back I was looking at a device to record TV and basically function as a Tivo. I looked at MythTV, Tivo, Windows Media Edition, and a couple of others. When I looked into Tivo, I was pretty disappointed. They want you to pay a monthly subscription or a big chunk of change up front, with no guarantee the service will be any good in future. You have to jump through hoops to enable the skip ahead/back and the times are not easily configurable? There is no easy way to easily export the video to my laptop for viewing on the plane, and burning DVDs and VCDs is a pain. The interface was okay, but it seemed like some of the these features were no-brainers. What was going on? A little research showed Tivo's biggest customers are cable providers who ship them as cable boxes. Suddenly it made sense. They were not making features customers wanted easy, because it was not something their big partners wanted. That's a smart business move, but sure does not make me want one.
For the same reason I'm somewhat skeptical that Apple will ever ship a good PVR. They are also partners with some of the same content providers. I ended up going with an Elgato EyeTV unit. I had an old mac sitting around as a Web and media server already, so adding the functionality was cheap by comparison. It lets me skip commercials nicely without any easter eggs and burning a DVD of a show I want to archive is as easy as selecting the export menu item and dropping a blank DVD in. If I want to save some shows as mpegs for my next plane ride, it is easy as cake. I can pick from a variety of scheduling services, including free ones so there is no monthly fee.
I understand people who really liked Tivo back in the day, but isn't it clear by now that they sold out and are no longer doing what is best for users, in favor of doing what is most profitable for cable companies? Brand loyalty i something I'll never really get I suppose.
What is the major draw of upgrading to Vista?
The features include:
A lot of these features have been on other OS's for quite a while, but they are welcome additions to Windows for people who are used to them on other platforms, but need to use Windows occasionally. In a year or so once it is stabilized and third parties have things together, it will probably be an improvement on XP
I agree, but there is a complication. hugh speed Internet access in the US is a pile of dog crap. The only reasonable choice I have is to go with my local cable provider (half the price of DSL). Cable internet+basic TV service is $10 cheaper than just cable internet access; so I'm forced to buy programming to get internet. Downloadable television may cut out the middle man, but for many people like myself, only after they've already been paid once.
Here's how I see the market changing. Right now the US is the center of content creation. Slowly, other countries with affordable, non-monopolized internet access will get more and more TV and movies over IP and more of it will be locally and tailored to them. Eventually, a significant amount of content will only be available this way and US citizens will be paying for that content separately, or it will be licensed to TV channels who will rerun it. A lot of that content will be free or ad supported so some people will not wait and will view it via a Web interface. After a decade of this, the US will finally catch up enough in the network space via wireless or something, by which time we'll be way behind the curve on both content creation and the technological delivery mechanisms, effectively ceding our dominance in both those spaces and putting the momentum behind foreign companies. Once again US laws written by greedy corporations will have squashed innovation here and resulted in the US losing another huge market and slipping a little further away from being the biggest economic powerhouse as China, India, and the EU take over.
How is this better than the following workflow...* Watch on your TV (via any network-attached device or stand-alone DVD player that supports lots of codecs and can be controlled with a remote)
Currently most people don't have an easy way to perform this step. Most people do not have their computer connected to their TV. Geeks like us do, normal people don't. Most people don't want to burn a DVD or VCD every time they want to watch something. Apple's device is a way to connect the computer to the TV, without burning DVDs or any other nonsense.
Currently the reliability of their hardware, including notebooks, is among the best in the industry as evaluated by consumer reports.
I am sad to say, especially with the Mac Book Pros, it seems like they've taken a few steps back with regards to reliability.
Whenever any manufacturer releases a new hardware line they take a few steps back with regard to reliability. Invariably there are some problems with the hardware that don't show up until it is in real world use for a while, and they fix those in later revisions. This is why most purchasing guides always recommend you wait 6 months or so for the rev B of some new machine.
[your anecdotal evidence here]
The number of people in line or what happened with your machine and your mom's machine is not a useful sample set and is pretty much meaningless. We've kept track of hardware failures here (Apple and Lenovo notebooks) for the past few years and Apple is just a bit ahead, which is not unexpected since both are regularly independently reviewed as among the best in the industry. That is a few hundred machines and is still pretty small for a valid sample.
Expand the line, but fix the problems first- not after their in the wild.
In most cases there is not a lot you can do to fix hardware you already shipped. You revise the next manufacturing run with small tweaks. Every company does this. Maybe you stay with Apple because if you try another vendor, better results would simply be a statistical anomaly.
Any way that the open source community could embrace and extend Open XML?
It is doubtful that anyone other than MS will ever be able to even implement OpenXML completely (since it would require reverse engineering old versions of Word, something that has never been 100%) and some of the functions within it are patented while MS provides only limited patent protection. OpenXML is not an open standard as such, but a way for MS to trick enough people into thinking their new .doc format meets the same requirements OpenDocument does. See they both have "Open" in the name? See?
Call me crazy but having two different standards doesn't really capture the idea of having Standards at all. I thought the point of standards was to make it so we (the developers) only have to implement one thing.
I disagree. I don't think there is any problem with having multiple OPEN standards because it is easy to translate between them and it allows competition among them for the best feature set and easiest to use, etc. The fundamental objection is what MS has come up with that they claim is an open standard. We've seen this same crap from them many times. Customers demand feature/behavior X because they want certain benefits it brings to them that do not benefit the software developer. Eventually, to keep customers from moving to something else to get those benefits, MS releases their own version of feature/behavior Y that has some of the same characteristics of feature/behavior X and which someone who does not understand the benefits or how those benefits come about might mistake for the same thing. At the same time this feature/behavior Y undermines and removes as many of the benefits that are not in MS's best interests as possible, then spends millions on marketing to try to tell people they are the same thing or that feature/behavior Y is better. Half the people that were demanding feature/benefit X have enough people in their organization confused that the move to feature/benfit X does not take place. MS does not want to give customers features, they want to give them bullet points.
In this particular example, why do people want an open standard document format? Why are customers and governments demanding it in the first place? What are the benefits? Well, first it means you can't be locked in by a vendor and multiple companies can all easily create tools, with different specialties that can interoperate and compete. This means lower prices and more innovation. Since it is a standard, you no longer have to worry that different versions of the software will be unable to read one another's documents.
Okay, lets look at MS's "Open"XML. The standard is very large, which makes it harder to implement exhaustively, meaning different version of software may well have incompatibilities. More importantly, the spec does not define all the behavior of all the things contained within it, instead referencing outside, closed software behaviors that have to be reverse engineered and which can never be done perfectly. When it says, make this table behave like Word98, no one but MS know what that means, meaning no one else can completely adhere to the spec so things are likely to break when moving between different software. That means it costs extra money when moving to a different tool, in order to fix incompatibilities. Many of the features are coded to be tool specific for interoperability with one specific program instead of generically with programs of that type, thus making it hard for users of the spec to interoperate with anyone but MS's partners. Finally, the last I heard MS's license still only specified vendors are protected from patent lawsuits when they are providing the current, latest version of the OpenXML spec, thus creating tools that are backwards compatible with old files and programs is dependent upon MS's behaving well, which no one in their right mind should expect. Does that pretty much castrate all the reasons people want to move to an open standard in the first place?
This is just like their "shared source" initiative. Customers demanded open source because that development method provided significant benefits. One benefit was many people reviewed the code for security holes One was all the "free" features that were added to the software by other companies and hobbyists. One was the fact that the code could fork, preventing lock in by one vendor. What did MS produce in order to confuse customers? Shared Source. Only people who pay and sign NDAs can see it, removing the benefit of many eyes. Only MS can contribute removing the benefit of free code. Only MS cont
It's sick and sad when people make straw-man arguments to defend a weak position about generalization of rights and what is a "right".
Are you sure you understand what a straw man argument is?
I'm pro-choice, pro-gun, pro-red-meat. (Bet that hurts your head.) But I don't claim my one anecdotal position defines every pro-choice person.
I'm sorry, would you mind copying the part of my original post where I claimed this example defines every person who is pro-choice? Oh, I didn't say that? Now you know what a straw man argument is.
the hypothetical pro-choicers pro-animal-rights people you despise have generalized the notion of rights much more broadly than your mind can handle. If you listen to animal rights groups, they believe the same rights we afford humans we should extend to animals.
I understand what a lot of these people think and their reasoning, but you're missing a vital piece of the pie. There is a difference between having a belief, and trying to enforce actions or restrictions on actions using laws based on the assumption that your belief is correct and everyone else's belief is wrong. Freedom is each person deciding for themselves what is right and what is wrong and acting on those beliefs. When I decide I think animals have rights I'm free to act on that. When I get a law passed that means if other people try to act differently because they have different beliefs someone with a gun comes up and throws them in a cage, that is not freedom. The essence of personal freedom is the recognition that other people must be free to make choices I think are wrong and that means not trying to hold a gun to their head and force them to act in some manner.
And there are even anti-abortion pro-animal-rights supporters, I just hope that fact doesn't make your head explode.
Sure there are. I have no problem with people who are for abortions or against abortions. I have a problem with people who claim they are for personal choice, when they are actually against personal choice in general, but in favor of abortion of even that particular choice. Perhaps you're not understanding what exactly my objection is. My objection is that people in general seem to think it is okay to restrict the personal freedoms of others to make choices, if the choices those people are making disagree with their opinions.
I think what you are having trouble understanding is not some kind of hypocrisy, but rather: how does a system resolve two conflicting rights? e.g, the right for you to play your stereo at 3am full-blast vs. the right for me to have a good night's sleep vs. the right for me to put a gun to your forehead if you don't turn it down.
All laws that are not "legislating morality" are resolving the conflict of rights between individuals. What I object to is laws that do not resolve a conflict of rights, or which enforce one particular right over another based upon a subjective judgement or opinion.
Do you know if fetuses have a soul? Do you know if souls exist at all? Do you have concrete proof? Do you know if fetuses can think? Do they have functioning brains? Can you prove it? Basing a law on the unproven belief that fetuses have souls, and then restricting another person's actions on the strength of that belief removes that person's freedom to decide for themselves.
the right for you to play your stereo at 3am full-blast
This is called freedom of expression.
the right for me to have a good night's sleep
What is stopping you from going elsewhere? I don't think this right is recognized by any human right's organization.
the right for me to put a gun to your forehead if you don't turn it down.
Do I even need to go into this?
In any case, thanks for illustrating my point. You seem to value opinions "pro-gun" over choice. I'm not pro-gun or anti-gun. I'm opposed to gun control laws because I think every person should decide for themselves. This is called pro-freedom. The fact that you don't even seem to see this as an issue is exactly what I was addressing.
What makes me think that? Nothing really...always made sense to me though considering more buisneses and consumers use closed-source software compared to open-source...90% is a rather fat piece of pie, you know...
I think you're confusing using software with developing software. Most companies use software, open and closed source. A few companies develop software. Some might develop exclusively closed source, but so much mainstream software includes open source components that someone works on. That someone is usually a programmer paid to fix something because the users need it. Take a look at big companies, like Ford, for example. They develop open source software and contribute to Linux, simply because they use that software for some things and need it working.
There is a significant difference. THe phone company doesnt list your age and gender....
Suppose I list a business number as Paul's Adult Entertainment, but I'm only 13 and my real name in Cindy? Should the phone company check to see if I'm an adult male? Do they have to?
The phone company does peer-to-peer networking as much as MySpace does.
My only dismay at this judgement is that that the reason is interferring with MySpaces business, rather than assert user responsibility.
Responsibility lies with the creep that molested people.
The 13 year holds some responsibility and that should be noted.
Ethically, perhaps, but legally this is not so. 13 year olds have no legal rights, thus have no legal responsibilities. Until they are granted the right to free speech, and the right to sleep with anyone they want, and the right to go wherever they want, you can't hold them legally responsible for saying the wrong thing, going somewhere they should not, or having sex.
As for the ethics, I'm of the opinion that it is all of society's responsibility to protect and teach children until such a time as they can take responsibility for themselves. The responsibility in this case is with the parents of this child, who are supposed to be responsible for them and with the molester.
I'm not denying the commercial nature that Linux has taken, however I can assure you that Linux development comes more from the community in general rather than major software companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Novell, Norton, etc.
The Linux "community" is mostly made up of developers working at different companies. Not all that many of them are hobbyists, and those hobbyists don't have the time paid developers do. Where I work we contribute to Linux OpenBSD, Apache, Snort, MySQL, and hundreds of other packages. The last company I worked at contributed to dozens of different projects as well. This is normal in the computer industry. People fix things in Linux because they use Linux to get things done, usually at work. People add things in Linux because they want Linux to do those things, usually for some work related task.
There are far more corporations working on closed-source software than those that are working on open source software.
Really? What makes you think that? A huge number of companies do both, including everywhere I've ever worked. Writing some closed source application that runs on Linux often means you have to fix some bug in Linux to get the best results.
After a couple of "sky is falling posts" I've read, I have an alternative theory for you. Soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use these boxes in that order.
What are you talking about and what does this have to do with my post? My assertion was that personal freedom is no longer an important value for Americans and I gave examples to back that up. Your alternative is empty rhetoric, not an alternative or even anything that contradicts what I wrote. Are you a script or something?
Honestly, if it gets THAT bad, then even "normal" people will rise up.
If what gets that bad? Our society? "Bad" is a relative term. What our grandparents would have considered terrible we think is just fine, and what we think is terrible they thought was normal and okay. I spoke about how our society is changing, not what is "good" or "bad."
Think France a la 1700's. We are way early on the road to tyrrany and trust me, it can get MUCH worse before things change. But, if it gets too bad, we just scrap the whole thing and start over. It's been done before and it will be done again.
The government produced by the constitution was better than anyone anticipated. It was more stable and resistant to tyranny. Perhaps the decline is inevitable. Can you imagine, however, what type of government would be created and supported by the average American today? I shudder to think. If the US government is overthrown, the chances of us getting a reasonable replacement instead of a series of violent, bloody tyrannies that promote human suffering for long periods of time, is rather slim. Salvaging this one would probably result in a lot less pain and be better for everyone, if people can be educated and motivated and it is not too late.
You know how people usually think when they see a company is "non-profit" that instantly makes them somehow better? The same thing holds true for open source.
You're right, most people do assume open source developers are instantly better, just like most people assume being a non-profit instantly makes them better. Both are, of course, incorrect.
A corporate programmer is a whore. An open source programmer is a slut.
Most open source coders get paid (by a corporation) to develop open source code. Why is it that people assume open source, means non-profit? Do you honestly think most contributions to GNU/Linux come from hobbyists working in their spare time? A whole lot of people are paid to work on commercial enterprises that are built on Linux. They improve and fix it because they are being paid to. They are paid to because it is part of what needs to be done for the company to make money. Some of them enjoy it to and contribute in ways that don't directly benefit their company, but make no mistake, Linux has been a commercial venture for a decade now.
What do you think? Good call?
Is the phone company responsible for verifying the age of people talking so a 19 year old can't lie to a 13 year old and then commit a crime? How about newspaper personal ads, are the newspaper's responsible? What ISPs who provide e-mail accounts? You know those companies that create voice boxes for people with throat cancer? Are they responsible for verifying the age of the person using them so they cannot be misused for this same purpose?
Blaming the medium or the tools is just plain stupid. This was, of course, a correct decision