Your rant is pointless. No one besides Microsoft, even Apple, has figured out how to render fonts properly.
It's funny because I know two people who cited better looking fonts as one reason they switched away from Windows. I actually have both IE+WinXP and Safari+OS X running on this same monitor and I prefer the look of the fonts in OS X. Maybe you need to look at your font settings if you're having problems.
Sadly I fear OS's of the future will be much like OS's of today, at least for the common man. MS still has no incentive to really make OS's better for consumers instead of better for MS and a lot of incentive to make their Windows OS's more and more restrictive. They know their model is slowly being undermined, but they plan to use.Net to effectively create the internet equivalent and lock everyone into one online platform instead. Other companies still have little motivation to invest in the desktop OS market and decreasing motivation to invest in the Server OS market.
I predict we will still have the same glacially slow pace of improvement as we've had for the last decade, with a lot of foot dragging and backwards steps as MS does their best to hold us all in the past. In 2015 I predict the mainstream OS from MS will finally support spell checking in every.net application from the same dictionary. They may even support other common features like grammar checking, but it will still be hard for developers to add arbitrary functions. I predict security will still be an issue and MS's solution for determining the trust of a given application will be broken and abused for anti-competative reasons. Further, configuring the permissions for an application will be painful, lack granularity, and still be something users have to worry about.
There is some hope. Maybe outside of the US, Linux or some other OS will rise to supremacy, and major corporations will carry the effort to progress beyond Window's artificial limitations. Maybe enough people will buy Mac's so that the market share undermines MS's monopoly and the free market brings innovation again. I have serious doubts however.
But like the GP said, what often matters to the purchaser is the overall price, not the value per dollar. If you're a parent buying a car for your kid, you're probably going to prefer the $12,000 Honda over the $50,000 BMW, even if customizing the Honda to have all the same features as the BMW would cost far more than $50k.
I'd prefer the Honda, but not just because of price. Reliability and likely future costs are important considerations. Realistically, the BMW is more likely to break in the next few years and if it does the repairs will be a lot more expensive. The Honda will last as long, maybe longer. The insurance on the Honda will probably cost a lot less.
Comparing a Honda to a more expensive BWM makes sense, placing the Mac as a BMW and an HP machine as a Honda, but another important comparison would be a Toyota versus a Ford; with the Toyota being a Mac and the Dell being a Ford. The Mac cost slightly more and has a few nicer features. The Dell is made out of junk parts, poorly tested and will break if you sneeze at it. In the long run, the cost of ownership will be a lot higher. I mean have you people ever bought Dells in quantity. They have very high failure rates and the parts are whatever was cheapest that day. 100 machines of the same model might ship with 3 different brands of hard drives, three different network cards, two different video controller cards, etc., etc. All of them are bottom of the barrel parts. A lot people look at the specifications for a machine and equate 100 Gig hard drive with 100 gig hard drive, but when one of those is a Hitachi and one is a Seagate, well one might be likely to last a year and another likely to last six years. Anyone comparing a Mac against a Dell who does not take that into account is missing out on a lot of the real value involved.
Apple is missing out on a lot of sales by not offering anything in these price ranges.
Yeah, and so are other reputable vendors with valuable brands who refuse to sell junk that is likely to break very soon. Apple loses out on a lot of sales by not offering a product to meet a specific need, but they are medium sized company and simply cannot maintain enough hardware to compete with every other hardware vendor on the market. They focus on a few specific markets and if you need some given feature the chances are you may have to get something more than you need in other areas. This is a problem with all vendors, but especially for Apple because they are the only one's that run OS X.
If the US populace would get off their asses and clean house by refusing to elect any incumbents that are democrats or republican and would vote for reform of election and lobbying laws, maybe we could get an unbiased court system that would break up MS's monopoly. Then Apple would have no need to bundle OS X with hardware and the market would strongly push them to unbundle it. In the mean time Apple has to make tough choices, and so do consumers.
Disabling it doesn't put the money back into my pocket, or spend it on things that are more likely to be usable.
The same could be argued for USB ports five years ago. Being a little forward thinking is the reason why Macs tend to remain in use longer than PCs bought at the same time. Some people don't want a monitor at all, why should a video card be included in every mac sold? Some people just want to use it over the network with terminals. There will always be some function of a computer (like wifi) some person doesn't want but ends up paying for.
There's the difference. The _vast_ majority of desktop PCs derive no benefit from having wifi included by default.
Are you joking? Most home users do not want to run cables and put in ethernet ports or pay to have that done. Hell, I'm about as technical as anyone you'll meet, and I have an ancient tower with a wi-fi card in it sitting right next to my router and wireless station. I never bothered plugging a cable into the back of both of them for faster transfer since that is almost never my bottleneck. The vast majority of PCs will be needing wi-fi in the next few years if they don't already.
They will never use it, because cheaper, faster, more reliable wired networking infrastructure already exists and is no less convenient to connect to.
Freeing the placement of the computer from the placement of the TV/cable box, or the DSL line is a huge benefit to most people.
One cannot make the same argument for the seats in a car or many other "options" in computers like, say, DVD drives.
He said heated seats, not seats in general.
The arguments for non-optional wifi in *desktop PCs* are weak, at best.
The arguments against wifi apply only to a subset of people and only if you do not look to the future. If you move to any town in my county, wouldn't it be nice to be able to get some internet access before your cable service is installed. Gee, with the free county-wide coverage, you can. My county is by no means the only location with such a project. Get with the times.
My powerbook is my workhorse. But, I would like to see a OSX on a Thinkpad. Reliable OS on reliable hardware.
For the last several years our standard options for laptops here at work have been Powerbooks and Thinkpads. If you wanted a laptop, that was your choice. Both are near the top of the heap for reliability according to consumer reports. Operations just mentioned something the other day, and I guess the powerbooks (now a mix of Macbooks and Macbook pros) are still winning the reliability race by a hair, largely due to two major recalls of power supplies for the Thinkpads. My point is, objectively, I'm not sure you can just make the assumption that Thinkpads are more reliable.
...a true maximize button that doesn't only sometimes work...
This would be a design anti-feature. On Windows the assumption is that only one program will be visible on a screen at a time. This is because they all replicate the menus in the window taking up space and making it really annoying if they are not always maximized all the time. For OS X, this need not be the case and it is useless to take up space you don't need in many instances. Thus, Apple leaves the function of the zoom button up to the developer to decide. Sometimes this means they implement the zoom to fit to content and it is much, much nicer than the same behavior on Windows. Sometimes this means the developer makes a bad choice and does not maximize when that would be better. This is a flaw with the individual application, not with OS X. I agree that some of the apps misuse this including several from Apple. File a bug on the app, don't try taking away the functionality from everyone.
...an extra button or two on my laptop and I'll consider Macs to be a good choice.
Barring the creation of a better technological solution, Apple is doing the right thing with this. Multi-button mice make sense for power users. Your hand is already off the keyboard using the mouse, so extra buttons can be mapped to extra features and it is faster. Multiple buttons on a laptop do not make usability sense. Currently, they cannot be customized for novice users and multiple buttons are one of the most common usability problems for users in general. Combined with current development practices, a multi-button mouse as the standard leads to less functional programs. Gee thanks WordPad for taking up that second mouse button with completely useless crap instead of letting me assign useful functions to TextEdit like I do on OS X. Finally, because your hands are already on the keyboard when using a trackpad and buttons, chording with a keyboard button is actually faster than having multiple buttons, it is just slightly harder to learn. For power users this should not be an issue. For novices, the multiple buttons are a net loss. So who benefits? Only those people who are sort of power users and would use multiple buttons, but who are not able to learn to use chording.
So, I assert that with current designs, what they have is the best option. Better yet would be a solution like the mighty mouse, where people are allowed to enable or disable multiple buttons in software, but which physically look like one button so as not to confuse novices. Slightly less ideal would be a solution where a user can drop in a replacement set of buttons, which is not default. Both of these, however, would be less benefit for the work than the mighty mouse is. I recommend you actually try using chording. Once you are used to it, it is measurably faster than multiple trackpad buttons.
As it is, I run Windows for the games or I run GNU/Linux so I guess I'm not the target consumer
Half the people I know switched from Linux to OS X. You can still buy a Mac and then run Windows and/or Linux in a variety of ways including on a separate partition, through a VM, or both. With both Parallels and VMWare racing to get graphics card acceleration working in their VM modes, you might even find it more convenient than running Linux/Windows in the near future. Wouldn't it be nice to not have to reboot to play any Windows game? Also, WINE and the like are progressing on OS X providing similar levels of Windows API re-implementation and at least one company is concentrating on that code for quick and dirty ports of Windows games. I'd argue that right now Windows gaming is better on a Mac than on a Linux PC and the situation actually looks to be getting better for the foreseeable future.
However if you use PCs for real experimental science, computers are supposed to gather data. Good luck finding drivers for specialized hardware for Macs.
This is actually pretty funny. I know a research biochemist and while visiting the lab, several times he had to walk across the hall to the other lab, where the workstation was a mac. The reason, a lot of the software including the control setup for much of the really expensive hardware, only runs on the mac.
From my experience specialized tools for the sciences are all dependent upon which of the sciences you're looking at. For biology, audio research, linguistics, and now much of physics, you're a lot more likely to find a mac version than a Windows version of research software. For mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, or CAD, you're a lot more likely to find Windows software.
However, that's going to destroy usability because none of the apps will be able to talk to one another. Which sounds to me like TFA is just not digging in deep enough to what is really going on. Otherwise, they are going to be creating A LOT more work than they really need to...
This doesn't stop apps from talking to each other, it just allows the OS to restrict unwanted or unneeded talking between apps. I, for one, don't want my first person shooter talking to my e-mail server without my permission.
Also, with such a hugely fundamental change to how applications function in the OS, what current software is going to work with it?
Software needs to be rewritten to work with this scheme, although it is possible to have wrappers for legacy software, or VMs. For some software, this will be little or no work, while for others it will be a lot of work.
RTFA. This only protects "against" benign software.
I did better than RTFA, I read the bitfrost spec. It is designed to protect against numerous types of malicious software. For example, the spec calls for protection against the machine being used to send spam by a worm. That is in fact, one of the examples in the spec.
Intentionally malicious software has a few hurdles to jump over, but at least the app permission part requires the cooperation of the software in question. In other words: It protects against misbehaving or misappropriated software only.
I'm not sure I follow you. A worm is generally classified as "malware." The "mal" in "malware" stands for "malicious" the opposite of "benign." It is certainly supposed to defend against malicious software.
Plus it's only a matter of time before the first solitaire clone ships with a "request everything available (and not conflicting with their simple limits model)" setting, because the app dev was too lazy to tie things down.
Why would a solitaire app need to tie things down to not run afoul of the defenses? Making a system that makes improperly designed apps hard to use is just fine, so long as they are untrusted. It encourages good coding practices. Luckily the third party software market is pretty responsive. If one app requires you to enable dozens of services by hand then it will lose in the market, as it should. I don't see the problem in the long term.
If you want a glance at that, install SELinux in non-enforcing mode and look at the log.
SELinux is a band-aid solution, running software not designed for it. If SELinux were a standard part of most Linux distros (which it likely will be some day) then this situation corrects itself. Read the spec, this provides software with their own locations for writing that is nice and contained, rather than shared space. Another nice thing is you can use VMs to allow for secure backwards compatible software during a transition (with some performance penalty).
Maybe you're the one who needs to do homework. The VoIP services to date have not been held to the same regulatory standards as regular telephone service. As for the IP service, I know what the law says, I also tried to get a DSL line from a different company once (speakeasy), after a month they gave up on getting the incumbent to actually obey said law and told me they did not have the money to go to court over it. Realistically speaking, the established players have enough ability to block newcomers and enough of a financial advantage due to the 100 of millions of tax dollars our government just handed over to them as a subsidy.
Also being a small country most ISPs have country wide networks, and good peering in London, so only use the Tier 1s for international transit.
BT is one of our bigger accounts. How this affects you is that Sprint might end up charging Netflix (or anyone else not based in the UK) for prioritized service and the cost gets passed on to you.
Where would the line stop with these laws? Would ISPs be able to prioritize VoIP traffic? Would they be able to de-prioritize peer to peer? Would they be allowed to block illegal content, such as child porn? Would they be able to block incoming viruses and worm traffic? Could they make a deal with someone like Apple to split revenue on downloaded content?
The companies against this keep trying to confuse the issue by claiming otherwise, but Quality of Service like making VoIP faster than Bittorrent would still be perfectly legal. This is strictly about traffic from given people, not using given protocols or sending some type of data. Discrimination on what is still fine, just not who. So long as they bloack child porn both from other networks and their own, they have no problem.
This really is a good idea and hopefully others will follow suit. Applications simply are not all trustworthy and the assumption that they are is a huge failing of most modern OS's. I hope they get this right. There are a lot of pieces here no one has perfected. They need restrictions, proper services between applications and to them, granular levels of trust, or ACL profiles, means of easily and accurately assigning those trust levels, and a well crafted UI for programs that want to override their trust level. Best of luck to them.
Tier 1 ISPs would not do such a thing, and is in most peering and internet exchange agreements that they don't tamper with the traffic passing through their network.
A number of tier 1 ISPs are already prioritizing traffic lower that has an origin ASN and port/protocol that matches a service that competes with theirs. This has happened twice I know of now with major VoIP services already.
Most big content providers, like google, or the BBC, already peer with lots of ISPs at all the major internet exchanges, so there are no networks in between to slow down traffic or whatever.
It only takes one customer edge provider to do this, especially in areas like most of the US where there is only one broadband ISP in the geographical region. And what about companies that aren't major service providers like Google. What about smaller players who offer some Web service or online store? Is it okay to gouge them?
The only people likely to do this are consumer ISPs, who do so at the risk of losing customers and creating bad publicity for themselves, so probably wouldn't bother.
As I said, in many cases there is no free market and no other choices, enforced by local law, or made practical by huge government subsidies. As for whether or not a large tier 1 is likely to be doing this, I happen to develop traffic monitoring, shaping, and blocking tools and this is functionality that is possible right now with our tools and about which we are routinely asked. Almost every tier 1 in the world uses our tools. I think maybe you need to wake up and look at what is actually happening out there before you start making claims like this. Net neutrality legislation may be the only thing stopping a drastic rise in the cost of online services (passed on to customers) and a large financial barrier to entry being erected to smaller players.
If you don't like what your ISP does, then move to another ISP, or start your own ISP!
Way to completely miss the point of what net neutrality legislation does. Allow me to explain. I pay a monthly fee to Comcast to provide me with internet access. Comcast has a peering agreement with AT&T who has a peering agreement with Sprint who has a peering agreement with Telus who has a peering agreement with RBD who Netflix buys their big internet pipes from (theoretically speaking). So My business relation ship is with Comcast. Suppose Sprint calls up Netflix and says, hey we want $10 million bucks or we're going to make your download service suck so badly no one will want to use it. Netfilx does not pay and as a result my ability to download video from Netflix suffers. Netflix, remember, has a business relationship with RBD. Does my switching to an AT&T DSL modem make any difference? Nope. Either way my service still sucks and it isn't the fault of company I'm doing business with or the one Netflix is doing business with that is the problem. So if Netflix pays, then they have to raise their rates to cover it and I end up paying more for the same service.
This has to do with people in the middle of the internet who have no direct business relationship with me or the person providing me with a Web service or any company either of us does business with breaking my service, after they've already been paid once. Theoretically, Comcast could complain to AT&T who could complain to Sprint to try to get them to not do that, but realistically, you could be four or five contract agreements removed from the company that is causing the problem and the market cannot work efficiently enough with that much intervening bureaucracy.
I don't think you understand what net neutrality is about, at all.
Then, when called, they say that it's up to 1 megabit. There needs to be a law stating that they have to show the average speed when they advertise a connections.
The average speed of a connection to what IP, using what protocols on what port? The way a user surfs the internet can drastically change the speed of a download, especially if some transit network in the middle is intentionally slowing that site down until the extortion money is paid.
So, suddenly, as if 'CAN-SPAM' wasn't bad enough in legitimizing spam, we'd end up with the spammers calling 'net neutrality' when some ISP tries to filter out their crap.
Core ISPs don't filter spam. Customer edge ISPs cannot be trusted to filter content appropriately, especially in the US where in most geographical locations there is only one option. If you want to filter some traffic, nothing stops them from offering a service to allow the end user to filter things, simply that they cannot discriminate as to what they automatically do.
I'm okay with ISPs filtering or doing rate limiting on traffic that starts or ends in their network.
So if, for example, AT&T were offering a VoIP service, you'd be okay with them making all competing service on their network so slow and inconsistent that they did not work, so long as at least one of the VoIP users was a direct customer of AT&T?
We're in a free market...
What ever gave you that idea. In the US, in many cases it is illegal for any company other than the local monopoly to run lines to a person's house. That's pretty bloody far from a free market. In both Canada and the US, the government has subsidized companies providing them with partially paid for fiber backbones and large chunks of money to build their infrastructure. If they don't give this to every company that asks, how is this a "free market?"
The other way is to pass the cost on to the consumer.
The cost is always passed on to the consumer, it is just who collects that cost which differs. Whether traffic is sold as a service with a flat rate, within certain parameters, or charged for by the bit, makes no difference to net neutrality. In my previous example of NetFlix, if Netflix pays the $10 million extortion fee, what happens to the prices they charge end users? it goes up. The money from the end user goes to NetFlix and then some is diverted to a man in the middle (AT&T), who has already been paid to carry traffic generically, but who is intentionally sabotaging part of that job unless they are paid extra.
If network A delivers content twice as fast as network B, they can get twice as much money out of their clients-per hour (Assuming the government regulates fair-market prices so there isn't price-gouging).
You don't understand. While ISPs may charge customers a flat rate they pay for the amount of traffic they send and receive. If one offers 10 mb/sec and the other offers 20 mb/sec connections, the second one is paying their peer twice as much each second (this is an oversimplification, but the concept is sound). The pricing scheme for how they sell that to end users is not connected to net neutrality.
I am not sure what the author means when he refers to the part of the brain that is related to "Consciousness". Neither am I clear on what the author means by the term "consciousness" here. Is consciousness, per the author, limited to the brain?
The model of human consciousness, to which the author refers is one that normally maps us to three layers, each of which corresponds to an evolutionary stage. The first layer is pain/pleasure and even very small organisms with no real brains, can respond to this sort of stimuli. The model moves on to the second layer, emotion, as a higher level of preprogrammed instinct, possessed by reptiles and other animals with brains. Basically, this is your brain reacting to a stimuli, with a simple predefined emotion. The third level, is rational thought, where we think about what we are experiencing and make decisions based upon that higher thought. This level of the brain is possessed by mammals and some other "higher" animals in differing degrees.
Here's an example situation. You're standing right in front of a bunch or rose bushes and a big, growling dog runs up to you. You take a step back and are pricked by a thorn. Your initial response to the pain is move away from the thorn to relieve the pain. Overriding that level of though is the emotion of fear, triggered by your perception of the dog as a threat. This fear is a preprogrammed response to run away from danger and hide. As a result, you push back into the rosebush ignoring the pain. A split second later your reason kicks in and you reason that if you don't show fear by cowering away, the dog is unlikely to attack, so you move back forward and hold your ground, while looking around for help, or a big rock.
"Consciousness," in humans, according to this model, is the combination of these three layers, although he seems to be ignoring the first layer. It is also important to note that this model does not mean a given layer always overrides the others and that they all act in conjunction. You might find the body language of a given person invokes the emotion of fear, which makes you angry, which leads you to react in a nonconstructive way to that person, leading you to try to get them fired. Rationally, there may be no reason for you to fear them, but that does not necessarily govern your actions. In my experience the motivation for actions is often on the emotional level, while the justification of those actions, is the rational level. People might be emotionally conditioned to dislike socialism (for example) and thus logically find reasons to justify that belief.
The model is most likely an oversimplification, but it can be useful in understanding how people think, in certain ways.
What about the emotional, vital parts of a human being...
This would be part of the second, emotional/instinctive layer.
...and what about that "inner voice" or daemon or feeling many people talk about?
This would be part of the higher, rational layer. In some variations of the model the subconscious is an independent layer from the rational layer, while in other cases it is subset of the rational and emotional layers.
I learned a lot from both it and "the tipping point" -- the width of his coverage is amazing.
So I read "the tipping point" and found it interesting, but upon looking a little harder I realized the research was very backwards. It looks like he started with a few premises, then looked specifically for data to support that, resulting in a wholly improper application of statistics. Gladwell even admits in later interviews that he no longer believes some of the concepts he espoused after seeing others evaluate the available data more scientifically. Quite simply, I don't trust either his methodology in coming to beliefs he espouses, or the data he cites to support it, since that data seems to have been chosen simply because it does suggest a possible (but unproven) connection. It is fine to speculate on subjects as he does, but he tries to make it seem pseudo-scientific, as though he were applying the trusted scientific method and understanding the world as a result, when that seems not to be the case at all.
I don't think you'll find the time wasted, even if you completely disagree.
Considering some of the crap fiction I "waste" my time on, so long as it is moderately entertaining I'm not too worried. I am a little concerned, however, that his illogical arguments by authority will mislead people and result in making poor decisions.
People are too lazy or stupid to read the proposed legislation and understand it themselves. As a result, government officials and company spokespersons can happily lie about the issue without everyone voting them out of office.
Doesn't matter, election comming, all gonna change.
I doubt it, since no one knows what the issue is, why should any politician do anything but what lobbyists are willing to pay them for?
Let companies prioritize their delivery, but when they advertise performance, they're only allowed to use the lowest common denominator. Time Warner can then stream HD stuff just for their customers, but when they advertise 4 megabits down, they aren't allowed to throttle anyone below it.
Conceptually, this might make sense, but practically, it won't work. Can Time Warner guarantee that every service over the Web will be able to send them 4 mb? Look at it this way Time Warner Advertises 4mb and delivers it. AT&T, who happens to be sitting in between Time Warner and NetFlix, calls up NetFlix and says, "give us 10 million bucks or we slow down all packets from your servers that transit our network." If Netflix complies, maybe the end user will get 4mb through their network and all the way through Time Warner's as well. If Netflix does not comply and AT&T slows them all down, Netflix download at half that, but Time Warner hasn't done anything about it.
Theoretically, this probably violates AT&T and Time Warner's peering agreement and Time Warner can complain. Realistically, however, This isn't just Netflix, AT&T and Time Warner, but a dozen different networks in between, any of which might be the one degrading service because Netflix did not pay up. How much chance is their that Time Warner will be able to influence their peer's, peer's peer's peer's peer in getting them not violate a peering agreement they have with someone six contract negotiations removed from them?
On top of all that, even if it is Time Warner doing the extortion directly, they can advertise 4mb down, but still mess with latency or other traffic aspects that they don't advertise. Even if customers are smart enough to know what is up, in many localities they may be the only service provider and the law in that locality makes it illegal for anyone else to run lines to people's houses, even if they could afford to without the huge government subsidies given to Time Warner out of our tax dollars. Realistically speaking, I think legislation or free, government run internet access is the only way to solve this.
Once again it seems that large corporations have managed to win the day because people are stupid and/or lazy. Whenever a remotely complex topic arises, they manage to confuse the issue by making claims that the topic being discussed is really something else and they're against that something else. In this way, they and politicians lobbied by them can argue against that something else, while voting against the topic at hand. People with party loyalty can simply choose to believe them, and most everyone else is confused enough by the disconnect so that the big boys get their way.
In this instance, the issue is net neutrality. Basically, it was asserted that since much of the infrastructure was funded by the government and since many of the last-mile providers have government enforced monopolies, maybe it would be wise to ensure that companies are forbidden by law from discriminating against traffic on their network based upon who sent that traffic. For example, this would mean AT&T cannot intentionally slow down or lose VoIP packets from some company unless they treat their own VoIP traffic the same way. Let me repeat the important part here. Net neutrality is about stopping discrimination based upon who sends something, not what is being sent.
So the big companies hire some PR firms to make up a new issue, which they can claim is what the net neutrality laws are really about, and which the average person might conceivably be against (since no one in their right mind could argue that net neutrality as described above is a bad idea). So they claim that Net Neutrality is about stopping telecos from discriminating based upon the type of traffic. They use the example of file sharing networks as "bad" traffic they want to be able to run slower. They use VoIP as traffic they want to ensure runs faster. All the while they make sure to outright lie and claim that the proposed net neutrality legislation would stop Quality of Service traffic shaping.
Every time an expert looks into it, this is shown to be false. How many evaluations have we had now that say QoS is not restricted by proposed net neutrality legislation? And what about encryption? Widespread deployment of encrypted tunnels makes discriminating based upon the type of traffic useless anyway, and would certainly be adopted (and has been) to foil and attempt to use QoS to discriminate. So the entire argument is bull crap.
The net result of all of this is most people who have heard of net neutrality being completely misinformed about what it is, or scratching their heads in confusion while the large network operators laugh their asses off and prepare to discriminate against competitors and start extorting money from certain Web services providers who don't have anything to do with them other than the fact that some of their traffic ends up transiting their network, providing an opportunity to waylay it like some sort of internet highwayman. Hey Canadian government, I hope you're proud of yourselves for helping to undermine the most important innovation in the last 20 years.
I strongly recommend the book and everything else Gladwell has written.
Blink has been on the verge of being added to my reading list for a long while. I've read some other stuff by Gladwell and frankly, while I found it sort of entertaining, I also thought his "logic" was spotty at best. Maybe he understands how to draw logical, supported conclusions, but he sure doesn't present it well and some of his assertions seem to be sheer nonsense. My main motivation for reading it would be to understand his arguments, so I can reasonably discuss them when next some twit at a party starts parroting them.
Comcast only charges me $11.95 / mo. for their DVR...
They charge you that on top of a $60/month subscription fee. In return, they can make your DVR just barely useful enough to keep other players out. If Tivo dies watch them jack up the prices or remove functionality by adding more and more shows you're not allowed to record, or skip commercial in. Comcast's interest is in maintaining their monopoly so they can keep gouging you that $60/month and then in making you watch as many commercials as possible. Anyone who goes with Comcast for their DVR is just helping a monopolist screw us all over in the long term.
The good thing about this is that it shows that the market is moving to an iTunes distribution model, and that kind of competition will only help everyone. iTunes is the competition space here though, not Netflix
Netflix is competition in that they offer streaming movies now and also in that their interests are directly opposed to those of the cable company. I could buy copies of the movies and series I really like and rent those I want to see once via Netflix a lot less expensively than paying a monthly cable bill. The problem is, they've tied their local monopoly on fast pipes with their TV service. It costs me more money to get just an internet connection than it does to get internet and TV. We need a truly neutral last mile before any of these service can take off.
However, if those users suddenly switched to Linux, it's doubtful that their practices would stop - they'd still install whichever distribution looked the best, installed 134 unneeded services and enabled them all by default, open unsafe attachments, and never update their computer.
I disagree with this. One of MS's largest security problems is their monopoly. First, the monoculture makes rapidly spreading viruses easy. Second, it detaches MS from motivation to solve customer problems. A significant number of people just aren't going to move to another OS, so while MS is motivated to make customers think they are taking steps, they have no real motivation to be effective in stopping malware.
This same situation does not hold true for Linux, or really any other OS. If lots of users are being compromised on a given Linux distro, the maintainers have direct motivation to solve that problem because they are being paid to do support and keep customers happy, or because they are users of that OS and don't want malware infecting their own machine. Currently, some Linux distros are lax when it comes to security, but they also don't have a real problem. If it became an everyday problem, they would fix it.
In every operating system I've seen yet, security is an inconvenience. While you and I think that the tradeoff is worth it, we will always be outnumbered by people who think that it isn't.
This just isn't so. Different OS's make different security decisions, some of which negatively affect usability, but this need not be the case. Not all security reduces usability and some of it increases usability. Turning off unneeded services by default, or not making local services run on the network for no reason are good security choices that don't reduce usability, in general. There are a lot more steps that can be taken that combined with other technologies result in a net increase in security. For example, a centralized package manager that keeps applications up to date is a security boon, and makes life easier for users. No one has yet done this 100% right, but if insecure applications that were not managed by the centralized package manager were a major issue on Linux, it would be solved.
People who log in as "Administrator" would just as quickly read their email and browse porn sites as "root".
Only if you were stupid enough to make root the default user account. Most users don't know or care about an administrator or root account. They don't care about accounts in general. They are one person, why should they have multiple identities. Providing new users with appropriate default permissions and appropriate information and options when they need to exceed those permissions is part of good security design. I have little doubt the problem of common malware can be mostly defeated by a good application of current technologies, if there is motivation to do so. If Linux were the most common OS, there would be such motivation.
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Your rant is pointless. No one besides Microsoft, even Apple, has figured out how to render fonts properly.
It's funny because I know two people who cited better looking fonts as one reason they switched away from Windows. I actually have both IE+WinXP and Safari+OS X running on this same monitor and I prefer the look of the fonts in OS X. Maybe you need to look at your font settings if you're having problems.
Sadly I fear OS's of the future will be much like OS's of today, at least for the common man. MS still has no incentive to really make OS's better for consumers instead of better for MS and a lot of incentive to make their Windows OS's more and more restrictive. They know their model is slowly being undermined, but they plan to use .Net to effectively create the internet equivalent and lock everyone into one online platform instead. Other companies still have little motivation to invest in the desktop OS market and decreasing motivation to invest in the Server OS market.
I predict we will still have the same glacially slow pace of improvement as we've had for the last decade, with a lot of foot dragging and backwards steps as MS does their best to hold us all in the past. In 2015 I predict the mainstream OS from MS will finally support spell checking in every .net application from the same dictionary. They may even support other common features like grammar checking, but it will still be hard for developers to add arbitrary functions. I predict security will still be an issue and MS's solution for determining the trust of a given application will be broken and abused for anti-competative reasons. Further, configuring the permissions for an application will be painful, lack granularity, and still be something users have to worry about.
There is some hope. Maybe outside of the US, Linux or some other OS will rise to supremacy, and major corporations will carry the effort to progress beyond Window's artificial limitations. Maybe enough people will buy Mac's so that the market share undermines MS's monopoly and the free market brings innovation again. I have serious doubts however.
But like the GP said, what often matters to the purchaser is the overall price, not the value per dollar. If you're a parent buying a car for your kid, you're probably going to prefer the $12,000 Honda over the $50,000 BMW, even if customizing the Honda to have all the same features as the BMW would cost far more than $50k.
I'd prefer the Honda, but not just because of price. Reliability and likely future costs are important considerations. Realistically, the BMW is more likely to break in the next few years and if it does the repairs will be a lot more expensive. The Honda will last as long, maybe longer. The insurance on the Honda will probably cost a lot less.
Comparing a Honda to a more expensive BWM makes sense, placing the Mac as a BMW and an HP machine as a Honda, but another important comparison would be a Toyota versus a Ford; with the Toyota being a Mac and the Dell being a Ford. The Mac cost slightly more and has a few nicer features. The Dell is made out of junk parts, poorly tested and will break if you sneeze at it. In the long run, the cost of ownership will be a lot higher. I mean have you people ever bought Dells in quantity. They have very high failure rates and the parts are whatever was cheapest that day. 100 machines of the same model might ship with 3 different brands of hard drives, three different network cards, two different video controller cards, etc., etc. All of them are bottom of the barrel parts. A lot people look at the specifications for a machine and equate 100 Gig hard drive with 100 gig hard drive, but when one of those is a Hitachi and one is a Seagate, well one might be likely to last a year and another likely to last six years. Anyone comparing a Mac against a Dell who does not take that into account is missing out on a lot of the real value involved.
Apple is missing out on a lot of sales by not offering anything in these price ranges.
Yeah, and so are other reputable vendors with valuable brands who refuse to sell junk that is likely to break very soon. Apple loses out on a lot of sales by not offering a product to meet a specific need, but they are medium sized company and simply cannot maintain enough hardware to compete with every other hardware vendor on the market. They focus on a few specific markets and if you need some given feature the chances are you may have to get something more than you need in other areas. This is a problem with all vendors, but especially for Apple because they are the only one's that run OS X.
If the US populace would get off their asses and clean house by refusing to elect any incumbents that are democrats or republican and would vote for reform of election and lobbying laws, maybe we could get an unbiased court system that would break up MS's monopoly. Then Apple would have no need to bundle OS X with hardware and the market would strongly push them to unbundle it. In the mean time Apple has to make tough choices, and so do consumers.
Disabling it doesn't put the money back into my pocket, or spend it on things that are more likely to be usable.
The same could be argued for USB ports five years ago. Being a little forward thinking is the reason why Macs tend to remain in use longer than PCs bought at the same time. Some people don't want a monitor at all, why should a video card be included in every mac sold? Some people just want to use it over the network with terminals. There will always be some function of a computer (like wifi) some person doesn't want but ends up paying for.
There's the difference. The _vast_ majority of desktop PCs derive no benefit from having wifi included by default.
Are you joking? Most home users do not want to run cables and put in ethernet ports or pay to have that done. Hell, I'm about as technical as anyone you'll meet, and I have an ancient tower with a wi-fi card in it sitting right next to my router and wireless station. I never bothered plugging a cable into the back of both of them for faster transfer since that is almost never my bottleneck. The vast majority of PCs will be needing wi-fi in the next few years if they don't already.
They will never use it, because cheaper, faster, more reliable wired networking infrastructure already exists and is no less convenient to connect to.
Freeing the placement of the computer from the placement of the TV/cable box, or the DSL line is a huge benefit to most people.
One cannot make the same argument for the seats in a car or many other "options" in computers like, say, DVD drives.
He said heated seats, not seats in general.
The arguments for non-optional wifi in *desktop PCs* are weak, at best.
The arguments against wifi apply only to a subset of people and only if you do not look to the future. If you move to any town in my county, wouldn't it be nice to be able to get some internet access before your cable service is installed. Gee, with the free county-wide coverage, you can. My county is by no means the only location with such a project. Get with the times.
My powerbook is my workhorse. But, I would like to see a OSX on a Thinkpad. Reliable OS on reliable hardware.
For the last several years our standard options for laptops here at work have been Powerbooks and Thinkpads. If you wanted a laptop, that was your choice. Both are near the top of the heap for reliability according to consumer reports. Operations just mentioned something the other day, and I guess the powerbooks (now a mix of Macbooks and Macbook pros) are still winning the reliability race by a hair, largely due to two major recalls of power supplies for the Thinkpads. My point is, objectively, I'm not sure you can just make the assumption that Thinkpads are more reliable.
This would be a design anti-feature. On Windows the assumption is that only one program will be visible on a screen at a time. This is because they all replicate the menus in the window taking up space and making it really annoying if they are not always maximized all the time. For OS X, this need not be the case and it is useless to take up space you don't need in many instances. Thus, Apple leaves the function of the zoom button up to the developer to decide. Sometimes this means they implement the zoom to fit to content and it is much, much nicer than the same behavior on Windows. Sometimes this means the developer makes a bad choice and does not maximize when that would be better. This is a flaw with the individual application, not with OS X. I agree that some of the apps misuse this including several from Apple. File a bug on the app, don't try taking away the functionality from everyone.
Barring the creation of a better technological solution, Apple is doing the right thing with this. Multi-button mice make sense for power users. Your hand is already off the keyboard using the mouse, so extra buttons can be mapped to extra features and it is faster. Multiple buttons on a laptop do not make usability sense. Currently, they cannot be customized for novice users and multiple buttons are one of the most common usability problems for users in general. Combined with current development practices, a multi-button mouse as the standard leads to less functional programs. Gee thanks WordPad for taking up that second mouse button with completely useless crap instead of letting me assign useful functions to TextEdit like I do on OS X. Finally, because your hands are already on the keyboard when using a trackpad and buttons, chording with a keyboard button is actually faster than having multiple buttons, it is just slightly harder to learn. For power users this should not be an issue. For novices, the multiple buttons are a net loss. So who benefits? Only those people who are sort of power users and would use multiple buttons, but who are not able to learn to use chording.
So, I assert that with current designs, what they have is the best option. Better yet would be a solution like the mighty mouse, where people are allowed to enable or disable multiple buttons in software, but which physically look like one button so as not to confuse novices. Slightly less ideal would be a solution where a user can drop in a replacement set of buttons, which is not default. Both of these, however, would be less benefit for the work than the mighty mouse is. I recommend you actually try using chording. Once you are used to it, it is measurably faster than multiple trackpad buttons.
As it is, I run Windows for the games or I run GNU/Linux so I guess I'm not the target consumer
Half the people I know switched from Linux to OS X. You can still buy a Mac and then run Windows and/or Linux in a variety of ways including on a separate partition, through a VM, or both. With both Parallels and VMWare racing to get graphics card acceleration working in their VM modes, you might even find it more convenient than running Linux/Windows in the near future. Wouldn't it be nice to not have to reboot to play any Windows game? Also, WINE and the like are progressing on OS X providing similar levels of Windows API re-implementation and at least one company is concentrating on that code for quick and dirty ports of Windows games. I'd argue that right now Windows gaming is better on a Mac than on a Linux PC and the situation actually looks to be getting better for the foreseeable future.
However if you use PCs for real experimental science, computers are supposed to gather data. Good luck finding drivers for specialized hardware for Macs.
This is actually pretty funny. I know a research biochemist and while visiting the lab, several times he had to walk across the hall to the other lab, where the workstation was a mac. The reason, a lot of the software including the control setup for much of the really expensive hardware, only runs on the mac.
From my experience specialized tools for the sciences are all dependent upon which of the sciences you're looking at. For biology, audio research, linguistics, and now much of physics, you're a lot more likely to find a mac version than a Windows version of research software. For mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, or CAD, you're a lot more likely to find Windows software.
However, that's going to destroy usability because none of the apps will be able to talk to one another. Which sounds to me like TFA is just not digging in deep enough to what is really going on. Otherwise, they are going to be creating A LOT more work than they really need to...
This doesn't stop apps from talking to each other, it just allows the OS to restrict unwanted or unneeded talking between apps. I, for one, don't want my first person shooter talking to my e-mail server without my permission.
Also, with such a hugely fundamental change to how applications function in the OS, what current software is going to work with it?
Software needs to be rewritten to work with this scheme, although it is possible to have wrappers for legacy software, or VMs. For some software, this will be little or no work, while for others it will be a lot of work.
RTFA. This only protects "against" benign software.
I did better than RTFA, I read the bitfrost spec. It is designed to protect against numerous types of malicious software. For example, the spec calls for protection against the machine being used to send spam by a worm. That is in fact, one of the examples in the spec.
Intentionally malicious software has a few hurdles to jump over, but at least the app permission part requires the cooperation of the software in question. In other words: It protects against misbehaving or misappropriated software only.
I'm not sure I follow you. A worm is generally classified as "malware." The "mal" in "malware" stands for "malicious" the opposite of "benign." It is certainly supposed to defend against malicious software.
Plus it's only a matter of time before the first solitaire clone ships with a "request everything available (and not conflicting with their simple limits model)" setting, because the app dev was too lazy to tie things down.
Why would a solitaire app need to tie things down to not run afoul of the defenses? Making a system that makes improperly designed apps hard to use is just fine, so long as they are untrusted. It encourages good coding practices. Luckily the third party software market is pretty responsive. If one app requires you to enable dozens of services by hand then it will lose in the market, as it should. I don't see the problem in the long term.
If you want a glance at that, install SELinux in non-enforcing mode and look at the log.
SELinux is a band-aid solution, running software not designed for it. If SELinux were a standard part of most Linux distros (which it likely will be some day) then this situation corrects itself. Read the spec, this provides software with their own locations for writing that is nice and contained, rather than shared space. Another nice thing is you can use VMs to allow for secure backwards compatible software during a transition (with some performance penalty).
Maybe you're the one who needs to do homework. The VoIP services to date have not been held to the same regulatory standards as regular telephone service. As for the IP service, I know what the law says, I also tried to get a DSL line from a different company once (speakeasy), after a month they gave up on getting the incumbent to actually obey said law and told me they did not have the money to go to court over it. Realistically speaking, the established players have enough ability to block newcomers and enough of a financial advantage due to the 100 of millions of tax dollars our government just handed over to them as a subsidy.
Also being a small country most ISPs have country wide networks, and good peering in London, so only use the Tier 1s for international transit.
BT is one of our bigger accounts. How this affects you is that Sprint might end up charging Netflix (or anyone else not based in the UK) for prioritized service and the cost gets passed on to you.
Where would the line stop with these laws? Would ISPs be able to prioritize VoIP traffic? Would they be able to de-prioritize peer to peer? Would they be allowed to block illegal content, such as child porn? Would they be able to block incoming viruses and worm traffic? Could they make a deal with someone like Apple to split revenue on downloaded content?
The companies against this keep trying to confuse the issue by claiming otherwise, but Quality of Service like making VoIP faster than Bittorrent would still be perfectly legal. This is strictly about traffic from given people, not using given protocols or sending some type of data. Discrimination on what is still fine, just not who. So long as they bloack child porn both from other networks and their own, they have no problem.
This really is a good idea and hopefully others will follow suit. Applications simply are not all trustworthy and the assumption that they are is a huge failing of most modern OS's. I hope they get this right. There are a lot of pieces here no one has perfected. They need restrictions, proper services between applications and to them, granular levels of trust, or ACL profiles, means of easily and accurately assigning those trust levels, and a well crafted UI for programs that want to override their trust level. Best of luck to them.
Tier 1 ISPs would not do such a thing, and is in most peering and internet exchange agreements that they don't tamper with the traffic passing through their network.
A number of tier 1 ISPs are already prioritizing traffic lower that has an origin ASN and port/protocol that matches a service that competes with theirs. This has happened twice I know of now with major VoIP services already.
Most big content providers, like google, or the BBC, already peer with lots of ISPs at all the major internet exchanges, so there are no networks in between to slow down traffic or whatever.
It only takes one customer edge provider to do this, especially in areas like most of the US where there is only one broadband ISP in the geographical region. And what about companies that aren't major service providers like Google. What about smaller players who offer some Web service or online store? Is it okay to gouge them?
The only people likely to do this are consumer ISPs, who do so at the risk of losing customers and creating bad publicity for themselves, so probably wouldn't bother.
As I said, in many cases there is no free market and no other choices, enforced by local law, or made practical by huge government subsidies. As for whether or not a large tier 1 is likely to be doing this, I happen to develop traffic monitoring, shaping, and blocking tools and this is functionality that is possible right now with our tools and about which we are routinely asked. Almost every tier 1 in the world uses our tools. I think maybe you need to wake up and look at what is actually happening out there before you start making claims like this. Net neutrality legislation may be the only thing stopping a drastic rise in the cost of online services (passed on to customers) and a large financial barrier to entry being erected to smaller players.
If you don't like what your ISP does, then move to another ISP, or start your own ISP!
Way to completely miss the point of what net neutrality legislation does. Allow me to explain. I pay a monthly fee to Comcast to provide me with internet access. Comcast has a peering agreement with AT&T who has a peering agreement with Sprint who has a peering agreement with Telus who has a peering agreement with RBD who Netflix buys their big internet pipes from (theoretically speaking). So My business relation ship is with Comcast. Suppose Sprint calls up Netflix and says, hey we want $10 million bucks or we're going to make your download service suck so badly no one will want to use it. Netfilx does not pay and as a result my ability to download video from Netflix suffers. Netflix, remember, has a business relationship with RBD. Does my switching to an AT&T DSL modem make any difference? Nope. Either way my service still sucks and it isn't the fault of company I'm doing business with or the one Netflix is doing business with that is the problem. So if Netflix pays, then they have to raise their rates to cover it and I end up paying more for the same service.
This has to do with people in the middle of the internet who have no direct business relationship with me or the person providing me with a Web service or any company either of us does business with breaking my service, after they've already been paid once. Theoretically, Comcast could complain to AT&T who could complain to Sprint to try to get them to not do that, but realistically, you could be four or five contract agreements removed from the company that is causing the problem and the market cannot work efficiently enough with that much intervening bureaucracy.
Now do you understand?
I don't think you understand what net neutrality is about, at all.
Then, when called, they say that it's up to 1 megabit. There needs to be a law stating that they have to show the average speed when they advertise a connections.
The average speed of a connection to what IP, using what protocols on what port? The way a user surfs the internet can drastically change the speed of a download, especially if some transit network in the middle is intentionally slowing that site down until the extortion money is paid.
So, suddenly, as if 'CAN-SPAM' wasn't bad enough in legitimizing spam, we'd end up with the spammers calling 'net neutrality' when some ISP tries to filter out their crap.
Core ISPs don't filter spam. Customer edge ISPs cannot be trusted to filter content appropriately, especially in the US where in most geographical locations there is only one option. If you want to filter some traffic, nothing stops them from offering a service to allow the end user to filter things, simply that they cannot discriminate as to what they automatically do.
I'm okay with ISPs filtering or doing rate limiting on traffic that starts or ends in their network.
So if, for example, AT&T were offering a VoIP service, you'd be okay with them making all competing service on their network so slow and inconsistent that they did not work, so long as at least one of the VoIP users was a direct customer of AT&T?
We're in a free market...
What ever gave you that idea. In the US, in many cases it is illegal for any company other than the local monopoly to run lines to a person's house. That's pretty bloody far from a free market. In both Canada and the US, the government has subsidized companies providing them with partially paid for fiber backbones and large chunks of money to build their infrastructure. If they don't give this to every company that asks, how is this a "free market?"
The other way is to pass the cost on to the consumer.
The cost is always passed on to the consumer, it is just who collects that cost which differs. Whether traffic is sold as a service with a flat rate, within certain parameters, or charged for by the bit, makes no difference to net neutrality. In my previous example of NetFlix, if Netflix pays the $10 million extortion fee, what happens to the prices they charge end users? it goes up. The money from the end user goes to NetFlix and then some is diverted to a man in the middle (AT&T), who has already been paid to carry traffic generically, but who is intentionally sabotaging part of that job unless they are paid extra.
If network A delivers content twice as fast as network B, they can get twice as much money out of their clients-per hour (Assuming the government regulates fair-market prices so there isn't price-gouging).
You don't understand. While ISPs may charge customers a flat rate they pay for the amount of traffic they send and receive. If one offers 10 mb/sec and the other offers 20 mb/sec connections, the second one is paying their peer twice as much each second (this is an oversimplification, but the concept is sound). The pricing scheme for how they sell that to end users is not connected to net neutrality.
I am not sure what the author means when he refers to the part of the brain that is related to "Consciousness". Neither am I clear on what the author means by the term "consciousness" here. Is consciousness, per the author, limited to the brain?
The model of human consciousness, to which the author refers is one that normally maps us to three layers, each of which corresponds to an evolutionary stage. The first layer is pain/pleasure and even very small organisms with no real brains, can respond to this sort of stimuli. The model moves on to the second layer, emotion, as a higher level of preprogrammed instinct, possessed by reptiles and other animals with brains. Basically, this is your brain reacting to a stimuli, with a simple predefined emotion. The third level, is rational thought, where we think about what we are experiencing and make decisions based upon that higher thought. This level of the brain is possessed by mammals and some other "higher" animals in differing degrees.
Here's an example situation. You're standing right in front of a bunch or rose bushes and a big, growling dog runs up to you. You take a step back and are pricked by a thorn. Your initial response to the pain is move away from the thorn to relieve the pain. Overriding that level of though is the emotion of fear, triggered by your perception of the dog as a threat. This fear is a preprogrammed response to run away from danger and hide. As a result, you push back into the rosebush ignoring the pain. A split second later your reason kicks in and you reason that if you don't show fear by cowering away, the dog is unlikely to attack, so you move back forward and hold your ground, while looking around for help, or a big rock.
"Consciousness," in humans, according to this model, is the combination of these three layers, although he seems to be ignoring the first layer. It is also important to note that this model does not mean a given layer always overrides the others and that they all act in conjunction. You might find the body language of a given person invokes the emotion of fear, which makes you angry, which leads you to react in a nonconstructive way to that person, leading you to try to get them fired. Rationally, there may be no reason for you to fear them, but that does not necessarily govern your actions. In my experience the motivation for actions is often on the emotional level, while the justification of those actions, is the rational level. People might be emotionally conditioned to dislike socialism (for example) and thus logically find reasons to justify that belief.
The model is most likely an oversimplification, but it can be useful in understanding how people think, in certain ways.
What about the emotional, vital parts of a human being...
This would be part of the second, emotional/instinctive layer.
This would be part of the higher, rational layer. In some variations of the model the subconscious is an independent layer from the rational layer, while in other cases it is subset of the rational and emotional layers.
I learned a lot from both it and "the tipping point" -- the width of his coverage is amazing.
So I read "the tipping point" and found it interesting, but upon looking a little harder I realized the research was very backwards. It looks like he started with a few premises, then looked specifically for data to support that, resulting in a wholly improper application of statistics. Gladwell even admits in later interviews that he no longer believes some of the concepts he espoused after seeing others evaluate the available data more scientifically. Quite simply, I don't trust either his methodology in coming to beliefs he espouses, or the data he cites to support it, since that data seems to have been chosen simply because it does suggest a possible (but unproven) connection. It is fine to speculate on subjects as he does, but he tries to make it seem pseudo-scientific, as though he were applying the trusted scientific method and understanding the world as a result, when that seems not to be the case at all.
I don't think you'll find the time wasted, even if you completely disagree.
Considering some of the crap fiction I "waste" my time on, so long as it is moderately entertaining I'm not too worried. I am a little concerned, however, that his illogical arguments by authority will mislead people and result in making poor decisions.
Stupid or lazy?
People are too lazy or stupid to read the proposed legislation and understand it themselves. As a result, government officials and company spokespersons can happily lie about the issue without everyone voting them out of office.
Doesn't matter, election comming, all gonna change.
I doubt it, since no one knows what the issue is, why should any politician do anything but what lobbyists are willing to pay them for?
Let companies prioritize their delivery, but when they advertise performance, they're only allowed to use the lowest common denominator. Time Warner can then stream HD stuff just for their customers, but when they advertise 4 megabits down, they aren't allowed to throttle anyone below it.
Conceptually, this might make sense, but practically, it won't work. Can Time Warner guarantee that every service over the Web will be able to send them 4 mb? Look at it this way Time Warner Advertises 4mb and delivers it. AT&T, who happens to be sitting in between Time Warner and NetFlix, calls up NetFlix and says, "give us 10 million bucks or we slow down all packets from your servers that transit our network." If Netflix complies, maybe the end user will get 4mb through their network and all the way through Time Warner's as well. If Netflix does not comply and AT&T slows them all down, Netflix download at half that, but Time Warner hasn't done anything about it.
Theoretically, this probably violates AT&T and Time Warner's peering agreement and Time Warner can complain. Realistically, however, This isn't just Netflix, AT&T and Time Warner, but a dozen different networks in between, any of which might be the one degrading service because Netflix did not pay up. How much chance is their that Time Warner will be able to influence their peer's, peer's peer's peer's peer in getting them not violate a peering agreement they have with someone six contract negotiations removed from them?
On top of all that, even if it is Time Warner doing the extortion directly, they can advertise 4mb down, but still mess with latency or other traffic aspects that they don't advertise. Even if customers are smart enough to know what is up, in many localities they may be the only service provider and the law in that locality makes it illegal for anyone else to run lines to people's houses, even if they could afford to without the huge government subsidies given to Time Warner out of our tax dollars. Realistically speaking, I think legislation or free, government run internet access is the only way to solve this.
Once again it seems that large corporations have managed to win the day because people are stupid and/or lazy. Whenever a remotely complex topic arises, they manage to confuse the issue by making claims that the topic being discussed is really something else and they're against that something else. In this way, they and politicians lobbied by them can argue against that something else, while voting against the topic at hand. People with party loyalty can simply choose to believe them, and most everyone else is confused enough by the disconnect so that the big boys get their way.
In this instance, the issue is net neutrality. Basically, it was asserted that since much of the infrastructure was funded by the government and since many of the last-mile providers have government enforced monopolies, maybe it would be wise to ensure that companies are forbidden by law from discriminating against traffic on their network based upon who sent that traffic. For example, this would mean AT&T cannot intentionally slow down or lose VoIP packets from some company unless they treat their own VoIP traffic the same way. Let me repeat the important part here. Net neutrality is about stopping discrimination based upon who sends something, not what is being sent.
So the big companies hire some PR firms to make up a new issue, which they can claim is what the net neutrality laws are really about, and which the average person might conceivably be against (since no one in their right mind could argue that net neutrality as described above is a bad idea). So they claim that Net Neutrality is about stopping telecos from discriminating based upon the type of traffic. They use the example of file sharing networks as "bad" traffic they want to be able to run slower. They use VoIP as traffic they want to ensure runs faster. All the while they make sure to outright lie and claim that the proposed net neutrality legislation would stop Quality of Service traffic shaping.
Every time an expert looks into it, this is shown to be false. How many evaluations have we had now that say QoS is not restricted by proposed net neutrality legislation? And what about encryption? Widespread deployment of encrypted tunnels makes discriminating based upon the type of traffic useless anyway, and would certainly be adopted (and has been) to foil and attempt to use QoS to discriminate. So the entire argument is bull crap.
The net result of all of this is most people who have heard of net neutrality being completely misinformed about what it is, or scratching their heads in confusion while the large network operators laugh their asses off and prepare to discriminate against competitors and start extorting money from certain Web services providers who don't have anything to do with them other than the fact that some of their traffic ends up transiting their network, providing an opportunity to waylay it like some sort of internet highwayman. Hey Canadian government, I hope you're proud of yourselves for helping to undermine the most important innovation in the last 20 years.
I strongly recommend the book and everything else Gladwell has written.
Blink has been on the verge of being added to my reading list for a long while. I've read some other stuff by Gladwell and frankly, while I found it sort of entertaining, I also thought his "logic" was spotty at best. Maybe he understands how to draw logical, supported conclusions, but he sure doesn't present it well and some of his assertions seem to be sheer nonsense. My main motivation for reading it would be to understand his arguments, so I can reasonably discuss them when next some twit at a party starts parroting them.
Comcast only charges me $11.95 / mo. for their DVR...
They charge you that on top of a $60/month subscription fee. In return, they can make your DVR just barely useful enough to keep other players out. If Tivo dies watch them jack up the prices or remove functionality by adding more and more shows you're not allowed to record, or skip commercial in. Comcast's interest is in maintaining their monopoly so they can keep gouging you that $60/month and then in making you watch as many commercials as possible. Anyone who goes with Comcast for their DVR is just helping a monopolist screw us all over in the long term.
The good thing about this is that it shows that the market is moving to an iTunes distribution model, and that kind of competition will only help everyone. iTunes is the competition space here though, not Netflix
Netflix is competition in that they offer streaming movies now and also in that their interests are directly opposed to those of the cable company. I could buy copies of the movies and series I really like and rent those I want to see once via Netflix a lot less expensively than paying a monthly cable bill. The problem is, they've tied their local monopoly on fast pipes with their TV service. It costs me more money to get just an internet connection than it does to get internet and TV. We need a truly neutral last mile before any of these service can take off.
However, if those users suddenly switched to Linux, it's doubtful that their practices would stop - they'd still install whichever distribution looked the best, installed 134 unneeded services and enabled them all by default, open unsafe attachments, and never update their computer.
I disagree with this. One of MS's largest security problems is their monopoly. First, the monoculture makes rapidly spreading viruses easy. Second, it detaches MS from motivation to solve customer problems. A significant number of people just aren't going to move to another OS, so while MS is motivated to make customers think they are taking steps, they have no real motivation to be effective in stopping malware.
This same situation does not hold true for Linux, or really any other OS. If lots of users are being compromised on a given Linux distro, the maintainers have direct motivation to solve that problem because they are being paid to do support and keep customers happy, or because they are users of that OS and don't want malware infecting their own machine. Currently, some Linux distros are lax when it comes to security, but they also don't have a real problem. If it became an everyday problem, they would fix it.
In every operating system I've seen yet, security is an inconvenience. While you and I think that the tradeoff is worth it, we will always be outnumbered by people who think that it isn't.
This just isn't so. Different OS's make different security decisions, some of which negatively affect usability, but this need not be the case. Not all security reduces usability and some of it increases usability. Turning off unneeded services by default, or not making local services run on the network for no reason are good security choices that don't reduce usability, in general. There are a lot more steps that can be taken that combined with other technologies result in a net increase in security. For example, a centralized package manager that keeps applications up to date is a security boon, and makes life easier for users. No one has yet done this 100% right, but if insecure applications that were not managed by the centralized package manager were a major issue on Linux, it would be solved.
People who log in as "Administrator" would just as quickly read their email and browse porn sites as "root".
Only if you were stupid enough to make root the default user account. Most users don't know or care about an administrator or root account. They don't care about accounts in general. They are one person, why should they have multiple identities. Providing new users with appropriate default permissions and appropriate information and options when they need to exceed those permissions is part of good security design. I have little doubt the problem of common malware can be mostly defeated by a good application of current technologies, if there is motivation to do so. If Linux were the most common OS, there would be such motivation.