Where, aside from Apple, can I buy a multi button mouse that is also a single button mouse that won't confuse my grandmother and will switch modes based upon my user preferences? Where else can I get a mouse with a roller ball built in instead of a scroll wheel? Don't get me wrong... I'm not going to buy one of these, but pretending that it is not innovative is being obtuse.
Apple has, and still does, ship with a single button mouse by default. This particular mouse ships in single button mode by default. The reason for this is to force developers to do the right thing with their UI designs. It has worked pretty well so far and the only people I ever hear complaining about it are people who don't have macs in the first place. Most of them are under the delusion that you can't just plug in a a multi-button mouse and have it work perfectly.
So just as a thank you to Apple for shipping with one button as the default... Ha Ha your second button is useless in 90% of applications because the people who wrote notepad [insert application name here] didn't know what to put there! Mine is useful all the time sucker!
The acid test is a great idea, but it has intentional errors that are supposed to be handled gracefully. Firefox renders it poorly in my opinion, but that is still head and shoulders above IE7 which is much, much worse.
The acid test, however, is an academic ideal. It is doable, but not necessary in order for a browser to render CSS sites well enough to be usable. The last CSS project I did worked just fine, with little or no tweaking, on every major browser except IE, which completely failed to implement the spec well enough to show any of the formatting. Failure to pass the Acid test is not the problem. Failure to implement the majority of the specifications that tiny companies manage to implement just fine is. It is especially a problem when you hold a monopoly in the space and are single handedly holding back the progress of the internet as a rich and flexible medium. It's like a company with a monopoly on cars who refuses to add seat belts, drink holders, or lug nuts saying, "Yeah some of you have been complaining so we're going to try to add some circular spots on the dash so your drink does not fall over as easily." It is not enough and it is bad for everyone and everything except their bottom line.
Now you come along with the equivalent of, "Here you guys are complaining about their cars being way behind but your seat belts only improve head on collision survival by 20%. And you wonder why no one listens to you?" Brilliant!
Microsoft tries to improve it's product, which everyone has been asking them to do for years, and now we should Boycott it?
I had to automate the translation of a bunch of well-formed but brittle XML coming out of a professional layout application to XHTML and CSS for web pages and a help system. I thought, "well gee this should be easy." A short while later I fired up Firefox and took a look. Well it needed a little bit of tweaking to clear up a typo or two, and to get things looking just right. Next came the compatibility testing. WC3 validator, Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera, and Lynx were my targets with a variety of versions and OS's. Everything looked just fine with the exception of Lynx which understandably could not display some of the graphic elements and IE which could not display any of the custom styles I had defined. I found one minor compliance bug in all of the browsers, but I was absolutely astounded that IE could not display any of the formatting except the few that coincided with valid plain old HTML.
I had to go through the whole system and downgrade everything to plain old HTML, and the few features I absolutely had to have working I had to go to great pains to generate, by hand, in the source file. In fact three people here spend a lot of their time manually working around IE's failure to comply to the CSS spec. Several of the less critical features I just left the way they should be and IE users can do without them.
MS says that they will fix the biggest outstanding bugs and try to comply more with the spec. By biggest, they mean the features people actually use, but that IE screws up due to its half-assed implementation of a feature. I've heard little or nothing about implementing all the parts of the spec that no one uses because IE does not support it at all.
I'd be willing to give some kudos to MS and regard it as a worthwhile browser if the next time I do a project like this IE is not the only currently developed browser I can find that can't seem to properly implement the spec even though they have 10 times the developers and money of any other project. If IE actually works, without a pile of work arounds, well great.
Until that time, I'll convert everyone I can to any other browser and I'll not support any friends or family who insist on using it.
MS can talk all they want, but thus far we have been given empty promises and no commitment to do the right thing. Better CSS is just not good enough unless it is a reasonable attempt at actually implementing the spec. Anything else is just giving up beating your wife on Sundays. Don't expect any praise.
I haven't seen a user confused by a multi-button mouse in well, over ten years.
Having a single button on the mouse is easier for clueless newbies it's one less thing for them to worry about. It's easier for children who have small hands. It's easier of lefties who otherwise need a different mouse or configuration (think public terminals and labs). It's easier for the elderly who have trouble with their hands. It is easier for the disabled who use alternate input devices. It is easier for people using voice recognition since it places all the functions in the standard menus (which voice recognition uses as input options).
Maybe you prefer multiple buttons and maybe most people do. I know I would dread not having all my mouse buttons. And that is exactly why I don't want them to ship with multiple buttons by default. If they did, my second button would be as useless as it is in Windows. Developers would put needed functionality there, it would cease to customizable, and all my useful scripts, shortcuts, services, that I set up for each application I use regularly would be unavailable to me. Instead I'd have whatever crap the developer decided I should have. The developer doesn't know what I'm doing or how I do it. They don't know what functions I use regularly. Let me populate my right-click menus thank you very much. If that means I have to buy a new mouse to go with each new mac I buy, so be it. I always do that anyway since I like trackballs with four buttons.
It will be a sad day when Apple ships a two button mouse by default. Any I'll be shopping for a five button mouse and cursing them all the way.
Say you have a link to a file on a web page, and you want to download it to your hard drive. Using the one button mouse you have to hold down a key on the keyboard (either ctrl or alt or open-apple, it's been a while since I've used a mac) to bring up the "save link target as" option you need.
Tell me that's more intuitive then the Windows/Linux right-click menu.
It is more intuitive to just click on the link, then the browser prompts you for where you want to save it. Or if it is the link URL you want to save, just drag it where you want it.
Now tell me this if Apple ships two button mice, by default, on most of their systems will developers write programs where using the right-click button is the only way to get to certain functionality? Personally I'm pretty sure it would happen. There are already a few applications that require right-clicking to use (Maya and Shake come to mind). Given that such functionality will be right-click-only how do you expect touch screen users, disabled users, and voice recognition system users will access the functionality?
More importantly, why do you think the developer of the program will be more knowledgeable about what should be in the right-click menu, than the end user? Personally, my right-click menus are full of scripts, services, shortcuts, and other applications that I use with a given application. Why would I want to lose all that functionality to be replaced with what the develop thought I would want? What about applications where there is nothing useful in the right-click menu? Should I effectively have one less button to use when using certain applications because the developers did not have anything good to put there? No thanks. I use all my mouse buttons and I don't want to have to buy a five button mouse and start working out my pinky finger because you want a to save a few seconds once by having two buttons by default.
...once Apple had grudgingly allowed the Control-Click thing, all its systems accepted multi-button mice without any adjustment at all. Apple gave up the point, but continued to include one-button mice just to be contrary. Er, I mean "Different."
Nope, they refused to ship multi-button mice because they knew that if they did developers would rely upon them. By not shipping multi-button mice as the default (note the mightymouse ships in single button configuration by default) they made certain no reasonable developer would include functionality only in a menu that needed a right click (or modified click) to access. This means the UI of almost every program on OS X works well with touchscreens, tablets, input devices for the disabled, and even voice recognition. It also means power users can customize the right button to do whatever they want without worrying about losing access to functionality. I for one am much more confident in my ability to define a menu full of scripts, shortcuts, services, and other tools associated with a given application than I am confident in some developer who has no idea what I am trying to do.
Have you ever used Notepad on Windows? Ever used the right-click contextual menu in it? It's completely useless. I for one would rather have that mouse button be worth something rather than wasted.
I think this is a very weak argument. No one with more than a few days of computer experience has the slightest trouble with multi-button mice.
You're wrong, and you missed the point. First, lots of users have trouble distinguishing whether to use the right or left button and a number of users always press both buttons simultaneously. Then there are people using input devices other than mice. Ever used a touchscreen system? Works fine for pretty much every mac application, but many Windows applications are unusable because you can't get to the right mouse button and functionality is only accessible from that location. The same goes for many devices for the disabled and for voice recognition. Forcing developers to develop for one mouse button means everything has to be in the menus or buttons and following the UI guidelines means they are in both.
You know what though, I don't care too much about any of that. I almost always access my system using a multi-button trackball. I still want Apple to ship with a single button by default though. Do you know why? Because on the typical Windows system, in 90% of the applications, the right mouse button is completely useless. It is assigned to a context menu that contains nothing useful and is crammed with shortcuts the developers thought I'd use, but I never do. On OS X, I can assign whatever I want to the right mouse button. That means it is full of useful shortcuts to other programs I use in conjunction with this one, system services like spelling and translation, scripts I use in a given application, and the actual functions of the program I do use regularly enough to want as shortcuts.
Shipping with a single button mouse might benefit absolute novices, but they're virtually useless for intermediate or expert users. Inflicting them on everyone by default makes no sense at all.
Shipping with a single button by default makes a lot of sense and shipping a mouse with an option to enable multiple buttons for users that know what they are doing makes even more sense. It keeps the developers writing applications properly, the novice users with a good default, and the experts with a 5 second way to get a more complex and functional system. I'm certainly glad you're not in charge at Apple.
The mouse is set up by default to act like a single button mouse.
Well, that is a good thing and will mitigate the multi-button problem for the most part. There will still be systems used by multiple people, however, who do not bother configuring extra accounts, but who end up with this enabled. Like when you browse the web at grandma's, enable it, but forget to turn it back off. This could be made better simply by adding a graphic on top of the mouse so that a clueless user can have them easily described. "OK, the context menu is appearing when you click because you have the right mouse button enabled. click on the left front area of the mouse." Compare this to, "click on the red button, not the green." What is wrong with having a definition showing which button is which? Adding colors, even if just a thin border of a color would make the mouse more usable, but sacrifice some of that all important aesthetic.
This still does not address the usability issues of dragging long distances with a mouse that cannot be easily picked up and has buttons where the user used to pick it up.
it is a four button mouse, with a trackball in place of a scroll wheel. I hope they did a lot of user testing with this because it looks like they missed some obvious possible problems. First, try telling a clueless user to right-click or even left-click over the phone. Not only is there the confusion of multiple buttons, but they are invisible buttons. I foresee very frustrated tech support people. Second, the original one button rocker mouse was a pain for new users because when they ran out of mouse pad it was hard to pick up without releasing the button. This was supposed to be done using the two non-moving pads on either side of the mouse, but realistically a lot of people held the mouse a little differently which made the task impossible. I saw users try to drag something reach the end of the mouse pad, then turn the mouse 90 degrees and keep dragging sideways then reach a corner and turn it again so the mouse was upside down and keep dragging. Some of this problem can be solved by turning up the mouse sensitivity, but realistically many novice users don't know you can even do that. Also, older users with bad hands can't turn the sensitivity up too much or they can't accurately select anything, but they still need to drag thing a long ways sometimes (like when dragging an item into a place in a long list). This new mouse has buttons right where those two pads were located. Users accustomed to using the old rocker mouse will have a lot of trouble learning not to grab those two spots.
I'm not a big mouse fan myself. A trackball takes up less desk real estate and is less a pain for long, straight lines. I'd love having a 360 degree mini scroll ball instead of a scroll wheel though. How long before these show up everywhere?
OK, fill me in in non-marketspeak. In what way will DRM help me, the end user that I cannot easily achieve with a traditional method. I'm all ears here. What is the benefit to me (I am aware of a number of drawbacks).
The same technology that protects HOLLYWOODS data can protect YOUR dat and MY data.
I aim my camcorder at the TV, boom I have hollywood's data. Even easier I just do a screen capture. If I can see it, read it, hear it, etc. so can a machine and a machine can duplicate it. Consider me completely unimpressed by the concept of trying to secure data from the person I'm giving it to.
You don't license your hardware, but you do license your software. To put another spin on it, do you think it would be alright to buy copy of the latest Harry Potter book, copy out the text, and start selling your own printed versions?
Well, it is far to early to tell what Apple will do with this DRM hardware. It may be reasonable and it may not be. Your analogy may be very flawed. Books and computers are both bought, not licensed. Both contain intellectual property, but that comes contained in the book or computer and no license is signed before it is purchased and brought home. How would you feel if you bought a Harry Potter book that was shrinkwrapped and upon opening the first page there was a license the book claimed you agree to by reading the book that says you won't write any critical reviews of the book? That is half of the issue here. Thus far, DRM has not been disclosed to the purchasers and they have not been given any chance to agree or not agree to any terms.
The second part is how would you feel if you found out the book was a new, high-tech book and the ability was built in to make all the pages display ads for three minutes every time you opened it, before allowing the text to appear. What if you knew it could refuse to display the text whenever you went outside the country? What if all this was controlled by a secret key that was not given to you with the book, but held by the publisher? What if they did not tell you this when you bought it, but you subsequently found out they could turn it on whenever they wanted?
The issue is Apple is including a hardware device that may or may not come preloaded with half key pairs to which you are not given access. It is just like buying a car, but having it come with a remote shut-off switch owned by the car company. That is fine if you are leasing, but this is not a leased car or computer. This is something bought and paid for and still subject to remote controls by Apple.
Now, just to take a step back here. First, this is only on a developer machine that is leased, not purchased. Second it only is called by the PPC emulator. Third, we don't have any idea what Apple plans to do with this hardware or if they plan to ship it with pre-installed keys.
There is no specific outstanding vulnerability. Merely an assertion that Cisco didn't handle a previous vulnerability...
Actually, if you look at the presentation you'll see he presented a walkthrough of exploiting the shellcode which Cisco has done nothing (yet) to mitigate. The (fixed) exploit he mentions was merely an example of how to get on the box, but there are obviously going to be more ways to do that and quite likely someone already knows some of them. He also explains that while this is not the end of the world, the hardware abstraction Cisco is pursuing will make this type of attack work on many more routers.
Obviously as soon as the press gets involved all sorts of misconceptions, simplifications, and dramatization immediately drowns out the factual info. I don't know Lynn, but I know a number of people who do and from what I have heard he is probably trying to do the right thing.
As for Cisco wanting to have their fair say, it was my understanding that they were originally going to present the flaw with him, but backed out. Perhaps I was misinformed.
Why didn't he blow the whistle to the US-CERT, then? Yeah, this is a good idea, let's present it at a Black Hat convention. Jeez
Do you have any idea who is at Black Hat these days? It is a huge security convention sponsored by hundreds of major computer and security vendors, even Microsoft is a sponsor. Heck the Department of Defense, the Army, West Point, Stanford Law School, etc. all had people giving presentations. If you want to get the word out when a major threat is being ignored, blackhat is a pretty good place to do it. It seems to have worked, don't you think?
before everybody starts yelling about the need for these things to be reported, there are channels he could have gone through that would have made Cisco aware of the problem
Cisco was aware, in fact they were originally supposed to be co-presenting with him. Lynn contacted them four months ago. The problem is many of their customers were not aware of the problem, and despite reports to the contrary, while the exploit used to get onto the system has been fixed for a while, the ability to run arbitrary code has not. Now Cisco is working to abstract their hardware layer. Put these two items together and you get new routers, with a flaw, where a single, generic exploit can take them all out.
I know a lot less about networking and networking security than Mr. Lynn. I am willing to believe, however, that he would not give up a good, paying job and risk his future employment prospects unless he felt that this was a real and serious risk. Whistleblowers need to be protected and companies that willfully disregard warnings that their incompetence is threatening vital business and communications infrastructure around the world are the ones who should be investigated, not Mr. Lynn.
Really this flaw is well known, every competent admin I know patches their routers within days of release
It was my understanding that the arbitrary code on IOS was the point of the presentation, while the particular exploit was an intentionally well known and already patched one. Mr. Lynn was trying to be responsible and point out the danger of leaving the flaw that allows arbitrary code to run, especially given Cisco's new hardware abstraction strategy because it could mean a single worm with a single new exploit could take down increasingly larger chunks of the internet.
Now I only glanced at the presentation and half-heartedly listened in on IRC chatter and your statement is somewhat ambiguous . You may, however, want to take a second look at the material. I think you missed the point.
...cut the fanboys out of the loop. You've basically got a similar problem to Apple here. A minority, but a *significant* minority, of your hardcore fanbase is a walking PR disaster area. They're arrogant, spiteful and incredibly sensitive to criticism. They make a mockery of the slashdot games moderation system.
Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha! Whew! Thanks that was great. The funniest thing I have heard all day is that Nintendo's problem is the "bad" press they get from their fans on Slashdot. What world do you live in?
Your comparison to Apple is also funny as hell. Apple is the number one rated computer seller for customer satisfaction and the second largest/most profitable computer seller in the U.S., behind Dell. Now I'll go one step further than you (in your comparison). I propose that Nintendo should partner with Apple. They are already competing with Microsoft which grabs a substantial extra market for their games by selling to the PC. I think Nintendo and Apple should get together and make sure whatever new format Nintendo comes up with for their games, plays out of the box on all Apple computers. Apple would get a selling point and more games (something many mac users want) and Nintendo would get a large new market for selling their games without having to sell a console at a loss in the first place. Both Niches are currently profitable, bring on the gestalt effect.
OK I think you're missing two important points. First, chaining together lots of small applications easily provides functionality that is considered impossible or very, very hard to the average Windows user and even to most GUI only users of other OS's. Want to change the phrase "World leader in Iron manufacturing" to "One of the World's top leaders in Iron manufacturing" an a few hundred unrelated web pages, text files, help systems, etc? Easy as pie with the CLI, but time consuming with a GUI. Apple's Automator is an attempt to fix this, but it really has a long way to go.
Second, small CLI programs are really really good at what they do, because they are so specialized. How many spell checkers does the average Windows user need? Well the one in Word, and one more for each other application they use to compose text. Maybe the one in Word is great, but the one in their text editor is only so-so and the one in their e-mail sucks. How many people do you know that paste text into Word to spell check it then back into the program they are using. The point is you only really need one good spell checker, but it needs to be available to all other applications. On the CLI you just call the spell checker for your text file and then move on to the next application you want to use on it. In OS X they have brought this functionality to the GUI as well with system services that allow spellchecking (and many other operations) on all text (or image or sound or whatever) in all applications everywhere. I think this is the sort of thing he was originally talking about.
In my mind whistle blower protection is valid if the whistle blower is uncovering corruption.
Technically, most whistle blower statutes apply to government corruption, illegal activity, public health concerns, and "topics in which the public has a important vested interest in disclosure or that pose a substantial threat to public heath or safety."
One could argue that that the ability of hackers to disrupt much of the internet is a topic that includes public safety or in which the public has a vested interest. If this was the first time Cisco denied or refused to fix critical vulnerabilities I'd be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, but they don't exactly have the best track record. Did anyone else notice the slides of the presentation were pulled yesterday? At the time I heard people speculating about government agency interference, but perhaps it was the result of a court order.
Perhaps working in the security space has given me a different perspective. Having sold to quite a few Fortune 500 companies as well (not personally I'm not in sales) I can say with certainty if it is the SOC, Security, development, or networking group that is driving the sale of our product, it is best to have a cross-platform solution.
Some of our customers are happy with IE, but many of them are very interested in hardening the interiors of their networks and that means no IE among other things. Sometimes this is for certain groups within the company, or just the security group themselves, but in a few cases this has been mandated company-wide and in at least one case this has been enforced company-wide with strict access policies. Dealing with large service providers also requires having a cross-platform solution as many run a substantial amount of Linux and UNIX.
I guess to summarize, yes there are a lot of IE shops out there, but there are also a lot of places where supporting one IE will cost you a sale. At least in our markets, it is a really bad idea and it is becoming even more so.
The web interface of Lotus Notes is IE-only. I found it hilarious that IBM is telling people how to migrate from IE-only to firefox when they haven't done it themselves.
IBM employs more than 300,000 people. You think it is hilarious that they aren't all on the same page all the time? Just because a large number of them are advocating Linux and open standards and the company's official policy does likewise does not mean all of the little departments will always immediately change to do the same. That said, yes it is a high profile application and yes it should be fixed.
We simply tell our clients (who are all windows users anyway) to use IE.
What do you do when IE is banned company-wide for security reasons (as it has been with several of our clients) or when the government agency you are trying to sell to says, "our security group is all on OS X, we need it to work in both Safari and Firefox?" What market are you selling to that you have not run into one of these two problems and what makes you think that market will stay so technologically backwards?
Cant we just stick to regular telephones? I dont want my 911 call to be interrupted by a denial of service attack...
Police arrive in time to arrest a suspect less than 3% of the time when 911 is called and a much smaller percentage of the time in order to actually stop a crime. Fire departments have a little bit better track record, but usually if you don't get out yourself, they aren't going to save you. Basically, don't overvalue the 911 system. It is not really very useful in most emergencies and the chances that it will be useful and you will be suffering a DoS attack at the same time are pretty damn slim. If an attack is directed at you to actually disable your 911 service how much easier is it to just cut your phone line?
Now I'm not saying that VoIP should not be regulated, I'm just saying that 911 service is not a priority for a lot of us. I think internet access as a whole should be regarded as a utility that should be made available and regulated across the nation.
As for local music, this will change as apple expands its network of content managers and iTunes will probably end up dealing with the artist directly.
As much as I'd like to see this happen, I am doubtful. Apple has bent over backwards to make it easy and encourage indy labels to publish via iTunes. They have at the same time completely avoided allowing even free publishing directly. This could be due to legal issues with Apple records, but it is more likely due to contracts or pressure from the RIAA member labels that don't want Apple to cut them out of the deal, or be in the position to do so.
Except it would be illegal if Pepsi had a monopoly, which they don't. Microsoft does, hence the difference. If you don't have a monopoly it is valid business tactic and incentive, if you do it is using your monopoly to prevent others from entering your market. That means there is no competition and consumers suffer. If Pepsi was a monopoly and they did this, how would a new soda company ever get started? They would have to open there own stores simply to sell soda. You now what else, there would be no diet or cherry pepsi, because Pepsi would not have to respond to market pressures and compete. Prices would also be much higher since stores would have to stock Pepsi or lose a lot business to there competitors who do, thus Pepsi would be able to dictate terms.
How come whenever someone makes one of the analogies or comparisons they never do so with a company that actually is a monopoly in their example?
Slashdot Mirror
Where, aside from Apple, can I buy a multi button mouse that is also a single button mouse that won't confuse my grandmother and will switch modes based upon my user preferences? Where else can I get a mouse with a roller ball built in instead of a scroll wheel? Don't get me wrong... I'm not going to buy one of these, but pretending that it is not innovative is being obtuse.
Apple has, and still does, ship with a single button mouse by default. This particular mouse ships in single button mode by default. The reason for this is to force developers to do the right thing with their UI designs. It has worked pretty well so far and the only people I ever hear complaining about it are people who don't have macs in the first place. Most of them are under the delusion that you can't just plug in a a multi-button mouse and have it work perfectly.
So just as a thank you to Apple for shipping with one button as the default... Ha Ha your second button is useless in 90% of applications because the people who wrote notepad [insert application name here] didn't know what to put there! Mine is useful all the time sucker!
The acid test is a great idea, but it has intentional errors that are supposed to be handled gracefully. Firefox renders it poorly in my opinion, but that is still head and shoulders above IE7 which is much, much worse.
The acid test, however, is an academic ideal. It is doable, but not necessary in order for a browser to render CSS sites well enough to be usable. The last CSS project I did worked just fine, with little or no tweaking, on every major browser except IE, which completely failed to implement the spec well enough to show any of the formatting. Failure to pass the Acid test is not the problem. Failure to implement the majority of the specifications that tiny companies manage to implement just fine is. It is especially a problem when you hold a monopoly in the space and are single handedly holding back the progress of the internet as a rich and flexible medium. It's like a company with a monopoly on cars who refuses to add seat belts, drink holders, or lug nuts saying, "Yeah some of you have been complaining so we're going to try to add some circular spots on the dash so your drink does not fall over as easily." It is not enough and it is bad for everyone and everything except their bottom line.
Now you come along with the equivalent of, "Here you guys are complaining about their cars being way behind but your seat belts only improve head on collision survival by 20%. And you wonder why no one listens to you?" Brilliant!
No.
Microsoft tries to improve it's product, which everyone has been asking them to do for years, and now we should Boycott it?
I had to automate the translation of a bunch of well-formed but brittle XML coming out of a professional layout application to XHTML and CSS for web pages and a help system. I thought, "well gee this should be easy." A short while later I fired up Firefox and took a look. Well it needed a little bit of tweaking to clear up a typo or two, and to get things looking just right. Next came the compatibility testing. WC3 validator, Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera, and Lynx were my targets with a variety of versions and OS's. Everything looked just fine with the exception of Lynx which understandably could not display some of the graphic elements and IE which could not display any of the custom styles I had defined. I found one minor compliance bug in all of the browsers, but I was absolutely astounded that IE could not display any of the formatting except the few that coincided with valid plain old HTML.
I had to go through the whole system and downgrade everything to plain old HTML, and the few features I absolutely had to have working I had to go to great pains to generate, by hand, in the source file. In fact three people here spend a lot of their time manually working around IE's failure to comply to the CSS spec. Several of the less critical features I just left the way they should be and IE users can do without them.
MS says that they will fix the biggest outstanding bugs and try to comply more with the spec. By biggest, they mean the features people actually use, but that IE screws up due to its half-assed implementation of a feature. I've heard little or nothing about implementing all the parts of the spec that no one uses because IE does not support it at all.
I'd be willing to give some kudos to MS and regard it as a worthwhile browser if the next time I do a project like this IE is not the only currently developed browser I can find that can't seem to properly implement the spec even though they have 10 times the developers and money of any other project. If IE actually works, without a pile of work arounds, well great.
Until that time, I'll convert everyone I can to any other browser and I'll not support any friends or family who insist on using it.
MS can talk all they want, but thus far we have been given empty promises and no commitment to do the right thing. Better CSS is just not good enough unless it is a reasonable attempt at actually implementing the spec. Anything else is just giving up beating your wife on Sundays. Don't expect any praise.
I haven't seen a user confused by a multi-button mouse in well, over ten years.
Having a single button on the mouse is easier for clueless newbies it's one less thing for them to worry about. It's easier for children who have small hands. It's easier of lefties who otherwise need a different mouse or configuration (think public terminals and labs). It's easier for the elderly who have trouble with their hands. It is easier for the disabled who use alternate input devices. It is easier for people using voice recognition since it places all the functions in the standard menus (which voice recognition uses as input options).
Maybe you prefer multiple buttons and maybe most people do. I know I would dread not having all my mouse buttons. And that is exactly why I don't want them to ship with multiple buttons by default. If they did, my second button would be as useless as it is in Windows. Developers would put needed functionality there, it would cease to customizable, and all my useful scripts, shortcuts, services, that I set up for each application I use regularly would be unavailable to me. Instead I'd have whatever crap the developer decided I should have. The developer doesn't know what I'm doing or how I do it. They don't know what functions I use regularly. Let me populate my right-click menus thank you very much. If that means I have to buy a new mouse to go with each new mac I buy, so be it. I always do that anyway since I like trackballs with four buttons.
It will be a sad day when Apple ships a two button mouse by default. Any I'll be shopping for a five button mouse and cursing them all the way.
Say you have a link to a file on a web page, and you want to download it to your hard drive. Using the one button mouse you have to hold down a key on the keyboard (either ctrl or alt or open-apple, it's been a while since I've used a mac) to bring up the "save link target as" option you need. Tell me that's more intuitive then the Windows/Linux right-click menu.
It is more intuitive to just click on the link, then the browser prompts you for where you want to save it. Or if it is the link URL you want to save, just drag it where you want it.
Now tell me this if Apple ships two button mice, by default, on most of their systems will developers write programs where using the right-click button is the only way to get to certain functionality? Personally I'm pretty sure it would happen. There are already a few applications that require right-clicking to use (Maya and Shake come to mind). Given that such functionality will be right-click-only how do you expect touch screen users, disabled users, and voice recognition system users will access the functionality?
More importantly, why do you think the developer of the program will be more knowledgeable about what should be in the right-click menu, than the end user? Personally, my right-click menus are full of scripts, services, shortcuts, and other applications that I use with a given application. Why would I want to lose all that functionality to be replaced with what the develop thought I would want? What about applications where there is nothing useful in the right-click menu? Should I effectively have one less button to use when using certain applications because the developers did not have anything good to put there? No thanks. I use all my mouse buttons and I don't want to have to buy a five button mouse and start working out my pinky finger because you want a to save a few seconds once by having two buttons by default.
Nope, they refused to ship multi-button mice because they knew that if they did developers would rely upon them. By not shipping multi-button mice as the default (note the mightymouse ships in single button configuration by default) they made certain no reasonable developer would include functionality only in a menu that needed a right click (or modified click) to access. This means the UI of almost every program on OS X works well with touchscreens, tablets, input devices for the disabled, and even voice recognition. It also means power users can customize the right button to do whatever they want without worrying about losing access to functionality. I for one am much more confident in my ability to define a menu full of scripts, shortcuts, services, and other tools associated with a given application than I am confident in some developer who has no idea what I am trying to do.
Have you ever used Notepad on Windows? Ever used the right-click contextual menu in it? It's completely useless. I for one would rather have that mouse button be worth something rather than wasted.
I think this is a very weak argument. No one with more than a few days of computer experience has the slightest trouble with multi-button mice.
You're wrong, and you missed the point. First, lots of users have trouble distinguishing whether to use the right or left button and a number of users always press both buttons simultaneously. Then there are people using input devices other than mice. Ever used a touchscreen system? Works fine for pretty much every mac application, but many Windows applications are unusable because you can't get to the right mouse button and functionality is only accessible from that location. The same goes for many devices for the disabled and for voice recognition. Forcing developers to develop for one mouse button means everything has to be in the menus or buttons and following the UI guidelines means they are in both.
You know what though, I don't care too much about any of that. I almost always access my system using a multi-button trackball. I still want Apple to ship with a single button by default though. Do you know why? Because on the typical Windows system, in 90% of the applications, the right mouse button is completely useless. It is assigned to a context menu that contains nothing useful and is crammed with shortcuts the developers thought I'd use, but I never do. On OS X, I can assign whatever I want to the right mouse button. That means it is full of useful shortcuts to other programs I use in conjunction with this one, system services like spelling and translation, scripts I use in a given application, and the actual functions of the program I do use regularly enough to want as shortcuts.
Shipping with a single button mouse might benefit absolute novices, but they're virtually useless for intermediate or expert users. Inflicting them on everyone by default makes no sense at all.
Shipping with a single button by default makes a lot of sense and shipping a mouse with an option to enable multiple buttons for users that know what they are doing makes even more sense. It keeps the developers writing applications properly, the novice users with a good default, and the experts with a 5 second way to get a more complex and functional system. I'm certainly glad you're not in charge at Apple.
The mouse is set up by default to act like a single button mouse.
Well, that is a good thing and will mitigate the multi-button problem for the most part. There will still be systems used by multiple people, however, who do not bother configuring extra accounts, but who end up with this enabled. Like when you browse the web at grandma's, enable it, but forget to turn it back off. This could be made better simply by adding a graphic on top of the mouse so that a clueless user can have them easily described. "OK, the context menu is appearing when you click because you have the right mouse button enabled. click on the left front area of the mouse." Compare this to, "click on the red button, not the green." What is wrong with having a definition showing which button is which? Adding colors, even if just a thin border of a color would make the mouse more usable, but sacrifice some of that all important aesthetic.
This still does not address the usability issues of dragging long distances with a mouse that cannot be easily picked up and has buttons where the user used to pick it up.
it is a four button mouse, with a trackball in place of a scroll wheel. I hope they did a lot of user testing with this because it looks like they missed some obvious possible problems. First, try telling a clueless user to right-click or even left-click over the phone. Not only is there the confusion of multiple buttons, but they are invisible buttons. I foresee very frustrated tech support people. Second, the original one button rocker mouse was a pain for new users because when they ran out of mouse pad it was hard to pick up without releasing the button. This was supposed to be done using the two non-moving pads on either side of the mouse, but realistically a lot of people held the mouse a little differently which made the task impossible. I saw users try to drag something reach the end of the mouse pad, then turn the mouse 90 degrees and keep dragging sideways then reach a corner and turn it again so the mouse was upside down and keep dragging. Some of this problem can be solved by turning up the mouse sensitivity, but realistically many novice users don't know you can even do that. Also, older users with bad hands can't turn the sensitivity up too much or they can't accurately select anything, but they still need to drag thing a long ways sometimes (like when dragging an item into a place in a long list). This new mouse has buttons right where those two pads were located. Users accustomed to using the old rocker mouse will have a lot of trouble learning not to grab those two spots.
I'm not a big mouse fan myself. A trackball takes up less desk real estate and is less a pain for long, straight lines. I'd love having a 360 degree mini scroll ball instead of a scroll wheel though. How long before these show up everywhere?
OK, fill me in in non-marketspeak. In what way will DRM help me, the end user that I cannot easily achieve with a traditional method. I'm all ears here. What is the benefit to me (I am aware of a number of drawbacks).
The same technology that protects HOLLYWOODS data can protect YOUR dat and MY data.
I aim my camcorder at the TV, boom I have hollywood's data. Even easier I just do a screen capture. If I can see it, read it, hear it, etc. so can a machine and a machine can duplicate it. Consider me completely unimpressed by the concept of trying to secure data from the person I'm giving it to.
You don't license your hardware, but you do license your software. To put another spin on it, do you think it would be alright to buy copy of the latest Harry Potter book, copy out the text, and start selling your own printed versions?
Well, it is far to early to tell what Apple will do with this DRM hardware. It may be reasonable and it may not be. Your analogy may be very flawed. Books and computers are both bought, not licensed. Both contain intellectual property, but that comes contained in the book or computer and no license is signed before it is purchased and brought home. How would you feel if you bought a Harry Potter book that was shrinkwrapped and upon opening the first page there was a license the book claimed you agree to by reading the book that says you won't write any critical reviews of the book? That is half of the issue here. Thus far, DRM has not been disclosed to the purchasers and they have not been given any chance to agree or not agree to any terms.
The second part is how would you feel if you found out the book was a new, high-tech book and the ability was built in to make all the pages display ads for three minutes every time you opened it, before allowing the text to appear. What if you knew it could refuse to display the text whenever you went outside the country? What if all this was controlled by a secret key that was not given to you with the book, but held by the publisher? What if they did not tell you this when you bought it, but you subsequently found out they could turn it on whenever they wanted?
The issue is Apple is including a hardware device that may or may not come preloaded with half key pairs to which you are not given access. It is just like buying a car, but having it come with a remote shut-off switch owned by the car company. That is fine if you are leasing, but this is not a leased car or computer. This is something bought and paid for and still subject to remote controls by Apple.
Now, just to take a step back here. First, this is only on a developer machine that is leased, not purchased. Second it only is called by the PPC emulator. Third, we don't have any idea what Apple plans to do with this hardware or if they plan to ship it with pre-installed keys.
There is no specific outstanding vulnerability. Merely an assertion that Cisco didn't handle a previous vulnerability...
Actually, if you look at the presentation you'll see he presented a walkthrough of exploiting the shellcode which Cisco has done nothing (yet) to mitigate. The (fixed) exploit he mentions was merely an example of how to get on the box, but there are obviously going to be more ways to do that and quite likely someone already knows some of them. He also explains that while this is not the end of the world, the hardware abstraction Cisco is pursuing will make this type of attack work on many more routers.
Obviously as soon as the press gets involved all sorts of misconceptions, simplifications, and dramatization immediately drowns out the factual info. I don't know Lynn, but I know a number of people who do and from what I have heard he is probably trying to do the right thing.
As for Cisco wanting to have their fair say, it was my understanding that they were originally going to present the flaw with him, but backed out. Perhaps I was misinformed.
Why didn't he blow the whistle to the US-CERT, then? Yeah, this is a good idea, let's present it at a Black Hat convention. Jeez
Do you have any idea who is at Black Hat these days? It is a huge security convention sponsored by hundreds of major computer and security vendors, even Microsoft is a sponsor. Heck the Department of Defense, the Army, West Point, Stanford Law School, etc. all had people giving presentations. If you want to get the word out when a major threat is being ignored, blackhat is a pretty good place to do it. It seems to have worked, don't you think?
before everybody starts yelling about the need for these things to be reported, there are channels he could have gone through that would have made Cisco aware of the problem
Cisco was aware, in fact they were originally supposed to be co-presenting with him. Lynn contacted them four months ago. The problem is many of their customers were not aware of the problem, and despite reports to the contrary, while the exploit used to get onto the system has been fixed for a while, the ability to run arbitrary code has not. Now Cisco is working to abstract their hardware layer. Put these two items together and you get new routers, with a flaw, where a single, generic exploit can take them all out.
I know a lot less about networking and networking security than Mr. Lynn. I am willing to believe, however, that he would not give up a good, paying job and risk his future employment prospects unless he felt that this was a real and serious risk. Whistleblowers need to be protected and companies that willfully disregard warnings that their incompetence is threatening vital business and communications infrastructure around the world are the ones who should be investigated, not Mr. Lynn.
Really this flaw is well known, every competent admin I know patches their routers within days of release
It was my understanding that the arbitrary code on IOS was the point of the presentation, while the particular exploit was an intentionally well known and already patched one. Mr. Lynn was trying to be responsible and point out the danger of leaving the flaw that allows arbitrary code to run, especially given Cisco's new hardware abstraction strategy because it could mean a single worm with a single new exploit could take down increasingly larger chunks of the internet.
Now I only glanced at the presentation and half-heartedly listened in on IRC chatter and your statement is somewhat ambiguous . You may, however, want to take a second look at the material. I think you missed the point.
Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha! Whew! Thanks that was great. The funniest thing I have heard all day is that Nintendo's problem is the "bad" press they get from their fans on Slashdot. What world do you live in?
Your comparison to Apple is also funny as hell. Apple is the number one rated computer seller for customer satisfaction and the second largest/most profitable computer seller in the U.S., behind Dell. Now I'll go one step further than you (in your comparison). I propose that Nintendo should partner with Apple. They are already competing with Microsoft which grabs a substantial extra market for their games by selling to the PC. I think Nintendo and Apple should get together and make sure whatever new format Nintendo comes up with for their games, plays out of the box on all Apple computers. Apple would get a selling point and more games (something many mac users want) and Nintendo would get a large new market for selling their games without having to sell a console at a loss in the first place. Both Niches are currently profitable, bring on the gestalt effect.
OK I think you're missing two important points. First, chaining together lots of small applications easily provides functionality that is considered impossible or very, very hard to the average Windows user and even to most GUI only users of other OS's. Want to change the phrase "World leader in Iron manufacturing" to "One of the World's top leaders in Iron manufacturing" an a few hundred unrelated web pages, text files, help systems, etc? Easy as pie with the CLI, but time consuming with a GUI. Apple's Automator is an attempt to fix this, but it really has a long way to go.
Second, small CLI programs are really really good at what they do, because they are so specialized. How many spell checkers does the average Windows user need? Well the one in Word, and one more for each other application they use to compose text. Maybe the one in Word is great, but the one in their text editor is only so-so and the one in their e-mail sucks. How many people do you know that paste text into Word to spell check it then back into the program they are using. The point is you only really need one good spell checker, but it needs to be available to all other applications. On the CLI you just call the spell checker for your text file and then move on to the next application you want to use on it. In OS X they have brought this functionality to the GUI as well with system services that allow spellchecking (and many other operations) on all text (or image or sound or whatever) in all applications everywhere. I think this is the sort of thing he was originally talking about.
In my mind whistle blower protection is valid if the whistle blower is uncovering corruption.
Technically, most whistle blower statutes apply to government corruption, illegal activity, public health concerns, and "topics in which the public has a important vested interest in disclosure or that pose a substantial threat to public heath or safety."
One could argue that that the ability of hackers to disrupt much of the internet is a topic that includes public safety or in which the public has a vested interest. If this was the first time Cisco denied or refused to fix critical vulnerabilities I'd be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, but they don't exactly have the best track record. Did anyone else notice the slides of the presentation were pulled yesterday? At the time I heard people speculating about government agency interference, but perhaps it was the result of a court order.
Perhaps working in the security space has given me a different perspective. Having sold to quite a few Fortune 500 companies as well (not personally I'm not in sales) I can say with certainty if it is the SOC, Security, development, or networking group that is driving the sale of our product, it is best to have a cross-platform solution.
Some of our customers are happy with IE, but many of them are very interested in hardening the interiors of their networks and that means no IE among other things. Sometimes this is for certain groups within the company, or just the security group themselves, but in a few cases this has been mandated company-wide and in at least one case this has been enforced company-wide with strict access policies. Dealing with large service providers also requires having a cross-platform solution as many run a substantial amount of Linux and UNIX.
I guess to summarize, yes there are a lot of IE shops out there, but there are also a lot of places where supporting one IE will cost you a sale. At least in our markets, it is a really bad idea and it is becoming even more so.
The web interface of Lotus Notes is IE-only. I found it hilarious that IBM is telling people how to migrate from IE-only to firefox when they haven't done it themselves.
IBM employs more than 300,000 people. You think it is hilarious that they aren't all on the same page all the time? Just because a large number of them are advocating Linux and open standards and the company's official policy does likewise does not mean all of the little departments will always immediately change to do the same. That said, yes it is a high profile application and yes it should be fixed.
We simply tell our clients (who are all windows users anyway) to use IE.
What do you do when IE is banned company-wide for security reasons (as it has been with several of our clients) or when the government agency you are trying to sell to says, "our security group is all on OS X, we need it to work in both Safari and Firefox?" What market are you selling to that you have not run into one of these two problems and what makes you think that market will stay so technologically backwards?
Cant we just stick to regular telephones? I dont want my 911 call to be interrupted by a denial of service attack...
Police arrive in time to arrest a suspect less than 3% of the time when 911 is called and a much smaller percentage of the time in order to actually stop a crime. Fire departments have a little bit better track record, but usually if you don't get out yourself, they aren't going to save you. Basically, don't overvalue the 911 system. It is not really very useful in most emergencies and the chances that it will be useful and you will be suffering a DoS attack at the same time are pretty damn slim. If an attack is directed at you to actually disable your 911 service how much easier is it to just cut your phone line?
Now I'm not saying that VoIP should not be regulated, I'm just saying that 911 service is not a priority for a lot of us. I think internet access as a whole should be regarded as a utility that should be made available and regulated across the nation.
As for local music, this will change as apple expands its network of content managers and iTunes will probably end up dealing with the artist directly.
As much as I'd like to see this happen, I am doubtful. Apple has bent over backwards to make it easy and encourage indy labels to publish via iTunes. They have at the same time completely avoided allowing even free publishing directly. This could be due to legal issues with Apple records, but it is more likely due to contracts or pressure from the RIAA member labels that don't want Apple to cut them out of the deal, or be in the position to do so.
Except it would be illegal if Pepsi had a monopoly, which they don't. Microsoft does, hence the difference. If you don't have a monopoly it is valid business tactic and incentive, if you do it is using your monopoly to prevent others from entering your market. That means there is no competition and consumers suffer. If Pepsi was a monopoly and they did this, how would a new soda company ever get started? They would have to open there own stores simply to sell soda. You now what else, there would be no diet or cherry pepsi, because Pepsi would not have to respond to market pressures and compete. Prices would also be much higher since stores would have to stock Pepsi or lose a lot business to there competitors who do, thus Pepsi would be able to dictate terms.
How come whenever someone makes one of the analogies or comparisons they never do so with a company that actually is a monopoly in their example?