Why would they pick the Windows version and totally rewrite the audio system to use CoreAudio, instead of using OpenAL which supports both? (And Linux!)
The short answer performance.
The long answer, you seem confused. CoreAudio includes OpenAL as one of the largest components, which is why Apple is a large OpenAL contributor.
Yes, except we are glossing over the part where you use a tool to "create" the application. Flash is a format AND an authoring tool. Unless Flash starts somehow exporting HTML 5, I don't really see this happening.
That is a very important point, but it does not undercut the point I made at all. Just because Flash has a nice toolset does not make it able to target platforms that don't and won't support Flash for either strategic or performance reasons. People will be targeting those platforms with HTML 5 so there is a lot of motivation for new and better tools to be created. Certainly some people will not want to learn new tools and will satisfy themselves with smaller potential market share, but that's a losing proposition unless Adobe has a lot more leverage than I know about. And there are already some compliant tools as I mentioned, including toolchains that incorporate Adobe's own products already. Adobe does not do animated vector graphics, but Ikivo will easily animate Illustrator graphics. More and more HTML 5 is finding its way into standard javascript libraries and we all know the plethora of javascriping tools available. Basically, all the HTML+Javascript toolchains are going to be incorporating HTML 5, leaving Flash only for non-programmers and people unwilling to learn new tools. Flash will be around for a long time, but frankly it is a proprietary tool/format with increasingly limited reach because of that proprietary nature. It's an added cost many Web developers pay now, but as more and more eyeballs move to platforms Flash can't reach, it will become increasingly useless.
IE tends to be more popular at work or other locked-down environments, where Group Policy bans the installation of Chrome Frame. In a lot of cases, even the PC in the break room has only IE without Chrome Frame.
There are always going to be backward environments running old versions of IE or Netscape or something equally dated. New versions of IE (IE 9) should theoretically run the HTML 5 spec and if it doesn't MS will probably be back in court in the EU. Regardless,any place that bans Chrome Frame in 5 years is probably also going to ban the Flash plugin as well, so there is still no incentive to use Flash over HTML 5.
I know of two ways to represent video: pixel block transforms and vector animations. Both H.264 and Theora are based on pixel block transforms. But a lot of the video on, say, Newgrounds is vector animations. So what do you recommend to replace SWF for that?
HTML 5 incorporates SVG as part of the standard, as mentioned in the article. You already asked about tools earlier and I answered with the most popular solution I know, Adobe Illustrator paired with Ikivo Animator. As per your sig, you can absolutely replace Badger Badger Badger with just an embedded video, but for more interesting vector graphics animations, i.e. vector graphics games, you can use SVG and javascript.
If a couple of worms make their way about exploiting OS X machines, Apple will immediately invest in better security technologies because they don't want to lose money.
It took them until.5.6 to deal with issues from.0
Dealing with potential issues that aren't actually causing a significant number of customers real problems is different from dealing with real problems that are costing Apple money and tarnishing their brand. It's always possible Apple systems could start getting exploited regularly and Apple would do nothing but it is extremely unlikely and would be an idiotic business decision. And as I said, Apple is already investing in security, they are just keeping it limited to a minor subset of their OS until the security need outweighs the potential hassle for users and developers. Apple encourages developers to sign their applications today, but does not limit unsigned apps because that would be a hassle for users and developers and there is no security problem that yet justifies it.
Any one have an idea if the security risk are any higher using HTML5? Or will it be the same risk just different types of vulnerabilities?
It's something of a trade off, but long term an improvement. You see, either way you can disable the plugin or disable javascript for a site to prevent exploits. With Javascript and HTML5 though, you can pick any browser to use and there is ongoing competition for making the best one. For Flash and Silverlight, you're stuck with a single vendor providing it, so any vulnerability and you're stuck waiting for Adobe and MS respectively. You can compare it to e-mail, perhaps. What is more secure Outlook, or standards compliant POP and IMAP clients collectively? Would you feel more secure using Outlook for your e-mail or taking your pick of any e-mail client that supports POP and IMAP?
I don't understand why anyone thinks this will put an end to Flash, Silverlight, etc., since HTML5 doesn't specify allowed CODECs. All this means is that those proprietary codecs will be specified with an HTML5 tag. Everything else will remain the same.
Picture this, in 5 years you're developing new Web site and you want a Web application on that site. Say it's a little Web based game. Will you:
Create a version in Flash and not support the iPhone, iPad, and several other phones.
Create a version in Flash and a version in HTML5 to support both regular Web browsers and the iPhone, iPad, and Mobile devices that don't do Flash?
Just create an HTML5 version without Flash, and still support both all major browsers and the iPhone, iPad, and other mobile browsers, excluding some very old versions of browsers that have not installed the Google Frame plug-in?
Basically, for applications, Flash becomes redundant since you need to use HTM for other devices anyway and HTML 5 supports everything important Flash does. For video, Flash becomes useless overhead, since you can just specify a codec already used in Flash which will save the user's processor and using Flash limits your audience to a subset of what just specifying a standard codec or two does.
Big thanks to Apple for standing up to the Flash juggernaut and showing the world we could live without it, thereby paving the way for HTML 5.
And big thanks to Google for creating a non-Flash dependent version of YouTube to help Apple do it, and starting to move YouTube away from Flash in general.
You know, with Apple products experiencing something of a resurgence in the past 5-10 years and their popularity slowly increasing, they will eventually cross that invisible line where hackers decide that it becomes worth their time to attack Apple products the way they attack Windows.
People already attack Apple created systems for a variety of purposes, it's just the average person never experiences it because the level of security is still good enough to make large scale automated attacks too hard to implement. As Apple's market share increases, so will the number of people attempting attacks, but that's not really a big concern. Apple and Linux developers both have a vested interest in making sure security is never a huge problem for most customers. As such, they invest in developing real security as needed. If a couple of worms make their way about exploiting OS X machines, Apple will immediately invest in better security technologies because they don't want to lose money. Heck, they see it coming which is why they have application signing and mandatory access control frameworks already built into OS X, even though they are barely used. That's the real security difference from Windows. MS has little or no financial incentive to spend money on real security improvements, because they don't lose significant money when people are exploited and marketing does a better job than engineering on keeping the money flowing.
I never got the hang of it, but he used to pick the locks to various classrooms.
Just FYI, classroom locks are generally less secure than average. At school, rooms had locks that worked for individual keys and floor keys and building keys and campus master keys. That's 4 stacked pins and gives a lockpick 4 times the chance each try to get a working solution.
For the previous poster, lockpick guns and whatnot don't generally take long and are not very suspicious. Some guy stands in front of the door fiddling at the lock for a few seconds. Not suspicious.
In practice the only way to gain access to the locations secured by physical keys is to steal them, doing it without the persons knowledge means stealing them, copying them and returning them without the persons knowledge.
It always amuses me when people who would angrily declaim easily hacked and bypassed computer security, blithely assert that physical locks are secure. Seriously, I showed my girlfriend how to pick locks and within a few days of practice she had no problem opening the front door of any of the townhouses in our area. Most keyed locks are not really very secure, they rely upon the fact that most people don't ever try to pick them, a minor deterrent, just like most people don't know how to crack WEP, so it provides a small roadblock to an attacker and a significant one to the unskilled.
Obviously you've never dealt with the VA. Imagine your experience with private health care and then imagine a similar system run by people who can't be fired.
Sadly, the VA is some of the better healthcare in the US. The people working there can be fired, especially if the press gets involved and politicians want to capitalize on the public interest. In the private sector, of course the employee can be fired, but more likely they will be given a bonus for exactly what they did to me. At the VA they probably don't care and just want to minimize their own work. In private insurance they are being paid to waste your time and make things hard on you, so you might just go away or die before costing them any more money.
I don't know what kind of insurance you have, but I think you need to look for a different provider.
None, because no one will sell it to me in the states.
I have what is probably pretty run-of-the-mill Blue Cross, and I've been through a couple of surgeries, my wife has been through a couple, and we both have prescriptions, as well as two kids that occasionally get hurt and need emergency room visits, etc. And in all those years, I've filled out very little paperwork.
Yeah, I used to have Blue Cross of Maryland, supposedly one of the best in the country because of stricter laws there. Then I experienced long term illness that wasn't one of the common problems, you know the couple dozen illnesses that make up 90% of cases. That's when the paperwork became insane. I wrote just my name address, phone number, and social security number on a sheet of paper almost every day for no reason whatsoever other than they needed me to write it for the twentieth time. That's annoying when you're well. When you're in and out of consciousness and vomiting all the time it's inhumane.
. The only thing I pay for up front is a co-pay for visits, surgeries, and drugs.
Yeah, thats fine until they start wanting multiple doctors to sign off on procedures and start denying procedures for no real reason. I ended up tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket for procedures it was too difficult to get them to pay for.
Just hope you never get sick to the point where the cost of your care starts to go above the profit them made from your premiums... you know what insurance is supposed to be for.
National Health Care = forfeiting of personal freedoms such as what you can eat, drink, smoke, and other physical or mental activities you enjoy doing.
Umm, what socialized healthcare system in the world stops you from doing any of those? I know some provide incentives for doctors to convince people to not smoke, but I don't know any that make it illegal. For that matter many places with socialized healthcare have more freedom as to what you can smoke. So are you trolling or just a complete wacko?
We're all thinking it, so I'll say it: "Hey, let's let our government handle healthcare to increase effeciency[sic]"
Obviously you haven't dealt with the private healthcare industry. The insurance companies (for example) actually have motivation to make simple task harder for their customers because their job is to get people's money then make it as hard as possible for people to ever get any back. So they invent useless paperwork and rules and procedures to discourage the process. Trust me, I've been there. When you're really, really ill you better hope you have some good friends because there is no way you're going to stay on top of the paperwork and phone calls needed.
If your friend's practice couldn't get it together well enough to store prescriptions in Word, Excel, Access, or even Notepad, should we have any hope that they will be able to participate meaningfully in a fully transactionalized data transfer system without error or confusion?
Yes, because while the employees will never change without being motivated, the corporate headquarters will mandate change and hire some experts to implement a system if they see both a chunk of change from the feds to more than pay for it and they see a threat to their medicare payment revenue if they don't make the change in the long term. A bunch of aged secretarial types will never upgrade anything on their own. They will, in fact, resist change. When management tells them a new system is being put in, sends them to training, and tells them to use it or they're fired (because money is on the line instead of just people's health) those same secretarial types will grumble but do it.
I don't advocate doing nothing, mind you. I'm very much behind the idea of seeing physicians moving into the 21st century. I just worry that our current method for doing that may be flawed and create more problems than it solved. I could be wrong, though. It's been known to happen.:)
The real question is, what do you advocate. Its easy to say a solution is not perfect (none ever is). Do you have a better idea for getting this problem solved?
In any case, sorry to hear you had a bad time of things and I hope we all see general improvements soon.
I appreciate the concern. I lived through several years of medical hell that pretty much ruined most of my life. I still have not recovered financially and as a person who had some of the "best" commercial health insurance and hospitals out there, I'm a strong advocate for real reform.
Clearly there are a lot of people here posting about how the government should not be getting involved and that seems to be the bias of both the article and summary. Allow me to go into some personal experience here though. As someone who has been very ill, lack of standardized medical records and the inability of various hospitals to transfer digital copies of video and images resulted in my spending another month or so of my life in a state I would not wish upon anyone. Right now a very good friend of mine works in healthcare and they have been (I shit you not) writing down patient information on recipe cards as the one and only method of storing drug prescription info. This resulted in, by her count, several hundred patients not getting needed insulin, antipsychotics, and other drugs as a result of numerous ordering errors that were never caught and were impossible to search for. So when people say digitizing medical records in a standard fashion is going to result in problems for patients... well not doing it is resulting in the very same.
I'm not big on government interference with many parts of our lives, but they are addressing a very real problem and they're doing it with kid gloves. They did not pass regulations requiring hospitals to comply, they just tied federal funding to that compliance and gave the hospitals many years in which to get their shit together. If medical providers have not done so and are rushing about now, that is absolutely not the fault of the feds.
"The malware for each of these companies has been customized based on the versions of vulnerable software they're running, as well as what kind of anti-virus they're using....
Since when has anti-virus heuristics algorithms been at all useful against custom malware?
"The malware has been customized" implies they are picking malware or modifying malware, rather than writing it from scratch. AV programs often can catch new variants of old malware unless it has been remade to avoid detection in specific ways.
The entire government is not a series of redundant clusterFs right now. It is large, parts of it work very well, parts of it do not.
Really? What US department right now does not provide their managers with incentive to overspend for budgetary reasons or to benefit their own career via headcount?
"Why? With virtual servers the same people can still create new ones, the only difference being they don't manage the hardware or networking."
You have no understanding of how organizations work. There will be an "authority" whose job it is to keep the server store for "security" if nothing else.
I've done work with the DoD and the Navy as well as hundreds of private companies. I think I have a fair understanding. As for managing the server store for security, there may well be processing power constraints, but I don't even understand what you're trying to say with regard to a store. How and Why would departments be prevented from making virtual servers and based upon what cloud computing model. None of the major ones I've seen have any such nonsense.
"But this would provide incentive for reducing waste in that regard rather than providing incentive for it, like we do now."
It won't, it will provide a new government agency with the reasons for increase expenditures, increased staffing, and with that increase "regulation" on users (i.e., the rest of the government) who will be forced to use it. If your agency wants to provide a new service, it will have to run the gauntlet of the new "service" agency.
The new government agency, will have little ability to justify and ever increasing budget because the amount of usage will be determined by other departments. "Yeah we need 100 new servers" is awfully hard to justify if you can't show demand based upon the load being put upon it by those other departments who no longer have motivation to create useless servers. Further, why would departments need to "run a gauntlet" to offer a new service. They just create a virtual server and start it up as any cloud computing client does now. Unless the new agency really is constrained by processing power, there would be no reason for them to halt new VMs being created, and if that happens you'll have dozens of agencies clamoring for increasing the funding.
Not only that, every few years when the new agency gets a new director, s/he will issue new marching orders merely to piss in the corners and make the agency his/her own...why...just like the current dolt proposing this reorg.
Sure, new people always like putting their fingerprint on things. That might be switching underlying architectures or the interface or any number of things. The difference being, this department is a service one servicing other organizations, so any significant changes they want to push will get pushback from other departments and legislators.
It isn't working in Virginia because dolts like him are great at proposing but have not the means to make the proposal actually work.
Yeah, your argument applies to any and all changes. You could say "moving from coal fired engines to electrical engines for transit won't work because dolts like... are great at proposing improvements but don't have the means to actually do it." That's not an argument against revamping US government IT in such a way that it takes advantage of cloud computing architectures. It's just a general "let's not change anything because all changes are bad" argument.
Google has 67% of the search market in the US, which does not actually qualify as a monopoly under US law and basic antitrust guidelines.
But does in other jurisdictions. The bar for being a monopoly in the UK is 25%, where Google have 86% of the market. Ooh, what's that big thing outside the US's borders... I think it's called a "world". You migh[sic]
The UK is one small jurisdiction and I'm not familiar with their antitrust laws. I generally pay attention to the big three (US, EU, CN) since most other jurisdictions follow suit. Do you have a citation of UK law? I strongly suspect you're looking at general competition laws and not antitrust laws if it regards market share that low.
See above.
You make this comment twice, but fail to site the relevant portions of my comment about why even if they did have sufficient market share in search, they would probably not be in violation of the law. Is it that you think that was not relevant to the discussion, or just that you didn't have any reasonable objection?
Except you're the only one asserting Google has a monopoly "desktop". Everyone else is talking about the market where Google is over 70% in the US, that being search related online advertising.
No, that's just you. If you even read the title, let alone RTFA, you will see it says "Microsoft behind Google complaints to EC". Now what exactly would the European Commission care about US market shares for?
Umm, because they're interested in mergers and partnerships that are not allowed if they consolidate markets too much, such as the search advertising market. How does the EU looking into Yahoo, Google, and MS (all three of whom are major participants in both markets) imply that the EU is looking into a specific one of those markets?
When Google released Buzz, it was a reminder that if they wanted to break gmail pretty badly, they'd be able to, and we'd have no recourse. With software on your own computer, you can at least refrain from running the upgrade.
Except, of course, GMail works with POP and IMAP so you can run your own software on your own computer, in fact you can run pretty much any e-mail program because it does a reasonable job of adhering to open published standards, unlike MS's e-mail offerings.
In fact, Google most certainly have been doing bundling, similar to what Microsoft was initially called out for.
Bundling what with what, specifically?
Remember that Google has a monopoly in search, not just in search advertising.
Google has 67% of the search market in the US, which does not actually qualify as a monopoly under US law and basic antitrust guidelines. Further, the distinction of search and search advertising is interesting because it requires that at the time Google gained enough market share to qualify as a monopoly that there was a separate market for search, which is to say companies were profiting by offering up search without accompanying advertising as a revenue model. (This may have been the case, I don't know, but it is a requirement.)
And browsers and media players were considered a 'market' even though IE and Windows Media Player were not sold, so "making no money from it" is no defense.
You seem to have a slight misunderstanding. It doesn't matter if MS was selling either product, just if anyone was making money from providing those items, either for sale, or rent, or with an advertising revenue model, or any other revenue model for that matter.
The Google search page -- both the home page and every results page -- contains direct links to their own other products...
Yes they do, but that is probably not enough to qualify as bundling, especially since they don't have a legal monopoly on search, just on search advertising. That means they have to bundle it with the product they offer to advertisers, not end users, i.e. when you buy an adword we also provide the ad within our other products for free. Were Google to gain a bit more market share, even then I doubt that would be considered bundling since, unlike with MS products, Google is merely advertising their products. It takes a user no more work to use Google's search to find a competing Web service of follow a link in their browser. This could be an issue for ChromeOS though.
That's far worse than Microsoft's situation (where you could set another browser as the Windows default if you installed one.)
Far worse for Google's competitors compared to MS's competitors? I doubt they'd agree with you.
Google most certainly are leveraging their monopoly in search to draw users to their other services.
If Google actually had a legal monopoly on search and skewed the results to their own services, I'd agree with you. As it is, I doubt the courts would.
...but as Google talks up the browser as being the desktop, people start to notice more and more that Google's monopoly "desktop" only links their own services.
Except you're the only one asserting Google has a monopoly "desktop". Everyone else is talking about the market where Google is over 70% in the US, that being search related online advertising.
The common rant on slashdot is how Microsoft is using their Windows marketshare to keep competitors off and to gain marketshare in unrelated areas like IE (which they were punished for by EU).
That's not a "rant" it's a summary of recent legal action.
Google is doing exactly the same here...
Really, the exact same? What other market is Google using it's search advertising market to gain an advantage in and by what mechanism?
...but in addition to that they're also pushing competitors of the market by the sheer amount of data they can datamine.
That's an advantage in the search advertising market gained by marketshare in the search advertising market. That is to say, it's the same as Microsoft selling a lot of copies of Windows to people who ned to run software that only works on Windows because MS sells a lot of copies of Windows. It speaks to The entrenchment of a monopoly (lock-in) and is interesting because most people feel Google has very little lock-in, but it does not speak to anything Google could be doing which is illegal.
This will eventually lead to 100% monopoly. You say if that's a good or bad thing.
Good or bad is a matter of judgement, but even if Google's market share in search advertising gains them more searches to look at and feed to their algorithm... that's not illegal. It is not illegal to use market advantages in a dominated market to gain yet more share in the same market, only in separate, pre-existing markets. The reason for this is that the laws go out of their way to only punish companies that undermine markets and don't naturally gain by fair competition. Since it is hard to establish the difference in the same market, there are a lot fewer laws regulating it.
The entire government is a series of redundant clusterfucks right now. At least this would reduce the overall cost of clusterfuckery.
Any small change will require you contact a different agency than your own, i.e., the one running the data center.
Why? With virtual servers the same people can still create new ones, the only difference being they don't manage the hardware or networking. Thus, they have no incentive to spend money unnecessarily on servers and other gear just to keep their budget numbers artificially high.
They will decide whether and when your new IT bauble the public has clamored for you to provide is appropriate for their pristine data center.
I don't even know what you mean by this. Specialty hardware servers? They are an extreme rarity and are mostly for tasks that individual would no longer need to worry about. Can you provide an example? The only real concern would be making sure the overall computing power and networking and backup capabilities met the consolidated needs of the federal government. But this would provide incentive for reducing waste in that regard rather than providing incentive for it, like we do now.
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Why would they pick the Windows version and totally rewrite the audio system to use CoreAudio, instead of using OpenAL which supports both? (And Linux!)
The short answer performance.
The long answer, you seem confused. CoreAudio includes OpenAL as one of the largest components, which is why Apple is a large OpenAL contributor.
Yes, except we are glossing over the part where you use a tool to "create" the application. Flash is a format AND an authoring tool. Unless Flash starts somehow exporting HTML 5, I don't really see this happening.
That is a very important point, but it does not undercut the point I made at all. Just because Flash has a nice toolset does not make it able to target platforms that don't and won't support Flash for either strategic or performance reasons. People will be targeting those platforms with HTML 5 so there is a lot of motivation for new and better tools to be created. Certainly some people will not want to learn new tools and will satisfy themselves with smaller potential market share, but that's a losing proposition unless Adobe has a lot more leverage than I know about. And there are already some compliant tools as I mentioned, including toolchains that incorporate Adobe's own products already. Adobe does not do animated vector graphics, but Ikivo will easily animate Illustrator graphics. More and more HTML 5 is finding its way into standard javascript libraries and we all know the plethora of javascriping tools available. Basically, all the HTML+Javascript toolchains are going to be incorporating HTML 5, leaving Flash only for non-programmers and people unwilling to learn new tools. Flash will be around for a long time, but frankly it is a proprietary tool/format with increasingly limited reach because of that proprietary nature. It's an added cost many Web developers pay now, but as more and more eyeballs move to platforms Flash can't reach, it will become increasingly useless.
IE tends to be more popular at work or other locked-down environments, where Group Policy bans the installation of Chrome Frame. In a lot of cases, even the PC in the break room has only IE without Chrome Frame.
There are always going to be backward environments running old versions of IE or Netscape or something equally dated. New versions of IE (IE 9) should theoretically run the HTML 5 spec and if it doesn't MS will probably be back in court in the EU. Regardless ,any place that bans Chrome Frame in 5 years is probably also going to ban the Flash plugin as well, so there is still no incentive to use Flash over HTML 5.
I know of two ways to represent video: pixel block transforms and vector animations. Both H.264 and Theora are based on pixel block transforms. But a lot of the video on, say, Newgrounds is vector animations. So what do you recommend to replace SWF for that?
HTML 5 incorporates SVG as part of the standard, as mentioned in the article. You already asked about tools earlier and I answered with the most popular solution I know, Adobe Illustrator paired with Ikivo Animator. As per your sig, you can absolutely replace Badger Badger Badger with just an embedded video, but for more interesting vector graphics animations, i.e. vector graphics games, you can use SVG and javascript.
If a couple of worms make their way about exploiting OS X machines, Apple will immediately invest in better security technologies because they don't want to lose money.
It took them until .5.6 to deal with issues from .0
Dealing with potential issues that aren't actually causing a significant number of customers real problems is different from dealing with real problems that are costing Apple money and tarnishing their brand. It's always possible Apple systems could start getting exploited regularly and Apple would do nothing but it is extremely unlikely and would be an idiotic business decision. And as I said, Apple is already investing in security, they are just keeping it limited to a minor subset of their OS until the security need outweighs the potential hassle for users and developers. Apple encourages developers to sign their applications today, but does not limit unsigned apps because that would be a hassle for users and developers and there is no security problem that yet justifies it.
Any one have an idea if the security risk are any higher using HTML5? Or will it be the same risk just different types of vulnerabilities?
It's something of a trade off, but long term an improvement. You see, either way you can disable the plugin or disable javascript for a site to prevent exploits. With Javascript and HTML5 though, you can pick any browser to use and there is ongoing competition for making the best one. For Flash and Silverlight, you're stuck with a single vendor providing it, so any vulnerability and you're stuck waiting for Adobe and MS respectively. You can compare it to e-mail, perhaps. What is more secure Outlook, or standards compliant POP and IMAP clients collectively? Would you feel more secure using Outlook for your e-mail or taking your pick of any e-mail client that supports POP and IMAP?
I don't understand why anyone thinks this will put an end to Flash, Silverlight, etc., since HTML5 doesn't specify allowed CODECs. All this means is that those proprietary codecs will be specified with an HTML5 tag. Everything else will remain the same.
Picture this, in 5 years you're developing new Web site and you want a Web application on that site. Say it's a little Web based game. Will you:
Basically, for applications, Flash becomes redundant since you need to use HTM for other devices anyway and HTML 5 supports everything important Flash does. For video, Flash becomes useless overhead, since you can just specify a codec already used in Flash which will save the user's processor and using Flash limits your audience to a subset of what just specifying a standard codec or two does.
Big thanks to Apple for standing up to the Flash juggernaut and showing the world we could live without it, thereby paving the way for HTML 5.
And big thanks to Google for creating a non-Flash dependent version of YouTube to help Apple do it, and starting to move YouTube away from Flash in general.
In order that HTML 5 may replace Flash on Newgrounds.com, what tool for creating vector animations for HTML 5 is comparable to Adobe Flash CS series?
You might try Adobe Illustrator paired with Ikivo Animator, that's what Adobe recommends anyway.
You know, with Apple products experiencing something of a resurgence in the past 5-10 years and their popularity slowly increasing, they will eventually cross that invisible line where hackers decide that it becomes worth their time to attack Apple products the way they attack Windows.
People already attack Apple created systems for a variety of purposes, it's just the average person never experiences it because the level of security is still good enough to make large scale automated attacks too hard to implement. As Apple's market share increases, so will the number of people attempting attacks, but that's not really a big concern. Apple and Linux developers both have a vested interest in making sure security is never a huge problem for most customers. As such, they invest in developing real security as needed. If a couple of worms make their way about exploiting OS X machines, Apple will immediately invest in better security technologies because they don't want to lose money. Heck, they see it coming which is why they have application signing and mandatory access control frameworks already built into OS X, even though they are barely used. That's the real security difference from Windows. MS has little or no financial incentive to spend money on real security improvements, because they don't lose significant money when people are exploited and marketing does a better job than engineering on keeping the money flowing.
I never got the hang of it, but he used to pick the locks to various classrooms.
Just FYI, classroom locks are generally less secure than average. At school, rooms had locks that worked for individual keys and floor keys and building keys and campus master keys. That's 4 stacked pins and gives a lockpick 4 times the chance each try to get a working solution.
For the previous poster, lockpick guns and whatnot don't generally take long and are not very suspicious. Some guy stands in front of the door fiddling at the lock for a few seconds. Not suspicious.
In practice the only way to gain access to the locations secured by physical keys is to steal them, doing it without the persons knowledge means stealing them, copying them and returning them without the persons knowledge.
It always amuses me when people who would angrily declaim easily hacked and bypassed computer security, blithely assert that physical locks are secure. Seriously, I showed my girlfriend how to pick locks and within a few days of practice she had no problem opening the front door of any of the townhouses in our area. Most keyed locks are not really very secure, they rely upon the fact that most people don't ever try to pick them, a minor deterrent, just like most people don't know how to crack WEP, so it provides a small roadblock to an attacker and a significant one to the unskilled.
Obviously you've never dealt with the VA. Imagine your experience with private health care and then imagine a similar system run by people who can't be fired.
Sadly, the VA is some of the better healthcare in the US. The people working there can be fired, especially if the press gets involved and politicians want to capitalize on the public interest. In the private sector, of course the employee can be fired, but more likely they will be given a bonus for exactly what they did to me. At the VA they probably don't care and just want to minimize their own work. In private insurance they are being paid to waste your time and make things hard on you, so you might just go away or die before costing them any more money.
I don't know what kind of insurance you have, but I think you need to look for a different provider.
None, because no one will sell it to me in the states.
I have what is probably pretty run-of-the-mill Blue Cross, and I've been through a couple of surgeries, my wife has been through a couple, and we both have prescriptions, as well as two kids that occasionally get hurt and need emergency room visits, etc. And in all those years, I've filled out very little paperwork.
Yeah, I used to have Blue Cross of Maryland, supposedly one of the best in the country because of stricter laws there. Then I experienced long term illness that wasn't one of the common problems, you know the couple dozen illnesses that make up 90% of cases. That's when the paperwork became insane. I wrote just my name address, phone number, and social security number on a sheet of paper almost every day for no reason whatsoever other than they needed me to write it for the twentieth time. That's annoying when you're well. When you're in and out of consciousness and vomiting all the time it's inhumane.
. The only thing I pay for up front is a co-pay for visits, surgeries, and drugs.
Yeah, thats fine until they start wanting multiple doctors to sign off on procedures and start denying procedures for no real reason. I ended up tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket for procedures it was too difficult to get them to pay for.
Just hope you never get sick to the point where the cost of your care starts to go above the profit them made from your premiums... you know what insurance is supposed to be for.
National Health Care = forfeiting of personal freedoms such as what you can eat, drink, smoke, and other physical or mental activities you enjoy doing.
Umm, what socialized healthcare system in the world stops you from doing any of those? I know some provide incentives for doctors to convince people to not smoke, but I don't know any that make it illegal. For that matter many places with socialized healthcare have more freedom as to what you can smoke. So are you trolling or just a complete wacko?
We're all thinking it, so I'll say it: "Hey, let's let our government handle healthcare to increase effeciency[sic]"
Obviously you haven't dealt with the private healthcare industry. The insurance companies (for example) actually have motivation to make simple task harder for their customers because their job is to get people's money then make it as hard as possible for people to ever get any back. So they invent useless paperwork and rules and procedures to discourage the process. Trust me, I've been there. When you're really, really ill you better hope you have some good friends because there is no way you're going to stay on top of the paperwork and phone calls needed.
If your friend's practice couldn't get it together well enough to store prescriptions in Word, Excel, Access, or even Notepad, should we have any hope that they will be able to participate meaningfully in a fully transactionalized data transfer system without error or confusion?
Yes, because while the employees will never change without being motivated, the corporate headquarters will mandate change and hire some experts to implement a system if they see both a chunk of change from the feds to more than pay for it and they see a threat to their medicare payment revenue if they don't make the change in the long term. A bunch of aged secretarial types will never upgrade anything on their own. They will, in fact, resist change. When management tells them a new system is being put in, sends them to training, and tells them to use it or they're fired (because money is on the line instead of just people's health) those same secretarial types will grumble but do it.
I don't advocate doing nothing, mind you. I'm very much behind the idea of seeing physicians moving into the 21st century. I just worry that our current method for doing that may be flawed and create more problems than it solved. I could be wrong, though. It's been known to happen. :)
The real question is, what do you advocate. Its easy to say a solution is not perfect (none ever is). Do you have a better idea for getting this problem solved?
In any case, sorry to hear you had a bad time of things and I hope we all see general improvements soon.
I appreciate the concern. I lived through several years of medical hell that pretty much ruined most of my life. I still have not recovered financially and as a person who had some of the "best" commercial health insurance and hospitals out there, I'm a strong advocate for real reform.
Congress doesn't have the Constitutional authority to directly require this of local hospitals and physicians...
How is it any different that HIPA from constitutional standpoint?
Clearly there are a lot of people here posting about how the government should not be getting involved and that seems to be the bias of both the article and summary. Allow me to go into some personal experience here though. As someone who has been very ill, lack of standardized medical records and the inability of various hospitals to transfer digital copies of video and images resulted in my spending another month or so of my life in a state I would not wish upon anyone. Right now a very good friend of mine works in healthcare and they have been (I shit you not) writing down patient information on recipe cards as the one and only method of storing drug prescription info. This resulted in, by her count, several hundred patients not getting needed insulin, antipsychotics, and other drugs as a result of numerous ordering errors that were never caught and were impossible to search for. So when people say digitizing medical records in a standard fashion is going to result in problems for patients... well not doing it is resulting in the very same.
I'm not big on government interference with many parts of our lives, but they are addressing a very real problem and they're doing it with kid gloves. They did not pass regulations requiring hospitals to comply, they just tied federal funding to that compliance and gave the hospitals many years in which to get their shit together. If medical providers have not done so and are rushing about now, that is absolutely not the fault of the feds.
"The malware for each of these companies has been customized based on the versions of vulnerable software they're running, as well as what kind of anti-virus they're using. ...
Since when has anti-virus heuristics algorithms been at all useful against custom malware?
"The malware has been customized" implies they are picking malware or modifying malware, rather than writing it from scratch. AV programs often can catch new variants of old malware unless it has been remade to avoid detection in specific ways.
The entire government is not a series of redundant clusterFs right now. It is large, parts of it work very well, parts of it do not.
Really? What US department right now does not provide their managers with incentive to overspend for budgetary reasons or to benefit their own career via headcount?
"Why? With virtual servers the same people can still create new ones, the only difference being they don't manage the hardware or networking."
You have no understanding of how organizations work. There will be an "authority" whose job it is to keep the server store for "security" if nothing else.
I've done work with the DoD and the Navy as well as hundreds of private companies. I think I have a fair understanding. As for managing the server store for security, there may well be processing power constraints, but I don't even understand what you're trying to say with regard to a store. How and Why would departments be prevented from making virtual servers and based upon what cloud computing model. None of the major ones I've seen have any such nonsense.
"But this would provide incentive for reducing waste in that regard rather than providing incentive for it, like we do now."
It won't, it will provide a new government agency with the reasons for increase expenditures, increased staffing, and with that increase "regulation" on users (i.e., the rest of the government) who will be forced to use it. If your agency wants to provide a new service, it will have to run the gauntlet of the new "service" agency.
The new government agency, will have little ability to justify and ever increasing budget because the amount of usage will be determined by other departments. "Yeah we need 100 new servers" is awfully hard to justify if you can't show demand based upon the load being put upon it by those other departments who no longer have motivation to create useless servers. Further, why would departments need to "run a gauntlet" to offer a new service. They just create a virtual server and start it up as any cloud computing client does now. Unless the new agency really is constrained by processing power, there would be no reason for them to halt new VMs being created, and if that happens you'll have dozens of agencies clamoring for increasing the funding.
Not only that, every few years when the new agency gets a new director, s/he will issue new marching orders merely to piss in the corners and make the agency his/her own...why...just like the current dolt proposing this reorg.
Sure, new people always like putting their fingerprint on things. That might be switching underlying architectures or the interface or any number of things. The difference being, this department is a service one servicing other organizations, so any significant changes they want to push will get pushback from other departments and legislators.
It isn't working in Virginia because dolts like him are great at proposing but have not the means to make the proposal actually work.
Yeah, your argument applies to any and all changes. You could say "moving from coal fired engines to electrical engines for transit won't work because dolts like ... are great at proposing improvements but don't have the means to actually do it." That's not an argument against revamping US government IT in such a way that it takes advantage of cloud computing architectures. It's just a general "let's not change anything because all changes are bad" argument.
Google has 67% of the search market in the US, which does not actually qualify as a monopoly under US law and basic antitrust guidelines.
But does in other jurisdictions. The bar for being a monopoly in the UK is 25%, where Google have 86% of the market. Ooh, what's that big thing outside the US's borders... I think it's called a "world". You migh[sic]
The UK is one small jurisdiction and I'm not familiar with their antitrust laws. I generally pay attention to the big three (US, EU, CN) since most other jurisdictions follow suit. Do you have a citation of UK law? I strongly suspect you're looking at general competition laws and not antitrust laws if it regards market share that low.
See above.
You make this comment twice, but fail to site the relevant portions of my comment about why even if they did have sufficient market share in search, they would probably not be in violation of the law. Is it that you think that was not relevant to the discussion, or just that you didn't have any reasonable objection?
Except you're the only one asserting Google has a monopoly "desktop". Everyone else is talking about the market where Google is over 70% in the US, that being search related online advertising.
No, that's just you. If you even read the title, let alone RTFA, you will see it says "Microsoft behind Google complaints to EC". Now what exactly would the European Commission care about US market shares for?
Umm, because they're interested in mergers and partnerships that are not allowed if they consolidate markets too much, such as the search advertising market. How does the EU looking into Yahoo, Google, and MS (all three of whom are major participants in both markets) imply that the EU is looking into a specific one of those markets?
When Google released Buzz, it was a reminder that if they wanted to break gmail pretty badly, they'd be able to, and we'd have no recourse. With software on your own computer, you can at least refrain from running the upgrade.
Except, of course, GMail works with POP and IMAP so you can run your own software on your own computer, in fact you can run pretty much any e-mail program because it does a reasonable job of adhering to open published standards, unlike MS's e-mail offerings.
In fact, Google most certainly have been doing bundling, similar to what Microsoft was initially called out for.
Bundling what with what, specifically?
Remember that Google has a monopoly in search, not just in search advertising.
Google has 67% of the search market in the US, which does not actually qualify as a monopoly under US law and basic antitrust guidelines. Further, the distinction of search and search advertising is interesting because it requires that at the time Google gained enough market share to qualify as a monopoly that there was a separate market for search, which is to say companies were profiting by offering up search without accompanying advertising as a revenue model. (This may have been the case, I don't know, but it is a requirement.)
And browsers and media players were considered a 'market' even though IE and Windows Media Player were not sold, so "making no money from it" is no defense.
You seem to have a slight misunderstanding. It doesn't matter if MS was selling either product, just if anyone was making money from providing those items, either for sale, or rent, or with an advertising revenue model, or any other revenue model for that matter.
The Google search page -- both the home page and every results page -- contains direct links to their own other products...
Yes they do, but that is probably not enough to qualify as bundling, especially since they don't have a legal monopoly on search, just on search advertising. That means they have to bundle it with the product they offer to advertisers, not end users, i.e. when you buy an adword we also provide the ad within our other products for free. Were Google to gain a bit more market share, even then I doubt that would be considered bundling since, unlike with MS products, Google is merely advertising their products. It takes a user no more work to use Google's search to find a competing Web service of follow a link in their browser. This could be an issue for ChromeOS though.
That's far worse than Microsoft's situation (where you could set another browser as the Windows default if you installed one.)
Far worse for Google's competitors compared to MS's competitors? I doubt they'd agree with you.
Google most certainly are leveraging their monopoly in search to draw users to their other services.
If Google actually had a legal monopoly on search and skewed the results to their own services, I'd agree with you. As it is, I doubt the courts would.
...but as Google talks up the browser as being the desktop, people start to notice more and more that Google's monopoly "desktop" only links their own services.
Except you're the only one asserting Google has a monopoly "desktop". Everyone else is talking about the market where Google is over 70% in the US, that being search related online advertising.
The common rant on slashdot is how Microsoft is using their Windows marketshare to keep competitors off and to gain marketshare in unrelated areas like IE (which they were punished for by EU).
That's not a "rant" it's a summary of recent legal action.
Google is doing exactly the same here...
Really, the exact same? What other market is Google using it's search advertising market to gain an advantage in and by what mechanism?
...but in addition to that they're also pushing competitors of the market by the sheer amount of data they can datamine.
That's an advantage in the search advertising market gained by marketshare in the search advertising market. That is to say, it's the same as Microsoft selling a lot of copies of Windows to people who ned to run software that only works on Windows because MS sells a lot of copies of Windows. It speaks to The entrenchment of a monopoly (lock-in) and is interesting because most people feel Google has very little lock-in, but it does not speak to anything Google could be doing which is illegal.
This will eventually lead to 100% monopoly. You say if that's a good or bad thing.
Good or bad is a matter of judgement, but even if Google's market share in search advertising gains them more searches to look at and feed to their algorithm... that's not illegal. It is not illegal to use market advantages in a dominated market to gain yet more share in the same market, only in separate, pre-existing markets. The reason for this is that the laws go out of their way to only punish companies that undermine markets and don't naturally gain by fair competition. Since it is hard to establish the difference in the same market, there are a lot fewer laws regulating it.
You will get a sclerotic monolith of a clusterF
The entire government is a series of redundant clusterfucks right now. At least this would reduce the overall cost of clusterfuckery.
Any small change will require you contact a different agency than your own, i.e., the one running the data center.
Why? With virtual servers the same people can still create new ones, the only difference being they don't manage the hardware or networking. Thus, they have no incentive to spend money unnecessarily on servers and other gear just to keep their budget numbers artificially high.
They will decide whether and when your new IT bauble the public has clamored for you to provide is appropriate for their pristine data center.
I don't even know what you mean by this. Specialty hardware servers? They are an extreme rarity and are mostly for tasks that individual would no longer need to worry about. Can you provide an example? The only real concern would be making sure the overall computing power and networking and backup capabilities met the consolidated needs of the federal government. But this would provide incentive for reducing waste in that regard rather than providing incentive for it, like we do now.