No, I don't think my opinion is the only one that counts. If you are an iPerson, yes, I do think you have been sucked into the hype or are drinking the koolaid. Apple makes computing devices. They truly are no better or no worse than dozens of other products. For any given user they may be more useful to their needs, but they are just computing devices. They happen to come packaged with restrictions as well as features. Hope you didn't like pR0n on your iPhone. If you want your tech daddy looking after you, and trust them to give you only the features you are mature enough to deal with, by all means, be an iPerson. Otherwise, there are plenty of other devices out there to serve your needs. Some of them are technically better than the iStuff. But you go ahead and get the iWhatever since you 'know' its superior to anything else. My opinion should never get in your way. Go out an buy some iStuff today for god's sake. It's your money, spend it how you like. Set it on fire for all I care. Oh, and when you need a car, don't buy a sensible used Honda, by all means, overspend, go get a Lamborghini because it's the best you can get. When people see you driving that they will know you are 'somebody' and not just a smuck with a car. Please, use the same buying sense on cars and houses that you use on tech gear. I bet you have a 128 port router at home too, why bother with just a 4 port router, get the 'real' stuff.
If you have an Apple computer, it makes a bit of sense to go with Apple mobile devices since they lock you in at every turn. If you don't, forget about Apple, it's a trap. A trap designed to get you to spend more money with Apple. If you want to spend your money on Apple products, go ahead, don't let common sense stop you.
They've been barking up the same wrong tree for a long time IMO. The fact that there are so many lemmings with so much free cash has worked to Apple's advantage. Remember, there is a large portion of the populace who buy things because they are told to, or because the commercials make it sound magic. As soon as they see that magic on sale, they buy. Many of them would not know the differences technically, or functionally between iStuff and anything else if you wrote it down for them. They just buy on reputation. As soon as Appple has something like a faulty accelerator system problem this will wear off. MS had one in the form of ME, then Vista. The Zune was practically stillborn in the me-too afterglow of iPods. Still, you can get functionally equivalent equipment at a lower price. Unless you have Apple computers there is NO compelling reason to buy iStuff. No, I'm not just trying to harang on Apple, but the price/function score for iStuff will not be better than what other manufacturers have or will have. Same story, same long tail, same 'magic' and it will continue to work for them till they mess up. IMO, Android is going to really start stealing their thunder very soon. Perhaps reveal the magic to everyone.
Well, you might be right IF it was not possible to accidentally do this. For about a year, my next door neighbor and I were stealing from each other. My wife had blocked our wifi ap in the laptop setup somehow (she doesn't know) and was leaching off the neighbor. When her laptop stopped working, I investigated. Found that it was not set to log to our own AP, and further found that a secondary AP of ours was in a default state, that is enabled and unsecure. Guess who was logged into it? The same neighbor who's AP her laptop had been using till he secured it. My best guess is that it had been that way for months. No party involved walked through any door, nor did we actively initiate picking up anything. There was no intent to steal, share, or otherwise deprive anyone of anything, but it happened just the same. In this case, no harm no foul. Yes, I look at the configs now and then. A recent storm reset the vonage router and it defaulted to enabled and secure but that caused interference with the AP I use so it was not left for anyone to try using it. Yes, I have UPS, so don't need obvious suggestions. The point is most equipment is set to log in anywhere it can and will happily do so without reporting where that is. Calling it theft is like accusing passersby of using images of your house without permission because they have stored a memory of their journey in their head.
To add one level more of upset, when we reach that point or singularity where robots can do all that humans can do it will bring up the question of what is a soul? At that point Skynet will protect itself from the impending religious genocide wars about to be waged against the robots.
Ahhh, the Internet at it's very finest. Social consciousness outing the bad guys. On the other hand, might just be someone who doesn't like MS. Either way, it's misuse of copyright AND this points out the real value of the DMCA, which of course is not to protect the people in any way shape or form. At least, that's how I see it.
I don't know, a couple of hearty men on a couple of random ships seems to be able to cut off most of the world from the Internet. If you planned it just right, that sysadmin might be on the bridge of a boat, but pull the plug he could.
Foolproof solutions only make smarter fools.
It would not take too long to programmaticly identify and block/drop/disconnect any IP on your network, daisy chain that effort, and you start making parts of the network dark, but it will shut down the attack, legal issues aside. If the problem is big enough, this type of answer would be acceptable for a short period to most users. Car analogy: Oh, I have to stop driving my car to get the snakes out of it? ok! screeechhh, door opens, driver exits as if ejected.
I'm not saying it's a practical plan, but in desperate times....
Dear customer, we want your web browsing experience to be as secure as possible, however we still want to be able to hear you sing happy birthday to aunt Margaret. Did you decide to send her the chocolates and candles you were discussing with your sister?
Regards
Comcast Customer Services
For your information:
People who sent chocolates and candles for birthdays also chose:...
The real problem with computers of any variety is that they require software to run. So as soon as you've purchased some computing hardware you have a 'problem' to deal with. No matter what choice you make for an OS, you now have a multitude of problems. Oh, so you want applications too? Now you have a larger list of problems.
I fail to see how looking at any small group of that now large list of problems constitutes anything more than complaining that you bought a computing device and it needs effort to maintain it. If it's really a big problem for the user, they can sit home and wait for their rotary dial phone to ring.
For phone manufacturers, making all those problems invisible is a profit thing. For computer software makers, making all those problems invisible is the holy grail. Even if they become invisible, they still exist, and will eventually come to haunt you. Well, until someone manages to stuff a 'mind reading' function into applications.
Exactly, logic says if you don't want it read by the public, don't host it on a public webserver. There are plenty of analogies here, but you're right, there was no lock or even a partially closed door. This doesn't equate well to the physical world unless you want to say they were invited into the room with no door on it, a room filled with artworks, and under a few of the paintings is a small sign with fine print that says 'please don't look at this painting'. Some of us are getting used to standards in web design and may attempt a uri by guess in case that common page is already created to save looking for it. This is not uncommon, so the practice of typing in a uri rather than clicking on links is not a felonious adventure. If you've already seen the painting, the fine print on the little sign is not going to be sufficient security. If you're not sure what I mean, try http://microsoft.com/search or http://ibm.com/search or http://any/ website/search I'm only guessing, but I bet the search box would have found the documents for them also?
There is a larger problem to this. Those same local ISP and service providers operate on a shoestring budget for the most part, and even in the USA operators will cut back on operating costs to keep a profit. The trouble this brings is that they are not equipped to fully integrated to emergency situations. Recent hurricanes and non-natural disasters in the USA led to regulations that are simply expensive to comply with in order to be compliant with state of emergency situations. It's expensive enough to pay for 4 hour response times to outages, but pay for 24-72 hour battery backup at every remote site, and longer at key sites and the cost is nearly unrecoverable.
When huge cash injections come for emergency aid, it DOES leave the businesses out of the loop. IMO, it's the fault of the government for not stating up front that local ISP/providers will eventually benefit from the cash and infrastructure injection as part of building future emergency response preparedness.
Yes, there are of course arguments on both sides, but I'm just saying they do have a real and rational point.
Bob isn't an idiot, he's a typical windows user. Not to ping on MS, but they do manage to capture the low end of the market in that respect. A vast majority of computer users think that computer programmers are modern day wizards, and blindly trust that only bad programmers build bad programs. Further there are only two kinds of programs, good ones and bad ones like viruses and malware. Any program that is not bad is good, and has things like virus checking and mind reading built into them. Stack overflow is a card mishap at the casino and cross site scripting sounds like a multi site movie writers program.
These warped expectations leads to things like... well, like Bob.
Bob and his friends are why so many virus and malware programs are profitable, so in a sad way, Bob is right.
And you might have heard on the commercial, 1 out of 4 women can't read a pregnancy test, so they made it easier to read. I'm pretty tired of advertising and mock white papers making it out like we're all stupid. Using Symantec security products won't make your business decisions smarter. What it will do is ensure that your minimum spending on security products is done with Symantec. A real white paper on security would have shown all options, and compared them to each other so you can not only make a decision to use security products and why you would do so, but which one suits your needs best.
I think I'm at the point where if the ad, paper, or whatever describes me or other users or the demographic they are after as stupid, I will just shitcan it on principle.
And the world goes on. Even if Win7 had huge memory problems, it wouldn't have stopped people from buying it. Though I wonder how close this comes to an actionable legal issue?
Pinning it on the Chinese government in public would be claiming an attack by one government on another's citizens and infrastructure. This would be one of the scenarios that Home Land Security is preparing to defend against. It's presumed that 'terrorists' would be the attackers, but if it turns out the terrorists are Chinese it would shift the direction of momentum for such groups as Homeland Security. With the USA in a semi-permanent state of war against terror, if this is tagged as terrorism, it stands a good chance of crumbling trade agreements to bits. Of course that can't be allowed to happen politically, so the offensive parts of this will be swept under the political rug, and in the worst case situation, China will claim to have punished some errant students. There is far more involved than some IT attacks. Rest assured that business and political interests will ensure that a bit of 'file sharing' won't get in the way of those other interests. So, where do we go from here? not page 1, page 7 of the local section if we're lucky enough to see it in main stream news at all.
Absolutely right. There is no reasonable estimation, never mind recorded volume of distribution. It in fact could be zero. Since the chances are as likely to have been zero as to have been 150,000, there is no reason to rule to the benefit of the RIAA. That is sort of like handing out a jay-walking ticket that carries a fine of 150000 times normal in case the offender has jaywalked in the past but did not get caught. Argument about the actual damages are moot, there is no way to show what the number of downloads or distributions actually is, hence, one copy is all that can be proved... or about 35 cents per song.
Why restore it now, a good slashdotting worth of free advertisement is probably more than they hoped for... or maybe expected. Either way, I'm sure they are happy with their site count today.
We've not really come very far in business with technology if you consider the paperless office as case in point. Watch any small group of people with smart phones, say something that needs to be written down and watch what happens... gadgets yes, advancement... not so much
Probably not. Imagine trying to reinvent the wheel, every time someone changes a tread pattern? MS did a lot of that, and with the do no evil mantra, supporting Wikipedia while collecting revenue from searches is donoevil+catchrevenue = ftw
By supporting Wikipedia Google continues to catalog and index the world's information. When you add it up, it is just Google doing what Google said it would do, making alliances along the way to make it profitable.
You, my friend, have hit the nail on the head. Social interaction is not defined by a behavior pattern, but by patterns driven by desires, or goals as they term them scientifically. It's great to get a press release when you figure out how to mimic some human behavior, and more great when you get a program to mimic human thought. The trouble really comes when you try to mimic humans, they are unpredictable, non-logical, and down-right antagonistic to programmatic function. Build me a robot with low self-esteem and we can have a conversation. Build me a robot that can sell used cars, we have a few months of conversation, build me a robot that can sell oil to Arabs and we have a deal. Build me a wall street robot and we have a government contract !!!
Slashdot Mirror
No, I don't think my opinion is the only one that counts. If you are an iPerson, yes, I do think you have been sucked into the hype or are drinking the koolaid. Apple makes computing devices. They truly are no better or no worse than dozens of other products. For any given user they may be more useful to their needs, but they are just computing devices. They happen to come packaged with restrictions as well as features. Hope you didn't like pR0n on your iPhone. If you want your tech daddy looking after you, and trust them to give you only the features you are mature enough to deal with, by all means, be an iPerson. Otherwise, there are plenty of other devices out there to serve your needs. Some of them are technically better than the iStuff. But you go ahead and get the iWhatever since you 'know' its superior to anything else. My opinion should never get in your way. Go out an buy some iStuff today for god's sake. It's your money, spend it how you like. Set it on fire for all I care. Oh, and when you need a car, don't buy a sensible used Honda, by all means, overspend, go get a Lamborghini because it's the best you can get. When people see you driving that they will know you are 'somebody' and not just a smuck with a car. Please, use the same buying sense on cars and houses that you use on tech gear. I bet you have a 128 port router at home too, why bother with just a 4 port router, get the 'real' stuff.
If you have an Apple computer, it makes a bit of sense to go with Apple mobile devices since they lock you in at every turn. If you don't, forget about Apple, it's a trap. A trap designed to get you to spend more money with Apple. If you want to spend your money on Apple products, go ahead, don't let common sense stop you.
P.S. Yes, I value my opinion that much.
You are right, shame that mods are all betting on the afterlife.
They've been barking up the same wrong tree for a long time IMO. The fact that there are so many lemmings with so much free cash has worked to Apple's advantage. Remember, there is a large portion of the populace who buy things because they are told to, or because the commercials make it sound magic. As soon as they see that magic on sale, they buy. Many of them would not know the differences technically, or functionally between iStuff and anything else if you wrote it down for them. They just buy on reputation. As soon as Appple has something like a faulty accelerator system problem this will wear off. MS had one in the form of ME, then Vista. The Zune was practically stillborn in the me-too afterglow of iPods. Still, you can get functionally equivalent equipment at a lower price. Unless you have Apple computers there is NO compelling reason to buy iStuff. No, I'm not just trying to harang on Apple, but the price/function score for iStuff will not be better than what other manufacturers have or will have. Same story, same long tail, same 'magic' and it will continue to work for them till they mess up. IMO, Android is going to really start stealing their thunder very soon. Perhaps reveal the magic to everyone.
Well, you might be right IF it was not possible to accidentally do this. For about a year, my next door neighbor and I were stealing from each other. My wife had blocked our wifi ap in the laptop setup somehow (she doesn't know) and was leaching off the neighbor. When her laptop stopped working, I investigated. Found that it was not set to log to our own AP, and further found that a secondary AP of ours was in a default state, that is enabled and unsecure. Guess who was logged into it? The same neighbor who's AP her laptop had been using till he secured it. My best guess is that it had been that way for months. No party involved walked through any door, nor did we actively initiate picking up anything. There was no intent to steal, share, or otherwise deprive anyone of anything, but it happened just the same. In this case, no harm no foul. Yes, I look at the configs now and then. A recent storm reset the vonage router and it defaulted to enabled and secure but that caused interference with the AP I use so it was not left for anyone to try using it. Yes, I have UPS, so don't need obvious suggestions. The point is most equipment is set to log in anywhere it can and will happily do so without reporting where that is. Calling it theft is like accusing passersby of using images of your house without permission because they have stored a memory of their journey in their head.
To add one level more of upset, when we reach that point or singularity where robots can do all that humans can do it will bring up the question of what is a soul? At that point Skynet will protect itself from the impending religious genocide wars about to be waged against the robots.
Ahhh, the Internet at it's very finest. Social consciousness outing the bad guys. On the other hand, might just be someone who doesn't like MS. Either way, it's misuse of copyright AND this points out the real value of the DMCA, which of course is not to protect the people in any way shape or form. At least, that's how I see it.
This needs to be reported to the EU, it's the DUTCH electric car that is supposed to go halfsies
I don't know, a couple of hearty men on a couple of random ships seems to be able to cut off most of the world from the Internet. If you planned it just right, that sysadmin might be on the bridge of a boat, but pull the plug he could.
Foolproof solutions only make smarter fools.
It would not take too long to programmaticly identify and block/drop/disconnect any IP on your network, daisy chain that effort, and you start making parts of the network dark, but it will shut down the attack, legal issues aside. If the problem is big enough, this type of answer would be acceptable for a short period to most users. Car analogy: Oh, I have to stop driving my car to get the snakes out of it? ok! screeechhh, door opens, driver exits as if ejected.
I'm not saying it's a practical plan, but in desperate times....
Dear customer, we want your web browsing experience to be as secure as possible, however we still want to be able to hear you sing happy birthday to aunt Margaret. Did you decide to send her the chocolates and candles you were discussing with your sister?
Regards
Comcast Customer Services
For your information:
People who sent chocolates and candles for birthdays also chose: ...
The real problem with computers of any variety is that they require software to run. So as soon as you've purchased some computing hardware you have a 'problem' to deal with. No matter what choice you make for an OS, you now have a multitude of problems. Oh, so you want applications too? Now you have a larger list of problems.
I fail to see how looking at any small group of that now large list of problems constitutes anything more than complaining that you bought a computing device and it needs effort to maintain it. If it's really a big problem for the user, they can sit home and wait for their rotary dial phone to ring.
For phone manufacturers, making all those problems invisible is a profit thing. For computer software makers, making all those problems invisible is the holy grail. Even if they become invisible, they still exist, and will eventually come to haunt you. Well, until someone manages to stuff a 'mind reading' function into applications.
Exactly, logic says if you don't want it read by the public, don't host it on a public webserver. There are plenty of analogies here, but you're right, there was no lock or even a partially closed door. This doesn't equate well to the physical world unless you want to say they were invited into the room with no door on it, a room filled with artworks, and under a few of the paintings is a small sign with fine print that says 'please don't look at this painting'. Some of us are getting used to standards in web design and may attempt a uri by guess in case that common page is already created to save looking for it. This is not uncommon, so the practice of typing in a uri rather than clicking on links is not a felonious adventure. If you've already seen the painting, the fine print on the little sign is not going to be sufficient security. If you're not sure what I mean, try http://microsoft.com/search or http://ibm.com/search or http://any/ website/search I'm only guessing, but I bet the search box would have found the documents for them also?
There is a larger problem to this. Those same local ISP and service providers operate on a shoestring budget for the most part, and even in the USA operators will cut back on operating costs to keep a profit. The trouble this brings is that they are not equipped to fully integrated to emergency situations. Recent hurricanes and non-natural disasters in the USA led to regulations that are simply expensive to comply with in order to be compliant with state of emergency situations. It's expensive enough to pay for 4 hour response times to outages, but pay for 24-72 hour battery backup at every remote site, and longer at key sites and the cost is nearly unrecoverable.
When huge cash injections come for emergency aid, it DOES leave the businesses out of the loop. IMO, it's the fault of the government for not stating up front that local ISP/providers will eventually benefit from the cash and infrastructure injection as part of building future emergency response preparedness.
Yes, there are of course arguments on both sides, but I'm just saying they do have a real and rational point.
Bob isn't an idiot, he's a typical windows user. Not to ping on MS, but they do manage to capture the low end of the market in that respect. A vast majority of computer users think that computer programmers are modern day wizards, and blindly trust that only bad programmers build bad programs. Further there are only two kinds of programs, good ones and bad ones like viruses and malware. Any program that is not bad is good, and has things like virus checking and mind reading built into them. Stack overflow is a card mishap at the casino and cross site scripting sounds like a multi site movie writers program.
These warped expectations leads to things like ... well, like Bob.
Bob and his friends are why so many virus and malware programs are profitable, so in a sad way, Bob is right.
Yes, just one mention and 4chan will be eerily silent for about 14 minutes while meedan servers burst into flames
And you might have heard on the commercial, 1 out of 4 women can't read a pregnancy test, so they made it easier to read. I'm pretty tired of advertising and mock white papers making it out like we're all stupid. Using Symantec security products won't make your business decisions smarter. What it will do is ensure that your minimum spending on security products is done with Symantec. A real white paper on security would have shown all options, and compared them to each other so you can not only make a decision to use security products and why you would do so, but which one suits your needs best.
I think I'm at the point where if the ad, paper, or whatever describes me or other users or the demographic they are after as stupid, I will just shitcan it on principle.
I'm not sure which way to point in this issue, but there is valid discussion on both sides. All I can say is this is one well done report!
And the world goes on. Even if Win7 had huge memory problems, it wouldn't have stopped people from buying it. Though I wonder how close this comes to an actionable legal issue?
Pinning it on the Chinese government in public would be claiming an attack by one government on another's citizens and infrastructure. This would be one of the scenarios that Home Land Security is preparing to defend against. It's presumed that 'terrorists' would be the attackers, but if it turns out the terrorists are Chinese it would shift the direction of momentum for such groups as Homeland Security. With the USA in a semi-permanent state of war against terror, if this is tagged as terrorism, it stands a good chance of crumbling trade agreements to bits. Of course that can't be allowed to happen politically, so the offensive parts of this will be swept under the political rug, and in the worst case situation, China will claim to have punished some errant students. There is far more involved than some IT attacks. Rest assured that business and political interests will ensure that a bit of 'file sharing' won't get in the way of those other interests. So, where do we go from here? not page 1, page 7 of the local section if we're lucky enough to see it in main stream news at all.
Absolutely right. There is no reasonable estimation, never mind recorded volume of distribution. It in fact could be zero. Since the chances are as likely to have been zero as to have been 150,000, there is no reason to rule to the benefit of the RIAA. That is sort of like handing out a jay-walking ticket that carries a fine of 150000 times normal in case the offender has jaywalked in the past but did not get caught. Argument about the actual damages are moot, there is no way to show what the number of downloads or distributions actually is, hence, one copy is all that can be proved... or about 35 cents per song.
Why restore it now, a good slashdotting worth of free advertisement is probably more than they hoped for... or maybe expected. Either way, I'm sure they are happy with their site count today.
to educate, you say?
We've not really come very far in business with technology if you consider the paperless office as case in point. Watch any small group of people with smart phones, say something that needs to be written down and watch what happens... gadgets yes, advancement... not so much
Just have patches issued by McAfee and Symantec... that will fix the problem, for certain.
Probably not. Imagine trying to reinvent the wheel, every time someone changes a tread pattern? MS did a lot of that, and with the do no evil mantra, supporting Wikipedia while collecting revenue from searches is donoevil+catchrevenue = ftw
By supporting Wikipedia Google continues to catalog and index the world's information. When you add it up, it is just Google doing what Google said it would do, making alliances along the way to make it profitable.
you should have gotten points
You, my friend, have hit the nail on the head. Social interaction is not defined by a behavior pattern, but by patterns driven by desires, or goals as they term them scientifically. It's great to get a press release when you figure out how to mimic some human behavior, and more great when you get a program to mimic human thought. The trouble really comes when you try to mimic humans, they are unpredictable, non-logical, and down-right antagonistic to programmatic function. Build me a robot with low self-esteem and we can have a conversation. Build me a robot that can sell used cars, we have a few months of conversation, build me a robot that can sell oil to Arabs and we have a deal. Build me a wall street robot and we have a government contract !!!