Exactly. The (very small) university that I attend went with GMail a couple years ago. I presume they evaluated the following options:
1) Keep paying an employee or contract a vast amount of money to maintain the custom pain-in-the-ass mail system that everybody hates. What happens when you get an overpaid, half-competent admin and throw in thousands of students and faculty who don't really understand how to use email in the first place but come beating down the door when the service is down? Not to mention the troubles involved with telling users how to configure their email clients.
2) Hand it all over to Google, who will do it for free. GMail is extremely stable in comparison to most homebrew email systems and does automatic spam and virus filtering. People who want their IMAP access can still have it. Those that don't get one of the best web-based email interfaces on the planet.
One nice thing about running Linux natively and Windows XP virtualized (assuming you have to run XP at all) is that you can move the XP image from physical machine to physical machine without tripping the hardware configuration change bullcrap because the virtualized hardware doesn't appear to change from XP's point of view.
I agree with you 100%, but the government has been flouting the spirit of the 4th amendment for quite some time. For example, it's illegal for a government agency (say, the CIA) to collect detailed dossiers on citizens without any suspicion of wrong-doing. However, it's not illegal for a company to do it. So when the government takes a sudden interest in you, they just buy your file (containing everything from physical addresses to magazine subscriptions) for $30. The end result is the same, but the process skirts the wording of the law.
Just because there's a 3rd party (phone company) involved doesn't mean 4th amendment goes out the window.
They probably think that they're in the clear now since a judge recently dismissed EFF's case against the NSA for its warrantless wiretapping program. If this decision holds, there's really not much that can be done about companies simply offering up their records on citizens to the government of their own free will.
In fact, I think that such a convention should be mandatory about every 50 years
To this, I would like to respond not just no, but HELL NO. The Constitution has done a relatively good job of preserving the vision of our founding fathers for more than 200 years precisely because its terms are plain and very, very static. This was a deliberate choice by the writers of the constitution. They wanted this document to be the concrete law of the land to prevent future generations of politicians and judges from mucking it up for their own agendas, against the general interest of the people. They knew they had only one shot at getting the foundations of the country's law right, that's why they made the Constitution's provisions permanent. Even though certain individuals, agencies, and organizations manage to subvert the spirit of the Constitution from time to time, it's simply amazing that the overall structure of our government and legal system as a whole has not changed dramatically since the country was founded.
Who exactly do you think is going to rewrite the Constitution? If something as mundane as health care reform can end up so wildly out of control with conflicting interests, special favors for lobbyists, and sausage making, what do you think is going to happen when they try to rewrite the document that forms the basis of our entire country? The primary purpose of the Constitution is explicitly give rights to the people and limit the power of the government, why on earth would you want to even risk having such an important foundation taken away?
Finally, rewriting the Constitution would be simply, well, unconstitutional.
They have a few products for small businesses, and mostly web-centric ones at that. TFA was about the enterprise market, competing with Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, etc.
The design mentality of Apple (well, Steve Jobs at any rate) seems to be that of "lets figure out how to build this interface as simple as possible while retaining the bare minimum functionality. It's not about removing "knobs and buttons," as they were never there to begin with.
The reason Apple won't deliberately get into business or government technology is simply because they aren't equipped for it. 99% of their marketing experience is geared towards direct-to-consumer sales. They don't even want to deal with third-party retail if they can avoid it. (The only Apple products you ever see at Walmart are iPods and their accessories. Everything else is sold through their stores and store website.)
It would be like asking General Motors to start manufacturing 747s. There's no doubt they couldn't do it if pressed, but they aren't set up for it, have no experience with it, and it would carry a ton of risks. To sell a computer to a consumer, all you have to do is convince them that its worth spending their money on and that's it. To sell a solution to a business, you have to network, cut deals, offer bribes and kickbacks, hire an actual support team, and then you'd still have to fend off additional lawsuits here and there because businesses are a lot more sue-happy than consumers.
Consumers are a lot easier to handle and Steve likes things to be easy (for him). It's not at all difficult to imagine that he wouldn't want to bother with businesses. Apple is making a killing with their current strategies, why jump into uncharted waters? Losing their focus is nearly killed Apple in the 90's. They won't repeat the mistake again.
But humanity probably wouldn't make much scientific, intellectual, or cultural progress if everyone was walking around every day drugged-up and lobotomized, with stupid goddamn grins on their faces.
Following that logic, we would already have the warp drive, transporter, and a democratic galactic government, all developed by pedestrians on the streets of New York City.
It's not that simple. For 99% of web development, even if you follow the specifications to the letter, you'll find that your markup/code just plain doesn't work at all on IE6 and most of the time IE7 as well. Graceful degradation is a myth for anything but static content.
But I do agree that actively blocking users via their User Agent string is dumb. Any good web developer writes code according to standards and then makes exceptions for popular browsers with known bugs or incomplete implementations. Or they risk locking out 20%-30% of their potential audience.
The thing is, this is a high-profile app that Apple can approve and point to, saying "Look, we're letting our competitors in!" even though it doesn't open the platform in any meaningful way.
Well, except that they've always stood by the anti-competition clause in their application approval process. Its the reason that I can't get a good podcast manager on my iPod Touch. Because iTunes can download podcasts, they won't let any other app download podcasts, even if the iTunes way of doing it is ridiculously limited and annoying.
Short of a lawsuit (which I think would be dumb... it's Apple's store, consumers can always vote with their wallets), I don't see them changing their position on this.
No. It's their service, they can do what they want with it without telling you anything. They can shut off your phone completely for no reason if they want to and still charge you for service. They can block you from calling certain numbers and they can send you text messages that you then pay to receive. They can add, remove, or change the functionality of the software on your phone overnight, like they did when Microsoft paid them to only use Bing. Seriously, it's all in your contract. Read it if you don't believe me.
And since all cell phone companies in the U.S. do these things, you can't just vote with your money and go elsewhere. There are no honest wireless carriers. I wish people would stop being surprised about it.
I no longer feel like I'm dragging a phone with me "just in case" I would need to get in touch with somebody - now I'm having a useful (and admittedly pretty good-looking) gadget instead. The fact that you can use it as a phone too is kind of secondary.
This is because we've finally reached the point where that little computer you carry around in your pocket is actually a general-purpose computing device first and a phone second. Cell phone carriers in the U.S. don't want to sell computers. They want to sell phones. They want us to use minutes, send text messages, browse the web at $0.05/KB. They don't get any money when you use it for some non-phone purpose.
I don't currently have a reason to own a cell phone, but I bought an iPod Touch a month ago and can echo Linus's feelings. There are a few things that I absolutely loathe about this thing (the iTunes lock-in, the lack of a native podcast manager, the uber-restrictive development process) but on the whole it is really darn cool to have a fully-functional web browser in my pocket (almost) wherever I go. Along with email and apps for Twitter, Facebook, stock portfolio management, and so on. If they ever release something like the Nexus One without the phone part, I'd dump this iPod in a heartbeat.
Or you buy it from a trustworthy dealer, like you would with any mission-critical piece of networking gear.
If your network is important enough that you're going to put Cisco gear in it, the last place you ought to be shopping for routers is some hole-in-the-wall second-hand computer store or, even worse, eBay.
It bugs me that I can't find it right now, but I'm certain there's a federal law prohibiting businesses from using the President's image or likeness either as an explicit or implied endorsement. So, not only does the law differ from what his administration is trying to claim, there's already a law to deal with the abuse that they're trying to curb.
I like Obama and I voted for him, but every single time I turn around, it looks like his administration is still trying to pound in nails in with a screwdriver.
Amen. In most classes, taking notes is a futile endeavor.
Okay, maybe it helps some people. And that's fine. But when I take notes, they tend to be incoherent, incomplete, and barely legible. And even if they weren't, I've not yet happened to experience an occasion where I sat down and said, "Gee, I have some free time. Maybe I'll review my microbiology class notes!" I get a lot more mileage out of my time by reading and reviewing the textbook and other source material.
So, TFQ was actually about taking notes with a computer versus handwriting, so I guess I'll touch on that. My take on it is: Most people can type a hell of a lot quicker than they can write by hand. But they can also sketch a lot quicker than they can input a diagram. So, like everything in life, you just use the right tool for the job. In a literature or composition class, bring a laptop. In a math or biology class, bring the notepad. In classes with significant amounts of writing and figure-drawing, bring both. It's not a life or death situation. This is just one of those things that you get a feel for in the first week of class.
1) Police are trained to lie, because sometimes you have to be a convincing liar to win the trust of criminals and witnesses 2) Polygraphs and other supposed forms of lie detection are 100% pseudo-science bullshit
The problem with police in the U.S. is that there is no oversight of their activities. At all. The best you get is some kind of internal investigation unit that is run by (you guessed it) the police themselves. You'd think the media would be an effective watchdog, except that most of their juicy ratings-boosting stories are supplied by the police themselves. No local news outlet wants to get on the bad side of a police department for fear of getting cut off from information and interviews.
We *always* hear about cases where police officers have severely abused their positions of power (including outright murder) and the worst reprimand they ever get for their crimes is a paid vacation. We desperately need some kind of agency that's responsible for auditing the procedures and actions of the police. This agency should be entirely impartial, and should be capable of investigating and acting on cases of reported abuse when those claims are shown to have merit.
Until that happens, I will never be comfortable with the police having instant, arbitrary access to private records and personal information. They cannot be allowed to continue to fall back on the rationale of, "Hey, we're the police, you can trust us."
I have mod points, but your score is topped out at 5. I just wanted to say thank you for the refreshing dose of reality. Google has its dark side, sure, but it's about a million times better at contributing to the open source community than any other company, period. (Red Hat comes in second only because they're a much smaller outfit. They too open source a large number of projects when they don't really have to.)
It seems that basic web sites made by uploading html and other files are going extinct, in favor of web apps like CMSs and blogs. As a result, the majority of the functionality provided by web servers like Apache is becoming unnecessary.
Not so. Apache is a general-purpose HTTP server. It has a lot more power and capability than what 99% of websites use it for, which is serving static content and CGI script output. There are loads of web servers that are capable of these menial tasks and they use a fraction of the resources that Apache does. Apache is only as popular as it is because it's what most web hosting companies, documentation, and sysadmins default to.
The reason you see CMSs and blogs adopting alternative HTTP daemons is because they want to reduce the complexity of their software stack and configuration. Apache is big and somewhat unwieldy. It's like using a 30-volt industrial electric screwdriver change a video card.
Apache's popularity might wane as lighter, more application-focused HTTP daemons become more common but it will never go away until HTTP does. It's just too darn flexible, even if it can't (usually) scale to millions of hits per second like newer servers can.
The 24 hours thing is just a gimmick. Like O'Reilly books, the quality depends on the author. I've used these Teach Yourself books in the past to come to speed quickly on various topics and generally they work well for that. Yeah, some really suck. And none are designed to be a comprehensive education, but for some quick cramming, they work fine.
If you're logged in, there are buttons to vote a story up and down in the firehose. I'm not sure they do anything once the story hits the front page, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. The (very small) university that I attend went with GMail a couple years ago. I presume they evaluated the following options:
1) Keep paying an employee or contract a vast amount of money to maintain the custom pain-in-the-ass mail system that everybody hates. What happens when you get an overpaid, half-competent admin and throw in thousands of students and faculty who don't really understand how to use email in the first place but come beating down the door when the service is down? Not to mention the troubles involved with telling users how to configure their email clients.
2) Hand it all over to Google, who will do it for free. GMail is extremely stable in comparison to most homebrew email systems and does automatic spam and virus filtering. People who want their IMAP access can still have it. Those that don't get one of the best web-based email interfaces on the planet.
Doesn't seem like a hard decision to me.
One nice thing about running Linux natively and Windows XP virtualized (assuming you have to run XP at all) is that you can move the XP image from physical machine to physical machine without tripping the hardware configuration change bullcrap because the virtualized hardware doesn't appear to change from XP's point of view.
I agree with you 100%, but the government has been flouting the spirit of the 4th amendment for quite some time. For example, it's illegal for a government agency (say, the CIA) to collect detailed dossiers on citizens without any suspicion of wrong-doing. However, it's not illegal for a company to do it. So when the government takes a sudden interest in you, they just buy your file (containing everything from physical addresses to magazine subscriptions) for $30. The end result is the same, but the process skirts the wording of the law.
They probably think that they're in the clear now since a judge recently dismissed EFF's case against the NSA for its warrantless wiretapping program. If this decision holds, there's really not much that can be done about companies simply offering up their records on citizens to the government of their own free will.
To this, I would like to respond not just no, but HELL NO. The Constitution has done a relatively good job of preserving the vision of our founding fathers for more than 200 years precisely because its terms are plain and very, very static. This was a deliberate choice by the writers of the constitution. They wanted this document to be the concrete law of the land to prevent future generations of politicians and judges from mucking it up for their own agendas, against the general interest of the people. They knew they had only one shot at getting the foundations of the country's law right, that's why they made the Constitution's provisions permanent. Even though certain individuals, agencies, and organizations manage to subvert the spirit of the Constitution from time to time, it's simply amazing that the overall structure of our government and legal system as a whole has not changed dramatically since the country was founded.
Who exactly do you think is going to rewrite the Constitution? If something as mundane as health care reform can end up so wildly out of control with conflicting interests, special favors for lobbyists, and sausage making, what do you think is going to happen when they try to rewrite the document that forms the basis of our entire country? The primary purpose of the Constitution is explicitly give rights to the people and limit the power of the government, why on earth would you want to even risk having such an important foundation taken away?
Finally, rewriting the Constitution would be simply, well, unconstitutional.
They have a few products for small businesses, and mostly web-centric ones at that. TFA was about the enterprise market, competing with Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, etc.
The design mentality of Apple (well, Steve Jobs at any rate) seems to be that of "lets figure out how to build this interface as simple as possible while retaining the bare minimum functionality. It's not about removing "knobs and buttons," as they were never there to begin with.
The reason Apple won't deliberately get into business or government technology is simply because they aren't equipped for it. 99% of their marketing experience is geared towards direct-to-consumer sales. They don't even want to deal with third-party retail if they can avoid it. (The only Apple products you ever see at Walmart are iPods and their accessories. Everything else is sold through their stores and store website.)
It would be like asking General Motors to start manufacturing 747s. There's no doubt they couldn't do it if pressed, but they aren't set up for it, have no experience with it, and it would carry a ton of risks. To sell a computer to a consumer, all you have to do is convince them that its worth spending their money on and that's it. To sell a solution to a business, you have to network, cut deals, offer bribes and kickbacks, hire an actual support team, and then you'd still have to fend off additional lawsuits here and there because businesses are a lot more sue-happy than consumers.
Consumers are a lot easier to handle and Steve likes things to be easy (for him). It's not at all difficult to imagine that he wouldn't want to bother with businesses. Apple is making a killing with their current strategies, why jump into uncharted waters? Losing their focus is nearly killed Apple in the 90's. They won't repeat the mistake again.
Newsflash: damaging or disrupting brain cells gets you high. Film at 11.
Following that logic, we would already have the warp drive, transporter, and a democratic galactic government, all developed by pedestrians on the streets of New York City.
It's not that simple. For 99% of web development, even if you follow the specifications to the letter, you'll find that your markup/code just plain doesn't work at all on IE6 and most of the time IE7 as well. Graceful degradation is a myth for anything but static content.
But I do agree that actively blocking users via their User Agent string is dumb. Any good web developer writes code according to standards and then makes exceptions for popular browsers with known bugs or incomplete implementations. Or they risk locking out 20%-30% of their potential audience.
Well, except that they've always stood by the anti-competition clause in their application approval process. Its the reason that I can't get a good podcast manager on my iPod Touch. Because iTunes can download podcasts, they won't let any other app download podcasts, even if the iTunes way of doing it is ridiculously limited and annoying.
Short of a lawsuit (which I think would be dumb... it's Apple's store, consumers can always vote with their wallets), I don't see them changing their position on this.
No. It's their service, they can do what they want with it without telling you anything. They can shut off your phone completely for no reason if they want to and still charge you for service. They can block you from calling certain numbers and they can send you text messages that you then pay to receive. They can add, remove, or change the functionality of the software on your phone overnight, like they did when Microsoft paid them to only use Bing. Seriously, it's all in your contract. Read it if you don't believe me.
And since all cell phone companies in the U.S. do these things, you can't just vote with your money and go elsewhere. There are no honest wireless carriers. I wish people would stop being surprised about it.
This is because we've finally reached the point where that little computer you carry around in your pocket is actually a general-purpose computing device first and a phone second. Cell phone carriers in the U.S. don't want to sell computers. They want to sell phones. They want us to use minutes, send text messages, browse the web at $0.05/KB. They don't get any money when you use it for some non-phone purpose.
I don't currently have a reason to own a cell phone, but I bought an iPod Touch a month ago and can echo Linus's feelings. There are a few things that I absolutely loathe about this thing (the iTunes lock-in, the lack of a native podcast manager, the uber-restrictive development process) but on the whole it is really darn cool to have a fully-functional web browser in my pocket (almost) wherever I go. Along with email and apps for Twitter, Facebook, stock portfolio management, and so on. If they ever release something like the Nexus One without the phone part, I'd dump this iPod in a heartbeat.
Or you buy it from a trustworthy dealer, like you would with any mission-critical piece of networking gear.
If your network is important enough that you're going to put Cisco gear in it, the last place you ought to be shopping for routers is some hole-in-the-wall second-hand computer store or, even worse, eBay.
It bugs me that I can't find it right now, but I'm certain there's a federal law prohibiting businesses from using the President's image or likeness either as an explicit or implied endorsement. So, not only does the law differ from what his administration is trying to claim, there's already a law to deal with the abuse that they're trying to curb.
I like Obama and I voted for him, but every single time I turn around, it looks like his administration is still trying to pound in nails in with a screwdriver.
Amen. In most classes, taking notes is a futile endeavor.
Okay, maybe it helps some people. And that's fine. But when I take notes, they tend to be incoherent, incomplete, and barely legible. And even if they weren't, I've not yet happened to experience an occasion where I sat down and said, "Gee, I have some free time. Maybe I'll review my microbiology class notes!" I get a lot more mileage out of my time by reading and reviewing the textbook and other source material.
So, TFQ was actually about taking notes with a computer versus handwriting, so I guess I'll touch on that. My take on it is: Most people can type a hell of a lot quicker than they can write by hand. But they can also sketch a lot quicker than they can input a diagram. So, like everything in life, you just use the right tool for the job. In a literature or composition class, bring a laptop. In a math or biology class, bring the notepad. In classes with significant amounts of writing and figure-drawing, bring both. It's not a life or death situation. This is just one of those things that you get a feel for in the first week of class.
One word: iTunes.
It's the same reason there will never be a good all-in-one podcast manager for the iPhone.
Privacy is dead, get over it
An interesting idea, but
1) Police are trained to lie, because sometimes you have to be a convincing liar to win the trust of criminals and witnesses
2) Polygraphs and other supposed forms of lie detection are 100% pseudo-science bullshit
The problem with police in the U.S. is that there is no oversight of their activities. At all. The best you get is some kind of internal investigation unit that is run by (you guessed it) the police themselves. You'd think the media would be an effective watchdog, except that most of their juicy ratings-boosting stories are supplied by the police themselves. No local news outlet wants to get on the bad side of a police department for fear of getting cut off from information and interviews.
We *always* hear about cases where police officers have severely abused their positions of power (including outright murder) and the worst reprimand they ever get for their crimes is a paid vacation. We desperately need some kind of agency that's responsible for auditing the procedures and actions of the police. This agency should be entirely impartial, and should be capable of investigating and acting on cases of reported abuse when those claims are shown to have merit.
Until that happens, I will never be comfortable with the police having instant, arbitrary access to private records and personal information. They cannot be allowed to continue to fall back on the rationale of, "Hey, we're the police, you can trust us."
Yeah, it's just a cache. But it's a really big cache.
Actually, it sounds a lot to me like a beige-box version of Intel's Turbo Memory thing for laptops, which only has drivers for Windows.
Mr. Carlin...... is that really you?
I have mod points, but your score is topped out at 5. I just wanted to say thank you for the refreshing dose of reality. Google has its dark side, sure, but it's about a million times better at contributing to the open source community than any other company, period. (Red Hat comes in second only because they're a much smaller outfit. They too open source a large number of projects when they don't really have to.)
Those are to be used for moderating all of my last month's comments +1 Insightful. CmdrTaco told me himself, so you can trust me.
Not so. Apache is a general-purpose HTTP server. It has a lot more power and capability than what 99% of websites use it for, which is serving static content and CGI script output. There are loads of web servers that are capable of these menial tasks and they use a fraction of the resources that Apache does. Apache is only as popular as it is because it's what most web hosting companies, documentation, and sysadmins default to.
The reason you see CMSs and blogs adopting alternative HTTP daemons is because they want to reduce the complexity of their software stack and configuration. Apache is big and somewhat unwieldy. It's like using a 30-volt industrial electric screwdriver change a video card.
Apache's popularity might wane as lighter, more application-focused HTTP daemons become more common but it will never go away until HTTP does. It's just too darn flexible, even if it can't (usually) scale to millions of hits per second like newer servers can.
The 24 hours thing is just a gimmick. Like O'Reilly books, the quality depends on the author. I've used these Teach Yourself books in the past to come to speed quickly on various topics and generally they work well for that. Yeah, some really suck. And none are designed to be a comprehensive education, but for some quick cramming, they work fine.
If you're logged in, there are buttons to vote a story up and down in the firehose. I'm not sure they do anything once the story hits the front page, though.