Well, even when I was younger, I didn't really think hacking a site only to spread a political message was all that cool. Now, hacking into a site and changing all the acronyms around and waiting to see how long it would take for the company to notice I would probably still think amusing.
Their security services basically for free (if you don't count the downtime). They're doing a great job exposing all those backdoors to everyone who would otherwise be fine just quietly exploiting them as often as possible to potentially do things far more nefarious.
Or you could look at it this way...it might just be the sort of thing people need to force a real debate in the legal community about how the law needs to adapt to the Internet. Right now, the legal community will all agree that something needs to be done...but you're split between people who think that a Facebook status update should be admissible as a confession to a crime in court, and people who think that it should just be governed by the same laws as phones are and desperately hope they can retire before people demand they make a real decision.
As far as I'm concerned, I'd like to see some real clear lines drawn about what the government, law enforcement, and employers can do with information, and maybe even some laws that force social networking sites to provide logs to users of who accessed their information and when so that they can properly defend themselves in court. I'd like to see a day come when employers realize that it just isn't worth risking a lawsuit by doing web searches to see what a prospective employee is up to...and besides, here's a shocker...people LIE about their personal lives, all the time...sometimes to try and convince their friends that they live exciting lives. That information can't be relied upon at any time as a measure of any sort. But I don't see that change in how we deal with the Internet happening as long as people keep deluding themselves into thinking that by checking a box and clicking a button, they're rendering all their info "private".
If more firms paid bounties for bugs found (as long as responsible disclosure is followed), you'd probably see a whole lot more security researchers content to follow responsible disclosure guidelines. There's no guarantee that they'll keep that all a secret in any case, but to get the cash, you've got to sign a legal form with your company's information or be registered as a valid security analysis firm. One of the biggest issues with these security analysis firms is that there's no way to tell most of the time if it's just a bunch of criminals hiding out under a corporate umbrella, or if they're bonafide security professionals. And no jokes about them being one and the same...there's a huge difference, I've known (and in the case of those pros, I've worked with them) guys from both sides. If a security firm refuses to be registered or refuses bounties, you know there's something fishy about them and it's time to contact local authorities.
Then again, there's the big problem with many of the bugs that outside security firms reporting being already known and in a work backlog. The realities of the industry is that capital isn't unlimited, time isn't unlimited, and sometimes, important stuff doesn't get done because you just don't have enough qualified developers to throw at the problem. Two years is fairly excessive for a security hole to sit around, but if a security firm is releasing exploits that it discovered and reported 6 months prior just because it "didn't see enough getting done", that's not being passionate about security, that's an attempt to commit extortion.
I'll propose a measurement technique and they'll scoff at it. I try to show them how to properly graph a run chart and they're indignant. I question their metrics and they try to back it up with lame attempts at statistical reasoning.
Look, programmers tend towards the egotistical at best most of the time. They like to argue, even about marginally different concepts. I've watched guys argue about things like for loops and while loops and ifs and switches so many times in my career that I can only try and block as much of that inanity out. When you approach developers by TELLING them how to do something using statistical analysis, you've got to first convince their supervisor/manager/etc. of the value of it and why it's better. THEN you approach them and tell them that's how you're doing it. Otherwise, you better believe they'll argue about that...everyone has their own way of doing things, and you can bet they don't care for someone else telling them that the way they've done things in the past is all wrong. The only way to make programmers learn is to do something first, have it become successful, and be able to demonstrate the value in doing things that way first. I've been on very, very few teams with developers who were constantly open to different ways of doing things. Very few colleges even bother to put emphasis on statistics...some will even let you dodge the course entirely and take an equivalent. CS and software engineering professors generally fall in line and focus on logic. Obviously, it's a comfort level thing, and you can't get through to people unless you can demonstratively prove your approach.
The solution for all three of those questions is the PDA. Apparently, all people really wanted was a bigger PDA, and didn't want it shrunk down and merged with a phone.
Bottom line is that is the logic behind tablets. PDAs, like the old Palms and such, had their UIs designed for interactivity through touchscreens. PDAs proved what was possible for that genre way back with the original Palm III (and I don't include that flop called Newton). PDAs were actually growing larger than smartphones, but because people felt strongly that they should die, killed them off.
The real problem, though, was we all kept calling them PDAs, but there was nothing about, for example, the Palm TX or Tapwave Zodiac that really made me think that it was a replacement for a binder with a calendar and todo list.
However, the question remains...will anyone develop an OS specifically for a tablet rocking a 6"x4" (and up) screen, or will they just "grow" their smartphone OS up (or reattempt the tragic Microsoft attempt to "shrink" down their OS and forcefit their desktop ideas into a small form factor). I really don't think iPhoneOS is practical for a tablet, nor is MacOS. There's a medium between the two, but I'd imagine some entirely different UI elements that neither share as well. I'd really prefer to see the linux variants like Android and webOS on a tablet like that, though. The problem with webOS is it's biggest benefit is being constantly connected to the web...and if you take out that phone data plan, you better have wifi everywhere you go or you miss out on its best features. As for Android, it had better fully support multitouch on a tablet, or you might as well run it on a single touch digitizer with a stylus.
This will be so much more entertaining to watch than all the sad, tired commuters on the bus I see every day. It will be like weird interpretive hand dances going on all the time, with people occasionally getting frustrated and swinging their fingers faster and faster. Someone will be touching their screen, and the person next to them will develop a smug look on their face, and you know they're thinking "Freakin newbies".
The only thing funny about this statement is how it seems to totally not get the entire point of the article.
The point being, of course, that just because it's made by Google doesn't instantly mean that its perfectly secure.
Until security becomes a primary feature, it generally will take a backseat to features leading up to an initial release, in my own experience. Then again, this article is chock full of assumptions, and a security assessment based on assumptions is pretty much useless, so who knows.
Google gets Android on Motorola's hot new phone, piggybacks on Motorola's marketing to boost the popularity of their own OS, then kicks them to the curb with a phone with "better integration" of Android features without even giving Motorola more than a few months to establish their own niche. Then, once the other Android phones "go away", Google turns up the data mining and the carriers just throw their hands up and say "well, they're Google, you know".
Nice. Well, their killer app for this one is voice recognition...though most people have to search for quiet places just to make a phone call, let alone voice transcribe an email. And it's a killer feature that OS/2 users had in 1996 or so.
I can forgive them for the app storage limit, though. Palm's webOS had the same problem, but they fixed that a release or so ago. Maybe Google will do the same. So I can forgive them until they fix that...unless, of course, their magical build of Android needs all those gigabytes for caching audio clips or graphics or something.
Provided, of course, they follow the same specs when they create their Linux or MacOS or otherwise client software. I've seen many situations where one OS will make it trickier than another to implement a particular security feature, so that feature gets pushed back for that platform and misses the release. I didn't read the article, so I don't know if they tested any sort of Linux or MacOS based password auth client to see if it has the same vulnerability, but from the general gist of what people are saying, I'm not expecting that there even is a Linux or MacOS based password client. All I know is that I wipe that crap off my flash drives as soon as I get them and opt for an OSS solution (lately truecrypt, but there have been others...I wrote a little one myself a few years back that didn't have this particular problem...but probably had other security shortfalls) to lock things down.
So, you going to port liberty over?;) So we don't have to try and run it in Classic. And yeah, I remember you as another regular from the old PalmOS mailing list about 10 years ago.
I haven't had too much of a problem with MOJO for webOS...then again, it's purpose was to kind of make the Pre into more of a cloud/networked device instead of a Linux PalmOS port running lots of native code. Apps with light web clients/heavy duty servers like Pandora, Stitcher, YouTube, etc. generally fit the existing platform using MOJO/javascript on webkit have been great. Since those are the apps that people tend to use the most for communications, it kind of made sense for Palm to go that way with things...not to mention it solves issues around deployment, maintenance/security updates, and localizations that other platforms (Android, WinMob, Symbian, even iPhone) have struggled with more or less. But getting real native code and OpenGL support is obviously a huge win for the virtualization and mobile gaming crowd. Of which, I'm sure, you're intimately familiar.
Anyway, it's always good news that there are more options to nerd out with the platform available...so long as bloat is kept to a minimum.
That's what I thought. Plenty of a certain nearsighted crowd like their big screens, but the overwhelming majority of people wouldn't mind finding a way to make their phone smaller and consume less pocket.
One of the reasons why I never bought an iPhone, Droid, HTC WinBrick, or BB...I resolved that I would not ever buy another smartphone bigger (height, width, or thickness) than my old Treo. By making their phones smaller, Palm actually kept my brand loyalty. They made their Pre smaller AND made their screen bigger. That's what I was looking for...not just making a screen bigger at all costs.
They have hardened fans in the smartphone development industry. A whole lot of the most experienced smartphone developers cut our teeth by developing on PalmOS, and they've been waiting for this platform's release for so long that these C coders taught themselves javascript and css and became web devs just to build apps for the platform. In part, a lot of us built close development relationships with Palm as their support and engineers were extremely cool and supportive back in the day, and a lot of us haven't forgotten that.
Apple fans (and employees) generate rumors. Fanboys giggle, scream, and preorder their Apple product. Apple product is released. It doesn't do anything really all that better than a lot of competing products already available, but because all these people got suckered and bought one, they begin to revere their purchase as if it were truly a groundbreaking innovation. I know these people get their iWhatever and they know it's nothing more than what everyone else is selling, but more expensive and in a prettier box, but they're so ashamed that they blew so much on a rumor that they've got to expound on that purchase as if it had been created by a collaboration between the resurrected minds of Newton and Tesla, with Michelangelo designing the UI.
The iTablet or iSlate or whatever isn't going to be any different than every other Apple product. It will sell well because their fans will refuse to admit that it's not as innovative as they thought it was going to be when they preordered it, and they'll show it off to the crowd that would buy anything as long as it comes in a pretty box. Then the sheeple who feel they should have what everyone else has buys them. Apple wins, and technology doesn't progress much for it. But at least the industry begins churning out toys with really nice cases for awhile.
Rather than lines of code. I figured that had been well understood by most people these days.
It's a big part of the reason Agile has caught on so much...theoretically, all one has to do is measure the effectiveness of a developer in dealing with high priority or tasks assessed as complex, rather than how much code is being produced. The only gotcha is that you have to avoid the trap of rewarding developers who do lots and lots of simple tasks over developers who take on the complex tasks, but that stuff usually hashes itself out during the scrum planning. In a waterfall system, you're kind of stuck evaluating developers by how much "stuff" they produce (documentation, code, tests, etc.) instead of quality because you don't keep track of the individual tasks like you would in Agile.
At least where I'm concerned. I bought a netbook because it was a sub $400 dollar laptop that had several hours of battery life. I always felt that the main purpose of a netbook was to provide an inexpensive, highly portable/ultra long battery life to counter mobile wifi use...as that leads into the main purpose...being connected and doing stuff on the net. Tradeoff being, of course, lower end graphics processing and lower power processors to boost that battery charge life. 12 inches, 10 inches, 9 inches, 8 inches...that's just a personal preference that kinda sorta plays into the portability part. At some point you've got a small laptop, at another point you have a big handheld. I have a smartphone...I don't need a slightly bigger one to complement the one I use now. The netbook sits nicely between the 17" desktop replacement and the big handheld categories.
Wait a minute. I never even tried it out...are you sure they had the capability to remote control it? Or did it just have some sort of built in time limiter the whole time? If I were intending something to be a stunt, I for one wouldn't bother remote controlling it unless I had some sort of botnet scheme in my head. I'd just set a simple timeout and make it shut down.
It's also strange that I didn't hear many reports about it not working. I guess then the question becomes, how do you know if it's working or not? Do you have a pirated version of COFEE to test it out with?
It'd be interesting though if someone were to hook up a sniffer on their line, leave DECAF installed, and see what happens.
I also have direct experience with this. For a short period of time, I worked in a team for a startup almost entirely comprised of Chinese developers hired mainly as interns under some shady L1 type of deal. (I don't even put this company on my resume.) The overwhelming theme is that the only way they can be successful is if their stuff works exactly like someone else's, and can be done super cheap and super fast. Cheap and imitative is pounded into their heads by management, and respect for licenses and other people's intellectual property is thrown out the door because the manager is always right. I guess it's the side effect of a culture that has been warped into a hyper-competitive assembly line mode of production in almost all aspects of industry.
With the numbers on the table, the only thing that 30 million could be effectively used for is ramping up police departments and the FBI for cracking down on large scale bootleg operations. Paranoia is one thing, but the numbers right there don't back that paranoia up. If the government were "getting serious" about illegal downloading, we're talking somewhere close to a billion to make a serious difference, along with massive regulations placed on ISPs and the major carriers where that cash would be used to enforce those regulations. They'd probably also have to meddle with the Fourth Amendment, because getting carriers to rat out potential terrorists is one thing, but getting the carriers to rat out a single mother who downloaded "Soul Plane" through bittorrent is another thing entirely. Meddling with the Fourth isn't going to be something that can be done at a whim. The last administration danced around it every way they could, and really, they got away with it because no one bothered to mount a serious case against them (for purely political reasons, of course) even though everyone knows full well they abused their power and circumvented the Constitution.
So put away the tinfoil hat for a minute and use some common sense. Large scale bootleggers are criminals, plain and simple. They make it tougher for you to buy stuff legitimately, and they hurt a company's bottom line. Targeting individual downloaders wouldn't really be ultimately worth the government's time to properly enforce. The RIAA and CRAA and MPAA can cry about it all they want, but the floodgates of the Internet are open, and to close those gates would directly hurt a lot of other major corporate forces that would put up a heck of a big fight as well. The government can really only pay lip service and throw cash at fighting things that can give back real deliverable results, and fighting individual downloading can't do that.
Just like the people who used to buy those ultra-cheap/free PCs from those shady startups that inundated them with ads, then complained that they were getting spammed.
First data mining...now constant ads. You have to also take into account that various apps are also ad supported as well. That's ads on top of ads...and that's part of the reason those shady startups didn't go on to profit like they thought they would.
Sure, wait for the phone to come out and THEN review the security policy. I get the feeling it'll be a little disappointing, though...this is Google, after all. The motto "do no evil" has long since been superseded by "do not speak about our evil". Wonder how Motorola and HTC are feeling about their decision to sink so much marketing dough into Droid and the Hero, only to have the OS vendor basically stick them right in their backs like this. If Microsoft had released a "free" WinMob phone a few years back, the carriers and hardware vendors would have sued the heck out of them. But because it's Google, they get a free pass for screwing their vendors because "after all, they do no evil, and Android is kinda/sorta an open technology".
You'd be surprised. There are still people out there dipping their first toe in the Internet pool because they felt it was time that they learn this "email" thing for various reasons. Those are precisely the people that spammers are targeting.
That said, bulk email is very 1999, and the spammers know it. The real goal these days is to try to get as many systems out there connected to botnets as possible and try to "force feed" as many people with spam as they possibly can. The key is to fashion emails to look as concise as possible, and get your parents' and friends' computers to send that email to you instead of a complete stranger. Suddenly, the basic spam defense tactics that we all know and live by go out the window. Everyone's mom or dad has a mailing list for forwards, and that is a prime target. If you got an email from your dad saying "I just made my own website!" and a link, you can bet there'd be at least a few kids who'd try to be good kids and click that link. And they're always the ones who don't patch their systems up, too.
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Well, even when I was younger, I didn't really think hacking a site only to spread a political message was all that cool. Now, hacking into a site and changing all the acronyms around and waiting to see how long it would take for the company to notice I would probably still think amusing.
Their security services basically for free (if you don't count the downtime). They're doing a great job exposing all those backdoors to everyone who would otherwise be fine just quietly exploiting them as often as possible to potentially do things far more nefarious.
Or you could look at it this way...it might just be the sort of thing people need to force a real debate in the legal community about how the law needs to adapt to the Internet. Right now, the legal community will all agree that something needs to be done...but you're split between people who think that a Facebook status update should be admissible as a confession to a crime in court, and people who think that it should just be governed by the same laws as phones are and desperately hope they can retire before people demand they make a real decision.
As far as I'm concerned, I'd like to see some real clear lines drawn about what the government, law enforcement, and employers can do with information, and maybe even some laws that force social networking sites to provide logs to users of who accessed their information and when so that they can properly defend themselves in court. I'd like to see a day come when employers realize that it just isn't worth risking a lawsuit by doing web searches to see what a prospective employee is up to...and besides, here's a shocker...people LIE about their personal lives, all the time...sometimes to try and convince their friends that they live exciting lives. That information can't be relied upon at any time as a measure of any sort. But I don't see that change in how we deal with the Internet happening as long as people keep deluding themselves into thinking that by checking a box and clicking a button, they're rendering all their info "private".
If more firms paid bounties for bugs found (as long as responsible disclosure is followed), you'd probably see a whole lot more security researchers content to follow responsible disclosure guidelines. There's no guarantee that they'll keep that all a secret in any case, but to get the cash, you've got to sign a legal form with your company's information or be registered as a valid security analysis firm. One of the biggest issues with these security analysis firms is that there's no way to tell most of the time if it's just a bunch of criminals hiding out under a corporate umbrella, or if they're bonafide security professionals. And no jokes about them being one and the same...there's a huge difference, I've known (and in the case of those pros, I've worked with them) guys from both sides. If a security firm refuses to be registered or refuses bounties, you know there's something fishy about them and it's time to contact local authorities.
Then again, there's the big problem with many of the bugs that outside security firms reporting being already known and in a work backlog. The realities of the industry is that capital isn't unlimited, time isn't unlimited, and sometimes, important stuff doesn't get done because you just don't have enough qualified developers to throw at the problem. Two years is fairly excessive for a security hole to sit around, but if a security firm is releasing exploits that it discovered and reported 6 months prior just because it "didn't see enough getting done", that's not being passionate about security, that's an attempt to commit extortion.
Look, programmers tend towards the egotistical at best most of the time. They like to argue, even about marginally different concepts. I've watched guys argue about things like for loops and while loops and ifs and switches so many times in my career that I can only try and block as much of that inanity out. When you approach developers by TELLING them how to do something using statistical analysis, you've got to first convince their supervisor/manager/etc. of the value of it and why it's better. THEN you approach them and tell them that's how you're doing it. Otherwise, you better believe they'll argue about that...everyone has their own way of doing things, and you can bet they don't care for someone else telling them that the way they've done things in the past is all wrong. The only way to make programmers learn is to do something first, have it become successful, and be able to demonstrate the value in doing things that way first. I've been on very, very few teams with developers who were constantly open to different ways of doing things. Very few colleges even bother to put emphasis on statistics...some will even let you dodge the course entirely and take an equivalent. CS and software engineering professors generally fall in line and focus on logic. Obviously, it's a comfort level thing, and you can't get through to people unless you can demonstratively prove your approach.
The solution for all three of those questions is the PDA. Apparently, all people really wanted was a bigger PDA, and didn't want it shrunk down and merged with a phone.
Bottom line is that is the logic behind tablets. PDAs, like the old Palms and such, had their UIs designed for interactivity through touchscreens. PDAs proved what was possible for that genre way back with the original Palm III (and I don't include that flop called Newton). PDAs were actually growing larger than smartphones, but because people felt strongly that they should die, killed them off.
The real problem, though, was we all kept calling them PDAs, but there was nothing about, for example, the Palm TX or Tapwave Zodiac that really made me think that it was a replacement for a binder with a calendar and todo list.
However, the question remains...will anyone develop an OS specifically for a tablet rocking a 6"x4" (and up) screen, or will they just "grow" their smartphone OS up (or reattempt the tragic Microsoft attempt to "shrink" down their OS and forcefit their desktop ideas into a small form factor). I really don't think iPhoneOS is practical for a tablet, nor is MacOS. There's a medium between the two, but I'd imagine some entirely different UI elements that neither share as well. I'd really prefer to see the linux variants like Android and webOS on a tablet like that, though. The problem with webOS is it's biggest benefit is being constantly connected to the web...and if you take out that phone data plan, you better have wifi everywhere you go or you miss out on its best features. As for Android, it had better fully support multitouch on a tablet, or you might as well run it on a single touch digitizer with a stylus.
This will be so much more entertaining to watch than all the sad, tired commuters on the bus I see every day. It will be like weird interpretive hand dances going on all the time, with people occasionally getting frustrated and swinging their fingers faster and faster. Someone will be touching their screen, and the person next to them will develop a smug look on their face, and you know they're thinking "Freakin newbies".
The only thing funny about this statement is how it seems to totally not get the entire point of the article.
The point being, of course, that just because it's made by Google doesn't instantly mean that its perfectly secure.
Until security becomes a primary feature, it generally will take a backseat to features leading up to an initial release, in my own experience. Then again, this article is chock full of assumptions, and a security assessment based on assumptions is pretty much useless, so who knows.
Google gets Android on Motorola's hot new phone, piggybacks on Motorola's marketing to boost the popularity of their own OS, then kicks them to the curb with a phone with "better integration" of Android features without even giving Motorola more than a few months to establish their own niche. Then, once the other Android phones "go away", Google turns up the data mining and the carriers just throw their hands up and say "well, they're Google, you know".
Nice. Well, their killer app for this one is voice recognition...though most people have to search for quiet places just to make a phone call, let alone voice transcribe an email. And it's a killer feature that OS/2 users had in 1996 or so.
I can forgive them for the app storage limit, though. Palm's webOS had the same problem, but they fixed that a release or so ago. Maybe Google will do the same. So I can forgive them until they fix that...unless, of course, their magical build of Android needs all those gigabytes for caching audio clips or graphics or something.
Provided, of course, they follow the same specs when they create their Linux or MacOS or otherwise client software. I've seen many situations where one OS will make it trickier than another to implement a particular security feature, so that feature gets pushed back for that platform and misses the release. I didn't read the article, so I don't know if they tested any sort of Linux or MacOS based password auth client to see if it has the same vulnerability, but from the general gist of what people are saying, I'm not expecting that there even is a Linux or MacOS based password client. All I know is that I wipe that crap off my flash drives as soon as I get them and opt for an OSS solution (lately truecrypt, but there have been others...I wrote a little one myself a few years back that didn't have this particular problem...but probably had other security shortfalls) to lock things down.
So, you going to port liberty over? ;) So we don't have to try and run it in Classic. And yeah, I remember you as another regular from the old PalmOS mailing list about 10 years ago.
I haven't had too much of a problem with MOJO for webOS...then again, it's purpose was to kind of make the Pre into more of a cloud/networked device instead of a Linux PalmOS port running lots of native code. Apps with light web clients/heavy duty servers like Pandora, Stitcher, YouTube, etc. generally fit the existing platform using MOJO/javascript on webkit have been great. Since those are the apps that people tend to use the most for communications, it kind of made sense for Palm to go that way with things...not to mention it solves issues around deployment, maintenance/security updates, and localizations that other platforms (Android, WinMob, Symbian, even iPhone) have struggled with more or less. But getting real native code and OpenGL support is obviously a huge win for the virtualization and mobile gaming crowd. Of which, I'm sure, you're intimately familiar.
Anyway, it's always good news that there are more options to nerd out with the platform available...so long as bloat is kept to a minimum.
That's what I thought. Plenty of a certain nearsighted crowd like their big screens, but the overwhelming majority of people wouldn't mind finding a way to make their phone smaller and consume less pocket.
One of the reasons why I never bought an iPhone, Droid, HTC WinBrick, or BB...I resolved that I would not ever buy another smartphone bigger (height, width, or thickness) than my old Treo. By making their phones smaller, Palm actually kept my brand loyalty. They made their Pre smaller AND made their screen bigger. That's what I was looking for...not just making a screen bigger at all costs.
Ha, you never did Symbian development, I take it.
They have hardened fans in the smartphone development industry. A whole lot of the most experienced smartphone developers cut our teeth by developing on PalmOS, and they've been waiting for this platform's release for so long that these C coders taught themselves javascript and css and became web devs just to build apps for the platform. In part, a lot of us built close development relationships with Palm as their support and engineers were extremely cool and supportive back in the day, and a lot of us haven't forgotten that.
Android is over a year old. WebOS was launched this year. Think about it. "Best newcomer of the year".
Apparently, it's not stated enough, because Apple fans don't seem to get it yet.
Apple fans (and employees) generate rumors. Fanboys giggle, scream, and preorder their Apple product. Apple product is released. It doesn't do anything really all that better than a lot of competing products already available, but because all these people got suckered and bought one, they begin to revere their purchase as if it were truly a groundbreaking innovation. I know these people get their iWhatever and they know it's nothing more than what everyone else is selling, but more expensive and in a prettier box, but they're so ashamed that they blew so much on a rumor that they've got to expound on that purchase as if it had been created by a collaboration between the resurrected minds of Newton and Tesla, with Michelangelo designing the UI.
The iTablet or iSlate or whatever isn't going to be any different than every other Apple product. It will sell well because their fans will refuse to admit that it's not as innovative as they thought it was going to be when they preordered it, and they'll show it off to the crowd that would buy anything as long as it comes in a pretty box. Then the sheeple who feel they should have what everyone else has buys them. Apple wins, and technology doesn't progress much for it. But at least the industry begins churning out toys with really nice cases for awhile.
Rather than lines of code. I figured that had been well understood by most people these days.
It's a big part of the reason Agile has caught on so much...theoretically, all one has to do is measure the effectiveness of a developer in dealing with high priority or tasks assessed as complex, rather than how much code is being produced. The only gotcha is that you have to avoid the trap of rewarding developers who do lots and lots of simple tasks over developers who take on the complex tasks, but that stuff usually hashes itself out during the scrum planning. In a waterfall system, you're kind of stuck evaluating developers by how much "stuff" they produce (documentation, code, tests, etc.) instead of quality because you don't keep track of the individual tasks like you would in Agile.
Ah, hell. Slashdot stripped out my greater than symbol: Battery life and price > screen size and weight. Darn it, thought I could pull that off.
At least where I'm concerned. I bought a netbook because it was a sub $400 dollar laptop that had several hours of battery life. I always felt that the main purpose of a netbook was to provide an inexpensive, highly portable/ultra long battery life to counter mobile wifi use...as that leads into the main purpose...being connected and doing stuff on the net. Tradeoff being, of course, lower end graphics processing and lower power processors to boost that battery charge life. 12 inches, 10 inches, 9 inches, 8 inches...that's just a personal preference that kinda sorta plays into the portability part. At some point you've got a small laptop, at another point you have a big handheld. I have a smartphone...I don't need a slightly bigger one to complement the one I use now. The netbook sits nicely between the 17" desktop replacement and the big handheld categories.
Wait a minute. I never even tried it out...are you sure they had the capability to remote control it? Or did it just have some sort of built in time limiter the whole time? If I were intending something to be a stunt, I for one wouldn't bother remote controlling it unless I had some sort of botnet scheme in my head. I'd just set a simple timeout and make it shut down.
It's also strange that I didn't hear many reports about it not working. I guess then the question becomes, how do you know if it's working or not? Do you have a pirated version of COFEE to test it out with?
It'd be interesting though if someone were to hook up a sniffer on their line, leave DECAF installed, and see what happens.
I also have direct experience with this. For a short period of time, I worked in a team for a startup almost entirely comprised of Chinese developers hired mainly as interns under some shady L1 type of deal. (I don't even put this company on my resume.) The overwhelming theme is that the only way they can be successful is if their stuff works exactly like someone else's, and can be done super cheap and super fast. Cheap and imitative is pounded into their heads by management, and respect for licenses and other people's intellectual property is thrown out the door because the manager is always right. I guess it's the side effect of a culture that has been warped into a hyper-competitive assembly line mode of production in almost all aspects of industry.
With the numbers on the table, the only thing that 30 million could be effectively used for is ramping up police departments and the FBI for cracking down on large scale bootleg operations. Paranoia is one thing, but the numbers right there don't back that paranoia up. If the government were "getting serious" about illegal downloading, we're talking somewhere close to a billion to make a serious difference, along with massive regulations placed on ISPs and the major carriers where that cash would be used to enforce those regulations. They'd probably also have to meddle with the Fourth Amendment, because getting carriers to rat out potential terrorists is one thing, but getting the carriers to rat out a single mother who downloaded "Soul Plane" through bittorrent is another thing entirely. Meddling with the Fourth isn't going to be something that can be done at a whim. The last administration danced around it every way they could, and really, they got away with it because no one bothered to mount a serious case against them (for purely political reasons, of course) even though everyone knows full well they abused their power and circumvented the Constitution.
So put away the tinfoil hat for a minute and use some common sense. Large scale bootleggers are criminals, plain and simple. They make it tougher for you to buy stuff legitimately, and they hurt a company's bottom line. Targeting individual downloaders wouldn't really be ultimately worth the government's time to properly enforce. The RIAA and CRAA and MPAA can cry about it all they want, but the floodgates of the Internet are open, and to close those gates would directly hurt a lot of other major corporate forces that would put up a heck of a big fight as well. The government can really only pay lip service and throw cash at fighting things that can give back real deliverable results, and fighting individual downloading can't do that.
Just like the people who used to buy those ultra-cheap/free PCs from those shady startups that inundated them with ads, then complained that they were getting spammed.
First data mining...now constant ads. You have to also take into account that various apps are also ad supported as well. That's ads on top of ads...and that's part of the reason those shady startups didn't go on to profit like they thought they would.
Sure, wait for the phone to come out and THEN review the security policy. I get the feeling it'll be a little disappointing, though...this is Google, after all. The motto "do no evil" has long since been superseded by "do not speak about our evil". Wonder how Motorola and HTC are feeling about their decision to sink so much marketing dough into Droid and the Hero, only to have the OS vendor basically stick them right in their backs like this. If Microsoft had released a "free" WinMob phone a few years back, the carriers and hardware vendors would have sued the heck out of them. But because it's Google, they get a free pass for screwing their vendors because "after all, they do no evil, and Android is kinda/sorta an open technology".
You'd be surprised. There are still people out there dipping their first toe in the Internet pool because they felt it was time that they learn this "email" thing for various reasons. Those are precisely the people that spammers are targeting.
That said, bulk email is very 1999, and the spammers know it. The real goal these days is to try to get as many systems out there connected to botnets as possible and try to "force feed" as many people with spam as they possibly can. The key is to fashion emails to look as concise as possible, and get your parents' and friends' computers to send that email to you instead of a complete stranger. Suddenly, the basic spam defense tactics that we all know and live by go out the window. Everyone's mom or dad has a mailing list for forwards, and that is a prime target. If you got an email from your dad saying "I just made my own website!" and a link, you can bet there'd be at least a few kids who'd try to be good kids and click that link. And they're always the ones who don't patch their systems up, too.