CD-Rs did not kill floppies, that's laughable. It takes too long to copy a CD-R to make any efficient use of them for simple file transfer, and no one uses them now for things like that. CD-Rs are on their way out as well. The physical media that ultimately replaced Floppies were little drives that use that thing called USB... you know, the interface plus that Apple first introduced on it's first iMac.
Apple did not by itself kill floppies, but they got creative and opened an opportunity for people to rethink data transfer, and that by opening that door, everyone followed and left the floppy behind. No one in the PC business except Apple is doing any kind of serious innovation. Everyone else pretty much just copies... no pun intended.
Okay I'll bite on this because the way this is presented is a bit of a slanted statement. It's accurate, but disingenuous by what it implies. TCP/IP offers very little functionality, it only does one thing... and it does it really really well. Because it does it so well, it frees up developers to innovate on top of it. Therefore trying to say iOS offers little functionality distracts from the idea that despite this, it's doing very very well for businesses who want to easily expand on the product and provide services to people who want to use iPads and iPhones in their business and personal life, simply because it does what little it does very well. Apple lets other people expand on the functionality.
It doesn't come down to software support, it comes down to the experience. Windows has the software support already, and it's on a decline because the market is saturated and Tablets are changing the computer paradigm. If you think pressure sensitive pen input support is the make or break feature for the tablet market at the moment you need to go back and study the market again.
Books at brick and mortar stores tend to be overpriced compared to those sold online. That's not because Borders is gouging them, but because the publishers demand so much. Retailers' margins are thin. So yes they are expensive but Borders didn't "do it to themselves." Borders and B&N have a quaint, warm, relaxed experience but the most hard core book buyers go online now for better prices.
B&N actually survives because they have a good website in competition with Amazon, and frankly their selection has always been better than borders. B&N also has Starbucks in their stores, which gives them a hipster mystique for those who just want to come in and sit and read and have some Starbucks coffee. Funny enough, Borders tried to get early in the game of book selling online and who did they contract with?... Amazon. Most people don't realize this fact seriously delayed Borders' web strategy rather than enhancing it. They didn't have the vision to see web commerce coming and Amazon did to them what they did to mom and pop book shops. And they spent no time getting any experience in marketing and selling on the web because they contracted with Amazon in the early days. I'm betting Amazon knew this and went ahead hoping to basically steal sales from Borders original paltry websites. So in a sense, Borders did to it to themselves, it's just it had everything to do with not getting online fast enough.
Each of the major US carriers has their own 4G standard. 3G/4G was a specific idea created by some engineers that was entirely coopted by marketing departments and was then corrupted. No one actually knows what the definition of 4G is except for some engineers, and the marketers and CEOs keep saying "well it's close enough to 4G if we just do this".
It's simply about speed. The bare minimum information you need to know is what the Mbps are on any single network and what's the fastest Mbps the phone can take. That's too much information for the average consumer to ask for.
And even then, it's not entirely about speed. Latency is important, especially for games. And then there are people who don't need the fastest phone, but want a good experience, reliable hardware, or good sound quality.
Maybe the lesson here is that user's aren't all that concerned about 4G because they aren't asking to be sure. Maybe consumers aren't that stupid because even though we call them stupid for not knowing, we would turn around and call them stupid for caring all that much at the same time.
The titles of both the/. post and the original article imply it's okay to track your spouse, as if you own them and can follow them around, which is not true without their consent. The summary clarifies this as does the original article body. #1 vehicles are in public places and #2 the person who hired the investigator owns or partially owns the car.
Essentially you are asking a private investigator to put a GPS tag on your private property. Also, if the car needs to be tagged, they want to make sure they are in a public place so they don't get slapped with trespassing on private property for any reason. Seems to me like a clear cut case. It's all about the spin.
You got early points for trying to platform bash, which is always popular here, but you're missing the point of the article, and deserve a quick demodding. The news here is not that Apple magically now has an option that it didn't have before, but instead how to specifically do this for Lion, since Lion doesn't come on a disc like previous versions. On previous versions I'd mount the CD and the USB drive, and basically do an install onto the USB drive directly (there may be a couple other minor steps but I've not done it on a USB drive in a while, I prefer a bootable firewire drive). Without a disc, the news is "what is the new way to create a bootable USB drive." If you had Googled this you would have seen Mac has had this option in some form for years.
Besides, it is true that Linux had this option before Windows or Mac OS years ago, but that's not the point either. Lion news is making the rounds, and nerds want to know how to do things like this. That's all this is. That makes your comments meaningless and useless.
That's great! I'll be ready with the massive popcorn pan in 5 years! I should get started soon, maybe Jordan can come over and help me, she never sleeps.
If Sally in accounting can't put Angry Birds on it, or the Kindle app, she won't want to carry it around. Those are the real reasons she carries her iPad everywhere, despite her claims of using it for calendar or email.
Thanks for the shameless iPad bash. Really. It's not like Stereotyping detracts from your argument or anything.
Errrrnttt. Nice try. You are correct that the article is committing a statistical error, but so are you. Technical support calls range the gamut from questions, software problems, hardware problems, user errors, help on setup and installation, etc. And you can't lump all the nonhardware issues into "problems strictly with the software" per se because a question could be as simple as "how do I install this" but could be more intricate like asking value added questions about how to best set up wifi or what settings are best to get maximize battery life. And some of those calls might fall outside the realm of the phone like "sorry the problem is not in your phone but your router/printer/computer/etc."
You also have to factor in user fatigue. If your first problem is a hardware problem where the phone doesn't even work, you're less likely to keep calling back about other problems because you just get tired of dealing with it.
Also the only scrap of information we have here from the article is that they separated out hardware calls from everything else. We have absolutely NO idea what those other issues are. They state "problems" but problems aren't the only reason to call technical support and by their own paramaters of the study they didn't appear to really look at those other calls to state they were actual problems.
Given the data in the article, the statement that 14% of Android phone calls are on hardware issues is meaningless. The statement that percentage wise, that 92% of iPhone calls are software problems is also meaningless. So you have an article and a comment, both meaningless. More numbers need to be revealed to make this meaningful.
I personally hate gun makers for lobbing in a broken system to keep guns legal and to keep regulations at a minimum so they can sell as much as they can, but if I get shot in the leg by some person on the street, depending on the situation I think I'm well within my moral rights to hate the person holding the gun, no matter who gave it to them.
1) Apple creates this service to upload your music 2) User's upload massive amounts of pirated music 3) Apple passes to RIAA all the logins of people who have uploaded watermarked music 4) RIAA sues these people with massively punitive lawsuits 5) Apple profits!!... profits?!?! Right? Hey, where are all our iPhone customers going?
Such a move is entirely not in Apple's best interest and Apple would not let such a thing happen. Nor would Google or Amazon, unless compelled by a court of law. Steve spent months negotiating so they wouldn't get sued, they wouldn't turn around and allow their customers to be sued en masse. All the Android fans could only hope that Apple would be this galactically stupid.
It's actually like a building company selling prefab bank buildings, and then selling it to your local bank, and the bank forgot to lock the back door they used to get into the building all the while inviting you to come into their new fangled ultra safe and secure bank where you can store personal stuff.
The problem is that Amazon gave someone a super easy way to set up a site... so easy, even idiots can set it up. And idiots will set it up and forget to close the back door, and those idiot will sell services and what not with users who log in using a customer ID and password, and then someone can come in and steal it using a very basic back door. The problem is that it's too easy to forget to do or completely ignore this last part. That's what needs to be fixed.
This is a process problem that makes it too easy for users to shoot themselves in the foot. Sure, those who bought web services should know better, but that doesn't mean Amazon bears no responsibility to make it easier to secure the site. In terms of managing risk, it's too likely that people will forget to secure this. Amazon, logically, has a responsibility to minimize this risk through any number of means, like an education program to it's hosted companies, a redesigned tool, or something similar. But by putting this 100% on the customer fails to acknowledge that the problem is not necessarily people, but the process.
If you aren't rising, you are falling. The public loves a good riches to rags story just as much as they like a rags to riches. So total active users dropped 6 million out of 700 million total. Big deal. In terms of a subscriber base it doesn't really matter. There are still tons of accounts ripe for data mining. Maybe those accounts were false accounts. Maybe they were expired accounts from people who got their old Facebook account hacked and created a brand new one and the old one finally lapsed. Maybe some people died.
Maybe FB is plateauing. It happens to every huge company, they have stop growing sometime. Maybe they drop 1% and their gains/losses level off. But thanks to the 24 hr news cycle we have "oh noes! FB is ded because a few people went outside! Film at 11!"
To us geeks, we often arrogantly think secure means that the weakest link in the security chain is the device we have, but that we geeks would never in a million years give out sensitive information to a computer program we don't trust. Real security to the lay people includes protecting us from ourselves. Humans are the weakest link and malicious people exploit that all the time. We think "well that person is just dumb, they need to become more educated." Really? So that surgeon who just saved your life with quadruple bypass surgery is dumb because he tapped "ok" to a prompt that stole his password with some clever language and sleight of hand? Judge not...
What's going to happen is not that the OS is less secure technically, but I have a feeling that Facebook will design in some very open ended and shitty protocols which allow programmers to design apps that ask for lots of personal information, just like Facebook does now. Apple's native apps have strict controls as to what they ask for, and Safari can't exactly access the address book and download all your contacts to a random server, but I'm sure a clever hacker will exploit the "wetware" of someone and just see if they can grab a few thousand logins/passwords from those who are not stupid, but simply ignorant. This is the lesson we are learning with the likes of MacDefender. Hackers are switching focus from IE exploits to social engineering and we need to start learning even faster.
Linus' major achievement was popularizing and demonstrating open source and the projects it could accomplish, and Linux and Git were merely demonstrations of that. Glyn merely has caught up to us who have realized sometimes great inventors great invent things, but in software great inventors truly only invent great ideas. That is what Linus has done here. Stop thinking of Linux as a thing and start thinking of it as an idea, part of a greater idea which he has touted for a very very long time.
I thought the 2009 stimulus package had $30 Billion which was to be paid to hospitals to update their systems? The only backup I have for this is an I, Cringley article I read over the weekend but I'd feel he'd of all IT writers would be a reasonably reliable and impartial source. Definitely a far more reliable source than the average Slashdot submission.
Okay I'm not trolling for any kind of political points here. I'm actually trying to point out that ol' Joe here will not have any effect on free speech because not only has he set up a "me vs the world" mentality, the world agrees and won't bother listening. In terms of the grand scheme of American politics, American society and the world in general, no one has a scrap of motivation to join his side.
US Government intervention into free speech is an unlikely but serious thing to always think about. Joe affecting free speech ain't happening.
It's true that if you aren't part of the solution, you are part of the problem. However, fault is a spectrum and at one point it's more the human's fault than the software. Software is best at dealing with digital software issues, like an exposed area in the code that's not supposed to let someone in but lets someone in anyway. Relatively speaking that's primarily the software's fault for allowing that, and secondarily the user's fault for not researching how to secure their system better. And yet, exactly how much do you expect the average person to do when they are told in some way they need to have a computer to do work or access important information for their life online? Once someone starts installing stuff themselves into a computer that is malware, fault moves from the software to the user.
It crosses over into the human realm of responsibility when a computer is done precisely what it is asked to do, and it's the owner of the computer who is deceived into doing that. This type of malware is possible on Windows, Mac OS, or Linux, because it requires the user to take actions on the system and install it or run it. The operating system is doing exactly what it's told. If you run a car off a cliff while texting, it's not a functional problem with the car, the car did exactly what was told.
The next step is for apple user's to take a very small bite of humble pie. Mac OS is immune to viruses and most Malware, particularly the malware that requires back doors. Them. But no system is immune to malware that requires user actions to install, i.e. a Trojan Horse. And it looks like criminals are switching from the back door to the front door simply because the back door is getting so much harder to break into. And future defensive software is probably going to ramp up the detection of common Trojan horses, but that won't be as effective as the age old adage of never downloading something you don't trust.
Slashdot Mirror
CD-Rs did not kill floppies, that's laughable. It takes too long to copy a CD-R to make any efficient use of them for simple file transfer, and no one uses them now for things like that. CD-Rs are on their way out as well. The physical media that ultimately replaced Floppies were little drives that use that thing called USB... you know, the interface plus that Apple first introduced on it's first iMac.
Apple did not by itself kill floppies, but they got creative and opened an opportunity for people to rethink data transfer, and that by opening that door, everyone followed and left the floppy behind. No one in the PC business except Apple is doing any kind of serious innovation. Everyone else pretty much just copies... no pun intended.
Okay I'll bite on this because the way this is presented is a bit of a slanted statement. It's accurate, but disingenuous by what it implies. TCP/IP offers very little functionality, it only does one thing... and it does it really really well. Because it does it so well, it frees up developers to innovate on top of it. Therefore trying to say iOS offers little functionality distracts from the idea that despite this, it's doing very very well for businesses who want to easily expand on the product and provide services to people who want to use iPads and iPhones in their business and personal life, simply because it does what little it does very well. Apple lets other people expand on the functionality.
It doesn't come down to software support, it comes down to the experience. Windows has the software support already, and it's on a decline because the market is saturated and Tablets are changing the computer paradigm. If you think pressure sensitive pen input support is the make or break feature for the tablet market at the moment you need to go back and study the market again.
Books at brick and mortar stores tend to be overpriced compared to those sold online. That's not because Borders is gouging them, but because the publishers demand so much. Retailers' margins are thin. So yes they are expensive but Borders didn't "do it to themselves." Borders and B&N have a quaint, warm, relaxed experience but the most hard core book buyers go online now for better prices.
B&N actually survives because they have a good website in competition with Amazon, and frankly their selection has always been better than borders. B&N also has Starbucks in their stores, which gives them a hipster mystique for those who just want to come in and sit and read and have some Starbucks coffee. Funny enough, Borders tried to get early in the game of book selling online and who did they contract with?... Amazon. Most people don't realize this fact seriously delayed Borders' web strategy rather than enhancing it. They didn't have the vision to see web commerce coming and Amazon did to them what they did to mom and pop book shops. And they spent no time getting any experience in marketing and selling on the web because they contracted with Amazon in the early days. I'm betting Amazon knew this and went ahead hoping to basically steal sales from Borders original paltry websites. So in a sense, Borders did to it to themselves, it's just it had everything to do with not getting online fast enough.
Each of the major US carriers has their own 4G standard. 3G/4G was a specific idea created by some engineers that was entirely coopted by marketing departments and was then corrupted. No one actually knows what the definition of 4G is except for some engineers, and the marketers and CEOs keep saying "well it's close enough to 4G if we just do this".
It's simply about speed. The bare minimum information you need to know is what the Mbps are on any single network and what's the fastest Mbps the phone can take. That's too much information for the average consumer to ask for.
And even then, it's not entirely about speed. Latency is important, especially for games. And then there are people who don't need the fastest phone, but want a good experience, reliable hardware, or good sound quality.
Maybe the lesson here is that user's aren't all that concerned about 4G because they aren't asking to be sure. Maybe consumers aren't that stupid because even though we call them stupid for not knowing, we would turn around and call them stupid for caring all that much at the same time.
It was called Serenity.
Stay Shiny!
The titles of both the /. post and the original article imply it's okay to track your spouse, as if you own them and can follow them around, which is not true without their consent. The summary clarifies this as does the original article body. #1 vehicles are in public places and #2 the person who hired the investigator owns or partially owns the car.
Essentially you are asking a private investigator to put a GPS tag on your private property. Also, if the car needs to be tagged, they want to make sure they are in a public place so they don't get slapped with trespassing on private property for any reason. Seems to me like a clear cut case. It's all about the spin.
You got early points for trying to platform bash, which is always popular here, but you're missing the point of the article, and deserve a quick demodding. The news here is not that Apple magically now has an option that it didn't have before, but instead how to specifically do this for Lion, since Lion doesn't come on a disc like previous versions. On previous versions I'd mount the CD and the USB drive, and basically do an install onto the USB drive directly (there may be a couple other minor steps but I've not done it on a USB drive in a while, I prefer a bootable firewire drive). Without a disc, the news is "what is the new way to create a bootable USB drive." If you had Googled this you would have seen Mac has had this option in some form for years.
Besides, it is true that Linux had this option before Windows or Mac OS years ago, but that's not the point either. Lion news is making the rounds, and nerds want to know how to do things like this. That's all this is. That makes your comments meaningless and useless.
Clearly you were given a great opportunity to be a Chris Knight and you turned it into a moment to be a Kent.
From now on, stop playing with yourself :P
That's great! I'll be ready with the massive popcorn pan in 5 years! I should get started soon, maybe Jordan can come over and help me, she never sleeps.
If Sally in accounting can't put Angry Birds on it, or the Kindle app, she won't want to carry it around. Those are the real reasons she carries her iPad everywhere, despite her claims of using it for calendar or email.
Thanks for the shameless iPad bash. Really. It's not like Stereotyping detracts from your argument or anything.
Errrrnttt. Nice try. You are correct that the article is committing a statistical error, but so are you. Technical support calls range the gamut from questions, software problems, hardware problems, user errors, help on setup and installation, etc. And you can't lump all the nonhardware issues into "problems strictly with the software" per se because a question could be as simple as "how do I install this" but could be more intricate like asking value added questions about how to best set up wifi or what settings are best to get maximize battery life. And some of those calls might fall outside the realm of the phone like "sorry the problem is not in your phone but your router/printer/computer/etc."
You also have to factor in user fatigue. If your first problem is a hardware problem where the phone doesn't even work, you're less likely to keep calling back about other problems because you just get tired of dealing with it.
Also the only scrap of information we have here from the article is that they separated out hardware calls from everything else. We have absolutely NO idea what those other issues are. They state "problems" but problems aren't the only reason to call technical support and by their own paramaters of the study they didn't appear to really look at those other calls to state they were actual problems.
Given the data in the article, the statement that 14% of Android phone calls are on hardware issues is meaningless. The statement that percentage wise, that 92% of iPhone calls are software problems is also meaningless. So you have an article and a comment, both meaningless. More numbers need to be revealed to make this meaningful.
I personally hate gun makers for lobbing in a broken system to keep guns legal and to keep regulations at a minimum so they can sell as much as they can, but if I get shot in the leg by some person on the street, depending on the situation I think I'm well within my moral rights to hate the person holding the gun, no matter who gave it to them.
1) Apple creates this service to upload your music
2) User's upload massive amounts of pirated music
3) Apple passes to RIAA all the logins of people who have uploaded watermarked music
4) RIAA sues these people with massively punitive lawsuits
5) Apple profits!!... profits?!?! Right? Hey, where are all our iPhone customers going?
Such a move is entirely not in Apple's best interest and Apple would not let such a thing happen. Nor would Google or Amazon, unless compelled by a court of law. Steve spent months negotiating so they wouldn't get sued, they wouldn't turn around and allow their customers to be sued en masse. All the Android fans could only hope that Apple would be this galactically stupid.
It's actually like a building company selling prefab bank buildings, and then selling it to your local bank, and the bank forgot to lock the back door they used to get into the building all the while inviting you to come into their new fangled ultra safe and secure bank where you can store personal stuff.
The problem is that Amazon gave someone a super easy way to set up a site... so easy, even idiots can set it up. And idiots will set it up and forget to close the back door, and those idiot will sell services and what not with users who log in using a customer ID and password, and then someone can come in and steal it using a very basic back door. The problem is that it's too easy to forget to do or completely ignore this last part. That's what needs to be fixed.
This is a process problem that makes it too easy for users to shoot themselves in the foot. Sure, those who bought web services should know better, but that doesn't mean Amazon bears no responsibility to make it easier to secure the site. In terms of managing risk, it's too likely that people will forget to secure this. Amazon, logically, has a responsibility to minimize this risk through any number of means, like an education program to it's hosted companies, a redesigned tool, or something similar. But by putting this 100% on the customer fails to acknowledge that the problem is not necessarily people, but the process.
If you aren't rising, you are falling. The public loves a good riches to rags story just as much as they like a rags to riches. So total active users dropped 6 million out of 700 million total. Big deal. In terms of a subscriber base it doesn't really matter. There are still tons of accounts ripe for data mining. Maybe those accounts were false accounts. Maybe they were expired accounts from people who got their old Facebook account hacked and created a brand new one and the old one finally lapsed. Maybe some people died.
Maybe FB is plateauing. It happens to every huge company, they have stop growing sometime. Maybe they drop 1% and their gains/losses level off. But thanks to the 24 hr news cycle we have "oh noes! FB is ded because a few people went outside! Film at 11!"
Hmmmmm, until recently, only countries and groups got TLDs. Now, corporations have been elevated to the level of countries.
Yet another sign that the dystopia is upon us.
To us geeks, we often arrogantly think secure means that the weakest link in the security chain is the device we have, but that we geeks would never in a million years give out sensitive information to a computer program we don't trust. Real security to the lay people includes protecting us from ourselves. Humans are the weakest link and malicious people exploit that all the time. We think "well that person is just dumb, they need to become more educated." Really? So that surgeon who just saved your life with quadruple bypass surgery is dumb because he tapped "ok" to a prompt that stole his password with some clever language and sleight of hand? Judge not...
What's going to happen is not that the OS is less secure technically, but I have a feeling that Facebook will design in some very open ended and shitty protocols which allow programmers to design apps that ask for lots of personal information, just like Facebook does now. Apple's native apps have strict controls as to what they ask for, and Safari can't exactly access the address book and download all your contacts to a random server, but I'm sure a clever hacker will exploit the "wetware" of someone and just see if they can grab a few thousand logins/passwords from those who are not stupid, but simply ignorant. This is the lesson we are learning with the likes of MacDefender. Hackers are switching focus from IE exploits to social engineering and we need to start learning even faster.
Linus' major achievement was popularizing and demonstrating open source and the projects it could accomplish, and Linux and Git were merely demonstrations of that. Glyn merely has caught up to us who have realized sometimes great inventors great invent things, but in software great inventors truly only invent great ideas. That is what Linus has done here. Stop thinking of Linux as a thing and start thinking of it as an idea, part of a greater idea which he has touted for a very very long time.
I thought the 2009 stimulus package had $30 Billion which was to be paid to hospitals to update their systems? The only backup I have for this is an I, Cringley article I read over the weekend but I'd feel he'd of all IT writers would be a reasonably reliable and impartial source. Definitely a far more reliable source than the average Slashdot submission.
Dude. I did use the keyboard! :)
All I could manage was row row row your boat.
http://goo.gl/doodle/Sesa
Okay I'm not trolling for any kind of political points here. I'm actually trying to point out that ol' Joe here will not have any effect on free speech because not only has he set up a "me vs the world" mentality, the world agrees and won't bother listening. In terms of the grand scheme of American politics, American society and the world in general, no one has a scrap of motivation to join his side.
US Government intervention into free speech is an unlikely but serious thing to always think about. Joe affecting free speech ain't happening.
He gave us poor battery life, crashing over the air updates, a shitty interface, and the ability to infect the OS without doing anything? Sweet!
It's true that if you aren't part of the solution, you are part of the problem. However, fault is a spectrum and at one point it's more the human's fault than the software. Software is best at dealing with digital software issues, like an exposed area in the code that's not supposed to let someone in but lets someone in anyway. Relatively speaking that's primarily the software's fault for allowing that, and secondarily the user's fault for not researching how to secure their system better. And yet, exactly how much do you expect the average person to do when they are told in some way they need to have a computer to do work or access important information for their life online? Once someone starts installing stuff themselves into a computer that is malware, fault moves from the software to the user.
It crosses over into the human realm of responsibility when a computer is done precisely what it is asked to do, and it's the owner of the computer who is deceived into doing that. This type of malware is possible on Windows, Mac OS, or Linux, because it requires the user to take actions on the system and install it or run it. The operating system is doing exactly what it's told. If you run a car off a cliff while texting, it's not a functional problem with the car, the car did exactly what was told.
The next step is for apple user's to take a very small bite of humble pie. Mac OS is immune to viruses and most Malware, particularly the malware that requires back doors. Them. But no system is immune to malware that requires user actions to install, i.e. a Trojan Horse. And it looks like criminals are switching from the back door to the front door simply because the back door is getting so much harder to break into. And future defensive software is probably going to ramp up the detection of common Trojan horses, but that won't be as effective as the age old adage of never downloading something you don't trust.
I see that the research into getting Sarah Palin a brain transplant is going well.