I give it about 10 minutes before it is abused. I would say it would probably take much longer--on the order of 3 weeks--to discover the abuse, however.
For those sending information that seems suspicious, or sent from somebody that the government is already suspicious of, this is certainly a possibility. But for Joe Schmoe down the street sending encrypted data, the government probably wouldn't care enough. Especially when enough unknown people are sending encrypted data, the people that are supposed to "weed out" the suspicious stuff will just get scroll blindness.
On the other hand, in a room full of unknown people, one person sending all data as encrypted might raise an eyebrow. This is why everyone should encrypt their data all the time, no matter how important or useless it is: increasing the signal-to-noise ratio makes attempts to find suspicious content infeasible at best.
In one of my older computers, I had to purchase a USB2.0 card so it could transfer stuff to/from an external HDD in a reasonable amount of time. All the plugs on the card were very close together, and it was difficult to determine (blindly) which was the right way; since the plastic tabs were quite brittle, they broke almost immediately, leaving the four metal connectors hanging out. Now it's a crapshoot to get USB connected properly to it--without shorting things out--unless I pull the computer out and look at the stupid card.
This is why I give credit to the idea that a very small design change could have made USB much better. By simply "keying" it, much like most IDE connectors are (thank you google image search), they could have avoided the problem altogether.
In order to avoid this situation (where the car is going an obscene speed with animals nearby), the car can implement a heat-sensitive motion camera. Whenever something is within a certain distance that it may become a hazard or possibly block the road, it uses a system similar to dead reckoning to determine the chances of that something suddenly blocking the road. The other option, of course, would be to install those stupid little "whistler" things that supposedly keep deer away from vehicles.
I would bet most bands don't actually care about the piracy. I would also bet that if the bands that did care were given an explanation of ALL impacts that piracy has on them, they probably wouldn't care either. Actually, I'll take that a step further: many bands might actually like piracy, and encourage it.
Before anybody flips out on me, let's compare this to a Microsoft "view" (probably not official) on piracy: Microsoft indirectly profits from piracy because each copy of it's OS that is installed on a machine is one machine that doesn't have a competing OS on it.
In a pseudo-vaguely-similar fashion, a person that has a pirated copy of a band's song is more exposure for them. The act of pirating the music means that person actually wanted to hear that band's work. Just like Microsoft, the band takes no "hit" from the piracy, as that person wasn't going to buy a CD anyway. The additional benefit is that the pirate is probably going to share that music to others, either through electronic means or by playing it for people that may or may not have ever listened to it. That's EXPOSURE.
Look at Metallica. Even though they have "taken a stand" against piracy in the past, they have also openly admitted that one of the single most important factors to their popularity was to piracy. Let's think about this logically for a minute. If CD sales only provide about 1% of a band's revenue, and the other 99% is from concerts: there is a great possibility that a large percent of the fans pirate their music. So, let's say 10% of the audience pirated their music, and it sells for $10/CD (for simplicity's sake): that means the band "lost" $1 per person from the piracy... but WAIT, they got $9/person for the concert! They gained far more than they lost.
Before I step off my soapbox, I have to say I think all this crap from the RIAA is the moanings and groanings of a company that realizes it can't make money from every single copy of every single song from every single artist that has EVER been under their control. Somebody stood up in a board room one day, gave some outrageous figures about how many pirates there are and how much those pirates are "stealing." The main person took that info, freaked out on others, and soon a whole tirade of stupid people started trying to prosecute over stupid shit that only a few of which even have even a small grasp. Had they embraced sharing as a form of free advertisement or ignored it altogether they'd be a much more powerful influence in the industry today.
I'm a contractor and I've worked on many programming jobs: from adding e-commerce to a website, to building scripts that handle password expiration and user deletion. As of recently, the company I contract through has updated the wording of their contracts to explicitly include extra time for bug-checking and security related testing (it's an abstract timeframe, I think they say about 20% over the time it takes to build the system, plus possibly more if issues are found).
Given that information, I think the problem is sort of with management though not where most of the above posts are pointing. I would say the management that isn't giving proper consideration to bugs and security is the company (or individual) setting up the contractual work. It should be implicit in the contract that extra time will be taken to guard against future problems. I would very much doubt that very many prospective companies would not give a contract based on that condition; doing so would be like saying, "we want it done fast and cheap, we don't want to worry about security." Of course, that may be the exception and not the rule... *cry*
Desensitizing people to alarms isn't a bad thing, provided there is a sane limit to the desensitization (when it's done to the extent that people don't even flinch at the alarm, it has gone too far).
For instance, let's take a fire alarm: if nobody has heard it before (i.e. they'd never gone through a fire drill at all), there could easily be mass panic and injuries/death due to hysteria; if people were aware of what to do in a fire drill (while not being completely desensitized), the relative calmness of the evacuation avoids hysteria, possibly even after those people realize it isn't a drill.
The moral of the story: using drugs in proper dose to limit pain is a good thing; taking enough drugs to make an elephant drowsy could cause you to be completely unaware of the alien ripping through your ribcage.
...it is said that if a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will never jump out [and therefore die].
Seriously. The same argument can be made against Windows. Try installing one of the first Windows dists and see how much you are willing to forgive and forget (Windows 3, anyone?); Microsoft hasn't always created great operating systems either. In fact, install the first version of almost anything, and you'll get a big steaming pile of flaming donkey poo.
For the non-gamer, most of the Linux distributions that have been around for as long as XP are very incredibly stable and very user-friendly (with exceptions, of course). The biggest curve to using is the curve itself: suddenly, there's no Microsoft logo, no start button, and the desktop looks... remarkably similar (take a look at KDE).
So let's talk about painful and annoying: connecting a USB hard drive.
Windows (30 secs - 2 minutes):
1.) wait for the drive to activate
2.) wait for the OS to find/install the new hardware
3.) wait for the OS to mount the drive
Linux (10-20 secs):
1.) wait for the OS to ask you want to do with the new device (or, if you've connected one before & selected to always open in a new window; wait for the window to appear)
Nobody likes a fanboi. Windows has many downfalls, just as Linux does... wait, I just said something bad about both M$ and Linux... am I going to be assassinated now?
... for the very reason that few people would be paying that much if there are alternatives.
People pay $100-$300 for Microsoft Office, and there have been many FREE alternatives (OpenOffice, etc).
People pay $100-$500 for Microsoft Windows X, and there are many FREE alternatives (Linux, BSD, etc).
People pay $(?) for Photoshop, and there are many FREE alternatives (GIMP/GIMPshop works for Windows, too).
People pay THOUSANDS OF $$$ for Oracle when there are FREE alternatives (PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc).
People will pay because they're scared of change, because they're scared of "little" companies that give out free software without any apparent way of making money... they're just scared. I think you'd be surprised to find out just how many people don't even realize there's another operating system available for their computer (many claim they do, but eventually admit they're lying). Some can't even distinguish programs like Office and Winamp from their OS.
I find the funniest part about people being scared of Linux is that they're worried that the company that makes it isn't going to be around forever... and they say it with the undertone that they're worried they won't have any support. Those very same people are the ones that call me or a friend to fix their problems, like they're avoiding calling Micro$oft like the plague... so even if there weren't support...
In all the tests I've done in asking vs. watching, the users complain about inconsequential things, while the real problems they had aren't even mentioned.
I had someone complain about what a button looked like for 5 minutes; the button was too small, not visible enough, and had an obtrusive font. Yet actually watching that same person use the app revealed they had no problems finding the afore-mentioned button (and using the associated feature), while another feature had them completely and utterly confused--yet they didn't mention the part that actually caused real problems.
Interesting how users many times don't realize (or remember the realization about) the problems they experienced and therefore don't relay them properly. A camera and a tool that records their activity on the screen is probably the most invaluable tool for usability (so the user doesn't worry about somebody standing over their shoulder, which actually alters the way that user works).
It is a statistical probability that 80% of all statistics are 50% questionable, 30% hype, and 20% lies, while the other 20% are only 50% truthful. There is a 50% margin for error in these statistics.
Seriously... the article doesn't even indicate how much power the CPU itself is using; the last link that purports 4 watt power usage doesn't say anything of the sort. There's a 3 watt difference in the two systems for the entire system, which still shows 56.4 to 59.2 watts... I'm sure they're nice systems, but the whole "using 4 watts of power under load" is a bunch of marketing crap.
This is the reason I keep my '76 GMC. No computers. At all. The only electronics in that beast consist of the radio, battery, and spark plugs. No "dumb" light to tell me I'm low on gas (that's what the gauge is for). Nothing to warn me my door is still open. If it starts running rough, I get a mechanic to adjust to the carburetor. It may only get 6mpg, but at least I don't have to worry about some DRM-laden mp3 program killing my car.
AMEN! Gmail is very much AJAX-driven and is built with the back button in mind. Run a search, click the back button, go forward again... it all just works. Don't blame the user for something you should have compensated for.
I see your point, but I think you may have missed mine: originally, we were talking about how "modern browsers, and not the how many users each has. There may be 15 million people that use BrowserA, 200 million that use BrowserB, and 8 thousand that use BrowserC: while there are are 223 million people, there are still only three browsers.
If we were to compare this to fathers: FatherA has 50 children, FatherB has 8, and FatherC has 2; B and C give 100% financial support to their children, while A gives none. There are still only 3 fathers. Your logic would state that "most modern fathers don't support their children" (purely based on the number of children each has), whilst my logic says that most fathers do (2 is still greater than 1).
There's lies, damn lies, and statistics. Don't mistake logic for statistics: logic is immutable; statistics say that 80% of statistics are 50% hype, 40% too narrow, and 10% other; the other 20% is just plain garbage.
Internet Explorer, regardless of market share, is still one browser. If there are (for example) three top browsers including IE, and the other two support SVG, then most modern browsers would support SVG. Your comparison is like saying the number of a person with multiple children is the sum of the number of children... if this were true of voices, then I'd always be the swing vote.
Oh, back in the day... I remember sitting at school, typing out BASIC code on the Apple IIe, working on my final project. It was an "awesome" graphical space game. Of course, the entirety of the game consisted of choosing whether to shoot the alien space ship or not (shooting wins and blows up the ship, not shooting loses and gets your spaceship destroyed). Oh, the fun of drawing pixel-by-pixel.
First, let me give the disclaimer: I'm a PHP programmer.
If you let the kid program in PHP, or some other web-related language, be sure to teach him that mixing HTML in with the code is bad. It's okay to start out with, for cutting his teeth or whatever, but make sure he knows not to keep doing it. Otherwise, we'll have another code monkey that writes nigh-unreadable code... and might think it's actually good.
Object-oriented code is very important. Structure is more important. If you're going the way of PHP and building dynamic webpages or whatever use (here comes the shameless plug) a templating system/framework.
--- Firefox_vs_IE (revision 1)
+++ Firefox_vs_IE (revision 3)
@@ -1,5 +1,7 @@
Me: You should try FireFox.
Friend: Why?
-Me: See the tabs? Makes things a whole lot easier to keep track of.
+Me: *Browses to MySpace* Notice anything different?
+Friend: Where are all the annoying ads?
+Me: It's called AdBlock.
Friend: Awesome!
FireFoxUsers++;
Slashdot Mirror
I give it about 10 minutes before it is abused. I would say it would probably take much longer--on the order of 3 weeks--to discover the abuse, however.
For those sending information that seems suspicious, or sent from somebody that the government is already suspicious of, this is certainly a possibility. But for Joe Schmoe down the street sending encrypted data, the government probably wouldn't care enough. Especially when enough unknown people are sending encrypted data, the people that are supposed to "weed out" the suspicious stuff will just get scroll blindness.
On the other hand, in a room full of unknown people, one person sending all data as encrypted might raise an eyebrow. This is why everyone should encrypt their data all the time, no matter how important or useless it is: increasing the signal-to-noise ratio makes attempts to find suspicious content infeasible at best.
In one of my older computers, I had to purchase a USB2.0 card so it could transfer stuff to/from an external HDD in a reasonable amount of time. All the plugs on the card were very close together, and it was difficult to determine (blindly) which was the right way; since the plastic tabs were quite brittle, they broke almost immediately, leaving the four metal connectors hanging out. Now it's a crapshoot to get USB connected properly to it--without shorting things out--unless I pull the computer out and look at the stupid card.
This is why I give credit to the idea that a very small design change could have made USB much better. By simply "keying" it, much like most IDE connectors are (thank you google image search), they could have avoided the problem altogether.
That's what condoms are for.
In order to avoid this situation (where the car is going an obscene speed with animals nearby), the car can implement a heat-sensitive motion camera. Whenever something is within a certain distance that it may become a hazard or possibly block the road, it uses a system similar to dead reckoning to determine the chances of that something suddenly blocking the road. The other option, of course, would be to install those stupid little "whistler" things that supposedly keep deer away from vehicles.
I would bet most bands don't actually care about the piracy. I would also bet that if the bands that did care were given an explanation of ALL impacts that piracy has on them, they probably wouldn't care either. Actually, I'll take that a step further: many bands might actually like piracy, and encourage it.
Before anybody flips out on me, let's compare this to a Microsoft "view" (probably not official) on piracy: Microsoft indirectly profits from piracy because each copy of it's OS that is installed on a machine is one machine that doesn't have a competing OS on it.
In a pseudo-vaguely-similar fashion, a person that has a pirated copy of a band's song is more exposure for them. The act of pirating the music means that person actually wanted to hear that band's work. Just like Microsoft, the band takes no "hit" from the piracy, as that person wasn't going to buy a CD anyway. The additional benefit is that the pirate is probably going to share that music to others, either through electronic means or by playing it for people that may or may not have ever listened to it. That's EXPOSURE.
Look at Metallica. Even though they have "taken a stand" against piracy in the past, they have also openly admitted that one of the single most important factors to their popularity was to piracy. Let's think about this logically for a minute. If CD sales only provide about 1% of a band's revenue, and the other 99% is from concerts: there is a great possibility that a large percent of the fans pirate their music. So, let's say 10% of the audience pirated their music, and it sells for $10/CD (for simplicity's sake): that means the band "lost" $1 per person from the piracy... but WAIT, they got $9/person for the concert! They gained far more than they lost.
Before I step off my soapbox, I have to say I think all this crap from the RIAA is the moanings and groanings of a company that realizes it can't make money from every single copy of every single song from every single artist that has EVER been under their control. Somebody stood up in a board room one day, gave some outrageous figures about how many pirates there are and how much those pirates are "stealing." The main person took that info, freaked out on others, and soon a whole tirade of stupid people started trying to prosecute over stupid shit that only a few of which even have even a small grasp. Had they embraced sharing as a form of free advertisement or ignored it altogether they'd be a much more powerful influence in the industry today.
$me->soapBox->step_down('now');
I'm a contractor and I've worked on many programming jobs: from adding e-commerce to a website, to building scripts that handle password expiration and user deletion. As of recently, the company I contract through has updated the wording of their contracts to explicitly include extra time for bug-checking and security related testing (it's an abstract timeframe, I think they say about 20% over the time it takes to build the system, plus possibly more if issues are found).
Given that information, I think the problem is sort of with management though not where most of the above posts are pointing. I would say the management that isn't giving proper consideration to bugs and security is the company (or individual) setting up the contractual work. It should be implicit in the contract that extra time will be taken to guard against future problems. I would very much doubt that very many prospective companies would not give a contract based on that condition; doing so would be like saying, "we want it done fast and cheap, we don't want to worry about security." Of course, that may be the exception and not the rule... *cry*
Desensitizing people to alarms isn't a bad thing, provided there is a sane limit to the desensitization (when it's done to the extent that people don't even flinch at the alarm, it has gone too far).
For instance, let's take a fire alarm: if nobody has heard it before (i.e. they'd never gone through a fire drill at all), there could easily be mass panic and injuries/death due to hysteria; if people were aware of what to do in a fire drill (while not being completely desensitized), the relative calmness of the evacuation avoids hysteria, possibly even after those people realize it isn't a drill.
The moral of the story: using drugs in proper dose to limit pain is a good thing; taking enough drugs to make an elephant drowsy could cause you to be completely unaware of the alien ripping through your ribcage.
Another, possibly better analogy (than the "first pair of glasses" one) is the frog in boiling water saying:
...it is said that if a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will never jump out [and therefore die].
Have you tried VMware?
Seriously. The same argument can be made against Windows. Try installing one of the first Windows dists and see how much you are willing to forgive and forget (Windows 3, anyone?); Microsoft hasn't always created great operating systems either. In fact, install the first version of almost anything, and you'll get a big steaming pile of flaming donkey poo.
For the non-gamer, most of the Linux distributions that have been around for as long as XP are very incredibly stable and very user-friendly (with exceptions, of course). The biggest curve to using is the curve itself: suddenly, there's no Microsoft logo, no start button, and the desktop looks... remarkably similar (take a look at KDE).
So let's talk about painful and annoying: connecting a USB hard drive.
Windows (30 secs - 2 minutes):
1.) wait for the drive to activate
2.) wait for the OS to find/install the new hardware
3.) wait for the OS to mount the drive
Linux (10-20 secs):
1.) wait for the OS to ask you want to do with the new device (or, if you've connected one before & selected to always open in a new window; wait for the window to appear)
Nobody likes a fanboi. Windows has many downfalls, just as Linux does... wait, I just said something bad about both M$ and Linux... am I going to be assassinated now?
... for the very reason that few people would be paying that much if there are alternatives.
People will pay because they're scared of change, because they're scared of "little" companies that give out free software without any apparent way of making money... they're just scared. I think you'd be surprised to find out just how many people don't even realize there's another operating system available for their computer (many claim they do, but eventually admit they're lying). Some can't even distinguish programs like Office and Winamp from their OS.
I find the funniest part about people being scared of Linux is that they're worried that the company that makes it isn't going to be around forever... and they say it with the undertone that they're worried they won't have any support. Those very same people are the ones that call me or a friend to fix their problems, like they're avoiding calling Micro$oft like the plague... so even if there weren't support...
(*sigh*) /soapbox
In all the tests I've done in asking vs. watching, the users complain about inconsequential things, while the real problems they had aren't even mentioned.
I had someone complain about what a button looked like for 5 minutes; the button was too small, not visible enough, and had an obtrusive font. Yet actually watching that same person use the app revealed they had no problems finding the afore-mentioned button (and using the associated feature), while another feature had them completely and utterly confused--yet they didn't mention the part that actually caused real problems.
Interesting how users many times don't realize (or remember the realization about) the problems they experienced and therefore don't relay them properly. A camera and a tool that records their activity on the screen is probably the most invaluable tool for usability (so the user doesn't worry about somebody standing over their shoulder, which actually alters the way that user works).
It is a statistical probability that 80% of all statistics are 50% questionable, 30% hype, and 20% lies, while the other 20% are only 50% truthful. There is a 50% margin for error in these statistics.
Seriously... the article doesn't even indicate how much power the CPU itself is using; the last link that purports 4 watt power usage doesn't say anything of the sort. There's a 3 watt difference in the two systems for the entire system, which still shows 56.4 to 59.2 watts... I'm sure they're nice systems, but the whole "using 4 watts of power under load" is a bunch of marketing crap .
This is the reason I keep my '76 GMC. No computers. At all. The only electronics in that beast consist of the radio, battery, and spark plugs. No "dumb" light to tell me I'm low on gas (that's what the gauge is for). Nothing to warn me my door is still open. If it starts running rough, I get a mechanic to adjust to the carburetor. It may only get 6mpg, but at least I don't have to worry about some DRM-laden mp3 program killing my car.
People misunderstanding the bible... hmm... isn't that called Catholicism? (sorry for the flamebait. I had to.)
AMEN! Gmail is very much AJAX-driven and is built with the back button in mind. Run a search, click the back button, go forward again... it all just works. Don't blame the user for something you should have compensated for.
I see your point, but I think you may have missed mine: originally, we were talking about how "modern browsers, and not the how many users each has. There may be 15 million people that use BrowserA, 200 million that use BrowserB, and 8 thousand that use BrowserC: while there are are 223 million people, there are still only three browsers.
If we were to compare this to fathers: FatherA has 50 children, FatherB has 8, and FatherC has 2; B and C give 100% financial support to their children, while A gives none. There are still only 3 fathers. Your logic would state that "most modern fathers don't support their children" (purely based on the number of children each has), whilst my logic says that most fathers do (2 is still greater than 1).
There's lies, damn lies, and statistics. Don't mistake logic for statistics: logic is immutable; statistics say that 80% of statistics are 50% hype, 40% too narrow, and 10% other; the other 20% is just plain garbage.
Internet Explorer, regardless of market share, is still one browser. If there are (for example) three top browsers including IE, and the other two support SVG, then most modern browsers would support SVG. Your comparison is like saying the number of a person with multiple children is the sum of the number of children... if this were true of voices, then I'd always be the swing vote.
Oh, back in the day... I remember sitting at school, typing out BASIC code on the Apple IIe, working on my final project. It was an "awesome" graphical space game. Of course, the entirety of the game consisted of choosing whether to shoot the alien space ship or not (shooting wins and blows up the ship, not shooting loses and gets your spaceship destroyed). Oh, the fun of drawing pixel-by-pixel.
First, let me give the disclaimer: I'm a PHP programmer.
If you let the kid program in PHP, or some other web-related language, be sure to teach him that mixing HTML in with the code is bad. It's okay to start out with, for cutting his teeth or whatever, but make sure he knows not to keep doing it. Otherwise, we'll have another code monkey that writes nigh-unreadable code... and might think it's actually good.
Object-oriented code is very important. Structure is more important. If you're going the way of PHP and building dynamic webpages or whatever use (here comes the shameless plug) a templating system/framework.
That's what symlinks are for. :) /etc /settings
ln -s
Wow... when I read that I actually thought to myself, "They had web in the late 60's?"
--- Firefox_vs_IE (revision 1)
+++ Firefox_vs_IE (revision 3)
@@ -1,5 +1,7 @@
Me: You should try FireFox.
Friend: Why?
-Me: See the tabs? Makes things a whole lot easier to keep track of.
+Me: *Browses to MySpace* Notice anything different?
+Friend: Where are all the annoying ads?
+Me: It's called AdBlock.
Friend: Awesome!
FireFoxUsers++;