A Web-based office app is not your basic HTML site...it's going to bend the browser as far as it can to accomplish what it wants, just like GMail and Google Maps do. Unfortunately by doing this, Google exposes their product to the whims of Microsoft, who is in the process of redesigning their browser already.
If the app is like Gmail but even more complicated (which seems likely), even small changes to the browser features this app depends on (some of which are not standardized and were originally introduced by Microsoft) will have massive effects on the app's performance. And Microsoft could easily make such tweaks ad infinitum by way of "security updates" that close security holes by continuously re-tweaking the advanced features of IE.
Most users won't download a whole new browser just to try out a new Google feature. They might not even realize they have to...when a site doesn't work right most users assume it's the site's fault, not the browser's.
At some point we all commit ourselves to dependence on infrastructure. The data infrastructure is not yet as reliable as the power infrastructure, but it will be soon. Then this won't seem like such a crazy idea.
The natural order of life (and therefore society) is conflict and change. This is the basis of most scientific understanding. including evolution, as well as the basis for the structure of the U.S. government.
In general technological advancement does not direct our development as a society, it facilitates it...your television will let you watch TV for as long and as often as you like, regardless of the good or harm to you or society. Technology does not make life better, it just makes it *more*--we can do more, whether it's good for us or not.
As with today's technology, I expect that future advancements will increase the number and intensity of instances of societal conflict, rather than resolving them. I believe the current uptick in terrorism is permanent rather than temporary--the natural outcome of technologies that confer greater destructive powers on the individual. Wanting to hurt other people is not new...the only new aspects to it are the ease and scope of what a single person or small group is capable of learning about and what they are capable of doing to others.
Firefox didn't have an security issues until it started becoming popular. The Mac had a few recently too.
I haven't seen or heard of a single Mac virus, worm, or rootkit in the wild since OS-X was released. I've gotten plenty of security updates from Apple, but these are patches, not exploits. In other words they're internal to the code, so they have no relation to popularity--the code has no idea how many computers it's installed on. Whereas exploits are human-created new code that could be inferred as being related to popularity. But I haven't heard of any. I'd love to know if some have actually been found (as opposed to hypothesized).
Why? Because I leave the desktop at work at the end of the day. I have a personal laptop I can use if I absolutely need to check e-mail, but without a company laptop I don't have the software or VPN connection to do any sort of real work. It is one way to enforce a bit of life balance on myself--something that slips away easily if I know I can "just finish that up at home in front of the TV."
The official U.S. unemployment number is NOT the number of people collecting unemployment benefits, it is the result of a survey called "the household survey" that involves tens of thousands of telephone interviews per month. This measures the number of people who are looking for work but who cannot find a job. Because it rigorously surveys the actual populace, it is considered an accurate measure of unemployment, and is the official measure in the U.S.
There's no traffic where Sheehan was protesting, it is a pedestrian mall closed to vehicles...basically the area was recently remodelled to hold events just like this one.
I acknowledge the online bitching, but the only one of these that has had any legal legs is the iPod battery problem.
I think there's a strong meme/peer influence factor at work online. A few loud people bitch about a problem, and suddenly it seems like everyone has the problem, the company fucked up and the product is in trouble. It's like the hundreds of calls the CDC gets everytime a local news broadcast covers some terrible disease. Remember the furor over Google redirect hijacking? Huge numbers were thrown around describing the scope, but could never be proven. And many of the people who thought they'd been hijacked ended up having much more mundane problems.
Personally I'll refer judgment on this latest crisis until some time passes.
The Nano LCD's glass surface is hidden under a clear plastic cover (in fact it covers the entire top of the Nano), whereas on the Mini the glass screen of the LCD is exposed. Glass is more difficult to scratch than plastic, therefore it is harder to scratch the Mini's screen than the Nano.
If you care about scratches, get a Mini on sale. The glass screen and metal body are very scratch resistant.
Not to blow a huge hole in your theory, but Microsoft's focus has ALWAYS been on beating their competitors. Look at the way they handled:
- the Mac - OS/2 - GO Corp's PenPoint - Netscape - Palm - Playstation - Logitech - etc.
In each case the competition drove them to get off their asses and create products. Were they amazing, groundbreaking innovations? No. That is not their game. Their game is mass-market, high volume sales, which means they must to some extent conform to their customers' existing expectations.
Other companies innovate and begin the process of changing personal habits...it's at that point that MS moves into the market. They throw a ton of resources at the problem with a tight focus on beating the competition...and they often do. Only when the competition is as well-funded as they are do they run into problems, and even then they manage to compete.
That's why it's ludicrous to think that Microsoft has the wrong focus...they have enjoyed almost unparalleled corporate success over the last 20 years based on that focus. They've never been in debt. They make obscene margins on their products and turn a profit every quarter. They've achieved immense market share in their core markets. They've successfully entered a number of new markets.
Personally I don't think Microsoft has a problem right now. They have business challenges, but their core profit generators are as secure as they have been for years, and their new entries are competing strongly.
So what? So is an unstealable car, but I don't see many cars without locks on the doors and ignition.
It's tempting to reduce the argument to the logical extreme, but there is a continuous range of security, consequences, AND respondent behavior. As illegal things get harder to do, or punishment more likely, fewer people are likely to do them.
Picture a quadrant plot of the axis wide open --> unbreakable against the axis likely consequences --> no consequences. Plot all human activities and you get an envelope. The more you can move an activity into the "unbreakable & likely consequences" corner, the fewer people will do it.
I know--digital media is different because it's so easy to distribute, right? Not necessarily...it's networked behavior and thus subject to Metcalf's proposition of value: the square of the number of participants. So with each person an effective DRM discourages, the overall value of the network declines considerably. The ability to attract and hold participants falls away, and over time the network is reduced to a hard core of dedicated true believers. This is no different than the effect of law enforcement in the trafficking of stolen car parts--also a networked behavior.
It doesn't matter that in the case of digital media you're trafficking in perfect copies rather than physical items. What determines people's behavior is how easy is it to do, and how hard is it to get caught. An effective DRM makes it hard to strip the protection from the file (not impossible, just hard for the average citizen). An effective enforcement regime makes it seem possible that if you distribute or receive the files, you might get caught (it doesn't even have to be efficient to achieve this...just well publicized).
There's no such thing as perfect security or perfect law enforcement, so to argue against any DRM because it's not perfect is pretty much a straw man argument. The question for each DRM scheme is the same as for any security scheme--how much does it cost (in any units), how does it impact ease of use, and where does it move the needle in the behavior quadrant?
Google seems to be sticking its finger in every pie it can find, but the reality is that they are still pretty much a one-revenue-stream company. They've cornered the search-based advertising market to a large extent (though of course they need to keep innovating to play defense). The real question is: how else will they make money? Look at a (perceived anyway) competitor: Microsoft has done a good job of diversifying their revenue streams--they make money from consumers, from businesses, from applications, from OS, from servers, from middleware, from games, from hardware...etc. How will Google do it?
Whether the ballot has a unique ID or not, the point is that I cannot go back and find my ballot after the fact to confirm it was recorded correctly. It is not auditable, unlike a financial transaction. That makes it harder to catch data recording mistakes after the fact.
That is why a paper printout is a must for electronic voting--it allows me to verify my vote in a medium that is not easily altered after it leaves my sight.
Many e-commerce Web sites are not for the public, but rather for the limited clients of a particular company. In that instance you typically have more freedom to specify the browser than you would on a pure public play like Amazon.
It's not unusual for companies to require certain compatibilities to do business with one another, the browser is minor compared to some of these. Nevertheless you want to make it as easy to comply as possible.
In banking neither party is anonymous. If the bank screws up one of my transactions, one of us is likely to find out and attempt to have it corrected.
Since voting is anonymous, it's harder to catch or correct mistakes. Only mistakes or fraud in the counting are catchable, and only by redundant counting. But if the system does not record my vote correctly to begin with, there is no way for anyone to know that or to correct it. This is true of any ballot paper or electronic--witness the butterfly ballots of FL 2000.
Then Kyoto came along and told us to sacrifice trillions on the altar of C02 emissions.
Conclusively prove that Kyoto would sacrifice trillions. If you think global climate science is complicated, try global economics.
I constantly hear the refrain that environmentalists are chicken littles who are foolishly predicting disaster. Yet the business community constantly expects us to believe that any regulatory concession to protecting our environment will horribly cripple our economy.
U.S. economic growth since the 1960s (approximate birth of the environmental movement) seems to indicate otherwise.
Nothing humanity can possibly do regarding CO2 levels will even be noticed by this vast slow cycle.
Just because an enormous cycle is not significantly affected by a minor perturbation, it does not follow that we will not be affected. Enough extra carbon released to affect a 1 or 2 degree change won't stop or even slow the carbon cycle, but it certainly would affect us.
Eliminate the Orbiter from the equation, and you have one uber-powerful set of boosters.
But the Orbiter contains the main engines. I think what you meant was eliminate the crew compartment and airframe. But you'd still have the weight of the main engines and their associated infrastructure, as well as the infrastructure needed to attach and enclose the payload.
Each main engine weighs about 3.2 metric tons, and there's three, so there's half your advantage over Saturn V gone right there. Throw in the engine frame and the payload compartment, and you're looking at a pretty small lifting advantage over the Saturn V.
Where I work we're only now getting Office 2003 because the IT department tested thoroughly and was waiting for the worst of the (numerous) bugs to be patched by MS.
No large company is going to install any update or software without some testing first. Short-cycle incremental releases are just more to test, and most companies will probably only bother to test/roll-out when a new feature set looks compelling.
This sort of release schedule works for Apple because they do not have the huge corporate installed base that MS does--most of their customers are individuals and small businesses.
Same strategy as Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, HP labs, and (believe it or not) Microsoft Research. Google is the newest incarnation of the classic R&D lab--a great collection of brilliant engineers with freedom to invent. Let's see if they do a better job than Xerox or Microsoft of turning them into products.
orbital nuclear weapons (don't say they don't exist... you are fooling yourself if you think that dream)
Put down the copy of Space Cowboys and listen up. Orbital nukes don't exist because there is absolutely no reason for them to exist. Secret orbital nukes offer no advantage over ballistic land- or submarine-based nukes. They don't reach their targets any faster. They don't cause any greater destruction. They aren't any easier to aim or deploy. They're absolutely impossible to monitor, test, maintain or upgrade. And since nukes only work as deterrents if people know about them, keeping them secret would serve no purpose.
Compare to spy satellites - these offer significant performance advantages over terrestial-based systems. And, they are most effective if no one knows about them.
Slashdot Mirror
A Web-based office app is not your basic HTML site...it's going to bend the browser as far as it can to accomplish what it wants, just like GMail and Google Maps do. Unfortunately by doing this, Google exposes their product to the whims of Microsoft, who is in the process of redesigning their browser already.
If the app is like Gmail but even more complicated (which seems likely), even small changes to the browser features this app depends on (some of which are not standardized and were originally introduced by Microsoft) will have massive effects on the app's performance. And Microsoft could easily make such tweaks ad infinitum by way of "security updates" that close security holes by continuously re-tweaking the advanced features of IE.
Most users won't download a whole new browser just to try out a new Google feature. They might not even realize they have to...when a site doesn't work right most users assume it's the site's fault, not the browser's.
At some point we all commit ourselves to dependence on infrastructure. The data infrastructure is not yet as reliable as the power infrastructure, but it will be soon. Then this won't seem like such a crazy idea.
The natural order of life (and therefore society) is conflict and change. This is the basis of most scientific understanding. including evolution, as well as the basis for the structure of the U.S. government.
In general technological advancement does not direct our development as a society, it facilitates it...your television will let you watch TV for as long and as often as you like, regardless of the good or harm to you or society. Technology does not make life better, it just makes it *more*--we can do more, whether it's good for us or not.
As with today's technology, I expect that future advancements will increase the number and intensity of instances of societal conflict, rather than resolving them. I believe the current uptick in terrorism is permanent rather than temporary--the natural outcome of technologies that confer greater destructive powers on the individual. Wanting to hurt other people is not new...the only new aspects to it are the ease and scope of what a single person or small group is capable of learning about and what they are capable of doing to others.
Firefox didn't have an security issues until it started becoming popular. The Mac had a few recently too.
I haven't seen or heard of a single Mac virus, worm, or rootkit in the wild since OS-X was released. I've gotten plenty of security updates from Apple, but these are patches, not exploits. In other words they're internal to the code, so they have no relation to popularity--the code has no idea how many computers it's installed on. Whereas exploits are human-created new code that could be inferred as being related to popularity. But I haven't heard of any. I'd love to know if some have actually been found (as opposed to hypothesized).
Why? Because I leave the desktop at work at the end of the day. I have a personal laptop I can use if I absolutely need to check e-mail, but without a company laptop I don't have the software or VPN connection to do any sort of real work. It is one way to enforce a bit of life balance on myself--something that slips away easily if I know I can "just finish that up at home in front of the TV."
The official U.S. unemployment number is NOT the number of people collecting unemployment benefits, it is the result of a survey called "the household survey" that involves tens of thousands of telephone interviews per month. This measures the number of people who are looking for work but who cannot find a job. Because it rigorously surveys the actual populace, it is considered an accurate measure of unemployment, and is the official measure in the U.S.
There's no traffic where Sheehan was protesting, it is a pedestrian mall closed to vehicles...basically the area was recently remodelled to hold events just like this one.
PowerBook paint chips, PowerBook palm stains, PowerBook warping, iBooks getting dirty, iPod battery life, mouse ergonomics.
I acknowledge the online bitching, but the only one of these that has had any legal legs is the iPod battery problem.
I think there's a strong meme/peer influence factor at work online. A few loud people bitch about a problem, and suddenly it seems like everyone has the problem, the company fucked up and the product is in trouble. It's like the hundreds of calls the CDC gets everytime a local news broadcast covers some terrible disease. Remember the furor over Google redirect hijacking? Huge numbers were thrown around describing the scope, but could never be proven. And many of the people who thought they'd been hijacked ended up having much more mundane problems.
Personally I'll refer judgment on this latest crisis until some time passes.
The Nano LCD's glass surface is hidden under a clear plastic cover (in fact it covers the entire top of the Nano), whereas on the Mini the glass screen of the LCD is exposed. Glass is more difficult to scratch than plastic, therefore it is harder to scratch the Mini's screen than the Nano.
If you care about scratches, get a Mini on sale. The glass screen and metal body are very scratch resistant.
Not to blow a huge hole in your theory, but Microsoft's focus has ALWAYS been on beating their competitors. Look at the way they handled:
- the Mac
- OS/2
- GO Corp's PenPoint
- Netscape
- Palm
- Playstation
- Logitech
- etc.
In each case the competition drove them to get off their asses and create products. Were they amazing, groundbreaking innovations? No. That is not their game. Their game is mass-market, high volume sales, which means they must to some extent conform to their customers' existing expectations.
Other companies innovate and begin the process of changing personal habits...it's at that point that MS moves into the market. They throw a ton of resources at the problem with a tight focus on beating the competition...and they often do. Only when the competition is as well-funded as they are do they run into problems, and even then they manage to compete.
That's why it's ludicrous to think that Microsoft has the wrong focus...they have enjoyed almost unparalleled corporate success over the last 20 years based on that focus. They've never been in debt. They make obscene margins on their products and turn a profit every quarter. They've achieved immense market share in their core markets. They've successfully entered a number of new markets.
Personally I don't think Microsoft has a problem right now. They have business challenges, but their core profit generators are as secure as they have been for years, and their new entries are competing strongly.
Did you convert it to png or is there a preferences setting for the save type?
unbreakable DRM is theoretically impossible
So what? So is an unstealable car, but I don't see many cars without locks on the doors and ignition.
It's tempting to reduce the argument to the logical extreme, but there is a continuous range of security, consequences, AND respondent behavior. As illegal things get harder to do, or punishment more likely, fewer people are likely to do them.
Picture a quadrant plot of the axis wide open --> unbreakable against the axis likely consequences --> no consequences. Plot all human activities and you get an envelope. The more you can move an activity into the "unbreakable & likely consequences" corner, the fewer people will do it.
I know--digital media is different because it's so easy to distribute, right? Not necessarily...it's networked behavior and thus subject to Metcalf's proposition of value: the square of the number of participants. So with each person an effective DRM discourages, the overall value of the network declines considerably. The ability to attract and hold participants falls away, and over time the network is reduced to a hard core of dedicated true believers. This is no different than the effect of law enforcement in the trafficking of stolen car parts--also a networked behavior.
It doesn't matter that in the case of digital media you're trafficking in perfect copies rather than physical items. What determines people's behavior is how easy is it to do, and how hard is it to get caught. An effective DRM makes it hard to strip the protection from the file (not impossible, just hard for the average citizen). An effective enforcement regime makes it seem possible that if you distribute or receive the files, you might get caught (it doesn't even have to be efficient to achieve this...just well publicized).
There's no such thing as perfect security or perfect law enforcement, so to argue against any DRM because it's not perfect is pretty much a straw man argument. The question for each DRM scheme is the same as for any security scheme--how much does it cost (in any units), how does it impact ease of use, and where does it move the needle in the behavior quadrant?
Google seems to be sticking its finger in every pie it can find, but the reality is that they are still pretty much a one-revenue-stream company. They've cornered the search-based advertising market to a large extent (though of course they need to keep innovating to play defense). The real question is: how else will they make money? Look at a (perceived anyway) competitor: Microsoft has done a good job of diversifying their revenue streams--they make money from consumers, from businesses, from applications, from OS, from servers, from middleware, from games, from hardware...etc. How will Google do it?
Whether the ballot has a unique ID or not, the point is that I cannot go back and find my ballot after the fact to confirm it was recorded correctly. It is not auditable, unlike a financial transaction. That makes it harder to catch data recording mistakes after the fact.
That is why a paper printout is a must for electronic voting--it allows me to verify my vote in a medium that is not easily altered after it leaves my sight.
Many e-commerce Web sites are not for the public, but rather for the limited clients of a particular company. In that instance you typically have more freedom to specify the browser than you would on a pure public play like Amazon.
It's not unusual for companies to require certain compatibilities to do business with one another, the browser is minor compared to some of these. Nevertheless you want to make it as easy to comply as possible.
If scientists can crack the cell differentiation mystery, they may be able to take some of your DNA from any cell and grow whatever organ you need.
It's beyond stupid to try to tie this issue to one party or the other. Read up: Cook County, 1960, Kennedy vs. Nixon.
In banking neither party is anonymous. If the bank screws up one of my transactions, one of us is likely to find out and attempt to have it corrected.
Since voting is anonymous, it's harder to catch or correct mistakes. Only mistakes or fraud in the counting are catchable, and only by redundant counting. But if the system does not record my vote correctly to begin with, there is no way for anyone to know that or to correct it. This is true of any ballot paper or electronic--witness the butterfly ballots of FL 2000.
Then Kyoto came along and told us to sacrifice trillions on the altar of C02 emissions.
Conclusively prove that Kyoto would sacrifice trillions. If you think global climate science is complicated, try global economics.
I constantly hear the refrain that environmentalists are chicken littles who are foolishly predicting disaster. Yet the business community constantly expects us to believe that any regulatory concession to protecting our environment will horribly cripple our economy.
U.S. economic growth since the 1960s (approximate birth of the environmental movement) seems to indicate otherwise.
Nothing humanity can possibly do regarding CO2 levels will even be noticed by this vast slow cycle.
Just because an enormous cycle is not significantly affected by a minor perturbation, it does not follow that we will not be affected. Enough extra carbon released to affect a 1 or 2 degree change won't stop or even slow the carbon cycle, but it certainly would affect us.
Eliminate the Orbiter from the equation, and you have one uber-powerful set of boosters.
But the Orbiter contains the main engines. I think what you meant was eliminate the crew compartment and airframe. But you'd still have the weight of the main engines and their associated infrastructure, as well as the infrastructure needed to attach and enclose the payload.
Each main engine weighs about 3.2 metric tons, and there's three, so there's half your advantage over Saturn V gone right there. Throw in the engine frame and the payload compartment, and you're looking at a pretty small lifting advantage over the Saturn V.
Where I work we're only now getting Office 2003 because the IT department tested thoroughly and was waiting for the worst of the (numerous) bugs to be patched by MS.
No large company is going to install any update or software without some testing first. Short-cycle incremental releases are just more to test, and most companies will probably only bother to test/roll-out when a new feature set looks compelling.
This sort of release schedule works for Apple because they do not have the huge corporate installed base that MS does--most of their customers are individuals and small businesses.
It is helpful for getting that ringworld back into position.
Same strategy as Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, HP labs, and (believe it or not) Microsoft Research. Google is the newest incarnation of the classic R&D lab--a great collection of brilliant engineers with freedom to invent. Let's see if they do a better job than Xerox or Microsoft of turning them into products.
orbital nuclear weapons (don't say they don't exist... you are fooling yourself if you think that dream)
Put down the copy of Space Cowboys and listen up. Orbital nukes don't exist because there is absolutely no reason for them to exist. Secret orbital nukes offer no advantage over ballistic land- or submarine-based nukes. They don't reach their targets any faster. They don't cause any greater destruction. They aren't any easier to aim or deploy. They're absolutely impossible to monitor, test, maintain or upgrade. And since nukes only work as deterrents if people know about them, keeping them secret would serve no purpose.
Compare to spy satellites - these offer significant performance advantages over terrestial-based systems. And, they are most effective if no one knows about them.