I appreciate you taking responsibility for that last line and trying to explain the logic behind it.
I'm still confused though. What would motivate Apple to put this in an update to OSX on user's desktops that they paid full price for? If Apple was hurting for cash or if OSX development was a big losing force, I could see that. But the simple fact is that Apple just posted its largest revenues and $3.25 billion in profit last quarter. They are doing really well, what need is there for this on the desktop of existing machines? If it's on there for app developers to push out apps for free with ad revenue tied into the OS and controlled by Apple then I could see that. But you simply wouldn't download any ad supported applications if you didn't want that. I assume this "feature" could go on any of their operating systems and be used to mitigate the price of iDevices in the future.
As a matter of fact, the mere fact that we are having this discussion, that I initiated by posting the story, is making me re-think any further investment into Apple platform.
If you're bought into Apple, you've already paid a pretty penny. I'm really confused why applying for a design patent causes you more remorse than the amount of money you've already shelled out but to each their own I guess. Before you switch to Linux, consider that this patent can be used in good way and in a very very bad way. And given that you're willing to buy Apple gear, it's highly likely you never experience this user ad supported interface. It just wouldn't make sense for Apple to force this onto desktop users.
With recent Apple entry into mobile ad business, and ambition to own half of all the mobile ads served in second half of this year, it certainly makes one wonder if Apple would dare and put something like this in its desktop OS. I wonder if this would push more people to open source alternatives?
I see what you did there. You made an unlikely assumption about how this patent would be used and then you turned it into an advertisement for open source. Well done. I hate Apple and Steve Jobs (smug bastard) vehemently but even I recognized that to be a highly contrived scenario and illogical statement.
But when I read the article, it seemed to make other assumptions about how this patent would be used. Assumptions that frankly make a whole hell of a lot more sense than asking users who have already paid a premium for an Apple desktop to watch iAds to further increase your profits. From the article:
Such a system could be used on computers placed in public places, allowing free access to the Internet on a terminal without paying a fee. Users could also choose to pay the fee and avoid the advertisements if they wish.
Huh. Imagine that. You know, when I walk through an airport I see people sitting around watching LCDs. And in between these CNN content sections are advertisements. That everyone seems to tolerate. I would wager that if you put in terminals with ads for internet access at airports, there would be an unending line to use them. Given that I only got free internet at an airport when Google felt generous last holiday season, I'd gladly use it and gladly watch ads.
Furthermore I pay $75+ per month for a smartphone with a data plan. This is the cheapest option and it includes a 20% off employer discount. If you could cut this in half with this sort of ad crap in the OS, you just might convince me to hop off of my Android operating system and on to crApple... even a different carrier.
Like you, I am adverse to ad watching when I have already paid for something under the assumption I will be given unmitigated access to it. Like anyone else who has watched TV over the airwaves, I am interested in how you can reduce my financial liabilities via nominal time goblin advertisements and, while I'm certainly no economist, I believe that advertisements are very healthy for the economy. The market adjusts if they become too invasive or unhealthy (people revolt against the products using such tactics) but it results in more cash in my pocket to make more purchases with and entices me to make more purchases. Google's basically been minting money with them and has maintained a (for the most part) positive relationship with its consumers--despite those "consumers" being the very product they sell to other companies!
While I'm not a big fan of Design Patents (which I think this is), I think Apple could pull this off and generate some interest in yet further proliferation of ads. We all complain when we pay for something like a video game only to get DLC ads but I think if you popped a free ad laden iDevice into someone's hands they'd quit complaining fairly quickly.
Years of research went into language analysis software for this plug-in before an intern stumbled on the genius idea of simply counting the exclamation marks.
I CAN THINK OF ANOTHER CONTRIBUTING FACTOR THAT IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR AWESOME.
WARNING: Outlook detected the phrase "full on double rainbow" as a modifying adjective in your e-mail and would like to remind you that this dangerously exceeds your predetermined threshold for elation and happiness. Outlook suggests taking one step down the elation scale and changing the phrase "Dude, last night that hooker was full on double rainbow!" to "Dude, last night that hooker was titties!" Yes/No?
I don't care how refined it is.
In other words: I don't care how much MS does to step up their technology.
Not true. I own an XBox360. I have a partition with a legit copy of Windows XP at home on one of my desktops. But I will never ever use IE again. I even get a little sick when I have to use IE to update XP. Firefox, Chrome, Opera I'll take anything over IE. Having had to develop to support IE6 for the longest time, I am jaded. I am biased. But if you get burned by something, you usually don't reward the company by continuing to use that product. This is how I feel about IE. I don't want it on my phone.
I hate them and anything they do will not be good enough for me.
No, I'm critical of them and everything they do. Similar to when I tear apart Google or Apple. They are big players with big resources and bigger responsibilities. They do get things right once in a while, this phone and the Zune were not done right in my opinion.
I'm a raving fanboi with a chip on my shoulder and if you want an honest opinion of a product from a company that I hate you're not going to find it here.
Well, to use either-you're-with-us-or-against-us-black-and-white extremes, I can't criticize anything around here without being accused of being a raving fanboi. And who am I a fanboi of exactly?
I really wish they had an ignore button around here.
Yeah, it's called your foes list. Log in, change your relationship with me to 'foe' and then add a foe modifier of -6. As long as you're logged in, you'll never see my posts again. Please, do us both a favor.
It's absolutely mind-boggling that Windows Phone 7 is missing some very fundamental features, like copy/paste, third-party multitasking, and universal search.
Absolutely mind-boggling you say? How about absolutely doomed?
In the past, competitors like Apple were lambasted by the public for not having such features, so you'd think Microsoft would take precautions not to repeat such mistakes.
You don't understand, Microsoft is adept at watching Apple do something right or make progress and then totally just think that they're different and special and therefore won't suffer from those problems.
What's worse, the rest of the smartphone world isn't slowing down, and with Windows Phone 7 not scheduled to launch till the holidays, the divide could get deeper.
It's called releasing a phone that's already behind the curve. So, unless you have a product name that causes people to hemorrhage cash regardless of the features, you're doomed. Like the release of the Zune. Except it appears Windows Phone 7 doesn't even have an exclusive 'squirt' functionality.
Criticisms aside, there's a lot we like about Windows Phone 7. The Zune integration is killer, and the core apps are much improved.
Zune integration is 'killer' you say? That's going to do it, huh? Well, everybody who owns a Zune now has the option to integrate it. All five of them. And the core apps are much improved? After suffering from the ailments of IE6 you think I want any version of Internet Exploder on my goddamn mobile device? You're insane. I don't care how refined it is.
We also commend Microsoft for being able to acknowledge that its old OS wasn't working and taking a chance on rebuilding something from the ground up.
Really? You're telling me that Microsoft owned up to and acknowledge its old OS wasn't working? I've never known Microsoft to tell their customers that something is wrong.
Long story short this product is doomed with a 97% confidence of certain doomage.
I do hope that you realise that you are libelling a number of Scottish doctors, as you have no evidence for that statement - many cancers do have unexpected periods of remission.
I can't help it if the doctors don't understand long tail statistics or if they can't understand giving percent confidences on time spans. They gave this man three months to live over one year ago. If you are saying it's libelous for me to call them out on an error on their part then I guess I don't mind being called libelous.
Meghrabi was convicted under Scottish law - not by an International Court
The court itself was in the Netherlands. How is that not an international court?!
- and was also released under Scottish law - which, by the way, Cameron cannot legally interfere with, as it is separate from the English legal system.
What on Earth are you talking about? Scotland is part of the UK. David Cameron is the UK Prime Minister. And you're telling me he has no grounds to interfere? I must seriously be missing something here.
You may not like Scottish law. I personally consider aspects of US Law, like your constant reference to an 18th century document to deal with 21st century issues, to be laughable.
So you're saying that none of your laws are from the 18th century? What does that even have to do with any of what we're talking about?
But if someone is tried, convicted and dealt with under sovereign Scottish law, US politicians have no business whatever interfering.
Well, let it be known that you may think I'm some dumb yank from the states but you've convinced me that Scotland has made a mockery of justice. I sincerely hope that if anything like this happens again we demand extradition instead of letting a man you found guilty of taking 270 lives walk free. And one year later he's still alive in his home country.
That's not justice and I hope you take the time to consider the families of those 270 victims when you chastise me for having laws intact and based off of an 18th century document--which somehow validates your Compassion Laws. Where's your compassion for the victims?
However, my basic point is that pissing off a new Prime Minister is likely to be counterproductive in the long term. Your failure to understand this seems to be shared by a large number of your countrymen.
I don't care what a new PM thinks. 270 people died and deserve justice. That supersedes any of your political bullshit. I've met only a handful of Scottish people and loved them all but interacting with you makes me think twice of that.
is the US Government trying to force the British Prime Minister to intervene in the Scottish courts over Meghrabi?
Because Meghrabi is the person who an international court found to be responsible for a plane bombing that killed 189 Americans (and 270 human beings in total)? And Meghrabi was recently released on erroneous health problems and living like a national hero in Libya?
On the other hand, McKinnon's guilty of social hacking and getting access to some NASA machines he shouldn't have had access to? And also maybe guilty of being a certifiable nutjob?
Can you spot the difference? And understand why one is a little higher priority than the other?
They don't want it open, they don't want it closed, they don't want it with cherries and whipped cream on top.
Adobe's Flash
- a poem by eldavojohn
I bash Jobs, Jobs I blash
That Jobs-I-bash, That Jobs-I-bash!
I do not like, that Jobs-I-bash
Do you like Adobe's flash?
I do not like it, Jobs-I-bash.
I do not like Adobe's flash.
Would you like it on your iPad?
I would not like it on my iPad.
I would not like it if it's a fad.
I do not like Adobe's flash.
I do not like it, Jobs-I-bash
Would you like it open or closed?
Would you like it
virtually imposed?
I do not like it open or closed.
I do not like it virtually imposed.
I do not like it on my iPad.
I do not like them if it's a fad.
I do not like Adobe's Flash.
I do not like it, Jobs-I-bash.
Would you install it on your box?
Would you install it in Firefox?
Not on my box.
Not with Firefox.
Not open or closed.
Not virtually imposed.
I would not install it open or closed.
I would not install it virtually imposed.
I would not install Adobe's Flash.
I do not like it, Jobs-I-bash!
If bowing to China is making the user take a single additional click from the google.cn landing page and bringing them right to unfiltered internet searches, that's some pretty lame bowing. I guess if both parties are happy and the Chinese people can very easily get to unfiltered search then I'm happy. Or does Google's Hong Kong search work differently inside China? If it works the same way as I see, I don't know how you could consider that evil. I perceive that Google has succeeded in granting the people of greater China with unfiltered search if they can tolerate an additional mouse click. This is assuming the Great Firewall of China or some government monitoring agency isn't watching these Google.cn -> Google.hk transactions.
How is attempting to bring unfiltered search to the people of China evil?
If you go to the page, 2.8.6-1 was released in April of this year. I guess that's a sign of recent life. Granted, 3.0 appears to be a year before that. I don't think competition between two open source projects is a bad thing. Hell, it's great for the end users. Roesch claims OISF's tool is way slower than SNORT. So let the two fight it out and reap the benefits.
I think the most serious claim against SNORT came at the end of the article:
"Sourcefire controls the intellectual property and the update cycle for changes. They use the install base of Snort to market their commercial solutions," Stiennon says. "I am not saying that is a bad thing for Snort users but it is limiting to the overall development of threat mitigation technology from the open source community."
If that's true, that is not cool. I hate it so much when I'm just trying install PDFCreator or some other GPL'd tool and part of the install process involves a default click box to also install Yahoo's toolbar in all my browsers. It's great to see companies back particular open source projects but I do not care for companies that take hold of the reigns and/or use it to propagate their own proprietary tools. It's one of the reasons I'll consider Flex better than Silverlight but never will I consider it open source despite the SDK source being available. It's got vendor lockin associated with it.
Also, When can the UK expect Obama to come over and talk with minor MPs to talk about US banks ruining costing the country billions and to pay the British citizens compensation?
I think the difference between an environmental disaster and financial disaster are pretty evident. You invested in the United States? Apparently that was a big mistake and hopefully you learned your lesson. You can't expect every country you invest in to apologize and pay you back when your investments go negative. That's not how investing works. If you didn't want to lose your money, maybe you shouldn't have been chasing the highly rated securities with highly rated returns that sounded too damn good to be true. Now you know not to trust our rating companies and our securities. The difference with the environmental disaster is that regulations were set for BP that apparently weren't followed and some percentage of the people affected weren't invested in BP. I applaud Cameron for his genuine concern but the blame by no means rests on him or his British constituents. And I can think of one case where Obama did meet with Northern Ireland MPs to help with their economic slump.
If I was Cameron I would have just ignored those senators.
Cameron had that choice. Whether you like it or not, I guess he felt it was a valuable show of support. If you are so staunchly anti-American, do not vote for Cameron. I've heard things come out of his mouth this past week that make me even blush. Is Obama that keen on the UK? I think he says he is but you won't see as much action from Obama as you will from Cameron.
The UK doesn't tell the US what to do with their prisoners, the US shouldn't tell the UK what to do with theirs.
I can't fucking believe you would say that when UK courts convicted him of a plane bombing that killed 270 civilians -- 189 of them Americans. I'm not sorry that my government is concerned what a country that has an extradition treaty with us does with people convicted of killing Americans overseas.
The guy probably would have been released on appeal anyway. The evidence against him was shockingly bad and should've been laughed out of court.
Listen, if your justice system is flawed then fix it. I don't know anything about that court case or the evidence. But when someone as closely allied to the United States as the United Kingdom convicts a man for a plane bombing then I'm inclined to believe he's guilty. Seriously, if someone blew up a plane in the United States with 189 UK citizens on it and then we "think we found the guy" and then we let him go years later on some phony health problems would you be upset? Now imagine some huge multi-billion dollar company like Exxon had been trying to use him as a token to drill in his home country's oil fields. Oh and the whole time the United States people are saying: "He was innocent anyway." How would you fucking feel about that?!
And yet EVERYONE uses it anyway. They must like something about it.
I think it's great. Of course I don't run ANY apps and I use Adblock.
Right, the same report says:
However, according to July 2010 Hitwise data, Facebook is the number one website in the country,
with 9% of all website visits (Google has 7.4% and Yahoo! 3.8%) and 55% of all social media visits.
Facebook’s market dominance in the U.S. and around the world is indisputable. How can it be so
popular if people dislike it so much?
They go on to point out Facebook's monopoly and its popularity being more with younger people while older people complain about it the most. There's little loyalty but it acts as a storehouse for existing videos and pictures well. Then I think this is the most telling piece of this paradox:
Customers are willing to suffer through a poor experience in return for the benefits Facebook provides.
This is a rare scenario in the American economy: usually customer satisfaction is intertwined
with market success. The few exceptions to this rule (airlines, cable companies, and fast food) are
operating in a sphere where there are no true standouts, so the bar is low. Should MySpace stage
a comeback, or should any other competitor to Facebook deliver a truly superior customer experience,
Facebook should have cause for concern. Right now, only Wikipedia and YouTube surpass
Facebook in terms of customer satisfaction, and they are not in direct competition.
Interesting stuff to consider for social sites. If Facebook users are so unhappy, could you build a better Facebook that grabs their images and videos off of Facebook and moves their friend network for them? I don't think Facebook would stand for it long but it's interesting to consider.
A new report from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) has put Facebook just above the taxman on America's lists. Out of 30 online companies, the two absolute worst were MySpace with 63 out of 100 and Facebook at 64 but other high scoring sites included Wikipedia (77) and YouTube (73). Unsurprisingly the report reveals that of the 233 companies they monitor year round, MySpace and Facebook are in the bottom 5% for customer satisfaction. That puts them with airlines and cable companies--two historically low ranked industries of customer satisfaction. You can see a brief overview of the scores and also note that on search engines, Bing hits 77 just behind Google at 80 for customer satisfaction. The full report with an overview of why consumers were satisfied or dissatisfied with each site can be found here in PDF.
Seriously, MySpace and Facebook are down there with cable companies and airlines. And their service is (on the surface) free. Must be doing a terrible job.
UM professor Claes Fornell blogged: "Controversies over privacy issues, frequent changes to user interfaces, and increasing commercialization have positioned the big social networking sites at satisfaction levels well below other Web sites..."
Oh, if only it ended there--he missed news feed control problems, advertising, spam, navigation issues and annoying applications. From the actual report:
When asked what they like least about Facebook, survey respondents gave answers including privacy and security concerns, the technology that controls the news feeds, advertising, the constant and unpredictable interface changes, spam, navigation troubles, annoying applications with constant notifications, and functionality, to name a few. There is no shortage of complaints about Facebook.
I'm not sure that allowing unique but simpler passwords is a better idea.
There is a misunderstanding here. The paper itself is proposing an additional mechanism for protecting against popular passwords. Let's say I give you the password "password" and you find it in the dictionary and send it back to me. Now I give you the password "p@ssword" and you again explain it must have an uppercase/lowercase mix as well as a special character and a number. So I give you "P@ssw0rd" and we go about on our merry business.
Unfortunately for the security of my account, I responded to your system's demands in a very algorithmic way. And, after millions of users try this, it might be safe for me to add in my dictionary attacks substitutions for characters in password.
I believe what the proposed paper is suggesting is that there is an oracle that alerts the user when their password is acceptable but is simply too common and therefore unsafe. The final piece of the puzzle is building in protection so that attackers cannot "query" the Oracle to find out what are popular passwords in your system that have reached their max. It's about managing entropy in the set of passwords that your user has with a new mechanism... and can be applied equally to the loosest and most stringent password requirements.
After reading the paper (assuming you don't have this already), it is genuinely a way to increase your user's protection.
Well,/. itself is a pretty good example of how this can work. The basics are available for free, but subscribers get nice perks. I'm more than happy to pay extra for those perks.
What "premium content" does Slashdot offer us as subscribers, exactly? We get plums 20 minutes to an hour ahead of the rest of the people and we can get a set number of pages without ads.
Was this your answer to what 'premium' content The Times should offer its readers? I have read many of your posts and have a genuine interest in what you might have for ideas to this very broad and allegedly large problem online news sources are facing. And they cannot retreat back to their old ways because the internet is here and is here to stay.
But I never would have even considered subscribing if, on my first visit to the site, I had been greeted with a big wall that said "You can't see ANYTHING here until you pay us.
I'm not aware that this is the case. Do you see this when you visit The Times? I am able to read the front page. On other sites like WSJ, they give you a nice little summary and then ask you to pay to read the full on details. Is that the correct way to do premium content? I may sound like a smartass but this topic interests me as I support many local bands through premium content by buying additional artwork, LPs and various digital artifacts along with their albums if I enjoy them. How do I do the same for my favorite news sites?
You can have the best reporters in the world, but if they're speaking to an empty room, they might as well not exist.
So, my understanding of this whole very interesting situation, is that journalism used to work by rewarding the journalists who went out and got a scoop, did investigative reporting or uncovered some huge scandal. That information was priceless and they would spend precious hours building up that report for an air date. Once their channel or printed paper ran that story, it would take a day or more for the rest to follow suit. Meanwhile you had a whole day of the public's attention on your channel/newspaper/magazine.
Enter the internet. For all intents and purposes of this discussion, she is the instantaneous transmission of such news stories. And duplication. How much time are you the center of attention when you break the story? A minute? Two minutes? You could have the best damned reporters in the world and some percentage of people will settle on reading a headline off of Slashdot or Google News that reads: "Murdoch Loses 90% of Readers with Times Paywall" instead of going to the source that called the Times and got that datum. And if I run a blog, all I need do is paraphrase everything in your article and suddenly I'm a contender for the endpoint of this information.
It seems to me like the Times would have been better off offering *premium* content to subscribers rather than closing off the entire site altogether.
What premium content do you have in mind? Do you think that doing even more exhaustive research on a story is going to change any of what I just explained? And what are you going to do when a blogger subscribes to your $5 per week premium content and then blogs about all of it at freetimes.blogspot.com? What then? Copyright lawsuits? Nobody cares. People say "offer premium content" with a wave of their hands. Well, what did you have in mind? I tried to discuss an alternative of this on Slashdot to no avail where basically there would be a pyramid of fractions of ad payments from those subscribed to your site cascading up to the original source.
Sure, why not? The post you linked to I find quite humorous because if you actually read section 2702 it says nothing about voluntarily shutting down your server. It's talking about voluntary disclosure of communications. That's assuming that whoever sent them the notice had already found the messages in question.
Tell me, where in that code did you find the information that they should voluntarily shut down their server or face life threatening consequences?
The reason the server was shut down -- I assume -- is because they were notified that they were serving such information and they had two choices A) read every single blog posting and verify that no more of that information is on that server or B) shut it down and be safe.
Guess what they did? The guy that was collecting adsense dollars on a huge ring of blogs got shut down by the private company he was "in contract" to. Oh well, business sucks. I think it's disingenuous to blame all of this on the United States government or even imply they were threatening someone's life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
Seriously? Will you please just shut up? I cannot believe you persist in this after Burst.net's CTO explained the situation in the article.
So because a private company operating under its own volition shuts down its server, that's the United States government's fault and equates them to China?
The amount of ignorance you demonstrate is downright impressive. The fact that the company had the choice given what the government reported to them shows that the US is not on the same level as China. Tell me, do you need a government approved license to host content in the United States? Go spend sometime on four chan and something awful... not to see great stuff but to understand just how unfettered stuff is in the United States. Yeah, things like bomb making and child porn get you in trouble. But it's a hell of a lot better than the large compendium of what may or may not get you in trouble in China.
What legally questionable scenarios have cropped up at your job?
I'm a software developer for one of the big automotive companies and we almost got into some legal trouble a while back. We had another team that would test the embedded code we put in there and we were always playing pranks on each other between the two teams. So one time, I wrote a procedure that cause the accelerator to randomly speed up with no user interaction. It was very very rare that the procedure would trigger and then I called it right in the middle of the main block of the embedded code. Anyway, they run a bunch of tests a day and on the like the fortieth day, John drove his car right through the wall of the testing facility! Oh my, what a hoot, I haven't laughed so hard since they air lifted him out. But then there was all this legal BS about somebody getting hurt and this and that. Those law-talking guys have no sense of humor. So I realized I had to go in and comment out that procedure. So all I did was go in and comment out the signature block... or at least I think that took care of it, but maybe it was that fancy ECC crap the smart guy put in... I wonder if anyone ever went back in there and totally cleaned it up? Oh well... dodged a bullet there... am I right?
That is the exact point here. Dell is telling customers which OS they should choose so they are capable to make the choice. Personally I'm a little bit surprised they didn't note the games, but casual people buying a computer don't necessarily know that they need Windows for their apps to work. Dell is just helping these casual users.
The only problem I have with Dell's EU page is that it's been so oversimplified it loses any meaning.
I find it curious that Ubuntu has two bullet points and yet from Dell's page on Ubuntu they have several positive caveats about Ubuntu that don't even get mentioned here. For example:
6) Ubuntu is secure
According to industry reports, Ubuntu is unaffected by the vast majority of viruses and spyware.
Why isn't there a bullet point for using Ubuntu if you just want a machine to browse the internet? Could Dell at least toss Ubuntu a bone and say "Linux currently suffers from less viruses than Windows"?
Why do you even have a page for Windows 7 vs Ubuntu when I have to buying one of these two machines in the first place?
Dell is telling customers which OS they should choose so they are capable to make the choice.
Wrong. Dell is telling people not to use Ubuntu. Walk down the street and pick out a hundred random people and ask them if they are interested in programming open source. They don't even say "if you are interested in free open source software" they say "open source programming." Do you think you'd even find one person interested in actually programming open source? That's basically what Dell's "comprehensive" Ubuntu list amounted to.
Emphatic Agreement
on
R In a Nutshell
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I also own this book in hard copy and cannot say enough good things about it. First I would like to add that the author is also the author of Baseball Hacks, which might not sound like a popular title for Slashdot but if you are a nerd and techie/programmer then this book is for you! Never have I seen such statistical rigor and beautifying/aggregation of baseball statistics brought together. I only hope that Mr. Adler continues to produce such great technical volumes.
In a volume of this size (about 650 pages)
Not to criticize the reviewer but there's not enough written above to do this book justice. From the author's emphasis on preprocessing the data in another language (like Perl I think he uses in the Chapter 3 tutorial) so that it can be effortlessly ingested by R to the very last pages on machine learning in R, it's a good book. I actively lament that in college I was relegated to Matlab instead of R today and the many packages available on CRAN.
I too would give this book a 9/10. It sometimes tries to inject tutorials in what should probably stick to being a reference and it might have too large of a scope for a single volume (I've read sets of books on machine learning and classification models) but this book is great for R beginners and R intermediates and as an R reference.
Seriously if you know a statistician who codes or if you know a developer who values statistics then this is their book. Given the nature of the subject matter and the GPL'd beauty of R, you'll undoubtedly have a hard time finding a negative review of this book anywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm still confused though. What would motivate Apple to put this in an update to OSX on user's desktops that they paid full price for? If Apple was hurting for cash or if OSX development was a big losing force, I could see that. But the simple fact is that Apple just posted its largest revenues and $3.25 billion in profit last quarter. They are doing really well, what need is there for this on the desktop of existing machines? If it's on there for app developers to push out apps for free with ad revenue tied into the OS and controlled by Apple then I could see that. But you simply wouldn't download any ad supported applications if you didn't want that. I assume this "feature" could go on any of their operating systems and be used to mitigate the price of iDevices in the future.
As a matter of fact, the mere fact that we are having this discussion, that I initiated by posting the story, is making me re-think any further investment into Apple platform.
If you're bought into Apple, you've already paid a pretty penny. I'm really confused why applying for a design patent causes you more remorse than the amount of money you've already shelled out but to each their own I guess. Before you switch to Linux, consider that this patent can be used in good way and in a very very bad way. And given that you're willing to buy Apple gear, it's highly likely you never experience this user ad supported interface. It just wouldn't make sense for Apple to force this onto desktop users.
With recent Apple entry into mobile ad business, and ambition to own half of all the mobile ads served in second half of this year, it certainly makes one wonder if Apple would dare and put something like this in its desktop OS. I wonder if this would push more people to open source alternatives?
I see what you did there. You made an unlikely assumption about how this patent would be used and then you turned it into an advertisement for open source. Well done. I hate Apple and Steve Jobs (smug bastard) vehemently but even I recognized that to be a highly contrived scenario and illogical statement.
But when I read the article, it seemed to make other assumptions about how this patent would be used. Assumptions that frankly make a whole hell of a lot more sense than asking users who have already paid a premium for an Apple desktop to watch iAds to further increase your profits. From the article:
Such a system could be used on computers placed in public places, allowing free access to the Internet on a terminal without paying a fee. Users could also choose to pay the fee and avoid the advertisements if they wish.
Huh. Imagine that. You know, when I walk through an airport I see people sitting around watching LCDs. And in between these CNN content sections are advertisements. That everyone seems to tolerate. I would wager that if you put in terminals with ads for internet access at airports, there would be an unending line to use them. Given that I only got free internet at an airport when Google felt generous last holiday season, I'd gladly use it and gladly watch ads.
... even a different carrier.
Furthermore I pay $75+ per month for a smartphone with a data plan. This is the cheapest option and it includes a 20% off employer discount. If you could cut this in half with this sort of ad crap in the OS, you just might convince me to hop off of my Android operating system and on to crApple
Like you, I am adverse to ad watching when I have already paid for something under the assumption I will be given unmitigated access to it. Like anyone else who has watched TV over the airwaves, I am interested in how you can reduce my financial liabilities via nominal time goblin advertisements and, while I'm certainly no economist, I believe that advertisements are very healthy for the economy. The market adjusts if they become too invasive or unhealthy (people revolt against the products using such tactics) but it results in more cash in my pocket to make more purchases with and entices me to make more purchases. Google's basically been minting money with them and has maintained a (for the most part) positive relationship with its consumers--despite those "consumers" being the very product they sell to other companies!
While I'm not a big fan of Design Patents (which I think this is), I think Apple could pull this off and generate some interest in yet further proliferation of ads. We all complain when we pay for something like a video game only to get DLC ads but I think if you popped a free ad laden iDevice into someone's hands they'd quit complaining fairly quickly.
Eudora had this 10 years ago (then called 'MoodWatch'). Good to see Microsoft keeping up...
WARNING: Outlook has detected dangerously high levels of sarcasm in your post ...
Years of research went into language analysis software for this plug-in before an intern stumbled on the genius idea of simply counting the exclamation marks.
I CAN THINK OF ANOTHER CONTRIBUTING FACTOR THAT IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR AWESOME.
WARNING: Outlook detected the phrase "full on double rainbow" as a modifying adjective in your e-mail and would like to remind you that this dangerously exceeds your predetermined threshold for elation and happiness. Outlook suggests taking one step down the elation scale and changing the phrase "Dude, last night that hooker was full on double rainbow!" to "Dude, last night that hooker was titties!" Yes/No?
I don't care how refined it is. In other words: I don't care how much MS does to step up their technology.
Not true. I own an XBox360. I have a partition with a legit copy of Windows XP at home on one of my desktops. But I will never ever use IE again. I even get a little sick when I have to use IE to update XP. Firefox, Chrome, Opera I'll take anything over IE. Having had to develop to support IE6 for the longest time, I am jaded. I am biased. But if you get burned by something, you usually don't reward the company by continuing to use that product. This is how I feel about IE. I don't want it on my phone.
I hate them and anything they do will not be good enough for me.
No, I'm critical of them and everything they do. Similar to when I tear apart Google or Apple. They are big players with big resources and bigger responsibilities. They do get things right once in a while, this phone and the Zune were not done right in my opinion.
I'm a raving fanboi with a chip on my shoulder and if you want an honest opinion of a product from a company that I hate you're not going to find it here.
Well, to use either-you're-with-us-or-against-us-black-and-white extremes, I can't criticize anything around here without being accused of being a raving fanboi. And who am I a fanboi of exactly?
I really wish they had an ignore button around here.
Yeah, it's called your foes list. Log in, change your relationship with me to 'foe' and then add a foe modifier of -6. As long as you're logged in, you'll never see my posts again. Please, do us both a favor.
It's absolutely mind-boggling that Windows Phone 7 is missing some very fundamental features, like copy/paste, third-party multitasking, and universal search.
Absolutely mind-boggling you say? How about absolutely doomed?
In the past, competitors like Apple were lambasted by the public for not having such features, so you'd think Microsoft would take precautions not to repeat such mistakes.
You don't understand, Microsoft is adept at watching Apple do something right or make progress and then totally just think that they're different and special and therefore won't suffer from those problems.
What's worse, the rest of the smartphone world isn't slowing down, and with Windows Phone 7 not scheduled to launch till the holidays, the divide could get deeper.
It's called releasing a phone that's already behind the curve. So, unless you have a product name that causes people to hemorrhage cash regardless of the features, you're doomed. Like the release of the Zune. Except it appears Windows Phone 7 doesn't even have an exclusive 'squirt' functionality.
Criticisms aside, there's a lot we like about Windows Phone 7. The Zune integration is killer, and the core apps are much improved.
Zune integration is 'killer' you say? That's going to do it, huh? Well, everybody who owns a Zune now has the option to integrate it. All five of them. And the core apps are much improved? After suffering from the ailments of IE6 you think I want any version of Internet Exploder on my goddamn mobile device? You're insane. I don't care how refined it is.
We also commend Microsoft for being able to acknowledge that its old OS wasn't working and taking a chance on rebuilding something from the ground up.
Really? You're telling me that Microsoft owned up to and acknowledge its old OS wasn't working? I've never known Microsoft to tell their customers that something is wrong.
Long story short this product is doomed with a 97% confidence of certain doomage.
I do hope that you realise that you are libelling a number of Scottish doctors, as you have no evidence for that statement - many cancers do have unexpected periods of remission.
I can't help it if the doctors don't understand long tail statistics or if they can't understand giving percent confidences on time spans. They gave this man three months to live over one year ago. If you are saying it's libelous for me to call them out on an error on their part then I guess I don't mind being called libelous.
Meghrabi was convicted under Scottish law - not by an International Court
The court itself was in the Netherlands. How is that not an international court?!
- and was also released under Scottish law - which, by the way, Cameron cannot legally interfere with, as it is separate from the English legal system.
What on Earth are you talking about? Scotland is part of the UK. David Cameron is the UK Prime Minister. And you're telling me he has no grounds to interfere? I must seriously be missing something here.
You may not like Scottish law. I personally consider aspects of US Law, like your constant reference to an 18th century document to deal with 21st century issues, to be laughable.
So you're saying that none of your laws are from the 18th century? What does that even have to do with any of what we're talking about?
But if someone is tried, convicted and dealt with under sovereign Scottish law, US politicians have no business whatever interfering.
Well, let it be known that you may think I'm some dumb yank from the states but you've convinced me that Scotland has made a mockery of justice. I sincerely hope that if anything like this happens again we demand extradition instead of letting a man you found guilty of taking 270 lives walk free. And one year later he's still alive in his home country.
That's not justice and I hope you take the time to consider the families of those 270 victims when you chastise me for having laws intact and based off of an 18th century document--which somehow validates your Compassion Laws. Where's your compassion for the victims?
However, my basic point is that pissing off a new Prime Minister is likely to be counterproductive in the long term. Your failure to understand this seems to be shared by a large number of your countrymen.
I don't care what a new PM thinks. 270 people died and deserve justice. That supersedes any of your political bullshit. I've met only a handful of Scottish people and loved them all but interacting with you makes me think twice of that.
is the US Government trying to force the British Prime Minister to intervene in the Scottish courts over Meghrabi?
Because Meghrabi is the person who an international court found to be responsible for a plane bombing that killed 189 Americans (and 270 human beings in total)? And Meghrabi was recently released on erroneous health problems and living like a national hero in Libya?
On the other hand, McKinnon's guilty of social hacking and getting access to some NASA machines he shouldn't have had access to? And also maybe guilty of being a certifiable nutjob?
Can you spot the difference? And understand why one is a little higher priority than the other?
They don't want it open, they don't want it closed, they don't want it with cherries and whipped cream on top.
Adobe's Flash
- a poem by eldavojohn
I bash Jobs, Jobs I blash
That Jobs-I-bash, That Jobs-I-bash!
I do not like, that Jobs-I-bash
Do you like Adobe's flash?
I do not like it, Jobs-I-bash.
I do not like Adobe's flash.
Would you like it on your iPad?
I would not like it on my iPad.
I would not like it if it's a fad.
I do not like Adobe's flash.
I do not like it, Jobs-I-bash
Would you like it open or closed?
Would you like it
virtually imposed?
I do not like it open or closed.
I do not like it virtually imposed.
I do not like it on my iPad.
I do not like them if it's a fad.
I do not like Adobe's Flash.
I do not like it, Jobs-I-bash.
Would you install it on your box?
Would you install it in Firefox?
Not on my box.
Not with Firefox.
Not open or closed.
Not virtually imposed.
I would not install it open or closed.
I would not install it virtually imposed.
I would not install Adobe's Flash.
I do not like it, Jobs-I-bash!
So much for do no evil.
To be fair, when I search for the (WARNING, graphic images) taboo words on the HK site they take me to from Google.cn, I find the "social stability" threatening images linked to by Google.
If bowing to China is making the user take a single additional click from the google.cn landing page and bringing them right to unfiltered internet searches, that's some pretty lame bowing. I guess if both parties are happy and the Chinese people can very easily get to unfiltered search then I'm happy. Or does Google's Hong Kong search work differently inside China? If it works the same way as I see, I don't know how you could consider that evil. I perceive that Google has succeeded in granting the people of greater China with unfiltered search if they can tolerate an additional mouse click. This is assuming the Great Firewall of China or some government monitoring agency isn't watching these Google.cn -> Google.hk transactions.
How is attempting to bring unfiltered search to the people of China evil?
I think the most serious claim against SNORT came at the end of the article:
"Sourcefire controls the intellectual property and the update cycle for changes. They use the install base of Snort to market their commercial solutions," Stiennon says. "I am not saying that is a bad thing for Snort users but it is limiting to the overall development of threat mitigation technology from the open source community."
If that's true, that is not cool. I hate it so much when I'm just trying install PDFCreator or some other GPL'd tool and part of the install process involves a default click box to also install Yahoo's toolbar in all my browsers. It's great to see companies back particular open source projects but I do not care for companies that take hold of the reigns and/or use it to propagate their own proprietary tools. It's one of the reasons I'll consider Flex better than Silverlight but never will I consider it open source despite the SDK source being available. It's got vendor lockin associated with it.
Also, When can the UK expect Obama to come over and talk with minor MPs to talk about US banks ruining costing the country billions and to pay the British citizens compensation?
I think the difference between an environmental disaster and financial disaster are pretty evident. You invested in the United States? Apparently that was a big mistake and hopefully you learned your lesson. You can't expect every country you invest in to apologize and pay you back when your investments go negative. That's not how investing works. If you didn't want to lose your money, maybe you shouldn't have been chasing the highly rated securities with highly rated returns that sounded too damn good to be true. Now you know not to trust our rating companies and our securities. The difference with the environmental disaster is that regulations were set for BP that apparently weren't followed and some percentage of the people affected weren't invested in BP. I applaud Cameron for his genuine concern but the blame by no means rests on him or his British constituents. And I can think of one case where Obama did meet with Northern Ireland MPs to help with their economic slump.
If I was Cameron I would have just ignored those senators.
Cameron had that choice. Whether you like it or not, I guess he felt it was a valuable show of support. If you are so staunchly anti-American, do not vote for Cameron. I've heard things come out of his mouth this past week that make me even blush. Is Obama that keen on the UK? I think he says he is but you won't see as much action from Obama as you will from Cameron.
The UK doesn't tell the US what to do with their prisoners, the US shouldn't tell the UK what to do with theirs.
I can't fucking believe you would say that when UK courts convicted him of a plane bombing that killed 270 civilians -- 189 of them Americans. I'm not sorry that my government is concerned what a country that has an extradition treaty with us does with people convicted of killing Americans overseas.
The guy probably would have been released on appeal anyway. The evidence against him was shockingly bad and should've been laughed out of court.
Listen, if your justice system is flawed then fix it. I don't know anything about that court case or the evidence. But when someone as closely allied to the United States as the United Kingdom convicts a man for a plane bombing then I'm inclined to believe he's guilty. Seriously, if someone blew up a plane in the United States with 189 UK citizens on it and then we "think we found the guy" and then we let him go years later on some phony health problems would you be upset? Now imagine some huge multi-billion dollar company like Exxon had been trying to use him as a token to drill in his home country's oil fields. Oh and the whole time the United States people are saying: "He was innocent anyway." How would you fucking feel about that?!
And yet EVERYONE uses it anyway. They must like something about it. I think it's great. Of course I don't run ANY apps and I use Adblock.
Right, the same report says:
However, according to July 2010 Hitwise data, Facebook is the number one website in the country, with 9% of all website visits (Google has 7.4% and Yahoo! 3.8%) and 55% of all social media visits. Facebook’s market dominance in the U.S. and around the world is indisputable. How can it be so popular if people dislike it so much?
They go on to point out Facebook's monopoly and its popularity being more with younger people while older people complain about it the most. There's little loyalty but it acts as a storehouse for existing videos and pictures well. Then I think this is the most telling piece of this paradox:
Customers are willing to suffer through a poor experience in return for the benefits Facebook provides. This is a rare scenario in the American economy: usually customer satisfaction is intertwined with market success. The few exceptions to this rule (airlines, cable companies, and fast food) are operating in a sphere where there are no true standouts, so the bar is low. Should MySpace stage a comeback, or should any other competitor to Facebook deliver a truly superior customer experience, Facebook should have cause for concern. Right now, only Wikipedia and YouTube surpass Facebook in terms of customer satisfaction, and they are not in direct competition.
Interesting stuff to consider for social sites. If Facebook users are so unhappy, could you build a better Facebook that grabs their images and videos off of Facebook and moves their friend network for them? I don't think Facebook would stand for it long but it's interesting to consider.
A new report from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) has put Facebook just above the taxman on America's lists. Out of 30 online companies, the two absolute worst were MySpace with 63 out of 100 and Facebook at 64 but other high scoring sites included Wikipedia (77) and YouTube (73). Unsurprisingly the report reveals that of the 233 companies they monitor year round, MySpace and Facebook are in the bottom 5% for customer satisfaction. That puts them with airlines and cable companies--two historically low ranked industries of customer satisfaction. You can see a brief overview of the scores and also note that on search engines, Bing hits 77 just behind Google at 80 for customer satisfaction. The full report with an overview of why consumers were satisfied or dissatisfied with each site can be found here in PDF.
Seriously, MySpace and Facebook are down there with cable companies and airlines. And their service is (on the surface) free. Must be doing a terrible job.
UM professor Claes Fornell blogged: "Controversies over privacy issues, frequent changes to user interfaces, and increasing commercialization have positioned the big social networking sites at satisfaction levels well below other Web sites..."
Oh, if only it ended there--he missed news feed control problems, advertising, spam, navigation issues and annoying applications. From the actual report:
When asked what they like least about Facebook, survey respondents gave answers including privacy and security concerns, the technology that controls the news feeds, advertising, the constant and unpredictable interface changes, spam, navigation troubles, annoying applications with constant notifications, and functionality, to name a few. There is no shortage of complaints about Facebook.
I'm not sure that allowing unique but simpler passwords is a better idea.
There is a misunderstanding here. The paper itself is proposing an additional mechanism for protecting against popular passwords. Let's say I give you the password "password" and you find it in the dictionary and send it back to me. Now I give you the password "p@ssword" and you again explain it must have an uppercase/lowercase mix as well as a special character and a number. So I give you "P@ssw0rd" and we go about on our merry business.
... and can be applied equally to the loosest and most stringent password requirements.
Unfortunately for the security of my account, I responded to your system's demands in a very algorithmic way. And, after millions of users try this, it might be safe for me to add in my dictionary attacks substitutions for characters in password.
I believe what the proposed paper is suggesting is that there is an oracle that alerts the user when their password is acceptable but is simply too common and therefore unsafe. The final piece of the puzzle is building in protection so that attackers cannot "query" the Oracle to find out what are popular passwords in your system that have reached their max. It's about managing entropy in the set of passwords that your user has with a new mechanism
After reading the paper (assuming you don't have this already), it is genuinely a way to increase your user's protection.
Anyone else a little weirded out by the WSJ image of Jeff Bezos trying to show you 1880s porn on his Kindle?
Well, /. itself is a pretty good example of how this can work. The basics are available for free, but subscribers get nice perks. I'm more than happy to pay extra for those perks.
What "premium content" does Slashdot offer us as subscribers, exactly? We get plums 20 minutes to an hour ahead of the rest of the people and we can get a set number of pages without ads.
Was this your answer to what 'premium' content The Times should offer its readers? I have read many of your posts and have a genuine interest in what you might have for ideas to this very broad and allegedly large problem online news sources are facing. And they cannot retreat back to their old ways because the internet is here and is here to stay.
But I never would have even considered subscribing if, on my first visit to the site, I had been greeted with a big wall that said "You can't see ANYTHING here until you pay us.
I'm not aware that this is the case. Do you see this when you visit The Times? I am able to read the front page. On other sites like WSJ, they give you a nice little summary and then ask you to pay to read the full on details. Is that the correct way to do premium content? I may sound like a smartass but this topic interests me as I support many local bands through premium content by buying additional artwork, LPs and various digital artifacts along with their albums if I enjoy them. How do I do the same for my favorite news sites?
You can have the best reporters in the world, but if they're speaking to an empty room, they might as well not exist.
So, my understanding of this whole very interesting situation, is that journalism used to work by rewarding the journalists who went out and got a scoop, did investigative reporting or uncovered some huge scandal. That information was priceless and they would spend precious hours building up that report for an air date. Once their channel or printed paper ran that story, it would take a day or more for the rest to follow suit. Meanwhile you had a whole day of the public's attention on your channel/newspaper/magazine.
Enter the internet. For all intents and purposes of this discussion, she is the instantaneous transmission of such news stories. And duplication. How much time are you the center of attention when you break the story? A minute? Two minutes? You could have the best damned reporters in the world and some percentage of people will settle on reading a headline off of Slashdot or Google News that reads: "Murdoch Loses 90% of Readers with Times Paywall" instead of going to the source that called the Times and got that datum. And if I run a blog, all I need do is paraphrase everything in your article and suddenly I'm a contender for the endpoint of this information.
It seems to me like the Times would have been better off offering *premium* content to subscribers rather than closing off the entire site altogether.
What premium content do you have in mind? Do you think that doing even more exhaustive research on a story is going to change any of what I just explained? And what are you going to do when a blogger subscribes to your $5 per week premium content and then blogs about all of it at freetimes.blogspot.com? What then? Copyright lawsuits? Nobody cares. People say "offer premium content" with a wave of their hands. Well, what did you have in mind? I tried to discuss an alternative of this on Slashdot to no avail where basically there would be a pyramid of fractions of ad payments from those subscribed to your site cascading up to the original source.
This has already been addressed above. . eldavojohn, care to comment on this post now?
Sure, why not? The post you linked to I find quite humorous because if you actually read section 2702 it says nothing about voluntarily shutting down your server. It's talking about voluntary disclosure of communications. That's assuming that whoever sent them the notice had already found the messages in question.
Tell me, where in that code did you find the information that they should voluntarily shut down their server or face life threatening consequences?
The reason the server was shut down -- I assume -- is because they were notified that they were serving such information and they had two choices A) read every single blog posting and verify that no more of that information is on that server or B) shut it down and be safe.
Guess what they did? The guy that was collecting adsense dollars on a huge ring of blogs got shut down by the private company he was "in contract" to. Oh well, business sucks. I think it's disingenuous to blame all of this on the United States government or even imply they were threatening someone's life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
Yeah, US so much better than China.
Seriously? Will you please just shut up? I cannot believe you persist in this after Burst.net's CTO explained the situation in the article.
... not to see great stuff but to understand just how unfettered stuff is in the United States. Yeah, things like bomb making and child porn get you in trouble. But it's a hell of a lot better than the large compendium of what may or may not get you in trouble in China.
So because a private company operating under its own volition shuts down its server, that's the United States government's fault and equates them to China?
The amount of ignorance you demonstrate is downright impressive. The fact that the company had the choice given what the government reported to them shows that the US is not on the same level as China. Tell me, do you need a government approved license to host content in the United States? Go spend sometime on four chan and something awful
Get a clue.
Huh, so the website went offline by the choice of the hosting provider? I guess we should say that the hosting provider is as bad as China and get moderated +4, Interesting? SquarePixel, care to comment on this now?
What legally questionable scenarios have cropped up at your job?
I'm a software developer for one of the big automotive companies and we almost got into some legal trouble a while back. We had another team that would test the embedded code we put in there and we were always playing pranks on each other between the two teams. So one time, I wrote a procedure that cause the accelerator to randomly speed up with no user interaction. It was very very rare that the procedure would trigger and then I called it right in the middle of the main block of the embedded code. Anyway, they run a bunch of tests a day and on the like the fortieth day, John drove his car right through the wall of the testing facility! Oh my, what a hoot, I haven't laughed so hard since they air lifted him out. But then there was all this legal BS about somebody getting hurt and this and that. Those law-talking guys have no sense of humor. So I realized I had to go in and comment out that procedure. So all I did was go in and comment out the signature block ... or at least I think that took care of it, but maybe it was that fancy ECC crap the smart guy put in ... I wonder if anyone ever went back in there and totally cleaned it up? Oh well ... dodged a bullet there ... am I right?
That is the exact point here. Dell is telling customers which OS they should choose so they are capable to make the choice. Personally I'm a little bit surprised they didn't note the games, but casual people buying a computer don't necessarily know that they need Windows for their apps to work. Dell is just helping these casual users.
The only problem I have with Dell's EU page is that it's been so oversimplified it loses any meaning.
I find it curious that Ubuntu has two bullet points and yet from Dell's page on Ubuntu they have several positive caveats about Ubuntu that don't even get mentioned here. For example:
6) Ubuntu is secure
According to industry reports, Ubuntu is unaffected by the vast majority of viruses and spyware.
Why isn't there a bullet point for using Ubuntu if you just want a machine to browse the internet? Could Dell at least toss Ubuntu a bone and say "Linux currently suffers from less viruses than Windows"?
On top of that, why can I only pick two laptops with Ubuntu on them?
Why do you even have a page for Windows 7 vs Ubuntu when I have to buying one of these two machines in the first place?
Dell is telling customers which OS they should choose so they are capable to make the choice.
Wrong. Dell is telling people not to use Ubuntu. Walk down the street and pick out a hundred random people and ask them if they are interested in programming open source. They don't even say "if you are interested in free open source software" they say "open source programming." Do you think you'd even find one person interested in actually programming open source? That's basically what Dell's "comprehensive" Ubuntu list amounted to.
In a volume of this size (about 650 pages)
Not to criticize the reviewer but there's not enough written above to do this book justice. From the author's emphasis on preprocessing the data in another language (like Perl I think he uses in the Chapter 3 tutorial) so that it can be effortlessly ingested by R to the very last pages on machine learning in R, it's a good book. I actively lament that in college I was relegated to Matlab instead of R today and the many packages available on CRAN.
I too would give this book a 9/10. It sometimes tries to inject tutorials in what should probably stick to being a reference and it might have too large of a scope for a single volume (I've read sets of books on machine learning and classification models) but this book is great for R beginners and R intermediates and as an R reference.
Seriously if you know a statistician who codes or if you know a developer who values statistics then this is their book. Given the nature of the subject matter and the GPL'd beauty of R, you'll undoubtedly have a hard time finding a negative review of this book anywhere.