And look what happened to them. Zynga are bottom feeders, and are absolutely loathed in the more 'traditional' videogame industry (those of us that make AAA PC and console games) for this and plenty of other reasons. They're the perfect poster child for why software patents are a horrible idea.
You can't stop a shitty company from stealing your game ideas. No one seriously wants to go there, because we all recognize that it's important to build on each other's work. Zynga just takes this to the most scummy level possible by essentially creating a virtual clone of anything they see that's successful and easily duplicated.
The only way to beat a company that steals your best ideas is to keep coming up with better ones. Software patents aren't going to solve that problem.
It IS slow, intentionally so, at least for retrieval of your data. That's fine for a backup system - and Glacier is specifically marketed for this. You want reliability and economy for backups, not speed. They've reduced the cost of the storage by sacrificing retrieval speed. "Glacier" is also evocative of "cold storage"
I think perhaps "ending war" is looking at the wrong end of things, because there's nothing much you can do other than say "let's be nice to each other." Peace isn't obtained by banning weapons of war. It's obtained when there's no longer any reason to fight a war. Or, perhaps put more cynically, when both sides have too much to lose by fighting a war.
Let's start by making the world free and prosperous, and encouraging the free trade of not only products, but culture and ideas. I have a feeling that things will work themselves out from there rather than simply trying to ban any new weapons systems. Naturally, we will probably never eradicate war completely, but modern, prosperous democracies have a reasonably good track record of not trying to obliterate each other, at least compared to historical precedents.
If you make that clever algorithm public and document it, you could be protecting yourself and others from being locked out of it by later patent trolls. It's called "prior art."
We very often do. I'm a videogame programmer, and a lot of us share knowledge at developer conferences, articles, blogs, and classroom lectures with the blessing of our companies. There's actually a healthy trend of knowledge sharing in this industry, and many people are surprised to find out that very few videogame companies bother with patents at all.
In a little under two decades in the industry, I've only had TWO experiences with patents: Having to pay to use mp3-encoded files in our game, and being sued by a patent troll. Given this, you can probably understand why I'm not all that enthusiastic about software patents. For the most part, I believe that most companies would rather focus on creating new, innovative products instead of desperately trying to leverage some patented advantage. There's nothing about our products that isn't perfectly well protected by copyright and trademark law.
Honestly, I've waffled on this a while in the past, but I can't honestly think of where real innovation has been spurred on or preserved because of software patents. On the other hand, I can point out hundreds of cases where the patent system has been horribly abused. Sorry, I'm going to disagree with you. No one except the bottom feeders that live off the licensing of patents themselves or giant corporations that hoard them like legal weapons are benefiting from these things.
I work as a programmer on some pretty sophisticated software, some of which was pretty new and novel in my field. The companies I've worked for didn't believe in software patents, and neither do I. Just because I'm the first one to think up some clever algorithm or trick shouldn't give me the right to lock people out of using it for the next seventeen years. It's absurd - that's an eternity in the software development world, and it has no good effect except to stifle competition.
The USPTO has had years to make improvements, and the situation is only getting worse.
As far as I can recall, tape backup systems have never been a consumer product. At least, I don't recall tape systems ever being marketed that way.
I think the big difference nowadays though, is that tape backup used to be the only real viable option for small business' computers and servers. Nowadays, it seems like cloud-based backups like Amazon Glacier are a much more sensible for smaller systems.
BTW, redundant HDDs as a backup system is a really bad idea unless you:
Yes, there's a legal way to do it. A congressperson introduces a bill that outlaws software patents, a majority of the legislature votes for it, and the President signs it into law. No more idiotic software patents.
I think the FAA is used to operating on the time scales and expectations of larger vehicles - manned aircraft specifically, in which individual models (and components) are approved on a case by case basis, because it wouldn't make sense to just approve them on a "per category" basis.
They're slowly coming to grips with the reality and speed of smaller vehicles. I think the fuss Amazon kicked up about the long delays probably motivated them to move a bit faster this time. There ARE other industries that are getting approval (they just approved use of drones for roof inspections), but let's face it... Amazon is a biggie, because when this deploys, there are going to be drones buzzing over us *everywhere*. I don't think it's a bad thing that they're playing it a bit cautiously for now. I think things will crawl along in the testing phases of these things for a while, but they'll eventually get some guidelines and rules stamped out that everyone can live with.
At least I hope so. I'm probably going to order something by Air Prime just to see a drone deliver it to my house.
I meant the specific page, not the site, so I misspoke there. But who's blocking anything? If Google doesn't index it, does it somehow magically disappear from the web? Did you find this story via a web link? In this case, the business name wasn't even mentioned or linked to.
But no, honestly, I'm not *really* serious about that - more of a wish that these businesses or individuals demanding things of Google would catch a bit of what they're trying to force on others. These businesses gain a lot of value from being indexed and thus easily located by Google services. It would be hilarious to see them essentially "delisted", and see their business plummet when fewer people find them via web searches or Google maps.
Upon receiving such a request, Google should no longer index any site or web page that links to or mentions those who demanded censorship in the first place.
Intel fabrication plants are mostly in the US, with one in Israel, one in Ireland, and one in China (apparently a 65nm process plant, so definitely not their most cutting edge stuff). Yeah, surprised me too when I looked it up.
Then I thought a bit about it, and it's perhaps not so surprising. The last thing Intel wants is to lose their edge in the *process* of making those chips. Considering that it probably costs them up to $10 billion to set up a fab plant, labor costs probably aren't exactly the big expense there. As good as the Chinese are at cloning technology, it seems pretty unlikely they'd be able to clone the latest chips so easily unless they new the tech for the latest low-nm processes, and from what I can see, Intel isn't giving them the opportunity.
Amazon already has a "verified purchase" tag for reviews (read the quoted part of my post again), and of course it's already only one review per product for each customer. The "verified purchase" tag isn't required, but people are much more likely to discount a review if it doesn't have that tag. I'm guessing it's also weighted much lower in aggregate scores as well.
There are a number of things that could conceivably alter the results between tests of similar machines, such as ambient temperature, the specific video codec used for movie playback (some are more CPU intensive than others), whether the video was being streamed from the HD or streaming wirelessly (wireless radios suck up a lot of power), the screen brightness, and so on. I'd simply look at the range of numbers as best and worst case scenarios that you're likely to see.
I can't answer any of your other questions though.
"We are not selling fake reviews. however we do provide Unbiased and Honest reviews on all the products"
Wow, that's priceless. Oh, wait, no, it does have a price. Want to know how this works? From the site itself:
A purchase of your product is not required for us to post a review. If you would like a verified purchase review however we can buy your product first. If the cost is $2.00 or less we will cover the price. If it is more than this you will need to make arrangements with us to reimburse the cost. We are only accepting very limited amounts of verified purchase reviews, please contact us before ordering if you are interested in these.
I can see why Amazon wants to shut this down. It completely undermines the legitimacy of their user ratings system. Not a big surprise, of course, as just about any system will be gamed if at all possible when there's money involved.
And I'd submit that was a good part of the reason Star Wars was so popular. Heaven forbid people get to see a fun flick that didn't end on a downer. My parents told me how they pretty much gave up on going to the movies in the seventies because everything was so damn depressing.
Synology had a remote exploit last year that was exploited by ransomware. You're insane to expose your NAS to the internet, even if it apparently has security enabled. Get a VPN capable router.
Yep, I followed that breaking news fairly carefully.
Although in fairness to Synology, it was only exploitable if you didn't actually patch your device (you can do this with a single button click) for quite some time. Then again, in fairness to users, Synology NAS devices didn't have a way to schedule automatic patching for your device like they do now. I think it may have been this incident which prompted them to add that feature, which I was glad to see.
Ah, I see, you're talking about training. Apologies, I didn't quite catch that.
I wasn't exactly talking about that necessarily. I was talking about the tendency of people (programmers like myself in particular) to ask "what cool stuff can we do with this?" first, long before anyone considers the question "what bad stuff could also be done with this?" as well.
For instance, when e-mail programs first allowed any file to be added as an attachment, it seems no one thought about the fact that it would be trivial to send a computer virus that way. Or in more modern terms, did no one ever stop to consider that it's trivial to transmit malicious code through a website with 3rd party advertisements that can use scripting? Time after time, we see programmers racing ahead with new technology without stopping to first consider the security aspects. I think it's fairly natural, because most people don't think like a criminal, so it's not in their nature to ask "How could I use this for malicious purposes?" It's hard enough to build things that simply work.
Recently, we keep hearing about huge organizations who keep losing the keys to the kingdom time after time after time. If the "professionals" can't seem to keep hackers out, what chance do ordinary shlubs have? Frankly, that's why I don't connect anything unnecessary to the internet.
I own a Synology NAS, and it comes with all sorts of nifty software that lets it do general server-like things. You can view photos or watch movies from anywhere on the internet. You can set up Wikis, serve webpages, and do all sorts of other stuff.
I partake in none of this. I use it as a file system, a data backup, and for streaming media to my videogame consoles, and absolutely nothing else. Frankly, opening up your NAS to the internet in any capacity is insane. It's where the phrase "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing" is never more appropriate. Even if you set up everything correctly, you're only a single security flaw away from the entire box being compromised. Most people see all these cool features and are encouraged to experiment with them a bit. No one ever tells them "Hey, if you screw this up, you could accidentally leak all your personal information to bad guys on the Internet."
It's funny, because you're seeing the same sort of learning process that the professional programmers and IT people have already gone through (or are STILL going through in the worst examples). People first think of cool things they can do with the internet, and then security-related thoughts come only after a disaster strikes. I'm not sure if there's really a fix for this. People will make silly mistakes and get burned, unfortunately. And then they'll know better. Life goes on.
Let's just say I'd rather keep the problem scope as limited as possible rather than purposefully propagating it. This app is collecting personal data on an entirely different level, and it's being collected with the express purpose of being monetized.
Just because your car is at risk of being stolen just about anywhere doesn't mean you should park it on the street overnight in a crime-ridden neighborhood with a sign on it that ways "Please take me - I'm unlocked!"
No kidding. It's tracking you constantly when you're in your car, and in some cases, even when you're not. You've sold your personal data (your current location) for a tiny bit of lucre. Why people might think this ISN'T a walking, talking privacy breach of the first order is beyond me.
When a company says that they'll protect your data, can they really speak for every one of the employees or contractors they hire? That's ultimately the fatal flaw with giving a company your personal data, even if their carefully crafted, lawyer approved privacy statement has the best of intentions.
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And look what happened to them. Zynga are bottom feeders, and are absolutely loathed in the more 'traditional' videogame industry (those of us that make AAA PC and console games) for this and plenty of other reasons. They're the perfect poster child for why software patents are a horrible idea.
You can't stop a shitty company from stealing your game ideas. No one seriously wants to go there, because we all recognize that it's important to build on each other's work. Zynga just takes this to the most scummy level possible by essentially creating a virtual clone of anything they see that's successful and easily duplicated.
The only way to beat a company that steals your best ideas is to keep coming up with better ones. Software patents aren't going to solve that problem.
It IS slow, intentionally so, at least for retrieval of your data. That's fine for a backup system - and Glacier is specifically marketed for this. You want reliability and economy for backups, not speed. They've reduced the cost of the storage by sacrificing retrieval speed. "Glacier" is also evocative of "cold storage"
I think perhaps "ending war" is looking at the wrong end of things, because there's nothing much you can do other than say "let's be nice to each other." Peace isn't obtained by banning weapons of war. It's obtained when there's no longer any reason to fight a war. Or, perhaps put more cynically, when both sides have too much to lose by fighting a war.
Let's start by making the world free and prosperous, and encouraging the free trade of not only products, but culture and ideas. I have a feeling that things will work themselves out from there rather than simply trying to ban any new weapons systems. Naturally, we will probably never eradicate war completely, but modern, prosperous democracies have a reasonably good track record of not trying to obliterate each other, at least compared to historical precedents.
If you make that clever algorithm public and document it, you could be protecting yourself and others from being locked out of it by later patent trolls. It's called "prior art."
We very often do. I'm a videogame programmer, and a lot of us share knowledge at developer conferences, articles, blogs, and classroom lectures with the blessing of our companies. There's actually a healthy trend of knowledge sharing in this industry, and many people are surprised to find out that very few videogame companies bother with patents at all.
In a little under two decades in the industry, I've only had TWO experiences with patents: Having to pay to use mp3-encoded files in our game, and being sued by a patent troll. Given this, you can probably understand why I'm not all that enthusiastic about software patents. For the most part, I believe that most companies would rather focus on creating new, innovative products instead of desperately trying to leverage some patented advantage. There's nothing about our products that isn't perfectly well protected by copyright and trademark law.
Honestly, I've waffled on this a while in the past, but I can't honestly think of where real innovation has been spurred on or preserved because of software patents. On the other hand, I can point out hundreds of cases where the patent system has been horribly abused. Sorry, I'm going to disagree with you. No one except the bottom feeders that live off the licensing of patents themselves or giant corporations that hoard them like legal weapons are benefiting from these things.
I work as a programmer on some pretty sophisticated software, some of which was pretty new and novel in my field. The companies I've worked for didn't believe in software patents, and neither do I. Just because I'm the first one to think up some clever algorithm or trick shouldn't give me the right to lock people out of using it for the next seventeen years. It's absurd - that's an eternity in the software development world, and it has no good effect except to stifle competition.
The USPTO has had years to make improvements, and the situation is only getting worse.
As far as I can recall, tape backup systems have never been a consumer product. At least, I don't recall tape systems ever being marketed that way.
I think the big difference nowadays though, is that tape backup used to be the only real viable option for small business' computers and servers. Nowadays, it seems like cloud-based backups like Amazon Glacier are a much more sensible for smaller systems.
BTW, redundant HDDs as a backup system is a really bad idea unless you:
a) take them offline, and
b) store them offsite.
Yes, there's a legal way to do it. A congressperson introduces a bill that outlaws software patents, a majority of the legislature votes for it, and the President signs it into law. No more idiotic software patents.
I think the FAA is used to operating on the time scales and expectations of larger vehicles - manned aircraft specifically, in which individual models (and components) are approved on a case by case basis, because it wouldn't make sense to just approve them on a "per category" basis.
They're slowly coming to grips with the reality and speed of smaller vehicles. I think the fuss Amazon kicked up about the long delays probably motivated them to move a bit faster this time. There ARE other industries that are getting approval (they just approved use of drones for roof inspections), but let's face it... Amazon is a biggie, because when this deploys, there are going to be drones buzzing over us *everywhere*. I don't think it's a bad thing that they're playing it a bit cautiously for now. I think things will crawl along in the testing phases of these things for a while, but they'll eventually get some guidelines and rules stamped out that everyone can live with.
At least I hope so. I'm probably going to order something by Air Prime just to see a drone deliver it to my house.
I meant the specific page, not the site, so I misspoke there. But who's blocking anything? If Google doesn't index it, does it somehow magically disappear from the web? Did you find this story via a web link? In this case, the business name wasn't even mentioned or linked to.
But no, honestly, I'm not *really* serious about that - more of a wish that these businesses or individuals demanding things of Google would catch a bit of what they're trying to force on others. These businesses gain a lot of value from being indexed and thus easily located by Google services. It would be hilarious to see them essentially "delisted", and see their business plummet when fewer people find them via web searches or Google maps.
Upon receiving such a request, Google should no longer index any site or web page that links to or mentions those who demanded censorship in the first place.
Intel fabrication plants are mostly in the US, with one in Israel, one in Ireland, and one in China (apparently a 65nm process plant, so definitely not their most cutting edge stuff). Yeah, surprised me too when I looked it up.
Then I thought a bit about it, and it's perhaps not so surprising. The last thing Intel wants is to lose their edge in the *process* of making those chips. Considering that it probably costs them up to $10 billion to set up a fab plant, labor costs probably aren't exactly the big expense there. As good as the Chinese are at cloning technology, it seems pretty unlikely they'd be able to clone the latest chips so easily unless they new the tech for the latest low-nm processes, and from what I can see, Intel isn't giving them the opportunity.
Amazon already has a "verified purchase" tag for reviews (read the quoted part of my post again), and of course it's already only one review per product for each customer. The "verified purchase" tag isn't required, but people are much more likely to discount a review if it doesn't have that tag. I'm guessing it's also weighted much lower in aggregate scores as well.
There are a number of things that could conceivably alter the results between tests of similar machines, such as ambient temperature, the specific video codec used for movie playback (some are more CPU intensive than others), whether the video was being streamed from the HD or streaming wirelessly (wireless radios suck up a lot of power), the screen brightness, and so on. I'd simply look at the range of numbers as best and worst case scenarios that you're likely to see.
I can't answer any of your other questions though.
No company would be stupid enough to destroy the integrity of their primary business for a little cash boost on the side.
Oh, snap. Lenovo was.
Well, Amazon probably isn't quite that stupid.
"We are not selling fake reviews. however we do provide Unbiased and Honest reviews on all the products"
Wow, that's priceless. Oh, wait, no, it does have a price. Want to know how this works? From the site itself:
A purchase of your product is not required for us to post a review. If you would like a verified purchase review however we can buy your product first. If the cost is $2.00 or less we will cover the price. If it is more than this you will need to make arrangements with us to reimburse the cost. We are only accepting very limited amounts of verified purchase reviews, please contact us before ordering if you are interested in these.
Price List:
3 Reviews $74.26!
5 Reviews (Reg: $124.50, w/ 20% $99.60!)
10 Reviews (Reg: $249.50, w/ 20% $199.60!)
.
.
.
200 Reviews (Reg: $4887.50, w/ 30% $3421.60)
I can see why Amazon wants to shut this down. It completely undermines the legitimacy of their user ratings system. Not a big surprise, of course, as just about any system will be gamed if at all possible when there's money involved.
And I'd submit that was a good part of the reason Star Wars was so popular. Heaven forbid people get to see a fun flick that didn't end on a downer. My parents told me how they pretty much gave up on going to the movies in the seventies because everything was so damn depressing.
Synology had a remote exploit last year that was exploited by ransomware. You're insane to expose your NAS to the internet, even if it apparently has security enabled. Get a VPN capable router.
Yep, I followed that breaking news fairly carefully.
Although in fairness to Synology, it was only exploitable if you didn't actually patch your device (you can do this with a single button click) for quite some time. Then again, in fairness to users, Synology NAS devices didn't have a way to schedule automatic patching for your device like they do now. I think it may have been this incident which prompted them to add that feature, which I was glad to see.
Can Windows Update serve you malware? Yes.
Ah, I see, you're talking about training. Apologies, I didn't quite catch that.
I wasn't exactly talking about that necessarily. I was talking about the tendency of people (programmers like myself in particular) to ask "what cool stuff can we do with this?" first, long before anyone considers the question "what bad stuff could also be done with this?" as well.
For instance, when e-mail programs first allowed any file to be added as an attachment, it seems no one thought about the fact that it would be trivial to send a computer virus that way. Or in more modern terms, did no one ever stop to consider that it's trivial to transmit malicious code through a website with 3rd party advertisements that can use scripting? Time after time, we see programmers racing ahead with new technology without stopping to first consider the security aspects. I think it's fairly natural, because most people don't think like a criminal, so it's not in their nature to ask "How could I use this for malicious purposes?" It's hard enough to build things that simply work.
Recently, we keep hearing about huge organizations who keep losing the keys to the kingdom time after time after time. If the "professionals" can't seem to keep hackers out, what chance do ordinary shlubs have? Frankly, that's why I don't connect anything unnecessary to the internet.
I was hoping people would catch the slightly sarcastic tone there. Too subtle?
Hmm, I would say the big difference is that the professionals tend to lose control of their customers' data rather than their own.
I own a Synology NAS, and it comes with all sorts of nifty software that lets it do general server-like things. You can view photos or watch movies from anywhere on the internet. You can set up Wikis, serve webpages, and do all sorts of other stuff.
I partake in none of this. I use it as a file system, a data backup, and for streaming media to my videogame consoles, and absolutely nothing else. Frankly, opening up your NAS to the internet in any capacity is insane. It's where the phrase "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing" is never more appropriate. Even if you set up everything correctly, you're only a single security flaw away from the entire box being compromised. Most people see all these cool features and are encouraged to experiment with them a bit. No one ever tells them "Hey, if you screw this up, you could accidentally leak all your personal information to bad guys on the Internet."
It's funny, because you're seeing the same sort of learning process that the professional programmers and IT people have already gone through (or are STILL going through in the worst examples). People first think of cool things they can do with the internet, and then security-related thoughts come only after a disaster strikes. I'm not sure if there's really a fix for this. People will make silly mistakes and get burned, unfortunately. And then they'll know better. Life goes on.
Let's just say I'd rather keep the problem scope as limited as possible rather than purposefully propagating it. This app is collecting personal data on an entirely different level, and it's being collected with the express purpose of being monetized.
Just because your car is at risk of being stolen just about anywhere doesn't mean you should park it on the street overnight in a crime-ridden neighborhood with a sign on it that ways "Please take me - I'm unlocked!"
No kidding. It's tracking you constantly when you're in your car, and in some cases, even when you're not. You've sold your personal data (your current location) for a tiny bit of lucre. Why people might think this ISN'T a walking, talking privacy breach of the first order is beyond me.
When a company says that they'll protect your data, can they really speak for every one of the employees or contractors they hire? That's ultimately the fatal flaw with giving a company your personal data, even if their carefully crafted, lawyer approved privacy statement has the best of intentions.