I was at Cisco for over 12 years and this kind of announcement isn't really news any more. Employees at Cisco are little more than yearly contractors. John Chambers, the former CEO, used to talk about Cisco being a family. If it is, then it's a highly dysfunctional one now!
My girlfriend got caught by some nasty OS X malware very recently from an ad network. It disguised itself as Flash Player and instead was CleanMyMac.
It had a valid developer certificate from Apple and she's aware enough to know that Flash Player needs updating. She didn't expect something bordering on a virus to change a load of settings and demand money for made-up problems.
For as long as I can remember Macs had avoided this kind of nastiness and there was a great community of great apps without spyware/malware etc (remember QuickSilver back in the day?). All good things come to an end and I guess soon we'll have to start unchecking boxes on installers, removing browser toolbars and generally avoiding predatory money grabbers as much as possible.
In most countries it's very common for children to walk to school in the mornings, especially when they get to 10/11 years old.
I understand the US is less pedestrian friendly as a general rule (outside of larger cities) but walking/cycling to school was one of my fondest memories, not to mention both healthy and social!
What is the motivation for having this banned in the first place?
I've owned a Slingbox since the mid-2000s and been very happy with the service. For those unfamiliar, you hook it up to your set top box and it rebroadcasts your signal over the internet and provides things like a remote control library so you can manage your device 100% remotely.
When I first got it, it came with Desktop software for Windows and Mac. This was replaced with a plugin based web interface a few years ago. For iOS and Android devices you have to buy a (rather expensive) dedicated app. I thought this was good value for money so invested. It's especially useful as I travel abroad a lot and UK-based services are almost all geofenced.
In the past 6 months they have been putting advertisements in the web app. Because Chrome has deprecated NPAPI, they released a Desktop application again (the old one doesn't work properly on recent versions of OS X). This Desktop app now inserts mandatory advertisements.
As a long-time customer it's infuriating! I paid good money for my Slingbox which originally had a Desktop app with no ads. The sale promise was "Watch TV anywhere with no subscription". I consider advertisements a subscription.
The web 20 years ago was a dark and miserable place. Netscape was the dominant player and their Navigator product was clunky, with a very awkward rendering engine and a lot of proprietary web extensions.
Microsoft, never being one to miss a trick, launched IE4 in 1997 which in many ways was a superior product. It supported dynamic content a lot better than Netscape (still in a largely proprietary way), was faster etc. It was so integrated in to Windows that it could replace your entire shell on Windows 95 or NT4. Windows 98 continued this.
Anyway, whilst IE4 and later 5 were unstable, they were subjectively better and easier to obtain for Windows users. Netscape was such a mess that they gave up entirely on their code base and created the Mozilla project for a next-generation browser. Microsoft launched IE6 in 2001 with just the right mix of Netscape compatibility and proprietary (shiny) extensions that everyone went for it. At one point, IE had almost 90% market share!
With this dominant position, Microsoft basically gave up developing their clunky, insecure web browser as businesses flocked to make applications require it. The Mozilla project spun out of the AOL-owned Netscape and launched a niche browser 'suite' which included email and web page editing all built in. It was slow, buggy and bloated - but very standards based (contrasting to IE).
A group of people took the good bits from the Mozilla project (browser) and tidied up the extension engine. They called it Phoenix and added useful features like tabs, download management etc. This got renamed to Firebird and then to Firefox for trade mark reasons... The world was given a browser that could take on IE. On launch day they had elaborate marketing schemes like full page adverts in the press and heavy promotion via Google.
Mozilla alone created a product that could take on Internet Explorers dominance, forced Microsoft to continue to develop IE towards a more standards-focussed goal and empowered us users to get back the web.
As Chrome (and Blink/WebKit) become more dominant it's critical that we have choice. The web was a dark place with too many sites requiring proprietary Microsoft extensions just to run apps. Lets hope it never happens again!
To be fair, he's just a low level back-bench MP without too much power. It's like we found the dumbest guy in the country and elected him president or something.
Still, you have a point. We have yet to see an atheist Prime Minister. Can't seem to abolish the monarchy.
Both Clement Atlee and James Callaghan were atheists - that's two.
Fortunately though religion has been at the fringe of our leaders manifesto and I hope it long continues!
I hope this isn't what you actually believe, as it sounds like an authoritarian nightmare to me! What would happen in your little imagined scenario is that the powers of control would inevitably extend to all undesirable* behaviour and would one-day collapse under its own weight or civil war -- after millions suffered.
* Undesirable being defined by the same nutcases who put this law in to place and could include being homosexual, jewish or having drugs planted on them
Back in the real world, I firmly believe punishment should fit the crime. In the case of taking drugs I can't think why it's a crime and why we would seek punishment! Someone at home getting high doesn't even deserve a trivial fine, let alone having their life ruined.
The only time I see it coming in to play is when mixed with other activties. High controlling machinery or a vechicle? Harsher sentencing. High looking after kids? Child neglect, harsher sentencing. Vandalism or assault... you get the idea.
There will be a negative impact to society where people get hooked on drugs and drop in productivity, but we already have problems with alcoholism, gambling, etc...
I agree, except it's better to push people on to 802.11n in the 2.4Ghz space; it uses the radio space more efficiently and won't slow down your neighbours. It also adds range and reliability. Considering most complaints aren't going to be about the routing performance but the wireless coverage, upgrading to n would be a boon for many, especially dual-band if their devices can run on 5Ghz.
A consortium of local farmers came together and allowed the use of their farmland and spare time to place fibre and hook up the local residents with gigabit internet speeds. By coming together as a consortium and being cooperative (rather than greedy) they have combined both entrepreneurial vigour with a sense of social awareness. I don't see why this model couldn't work in France too...
It's not about the ethics of the animal in question, it's about the promises made by the manufacturer (no mention of horse) and the questions of quality control, correct process and oversight.
My concern isn't "OMG HORSIES!"
My concern is "fuck you consumer" as they pump the product full of whatever they think they can get away with to turn a profit.
the United Kingdom still uses MILES to measure distance, MILES PER HOUR to measure speed, STONES and POUNDS and OUNCES to measure weight, and FLUID OUNCES to measure volume.
OK, I'll bite. Aside from miles to measure distance and speed on the roads, we certainly do not use pounds and ounces in daily life. All meat, food etc is sold in grams. Almost all drinks are sold in litres. Temperature is done in C on the TV and most cookbooks are metric (often with imperial translations).
The only exceptions I can think of are: 1. Beer and milk - we still buy these by the pint (with the metric equiv printed on the label) 2. Roads, as mentioned 3. Human weight is still often done in stones and lbs
Is it perfect? No. However, most people born in the last 30-40 years will have been taught exclusively metric at school. They're comfortable with it.
There is no way that anyone short of a politician would claim that the UK is "Metrified" (or metrificated) and yet they do.
Sorry, I know it's great to paint the US and Liberia as "holdouts". The truth is there are a lot of houldouts that JUST DON'T GET COUNTED.
E
The UK isn't perfect and we're not all the way there yet, but I don't think people are running around confused. We're getting there (to metric) it just might take a bit longer... The important thing is that we've started!
One thing I've always admired about you (but found difficult to emulate myself) is your steadfast consistency and refusal to compromise your principals.
With that said, are there any times when you look back and failed to do this - or perhaps wished you had been less hardline?
"Apple itself must (having created the confusion) make the position clear: that it acknowledges that the court has decided that these Samsung products do not infringe its registered design. The acknowledgement must come from the horse's mouth. Nothing short of that will be sure to do the job completely."
The judge took believed Apple deserved it because they had to lean up the mess they created. The judgement (http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2012/1339.html) is very easy to read and the summary of the Publicity Appeal (section 64 onwards) goes through this verdict. I was quite surprised at how informal and layman-oriented the language was.
I don't think either implementation makes the applications easier to use. They seem to have been done for no other reason than "we can".
Mountain Lion's implementations aren't as awful, adding back most of the 10.6 functionality to iCal and making Address Book usable without constantly clicking between screens. However, they've gone this far, it would be trivial to remove the stitching and faux leather leaving them with standard apps that follow colouring conventions.
Certainly from a HUI perspective and imho the changes aren't positive.
I used to work in a store when Chip & PIN was introduced to the UK - after the switchover we were told in no uncertain terms that we would take liability if we didn't use Chip & PIN when it was available (e.g. verify by signature). This makes a lot of sense to me, as some peoples signatures had rubbed off and others really didn't match.
Whenever I go to the US, my card is almost never checked. I usually get my card back before I even sign. There is often zero fraud prevention at the point of sale. Even when they ask for photo ID (rarely) they often just check the picture, not my name or even if it's valid ID.
From my side, I would consider liability to be very much on a merchant who didn't bother checking properly and reduce it as an incentive to help me reduce fraud (e.g. chip & pin systems).
Why does GNOME have to find new niches? It's the de-facto desktop installation for an awful lot of distributions and has been the primary choice for an awful lot of people for the past 10+ years.
It seems to me that they already had a huge user base and many more coming on-board through the likes of Fedora, Ubuntu and Linux Mint. They had a good thing going with a consistent toolkit (GTK+2), LGPL and some really nice software. From my humble perspective, this is a great starting point.
Instead they released GNOME 3. I have no idea who it's for? I remember GNOME 1.x and the thousands of configuration options - it was definitely overkill for a standard desktop environment. I think GNOME 3 is bad for exactly the opposite reasons - completely no customisation. I have no idea why they can't get this right and understand their target audience.
Fortunately, there are solid alternatives. However, I find it a great shame that GNOME seems to be determined to lose its userbase to meet some CS/HCI textbook ideal.
Add this to your.vimrc for numpad: "================ " Numpad Hacks "================ " Map numpad keys 0-9 to their respective digits :imap Oq 1 :imap Or 2 :imap Os 3 :imap Ot 4 :imap Ou 5 :imap Ov 6 :imap Ow 7 :imap Ox 8 :imap Oy 9 :imap Op 0
iTerm2 is a decent terminal emulator in my opinion.
Not saying OS X is perfect, but at least you an use numpad now. My vimrc has a couple of other tricks for OS X too: http://matt.fragilegeek.com/vimrc
In 1998 my mother bought me a 'Linux' book with Red Hat 5.2 attached. Being a geek I installed it and loved it. I dabbled with upgrading it and using the Ximian beta Gnome 2. It always felt clunky though.
Then I discovered Debian. Not only did it have an AWESOME package manager, but it taught me about free software. It showed me that people can collaborate across the globe to make an integrated, high quality operating system for free. Around this time, I was finding my place in the world and I honestly think the spirit of Debian helped me discover Humanism and a concept of greater, moral good.
To this day I am in awe of this effort. Looking across its entire collection, the social structure and the individual elements (kernel, GNU toolchain, X, OpenSSH etc) I think free software is one of humanities greatest achievements. Whether you use it or not, take reflection in how awesome this completely free project is and how much it's brought us.
The problem with what you say is that NBCs coverage was profit driven. They tape-delayed shows to ensure prime-time audiences, cut large elements out of the opening/closing ceremonies and most events were not free to watch online without a cable subscription.
Whilst the BBC and the Television License is a subject of debate in the UK, it's very narrow-minded to say the $230 USD (not $300) brings only dramas. Comedy, news, current affairs, radio, light entertainment, online streaming, education and a whole load of other content ad-free.
I haven't looked up the figures, but my bet is that the BBC channels are amongst the most popular TV and Radio offerings in the UK - people clearly seem to like what they produce (myself included, I would pay the license fee just to have Radio 4).
Cisco is presently moving to IOS-XE which is the classic IOS binary blob running under a Linux kernel, which strikes them a balance between stability/portability (Linux) and features (IOS).
Of course, it's somewhat disingenuous to describe IOS-XE as "Linux" as it's really using it as a hardware layer - more like a heavy hypervisor which can host other applications.
Slashdot Mirror
I was at Cisco for over 12 years and this kind of announcement isn't really news any more. Employees at Cisco are little more than yearly contractors. John Chambers, the former CEO, used to talk about Cisco being a family. If it is, then it's a highly dysfunctional one now!
My girlfriend got caught by some nasty OS X malware very recently from an ad network. It disguised itself as Flash Player and instead was CleanMyMac.
It had a valid developer certificate from Apple and she's aware enough to know that Flash Player needs updating. She didn't expect something bordering on a virus to change a load of settings and demand money for made-up problems.
For as long as I can remember Macs had avoided this kind of nastiness and there was a great community of great apps without spyware/malware etc (remember QuickSilver back in the day?). All good things come to an end and I guess soon we'll have to start unchecking boxes on installers, removing browser toolbars and generally avoiding predatory money grabbers as much as possible.
Preferences and then:
"editor.cursorBlinking": "solid",
Job done!
In most countries it's very common for children to walk to school in the mornings, especially when they get to 10/11 years old.
I understand the US is less pedestrian friendly as a general rule (outside of larger cities) but walking/cycling to school was one of my fondest memories, not to mention both healthy and social!
What is the motivation for having this banned in the first place?
I've owned a Slingbox since the mid-2000s and been very happy with the service. For those unfamiliar, you hook it up to your set top box and it rebroadcasts your signal over the internet and provides things like a remote control library so you can manage your device 100% remotely.
When I first got it, it came with Desktop software for Windows and Mac. This was replaced with a plugin based web interface a few years ago. For iOS and Android devices you have to buy a (rather expensive) dedicated app. I thought this was good value for money so invested. It's especially useful as I travel abroad a lot and UK-based services are almost all geofenced.
In the past 6 months they have been putting advertisements in the web app. Because Chrome has deprecated NPAPI, they released a Desktop application again (the old one doesn't work properly on recent versions of OS X). This Desktop app now inserts mandatory advertisements.
As a long-time customer it's infuriating! I paid good money for my Slingbox which originally had a Desktop app with no ads. The sale promise was "Watch TV anywhere with no subscription". I consider advertisements a subscription.
The web 20 years ago was a dark and miserable place. Netscape was the dominant player and their Navigator product was clunky, with a very awkward rendering engine and a lot of proprietary web extensions.
Microsoft, never being one to miss a trick, launched IE4 in 1997 which in many ways was a superior product. It supported dynamic content a lot better than Netscape (still in a largely proprietary way), was faster etc. It was so integrated in to Windows that it could replace your entire shell on Windows 95 or NT4. Windows 98 continued this.
Anyway, whilst IE4 and later 5 were unstable, they were subjectively better and easier to obtain for Windows users. Netscape was such a mess that they gave up entirely on their code base and created the Mozilla project for a next-generation browser. Microsoft launched IE6 in 2001 with just the right mix of Netscape compatibility and proprietary (shiny) extensions that everyone went for it. At one point, IE had almost 90% market share!
With this dominant position, Microsoft basically gave up developing their clunky, insecure web browser as businesses flocked to make applications require it. The Mozilla project spun out of the AOL-owned Netscape and launched a niche browser 'suite' which included email and web page editing all built in. It was slow, buggy and bloated - but very standards based (contrasting to IE).
A group of people took the good bits from the Mozilla project (browser) and tidied up the extension engine. They called it Phoenix and added useful features like tabs, download management etc. This got renamed to Firebird and then to Firefox for trade mark reasons... The world was given a browser that could take on IE. On launch day they had elaborate marketing schemes like full page adverts in the press and heavy promotion via Google.
Mozilla alone created a product that could take on Internet Explorers dominance, forced Microsoft to continue to develop IE towards a more standards-focussed goal and empowered us users to get back the web.
As Chrome (and Blink/WebKit) become more dominant it's critical that we have choice. The web was a dark place with too many sites requiring proprietary Microsoft extensions just to run apps. Lets hope it never happens again!
To be fair, he's just a low level back-bench MP without too much power. It's like we found the dumbest guy in the country and elected him president or something.
Still, you have a point. We have yet to see an atheist Prime Minister. Can't seem to abolish the monarchy.
Both Clement Atlee and James Callaghan were atheists - that's two.
Fortunately though religion has been at the fringe of our leaders manifesto and I hope it long continues!
I hope this isn't what you actually believe, as it sounds like an authoritarian nightmare to me! What would happen in your little imagined scenario is that the powers of control would inevitably extend to all undesirable* behaviour and would one-day collapse under its own weight or civil war -- after millions suffered.
* Undesirable being defined by the same nutcases who put this law in to place and could include being homosexual, jewish or having drugs planted on them
Back in the real world, I firmly believe punishment should fit the crime. In the case of taking drugs I can't think why it's a crime and why we would seek punishment! Someone at home getting high doesn't even deserve a trivial fine, let alone having their life ruined.
The only time I see it coming in to play is when mixed with other activties. High controlling machinery or a vechicle? Harsher sentencing. High looking after kids? Child neglect, harsher sentencing. Vandalism or assault... you get the idea.
There will be a negative impact to society where people get hooked on drugs and drop in productivity, but we already have problems with alcoholism, gambling, etc...
I agree, except it's better to push people on to 802.11n in the 2.4Ghz space; it uses the radio space more efficiently and won't slow down your neighbours. It also adds range and reliability. Considering most complaints aren't going to be about the routing performance but the wireless coverage, upgrading to n would be a boon for many, especially dual-band if their devices can run on 5Ghz.
I agree and dislike this behaviour.
Fortunately others do too and there's a good addon already available:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=2141579
Kinda sucks having to get one just to hide the tab bar, but works well enough so far.
Ignoring the politics a little bit, there was a really good example of how this CAN work recently with the B4RN project.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21442348
A consortium of local farmers came together and allowed the use of their farmland and spare time to place fibre and hook up the local residents with gigabit internet speeds. By coming together as a consortium and being cooperative (rather than greedy) they have combined both entrepreneurial vigour with a sense of social awareness. I don't see why this model couldn't work in France too...
They compare it to the iPad, which is pretty bad to repair... However, as a general purpose computer running a full OS, a fair comparison would also be the MacBook Pro Retina. ...1 out of 10 as well.
http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Pro-with-Retina-Display-Teardown/9462/
This is a bad trend with custom screws, glue and all sorts of crap.
It's not about the ethics of the animal in question, it's about the promises made by the manufacturer (no mention of horse) and the questions of quality control, correct process and oversight.
My concern isn't "OMG HORSIES!"
My concern is "fuck you consumer" as they pump the product full of whatever they think they can get away with to turn a profit.
the United Kingdom still uses MILES to measure distance, MILES PER HOUR to measure speed, STONES and POUNDS and OUNCES to measure weight, and FLUID OUNCES to measure volume.
OK, I'll bite. Aside from miles to measure distance and speed on the roads, we certainly do not use pounds and ounces in daily life. All meat, food etc is sold in grams. Almost all drinks are sold in litres. Temperature is done in C on the TV and most cookbooks are metric (often with imperial translations).
The only exceptions I can think of are:
1. Beer and milk - we still buy these by the pint (with the metric equiv printed on the label)
2. Roads, as mentioned
3. Human weight is still often done in stones and lbs
Is it perfect? No. However, most people born in the last 30-40 years will have been taught exclusively metric at school. They're comfortable with it.
There is no way that anyone short of a politician would claim that the UK is "Metrified" (or metrificated) and yet they do.
Sorry, I know it's great to paint the US and Liberia as "holdouts". The truth is there are a lot of houldouts that JUST DON'T GET COUNTED.
E
The UK isn't perfect and we're not all the way there yet, but I don't think people are running around confused. We're getting there (to metric) it just might take a bit longer... The important thing is that we've started!
One thing I've always admired about you (but found difficult to emulate myself) is your steadfast consistency and refusal to compromise your principals.
With that said, are there any times when you look back and failed to do this - or perhaps wished you had been less hardline?
It's written in the judgement, section 84:
"Apple itself must (having created the confusion) make the position clear: that it acknowledges that the court has decided that these Samsung products do not infringe its registered design. The acknowledgement must come from the horse's mouth. Nothing short of that will be sure to do the job completely."
The judge took believed Apple deserved it because they had to lean up the mess they created. The judgement (http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2012/1339.html) is very easy to read and the summary of the Publicity Appeal (section 64 onwards) goes through this verdict. I was quite surprised at how informal and layman-oriented the language was.
A Google van drove past me about 2 weeks ago here in the UK, which last I checked is part of Europe.
For those not familiar with this paradigm shift in OS X, John Siracusa nails it in his Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Review.
I don't think either implementation makes the applications easier to use. They seem to have been done for no other reason than "we can".
Mountain Lion's implementations aren't as awful, adding back most of the 10.6 functionality to iCal and making Address Book usable without constantly clicking between screens. However, they've gone this far, it would be trivial to remove the stitching and faux leather leaving them with standard apps that follow colouring conventions.
Certainly from a HUI perspective and imho the changes aren't positive.
Expect to be followed up with a "Free to Type" and "Pay to Save" model shortly.
With older versions it was pray to save, so this is an improvement!
I used to work in a store when Chip & PIN was introduced to the UK - after the switchover we were told in no uncertain terms that we would take liability if we didn't use Chip & PIN when it was available (e.g. verify by signature). This makes a lot of sense to me, as some peoples signatures had rubbed off and others really didn't match.
Whenever I go to the US, my card is almost never checked. I usually get my card back before I even sign. There is often zero fraud prevention at the point of sale. Even when they ask for photo ID (rarely) they often just check the picture, not my name or even if it's valid ID.
From my side, I would consider liability to be very much on a merchant who didn't bother checking properly and reduce it as an incentive to help me reduce fraud (e.g. chip & pin systems).
Why does GNOME have to find new niches? It's the de-facto desktop installation for an awful lot of distributions and has been the primary choice for an awful lot of people for the past 10+ years.
It seems to me that they already had a huge user base and many more coming on-board through the likes of Fedora, Ubuntu and Linux Mint. They had a good thing going with a consistent toolkit (GTK+2), LGPL and some really nice software. From my humble perspective, this is a great starting point.
Instead they released GNOME 3. I have no idea who it's for? I remember GNOME 1.x and the thousands of configuration options - it was definitely overkill for a standard desktop environment. I think GNOME 3 is bad for exactly the opposite reasons - completely no customisation. I have no idea why they can't get this right and understand their target audience.
Fortunately, there are solid alternatives. However, I find it a great shame that GNOME seems to be determined to lose its userbase to meet some CS/HCI textbook ideal.
Add this to your .vimrc for numpad:
:imap Oq 1
"================
" Numpad Hacks
"================
" Map numpad keys 0-9 to their respective digits
:imap Or 2
:imap Os 3
:imap Ot 4
:imap Ou 5
:imap Ov 6
:imap Ow 7
:imap Ox 8
:imap Oy 9
:imap Op 0
iTerm2 is a decent terminal emulator in my opinion.
Not saying OS X is perfect, but at least you an use numpad now. My vimrc has a couple of other tricks for OS X too:
http://matt.fragilegeek.com/vimrc
In 1998 my mother bought me a 'Linux' book with Red Hat 5.2 attached. Being a geek I installed it and loved it. I dabbled with upgrading it and using the Ximian beta Gnome 2. It always felt clunky though.
Then I discovered Debian. Not only did it have an AWESOME package manager, but it taught me about free software. It showed me that people can collaborate across the globe to make an integrated, high quality operating system for free. Around this time, I was finding my place in the world and I honestly think the spirit of Debian helped me discover Humanism and a concept of greater, moral good.
To this day I am in awe of this effort. Looking across its entire collection, the social structure and the individual elements (kernel, GNU toolchain, X, OpenSSH etc) I think free software is one of humanities greatest achievements. Whether you use it or not, take reflection in how awesome this completely free project is and how much it's brought us.
Thanks Debian!
The problem with what you say is that NBCs coverage was profit driven. They tape-delayed shows to ensure prime-time audiences, cut large elements out of the opening/closing ceremonies and most events were not free to watch online without a cable subscription.
Whilst the BBC and the Television License is a subject of debate in the UK, it's very narrow-minded to say the $230 USD (not $300) brings only dramas. Comedy, news, current affairs, radio, light entertainment, online streaming, education and a whole load of other content ad-free.
I haven't looked up the figures, but my bet is that the BBC channels are amongst the most popular TV and Radio offerings in the UK - people clearly seem to like what they produce (myself included, I would pay the license fee just to have Radio 4).
Cisco is presently moving to IOS-XE which is the classic IOS binary blob running under a Linux kernel, which strikes them a balance between stability/portability (Linux) and features (IOS).
Of course, it's somewhat disingenuous to describe IOS-XE as "Linux" as it's really using it as a hardware layer - more like a heavy hypervisor which can host other applications.