Don't forget that this is all talking about a end-2010 Firefox release. Assuming that release is on time (not a safe assumption given Mozilla's history), it's still 18 months before Mozilla drops support for the last Firefox to support 10.4. That'd be 4 years since Leopard came out.
Apple's general tendency is to support it's current OS and then the one previous OS. In this case, that'd be Snow Leopard and Leopard. Tiger got a security update in 2009, but it hasn't received any of the 2010 ones. I think it's safe to assume that since Tiger wasn't included in the 2010-001 patch, Apple has no intention of providing security patches or bug fixes for it.
Tiger is already coming up on 5 years old. By the time the 10.4-supporting versions of Firefox are phased out, it's going to be at least 6 years old, maybe older (given Mozilla's tendency to let deadlines slip), and by that time, 10.7 will probably be in beta or something.
The answer is: Mozilla should have a very clear policy about backwards compatibility and follow it to the letter. Correct me if I'm wrong, but they don't currently have that.
I think this is hard to establish when different OS vendors have radically different philosophies. Apple dropped Tiger support a few months ago (after ~4.5 years of support), but XP will be like 12-13 years old when Microsoft stops releasing security patches for it in 2014. Similarly, desktop Linux releases are supported for timeframes ranging from 12 months to 3 years. If Mozilla said "we'll support anything less than 3 years old", they'd have to drop Vista support. If they make it 5 years, then they're supporting versions of Linux that the vendor abandoned years ago. If they say "three most recent releases", then they wind up in a pattern where they're dropping support for an Ubuntu while keeping a similarly-aged Fedora or Debian distro (which have the same libraries and dependencies).
And for the record, my guess is that most of the holdup would be in testing. Having to run the general tests on a 10.4 system, and having to run and maintain tests for specific 10.4 quirks would be the developer-time cost.
Actually, this news story suggests that you have to have certain HTML/JS files planted in the user's shared folder for the flaw to work. So it's even less dangerous than implied (not that you shouldn't worry about it).
And then finally they'll get the bright idea to implement software that recognizes whether it's upside down and only print out the ones that are right-side up!
They can't implement that software because a method for doing that has already been patented!
Much though I dislike software patents, that doesn't prevent using text to detect orientation. Someone upthread came up with a solution that wouldn't violate that patent, namely OCRing all orientations and the one with the most dictionary words is the correct orientation.
The posted patent compares letter width to letter height, and uses that to determine if the image is sideways. If the document is all capital letters or in Russian, it looks at the 'T's in the document, otherwise it uses 'i's. It then figures the ratio of what appear to be correctly oriented 'T's or 'i's to incorrectly oriented 'T's or 'i's and uses that to determine whether or not the document is upside down.
To circumvent that, you could test something different. If using different letters and the same overall formula don't evade the patent, you could still use factors like frequency analysis ('b' and 'd' are more common in English than 'q' and 'p') or attempting to detect different known incorrect characters (there's no English letter that looks like a sideways 'b', 'd', 'p', or 'q' or an upside-down 'k' or 'h' or 'y' (though an upside-down 'y' looks like a backwards 'h')
They're missing a way to circumvention that patent - flip the paper upside down, and then roll it 180 degrees around the semi-major axis. Don't worry though, I'll be seeing a patent attorney about that one at lunch.
It's a choice between a "themepark" model of computing and a "sandbox" model of computing. A lot of people prefer themeparks for a variety of reasons, and as long as sandbox people still have that option, I don't see a huge problem. I'd see a problem if all computers went to the themepark model, but that doesn't appear to be in danger of happening, and right now, there are a lot of users sitting in the sandbox who'd likely prefer a themepark.
I think it's a function of how much people care about a given right or freedom. If someone has no need to run arbitrary code, then trading that right for more ease of use or security or whatever is a good and rational decision. It's not explicitly evil to make that trade, so long as people are aware of it when they're making it. Most prospective iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad customers know they only run App Store applications, and it's possible to browse those applications to make sure the features you expect are available, so it's not like it's a dirty trick. In most cases, trading away rights is a bad decision, but it's a decision people should have the right to make, provided it's reversible (and iPads have no service contract).
Personally, I would not want to make that trade on my machine(s) (I'm a programmer), but I can see where someone like my mom might find more advantage from an iPad's "themepark" than a computer's sandbox.
If people want a choice, they should GET a choice - use the app store, or don't. Instead, Apple's making the choice for you. And that's no choice at all.
People have a choice. In fact, they have three choices: (1) Don't get an iPad. (2) Get an iPad and use the App Store. (3) Get an iPad and use web apps.
Google can rewrite Google Voice as a web-app, and Mobile Safari can support hardware rendering. There's no reason you can't do pretty much anything you need to do as a web-app. Slightly less convenient for those without the 3g models, but it's still an option.
Study says it compared first senators and then college students. There's likely not enough of an age disparity among college students to make age a factor in political affiliation, nor would the average person have sufficient skill at guessing age to reliably distinguish a 19-year-old from a 22-year-old.
And politicians are an edge case - the youngest current senator is a 40-year old Republican and the oldest senator is a 92-year-old Democrat. Senators (and indeed all national politicians) as a class are too different from the mainstream population to make those sorts of generalizations.
Hulu advertisers get a guaranteed number of viewers and they can try to target specific audiences (not sure how much targeting hulu does). With traditional advertising, you buy a time block and then you hope that people are going to watch it. If the football game on another channel goes into double overtime and half of your expected viewers show up...tough cookies. If only half of the viewers show up on hulu, you only run half the amount of ads.
Actually, a lot of bigger advertisers on TV, especially in primetime who buy ads in bulk at the up-fronts, get "make-good" ads if the show the ad was in underperform the expected numbers drastically. So if "Heroes" viewership is off 25% year-over-year, those advertisers who bought the ads the previous summer based on last year's numbers get extra ads run for free to make up for it.
If I am the CEO of a mega corporation, then I know the value of good will to generate goodwill and I will put some kind of human at Control Gate C who will put a stopper on the mindless sharks in my legal department who would sully my business' positive reputation by suing dancing toddlers.
Goodwill only really works if people understand the issue. In this case, you only risk alienating the reddit/slashdot/groklaw crowd, because 99.5% of the market doesn't understand copyright or computers or the law at all. That puts a rather tight cap on the value of "goodwill".
Don't forget that like half of those 12 million players are in China, where the pay structure is different - they pay by the hour, and it's handled by a licensee, not directly by Blizzard. They probably only have 5-6 million on the $12-$15 monthly plans.
And don't forget that WoW China has been offline a bit recently due to government issues.
A comic book series will go many years between reboots. It's basically impossible to have any sort of narrative with a continuous storyline and characters that works for decades. I mean, shows like Law and Order and soaps change up their cast all the time and play fast and loose with the continuity, but while it's easy to imagine a situation where a cop or DA is replaced by someone similar, it's harder to imagine that every 20 years a group of 4 astronauts get exposed to the same type of radiation and gain the same types of powers as the Original Fantastic Four. The main exception to this is the Doctor Who franchise, which of course has built in cast-replacement mechanisms and which can play fast and loose with continuity because it's about a time traveller.
That's not cheaper. It's $6.50 for the authenicator (or free on a mobile phone). Versus $0.10 to you and Blizzard every time you log in? No question the text messages are more expensive - for Blizzard and for everyone who doesn't have unlimited messaging. At 65 logins, it pays for itself inside 3 months.
Latency would be an issue, but coherence and caching would be bigger issues. For almost anything beyond Web 0.5, you'll have the pages updating semi-frequently (blogs getting comments, forums getting posts, widgets receiving tweets, people editing content), so it'd be hard to have someone "seeding" one of the pages they just visited, since their version will be out of date in short order. Then you throw in the unique content problem - you can't seed me my Facebook page, because you and I see totally different things when we look at our friends lists - and that's the ballgame. Even normal wikipedia pages have to show different things depending on whether I'm anonymous, a logged-in editor, or an administrator.
BitTorrent also would suck for webpages because most people don't leave them open long. What're we gonna do, have them seed it after they closed the page? Also people's upstreams are usually really limited relative to their downstreams, so it would take major network-level changes to accommodate such a protocol on a mass-market scale.
It'd work great for rarely-changed, fairly small, totally static HTML content, but that's not the content that's expensive to serve in the first place.
If Chase was going to legitimately disqualify them, they should have done so at the onset, so that people don't go "wasting" their votes on an organization that's not eligible to win. If I had voted for one of those organizations, I'd certainly be pissed that my vote was thrown out, and if I was a group near the top 20, I'd be pissed that I potentially lost votes to a group that wasn't going to be allowed to compete (a religious charity might lose votes to an anti-abortion group, for instance)
Their OS, until quite recently, had to work on x86, x86_64, PPC, PPC64, and ARM. Deliberately excluding one particular variant of one of these in a nontrivial way just means they will have to deal with increased complexity in their codebase, because the Hackintosh community is just going to work around it anyway. So it doesn't make business sense to do that.
Actually, it's very possible that excluding certain categories of x86 and x86_64 processors reduces complexity. Because Apple ships Mac OS X (as opposed to iPhone OS) on only certain laptop/desktop/server processor ranges from Intel, they can assume the presence of some optional x86 features, like SSE3 or Out-of-Order-Execution, that exist in all shipping Mac models but might not be supported on some Atoms or other x86 processors.
These guys don't just want it both ways. They want it every which way and twice on Sunday. Take your meds boys, and put on this comfy straight jacket before the multiple personality disorder
I didn't actually RTFA, but it's a committee receiving multiple presentations. It's somewhat natural for there to be multiple, potentially exclusive, opinions, because there are multiple agents involved with multiple backgrounds, offering multiple opinions and proposed solutions. In fact, if they didn't display multiple personalities, that's when you worry about their sanity and self-awareness.
This is not an exception. The reason Apple sells $1 songs and $2-$3 TV shows isn't because they want a few pennies in profits on each, but rather because they want $100+ in profits on an iPod Touch or iPod Video or AppleTV. They could sell you every episode of The Office and 24 and BSG and it'd still be less valuable to them than selling the one iPod you play them on.
It's perfectly fine for the Internet to have walled-off sections like this, provided you can opt to go somewhere else if you want.
I'd take this a step further. There doesn't even need to be an alternative, there just need to be no major barriers to an alternative existing. This is the case with the App Store (someone can design another phone) but not the case with net neutrality (laying ISP pipes is very capital-intensive).
The bank's unlikely to lose any principal in the matter. My conjecture is they charge 8% to milk the favorable situation for all its worth, since students applying for these loans have very limited options (if they could qualify for a more favorable type of loan, that is presumably what they would use), they gotta take or leave the 8%.
Oh, I completely agree. Students are getting hosed in a system where the federal government is backing a lot of these loans, and many of them are non-defaultable. I'm just saying that the label "student" provides a lot of information relevant to the ability to repay a loan.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget that this is all talking about a end-2010 Firefox release. Assuming that release is on time (not a safe assumption given Mozilla's history), it's still 18 months before Mozilla drops support for the last Firefox to support 10.4. That'd be 4 years since Leopard came out.
Apple's general tendency is to support it's current OS and then the one previous OS. In this case, that'd be Snow Leopard and Leopard. Tiger got a security update in 2009, but it hasn't received any of the 2010 ones. I think it's safe to assume that since Tiger wasn't included in the 2010-001 patch, Apple has no intention of providing security patches or bug fixes for it.
Tiger is already coming up on 5 years old. By the time the 10.4-supporting versions of Firefox are phased out, it's going to be at least 6 years old, maybe older (given Mozilla's tendency to let deadlines slip), and by that time, 10.7 will probably be in beta or something.
The answer is: Mozilla should have a very clear policy about backwards compatibility and follow it to the letter. Correct me if I'm wrong, but they don't currently have that.
I think this is hard to establish when different OS vendors have radically different philosophies. Apple dropped Tiger support a few months ago (after ~4.5 years of support), but XP will be like 12-13 years old when Microsoft stops releasing security patches for it in 2014. Similarly, desktop Linux releases are supported for timeframes ranging from 12 months to 3 years. If Mozilla said "we'll support anything less than 3 years old", they'd have to drop Vista support. If they make it 5 years, then they're supporting versions of Linux that the vendor abandoned years ago. If they say "three most recent releases", then they wind up in a pattern where they're dropping support for an Ubuntu while keeping a similarly-aged Fedora or Debian distro (which have the same libraries and dependencies).
And for the record, my guess is that most of the holdup would be in testing. Having to run the general tests on a 10.4 system, and having to run and maintain tests for specific 10.4 quirks would be the developer-time cost.
Actually, this news story suggests that you have to have certain HTML/JS files planted in the user's shared folder for the flaw to work. So it's even less dangerous than implied (not that you shouldn't worry about it).
And then finally they'll get the bright idea to implement software that recognizes whether it's upside down and only print out the ones that are right-side up!
They can't implement that software because a method for doing that has already been patented!
Much though I dislike software patents, that doesn't prevent using text to detect orientation. Someone upthread came up with a solution that wouldn't violate that patent, namely OCRing all orientations and the one with the most dictionary words is the correct orientation.
The posted patent compares letter width to letter height, and uses that to determine if the image is sideways. If the document is all capital letters or in Russian, it looks at the 'T's in the document, otherwise it uses 'i's. It then figures the ratio of what appear to be correctly oriented 'T's or 'i's to incorrectly oriented 'T's or 'i's and uses that to determine whether or not the document is upside down.
To circumvent that, you could test something different. If using different letters and the same overall formula don't evade the patent, you could still use factors like frequency analysis ('b' and 'd' are more common in English than 'q' and 'p') or attempting to detect different known incorrect characters (there's no English letter that looks like a sideways 'b', 'd', 'p', or 'q' or an upside-down 'k' or 'h' or 'y' (though an upside-down 'y' looks like a backwards 'h')
They're missing a way to circumvention that patent - flip the paper upside down, and then roll it 180 degrees around the semi-major axis. Don't worry though, I'll be seeing a patent attorney about that one at lunch.
It's a choice between a "themepark" model of computing and a "sandbox" model of computing. A lot of people prefer themeparks for a variety of reasons, and as long as sandbox people still have that option, I don't see a huge problem. I'd see a problem if all computers went to the themepark model, but that doesn't appear to be in danger of happening, and right now, there are a lot of users sitting in the sandbox who'd likely prefer a themepark.
I think it's a function of how much people care about a given right or freedom. If someone has no need to run arbitrary code, then trading that right for more ease of use or security or whatever is a good and rational decision. It's not explicitly evil to make that trade, so long as people are aware of it when they're making it. Most prospective iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad customers know they only run App Store applications, and it's possible to browse those applications to make sure the features you expect are available, so it's not like it's a dirty trick. In most cases, trading away rights is a bad decision, but it's a decision people should have the right to make, provided it's reversible (and iPads have no service contract).
Personally, I would not want to make that trade on my machine(s) (I'm a programmer), but I can see where someone like my mom might find more advantage from an iPad's "themepark" than a computer's sandbox.
If people want a choice, they should GET a choice - use the app store, or don't. Instead, Apple's making the choice for you. And that's no choice at all.
People have a choice. In fact, they have three choices: (1) Don't get an iPad. (2) Get an iPad and use the App Store. (3) Get an iPad and use web apps.
Google can rewrite Google Voice as a web-app, and Mobile Safari can support hardware rendering. There's no reason you can't do pretty much anything you need to do as a web-app. Slightly less convenient for those without the 3g models, but it's still an option.
Study says it compared first senators and then college students. There's likely not enough of an age disparity among college students to make age a factor in political affiliation, nor would the average person have sufficient skill at guessing age to reliably distinguish a 19-year-old from a 22-year-old.
And politicians are an edge case - the youngest current senator is a 40-year old Republican and the oldest senator is a 92-year-old Democrat. Senators (and indeed all national politicians) as a class are too different from the mainstream population to make those sorts of generalizations.
Hulu advertisers get a guaranteed number of viewers and they can try to target specific audiences (not sure how much targeting hulu does). With traditional advertising, you buy a time block and then you hope that people are going to watch it. If the football game on another channel goes into double overtime and half of your expected viewers show up...tough cookies. If only half of the viewers show up on hulu, you only run half the amount of ads.
Actually, a lot of bigger advertisers on TV, especially in primetime who buy ads in bulk at the up-fronts, get "make-good" ads if the show the ad was in underperform the expected numbers drastically. So if "Heroes" viewership is off 25% year-over-year, those advertisers who bought the ads the previous summer based on last year's numbers get extra ads run for free to make up for it.
If I am the CEO of a mega corporation, then I know the value of good will to generate goodwill and I will put some kind of human at Control Gate C who will put a stopper on the mindless sharks in my legal department who would sully my business' positive reputation by suing dancing toddlers.
Goodwill only really works if people understand the issue. In this case, you only risk alienating the reddit/slashdot/groklaw crowd, because 99.5% of the market doesn't understand copyright or computers or the law at all. That puts a rather tight cap on the value of "goodwill".
Don't forget that like half of those 12 million players are in China, where the pay structure is different - they pay by the hour, and it's handled by a licensee, not directly by Blizzard. They probably only have 5-6 million on the $12-$15 monthly plans.
And don't forget that WoW China has been offline a bit recently due to government issues.
A comic book series will go many years between reboots. It's basically impossible to have any sort of narrative with a continuous storyline and characters that works for decades. I mean, shows like Law and Order and soaps change up their cast all the time and play fast and loose with the continuity, but while it's easy to imagine a situation where a cop or DA is replaced by someone similar, it's harder to imagine that every 20 years a group of 4 astronauts get exposed to the same type of radiation and gain the same types of powers as the Original Fantastic Four. The main exception to this is the Doctor Who franchise, which of course has built in cast-replacement mechanisms and which can play fast and loose with continuity because it's about a time traveller.
That's not cheaper. It's $6.50 for the authenicator (or free on a mobile phone). Versus $0.10 to you and Blizzard every time you log in? No question the text messages are more expensive - for Blizzard and for everyone who doesn't have unlimited messaging. At 65 logins, it pays for itself inside 3 months.
You even have to register your Linux distro.
Yeah, or what? They'll sue me for pirating Linux? Make me pay triple damages? What's three times nothing?
Check out tvtropes.org BTW.. :)
NO! DO NOT GO TO tvtropes.org! It sucks away your time more effectively than wikipedia! Run away while you still can!
Latency would be an issue, but coherence and caching would be bigger issues. For almost anything beyond Web 0.5, you'll have the pages updating semi-frequently (blogs getting comments, forums getting posts, widgets receiving tweets, people editing content), so it'd be hard to have someone "seeding" one of the pages they just visited, since their version will be out of date in short order. Then you throw in the unique content problem - you can't seed me my Facebook page, because you and I see totally different things when we look at our friends lists - and that's the ballgame. Even normal wikipedia pages have to show different things depending on whether I'm anonymous, a logged-in editor, or an administrator.
BitTorrent also would suck for webpages because most people don't leave them open long. What're we gonna do, have them seed it after they closed the page? Also people's upstreams are usually really limited relative to their downstreams, so it would take major network-level changes to accommodate such a protocol on a mass-market scale.
It'd work great for rarely-changed, fairly small, totally static HTML content, but that's not the content that's expensive to serve in the first place.
If Chase was going to legitimately disqualify them, they should have done so at the onset, so that people don't go "wasting" their votes on an organization that's not eligible to win. If I had voted for one of those organizations, I'd certainly be pissed that my vote was thrown out, and if I was a group near the top 20, I'd be pissed that I potentially lost votes to a group that wasn't going to be allowed to compete (a religious charity might lose votes to an anti-abortion group, for instance)
Their OS, until quite recently, had to work on x86, x86_64, PPC, PPC64, and ARM. Deliberately excluding one particular variant of one of these in a nontrivial way just means they will have to deal with increased complexity in their codebase, because the Hackintosh community is just going to work around it anyway. So it doesn't make business sense to do that.
Actually, it's very possible that excluding certain categories of x86 and x86_64 processors reduces complexity. Because Apple ships Mac OS X (as opposed to iPhone OS) on only certain laptop/desktop/server processor ranges from Intel, they can assume the presence of some optional x86 features, like SSE3 or Out-of-Order-Execution, that exist in all shipping Mac models but might not be supported on some Atoms or other x86 processors.
These guys don't just want it both ways. They want it every which way and twice on Sunday. Take your meds boys, and put on this comfy straight jacket before the multiple personality disorder
I didn't actually RTFA, but it's a committee receiving multiple presentations. It's somewhat natural for there to be multiple, potentially exclusive, opinions, because there are multiple agents involved with multiple backgrounds, offering multiple opinions and proposed solutions. In fact, if they didn't display multiple personalities, that's when you worry about their sanity and self-awareness.
Exception: Apple iTunes
This is not an exception. The reason Apple sells $1 songs and $2-$3 TV shows isn't because they want a few pennies in profits on each, but rather because they want $100+ in profits on an iPod Touch or iPod Video or AppleTV. They could sell you every episode of The Office and 24 and BSG and it'd still be less valuable to them than selling the one iPod you play them on.
It's perfectly fine for the Internet to have walled-off sections like this, provided you can opt to go somewhere else if you want.
I'd take this a step further. There doesn't even need to be an alternative, there just need to be no major barriers to an alternative existing. This is the case with the App Store (someone can design another phone) but not the case with net neutrality (laying ISP pipes is very capital-intensive).
The bank's unlikely to lose any principal in the matter. My conjecture is they charge 8% to milk the favorable situation for all its worth, since students applying for these loans have very limited options (if they could qualify for a more favorable type of loan, that is presumably what they would use), they gotta take or leave the 8%.
Oh, I completely agree. Students are getting hosed in a system where the federal government is backing a lot of these loans, and many of them are non-defaultable. I'm just saying that the label "student" provides a lot of information relevant to the ability to repay a loan.