"Donate your dollar to the artist, save a dollar on an ipod" or something What incentive would apple have to do something like that?
They're a BUSINESS, not the saviors of the planet. They have a duty to their stockholders to maximize their profits. If anybody starts a revolution with the music industry, it certainly won't be apple. More than likely it will something like last.fm, imeem.com or the pandora project.
Let's be sure that nobody can steal a dollar; but if they can help a democrat steal an election... so be it. The sad thing is that very few people care. I've actually had a friend tell me that he thought it was okay that people vote without knowing anything about any of the candidates because "its not THAT many votes, man"....
Voting seems like such an abstract, far-away thing to most people that it doesn't feel like it matters.
Slot machines, however, offer instant gratification (or loss of money). Its a more DIRECT, this-is-happening-to-me-right-now feeling.
Its a double-edged sword that it has become fashionable to hate the [current] government. While you've got more people out there talking about politics, very VERY few of them actually KNOW what they're talking about. All thats happened is somebody turned up the gain; now we have to deal with way more noise than signal. So while you would hope that this current trend would increase public awareness of this sort of thing, it doesn't.
And that's a great idea, until you end up with a piece of required software that refuses to run without local admin privileges on the computer... YES!!
Or activex controls that are a requirement that want to be able to write into the/windows/system32 directory.
WTF!?! developers. Please, any devs. reading this. Users have a home directory for a reason, put things IN THERE!
Flash is not a standard, it just has a lot of implementations. Let me clarify: Flash is standard. In this case "standard" is being used as an adjective, not a noun. As in "this new dodge viper comes with a stearing wheel; standard"
As far as CPU goes. Yes, flash requires more CPU than just a raw video stream does. I think that this goes without saying.
Nearly every graphics based browser out there can (and does) support flash. This is great because of the huge online video craze going on right now. Do you remember the days of some websites using quicktime, others using real player, some using windows media, some just streaming MPGs etc? Have you ever tried getting mplayer to actually PLAY all of those things in your browser?
Streaming video (and audio) using flash is great because it just works.
Is there only ONE guy that develops the software for the slots? Admittedly, I've never worked any slot machine projects before, but I would imagine that the function that goes:
if(key1, key2, key3, key4):
jackpot()
would be kindof....obvious.
Anybody wanna shed some insight on how these things are written? Are there some open source slot machines i can poke through somewhere?
This is one of my favorite things I've seen google do so far. It really is neat to see how google has gone from a company that indexes web pages, to a company that stores and indexes your email, to a company that stores and indexes maps of the world, to a company that will literally tell you ANY available information about an area on the map. As much as the privacy advocates are going to hate this (and please, somebody tell me WHY without using a slippery slope argument), this is really where I would like to see mapping go. Maps hadn't really improved in the past couple of hundred years, but now we're starting to see just what mapping can do.
Most small businesses need the highspeed connection for credit cards, edi, etc... there's really nothing other than DSL (way too fast) or dial up (far too little) for them anyway. They're probably paying a minimum of $120 per month for what we get for $40 at home.... so they might as well offer it to clients. They're not running $50 routers... or shouldn't be. They should be running netopia or low-end cisco boxes ($200-$500) that split the connection to their private network and the public network at the incomming box to protect their register networks... PCI probably demands it. So why can't they get a separate cable connection for 50 bucks a month, and run that on a 50 dollar best buy AP? Running your credit card machines and your public wifi over the same link sounds like a bad idea. I guess if you tried to over complicate things, you could get the price higher than $50 a month, but I don't see why you would do that.
Places that DON'T have free wifi are finding themselves with a very easy decision: either get with the times, or lose business.
It is assumed that a coffee shop will have wifi, seeing it at a restaurant is becoming more and more commonplace, and seeing it at an airport is starting to be expected.
Does he mean non FREE wifi?
This is something that has always baffled me. A really fast cable connection costs about 50 bucks a month (at least thats what I pay for 8down 2up in Phoenix)....a wireless AP costs anywhere from $20-100 depending on how much bullshit you eat from the idiot working at best buy. How can you not justify a $50 a month expense, and a $50 initial cost?
Oh really, I think corporate spy would be a simple job. Find out what they want you to do, turn in your company/boss, flip them off as the FBI takes them away, collect the reward and get a new job. Sounds awfully simple to me. If anyone ever asked me to pull some illegal bullshit job like that I'd be like "Hmm, yeah can you repeat that and speak closer to my MP3 recorder?" They're talking about being a pen-tester. The company that you're breaking into hired your firm to test their security.
Terrorism is the new communism. Don't let the actual definition get in the way of people using this to incite fear.
What we're talking about there is Cold war V2.0 with China. There is no shortage of people who theorize that Russia at one point might have been able to pull of some crazy hack that disabled all of our electronics using Tesla tech; what we're talking about here is an ACTUAL ability for China to do it. The real solution to this problem is to bring manufacturing back to the United States.
Unfortunately this requires more regulation on American Companies.
So, a wildly popular handset doesn't look like a future winner, and a completely productless handset does?
You should go into the venture capital business. Oh, silly me, for some reason I thought we were talking about the iPhone being used as a business tool. So its going to be popular with execs, huh? You might want to tell apple that they can stop worrying, then.
Have you thought about going into the fortune telling business?
I'm sure Apple is worried a lot about something that "looks like" a "potential", "future" winner. Well they should be. The iphone DOESN'T look look like it will be a future winner. Don't get me wrong, they've got a great product, but they are going to have a tough time venturing outside of the teenage "OMG ITS SO CUTE" market with this.
IF and ONLY if they had actually included a full qwerty keyboard with this would they have had a shot. I can type on my blackberry (7520, and nextel can have it when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers) in the dark, without looking at it, with one hand. Its quick, its very VERY durable, and, most importantly, it LOOKS like a business tool. Maybe in the tech business world this doesn't matter (and in that market, the iphone might do really well), but in a world where some Execs still feel funny about using computers (I can think of one guy, a multi-billionaire, who uses his computer for nothing other than playing freecell while he's doing deals over the phone, and insisted on a teletype messaging system in his office), the ability to watch youtube videos or have a really shiny thing clipped to your belt really doesn't have that much appeal.
couldn't they just reverse engineer the blueprints and modify them to bypass the feature? Well if it were that easy, wouldn't people just do that to get rid of the DRM in software?...oh, yeah.
(1) The local city government monitoring your car at every intersection and every stretch of road, and mailing you a ticket every time you exceed the speed limit by 5 mph or fail to beat the red light by 0.01 seconds. Go drive around the Phoenix suburbs and you'll see your future. You can pick up half a dozen robo-tickets just driving to the local mall and back. This is a safety problem. I live in Old Town Scottsdale (a phoenix suburb with lots of shops and bars and stuff that you can actually *WALK* to) so i do a lot of walking around intersections and stuff. All of the intersections have those red light cameras on them, and there is almost ALWAYS a photo radar van parked somewhere around old town. When people see these things, they stop paying attention to anything that is going on around them EXCEPT for the van/camera/light. What is more dangerous? Somebody running a red light by a half a second or so, or somebody stomping down on their Huge lifted escalade (uhg..) to try and speed up and make it through the yellow light without getting a ticket.
Tempe (another suburb, home to ASU) is even WORSE. They recently installed stationary cameras on Rural(scottsdale rd) just north of University. Anybody from this area knows that this is one of the busiest areas in tempe (traffic wise). It is the main route into and out of ASU. Well, when you're in thick traffic, driving 50mph, and suddenly the person who is just in town visiting sees the camera and slams on the brakes all the way down to 20mph without any warning (except brakelights) it causes accidents. Lots of them.
When did we get to vote on this matter? And who the hell voted FOR it?
You obviously aren't a member of the Illuminati or you'd know of the secret live update version of Google Street. In fact, this version is so powerful, it's not limited to streets.
I'm watching you right now. So it was YOU who made this video! Click
Yes, obviously I DO work in a much smaller environment than I could. But guess what? I LOVE my job, I make more money than the VAST majority of people that work in my field, I get to work my own hours, I get to work on the projects that I WANT to work on, and if somebody tries to implement something stupid, I can change it.
Wanna know why? Because I am the type of person that DOES take the time to sit down with users and explain WHY things are the way they are (or, if necessary, schedule a training meeting with their department heads and allow the knowledge to trickle down). Every person in the company (we're small, only about 220 employees) has my cell phone number and email address written on a paper that I gave them explaining why some common problems will occur, and how to fix them. The times that I HAVE been called at 3:00am (which is VERY VERY rare...training can go a LONG way) I am very polite to the person on the other end of the line.
Companies notice things like this. Appearantly you work in a job that you hate, where you probably get no recognition for anything that you do (if you are allowed to do anything other than what is written in your, appearantly sacred, employee handbooks). My suggestion to you would be to increase your skillset, and go find another job. Also, practice interacting with other people other than what you can do online. This is absolutely the NUMBER ONE thing that you can do that will increase your pay/responsibility. Good luck.
Some admins are just working in larger environments where they can't sit down with hundreds or thousands of users and hold their hand and teach them nifty memorization tricks to help them remember their sufficiently complex password. Then you need to either learn to better manage your time, or you need to talk with your boss and get her/him to hire you some help.
Wow, this portion of my post was really just a footnote, but everybody seems to be responding to it...so I'll bite.
Maybe most admins are really detached from their users and never talk to them/hate them/think they're stupid/whatever, but I'm not.
I TALK to the users, and TRAIN them on WHY they need to choose a good password. If they want to create a new one, and have it never change, they can come and talk to me. I'll sit there and help them remember it for a few minutes, explain WHY they aren't supposed to write it on a post-it note, and what will happen if they do (somebody could log into their account and they will be liable for it), etc.
Are most admins really that arrogant? OMG STUPID USERS THAT JUST DON"T GET IT!!! LOLZ IF ONLY THEY WERE AS SMART AS ME!!! HAHAHAHAHA Seriously guys, get a life.
This is not a good thing. How many of these devices are going to have the equivalent "1111" or "1234" or "8520" (the center of the keypad that users think is just OH so clever) as the password?
At least if the person is smart enough to know that they NEED encryption on their disk and they don't have it, they'll [hopefully] be smart enough not to just leave the thing laying around.
With this thing, it gives users a false sense of security...now they don't NEED to worry about losing the thing because "Oh, its ENCRYPTED!" No amount of hardware will EVER replace proper training.
Example: At first, we used a pretty strict password policy at work...+8 characters, numbers, symbols, capitols etc. all required. YOu have to change your password every month. This is a security DISASTER! Everybody will set their password to like "jason1!" the first month, then "jason2@" the next month", then "jason3#" the next month and so on. Finally I changed the policy. Now a user can request a password that never changes, so long as it meets *MY* requirements...
The huge security hole in the credit card system is the users. I flipped out at one of our vendors when they STORED my credit card number in their database, and just went ahead an charged it next time I was in the store. People will gladly give their credit card number over the phone to a shady pizza shop, just to get a 15 dollar pizza delivered to their door. We could build the most secure credit card system in the world, but the problem is that it has to be simple enough for idiots to use.
First and foremost, bittorrent, and NNTP are useful for exchanging much more than just pirated materials.
However, that is beside the point. Copyright laws ARE being violated on a massive scale; larger than anything the drafters of the law could have imagined. Unfortunately for the citizens that have to abide by these laws, they are very outdated, and are being abused by the entities for whose protection they were intended. These laws need amending, and quickly, or we are going to see the disappearance of some very large, and very profitable, American companies. What the copyright holders have yet to understand is that open digital distribution is something that should be embraced, not feared. The methods used by large media distribution firms in the past are outdated, and irrelevant in contemporary society. Previously, huge amounts of money were spent promoting artists and getting their work into the heads of the consumer. The energy and money that was previously spent on advertising is no longer necessary. The fact is that people, especially those in positions of power, fear change. There is a change happening right now in the world of media and the companies previously responsible for its promotion are seeing a change in their roles.
Furthermore, it is not the responsibility Government to censor communication between its citizens. Doing so is vastly overstepping what would be considered reasonable by any member of almost all contemporary societies. Communication is the issue here, not copyright law. Copyright law is simply the mechanism by which the controlling bodies of the world are taking personal privacy away from their citizens. Previously, telecommunications firms were not to be held responsible for the interactions that happened on their networks. They were a passive participant in any exchange that they facilitated. Recently, laws have been proposed, and is some cases implemented, which would strip these firms of their immunity. The places the irrational burden of censoring an overwhelmingly large amount of interactions on entities that are not equipped to do so. The only viable option for these previously immune bodies is to allow members of government do the censoring for them.
This is absolutely unacceptable. Governments have placed irrational requirements on telecommunications companies, leaving them with once choice: allow the government to control their privately owned networks.
Slashdot Mirror
They're a BUSINESS, not the saviors of the planet.
They have a duty to their stockholders to maximize their profits.
If anybody starts a revolution with the music industry, it certainly won't be apple. More than likely it will something like last.fm, imeem.com or the pandora project.
Techincally, an organ transplant IS cancer.
I've actually had a friend tell me that he thought it was okay that people vote without knowing anything about any of the candidates because "its not THAT many votes, man"....
Voting seems like such an abstract, far-away thing to most people that it doesn't feel like it matters.
Slot machines, however, offer instant gratification (or loss of money). Its a more DIRECT, this-is-happening-to-me-right-now feeling.
Its a double-edged sword that it has become fashionable to hate the [current] government. While you've got more people out there talking about politics, very VERY few of them actually KNOW what they're talking about. All thats happened is somebody turned up the gain; now we have to deal with way more noise than signal. So while you would hope that this current trend would increase public awareness of this sort of thing, it doesn't.
Or activex controls that are a requirement that want to be able to write into the
WTF!?! developers.
Please, any devs. reading this. Users have a home directory for a reason, put things IN THERE!
Here you go.
This doesn't prompt you (that would be annoying) but prevents any flash from playing until you click an icon to enable it.
#1 best FF extension out there in my opinion.
Flash is standard. In this case "standard" is being used as an adjective, not a noun. As in "this new dodge viper comes with a stearing wheel; standard"
As far as CPU goes. Yes, flash requires more CPU than just a raw video stream does. I think that this goes without saying.
Flash is great because its standard.
Nearly every graphics based browser out there can (and does) support flash. This is great because of the huge online video craze going on right now. Do you remember the days of some websites using quicktime, others using real player, some using windows media, some just streaming MPGs etc? Have you ever tried getting mplayer to actually PLAY all of those things in your browser?
Streaming video (and audio) using flash is great because it just works.
Is there only ONE guy that develops the software for the slots?
Admittedly, I've never worked any slot machine projects before, but I would imagine that the function that goes:
if(key1, key2, key3, key4):
jackpot()
would be kindof....obvious.
Anybody wanna shed some insight on how these things are written? Are there some open source slot machines i can poke through somewhere?
This is one of my favorite things I've seen google do so far.
It really is neat to see how google has gone from a company that indexes web pages, to a company that stores and indexes your email, to a company that stores and indexes maps of the world, to a company that will literally tell you ANY available information about an area on the map.
As much as the privacy advocates are going to hate this (and please, somebody tell me WHY without using a slippery slope argument), this is really where I would like to see mapping go. Maps hadn't really improved in the past couple of hundred years, but now we're starting to see just what mapping can do.
Should be an exciting next few years.
Most small businesses need the highspeed connection for credit cards, edi, etc... there's really nothing other than DSL (way too fast) or dial up (far too little) for them anyway. They're probably paying a minimum of $120 per month for what we get for $40 at home.... so they might as well offer it to clients. They're not running $50 routers... or shouldn't be. They should be running netopia or low-end cisco boxes ($200-$500) that split the connection to their private network and the public network at the incomming box to protect their register networks... PCI probably demands it. So why can't they get a separate cable connection for 50 bucks a month, and run that on a 50 dollar best buy AP?
Running your credit card machines and your public wifi over the same link sounds like a bad idea.
I guess if you tried to over complicate things, you could get the price higher than $50 a month, but I don't see why you would do that.
Places that DON'T have free wifi are finding themselves with a very easy decision:
either get with the times, or lose business.
It is assumed that a coffee shop will have wifi, seeing it at a restaurant is becoming more and more commonplace, and seeing it at an airport is starting to be expected.
Does he mean non FREE wifi?
This is something that has always baffled me. A really fast cable connection costs about 50 bucks a month (at least thats what I pay for 8down 2up in Phoenix)....a wireless AP costs anywhere from $20-100 depending on how much bullshit you eat from the idiot working at best buy.
How can you not justify a $50 a month expense, and a $50 initial cost?
The company that you're breaking into hired your firm to test their security.
Terrorism is the new communism. Don't let the actual definition get in the way of people using this to incite fear.
What we're talking about there is Cold war V2.0 with China.
There is no shortage of people who theorize that Russia at one point might have been able to pull of some crazy hack that disabled all of our electronics using Tesla tech; what we're talking about here is an ACTUAL ability for China to do it.
The real solution to this problem is to bring manufacturing back to the United States.
Unfortunately this requires more regulation on American Companies.
You should go into the venture capital business. Oh, silly me, for some reason I thought we were talking about the iPhone being used as a business tool.
So its going to be popular with execs, huh? You might want to tell apple that they can stop worrying, then.
Have you thought about going into the fortune telling business?
The iphone DOESN'T look look like it will be a future winner. Don't get me wrong, they've got a great product, but they are going to have a tough time venturing outside of the teenage "OMG ITS SO CUTE" market with this.
IF and ONLY if they had actually included a full qwerty keyboard with this would they have had a shot. I can type on my blackberry (7520, and nextel can have it when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers) in the dark, without looking at it, with one hand.
Its quick, its very VERY durable, and, most importantly, it LOOKS like a business tool.
Maybe in the tech business world this doesn't matter (and in that market, the iphone might do really well), but in a world where some Execs still feel funny about using computers (I can think of one guy, a multi-billionaire, who uses his computer for nothing other than playing freecell while he's doing deals over the phone, and insisted on a teletype messaging system in his office), the ability to watch youtube videos or have a really shiny thing clipped to your belt really doesn't have that much appeal.
HAHA EPIC = FAIL
I live in Old Town Scottsdale (a phoenix suburb with lots of shops and bars and stuff that you can actually *WALK* to) so i do a lot of walking around intersections and stuff. All of the intersections have those red light cameras on them, and there is almost ALWAYS a photo radar van parked somewhere around old town.
When people see these things, they stop paying attention to anything that is going on around them EXCEPT for the van/camera/light.
What is more dangerous?
Somebody running a red light by a half a second or so, or somebody stomping down on their Huge lifted escalade (uhg..) to try and speed up and make it through the yellow light without getting a ticket.
Tempe (another suburb, home to ASU) is even WORSE. They recently installed stationary cameras on Rural(scottsdale rd) just north of University. Anybody from this area knows that this is one of the busiest areas in tempe (traffic wise). It is the main route into and out of ASU.
Well, when you're in thick traffic, driving 50mph, and suddenly the person who is just in town visiting sees the camera and slams on the brakes all the way down to 20mph without any warning (except brakelights) it causes accidents.
Lots of them.
When did we get to vote on this matter?
And who the hell voted FOR it?
I'm watching you right now. So it was YOU who made this video!
Click
Calm down.
Yes, obviously I DO work in a much smaller environment than I could. But guess what? I LOVE my job, I make more money than the VAST majority of people that work in my field, I get to work my own hours, I get to work on the projects that I WANT to work on, and if somebody tries to implement something stupid, I can change it.
Wanna know why?
Because I am the type of person that DOES take the time to sit down with users and explain WHY things are the way they are (or, if necessary, schedule a training meeting with their department heads and allow the knowledge to trickle down). Every person in the company (we're small, only about 220 employees) has my cell phone number and email address written on a paper that I gave them explaining why some common problems will occur, and how to fix them. The times that I HAVE been called at 3:00am (which is VERY VERY rare...training can go a LONG way) I am very polite to the person on the other end of the line.
Companies notice things like this.
Appearantly you work in a job that you hate, where you probably get no recognition for anything that you do (if you are allowed to do anything other than what is written in your, appearantly sacred, employee handbooks).
My suggestion to you would be to increase your skillset, and go find another job.
Also, practice interacting with other people other than what you can do online. This is absolutely the NUMBER ONE thing that you can do that will increase your pay/responsibility.
Good luck.
Wow, this portion of my post was really just a footnote, but everybody seems to be responding to it...so I'll bite.
Maybe most admins are really detached from their users and never talk to them/hate them/think they're stupid/whatever, but I'm not.
I TALK to the users, and TRAIN them on WHY they need to choose a good password. If they want to create a new one, and have it never change, they can come and talk to me. I'll sit there and help them remember it for a few minutes, explain WHY they aren't supposed to write it on a post-it note, and what will happen if they do (somebody could log into their account and they will be liable for it), etc.
Are most admins really that arrogant? OMG STUPID USERS THAT JUST DON"T GET IT!!! LOLZ IF ONLY THEY WERE AS SMART AS ME!!! HAHAHAHAHA
Seriously guys, get a life.
This is not a good thing.
How many of these devices are going to have the equivalent "1111" or "1234" or "8520" (the center of the keypad that users think is just OH so clever) as the password?
At least if the person is smart enough to know that they NEED encryption on their disk and they don't have it, they'll [hopefully] be smart enough not to just leave the thing laying around.
With this thing, it gives users a false sense of security...now they don't NEED to worry about losing the thing because "Oh, its ENCRYPTED!"
No amount of hardware will EVER replace proper training.
Example:
At first, we used a pretty strict password policy at work...+8 characters, numbers, symbols, capitols etc. all required. YOu have to change your password every month.
This is a security DISASTER! Everybody will set their password to like "jason1!" the first month, then "jason2@" the next month", then "jason3#" the next month and so on. Finally I changed the policy. Now a user can request a password that never changes, so long as it meets *MY* requirements...
The huge security hole in the credit card system is the users. I flipped out at one of our vendors when they STORED my credit card number in their database, and just went ahead an charged it next time I was in the store.
People will gladly give their credit card number over the phone to a shady pizza shop, just to get a 15 dollar pizza delivered to their door.
We could build the most secure credit card system in the world, but the problem is that it has to be simple enough for idiots to use.
Sure, you're trolling, but I'll bite.
First and foremost, bittorrent, and NNTP are useful for exchanging much more than just pirated materials.
However, that is beside the point. Copyright laws ARE being violated on a massive scale; larger than anything the drafters of the law could have imagined. Unfortunately for the citizens that have to abide by these laws, they are very outdated, and are being abused by the entities for whose protection they were intended. These laws need amending, and quickly, or we are going to see the disappearance of some very large, and very profitable, American companies. What the copyright holders have yet to understand is that open digital distribution is something that should be embraced, not feared. The methods used by large media distribution firms in the past are outdated, and irrelevant in contemporary society. Previously, huge amounts of money were spent promoting artists and getting their work into the heads of the consumer. The energy and money that was previously spent on advertising is no longer necessary.
The fact is that people, especially those in positions of power, fear change. There is a change happening right now in the world of media and the companies previously responsible for its promotion are seeing a change in their roles.
Furthermore, it is not the responsibility Government to censor communication between its citizens. Doing so is vastly overstepping what would be considered reasonable by any member of almost all contemporary societies.
Communication is the issue here, not copyright law. Copyright law is simply the mechanism by which the controlling bodies of the world are taking personal privacy away from their citizens. Previously, telecommunications firms were not to be held responsible for the interactions that happened on their networks. They were a passive participant in any exchange that they facilitated. Recently, laws have been proposed, and is some cases implemented, which would strip these firms of their immunity. The places the irrational burden of censoring an overwhelmingly large amount of interactions on entities that are not equipped to do so. The only viable option for these previously immune bodies is to allow members of government do the censoring for them.
This is absolutely unacceptable. Governments have placed irrational requirements on telecommunications companies, leaving them with once choice: allow the government to control their privately owned networks.
Which, you know, freaking sucks man!
You assume anybody watching clips on a DVD wants to do so linearly. What if i want episode 1 of family guy from season 6, then episode 8?