It's the cutting edge of our understanding of how MBHs work, and _that_ understanding in turn depends on a quite large, quite solid foundation of math and physics.
So please, this isn't speculation, it's SCIENCE.
I thought science is when you confirm your theories by experimentation. I didn't know we've had the chance to confirm the precise mechanics of black holes via experimental observation.
At that stage, calling it "solid foundation" and deflecting doubts sounds to me more like religion, and not science.
The main lesson of science is to be humble, all scientific models are "incorrect" in the long term. While I don't find the LHC is a threat, the outcome of its tests will very likely surprise both sides of this discussion.
The vulnerability is not new at all. It's been known for probably coupe of years now. If a site accepts file uploads, in some cases even if simply displays user submitted data like *comments*, a malicious user may upload content that contains a policy XML snippet (the resulting file doesn't have to start with the snippet as well due to some specific of how the content is parsed). Flash can be pointed to that snippet and it will blindly accept it as the security policy for that domain/folder.
The security implications are that even if the site doesn't use Flash itself, a user opening a third party site with Flash could read from the site with the faulty policy.
Say Facebook is vulnerable to this problem (likely it is), and you're logged in. Opening another site will allow Flash on that third party site to read your Facebook details, as it has access to anything you do.
This problem was introduced sometimes Flash 7-8 (I forget) when an ability was added for Flash to read policy files from a custom URL. Prios to that, the only valid location was www.example.com/crossdomain.xml, which is, of course far simpler to lock down and secure. The bottom line is, they can fix this in a number of ways, but not in a backwards compatible manner. For the moment they simply seems to have their bets that people don't care enough about this problem to warrant the effort.
It's great how fast it is, but it also eats ridiculous amount of RAM. It easily can take 100MB per tab on popular sites.
It's hard to notice on machines with 3GB RAM or more, but after I moved some people with more modest configurations from Firefox to Chrome, they started experiencing heavy swapping and constant PC slowdowns. And as we know, when your PC is swapping, any other performance optimization pales in comparison.
Another major blow for Chrome is its plugin performance. Visiting a site with Flash is sure to kill any decent performance you're experiencing with Chrome, never mind your CPU or RAM. Even sites like YouTube, where other browsers have zero problems.
What they mean is, all versions of Firefox put together (2, 3, 3.5) have surpassed one version of Internet Explorer (6), the oldest one. If you look only at oldest versions, only newer versions, or all versions together, IE has a solid lead over Firefox in all three categories. I'm not sure about the significance of this, as IE6 being at over 23% share, most sites still to support it for the foreseeable future.
[reposting since Slashdot damaged the previous post]
Because they have enough wealth and power to hire one of the smartest public relations firms on the planet. Waggener Edstrom is the same firm in charge of the Fox Channels. If there's any one thing they know how to do, it's identify a market and then lock down that market forever and ever and sell them whatever the hell 'truth' they feel like selling.
Just a little remark: there's no company called the "Fox Channels". The Fox brand is spread over dozens of semi-independent companies of News Corp., which have little relation to each other in terms of their management and PR. Saying "Fox Something" when you deal with huge corporations is simply useless. Waggener Edstrom has been doing some work for "Fox International Channels" in particular, which are doing work broadcasting and producing shows for public outside USA.
What is the company Microsoft previously worked with? Crispin Porter + Boguski, also considered one of the "smartest marketing firms on the planet", who have done work for Burger King, Coca Cola, American Express, Domino's and more. And now they have Microsoft on their portfolio thanks to their work few months back, which was poorly received, and mostly forgotten by now, with frequent strategy shifts, awkward moments and prematurely ending projects and relationships. This is how these "big smart marketing companies" build portfolio and you better get used to being tricked by their statements when "googling a little" as you say you do.
As for these party ads, I enjoy how you retroactively try to explain Microsoft's decisions, but their behavior is very typical. As any person/company with vast resources, they believe the fastest and safest way to success is simply to find and hire the "top" people for lots of money. Even if the people involved in this decision knew any better, they know that getting the "top companies" is simply a less risky decision, and risk is definitely a factor when your job is on the line.
To praphrase a sentence, "no one was fired for hiring [top company in some field]". It's also one reason why people with such vast resources frequently arrive at subpar results, because money doesn't translate into success as easily. Case in point:
Like many tech PR firms, WaggEd also monitors religiously Twitter trends involving its biggest client. On March 11, WaggEd went beyond simply monitoring tweets: It introduced a beta version of a software tool for monitoring and analyzing them.
Do they sound stupid now?
I'm missing your point. Even I have written a tool for analyzing tweets, as I bet anyone who toyed with Twitter's API. Can I get lots of money now? All I get out of the above is that you're easily impressed by buzz-words. The amount of Second Life, Twitter and Facebook apps a marketing company has may have surprisingly little to do with how good they are at making advertising campaigns.
Not to mention Twitter doesn't accurately reflect the kind of crowd Microsoft makes the bulk of their money with, which is enterprise and OEM deployment. Twitter is predominantly teens with too much time on their hands. Is this your example of a PR company can "identify a market and then lock down that market forever".?
As for the psycho-babble reasons you defend the awkwardness of the ad, I have to admit, bravo. If you ever work in a marketing/PR company like Waggener Edstrom, this is exactly the kind of babble you need to sell services to clueless management. And with this insight, now you know why big companies have crappy ads: because the marketing companies they use don't need to be really good at selling products to end-users, they mostly need to be good at selling service to management.
As for you, coming here and being indignant about why Slashdot discusses Microsoft's ads is utterly pointless. This is an echo chamber full of people who are critical of Microsoft. Echo chambers have this property of seemingly
Because they have enough wealth and power to hire one of the smartest public relations firms on the planet. Waggener Edstrom is the same firm in charge of the Fox Channels. If there's any one thing they know how to do, it's identify a market and then lock down that market forever and ever and sell them whatever the hell 'truth' they feel like selling.
Just a little remark: there's no company called the "Fox Channels". The Fox brand is spread over dozens of semi-independent companies of News Corp., which have little relation to each other in terms of their management and PR. Saying "Fox Something" when you deal with huge corporations is simply information the least. Waggener Edstrom has been doing some work for "Fox International Channels" in particular.
What is the company Microsoft they previously worked with? Crispin Porter + Boguski, also considered one of the "smartest marketing firms on the planet", who have done work for Burger Kind, Coca Cola, AmEx, Domino's and more. And now they have Microsoft on their portfolio thanks to their work few months back, which was poorly received, and mostly forgotten by now, with frequent strategy shifts, awkward moments and prematurely ending projects and relationships. This is how these "big smart marketing companies" build portfolio and you better get used to being tricked by their statements when googling around as you claim you do.
As for these party ads, I enjoy how you retroactively try to explain Microsoft's decisions, but their behavior is very typical. As any person/company with vast resources, they believe the fastest and safest way to success is simply to find and hire the "top" people for lots of money. Even if the people involved in this decision knew any better, they know that getting the "top companies" is simply a less risky decision, and risk is definitely a factor when your job is on the line.
To praphrase a sentence, "no one was fired for hiring [top company in some field]". It's also one reason why people with such vast resources frequently arrive at subpar results, because money doesn't translate into success as easily. Case in point:
Like many tech PR firms, WaggEd also monitors religiously Twitter trends involving its biggest client. On March 11, WaggEd went beyond simply monitoring tweets: It introduced a beta version of a software tool for monitoring and analyzing them.
Do they sound stupid now?
The other question is what is the performance hit of using the Frame plug-in instead of running the browser natively.
Well let me give you a hint: the native browser renderer is a plug-in itself (well known as mshtml.dll).
The actual other question is, what is the point of this plug-in in reality. People who use IE can install Chrome today already. Those who keep IE mostly do it for two reasons: 1) it's a corporate policy and their business apps need it, and 2) they don't know any better. So the frame addresses none of those two segments adequately, since Google Frame is not 100% compatible with the standard MSIE stack, and requires people to deliberately install something (at which point they could as well install Firefox or Chrome itself).
The only dividents to be had from this project appear to be political. Last time some competition showed up for IE, Microsoft put vast resources in order to catch up and create IE7 and 8. The prospect that their competitors will take over IE piece by piece via parasitic plug-ins must seem even scarier from their point of view.
Oh I like that, simple and easy to follow. Or is it. Don't make it a plug-in, make it standalone. This way you only depend on the whims of those who provide your development tools, libraries, operating system and in some cases, hardware devices.
I wasn't a big fan of Skype Extras, but I specifically preferred Skype for its ability to record calls (first informing the other side), when discussing technical specifications and products, so I can go back to it and take more detailed notes.
Skype may be trying to close Pandora's box here. There are already lots of people stuck at version 3 of their client since version 4 did a very poor redesign of the UI and dropped desirable features. If you would tell your users "and with the next version we drop Extras", they'll simply not upgrade, ever.
While the X-51 looks like a large rocket now, its applications could change the way aircraft or spaceships are designed, fly into space, support reconnaissance missions and handle long-distance flight operations.
The Concorde flew at 2.2 Mach and in order to achieve this, it ended up too expensive to create, manufacture and maintain. It would be awkward to see airlines adopt airplanes which are more expensive to fly than current models. The trend is towards less fuel usage, and cheaper flight, in fact, at the expense of speed at times. On the other hand I'm happy to see that US is working heavily on creating a replacement for F-22, an insanely expensive jet with a nearly 30 year history that was barely ever used for something at all, before being discontinued:P...
[...] insecure mail api provided by PHP. Their API is more than happy to let you add linefeeds in the "From" or "To" parameters and thus let you add extra headers (say BCC). The reason it was my fault was for using PHP in the first place!
There is no "From" parameter. It's called additional_headers which, yes, lets you include one or more raw headers, separated by newlines. There are plenty of higher-level API-s for PHP, but you chose to pass headers to the the raw API without validating. Have you heard this one: "a poor craftsman blames his tools"?
More control for one. Flash is essentially a self contained program running in your browser. HTML5 will allow things like audio volume per tab, or per domain, more interaction between the page itself, the content, and the user.
The fact it's self-contained doesn't mean it's isolated from the page. It's in fact a benefit, because it quickly becomes a burden to serve your app as a hundred of tiny images and js files. The "minification" and "sprite" techniques the community is forced to use in JS/HTML/CSS apps, are tedious, limited and just a poor-man's compilation technique, a sign that in practice a compressed one-off-download container is the better choice for web apps.
There is also fast two-way connection between JS and Flash that works in all browsers today. Anything the browser provides as settings and per-tab controls and so on, which is accessible to JavaScript/DOM, is accessible to Flash as well. As an example of this feature in action, you can see the HTML5 features like canvas and SVG implemented transparently via Flash. You can also use most of the essential Flash features directly from JavaScript with libraries like Aflax.
Would you care to elaborate what is in that demo that Flash can't easily top today. I see scalable rotatable rectangles with transluccent video in them. Nothing Flash couldn't do few years ago. Today, in Flash you can also map videos like that on waving flags in 3D space or have full-blown alpha mask for dynamic compositing, if you wish. I shouldn't need to mention also that Flash provides consistent codec support (including H264/AAC) on all platforms and browsers in turns on, today. All this while even non-MS browser makers can't agree on a common codec to use (let alone Microsoft joining them any time soon).
All in all, most arguments against Flash I've seen, are arguments out of ignorance and bias. I would be the first to call out a poor use of Flash when I see one, but it works the other way too. In the end, can't we have both instead of either? Who stands to win by "eliminating" either option when they both fill different, though partially overlapping roles?
The summary is misleading. The EU hasn't told Microsoft to do anything. They are still investigating but Microsoft decided to remove IE perhaps in the hope that the EU will be pressured into asking them to do that. But so far the EU has not asked them to do anything.
You are confusing the lack of legal verdict with whether they said anything or not. The position of the EU commission is quite clear, let me quote it for you:
The European Commission (EC) has reacted swiftly to Microsoft's intention to offer some versions of the upcoming Windows 7 operating system without Internet Explorer (IE).
"The Commission had suggested to Microsoft that consumers be provided with a choice of web browsers. Instead, Microsoft has apparently decided to supply retail consumers with a version of Windows without a web browser at all," the EC said in a statement. "Rather than more choice, Microsoft seems to have chosen to provide less."
The Commission cited an alternative option of shipping Windows 7 with a choice of different web browsers presented through a 'ballot screen', from where users could choose and easily install their preferred browser.
Because Microsoft probably has close to 90% of the consumer PC market whereas Apple and various Linux distributions account for the remaining 10%. Hell, 10% may be overly generous.
So, your point is, it's ok, say, to steal a purse, as long as you don't have a monopoly on the purse theft market.
It's either an abuse of position, or it isn't. Defining arbitrary categories such as "consumer PC" and going after the people who make the ecosystem happen is just an excuse for going after the most lucrative targets. If a Macintosh user is not allowed to change Safari's search engine, since Apple locked it down, how does it make it any better for this user that the Windows user accross the office, can change it.
Because the EU didn't tell them to remove IE, they only told them to offer other browsers to be installed during setup.
Saying "only" doesn't make that statement any less absurd. How is the selection for these browsers to be made? Because you know the moment Microsoft announces they're to put "select few" browsers in Windows 7, everyone will want theirs in.
Opera says "top 5" browsers, but picking browsers by market share, in order to promote less popular competitors results in a bitter irony. Not to mention the magical number "5" comes from Opera being 5-th in desktop browser market share. If it was "top 3" they wouldn't even be in that list, depriving them of the purpose of their own lawsuit. Have you seen what YouTube says to IE6 users? Please upgrade to a modern browser: Chrome, IE8, Firefox. Opera's nowhere in that list. Should they sue YouTube?
What the EU commission wants from Microsoft is a solution that can't be carried out in any sensible manner. But maybe that's exactly what they want, have you seen what EU charges Microsoft for failing to abide? To paraphrase another euphemism, let's call it "surprise tax";)
I'm not particularly surprised at what Apple's doing with Palm, but rather surprised that the top people at Palm believe they stand a chance. Integration is Apple's bread and butter, and Apple would rather burn in flames than let that advantage be lost (again).
Jon Rubinstein, COO of Palm, and former Apple iPod VC, has an axe to grind with Apple and Steve Jobs in particular. So what he thought he'd do is join Palm and begin series of unpolished and, frankly, strange attempts to copy Apple's act, including the way they design and market devices, the way they build their presentations, and also co-opting selectively parts of their ecosystem (iTunes sync) without any standing agreement between both companies.
It's a pity for the engineering and design talent behind Palm's Pre, that their top product is being reduced to an iPhone knock-off, because someone high up has scores to set straight. Hopefully, they'll realize that differentiating and creating your niche is the winning strategy, and not cheap attempts at copying and one-upping the market leader.
You have a good point, but are you sure web sites are actually legally entitled to inspect what people are paying them to put on their servers?
If you read the small print in the ToS you'll see they entitle themselves to doing anything they could imagine. Even if it was not in the ToS, adding it in there is trivial.
The reason they don't do it is one of pure economy. Integrating and running antivirus programs daily on a server is not free. It slows down the server (so they can pack less sites per server), it means license/support contracts (even if the basic software is free), means the staff spending time on integrating and supporting this feature.
At the same time, browser exploits are simply small static files that don't affect or abuse the server in question in any significant way. If they scan, it would be just to protect the site visitors, which are not a party that matters to web host providers. So, unless site owners decide they would rather take their business with a host who scans, the hosts have no interest to implement this.
Anyone too lazy to code nice neat xhtml shouldn't be allowed to create web pages.
You know, I'm not a fan of bad-formed code, and I'm not religious. But when I read statements like yours, I make the sign of the cross and start praying we don't come to this;)
If you have any confusion about it at this point, the value of the web was never in the markup. It's in the content the markup describes. Strict in what you send, liberal in what you accept, I suppose you've heard that one:)
There's a huge codebase out there that's using PHP against MySQL, and using PHP's original ereg regex syntax instead of the Perl-wannabe stuff. What are they thinking, when they set out to break this?
Nothing is broken. Ereg is moved to the 'official' extension pack called PECL, which you can use for full backwards compatibility. At the same time the community has been warning not to use the ereg functions for the past at least 3-4 years, if not more, citing worse performance, worse featureset, and the possibility of PCRE replacing it at some point in the future.
Why do people still live there again? Seriously though, I wonder what the morale of people who live there is like? Do they all hate it but have nowhere else to go, or are they just culturally complacent with their rights being trampled on?
I've thought about that several times for USA during the Bush years and all the abuse happening post 9/11. But then I realized: who the heck am I to tell someone else how to live their life? And I'd advise you do the same:)
That's it? That's all it takes to bring Twitter to its knees? A measily 18 tweets per second? Do they manually transcribe the messages after having read that an air gap was the most effective security you could get? Or is the article plain wrong.
What do you think:)? For the record, when the MJ news was at its peak, the volume was more like 1000+ tweets per second on Michael Jackson alone, so I have no idea how the article got those numbers.
While this seems like an opinion that runs counter to many tenants slashdotters hold dear, I think we should at least consider it.
Ok, I'm willing to consider it for a moment, but it's hard to pull a straight line between what is allowed and not allowed without destroying much of the value the web represents today.
In terms of search engines linking and quoting/paraphrasing copyrighted content, consent is already arranged by the robots.txt configuration. Most search engines, including the major players respect that configuration which anyone can adjust for his site, and also respect additional attributes like "nofollow", "noarchive", "noindex", "nosnippet" that will stop the spiders from indexing or caching parts, or all of a website.
In terms of people linking from a particular place, the problem can be partially solved with technology since a site knows where the link came from (the Referrer header, which although not 100% reliable, as if anything is, works in all popular browsers).
Now, stopping people from manually quoting/paraphrasing without attribution online... very hard issue. Since it goes against the simple provisions of fair use, those will need to be adjusted, let's assume for a moment there are. Big media will sign contracts with each other and quote and paraphrase each other as agreed, so that's ok.
However, what about little players and personal speech? Can nytimes.com give an "explicit consent" to every single of millions of users who want to talk or link to it somewhere on the web. Or what about me paraphrasing and linking to a nytimes.com article on IRC, web chat, or an Instant Messenger, and then this content showing up somewhere on an IRC indexer web site. Will I be liable? Will the indexing site be liable? Where do sites like Twitter sit in this picture. Are they a publishing platform or a personal speech communication platform?
As you see, this requires a very hard to define, strict legal distinction between personal speech online and publishing online. At the current state of the web, the genie is out of the bottle and I don't think such distinction is possible at all; you can't legislate one without affecting the other.
What will happen instead, is we'll see the industry change and adapt to the status quo the web has forced upon it, as we're already witnessing today. It maybe for the better, maybe for the worse, we can't really know before things settle down. But putting limitation on links and quoting won't be the solution everyone's looking for.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the cutting edge of our understanding of how MBHs work, and _that_ understanding in turn depends on a quite large, quite solid foundation of math and physics.
So please, this isn't speculation, it's SCIENCE.
I thought science is when you confirm your theories by experimentation. I didn't know we've had the chance to confirm the precise mechanics of black holes via experimental observation.
At that stage, calling it "solid foundation" and deflecting doubts sounds to me more like religion, and not science.
The main lesson of science is to be humble, all scientific models are "incorrect" in the long term. While I don't find the LHC is a threat, the outcome of its tests will very likely surprise both sides of this discussion.
The vulnerability is not new at all. It's been known for probably coupe of years now. If a site accepts file uploads, in some cases even if simply displays user submitted data like *comments*, a malicious user may upload content that contains a policy XML snippet (the resulting file doesn't have to start with the snippet as well due to some specific of how the content is parsed). Flash can be pointed to that snippet and it will blindly accept it as the security policy for that domain/folder.
The security implications are that even if the site doesn't use Flash itself, a user opening a third party site with Flash could read from the site with the faulty policy.
Say Facebook is vulnerable to this problem (likely it is), and you're logged in. Opening another site will allow Flash on that third party site to read your Facebook details, as it has access to anything you do.
This problem was introduced sometimes Flash 7-8 (I forget) when an ability was added for Flash to read policy files from a custom URL. Prios to that, the only valid location was www.example.com/crossdomain.xml, which is, of course far simpler to lock down and secure. The bottom line is, they can fix this in a number of ways, but not in a backwards compatible manner. For the moment they simply seems to have their bets that people don't care enough about this problem to warrant the effort.
It's great how fast it is, but it also eats ridiculous amount of RAM. It easily can take 100MB per tab on popular sites.
It's hard to notice on machines with 3GB RAM or more, but after I moved some people with more modest configurations from Firefox to Chrome, they started experiencing heavy swapping and constant PC slowdowns. And as we know, when your PC is swapping, any other performance optimization pales in comparison.
Another major blow for Chrome is its plugin performance. Visiting a site with Flash is sure to kill any decent performance you're experiencing with Chrome, never mind your CPU or RAM. Even sites like YouTube, where other browsers have zero problems.
What they mean is, all versions of Firefox put together (2, 3, 3.5) have surpassed one version of Internet Explorer (6), the oldest one. If you look only at oldest versions, only newer versions, or all versions together, IE has a solid lead over Firefox in all three categories. I'm not sure about the significance of this, as IE6 being at over 23% share, most sites still to support it for the foreseeable future.
So malware is Microsoft's fault for not patching pirated machines? Or did I miss something...
They don't prevent patching of pirated machines. People disable it because they worry of disactivation.
[reposting since Slashdot damaged the previous post]
Because they have enough wealth and power to hire one of the smartest public relations firms on the planet. Waggener Edstrom is the same firm in charge of the Fox Channels. If there's any one thing they know how to do, it's identify a market and then lock down that market forever and ever and sell them whatever the hell 'truth' they feel like selling.
Just a little remark: there's no company called the "Fox Channels". The Fox brand is spread over dozens of semi-independent companies of News Corp., which have little relation to each other in terms of their management and PR. Saying "Fox Something" when you deal with huge corporations is simply useless. Waggener Edstrom has been doing some work for "Fox International Channels" in particular, which are doing work broadcasting and producing shows for public outside USA.
What is the company Microsoft previously worked with? Crispin Porter + Boguski, also considered one of the "smartest marketing firms on the planet", who have done work for Burger King, Coca Cola, American Express, Domino's and more. And now they have Microsoft on their portfolio thanks to their work few months back, which was poorly received, and mostly forgotten by now, with frequent strategy shifts, awkward moments and prematurely ending projects and relationships. This is how these "big smart marketing companies" build portfolio and you better get used to being tricked by their statements when "googling a little" as you say you do.
As for these party ads, I enjoy how you retroactively try to explain Microsoft's decisions, but their behavior is very typical. As any person/company with vast resources, they believe the fastest and safest way to success is simply to find and hire the "top" people for lots of money. Even if the people involved in this decision knew any better, they know that getting the "top companies" is simply a less risky decision, and risk is definitely a factor when your job is on the line.
To praphrase a sentence, "no one was fired for hiring [top company in some field]". It's also one reason why people with such vast resources frequently arrive at subpar results, because money doesn't translate into success as easily. Case in point:
Like many tech PR firms, WaggEd also monitors religiously Twitter trends involving its biggest client. On March 11, WaggEd went beyond simply monitoring tweets: It introduced a beta version of a software tool for monitoring and analyzing them. Do they sound stupid now?
I'm missing your point. Even I have written a tool for analyzing tweets, as I bet anyone who toyed with Twitter's API. Can I get lots of money now? All I get out of the above is that you're easily impressed by buzz-words. The amount of Second Life, Twitter and Facebook apps a marketing company has may have surprisingly little to do with how good they are at making advertising campaigns.
Not to mention Twitter doesn't accurately reflect the kind of crowd Microsoft makes the bulk of their money with, which is enterprise and OEM deployment. Twitter is predominantly teens with too much time on their hands. Is this your example of a PR company can "identify a market and then lock down that market forever".?
As for the psycho-babble reasons you defend the awkwardness of the ad, I have to admit, bravo. If you ever work in a marketing/PR company like Waggener Edstrom, this is exactly the kind of babble you need to sell services to clueless management. And with this insight, now you know why big companies have crappy ads: because the marketing companies they use don't need to be really good at selling products to end-users, they mostly need to be good at selling service to management.
As for you, coming here and being indignant about why Slashdot discusses Microsoft's ads is utterly pointless. This is an echo chamber full of people who are critical of Microsoft. Echo chambers have this property of seemingly
Because they have enough wealth and power to hire one of the smartest public relations firms on the planet. Waggener Edstrom is the same firm in charge of the Fox Channels. If there's any one thing they know how to do, it's identify a market and then lock down that market forever and ever and sell them whatever the hell 'truth' they feel like selling.
Just a little remark: there's no company called the "Fox Channels". The Fox brand is spread over dozens of semi-independent companies of News Corp., which have little relation to each other in terms of their management and PR. Saying "Fox Something" when you deal with huge corporations is simply information the least. Waggener Edstrom has been doing some work for "Fox International Channels" in particular.
What is the company Microsoft they previously worked with? Crispin Porter + Boguski, also considered one of the "smartest marketing firms on the planet", who have done work for Burger Kind, Coca Cola, AmEx, Domino's and more. And now they have Microsoft on their portfolio thanks to their work few months back, which was poorly received, and mostly forgotten by now, with frequent strategy shifts, awkward moments and prematurely ending projects and relationships. This is how these "big smart marketing companies" build portfolio and you better get used to being tricked by their statements when googling around as you claim you do.
As for these party ads, I enjoy how you retroactively try to explain Microsoft's decisions, but their behavior is very typical. As any person/company with vast resources, they believe the fastest and safest way to success is simply to find and hire the "top" people for lots of money. Even if the people involved in this decision knew any better, they know that getting the "top companies" is simply a less risky decision, and risk is definitely a factor when your job is on the line.
To praphrase a sentence, "no one was fired for hiring [top company in some field]". It's also one reason why people with such vast resources frequently arrive at subpar results, because money doesn't translate into success as easily. Case in point:
Like many tech PR firms, WaggEd also monitors religiously Twitter trends involving its biggest client. On March 11, WaggEd went beyond simply monitoring tweets: It introduced a beta version of a software tool for monitoring and analyzing them. Do they sound stupid now?
I'm missing your point. I/em%3
The other question is what is the performance hit of using the Frame plug-in instead of running the browser natively.
Well let me give you a hint: the native browser renderer is a plug-in itself (well known as mshtml.dll). The actual other question is, what is the point of this plug-in in reality. People who use IE can install Chrome today already. Those who keep IE mostly do it for two reasons: 1) it's a corporate policy and their business apps need it, and 2) they don't know any better. So the frame addresses none of those two segments adequately, since Google Frame is not 100% compatible with the standard MSIE stack, and requires people to deliberately install something (at which point they could as well install Firefox or Chrome itself). The only dividents to be had from this project appear to be political. Last time some competition showed up for IE, Microsoft put vast resources in order to catch up and create IE7 and 8. The prospect that their competitors will take over IE piece by piece via parasitic plug-ins must seem even scarier from their point of view.
never write a plug-in
Oh I like that, simple and easy to follow. Or is it. Don't make it a plug-in, make it standalone. This way you only depend on the whims of those who provide your development tools, libraries, operating system and in some cases, hardware devices.
I wasn't a big fan of Skype Extras, but I specifically preferred Skype for its ability to record calls (first informing the other side), when discussing technical specifications and products, so I can go back to it and take more detailed notes.
Skype may be trying to close Pandora's box here. There are already lots of people stuck at version 3 of their client since version 4 did a very poor redesign of the UI and dropped desirable features. If you would tell your users "and with the next version we drop Extras", they'll simply not upgrade, ever.
While the X-51 looks like a large rocket now, its applications could change the way aircraft or spaceships are designed, fly into space, support reconnaissance missions and handle long-distance flight operations.
The Concorde flew at 2.2 Mach and in order to achieve this, it ended up too expensive to create, manufacture and maintain. It would be awkward to see airlines adopt airplanes which are more expensive to fly than current models. The trend is towards less fuel usage, and cheaper flight, in fact, at the expense of speed at times. On the other hand I'm happy to see that US is working heavily on creating a replacement for F-22, an insanely expensive jet with a nearly 30 year history that was barely ever used for something at all, before being discontinued :P...
[...] insecure mail api provided by PHP. Their API is more than happy to let you add linefeeds in the "From" or "To" parameters and thus let you add extra headers (say BCC). The reason it was my fault was for using PHP in the first place!
There is no "From" parameter. It's called additional_headers which, yes, lets you include one or more raw headers, separated by newlines. There are plenty of higher-level API-s for PHP, but you chose to pass headers to the the raw API without validating. Have you heard this one: "a poor craftsman blames his tools"?
More control for one. Flash is essentially a self contained program running in your browser. HTML5 will allow things like audio volume per tab, or per domain, more interaction between the page itself, the content, and the user.
The fact it's self-contained doesn't mean it's isolated from the page. It's in fact a benefit, because it quickly becomes a burden to serve your app as a hundred of tiny images and js files. The "minification" and "sprite" techniques the community is forced to use in JS/HTML/CSS apps, are tedious, limited and just a poor-man's compilation technique, a sign that in practice a compressed one-off-download container is the better choice for web apps.
There is also fast two-way connection between JS and Flash that works in all browsers today. Anything the browser provides as settings and per-tab controls and so on, which is accessible to JavaScript/DOM, is accessible to Flash as well. As an example of this feature in action, you can see the HTML5 features like canvas and SVG implemented transparently via Flash. You can also use most of the essential Flash features directly from JavaScript with libraries like Aflax.
Here's a fantastic example of the sorts of things this'll make possible, which simply can't be done with flash: http://www.double.co.nz/video_test/video.svg [double.co.nz]
Would you care to elaborate what is in that demo that Flash can't easily top today. I see scalable rotatable rectangles with transluccent video in them. Nothing Flash couldn't do few years ago. Today, in Flash you can also map videos like that on waving flags in 3D space or have full-blown alpha mask for dynamic compositing, if you wish. I shouldn't need to mention also that Flash provides consistent codec support (including H264/AAC) on all platforms and browsers in turns on, today. All this while even non-MS browser makers can't agree on a common codec to use (let alone Microsoft joining them any time soon).
You have true 3D engines with shader support or full-blown music synthesis and sequencing applications built directly on top of the flash platform.
All in all, most arguments against Flash I've seen, are arguments out of ignorance and bias. I would be the first to call out a poor use of Flash when I see one, but it works the other way too. In the end, can't we have both instead of either? Who stands to win by "eliminating" either option when they both fill different, though partially overlapping roles?
The summary is misleading. The EU hasn't told Microsoft to do anything. They are still investigating but Microsoft decided to remove IE perhaps in the hope that the EU will be pressured into asking them to do that. But so far the EU has not asked them to do anything.
You are confusing the lack of legal verdict with whether they said anything or not. The position of the EU commission is quite clear, let me quote it for you:
The European Commission (EC) has reacted swiftly to Microsoft's intention to offer some versions of the upcoming Windows 7 operating system without Internet Explorer (IE).
"The Commission had suggested to Microsoft that consumers be provided with a choice of web browsers. Instead, Microsoft has apparently decided to supply retail consumers with a version of Windows without a web browser at all," the EC said in a statement. "Rather than more choice, Microsoft seems to have chosen to provide less."
The Commission cited an alternative option of shipping Windows 7 with a choice of different web browsers presented through a 'ballot screen', from where users could choose and easily install their preferred browser.
Source (one of many): http://www.v3.co.uk/vnunet/news/2244050/ec-reacts-ms-ie-plans
Because Microsoft probably has close to 90% of the consumer PC market whereas Apple and various Linux distributions account for the remaining 10%. Hell, 10% may be overly generous.
So, your point is, it's ok, say, to steal a purse, as long as you don't have a monopoly on the purse theft market.
It's either an abuse of position, or it isn't. Defining arbitrary categories such as "consumer PC" and going after the people who make the ecosystem happen is just an excuse for going after the most lucrative targets. If a Macintosh user is not allowed to change Safari's search engine, since Apple locked it down, how does it make it any better for this user that the Windows user accross the office, can change it.
Because the EU didn't tell them to remove IE, they only told them to offer other browsers to be installed during setup.
Saying "only" doesn't make that statement any less absurd. How is the selection for these browsers to be made? Because you know the moment Microsoft announces they're to put "select few" browsers in Windows 7, everyone will want theirs in.
;)
Opera says "top 5" browsers, but picking browsers by market share, in order to promote less popular competitors results in a bitter irony. Not to mention the magical number "5" comes from Opera being 5-th in desktop browser market share. If it was "top 3" they wouldn't even be in that list, depriving them of the purpose of their own lawsuit. Have you seen what YouTube says to IE6 users? Please upgrade to a modern browser: Chrome, IE8, Firefox. Opera's nowhere in that list. Should they sue YouTube?
What the EU commission wants from Microsoft is a solution that can't be carried out in any sensible manner. But maybe that's exactly what they want, have you seen what EU charges Microsoft for failing to abide? To paraphrase another euphemism, let's call it "surprise tax"
I'm not particularly surprised at what Apple's doing with Palm, but rather surprised that the top people at Palm believe they stand a chance. Integration is Apple's bread and butter, and Apple would rather burn in flames than let that advantage be lost (again).
Jon Rubinstein, COO of Palm, and former Apple iPod VC, has an axe to grind with Apple and Steve Jobs in particular. So what he thought he'd do is join Palm and begin series of unpolished and, frankly, strange attempts to copy Apple's act, including the way they design and market devices, the way they build their presentations, and also co-opting selectively parts of their ecosystem (iTunes sync) without any standing agreement between both companies.
It's a pity for the engineering and design talent behind Palm's Pre, that their top product is being reduced to an iPhone knock-off, because someone high up has scores to set straight. Hopefully, they'll realize that differentiating and creating your niche is the winning strategy, and not cheap attempts at copying and one-upping the market leader.
This is why smart web developers use tables.
Care to elaborate :)?
You have a good point, but are you sure web sites are actually legally entitled to inspect what people are paying them to put on their servers?
If you read the small print in the ToS you'll see they entitle themselves to doing anything they could imagine. Even if it was not in the ToS, adding it in there is trivial.
The reason they don't do it is one of pure economy. Integrating and running antivirus programs daily on a server is not free. It slows down the server (so they can pack less sites per server), it means license/support contracts (even if the basic software is free), means the staff spending time on integrating and supporting this feature.
At the same time, browser exploits are simply small static files that don't affect or abuse the server in question in any significant way. If they scan, it would be just to protect the site visitors, which are not a party that matters to web host providers. So, unless site owners decide they would rather take their business with a host who scans, the hosts have no interest to implement this.
Must... resist... must... resist...PHP! Bloody PHP! Bloody E_NOTICE!
Oh dear, there goes my karma...
In attempt to preserve your "karma", I give you asolution:
.': '.$message.' at '.$filename.' ('.$line.').'); }
;).
function errorHandler($code, $message, $filename, $line) { die($code
set_error_handler('errorHandler');
You know, less talk, more action
P.S.: You could also throw an exception, which is the most convenient option, as you can handle the errors in some cases.
Anyone too lazy to code nice neat xhtml shouldn't be allowed to create web pages.
You know, I'm not a fan of bad-formed code, and I'm not religious. But when I read statements like yours, I make the sign of the cross and start praying we don't come to this ;)
:)
If you have any confusion about it at this point, the value of the web was never in the markup. It's in the content the markup describes. Strict in what you send, liberal in what you accept, I suppose you've heard that one
There's a huge codebase out there that's using PHP against MySQL, and using PHP's original ereg regex syntax instead of the Perl-wannabe stuff. What are they thinking, when they set out to break this?
Nothing is broken. Ereg is moved to the 'official' extension pack called PECL, which you can use for full backwards compatibility. At the same time the community has been warning not to use the ereg functions for the past at least 3-4 years, if not more, citing worse performance, worse featureset, and the possibility of PCRE replacing it at some point in the future.
Why do people still live there again? Seriously though, I wonder what the morale of people who live there is like? Do they all hate it but have nowhere else to go, or are they just culturally complacent with their rights being trampled on?
I've thought about that several times for USA during the Bush years and all the abuse happening post 9/11. But then I realized: who the heck am I to tell someone else how to live their life? And I'd advise you do the same :)
That's it? That's all it takes to bring Twitter to its knees? A measily 18 tweets per second? Do they manually transcribe the messages after having read that an air gap was the most effective security you could get? Or is the article plain wrong.
What do you think :)? For the record, when the MJ news was at its peak, the volume was more like 1000+ tweets per second on Michael Jackson alone, so I have no idea how the article got those numbers.
Now, stopping people from manually quoting/paraphrasing without attribution online
Clarifying myself, meant to say:
Now, stopping people from manually quoting/paraphrasing with attribution, but without consent online
While this seems like an opinion that runs counter to many tenants slashdotters hold dear, I think we should at least consider it.
Ok, I'm willing to consider it for a moment, but it's hard to pull a straight line between what is allowed and not allowed without destroying much of the value the web represents today.
In terms of search engines linking and quoting/paraphrasing copyrighted content, consent is already arranged by the robots.txt configuration. Most search engines, including the major players respect that configuration which anyone can adjust for his site, and also respect additional attributes like "nofollow", "noarchive", "noindex", "nosnippet" that will stop the spiders from indexing or caching parts, or all of a website.
In terms of people linking from a particular place, the problem can be partially solved with technology since a site knows where the link came from (the Referrer header, which although not 100% reliable, as if anything is, works in all popular browsers).
Now, stopping people from manually quoting/paraphrasing without attribution online... very hard issue. Since it goes against the simple provisions of fair use, those will need to be adjusted, let's assume for a moment there are. Big media will sign contracts with each other and quote and paraphrase each other as agreed, so that's ok.
However, what about little players and personal speech? Can nytimes.com give an "explicit consent" to every single of millions of users who want to talk or link to it somewhere on the web. Or what about me paraphrasing and linking to a nytimes.com article on IRC, web chat, or an Instant Messenger, and then this content showing up somewhere on an IRC indexer web site. Will I be liable? Will the indexing site be liable? Where do sites like Twitter sit in this picture. Are they a publishing platform or a personal speech communication platform?
As you see, this requires a very hard to define, strict legal distinction between personal speech online and publishing online. At the current state of the web, the genie is out of the bottle and I don't think such distinction is possible at all; you can't legislate one without affecting the other.
What will happen instead, is we'll see the industry change and adapt to the status quo the web has forced upon it, as we're already witnessing today. It maybe for the better, maybe for the worse, we can't really know before things settle down. But putting limitation on links and quoting won't be the solution everyone's looking for.