That's the easiest piece. Apple becomes a merchant processor (actually, something closer to the issuing bank at their scale) and takes a cut out of the payment. Hell, they'd practically be a new payment network. They're already effectively giving you a tiny line of credit with the way iTunes works, simply for the sake of aggregating payments to minimize their own fees. Why not go all the way with it?
Of course, they'd then have to deal with a truly absurd number of payments-related regulations, which I'll tell you from firsthand experience is something best avoided if you can help it. That's a whole lot of not fun.
Value is not measured in hours, otherwise sports stars would be making about $10k/year. Creating software that allows millions of people to connect to the internet definitely provides value. I would certainly argue that a dollar a person is on the low side.
Unlikely, considering that SMS traffic is just filling empty packets so it literally costs the providers nothing on top of their existing infrastructure.
I think it would be much better to have a blacklist of known infected apps. The phone can check against this lis, and, just like other malware detectors, note that it is dangerous, and why, and then prompt the user for removal.
Ehh... while I like your sentiment, it's just not a good idea. People just don't give a crap about security (those not reading/. anyway), and that kind of opt-in prevention will be about as effective as Windows XP pre-SP2, which is to say not at all. Especially if something pops up while the user is in the middle of doing, well, pretty much anything - they're just going to hit the "shut up and go away" (cancel) button.
I think there should be a published list of deleted apps (they can push an update of this list to phones, which then act upon it), but also a very specific reason of why they were remote-wiped. That way we can still easily determine if it's being misused, and take corrective action from there. If all mobile phone users were security-conscious then I would agree with you, but that idea is demonstrably false. Having an option to opt out of remote wipe and into alerts seems a practical compromise, but defaulting to less secure just isn't a good idea.
Hell... what if FB partnered with BING (MS), and pushed that platform. How many millions of users searching BING from within FB would put a dent in Google's search traffic.
Facebook's web search results (yes, you can search the web, clumsily, through Facebook) are indeed powered by Bing.
And to my knowledge, it hasn't made a damn bit of difference for anyone. If Bing search hasn't lured me away from Google, Facebook's odd mix of users, pages, help topics, and web results most certainly will not.
What the people in that article did instead was try to write over data with crap. The SSD then did a good job of wear levelling and instead of overwriting what was previously there wrote to a totally different cell, and updated it's map of what was where.
I don't see why this would be less effective on an SSD than on magnetic media - assuming, of course, you're doing a multi-pass overwrite. My hard drives contain sensitive information, so they get the DOD-spec 7-pass overwrite when that special time comes (although the info is encrypted to start, so the risk is minuscule to start). Sounds like zeroing out the drive alone isn't enough (until TRIM does its thing), but is there any reason that completely overwriting the drive wouldn't work on an SSD?
I assume the procedure you're referring to is simply overwriting the original sectors, rather than the entire drive.
That's just not true. You have to write your Flash in a specific way in order to allow content to be crawled by search engines (I think they provide some sort of XML endpoint), but they're not completely inaccessible.
Which is too damn bad, since that above anything else could probably kill flash sites once and for all.
Ford is a company named after its founder. Tolkien is an author. To my knowledge, there is no Tolkien, Inc. founded by said author.
Also, you're able to use Ford freely when talking about the person, or in any context that's not Ford, Inc. Which is a good thing, otherwise my aunt would be a walking trademark violation after having married into the name (no relation to those Fords, though).
Un-DRMed standard def media isn't for sale either, last I checked. It's just trivially easy to break DVD protection so it might as well be - although I think SlySoft has a BluRay product as well (back when I ripped my entire DVD collection, their AnyDVD offering made it almost too easy)
Paypal can't withdraw money from a bank account that has no money in it.
Perhaps you are not familiar with the ACH networks. Or how much banks enjoy collecting overdraft fees. Or how much PayPal enjoys also charging overdraft fees. Hint: by registering, you agree to ToS which gives them a clause to collect overdraft fees. Whether they're going to take the time and effort to pursue that $35 (or whatever) is another story, but they can absolutely create quite a lot of headache.
Since I forgot I can't edit on/. - I'm by no means defending PayPal's actions or the company as a whole (in fact, I work for one of their competitors - it shouldn't be hard to find out which one if you care). On the contrary, I'm more attacking the government's stance on this, since it's in my opinion an attack on free speech. Whether what Manning did is illegal is something for the jury to decide, but by trying to help the guy out you effectively get labelled as a co-conspirator. Same with attempts to raise funds Assenage's (apparently failed) defense. As someone would who would like to contribute in some way (whether financially or otherwise), it's a damn shame that the government has made it anywhere from impractical to potentially illegal to do so.
Huh? PayPal was basically a weird PDA app focusing far more on security than payments before the x.com merger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal#Beginnings). They basically hacked their way into IPSP/merchant services through eBay sellers which then acquired them and made them the only payment option for auctions.
All of this stuff boils down to risk management. Not just payment chargebacks, but bringing in undesired oversight and investigation from the government. I think it's a sad state of affairs when collecting donations for someone's legal defense is likely to get you and everyone else involved (donors, payment processors, etc) under federal scrutiny, but that's America in 2011 for you. PayPal isn't the only payments company trying to avoid the potential fiasco, they're just the most high-profile.
I'm quite confident that Amazon has every intention of using the streaming as a loss leader to sell more Prime memberships, which will encourage more shopping for physical goods on their site. And it will probably work. I placed over 50 orders last year on Amazon, plus a half dozen or so this year and we're only seven weeks in. While shipping is definitely an expense for them, obviously their margins are sufficient that it's still worth it (even after affiliate program payouts), and that's before you consider that every one of those orders was on an Amazon Visa so they're either getting a cut of the interchange (in effect, significantly lower processing rates), doing something tricky where they bypass the credit networks entirely and pay nothing, or a combination. Plus interest for those that don't pay their balance in full.
I wouldn't pay extra for streaming, but I'm already a loyal and vocal customer of theirs. To me it's just a bonus, but I'm sure it will be something else I mention when talking about prime (it may just be a hazard of working at a tech company in silicon valley, but that kind of thing comes up in conversation more often than you'd expect)
My MBP is the base $1100 model plus a couple of upgrades after the fact. The dongle to send video to a standard DVI port cost about eight dollars at Monoprice. Though I certainly share your gripe about the dongles if you need dual link DVI (typically 27+" displays), but (at least according to wikipedia) that's just the nature of dual-link dvi's signaling requirements. But after dropping $1300 on the screen, what's another $99*?
You also need to consider that the only external display Apple sells uses mini-displayport natively, so no dongles are required. Not that I use that particular display, although I'd probably prefer it over my Dell 30".
* Yes, that was a joke. But still, part of me says "serves me (or, rather, my employer) right for picking a display that only has DL-DVI in", especially in getting the display after the laptop. Bad luck, as I believe both one model newer and older had native displayport support in which case I could have used a $6 cable instead of a $120 rat's nest of adapters.
On a high-density drive, 80-90MB/s is quite common. And I'm not talking high-end drives - I'm referring to the 2TB drives that can be had for $85 these days. I've been doing some spring cleaning on my hard drives this weekend (freed up about 3TB across many, many drives so far), and transferring a 300GB system backup disk image between two drives in the 1TB capacity range (I think one Samsung and one WD) it was sustaining around 85MB/s, maybe 75MB/s by the end of it as the data was physically closer to the spindle. They'd easily burst to 110-120MB/s.
And that's before you get into consumer-grade SSDs. They certainly have a price premium over mechanical storage, but a good drive will perform around the 200MB/s range and still only cost a couple hundred bucks (but a crappy SSD really makes very little difference). That's quickly escaping the point of your post, but I'm not talking enterprise-grade hardware either.
I'll be really interested to see if new tech for external drives speeds that up. I don't know whether what I'm working on is slow because of the interface (FW800 - so it shouldn't be) or the Drobo (4 drives in pseudo-raid, but god-only knows what's really happening in that box) but it's rapidly approaching unusable. Can't beat the thing for backups, but actually running anything off the drive gets more painful by the day. A very jittery performance that averages out to... maybe 5MB/s on a good day.
DRM only on streaming would be practically pointless if the same product is for sale without DRM. Why would you trust people to not share their purchased content with a million of their closest friends as prohibited by copyright law, yet not trust them to follow the streaming agreement?
Because I recognize that trust on the internet is worthless? I wouldn't bother for streaming content either, although it's slightly more reasonable.
My thinking is this: Right now, I can go to thepiratebay and download pretty much any content that's ever been available, in full quality (or close enough to original quality as to be indistinguishable). All of that content originally was "protected" by DRM. What did that DRM gain the publishers in terms of preventing copyright infringement? Not a damn thing. However, that same DRM actively hurts legitimate customers, turning them towards piracy - I can think of three friends off the top of my head that could not play back their purchased/rented iTunes content due to HDCP requirements, and immediately decided to never pay for content through that same service again.
The whole concept of DRM is fundamentally broken - it's akin to enabling SSL on your website in an attempt to block out people that haven't paid (read: completely pointless). Anything that must be eventually decrypted in order to be useful to the end user requires that end user to have a means to decrypt that content. You can try to make it very hard to access that key outside of its intended usage (which is precisely the concept that DRM uses), but that's merely delaying the inevitable.
To content producers, this situation sucks. There is simply no practical way to absolutely prevent that content from showing up on piracy sites. In light of that, it's best to simply accept that and plan accordingly - either don't produce content, or make it worth paying for and give people no reason to pirate it. Copy protection on the purchased version is reason to pirate it, since that pirate version will not have any usage restrictions.
Depends on the email provider, at least at some level (might be the client, the sending server, or a number of other things - I don't know the SMTP protocol). I've done the same thing by mistake, not realizing I had been BCC'd. My experiences were on Google Apps and I've had similar issues with standard gmail. Thankfully nothing embarrassing, but enough to receive an "Oh, didn't realize this was forwarded to you too. Um, thanks?" kind of response.
Handily, there's some new Labs feature for gmail that will display some sort of warning if you received the message over BCC, although it would probably be better if it just disabled reply-all.
And in order to get that price, you sign a contract. The only thing you sign when buying a PS3 is the receipt for your credit card purchase, which is most certainly not a contract with Sony. When you enter a legally binding contract with Sony upon purchasing a PS3 requiring you to buy at least four games, they have a right to complain. Until that time comes - which it won't - they can enjoy a nice steaming mug of STFU.
Or just edit your hosts file so that you're developing against local.myfuturesite.com. Doing so may also expose other bugs you'd encounter when switching over to production (weird paths, odd webserver config settings, etc)
The newest version of./ is (in my experience) at least an order of magnitude faster than the old version, at least as my logged-in settings cause the page to render. I'd like to take a small amount of credit by having spent four seconds in Chrome's JS profiler and then reported an egregious flaw in their JS that caused it to run at 100% CPU continually (in effect: c = function(){someSlowThing();setTimeout(c,0);}; c(); ), but even with that original problem it was still faster for me than the old version. Or, at least, it didn't cause my browser to deadlock when first loading the page.
YMMV. My experiences were in Chrome 9 (Mac), but they were similar in Firefox and Safari.
Still, compared to a simple blog or even a pretty complicated web app, the sheer size of the DOM on./ thanks to hundreds of nested comments is always going to slow things down. I'm sure there are plenty of optimizations they could make (not least of which is finally dropping the fluid-width layout, which makes zooming and many other operations cause a document reflow - incredibly expensive on a giant page), but part of it is just the nature of the beast. Look at Twitter - it gets slower the farther down you scroll, since the DOM gets bigger and bigger thanks to their funky bottomless-page scripts.
I should hope that all of the Lybian protesters aren't three years old. I don't think the "knock it off or we're taking away your internet privileges" approach will work - if anything, it should add fuel to the fire. In fact, it should be just the opposite: the government should be receiving the "knock it off or we're taking away your being in power privileges" message from its citizens.
It's so slow to remind you what it's like for the underprivileged Americans without broadband access living in...well, I have no idea since the damn map won't load.
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That's the easiest piece. Apple becomes a merchant processor (actually, something closer to the issuing bank at their scale) and takes a cut out of the payment. Hell, they'd practically be a new payment network. They're already effectively giving you a tiny line of credit with the way iTunes works, simply for the sake of aggregating payments to minimize their own fees. Why not go all the way with it?
Of course, they'd then have to deal with a truly absurd number of payments-related regulations, which I'll tell you from firsthand experience is something best avoided if you can help it. That's a whole lot of not fun.
Well, in fairness, it's not Adobe's fault that you can't access connected devices (camera, mic, etc.) via HTML5. Yet.
Value is not measured in hours, otherwise sports stars would be making about $10k/year. Creating software that allows millions of people to connect to the internet definitely provides value. I would certainly argue that a dollar a person is on the low side.
Unlikely, considering that SMS traffic is just filling empty packets so it literally costs the providers nothing on top of their existing infrastructure.
I think it would be much better to have a blacklist of known infected apps. The phone can check against this lis, and, just like other malware detectors, note that it is dangerous, and why, and then prompt the user for removal.
Ehh... while I like your sentiment, it's just not a good idea. People just don't give a crap about security (those not reading /. anyway), and that kind of opt-in prevention will be about as effective as Windows XP pre-SP2, which is to say not at all. Especially if something pops up while the user is in the middle of doing, well, pretty much anything - they're just going to hit the "shut up and go away" (cancel) button.
I think there should be a published list of deleted apps (they can push an update of this list to phones, which then act upon it), but also a very specific reason of why they were remote-wiped. That way we can still easily determine if it's being misused, and take corrective action from there. If all mobile phone users were security-conscious then I would agree with you, but that idea is demonstrably false. Having an option to opt out of remote wipe and into alerts seems a practical compromise, but defaulting to less secure just isn't a good idea.
Hell... what if FB partnered with BING (MS), and pushed that platform.
How many millions of users searching BING from within FB would put a dent in Google's search traffic.
Facebook's web search results (yes, you can search the web, clumsily, through Facebook) are indeed powered by Bing.
And to my knowledge, it hasn't made a damn bit of difference for anyone. If Bing search hasn't lured me away from Google, Facebook's odd mix of users, pages, help topics, and web results most certainly will not.
What the people in that article did instead was try to write over data with crap. The SSD then did a good job of wear levelling and instead of overwriting what was previously there wrote to a totally different cell, and updated it's map of what was where.
I don't see why this would be less effective on an SSD than on magnetic media - assuming, of course, you're doing a multi-pass overwrite. My hard drives contain sensitive information, so they get the DOD-spec 7-pass overwrite when that special time comes (although the info is encrypted to start, so the risk is minuscule to start). Sounds like zeroing out the drive alone isn't enough (until TRIM does its thing), but is there any reason that completely overwriting the drive wouldn't work on an SSD?
I assume the procedure you're referring to is simply overwriting the original sectors, rather than the entire drive.
Maybe it's still there if you look with a microscope but who really does that?
The forensics team mentioned in TFS?
That's just not true. You have to write your Flash in a specific way in order to allow content to be crawled by search engines (I think they provide some sort of XML endpoint), but they're not completely inaccessible.
Which is too damn bad, since that above anything else could probably kill flash sites once and for all.
Ford is a company named after its founder. Tolkien is an author. To my knowledge, there is no Tolkien, Inc. founded by said author.
Also, you're able to use Ford freely when talking about the person, or in any context that's not Ford, Inc. Which is a good thing, otherwise my aunt would be a walking trademark violation after having married into the name (no relation to those Fords, though).
Un-DRMed standard def media isn't for sale either, last I checked. It's just trivially easy to break DVD protection so it might as well be - although I think SlySoft has a BluRay product as well (back when I ripped my entire DVD collection, their AnyDVD offering made it almost too easy)
Paypal can't withdraw money from a bank account that has no money in it.
Perhaps you are not familiar with the ACH networks. Or how much banks enjoy collecting overdraft fees. Or how much PayPal enjoys also charging overdraft fees. Hint: by registering, you agree to ToS which gives them a clause to collect overdraft fees. Whether they're going to take the time and effort to pursue that $35 (or whatever) is another story, but they can absolutely create quite a lot of headache.
Since I forgot I can't edit on /. - I'm by no means defending PayPal's actions or the company as a whole (in fact, I work for one of their competitors - it shouldn't be hard to find out which one if you care). On the contrary, I'm more attacking the government's stance on this, since it's in my opinion an attack on free speech. Whether what Manning did is illegal is something for the jury to decide, but by trying to help the guy out you effectively get labelled as a co-conspirator. Same with attempts to raise funds Assenage's (apparently failed) defense. As someone would who would like to contribute in some way (whether financially or otherwise), it's a damn shame that the government has made it anywhere from impractical to potentially illegal to do so.
Huh? PayPal was basically a weird PDA app focusing far more on security than payments before the x.com merger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal#Beginnings). They basically hacked their way into IPSP/merchant services through eBay sellers which then acquired them and made them the only payment option for auctions.
All of this stuff boils down to risk management. Not just payment chargebacks, but bringing in undesired oversight and investigation from the government. I think it's a sad state of affairs when collecting donations for someone's legal defense is likely to get you and everyone else involved (donors, payment processors, etc) under federal scrutiny, but that's America in 2011 for you. PayPal isn't the only payments company trying to avoid the potential fiasco, they're just the most high-profile.
I'm quite confident that Amazon has every intention of using the streaming as a loss leader to sell more Prime memberships, which will encourage more shopping for physical goods on their site. And it will probably work. I placed over 50 orders last year on Amazon, plus a half dozen or so this year and we're only seven weeks in. While shipping is definitely an expense for them, obviously their margins are sufficient that it's still worth it (even after affiliate program payouts), and that's before you consider that every one of those orders was on an Amazon Visa so they're either getting a cut of the interchange (in effect, significantly lower processing rates), doing something tricky where they bypass the credit networks entirely and pay nothing, or a combination. Plus interest for those that don't pay their balance in full.
I wouldn't pay extra for streaming, but I'm already a loyal and vocal customer of theirs. To me it's just a bonus, but I'm sure it will be something else I mention when talking about prime (it may just be a hazard of working at a tech company in silicon valley, but that kind of thing comes up in conversation more often than you'd expect)
My MBP is the base $1100 model plus a couple of upgrades after the fact. The dongle to send video to a standard DVI port cost about eight dollars at Monoprice. Though I certainly share your gripe about the dongles if you need dual link DVI (typically 27+" displays), but (at least according to wikipedia) that's just the nature of dual-link dvi's signaling requirements. But after dropping $1300 on the screen, what's another $99*?
You also need to consider that the only external display Apple sells uses mini-displayport natively, so no dongles are required. Not that I use that particular display, although I'd probably prefer it over my Dell 30".
* Yes, that was a joke. But still, part of me says "serves me (or, rather, my employer) right for picking a display that only has DL-DVI in", especially in getting the display after the laptop. Bad luck, as I believe both one model newer and older had native displayport support in which case I could have used a $6 cable instead of a $120 rat's nest of adapters.
On a high-density drive, 80-90MB/s is quite common. And I'm not talking high-end drives - I'm referring to the 2TB drives that can be had for $85 these days. I've been doing some spring cleaning on my hard drives this weekend (freed up about 3TB across many, many drives so far), and transferring a 300GB system backup disk image between two drives in the 1TB capacity range (I think one Samsung and one WD) it was sustaining around 85MB/s, maybe 75MB/s by the end of it as the data was physically closer to the spindle. They'd easily burst to 110-120MB/s.
And that's before you get into consumer-grade SSDs. They certainly have a price premium over mechanical storage, but a good drive will perform around the 200MB/s range and still only cost a couple hundred bucks (but a crappy SSD really makes very little difference). That's quickly escaping the point of your post, but I'm not talking enterprise-grade hardware either.
I'll be really interested to see if new tech for external drives speeds that up. I don't know whether what I'm working on is slow because of the interface (FW800 - so it shouldn't be) or the Drobo (4 drives in pseudo-raid, but god-only knows what's really happening in that box) but it's rapidly approaching unusable. Can't beat the thing for backups, but actually running anything off the drive gets more painful by the day. A very jittery performance that averages out to... maybe 5MB/s on a good day.
DRM only on streaming would be practically pointless if the same product is for sale without DRM. Why would you trust people to not share their purchased content with a million of their closest friends as prohibited by copyright law, yet not trust them to follow the streaming agreement?
Because I recognize that trust on the internet is worthless? I wouldn't bother for streaming content either, although it's slightly more reasonable.
My thinking is this: Right now, I can go to thepiratebay and download pretty much any content that's ever been available, in full quality (or close enough to original quality as to be indistinguishable). All of that content originally was "protected" by DRM. What did that DRM gain the publishers in terms of preventing copyright infringement? Not a damn thing. However, that same DRM actively hurts legitimate customers, turning them towards piracy - I can think of three friends off the top of my head that could not play back their purchased/rented iTunes content due to HDCP requirements, and immediately decided to never pay for content through that same service again.
The whole concept of DRM is fundamentally broken - it's akin to enabling SSL on your website in an attempt to block out people that haven't paid (read: completely pointless). Anything that must be eventually decrypted in order to be useful to the end user requires that end user to have a means to decrypt that content. You can try to make it very hard to access that key outside of its intended usage (which is precisely the concept that DRM uses), but that's merely delaying the inevitable.
To content producers, this situation sucks. There is simply no practical way to absolutely prevent that content from showing up on piracy sites. In light of that, it's best to simply accept that and plan accordingly - either don't produce content, or make it worth paying for and give people no reason to pirate it. Copy protection on the purchased version is reason to pirate it, since that pirate version will not have any usage restrictions.
Depends on the email provider, at least at some level (might be the client, the sending server, or a number of other things - I don't know the SMTP protocol). I've done the same thing by mistake, not realizing I had been BCC'd. My experiences were on Google Apps and I've had similar issues with standard gmail. Thankfully nothing embarrassing, but enough to receive an "Oh, didn't realize this was forwarded to you too. Um, thanks?" kind of response.
Handily, there's some new Labs feature for gmail that will display some sort of warning if you received the message over BCC, although it would probably be better if it just disabled reply-all.
And in order to get that price, you sign a contract. The only thing you sign when buying a PS3 is the receipt for your credit card purchase, which is most certainly not a contract with Sony. When you enter a legally binding contract with Sony upon purchasing a PS3 requiring you to buy at least four games, they have a right to complain. Until that time comes - which it won't - they can enjoy a nice steaming mug of STFU.
Or just edit your hosts file so that you're developing against local.myfuturesite.com. Doing so may also expose other bugs you'd encounter when switching over to production (weird paths, odd webserver config settings, etc)
The newest version of ./ is (in my experience) at least an order of magnitude faster than the old version, at least as my logged-in settings cause the page to render. I'd like to take a small amount of credit by having spent four seconds in Chrome's JS profiler and then reported an egregious flaw in their JS that caused it to run at 100% CPU continually (in effect: c = function(){someSlowThing();setTimeout(c,0);}; c(); ), but even with that original problem it was still faster for me than the old version. Or, at least, it didn't cause my browser to deadlock when first loading the page.
YMMV. My experiences were in Chrome 9 (Mac), but they were similar in Firefox and Safari.
Still, compared to a simple blog or even a pretty complicated web app, the sheer size of the DOM on ./ thanks to hundreds of nested comments is always going to slow things down. I'm sure there are plenty of optimizations they could make (not least of which is finally dropping the fluid-width layout, which makes zooming and many other operations cause a document reflow - incredibly expensive on a giant page), but part of it is just the nature of the beast. Look at Twitter - it gets slower the farther down you scroll, since the DOM gets bigger and bigger thanks to their funky bottomless-page scripts.
I should hope that all of the Lybian protesters aren't three years old. I don't think the "knock it off or we're taking away your internet privileges" approach will work - if anything, it should add fuel to the fire. In fact, it should be just the opposite: the government should be receiving the "knock it off or we're taking away your being in power privileges" message from its citizens.
That's the theory, at least.
It worked after I disabled Flashblock.
It's so slow to remind you what it's like for the underprivileged Americans without broadband access living in...well, I have no idea since the damn map won't load.