Great in theory, but ultimately even the best security measures at the OS level can be compromised by a dumb user. While at least in OS X (and I expect Linux, but don't have enough experience to say) a majority of apps are correctly running in user-space and don't require admin permissions to run/install, there are still plenty that do have that requirement for whatever reason. Because of that, I'm not nearly cautious enough when apps ask for elevated privileges during installation, so it would be pretty easy to slip something past me. And I'm a slashdotter who works in a very security-conscious industry; imagine how much easier it would be to pull the same trick on my parents.
Requiring everything to be signed would be a great step in the right direction, but ultimately one could still do a lot of damage in the time it took to discover the problem and send out a kill signal via an OS security update, especially if it's something relatively silent like a keylogger.
Never mind the logistics of making something like that happen. It would take an entirely new OS to pull off, and I can't imagine Google has that kind of thing up their sleeves for Chrome OS (even if it was as simple as adding a meta tag to your web app's head tag with a signing key before you could save it as a home screen app or something)
But Google Voice is not a VOIP app - it runs over standard phone lines (at least the part that you interact with does; you can bet that all of the internal routing is done digitally). There's no reason for AT&T to try getting GV banned since it doesn't detract from their own phone service. Skype (and several other VOIP services) is available and would certainly be more damaging to revenues than GV.
Well, I'm sure they don't want GV's texting since that DOES avoid using the phone service (it basically equates to sending an email to a phone number); between push notification services and/or push email, it's a complete text messaging replacement, and that's pure profit for the service providers. That being said, I have several apps installed that also equate to a text messaging replacement and there's been no ongoing battles to get them pulled or added beyond the scope of what developers normally have to deal with in the App Store.
In any case, Apple claimed that it was blocked because it would cause confusion with the native phone app. I assume the same has been said for a native Gmail app but that's just speculation on my part. I'm sure they have their reasons, whatever they may be. I certainly don't agree with them, but there are enough apps that would be much more harmful to cell carriers than GV that I'm confident AT&T had no say in GV getting blocked, as I believe all three companies have claimed.
Someone who fears the command line to much to use those three commands shouldn't even be ATTEMPTING to compile something.
Well, yeah. But I'll be damned if I have to sit around for an hour while my browser is compiling before I can browse the web after a fresh OS install.
Just because it's easy doesn't mean it makes sense. And that approach certainly won't do much for the "year of the Linux desktop" that we've been celebrating for the past decade.
If a browser doesn't display a page, people will wonder what the hell is wrong, and then hit the back button. That's somewhat less true for Firefox users than those of most other browsers (IE and Safari, at least), but with something as widespread as video embeds, chances are that it's mostly irrelevant. Webmasters will either a) provided h.264, ogg, and flash fallback*, b) provide h.264 and flash fallback, or c) just use flash. Only sites that basically equate to tech demos aren't going to provide any sort of graceful degradation when it comes to html5 video support.
That being said, Mozilla needs to suck it up and find a way to implement h.264, even if that means coughing up for licensing. It's not some lofty ideal, but h.264 has already become the de-facto standard and has been for quite a while - this is just changing the playback medium. I've had enough trouble trying to get one video converted to ogg for html5/firefox playback (to the point where I eventually just gave up... something with broken poster frames I think, and the color getting screwed up). YouTube et al are already serving h.264 via flash - transcoding millions of hours of video simply isn't going to happen, especially not to support a format that's never seen any real widespread use.
Nothing against ogg/vorbis/theora, that's just the reality of things. H.264 won, and it did so about three years ago.
*Flash fallback is so easy to implement that I don't know why all video sharing sites haven't switched to html5 natively anyways. You just wrap the flash embed inside the video tag - if the browser can play the video natively it will, otherwise it uses the flash.
And to think that I was going to ask what kind of person has enough time to make data visualizations like that. Guess it's easy when that's your job.
Still, the video raises an interesting question, slashvertisement or not. (FWIW, I wouldn't have known what company was being slashvertised if it hasn't been pointed out a dozen times in the comments)
That would make more sense if they were regular - but those lines appeared to show up at several irregular periods throughout the day. Though on the flip side, they may have several cron jobs that run and ping (most of) the outside world to make sure there wasn't a nuclear detonation during teatime or something.
Without knowing more about the environment and having more data, we can only speculate. But I doubt it's malicious - seems unlikely to follow that consistent of a pattern for the vertical stripes. Someone above mentioned videoconferencing as a possible explanation - it starts at the beginning of the work day and ends at the end, and is only going out to a few different places. Something along those lines would make sense for the horizontal stripes, at least.
Has it not occurred to you that he may have resized the full-res images for web posting? I'd be willing to bet that the originals aren't Hubble-quality, but they probably have more resolution than a 1996-era webcam.
I doubt it - my understanding is that a sufficiently strong crash will rupture a barrier between two chemicals that basically explode (thus filling the airbag) when mixed.
Of course, we like to over-engineer everything else with unnecessary electronics - I don't see why airbags would be any different.
Yes, but it's also a lot harder to get in a position in a bank to deploy software to crack their systems (never mind then laundering the money enough so that it's not traced back to you) than to sit on the side of the road with the car equivalent of a tv-b-gone.
Which completely defeats the purpose of safely disabling the car. Most car chases already end with a crash into a bystander's vehicle - that would just add an additional possibility for a lawsuit against the city.
Multiples of reasonable and resemblance to actual damages done are almost entirely unrelated. In this case both are pretty accurate. You could be the guy who uploads a screener of Avatar and could quite reasonably have done several million dollars in damages, but that's hardly payable. Conversely, they could track you down for seeding an album that NOBODY ever downloaded, and hit you for a much-more-payable three grand despite having done precisely $0 in damage.
That said, both are pretty accurate in this example.
You're just going to give up and pay their $20k (10-track album) extortion charge? I'm not exactly broke, but I don't have that kind of cash sitting around in my rainy day jar. Maybe at $200 a song (which, is memory serves, isn't too far from what they ask for in the "pay up and we won't sue" letter) that makes sense.
From what I hear *cough*, a lot of porn is still using WMV. Which is not nearly as limiting as the native support of Theora (yes it's Free, but my browser doesn't know that out of the box), but still excludes all Linux and Mac users that don't want to fight with irritating and semi-functional plugins.
You can, but it's a pain in the ass - and you have to do it on a per-site basis. Unlike font-faces and styles, the video controls are just generic HTML elements with onclick bindings to manipulate video playback - it's not a simple thing where you just replace a sprite for the controls overlay. You have to manipulate the DOM to remove/hide the custom controls and enable the native controls on the video element; the latter is trivial, but the former is not since every site does that differently. YouTube at least also puts an empty div overlaying the video element specifically to block you from doing that - also easy to deal with, but one of many things that you'll have to fix on a per-site basis.
Did you not read the part where he said that turning on fullscreen mode is not part of the native video APIs? I completely fail to see how greasemonkey is going to fix that. Scripts running from localhost don't get special permissions.
In 2009 it went up to $5,000,000. In 2011, it is going to go up again. So Mozilla will have to pay out $5,000,000 (and climbing) per year, just to support this one video codec in a product that they give away for free. Their revenue in their last fiscal year was $78.6 million.
Is it really worth it to spend 6% of your total yearly revenue on the licensing fee for one video codec?
More to the point, is it worth spending 6% of your revenue on not having all of your customers switch to competing products?
Yes. Absolutely, undoubtedly yes.
You have to remember that Firefox is not IE - it doesn't come preinstalled on 90% of computers shipped. Nearly everyone using that browser is doing so because they chose to switch to it from the system default. Given that both Safari and Chrome offer most of the features that got people to switch in the first place, it wouldn't come as a shock to see people migrate away from Firefox. I switched to Safari for my full-time browsing a few months ago, and I'd been using Firefox since the pre-1.0 naming debacle. Most of the extensions that I cared about had some sort of counterpart, and it's consistently faster, more responsive, and has a lighter footprint.
Don't take this as an ad for Safari (it's not), but realize that browsers have started to suck a lot less since Firefox came out years and years ago, and that means competition. And in my eyes, the competition is winning. That's my opinion of course, but many of my geek friends that used to use Firefox have also switched to Chrome and/or Safari.
That's no different than reading the paper. You scan the titles and spend time on the few articles that seem worth reading or pique your interest. This just changes the front page into something that more resembles a table of contents.
Papers can complain that these indexing services are taking half of their traffic. In reality, far fewer people would go to their site specifically to scan for those same headlines. Half of all aggregator readers clicking through to a story seems astonishingly high - I'd have expected closer to 10-20%
Any chance of getting something like that in a 12-13" casing? I find the netbook keyboards completely unusable, and I have pretty small hands. Take the space that would normally hold a dvd burner and pack in twice as much battery. Better battery life benefits users all the time; how often do you find yourself using optical media these days (or, do you find the lack of a dvd drive in netbooks to be problematic)?
I wish they'd start speccing battery life numbers based off h264 playback rather than DVDs. Or more to the point, include a dedicated lower-power decoder chip. I haven't touched DVDs in quite a long time, but between ripped movies and web streaming, there's a ton of h264 playback going on. I haven't done benchmarks on battery drain, but the extra CPU juice required (compared to mpeg2/4) seems to more than offset the savings of not having a dvd drive spinning the whole time. The high WiFi activity during most video playback doesn't help either.
If you don't use the thing at all, have WiFi, bluetooth, email checking, and push notifications disabled, and have solid reception, those numbers are realistic. But if you're actually treating it as a smartphone, that drops like a rock (which to be fair is true of all smartphones).
My iPhone is definitely a "charge every night" device. While I don't actually talk on the phone much, the battery has everything except screen brightness going against it (I keep all of my devices at low brightness, partly to save power but more because all of these screens are way too damn bright in everything but direct sunlight).
That said, any laptop which even claims the ability to be another "charge every night" (rather than every few hours) device is quite intriguing. Even if it gets 2/3 of the claim, which seems to be a reasonable estimate if other devices are anything to go by, that's still at or near a full work day on a single charge.
If you're up for wasting some time hacking the software that power those digital picture frames, you'll get pretty close. Maybe not $20, but I spotted a couple on Amazon in the $30-50 range. It would be a bit large and unwieldy (not to mention not even remotely portable, given that they're not battery-powered) but at a vague conceptual level, it's not that far off the mark.
Re:idiocy? Incompetence?
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Actually, some early problems would have been discovered two years ago (think: 30-year loans). In all likelihood, there are plenty of bugs out there going unnoticed because some database table is silently capping the value at the signed int limit rather than throwing some sort of overflow error. Come 2038, there may be plenty of people who get a bill for an unexpected balloon payment in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Or on the flip side, bills will stop being sent out and some bank ends up losing a ton of money.
Not all devices need publicly addressable IPs, but providing them could enable a lot of cool new stuff, or at least vastly simplify its implementation. I'd quite like to be able to ping my refrigerator from my cell phone when out getting groceries to find out where I need to pick up milk. Right now, that would be completely impractical (from a networking perspective) without NAT, plus probably also UPNP (we are talking consumer devices here, who the hell wants to screw with their router's firewall for a fridge?!) and remembering a non-standard port number.
Or a more practical task: maybe you've tried to enable remote desktop (or some other service that has a standard port) on two machines in the same private network. At least on my consumer-grade router, I have to set up all sorts of port mapping (tedious) and then remember which port corresponds to which machine (horribly annoying).
Quite a first-world problem, but giving each device its own unique public IP eliminates a lot of ugly hacks that we currently have to employ.
You feel safer in an SUV, but the opposite is true -- you're in far more danger than any other kind of passenger vehicle. I can't imagine why anyone would transport their children in one of these dangerous, wasteful cars.
Not really. Maybe in the strictest sense that I'd probably come out on top if I were to crash into a smaller vehicle, but I never feel like I have sufficient control of the vehicle - and that does nothing to make me feel safe. I'm much happier to take my chances in a vehicle where I can better avoid crashing in the first place. The 4WD option is nice when trying to get up my stupidly long and steep driveway in the winter, but unless I need to transport a lot of people or stuff I avoid driving the thing.
Of course, I also had it spontaneously combust when driving it once, so I'm a bit mistrusting (the parking brake cable had gotten screwed up so the brake was dragging. Lots of friction led to lots of heat which ended in flames. Luckily I was at a gas station when it actually ignited so there was a fire extinguisher nearby)
Slashdot Mirror
Great in theory, but ultimately even the best security measures at the OS level can be compromised by a dumb user. While at least in OS X (and I expect Linux, but don't have enough experience to say) a majority of apps are correctly running in user-space and don't require admin permissions to run/install, there are still plenty that do have that requirement for whatever reason. Because of that, I'm not nearly cautious enough when apps ask for elevated privileges during installation, so it would be pretty easy to slip something past me. And I'm a slashdotter who works in a very security-conscious industry; imagine how much easier it would be to pull the same trick on my parents.
Requiring everything to be signed would be a great step in the right direction, but ultimately one could still do a lot of damage in the time it took to discover the problem and send out a kill signal via an OS security update, especially if it's something relatively silent like a keylogger.
Never mind the logistics of making something like that happen. It would take an entirely new OS to pull off, and I can't imagine Google has that kind of thing up their sleeves for Chrome OS (even if it was as simple as adding a meta tag to your web app's head tag with a signing key before you could save it as a home screen app or something)
But Google Voice is not a VOIP app - it runs over standard phone lines (at least the part that you interact with does; you can bet that all of the internal routing is done digitally). There's no reason for AT&T to try getting GV banned since it doesn't detract from their own phone service. Skype (and several other VOIP services) is available and would certainly be more damaging to revenues than GV.
Well, I'm sure they don't want GV's texting since that DOES avoid using the phone service (it basically equates to sending an email to a phone number); between push notification services and/or push email, it's a complete text messaging replacement, and that's pure profit for the service providers. That being said, I have several apps installed that also equate to a text messaging replacement and there's been no ongoing battles to get them pulled or added beyond the scope of what developers normally have to deal with in the App Store.
In any case, Apple claimed that it was blocked because it would cause confusion with the native phone app. I assume the same has been said for a native Gmail app but that's just speculation on my part. I'm sure they have their reasons, whatever they may be. I certainly don't agree with them, but there are enough apps that would be much more harmful to cell carriers than GV that I'm confident AT&T had no say in GV getting blocked, as I believe all three companies have claimed.
Just how easy should it be to compile something?
configure
make
make install
Someone who fears the command line to much to use those three commands shouldn't even be ATTEMPTING to compile something.
Well, yeah. But I'll be damned if I have to sit around for an hour while my browser is compiling before I can browse the web after a fresh OS install.
Just because it's easy doesn't mean it makes sense. And that approach certainly won't do much for the "year of the Linux desktop" that we've been celebrating for the past decade.
Heh, if only.
If a browser doesn't display a page, people will wonder what the hell is wrong, and then hit the back button. That's somewhat less true for Firefox users than those of most other browsers (IE and Safari, at least), but with something as widespread as video embeds, chances are that it's mostly irrelevant. Webmasters will either a) provided h.264, ogg, and flash fallback*, b) provide h.264 and flash fallback, or c) just use flash. Only sites that basically equate to tech demos aren't going to provide any sort of graceful degradation when it comes to html5 video support.
That being said, Mozilla needs to suck it up and find a way to implement h.264, even if that means coughing up for licensing. It's not some lofty ideal, but h.264 has already become the de-facto standard and has been for quite a while - this is just changing the playback medium. I've had enough trouble trying to get one video converted to ogg for html5/firefox playback (to the point where I eventually just gave up... something with broken poster frames I think, and the color getting screwed up). YouTube et al are already serving h.264 via flash - transcoding millions of hours of video simply isn't going to happen, especially not to support a format that's never seen any real widespread use.
Nothing against ogg/vorbis/theora, that's just the reality of things. H.264 won, and it did so about three years ago.
*Flash fallback is so easy to implement that I don't know why all video sharing sites haven't switched to html5 natively anyways. You just wrap the flash embed inside the video tag - if the browser can play the video natively it will, otherwise it uses the flash.
And to think that I was going to ask what kind of person has enough time to make data visualizations like that. Guess it's easy when that's your job.
Still, the video raises an interesting question, slashvertisement or not. (FWIW, I wouldn't have known what company was being slashvertised if it hasn't been pointed out a dozen times in the comments)
That would make more sense if they were regular - but those lines appeared to show up at several irregular periods throughout the day. Though on the flip side, they may have several cron jobs that run and ping (most of) the outside world to make sure there wasn't a nuclear detonation during teatime or something.
Without knowing more about the environment and having more data, we can only speculate. But I doubt it's malicious - seems unlikely to follow that consistent of a pattern for the vertical stripes. Someone above mentioned videoconferencing as a possible explanation - it starts at the beginning of the work day and ends at the end, and is only going out to a few different places. Something along those lines would make sense for the horizontal stripes, at least.
Has it not occurred to you that he may have resized the full-res images for web posting? I'd be willing to bet that the originals aren't Hubble-quality, but they probably have more resolution than a 1996-era webcam.
I doubt it - my understanding is that a sufficiently strong crash will rupture a barrier between two chemicals that basically explode (thus filling the airbag) when mixed.
Of course, we like to over-engineer everything else with unnecessary electronics - I don't see why airbags would be any different.
Yes, but it's also a lot harder to get in a position in a bank to deploy software to crack their systems (never mind then laundering the money enough so that it's not traced back to you) than to sit on the side of the road with the car equivalent of a tv-b-gone.
Which completely defeats the purpose of safely disabling the car. Most car chases already end with a crash into a bystander's vehicle - that would just add an additional possibility for a lawsuit against the city.
Multiples of reasonable and resemblance to actual damages done are almost entirely unrelated. In this case both are pretty accurate. You could be the guy who uploads a screener of Avatar and could quite reasonably have done several million dollars in damages, but that's hardly payable. Conversely, they could track you down for seeding an album that NOBODY ever downloaded, and hit you for a much-more-payable three grand despite having done precisely $0 in damage.
That said, both are pretty accurate in this example.
You're just going to give up and pay their $20k (10-track album) extortion charge? I'm not exactly broke, but I don't have that kind of cash sitting around in my rainy day jar. Maybe at $200 a song (which, is memory serves, isn't too far from what they ask for in the "pay up and we won't sue" letter) that makes sense.
From what I hear *cough*, a lot of porn is still using WMV. Which is not nearly as limiting as the native support of Theora (yes it's Free, but my browser doesn't know that out of the box), but still excludes all Linux and Mac users that don't want to fight with irritating and semi-functional plugins.
You can, but it's a pain in the ass - and you have to do it on a per-site basis. Unlike font-faces and styles, the video controls are just generic HTML elements with onclick bindings to manipulate video playback - it's not a simple thing where you just replace a sprite for the controls overlay. You have to manipulate the DOM to remove/hide the custom controls and enable the native controls on the video element; the latter is trivial, but the former is not since every site does that differently. YouTube at least also puts an empty div overlaying the video element specifically to block you from doing that - also easy to deal with, but one of many things that you'll have to fix on a per-site basis.
Did you not read the part where he said that turning on fullscreen mode is not part of the native video APIs? I completely fail to see how greasemonkey is going to fix that. Scripts running from localhost don't get special permissions.
In 2009 it went up to $5,000,000. In 2011, it is going to go up again. So Mozilla will have to pay out $5,000,000 (and climbing) per year, just to support this one video codec in a product that they give away for free. Their revenue in their last fiscal year was $78.6 million.
Is it really worth it to spend 6% of your total yearly revenue on the licensing fee for one video codec?
More to the point, is it worth spending 6% of your revenue on not having all of your customers switch to competing products?
Yes. Absolutely, undoubtedly yes.
You have to remember that Firefox is not IE - it doesn't come preinstalled on 90% of computers shipped. Nearly everyone using that browser is doing so because they chose to switch to it from the system default. Given that both Safari and Chrome offer most of the features that got people to switch in the first place, it wouldn't come as a shock to see people migrate away from Firefox. I switched to Safari for my full-time browsing a few months ago, and I'd been using Firefox since the pre-1.0 naming debacle. Most of the extensions that I cared about had some sort of counterpart, and it's consistently faster, more responsive, and has a lighter footprint.
Don't take this as an ad for Safari (it's not), but realize that browsers have started to suck a lot less since Firefox came out years and years ago, and that means competition. And in my eyes, the competition is winning. That's my opinion of course, but many of my geek friends that used to use Firefox have also switched to Chrome and/or Safari.
That's no different than reading the paper. You scan the titles and spend time on the few articles that seem worth reading or pique your interest. This just changes the front page into something that more resembles a table of contents.
Papers can complain that these indexing services are taking half of their traffic. In reality, far fewer people would go to their site specifically to scan for those same headlines. Half of all aggregator readers clicking through to a story seems astonishingly high - I'd have expected closer to 10-20%
Any chance of getting something like that in a 12-13" casing? I find the netbook keyboards completely unusable, and I have pretty small hands. Take the space that would normally hold a dvd burner and pack in twice as much battery. Better battery life benefits users all the time; how often do you find yourself using optical media these days (or, do you find the lack of a dvd drive in netbooks to be problematic)?
I wish they'd start speccing battery life numbers based off h264 playback rather than DVDs. Or more to the point, include a dedicated lower-power decoder chip. I haven't touched DVDs in quite a long time, but between ripped movies and web streaming, there's a ton of h264 playback going on. I haven't done benchmarks on battery drain, but the extra CPU juice required (compared to mpeg2/4) seems to more than offset the savings of not having a dvd drive spinning the whole time. The high WiFi activity during most video playback doesn't help either.
If you don't use the thing at all, have WiFi, bluetooth, email checking, and push notifications disabled, and have solid reception, those numbers are realistic. But if you're actually treating it as a smartphone, that drops like a rock (which to be fair is true of all smartphones).
My iPhone is definitely a "charge every night" device. While I don't actually talk on the phone much, the battery has everything except screen brightness going against it (I keep all of my devices at low brightness, partly to save power but more because all of these screens are way too damn bright in everything but direct sunlight).
That said, any laptop which even claims the ability to be another "charge every night" (rather than every few hours) device is quite intriguing. Even if it gets 2/3 of the claim, which seems to be a reasonable estimate if other devices are anything to go by, that's still at or near a full work day on a single charge.
If you're up for wasting some time hacking the software that power those digital picture frames, you'll get pretty close. Maybe not $20, but I spotted a couple on Amazon in the $30-50 range. It would be a bit large and unwieldy (not to mention not even remotely portable, given that they're not battery-powered) but at a vague conceptual level, it's not that far off the mark.
No problem, as long as she runs Linux.
Actually, some early problems would have been discovered two years ago (think: 30-year loans). In all likelihood, there are plenty of bugs out there going unnoticed because some database table is silently capping the value at the signed int limit rather than throwing some sort of overflow error. Come 2038, there may be plenty of people who get a bill for an unexpected balloon payment in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Or on the flip side, bills will stop being sent out and some bank ends up losing a ton of money.
Not all devices need publicly addressable IPs, but providing them could enable a lot of cool new stuff, or at least vastly simplify its implementation. I'd quite like to be able to ping my refrigerator from my cell phone when out getting groceries to find out where I need to pick up milk. Right now, that would be completely impractical (from a networking perspective) without NAT, plus probably also UPNP (we are talking consumer devices here, who the hell wants to screw with their router's firewall for a fridge?!) and remembering a non-standard port number.
Or a more practical task: maybe you've tried to enable remote desktop (or some other service that has a standard port) on two machines in the same private network. At least on my consumer-grade router, I have to set up all sorts of port mapping (tedious) and then remember which port corresponds to which machine (horribly annoying).
Quite a first-world problem, but giving each device its own unique public IP eliminates a lot of ugly hacks that we currently have to employ.
You feel safer in an SUV, but the opposite is true -- you're in far more danger than any other kind of passenger vehicle. I can't imagine why anyone would transport their children in one of these dangerous, wasteful cars.
Not really. Maybe in the strictest sense that I'd probably come out on top if I were to crash into a smaller vehicle, but I never feel like I have sufficient control of the vehicle - and that does nothing to make me feel safe. I'm much happier to take my chances in a vehicle where I can better avoid crashing in the first place. The 4WD option is nice when trying to get up my stupidly long and steep driveway in the winter, but unless I need to transport a lot of people or stuff I avoid driving the thing.
Of course, I also had it spontaneously combust when driving it once, so I'm a bit mistrusting (the parking brake cable had gotten screwed up so the brake was dragging. Lots of friction led to lots of heat which ended in flames. Luckily I was at a gas station when it actually ignited so there was a fire extinguisher nearby)