I'm completely inclined to agree with you - having gone through the (English) education system rather recently, I think it really misses the point. Then again, the business world misses the point in similar ways, so I suppose it's at least decent preparation...
I think you understand my point, though, that your average adult won't try to take their children out of school, whereas they are liable to overreact about MySpace. Ironically, school probably is more damaging - would the disadvantages of home-schooling (i.e. lack of daily contact with peers) outweight the benefits of home-schooling (i.e. lack of daily contact with peers) with responsible and educated parents? Discuss.
Could you, perchance, be referring to the part of TFA which says:
At least one partner, Tangent Inc., an OEM based in Burlingame, Calif., has come right out and said that Microsoft charges exorbitant fees from OEMs, distributors, and resellers for its operating system licenses.
Do you know what else Tangent claims? That Microsoft entered into restrictive agreements with OEMs and system builders that limit or eliminate their ability to feature non-Microsoft products. The company filed an antitrust lawsuit in US District Court Feb. 14 against Microsoft, alleging anticompetitive behavior in several areas (digital rights management (DRM), server software, and others). Hmmm...
Is this the first step toward a drive that plays HD DVD and Blu-Ray? Is this even possible?
Yes. Really, all you need is different lasers to read the surface - all the rest of the hardware is there to spin the disc, and manage communication on the bus, etc. Once you've got to the point of "I read these 0s and 1s from the disc", drives are identical. (Probably an oversimplification, but valid in principle.)
We currently have DVD+R and DVD-R combo drives, and IIRC these formats are as distinct as HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Also, IANAODM (I Am Not An Optical Drive Manufacturer), but Samsung is, and they seem to think it's possible...
Cheaper brands will have cheaper components and lower specifications than many name-brand companies.
I'm not convinced that's true. Now I can't pull any references out here, so you'll just have to take this as an opinion, but AFAIK it's not uncommon for cheaper brands to use the same components as more expensive brands, but to have lower markup and other expenditures. Of course, they'll probably cut some corners where the user is less likely to notice from the specs (e.g. controller chips), but on the whole the product is often of comparably quality.
I can say from experience it works like this in the golf industry. Big companies like Callaway and Taylor Made get their heads from the same foundries as smaller brands like Dynacraft and Golfsmith, using exactly the same quality of materials and labour. Yet they go on to sell for as much as double the price (when paired with lower quality shafts); partly because the millions they spend on advertising drives up their break-even point, and partly because the millions they spend on advertising allows them to push up their markup even more because it's a "top quality product".
Generally, more $ on advertising == Bigger brand != better products.
I can't see how this is worse than what Apple did for its WebKit contributors. Except here they're mentioning that there's a prize beforehand, rather than retrospectively deciding to award one.
In fact, I can't see how this is worse than open source development in general, which in your words is "free labor in exchange for no chance at a contest prize". I'd like to refer you both to the keilinw's earlier comment about funding innovation, and Eric S. Raymond's Homesteading the Noosphere for an explanation of why people create open source software. Then remember that those reasons still apply, plus they stand a chance to benefit financially from it, and try to maintain it's a bad thing.
I was kind of tired of trying other tutorials (mainly from the internet) as I fouind them incomplete and sincerely wanting.
Did you see Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide, by Ruby's creator Yukihiro Matsumoto? It's a freely-available transcript of a paper book, and I'm halfway through and finding it good going.
Now I'm only playing with Ruby at the moment, so I couldn't say how the examples and sections stand up to heavy industrial use, but if seems an excellent introduction and the tone and flow are both good!
I've said it before and I'll say it again, technology is very rarely the problem. MySpace is by its very nature a social networking tool (of dubious quality, but that's another issue), and is meant to bring people together. What they do after that is a function of the people, not MySpace itself. And yes, sometimes these people meet through MySpace and then have underage sex.
Sometimes people meet each other through school and then have underage sex... I don't hear any claims that school is a "danger to teens". It's time we stopped blaming technology for merely giving people opportunities to show their moral fibre.
Close, but not quite. You're forgetting that you're not using the software for the software's sake; you're using it to acheive something. That is to say, the software isn't the be-all and end-all, it's just a means to an end.
More than likely, the OP needed "A spreadsheet" but chose the actual application based on a variety of factors, one of which was probably the OS he was running at the time. He doesn't need to run spreadsheet Brand X, that's just his current choice; if spreadsheet Brand Y can fulfil the needs as well, but works solely on Linux, that's fine. It's certainly not the vicious cycle of "I chose X because I run Windows, and I need to run Windows because I use X".
Admittedly there are retraining/migration costs, which would come under the cons of changing product (and are sometimes really large, e.g. incompatible data files). But don't make the mistake of thinking that because you can't get a specific app on Linux, it's not worth switching. People really use computers as a tool, to acheive certain goals, and people using and developing for Linux have similar goals to those using Windows. If you can do it in Windows, you can probably do it some way in Linux; don't get too hooked on the details.
I can't imagine any possible reason to having external interfacing on these computers, so with any sense they'd be autonomous once built and released.
In theory someone could still change their program physically... but if someone you don't trust is up to their elbows in your kidneys, you've got more pressing concerns!:)
OK, so they've got a computer that works on enzymes, which is pretty clever. And from TFA:
"This is basically a computer that could be integrated with the human body," Willner told New Scientist. "We feel you could implant an enzyme computer into the body and use it to calculate an entire metabolic pathway."
But can't you do that already with standard computers (we can make them pretty small these days, so I'm told)?
My guess is that they instinctively think "Ooh, it's made of enzymes, instead of all that nasty enzymes and electricity, so it must be better to put in people." But then we've been putting pacemakers etc. in people for years without any problems. And if they're suggesting that these wouldn't be self-enclosed units and would actually interact with actual human enzymes that may come and go as they please... then they've got a lot of contingency planning and 'wiring' work to do...
I don't see this having any real impact for a long while yet.
less than 5% of the aggregate iPod capacity is filled with iTMS songs.
Yes... but what percentage of the aggregate iPod capacity is filled with any songs?
iPods have been exceptionally well-marketed (to the masses, at least), and many people want them solely for the status they confer. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a vast amount of iPods actually sitting unused, and many more that hold a mere handful of songs.
I had a look at the patent description, saw a massive amount of images referenced, and clicked on the 'Images' link at the bottom in order to see them. Firefox tells me "Additional plugins are required to display all the media on this page".
Nice... you can't read the patent about rich media without having something to process that media. That strikes me as very strange, somehow.:)
It'll certainly be interesting to see effects like those of 3dDesk the norm, rather than the exception. Also, if anyone else has played with it they might have noticed that it essentially works with lowish-res images of the desktop rather than the windows and icons themselves - you can notice it in some of the modes, there's a definite switch between the desktop itself, and the image of the desktop (in both directions). Having something fully integrated will open up many new possibilities......and on the same note, it's a challenge to designers to use them in a truly worthwhile way. While I agree with that eye candy does make a difference, it can also make a difference in a bad way when clueless designers turn to snazzy effects to make up for lack of basic competence (viz. many many webpages). It's the difference between
"Let's make improvements to X - ooh, that new 3D stuff could help with that"
and
"Wow, that 3D stuff sure is snazzy! We'd best think up a way to get it into our next release."
Now I'm certainly not saying that this is bad news, far from it in fact, but I can imagine there'll be temptation there to use it at any cost (especially once it starts making its way into competing projects). Hopefully interface designers will embrace the new possibilites open to them and give us some genuinely useful/nice improvements.
That's as maybe. But we'd still have (if that's the only problem) a wonderful, robust, fast, legal P2P network.
Stupid people will always buy stupid things; you can't try to protect them from that by never creating anything that could be marketed in a misleading way. And although it won't really apply to said stupid people, if the GPL or equivalent was used, the adware-filled copy would have to be open source too.
The worst problem I see is more people will rely on KAD, increasing the server load......and making it a larger target. It's certainly no coincidence that the "biggest and best ed2k server" was the one that got shut down. The agencies know they can't take down every server, so they concentrate on the few where it'll hit the users hard. Then a new one will rise to prominence, and be shut down... over time, enough big setbacks cause popular networks to be less useful, and newer ones come up under the public radar to be the Next Big Thing.
Granted, there have been a lot of technical innovations, but the major reason why there's so much churn in filesharing is that it sucks to be big - it paints a nice big "sue me" target on you...
Seriously, if you're going to "allow a group to congregate around the table and share pictures, play board games, or peruse a map", then you can't expect them to form an orderly queue to take turns to touch the screen in a well-defined order. Well, you can, but it takes half the fun out of it. If this is to stand a chance of being successful (which it probably doesn't anyway right now), they've got to really push the social, collaborative angle.
And that includes people doing several things at once with the screen.
From TFA, "IBM led the overall market in 2005 in terms of revenue, with $16.9 billion in sales and 32.9 percent share." This year they're at $17.5 billion and 32.6% of market share.
If you extrapolate totals from that, you get: |_Year_|_____Unix_______|_______Win______|_____Lin ux____|_____*nix_______| (/. weirdly puts a space in 'Linux') | 2004 | $16.9bn(32.9%) | $??.?bn(??.?%) | $4.3bn(8.37%) | $21.2bn(41.3%) | | 2005 | $17.5bn(32.6%) | $17.7bn(34.5%) | $5.3bn(9.87%) | $22.8bn(42.5%) |
Or, in other words, the *nix share of the market has grown, even though Unix's share fell. We can see that Microsoft's share of the market in 2004 was less than 32.9%, so they've gained over 1.6% of the market - that's not shabby by anyone's standards, and does represent a real gain for them regardless of anything else. In addition to this, it certainly looks like Linux is eating into Unix's market quite substantially.
To summarise: a bit of both.
(If anyone can find the 2004 report, it'd be interesting to fill in those blanks...)
...giving out copies of address lists would leave the newsletter subscribers open to spam and computer viruses.
and yet are happy to gdo exactly this to a teenager who's clearly a bit of a techno whizz, and likely anti-establishment (given this episode)?
Let's for the moment assume they meant "electronically" in the above claim. Then it's the distinction that puzzles me. If you claim safety/anti-virus as your reason for making him copy it out by hand, then you're implying that emailing someone a list, or mailing them a floppy with some files on, or whatever is open to abuse, but somehow that person coming in and copying them down himself isn't? Very weird - it's either inconsistent, or more worringly they're saying that any other method of transmission other than eye and pencil is substantially insecure.
So what'll it be - negligent, inconsistent or dangerously under-secured...?
The Motion Picture Association of America estimates that the movie industry lost $5.4 billion last year due to piracy.
More accurately, the MPAA estimates that the retail value of pirated films, etc, was $5.4bn. Now I'm not advocating piracy, but when I was a student a couple of years ago I would download albums and films, and I can personally guarantee that it did not cost the industry any money - simply because as a poor student I couldn't afford to buy them. If I hadn't downloaded them, I just wouldn't have seen them, and that's that.
The MPAA seems to think there's a dichotomy of pirating films or purchasing them, and by extension that if we make pirating impossible, then every pirate will go out and purchase everything that they would otherwise have pirated. And that, my friends, is a rather baseless claim (even if you're completely unaware of the animosity towards studios in general).
I'm not sure exactly what the legal definition of indemnity is, but in general speak I understand it to be that "if you get sued for IP infringement, Microsoft will handle the court case on your behalf as a representative of the allegedly infringing product". They're pushing this as a feature (which is a bit crazy, as noted above) in order to try to get a foothold in Asia.
But in today's patent-happy legal minefield, do they really expect that no-one would stand up for Linux users? It's a matter of precedent - no matter whether the case is brought against a particular user or not, what's really on trial is the allegedly infringing software. If the user is found guilty, then the software is found guilty and cannot be used by anyone else. The makers of the software, and more likely organisations such as distros and Linux advocacy groups will all have an interest and no doubt a role in protecting the product (and the user).
Anyway, does anyone else think it's sad that you can be sued for using IP-infringing software, rather than the software makers? That implies the onus is on the user to pore through the source code and the list of software patents, looking for any potential infringements, which is quite patently (pun intended) ridiculous.
In the end studies are only worth something if they can be verified and are accurate with a sample that has as few biases (sp?) as possible.
As Stuart mentions:
Questioning the credibility of ALL analyst studies is important.
If your claim was true, then History would be a worthless subject as it's almost impossible to get unbiased historical records. Yet it continues to be able to reconstruct the past in surprising detail, in part because the bias lets us know more about the different schools of thought and power groups of the day.
Besides, most people who are involved with a sector of an industry will have an angle on that industry, and will be predisposed to like certain things and to dislike others, whether they want to or not. If you insist on an unbiased report, then most likely you'll have to get some entirely external reporters in, and I daresay that their lack of knowledge of the subject area will result in a worse report than a few potential biases. It's a very important skill to be able to separate fact from opinion - and likewise it's important not to just throw out the opinion as non-fact! If someone (especially high-profile, who's been involved with a subject for a bit) holds a certain view, that can mean a lot, since they've come to that view based on what they've seen. A dozen justified opinions will go a very long way to playing out all the pros, cons and miscellanea of a debate.
(Anyway - if you're going to hold out for an analysis of Linux vs Windows from someone who has no prior contact and thus bias... good luck with that...)
Yahoo! feels it would be help responsible for the string representation of one of its user's usernames, should it be deemed to be culturally offensive (and I'm not talking about one that obviously uses a swear word)
It decides to deal with this in a very knee-jerk, and perhaps more tellingly, non-labour-intensive way.
If Yahoo actually cared about both the content of user names and the users, it could simply flag all new usernames for review, perhaps require that the name is approved by a reviewer before use? The vast majority of names could be passed in literally one second; you could send a digest of 100 prospective screen names to operators and have them filter out any actually offensive ones in under 60 seconds, definitely. I don't think any legitimate users would mind waiting a few hours (probably much less) for an account to be first-time activated.
Then again, what with the way things are going recently, I'm not sure I want underpaid Yahoo goons deciding what counts as offensive...
Goodness me, I'll admit I don't know that much about the workings of OS X but I'm shocked to hear that meta data stored in a file is trusted in this fashion. It's entirely up to the file creators as to what to put in this meta data, and since it's handily bundled with the file it's persistant across different environments. I know it's not quite as bad as a file telling the OS that it's owned by root and executable (perhaps SUID even?), but as we've seen it's quite exploitable.
Are there any other meta data attributes that OS X naively reads from the file that could be exploited in this way? Is there a compelling reason to store this data in the file itself and not in some central data store (chmodded 400/600)?
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Pretty much the same thing as you're proposing, in fact.
I'm completely inclined to agree with you - having gone through the (English) education system rather recently, I think it really misses the point. Then again, the business world misses the point in similar ways, so I suppose it's at least decent preparation...
I think you understand my point, though, that your average adult won't try to take their children out of school, whereas they are liable to overreact about MySpace. Ironically, school probably is more damaging - would the disadvantages of home-schooling (i.e. lack of daily contact with peers) outweight the benefits of home-schooling (i.e. lack of daily contact with peers) with responsible and educated parents? Discuss.
s, or
s.
But nice list, nonetheless.
We currently have DVD+R and DVD-R combo drives, and IIRC these formats are as distinct as HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Also, IANAODM (I Am Not An Optical Drive Manufacturer), but Samsung is, and they seem to think it's possible...
I can say from experience it works like this in the golf industry. Big companies like Callaway and Taylor Made get their heads from the same foundries as smaller brands like Dynacraft and Golfsmith, using exactly the same quality of materials and labour. Yet they go on to sell for as much as double the price (when paired with lower quality shafts); partly because the millions they spend on advertising drives up their break-even point, and partly because the millions they spend on advertising allows them to push up their markup even more because it's a "top quality product".
Generally, more $ on advertising == Bigger brand != better products.
I can't see how this is worse than what Apple did for its WebKit contributors. Except here they're mentioning that there's a prize beforehand, rather than retrospectively deciding to award one.
In fact, I can't see how this is worse than open source development in general, which in your words is "free labor in exchange for no chance at a contest prize". I'd like to refer you both to the keilinw's earlier comment about funding innovation, and Eric S. Raymond's Homesteading the Noosphere for an explanation of why people create open source software. Then remember that those reasons still apply, plus they stand a chance to benefit financially from it, and try to maintain it's a bad thing.
Now I'm only playing with Ruby at the moment, so I couldn't say how the examples and sections stand up to heavy industrial use, but if seems an excellent introduction and the tone and flow are both good!
I've said it before and I'll say it again, technology is very rarely the problem. MySpace is by its very nature a social networking tool (of dubious quality, but that's another issue), and is meant to bring people together. What they do after that is a function of the people, not MySpace itself. And yes, sometimes these people meet through MySpace and then have underage sex.
Sometimes people meet each other through school and then have underage sex... I don't hear any claims that school is a "danger to teens". It's time we stopped blaming technology for merely giving people opportunities to show their moral fibre.
Close, but not quite. You're forgetting that you're not using the software for the software's sake; you're using it to acheive something. That is to say, the software isn't the be-all and end-all, it's just a means to an end.
More than likely, the OP needed "A spreadsheet" but chose the actual application based on a variety of factors, one of which was probably the OS he was running at the time. He doesn't need to run spreadsheet Brand X, that's just his current choice; if spreadsheet Brand Y can fulfil the needs as well, but works solely on Linux, that's fine. It's certainly not the vicious cycle of "I chose X because I run Windows, and I need to run Windows because I use X".
Admittedly there are retraining/migration costs, which would come under the cons of changing product (and are sometimes really large, e.g. incompatible data files). But don't make the mistake of thinking that because you can't get a specific app on Linux, it's not worth switching. People really use computers as a tool, to acheive certain goals, and people using and developing for Linux have similar goals to those using Windows. If you can do it in Windows, you can probably do it some way in Linux; don't get too hooked on the details.
I can't imagine any possible reason to having external interfacing on these computers, so with any sense they'd be autonomous once built and released.
:)
In theory someone could still change their program physically... but if someone you don't trust is up to their elbows in your kidneys, you've got more pressing concerns!
My guess is that they instinctively think "Ooh, it's made of enzymes, instead of all that nasty enzymes and electricity, so it must be better to put in people." But then we've been putting pacemakers etc. in people for years without any problems. And if they're suggesting that these wouldn't be self-enclosed units and would actually interact with actual human enzymes that may come and go as they please... then they've got a lot of contingency planning and 'wiring' work to do...
I don't see this having any real impact for a long while yet.
iPods have been exceptionally well-marketed (to the masses, at least), and many people want them solely for the status they confer. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a vast amount of iPods actually sitting unused, and many more that hold a mere handful of songs.
I had a look at the patent description, saw a massive amount of images referenced, and clicked on the 'Images' link at the bottom in order to see them. Firefox tells me "Additional plugins are required to display all the media on this page".
:)
Nice... you can't read the patent about rich media without having something to process that media. That strikes me as very strange, somehow.
That's as maybe. But we'd still have (if that's the only problem) a wonderful, robust, fast, legal P2P network.
Stupid people will always buy stupid things; you can't try to protect them from that by never creating anything that could be marketed in a misleading way. And although it won't really apply to said stupid people, if the GPL or equivalent was used, the adware-filled copy would have to be open source too.
...but will it feature multiple-point touchscreen technology?
Seriously, if you're going to "allow a group to congregate around the table and share pictures, play board games, or peruse a map", then you can't expect them to form an orderly queue to take turns to touch the screen in a well-defined order. Well, you can, but it takes half the fun out of it. If this is to stand a chance of being successful (which it probably doesn't anyway right now), they've got to really push the social, collaborative angle.
And that includes people doing several things at once with the screen.
From TFA, "IBM led the overall market in 2005 in terms of revenue, with $16.9 billion in sales and 32.9 percent share." This year they're at $17.5 billion and 32.6% of market share.
n ux____|_____*nix_______| (/. weirdly puts a space in 'Linux')
If you extrapolate totals from that, you get:
|_Year_|_____Unix_______|_______Win______|_____Li
| 2004 | $16.9bn(32.9%) | $??.?bn(??.?%) | $4.3bn(8.37%) | $21.2bn(41.3%) |
| 2005 | $17.5bn(32.6%) | $17.7bn(34.5%) | $5.3bn(9.87%) | $22.8bn(42.5%) |
Or, in other words, the *nix share of the market has grown, even though Unix's share fell. We can see that Microsoft's share of the market in 2004 was less than 32.9%, so they've gained over 1.6% of the market - that's not shabby by anyone's standards, and does represent a real gain for them regardless of anything else. In addition to this, it certainly looks like Linux is eating into Unix's market quite substantially.
To summarise: a bit of both.
(If anyone can find the 2004 report, it'd be interesting to fill in those blanks...)
Let's for the moment assume they meant "electronically" in the above claim. Then it's the distinction that puzzles me. If you claim safety/anti-virus as your reason for making him copy it out by hand, then you're implying that emailing someone a list, or mailing them a floppy with some files on, or whatever is open to abuse, but somehow that person coming in and copying them down himself isn't? Very weird - it's either inconsistent, or more worringly they're saying that any other method of transmission other than eye and pencil is substantially insecure.
So what'll it be - negligent, inconsistent or dangerously under-secured...?
The MPAA seems to think there's a dichotomy of pirating films or purchasing them, and by extension that if we make pirating impossible, then every pirate will go out and purchase everything that they would otherwise have pirated. And that, my friends, is a rather baseless claim (even if you're completely unaware of the animosity towards studios in general).
I'm not sure exactly what the legal definition of indemnity is, but in general speak I understand it to be that "if you get sued for IP infringement, Microsoft will handle the court case on your behalf as a representative of the allegedly infringing product". They're pushing this as a feature (which is a bit crazy, as noted above) in order to try to get a foothold in Asia.
But in today's patent-happy legal minefield, do they really expect that no-one would stand up for Linux users? It's a matter of precedent - no matter whether the case is brought against a particular user or not, what's really on trial is the allegedly infringing software. If the user is found guilty, then the software is found guilty and cannot be used by anyone else. The makers of the software, and more likely organisations such as distros and Linux advocacy groups will all have an interest and no doubt a role in protecting the product (and the user).
Anyway, does anyone else think it's sad that you can be sued for using IP-infringing software, rather than the software makers? That implies the onus is on the user to pore through the source code and the list of software patents, looking for any potential infringements, which is quite patently (pun intended) ridiculous.
Besides, most people who are involved with a sector of an industry will have an angle on that industry, and will be predisposed to like certain things and to dislike others, whether they want to or not. If you insist on an unbiased report, then most likely you'll have to get some entirely external reporters in, and I daresay that their lack of knowledge of the subject area will result in a worse report than a few potential biases. It's a very important skill to be able to separate fact from opinion - and likewise it's important not to just throw out the opinion as non-fact! If someone (especially high-profile, who's been involved with a subject for a bit) holds a certain view, that can mean a lot, since they've come to that view based on what they've seen. A dozen justified opinions will go a very long way to playing out all the pros, cons and miscellanea of a debate.
(Anyway - if you're going to hold out for an analysis of Linux vs Windows from someone who has no prior contact and thus bias... good luck with that...)
If Yahoo actually cared about both the content of user names and the users, it could simply flag all new usernames for review, perhaps require that the name is approved by a reviewer before use? The vast majority of names could be passed in literally one second; you could send a digest of 100 prospective screen names to operators and have them filter out any actually offensive ones in under 60 seconds, definitely. I don't think any legitimate users would mind waiting a few hours (probably much less) for an account to be first-time activated.
Then again, what with the way things are going recently, I'm not sure I want underpaid Yahoo goons deciding what counts as offensive...
Goodness me, I'll admit I don't know that much about the workings of OS X but I'm shocked to hear that meta data stored in a file is trusted in this fashion. It's entirely up to the file creators as to what to put in this meta data, and since it's handily bundled with the file it's persistant across different environments. I know it's not quite as bad as a file telling the OS that it's owned by root and executable (perhaps SUID even?), but as we've seen it's quite exploitable.
Are there any other meta data attributes that OS X naively reads from the file that could be exploited in this way? Is there a compelling reason to store this data in the file itself and not in some central data store (chmodded 400/600)?