If they don't like it, they can very easily "opt out" by using Robots.txt to disallow Googlebot. I fail to see where the problem is here.
Problem is.... newspapers, wanna have their pie and eat it too. Solution.... it's Google's fault. Result.... news dinosaurs go extinct and news mammals come to rule Earth Moral.... don't be greedy beyond survival.
Mac OS X makes heavy use of hardware accelerated functions: Quartz/Aqua 3D graphics (which unlike Vista's Aero can't be turned off), GPU-rendered graphics processing among others in CoreImage and iMovie, low-latency sound in CoreAudio,... - likely making it perhaps the worst candidate for virtualization among all operating systems.
"Virtualization" and "Hardware Acceleration" are not mutually exclusive. In fact, most of the virtualisation software seems to already provide pass-through drivers for their most popular guest OS-es, which access various 2D acceleration API-s on the host hardware.
And VMWare has a working 3D acceleration in beta.
If OSX was to be supported officially, they'd also benefit from this, and work a LOT better under, say, VMWare, compared to the current (illegal) hacks.
Re:Where's the security section of the book?
on
PHP 5 in Practice
·
· Score: 1
Considering that PHP will let you do things like do external includes from other web servers that can modify your PHP environment, etc... What PHP needs is not more features, but better designed security model.
Noone is putting a gun on your head to do an external include on a random external file.
*Any* reasonably flexible language allows you to shoot yourself in the foot, if you so desire. This is why serious programming is best kept away from little children.
When a new law is written and put into action, people's debate center around two opposing opinions: is it good, or is it bad.
Granted, every law can be bad or good, but we're missing the big picture. Have you seen the proposed European consitution? The Bible's both testaments are nothing compared to it.
Every time you put a law about something, you need to be really friggin sure that the right solution is *legal*. Otherwise we end up in a system so complicated and flawed (every law is imperfect, you know this), that nobody understands it at all, and the rules are so many and in many cases conflicting with each other, that the only way to apply them is selectively and "with a spin", depending on the lawyer/prosecutor/citizen bias.
We all fall pray to lawyers and the juridical system setting traps for us on every step to doing something.
Should fake blogs and reviews be banned? They shouldn't be encouraged, but a law is excessive. I mean, how many times should Sony/for example/ face public humiliation and mockery before they decide that this wasn't a good idea to begin with?
Fake marketing right now is, in most instances, easily recognizable. If we decide to patch the situation with a bunch of "moral" and "smart" laws, then the corporations in question will just get stealthier, and hire few more lawyers to let them workaround the law.
In the end, we gain nothing, except more complexity, and more lawyers. Great.
If our intelligent systems are always evolution-limited by the progress of our own biological systems then I can't see how A.I. smarter than a human will ever ben achieved.
You know this is pretty misleading so you can't take any blame for thinking so. Lots of people also think that we're also "a hundred years smarter" than those living in the 1900's, just because we were lucky to be born in a higher culture.
But think about it: what is our entire culture and science, if not ultra sped-up evolution. We make mistakes, tons of mistakes, as human beings, but compared to completely random mutations, we have supreme advantage over evolution in the signal/noise ratio of the resulting product.
Can we ever surpass our own complexity in what we create? But of course. Take a look at any moderately complex software product. I won't argue it's more complex than our brain, but something else: can you grasp and asses the scope of effort and complexity in, say (something trivial to us), Windows running on a PC, as one single product? Not just what's on the surface, but comprehend at once every little detail from applications, dialogs, controls, drivers, kernel, to the processor microcode.
I tell you what: even the programmers of Windows, and the engineers at Intel can't.
Our brain works in "OOP" fashion, simplifying huge chunks of complexity into a higher level "overview", so we could think about it in a different scale. In fact, lots of mental diseases, like autism or obsessive compulsive disorders revolve around the loss of ability to "see the big picture" or concentrate on a detail of it, at will.
Together, we break immensely complex tasks into much smaller, manageable tasks, and build upon the discoveries and effort we made yesterday. This way, although we still work on tiny pieces of a huge mind-bogglingly complex puzzle, our brain can cope with the task properly. There aren't any limits.
While I'm sure we'll see completely self-evolving AI in the next 100 years, I know that developing highly complex sentient AI with only elements of self-learning is quite in the ability of our scientists. Small step, by small step.
I mean come on, doesn't everyone know that the internet is run on Windows software and IE is the only REAL web browser! Anyone who uses anything else MUST be a hacker trying to break their site.
This would be funny, if it wasn't true. This was coming 1:1 from the mouth of one of my big clients (and otherwise a smart fella), just 10 months ago.
I would explain in a long tirade how Firefox is picking up and so on and so on. He'd just say "Nah, don't spend a second testing in Firefox, they'll have to use a REAL browser/IE/.".
Of course, I was secretly testing in other browsers for the hell of it, since I'm your typical thickheaded geek.
A month ago, the same client comes back crying that something broke the feature in the new Firefox 2.0. The irony.
(Also, turned out the issue was from a tweak HE made, after reverting it was ok.)
Has ruined every medium so far it has touched... This is the rule not the exception!
It has that potential, but come on: I watched the video 10 mins ago after I read this article (i.e. I already knew it's fake). I still enjoyed it a lot and laughed at some moments.
Not everything should be "real" for it to be enjoyable. And not everything should be void of marketing and product placement to be enjoyable too.
The devil's in the details as always, and how well all goals the creators had play together to form a coherent and fun final product.
This forces us to be more discerning. How is this a bad thing?
Indeed. And not just that. What kind of advertisement do you prefer: the marketoid speak, bland, noisy, blinking commercial spots rotated a hundred times on every channel every day, or more game-like advertising, which is fun on its own, and tries to show some practical usage of the advertised product?
I personally am sick of the "old school" commercial spots and would trade them for anything any day.
Of course it's important to differentiate deceptive viral marketing (ex. Sony's PSP "blog") and scams (ex. "Neuronet" virtual reality networks) and the harmless reality-game-like advertising, where the creators would reveal themselves as part of the plan (like the Bridezilla spot).
I would really rather them post those videos on their official sites as entertainment marketing their products, but truth is that while this generated hype, people will abuse it. The novelty will wear off and they will move on to a newer technique.
The difference may come as hard to discern in the general case of viral marketing, but quite important.
The ribbon looks cool, but I find myself digging around for items that I used to just have a small toolbox pop up for or were just on the main toolbar--plus there doesn't appear to be a way to reorganize the ribbon...)
I upgraded to Office 2007. It was confusing. For a minute. I have to say I'm really impressed with the new interface, and most of the reviews out there are positive, regarding the ribbon.
Of course, you'll always find the occasional "usability expert" nagging how it's not usable because HE thought so, but interfaces are not made with usability experts in mind, but users. If there's lack of coherence between those two groups, I'd opt to trust the overall user experience instead.
And while talking about usability, start with your blog:
- some of the tags are too tiny to even read (why not make them bigger or just hide them?) - the search box on top is just a blank text field without any hint as to what it is, or a button to hit (not everybody expects Enter would work). It doesn't work without JavaScript too, without any logical reason. - you fixed the text size, so it can't scale in IE (my, my) - your header "Shiny Happy People - the user experience" fails the "can I figure what this site is about in 10 seconds" rule and so on and so on.
I don't care if it's 65nm, 45nm or 10mm - that's a completely irrelevant (to me as a user and purchaser) implementation detail.
This is Slashdot. We care about those details. You can read more about the "super fast, super cool, super cheap!" market speak on the company's official press releases section.
Funny how Apple supporters dismiss this reason when it's applied to Windows security, but when it supports Job's reasons for keeping FairPlay closed it's accepted.
You've seen nothing yet. They're prepping a Chewbacca defense post as well.
Doesn't mean anything when you consider the market share of Apple vs. all of the Microsoft-licensed stores combined. Clearly people will be cracking the more-popular DRM, and that happens to be Apple's FairPlay.
You know, I once started thinking a lot and realized nothing ever means anything. It's all just a bunch of people arguing over unprovable hypotheses in a one-up-man-ship style and eventually spinning whatever facts they have in their disposal to reach a goal determined in advance before any analysis was done.
If it were profitable you would find just that. It's called free market. Start your own company and start selling computers without windows installed. If there is a demand you'll make a boatload of money;) I think you'll find as most retailers have, the demand is exactly 0.
In fact, in Eastern Europe, the "OS-less beige box" companies rule. It allows for max customization, minimal price and no Windows tax.
Ironically though, guess what people install on those OS-less beige boxes when they get home (hint: pirated Windows).
You know the salesmen that ring on your doorbell to sell you the latest in water-filtered dust hoovers, or the TN infomercials selling you those ultrasharp, lifetime guarantee knife set?
Steve's no different, except he's a very rich, and smarter salesman. He believes that if you mix: "cool" + "easy" + "hype", he has the sale secured. He won't mind bending some facts to tell you his story, and of all facts, by far the easiest to bend are the statistics, of course. A baby can do it, as he'd say.
I would comment when the original articles was posted, the problem is, this is far too transparent for most people his essay is directed to.
Not that I really believe Steve Jobs will care to read this post or even less take advice from a random commenter, but: Steve, keep the salesman tactics for your next product pitch to the consumers. When you talk to serious people, you better have serious arguments.
Most quantum computers have to be isolated from the outside world (look at them and they stop working)
This is often misunderstood. Quantum computers don't stop working when you "look at them", the "observer" metaphor is just a fancy way to say that the wave propagation of a particle collapses when it interacts with another particle.
Basically, imagine they are waves, propagating from the point of last interaction like expanding spheres. When two particles (spheres) touch each other, they collapse back to being single-point particles, and continue propagation anew until the next collision.
Which means, look at them all you want, just don't crack the casing open and point a torch inside.
What better unique identifier than the system bios?
Any random persistent data with equal or greater size? In facts the odds of BIOS data matching other copy of BIOS data is much higher than two randomly generated numbers of the same size because of the much lower entropy.
Why read the BIOS for this, what if you change your BIOS setup or motherboard? Your theory doesn't stand under closer scrutinity.
Especially since Skype doesn't lock the accounts to a specific PC.
People are buying PS3-s. More PS3-s than HD-DVD players. Because it's a Playstation.
It makes sense for their investment (they can't choose, as with XBOX360), they'll buy at least one BR movie to try out "what it's about".
But once the novelty wears off, one thing remains absolute: BR movies have worse DRM and way worse prices than plain DVDs, and only a little benefit in value (namely, higher resolution).
I'm not trying to spin this as if Sony's success with Blu-Ray is fake, as there isn't any real reason for HD-DVD to take off either.
Slashdot Mirror
If they don't like it, they can very easily "opt out" by using Robots.txt to disallow Googlebot. I fail to see where the problem is here.
Problem is.... newspapers, wanna have their pie and eat it too.
Solution.... it's Google's fault.
Result.... news dinosaurs go extinct and news mammals come to rule Earth
Moral.... don't be greedy beyond survival.
Mac OS X makes heavy use of hardware accelerated functions: Quartz/Aqua 3D graphics (which unlike Vista's Aero can't be turned off), GPU-rendered graphics processing among others in CoreImage and iMovie, low-latency sound in CoreAudio, ... - likely making it perhaps the worst candidate for virtualization among all operating systems.
"Virtualization" and "Hardware Acceleration" are not mutually exclusive. In fact, most of the virtualisation software seems to already provide pass-through drivers for their most popular guest OS-es, which access various 2D acceleration API-s on the host hardware.
And VMWare has a working 3D acceleration in beta.
If OSX was to be supported officially, they'd also benefit from this, and work a LOT better under, say, VMWare, compared to the current (illegal) hacks.
Considering that PHP will let you do things like do external includes from other web servers that can modify your PHP environment, etc...
What PHP needs is not more features, but better designed security model.
Noone is putting a gun on your head to do an external include on a random external file.
*Any* reasonably flexible language allows you to shoot yourself in the foot, if you so desire. This is why serious programming is best kept away from little children.
When a new law is written and put into action, people's debate center around two opposing opinions: is it good, or is it bad.
/for example/ face public humiliation and mockery before they decide that this wasn't a good idea to begin with?
Granted, every law can be bad or good, but we're missing the big picture. Have you seen the proposed European consitution? The Bible's both testaments are nothing compared to it.
Every time you put a law about something, you need to be really friggin sure that the right solution is *legal*. Otherwise we end up in a system so complicated and flawed (every law is imperfect, you know this), that nobody understands it at all, and the rules are so many and in many cases conflicting with each other, that the only way to apply them is selectively and "with a spin", depending on the lawyer/prosecutor/citizen bias.
We all fall pray to lawyers and the juridical system setting traps for us on every step to doing something.
Should fake blogs and reviews be banned? They shouldn't be encouraged, but a law is excessive. I mean, how many times should Sony
Fake marketing right now is, in most instances, easily recognizable. If we decide to patch the situation with a bunch of "moral" and "smart" laws, then the corporations in question will just get stealthier, and hire few more lawyers to let them workaround the law.
In the end, we gain nothing, except more complexity, and more lawyers. Great.
you can't just plug the Internet into your arm.
:((
Oooooh
Pitty, that would really put an interesting spin on the "donating cycles" phrase.
If our intelligent systems are always evolution-limited by the progress of our own biological systems then I can't see how A.I. smarter than a human will ever ben achieved.
You know this is pretty misleading so you can't take any blame for thinking so. Lots of people also think that we're also "a hundred years smarter" than those living in the 1900's, just because we were lucky to be born in a higher culture.
But think about it: what is our entire culture and science, if not ultra sped-up evolution. We make mistakes, tons of mistakes, as human beings, but compared to completely random mutations, we have supreme advantage over evolution in the signal/noise ratio of the resulting product.
Can we ever surpass our own complexity in what we create? But of course. Take a look at any moderately complex software product. I won't argue it's more complex than our brain, but something else: can you grasp and asses the scope of effort and complexity in, say (something trivial to us), Windows running on a PC, as one single product? Not just what's on the surface, but comprehend at once every little detail from applications, dialogs, controls, drivers, kernel, to the processor microcode.
I tell you what: even the programmers of Windows, and the engineers at Intel can't.
Our brain works in "OOP" fashion, simplifying huge chunks of complexity into a higher level "overview", so we could think about it in a different scale. In fact, lots of mental diseases, like autism or obsessive compulsive disorders revolve around the loss of ability to "see the big picture" or concentrate on a detail of it, at will.
Together, we break immensely complex tasks into much smaller, manageable tasks, and build upon the discoveries and effort we made yesterday. This way, although we still work on tiny pieces of a huge mind-bogglingly complex puzzle, our brain can cope with the task properly. There aren't any limits.
While I'm sure we'll see completely self-evolving AI in the next 100 years, I know that developing highly complex sentient AI with only elements of self-learning is quite in the ability of our scientists. Small step, by small step.
I mean come on, doesn't everyone know that the internet is run on Windows software and IE is the only REAL web browser! Anyone who uses anything else MUST be a hacker trying to break their site.
/IE/.".
This would be funny, if it wasn't true. This was coming 1:1 from the mouth of one of my big clients (and otherwise a smart fella), just 10 months ago.
I would explain in a long tirade how Firefox is picking up and so on and so on. He'd just say "Nah, don't spend a second testing in Firefox, they'll have to use a REAL browser
Of course, I was secretly testing in other browsers for the hell of it, since I'm your typical thickheaded geek.
A month ago, the same client comes back crying that something broke the feature in the new Firefox 2.0. The irony.
(Also, turned out the issue was from a tweak HE made, after reverting it was ok.)
So then, what is the problem with being upfront about it? Why do they have to pretend they're not marketers?
Simple: hype. It's just easier to hype it up this way.
This is a temporary effect though. We know if this formula gets users often enough, people will stop reacting to it, as with anything else.
Has ruined every medium so far it has touched... This is the rule not the exception!
It has that potential, but come on: I watched the video 10 mins ago after I read this article (i.e. I already knew it's fake). I still enjoyed it a lot and laughed at some moments.
Not everything should be "real" for it to be enjoyable. And not everything should be void of marketing and product placement to be enjoyable too.
The devil's in the details as always, and how well all goals the creators had play together to form a coherent and fun final product.
This forces us to be more discerning. How is this a bad thing?
Indeed. And not just that. What kind of advertisement do you prefer: the marketoid speak, bland, noisy, blinking commercial spots rotated a hundred times on every channel every day, or more game-like advertising, which is fun on its own, and tries to show some practical usage of the advertised product?
I personally am sick of the "old school" commercial spots and would trade them for anything any day.
Of course it's important to differentiate deceptive viral marketing (ex. Sony's PSP "blog") and scams (ex. "Neuronet" virtual reality networks) and the harmless reality-game-like advertising, where the creators would reveal themselves as part of the plan (like the Bridezilla spot).
I would really rather them post those videos on their official sites as entertainment marketing their products, but truth is that while this generated hype, people will abuse it. The novelty will wear off and they will move on to a newer technique.
The difference may come as hard to discern in the general case of viral marketing, but quite important.
The ribbon looks cool, but I find myself digging around for items that I used to just have a small toolbox pop up for or were just on the main toolbar--plus there doesn't appear to be a way to reorganize the ribbon...)
I upgraded to Office 2007. It was confusing. For a minute. I have to say I'm really impressed with the new interface, and most of the reviews out there are positive, regarding the ribbon.
Of course, you'll always find the occasional "usability expert" nagging how it's not usable because HE thought so, but interfaces are not made with usability experts in mind, but users. If there's lack of coherence between those two groups, I'd opt to trust the overall user experience instead.
And while talking about usability, start with your blog:
- some of the tags are too tiny to even read (why not make them bigger or just hide them?)
- the search box on top is just a blank text field without any hint as to what it is, or a button to hit (not everybody expects Enter would work). It doesn't work without JavaScript too, without any logical reason.
- you fixed the text size, so it can't scale in IE (my, my)
- your header "Shiny Happy People - the user experience" fails the "can I figure what this site is about in 10 seconds" rule
and so on and so on.
I don't care if it's 65nm, 45nm or 10mm - that's a completely irrelevant (to me as a user and purchaser) implementation detail.
This is Slashdot. We care about those details. You can read more about the "super fast, super cool, super cheap!" market speak on the company's official press releases section.
Not to mention that intentions and actions are two very different things.
Yep, you know they say: Life is what happens while you're planning a mass massacre.
Funny how Apple supporters dismiss this reason when it's applied to Windows security, but when it supports Job's reasons for keeping FairPlay closed it's accepted.
You've seen nothing yet. They're prepping a Chewbacca defense post as well.
Doesn't mean anything when you consider the market share of Apple vs. all of the Microsoft-licensed stores combined. Clearly people will be cracking the more-popular DRM, and that happens to be Apple's FairPlay.
You know, I once started thinking a lot and realized nothing ever means anything. It's all just a bunch of people arguing over unprovable hypotheses in a one-up-man-ship style and eventually spinning whatever facts they have in their disposal to reach a goal determined in advance before any analysis was done.
Wow. I'm boring.
If it were profitable you would find just that. It's called free market. Start your own company and start selling computers without windows installed. If there is a demand you'll make a boatload of money ;) I think you'll find as most retailers have, the demand is exactly 0.
In fact, in Eastern Europe, the "OS-less beige box" companies rule. It allows for max customization, minimal price and no Windows tax.
Ironically though, guess what people install on those OS-less beige boxes when they get home (hint: pirated Windows).
Which European? He must be pretty important to get a Slashdot frontpage notice.
Tommorow in the news: some American moves to Windows, and some Australian gets bitten by a stray dog.
by exp(pi*sqrt(163))
I don't know why this was modded up.
Don't listen to him, he's irrational!
You know the salesmen that ring on your doorbell to sell you the latest in water-filtered dust hoovers, or the TN infomercials selling you those ultrasharp, lifetime guarantee knife set?
Steve's no different, except he's a very rich, and smarter salesman. He believes that if you mix: "cool" + "easy" + "hype", he has the sale secured. He won't mind bending some facts to tell you his story, and of all facts, by far the easiest to bend are the statistics, of course. A baby can do it, as he'd say.
I would comment when the original articles was posted, the problem is, this is far too transparent for most people his essay is directed to.
Not that I really believe Steve Jobs will care to read this post or even less take advice from a random commenter, but: Steve, keep the salesman tactics for your next product pitch to the consumers. When you talk to serious people, you better have serious arguments.
Most quantum computers have to be isolated from the outside world (look at them and they stop working)
This is often misunderstood. Quantum computers don't stop working when you "look at them", the "observer" metaphor is just a fancy way to say that the wave propagation of a particle collapses when it interacts with another particle.
Basically, imagine they are waves, propagating from the point of last interaction like expanding spheres. When two particles (spheres) touch each other, they collapse back to being single-point particles, and continue propagation anew until the next collision.
Which means, look at them all you want, just don't crack the casing open and point a torch inside.
Macs pretending to be PCs
Funny, and I thought nowadays Apple sells PC's pretending to be Macs.
What better unique identifier than the system bios?
Any random persistent data with equal or greater size? In facts the odds of BIOS data matching other copy of BIOS data is much higher than two randomly generated numbers of the same size because of the much lower entropy.
Why read the BIOS for this, what if you change your BIOS setup or motherboard? Your theory doesn't stand under closer scrutinity.
Especially since Skype doesn't lock the accounts to a specific PC.
People are buying PS3-s. More PS3-s than HD-DVD players. Because it's a Playstation.
It makes sense for their investment (they can't choose, as with XBOX360), they'll buy at least one BR movie to try out "what it's about".
But once the novelty wears off, one thing remains absolute: BR movies have worse DRM and way worse prices than plain DVDs, and only a little benefit in value (namely, higher resolution).
I'm not trying to spin this as if Sony's success with Blu-Ray is fake, as there isn't any real reason for HD-DVD to take off either.
I'm just saying: not so fast.
I fail to see why posts talking about vulnerabilities in widely used software is tagged "haha". Is it really so funny?
The zombies that will result from those attacks will send spam even to your tricked out Linux PC. You're laughing at your own expense. Have fun.
Plus it's still easier and cheaper for An Actual Human to simply shoot you with a conventional gun, rather than use Wii-eqipped sword holding robots.
For now.
Was this supposed to sound spooky or TV-sci-fi-series cheesy?