Everyone is greedy to a point. Some are just able to carry their greed to the point of complete selfishness and totally ignore the high percentage of people who have a hard time just keeping a roof over their heads.
What the heck will it take? Evolution of the human species? I always think back to those old Star Trek episodes where they land on some planet where the inhabitants laugh kindly at Earth's culture because they have learned to live without greed, take care of everyone, and actually enjoy sex rather than codify it.
I don't know why I want to write this... mod at your leisure. But before you bite my head off, I want to make sure all the future commenters out there read this very key quote:
"Music companies make more money when they sell a song on iTunes than when they sell a CD," Mr Jobs said last year. "If they want to raise prices, it's because they're greedy. If the price goes up, people turn back to piracy - and everybody loses."
Hopefully that will keep those crazy anti-Apple fanboys at bay.
Flickr alternative in case you really need control
on
A History of Flickr
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· Score: 2, Informative
I've never used Flickr, but I have been using Gallery now for about 6 months. It's Open Source, based on PHP and MySQL. I've had to do two complete machine moves in that time, and it's handled them both flawlessly.
I think of all the image organization programs and services I've used (and there's a whole lotta them!), Gallery has brought me the most pleasure. I had more or less put down my digital camera, because I found sharing, storing and cataloging photos publicly too much of a pain. Being able to share my photos with my friends and family has just been a real joy for me. And no, it's not pr0n.;-)
I suppose I could use the Flickr API, but I just wanted something I could stick on my own private site. If something bad happened with Flickr it would be far too much of a hassle to have to deal with someone else's system.
Actually, Mozilla does not use yellow. Specifically, it uses RGB values 245, 246, and 190 respectively. SiteAdvisor uses a more pure yellow with less blue light and far more equal red and green light.
In related news, yellow means warning. Orange means caution. Mozilla has defined the color peach to mean "secure web site". But hey, nobody else claimed peach!
To say "5% of All Web Traffic [is] Unsafe" would make the assumption that out of 100 bytes transmitted, 5 were from dangerous sites. The correct way to specify what SiteAdvisor claims would be "5% of All Web Requests From Unsafe Sites".
But this isn't to say that SiteAdvisor isn't bad. Heck, it's the best thing to happen since sliced bread, or just bread. I have a brother who is marred and has 2 kids between the ages of 12 and 15. Those kids killed his last computer, unwittingly installing all sorts of nonsense when they downloaded games and graphics. That was on a Windows 98 machine which, as hard as I tried, simply could not secure or revive from all of the trojan horses and malware that had infected it.
I've just emailed him about installing the SiteAdvisor plug-in for Firefox which is absolutely brilliant for users like my brother. Hell, I've installed it just for the novelty of it. The "Red X/Green Check" thing really turns novices more skeptical.
Merely sending people up in to space isn't exploration. We've sent probes to many of the planets (Mars in paticular), and there are plans to a new space observatory. Considering the costs associated with space, I think the U.S. is doing just fine. Hell, I like to wonder, where is everyone else?
Oh, and for you anti-NASA freaks, I'd like to provide you with a link to a history of NASA's budget. It calculates to about $3 per taxpayer per year. Compare that to the military budget, which is about 500 times higher.
The only experience Europe has with space travel is situated in Sweden, and they have very long hair and annoying synth lines. Why doesn't the Europe Space Agency just save some of their taxpayer's money and ask NASA how they accomplished this AMAZING FEAT back in the 1980's?
But seriously, you'd think Europe would want to streamline their space budget since they're planning on releasing a technology to compete with the United States' GPS system, but if they keep throwing away money like this it won't happen anytime soon.
Space travel has not progressed like it should have in the decades following the amazing progress of the 1960s. Hell, it hasn't progressed like the exploration of the New World in the 1500s.
I feel that it is because we (as in, both Europe and the U.S.) have become completely and hopelessly terrified of danger. Many men and women died in those eras exploring the great unknown. But without their sacrifice, we would never have been able to accomplish what we have.
Apollo 1, The Space Shuttles Challenger and Columbia's losses were all tragic. And I am NOT saying that their loss should be shrugged off as "eh, someone had to die to explore space." What I am saying is that we as humans needed to grow and explore space, much as the Europeans needed to grow and explore beyond their continent. When there was a tragic event in colonial exploration (Jamestown), those people learned from their mistake and tried again and usually succeeded. When we fail today, we usually cower up and shut down all exploration for a half-decade or so.
It's actually a bit sad how Europe is learning from the mistakes made in the United States. A few years ago it was the other way around. Re-inventing the wheel doesn't make driving any safer, and considering the wheel (in this case, the spacesuit) is the LEAST of space travelers' worries, I cannot see our presence in space advancing much further.
It's just plain silly to use religion to try to manipulate politics this way. Anybody can see why RFIDs are simply not economically viable.
I am currently working with one of the RFID companies that is "working" with Wal-Mart on the actual implementation of RFID. Let me tell you that there is no foreseable ROI in the near future. Currently at a cost of about 25 cents a tag, it is much too expensive to be worth it for anyone. The technology is in its infancy so there are so many problems we have encountered so far.
One of the problems is the tags. Not only do they cost so damn much, but they are also not very high quality. There's a feature called "locking" which allows you to set a number on the tag and not allow it to change, but when using this we have too high a failure rate to be effective (10-30% depending on the tag type). So we had to turn off the locking, meaning its much easier to change the unique number associated with the tags (which will be a problem when tags hit the retail sector) and now we only get around a 1-2% failure rate. But when doing high volumes, even this small percent is expensive to deal with.
Another is the hardware. Part of the tag writing problems we have seen may be due to the tags and/or the reader/writer units. But right now, some tags get created and written to with no problems, but when they go by a reader, the reader just does not see a number on that tag, meaning as i said before its either a bad tag or some sort of incompatibility/problem with the reader unit. Currently we are trying to get the tags applied cost effectively, but unfortunately its pretty much boiling down to using people to grab tags from a RFID printer and hand-apply everything.
We have also been having trouble verifying all the product on a pallet, and certainly cannot expect to read 100% of product 100% of time. Some product is easy to see, but depending on the density/material in the materials on the pallet, it can be very difficult to read many of the tags.
Software is another hinderance. While the company i have been working with has had its large share of problems in the last few months, they are getting better, but still are not perfect. And unless things work perfect, it can cause so many problems. One small chink in the software can make it inoperable (essentially crashing the software a-la Windows), but the software is slowly getting more and more stable.
The honest answer is free software is NOT always the best solution for every problem, especially when it comes to security. I know that people are going to flame me but sometimes the best current solution is a closed source program.
CAD is a good example. I have heard a lot of good things about a new open source CAD program but what if you have a lot of vendors that use Solidworks or Autodesk?
Office is another good example. Many local and state governments have tried Applix or Star Office (now OpenOffice) for a few years. The day that they got rid of it and went to Office 2003 the county workers were more productive than ever. They had a terrible time with sending files to and getting files in Office format. I tried to convince them that it would improve and that they shouldn't sign away their life, but they needed something that would just work. For them, Windows XP and Office 2003 just worked.
If you look at a lot of the government studies of who uses and gets the most benefit out of open source it tends to fall into two categories:
REALLY BIG TECH COMPANIES. They have their own support and development staff and can contribute back to open source projects.
Really tiny startups with a good techie or two. They are not big enough for the big vendors to care about. So the support they get for much of the open source tools is as good, or better than, what they get from big closed source vendors.
In the middle you have a lot of medium companies that really don't want to manage software developers or handle support in house. I am all for open source but their are a lot of issues yet to be solved.
Education. I can not take a course on Linux at my local Community College. I can get my MSCE or Cisco cert there.
Support. I can make Linux work for me and my company but not every company can. Where is the Linux Geek Squad? Yea all those scan-disk, defrag, run adaware and scan for virus "techies" give me the creeps but they seem to fill a need. Where can the mythical grandmother go to get a DVD installed in her Linux box or find out how to fix Thunderbird if the mail folder blows up? I will not even go into the poor state of some documentation for open source programs.
Teaching. If you are going to send people out in to the real world as system administrators and/or programmers, they will have a better chance to find a job if they know Windows and Linux. Heck, they should know as many different systems like Z/OS and OS/400!
In conclusion, open source security depends on people admitting that bugs exist. If they act all high-and-mighty, nothing happens and it's just as bad as whatever software product is out there nowadays that people just love to hate.
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Everyone is greedy to a point. Some are just able to carry their greed to the point of complete selfishness and totally ignore the high percentage of people who have a hard time just keeping a roof over their heads.
What the heck will it take? Evolution of the human species? I always think back to those old Star Trek episodes where they land on some planet where the inhabitants laugh kindly at Earth's culture because they have learned to live without greed, take care of everyone, and actually enjoy sex rather than codify it.
I don't know why I want to write this... mod at your leisure. But before you bite my head off, I want to make sure all the future commenters out there read this very key quote: Hopefully that will keep those crazy anti-Apple fanboys at bay.
I've never used Flickr, but I have been using Gallery now for about 6 months. It's Open Source, based on PHP and MySQL. I've had to do two complete machine moves in that time, and it's handled them both flawlessly.
;-)
I think of all the image organization programs and services I've used (and there's a whole lotta them!), Gallery has brought me the most pleasure. I had more or less put down my digital camera, because I found sharing, storing and cataloging photos publicly too much of a pain. Being able to share my photos with my friends and family has just been a real joy for me. And no, it's not pr0n.
I suppose I could use the Flickr API, but I just wanted something I could stick on my own private site. If something bad happened with Flickr it would be far too much of a hassle to have to deal with someone else's system.
Actually, Mozilla does not use yellow. Specifically, it uses RGB values 245, 246, and 190 respectively. SiteAdvisor uses a more pure yellow with less blue light and far more equal red and green light.
In related news, yellow means warning. Orange means caution. Mozilla has defined the color peach to mean "secure web site". But hey, nobody else claimed peach!
To say "5% of All Web Traffic [is] Unsafe" would make the assumption that out of 100 bytes transmitted, 5 were from dangerous sites. The correct way to specify what SiteAdvisor claims would be "5% of All Web Requests From Unsafe Sites".
But this isn't to say that SiteAdvisor isn't bad. Heck, it's the best thing to happen since sliced bread, or just bread. I have a brother who is marred and has 2 kids between the ages of 12 and 15. Those kids killed his last computer, unwittingly installing all sorts of nonsense when they downloaded games and graphics. That was on a Windows 98 machine which, as hard as I tried, simply could not secure or revive from all of the trojan horses and malware that had infected it.
I've just emailed him about installing the SiteAdvisor plug-in for Firefox which is absolutely brilliant for users like my brother. Hell, I've installed it just for the novelty of it. The "Red X/Green Check" thing really turns novices more skeptical.
Merely sending people up in to space isn't exploration. We've sent probes to many of the planets (Mars in paticular), and there are plans to a new space observatory. Considering the costs associated with space, I think the U.S. is doing just fine. Hell, I like to wonder, where is everyone else?
Oh, and for you anti-NASA freaks, I'd like to provide you with a link to a history of NASA's budget. It calculates to about $3 per taxpayer per year. Compare that to the military budget, which is about 500 times higher.
The only experience Europe has with space travel is situated in Sweden, and they have very long hair and annoying synth lines. Why doesn't the Europe Space Agency just save some of their taxpayer's money and ask NASA how they accomplished this AMAZING FEAT back in the 1980's?
But seriously, you'd think Europe would want to streamline their space budget since they're planning on releasing a technology to compete with the United States' GPS system, but if they keep throwing away money like this it won't happen anytime soon.
Space travel has not progressed like it should have in the decades following the amazing progress of the 1960s. Hell, it hasn't progressed like the exploration of the New World in the 1500s.
I feel that it is because we (as in, both Europe and the U.S.) have become completely and hopelessly terrified of danger. Many men and women died in those eras exploring the great unknown. But without their sacrifice, we would never have been able to accomplish what we have.
Apollo 1, The Space Shuttles Challenger and Columbia's losses were all tragic. And I am NOT saying that their loss should be shrugged off as "eh, someone had to die to explore space." What I am saying is that we as humans needed to grow and explore space, much as the Europeans needed to grow and explore beyond their continent. When there was a tragic event in colonial exploration (Jamestown), those people learned from their mistake and tried again and usually succeeded. When we fail today, we usually cower up and shut down all exploration for a half-decade or so.
It's actually a bit sad how Europe is learning from the mistakes made in the United States. A few years ago it was the other way around. Re-inventing the wheel doesn't make driving any safer, and considering the wheel (in this case, the spacesuit) is the LEAST of space travelers' worries, I cannot see our presence in space advancing much further.
It's just plain silly to use religion to try to manipulate politics this way. Anybody can see why RFIDs are simply not economically viable.
I am currently working with one of the RFID companies that is "working" with Wal-Mart on the actual implementation of RFID. Let me tell you that there is no foreseable ROI in the near future. Currently at a cost of about 25 cents a tag, it is much too expensive to be worth it for anyone. The technology is in its infancy so there are so many problems we have encountered so far.
One of the problems is the tags. Not only do they cost so damn much, but they are also not very high quality. There's a feature called "locking" which allows you to set a number on the tag and not allow it to change, but when using this we have too high a failure rate to be effective (10-30% depending on the tag type). So we had to turn off the locking, meaning its much easier to change the unique number associated with the tags (which will be a problem when tags hit the retail sector) and now we only get around a 1-2% failure rate. But when doing high volumes, even this small percent is expensive to deal with.
Another is the hardware. Part of the tag writing problems we have seen may be due to the tags and/or the reader/writer units. But right now, some tags get created and written to with no problems, but when they go by a reader, the reader just does not see a number on that tag, meaning as i said before its either a bad tag or some sort of incompatibility/problem with the reader unit. Currently we are trying to get the tags applied cost effectively, but unfortunately its pretty much boiling down to using people to grab tags from a RFID printer and hand-apply everything.
We have also been having trouble verifying all the product on a pallet, and certainly cannot expect to read 100% of product 100% of time. Some product is easy to see, but depending on the density/material in the materials on the pallet, it can be very difficult to read many of the tags.
Software is another hinderance. While the company i have been working with has had its large share of problems in the last few months, they are getting better, but still are not perfect. And unless things work perfect, it can cause so many problems. One small chink in the software can make it inoperable (essentially crashing the software a-la Windows), but the software is slowly getting more and more stable.
CAD is a good example. I have heard a lot of good things about a new open source CAD program but what if you have a lot of vendors that use Solidworks or Autodesk?
Office is another good example. Many local and state governments have tried Applix or Star Office (now OpenOffice) for a few years. The day that they got rid of it and went to Office 2003 the county workers were more productive than ever. They had a terrible time with sending files to and getting files in Office format. I tried to convince them that it would improve and that they shouldn't sign away their life, but they needed something that would just work. For them, Windows XP and Office 2003 just worked.
If you look at a lot of the government studies of who uses and gets the most benefit out of open source it tends to fall into two categories:
- REALLY BIG TECH COMPANIES. They have their own support and development staff and can contribute back to open source projects.
- Really tiny startups with a good techie or two. They are not big enough for the big vendors to care about. So the support they get for much of the open source tools is as good, or better than, what they get from big closed source vendors.
In the middle you have a lot of medium companies that really don't want to manage software developers or handle support in house. I am all for open source but their are a lot of issues yet to be solved.- Education. I can not take a course on Linux at my local Community College. I can get my MSCE or Cisco cert there.
- Support. I can make Linux work for me and my company but not every company can. Where is the Linux Geek Squad? Yea all those scan-disk, defrag, run adaware and scan for virus "techies" give me the creeps but they seem to fill a need. Where can the mythical grandmother go to get a DVD installed in her Linux box or find out how to fix Thunderbird if the mail folder blows up? I will not even go into the poor state of some documentation for open source programs.
- Teaching. If you are going to send people out in to the real world as system administrators and/or programmers, they will have a better chance to find a job if they know Windows and Linux. Heck, they should know as many different systems like Z/OS and OS/400!
In conclusion, open source security depends on people admitting that bugs exist. If they act all high-and-mighty, nothing happens and it's just as bad as whatever software product is out there nowadays that people just love to hate.