Fair enough. There are plenty of companies I instinctually mistrust. I appreciate your follow-up post, given that so many Slashdotters focus only on winning the argument.
I can think of a number of reasons why he wouldn't post any possible correspondence that he got from Apple's lawyers. Most of them having to do with preserving his financial well-being.
That's a good point. However, I find the heavy-handed hints of Apple legal involvement to be rather self-serving. If Apple is leaning on them, they ought to simply come out and say they've been told by Apple not to say anything more. If they're not being harrassed by Apple legal, they should make that clear.
As it stands now, I feel like the whole manner in which SecureWorks has dealt with this story leaves a lot to be desired. Instead of illuminating a problem, they've created a swarm of controversy. They may be very technically capable, but they don't exactly strike me as being transparent in their business dealings, which isn't a good thing for a security company.
before they only threw dirt to make him look unreliable
Point me to the link where Apple threw dirt at him.
There are plenty of bloggers who did the research on their own and asked the right kind of questions, but I've never seen anything from Apple attacking him. Maybe you're referring to Apple pointing out that he used a third party USB device and didn't disclose any info to Apple about the exploit? I wouldn't exactly call that throwing dirt.
It's blatantly obvious that Apple's lawyers have come down on him like a ton of bricks
If Apple's lawyers wrote a nastygram to these guys, don't you think we'd have seen it by now? The first thing anyone in a public situation like this does when they get pressure from the big players is to publicize the legal threats.
At the moment all we have is the word of someone who cast aspersions at Mac users, disingenuously claimed that he was exploiting Apple security flaws, and now claims (not so subtly) that Apple's lawyers are the reason he can't come clean.
The article meanders around without making much of a point, but this seems to be the gist of it:
They [Microsoft]haven't complained about what's going on, and to be honest, I think these Mac developments have been the best press that they've received in a long time. Negativity is abundant on the PC side of things because of Vista issues, but everyone seems thrilled with Microsoft's appearance on the Mac scene.
He goes on to say:
In contrast, Apple doesn't seem to be in any hurry about getting OS X to run on any other machines besides the ones that they make.
Of course Microsoft is unconcerned, because they make money by selling Windows. They are not a PC OEM. Apple has a different business model. The company makes most of its money selling hardware. The well-integrated OS and hardware are what coax consumers to buy Macs. You can't have one without the other and still call it a Mac. As us old fogies remember, Apple tried letting other companies build Macs, and it was not exactly a rousing success for Apple. Sales of clones ate into Apple's market without building overall market share.
Boot Camp and the various virtualization technologies are giving Windows users the opportunity to buy Apple hardware and compare the Mac experience with the Windows experience on the same machine, with no special technical expertise required. So far the results have been overwhelmingly positive for Apple. There's a reason Apple was confident enough to bring a x86 processor into Macintosh hardware again (it's been done before). Apple knows that if customers compare Windows to OS X head-to-head, OS X will gain users. If even a small percentage of new Mac purchasers make OS X the primary OS on their Mac, OS X will gain marketshare.
So far the strategy appears to be working. The low "green" rating for Apple is unfortunate, but it's not going to keep people from buying Macs. Dell, the company Jobs considers as Apple's biggest rival, isn't exactly kicking ass, and Microsoft's troubles with Vista are well-known.
How is it that Microsoft is beating Apple at its own game?
Thanks, that helps. So there are no concrete requirements, but these reports can be used as a point of reference for grant applicants. It sounds like the conclusions of one of these reports don't necessarily serve as the framework for future development, but they do serve as philosophical guideposts.
he might notice that the ex-president of MIT and the ex-president of the University of Michigan were commissioners active in this debate.
Who was involved in the debate doesn't tell me anything about whether it will be listened to or not.
The 9/11 Commission involved a lot of very important people and did meticulous work, but was in the main ignored by the US government. Blue ribbon panels and commissions get igored all the time.
So can you tell me from the prior record of these reports whether they have any actual impact, or do you not really know?
Ads are a terrible way to learn about Net Neutrality.
I keep tabs on the debate at The Technology Liberation Front, which is libertarian, IP Democracy, which provides Net Neutrality news and a wider slice of commentary, and Common Cause, which is inherently suspicious of corporate power.
The TLF and Common Cause each come at Net Neutrality from their own philosophical start points, and IP Democracy is about exploring the debate. Net Neutrality is not the central issue for any of these three sites, so they are much more useful sources of factual information and intellectually honest debate than any of the corporate-sponsored coalition sites on either side of the debate.
When Google or Comcast talks about Net Neutrality, I simply can't believe that they are not acting out of financial self-interest, so I find it impossible to give credence to anything they say. They're locked in a struggle for control of the Internet. I want fast Internet access, lots of provider choices, and true competitive pricing. So I'm not going to do my research by reading what the goliaths in this struggle are telling me.
We're talking about government and academia, two worlds that produce mountains of papers and reports each year. Does anyone know if these reports from the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education are ever given any attention by the leaders of colleges and universities?
Now somebody just has to explain to me why we'd want to go to the moon again, especially with humans.
If you wouldn't jump at the chance to go to the moon or to Mars, then I can see why you don't understand the motivations behind manned space flight. It's not just about bringing back scientific data. Beyond expanding the reach of humanity, I think it's about the romance of reaching beyond the little rock we live on.
The desire to push beyond Earth transcends politics. There are obviously better ways to do it than the Bush proposal, but to me that doesn't invalidate the need for humans to explore space in person.
Restarting, ignoring what hardware, is a must. If you don't, ram will get filled up with crap, thing will be running and errors will start to chain.... this will happen on any system, even BSD without any visual GUI.
If Apple and Google are so tight, where the hell is that Mac-compatible Google Talk voice chat client we were promised a year ago?
Likewise, how come Intuit has waffled back and forth over Mac support during Campbell's tenure on Apple's board? How come the presence of Ellison on Apple's board never resulted in any staggering Oracle+Apple ventures?
Boards of directors are supposed provide outside perspective and serve as a safeguard for shareholders. Whether they actually do this in the era of the massively overpaid chief executive is debatable, but it seems obvious that membership on a board doesn't lead to actual strategic connections between the two companies.
I have found new comfort in the fact that I never gave my employer my email address. I guess now I never will.
If they're going to e-fire you, you're still fired, whether you receive the email message from them or not.
Actually, I'm more curious about why you don't give your employer your email address? I'd have never given it a second thought. Why would you not want your employer to be able to communicate with you via email? They already have your snail mail address, bank account info, and SSN. What is the advantage of not giving them your email address?
Because everyone knows that research in one discipline never proves useful in other disciplines. Thank God knowledge is inherently categorized into "useful" and "unuseful" boxes, so we can easily dismiss research that is a waste of time.
This video was posted 3 weeks ago and only had a 100 odd ratings, even after appearing on slashdot. Meanwhile a regular skanky youtube teen could get thousands within a hours. Even you guys will probably move on to the next story in a few minutes. I think the government is safe.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Just because they're both on YouTube doesn't mean that they are in competition or are being viewed by the same audience. The story has already hit Time and The Washington Post.
There are other reasons to believe that De Kort won't get Lockheed or the Coast Guard to change anything, but the number of times his video has been viewed on YouTube isn't one of them. The cat is out of the bag, and they'll have to respond to the charges now, one way or another.
For years people like me and countless other Slashdotters have been telling the labels to detach themselves from a dead business model. Maybe this plan will work for Universal and maybe it won't. I'm not interested in listening to SpiralFrog, but then again, I gave up on commercial radio years ago. There may be all kinds of people out there who will find SpiralFrog quite tasty.
At least they're trying something new, something that fits more closely with 2006 than 1956.
Shame I don't have any mod points. I laughed out loud at that one. I'm not sure she deserves all the slings and arrows, but from what I've heard she certainly deserves the lion's share of them.
I understand that they *intend* to open source Java, but how and when they actually do it is what really matters. Hopefully they've learned a lot from their effort with Solaris. Open sourcing a product as big and connected to third party products as Solaris and Java can be a monumental undertaking. They need to execute flawlessly.
I also agree that they're doing great things in hardware these days. Their last quarter shocked a lot of people.
Don't get me wrong. I want Sun to succeed. Hell, I even own some Sun stock. Sun has been a huge force in the computing world and has come up with too many great technologies to go down in ignominious defeat. I'm hoping that they can stop doing stupid crap like buying cardboard cutouts, because it is distracting, at a time when the last thing they need is distractions.
Star Trek was a huge cultural phenomenon for years after its cancellation. It was fans that got Paramount to wake up and make the first Star Trek movie. Terms like "Beam me up, Scotty" were part of pop culture well before the franchise was reborn in 1979.
In this respect it is akin to Tolkien's works, which enjoyed widespread popularity for decades before Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies were a smash hit. The Rankin/Bass Hobbit movie and Bashki's ill-fated Lord of the Rings film didn't diminish the cultural impact of the books. Most people have never read them, but everyone knew what a Hobbit was well before Jackson's screen version arrived.
I think the distinction here is that popular culture is not just the sum of a series of transitory flashes in the pan that are only remembered as nostalgia. Star Trek first was seen in the 1960s, but I think most people think of the Star Trek universe as a concept unto itself, rather than an artifact of a particular time in American history. Star Trek seems to have the same appeal and cultural reach, and it would be hard to argue that The Lord of the Rings is the product of the 1960s (when it first became popular on a wide scale) or the early 21st century (when the movie was released).
Brittney Spears, et. al., while commercially successful and visible everywhere in pop culture, will likely be associated in the future with the 2000s. Star Trek, while less obvious, is still there, and still relevant, if less obvious.
just like everything else about Sun it lacks focus and direction
I think that sums it up nicely. What does this little stunt really mean, anyway? It is unfocused and just plain unfathomable. They seem to be doing a lot of smart things (a bit too late in the game perhaps), but there are still big question marks, like what they actually intend to do with Java, and how they intend to operate in a world where Open Source is squeezing them in software, and commodity boxes are squeezing them in hardware. It's not that they can't possibly find a clear path to recovery. They have tremendously talented people all over the organization. But they seem to lurch sideways as often as they step forward.
I never made reference to Apple advertising. If you think Apple pulled itself out of the death spriral it was in because of cute ads, maybe you haven't been looking at their revival closely enough.
Schwartz is in the middle of trying to pull Sun out of a very deep hole. The company's stock is still trading at under $5/share. It faces tremendous competition from above and below, and it has been shedding employees like a duck sheds water. There are times when publicity stunts like this are a good idea. For example, when you're the young upstart and you want to poke fun at the established titans of industry.
Spending thousands of dollars to buy a cutout of highly respected founders of Silicon Valley, then to bedeck them in garish Sun paraphanalia is juvenile, tacky, and demonstrative of an utterly deranged public relations department. Sun *is* an established titan of industry, one that has been hurting for years. Attempts to look like a saucy underdog just make the company look pathetic.
Make kick-ass products. Give customers what they want, and then some. Ready your history. Examine how IBM, Apple, and yes, HP recovered from their missteps. Earn respect. Don't endanger it by resorting to head-scratching 9th grade pep rally moves like this.
What I really would like to see is a new widget set (with lots of data presentation support - obviously most of the widgets should be quantitative displays) and a style written in some already well-supported widget set (Qt, Swing,...) that lives up to Tufte's ideas about maximizing data ink and minimizing junk.
Tufte would like that too. One of the central points of Beautiful Evidence is that software tools are all wrong for presenting information. They artificially segregate it into textual, visual, numeric, and so on. I was suprised to see that good old RagTime is still around, and in its latest iteration it seems strongly focused on integration of disparate types of information.
Even with more broadly capable software, different problems still require different visual representations. This is sort of like the blog template conundrum. Sure, there are many professionally-designed blog templates, but if you really want your site's look to match its content, you have to tweak the template yourself. It also reminds me of logos. Sure, you can assemble components and create your own spiffy new logo, but it takes a talented designer to create a truly professional logo that carries a strong message and resonates with viewers.
Ask Fox what they think. They sued the creators of the original Battlestar Galactica for copyright infringement, saying that BG ripped off from Star Wars. My point was that all art is derivative to at least some degree. It is never wholly original.
Given that you think BG stole from the Book of Mormon, should the Mormon Church sue the creators of BG?
Slashdot Mirror
still i don't like apple ;)
Fair enough. There are plenty of companies I instinctually mistrust. I appreciate your follow-up post, given that so many Slashdotters focus only on winning the argument.
I can think of a number of reasons why he wouldn't post any possible correspondence that he got from Apple's lawyers. Most of them having to do with preserving his financial well-being.
That's a good point. However, I find the heavy-handed hints of Apple legal involvement to be rather self-serving. If Apple is leaning on them, they ought to simply come out and say they've been told by Apple not to say anything more. If they're not being harrassed by Apple legal, they should make that clear.
As it stands now, I feel like the whole manner in which SecureWorks has dealt with this story leaves a lot to be desired. Instead of illuminating a problem, they've created a swarm of controversy. They may be very technically capable, but they don't exactly strike me as being transparent in their business dealings, which isn't a good thing for a security company.
Nothing about this story seems obvious to me.
before they only threw dirt to make him look unreliable
Point me to the link where Apple threw dirt at him.
There are plenty of bloggers who did the research on their own and asked the right kind of questions, but I've never seen anything from Apple attacking him. Maybe you're referring to Apple pointing out that he used a third party USB device and didn't disclose any info to Apple about the exploit? I wouldn't exactly call that throwing dirt.
It's blatantly obvious that Apple's lawyers have come down on him like a ton of bricks
If Apple's lawyers wrote a nastygram to these guys, don't you think we'd have seen it by now? The first thing anyone in a public situation like this does when they get pressure from the big players is to publicize the legal threats.
At the moment all we have is the word of someone who cast aspersions at Mac users, disingenuously claimed that he was exploiting Apple security flaws, and now claims (not so subtly) that Apple's lawyers are the reason he can't come clean.
The article meanders around without making much of a point, but this seems to be the gist of it:
He goes on to say:
Of course Microsoft is unconcerned, because they make money by selling Windows. They are not a PC OEM. Apple has a different business model. The company makes most of its money selling hardware. The well-integrated OS and hardware are what coax consumers to buy Macs. You can't have one without the other and still call it a Mac. As us old fogies remember, Apple tried letting other companies build Macs, and it was not exactly a rousing success for Apple. Sales of clones ate into Apple's market without building overall market share.
Boot Camp and the various virtualization technologies are giving Windows users the opportunity to buy Apple hardware and compare the Mac experience with the Windows experience on the same machine, with no special technical expertise required. So far the results have been overwhelmingly positive for Apple. There's a reason Apple was confident enough to bring a x86 processor into Macintosh hardware again (it's been done before). Apple knows that if customers compare Windows to OS X head-to-head, OS X will gain users. If even a small percentage of new Mac purchasers make OS X the primary OS on their Mac, OS X will gain marketshare.
So far the strategy appears to be working. The low "green" rating for Apple is unfortunate, but it's not going to keep people from buying Macs. Dell, the company Jobs considers as Apple's biggest rival, isn't exactly kicking ass, and Microsoft's troubles with Vista are well-known.
How is it that Microsoft is beating Apple at its own game?
Thanks, that helps. So there are no concrete requirements, but these reports can be used as a point of reference for grant applicants. It sounds like the conclusions of one of these reports don't necessarily serve as the framework for future development, but they do serve as philosophical guideposts.
he might notice that the ex-president of MIT and the ex-president of the University of Michigan were commissioners active in this debate.
Who was involved in the debate doesn't tell me anything about whether it will be listened to or not.
The 9/11 Commission involved a lot of very important people and did meticulous work, but was in the main ignored by the US government. Blue ribbon panels and commissions get igored all the time.
So can you tell me from the prior record of these reports whether they have any actual impact, or do you not really know?
Ads are a terrible way to learn about Net Neutrality.
I keep tabs on the debate at The Technology Liberation Front, which is libertarian, IP Democracy, which provides Net Neutrality news and a wider slice of commentary, and Common Cause, which is inherently suspicious of corporate power.
The TLF and Common Cause each come at Net Neutrality from their own philosophical start points, and IP Democracy is about exploring the debate. Net Neutrality is not the central issue for any of these three sites, so they are much more useful sources of factual information and intellectually honest debate than any of the corporate-sponsored coalition sites on either side of the debate.
When Google or Comcast talks about Net Neutrality, I simply can't believe that they are not acting out of financial self-interest, so I find it impossible to give credence to anything they say. They're locked in a struggle for control of the Internet. I want fast Internet access, lots of provider choices, and true competitive pricing. So I'm not going to do my research by reading what the goliaths in this struggle are telling me.
We're talking about government and academia, two worlds that produce mountains of papers and reports each year. Does anyone know if these reports from the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education are ever given any attention by the leaders of colleges and universities?
Now somebody just has to explain to me why we'd want to go to the moon again, especially with humans.
If you wouldn't jump at the chance to go to the moon or to Mars, then I can see why you don't understand the motivations behind manned space flight. It's not just about bringing back scientific data. Beyond expanding the reach of humanity, I think it's about the romance of reaching beyond the little rock we live on.
The desire to push beyond Earth transcends politics. There are obviously better ways to do it than the Bush proposal, but to me that doesn't invalidate the need for humans to explore space in person.
Restarting, ignoring what hardware, is a must. If you don't, ram will get filled up with crap, thing will be running and errors will start to chain.... this will happen on any system, even BSD without any visual GUI.
I want what you're smoking.
If Apple and Google are so tight, where the hell is that Mac-compatible Google Talk voice chat client we were promised a year ago?
Likewise, how come Intuit has waffled back and forth over Mac support during Campbell's tenure on Apple's board? How come the presence of Ellison on Apple's board never resulted in any staggering Oracle+Apple ventures?
Boards of directors are supposed provide outside perspective and serve as a safeguard for shareholders. Whether they actually do this in the era of the massively overpaid chief executive is debatable, but it seems obvious that membership on a board doesn't lead to actual strategic connections between the two companies.
I have found new comfort in the fact that I never gave my employer my email address. I guess now I never will.
If they're going to e-fire you, you're still fired, whether you receive the email message from them or not.
Actually, I'm more curious about why you don't give your employer your email address? I'd have never given it a second thought. Why would you not want your employer to be able to communicate with you via email? They already have your snail mail address, bank account info, and SSN. What is the advantage of not giving them your email address?
Like cancer or AIDS? Just a thought.
Because everyone knows that research in one discipline never proves useful in other disciplines. Thank God knowledge is inherently categorized into "useful" and "unuseful" boxes, so we can easily dismiss research that is a waste of time.
This video was posted 3 weeks ago and only had a 100 odd ratings, even after appearing on slashdot. Meanwhile a regular skanky youtube teen could get thousands within a hours. Even you guys will probably move on to the next story in a few minutes. I think the government is safe.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Just because they're both on YouTube doesn't mean that they are in competition or are being viewed by the same audience. The story has already hit Time and The Washington Post.
There are other reasons to believe that De Kort won't get Lockheed or the Coast Guard to change anything, but the number of times his video has been viewed on YouTube isn't one of them. The cat is out of the bag, and they'll have to respond to the charges now, one way or another.
For years people like me and countless other Slashdotters have been telling the labels to detach themselves from a dead business model. Maybe this plan will work for Universal and maybe it won't. I'm not interested in listening to SpiralFrog, but then again, I gave up on commercial radio years ago. There may be all kinds of people out there who will find SpiralFrog quite tasty.
At least they're trying something new, something that fits more closely with 2006 than 1956.
But Sun can't fire Carly, they never hired her
Shame I don't have any mod points. I laughed out loud at that one. I'm not sure she deserves all the slings and arrows, but from what I've heard she certainly deserves the lion's share of them.
I understand that they *intend* to open source Java, but how and when they actually do it is what really matters. Hopefully they've learned a lot from their effort with Solaris. Open sourcing a product as big and connected to third party products as Solaris and Java can be a monumental undertaking. They need to execute flawlessly.
I also agree that they're doing great things in hardware these days. Their last quarter shocked a lot of people.
Don't get me wrong. I want Sun to succeed. Hell, I even own some Sun stock. Sun has been a huge force in the computing world and has come up with too many great technologies to go down in ignominious defeat. I'm hoping that they can stop doing stupid crap like buying cardboard cutouts, because it is distracting, at a time when the last thing they need is distractions.
Star Trek was a huge cultural phenomenon for years after its cancellation. It was fans that got Paramount to wake up and make the first Star Trek movie. Terms like "Beam me up, Scotty" were part of pop culture well before the franchise was reborn in 1979.
In this respect it is akin to Tolkien's works, which enjoyed widespread popularity for decades before Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies were a smash hit. The Rankin/Bass Hobbit movie and Bashki's ill-fated Lord of the Rings film didn't diminish the cultural impact of the books. Most people have never read them, but everyone knew what a Hobbit was well before Jackson's screen version arrived.
I think the distinction here is that popular culture is not just the sum of a series of transitory flashes in the pan that are only remembered as nostalgia. Star Trek first was seen in the 1960s, but I think most people think of the Star Trek universe as a concept unto itself, rather than an artifact of a particular time in American history. Star Trek seems to have the same appeal and cultural reach, and it would be hard to argue that The Lord of the Rings is the product of the 1960s (when it first became popular on a wide scale) or the early 21st century (when the movie was released).
Brittney Spears, et. al., while commercially successful and visible everywhere in pop culture, will likely be associated in the future with the 2000s. Star Trek, while less obvious, is still there, and still relevant, if less obvious.
just like everything else about Sun it lacks focus and direction
I think that sums it up nicely. What does this little stunt really mean, anyway? It is unfocused and just plain unfathomable. They seem to be doing a lot of smart things (a bit too late in the game perhaps), but there are still big question marks, like what they actually intend to do with Java, and how they intend to operate in a world where Open Source is squeezing them in software, and commodity boxes are squeezing them in hardware. It's not that they can't possibly find a clear path to recovery. They have tremendously talented people all over the organization. But they seem to lurch sideways as often as they step forward.
and much like those cute Apple ads you reference
I never made reference to Apple advertising. If you think Apple pulled itself out of the death spriral it was in because of cute ads, maybe you haven't been looking at their revival closely enough.
Schwartz is in the middle of trying to pull Sun out of a very deep hole. The company's stock is still trading at under $5/share. It faces tremendous competition from above and below, and it has been shedding employees like a duck sheds water. There are times when publicity stunts like this are a good idea. For example, when you're the young upstart and you want to poke fun at the established titans of industry.
Spending thousands of dollars to buy a cutout of highly respected founders of Silicon Valley, then to bedeck them in garish Sun paraphanalia is juvenile, tacky, and demonstrative of an utterly deranged public relations department. Sun *is* an established titan of industry, one that has been hurting for years. Attempts to look like a saucy underdog just make the company look pathetic.
Make kick-ass products. Give customers what they want, and then some. Ready your history. Examine how IBM, Apple, and yes, HP recovered from their missteps. Earn respect. Don't endanger it by resorting to head-scratching 9th grade pep rally moves like this.
What I really would like to see is a new widget set (with lots of data presentation support - obviously most of the widgets should be quantitative displays) and a style written in some already well-supported widget set (Qt, Swing, ...) that lives up to Tufte's ideas about maximizing data ink and minimizing junk.
Tufte would like that too. One of the central points of Beautiful Evidence is that software tools are all wrong for presenting information. They artificially segregate it into textual, visual, numeric, and so on. I was suprised to see that good old RagTime is still around, and in its latest iteration it seems strongly focused on integration of disparate types of information.
Even with more broadly capable software, different problems still require different visual representations. This is sort of like the blog template conundrum. Sure, there are many professionally-designed blog templates, but if you really want your site's look to match its content, you have to tweak the template yourself. It also reminds me of logos. Sure, you can assemble components and create your own spiffy new logo, but it takes a talented designer to create a truly professional logo that carries a strong message and resonates with viewers.
They certainly accomplished that, and probably raised the visibility of their security company as a result. Good for them, I guess.
Given how this has all panned out, would you trust these guys?
Bad choice of reference.
Ask Fox what they think. They sued the creators of the original Battlestar Galactica for copyright infringement, saying that BG ripped off from Star Wars. My point was that all art is derivative to at least some degree. It is never wholly original.
Given that you think BG stole from the Book of Mormon, should the Mormon Church sue the creators of BG?