In my experience with the technology, websites do not adequately explain what it is you're doing and why.
The fault here doesn't lie just with the websites. As someone involved in implementing e-commerce websites, numerous user focus groups and usability analysis sessions indicate that people just wouldn't read the information even if you did bother to provide it, and moreoever they'd see it as off-putting and a detriment to using the site (I'm talking about the majority of users here, by the way, but it's not something limited to technical know-how either as many tech-savvy folk believe they don't need to read the instructions and just wade in).
There is no easy answer here other than keeping the whole thing as simple as possible and incrementally adding measures which are as intuitive as possible until users become aware of and used to them, then adding more.
And then he'll rotate the 2D map to give a 3D view of the front of the building. And then zoom in through the window and use the reflection in a mirror to pinpoint the key government official hiding just out of view.
You do realise that a lot of these buildings are under no fly zones and that you would have the police check on you if you tried photographing them Thats true not just about Indian, but in most countries. In the library, books would have snaps but which would not have any real time implications. A snap of Pokharan taken 8 years ago would not show India preparing for a nuclear test, would it?
What kind of "real time implications" does Google give? You don't think it has data which is several years out of date? Hell, the office building opposite my window doesn't exist on Google, and it's been there longer than I've worked here - it's at least three to four years old, if not more, and the Google data predates that. Nobody would mount an attack based on data which is more than likely several years out of date, which reduces Google's usefulness to these people to that of a standard map, and I see no calls for maps to be altered.
The real problem is that Google is setting itself up here for all kinds of headaches. If they do this for one country, surely they have to do it for all - if not, who gets to pick and choose? Should they do it for only government buildings? For military buildings? For key civilian buildings such as hospitals? Large corporations? If all these people can demand removal, then why not individuals? The problem with this is, where does it all stop. In the end, Google is only using data which is freely available (as in available to anyone, rather than free in the monetary sense), they shouldn't set themselves up as the gatekeepers of that data. People who really want it will just go elsewhere, as for the rest of us it just reduces the effectiveness of their service.
The main problem I can instantly see with an open source search solution is that it would be spammed out of existence within weeks of it becoming popular enough for people to invest the time in doing so. There are companies that make big money just trying to guess what Google's algorithms all do. Giving these companies access to the algorithms outright would effectively mean that either 1) everyone in the world would have to optimise their sites to the maximum in order to prevent search results being horribly skewed or 2) more likely we'd return to search results where the first 50 pages are ads for people's products and it's near impossible to find real information.
The reason Google got so big in the first place was that it provided useful information. Even that (with a closely guarded , closed source algorithm) has been diluted a lot recently. Open sourcing it would be the most effective way to kill Google and is the most effective way of preventing another search solution from taking their place.
When you have stock traded in the market you have to maximize profits.
This is a common misconception. All you really have to do as a publicly traded corporation is act in the best interests of your shareholders. Now, quite often that aligns nicely with maximizing profits but it doesn't necessarily have to be the case. A company which owes part of its success to having a "do no evil" image might also owe it to the shareholders to maintain that image, as deviating from this path could result in harm to the company. This might not result in such high profits as an openly evil company would make, but it could still be argued to be in the interests of the shareholders (and if they don't like it - well hey, they were free to not invest).
Another example of this could be paid-for search listings. Google is big enough now that they could auction off "natural" search and have companies bid to be top of the organic search listings. This would be a massive cash cow as everyone would want a piece of the pie, but it would pretty much kill their reputation for providing impartial, relevant search results. As such, they have no duty to follow this path in order to maximise profits, and in fact doing so in this case could have a detrimental impact on the shareholders whose interests they are meant to protect.
If someone from another company started talking about my department or boss or coworkers, there would probably be physical violence to right the wrongs.
We are a tight group and we get things done.
However, if you make a wrong step, it can all turn sour in a minute.
It sounds to me like the one you should be complaining about is Flickr, for selling out to Yahoo in the first place. All Yahoo are doing is streamlining the operation so that supporting it and adding new features in the future will be easier - surely that has to be a win for users? Sure, some users now have to sign up for the ID, but that's not really any more hassle than finding an alternative photo hosting site and signing up with them, is it?
As for people viewing photos, ditto them having to sign up elsewhere vs. signing up with Yahoo (and add to that the fact that, if enough people switch to a different service, the chances of it being acquired and the same thing happening down the line are pretty high). It seems that, if anything, moving to a different service is likely to mean more hassle for your photo viewers, since they'll still probably have to sign up to leave comments, it's just that if they want to leave comments on Flickr and a different service, they'll have twice as much sign-up hassle.
Really, this is a non-issue. If you don't want to use any of Yahoo's other services, don't use them.
Why buy MS and waste valuable time and resources fixing bugs when they can just continue their efforts to make more applications web-based, where the user's O/S becomes meaningless? Google have the perfect basis to start offering completely cross platform, device independent solutions (and their current business model means they can offer these solutions free of charge to the end consumer, a price MS would find it very difficult to compete with). No, I think Google has much bigger plans than merely buying MS, I think it plans to eventually make MS irrelevant.
And don't say that doesn't matter if the keys don't get invalidated. If you are going to
completely ignore the EULA, why are you not just pirating it in the first place?
Because ignoring a EULA which hasn't been proven to have any force in law and probably isn't worth the bits it occupies on the disk is a lot different to downloading the entire software without paying for it and installing it without any kind of license? Most licenses have to stand up to a test of reasonableness at the very least before they can have any kind of binding effect - if I have a legitimate copy of XP and install a Vista upgrade, don't like it and go back to XP I'd not have a hard time arguing in court that it was unreasonable for the EULA to prevent me doing this. To say that I have to either accept a blatantly unreasonable EULA or download pirated software and these are my only options is just wrong, the third option is to contest the EULA (and the fourth is to use *nix of course... or is that the first?)
I'm sure they've already tried. I guess the ideal vision for them would be a situation where media is tied to a single device, so once one person has watched/listened to it it's useless to everyone else. That would effectively kill visual/audio media in libraries.
The problem is you're assuming they want a DRM-free solution. They could trivially offer a simple solution that lets them sell content at next to no cost to themselves for a very small fee, and the number of people who would sign up would surely be enough to account for the lower retail price... but if they do that, how the hell are they meant to re-sell you the same stuff in 10-15 years time? Once everyone has a perfect digital copy of the media, they can't milk it any more. DRM provides them a means to do this ("Oh, now we have HDD++, it's like HDD except none of your old content will play on it... but look at the shiny new logo!").
I think the distinction is probably how much time we're prepared to invest in a particular project. Usually, reading a book will take a good deal more time and effort than watching a movie or listening to a CD, so it has the appearance of a more valuable experience. Sometimes it happens that we will want to invest more time in a DVD than is usual, and that becomes then a more valuable experience (and ditto on the Futurama).
The main problem seems to be that movie and CD producers think we should pay a cost that reflects how much money they spent on the project and how much profit they want to make, rather than a cost which reflects how much we get from the end product. They try and artificially keep prices high and now they're using DRM to try and artificially restrict supply instead of following established market practice and reducing prices (and, if necessary, reducing costs by, for example, not paying 'stars' a lifetime's fortune for 3-6 months work). Instead of listening to the market, they're trying to tell it what to think...
I've played this game and I've gone back to Netflix, Movies Unlimited, The Serial Squadron.
And in the meantime, things have moved on in the 'P2P experience'. Unlike the **AAs, the P2Pers understand and embrace new technology which makes life more convenient for them, rather than trying to shoehorn technology into a role where it makes life difficult for everybody... things move on for both sides of the divide, but one seems to be making more gains than the other, here.
The attitudes of the masses? Growing up, it seemed smoking was the norm and smokers received many concessions in the workplace and public areas. Now smokers are practically pariahs, sure it still happens but it becomes a less attractive proposition the more people are swayed against it. It's a slow, ongoing process, but it's a process nonetheless and one which wouldn't be happening without the first blows having been struck.
This isn't a story about someone claiming rights to the trademark. It's a story about someone successfully taking the fastest growing company in history to court and winning a trademark claim. The article you link to doesn't seem to mention anyone successfully taking Google to court over this, so how is this the same story? I could "claim" I was entitled to a trademark, but proving that in a court of law is the hard part, especially proving it against a company with the legal might of Google. Besides, taking none of this into account it's still newsworthy for everyone with a german account who will now want to know how this impacts them (if at all). News doesn't have to cater just to your personal needs.
On a side note, where does this whole ethos of a story being not newsworthy if we've heard a similar story before come from? I mean, I can understand the feeling against dupes, but if the stories are merely similar but have their own unique characteristics, are they not news anymore? In which case, someone had better tell every newspaper, TV and radio station in the world that's been reporting on terrorism non-stop for the last few years...
I'm not 100% sure on this but I've always been led to believe that abort is meant to completely abort the operation, while fail will only return a failed flag for reading from/writing to the disk and allow the operation to handle that failure in its own way. So, in other words, imagine you have an application which reads one file in at a time from a floppy and performs some action on it. One of the files fails to read, if you abort, the application will terminate what it's doing, if you simply fail the application should continue (by trying to read the next file).
There must be a couple hundred computers on the same floor as me at the moment, but if someone handed me a floppy disk right now I'd probably have to get support to go digging around in the old storerooms looking for a machine that can read it, I'm not sure they'd have a great deal of success even then. If this was any kind of an issue then we'd all have ready access to floppies and drives, but the standard "hard" format for sharing around data now seems to be CD, and increasingly USB.
I'd be hard pressed to find a floppy disk or drive in this building, but on my desk alone I have access to a flash card reader, various USB pen devices and a phone and MP3 player with mass storage capability. It might be harder to physically hand someone something with data on it, but it's never been easier to give them the data (by copying it to a device of their own). You could lose or misspell an email, if it was important enough you would probably make sure you didn't (you could equally lose or ruin a floppy by leaving it near a magnetic force, if we're talking hypothetical). More often these days if I need to share my contact details with someone I'll send them a business card via blue tooth.
It seems like the reason floppies don't have a direct replacement is because they've been replaced by lots of different solutions which overlap to fill the gap. If you still need to physically hand someone some data in a situation where there is no way to merely give them a copy, then USB is cheap enough to fill this role, for everything else there are already solutions out there.
I don't think I've bought any hardware in the last five years that didn't either have the drivers on CD or just do away with the disk completely and point you to a website. I have one PC that I've had running since around the year 2k with a busted floppy IO port on the mobo and I've never needed to use it. The only place I can see this really mattering is with really old mobos that don't support booting from CD when you need to re-install, but they must be few and far between by now anyway, by the time it's impossible to get your hands on floppy drives (be it through specialist suppliers, salvage machines, etc) I would guess these old machines would be pretty much extinct.
Probably not, the $150 is likely based on the estimated cost of repairing the damage done by the rootkit, or the cost for removal by a professional at any rate. If you were to rootkit a server then the potential for damage and cost of removal are likely to be much higher. If you were to rootkit individual machines then this would probably be assessed on the basis of the machines in question.
What is most annoying about this is that it requires the injured party to be pro-active in claiming the money, and for the most part people will not bother. It's a small enough amount that it's not worth the hoops you'll probably have to jump through to collect it, and as such it's unlikely to be more than a blip to Sony. The real precedent here should be that damages to **AA should only be paid if the individual artist (the injured party) comes forward and stakes their claim. Then lets see how many multi-millionaire musicians want to stand up in court and claim damages against their fans when they have no faceless organisation to hide behind...
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In my experience with the technology, websites do not adequately explain what it is you're doing and why.
The fault here doesn't lie just with the websites. As someone involved in implementing e-commerce websites, numerous user focus groups and usability analysis sessions indicate that people just wouldn't read the information even if you did bother to provide it, and moreoever they'd see it as off-putting and a detriment to using the site (I'm talking about the majority of users here, by the way, but it's not something limited to technical know-how either as many tech-savvy folk believe they don't need to read the instructions and just wade in).
There is no easy answer here other than keeping the whole thing as simple as possible and incrementally adding measures which are as intuitive as possible until users become aware of and used to them, then adding more.
And then he'll rotate the 2D map to give a 3D view of the front of the building. And then zoom in through the window and use the reflection in a mirror to pinpoint the key government official hiding just out of view.
You do realise that a lot of these buildings are under no fly zones and that you would have the police check on you if you tried photographing them Thats true not just about Indian, but in most countries. In the library, books would have snaps but which would not have any real time implications. A snap of Pokharan taken 8 years ago would not show India preparing for a nuclear test, would it?
What kind of "real time implications" does Google give? You don't think it has data which is several years out of date? Hell, the office building opposite my window doesn't exist on Google, and it's been there longer than I've worked here - it's at least three to four years old, if not more, and the Google data predates that. Nobody would mount an attack based on data which is more than likely several years out of date, which reduces Google's usefulness to these people to that of a standard map, and I see no calls for maps to be altered.
The real problem is that Google is setting itself up here for all kinds of headaches. If they do this for one country, surely they have to do it for all - if not, who gets to pick and choose? Should they do it for only government buildings? For military buildings? For key civilian buildings such as hospitals? Large corporations? If all these people can demand removal, then why not individuals? The problem with this is, where does it all stop. In the end, Google is only using data which is freely available (as in available to anyone, rather than free in the monetary sense), they shouldn't set themselves up as the gatekeepers of that data. People who really want it will just go elsewhere, as for the rest of us it just reduces the effectiveness of their service.
But you don't seem to understand... this one has a sword!!
The main problem I can instantly see with an open source search solution is that it would be spammed out of existence within weeks of it becoming popular enough for people to invest the time in doing so. There are companies that make big money just trying to guess what Google's algorithms all do. Giving these companies access to the algorithms outright would effectively mean that either 1) everyone in the world would have to optimise their sites to the maximum in order to prevent search results being horribly skewed or 2) more likely we'd return to search results where the first 50 pages are ads for people's products and it's near impossible to find real information.
The reason Google got so big in the first place was that it provided useful information. Even that (with a closely guarded , closed source algorithm) has been diluted a lot recently. Open sourcing it would be the most effective way to kill Google and is the most effective way of preventing another search solution from taking their place.
When you have stock traded in the market you have to maximize profits.
This is a common misconception. All you really have to do as a publicly traded corporation is act in the best interests of your shareholders. Now, quite often that aligns nicely with maximizing profits but it doesn't necessarily have to be the case. A company which owes part of its success to having a "do no evil" image might also owe it to the shareholders to maintain that image, as deviating from this path could result in harm to the company. This might not result in such high profits as an openly evil company would make, but it could still be argued to be in the interests of the shareholders (and if they don't like it - well hey, they were free to not invest).
Another example of this could be paid-for search listings. Google is big enough now that they could auction off "natural" search and have companies bid to be top of the organic search listings. This would be a massive cash cow as everyone would want a piece of the pie, but it would pretty much kill their reputation for providing impartial, relevant search results. As such, they have no duty to follow this path in order to maximise profits, and in fact doing so in this case could have a detrimental impact on the shareholders whose interests they are meant to protect.
If someone from another company started talking about my department or boss or coworkers, there would probably be physical violence to right the wrongs.
We are a tight group and we get things done.
However, if you make a wrong step, it can all turn sour in a minute.
You work for the Mafia, right?
It sounds to me like the one you should be complaining about is Flickr, for selling out to Yahoo in the first place. All Yahoo are doing is streamlining the operation so that supporting it and adding new features in the future will be easier - surely that has to be a win for users? Sure, some users now have to sign up for the ID, but that's not really any more hassle than finding an alternative photo hosting site and signing up with them, is it?
As for people viewing photos, ditto them having to sign up elsewhere vs. signing up with Yahoo (and add to that the fact that, if enough people switch to a different service, the chances of it being acquired and the same thing happening down the line are pretty high). It seems that, if anything, moving to a different service is likely to mean more hassle for your photo viewers, since they'll still probably have to sign up to leave comments, it's just that if they want to leave comments on Flickr and a different service, they'll have twice as much sign-up hassle.
Really, this is a non-issue. If you don't want to use any of Yahoo's other services, don't use them.
Why buy MS and waste valuable time and resources fixing bugs when they can just continue their efforts to make more applications web-based, where the user's O/S becomes meaningless? Google have the perfect basis to start offering completely cross platform, device independent solutions (and their current business model means they can offer these solutions free of charge to the end consumer, a price MS would find it very difficult to compete with). No, I think Google has much bigger plans than merely buying MS, I think it plans to eventually make MS irrelevant.
And don't say that doesn't matter if the keys don't get invalidated. If you are going to completely ignore the EULA, why are you not just pirating it in the first place?
Because ignoring a EULA which hasn't been proven to have any force in law and probably isn't worth the bits it occupies on the disk is a lot different to downloading the entire software without paying for it and installing it without any kind of license? Most licenses have to stand up to a test of reasonableness at the very least before they can have any kind of binding effect - if I have a legitimate copy of XP and install a Vista upgrade, don't like it and go back to XP I'd not have a hard time arguing in court that it was unreasonable for the EULA to prevent me doing this. To say that I have to either accept a blatantly unreasonable EULA or download pirated software and these are my only options is just wrong, the third option is to contest the EULA (and the fourth is to use *nix of course... or is that the first?)
I'm sure they've already tried. I guess the ideal vision for them would be a situation where media is tied to a single device, so once one person has watched/listened to it it's useless to everyone else. That would effectively kill visual/audio media in libraries.
The problem is you're assuming they want a DRM-free solution. They could trivially offer a simple solution that lets them sell content at next to no cost to themselves for a very small fee, and the number of people who would sign up would surely be enough to account for the lower retail price... but if they do that, how the hell are they meant to re-sell you the same stuff in 10-15 years time? Once everyone has a perfect digital copy of the media, they can't milk it any more. DRM provides them a means to do this ("Oh, now we have HDD++, it's like HDD except none of your old content will play on it... but look at the shiny new logo!").
I think the distinction is probably how much time we're prepared to invest in a particular project. Usually, reading a book will take a good deal more time and effort than watching a movie or listening to a CD, so it has the appearance of a more valuable experience. Sometimes it happens that we will want to invest more time in a DVD than is usual, and that becomes then a more valuable experience (and ditto on the Futurama).
The main problem seems to be that movie and CD producers think we should pay a cost that reflects how much money they spent on the project and how much profit they want to make, rather than a cost which reflects how much we get from the end product. They try and artificially keep prices high and now they're using DRM to try and artificially restrict supply instead of following established market practice and reducing prices (and, if necessary, reducing costs by, for example, not paying 'stars' a lifetime's fortune for 3-6 months work). Instead of listening to the market, they're trying to tell it what to think...
That is exactly the reason nobody ever created anything before we had IP laws. You, Sir, have hit the nail on the head. Oh, wait...
I've played this game and I've gone back to Netflix, Movies Unlimited, The Serial Squadron.
And in the meantime, things have moved on in the 'P2P experience'. Unlike the **AAs, the P2Pers understand and embrace new technology which makes life more convenient for them, rather than trying to shoehorn technology into a role where it makes life difficult for everybody... things move on for both sides of the divide, but one seems to be making more gains than the other, here.
Yeah, I remember the referendum on the war in Iraq when we all voted to, oh, never mind...
He needs to somehow implicate Linux first...
The attitudes of the masses? Growing up, it seemed smoking was the norm and smokers received many concessions in the workplace and public areas. Now smokers are practically pariahs, sure it still happens but it becomes a less attractive proposition the more people are swayed against it. It's a slow, ongoing process, but it's a process nonetheless and one which wouldn't be happening without the first blows having been struck.
Why do you think they play so much hockey at Google? It's a good excuse to always be carrying around a big stick... ;)
This isn't a story about someone claiming rights to the trademark. It's a story about someone successfully taking the fastest growing company in history to court and winning a trademark claim. The article you link to doesn't seem to mention anyone successfully taking Google to court over this, so how is this the same story? I could "claim" I was entitled to a trademark, but proving that in a court of law is the hard part, especially proving it against a company with the legal might of Google. Besides, taking none of this into account it's still newsworthy for everyone with a german account who will now want to know how this impacts them (if at all). News doesn't have to cater just to your personal needs.
On a side note, where does this whole ethos of a story being not newsworthy if we've heard a similar story before come from? I mean, I can understand the feeling against dupes, but if the stories are merely similar but have their own unique characteristics, are they not news anymore? In which case, someone had better tell every newspaper, TV and radio station in the world that's been reporting on terrorism non-stop for the last few years...
The capacity wasn't so good though, so I guess it really isn't the size but what you do with it that counts?
I'm not 100% sure on this but I've always been led to believe that abort is meant to completely abort the operation, while fail will only return a failed flag for reading from/writing to the disk and allow the operation to handle that failure in its own way. So, in other words, imagine you have an application which reads one file in at a time from a floppy and performs some action on it. One of the files fails to read, if you abort, the application will terminate what it's doing, if you simply fail the application should continue (by trying to read the next file).
There must be a couple hundred computers on the same floor as me at the moment, but if someone handed me a floppy disk right now I'd probably have to get support to go digging around in the old storerooms looking for a machine that can read it, I'm not sure they'd have a great deal of success even then. If this was any kind of an issue then we'd all have ready access to floppies and drives, but the standard "hard" format for sharing around data now seems to be CD, and increasingly USB.
I'd be hard pressed to find a floppy disk or drive in this building, but on my desk alone I have access to a flash card reader, various USB pen devices and a phone and MP3 player with mass storage capability. It might be harder to physically hand someone something with data on it, but it's never been easier to give them the data (by copying it to a device of their own). You could lose or misspell an email, if it was important enough you would probably make sure you didn't (you could equally lose or ruin a floppy by leaving it near a magnetic force, if we're talking hypothetical). More often these days if I need to share my contact details with someone I'll send them a business card via blue tooth.
It seems like the reason floppies don't have a direct replacement is because they've been replaced by lots of different solutions which overlap to fill the gap. If you still need to physically hand someone some data in a situation where there is no way to merely give them a copy, then USB is cheap enough to fill this role, for everything else there are already solutions out there.
I don't think I've bought any hardware in the last five years that didn't either have the drivers on CD or just do away with the disk completely and point you to a website. I have one PC that I've had running since around the year 2k with a busted floppy IO port on the mobo and I've never needed to use it. The only place I can see this really mattering is with really old mobos that don't support booting from CD when you need to re-install, but they must be few and far between by now anyway, by the time it's impossible to get your hands on floppy drives (be it through specialist suppliers, salvage machines, etc) I would guess these old machines would be pretty much extinct.
Probably not, the $150 is likely based on the estimated cost of repairing the damage done by the rootkit, or the cost for removal by a professional at any rate. If you were to rootkit a server then the potential for damage and cost of removal are likely to be much higher. If you were to rootkit individual machines then this would probably be assessed on the basis of the machines in question.
What is most annoying about this is that it requires the injured party to be pro-active in claiming the money, and for the most part people will not bother. It's a small enough amount that it's not worth the hoops you'll probably have to jump through to collect it, and as such it's unlikely to be more than a blip to Sony. The real precedent here should be that damages to **AA should only be paid if the individual artist (the injured party) comes forward and stakes their claim. Then lets see how many multi-millionaire musicians want to stand up in court and claim damages against their fans when they have no faceless organisation to hide behind...