Agreed on the press point. If you were a firm who made their money by highlighting issues in other people's code, wouldn't you leap at the chance to highlight issues with the code of one of the biggest companies on the planet - the fact that it's open source means you can do this publicly and simply. It doesn't even matter if Google are already aware of most of these and are working to fix them - so much the better, you go from "the software that found Google's bugs" to "the software that helped fix Google's bugs".
The carriers and hardware manufacturers are still far too used to doing things the old way (perhaps one update during the life cycle of a phone, if you're lucky). However, what I'm starting to see are more and more complaints from regular (i.e. non-technical) users about the lack of updates. This is a good thing, eventually someone on the hardware side will start to capitalise on this by offering phones with minimal or no cruft on top of the base Android OS, and carriers who want to be able to offer all the latest updates will hopefully start to pick them up and release them without modification (and if not, there are plenty of places that will sell you a phone and a contract without the proprietary crap associated with that contract's carrier). What we should hope for is more updates from Android pushing flashier new features to drive public opinion in the direction of demanding the hardware/carrier side of things give us the ability to update over the air ourselves, out of the box.
I have to say, I don't think Google will necessarily be too worried about the licensing cost. Other smaller companies who hear about the software via this story (and let's face it, that's the bottom line - they want to be the company that unearths a bunch of bugs in the Next Big Thing (tm) and sell copies of their own software off the back of it) can always choose to find their own bugs if they don't want to pay. It's a useful tool, that's all, for most developers it's not lack of ability to find and fix bugs that's the problem, it's that nobody wants to dedicate the developer resource to doing it.
I think he used WP7 as it comes from a company with a known history in this area and neatly highlights that closed source is certainly no guarantee of security (of course, we stand to be corrected if WP7 turns out to be incredibly secure). While the others no doubt also have their flaws, you mention Windows and you generally don't need to labour the point, people will see what you're getting at.
It's certainly not as clear cut as you are suggesting. Apple have a good percentage of the market right now, but the majority of growth is in Android (that's largely people moving from non-smart phones to smart phones, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out once that trend levels off), okay that's to be expected since they're starting from simpler roots, but I'd hardly say Android over here are feeling any kind of "hit", and we've had iPhones on other carriers for a good while.
I never understood how an out of court settlement, where the company admits no responsibility, negates even relevant court action, let alone all future action. Sure, if you're a party to it then maybe it's akin to a contract not to sue, but if you weren't even aware of it and are still expected to opt out, that to me seems to fail the test of reasonableness that a contract would need, so what's the story?
While I'm loathe to support the enrichment of lawyers, the reason option 1 (letting the company keep the money) wouldn't work is that, at the moment, many companies knowindgly sail as close to the edge as they dare or even engage in illegal conduct, but not if they think there's a good chance of being caught/punished. Remove the lawyer element and there's no real check on what a company does, not to mention a lawyer who can scent money is probably quite a vigilant watchdog to sic on companies. It might be better if government had some checks and balances in place to prevent illegal behaviour on the part of the companies in the first place, but we know that's unlikely to happen (or at least effectively), and even where it does, companies are creative enough to find the loopholes faster than a lumbering government can close them down.
I'm not sure how US law works - is it not possible to opt out of the class action and bring your own personal action? If not, it seems like a good way for companies to get away with murder is to do something wrong, then have someone start a class action, knowing they'll just get a monetary slap on the wrists.
Why is this kind of thing always marked insightful? Does the bicycle have the choice to be made at a different factory by a different manufacturer if they dislike the way the current manufacturer does things? The user might not be the customer in this situation, but they're similarly not an inanimate object. They can influence the dynamic by using a competiting service, and ultimately if enough choose to do so, the advertising money will leave. It's more like the user is a food critic, Google is a restaurant and the advertisers are hungry customers. Google has to keep its standards up if they don't want bad reviews and all their customers to go eat elsewhere.
Gone are the days of good sci-fi shows that are light and fun to watch while still invoking that sense of wonder and inspiration that lets you detach from the present world and wish you were part of this future or alternate world.
If they didn't aim for such long arcs in the first place it might help. Assume your show is going to be around for 2 or 3 seasons max, and build your arc around that, and stick to it - have some artistic integrity and don't play a series out way past its natural experation date using tedious filler. That would keep the scripting tight and the viewers interested. I know networks would hate it because they'd have to find yet more new shows, but still, aiming for 3 seasons and delivering a quality product that will sell into syndicates and shift merchandise for years has got to be better than aiming for 7 seasons and getting cancelled halfway through the first.
On the other hand, if you're going to test the model it might be worth testing it with a show that's dying anyway. I still don't think it would work - personally I don't like adverts, but if I like the show I'll suffer them, life's far too short to watch poor television just because there are few ads, though.
I'm tired enough of shows getting cancelled that, these days, I won't even bother watching a show until it has four or five seasons under its belt. That's also about the right number to figure out if there is a real story that's going somewhere or it's just meandering unil cancellation day.
Of course, their entire business model depends on them piggy-backing on the success of Facebook. While Facebook looks pretty unassailable at the moment, that might not always be the case. The true test will be if Facebook flounders, will Zynga be able to do enough and quickly enough to outlast them.
I don't really think much has changed. When I first got into gaming, the majority of games were simplistic beat 'em ups, shoot 'em ups or platformers. Occasionally you'd get a Lords of Midnight or Elite but you had to wade through an awful lot of dross to find them. It's pretty much the same thing now - great new games, both from big developers and little indie outfits, are still appearing at the same rate, it might just appear that's no longer the case because there's so much marketing of "mainstream" family games, but the gems are still there to find and I can't see them ever going away.
Also assuming the attackers don't just plant devices on innocent travellers. How many innocent people would need to be red-misted before they abandoned the scheme.
I also think the restriction on liquids is stupid. So you're not allowed to carry more than 100ml of liquid through security. What's to stop five or ten people each carrying the same amount and pooling it on the other side - once you're passed the checks nobody gives a damn what you're carrying onto the plane. They don't even all need to die (if the aim is to bring the plane down), just have 9 of them fly elsewhere and one guy gets to be a "martyr" for his cause.
Indeed, while there's no proof that the techniques work, and almost certainly if they did they'd be useless in anything other than a closed interview room with cameras to monitor and replay actions, they do have the benefit to the authorities of pretty much being able to drag anyone out of line for interview with zero real reason ("Oh, I saw a micro-expression that looked like guilt").
Five minutes per lesson? If you assume 3 seconds to call each student's name and get a "here" response, you'd have to have 100 students per class for it to take that long - and 3 seconds is generous, considering most kids sit in roughly the same places every time a decent teacher wouldn't even need them to call out, he/she would just look around the room and see who was missing. In our classes of 20ish students, roll call - or taking the register as we call it over here - used to take maybe 30 seconds (most teachers would do it while the kids were getting seated and taking out their books/pens) and seemed to actually serve the dual useful purpose of finding out who was missing and ensuring those present were paying attention before the lesson proper began. If it's taking five minutes per lesson, either the class sizes are way too big or the teachers have lost all control over the class, either way there are much bigger issues to solve.
You seriously do not want to eat a gummi bear that's touched the same scanner as a couple hundred teenagers - trust me, I used to be one, I know the kinds of things they touch. I wouldn't even want to touch that with my finger, let alone my food. On the plus side, at least when all the kids get sick because they're sharing around their diseases, at least they'll have a legitimate excuse to not be in class.
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Agreed on the press point. If you were a firm who made their money by highlighting issues in other people's code, wouldn't you leap at the chance to highlight issues with the code of one of the biggest companies on the planet - the fact that it's open source means you can do this publicly and simply. It doesn't even matter if Google are already aware of most of these and are working to fix them - so much the better, you go from "the software that found Google's bugs" to "the software that helped fix Google's bugs".
The carriers and hardware manufacturers are still far too used to doing things the old way (perhaps one update during the life cycle of a phone, if you're lucky). However, what I'm starting to see are more and more complaints from regular (i.e. non-technical) users about the lack of updates. This is a good thing, eventually someone on the hardware side will start to capitalise on this by offering phones with minimal or no cruft on top of the base Android OS, and carriers who want to be able to offer all the latest updates will hopefully start to pick them up and release them without modification (and if not, there are plenty of places that will sell you a phone and a contract without the proprietary crap associated with that contract's carrier). What we should hope for is more updates from Android pushing flashier new features to drive public opinion in the direction of demanding the hardware/carrier side of things give us the ability to update over the air ourselves, out of the box.
I have to say, I don't think Google will necessarily be too worried about the licensing cost. Other smaller companies who hear about the software via this story (and let's face it, that's the bottom line - they want to be the company that unearths a bunch of bugs in the Next Big Thing (tm) and sell copies of their own software off the back of it) can always choose to find their own bugs if they don't want to pay. It's a useful tool, that's all, for most developers it's not lack of ability to find and fix bugs that's the problem, it's that nobody wants to dedicate the developer resource to doing it.
I think he used WP7 as it comes from a company with a known history in this area and neatly highlights that closed source is certainly no guarantee of security (of course, we stand to be corrected if WP7 turns out to be incredibly secure). While the others no doubt also have their flaws, you mention Windows and you generally don't need to labour the point, people will see what you're getting at.
It's certainly not as clear cut as you are suggesting. Apple have a good percentage of the market right now, but the majority of growth is in Android (that's largely people moving from non-smart phones to smart phones, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out once that trend levels off), okay that's to be expected since they're starting from simpler roots, but I'd hardly say Android over here are feeling any kind of "hit", and we've had iPhones on other carriers for a good while.
I never understood how an out of court settlement, where the company admits no responsibility, negates even relevant court action, let alone all future action. Sure, if you're a party to it then maybe it's akin to a contract not to sue, but if you weren't even aware of it and are still expected to opt out, that to me seems to fail the test of reasonableness that a contract would need, so what's the story?
While I'm loathe to support the enrichment of lawyers, the reason option 1 (letting the company keep the money) wouldn't work is that, at the moment, many companies knowindgly sail as close to the edge as they dare or even engage in illegal conduct, but not if they think there's a good chance of being caught/punished. Remove the lawyer element and there's no real check on what a company does, not to mention a lawyer who can scent money is probably quite a vigilant watchdog to sic on companies. It might be better if government had some checks and balances in place to prevent illegal behaviour on the part of the companies in the first place, but we know that's unlikely to happen (or at least effectively), and even where it does, companies are creative enough to find the loopholes faster than a lumbering government can close them down.
I'm not sure how US law works - is it not possible to opt out of the class action and bring your own personal action? If not, it seems like a good way for companies to get away with murder is to do something wrong, then have someone start a class action, knowing they'll just get a monetary slap on the wrists.
Why is this kind of thing always marked insightful? Does the bicycle have the choice to be made at a different factory by a different manufacturer if they dislike the way the current manufacturer does things? The user might not be the customer in this situation, but they're similarly not an inanimate object. They can influence the dynamic by using a competiting service, and ultimately if enough choose to do so, the advertising money will leave. It's more like the user is a food critic, Google is a restaurant and the advertisers are hungry customers. Google has to keep its standards up if they don't want bad reviews and all their customers to go eat elsewhere.
He said 99% of users are on Windows, Linux or OSX (okay, in the phone world it's iOS, but it's derived from OSX).
Gone are the days of good sci-fi shows that are light and fun to watch while still invoking that sense of wonder and inspiration that lets you detach from the present world and wish you were part of this future or alternate world.
Clearly you need to watch more Doctor Who :)
If they didn't aim for such long arcs in the first place it might help. Assume your show is going to be around for 2 or 3 seasons max, and build your arc around that, and stick to it - have some artistic integrity and don't play a series out way past its natural experation date using tedious filler. That would keep the scripting tight and the viewers interested. I know networks would hate it because they'd have to find yet more new shows, but still, aiming for 3 seasons and delivering a quality product that will sell into syndicates and shift merchandise for years has got to be better than aiming for 7 seasons and getting cancelled halfway through the first.
On the other hand, if you're going to test the model it might be worth testing it with a show that's dying anyway. I still don't think it would work - personally I don't like adverts, but if I like the show I'll suffer them, life's far too short to watch poor television just because there are few ads, though.
I'm tired enough of shows getting cancelled that, these days, I won't even bother watching a show until it has four or five seasons under its belt. That's also about the right number to figure out if there is a real story that's going somewhere or it's just meandering unil cancellation day.
Of course, their entire business model depends on them piggy-backing on the success of Facebook. While Facebook looks pretty unassailable at the moment, that might not always be the case. The true test will be if Facebook flounders, will Zynga be able to do enough and quickly enough to outlast them.
You don't understand what he means by shooting a real cow with a bazooka. The cow has the bazooka.
I don't really think much has changed. When I first got into gaming, the majority of games were simplistic beat 'em ups, shoot 'em ups or platformers. Occasionally you'd get a Lords of Midnight or Elite but you had to wade through an awful lot of dross to find them. It's pretty much the same thing now - great new games, both from big developers and little indie outfits, are still appearing at the same rate, it might just appear that's no longer the case because there's so much marketing of "mainstream" family games, but the gems are still there to find and I can't see them ever going away.
Also assuming the attackers don't just plant devices on innocent travellers. How many innocent people would need to be red-misted before they abandoned the scheme.
I also think the restriction on liquids is stupid. So you're not allowed to carry more than 100ml of liquid through security. What's to stop five or ten people each carrying the same amount and pooling it on the other side - once you're passed the checks nobody gives a damn what you're carrying onto the plane. They don't even all need to die (if the aim is to bring the plane down), just have 9 of them fly elsewhere and one guy gets to be a "martyr" for his cause.
So order the steak - if you're going first class anyway, damn the expense.
Terrorists from Ireland/NI don't need to make air travel any more miserable for people. Ryanair already does a good enough job.
Indeed, while there's no proof that the techniques work, and almost certainly if they did they'd be useless in anything other than a closed interview room with cameras to monitor and replay actions, they do have the benefit to the authorities of pretty much being able to drag anyone out of line for interview with zero real reason ("Oh, I saw a micro-expression that looked like guilt").
Five minutes per lesson? If you assume 3 seconds to call each student's name and get a "here" response, you'd have to have 100 students per class for it to take that long - and 3 seconds is generous, considering most kids sit in roughly the same places every time a decent teacher wouldn't even need them to call out, he/she would just look around the room and see who was missing. In our classes of 20ish students, roll call - or taking the register as we call it over here - used to take maybe 30 seconds (most teachers would do it while the kids were getting seated and taking out their books/pens) and seemed to actually serve the dual useful purpose of finding out who was missing and ensuring those present were paying attention before the lesson proper began. If it's taking five minutes per lesson, either the class sizes are way too big or the teachers have lost all control over the class, either way there are much bigger issues to solve.
If the gummi bear is stuck on the end of the finger, it sounds like this would still be sufficient to fool the scanner.
You seriously do not want to eat a gummi bear that's touched the same scanner as a couple hundred teenagers - trust me, I used to be one, I know the kinds of things they touch. I wouldn't even want to touch that with my finger, let alone my food. On the plus side, at least when all the kids get sick because they're sharing around their diseases, at least they'll have a legitimate excuse to not be in class.