Hey man, if the cosmic rays are making Toyotas drive themselves, I sure wouldn't trust them to leave my SSDs alone! They might spontaneously populate with hundreds of gigs of pr0n!
If we had all the security and privacy elements in place that we should, there would be no such thing as a "data disaster". There's no real limit to the degree to which we can secure personal (or other) data, if we actually put some effort into it. We just don't right now, because it's not on enough peoples' radars yet. Once the girl you met in the bar last night cares enough about her privacy to use, say, Diaspora*, then there won't really be such thing as a privacy disaster, because everything will be cryptographically secure between parties, and there won't be the Facebooks of the world out there with huge repositories of unencrypted personal data. Right now she doesn't.
There's also a truly mindboggling amount of irresponsibility on behalf of the various financial institutions of the world (and the like), for most of the same reasons. Nobody cares enough to do security or privacy the right way. Yet.
Unless, perhaps, Apple gains dominance in a market to the point that their denial of services or manipulation of terms would be detrimental to the targeted party unless complied with.
Is this some sort of joke? Apple is ALREADY in that position. You just seem to be blinded to anything not having to do with PC OSes.
Yeah, that's actually exactly what he's saying. Look into non-compete agreements. Then look at the paperwork you signed when you took your job to see if you have one or not. Finally, check and see if the terms end immediately upon leaving your current employer, or 1/2/5/10 years later.
What are you? Some 16-year old who's never worked a job? If someone's willing to screw around at work and play PAC-MAN, they're sure as hell willing to chit-chat with a coworker for awhile.
To answer the inevitable question, yes, I do work a real job, at a real company, and no, I don't work 8 hours straight every day without looking up from my keyboard to talk to a coworker about the baseball game.
But that is too "Regressive" for the "progressives" who would rather reward failure and punish success.
Under what system of logic is manipulating your corporation into a position where you can rape your consumers without fear of reprisal from either them, or the government, considered a failure?
So you're comparing apples and oranges? By your own admission, you were referring to/.'ers (who presumably all have houses), and yet you're trying to draw comparisons to homeless people?
If I'm not mistaken, Froyo introduces Flash on Android, so I guess we'll get to see whether the Flash-haters were right about how much Flash on mobile would suck.
I understand that over time software gets bloated, but the biggest deal to me is not allowing that bloat to impact the UI. Nothing frustrates me more than having an unresponsive UI while a page is loading. Some stupid flash script is loading, so it takes 5 seconds to switch tabs. That's unacceptable to me. The UI should be instant, no matter what's going on. Switching tabs should be instant, clicking buttons should be instant, typing text in textboxes should be instant, even when the page hasn't fully loaded.
It doesn't really matter, any more than AMD's "proper" quad core mattered more than Intel pasting two dual-core dies together. This is really just AMD getting beaten to the punch again, and having to try to spin it in some positive way. It's great news that it will be out earlier than expected, but I think they would have been better off taking the less "beautiful" and just throwing discrete dies into a single package. Particularly as it has yet to be seen how big the market for this sort of thing is. More exciting to me is that AMD is ahead of schedule with this, so hopefully they'll be similarly ahead with their next architecture. I'm yearning for the day when AMD is back to being competitive on a clock-for-clock basis with Intel.
I don't know what sort of an organization you work for, but you mention that your business departments use change tracking a lot. What about your other departments? Obviously Google Docs isn't for everyone, but I'd be more than a little surprised if the majority of your organization needed that feature, and I know for sure that my (also rather large) company doesn't (as a whole).
On the one hand, it seems anyone who's ever used a computer before in their life would half-way expect this sort of incompatibility to arise, given the drastically different natures of Google Docs and Office (Web based vs standalone app).
On the other hand, how often do the people Google is trying to cater to actually use these features? Google Docs has always struck me as a quick and easy way to get Word documents from anywhere. And I've gotta say, not many of my office reports use fancy styles, or SmartArt. Charts occasionally, yes, but the rest of those items just strike me as "meh" and SmartArt particularly strikes me as "yeah, that was cool when I was seven."
I dunno. It just doesn't seem to me like this is going to be a problem in common usage.
You'd sure think so. If, with my 20 liter tank, I can store over 3000 liters of methane gas, that would seem to me to be a fairly efficient fuel storage mechanism. The devil may be in the details of keeping the ice frozen, and decomposing it in a controlled fashion though.
The problem I see with that is, what makes something a "standard"? And for that matter, why should the government be in any way involved with standards bodies? I mean, the standards bodies can say they won't support patent-encumbered technologies, but then they're just effed in the A because they have no technologies to put in their standards. So the only way your suggestion would become plausible would be for the government to somehow decide that ISO, IETF, W3C, etc, get these privileges of essentially stripping patents from anyone who submits their technology for use in a standard. Unless, you're proposing that once you publish your algorithm, you lose patent protection on it. Which seems a little misguided to me.
"I'm sorry sir, your idea has become too successful, we're going to have to take it away from you now."
Is this some sort of joke? This is similar to claiming that is too important to fail, thus the government should take it over and run it "for the people." The real solution is to make sure you can't get patents on trivial algorithms that anyone would come up with, when presented with a particular problem. Not to take away genuinely innovative approaches that just so happen to become popular. Yes, it's true that most software patents are trivial. But not all are, and the ones that aren't should be protected just like any other innovation or invention.
Slashdot Mirror
A little further toward the "other end" of the spectrum: :D
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/mirrors/images/images/pao/AS4/10074807.jpg
For a few seconds, anyways
Smelly action at a distance.
Hey man, if the cosmic rays are making Toyotas drive themselves, I sure wouldn't trust them to leave my SSDs alone! They might spontaneously populate with hundreds of gigs of pr0n!
If we had all the security and privacy elements in place that we should, there would be no such thing as a "data disaster". There's no real limit to the degree to which we can secure personal (or other) data, if we actually put some effort into it. We just don't right now, because it's not on enough peoples' radars yet. Once the girl you met in the bar last night cares enough about her privacy to use, say, Diaspora*, then there won't really be such thing as a privacy disaster, because everything will be cryptographically secure between parties, and there won't be the Facebooks of the world out there with huge repositories of unencrypted personal data. Right now she doesn't.
There's also a truly mindboggling amount of irresponsibility on behalf of the various financial institutions of the world (and the like), for most of the same reasons. Nobody cares enough to do security or privacy the right way. Yet.
Unless, perhaps, Apple gains dominance in a market to the point that their denial of services or manipulation of terms would be detrimental to the targeted party unless complied with.
Is this some sort of joke? Apple is ALREADY in that position. You just seem to be blinded to anything not having to do with PC OSes.
Yeah, that's actually exactly what he's saying. Look into non-compete agreements. Then look at the paperwork you signed when you took your job to see if you have one or not. Finally, check and see if the terms end immediately upon leaving your current employer, or 1/2/5/10 years later.
What are you? Some 16-year old who's never worked a job? If someone's willing to screw around at work and play PAC-MAN, they're sure as hell willing to chit-chat with a coworker for awhile.
To answer the inevitable question, yes, I do work a real job, at a real company, and no, I don't work 8 hours straight every day without looking up from my keyboard to talk to a coworker about the baseball game.
But that is too "Regressive" for the "progressives" who would rather reward failure and punish success.
Under what system of logic is manipulating your corporation into a position where you can rape your consumers without fear of reprisal from either them, or the government, considered a failure?
So you're comparing apples and oranges? By your own admission, you were referring to /.'ers (who presumably all have houses), and yet you're trying to draw comparisons to homeless people?
Thing is that in computing, stuff gets obsolete extremely fast.
Consider that DVD was developed in 1995, so the base MPEG-2 patents expire within 5 years, if not earlier, and people are still using it.
Better for you?
Finally, effective piracy countermeasures! Someone alert Ubisoft!
If I'm not mistaken, Froyo introduces Flash on Android, so I guess we'll get to see whether the Flash-haters were right about how much Flash on mobile would suck.
how polluted do you want it?
I understand that over time software gets bloated, but the biggest deal to me is not allowing that bloat to impact the UI. Nothing frustrates me more than having an unresponsive UI while a page is loading. Some stupid flash script is loading, so it takes 5 seconds to switch tabs. That's unacceptable to me. The UI should be instant, no matter what's going on. Switching tabs should be instant, clicking buttons should be instant, typing text in textboxes should be instant, even when the page hasn't fully loaded.
It doesn't really matter, any more than AMD's "proper" quad core mattered more than Intel pasting two dual-core dies together. This is really just AMD getting beaten to the punch again, and having to try to spin it in some positive way. It's great news that it will be out earlier than expected, but I think they would have been better off taking the less "beautiful" and just throwing discrete dies into a single package. Particularly as it has yet to be seen how big the market for this sort of thing is. More exciting to me is that AMD is ahead of schedule with this, so hopefully they'll be similarly ahead with their next architecture. I'm yearning for the day when AMD is back to being competitive on a clock-for-clock basis with Intel.
I don't know what sort of an organization you work for, but you mention that your business departments use change tracking a lot. What about your other departments? Obviously Google Docs isn't for everyone, but I'd be more than a little surprised if the majority of your organization needed that feature, and I know for sure that my (also rather large) company doesn't (as a whole).
On the one hand, it seems anyone who's ever used a computer before in their life would half-way expect this sort of incompatibility to arise, given the drastically different natures of Google Docs and Office (Web based vs standalone app).
On the other hand, how often do the people Google is trying to cater to actually use these features? Google Docs has always struck me as a quick and easy way to get Word documents from anywhere. And I've gotta say, not many of my office reports use fancy styles, or SmartArt. Charts occasionally, yes, but the rest of those items just strike me as "meh" and SmartArt particularly strikes me as "yeah, that was cool when I was seven."
I dunno. It just doesn't seem to me like this is going to be a problem in common usage.
So what happens when the electric/hydraulic motor fails?
Sounds disturbingly similar to the Chevy Volt.
It's deep, for sure.
You'd sure think so. If, with my 20 liter tank, I can store over 3000 liters of methane gas, that would seem to me to be a fairly efficient fuel storage mechanism. The devil may be in the details of keeping the ice frozen, and decomposing it in a controlled fashion though.
The problem I see with that is, what makes something a "standard"? And for that matter, why should the government be in any way involved with standards bodies? I mean, the standards bodies can say they won't support patent-encumbered technologies, but then they're just effed in the A because they have no technologies to put in their standards. So the only way your suggestion would become plausible would be for the government to somehow decide that ISO, IETF, W3C, etc, get these privileges of essentially stripping patents from anyone who submits their technology for use in a standard.
Unless, you're proposing that once you publish your algorithm, you lose patent protection on it. Which seems a little misguided to me.
You underestimate the power of sudo.
Depends on whether the global internet is impacted by the country's shenanigans.
"I'm sorry sir, your idea has become too successful, we're going to have to take it away from you now."
Is this some sort of joke? This is similar to claiming that is too important to fail, thus the government should take it over and run it "for the people." The real solution is to make sure you can't get patents on trivial algorithms that anyone would come up with, when presented with a particular problem. Not to take away genuinely innovative approaches that just so happen to become popular.
Yes, it's true that most software patents are trivial. But not all are, and the ones that aren't should be protected just like any other innovation or invention.