A trans woman who is very good at quantum. Check out my newsletter at https://buttondown.email/xgranade and consulting services at https://dual-space.solutions/.
Make software secure-by-default, make it difficult to override defaults by accident, easy to override on purpose. This is the thought process that seems to be behind, for example, CyanogenMod's recent decision to disable root access by default.
To me, the essence of that quote is that any sane security model must include the vendor as a threat, but when I do not have control over my own hardware and software, I have little to no ability to respond to that threat. Moreover, without access to source code, I have little to no ability to audit my own security. Fundamentally, I do not believe in the idea that security can reasonably exist without auditability.
From the article: "Proprietary security software is an oxymoron -- if the user is not fundamentally in control of the software, the user has no security."
Just to point out, there is a link, but it's hidden at the bottom of the page under "Related Internet links." That's pretty bad, but it at least beats the many articles I've seen that discuss something on the Internet without ever providing a link that I could reasonably find.
I get that moving forward means breaking existing paradigms. I'm happy that MS is trying Metro (not so happy with the horribly anti-user policies surrounding Metro, but I digress), and don't mind that it's a change. That said, they need to leave some kind of path for existing users to map concepts onto the new UI. A great example of this, I think, is in Gnome Shell, where the "Activities" hotcorner is clearly labelled, and fills the same UI role as the "Applications" menu in previous versions of Gnome. A user moving from Gnome 2 would likely try to click Activities, and while they may be surprised at the overlay that results, would still find all their applications in one place there. From the looks of it, Windows 8 provides no such path for users to attach existing intuition to. Change is fine, but it has to be done well.
I think the idea is so that you can just drop in a dock to connect USB, HDMI and power, rather than plugging and unplugging three different cables each time. That is, the dock wouldn't offer new kinds of ports, so much as collect them together for the user.
This is a very different situation in quite a few ways. For one, IE was not just a big browser, but was almost completely dominant. For another, many of IE's browser-specific features were Windows-only by design, such as ActiveX.
Here, we have an open source rendering engine that clearly delineates browser-specific features (each of which is well-documented). The use of a prefix makes it possible to use the browser-specific features offered by WebKit without sacrificing compatibility with other browsers, something Microsoft actively resisted. For quite a while, it was very difficult, if not impossible, to make sites that looked and felt right both in IE and in other browsers.
Had Microsoft extended standards in a way that played nice with the rest of the community, maybe they would have had someone saying something like this in their defence. Instead, they used browser-specific features as a way of undermining standards.
From the article: "[Gates] also said there was no viable alternative to the Windows operating system in the market at the time [1995], which would mean Novell does not have an antitrust case."
That statement is only even remotely true if one interprets it to mean that there was no alternative to Windows at the time that ran on the same hardware. Macintosh computers were alive and well, no?
I agree, that is a poor choice to have as the only way to share something. An easy fix would be to add a link on each item as a kind of synonym for the Share button in the G+ bar. That said, the problem is a pretty minor one given the extent of the redesign. I'm rather happy with the new Reader myself.
I don't know why that's true in general, but in my case, when Apple does poorly in the market, I feel more hopeful for the positive impacts computing can have on a society. As many here have pointed out (and as many others have disagreed with) Apple has become a company that has made censorship and curated computing in particular a profitable business model. It is my contention that the more that model becomes unprofitable, the better off we are as users, as it disincentives other companies from imitating the worst aspects of modern-day Apple.
From my view, this quote summed up so much of what's wrong with the article:
"If it’s for those who still want to make some sort of argument predicated on shouting the word “OPEN!”, that’s sad, because Android’s “openness” is a meaningless bullet point to average users and a facade championed by its most devoted."
"Open" is not just a keyword, and it's not something that "average" users should feel so complacent about ignoring. While issues exist with Android's Honeycomb branch and openness, the bottom line remains that Android is far more open than iOS, and that average users benefit. For one thing, that openness makes censorship much more difficult, and so users get access to a wide array of content that is unavailable or difficult to access on iOS. The other side is that Android's openness means that app developers are free to make their apps more useful, such as remapping volume keys to page turn buttons in a reader or allowing users to set phone features based on triggers (Locale, Tasker and to a lesser degree Shush). Even if users are not by and large aware of the effect that openness has on their experience, it does have a very positive effect for them. The recent example of Instapaper being crippled by Apple's design decisions in iOS 5 is a good example of that: had Apple been more open in their approach to iOS's design, then Instapaper would be able to store data somewhere else and thus to deliver a better UX.
I remain unimpressed with articles that simply assert that "openness" doesn't matter to users, without exploring what effects the open-vs-closed dichotomy has on their experiences.
Where personally identifiable information is concerned, transmission implies collection, as there is no way to verify that the receiving party does not record. Any statement to the contrary is to take the recipient merely on faith.
But it's bad for compulsive checkers, too, in that it doesn't let you peruse every item in order like the old News Feed design did. It's a ticker, and so far as I can tell, that means that when you miss an item it's gone.
I do think flagging is appropriate in this case, though, as the title is completely inaccurate and misleading.
First, they haven't come close to actually building something that can rightfully be called a "quantum computer." They've demonstrated an interesting research program, but there's still a very long way to go.
Second, there have been quite a few proposals for quantum computing architectures that separate processing elements from memory elements, and so the proposed architecture is not at all "the first."
I guess it just bothers me a bit because as a grad student in quantum information, I want my field to be represented as well as it can be.
The only thing that I might ever want from functional and symbolic programming paradigms that I can't imagine how to emulate with decorators would be the ability to transform the actual compiled function object in some way. Python decorators can add lots of new code, sure, but they don't get access to the syntax tree for the function object to be able to break it apart and transform it.
Mind you, I truly love Python decorators, but I just don't think the comparison to languages like LISP quite holds up. Maybe I'm just inexperienced, though...
YMMV. I'm definitely not in a ghost town over there. People like Andrea Kuszewski do a lot to generate high-quality content, and keep the conversation going. While my Facebook is more active, sure, my G+ account is where things I care about are happening.
Looks really cool, except for that the underlying project hasn't issued a release in over two years. Given how much Android has changed in two years, that would seem to make this tool inappropriate for dev testing, unfortunately. Also, the article didn't make it clear if this live distro works with adb or not, which would be very useful for debugging and testing.
Free speech is not the same as enjoying non-profit status. Google cutting off the latter means that they no longer actively sponsor the speech of religious groups, but those groups still are able to speak the same as anyone else. By ceasing to preferentially treat religious organizations, Google has effectively taken a stance for free speech, not against it.
I presume you are aware that we have an extensive amount of evidence that cancer does exist and is a real and likely consequence of smoking, but that we have absolutely no evidence of a hell, much less of which actions would lead one there.
Some of the things that the author claims Apple "innovated" on here are ludicrous. The original Macintosh OS was not an innovation so much as it was an imitation of Xerox research into GUIs, for example. The original iPod was a fairly modest set of improvements to prior digital media players, such as the Rio Diamond (which was much more original). Perhaps most strikingly, the iPhone was a fairly incremental step from many preexisting ideas like the Treo and Tungsten lines from Palm, or even the old Windows Mobile line.
Mind you, I don't see it as a problem that Apple and Microsoft have both by and large profited from imitation, as that's what drives the industry forward. Someone has a good idea, and builds it on top of an established base of other good ideas, imitated from others. Standing on the shoulders of giants, so to speak. What I mind are the contortions of historical revisionism one has to go through to paint this picture of "Apple innovates, Microsoft imitates."
What we really need is the ability to use pubkey systems like OpenPGP without hacking the script context of a page (a la FireGPG--- while good, it was fragile with respect to Gmail changes). I would love to have browsers bake in PGP support and for sites like Gmail and FB to start relying on the browser for encryption services.
Patent suits are all too common a practice, I agree, but it has become quite clear over the past year that Apple is going well beyond the pack in their use of patents to shut out competitors. This injunction isn't a shakedown, but an attempt to deny a competitor the right to participate in the market.
And here we find one of the major advantages of open source development: their efforts need not be lost, and that productivity need not be wasted. Instead, there is now an opportunity for someone to stand up and continue making MeeGo something awesome.
Those statistics are enough to sample the entire population only if it is a fair sampling, but I think the point is that Alexa toolbar users are not a fair sampling of Internet users in general, and hence the claiming that 27% figure applies to all 'net users is inaccurate and misleading.
I remember at one point, Apple forbid pricing things higher on iOS' App Store to compensate for the 30% cut. Is that still the case? If so, then Amazon's choices are a lot narrower: kill the link or kill the app.