Apple's position is clearly that by letting google extend their platform to the iphone they would clearly gain converts to it, but without letting apple control that environment they lose the ability to provide distinction, and maintain their competitive advantage.

Nobody is forcing users to install Google Voice. So, what you are saying is that if users have the choice, they will install Google Voice and not use Apple's services anymore.

So, you are basically saying that Apple's "competitive advantage" is in propping up an uncompetitive product (their services) with a good product (their phone hardware).

Just thought I'd put that into perspective for you.

>>>>>Apple charges me around $100 each year to upgrade

>>update. You can see I'm not being flippant by making a side-by-side of what each path offers. Also, your OS X updates were free.

I apologize, but I don't understand what you mean by comparing the words "upgrade" versus "update", and since English spans the entire world, it's doubtful these words mean the same thing across international borders. Where I live (USA) these two words are interchangeable. I could have just as easily said I "updated" from 10.3 to 104. to 10.5 and so on.

ANYWAY..... let me put it this way so you can better understand my point - I bought my current Wintel OS (XP) in 2002. I'm still using it after all these years. If I was still using the Mac OS that I had in 2002, it would essentially be unusable. QED the wintel OS is cheaper (no money spent in 7 years) versus the Mac OS, because I had spend money to keep my Mac working.

I always look at the bottom line.
"Free" looks pretty damn good.

Wikipedia provides full citations for the author/source of all uploaded photos. If a professional photographer wanted to increase his exposure (no pun intended), he could contribute to wikipedia under a free license. The upsides really dwarf the downsides.

-Gonz

Outlook was probably slow because you were loading against Google's IMAP server on the internet, rather than from an Exchange server in the same office. :-P

A web-based system is LESS efficient because nothing is cached locally. I use Gmail for some accounts, and every time I jump to a new message ("conversation"), I have to wait several seconds while the page loads. I periodically have cases where I get a blank white page because the internet connection timed out. If the network goes offline for some reason, my e-mail is totally inaccessible. Outlook (or in my case Thunderbird) has NONE of these problems because all the messages are right their on your laptop's hard disk. You can read them and search them with no internet at all.

In other words, NO, Gmail does not have simple folders. It has a different system called labels. If you want to use Gmail, you need to learn how to use labels, and accept the claim that labels are better than folders.

This claim might be true, but it's interesting that to this day, simple folders are still the model used by file systems. When filing, you want things to have a single location in a nice hierarchical tree. Searching is useful, but it's not the same as filing.

No, Google's challenge is to actually be better. It's great for personal e-mail, but regular people rarely need to "manage" their personal e-mail, since it's mostly chatter that expires after 1 week. By contrast, business e-mails are documents that need to be searched and sorted, with deadline pressure from the boss.

You've shown that this woman was unable to refute your spirited technical arguments. But does that really mean she's clueless and incapable of deciding which product meets her needs?

-Gonz

You're comparing apples and oranges here. With hosted Exchange, you're entrusting your data to a medium-sized company that specializes in hosting Exchange. They charge a fee because that's really their business plan. With Google Apps, you're entrusting your data to a massive leviathan that aims to eventually be a competitor for every business in every industry, and who specializes in mining the hell out of everyone else's data. Google doesn't charge a fee because your data is way more valuable to them than the actual cost of hosting it.

Sure, Google has a privacy policy. But what good is a promise to only use your data to "improve our services" and "develop new services", when those "services" are completely unbounded? Google is constantly trying to invent new services, and inevitably its services will turn into a conflict of interest.

Google might be appropriate for individuals who don't see any value in data privacy. But it's not appropriate for a business.

-Gonz

The web site doesn't clearly explain the difference between "Chameleon" versus "PrivateEye". I found the answers in this PDF:

http://oculislabs.com/Oculis_Whitepaper_1.pdf

It sounds like PrivateEye is the $19.95 edition for consumers using a simple web cam. Whereas Chameleon is the "high end" version using a special "Gazetracker" hardware device that probably has a much better reaction time. There's no price listing for Chameleon, i.e. it's intended for someone spending taxpayer's money rather than their own.

The demo is on the Chameleon page:

http://oculislabs.com/Products/ChameleonP.htm

It took me awhile to figure out that this "PROTECTING DATA IN USE" image is actually an interactive Flash applet. What you do is hover the mouse over "Oculus in Action", and then wait until a blue/red oval slides across the screen. After the oval disappears, you can use the mouse to bring it back on the screen and move it around. The text inside the oval is readable, everything outside is scrambled.

The obscured text is pretty strange actually. On the "This is what the attacker sees" preview tab, the letters in each word are shuffled and easily deciphered. But on the "Oculus in Action" tab, they substitute random words of equal length, apparently sampled from a corpus of gay Satanic rites:

States --> Yapper
Government --> Satanology
degree --> faerie
classifies --> spermatova
determine --> doohinkus
classifying --> luciferidae

(No joke, these are real excerpts!)

From moving the oval around and trying to read what's inside, it's pretty apparent that reaction time is extremely important to the usability of this product. Since there's no downloadable demo program (and a whole lot of marketing patter), I'm guessing that PrivateEye is way too sluggish to be practical. Chameleon might be usable, but you probably have to pay full price to find that out as well heheh.

-Gonz

Kaspersky tends to be underrepresented in anti-virus discussions, maybe because they don't market as heavily. But IMO it's totally worth the price tag. I finally shelled out for Kaspersky AntiVirus (not the full firewall thing) in December of last year, when two virus infections caused enough downtime to impact my consulting hours. An Adobe PDF vulnerability was enabling my PC to be infected from simply browsing web pages with Firefox, even with AVG Internet Security fully enabled.

I tried products like Symantec and McAfee, but they're very "noisy" GUI's (in terms of advertising their presence), and it's difficult to temporarily disable them. I need this feature because I use driver debuggers and other programmer tools that conflict with antivirus services. This was a major factor in my decision to use Kaspersky, which is a very no-nonsense app with an "off" switch that works.

As far as detection rates, I browse pages and run files from a lot of (ahem) untrusted sources, and Kaspersky catches at least one real virus for me every month. No misses so far. In addition to actual threats, Kaspersky also detects potential vulnerabilities such as outdated Java or Flash DLL's, which is pretty cool. So if you can afford for-pay protection, definitely give it a try.

-Gonz

I disagree -- SpyBot is not a passive scanner. It hooks into the operating system in fairly complex ways, similar to an anti-virus program (or actual virus). You cannot expect such programs to coexist without eventually interfering with each other. I suppose Kaspersky and Safer Networking could collaborate to ensure compatibility (e.g. by providing documentation and guarantees regarding the ways they interface with the OS), but this is fairly unrealistic for two competitors.

If Microsoft provided a standardized API interface for virus scanners, the problem would be much simpler. But is that even possible? These tools defend against a very wide range of inventive attacks.

-Gonz

Not really. This site has some statistics:

Applying basic probability, if ("ideally") the chance of pregnancy is 2%, then the chance of NOT getting pregnant over 10 years is (100%-2%)^10 = 81.7%. In other words, 1 out of 5 dudes is gonna paying child support after 10 years.

More realistically, if the failure rate is 4%, then that's (100%-4%)^10 = 66.4% chance of NOT getting pregnant. In other words, 1 out of THREE dudes will be paying child support after 10 years. Condoms suck!

And statistics is counterintuitive. If contraceptive rates were quoted per-decade rather than per-year, contraception research would actually get the funding it deserves.

-Gonz

Interesting point... except that a lifetime cost of $648,000 is worth way less than $400,000 up front. Give me $400,000 today, and I'll happily pay you $1800/month for the next 30 years. Just tell me where to send the checks! ;-)

-Gonz

I tried to read Daniel Solove's PDF, but fell asleep around page 15. His citations are mostly from anonymous internet blog posters, and the essay has a rambling nature that wanders down every side street before (presumably) arriving at some kind of conclusion. That's a great style for a college PhD thesis, but I'm not a panel of professors obligated to read every page he writes. To be persuasive, he needs to convince me that his essay is worth my time. Instead of 3 pages outlining the document structure and 25 pages slowly building to a point, it should have been 3 pages summarizing the thesis and 25 pages of supplementary minutia.

-Gonz

So you're saying that if your password was loosely related to a dictionary word, and if a hacker gained root access to that server, then you would be completely unconcerned about having used the same password on other servers? You would sleep well at night, with complete confidence that the text spit out by "John the Ripper" is going to be some totally unrelated text string?

In your reply, please include the IP address of your server. ;-)

-Gonz

How can you compare Java code-completion to C++ code-completion? Java has a relatively simple grammar with no macros. C++ is a very complex language that mixes together #include's, inline assembly, old-school C syntax, compile-time execution via templates, .NET extensions, auto-generated ATL/COM wrappers, etc.

-Gonz

Not true unless you're talking about a very small number of samples. With integer or fixed point variables, the total will eventually overflow. With floating point variables, the precision errors will steadily compound and can corrupt the result.

A better solution is to store an array of readings over a time window (e.g. the past 5 seconds), and repeatedly recalculate the array average. However, this requires memory and CPU resources that often aren't available for embedded systems. People try to optimize the average by keeping a running total (i.e. adding the newest sample and subtracting the oldest sample), but this reintroduces the problem of steadily accumulating floating point errors. There are more robust algorithms (e.g. from Knuth or Welford) that address this problem.

One last point is that a windowed average is only mathematically valid for a signal that doesn't have too much noise. Otherwise you're looking at a lowpass filtering problem, and a windowed average is essentially the worst of "finite impulse response" filters.

-Gonz

Actually, no, you can legally photograph nearly everything you can see from public land in the US. There are a few places where they're known to lack a sense of humor about it, but almost everything is fair game.

A few years ago I took a tourist photo of the Pentagon in D.C. from just outside the metro stop, which is pretty far away from the building. A security officer came and asked me to delete the photo from my camera. I explained that it wasn't a digital camera, but rather a disposable film camera. He said that officially he should make me throw it away, but instead allowed me to go on condition that I didn't take any more photos.

You're right that the law allows people to take tourist photos. But where "security" is concerned, it apparently doesn't matter what the law says.

-Gonz