Yes, thanks for the reminder!

iOS seems to have been last to join the flat look crowd.

It's not really accurate to say that iOS 7's design is flat. It actually has more depth than the earlier design, it's just that the individual items in each layer are flat.

So, for example, the Apple application's icons on the home screen are flat, but they are floating over a parallax background that gives the feeling of depth. The buttons in the control centre are flat, but the translucent background of the control centre gives the impression that it's sitting on top of the home screen.

They even spell it out explicitly on their website when they talk about iOS 7's design:

Distinct and functional layers help create depth and establish hierarchy and order. The use of translucency provides a sense of context and place.

Isn't there a short story about a songwriter who kills himself after losing a court case for plagiarism because there aren't any original melodies left?

And although many on Slashdot complain about the "Walled Garden", having an App store run by Apple itself provides some assurance to the customer that the App is legit and not some form of malware.

I don't think malware is particularly worrisome in the average user's mind. I think it's more about quality.

Speaking as an application developer, the vast majority of times I've had to say to clients "Apple won't allow that", it's been something that is self-serving and user-unfriendly if not downright abusive. Apple serve as a convenient foil for developers who care about users and stop developers who don't care from going too far.

As a developer, I know first hand how frustrating it is to have a great idea for something that Apple simply won't allow, but at the same time, I frequently see the benefit its policies bring to end users.

For instance, just the other day I saw a developer complain that a client wanted to force users to enter their personal information (e.g. age) before they could use the application, so that they could use it for marketing. Simple solution: Apple don't allow that. But Google does. How do you think policies like that are reflected in the average application quality?

Right now it's 8. It and 7 were wonderful improvements in CSS from IE 6

Not really. The only real difference between 6 and 7 from a CSS perspective was a few extra selectors and bug fixes. The real improvements came with version 8, which finally had full support for CSS 2.

Or which happens to be a valid image but has the same hash.

This is extremely unlikely. The whole point of hashes is that they collide as infrequently as possible.

So they got the warrant based on google reading his email?

He is a convicted child abuser who had a third party service provider independently notify the police that he was sending child pornography by email. Are you arguing that a judge shouldn't grant a search warrant under those circumstances?

Guess all the cops need for a warrant is for some throwaway email address to send a pic to your account.

Listen, if somebody tells you that you're saying dumb things because you didn't read the article, don't just say more dumb things without reading the article. The article clearly points out that Google detected it in an email he was sending, not receiving.

I've found it funny when I've made arguments about Google's ad scanning being something I didn't like, and people always came back with "but it's 100% automated and completely anonymous - no human ever looks at your mail".

I think that argument just got settled with this story - and I won.

No you didn't. If you had bothered to read the article, you would have seen that they detect things like this by using image hashing. It's an automatic process - unless you happen to be passing around images that are identical to known images of child pornography, at which point of course humans will get involved.

I really need to know more about whether this email triggered a thorough and careful investigation that led to the arrest of the person, or if the email WAS the trigger for his arrest.

Well, if you really need to know, then you could always read the article. It specifically states that he was arrested after police found other suspicious images on his computer (after obtaining a search warrant), and that he's a registered sex offender. Chances of this being a mistake are practically nil. All indications are that both Google and the police did their job properly, with judicial oversight.

Unless *all* datafiles on your client's system are encrypted, also, and I don't think even that's enough.

ObDisclosure: I worked for about 4 months on a contract at Trustwave, a root CA.

Leaving that huge hole in your defenses... I suggest you look, if you don't already know, at .

From the 1.2 std: "Firewalls are a key protection mechanism for any computer network. Other system components may provide Firewall functionality, provided they meet the minimum requirements for Firewalls as provided in Requirement"

Even all data between two systems *MUST* be encrypted, for full compliance, if you're doing your own.

So, what this vendor is doing... I'd say you and your client need to reread the contract *VERY* closely, and if they say they're adhering to stds, they're in violation of the contract.

                        mark

I just skimmed half of the 300 or so comments, and have yet to see anyone consider the point of the article, rather than whether they said "Red Bull is a gateway drug".

Y'know, the real point: upper managers, under the heel of venture capital who want 1000% ROI next week, giving people insanely impossible deadlines, and then getting them (under threat of being fired) to work far beyond any reason when it's not a disaster zone (say, a flood) or the middle of a war zone.

And if you work like that, with not a trace of a life, and think you're Important, there's another word for you: sucker. I'd even add stupid sucker.

                mark, who swore he'd never do that again after breaking 70 hours in one week in the mid-nineties
                                              (and did I mention the pagers?)*

* Admittedly, not crazy enough to do what one of the young what-was-then-Anderson Consulting guys did: 1 week, 119 hours....

Maltron keyboards are kind of crazy - they're still made using very low volume manufacturing techniques. The keyboard shells, AFAIK are vacuum formed and (unless things have changed recently) I think they do manual point-to-point wiring on the switches. But if you look at the sculpted shape of a Maltron, they don't lend themselves to conventional PCBs.

I'm typing on one now - I think it's quite an old one but it looks as though the design changes are mostly smallish refinements and updates to the controller / electronics. I got mine from an office clearer on eBay, otherwise they've very expensive and I probably wouldn't have got it.

I've also got a Kinesis, an ergo board which came later (and with a strikingly similar design). It feels a bit more like a slick, mass-manufactured product but I've known people insist that the Maltron is ergonomically better overall. I'm not so fussy, I'm just glad I got two cool keyboards for prices I felt I could afford!

In fact, this makes perfect sense. Consider that we *know* black holes evaporate via Hawking radiation. I haven't read the paper, but unless I miss my guess, what he's effectively suggesting is that the evaporation starts as the star collapses, and becomes stronger as it grows more dense, to the point where a balance is reached, *above* the Schwartschild Radius.

                  mark

I saw someone suggesting that the users should play nice. That'd be great... and maybe they did, 30 years ago. (We'll ignore the late 80's early 90's stealing of someone else in the lab's xterm....)

I had a user last year - an intern - like everyone, NFS-mounted home directory. It was, of course, shared with a good number of other users. He ran a job that dumped a logfile in his home directory. MANY gigs of logfile, enough to blow out the filesystem. Users were not amused. *I* was NOT AMUSED, as my home directory was on this system, and my login was screwed up, as well as my firefox bookmarks.....

My question is what order of magnitude number of users - tens? hundreds? more? If Sometimes, human to human works.

ulimit might help, too. So might putting the abusers' home directories on the same filesystem, and let them duke it out....

                    mark

Do you still have the box your computer came in?
Good, please turn off your computer, disconnect it, and ship it back.
Why?
Becuase you're too fscking stupid and ignorant to use one. And as to why you even thought you should comment on something that you have no clue about, other than to display your gross ignorance in public, like a baboon's ass, I have no idea.

                    mark

*Microsoft* is working on intrusive software to predict buggy code? I can do that without software - just point at the Microsoft campus, and any and all products....

                        mark