Comment Re:social shopping yes - social network no (Score 1) 271
have you ever been on YouTube?
Comment Re:Last.fm anyone? (Score 2, Insightful) 271
for the same reason that people use Internet Explorer - because it comes bundled and you don't have to deal with downloading extra software, setting up an account etc.
Not because it's better, more secure or offers anything new - ease of use seems to be a lot more important than all of that.
Comment Re:social shopping yes - social network no (Score 1) 271
who says that the artist or record company didn't put the live video up himself? Legally? And if my friends saw the video, maybe they would notice they like the music and *would* by the track...
Comment social shopping yes - social network no (Score 4, Insightful) 271
The problem is that all it is is a social shopping network. And of course it's a "social shopping at the iTunes store" network, so it's very, very limited. I personally think that Apple narrowed the scope of their network too much (you can't even post a link to a live video on YouTube of a song you just bought - or rather, you can but it will show up as text only with no way to click or copy&paste it) and most users will be bored by it very quickly and just ignore it. Even if Apple expands it later, a reputation once ruined is hard to improve...
Submission + - Checking email for TLS support now easy (ismymailsecure.com)
theonlyholle writes: Finding out if a certain email address is able to receive email securely with TLS based encryption has always been a bit of a hassle, as you had to check every single MX manually. So I wrote a little web tool for myself and some colleagues, which is now open to the general public. Just enter an email address (the left part really doesn't matter, it's just so it's more end-user friendly) and the tool will tell you which MXs accept email for the domain and if they support TLS. Of course you still need to be sure that you support it on your end as well... try it at http://www.ismymailsecure.com/
Comment man page != end user documentation (Score 1) 769
The question in the summary shows the extent of the problem. No, a man page is not proper end-user documentation. It's great for a trained IT professional who quickly needs to look up the syntax for a command. But for my mom or my wife's dad, even getting to the man page is a challenge - and to get there, they need to know that man pages exist. Are there even man page viewers for the desktop? Ones that are readily accessible and preinstalled with the default system?
But I must come to Linux's defense, too. The documentation on my latest Windows system is not much better, except that a help system is built right into the desktop. It's the availability of third party printed documentation that makes the difference.
Submission + - How to sell to a pirate (po-ru.com)
theonlyholle writes: "Paul Battley has an excellent blog post on "how to sell to a pirate" that shows how artificial restrictions on media distribution kept him from paying for the content he wanted to see: "At any stage up until the last, you could have had me as a customer, if you were willing to supply it there and then in a format I could use. However, because of licensing, region coding, and DRM, my best option was the 'pirate' one.""
The Real Story On WPA's Flaw 67
Glenn Fleishman writes "The reports earlier today on WPA's TKIP key type being cracked were incorrect. I spoke at length with Erik Tews, the joint author of the paper that discloses a checksum weakness in TKIP that allows individual short packets to be decrypted without revealing the TKIP key. I wrote this up for Ars Technica with quite a bit of background on WEP and WPA. Tews's paper, co-written with Martin Beck, whom he credits as discovering and implementing a working crack (in aircrack-ng as a module), describes a way to use a backwards-compatible part of TKIP to exploit a weakness that remains from WEP. ARP packets and similarly short packets can be decoded. Longer packets are likely still safe, and TKIP hasn't been cracked. Don't believe the hype, but the exploit is still notable."
Red Hat CEO Says Economic Crisis Favors Open Source 191
arashtamere writes "Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst predicts the enterprise open source software business will emerge from the economic crisis stronger than the proprietary market. 'I've had a couple of conversations with CIOs who said, "We're a Microsoft shop and we don't use any open source whatsoever, but we're already getting pressure to reduce our operating costs and we need you to help put together a plan for us to... use open source to reduce our costs." And we've had other customers literally looking at ripping and replacing WebLogic or WebSphere for JBoss ... I think we'll know in about six to nine months but there is no question that open source will come out of this in relatively better shape than our proprietary competitors,' he told Computerworld."
Submission + - petition to switch off iPhone autocorrection (please-let-us-disable-autocorrection-steve.com)
theonlyholle writes: "A swiss web designer has created an online petition asking Apple to allow users to switch off the auto-correction feature on the iPhone. This has long been one of the more annoying features of the iPhone firmware, especially since it gives preference to its own suggestions over what the user typed. German speaking users have been particularly plagued with the iPhone's strange obsession with umlauts..."
Submission + - The trouble with the latest AJAX gimmicks (po-ru.com)
theonlyholle writes: "Paul Battley hits it spot on in his blog article on the pains of using so many AJAX pages on small screen devices today. Using the oh-so-popular lightboxes as an example, he shows how they take away user choice and usability (not just, but especially on devices like the EeePC). Commenters suggest that most designers hate these features, but customers want them anyway and sales people are happy for the extra hours to bill them for."
Submission + - Mobile security challenges (android-devices.org)
theonlyholle writes: Since it's a boring post holiday weekend Monday, how about a look at mobile security? The Android Devices Blog has a look at some past and present challenges. How long until we see the first mobile devices based botnet sending SMS spam to the whole world?
Comment why would she work for IBM... she works for me :) (Score 5, Interesting) 340
At least I've paid her a couple of times and I suspect others have done the same. There are some very convenient donation links on Groklaw and for every donation I have sent so far I have received a friendly "thankyou" email.
But even if she *did* work for IBM, that wouldn't change the facts of the case and I would still enjoy reading the legal analysis, which is pretty sound once you take out the sometimes over the top OSS "fangirlism" that I occasionally find a bit annyoing.
Submission + - Surface Wave Touch Technology might be next
ranga_the_don writes: "
"Hugo Ortega of UberTablet provides us with an in-depth look at "Surface Wave Technology", a touchscreen that "registers coordinates by interacting with a sound wave that crosses the screen." Video after the jump. Quite literally X and Y coordinates (cursor movements) are recorded by someone breaking this Sound Wave by placing their finger on the screen
Submission + - The future of Creative and the sound card market
Hanners writes: "Elite Bastards investigates the future of Creative Labs, and in particular their PC sound card business, which is facing a number of big challenges during 2007. Windows Vista has seen some large changes to the driver model required by audio devices, the abilities of on-board solutions have improved somewhat, and the amount of competition in the market place has ballooned. So what does all of this mean for the traditional leader of this market? As well as outlining all of these issues, they speculate as to what measures Creative may need to take to thrive once more in this changing market."
