Thats ridiculous. If you are working on a project should I expect that you prepare for any arbitrary change my lawyers force you to make a year from now?
Note that the change they are being forced to make is actually -bad- for the security of windows. Its not fair to expect that their design be ready for any random decision that some lawyers force on them years later.
I could understand why the EU was upset about the media player bundling. I can understand them being upset about the splash screen for MSs AV stuff. I dont agree with them forcing MS to get rid of those things, but I understand where they are coming from.
Forcing MS to weaken Vista's security and reliability to accomodate these AV companies sucks though.
This is a -bad- thing. Why are we applauding it on slashdot? Are we so caught up in MS hate that we want the government to force them to weaken their product from a technical standpoint?
Maybe this is an example of how having a reputation for lying will make people think you are being dishonest even when you are telling the truth. I know a lot of people on this website dont totally understand the technical issues involved. But doesnt the EU commission have any experts that can explain to them that they are weakening Vista by forcing this on MS?
It stands for "Application programmer Interface". Basically its a set of functions that are provided to someone who is writing an Application. So for example here there could be a function like setCellTo(int row, int x, int value). A whole set of these sorts of things makes up the API.
Why do you assume that this investor is telling the truth and MS is lying? Is it just because you have a negative view of MS? People lie all the time when that kind of money is on the line.
When this guy was funding SCO he/baystar were viewed in a horribly unfavorable light on this website. To say people here thought he was being dishonest would be an understatement. But now he makes a claim that he had a vague oral promise from someone at MS that can never be confirmed and all of a sudden its taken as unquestionable truth. I mean does it really seem likely that he would just blow millions of dollars based on some vaugely worded conversation with an MS exec? Shouldnt we at least acknowledge the possibility that MS is telling the truth and this guy is lying?
I think there are a lot of people here who want to believe in an evil conspiracy in Redmond to destroy open source. MS may promote their products aggresively through sales, marketing, bundling, and even closed standards. But these conspiracy theories seem a little unlikely to me, its as though people will latch onto any theory that incriminates Microsoft.
That sounds like a pretty clearcut denial of the allegation that was made against them on slashdot the other day to me.
Did you actually read the entire statement that microsoft put out before accusing them of using "weasel words" or just that one quote from the article that was linked? (I suspect that you did not, but if you did I would be interested in seeing the full statement myself) If you only read that one quote and used it for the basis of your claim that they are sneaking away from saying something you arent really being very fair.
Hmm, ok I could estimate it, the number of people I personally know who I believe have been harmed significantly by spending too much time playing video games is probably around 50. Maybe my sample is skewed though, I went to a "nerd" college and lived in the dorms for four years. You usually dont meet these kinds of people unless you live in the dorms because they never leave since they play games so much. If it wasnt WoW it was some other game, did you go to school before internet gaming was popular with clans and guilds and so forth?
Since you called me out on it I will admit that I pulled the "hundreds of thousands" out of my butt. But it seems probable, its got to be *at least* a hundred thousand, maybe even in the millions. I would be interested in seeing a survey of what percentage of people game for 40+ hours a week.
Take the number of people who play world of warcraft, thats well into the millions. If even 5% of those are messing up their lives by playing it we've got way over 100,000 from that game alone. And lets face it, the way that game eats up peoples time the number is probably higher than 5%.
I dont believe I specified a nationality, you arrived at that.1% figure by excluding members of other nations. (even though I believe.1% is probable) In Korea this issue is causing a huge outcry in mainstream media, much moreso than the United States. It seems reasonable to assume they are contributing hundreds of thousands of people who spend too much time gaming.
Believe me there are -vast- numbers of people who are spending so much time playing video games that they will never go anywhere in life. So to answer you: Yes, Really, or at least I am convinced its true.
The developers are highschool students and university co-ops? I very much doubt that. I can imagine that there might have been a few co-ops involved with some game's development at some point as part of their recruitment program but just about every game is written by teams of professional software engineers with lots of experience. And experienced software engineers aint cheap.
I cant even count the number of people I knew when I was in college who threw away the chance to become succesfull engineers (I went to an engineering school) to play WoW/Everquest/Counterstrike 15 hours a day. For every guy like this who makes a career out of gaming there are hundreds of thousands who give up their careers because they spend too much time playing video games.
Spending the enourmous amount of time required to be good at video games is a worse investment than a lottery ticket. Lottery tickets have had more winners, require less time investment, and the payoff is a lot bigger than 250 grand.
Yes, I realize that a lot of people play video games for fun and moderate their time spent well. But dont we all know people who play endlessly because they want to be the best on their server or be in a clan that wins a lot of tournaments?
Well of course Vista will lack features or contain drawbacks that the Microsoft's OS after it will improve on. It isnt like they are deliberately sabotaging their operating systems, whenever a bug is found they patch it.(yes, they have been slow about it before, but they have never charged for bug fixes) Do you really believe that companies should be expected to put out only one release of their software that is absolutely perfect and has every feature their users could ever want for the next 80 years?
Do you also have a negative view of Apple? They have released way more than one version of their operating system as well.
This is the first time I have ever heard someone try to make the claim that putting out a new version of their software every couple of years and trying to charge money for it constituted a lack of ethics.
Thats a bold accusation. While you are right about MS-netscape that is a seperate issue from a decade ago.
Do you understand how the contaiment wall works? XP wasnt designed to support this kind of thing at all. As near as I can tell they implemented everything that they could for the XP release. While the containment wall is a very nice thing and its unfortunate that it wont be in the XP version, your accusations that they are doing something sinister dont seem to be based on the facts. It looks to me like they are making a good faith effort to improve the security of IE for XP even though it probably will not be as good as the security in Vista.
Oh, I see what you are saying. A better analogy would have been that you went and installed all the security measures you could on the garage but didnt do one because the architecture of the house didnt support it. It isnt like they are deliberately trying to sabotage the security to force you to upgrade to vista which seems to be what you are implying.
So is there anyone reading this website who didnt know that ports are constantly being scanned? Or that hackers are trying to recruit your PC for a botnet? Or that connecting xp without any patches, sp1 or sp2 to the internet is asking for trouble?
It seems that this article is directed at people who have a very minimal amount of knowledge about computers.
Why post this? Is it just our daily reminder that older and unpatched MS operating systems are insecure?
So somewhere some invester claims that a manager at MS made some vaguely worded gaurantee. And of course this is accepted as gospel on slashdot because it bashes MS.
Now, I am an engineer, not a businessman by trade, but this just seems horribly unlikely to me. Do businessmen really accept vaugely worded oral promises on a regular basis? Sorry, this is even less concrete than SCO's case. I get the impression that a lot of people who read this are making a big fuss because they want to find a smoking gun that incriminates MS. Shouldnt there be at least a little skepticism? There is a crapton of money in the tech industry and people make wild accusations all the time because they want a piece of it. There is the possibility that this guy is telling the truth, but dont believe him just because you want to slam MS.
Sometimes I think that if I threw up some post on my blog tomorrow about how Bill Gates has a kiddie porn dungeon in that super expensive house of his with no evidence to back up my claim it would get linked to on slashdot and regarded as absolute truth.
So how is this a security issue?
on
IE7 Toolbar Mayhem
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· Score: 2, Interesting
So whats with the submitter implying that allowing third parties to install toolbars is a security hole? The article even said they went looking for them and clicked "yes/install/whatever" to every window they were presented with.
The only possible way to prevent this (and why would you want to prevent users from using their favorite toolbars?) would be to completely disallow downloading toolbars from the internet in IE.
By the way, did the submitter actually refer to Google toolbar as an "infection" with the implication that IE should have prevented it?
It looks like these upcoming MS releases are actually going to be good products based on the things slashdot articles are having to resort to in order to bash them.
It implies that the API is a candidate for release. What is wrong with that? It seems like everyone here is arguing over semantics. Even if you are right about the grammer, what does it matter? Do you also scream in protest because google didnt spell itself accurately? (the real word is googol if I remember correctly)
Do we have long threads of posts on slashdot devoted to the fact that google has charged advertisers to have their stuff displayed on products that they were still referring to as beta? Of course not, because its silly to argue over how different companies use the terms engineering release, alpha, beta, release candidate, etc in different ways. Why do we condemn MS then?
Microsoft is better than most because their cycles are actually very well defined. This makes it easier to develop software for upcoming MS releases.
Why does it matter how Microsoft defines their terminology? So many people here seem to be irate at the fact that Microsoft uses the term "Release Candidate" in a different way than they do.
All the are saying with is that its a version with frozen APIs unless a fundamental problem with the API's design is found which is unlikely. They use the term "Release Candidate" for that. Why are there all these "+5 Insightful" posts ripping on them for doing that? They arent doing anything sneaky, dishonest, or even anything that could be considered bad software development. (at least as far as their development cycle goes) They are just trying to give the bazillions of third party developers for windows something to develop against before release.
I work as a software engineer and the idea of losing my job to someone in who lives in India or some other place where the average salary couldnt cover the cost of rent in the worst of slums in America scares me a lot. But whenever I read an article (like this one) claiming that its already happened I feel a lot better because it makes me think that its just fearmongering.
I recently did a job search and had potential employers beating down my door, within a week of sending my resume out I had a half a dozen interviews lined up with well known companies that pay nicely. I know of noone in a different field who has been in a situation as good as that. The company I work for now is desperate to get more software engineers and cant find enough qualified people to fill even half of the open positions. So whenever I read an article like this about how "all the programmers are losing their jobs to the developing world" I cant help but think its just some journalists trying to scare people.
Maybe I'll be eating my words 10 years from now, but right now I am calling BS.
It seems like all the members of the left want to blame buch for 9/11 and all the members of the right insist that Clinton could have stopped it. It seems to me that there is no way that some high ranking government official (republican or democrat) could have prevented 9/11 by reading some broad document titled "Bin Laden determined to attack Americans". I'm sure they see a million documents about terrorist organizations that dont like the US. I mean what were they supposed to do? Use their spider sense when they saw the document to say "aha! that must mean they are going to fly planes into the twin towers on september 11th!"
Trying to pin this on Bush or Clinton is just silly. The only people who deserve to be blamed for 9/11 are the members of Al-Qaida.
I dont totally understand whats going on here. What does intel stand to gain from refusing to publish hardware documentation? The article seems to imply that they are doing something shady and sneaky so that they can make more money but I dont see how this is to their advantage in any way. How do they stand to gain by having people writing software without proper documentation? I would think this would hurt them if anything. Can someone please enlighten me?
Although I am ill informed on this issue, calling someone you are trying to influence a "big fat liar" and publishing anothers personal email so that they can be spammed hardly seems like a good idea.
So the linux journal prints an article with the inflammatory title "Microsoft's Masterpiece of FUD". This article contains a couple of paragraphs and does not go into any in depth rebuttals at all. It only makes the obvious claim that 40 billion in income for people who stand to profit from Vista == 40 billion spent by their customers. If this article were a post on slashdot and the word Microsoft was replaced with that of another company I would expect it to get modded as a troll.
The number of companies that have to buy more licenses of xp because they lost their original key != the number of people who install a beta OS then want to switch back to xp but have lost their product key. You imply that there would be a correlation but I dont think there is. And what on earth do false positives for WGA have to do with this issue?
I think that the typical person who installs a beta OS will make at least think in passing about how they can restore to their original OS if they want to. If not then they really ought not be installing a pre-RTM OS.
As far as Joe Sixpack trying out beta systems goes, your response to that point was to just take a cheap shot at MS and does not address my original point which is that Joe Sixpack does not typically install a beta OS.
Do you really believe that Joe Sixpack is trying out beta operating systems on his computer? Do you also believe that somewhere in Redmond there is an evil manager saying "Ah, lets do this just so we can mess up that tiny group of people who thought they could install a beta operating system over their old one and be able to switch back to the old one 100% despite the fact that we told them it wouldnt work."
Realistically speaking how many licenses could microsoft expect to sell to people who installed the vista beta/RC1/whatever over xp and then wanted to switch back to xp but had somehow lost the product key/install cd? I doubt that that is a huge group. This just sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Thats ridiculous. If you are working on a project should I expect that you prepare for any arbitrary change my lawyers force you to make a year from now?
Note that the change they are being forced to make is actually -bad- for the security of windows. Its not fair to expect that their design be ready for any random decision that some lawyers force on them years later.
My impression is that this is not MS's fault. Its the AV companies lawyers and the EU forcing them to make a stupid change at the last minute.
I could understand why the EU was upset about the media player bundling. I can understand them being upset about the splash screen for MSs AV stuff. I dont agree with them forcing MS to get rid of those things, but I understand where they are coming from.
Forcing MS to weaken Vista's security and reliability to accomodate these AV companies sucks though.
This is a -bad- thing. Why are we applauding it on slashdot? Are we so caught up in MS hate that we want the government to force them to weaken their product from a technical standpoint?
Maybe this is an example of how having a reputation for lying will make people think you are being dishonest even when you are telling the truth. I know a lot of people on this website dont totally understand the technical issues involved. But doesnt the EU commission have any experts that can explain to them that they are weakening Vista by forcing this on MS?
It stands for "Application programmer Interface". Basically its a set of functions that are provided to someone who is writing an Application. So for example here there could be a function like setCellTo(int row, int x, int value). A whole set of these sorts of things makes up the API.
Why do you assume that this investor is telling the truth and MS is lying? Is it just because you have a negative view of MS? People lie all the time when that kind of money is on the line.
When this guy was funding SCO he/baystar were viewed in a horribly unfavorable light on this website. To say people here thought he was being dishonest would be an understatement. But now he makes a claim that he had a vague oral promise from someone at MS that can never be confirmed and all of a sudden its taken as unquestionable truth. I mean does it really seem likely that he would just blow millions of dollars based on some vaugely worded conversation with an MS exec? Shouldnt we at least acknowledge the possibility that MS is telling the truth and this guy is lying?
I think there are a lot of people here who want to believe in an evil conspiracy in Redmond to destroy open source. MS may promote their products aggresively through sales, marketing, bundling, and even closed standards. But these conspiracy theories seem a little unlikely to me, its as though people will latch onto any theory that incriminates Microsoft.
That sounds like a pretty clearcut denial of the allegation that was made against them on slashdot the other day to me.
Did you actually read the entire statement that microsoft put out before accusing them of using "weasel words" or just that one quote from the article that was linked? (I suspect that you did not, but if you did I would be interested in seeing the full statement myself) If you only read that one quote and used it for the basis of your claim that they are sneaking away from saying something you arent really being very fair.
Hmm, ok I could estimate it, the number of people I personally know who I believe have been harmed significantly by spending too much time playing video games is probably around 50. Maybe my sample is skewed though, I went to a "nerd" college and lived in the dorms for four years. You usually dont meet these kinds of people unless you live in the dorms because they never leave since they play games so much. If it wasnt WoW it was some other game, did you go to school before internet gaming was popular with clans and guilds and so forth?
.1% figure by excluding members of other nations. (even though I believe .1% is probable) In Korea this issue is causing a huge outcry in mainstream media, much moreso than the United States. It seems reasonable to assume they are contributing hundreds of thousands of people who spend too much time gaming.
Since you called me out on it I will admit that I pulled the "hundreds of thousands" out of my butt. But it seems probable, its got to be *at least* a hundred thousand, maybe even in the millions. I would be interested in seeing a survey of what percentage of people game for 40+ hours a week.
Take the number of people who play world of warcraft, thats well into the millions. If even 5% of those are messing up their lives by playing it we've got way over 100,000 from that game alone. And lets face it, the way that game eats up peoples time the number is probably higher than 5%.
I dont believe I specified a nationality, you arrived at that
Believe me there are -vast- numbers of people who are spending so much time playing video games that they will never go anywhere in life. So to answer you: Yes, Really, or at least I am convinced its true.
The developers are highschool students and university co-ops? I very much doubt that. I can imagine that there might have been a few co-ops involved with some game's development at some point as part of their recruitment program but just about every game is written by teams of professional software engineers with lots of experience. And experienced software engineers aint cheap.
I cant even count the number of people I knew when I was in college who threw away the chance to become succesfull engineers (I went to an engineering school) to play WoW/Everquest/Counterstrike 15 hours a day. For every guy like this who makes a career out of gaming there are hundreds of thousands who give up their careers because they spend too much time playing video games.
Spending the enourmous amount of time required to be good at video games is a worse investment than a lottery ticket. Lottery tickets have had more winners, require less time investment, and the payoff is a lot bigger than 250 grand.
Yes, I realize that a lot of people play video games for fun and moderate their time spent well. But dont we all know people who play endlessly because they want to be the best on their server or be in a clan that wins a lot of tournaments?
Well of course Vista will lack features or contain drawbacks that the Microsoft's OS after it will improve on. It isnt like they are deliberately sabotaging their operating systems, whenever a bug is found they patch it.(yes, they have been slow about it before, but they have never charged for bug fixes) Do you really believe that companies should be expected to put out only one release of their software that is absolutely perfect and has every feature their users could ever want for the next 80 years?
Do you also have a negative view of Apple? They have released way more than one version of their operating system as well.
This is the first time I have ever heard someone try to make the claim that putting out a new version of their software every couple of years and trying to charge money for it constituted a lack of ethics.
Thats a bold accusation. While you are right about MS-netscape that is a seperate issue from a decade ago.
Do you understand how the contaiment wall works? XP wasnt designed to support this kind of thing at all. As near as I can tell they implemented everything that they could for the XP release. While the containment wall is a very nice thing and its unfortunate that it wont be in the XP version, your accusations that they are doing something sinister dont seem to be based on the facts. It looks to me like they are making a good faith effort to improve the security of IE for XP even though it probably will not be as good as the security in Vista.
Oh, I see what you are saying. A better analogy would have been that you went and installed all the security measures you could on the garage but didnt do one because the architecture of the house didnt support it. It isnt like they are deliberately trying to sabotage the security to force you to upgrade to vista which seems to be what you are implying.
I dont follow that analogy. How is MS refusing to allow you to change your combination from 1234 unless you pay them?
If want to prevent the automatic install MS has a page for you here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/updatemanagement/ windowsupdate/ie7announcement.mspx
It looks like you have the option to just click "no thanks" when it asks you if you want to upgrade to IE7.
So is there anyone reading this website who didnt know that ports are constantly being scanned? Or that hackers are trying to recruit your PC for a botnet? Or that connecting xp without any patches, sp1 or sp2 to the internet is asking for trouble?
It seems that this article is directed at people who have a very minimal amount of knowledge about computers.
Why post this? Is it just our daily reminder that older and unpatched MS operating systems are insecure?
So somewhere some invester claims that a manager at MS made some vaguely worded gaurantee. And of course this is accepted as gospel on slashdot because it bashes MS.
Now, I am an engineer, not a businessman by trade, but this just seems horribly unlikely to me. Do businessmen really accept vaugely worded oral promises on a regular basis? Sorry, this is even less concrete than SCO's case. I get the impression that a lot of people who read this are making a big fuss because they want to find a smoking gun that incriminates MS. Shouldnt there be at least a little skepticism? There is a crapton of money in the tech industry and people make wild accusations all the time because they want a piece of it. There is the possibility that this guy is telling the truth, but dont believe him just because you want to slam MS.
Sometimes I think that if I threw up some post on my blog tomorrow about how Bill Gates has a kiddie porn dungeon in that super expensive house of his with no evidence to back up my claim it would get linked to on slashdot and regarded as absolute truth.
So whats with the submitter implying that allowing third parties to install toolbars is a security hole? The article even said they went looking for them and clicked "yes/install/whatever" to every window they were presented with.
The only possible way to prevent this (and why would you want to prevent users from using their favorite toolbars?) would be to completely disallow downloading toolbars from the internet in IE.
By the way, did the submitter actually refer to Google toolbar as an "infection" with the implication that IE should have prevented it?
It looks like these upcoming MS releases are actually going to be good products based on the things slashdot articles are having to resort to in order to bash them.
It implies that the API is a candidate for release. What is wrong with that? It seems like everyone here is arguing over semantics. Even if you are right about the grammer, what does it matter? Do you also scream in protest because google didnt spell itself accurately? (the real word is googol if I remember correctly) Do we have long threads of posts on slashdot devoted to the fact that google has charged advertisers to have their stuff displayed on products that they were still referring to as beta? Of course not, because its silly to argue over how different companies use the terms engineering release, alpha, beta, release candidate, etc in different ways. Why do we condemn MS then? Microsoft is better than most because their cycles are actually very well defined. This makes it easier to develop software for upcoming MS releases.
Why does it matter how Microsoft defines their terminology? So many people here seem to be irate at the fact that Microsoft uses the term "Release Candidate" in a different way than they do.
All the are saying with is that its a version with frozen APIs unless a fundamental problem with the API's design is found which is unlikely. They use the term "Release Candidate" for that. Why are there all these "+5 Insightful" posts ripping on them for doing that? They arent doing anything sneaky, dishonest, or even anything that could be considered bad software development. (at least as far as their development cycle goes) They are just trying to give the bazillions of third party developers for windows something to develop against before release.
I work as a software engineer and the idea of losing my job to someone in who lives in India or some other place where the average salary couldnt cover the cost of rent in the worst of slums in America scares me a lot. But whenever I read an article (like this one) claiming that its already happened I feel a lot better because it makes me think that its just fearmongering.
I recently did a job search and had potential employers beating down my door, within a week of sending my resume out I had a half a dozen interviews lined up with well known companies that pay nicely. I know of noone in a different field who has been in a situation as good as that. The company I work for now is desperate to get more software engineers and cant find enough qualified people to fill even half of the open positions. So whenever I read an article like this about how "all the programmers are losing their jobs to the developing world" I cant help but think its just some journalists trying to scare people.
Maybe I'll be eating my words 10 years from now, but right now I am calling BS.
It seems like all the members of the left want to blame buch for 9/11 and all the members of the right insist that Clinton could have stopped it. It seems to me that there is no way that some high ranking government official (republican or democrat) could have prevented 9/11 by reading some broad document titled "Bin Laden determined to attack Americans". I'm sure they see a million documents about terrorist organizations that dont like the US. I mean what were they supposed to do? Use their spider sense when they saw the document to say "aha! that must mean they are going to fly planes into the twin towers on september 11th!"
Trying to pin this on Bush or Clinton is just silly. The only people who deserve to be blamed for 9/11 are the members of Al-Qaida.
I dont totally understand whats going on here. What does intel stand to gain from refusing to publish hardware documentation? The article seems to imply that they are doing something shady and sneaky so that they can make more money but I dont see how this is to their advantage in any way. How do they stand to gain by having people writing software without proper documentation? I would think this would hurt them if anything. Can someone please enlighten me? Although I am ill informed on this issue, calling someone you are trying to influence a "big fat liar" and publishing anothers personal email so that they can be spammed hardly seems like a good idea.
So the linux journal prints an article with the inflammatory title "Microsoft's Masterpiece of FUD". This article contains a couple of paragraphs and does not go into any in depth rebuttals at all. It only makes the obvious claim that 40 billion in income for people who stand to profit from Vista == 40 billion spent by their customers. If this article were a post on slashdot and the word Microsoft was replaced with that of another company I would expect it to get modded as a troll.
The number of companies that have to buy more licenses of xp because they lost their original key != the number of people who install a beta OS then want to switch back to xp but have lost their product key. You imply that there would be a correlation but I dont think there is. And what on earth do false positives for WGA have to do with this issue?
I think that the typical person who installs a beta OS will make at least think in passing about how they can restore to their original OS if they want to. If not then they really ought not be installing a pre-RTM OS.
As far as Joe Sixpack trying out beta systems goes, your response to that point was to just take a cheap shot at MS and does not address my original point which is that Joe Sixpack does not typically install a beta OS.
Do you really believe that Joe Sixpack is trying out beta operating systems on his computer? Do you also believe that somewhere in Redmond there is an evil manager saying "Ah, lets do this just so we can mess up that tiny group of people who thought they could install a beta operating system over their old one and be able to switch back to the old one 100% despite the fact that we told them it wouldnt work."
Realistically speaking how many licenses could microsoft expect to sell to people who installed the vista beta/RC1/whatever over xp and then wanted to switch back to xp but had somehow lost the product key/install cd? I doubt that that is a huge group. This just sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.