It seems that Apple has made a well-timed and completely innovative and ground-breaking price-cut on their products, plus a brand new low-end iPod. Perhaps they are trying to throw a wrench into the machinations of the massive unstoppable juggernaut that is the Zune.
The iPod Touch is a solid product, but its hardware is a bit lackluster. I wish Creative Labs would just productize the Zii Egg already.
The LAS department does not support linux, but it does not go out of its way not to support them, either. We have a "if you use linux, you're on your own" policy.
Many of the dorm net techs will be available and will be willing to help you. You said "Daughter," right? Since she is a girl, she can simply walk to the ACM office and someone will solve whatever problem she's having for free. No problem.
If you're on a public or open network and your profile is set to "Public", this likely wouldn't be possible. Windows 7 makes it very easy to do this.
Well, I suppose we can always find out. If anyone's at UIUC right now, hop on UIwpa2 2 (near the union) and BSoD Wallaby. It's on my lap right now. I'll buy you a drink if you succeed.
I understand, and Apple did a great job with it. It just really disturbs me when Apple (and their ilk) keep rehashing work previously completed on other platforms and claiming that they somehow invented it. I am yet to see a feature that's really *new* in Snow Leopard, yet I can't stop hearing about how many amazing new technologies Apple has created.
Apple did an intelligent new optimization of their dynamic loader on their platform. This is a good thing. They did not invent the concept of a dynamic loader.
It's nothing like Superfetch. Superfetch preloads applications into system memory [microsoft.com] and this shared cache doesn't do that instead from what I understand it preforms some of the work the linker would do on load in advance.
The whole dyld sounds a lot like some of the basic features of the.NET runtime...
Or maybe some of the features in this advanced futuristic os:
May I be the second to say "AMEN!". Linux is always said to be the fastest most responsive desktop os on older hardare. Still xp can beat x/gnome/linux 2.6 on a low end machine, perhaps this scheduler will change it.
There are a lot more desktop-oriented differences between XP and desktop linux far beyond scheduling.
There's also a huge optimization and efficiency gulf in terms of the compiler and quality of code. In linux, you're far more likely to have some weak component jammed in the middle of the stack somewhere eating up resources, especially with gnome vs. XP.
I know there's a type of card that will push the serial interface through the network, if having a serial console (like running HyperTerminal in windows with a Null Modem cable plugged in) is not sufficient. That should allow you to get to the bios without having the monitor plugged in-- that's the theory, at least.
Also, if you're using this system as the lowest wrung sort of server, you might want to look into simply buying some Via Nano or Intel Atom hardware and just creating an ultra low-wattage server. Older desks were not renowned for their power efficiency, so over a few months, if its running 24/7, more efficient hardware might actually pay for itself in terms of energy costs, especially if you're somewhere with expensive power like California. It might be clever to cannibalize your old systems for hard disks and such and use them in this low power system, since the power usage of the hard disk will be largely a software problem, etc.
This is marketing material, children. Calm down. Who cares? Most people shopping for PC's at Best Buy do not need to deal with Linux and its printer support nightmare, the lack of consistent behavior in desktop application, the fact that none of the software they're familiar with will work without an awkward and complex procedure. Wine is not intuitive. OpenOffice is not comparable to Microsoft Word 2007... it's years behind. There are no easy wizards or templates for home users, documents look utterly awful coming out of it without extensive effort. Most support information on the web (setting up email accounts, etc) is for Microsoft Windows and Mac. There's more and easier to use documentation included with the Windows (or Mac) platform... whereas most linux distributions are supported by goddamn forums. "Hey, Mom, how do I edit the redeye out of these photos?" "Check the forums, dear!"
In terms of usability, Linux is not even comparable to Windows or Mac. It's a joke. It's not ready for desktop users.
Microsoft is hitting low here with these marketing materials, but there's nothing stopping Linux co's from doing what Apple is doing except for the fact that they have no product in the desktop sphere.
Obviously, Apple has proven that there's no magical conspiracy keeping down competition here. Linux just sucks on the desktop. The low quality bar and lack of any coherent vision for the platform towards the desktop market has really made this unfortunately easy for Microsoft.
The most hilarious thing about this is that, at the core, these marketing materials are true.
Anyone who has ever worked in end user support at any level would understand why you wouldn't wish desktop linux on any unfortunate home user, no matter how much malice you might have.
This would be a whole lot more insightful if bloatedness was one of Opera's 'features'.
It comes with a mail client, what a non-point.
Actually, the installer for Opera is about the same size as Firefox's, but it includes a mail client, news reader, irc, and bittorrent client internally. It is indeed a communication suite and not just a browser.
So you can run two (or more) whole bloated XUL environments or one lightweight Opera environment running both, with very little memory added to the pile for a fully featured mail client-- not to mention proper threading and much more intelligent CPU usage and image rendering.
I personally find Opera 10's mail client to be very powerful and usable, far moreso than Thunderbird.
That's what I used to think. Then I decided to lighten up a bit, and give it a shot. Then I realised I shouldn't have. Opera is very incompatible, even compared to Konqueror.
What browser were you using again? When? You're obviously not talking about Opera 10 or the modern Konqueror.
Whoops, before anyone corrects me it turns out that I forgot to convert NOK to USD. In reality, they're financially neck and neck, with Opera only slightly ahead. About 75 million in revenue with Mozilla to 78 million at Opera.
When will they learn that Firefox is kicking their ass just by virtue of being open source? Firefox is probably inferior in many ways, but at least they don't get THE most obvious marketing move wrong.
One is a professional custom browser solution (and thus quite proprietary) and the other is an open source browser just put out to get grabbed and used by whomever. In the end, Mozilla Corporation is making a net income of 41 million a year and Opera Software is pulling in 80.9 million. So, I would say Firefox is really only winning on the PC platform, which isn't necessarily Opera's main market or the biggest cash cow. So who's really winning, hm?;)
Because we all just -know- how great MS Office is at keeping formatting between versions. Ever had different versions of Office and open up the same document? Take the document from Word 2003 from work and open it on Office XP at home and it looks totally different. Even documents between versions don't show up the same. If you want things to look the exact same, export it as a PDF.
Or you could use OOXML. That's pretty consistent, too.
While KOffice isn't really that great, Open Office is perhaps the best office suite save for iLife and MS Office. And yes, there are a -lot- of others, (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_suite [wikipedia.org]).
I would take Wordperfect Office or Softmaker 2008 over OpenOffice any day. I don't think there's much competition there. I have no idea about the other ones. I would say OpenOffice is one of the poorer office suites being offered right now, if only for its shoddy interface and terrible formatting.
Compiz is pretty good for eye candy, it works much nicer than Vista's "3-D effects" and more impressive than OS X's.
I find it really cool that DWM and Quartz don't tear my windows to shit when I drag them across the screen. Also, it's really neat how they initialize the texture correctly and don't end up with momentarily garbled windows due to amateur implementation all the time. Oh yeah, and they use drastically less resources. Compiz is cooler in the same a blinged-out honda civic is "cooler" than a BMW or a Ferrari.
Second of all, those who in theory don't care, when explained why it's important, start to care. When you add up the cost of upgrading from Windows 95 to Windows XP to Windows Vista to Windows 7, along with all of its associated applications (I'm looking at you, Microsoft Office), versus the cost of upgrading through the various versions of Ubuntu or any of the other popular distributions and their associated applications, people really start to notice. One of my favorite things to do when I'm showing off Ubuntu to people is to open the package manager application. I tell them it's like the "Add or Remove Programs" applet, except that you can actually add programs. "All this stuff is available to you for no cost. Just click it, and you're good to go."
This would only be relevant if the products were equivalent. Most the FOSS projects that are worth using have Windows and Mac ports anyway... available to the user.. FOR FREE! For some reason, despite the price tag of zero and the hardcore love of a thousand morons, OpenOffice makes every single document I produce or open from any office suite to any office suite look like total and absolute ass. Maybe it's worth $65 to me for my documents not to induce eye strain. Aesthetics are extremely important in the "real world" (see: the desktop usage scenario where most F/OSS does not exist.)
When you explain to these people how honest competition from really smart people doing really smart things just because they can and because they feel that others should benefit from their collective knowledge is one of the reasons why a lot of commercial closed-source software these days that might otherwise cost hundreds or thousands of dollars is sold for really low cost or given away for free because of how hard it is to compete with volunteer work, it also gets their attention.
Yeah, until they use it...
I could go on, but hopefully you see my point. Free and open source software benefits everyone, even people who don't otherwise care, even people who shun it in favor of commercial and/or closed-source options. And sitting back and saying that people don't care isn't very productive. It's in our best interest to actually educate people so that they will care.
That's absolutely wrong. It's in our best interest to ignore these products until they become worth showing people. Some open source projects have graduated and are worth showing users (ie 7-zip) while others are utterly terrible and only have popularity due to an arbitrary freetard bias (openoffice, koffice, compiz, etc..) so they need to be ignored so the developers don't get the idea into their heads that they've accomplished something worthwhile and (heaven-forbid) stop going back to the drawing board, where they should be firmly planted.
I'm sorry, did you just provide some random blog as a real world figure of market share? The fact that you even made this retarded comment on slashdot suggests that you're going to have a higher number of linux users anyway, since you obviously have a bias. I mean, you have higher linux users than Mac users-- obviously this is not representative. Mac is way ahead of linux in market share.
As a former game industry insider, I can safely say that EA is a dark and cruel factory of nightmares. Their employees are overworked and underslept like slaves or animals.
So, perhaps the more alarming thing about this shouldn't be how much they're spending on marketing but how little they're paying their development teams. The entertainment industry takeover of game studios has truly been a travesty in terms of games as a creative medium.
One story I'd heard was that EA essentially has many many developers who are so undermanaged and overworked that their products always come out totally broken internally, where they have a mere handful of highly skilled developers who just get flown from studio to studio pulling people out of crises to make deadlines. Of course, an EA employee might refute me on this- so I will say it's just hear-say.
Disclaimer: I worked for a competing company, but knew many people who had left EA.
Am I the only person to notice that MS strongly encourages you to find and install an antivirus immediately after installation?
Linux and Mac OS X are fully vulnerable to viruses, also. On a Windows or Mac computer you run far more third party untrusted code than on Linux, which endemically lacks third party support. It's both a strength and weakness of the platform. Mostly, Linux avoids viruses in the same way it avoids commercial software, by being an inconsistent platform. It's security through incompatibility.
Meanwhile, you might browse these pesky articles. [google.com]
I see old exploits. On the Microsoft security page, there's some stuff relating to Office and IE, but nothing regarding a remote platform exploit. Windows isn't like Mac or Linux where an attacker can casually step in through poorly written network services or even audio drivers and become root through one of the thousands of undiscovered exploits GCC optimizes into the kernel.
Admittedly, these are desktop systems. They constantly do risky things and the security is often reduced for convenience. Among desktop systems, Vista/7 are comfortably more secure. If a user runs with a limited account and follows proper security procedures (uses an anti-virus, doesn't grant arbitrary applications admin privileges, etc.) then they will find themselves far less vulnerable than users on platforms with more archaic security models, such as Linux. UAC may be annoying, but at least it's not like Linux where you don't even need the user's permission to privilege escalate. There are decades-old holes for that. Thanks, SUID.
So, what you seem to be saying is, you have faith that over the next several months, as NT6 is adopted by more and more people, we will see an end to Windows exploits.
No, there will always be exploits as long as open systems are used. I simply believe that if Mac gains more users, it will have dangerously more security holes than Windows, given the reduced security resources and vast architectural deficiencies. Linux exploits popularly are saved for servers, the only place where it's really used from a broad perspective. If anyone wants something on a linux server and has the expertise, it's an open door.
Give it 12 to 24 months, then come back and tell me that NT6 security is superior to Linux, or Mac, or whatever.
Given the wide gulf in security practices between the platforms, I would say I'm quite confident that that will be the case.
And, I also note that MS bugs are routinely exploited, locally and remotely. The unwarranted superiority complex looks pretty pathetic, doesn't it?
Would you like to cite how you can remotely exploit NT 6? I would be fascinated to hear that. Unless you're just saying that local exploits are distributed and then run locally by users.
So no, it doesn't. NT 6 is the most secure desktop operating system, followed by maybe Red Hat or SuSE linux and somewhere down the line perhaps Mac OS X. That's the security situation we're looking at, like it or not.
Microsoft exploits get huge press-- Microsoft has lots of enterprise customers and needs to be very clear when something has gone wrong. Linux exploits show up constantly and are swept under the rug with quick hackish "fixes" to the kernel that often only address part of the issue, and Mac OS X exploits are casually ignored and smarmed away as Apple doesn't like to draw attention to them. Cultural differences between systems are a big deal in security issues, where part of the exploit system is human.
Many people here are fans of elegant simplicity, so it would suffice to say that the NT 6 kernel is much much smaller than the Linux or XNU kernel and is designed using advanced modern security practices and architecture. This is a kernel that is commonly re-architected. The kernels on Linux and Mac are architecturally stagnant in comparison.
That's very... technical. I am talking about everything else, you know, the data that's transmitted over TCP/IP... the most important issue is whose servers you're using and which services you've licensed--this is platform dependent. Microsoft will not allow you to federate Xbox Live... even it it were possible.
For one, Xbox Live is sort of a pre-packaged networking solution. There are many issues of consistency across the network, when you're using it you're buying into an environment where everyone is expected to be within the same gaming experience with the same method of communication and a standard means of identifying users and organizing their status within the community. You're buying into this closed gaming community when you're a user and you're buying into it when you purchase a developer kit and send a game to Microsoft to be published. You don't just choose Xbox Live... when you release a Microsoft Xbox 360 game, you are releasing a Microsoft branded software product and it must meet certain requirements, so you play with Microsoft's networks.
Playstation Network didn't exist last time I worked on a PS3 game, but I believe their networking is a bit more open and broad. A current developer might correct me on this. Network gaming on PS3 is the same as on PC, really, you do a lot more to set up your own service. If it's still the way it was when I worked on it, there's really not a *good* reason PS3's and PC's can't speak, for instance, besides issues of balance with the different control models and the common questions of cheating.
That's at least how I understand it. I think the Wii is similar to the 360 in that its networks are a tightly controlled walled garden.
So issues of quality v. bandwidth should be absolutely critical, right? Any increase in bandwidth could cost millions of dollars over a short amount of time across the whole site, so the licensing fees should be minimal in comparison.
It should be menial compared to loss involved with offering users an inferior end-user experience and losing customers. Flash is not that expensive to a major content provider.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that Apple has made a well-timed and completely innovative and ground-breaking price-cut on their products, plus a brand new low-end iPod. Perhaps they are trying to throw a wrench into the machinations of the massive unstoppable juggernaut that is the Zune.
The iPod Touch is a solid product, but its hardware is a bit lackluster. I wish Creative Labs would just productize the Zii Egg already.
The LAS department does not support linux, but it does not go out of its way not to support them, either. We have a "if you use linux, you're on your own" policy.
Many of the dorm net techs will be available and will be willing to help you. You said "Daughter," right? Since she is a girl, she can simply walk to the ACM office and someone will solve whatever problem she's having for free. No problem.
A local python attack from within my LAN? Blimey, I'd rather expect the Spanish Inquisition.
If you're on a public or open network and your profile is set to "Public", this likely wouldn't be possible. Windows 7 makes it very easy to do this.
Well, I suppose we can always find out. If anyone's at UIUC right now, hop on UIwpa2 2 (near the union) and BSoD Wallaby. It's on my lap right now. I'll buy you a drink if you succeed.
I understand, and Apple did a great job with it. It just really disturbs me when Apple (and their ilk) keep rehashing work previously completed on other platforms and claiming that they somehow invented it. I am yet to see a feature that's really *new* in Snow Leopard, yet I can't stop hearing about how many amazing new technologies Apple has created.
Apple did an intelligent new optimization of their dynamic loader on their platform. This is a good thing. They did not invent the concept of a dynamic loader.
It's nothing like Superfetch. Superfetch preloads applications into system memory [microsoft.com] and this shared cache doesn't do that instead from what I understand it preforms some of the work the linker would do on load in advance.
The whole dyld sounds a lot like some of the basic features of the .NET runtime...
Or maybe some of the features in this advanced futuristic os:
http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2008/02/06/ws2008-dynamic-link-library-loader-and-address-space-load-randomization.aspx
May I be the second to say "AMEN!". Linux is always said to be the fastest most responsive desktop os on older hardare. Still xp can beat x/gnome/linux 2.6 on a low end machine, perhaps this scheduler will change it.
There are a lot more desktop-oriented differences between XP and desktop linux far beyond scheduling.
There's also a huge optimization and efficiency gulf in terms of the compiler and quality of code. In linux, you're far more likely to have some weak component jammed in the middle of the stack somewhere eating up resources, especially with gnome vs. XP.
I know there's a type of card that will push the serial interface through the network, if having a serial console (like running HyperTerminal in windows with a Null Modem cable plugged in) is not sufficient. That should allow you to get to the bios without having the monitor plugged in-- that's the theory, at least.
Also, if you're using this system as the lowest wrung sort of server, you might want to look into simply buying some Via Nano or Intel Atom hardware and just creating an ultra low-wattage server. Older desks were not renowned for their power efficiency, so over a few months, if its running 24/7, more efficient hardware might actually pay for itself in terms of energy costs, especially if you're somewhere with expensive power like California. It might be clever to cannibalize your old systems for hard disks and such and use them in this low power system, since the power usage of the hard disk will be largely a software problem, etc.
This is marketing material, children. Calm down. Who cares? Most people shopping for PC's at Best Buy do not need to deal with Linux and its printer support nightmare, the lack of consistent behavior in desktop application, the fact that none of the software they're familiar with will work without an awkward and complex procedure. Wine is not intuitive. OpenOffice is not comparable to Microsoft Word 2007... it's years behind. There are no easy wizards or templates for home users, documents look utterly awful coming out of it without extensive effort. Most support information on the web (setting up email accounts, etc) is for Microsoft Windows and Mac. There's more and easier to use documentation included with the Windows (or Mac) platform... whereas most linux distributions are supported by goddamn forums. "Hey, Mom, how do I edit the redeye out of these photos?" "Check the forums, dear!"
In terms of usability, Linux is not even comparable to Windows or Mac. It's a joke. It's not ready for desktop users.
Microsoft is hitting low here with these marketing materials, but there's nothing stopping Linux co's from doing what Apple is doing except for the fact that they have no product in the desktop sphere.
Obviously, Apple has proven that there's no magical conspiracy keeping down competition here. Linux just sucks on the desktop. The low quality bar and lack of any coherent vision for the platform towards the desktop market has really made this unfortunately easy for Microsoft.
The most hilarious thing about this is that, at the core, these marketing materials are true.
Anyone who has ever worked in end user support at any level would understand why you wouldn't wish desktop linux on any unfortunate home user, no matter how much malice you might have.
This would be a whole lot more insightful if bloatedness was one of Opera's 'features'.
It comes with a mail client, what a non-point.
Actually, the installer for Opera is about the same size as Firefox's, but it includes a mail client, news reader, irc, and bittorrent client internally. It is indeed a communication suite and not just a browser.
So you can run two (or more) whole bloated XUL environments or one lightweight Opera environment running both, with very little memory added to the pile for a fully featured mail client-- not to mention proper threading and much more intelligent CPU usage and image rendering.
I personally find Opera 10's mail client to be very powerful and usable, far moreso than Thunderbird.
That's what I used to think. Then I decided to lighten up a bit, and give it a shot. Then I realised I shouldn't have. Opera is very incompatible, even compared to Konqueror.
What browser were you using again? When? You're obviously not talking about Opera 10 or the modern Konqueror.
Whoops, before anyone corrects me it turns out that I forgot to convert NOK to USD. In reality, they're financially neck and neck, with Opera only slightly ahead. About 75 million in revenue with Mozilla to 78 million at Opera.
When will they learn that Firefox is kicking their ass just by virtue of being open source? Firefox is probably inferior in many ways, but at least they don't get THE most obvious marketing move wrong.
One is a professional custom browser solution (and thus quite proprietary) and the other is an open source browser just put out to get grabbed and used by whomever. In the end, Mozilla Corporation is making a net income of 41 million a year and Opera Software is pulling in 80.9 million. So, I would say Firefox is really only winning on the PC platform, which isn't necessarily Opera's main market or the biggest cash cow. So who's really winning, hm? ;)
Oh... well I suppose. In sort of the same way that a firecracker is sort of like a small nuclear warhead.
Because we all just -know- how great MS Office is at keeping formatting between versions. Ever had different versions of Office and open up the same document? Take the document from Word 2003 from work and open it on Office XP at home and it looks totally different. Even documents between versions don't show up the same. If you want things to look the exact same, export it as a PDF.
Or you could use OOXML. That's pretty consistent, too.
While KOffice isn't really that great, Open Office is perhaps the best office suite save for iLife and MS Office. And yes, there are a -lot- of others, (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_suite [wikipedia.org]).
I would take Wordperfect Office or Softmaker 2008 over OpenOffice any day. I don't think there's much competition there. I have no idea about the other ones. I would say OpenOffice is one of the poorer office suites being offered right now, if only for its shoddy interface and terrible formatting.
Compiz is pretty good for eye candy, it works much nicer than Vista's "3-D effects" and more impressive than OS X's.
I find it really cool that DWM and Quartz don't tear my windows to shit when I drag them across the screen. Also, it's really neat how they initialize the texture correctly and don't end up with momentarily garbled windows due to amateur implementation all the time. Oh yeah, and they use drastically less resources. Compiz is cooler in the same a blinged-out honda civic is "cooler" than a BMW or a Ferrari.
Second of all, those who in theory don't care, when explained why it's important, start to care. When you add up the cost of upgrading from Windows 95 to Windows XP to Windows Vista to Windows 7, along with all of its associated applications (I'm looking at you, Microsoft Office), versus the cost of upgrading through the various versions of Ubuntu or any of the other popular distributions and their associated applications, people really start to notice. One of my favorite things to do when I'm showing off Ubuntu to people is to open the package manager application. I tell them it's like the "Add or Remove Programs" applet, except that you can actually add programs. "All this stuff is available to you for no cost. Just click it, and you're good to go."
This would only be relevant if the products were equivalent. Most the FOSS projects that are worth using have Windows and Mac ports anyway... available to the user.. FOR FREE! For some reason, despite the price tag of zero and the hardcore love of a thousand morons, OpenOffice makes every single document I produce or open from any office suite to any office suite look like total and absolute ass. Maybe it's worth $65 to me for my documents not to induce eye strain. Aesthetics are extremely important in the "real world" (see: the desktop usage scenario where most F/OSS does not exist.)
When you explain to these people how honest competition from really smart people doing really smart things just because they can and because they feel that others should benefit from their collective knowledge is one of the reasons why a lot of commercial closed-source software these days that might otherwise cost hundreds or thousands of dollars is sold for really low cost or given away for free because of how hard it is to compete with volunteer work, it also gets their attention.
Yeah, until they use it...
I could go on, but hopefully you see my point. Free and open source software benefits everyone, even people who don't otherwise care, even people who shun it in favor of commercial and/or closed-source options. And sitting back and saying that people don't care isn't very productive. It's in our best interest to actually educate people so that they will care.
That's absolutely wrong. It's in our best interest to ignore these products until they become worth showing people. Some open source projects have graduated and are worth showing users (ie 7-zip) while others are utterly terrible and only have popularity due to an arbitrary freetard bias (openoffice, koffice, compiz, etc..) so they need to be ignored so the developers don't get the idea into their heads that they've accomplished something worthwhile and (heaven-forbid) stop going back to the drawing board, where they should be firmly planted.
I'm sorry, did you just provide some random blog as a real world figure of market share? The fact that you even made this retarded comment on slashdot suggests that you're going to have a higher number of linux users anyway, since you obviously have a bias. I mean, you have higher linux users than Mac users-- obviously this is not representative. Mac is way ahead of linux in market share.
As a former game industry insider, I can safely say that EA is a dark and cruel factory of nightmares. Their employees are overworked and underslept like slaves or animals.
So, perhaps the more alarming thing about this shouldn't be how much they're spending on marketing but how little they're paying their development teams. The entertainment industry takeover of game studios has truly been a travesty in terms of games as a creative medium.
One story I'd heard was that EA essentially has many many developers who are so undermanaged and overworked that their products always come out totally broken internally, where they have a mere handful of highly skilled developers who just get flown from studio to studio pulling people out of crises to make deadlines. Of course, an EA employee might refute me on this- so I will say it's just hear-say.
Disclaimer: I worked for a competing company, but knew many people who had left EA.
Am I the only person to notice that MS strongly encourages you to find and install an antivirus immediately after installation?
Linux and Mac OS X are fully vulnerable to viruses, also. On a Windows or Mac computer you run far more third party untrusted code than on Linux, which endemically lacks third party support. It's both a strength and weakness of the platform. Mostly, Linux avoids viruses in the same way it avoids commercial software, by being an inconsistent platform. It's security through incompatibility.
Meanwhile, you might browse these pesky articles. [google.com]
I see old exploits. On the Microsoft security page, there's some stuff relating to Office and IE, but nothing regarding a remote platform exploit. Windows isn't like Mac or Linux where an attacker can casually step in through poorly written network services or even audio drivers and become root through one of the thousands of undiscovered exploits GCC optimizes into the kernel.
Admittedly, these are desktop systems. They constantly do risky things and the security is often reduced for convenience. Among desktop systems, Vista/7 are comfortably more secure. If a user runs with a limited account and follows proper security procedures (uses an anti-virus, doesn't grant arbitrary applications admin privileges, etc.) then they will find themselves far less vulnerable than users on platforms with more archaic security models, such as Linux. UAC may be annoying, but at least it's not like Linux where you don't even need the user's permission to privilege escalate. There are decades-old holes for that. Thanks, SUID.
So, what you seem to be saying is, you have faith that over the next several months, as NT6 is adopted by more and more people, we will see an end to Windows exploits.
No, there will always be exploits as long as open systems are used. I simply believe that if Mac gains more users, it will have dangerously more security holes than Windows, given the reduced security resources and vast architectural deficiencies. Linux exploits popularly are saved for servers, the only place where it's really used from a broad perspective. If anyone wants something on a linux server and has the expertise, it's an open door.
Give it 12 to 24 months, then come back and tell me that NT6 security is superior to Linux, or Mac, or whatever.
Given the wide gulf in security practices between the platforms, I would say I'm quite confident that that will be the case.
And, I also note that MS bugs are routinely exploited, locally and remotely. The unwarranted superiority complex looks pretty pathetic, doesn't it?
Would you like to cite how you can remotely exploit NT 6? I would be fascinated to hear that. Unless you're just saying that local exploits are distributed and then run locally by users.
So no, it doesn't. NT 6 is the most secure desktop operating system, followed by maybe Red Hat or SuSE linux and somewhere down the line perhaps Mac OS X. That's the security situation we're looking at, like it or not.
Microsoft exploits get huge press-- Microsoft has lots of enterprise customers and needs to be very clear when something has gone wrong. Linux exploits show up constantly and are swept under the rug with quick hackish "fixes" to the kernel that often only address part of the issue, and Mac OS X exploits are casually ignored and smarmed away as Apple doesn't like to draw attention to them. Cultural differences between systems are a big deal in security issues, where part of the exploit system is human.
Many people here are fans of elegant simplicity, so it would suffice to say that the NT 6 kernel is much much smaller than the Linux or XNU kernel and is designed using advanced modern security practices and architecture. This is a kernel that is commonly re-architected. The kernels on Linux and Mac are architecturally stagnant in comparison.
This is an excellent post, but let me provide an alternative explanation for Opera 10.00 (not sure if it works in 9, but it probably does...):
1. Navigate to www.bing.com
2. Right-click on search element and select "Create Search"
3. Enter a keyword. (since bittorrent is gone in Opera 10, I just select b by default)
4. Expand the window with the "Details >>" button
5. Tick the dialog boxes next to "Use as default search engine" and "use as Speed Dial search engine as appropriate" and click OK
6. The next tab you open will have a Bing search bar.
====
I do believe this is the simplest way to add a search to any browser. I may have expanded my steps more than the OP, though.
That's very... technical. I am talking about everything else, you know, the data that's transmitted over TCP/IP... the most important issue is whose servers you're using and which services you've licensed--this is platform dependent. Microsoft will not allow you to federate Xbox Live... even it it were possible.
For one, Xbox Live is sort of a pre-packaged networking solution. There are many issues of consistency across the network, when you're using it you're buying into an environment where everyone is expected to be within the same gaming experience with the same method of communication and a standard means of identifying users and organizing their status within the community. You're buying into this closed gaming community when you're a user and you're buying into it when you purchase a developer kit and send a game to Microsoft to be published. You don't just choose Xbox Live... when you release a Microsoft Xbox 360 game, you are releasing a Microsoft branded software product and it must meet certain requirements, so you play with Microsoft's networks.
Playstation Network didn't exist last time I worked on a PS3 game, but I believe their networking is a bit more open and broad. A current developer might correct me on this. Network gaming on PS3 is the same as on PC, really, you do a lot more to set up your own service. If it's still the way it was when I worked on it, there's really not a *good* reason PS3's and PC's can't speak, for instance, besides issues of balance with the different control models and the common questions of cheating.
That's at least how I understand it. I think the Wii is similar to the 360 in that its networks are a tightly controlled walled garden.
So issues of quality v. bandwidth should be absolutely critical, right? Any increase in bandwidth could cost millions of dollars over a short amount of time across the whole site, so the licensing fees should be minimal in comparison.
It should be menial compared to loss involved with offering users an inferior end-user experience and losing customers. Flash is not that expensive to a major content provider.