No, the $1MM isn't what's important here. $1 million or 1 cent--the point is the same. That niche software was sold by a niche company to a niche market, and nobody has come up with a replacement. This is likely due to some combination of the market being too small, can't reverse-engineer the code, and/or fear of patent trolls...
Hypothetical Example: "Important Business Critical SW" bought for $1 million in 1996 (compiled & sold as 16-bit so it would run on both Win95 and Win3.1x (without needing Win32s)), "Important, Inc." company went under in 1998, and nobody has a clue where the source code could be...
How could this software have been moved "to 64-bit 10 years ago"??? This scenario happens more often than you'd like to think in the business world...
Wrong... Windows 3.0 Program Manager supported multiple, overlapping windows. Win8 is a regression to Windows 1.0x, which did not support overlapping windows--only maximized & tiled. We didn't go back to 1990-era capabilities (3.0), but back to 1985-era capabilities. Is there a hack that will allow me to run the tiles in 4-color CGA mode???
Where Win8's crappy Metro tile desktop program loading thingy falls apart is when you have multiple shortcuts that have the same name. How does that happen? Simple: "Uninstall". Not "Uninstall (program"), but "Uninstall". With the Start Menu, "Uninstall" is under the folder of the program (or even in the Win3.x Program Manager Group). No such info on Win8's StartClusterfuck...
...but they do have a valid point with this one. Right or wrong, Congress has forbidden state & Federal agencies (e.g. FBI, ATF, etc.) from putting together a list of gun owners. Period. It wouldn't take any stretch of the imagination to realize that the "government" (NSA, FBI, ATF, etc.) would have 99% of the gun owners' phone numbers out there simply by querying for phone numbers of gun shops, ranges, etc. All it would take is for an NSA snoop to do a simple SQL query "WHERE phone_num in ('222-333-4444', '333-444-5555', '444-555-6666',...)" and they have such a list.
The NSA's phone snooping does offer the ability to create such a de facto list... Sure, there could be some false-positives (e.g. the non-gun-owning wife of the gun store shop's owner) and some false-negatives (e.g. the militia man who doesn't own a phone or have access to "thar Intar-webs"), but I can't see it not being 98-99% accurate...
Now the conservative Congress-critters who voted to keep the NSA snooping but who are also financed by the NRA are likely to change their minds...
But the on-site / server backdoors are necessary unless there's some unknown backdoor built into SSL that the NSA, MI6, IDF, etc. can utilize. By default, my GMail uses HTTPS, but the NSA's backdoor to Google servers negates that advantage.
So, unless there's an unknown backdoor built into SSL, as long as Runbox.com uses HTTPS, how should "Australia, the UK, the US", etc. know what was transmitted unless they use a brute-force attack?
Just yesterday, NPR indicated that US-based cloud platforms stand to lose between $21 billion and $35 billion over the next few years over the NSA scandal... http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=210570888 . Lavamail and Silent Circle shut down unexpectedly & destroyed all data they had to not get caught up in the scandal...
No, they don't. Sure, those born in the USA in a hospital and those who have passports are generally known. But there are people who don't know they even are American citizens, as they were born in a foreign country & had one parent who might dual-citizenship, yet have never set foot on American soil... I doubt the NSA knows those peoples' names & doubtful they're throwing out data associated with those people... I doubt the NSA knows unless the IRS comes knocking on those (unknown) citizens' doorsteps. (Happens to Canadians all the time...)
IIRC, one of the people who was supposed to be sent to Guantanamo a decade ago turned out to be a US citizen (by birth)--he even had no idea...
Given everything that I've heard about PRISM over the past few days, I have one major question...
How do they know who is a US citizen and who isn't?
I don't remember being asked nor answering a "citizenship question" when signing up for GMail, Hotmail, Facebook, Skype, YouTube, etc. Is the NSA data matching names to (known) citizens and throwing out that data? Kinda tough to accurately do so for the "Bill Smiths" of the world, not all of which live in the US. Are they building a profile of everyone by address, thus assuming US residents are "citizens"? If I set up a fake Hotmail account as "Bubbles Sanchez" and say I live in Miami (and my ISP says I'm in Miami), does that make me and my data a "citizen" in the eyes of the NSA?
Or are they simply vacuuming up everything from these sites and TELLING US they're not looking at US citizens' data, simply because they don't have a decent way (let alone a fool-proof one) to tell who is a citizen or not?
Since I'm using "Start Is Back" to give me a Start menu and not go into Metro directly, what are all those apps sending to others about me, my PC, and what I'm doing???
One of my complaints (and yet another 3rd party utility to get around Win8's shortcomings) is that the Windows Update icon no longer shows in Desktop. In fact, if you have Windows Update set to inform but not download updates automatically, and you use an automatic logon, Win8 doesn't show you any warning that updates are available in either Desktop or Metro...
No, but some terrorists with scuba training could cause a little bit of a problem... Hell, unless you tell the populace where their underwater nuclear reactor is (you know, to look out for possible trouble), a bunch of divers in the water "over there" wouldn't raise any suspicions...
Umm, you still have the issue with the residents, hippies, etc. As a beachfront resident, would you feel safe knowing that 5 miles outside your big windows you have a nuclear reactor--as opposed to a wind farm? To add, hippies do like "the sea", fish, and underwater nature, so that doesn't really change. The only thing that would change is that the local government's objections end at the city limits, which may be at the shore...
So, according to this prosecutor, if someone looks for porn on a PC used by a spouse, especially if protected with a password, then that spouse is hacking and faces felony prosecution? Looks like the bar would be set even lower to prosecute, especially if there was no official legitimate safety concern (e.g. for the child)...
Better tell the makers of the USB devices that secretly load tracking software on PCs (forgot the name) not to sell their devices in Michigan. It would only be logical that the prosecutor would have to go after the device maker's officers as accessories in the commission of a felony...
Whether felons have the right to vote & the restrictions posed on them is a state matter.
Only 2 states, Kentucky & Virginia, deny felons the right to vote for the rest of their lives, although Kentucky has a process to restore that right. Other states disallow voting for felons in prison, on probation, on parole, etc.--just depends on the state. Maine & Vermont allow felons to vote while in prison. Oddly, "felony disenfranchisement" laws have been found to be constitutional.
For some reason, TFA only mentions Safari. No mention of IE (though Silverlight is mentioned) or Firefox, just Safari & Chrome. I don't know if that's because the author hasn't gotten around to testing Firefox or if it's immune--but Silverlight & Flash could be holes for FF.
Frankly, I never trusted Google's ability to vet Apple's (Webkit) code for security holes... And I just don't trust Apple.
And what the hell is "HTML5 database storage"--and why would I want to give any app persistent storage? Seems like a great way to store malware...
I recognize that styles can be customized by different users. However, when it comes to college students, few people change the base styles that come with Word. The example I was citing was getting files from 3 different people, none of whom use Word for anything beyond basic word processing, and attempting to cut/paste parts into into a file to submit to a teacher as a group paper. Margins, tab stops, bulleting, source OS (Windows vs. Mac), etc. may all be different, but that wouldn't cause conflicts in a well designed product (of which, Word is not).
Does this come as a surprise to anyone who has used Word extensively???
To this day, I don't know why Microsoft hasn't added WordPerfect's "Reveal Codes" feature to Word to help resolve this... I cringe whenever I have to merge documents from different sources, especially if they're from different versions (e.g. 97-03.doc + 07-10.docx), because I never know how badly the result will turn out...
In one example of a 10-page merged document, I deleted a group of bullets and the text moved 1/2 way to the right & the font changed, became bold, and was blue. But it wasn't a simple fix of moving the tab stops, changing the font, etc.--it wouldn't let me do some of those things. That document was so screwed up that I had to cut/paste everything into Notepad and spent 3 hours reformatting it from scratch.
I mean nobody is moving TO WordPerfect from Word, so Corel should want to get some $$$ from Microsoft to license the technology (e.g. due to copyrights, patents)... But then again, Microsoft might be scared to reveal how screwed up the formatting is within.doc and.docx formats, so there might be CYA involved in not doing so...
Therein lies the problem... Facebook tries to be "everything to everyone" (well, at least those with access to a computer), and does reasonably well in attempting to do that. Ping is going for a subset of that market, attempting to fracture out a niche that owns a specific brand. Nobody else will care about that market, so I don't place much faith in it...
Unfortunately for Apple, there are enough users like me that are interested in the technology (e.g. iPad) who don't want to be told how to use that technology (e.g. iPad). Facebook's major advantage is that it doesn't require a specific type of hardware (e.g. iPad) with only minimal requirements for software (e.g. free browser) to take advantage of their services--or require a certain level of disposable income to take advantage of. Hell, I know people who don't have a PC who go to the library to login to Facebook... Can't do that with Ping...
Sure, this will be popular with iPxxxxxxx users, but it will help create a digital divide with those who can't afford (or don't want) such devices...
Even Microsoft has thrown in the towel with IA-64 given the scalability of AMD64 (err, x86-64) in Xeon & Opteron processors. Windows Server 2008 R2 is the last version to support IA-64...
Re:I finally could tell my friend to go to hell
on
Windows 95 Turns 15
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· Score: 1
You'd be surprised how much 16-bit code was in Win95... Scandisk, disk defragmenter, DriveSpace compression all were 16-bit Windows code. (And let's not forget the DOS programs that were needed like FDISK & the DOS version of Scandisk). To make matters worse, all of these utilities existed as such in Win98 & WinME as well... They had serious problems with hard drives beyond 64GB (MS did come up with fixes for 98 & ME) and couldn't be used with 48-bit LBA hard drives (>137GB)--sizes that weren't uncommon in 2001 before XP was released...
Wasting it on party balloons is destroying a potentially very useful product.
Can you imagine what "My Super Sweet 16" will look like in a few years?
"Miffy's party was the best! I mean there were like 20 balloons! You don't see many of those anymore... But Miffy threw a tantrum when she saw that the pink BMW was the wrong shade of pink... But all was good when mom snuck that Valium in Miffy's drink."
A little background... I'm in the process of getting my MBA full-time from a big university in the Midwest US. Personally, I was shocked to see how many students came in with Apple laptops... Those students are fine until they take elective classes--too much business software runs on Windows only because, in the real world, Windows rules... Of course, those students start whining about how their Macs can't run certain software or end up leeching off those of us with Windows laptops.
It always ends up becoming a pointless philosophical debate with the iFans on why all this business software should be able to be run on Macs. But the reality is that Macs are 97+% not used in business (excluding maybe the Marketing or graphic design departments) and these vendors aren't about to spend time making Mac versions to appeal to the B-school students that will eventually run the software on Windows work PCs.
Three pieces of software that I've come across that are used in schools that just aren't available for Macs: Argus (real estate), The Marketing Game, and the biggie SPSS (statistics).
So, I've helped several Mac-limited students load Virtualbox and WinXP/Vista/7 x86 or x64, depending on what MSDNAA will allow me to get...
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No, the $1MM isn't what's important here. $1 million or 1 cent--the point is the same. That niche software was sold by a niche company to a niche market, and nobody has come up with a replacement. This is likely due to some combination of the market being too small, can't reverse-engineer the code, and/or fear of patent trolls...
Hypothetical Example: "Important Business Critical SW" bought for $1 million in 1996 (compiled & sold as 16-bit so it would run on both Win95 and Win3.1x (without needing Win32s)), "Important, Inc." company went under in 1998, and nobody has a clue where the source code could be...
How could this software have been moved "to 64-bit 10 years ago"??? This scenario happens more often than you'd like to think in the business world...
Vista's up to SP2... It's stable by now and works just as well as Win7. (Sarcasm implied...)
Wrong... Windows 3.0 Program Manager supported multiple, overlapping windows. Win8 is a regression to Windows 1.0x, which did not support overlapping windows--only maximized & tiled. We didn't go back to 1990-era capabilities (3.0), but back to 1985-era capabilities. Is there a hack that will allow me to run the tiles in 4-color CGA mode???
Where Win8's crappy Metro tile desktop program loading thingy falls apart is when you have multiple shortcuts that have the same name. How does that happen? Simple: "Uninstall". Not "Uninstall (program"), but "Uninstall". With the Start Menu, "Uninstall" is under the folder of the program (or even in the Win3.x Program Manager Group). No such info on Win8's StartClusterfuck...
...but they do have a valid point with this one. Right or wrong, Congress has forbidden state & Federal agencies (e.g. FBI, ATF, etc.) from putting together a list of gun owners. Period. It wouldn't take any stretch of the imagination to realize that the "government" (NSA, FBI, ATF, etc.) would have 99% of the gun owners' phone numbers out there simply by querying for phone numbers of gun shops, ranges, etc. All it would take is for an NSA snoop to do a simple SQL query "WHERE phone_num in ('222-333-4444', '333-444-5555', '444-555-6666', ...)" and they have such a list.
The NSA's phone snooping does offer the ability to create such a de facto list... Sure, there could be some false-positives (e.g. the non-gun-owning wife of the gun store shop's owner) and some false-negatives (e.g. the militia man who doesn't own a phone or have access to "thar Intar-webs"), but I can't see it not being 98-99% accurate...
Now the conservative Congress-critters who voted to keep the NSA snooping but who are also financed by the NRA are likely to change their minds...
But the on-site / server backdoors are necessary unless there's some unknown backdoor built into SSL that the NSA, MI6, IDF, etc. can utilize. By default, my GMail uses HTTPS, but the NSA's backdoor to Google servers negates that advantage.
So, unless there's an unknown backdoor built into SSL, as long as Runbox.com uses HTTPS, how should "Australia, the UK, the US", etc. know what was transmitted unless they use a brute-force attack?
Just yesterday, NPR indicated that US-based cloud platforms stand to lose between $21 billion and $35 billion over the next few years over the NSA scandal... http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=210570888 . Lavamail and Silent Circle shut down unexpectedly & destroyed all data they had to not get caught up in the scandal...
No, they don't. Sure, those born in the USA in a hospital and those who have passports are generally known. But there are people who don't know they even are American citizens, as they were born in a foreign country & had one parent who might dual-citizenship, yet have never set foot on American soil... I doubt the NSA knows those peoples' names & doubtful they're throwing out data associated with those people... I doubt the NSA knows unless the IRS comes knocking on those (unknown) citizens' doorsteps. (Happens to Canadians all the time...)
IIRC, one of the people who was supposed to be sent to Guantanamo a decade ago turned out to be a US citizen (by birth)--he even had no idea...
Oh wait... According to John Oliver, if some NSA system gives me a 51% "foreignness" rating, I must be a foreigner and not a US citizen.
Well, I feel confident...
Given everything that I've heard about PRISM over the past few days, I have one major question...
How do they know who is a US citizen and who isn't?
I don't remember being asked nor answering a "citizenship question" when signing up for GMail, Hotmail, Facebook, Skype, YouTube, etc. Is the NSA data matching names to (known) citizens and throwing out that data? Kinda tough to accurately do so for the "Bill Smiths" of the world, not all of which live in the US. Are they building a profile of everyone by address, thus assuming US residents are "citizens"? If I set up a fake Hotmail account as "Bubbles Sanchez" and say I live in Miami (and my ISP says I'm in Miami), does that make me and my data a "citizen" in the eyes of the NSA?
Or are they simply vacuuming up everything from these sites and TELLING US they're not looking at US citizens' data, simply because they don't have a decent way (let alone a fool-proof one) to tell who is a citizen or not?
Since I'm using "Start Is Back" to give me a Start menu and not go into Metro directly, what are all those apps sending to others about me, my PC, and what I'm doing???
One of my complaints (and yet another 3rd party utility to get around Win8's shortcomings) is that the Windows Update icon no longer shows in Desktop. In fact, if you have Windows Update set to inform but not download updates automatically, and you use an automatic logon, Win8 doesn't show you any warning that updates are available in either Desktop or Metro...
No, but some terrorists with scuba training could cause a little bit of a problem... Hell, unless you tell the populace where their underwater nuclear reactor is (you know, to look out for possible trouble), a bunch of divers in the water "over there" wouldn't raise any suspicions...
Umm, you still have the issue with the residents, hippies, etc. As a beachfront resident, would you feel safe knowing that 5 miles outside your big windows you have a nuclear reactor--as opposed to a wind farm? To add, hippies do like "the sea", fish, and underwater nature, so that doesn't really change. The only thing that would change is that the local government's objections end at the city limits, which may be at the shore...
"Respect my authoritah!"
So, according to this prosecutor, if someone looks for porn on a PC used by a spouse, especially if protected with a password, then that spouse is hacking and faces felony prosecution? Looks like the bar would be set even lower to prosecute, especially if there was no official legitimate safety concern (e.g. for the child)...
Better tell the makers of the USB devices that secretly load tracking software on PCs (forgot the name) not to sell their devices in Michigan. It would only be logical that the prosecutor would have to go after the device maker's officers as accessories in the commission of a felony...
Whether felons have the right to vote & the restrictions posed on them is a state matter.
.
Only 2 states, Kentucky & Virginia, deny felons the right to vote for the rest of their lives, although Kentucky has a process to restore that right. Other states disallow voting for felons in prison, on probation, on parole, etc.--just depends on the state. Maine & Vermont allow felons to vote while in prison. Oddly, "felony disenfranchisement" laws have been found to be constitutional
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement
For some reason, TFA only mentions Safari. No mention of IE (though Silverlight is mentioned) or Firefox, just Safari & Chrome. I don't know if that's because the author hasn't gotten around to testing Firefox or if it's immune--but Silverlight & Flash could be holes for FF.
Frankly, I never trusted Google's ability to vet Apple's (Webkit) code for security holes... And I just don't trust Apple.
And what the hell is "HTML5 database storage"--and why would I want to give any app persistent storage? Seems like a great way to store malware...
I recognize that styles can be customized by different users. However, when it comes to college students, few people change the base styles that come with Word. The example I was citing was getting files from 3 different people, none of whom use Word for anything beyond basic word processing, and attempting to cut/paste parts into into a file to submit to a teacher as a group paper. Margins, tab stops, bulleting, source OS (Windows vs. Mac), etc. may all be different, but that wouldn't cause conflicts in a well designed product (of which, Word is not).
Does this come as a surprise to anyone who has used Word extensively???
.doc + 07-10 .docx), because I never know how badly the result will turn out...
.doc and .docx formats, so there might be CYA involved in not doing so...
To this day, I don't know why Microsoft hasn't added WordPerfect's "Reveal Codes" feature to Word to help resolve this... I cringe whenever I have to merge documents from different sources, especially if they're from different versions (e.g. 97-03
In one example of a 10-page merged document, I deleted a group of bullets and the text moved 1/2 way to the right & the font changed, became bold, and was blue. But it wasn't a simple fix of moving the tab stops, changing the font, etc.--it wouldn't let me do some of those things. That document was so screwed up that I had to cut/paste everything into Notepad and spent 3 hours reformatting it from scratch.
I mean nobody is moving TO WordPerfect from Word, so Corel should want to get some $$$ from Microsoft to license the technology (e.g. due to copyrights, patents)... But then again, Microsoft might be scared to reveal how screwed up the formatting is within
Therein lies the problem... Facebook tries to be "everything to everyone" (well, at least those with access to a computer), and does reasonably well in attempting to do that. Ping is going for a subset of that market, attempting to fracture out a niche that owns a specific brand. Nobody else will care about that market, so I don't place much faith in it...
New Apple = Old IBM
Unfortunately for Apple, there are enough users like me that are interested in the technology (e.g. iPad) who don't want to be told how to use that technology (e.g. iPad). Facebook's major advantage is that it doesn't require a specific type of hardware (e.g. iPad) with only minimal requirements for software (e.g. free browser) to take advantage of their services--or require a certain level of disposable income to take advantage of. Hell, I know people who don't have a PC who go to the library to login to Facebook... Can't do that with Ping...
Sure, this will be popular with iPxxxxxxx users, but it will help create a digital divide with those who can't afford (or don't want) such devices...
Even Microsoft has thrown in the towel with IA-64 given the scalability of AMD64 (err, x86-64) in Xeon & Opteron processors. Windows Server 2008 R2 is the last version to support IA-64...
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/2008-IA.aspx
You'd be surprised how much 16-bit code was in Win95... Scandisk, disk defragmenter, DriveSpace compression all were 16-bit Windows code. (And let's not forget the DOS programs that were needed like FDISK & the DOS version of Scandisk). To make matters worse, all of these utilities existed as such in Win98 & WinME as well... They had serious problems with hard drives beyond 64GB (MS did come up with fixes for 98 & ME) and couldn't be used with 48-bit LBA hard drives (>137GB)--sizes that weren't uncommon in 2001 before XP was released...
Can you imagine what "My Super Sweet 16" will look like in a few years?
"Miffy's party was the best! I mean there were like 20 balloons! You don't see many of those anymore... But Miffy threw a tantrum when she saw that the pink BMW was the wrong shade of pink... But all was good when mom snuck that Valium in Miffy's drink."
A little background... I'm in the process of getting my MBA full-time from a big university in the Midwest US. Personally, I was shocked to see how many students came in with Apple laptops... Those students are fine until they take elective classes--too much business software runs on Windows only because, in the real world, Windows rules... Of course, those students start whining about how their Macs can't run certain software or end up leeching off those of us with Windows laptops.
It always ends up becoming a pointless philosophical debate with the iFans on why all this business software should be able to be run on Macs. But the reality is that Macs are 97+% not used in business (excluding maybe the Marketing or graphic design departments) and these vendors aren't about to spend time making Mac versions to appeal to the B-school students that will eventually run the software on Windows work PCs.
Three pieces of software that I've come across that are used in schools that just aren't available for Macs: Argus (real estate), The Marketing Game, and the biggie SPSS (statistics).
So, I've helped several Mac-limited students load Virtualbox and WinXP/Vista/7 x86 or x64, depending on what MSDNAA will allow me to get...