If Microsoft can manage to put together a browser that is even half as good as anything Mozilla based then I will be happy. Nothing is going to completely kill Firefox anyway but nothing is going to dethrone IE as the world's main browser either until Windows is not the defacto standard for a desktop computer. So I personally would prefer MS did put out a quality browser regardless of how it hurts Firefox's market share. Oh and for the record I absolutely despise Microsoft.
Is anyone else screaming WHAT ABOUT CSS?! IE is the single largest reason I don't enjoy doing web development. If they could somehow manage to actually support some accepted standards (other than their own) it would make life oh so much better for all of us.
The Tuesday attack left PC users frustrated when trying to access some of the Internet's most heavily visited sites, the Washington Post said Wednesday.
Heh. I know I always get upset when I'm not being bombarded by advertisements.
What I don't get is why this guy doesn't use his skills to do something a little safer and more worthwhile. Obviously he's got some brains... Too bad he's wasting them.
Umm.. I don't know about you but the idea of having Microsoft in charge of all the critical equipment in my space ship makes me quite uncomfortable. Suddenly the term "Blue Screen of Death" has become a lot more serious.
all legislation will do is drive the spammers further and further underground...
I agree with you but the article did mention that there are known major spammers that they are unable to prosecute. So maybe we do need a few more laws. I think the key here is to get these anti-spam laws passed in (nearly) all countries so that spammers have fewer places to hide geographically.
Unless you bought it with the implicit agreement that you wouldn't do X, Y, or Z with it. And you did agree to that, by buying content that has the flag bit.
You're right. Unfortunately this is the direction that we're headed in. Pretty soon all content will be licensed to you. You won't own anything and what you can and can't do with that content will be strictly controlled. Ugh... What a great future we have to look forward to.
This kind of restriction seems pointless to me. The casual user who wants to copy a show/film for a friend to see will use VCR type recording anyway. The only people who will want to redistribute the digital signal will be criminals who - not being well known as maintainers of laws - are likely to have outlawed equipment.
All in all the only people this will harm are the legitimate paying customers. How long can a business model last that pisses of the people who pay the wages?
This is pretty much the case with all copy protection... The true criminals are always going to be sophisticated enough to break whatever protections are in place. It is always the normal, law-abiding citizens that get inconvenienced the most by stuff like this. If these companies were truly worried about piracy they would be going after the major piracy rings which, I might add, are not all that difficult to find even for a normal citizen let alone a law enforcement agency. It is a truly sad state of affairs.
It's not so much telling you what you can do with your machine as telling you what you can do with their content.
Yes but once you buy that content it becomes YOUR content (not in the IP sense) and you should be free to do with it as you wish (for personal use of course). We actually have laws in place to ensure that we have the right to make personal copies and this would eliminate that right.
I saw a recent Slashdot poll that showed that most people here either like FPS or RPG games. I guess changing tack would mean more of these, if Nintendo wants to really crack the market better. I would like to see some better RPG games, myself.
Me too. How about an RPG FPS?:-)
I'm hoping that more and more types of games start incorporating RPG elements... I like good, real-time action but I also want character development and a good storyline.
Yes. It is, isn't it? I see the exact same ads on Slashdot all the time. OSDN takes money from "evil" Microsoft all damn day, and the frothing posters seem to be none the wiser, or look the other way to bash Microsoft some more. If a website is going to bash Microsoft yet take money and display their ads, I will declare that they have lost all integrity.
As others have already pointed out there is a difference between Slashdot displaying such ads and a site such as Linux Today. Slashdot is NOT a Linux website. It is news for nerds. I don't know about you but I would say that anything involving computers falls under that category... Guess what? Microsoft is a huge part of the computer industry. Nerds like computers... how is there a problem here?
On the other hand, Linux Today is a website devoted entirely to Linux. I find it disturbing that a site such as this would spread blatant misinformation about the very thing that it is supposed to be supporting. Obviously the new owners of Linux Today couldn't care less about Linux itself. They just want a new Mercedes or two. Disgusting...
In addition, many networks add their own nonstandard features and hacks to further improve their users experience.
I'm not sure "improve" is always the correct word here... Some networks out there just seem to love implementing similar features but in completely different ways thus causing client authors immense headaches and, consequently, causing the user's experience to suffer as well due to their "broken" client. *ugh*
I've got both Windows and Linux machines and have them both fully autoupdating. They only time I've ever had anything "break" due to autoupdating was when one of Microsoft's patches about a year ago caused machines running Norton Antivirus to slow down in some activities. Yes, 4 or 5 years ago when NT was the game, it was different and the patches tended to bite you. But it hasn't been that way for a long time.
Overall, I'd say the risk of a patch breaking something on your specific machine (as opposed to a few random thousand of the 100s of millions out there) is much lower than the risk of a virus hitting you while you're "testing" the patches.
I think that the real driver for people using your excuse for not patching is one of responsibility shifting. If you don't patch and get hit by a virus and its not an extreme case like taking more than a year to patch, you can whine about MS even though it was really your choice to bet the farm on 10:1 odds just because whining about Microsoft is a popular thing. If you do patch and you encounter that more rare condition that the patch busted you, you'll catch hell for patching without testing. So, not patching is the safer bet for you, patching is the safer bet for your machine.
Obviously you've never worked in an environment with lots of mission critical systems. Even if MS patches didn't regularly hose your system (in my experience they do) then you still have to be extremely careful when applying any updates. Having your PC at home or you desktop at work automatically update itself isn't a big deal because you aren't going to lose millions of dollars if the patches do break something. Think about companies with 300+ machines that all need to work. If a particular patch does break something and all of those machines are automatically updated then you're going to waste a whole lot more time, energy, and consequently money fixing them than you would have needed to actually do proper testing before applying the patch network-wide. Either way, I would sure as hell rather risk getting the latest worm or virus than risk hosing the entire network with untested patches.
Inaightful? Please. If you hold a patent for something, and implement it, it is impossible for someone to sue you for that implementation.
In other words, you don't have to worry about Eolas coming along, patenting something you're using, and suing you. How would you, oh insightful one, suggest preventing the situation otherwise?
Maybe you should think about this a little more...
You're right except that you forget that you can't patent everything you do. It would be impossible for a large company like Microsoft (especially a software company) to patent everything they do. There is always going to be something you either missed or weren't granted (perhaps because some other company has already patented it). This is what the AC was getting at with their post. Defensive patents only work if you are able to threaten the other company threatening you. If that company doesn't make a product then they have nothing that you can attack using patents. The Cold War analogy is perfect here. The only reason nuclear arms work as a deterrent is because both sides can expect mutual annihilation if either side uses them. If you have no target to destroy then what good is even the most powerful weapon?
What you really mean here is not "organic", but traditional or heirloom.
No, actually I did mean organic. I don't know that the way these terms are used is 100% technically correct but that is what they call it. Some supermarkets carry both and label them as such. I can go and buy conventional bananas or I can buy organic bananas and there is a huge difference between them.
When I say organic, I'm referring to foods that are certified (California Organic Foods Act of 1990, CCOF, USDA organic, etc).
Bleh. Guess I fired that one off a little bit too soon.
My point was mostly that there is a very noticeable difference between organic and conventional (especially GM) food but somehow most of our country's population still thinks that it is the organic food that is bad for you. It's quite sad.
Hell, bigger and better looking sells every other thing in the produce department, why would tomatos be any different? Most people don't know what a fresh grown tomato tastes like anymore anyway.
This is so true. I'm lucky to live in an area where we have a great wealth of good, organic food but even here you mostly find conventional produce. We have large chain supermarkets like Safeway (isn't the name ironic?) that only carry conventional produce and the difference between the conventional and the organic stuff is very striking, both in looks and taste. The conventional fruit is always big, perfect and polished looking whereas organic fruit is usually imperfect with each piece being unique (like fruit is supposed to be). Then there's the texture and taste. Organic fruit is more often juicy and sweet and the conventional fruit is generally tougher with much less flavor. The difference is truly incredible.
Needless to say, the food is one of the major reasons I stay in the area despite the rising costs of living and overcrowding.
calling this vulnerability severe is like screaming that highways are fundamentally unsafe because someone could point their car the wrong way and start smashing into oncoming traffic.
Ya know, some people might just call that unsafe. Driving is probably the most dangerous thing I do on a regular basis and I consider myself a pretty safe driver. It's the other people on the road that worry me.
But therein is the flaw in your thinking. You are only considering Microsoft.
Actually I was speaking very generally. Microsoft is just the very obvious example. My point was simply that there really isn't any major relationship between the quality of a piece of software and whether or not it is open source. Every project is different and each has its own set of priorities based on many different factors. IMHO, to say that either open source or proprietary software is generally higher quality than the other is just unfounded.
Pure Slashdot invention actually. Nowhere in the article does MS or anyone else make any mention of the "Death of Free software", or any related phrase or concept.
Did you actually read the article?
Microsoft has a soft spot for Linux, but it believes that recent developments in the open-source community have killed the free software model ... Red Hat's decision to end support for its free software and the Novell-SuSE link-up have put the last nail in the coffin of the free-software model ... even going so far as to speculate that the move from free to paid-for open-source software is a validation of Microsoft's way of doing business and the only way the open-source movement can survive.
Just because quality may not be an OSS coder's primary goal does not mean that they aren't just as concerned with it as a commercial, proprietary software vendor. The two goals can coexist very nicely together.
Remember, the main goal of a commercial software vendor is not to produce quality software. It is to make money. Quality software does not always make money and software that makes money is not always high quality. Just look at Microsoft.;-)
But there's way too much OSS that gets released with the disclaimer "Hey, this is free software -- you get what you pay for" for me to agree with you that quality is more important to the OSS folks than those who will get fired if they screw up coding.
Now that is completely absurd. The existence of such a disclaimer does not say anything about the author's commitment to quality. These disclaimers exist purely because without them no one would want to write software for fear of being held liable for damages caused by an inevitable bug. (Bugs are inevitable. All software has them.)
What's more, if you actually bothered to read any of the EULAs that you are forced to click through before using commercial software, you would notice that they too include a similar disclaimer that clears them of any liability for any damages caused by their software. This is for exactly the same reason that non-commercial software includes them.
It's true that someone who is paid to write code may not want to lose their job, but what if writing quality code is not a requisite for keeping their job? Who is to say that management even knows what quality code is? Developers of proprietary software are not going to have thousands upon thousands of people all over the world looking over their code. They might not even have anyone checking their code, provided that it seems to work.
You said yourself that most OSS coders are primarily interested in furthering their own reputation. If this were true (It isn't. Many OSS authors write their programs to scratch an itch.) then writing poor quality code would only hurt their reputation, since so many eyes will see it.
In short, all software has such disclaimers because it is required to protect the author from lawsuits. It says nothing whatsoever about the author's commitment to quality. If you want to argue the merits of open source vs. closed source, fine, but it has nothing to do with disclaimers.
Slashdot Mirror
If Microsoft can manage to put together a browser that is even half as good as anything Mozilla based then I will be happy. Nothing is going to completely kill Firefox anyway but nothing is going to dethrone IE as the world's main browser either until Windows is not the defacto standard for a desktop computer. So I personally would prefer MS did put out a quality browser regardless of how it hurts Firefox's market share. Oh and for the record I absolutely despise Microsoft.
Is anyone else screaming WHAT ABOUT CSS?! IE is the single largest reason I don't enjoy doing web development. If they could somehow manage to actually support some accepted standards (other than their own) it would make life oh so much better for all of us.
The Tuesday attack left PC users frustrated when trying to access some of the Internet's most heavily visited sites, the Washington Post said Wednesday.
Heh. I know I always get upset when I'm not being bombarded by advertisements.
Too bad that you can't upgrade an existing system without using portupgrade
O_o
What ever do you mean? I still to this day have not used portupgrade and all my systems are up-to-date.
What I don't get is why this guy doesn't use his skills to do something a little safer and more worthwhile. Obviously he's got some brains... Too bad he's wasting them.
Microsoft, turn to the stars!
Umm.. I don't know about you but the idea of having Microsoft in charge of all the critical equipment in my space ship makes me quite uncomfortable. Suddenly the term "Blue Screen of Death" has become a lot more serious.
all legislation will do is drive the spammers further and further underground...
I agree with you but the article did mention that there are known major spammers that they are unable to prosecute. So maybe we do need a few more laws. I think the key here is to get these anti-spam laws passed in (nearly) all countries so that spammers have fewer places to hide geographically.
Unless you bought it with the implicit agreement that you wouldn't do X, Y, or Z with it. And you did agree to that, by buying content that has the flag bit.
You're right. Unfortunately this is the direction that we're headed in. Pretty soon all content will be licensed to you. You won't own anything and what you can and can't do with that content will be strictly controlled. Ugh... What a great future we have to look forward to.
This kind of restriction seems pointless to me. The casual user who wants to copy a show/film for a friend to see will use VCR type recording anyway. The only people who will want to redistribute the digital signal will be criminals who - not being well known as maintainers of laws - are likely to have outlawed equipment.
All in all the only people this will harm are the legitimate paying customers. How long can a business model last that pisses of the people who pay the wages?
This is pretty much the case with all copy protection... The true criminals are always going to be sophisticated enough to break whatever protections are in place. It is always the normal, law-abiding citizens that get inconvenienced the most by stuff like this. If these companies were truly worried about piracy they would be going after the major piracy rings which, I might add, are not all that difficult to find even for a normal citizen let alone a law enforcement agency. It is a truly sad state of affairs.
Seems to me that they are spending more money developing all these technologies than they stand to gain by knocking out piracy.
That's because it isn't about stopping piracy at all... It's about control.
It's not so much telling you what you can do with your machine as telling you what you can do with their content.
Yes but once you buy that content it becomes YOUR content (not in the IP sense) and you should be free to do with it as you wish (for personal use of course). We actually have laws in place to ensure that we have the right to make personal copies and this would eliminate that right.
I saw a recent Slashdot poll that showed that most people here either like FPS or RPG games. I guess changing tack would mean more of these, if Nintendo wants to really crack the market better. I would like to see some better RPG games, myself.
:-)
Me too. How about an RPG FPS?
I'm hoping that more and more types of games start incorporating RPG elements... I like good, real-time action but I also want character development and a good storyline.
Yes. It is, isn't it? I see the exact same ads on Slashdot all the time. OSDN takes money from "evil" Microsoft all damn day, and the frothing posters seem to be none the wiser, or look the other way to bash Microsoft some more. If a website is going to bash Microsoft yet take money and display their ads, I will declare that they have lost all integrity.
As others have already pointed out there is a difference between Slashdot displaying such ads and a site such as Linux Today. Slashdot is NOT a Linux website. It is news for nerds. I don't know about you but I would say that anything involving computers falls under that category... Guess what? Microsoft is a huge part of the computer industry. Nerds like computers... how is there a problem here?
On the other hand, Linux Today is a website devoted entirely to Linux. I find it disturbing that a site such as this would spread blatant misinformation about the very thing that it is supposed to be supporting. Obviously the new owners of Linux Today couldn't care less about Linux itself. They just want a new Mercedes or two. Disgusting...
More information is always better than less information when it comes to making decisions.
Yes but what about misinformation?
In addition, many networks add their own nonstandard features and hacks to further improve their users experience.
I'm not sure "improve" is always the correct word here... Some networks out there just seem to love implementing similar features but in completely different ways thus causing client authors immense headaches and, consequently, causing the user's experience to suffer as well due to their "broken" client. *ugh*
I've got both Windows and Linux machines and have them both fully autoupdating. They only time I've ever had anything "break" due to autoupdating was when one of Microsoft's patches about a year ago caused machines running Norton Antivirus to slow down in some activities. Yes, 4 or 5 years ago when NT was the game, it was different and the patches tended to bite you. But it hasn't been that way for a long time.
Overall, I'd say the risk of a patch breaking something on your specific machine (as opposed to a few random thousand of the 100s of millions out there) is much lower than the risk of a virus hitting you while you're "testing" the patches.
I think that the real driver for people using your excuse for not patching is one of responsibility shifting. If you don't patch and get hit by a virus and its not an extreme case like taking more than a year to patch, you can whine about MS even though it was really your choice to bet the farm on 10:1 odds just because whining about Microsoft is a popular thing. If you do patch and you encounter that more rare condition that the patch busted you, you'll catch hell for patching without testing. So, not patching is the safer bet for you, patching is the safer bet for your machine.
Obviously you've never worked in an environment with lots of mission critical systems. Even if MS patches didn't regularly hose your system (in my experience they do) then you still have to be extremely careful when applying any updates. Having your PC at home or you desktop at work automatically update itself isn't a big deal because you aren't going to lose millions of dollars if the patches do break something. Think about companies with 300+ machines that all need to work. If a particular patch does break something and all of those machines are automatically updated then you're going to waste a whole lot more time, energy, and consequently money fixing them than you would have needed to actually do proper testing before applying the patch network-wide. Either way, I would sure as hell rather risk getting the latest worm or virus than risk hosing the entire network with untested patches.
Inaightful? Please. If you hold a patent for something, and implement it, it is impossible for someone to sue you for that implementation.
In other words, you don't have to worry about Eolas coming along, patenting something you're using, and suing you. How would you, oh insightful one, suggest preventing the situation otherwise?
Maybe you should think about this a little more...
You're right except that you forget that you can't patent everything you do. It would be impossible for a large company like Microsoft (especially a software company) to patent everything they do. There is always going to be something you either missed or weren't granted (perhaps because some other company has already patented it). This is what the AC was getting at with their post. Defensive patents only work if you are able to threaten the other company threatening you. If that company doesn't make a product then they have nothing that you can attack using patents. The Cold War analogy is perfect here. The only reason nuclear arms work as a deterrent is because both sides can expect mutual annihilation if either side uses them. If you have no target to destroy then what good is even the most powerful weapon?
What you really mean here is not "organic", but traditional or heirloom.
No, actually I did mean organic. I don't know that the way these terms are used is 100% technically correct but that is what they call it. Some supermarkets carry both and label them as such. I can go and buy conventional bananas or I can buy organic bananas and there is a huge difference between them.
When I say organic, I'm referring to foods that are certified (California Organic Foods Act of 1990, CCOF, USDA organic, etc).
Bleh. Guess I fired that one off a little bit too soon.
My point was mostly that there is a very noticeable difference between organic and conventional (especially GM) food but somehow most of our country's population still thinks that it is the organic food that is bad for you. It's quite sad.
Hell, bigger and better looking sells every other thing in the produce department, why would tomatos be any different? Most people don't know what a fresh grown tomato tastes like anymore anyway.
This is so true. I'm lucky to live in an area where we have a great wealth of good, organic food but even here you mostly find conventional produce. We have large chain supermarkets like Safeway (isn't the name ironic?) that only carry conventional produce and the difference between the conventional and the organic stuff is very striking, both in looks and taste. The conventional fruit is always big, perfect and polished looking whereas organic fruit is usually imperfect with each piece being unique (like fruit is supposed to be). Then there's the texture and taste. Organic fruit is more often juicy and sweet and the conventional fruit is generally tougher with much less flavor. The difference is truly incredible.
Needless to say, the food is one of the major reasons I stay in the area despite the rising costs of living and overcrowding.
calling this vulnerability severe is like screaming that highways are fundamentally unsafe because someone could point their car the wrong way and start smashing into oncoming traffic.
Ya know, some people might just call that unsafe. Driving is probably the most dangerous thing I do on a regular basis and I consider myself a pretty safe driver. It's the other people on the road that worry me.
But therein is the flaw in your thinking. You are only considering Microsoft.
Actually I was speaking very generally. Microsoft is just the very obvious example. My point was simply that there really isn't any major relationship between the quality of a piece of software and whether or not it is open source. Every project is different and each has its own set of priorities based on many different factors. IMHO, to say that either open source or proprietary software is generally higher quality than the other is just unfounded.
Did you actually read the article?
Just because quality may not be an OSS coder's primary goal does not mean that they aren't just as concerned with it as a commercial, proprietary software vendor. The two goals can coexist very nicely together.
;-)
Remember, the main goal of a commercial software vendor is not to produce quality software. It is to make money. Quality software does not always make money and software that makes money is not always high quality. Just look at Microsoft.
But there's way too much OSS that gets released with the disclaimer "Hey, this is free software -- you get what you pay for" for me to agree with you that quality is more important to the OSS folks than those who will get fired if they screw up coding.
Now that is completely absurd. The existence of such a disclaimer does not say anything about the author's commitment to quality. These disclaimers exist purely because without them no one would want to write software for fear of being held liable for damages caused by an inevitable bug. (Bugs are inevitable. All software has them.)
What's more, if you actually bothered to read any of the EULAs that you are forced to click through before using commercial software, you would notice that they too include a similar disclaimer that clears them of any liability for any damages caused by their software. This is for exactly the same reason that non-commercial software includes them.
It's true that someone who is paid to write code may not want to lose their job, but what if writing quality code is not a requisite for keeping their job? Who is to say that management even knows what quality code is? Developers of proprietary software are not going to have thousands upon thousands of people all over the world looking over their code. They might not even have anyone checking their code, provided that it seems to work.
You said yourself that most OSS coders are primarily interested in furthering their own reputation. If this were true (It isn't. Many OSS authors write their programs to scratch an itch.) then writing poor quality code would only hurt their reputation, since so many eyes will see it.
In short, all software has such disclaimers because it is required to protect the author from lawsuits. It says nothing whatsoever about the author's commitment to quality. If you want to argue the merits of open source vs. closed source, fine, but it has nothing to do with disclaimers.