> What surprises me is the massive boost in OS profits in Dec 09.
I'm amazed not so much by the boost as by the dip - during the prior 12 months profit fell by an amazing ~30% on Windows. This is despite MS offering vouchers for upgrades to Win7 for most of the year with new computers. It must be really terrifying to watch that as a MS exec and wonder... "will it come back... is it really just Win 7 or is the bottom falling out of our company?". And it *did* come back. But I wouldn't have liked to have been in their shoes and watching that throughout 09.
I'm not complaining that I can't install what I want. I'm complaining that simple basic functions needed to manage a computer don't even come with the computer itself.
They obviously see the need for an editor or they wouldn't ship Notepad. But if you're going to ship an editor, what on earth is the logic in shipping a totally crap one? It would take them about 3 days to code something better than Notepad. After 15 years you have to assume that failing to do so is strategic - they *really* want to have a crap editor on Windows. I don't get it.
> The average user doesn't need these tools. The people who can make use of them without messing other things up already know about them
Some of them yes. But I've always been utterly mystified about why some incredibly useful things don't (or didn't) come with Windows.
Eg: there is all this integrated stuff for CD burning but NO WAY TO BURN AN ISO!!! Which happens to be 99% of my use of the CD / DVD burner. (Yes, this is rectified in 7). And just as bad, no way to mount or see the contents of an ISO file. And this is a format that Microsoft themselves ship software in!
Eg: no virtual desktop utility. I can understand they think most users barely grok their single desktop, but for the love of god, why not ship a simple util for flipping desktops. There are half a dozen freeware ones out there, how hard would it be???
Eg: why the heck is the built in text editor so completely and utterly lame? What is the point???? Microsoft doesn't make a text editor, there is no market here, it's just a pain in the ass to go to fix stuff on grandma's computer and find the only editor there is the lamest thing on the planet.
> I mean, have you ever had a till refusing to give you the money that's supposedly already yours because you're Indian
Yes. A place I worked had an employee who pilfered money from the till. It took about 2 days to confirm it, resolve who had done it and they fired him (and called the police). Just like PayPal, it's an insecure place, but you don't leave the money there long so your risk is low.
That's certainly a sobering story, but I'm really curious - did they manage to report her to a credit agency without knowing her SSN? Or did she give it to them?
My security with PayPal is that I have never given them any such info. The only fix they have on me is the bank account I transfer money out to, which is merely a holding account itself and can be tossed aside if necessary.
People may *use* PayPal like a bank but if they do they are misusing it.
PayPal is not your bank. PayPal is the cash till in your register. No business owner leaves cash accumulating in their register day after day. They count it and clear it out at the end of each day and bank it because the register is a fundamentally insecure and unreliable place. If people treated PayPal more like that there would be less issues (not saying PayPal doesn't have problems - just that people's tendency to accumulate large balances is part of the problem).
If your turnover is such that large balances accumulate even inside a single day then you should really be getting a merchant account somewhere and doing things properly.
As someone with slow and terribly messy hand writing I would have loved to be able to take today's net books into class. I spent most of my university years frantically writing and so focussed on trying to record what was being said or written that I emerged from lectures not having understood anything, only to get home and find my notes were illegible and useless. It was a nightmare.
Unlike most of the others posting my goal in taking notes is not to learn the material. It is to record it with maximum accuracy and recoverability so that when I review it later I understand it, while using the minimum effort so that I can devote my attention to actually understanding what the lecturer is saying. Being able to type most stuff and take the odd web cam grabs and audio would have made my life so much easier.
The beauty is that you don't really have to trust PayPal. I usually transfer money out of my PayPal account within minutes of it arriving there, and I have made sure never to authorize PayPal to withdraw from any bank account I have.
Just make sure you have a backup plan so that if / when PayPal suspends your account for some stupid reason you have somewhere else for customers to go.
I'm 99% certain the browser will give no warning. All it cares is that whatever cert is presented by the server is signed by a trusted root. That root can change around all it wants. This happens routinely when people replace their root certs on web servers and switch between issuers. It does not generate any kind of warning.
This has been the most fascinating thing about the iPad discussion in the last week. I've had multiple Mac fanbois tell me "this is aimed at your parents" as in, a device for senior citizens to use. I find this simply astonishing - seriously - Apple is marketing a device for senior citizens? This is their new demographic? Not young, hip, mobile & trendy financially well-endowed folks, but people who live off a pension and scrape together money for bingo every Friday night? This conjecture that these people are all going to run out en masse and buy a piece of hot new technology, or that Apple would in any sane universe actually target this demographic, seems amazing.
> Everybody is underestimating the market penetration of netbooks right now
I can't tell if you're serious... but I totally disagree. Netbooks, sadly, just can't seem to hit the price point they need to really hit the big time. They need to get down to about half or less what they are now (say $120) and perform about double. They need to meet some specific targets:
* I can afford to buy one for each of my kids * I can afford to lose it when it gets dropped / stolen / stepped on * I can easily play full screen video at reasonable quality * I can easily look at the ridiculous 11 megapixel photos spewed out by my camera.
The current generation just doesn't do it. Not to say they won't / aren't selling - but they won't "go critical" until these conditions are met.
I still don't buy it. It was stated at one point that the attack vector was a "link sent by email or instant message". That really makes no sense for a machine used for testing.
My guess: probably the breach probably happened at a site or company external to google that *does* use IE6 and they had some kind of privileged access to google's servers, email accounts or something else. One way or another I would bet there is more to this but Google would much rather just lay the blame at IE6's fault than explain.
> The iP* products are consumer electronic devices, not general purpose machines
That's not how they are being sold. They are being marketed specifically as general purpose computers. How else would you justify the whole "There's an app for that" marketing campaign from Apple? They are saying "this is a general purpose computing device". If they are marketing the iPhone that way I can hardly think they will market the iPad as *less* general. And in doing this they are trying to redefine in the public mind and in the software industry what that is. The old definition was a device that lets you run an infinite universe of applications including whatever you might want to make yourself. The new definition is "you consume whatever the maker of the device deigns acceptable for you and in their business interests and you like it".
> I'll start to worry when nice, open, fidgetable devices aren't completely fricking ubiquitous anymore
Umm, then you should start worrying. That is the whole point. The whole reason everyone is clammoring about this is that Apple is setting a precedent here. Don't you think Microsoft would love to be able to tell you what you can and can't run on Windows? They'd be ecstatic if they could just "refuse" to let FireFox or iTunes etc. run just by saying "it doesn't meet our standards" or even worse "it competes with our own application". So why don't they? Because they could never get away with it. Even if there was no legal problem, people would go absolutely nuts and protest about it. But if Apple succeeds in creating a hugely successful device here that is totally locked down, and if they further succeed in establishing that it's perfectly ok to refuse an application on the basis that it competes with their own one then do you think other manufacturers will hold back once the general public and industry has accepted the precedent with Apple?
If you only start worrying about this when there are no other devices left than locked down controlled ones, you will have started worrying about 10 years too late. If you care about this at all, the time to worry is *now*.
I think you're opening pandora's box by endorsing OS discrimmination. The equation will look like:
OpenBSD Price =
- 20% discount for no viruses
+ 200% surcharge for probably hosting their own server
+ 200% surcharge for being a smartass to tech support
Here's hoping that's exactly what they are doing. If they can keep it going for just 5 more years they should build able to build up ~$200M in the bank and fund a $5 - $7M development effort (say, 20 developers) into perpetuity. I'd much rather that than blowing $50M a year just because it's raining from the sky right now.
> by default, most browsers won't cache anything that is ssl-encrypted.
Not quite true. They will cache it, but some only in memory, and in some cases only when you send back particularly aggressive cache directives. FireFox was particularly poor at this for a long time, but now they changed the default setting so 3.x will work a bit better.
Hmm, how could having your photo publicly identified as being that of a terrorist possibly harm one's life? I can't imagine. That is, I can't imagine how people can possibly think this is acceptable. I can't think of any worse kind of defamation.
> Another part of it was that Google has a concept of how they run their business. That concept has been successful.
Agree. Google is notoriously ruthless in what they choose to do or not do. They identify areas where they can run absolutely automated IT solutions and do not even try to compete in areas that require heavy investment outside of that. They basically avoid anything that stops their fully automatic money-printing machine from running unattended. I think somewhere at the base of this is their realization that dealing with China is going to be an endless series of headaches requiring constant attention from their top level people focussed on things that are entirely unproductive for their core mission - so they just cut it out of their business model.
Seems like he's just done a mea culpa and asked the world to stop using PDFs as a document format.
He's basically said: "Our document format is out of control. We no longer have the ability to keep it secure. Run for the hills. Save your women and children if you can. Treat our product the same way you treat malicious.exe's when your browser encounters them. Whatever you do, don't use it for encoding simple read only documents, it's not meant for that."
The whole point of encryption is that no amount of software manipulation can bypass it. The data simply cannot be decoded without the key. If the software can bypass the encryption without the key under any circumstances then the encryption has been broken or didn't exist in the first place.
> Now I've mounted those drives under Linux by bypassing the login process. Instead of mounting sdc1 (assuming sdc is your encrypted flash drive), you mount sdc2.
Honestly, I think you could gain significant publicity if you publish detailed steps somewhere to demonstrate this. If you do, this is a huge and significant case of misleading advertising by the flash driver makers. Google ads + a single blog page probably will make it worth your time.
On the other hand, you could be mistaken, misleading us or something else. (I'm not saying you are, just that the claim you are making is huge and deserves / needs followup).
But it's cheap (~USD$20) and made by a single developer who gladly will give you the source and accept bug reports directly and even fix them occasionally. It's a pretty good deal.
I don't think google is unbeatable due to their size. Rather I think that search itself has such a high barrier to entry that nobody new can enter the market.
Can you name a single successful completely *new* entrant to the market in 10 years? Yes existing secondary players manage to eke out an existence. But there is not one new company in the search business that I know of in a decade. There is a reason for that - it's freakin' hard to do.
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> What surprises me is the massive boost in OS profits in Dec 09.
I'm amazed not so much by the boost as by the dip - during the prior 12 months profit fell by an amazing ~30% on Windows. This is despite MS offering vouchers for upgrades to Win7 for most of the year with new computers. It must be really terrifying to watch that as a MS exec and wonder ... "will it come back ... is it really just Win 7 or is the bottom falling out of our company?". And it *did* come back. But I wouldn't have liked to have been in their shoes and watching that throughout 09.
I'm not complaining that I can't install what I want. I'm complaining that simple basic functions needed to manage a computer don't even come with the computer itself.
They obviously see the need for an editor or they wouldn't ship Notepad. But if you're going to ship an editor, what on earth is the logic in shipping a totally crap one? It would take them about 3 days to code something better than Notepad. After 15 years you have to assume that failing to do so is strategic - they *really* want to have a crap editor on Windows. I don't get it.
> The average user doesn't need these tools. The people who can make use of them without messing other things up already know about them
Some of them yes. But I've always been utterly mystified about why some incredibly useful things don't (or didn't) come with Windows.
Eg: there is all this integrated stuff for CD burning but NO WAY TO BURN AN ISO!!! Which happens to be 99% of my use of the CD / DVD burner. (Yes, this is rectified in 7). And just as bad, no way to mount or see the contents of an ISO file. And this is a format that Microsoft themselves ship software in!
Eg: no virtual desktop utility. I can understand they think most users barely grok their single desktop, but for the love of god, why not ship a simple util for flipping desktops. There are half a dozen freeware ones out there, how hard would it be???
Eg: why the heck is the built in text editor so completely and utterly lame? What is the point???? Microsoft doesn't make a text editor, there is no market here, it's just a pain in the ass to go to fix stuff on grandma's computer and find the only editor there is the lamest thing on the planet.
> I mean, have you ever had a till refusing to give you the money that's supposedly already yours because you're Indian
Yes. A place I worked had an employee who pilfered money from the till. It took about 2 days to confirm it, resolve who had done it and they fired him (and called the police). Just like PayPal, it's an insecure place, but you don't leave the money there long so your risk is low.
That's certainly a sobering story, but I'm really curious - did they manage to report her to a credit agency without knowing her SSN? Or did she give it to them?
My security with PayPal is that I have never given them any such info. The only fix they have on me is the bank account I transfer money out to, which is merely a holding account itself and can be tossed aside if necessary.
> Stephen Conroy: "The problem is at the moment in Australia there is no agreement, there is no discussion, there is no dialogue"
Sounds an awful lot like Stephen Conroy talking about himself on internet censorship.
People may *use* PayPal like a bank but if they do they are misusing it.
PayPal is not your bank. PayPal is the cash till in your register. No business owner leaves cash accumulating in their register day after day. They count it and clear it out at the end of each day and bank it because the register is a fundamentally insecure and unreliable place. If people treated PayPal more like that there would be less issues (not saying PayPal doesn't have problems - just that people's tendency to accumulate large balances is part of the problem).
If your turnover is such that large balances accumulate even inside a single day then you should really be getting a merchant account somewhere and doing things properly.
As someone with slow and terribly messy hand writing I would have loved to be able to take today's net books into class. I spent most of my university years frantically writing and so focussed on trying to record what was being said or written that I emerged from lectures not having understood anything, only to get home and find my notes were illegible and useless. It was a nightmare.
Unlike most of the others posting my goal in taking notes is not to learn the material. It is to record it with maximum accuracy and recoverability so that when I review it later I understand it, while using the minimum effort so that I can devote my attention to actually understanding what the lecturer is saying. Being able to type most stuff and take the odd web cam grabs and audio would have made my life so much easier.
The beauty is that you don't really have to trust PayPal. I usually transfer money out of my PayPal account within minutes of it arriving there, and I have made sure never to authorize PayPal to withdraw from any bank account I have.
Just make sure you have a backup plan so that if / when PayPal suspends your account for some stupid reason you have somewhere else for customers to go.
I'm 99% certain the browser will give no warning. All it cares is that whatever cert is presented by the server is signed by a trusted root. That root can change around all it wants. This happens routinely when people replace their root certs on web servers and switch between issuers. It does not generate any kind of warning.
> They're aimed at our parents.
This has been the most fascinating thing about the iPad discussion in the last week. I've had multiple Mac fanbois tell me "this is aimed at your parents" as in, a device for senior citizens to use. I find this simply astonishing - seriously - Apple is marketing a device for senior citizens? This is their new demographic? Not young, hip, mobile & trendy financially well-endowed folks, but people who live off a pension and scrape together money for bingo every Friday night? This conjecture that these people are all going to run out en masse and buy a piece of hot new technology, or that Apple would in any sane universe actually target this demographic, seems amazing.
> Everybody is underestimating the market penetration of netbooks right now
I can't tell if you're serious ... but I totally disagree. Netbooks, sadly, just can't seem to hit the price point they need to really hit the big time. They need to get down to about half or less what they are now (say $120) and perform about double. They need to meet some specific targets:
* I can afford to buy one for each of my kids
* I can afford to lose it when it gets dropped / stolen / stepped on
* I can easily play full screen video at reasonable quality
* I can easily look at the ridiculous 11 megapixel photos spewed out by my camera.
The current generation just doesn't do it. Not to say they won't / aren't selling - but they won't "go critical" until these conditions are met.
I still don't buy it. It was stated at one point that the attack vector was a "link sent by email or instant message". That really makes no sense for a machine used for testing.
My guess: probably the breach probably happened at a site or company external to google that *does* use IE6 and they had some kind of privileged access to google's servers, email accounts or something else. One way or another I would bet there is more to this but Google would much rather just lay the blame at IE6's fault than explain.
> The iP* products are consumer electronic devices, not general purpose machines
That's not how they are being sold. They are being marketed specifically as general purpose computers. How else would you justify the whole "There's an app for that" marketing campaign from Apple? They are saying "this is a general purpose computing device". If they are marketing the iPhone that way I can hardly think they will market the iPad as *less* general. And in doing this they are trying to redefine in the public mind and in the software industry what that is. The old definition was a device that lets you run an infinite universe of applications including whatever you might want to make yourself. The new definition is "you consume whatever the maker of the device deigns acceptable for you and in their business interests and you like it".
I want the *old* definition.
> I'll start to worry when nice, open, fidgetable devices aren't completely fricking ubiquitous anymore
Umm, then you should start worrying. That is the whole point. The whole reason everyone is clammoring about this is that Apple is setting a precedent here. Don't you think Microsoft would love to be able to tell you what you can and can't run on Windows? They'd be ecstatic if they could just "refuse" to let FireFox or iTunes etc. run just by saying "it doesn't meet our standards" or even worse "it competes with our own application". So why don't they? Because they could never get away with it. Even if there was no legal problem, people would go absolutely nuts and protest about it. But if Apple succeeds in creating a hugely successful device here that is totally locked down, and if they further succeed in establishing that it's perfectly ok to refuse an application on the basis that it competes with their own one then do you think other manufacturers will hold back once the general public and industry has accepted the precedent with Apple?
If you only start worrying about this when there are no other devices left than locked down controlled ones, you will have started worrying about 10 years too late. If you care about this at all, the time to worry is *now*.
I think you're opening pandora's box by endorsing OS discrimmination. The equation will look like:
OpenBSD Price =
- 20% discount for no viruses
+ 200% surcharge for probably hosting their own server
+ 200% surcharge for being a smartass to tech support
= 480% of Windows price.
Here's hoping that's exactly what they are doing. If they can keep it going for just 5 more years they should build able to build up ~$200M in the bank and fund a $5 - $7M development effort (say, 20 developers) into perpetuity. I'd much rather that than blowing $50M a year just because it's raining from the sky right now.
> by default, most browsers won't cache anything that is ssl-encrypted.
Not quite true. They will cache it, but some only in memory, and in some cases only when you send back particularly aggressive cache directives. FireFox was particularly poor at this for a long time, but now they changed the default setting so 3.x will work a bit better.
Hmm, how could having your photo publicly identified as being that of a terrorist possibly harm one's life? I can't imagine. That is, I can't imagine how people can possibly think this is acceptable. I can't think of any worse kind of defamation.
> Another part of it was that Google has a concept of how they run their business. That concept has been successful.
Agree. Google is notoriously ruthless in what they choose to do or not do. They identify areas where they can run absolutely automated IT solutions and do not even try to compete in areas that require heavy investment outside of that. They basically avoid anything that stops their fully automatic money-printing machine from running unattended. I think somewhere at the base of this is their realization that dealing with China is going to be an endless series of headaches requiring constant attention from their top level people focussed on things that are entirely unproductive for their core mission - so they just cut it out of their business model.
Seems like he's just done a mea culpa and asked the world to stop using PDFs as a document format.
He's basically said: "Our document format is out of control. We no longer have the ability to keep it secure. Run for the hills. Save your women and children if you can. Treat our product the same way you treat malicious .exe's when your browser encounters them. Whatever you do, don't use it for encoding simple read only documents, it's not meant for that."
The whole point of encryption is that no amount of software manipulation can bypass it. The data simply cannot be decoded without the key. If the software can bypass the encryption without the key under any circumstances then the encryption has been broken or didn't exist in the first place.
> Now I've mounted those drives under Linux by bypassing the login process. Instead of mounting sdc1 (assuming sdc is your encrypted flash drive), you mount sdc2.
Honestly, I think you could gain significant publicity if you publish detailed steps somewhere to demonstrate this. If you do, this is a huge and significant case of misleading advertising by the flash driver makers. Google ads + a single blog page probably will make it worth your time.
On the other hand, you could be mistaken, misleading us or something else. (I'm not saying you are, just that the claim you are making is huge and deserves / needs followup).
But it's cheap (~USD$20) and made by a single developer who gladly will give you the source and accept bug reports directly and even fix them occasionally. It's a pretty good deal.
I don't think google is unbeatable due to their size. Rather I think that search itself has such a high barrier to entry that nobody new can enter the market.
Can you name a single successful completely *new* entrant to the market in 10 years? Yes existing secondary players manage to eke out an existence. But there is not one new company in the search business that I know of in a decade. There is a reason for that - it's freakin' hard to do.