I am glad to see DRM go away on purchased music as I agree that its bad for numerous and already explained reasons but I absolutely do not want DRM to die. DRM is necessary to enable music subscription, movie rentals, game rentals and subscriptions and various other related ideas. In that case you don't "own" the file so its ok that they are enforcing some restrictions. Lock-in isn't even a huge problem as you can just resubscribe elsewhere if you get an incompatible device. Anyways, DRM has some beneficial uses in enabling valuable and interesting business models that otherwise would be difficult to make work.
Yeah, the split token is confusing, would be better to have real admins that are not allowed login privledge and can only be used via the elevation prompt. That way it would be completely obvious if you had rights to manipulate files or not.
An alternative they could use is to be specific in the permissions about whether the elevated token or the limited token had permissions as if they were two different users.
That is wrong, if your setup program is authored correctly to install per-user in a location that the user has rights to then UAC should not pop up. This includes locations in the registry, you must not write to machine wide locations in the registry or you need admin rights to do this. I still blame Microsoft for the fact that few pieces of software are correctly written as its a result of the non-security in past OS versions. That said, more and more programs are coming out not to require elevation in order to install and I think that as time goes on the majority of user side programs will be able to install as non-admin.
One disadvantage of installing per-user programs in a per-user location is that if multiple users on the machine want to use the software you end up with duplicate binaries. If this really becomes an issue log in as admin and install the software per-machine.
I guess the long and short of it is that Vista doesn't ask for admin rights more often than it should but instead that apps were written with the assumption that it didn't matter if you needed admin rights because everyone had them. This causes windows to seem like it needs admin rights for more things but it really doesn't. When apps become correctly written for vista and we retire our older apps Vista should ask for admin rights about the same amount as OSX or Linux.
This is completely unscientific in nature and I don't have links to the articles to prove what I read but there was some interview of middle to early high school students and some very high percentage of those interviewed did not buy cds and instead they "got music from the internet". Given that only 22 iTunes songs downloaded per iPod sold you probably won't wonder what those children meant by "got music from the internet".
Actually, that would work fine too as the price you pay for soda is approximately split as $0.20US for cup, $0.05 for all the soda a person can drink and the rest is profit. Soda is the most profitable item at Mcdonalds even with free refills. The large is just even more gravy but if mcdonalds never sold another large the soda would still be massively profitable.
As far as returns go on products, the US is slowly approaching a point where returns will be very difficult if not impossible due to the fact the pendulum has swung far away from the 70's-80's where warrenty laws were weak and companies were screwing consumers to now where consumers quite regularily abuse return policies in a number of ways.
So long as your graph were directional so that calls leaving a node were representative of the number of calls being made by the function represented by the node and that the number of calls entering the node were calls to the function being represented you could easily measure both the level of modularity and reuse and from that determine complexity. That said simpler API's sometimes require more calls and not less. I could make a single function that contained the entire windows API which would be no more or less complex than the windows API as it is now. It would just be a difference of calling many different functions with fewer parameters or calling a single function with lots and lots of parameters. Is there a measure in the graph of the complexity of the calls in addtion to the raw number of calls? I still think linux might be simpler I'm just saying that it is not necessarily so based purely on the number of methods called.
Re:That "fairly stable api" didn't help Microsoft
on
Vista - iPod Killer?
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· Score: 1
I have a funny feeling that Apple has at least 1 MSDN subscription that came with a full version of Vista in it.
The fix I read about today for at least part of thier troubles deals with UAC. That means that Apple made a bad (yet sickenly common across all software) assumption as to what rights they would have on a windows PC. At least that one problem has been well known for many months and quite publically announced.
Re:That "fairly stable api" didn't help Microsoft
on
Vista - iPod Killer?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
My point was that if the software had be started at the same time time as the zune software it could have released in January as well and been ready for vista. Instead Apple waits until release to send out a bulliten saying how awful Vista is for thier hardware. I agree it takes a while for new software to get written but you don't start writing the fixes the day the OS releases to the mass market when you could have started 6 months before and been completely ready for it.
Re:That "fairly stable api" didn't help Microsoft
on
Vista - iPod Killer?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Zune client version 1.2 was fully compatible with Vista and released near the beginning of January.
I probably shouldn't address this, but if you notice I said 2gb of ram is the magic number I've found for Vista which most modern motherboards support fairly well. 4gb of ram, so far as I know, would only be well supported in a 64bit version of Vista which I have never personally tried.
It depends on how the drivers install as to whether you need a reboot. For video drivers it also depends on your video card being able to restart independant of the rest of the computer which I think is a requirement for a vista premium video card. I did not always have to restart on XP to install new video drivers and I have to reboot even less on vista but reboots are still sometimes required. Another thing to note is that sometimes installers request a reboot when one is not actually necessary which may be happening in this case.
I will say that ATI has had more success writing new drivers for Vista but I have not yet hit any issues with the Nvidia drivers on my other box running vista.
Knowing enough Microsoft employees given my locality to Redmond I have learned that they both use Microsoft products and speak out strongly against what they feel are bad decisions due to extreme pride both in thier own work and others work at the company. This is a good thing for a company and healthy so long as it is handled in the right way. From everything I can tell Microsoft at the grass roots really does strive to make the best products even though they don't always achieve that goal for various reasons.
With visual studio and a few other small apps running I regularily thrash the hard disk with memory paging under vista. That said I don't think its so horrible for the OS to use more ram if it gives features that are worth the cost (What, like $200?). That said I haven't been convinced that I get those features yet but we will see. I am lucky enough that by accident I already had 2 gig of ram in all the pc's that I own and it is only my work machines that only have 1gig.
Its worse than that. There has been a fairly stable api in vista for the last 6 months and even before that there were little changes for the last year. Apple just decided not to fix thier software for whatever reason and now they are trying to make Vista look bad instead of taking the blame for being slow to support windows users.
It seems like this will be a civil case in which case the person asking the question won't be pleading as that is something that is part of criminal proceedings.
Did he ever think that maybe they need TONS of bandwidth to replicate thier data between the thousands of servers in thier giant backend? Did he ever think that power costs are significant enough that not moving near cheap power is a significant business disadvantage? I work on a team dealing with exactly the same datacenter issues and I highly doubt any sinister plans on googles part (even though I don't personally trust them for completely different reasons).
The answer is easy, Google is just trying to keep up with the monster they have created.
This seems like exactly the thing we SHOULD be spending federal research grant dollars on. I am sure that the cancer societies in america would be happy to fund something if it is truely as promising as the article states. Once the drug has approval it will be a no brainer for every drug company out there to pick it up as it would be wildy popular and though the price would quickly drop to the marginal cost and there would be no monopoly profits, it is still wise to sell as it is a perfectly good business idea to operate at 0 economic profit.
There is nothing at all wrong with showing political films in school so long as your students are not being indoctrinated via presenting the film as fact. I welcome discussion of global warming even though as of now I haven't been shown (though I admit to not having looked in detail for a while now) evidence that convinces me that global warming is and issue or that humans are the cause of it. The key (as with evolution vs creation) is teaching the children to be critical thinkers and giving them the skills to take information from various sources and weigh and measure it before synthesizing it into thier view of reality. If more people were capable of this many of the silly yet world shaking arguments would melt away.
No, they are the web search that 99% of people type every idea that hits thier mind into from the same IP and browser window. So Google is likely to have FAR more info about you than Microsoft even wishes to have in thier wettest advertising dreams.
I don't know if its still there but somewhere in the privacy statements for MSN sites was a 1-800 number you could call to opt out of all ad targeting that was linked to your passport account.
This is not new and so far as I know not unique to Microsoft. The advertiser buys a "segment" of people and when a person in the segment views a Microsoft owned website they see the add that is "targeted" to them. A segment of people would be like Male 18-25 who likes cars. To be honest this is the same sort of thing that advertisers have purchased for years its just that Microsoft has the ability to better know if the viewer has those tastes. I'm not sure at all why this is some sort of new privacy concern for people. I also think most of the readers here understand that every other major advertising player online is trying to do the same thing. Those big players probably being Yahoo and Google of course.
Ways to avoid being "tracked" are to clear your cookies and don't sign in to sites. Of course then you will get to see the ads you could care less about instead of something that might possibly be useful to you.
As far as the claim that a person that buys a large portion of ads could start to identify people I don't at all buy it because Microsoft states, and I trust they follow the statement given the scrutiny that they recieve from all sides, that they don't pass your data on. Whats likely is that a person buys a segment for thier ads and at the end they get a report that says, "We were able to satisfy xx% of your request in xx days". They might also get info like "If you had booked your add on xxx.msn.com instead of zzz.msn.com we could have satisfied tt% more of your request and if you had booked both we could have satisfied the entire request."
One way that you could be "identified" is if you actually clicked through any of the ads in which case they could assign your IP or a cookie on your machine to a profile that has the segment information from the ad you clicked through on pre-populated.
A better solution is to strictly enforce following distance laws. A study was done on traffic patterns in Seattle area to see how they could be improved and found that the single most important thing to fix the issue was to give proper following distance between cars. This counteracts the pipeline bubbles (yes almost the same thing as a bubble in your processor pipeline) by giving room to absorb sudden stops and also solves some of the merging issues that we see. Its more likely than not that even though the one jackass that was spoken about in the summary triggered the slowdown the real cause was everyone crowding the person in front of them so that the sudden stop was propogated in perpetuity instead of being absorbed and spread across the whole flow.
That won't sink vista though I don't think. Nothing I've seen in vista prevents any of my old stuff from working and if the new stuff sucks due to drm it may well sink but I still am unlikely to unintall vista to put xp back on the box and likely if its a new machine I won't even have vista to put on it.
Re:Blind capitalism doesn't work in social situati
on
More A's, More Pay
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· Score: 1
I think that we would be FAR better off offering performance based incentives to the parents of the children and not the teachers. For the most part teachers I've seen try to do a reasonable job at teaching and many of the times when they don't succeed it is as a result of families not living up to thier end of the deal. It is my very deep personal belief that education is the responsibility of the family and the school is just one tool that can be used to accomplish this task. I also believe you can only get out of school what you as a family put into it. If you just go and hang out you won't do nearly as well as if you go and actively participate in the entire experience. If every family had some sort of incentive (that they noticed I guess since education was an incentive in and of itself in my family) to hold thier children up to high standards I think it would go a long way toward fixing the problem rather than shoving it entirely off onto the state who can't control enough of a childs life to have the great effect on it that we all expect.
Believe me I'm not saying that schools don't need improvements, I'm more saying that those changes should be driven by the families of all the students rather than be driven by the state if we want those changes to have a high effectiveness. Its been shown that schools that do the best are not the ones with the most money but the ones with the best family participation.
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I am glad to see DRM go away on purchased music as I agree that its bad for numerous and already explained reasons but I absolutely do not want DRM to die. DRM is necessary to enable music subscription, movie rentals, game rentals and subscriptions and various other related ideas. In that case you don't "own" the file so its ok that they are enforcing some restrictions. Lock-in isn't even a huge problem as you can just resubscribe elsewhere if you get an incompatible device. Anyways, DRM has some beneficial uses in enabling valuable and interesting business models that otherwise would be difficult to make work.
Yeah, the split token is confusing, would be better to have real admins that are not allowed login privledge and can only be used via the elevation prompt. That way it would be completely obvious if you had rights to manipulate files or not.
An alternative they could use is to be specific in the permissions about whether the elevated token or the limited token had permissions as if they were two different users.
That is wrong, if your setup program is authored correctly to install per-user in a location that the user has rights to then UAC should not pop up. This includes locations in the registry, you must not write to machine wide locations in the registry or you need admin rights to do this. I still blame Microsoft for the fact that few pieces of software are correctly written as its a result of the non-security in past OS versions. That said, more and more programs are coming out not to require elevation in order to install and I think that as time goes on the majority of user side programs will be able to install as non-admin.
One disadvantage of installing per-user programs in a per-user location is that if multiple users on the machine want to use the software you end up with duplicate binaries. If this really becomes an issue log in as admin and install the software per-machine.
I guess the long and short of it is that Vista doesn't ask for admin rights more often than it should but instead that apps were written with the assumption that it didn't matter if you needed admin rights because everyone had them. This causes windows to seem like it needs admin rights for more things but it really doesn't. When apps become correctly written for vista and we retire our older apps Vista should ask for admin rights about the same amount as OSX or Linux.
Its possible that the version he tried was a beta or RC in which case there were more dialogs popped and have since been fixed.
This is completely unscientific in nature and I don't have links to the articles to prove what I read but there was some interview of middle to early high school students and some very high percentage of those interviewed did not buy cds and instead they "got music from the internet". Given that only 22 iTunes songs downloaded per iPod sold you probably won't wonder what those children meant by "got music from the internet".
Actually, that would work fine too as the price you pay for soda is approximately split as $0.20US for cup, $0.05 for all the soda a person can drink and the rest is profit. Soda is the most profitable item at Mcdonalds even with free refills. The large is just even more gravy but if mcdonalds never sold another large the soda would still be massively profitable.
As far as returns go on products, the US is slowly approaching a point where returns will be very difficult if not impossible due to the fact the pendulum has swung far away from the 70's-80's where warrenty laws were weak and companies were screwing consumers to now where consumers quite regularily abuse return policies in a number of ways.
So long as your graph were directional so that calls leaving a node were representative of the number of calls being made by the function represented by the node and that the number of calls entering the node were calls to the function being represented you could easily measure both the level of modularity and reuse and from that determine complexity. That said simpler API's sometimes require more calls and not less. I could make a single function that contained the entire windows API which would be no more or less complex than the windows API as it is now. It would just be a difference of calling many different functions with fewer parameters or calling a single function with lots and lots of parameters. Is there a measure in the graph of the complexity of the calls in addtion to the raw number of calls? I still think linux might be simpler I'm just saying that it is not necessarily so based purely on the number of methods called.
I have a funny feeling that Apple has at least 1 MSDN subscription that came with a full version of Vista in it.
The fix I read about today for at least part of thier troubles deals with UAC. That means that Apple made a bad (yet sickenly common across all software) assumption as to what rights they would have on a windows PC. At least that one problem has been well known for many months and quite publically announced.
My point was that if the software had be started at the same time time as the zune software it could have released in January as well and been ready for vista. Instead Apple waits until release to send out a bulliten saying how awful Vista is for thier hardware. I agree it takes a while for new software to get written but you don't start writing the fixes the day the OS releases to the mass market when you could have started 6 months before and been completely ready for it.
Zune client version 1.2 was fully compatible with Vista and released near the beginning of January.
I probably shouldn't address this, but if you notice I said 2gb of ram is the magic number I've found for Vista which most modern motherboards support fairly well. 4gb of ram, so far as I know, would only be well supported in a 64bit version of Vista which I have never personally tried.
It depends on how the drivers install as to whether you need a reboot. For video drivers it also depends on your video card being able to restart independant of the rest of the computer which I think is a requirement for a vista premium video card. I did not always have to restart on XP to install new video drivers and I have to reboot even less on vista but reboots are still sometimes required. Another thing to note is that sometimes installers request a reboot when one is not actually necessary which may be happening in this case.
I will say that ATI has had more success writing new drivers for Vista but I have not yet hit any issues with the Nvidia drivers on my other box running vista.
Knowing enough Microsoft employees given my locality to Redmond I have learned that they both use Microsoft products and speak out strongly against what they feel are bad decisions due to extreme pride both in thier own work and others work at the company. This is a good thing for a company and healthy so long as it is handled in the right way. From everything I can tell Microsoft at the grass roots really does strive to make the best products even though they don't always achieve that goal for various reasons.
With visual studio and a few other small apps running I regularily thrash the hard disk with memory paging under vista. That said I don't think its so horrible for the OS to use more ram if it gives features that are worth the cost (What, like $200?). That said I haven't been convinced that I get those features yet but we will see. I am lucky enough that by accident I already had 2 gig of ram in all the pc's that I own and it is only my work machines that only have 1gig.
Its worse than that. There has been a fairly stable api in vista for the last 6 months and even before that there were little changes for the last year. Apple just decided not to fix thier software for whatever reason and now they are trying to make Vista look bad instead of taking the blame for being slow to support windows users.
It seems like this will be a civil case in which case the person asking the question won't be pleading as that is something that is part of criminal proceedings.
Did he ever think that maybe they need TONS of bandwidth to replicate thier data between the thousands of servers in thier giant backend? Did he ever think that power costs are significant enough that not moving near cheap power is a significant business disadvantage? I work on a team dealing with exactly the same datacenter issues and I highly doubt any sinister plans on googles part (even though I don't personally trust them for completely different reasons).
The answer is easy, Google is just trying to keep up with the monster they have created.
This seems like exactly the thing we SHOULD be spending federal research grant dollars on. I am sure that the cancer societies in america would be happy to fund something if it is truely as promising as the article states. Once the drug has approval it will be a no brainer for every drug company out there to pick it up as it would be wildy popular and though the price would quickly drop to the marginal cost and there would be no monopoly profits, it is still wise to sell as it is a perfectly good business idea to operate at 0 economic profit.
There is nothing at all wrong with showing political films in school so long as your students are not being indoctrinated via presenting the film as fact. I welcome discussion of global warming even though as of now I haven't been shown (though I admit to not having looked in detail for a while now) evidence that convinces me that global warming is and issue or that humans are the cause of it. The key (as with evolution vs creation) is teaching the children to be critical thinkers and giving them the skills to take information from various sources and weigh and measure it before synthesizing it into thier view of reality. If more people were capable of this many of the silly yet world shaking arguments would melt away.
No, they are the web search that 99% of people type every idea that hits thier mind into from the same IP and browser window. So Google is likely to have FAR more info about you than Microsoft even wishes to have in thier wettest advertising dreams.
I don't know if its still there but somewhere in the privacy statements for MSN sites was a 1-800 number you could call to opt out of all ad targeting that was linked to your passport account.
This is not new and so far as I know not unique to Microsoft. The advertiser buys a "segment" of people and when a person in the segment views a Microsoft owned website they see the add that is "targeted" to them. A segment of people would be like Male 18-25 who likes cars. To be honest this is the same sort of thing that advertisers have purchased for years its just that Microsoft has the ability to better know if the viewer has those tastes. I'm not sure at all why this is some sort of new privacy concern for people. I also think most of the readers here understand that every other major advertising player online is trying to do the same thing. Those big players probably being Yahoo and Google of course.
Ways to avoid being "tracked" are to clear your cookies and don't sign in to sites. Of course then you will get to see the ads you could care less about instead of something that might possibly be useful to you.
As far as the claim that a person that buys a large portion of ads could start to identify people I don't at all buy it because Microsoft states, and I trust they follow the statement given the scrutiny that they recieve from all sides, that they don't pass your data on. Whats likely is that a person buys a segment for thier ads and at the end they get a report that says, "We were able to satisfy xx% of your request in xx days". They might also get info like "If you had booked your add on xxx.msn.com instead of zzz.msn.com we could have satisfied tt% more of your request and if you had booked both we could have satisfied the entire request."
One way that you could be "identified" is if you actually clicked through any of the ads in which case they could assign your IP or a cookie on your machine to a profile that has the segment information from the ad you clicked through on pre-populated.
A better solution is to strictly enforce following distance laws. A study was done on traffic patterns in Seattle area to see how they could be improved and found that the single most important thing to fix the issue was to give proper following distance between cars. This counteracts the pipeline bubbles (yes almost the same thing as a bubble in your processor pipeline) by giving room to absorb sudden stops and also solves some of the merging issues that we see. Its more likely than not that even though the one jackass that was spoken about in the summary triggered the slowdown the real cause was everyone crowding the person in front of them so that the sudden stop was propogated in perpetuity instead of being absorbed and spread across the whole flow.
That won't sink vista though I don't think. Nothing I've seen in vista prevents any of my old stuff from working and if the new stuff sucks due to drm it may well sink but I still am unlikely to unintall vista to put xp back on the box and likely if its a new machine I won't even have vista to put on it.
I think that we would be FAR better off offering performance based incentives to the parents of the children and not the teachers. For the most part teachers I've seen try to do a reasonable job at teaching and many of the times when they don't succeed it is as a result of families not living up to thier end of the deal. It is my very deep personal belief that education is the responsibility of the family and the school is just one tool that can be used to accomplish this task. I also believe you can only get out of school what you as a family put into it. If you just go and hang out you won't do nearly as well as if you go and actively participate in the entire experience. If every family had some sort of incentive (that they noticed I guess since education was an incentive in and of itself in my family) to hold thier children up to high standards I think it would go a long way toward fixing the problem rather than shoving it entirely off onto the state who can't control enough of a childs life to have the great effect on it that we all expect.
Believe me I'm not saying that schools don't need improvements, I'm more saying that those changes should be driven by the families of all the students rather than be driven by the state if we want those changes to have a high effectiveness. Its been shown that schools that do the best are not the ones with the most money but the ones with the best family participation.