Somewhere on the ArsTechnica forums you will find a cookbook that was created by the members there. There were some pretty good suggestions, and some pretty bad ones as well
Maybe we should judge all mediums by some of the worst representations.
Maybe movies shouldn't be protected because all of those actions thrillers just have violence.
Maybe books shouldn't be protected because all those romance novels are just softcore porn.
Maybe music shouldn't be protected because all that gangster rap just talks about killing cops.
What the hell is wrong with people. Sure there are games that have no decent content, but there are also games like black and white, sim city, etc that actually have redeeming value. I don't think most games should be banned from kids, regardless, or more precisely because of their content. If I didn't have video games to vent my frustration with when I was younger I might have vented in a far more destructive manner. Give me the violent games, god knows the sims aren't going to keep me from being frustrated with the stupidity of this judge.
I would rather have a computer that I can actually upgrade then one that looks nice (Mine happens to be both and no one will mistake it for a lamp. Yes iMac, I was looking at you when I said that). Moreover the trend to replace every monitor with an LCD annoys the hell out of me. LCDs suck: they cost to much, their pixel refresh rate blows ass, there are invariably dead pixels, most have a limited view angle. The only thing they have going for them is size and if IBM would get off their ass and ship the inch thick CRTs they made LCDs wouldn't even have that.
Ah, typical blind "If its from MS its crap" sentiments from the zelots. ActiveX controls are about the best technology for producing Web apps (Which are huge in the corperate world). Their only real drawback is that they only run on windows (Well, ATL ActiveX controls theoretically run on Solaris and MacOS if the appropriate MS software is preinstalled) but guess what, since 95% of the desktop market is Windows I guess this doesn't matter. ActiveX controls are a huge step over the antiquated plugin model that Netscape uses, it is kind of nice to be able to script against the control which isn't feasible with a plugin in Netscape. When compared to Applets ActiveX controls are far faster, have far better gui tools, and are just as secure as Applets. With an applet you can gain elivated permissions that allow things like file I/O by making calls to the VM, with an ActiveX control you have to Implement IObjectSafety to be designated safe to do this. With WinForm Controls (the next gen ActiveX control) the corporation will be able to have even more control over security by defining policies in IE that designate just what kind of privlages the control has. Oh, and since the CLR isn't platform specific WinForm controls can theoretically run under any OS. Mozilla is so stuck on rendering HTML according to a standard that they team hasn't realized that browsers are slowly accrueing far mor functionality. Software now runs in a browser, but applets don't cut it and plugins just blow ass. The only technology that can do this effectively is ActiveX (and now winform controls).
The mozilla team has produced an activex control container. It doesn't give you near the functionality since its a plugin and does not allow you to script against the activex control but it will allow controls to run in mozilla.
...A front page troll. How clever. And now we can listen to all the various fanatics proclaim that C# is shit and the Java R0x0r5. Of course no one here is going to agree with the author, they all are so blind they assume that anything MS does will immediately suck and fail (you know, like how they failed to capture the desktop market, failed to capture the browser market, etc).
Truth to the matter is that Sun may be in a bit of trouble here. Sure, C# isn't currently as portable since there are no VMs for other platforms, yet (there will be a freebsd version, and then there is Mono. And since they did submit C# to a standards commitee anyone could develope one) however its much faster, has far superior client side features, has a much better IDE and is just as competitive server side. Moreover it is relitively easy for a Java guy to go pick up C#. I suspect that we will see a good deal of people going over to the "Dark Side" once.net server is released.
On another note, how come so many OSS guys like Sun yet Hate MS. The only difference between Sun and MS is that MS plays the game better. Sun does try though. Remember which one challenged the GPL, hint, it wasn't MS.
I just love the how the average slashdotter automatically assumes something when they have no practical experiene in the matter. I once heard this, that makes me an authority.
Well Mr. Authority, here is the code to get file I/O privlages with the MS and Netscape VMs. I don't know the syntax for the sun vm off the top of my head, but it will recognize the netscape syntax (throws a Depricated method exception but still does what it is supposed to, at least in 1.3 vm).
MS syntax: import com.ms.security.PermissionID; import com.ms.security.PolicyEngine;
The imports are provided by the respective vm vendors. These are method calls to the VM to turn off permissions. Sun is well aware these exist, in fact Sun endorses them because applets would be worthless in the realm of Corperate Web applications without any file IO ability.
And no, the applet or ActiveX control do not have to be signed to do this, however most browsers default security settings keep usigned applets/ActiveX controls from running.
Its not a bug. It is a "feature" of each JVM. Each jvm has exposed classes that allow you to turn off the security, including the sun VM. Some of the VMs notify users when extra privlages are being exerted, others don't. This isn't a feature of Java, its a feature of the vm, each vm having different methods for doing this. I think the vm vendors realized that applets would be worthless in the realm of web apps if the applet was stuck in the sand box (what good is an app if you can't save files, etc).
I know for a fact that the MS, Netscape and Sun VMs support this. See my comment to the other guy who replied to my message for the syntax to do this with the MS and Netscape VMs. I am sure the other VMs support this feature (being that IBM host on demand does file IO I suspect IBM added that privlage to their VM).
IE supports more of the standards then any other browser, its just that it also supports additional features. Heaven forbid a company improve upon something (and Yes zealots, a lot of what they have added is an improvement. Thats why people use the additional stuff). No one complains when cars have additional safety features that aren't in the safety standard, but of course MS doesn't make cars so I guess that makes it OK.
I have to say I don't understand your little "God forbid ActiveX" comment. ActiveX controls are many times faster then applets and contrary to popular belief, are as secure (With an applet all you have to do is make a simple call to the VM to disable the sandbox, with activeX you have to implement IObjectSafety to be able to do certain things. I can write an applet that will erase your harddrive). ActiveX controls are in every way superior to the craptacular plugin model that netscape implemented. The MS deployment paradigm using cabs beats the hell out of what any other browser thought up. And I am sure the 35 million screaming AOL users will be yelling at AOL when all of the IE specific sites put up messages saying they are using an incompatible browser. Moreover I suspect that the number of users will be much smaller. All large corperations deploy IE as the primary browser because IE has the best support for Web based applications, which are far easier to deploy and maintain then client side fat clients. When the users get home from work they are going to use the browser they are most familiar with, that is, not Mozilla. AOL will convert a lot of people with this little push, but I suspect the majority of users will remain IE users.
Aquire a much larger group of users? What, is 95% of the desktop market not enough? There isn't a "Much larger group of users" left for MS to aquire on the desktop side of things (since XP is a desktop OS).
In most user's minds the internet is synonumous with computers. It is the biggest selling point for most users and the internet is more then just a web browser. Its amazingly convinient to open up windows explorer, browse through all my directories and then seemlessly browse the directories on an ftp site. I can do this because Windows Explorer simply loads the IE com object when it needs to. You would be amazed at the number of applications that load up the IE com object to do all kinds of little things, because its so well integrated that you never notice. These things make my life easier. Sure, each component could have its own code to do these things but why should it. This achieves the same purpose, but allows for smaller programs because they all share components. And its not like MS is the only one who can use these components, all of IEs interfaces are very well documented so that anyone can seemlessly integrate internet functionality into their application.
Oh, and Mozilla has IE beat on a couple things, the popup killer definitely being on of the more usefull. However I wrote an application that keeps IE from spawning new windows when I don't want it to so that doesn't really bother me. As for Mozilla being faster and more stable this is just wishful thinking. In some cases its faster (not the majority though), but.99 crashes on me a couple times a day. With IE I can go two or three days without it crashing (at home, at work it crashes all the time, but thats my fault since its my application within IE causing it to crash). I don't think mozilla is prettier but thats because I prefer a minimilistic User interface. This is personal opinion though.
IE really shines when it comes to web based applications. I am sorry but ActiveX controls beat the shit out of both plugins and applets (and contrary to popular belief, ActiveX controls are no more dangerous then an applet. With an applet you can make calls to the vm to circumvent the sandbox, with an ActiveX control you can use IObjectXSafety to designate yourself as safe to instantiate and script within a web browser). Moreover the cab distribution method in IE beats the shit out of smart installation in Mozilla.
Finally, the IE DOM is superior to Mozillas (oh and curse IE for extending the standard, how dare they add functionality.).
Mozilla is a good browser, better then IE in some respects, but overall IE is still better. At least there is competition now. It will continue to make both browsers better.
As for media player, well, obviously we are at different opinions about this. My argument above for the integration of the browser pretty much applies here as well. Judge as you like. I find having the media player objects in my system helpful even though I don't normally use media player to listen to music. Media player doesn't benifit from being integrated with the OS, its every other application that uses media player that benifits.
Now on to my horribly spelling of supremacy and the point I was making. First, I shouldn't have said special APIs. I should have said undocumented APIs. Obviously MS has made changes to Kerberos and several other components. However they have documented all of the APIs for these components (even if they didn't release the source). People were bitching because MS was supposedly using super secret APIs to created better Apps. I bet they aren't. Sure they aren't going to tell the Samba team how to make duplicate APIs, but they will tell someone how to create an app that utilize the APIs for some functionality. As for the undocumented file format this is a freeking stupid issue. Of course MS has their own file format, and guess what, SO DOES DAMN NEAR ANY OTHER SOFTWARE COMPANY. And you know what, none of us are going to tell our competition how to read our files. That would just be the definition of stupid. Here you go competitor, this is our file format, now you can make a migration tool to steal all of our customers and drive us out of business.
Anyway, these are my opinions. Obviously we don't agree and just as obviously we aren't going to convince the other to change their opinion. I also wish MS would stop bundling a lot of stuff, like windows messanger and Movie Maker. And honestly it would be really hard to swap components since they would need the exact same COM interface that the MS products have. And look at it from this point, MS already recieves a lot of shit about instability (desserved with the 9x line, not with the nt line), if their components were replaced with unstable third party components then that is going to reflect even worse on MS. Sure, third parties should be allowed to place their icons on the desktop and OEMS should be allowed to take shortcuts off the desktop but that is an entirely different discussion (e.g. to what extent should a company be able to fight competitors).
Hay, if front page stories have glaring spelling mistakes in them then I don't think I can be reprimanded for spelling something wrong deep within a comment tree. Besides, you knew what I was talking about.
I too am a coder, and the amount of work does not stem from the difficulty in making the command line tools (since that is in fact fairly simple, it was hyperbole when I refered to using a gui config for nix) but from the shear volume of feature that need to be migrated. Hell, on just the desktop OS it would take a damn long time to convert all of the little configurations here and there (just think of all the little places you go configure settings, folder options, management console, display options, everything in the control panel). With advanced server there are millions of settings to worry about. I had heard rumors of a command line only version of server that someone mentioned above but I have yet to see it and I am curious if thats just a rumor or not.
- Everything configurable via the command line for power users > Everything is already configurable from the registry. For power admins they can just make a.reg file to apply the necessary changes to all PCs. Though in all seriousness do you have any idea how much work it would take to also make everything configurable from the command line. Almost as much work as it would take to make things configurable in a GUI for *nix.
- Non-integrated browser > There are a lot of integrated components I want out of the OS (like fucking windows messenger) but the browser isn't one of them. I would argue that surfing the web is one of the core features of the computer and thus should be part of the OS. Since IE happens to be the best browser on the market you can't really complain. Its not like they are keeping you from using a different browser.
- Non-integrated media player > Again, playing media is now a core feature of the computer. Users expect this functionality out of the box, thus it belongs in a desktop OS (server OS is a different matter). Moreover it should be as feature rich as possible, which will cause some intermingling with the OS. If you want to use a different media player, feel free, there isn't anything stopping you.
- Drivers for USB 2.0, Bluetooth, and Firewire > USB 2.0 and Firewire are expected in a service pack to XP. Bluetooth would be cool though.
- 100% documented APIs > I honestly don't believe that microsoft gains suppremissy by using special APIs. The reason MS products tend to be better then the compitition is that MS puts more people on the team, and hires brighter people. If someone from the office team came and asked someone on the platform dev team to add a special API to make their life easier I think the platform dev would tell the office guy to fuck off.
- No WPA > Agreed. Of course the corperate version doesn't have it...
Honestly, there is a lot I would like to see change in windows. For example I don't want to pay for Windows Movie Maker or any of the other extranious applications MS has decided to bundle. Some stuff should be with the OS, internet and media integration is a good thing. It provides a richer user experience that most people will use.
Before you feel all high and mighty I think I should point out that something likely 75% of all redhat boxes are rooted in the first 24 hours. Moreover, I have pretty good uptimes on my windows xp box. I don't think I have ever seen it bluescreen, and the only reason the uptime isn't higher is because I occassionally have to reboot it when I apply a critical update (which is so much easier then recompiling my kernal to get a fix in). When I was running linux as a desktop OS I was crashing all the time. Most of that is the fault of the software I was running, not the OS, but regardless it does not reflect terribly well on linux. MS has a long way to go, but Linux is far from perfect and I think you should realize that.
use remote desktop, which is built in. Its the best remote desktop solution I have ever used. Its fast, responive, and it even lets you stream audio over the connection. It requires the remote desktop client, which can be installed on any windows pc (not just XP).
Emulating games will be the toughest accomplishment. More and more games are being written in DirectX, which goes through pretty big changes every year or so (the difference between 8 and 7 is huge). Its going to be a lot of work to make directX compatibility layers, and by the time a decent version is ready Microsoft will probably have released a new version.
Moreover people fail to realized that software isn't the only thing linux needs to be compatible with. Windows is compatible with damn near every piece of hardware produced (though there is usually a lag time for drivers when a new Windows is released). No other OS can really claim this. Wine isn't going to help here, hardware companies need to start caring about other OSes (and either produce their own drivers and release documentation so others can make drivers).
a more likely scenerio is that they are testing the fix. Microsoft is usually rather quick about releasing things, but they believe in testing it first. Great concept that.
Oh, and it will be available on windows update so that it will actually have wide spread adoption. Lets see how wide spread the linux fix is. Since 80% of redhat boxes are rooted in the first 24 hours there seems to be a rather large precedence for boxes not being patched when they should be. Get off your fucking high horse buddy. Microsoft may be a lot of things, but they aren't stupid. If they were they would never have gained absolute control of the desktop.
You can already do the data storage thing with Active Directory in Windows 2000 Server. This will just be a much better implementation of this.
On an unrelated note, the claim that this will break all current applications is a flat out lie. Microsoft has abstracted most of their file system APIs (which is why the same API works for FAT, FAT32, and all versions of NTFS). These APIs will work just as well with the new file system.
"More than 80 percent of respondents across the country understood how to work a TV better than a computer, something for the computer industry to ponder long and hard. "
Gee, you don't say. Maybe thats because a TV has limited functionality when compared to a computer. Here is is another amazing fact "99.9% of the people surveyed understand how to work a toaster better then a Nuclear Reactor". Obviously the Nuclear reactor industry has something to learn from the toaster industry.
The Educational MSDN license that the CS department at the college I attended had allowed the department to freely burn copies of all the MS software and distribute it to students. MS is not stupid. They want students developing on MS platfroms so that when they go into industry those same people continue developing for MS platforms.
Slashdot Mirror
Somewhere on the ArsTechnica forums you will find a cookbook that was created by the members there. There were some pretty good suggestions, and some pretty bad ones as well
Maybe we should judge all mediums by some of the worst representations.
Maybe movies shouldn't be protected because all of those actions thrillers just have violence.
Maybe books shouldn't be protected because all those romance novels are just softcore porn.
Maybe music shouldn't be protected because all that gangster rap just talks about killing cops.
What the hell is wrong with people. Sure there are games that have no decent content, but there are also games like black and white, sim city, etc that actually have redeeming value. I don't think most games should be banned from kids, regardless, or more precisely because of their content. If I didn't have video games to vent my frustration with when I was younger I might have vented in a far more destructive manner. Give me the violent games, god knows the sims aren't going to keep me from being frustrated with the stupidity of this judge.
I would rather have a computer that I can actually upgrade then one that looks nice (Mine happens to be both and no one will mistake it for a lamp. Yes iMac, I was looking at you when I said that). Moreover the trend to replace every monitor with an LCD annoys the hell out of me. LCDs suck: they cost to much, their pixel refresh rate blows ass, there are invariably dead pixels, most have a limited view angle. The only thing they have going for them is size and if IBM would get off their ass and ship the inch thick CRTs they made LCDs wouldn't even have that.
Ah, typical blind "If its from MS its crap" sentiments from the zelots. ActiveX controls are about the best technology for producing Web apps (Which are huge in the corperate world). Their only real drawback is that they only run on windows (Well, ATL ActiveX controls theoretically run on Solaris and MacOS if the appropriate MS software is preinstalled) but guess what, since 95% of the desktop market is Windows I guess this doesn't matter. ActiveX controls are a huge step over the antiquated plugin model that Netscape uses, it is kind of nice to be able to script against the control which isn't feasible with a plugin in Netscape. When compared to Applets ActiveX controls are far faster, have far better gui tools, and are just as secure as Applets. With an applet you can gain elivated permissions that allow things like file I/O by making calls to the VM, with an ActiveX control you have to Implement IObjectSafety to be designated safe to do this. With WinForm Controls (the next gen ActiveX control) the corporation will be able to have even more control over security by defining policies in IE that designate just what kind of privlages the control has. Oh, and since the CLR isn't platform specific WinForm controls can theoretically run under any OS. Mozilla is so stuck on rendering HTML according to a standard that they team hasn't realized that browsers are slowly accrueing far mor functionality. Software now runs in a browser, but applets don't cut it and plugins just blow ass. The only technology that can do this effectively is ActiveX (and now winform controls).
The mozilla team has produced an activex control container. It doesn't give you near the functionality since its a plugin and does not allow you to script against the activex control but it will allow controls to run in mozilla.
...A front page troll. How clever. And now we can listen to all the various fanatics proclaim that C# is shit and the Java R0x0r5. Of course no one here is going to agree with the author, they all are so blind they assume that anything MS does will immediately suck and fail (you know, like how they failed to capture the desktop market, failed to capture the browser market, etc).
.net server is released.
Truth to the matter is that Sun may be in a bit of trouble here. Sure, C# isn't currently as portable since there are no VMs for other platforms, yet (there will be a freebsd version, and then there is Mono. And since they did submit C# to a standards commitee anyone could develope one) however its much faster, has far superior client side features, has a much better IDE and is just as competitive server side. Moreover it is relitively easy for a Java guy to go pick up C#. I suspect that we will see a good deal of people going over to the "Dark Side" once
On another note, how come so many OSS guys like Sun yet Hate MS. The only difference between Sun and MS is that MS plays the game better. Sun does try though. Remember which one challenged the GPL, hint, it wasn't MS.
I just love the how the average slashdotter automatically assumes something when they have no practical experiene in the matter. I once heard this, that makes me an authority.
Well Mr. Authority, here is the code to get file I/O privlages with the MS and Netscape VMs. I don't know the syntax for the sun vm off the top of my head, but it will recognize the netscape syntax (throws a Depricated method exception but still does what it is supposed to, at least in 1.3 vm).
MS syntax:
import com.ms.security.PermissionID;
import com.ms.security.PolicyEngine;
PolicyEngine.assertPermission( PermissionID.FILEIO );
Netscape:
import netscape.security.PrivilegeManager;
PrivilegeManager.enablePrivilege( "UniversalFileAccess" );
The imports are provided by the respective vm vendors. These are method calls to the VM to turn off permissions. Sun is well aware these exist, in fact Sun endorses them because applets would be worthless in the realm of Corperate Web applications without any file IO ability.
And no, the applet or ActiveX control do not have to be signed to do this, however most browsers default security settings keep usigned applets/ActiveX controls from running.
Its not a bug. It is a "feature" of each JVM. Each jvm has exposed classes that allow you to turn off the security, including the sun VM. Some of the VMs notify users when extra privlages are being exerted, others don't. This isn't a feature of Java, its a feature of the vm, each vm having different methods for doing this. I think the vm vendors realized that applets would be worthless in the realm of web apps if the applet was stuck in the sand box (what good is an app if you can't save files, etc).
I know for a fact that the MS, Netscape and Sun VMs support this. See my comment to the other guy who replied to my message for the syntax to do this with the MS and Netscape VMs. I am sure the other VMs support this feature (being that IBM host on demand does file IO I suspect IBM added that privlage to their VM).
you have been enlightened.
IE supports more of the standards then any other browser, its just that it also supports additional features. Heaven forbid a company improve upon something (and Yes zealots, a lot of what they have added is an improvement. Thats why people use the additional stuff). No one complains when cars have additional safety features that aren't in the safety standard, but of course MS doesn't make cars so I guess that makes it OK.
I have to say I don't understand your little "God forbid ActiveX" comment. ActiveX controls are many times faster then applets and contrary to popular belief, are as secure (With an applet all you have to do is make a simple call to the VM to disable the sandbox, with activeX you have to implement IObjectSafety to be able to do certain things. I can write an applet that will erase your harddrive). ActiveX controls are in every way superior to the craptacular plugin model that netscape implemented. The MS deployment paradigm using cabs beats the hell out of what any other browser thought up. And I am sure the 35 million screaming AOL users will be yelling at AOL when all of the IE specific sites put up messages saying they are using an incompatible browser. Moreover I suspect that the number of users will be much smaller. All large corperations deploy IE as the primary browser because IE has the best support for Web based applications, which are far easier to deploy and maintain then client side fat clients. When the users get home from work they are going to use the browser they are most familiar with, that is, not Mozilla. AOL will convert a lot of people with this little push, but I suspect the majority of users will remain IE users.
Aquire a much larger group of users? What, is 95% of the desktop market not enough? There isn't a "Much larger group of users" left for MS to aquire on the desktop side of things (since XP is a desktop OS).
In most user's minds the internet is synonumous with computers. It is the biggest selling point for most users and the internet is more then just a web browser. Its amazingly convinient to open up windows explorer, browse through all my directories and then seemlessly browse the directories on an ftp site. I can do this because Windows Explorer simply loads the IE com object when it needs to. You would be amazed at the number of applications that load up the IE com object to do all kinds of little things, because its so well integrated that you never notice. These things make my life easier. Sure, each component could have its own code to do these things but why should it. This achieves the same purpose, but allows for smaller programs because they all share components. And its not like MS is the only one who can use these components, all of IEs interfaces are very well documented so that anyone can seemlessly integrate internet functionality into their application.
.99 crashes on me a couple times a day. With IE I can go two or three days without it crashing (at home, at work it crashes all the time, but thats my fault since its my application within IE causing it to crash). I don't think mozilla is prettier but thats because I prefer a minimilistic User interface. This is personal opinion though.
Oh, and Mozilla has IE beat on a couple things, the popup killer definitely being on of the more usefull. However I wrote an application that keeps IE from spawning new windows when I don't want it to so that doesn't really bother me. As for Mozilla being faster and more stable this is just wishful thinking. In some cases its faster (not the majority though), but
IE really shines when it comes to web based applications. I am sorry but ActiveX controls beat the shit out of both plugins and applets (and contrary to popular belief, ActiveX controls are no more dangerous then an applet. With an applet you can make calls to the vm to circumvent the sandbox, with an ActiveX control you can use IObjectXSafety to designate yourself as safe to instantiate and script within a web browser). Moreover the cab distribution method in IE beats the shit out of smart installation in Mozilla.
Finally, the IE DOM is superior to Mozillas (oh and curse IE for extending the standard, how dare they add functionality.).
Mozilla is a good browser, better then IE in some respects, but overall IE is still better. At least there is competition now. It will continue to make both browsers better.
As for media player, well, obviously we are at different opinions about this. My argument above for the integration of the browser pretty much applies here as well. Judge as you like. I find having the media player objects in my system helpful even though I don't normally use media player to listen to music. Media player doesn't benifit from being integrated with the OS, its every other application that uses media player that benifits.
Now on to my horribly spelling of supremacy and the point I was making. First, I shouldn't have said special APIs. I should have said undocumented APIs. Obviously MS has made changes to Kerberos and several other components. However they have documented all of the APIs for these components (even if they didn't release the source). People were bitching because MS was supposedly using super secret APIs to created better Apps. I bet they aren't. Sure they aren't going to tell the Samba team how to make duplicate APIs, but they will tell someone how to create an app that utilize the APIs for some functionality. As for the undocumented file format this is a freeking stupid issue. Of course MS has their own file format, and guess what, SO DOES DAMN NEAR ANY OTHER SOFTWARE COMPANY. And you know what, none of us are going to tell our competition how to read our files. That would just be the definition of stupid. Here you go competitor, this is our file format, now you can make a migration tool to steal all of our customers and drive us out of business.
Anyway, these are my opinions. Obviously we don't agree and just as obviously we aren't going to convince the other to change their opinion. I also wish MS would stop bundling a lot of stuff, like windows messanger and Movie Maker. And honestly it would be really hard to swap components since they would need the exact same COM interface that the MS products have. And look at it from this point, MS already recieves a lot of shit about instability (desserved with the 9x line, not with the nt line), if their components were replaced with unstable third party components then that is going to reflect even worse on MS. Sure, third parties should be allowed to place their icons on the desktop and OEMS should be allowed to take shortcuts off the desktop but that is an entirely different discussion (e.g. to what extent should a company be able to fight competitors).
Hay, if front page stories have glaring spelling mistakes in them then I don't think I can be reprimanded for spelling something wrong deep within a comment tree. Besides, you knew what I was talking about.
I too am a coder, and the amount of work does not stem from the difficulty in making the command line tools (since that is in fact fairly simple, it was hyperbole when I refered to using a gui config for nix) but from the shear volume of feature that need to be migrated. Hell, on just the desktop OS it would take a damn long time to convert all of the little configurations here and there (just think of all the little places you go configure settings, folder options, management console, display options, everything in the control panel). With advanced server there are millions of settings to worry about. I had heard rumors of a command line only version of server that someone mentioned above but I have yet to see it and I am curious if thats just a rumor or not.
- Everything configurable via the command line for power users .reg file to apply the necessary changes to all PCs. Though in all seriousness do you have any idea how much work it would take to also make everything configurable from the command line. Almost as much work as it would take to make things configurable in a GUI for *nix.
> Everything is already configurable from the registry. For power admins they can just make a
- Non-integrated browser
> There are a lot of integrated components I want out of the OS (like fucking windows messenger) but the browser isn't one of them. I would argue that surfing the web is one of the core features of the computer and thus should be part of the OS. Since IE happens to be the best browser on the market you can't really complain. Its not like they are keeping you from using a different browser.
- Non-integrated media player
> Again, playing media is now a core feature of the computer. Users expect this functionality out of the box, thus it belongs in a desktop OS (server OS is a different matter). Moreover it should be as feature rich as possible, which will cause some intermingling with the OS. If you want to use a different media player, feel free, there isn't anything stopping you.
- Drivers for USB 2.0, Bluetooth, and Firewire
> USB 2.0 and Firewire are expected in a service pack to XP. Bluetooth would be cool though.
- 100% documented APIs
> I honestly don't believe that microsoft gains suppremissy by using special APIs. The reason MS products tend to be better then the compitition is that MS puts more people on the team, and hires brighter people. If someone from the office team came and asked someone on the platform dev team to add a special API to make their life easier I think the platform dev would tell the office guy to fuck off.
- No WPA
> Agreed. Of course the corperate version doesn't have it...
Honestly, there is a lot I would like to see change in windows. For example I don't want to pay for Windows Movie Maker or any of the other extranious applications MS has decided to bundle. Some stuff should be with the OS, internet and media integration is a good thing. It provides a richer user experience that most people will use.
Before you feel all high and mighty I think I should point out that something likely 75% of all redhat boxes are rooted in the first 24 hours. Moreover, I have pretty good uptimes on my windows xp box. I don't think I have ever seen it bluescreen, and the only reason the uptime isn't higher is because I occassionally have to reboot it when I apply a critical update (which is so much easier then recompiling my kernal to get a fix in). When I was running linux as a desktop OS I was crashing all the time. Most of that is the fault of the software I was running, not the OS, but regardless it does not reflect terribly well on linux. MS has a long way to go, but Linux is far from perfect and I think you should realize that.
use remote desktop, which is built in. Its the best remote desktop solution I have ever used. Its fast, responive, and it even lets you stream audio over the connection. It requires the remote desktop client, which can be installed on any windows pc (not just XP).
Emulating games will be the toughest accomplishment. More and more games are being written in DirectX, which goes through pretty big changes every year or so (the difference between 8 and 7 is huge). Its going to be a lot of work to make directX compatibility layers, and by the time a decent version is ready Microsoft will probably have released a new version.
Moreover people fail to realized that software isn't the only thing linux needs to be compatible with. Windows is compatible with damn near every piece of hardware produced (though there is usually a lag time for drivers when a new Windows is released). No other OS can really claim this. Wine isn't going to help here, hardware companies need to start caring about other OSes (and either produce their own drivers and release documentation so others can make drivers).
Who would want to stream real anyway. God that format sucks and the clients are even worse.
a more likely scenerio is that they are testing the fix. Microsoft is usually rather quick about releasing things, but they believe in testing it first. Great concept that.
Oh, and it will be available on windows update so that it will actually have wide spread adoption. Lets see how wide spread the linux fix is. Since 80% of redhat boxes are rooted in the first 24 hours there seems to be a rather large precedence for boxes not being patched when they should be. Get off your fucking high horse buddy. Microsoft may be a lot of things, but they aren't stupid. If they were they would never have gained absolute control of the desktop.
You can already do the data storage thing with Active Directory in Windows 2000 Server. This will just be a much better implementation of this.
On an unrelated note, the claim that this will break all current applications is a flat out lie. Microsoft has abstracted most of their file system APIs (which is why the same API works for FAT, FAT32, and all versions of NTFS). These APIs will work just as well with the new file system.
And IE is better then Netscape.
"More than 80 percent of respondents across the country understood how to work a TV better than a computer, something for the computer industry to ponder long and hard. "
Gee, you don't say. Maybe thats because a TV has limited functionality when compared to a computer. Here is is another amazing fact "99.9% of the people surveyed understand how to work a toaster better then a Nuclear Reactor". Obviously the Nuclear reactor industry has something to learn from the toaster industry.
The Educational MSDN license that the CS department at the college I attended had allowed the department to freely burn copies of all the MS software and distribute it to students. MS is not stupid. They want students developing on MS platfroms so that when they go into industry those same people continue developing for MS platforms.
Personally instead of .xxx I think they should have created a .cum