If you think this is new, you've not been paying attention. There have been the odd stories about products that looked for all the world like thinly-veiled adverts. One for an LCD monitor springs to mind; I don't have time to dig out the link (I should be on my way to work even now), but the story was based on a review at Tom's. The summary here painted a glowing picture, but quoted the review very selectively. The review itself was very much less glowing, essentially saying "looks great, shame about the panel". I can only assume that the poster was attempting to exploit the common practice of not bothering to read the article...
I'm not complaining; after all,/. costs me nothing and no-one's forcing me to read it. I actually think it's interesting, and something that's likely to only happen more often. After all, I assume that/. is mostly advertising supported, yet a large proportion of the readership is anti-ads enough and tech savvy enough to block most/all ads, and the owners know that...
Well, according to your user info page, you've posted 2193 comments, against my 4027 (plus this one, making 4028 by the time I hit submit). That doesn't sound too bad (for you) until you compare our UIDs...:)
Like everyone else who's replied so far, I don't mind you posting the link at all - in fact, I think it's a good thing. I found the first episode because of a posting of yours, and the second when I noticed your latest.sig. MINERVA is good fun to play, and deserves a larger audience.
Windows has a bundled in.doc reader but not one for all the other document formats
That's true, but (read-only) viewers for the other formats are available for free download from microsoft.com. Also while Wordpad can read (simple).doc files, it can only actually create rtf files (and text, etc), so at best I think that's probably a grey area.
Even if your competitors are bundling non monopolized products together does not mean you can bundle monopolized and non-monopolized products together.
Well, IANAL so I can't comment on what anti-trust law says, but that's not how I would expect it to work. To me, PDF is just another document format, and I don't see why MS Office shouldn't be able to understand it especially given that OOo already understands it. That's for the lawyers to decide though, should it ever get to court.
I don't know about where you are, but here in the UK plumbers aren't exactly poorly paid. The last couple of times I've needed one, the fees have been £55 per half hour (or part thereof) plus parts. Obviously the plumber doesn't get all of that, just like I don't get the whole of what my company charges me out to clients at, but you can be sure that they're not exactly starving, either.
IANAL, but I'm not convinced that #2 would apply. They're not the first or only office suite producer to include PDF creation in their office suite - OOo already does for one. I don't see how it can be in violation of anti-trust law to follow your competitor's lead, monopoly or not.
Like I said though, IANAL, and I'm aware that the letter of the law doesn't always match up to my idea of common sense or fair play.
Speaking as a 'real software engineer' who writes 'real software', web developers have always been looked down upon has untalented hacks.
I encountered pretty much that exact attitude from a group of contractors we hired to work on a web-based application a couple of years ago (it was a directory and mail service for a large governmental organisation in the UK).
There was a clear attitude that web programming wasn't "real programming", and that it was simple, toy stuff.
Funny thing was, some of their code was utterly atrocious - little or no attempt to handle concurrency, little or no attempt to perform bounds checking/validation on input values, and the occasional huge security hole (such as trusting the value of a userId passed in on the query string to determine who was attempting to access a protected admin page, or a custom-written data access layer that was trivially vulnerable to injection attacks!). That's without getting on to simply removing code from core library classes that they didn't understand and couldn't be bothered to take the time to learn to use properly (which was the cause of several mysterious bugs until we tracked it down).
As another respondent has said, the attitude is probably mostly due to the limited exposure that most people have had to real web programming. Throwing together a few HTML pages and a "contact me" CGI might have been the state of the art in 1998, but things have come on a long way since then. Most of the work I've done in the last few years has essentially been on massively multi-user client server applications. The fact that the UI is web-based rather than fat client really doesn't make a huge difference; almost none of the logic is in the UI anyway.
I had to go through a few hoops to return what the store claimed was "non-returnable".
I think perhaps phrases like "not fit for the purpose for which it was bought" may have been helpful, along with "I'll see what trading standards has to say about that then" if that doesn't work.
It's being sold as an audio CD. You have a reasonable expectation that it will work in your audio CD player(s). If it doesn't, then as far as I'm concerned either the CD or the player(s) is faulty. Assuming your player(s) work(s) with other CDs, the implication would be that it's the CD that's faulty. Therefore, you're entitled to a refund, end of story.
I don't buy very many CDs anymore, but if that happened to me and the store refused to accept the return, I'd definitely be contacting trading standards.
Well, the way I see it MS aren't bundling PDF software with their system - they were planning on including it with Office. I don't see how anti-trust applies in that case, as other office suites already do the same (eg OOo), so they're not using their monopoly position in OSes to push into another area (PDF creation tools), they're just following the same path as their nearest competitor.
Of course, IANAL, so perhaps anti-trust law really does prevent them from doing that, although it wouldn't seem fair (assuming that the purpose of anti-trust law is to prevent unfair competition, not prevent any competition at all).
While it's not your duty to "give a shit about producers", if you actually like the programs they produce then it's certainly enlightened self interest to care. If they can't make money, they can't make more programs, and you don't get to watch them.
ake a moment to stop and realize that this is the company that SELLS THE CHIPS making the proposal, NOT the government
And that makes that someone is seriously, publicly suggesting this less shocking how?
Personally, I'm disgusted, and I'm
a) not an immigrant b) not an American c) not likely to ever be either
I'm just a human, and frankly outraged that any human could seriously suggest treating other humans in this way, especially in the name of corporate profit.
Just warning the user the first time new software tries to access their personal files, address book, IM list, internet, or system files and forcing them to choose what level of permission to grant, with a good UI would stop 90% of the trojans out there right now.
The idea has merit, but again, it's hardly foolproof. So Jo Sixpack installs Weather Buddy Widget, and lo, Windows pops up a dialogue warning him that it's trying to make a network connection.
Well, of course it is - it's trying to download the weather forecast, right?
Or is it establishing its place in the zombie botnet and awaiting its first spam to send out or DDoS target? How does Jo Sixpack (who's already naive enough to download and install the thing in the first place, remember) know which?
It's accessing "My Documents" - well, yeah, it's trying to write config data; or trying to scan all your documents for juicy looking data?
I'll grant you that accessing your email address book should be a giveaway. So you don't write Weather Buddy Widget to do that; you write Comet Contact Manager to do that.
Better information about what's being accessed by what might well help catch some of these things, but by no means all. I've also seen programmers with a couple of decades experience absently-mindedly click "ok" on a dialogue, then realise the stupid mistake they've made. People make mistakes, misread things, are in a hurry, don't care, or just plain don't understand.
would stop 90% of the trojans out there right now
Even assuming that the figure you pulled out of the air is correct (and I think it's hopelessly optimistic, but then I'm pretty pessimistic), all it would do is trigger a brief lull as the crapware spewing idiots upped their game and wrote new malware that asked for reasonable-sounding access, then abused it.
There's only so much an OS can do, as long as the person sat at the keyboard has insufficient knowledge and the administrative password.
Fair enough, but the correct way to vent your frustrations with a product is in the general direction of the product's producer. In this case, MS has specifically asked for feedback - so people should stop bitching here and bitch over there. At least there, there's a chance that it'll actually get fixed.
OpenOffice is a competitor to MS Office, and includes PDF-creation features. I do not see how MS is leveraging their monopoly into a different product space by implementing features that their direct competitors in that same product space already implement.
In other words, OO did it first, so now PDF creation is a feature of office suites; it seems only fair for MS (despite being a monopoly) to be allowed to do likewise.
Why the hell are these things connected to the Internet then?
I'm thinking; I'm thinking that they almost certainly aren't. I'm also thinking that until such time as I'm provided with evidence that they are connected to the Internet, I'll continue believing that they aren't, and furthermore, that this guy is just scaremongering and trolling for either attention or money.
Something I've noticed from a quick scan of the comments is that people are talking about how you'll never achieve your rated line speed in practice because of the overheads associated with TCP/IP, etc.
Here in the UK, what companies sell as (eg) a 512Kbps connection is actually (from memory) a 572Kbps connection, with the extra few Kbps to account for that overhead. At least, that's how it was at least until recently; I can't tell any more as I upgraded to my ISP's 8Mbps service, but my phone line (as expected) can't handle that rate. (Still, the ~3.6Mbps I get is fine for now, and the upgrade was only £1/month more)
It always makes me laugh when I see companies advertising 16Mbps or even 24Mbps services; I can't believe that more than a handful of people actually have the line quality needed and are close enough to their exchange to achieve those speeds. Now if only BT would start improving the lines...
That's not a CLI workaround, that's the equivalent of launching Explorer and typing \\bob in the address bar.
Other than that, I agree; the network share discoverer has been flaky for as long as I've known, and really needs to be fixed. I've lost count of the number of times I've been unable to find a network resource yet have had no trouble accessing it when I typed the address in by hand (not that that's a problem for me, but hey)
Slashdot Mirror
If you think this is new, you've not been paying attention. There have been the odd stories about products that looked for all the world like thinly-veiled adverts. One for an LCD monitor springs to mind; I don't have time to dig out the link (I should be on my way to work even now), but the story was based on a review at Tom's. The summary here painted a glowing picture, but quoted the review very selectively. The review itself was very much less glowing, essentially saying "looks great, shame about the panel". I can only assume that the poster was attempting to exploit the common practice of not bothering to read the article...
/. costs me nothing and no-one's forcing me to read it. I actually think it's interesting, and something that's likely to only happen more often. After all, I assume that /. is mostly advertising supported, yet a large proportion of the readership is anti-ads enough and tech savvy enough to block most/all ads, and the owners know that...
I'm not complaining; after all,
Yikes! I think I must post too often.
:)
Well, according to your user info page, you've posted 2193 comments, against my 4027 (plus this one, making 4028 by the time I hit submit). That doesn't sound too bad (for you) until you compare our UIDs...
Like everyone else who's replied so far, I don't mind you posting the link at all - in fact, I think it's a good thing. I found the first episode because of a posting of yours, and the second when I noticed your latest .sig. MINERVA is good fun to play, and deserves a larger audience.
Keep up the good work!
That's exactly what I was thinking - iBook, iPod, iTunes, iTMS; of course it would be iBerry.
Today, none (unless you want to run something like Doom 3 or Half Life 2 with all the options turned up to max and at an insane resolution).
Tomorrow, who knows? I remember a time when a TNT2 Ultra was considered overkill, now you can get more powerful GPUs in mobile phones.
Windows has a bundled in .doc reader but not one for all the other document formats
.doc files, it can only actually create rtf files (and text, etc), so at best I think that's probably a grey area.
That's true, but (read-only) viewers for the other formats are available for free download from microsoft.com. Also while Wordpad can read (simple)
Even if your competitors are bundling non monopolized products together does not mean you can bundle monopolized and non-monopolized products together.
Well, IANAL so I can't comment on what anti-trust law says, but that's not how I would expect it to work. To me, PDF is just another document format, and I don't see why MS Office shouldn't be able to understand it especially given that OOo already understands it. That's for the lawyers to decide though, should it ever get to court.
I don't know about where you are, but here in the UK plumbers aren't exactly poorly paid. The last couple of times I've needed one, the fees have been £55 per half hour (or part thereof) plus parts. Obviously the plumber doesn't get all of that, just like I don't get the whole of what my company charges me out to clients at, but you can be sure that they're not exactly starving, either.
IANAL, but I'm not convinced that #2 would apply. They're not the first or only office suite producer to include PDF creation in their office suite - OOo already does for one. I don't see how it can be in violation of anti-trust law to follow your competitor's lead, monopoly or not.
Like I said though, IANAL, and I'm aware that the letter of the law doesn't always match up to my idea of common sense or fair play.
Speaking as a 'real software engineer' who writes 'real software', web developers have always been looked down upon has untalented hacks.
I encountered pretty much that exact attitude from a group of contractors we hired to work on a web-based application a couple of years ago (it was a directory and mail service for a large governmental organisation in the UK).
There was a clear attitude that web programming wasn't "real programming", and that it was simple, toy stuff.
Funny thing was, some of their code was utterly atrocious - little or no attempt to handle concurrency, little or no attempt to perform bounds checking/validation on input values, and the occasional huge security hole (such as trusting the value of a userId passed in on the query string to determine who was attempting to access a protected admin page, or a custom-written data access layer that was trivially vulnerable to injection attacks!). That's without getting on to simply removing code from core library classes that they didn't understand and couldn't be bothered to take the time to learn to use properly (which was the cause of several mysterious bugs until we tracked it down).
As another respondent has said, the attitude is probably mostly due to the limited exposure that most people have had to real web programming. Throwing together a few HTML pages and a "contact me" CGI might have been the state of the art in 1998, but things have come on a long way since then. Most of the work I've done in the last few years has essentially been on massively multi-user client server applications. The fact that the UI is web-based rather than fat client really doesn't make a huge difference; almost none of the logic is in the UI anyway.
I had to go through a few hoops to return what the store claimed was "non-returnable".
I think perhaps phrases like "not fit for the purpose for which it was bought" may have been helpful, along with "I'll see what trading standards has to say about that then" if that doesn't work.
It's being sold as an audio CD. You have a reasonable expectation that it will work in your audio CD player(s). If it doesn't, then as far as I'm concerned either the CD or the player(s) is faulty. Assuming your player(s) work(s) with other CDs, the implication would be that it's the CD that's faulty. Therefore, you're entitled to a refund, end of story.
I don't buy very many CDs anymore, but if that happened to me and the store refused to accept the return, I'd definitely be contacting trading standards.
Well, the way I see it MS aren't bundling PDF software with their system - they were planning on including it with Office. I don't see how anti-trust applies in that case, as other office suites already do the same (eg OOo), so they're not using their monopoly position in OSes to push into another area (PDF creation tools), they're just following the same path as their nearest competitor.
Of course, IANAL, so perhaps anti-trust law really does prevent them from doing that, although it wouldn't seem fair (assuming that the purpose of anti-trust law is to prevent unfair competition, not prevent any competition at all).
And attached to every story about the MPAA/RIAA, piracy, etc are comments along the lines of "we reject your outdated business model - adapt or die!".
I fail to see how it's really all that different.
While it's not your duty to "give a shit about producers", if you actually like the programs they produce then it's certainly enlightened self interest to care. If they can't make money, they can't make more programs, and you don't get to watch them.
And then MS will sell you the service of packaging, burning and shipping Windows to you for the low low price of $200...
ake a moment to stop and realize that this is the company that SELLS THE CHIPS making the proposal, NOT the government
And that makes that someone is seriously, publicly suggesting this less shocking how?
Personally, I'm disgusted, and I'm
a) not an immigrant
b) not an American
c) not likely to ever be either
I'm just a human, and frankly outraged that any human could seriously suggest treating other humans in this way, especially in the name of corporate profit.
Just warning the user the first time new software tries to access their personal files, address book, IM list, internet, or system files and forcing them to choose what level of permission to grant, with a good UI would stop 90% of the trojans out there right now.
The idea has merit, but again, it's hardly foolproof. So Jo Sixpack installs Weather Buddy Widget, and lo, Windows pops up a dialogue warning him that it's trying to make a network connection.
Well, of course it is - it's trying to download the weather forecast, right?
Or is it establishing its place in the zombie botnet and awaiting its first spam to send out or DDoS target? How does Jo Sixpack (who's already naive enough to download and install the thing in the first place, remember) know which?
It's accessing "My Documents" - well, yeah, it's trying to write config data; or trying to scan all your documents for juicy looking data?
I'll grant you that accessing your email address book should be a giveaway. So you don't write Weather Buddy Widget to do that; you write Comet Contact Manager to do that.
Better information about what's being accessed by what might well help catch some of these things, but by no means all. I've also seen programmers with a couple of decades experience absently-mindedly click "ok" on a dialogue, then realise the stupid mistake they've made. People make mistakes, misread things, are in a hurry, don't care, or just plain don't understand.
would stop 90% of the trojans out there right now
Even assuming that the figure you pulled out of the air is correct (and I think it's hopelessly optimistic, but then I'm pretty pessimistic), all it would do is trigger a brief lull as the crapware spewing idiots upped their game and wrote new malware that asked for reasonable-sounding access, then abused it.
There's only so much an OS can do, as long as the person sat at the keyboard has insufficient knowledge and the administrative password.
Fair enough, but the correct way to vent your frustrations with a product is in the general direction of the product's producer. In this case, MS has specifically asked for feedback - so people should stop bitching here and bitch over there. At least there, there's a chance that it'll actually get fixed.
I don't think posting "lololololol!!!1! M$ suX0rz, Linux r0ck0rz!!!111!!" to slashdot counts as feedback.
How about if you add something extra to make sure no "malware" lands up on my system? Can you do that?
In a word, no. How is the OS supposed to know that that cute little systray weather forecast app you downloaded and installed is actually a trojan?
As long as a user can download and install/run software, the system is vulnerable, and there's nothing it can do about it.
Presumably the malware won't know your password...
I see your point, but I don't agree with it.
OpenOffice is a competitor to MS Office, and includes PDF-creation features. I do not see how MS is leveraging their monopoly into a different product space by implementing features that their direct competitors in that same product space already implement.
In other words, OO did it first, so now PDF creation is a feature of office suites; it seems only fair for MS (despite being a monopoly) to be allowed to do likewise.
Actually, from what I gather, it's travelled very well, it just chose to skip America.
Why the hell are these things connected to the Internet then?
I'm thinking; I'm thinking that they almost certainly aren't. I'm also thinking that until such time as I'm provided with evidence that they are connected to the Internet, I'll continue believing that they aren't, and furthermore, that this guy is just scaremongering and trolling for either attention or money.
Something I've noticed from a quick scan of the comments is that people are talking about how you'll never achieve your rated line speed in practice because of the overheads associated with TCP/IP, etc.
Here in the UK, what companies sell as (eg) a 512Kbps connection is actually (from memory) a 572Kbps connection, with the extra few Kbps to account for that overhead. At least, that's how it was at least until recently; I can't tell any more as I upgraded to my ISP's 8Mbps service, but my phone line (as expected) can't handle that rate. (Still, the ~3.6Mbps I get is fine for now, and the upgrade was only £1/month more)
It always makes me laugh when I see companies advertising 16Mbps or even 24Mbps services; I can't believe that more than a handful of people actually have the line quality needed and are close enough to their exchange to achieve those speeds. Now if only BT would start improving the lines...
That's not a CLI workaround, that's the equivalent of launching Explorer and typing \\bob in the address bar.
Other than that, I agree; the network share discoverer has been flaky for as long as I've known, and really needs to be fixed. I've lost count of the number of times I've been unable to find a network resource yet have had no trouble accessing it when I typed the address in by hand (not that that's a problem for me, but hey)