This article needs taken down now, It is not factual, and the patent is for available credit, not bank account balance. there is a huie difference in both availability and ethics.
It's largely the same thing in practical terms, the bank account Apple can query is accessible either as a credit card (available credit) or as a debit card using the VISA, MasterCard, Citi, etc. systems where the "available credit" is the balance of the account the card is linked to.
RMS may be highly opinionated and abrasive, but at least he's out there pushing back at those that would take away rights.
These days so much of it is just spreading FUD rather than real issues though. Just look at The Javascript Trap and tell me why a normal user would care about that. It's a similar story with the anti-Windows, anti-iOS, anti-SaaS, etc... diatribes, we have had Windows for 20-something years and iOS for 8 years so you would think that if that fear-mongering were well founded then there would be countless concrete examples of non-trivial harm done by non-free software that could be referenced to convince users that it is a bad idea.
There's also this idea that freedom is "taken away", which we all know is rubbish, it's the same false argument the RIAA/MPAA use with "lost profits". If you receive a binary licensed under the GPL you are granted the right to the source code, you didn't have that before. If you receive a proprietary binary you are not granted the right to the source code, it is not a right you had before that has now been "taken away".
The free software idea is great but the message is unconvincing. It's all well and good to rip on somebody else's new product by spreading this fear that it is a vehicle for bad things to happen but taking the iPhone for example, has there really been any non-trivial harm to manifest from all these supposed problems?
Free software should have a lot to offer so it should be a positive message rather than a negative - somewhat abstract and unspecific - fear-mongering of its competitors. The freedom aspect should be a value-add to a superior product.
The difference between an app and application is who controls the executable. You or MS?
"app" is just short for "application", they are the same thing. Windows 10 can run the same applications (apps, applications, programs, whatever you want to call them) that previous versions did. I'm not sure what you mean by "who controls it" because the computer user controls it by executing it in a specific environment and/or with input. The app (or application) does whatever the author programs it to do, if that's me then it does what I tell it, if it's Microsoft then it has whatever capabilities they put in it, if it's some other 3rd party then it has whatever capabilities they put in it.
this OS wants to automatically update itself and any apps you have installed (can't be turned off unless you just kill the services)
Surely you understand that for most users the automatic patching and updating of the system and programs is a good thing, they don't have to worry about computer maintenance. And as you say the power users can kill the services if they really want to do things manually. OS X has gone through a similar process of taking maintenance tasks or traditional mundane workflow tasks and automating them (like the auto save stuff) and this confuses the people who are just used to doing this on a regular basis but is better for those who don't want to worry about it.
A computer - and the operating system - is a tool to do a job, when the maintenance of that tool becomes implicit and automatic that is good for most users and power users can circumvent that default behavior if they feel they need to.
Annoyance #2, actually dealbreaker, is how they've made the OS almost broken if you don't use a Microsoft account login.
I'm using it without a Microsoft account login... aside from syncing my data with an account I don't have which is precisely why I didn't put one in to begin with I haven't noticed anything "broken". What doesn't work without a Microsoft account?
And of course "it runs a custom version of Android". Sure make yet another smartphone but do we need another fork of Android for it? Why can't they just preload their emulators onto a stock version of Android?
This "custom version of Android" rubbish is just code for: if it isnt successful it will be abandoned and users wont get updates. Make it a stock version and add your applications and support for specific hardware on top so that users can upgrade to the latest version of Android when Google releases it.
All I want is a simple "Windows Classic" theme that makes Windows 10 look exactly like Windows 2000. That's it. Keep all the fancy kernel improvements and everything else, I just want to interact with the computer how I've found it best.
There have always been alternative shells for those who don't like the out-of-the-box UI.
Why would anyone want to switch over to Microsoft's app based Windows 10?
Every operating system is "app based" that is the whole point of an operating system. An operating system that doesn't run apps (also known as applications or programs) is pretty useless.
Does anyone here have any substantive reasons other than small differences in boot time or DirectX 12 support, that make the upgrade useful for desktop users with Windows 7? I'm curious.
Lower resource usage, improved battery life on mobile devices, better support for high dpi displays, continuum (if you have a convertible device), etc. There's quite a few but really if you're happy with your current system then why change? It's the same whether you're using Windows, Linux or OS X.
I think they're going to use the next few years of rolling updates to get the average consumer used to the Windows as a Service model. Then, at least for the Home version, they're going to come out with Windows 365 when "Windows 11" is ready. The Pro and Enterprise versions will probably still be available in perpetual license format (They already committed to a long term stable (LTS) branch of 10 for companies.) The carrot for going to Windows 365 will be the availability of features.
More likely they will just continue to charge an OEM license fee and tie the software license to the hardware then providing free upgrades for the life of the hardware like Apple does. A subscription model makes sense when it is "Software as a Service" but not when it is an operating system, that makes more sense to tie the license to the hardware.
I'm not a fan of the constant rental fees for software. Adobe went that way with Creative Cloud, and people basically have no choice but to keep paying forever. AutoCAD is now rent-only as well.
I prefer the perpetual licensing too but from a business accounting perspective subscription makes more sense, it also means you don't have different people using different versions since everybody who has Photoshop can have the latest version of Photoshop.
No it is a suggestion that you think they will. You could then say they are "moving toward" subscription only and equally that they are "moving toward" abandoning subscription completely.
And what is with this 'Cheaper alternative' nonsense? Last I checked, Linux users don't choose it because they are cheapskates
That's certainly supposed to be the idea, in fact cost shouldn't be the issue at all. End user funded development should be encouraged otherwise the majority of development comes from the corporate interests that pay for it. The consumer end is just driven by hobbyists.
What need is there for "Windows" in a "cloud" based ecosystem?
A "cloud-based" ecosystem does not encompass anywhere near a significant amount of use cases for Windows.
If I get the functionality of Office, on web interface(and thus, on any web device), why do I need Windows?
Unlike you most Windows users aren't just office drones that use nothing but Microsoft Office. While you might not need Windows just because you can run Office on other systems that isn't representative of the majority of users.
Yes i get that what you're trying to say is you think that because they are offering a subscription model that this means they then have the possibility to offer only a subscription model but there is nothing to support the assertion that they would. If you use that terminology you could also say Google is "moving towards" a pay-only model of gmail or google drive by offering a paid version. Or that Apple is "moving towards" abandoning iTunes music because they are offering a subscription music service. But that phrase is not used in that way.
The reality is equally likely that they are "moving towards" a future where you can switch between licensing models at will.
Yes it is. I did not say it was *only* available in a subscription, but they are *moving* in that direction.
What does that even mean? They are "supporting" that model because it makes sense in that context. When you're offering a product as a service to support multiple software platforms from other vendors that subscription model makes sense but for an operating system it makes no sense at all because the operating system is tied to the hardware but the applications are not.
I see more and more Windows tablets in people's hands, but if you compare it statistically to the Android / iOS tablets instead of laptops then Windows tablets have abysmal market share and growth.
That's because there is no real concrete definition of a "tablet". A Windows tablet has always been a laptop with a touchscreen interface (even back to the old HPs running Windows XP) while Android and iOS tablets are large smartphones (sometimes with slightly different UI elements for the larger screens). The two types really aren't comparable, they are different tools for different jobs.
You often see iPads used as menus in restaurants because they are fairly robust (once in a case), easy to lockdown, long battery life and relatively cheap. Now you wouldn't use a Surface for the purpose since they aren't really made to go in a case, the hardware is fairly power-hungry and you would be paying for things you don't need like the active stylus.
Switching to subscription is going to kill Windows, regardless of whether or not Windows is subscription.
Why is that? Assuming Windows doesn't go subscription (there's no real need for it since the subscription stuff is being applied to services and cross-platform cloud-based applications where that model makes sense) why would the subscription model of Microsoft's other products have any effect on it?
well, hello Office 365, being pushed on a large percentage of Windows 8 machines, with 1 year free subscription to get people hooked.
How will that "get people hooked"? LibreOffice is free, Google Apps are free, Apple bundles its iWork suite free on OS X and iOS. Sure in some cases you may have minor formatting issues importing your MS Office docs to one of those applications but if you don't want to pay there is certainly no reason to unless it is a better experience worth paying for.
See, arguments like this are precisely why people like me quit contributing to open source projects a long time ago. It's just the "fuck you" attitude that gets to us. When users demand features, you are supposed to listen. But nope, this stock answer is trotted out every time as a way to avoid doing work.
No that's absolute rubbish! Just because you release code as open source doesn't mean you then have an obligation to do whatever the users of that code demand of you.
I'd thought I had read (maybe here?) about a proof of concept GPU malware authorship recently.
You can certainly get it to perform some of the malware tasks but you still need a process running on the CPU that has access to the requisite data. So you still need CPU-based malware that has access to all the data you need, you can just obscure what your process does with that data by passing it to the GPU.
The first or second link in your results had a diagram that shows this.
I think you may be a bit out of date with your info that it can not be done.
What cannot be done is to just take a process and have it run on the GPU, you must have a CPU-side process that has access to all the data and then offloads that to the GPU for processing. Point is if your CPU process already has all the access to the data then generally you can obfuscate what it's doing enough to be able to avoid detection by anti-virus software already anyway.
The equivalent in the kernel is kdbus. Heard that the developers of kdbus are not listening to people as usual.
Well the point of free software is to do things you need and contribute that back so other people can use it, do things out of charity or get paid by people to do those things. If those "people" want to pay the kdbus developers to do what they want then fine but outside of that there's no real need or reason they would listen to what other people want them to do.
I am not a GPU designer, but as far as I know, GPUs do not have much security compared to CPUs, thus the issue of keyloggers and malware that run just on that processor, and since nothing checks the GPU out, it is an effective way to hide processes.
The GPU is not a general purpose processor like the CPU, you can offload certain tasks to it that suit its processing and data model but you can't take processes like keyloggers and malware and run them on the GPU.
Hand the Web browser control of the GPU... which has full access to RAM
No the GPU does not have access to RAM.
and it wouldn't be farfetched to see malware be able to modify memory, add itself into the CPU's kernel space, or just do its dirty work from the GPU,
perhaps flashing the firmware on a vulnerable device so it has the ability to reload again.
No this sort of capability simply isn't possible on a GPU.
On a less lethal level, a GPU-based botnet has the ability to do not just DDoS attacks, but be used for distributed items like cryptocurrency mining.
In a botnet the bottleneck is the network, not the CPU, I'm not quite sure what a the GPU component of a GPU-based DDoSing botnet would even do. You can already do cryptocurrency mining on the CPU in the browser, having the CPU offload the applicable elements of the mining process to the GPU isn't going to make it any more clandestine.
Overall, why does the Web browser need this much access to low level hardware? A browser should have -no- hardware access, and be limited on CPU/RAM/GPU/disk resources by the OS.
It already is limited, even access to the GPU is not some direct thing. You don't just get some system control or ability to control what is displayed on the screen just because you can run shader programs on the GPU.
What they're glossing over with their review is that adblocker extensions, password managers, extensions that prevent video from autoplaying and etc. will not be available.
And what you're glossing over is that extensions will be available, just not immediately at release. You're criticising somebody for telling a half-truth and then doing exactly that yourself.
They have even detailed the process for creating extensions for Edge.
And I won't use Edge because if I can't control the behavior of my web browser I won't use that web browser.
Ok. You're a minority, most people don't worry about controlling Safari (OSX or iOS) or Chrome or Firefox, they just use the vendor binary.
Right, when they lock down the entire system. Who would want an x-box anyway?
About 80 million people, much the same with the Playstation 3 which also around 80 million and the XB1 and PS4 are already on around 20 and 12 million respectively. So the answer is that lots of people want these systems despite the lockdown.
And websites always need clickbait with headlines implying a world shaking problem that hits all users... so the problem gets blown out of proportion.
The one blowing it out of proportion is you. The headline is: "How Apple Music Can Disrupt Users' iTunes Libraries" and you somehow then interpret this to mean a "world shaking problem that hits all users".
Slashdot Mirror
This article needs taken down now, It is not factual, and the patent is for available credit, not bank account balance. there is a huie difference in both availability and ethics.
It's largely the same thing in practical terms, the bank account Apple can query is accessible either as a credit card (available credit) or as a debit card using the VISA, MasterCard, Citi, etc. systems where the "available credit" is the balance of the account the card is linked to.
RMS may be highly opinionated and abrasive, but at least he's out there pushing back at those that would take away rights.
These days so much of it is just spreading FUD rather than real issues though. Just look at The Javascript Trap and tell me why a normal user would care about that. It's a similar story with the anti-Windows, anti-iOS, anti-SaaS, etc... diatribes, we have had Windows for 20-something years and iOS for 8 years so you would think that if that fear-mongering were well founded then there would be countless concrete examples of non-trivial harm done by non-free software that could be referenced to convince users that it is a bad idea.
There's also this idea that freedom is "taken away", which we all know is rubbish, it's the same false argument the RIAA/MPAA use with "lost profits". If you receive a binary licensed under the GPL you are granted the right to the source code, you didn't have that before. If you receive a proprietary binary you are not granted the right to the source code, it is not a right you had before that has now been "taken away".
The free software idea is great but the message is unconvincing. It's all well and good to rip on somebody else's new product by spreading this fear that it is a vehicle for bad things to happen but taking the iPhone for example, has there really been any non-trivial harm to manifest from all these supposed problems?
Free software should have a lot to offer so it should be a positive message rather than a negative - somewhat abstract and unspecific - fear-mongering of its competitors. The freedom aspect should be a value-add to a superior product.
The difference between an app and application is who controls the executable. You or MS?
"app" is just short for "application", they are the same thing. Windows 10 can run the same applications (apps, applications, programs, whatever you want to call them) that previous versions did. I'm not sure what you mean by "who controls it" because the computer user controls it by executing it in a specific environment and/or with input. The app (or application) does whatever the author programs it to do, if that's me then it does what I tell it, if it's Microsoft then it has whatever capabilities they put in it, if it's some other 3rd party then it has whatever capabilities they put in it.
this OS wants to automatically update itself and any apps you have installed (can't be turned off unless you just kill the services)
Surely you understand that for most users the automatic patching and updating of the system and programs is a good thing, they don't have to worry about computer maintenance. And as you say the power users can kill the services if they really want to do things manually. OS X has gone through a similar process of taking maintenance tasks or traditional mundane workflow tasks and automating them (like the auto save stuff) and this confuses the people who are just used to doing this on a regular basis but is better for those who don't want to worry about it.
A computer - and the operating system - is a tool to do a job, when the maintenance of that tool becomes implicit and automatic that is good for most users and power users can circumvent that default behavior if they feel they need to.
Annoyance #2, actually dealbreaker, is how they've made the OS almost broken if you don't use a Microsoft account login.
I'm using it without a Microsoft account login ... aside from syncing my data with an account I don't have which is precisely why I didn't put one in to begin with I haven't noticed anything "broken". What doesn't work without a Microsoft account?
Yet another smartphone?
And of course "it runs a custom version of Android". Sure make yet another smartphone but do we need another fork of Android for it? Why can't they just preload their emulators onto a stock version of Android?
This "custom version of Android" rubbish is just code for: if it isnt successful it will be abandoned and users wont get updates. Make it a stock version and add your applications and support for specific hardware on top so that users can upgrade to the latest version of Android when Google releases it.
All I want is a simple "Windows Classic" theme that makes Windows 10 look exactly like Windows 2000. That's it. Keep all the fancy kernel improvements and everything else, I just want to interact with the computer how I've found it best.
There have always been alternative shells for those who don't like the out-of-the-box UI.
Why would anyone want to switch over to Microsoft's app based Windows 10?
Every operating system is "app based" that is the whole point of an operating system. An operating system that doesn't run apps (also known as applications or programs) is pretty useless.
Does anyone here have any substantive reasons other than small differences in boot time or DirectX 12 support, that make the upgrade useful for desktop users with Windows 7? I'm curious.
Lower resource usage, improved battery life on mobile devices, better support for high dpi displays, continuum (if you have a convertible device), etc. There's quite a few but really if you're happy with your current system then why change? It's the same whether you're using Windows, Linux or OS X.
I think they're going to use the next few years of rolling updates to get the average consumer used to the Windows as a Service model. Then, at least for the Home version, they're going to come out with Windows 365 when "Windows 11" is ready. The Pro and Enterprise versions will probably still be available in perpetual license format (They already committed to a long term stable (LTS) branch of 10 for companies.) The carrot for going to Windows 365 will be the availability of features.
More likely they will just continue to charge an OEM license fee and tie the software license to the hardware then providing free upgrades for the life of the hardware like Apple does. A subscription model makes sense when it is "Software as a Service" but not when it is an operating system, that makes more sense to tie the license to the hardware.
I'm not a fan of the constant rental fees for software. Adobe went that way with Creative Cloud, and people basically have no choice but to keep paying forever. AutoCAD is now rent-only as well.
I prefer the perpetual licensing too but from a business accounting perspective subscription makes more sense, it also means you don't have different people using different versions since everybody who has Photoshop can have the latest version of Photoshop.
Moving toward is not guarantee of arriving.
No it is a suggestion that you think they will. You could then say they are "moving toward" subscription only and equally that they are "moving toward" abandoning subscription completely.
And what is with this 'Cheaper alternative' nonsense? Last I checked, Linux users don't choose it because they are cheapskates
That's certainly supposed to be the idea, in fact cost shouldn't be the issue at all. End user funded development should be encouraged otherwise the majority of development comes from the corporate interests that pay for it. The consumer end is just driven by hobbyists.
What need is there for "Windows" in a "cloud" based ecosystem?
A "cloud-based" ecosystem does not encompass anywhere near a significant amount of use cases for Windows.
If I get the functionality of Office, on web interface(and thus, on any web device), why do I need Windows?
Unlike you most Windows users aren't just office drones that use nothing but Microsoft Office. While you might not need Windows just because you can run Office on other systems that isn't representative of the majority of users.
Yes i get that what you're trying to say is you think that because they are offering a subscription model that this means they then have the possibility to offer only a subscription model but there is nothing to support the assertion that they would. If you use that terminology you could also say Google is "moving towards" a pay-only model of gmail or google drive by offering a paid version. Or that Apple is "moving towards" abandoning iTunes music because they are offering a subscription music service. But that phrase is not used in that way.
The reality is equally likely that they are "moving towards" a future where you can switch between licensing models at will.
Whoops that's backwards...which you can obviously see in the link.
Yes it is. I did not say it was *only* available in a subscription, but they are *moving* in that direction.
What does that even mean? They are "supporting" that model because it makes sense in that context. When you're offering a product as a service to support multiple software platforms from other vendors that subscription model makes sense but for an operating system it makes no sense at all because the operating system is tied to the hardware but the applications are not.
I see more and more Windows tablets in people's hands, but if you compare it statistically to the Android / iOS tablets instead of laptops then Windows tablets have abysmal market share and growth.
That's because there is no real concrete definition of a "tablet". A Windows tablet has always been a laptop with a touchscreen interface (even back to the old HPs running Windows XP) while Android and iOS tablets are large smartphones (sometimes with slightly different UI elements for the larger screens). The two types really aren't comparable, they are different tools for different jobs.
You often see iPads used as menus in restaurants because they are fairly robust (once in a case), easy to lockdown, long battery life and relatively cheap. Now you wouldn't use a Surface for the purpose since they aren't really made to go in a case, the hardware is fairly power-hungry and you would be paying for things you don't need like the active stylus.
Switching to subscription is going to kill Windows, regardless of whether or not Windows is subscription.
Why is that? Assuming Windows doesn't go subscription (there's no real need for it since the subscription stuff is being applied to services and cross-platform cloud-based applications where that model makes sense) why would the subscription model of Microsoft's other products have any effect on it?
well, hello Office 365, being pushed on a large percentage of Windows 8 machines, with 1 year free subscription to get people hooked.
How will that "get people hooked"? LibreOffice is free, Google Apps are free, Apple bundles its iWork suite free on OS X and iOS. Sure in some cases you may have minor formatting issues importing your MS Office docs to one of those applications but if you don't want to pay there is certainly no reason to unless it is a better experience worth paying for.
By the same token kernel developers are free to keep rejecting kdbus if it doesn't meet their needs or expectations.
Yes, of course. And distro maintainers and users are free to keep rejecting systemd if they don't like it.
See, arguments like this are precisely why people like me quit contributing to open source projects a long time ago. It's just the "fuck you" attitude that gets to us. When users demand features, you are supposed to listen. But nope, this stock answer is trotted out every time as a way to avoid doing work.
No that's absolute rubbish! Just because you release code as open source doesn't mean you then have an obligation to do whatever the users of that code demand of you.
I'd thought I had read (maybe here?) about a proof of concept GPU malware authorship recently.
You can certainly get it to perform some of the malware tasks but you still need a process running on the CPU that has access to the requisite data. So you still need CPU-based malware that has access to all the data you need, you can just obscure what your process does with that data by passing it to the GPU.
The first or second link in your results had a diagram that shows this.
I think you may be a bit out of date with your info that it can not be done.
What cannot be done is to just take a process and have it run on the GPU, you must have a CPU-side process that has access to all the data and then offloads that to the GPU for processing. Point is if your CPU process already has all the access to the data then generally you can obfuscate what it's doing enough to be able to avoid detection by anti-virus software already anyway.
The equivalent in the kernel is kdbus. Heard that the developers of kdbus are not listening to people as usual.
Well the point of free software is to do things you need and contribute that back so other people can use it, do things out of charity or get paid by people to do those things. If those "people" want to pay the kdbus developers to do what they want then fine but outside of that there's no real need or reason they would listen to what other people want them to do.
I am not a GPU designer, but as far as I know, GPUs do not have much security compared to CPUs, thus the issue of keyloggers and malware that run just on that processor, and since nothing checks the GPU out, it is an effective way to hide processes.
The GPU is not a general purpose processor like the CPU, you can offload certain tasks to it that suit its processing and data model but you can't take processes like keyloggers and malware and run them on the GPU.
Hand the Web browser control of the GPU... which has full access to RAM
No the GPU does not have access to RAM.
and it wouldn't be farfetched to see malware be able to modify memory, add itself into the CPU's kernel space, or just do its dirty work from the GPU, perhaps flashing the firmware on a vulnerable device so it has the ability to reload again.
No this sort of capability simply isn't possible on a GPU.
On a less lethal level, a GPU-based botnet has the ability to do not just DDoS attacks, but be used for distributed items like cryptocurrency mining.
In a botnet the bottleneck is the network, not the CPU, I'm not quite sure what a the GPU component of a GPU-based DDoSing botnet would even do. You can already do cryptocurrency mining on the CPU in the browser, having the CPU offload the applicable elements of the mining process to the GPU isn't going to make it any more clandestine.
Overall, why does the Web browser need this much access to low level hardware? A browser should have -no- hardware access, and be limited on CPU/RAM/GPU/disk resources by the OS.
It already is limited, even access to the GPU is not some direct thing. You don't just get some system control or ability to control what is displayed on the screen just because you can run shader programs on the GPU.
What they're glossing over with their review is that adblocker extensions, password managers, extensions that prevent video from autoplaying and etc. will not be available.
And what you're glossing over is that extensions will be available, just not immediately at release. You're criticising somebody for telling a half-truth and then doing exactly that yourself.
They have even detailed the process for creating extensions for Edge.
And I won't use Edge because if I can't control the behavior of my web browser I won't use that web browser.
Ok. You're a minority, most people don't worry about controlling Safari (OSX or iOS) or Chrome or Firefox, they just use the vendor binary.
Right, when they lock down the entire system. Who would want an x-box anyway?
About 80 million people, much the same with the Playstation 3 which also around 80 million and the XB1 and PS4 are already on around 20 and 12 million respectively. So the answer is that lots of people want these systems despite the lockdown.
And websites always need clickbait with headlines implying a world shaking problem that hits all users... so the problem gets blown out of proportion.
The one blowing it out of proportion is you. The headline is: "How Apple Music Can Disrupt Users' iTunes Libraries" and you somehow then interpret this to mean a "world shaking problem that hits all users".