That said lets cut through the bullshit and talk about the REAL reason so many are hanging onto XP for dear life...Windows 8. They claim Win 8 is "easy to use" but that is bullshit [story about dad]
Did your dad have the right hardware: a touchscreen laptop with an adjustable hinge? If not. Then of course it was hard to use, he was using a Windows 7 laptop to run Windows 8. Run Windows 8 on the right hardware running applications designed for that hardware and it is a very different experience. Microsoft made a huge mistake in not making Windows 8 touchscreen or external tablet mandatory.
but they added a Goatse by saying "We brought back the start screen!" only to have it...drumroll...take you back to the fucking metro you were trying to get away from!
I was at WPC where they made the announcement. They did not bring back the start menu. They introduced a new dashboards feature for desktop mode, and included one sample dashboard which uses a button market "start" to launch the Metro launcher. They were giving an example of the power of dashboards. There is no way to get away from Metro, Metro is the new OS, desktop / Win32 is a legacy product.
Compare that to Apple's month-long MobileMe outage, the uncountable outages afterward, the regular iCloud outages, and even their recent month-long developer center outage. Those aren't even news. It's just par for the course. Yet Apple inexplicably maintains a reputation for reliability.
In web services? Apple has a terrible reputation for web services. They have a great reputation for hardware reliability mainly because they are compared to bad desktops and Android phones. That being said, there is a very important difference. iCloud is unimportant to iPhone. iPhone works fine without Apple servers. BlackBerries not on BES conversely needed BIZ. The outage was devastating.
Customers don't respond well, but they quickly forget. Except when it comes to BlackBerry. Then they remember. Probably because they're constantly reminded by people who seem to have some pathological hatred for cell-phone manufacturer
I agree with your points. I actually think the differences are cultural more than technological.
Desktop: Windows has far and away the least educated and the least motivated user base. Apple has a very strong policy of forced upgrades which allows them to respond to security threat vectors incredibly aggressively and quickly.
Server: Linux has tremendous diversity Linux has a long standing tradition of software with rare exceptions coming from the distribution not 1st parties Linux has a reputation of security patches being free so Apache, MySQL (similar to Exchange in usage) get patches fast.
I wonder how hard it would be to convince people to install GreatestScreenSaverEver.rpm given a nice screenshot and some flattering text
Rather difficult I suspect, since they've been trained to only install software that comes from their distribution. So unless RedHat was tricked they are unlikely to install.
If people just click OK or YES on every request they see then what can the OS do about it ? (assuming the user fully owns & manages the machine.
What Apple does, makes doing harmful stuff more difficult than doing easy stuff.
Will you cut the nonsense about "religious argument" whenever the flaws of Windows are pointed out. Sjames made a valid point, that in multiple venues Windows seems more susceptible. That's not religious that's fact. It is religious to fail to evaluate products fairly on their genuine disadvantages.
Now I happen to think the issue with Windows is cultural not technological. But that being said, Sjames' argument is not religious.
I'd like to here the original and not just a reporter's summary. But assuming this is accurate then In my read, dumb advice. If DLP is solved EC factoring is solved. The article has mistakes a perfect solution to DLP is a perfect solution to factoring. I could imagine that progress is made in DLP, something like a another million+ reduction in computation, which EC factoring is less susceptible to. But if the problem is solved and these papers aren't just about a speed up then game over.
Unix grew up as a reaction against the security in Multics, which was a genuinely secure OS. UNIX has never had good security though year by year it gets better. Windows had a very good capability security model they just didn't use very much because of application compatibility problems.
The difference is in the applications culture not the origination.
RSA is not going to be cracked. And moreover if RSA could be fully cracked, i.e. prime factorization was a solved problem then ECC wouldn't hold up either. It is not difficult to map any ECC problem to a finite collection of factorizations on the integers.
Yes it did make them look bad. They floundered a lot. In 2010 they were still king of the hill, dictated terms to others and exploring expanding into complex verticals. It took time for them to realize they could lose it all.
That line in context was about kernel level features in particular porting Balance. So yes, that would be against the Linux Kernel, so the GPL would apply.
I don't think it was one thing, but I agree that was a huge factor. It was the same thing that killed Danger (Sidekick) after the acquisition by Microsoft. Customers do not respond well to an extended outage. Blackberry can't run around claiming to be the best in IT while having an incident like this.
Corporate customers aren't supposed to want Windows 8. They are mostly satisfied with Windows 7. What Windows 8 will do though is make them unsatisfied with Windows 7 style applications, forcing vertical applications to code for Metro prior to the time when Android is ready to act as a primary OS. They don't need to want it, they just need to accept it.
Excluding BB10, to have a BlackBerry function you either needed BIS or BES. If there was no fairly extensive carrier support nor was it being purchased for a corporate client with a BES the phone wouldn't work. Finland is Nokia country. I'm not shocked carriers didn't want to give RIM a complex feature set to do stuff that Nokia / Symbian mostly already did.
In all fairness, BlackBerry made damn sure everyone knew that they had handed the keys over and created plenty of lead time so people in India could have alternative solutions. They handled this as responsible as they could have. That's not remotely similar to the USA situation with the telcos of secretly handing customer data over.
First off, it doesn't really matter what QNX can do vs. Linux. RIM/Blackberry wrote their features against QNX. They would have to rewrite chunks of them against Linux or XNU (BTW iOS kernel is XNU not Mach).
There are plusses and minus to QNX. QNX offers much better automated syntonization so low level routines in Linux have hand-coded syntonization while QNX code frequently doesn't. QNX applications have deterministic execution times which means that chunks of the code know that process X is finished because it started Y time ago. Linux has nothing like that.
Also the ability to have more than one user space and rules governing them isn't present in Linux or XNU. Blackberry makes use of this in their implementation of Balance ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI5sbDOt4WE ). While both iOS and Android are getting mini versions of balance.
I believe there are 269 patents on the Aqua interface elements. If you are right, given they sell this distro for $10, they better hope they are never successful enough to get noticed.
Yes that is hard. Many of BlackBerry's best features rely on BBOS or QNX. Android doesn't have them. It would be a massive porting effort. Android is often open source so once they finished porting they would have to share what they wrote with Samsung.
Given that BB10 already has compatibility with Android application, what does Android do for them?
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That's one of the big advantages of the Apple community with rapid adoption of OSes and associated applications.
Did your dad have the right hardware: a touchscreen laptop with an adjustable hinge? If not. Then of course it was hard to use, he was using a Windows 7 laptop to run Windows 8. Run Windows 8 on the right hardware running applications designed for that hardware and it is a very different experience. Microsoft made a huge mistake in not making Windows 8 touchscreen or external tablet mandatory.
I was at WPC where they made the announcement. They did not bring back the start menu. They introduced a new dashboards feature for desktop mode, and included one sample dashboard which uses a button market "start" to launch the Metro launcher. They were giving an example of the power of dashboards. There is no way to get away from Metro, Metro is the new OS, desktop / Win32 is a legacy product.
The start menu is a directory. Open it and move stuff.
In web services? Apple has a terrible reputation for web services. They have a great reputation for hardware reliability mainly because they are compared to bad desktops and Android phones. That being said, there is a very important difference. iCloud is unimportant to iPhone. iPhone works fine without Apple servers. BlackBerries not on BES conversely needed BIZ. The outage was devastating.
How is Danger, which had a similar outage doing?
As an aside Microsoft also sells a stripped down Windows called Windows embedded. You do't even need to go to vlite.
I agree with your points. I actually think the differences are cultural more than technological.
Desktop:
Windows has far and away the least educated and the least motivated user base.
Apple has a very strong policy of forced upgrades which allows them to respond to security threat vectors incredibly aggressively and quickly.
Server:
Linux has tremendous diversity
Linux has a long standing tradition of software with rare exceptions coming from the distribution not 1st parties
Linux has a reputation of security patches being free so Apache, MySQL (similar to Exchange in usage) get patches fast.
Rather difficult I suspect, since they've been trained to only install software that comes from their distribution. So unless RedHat was tricked they are unlikely to install.
What Apple does, makes doing harmful stuff more difficult than doing easy stuff.
Will you cut the nonsense about "religious argument" whenever the flaws of Windows are pointed out. Sjames made a valid point, that in multiple venues Windows seems more susceptible. That's not religious that's fact. It is religious to fail to evaluate products fairly on their genuine disadvantages.
Now I happen to think the issue with Windows is cultural not technological. But that being said, Sjames' argument is not religious.
I'd like to here the original and not just a reporter's summary. But assuming this is accurate then In my read, dumb advice. If DLP is solved EC factoring is solved. The article has mistakes a perfect solution to DLP is a perfect solution to factoring. I could imagine that progress is made in DLP, something like a another million+ reduction in computation, which EC factoring is less susceptible to. But if the problem is solved and these papers aren't just about a speed up then game over.
Unix grew up as a reaction against the security in Multics, which was a genuinely secure OS. UNIX has never had good security though year by year it gets better. Windows had a very good capability security model they just didn't use very much because of application compatibility problems.
The difference is in the applications culture not the origination.
RSA is not going to be cracked. And moreover if RSA could be fully cracked, i.e. prime factorization was a solved problem then ECC wouldn't hold up either. It is not difficult to map any ECC problem to a finite collection of factorizations on the integers.
Yes it did make them look bad. They floundered a lot. In 2010 they were still king of the hill, dictated terms to others and exploring expanding into complex verticals. It took time for them to realize they could lose it all.
That line in context was about kernel level features in particular porting Balance. So yes, that would be against the Linux Kernel, so the GPL would apply.
Nokia / Microsoft is focusing on the mid range primarily. They are aiming at higher and of Android's customer base not primarily Apple's.
I don't think it was one thing, but I agree that was a huge factor. It was the same thing that killed Danger (Sidekick) after the acquisition by Microsoft. Customers do not respond well to an extended outage. Blackberry can't run around claiming to be the best in IT while having an incident like this.
Huh? BlackBerry is in the hardware business. They don't just produce an OS and a software they do hardware as well.
Corporate customers aren't supposed to want Windows 8. They are mostly satisfied with Windows 7. What Windows 8 will do though is make them unsatisfied with Windows 7 style applications, forcing vertical applications to code for Metro prior to the time when Android is ready to act as a primary OS. They don't need to want it, they just need to accept it.
Excluding BB10, to have a BlackBerry function you either needed BIS or BES. If there was no fairly extensive carrier support nor was it being purchased for a corporate client with a BES the phone wouldn't work. Finland is Nokia country. I'm not shocked carriers didn't want to give RIM a complex feature set to do stuff that Nokia / Symbian mostly already did.
In all fairness, BlackBerry made damn sure everyone knew that they had handed the keys over and created plenty of lead time so people in India could have alternative solutions. They handled this as responsible as they could have. That's not remotely similar to the USA situation with the telcos of secretly handing customer data over.
First off, it doesn't really matter what QNX can do vs. Linux. RIM/Blackberry wrote their features against QNX. They would have to rewrite chunks of them against Linux or XNU (BTW iOS kernel is XNU not Mach).
There are plusses and minus to QNX. QNX offers much better automated syntonization so low level routines in Linux have hand-coded syntonization while QNX code frequently doesn't. QNX applications have deterministic execution times which means that chunks of the code know that process X is finished because it started Y time ago. Linux has nothing like that.
Also the ability to have more than one user space and rules governing them isn't present in Linux or XNU. Blackberry makes use of this in their implementation of Balance ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI5sbDOt4WE ). While both iOS and Android are getting mini versions of balance.
I believe there are 269 patents on the Aqua interface elements. If you are right, given they sell this distro for $10, they better hope they are never successful enough to get noticed.
Yes that is hard. Many of BlackBerry's best features rely on BBOS or QNX. Android doesn't have them. It would be a massive porting effort. Android is often open source so once they finished porting they would have to share what they wrote with Samsung.
Given that BB10 already has compatibility with Android application, what does Android do for them?
Not really. In some blue chips Blackberry is still in use. But they've lost huge share even in large enterprise and government.
One of things I think the environmentalists need to do is stop classifying all this as denialism. These are different arguments.
Well OK, but GP was arguing that Microsoft never did this sort of thing before.