I've been using BSD since before Finder 0.9 was a glint in Jef Raskin's eye. Mac OS before OS X (before Jaguar, really) was exactly the kind of joke you're trying to make it. Today it's a decent desktop OS, and better than Windows as a server, but only because it's fired the creaky old 1960-quality OS that was holding it back. What's there now is no more "Mac OS" than Linux or FreeBSD are. Pity Microsoft can't bring themselves to bury the horrorshow of misdirected grad theses in the NT kernel and the crippled Win32 subsystem and start over from scratch.
I haven't read the iTMS EULA, but it's probably the case that burning a song to CD and then ripping the resulting CD is not allowed by it.
The EULA can't override traditional fair use.
Besides, is this really the process that you want to go through in order to make a personal backup copy of your music? Is this what you would expect the average consumer to go through?
Absolutely. When even "honor system" DRM makes users jump through hoops like this to do normal and expected operations, that makes DRM as a whole look bad. Which is good.
Apple is the largest single purveyor of DRM so we started there.
Sony's bigger.
Microsoft's bigger AND more dangerous.
Blockbuster's bigger.
Apple is small potatoes.
Read my response in more detail, paying particular care to the reasons why Apple's clunky, incompetant, incomplete, and inconvenient DRM is good for the consumer.
Windows users are easy targets for trolling. They've been sucked in to putting up with the most outrageous problems for the sake of saving a few dollars on an overpowered computer, then feel the overwhelming need to try and convince themselves that they don't really care about Windows annoyances and disasters, apparently to justify their purchase of a fancy videogame console. I don't get it, but sometimes they can be amusing when they're trying to be dry and ironic.
They don't know that they're giving up rights that they have always had in order to get music on to their iPod.
If I buy a song from the iTMS and burn it to an audio CD, I can do anything with it I could do with the same song bought on an audio CD from the nearest music store.
What rights am I giving up?
It's not like I bought a DVD from France and wanted to play it on my DVD player in the US.
if the RIAA had stores set up in malls that gather lots of foot traffic we might be targetting them as well.
Every bookstore and video store is selling encrypted DRMed DVDs. They just don't happen to be inconvenient for you, I guess.
How cool would it be if there was a law that said it was illegal to create a copy protection mechanism that offered the copyright holder more rights than the law did.
Wow. A law that would keep me from encrypting my own personal documents on my own computer.
The question is, that I have seen asked before, is whether an independent label or artist whether can have my music on iTunes without DRM and ask for automatic global distribution.
Remember that Apple has managed to get the big labels to all accept exactly the same terms for their distribution, the famous "99c a track" across the board. I can't imagine that these contracts leave much more room for alternate terms on Apple's side than they do on the label's side. Otherwise the labels would just use that as leverage in their current attempt to dump the flat rate for songs.
Well, they may not be lying. They may be terminally clueless. Nobody who's even just been following the debate could have missed this stuff:
They claimed that Apple limits the number of copies you can make of a song. That's not true, you can burn as many copies of a song as you want. You just have to make a new playlist now and then (which is pretty easy, it's about 3 clicks and a drag).
They claimed that Apple was the biggest distributor of DRM in the world. Not even close. Microsoft beats them hollow, and the DVD industry makes both look like small potatoes.
Why on Earth would the music industry want Apple to licence FairPlay?
Because a balkanized DRM "marketplace" is good for consumers, and bad for the Intellectual Property Misers that run the labels. So since Apple's not caving in to Microsoft they want to see Apple "win" in the DRM wars. Luckily, Apple doesn't want to "win", because they know the only way to win is not to play.
I wish Sony's DRM and Real's DRM were still seriously fighting it out with Microsoft's Trusted Computing software.
There's actually a couple of good things about Apple's DRM.
Here's two HUGE advantages of having Apple in the DRM market that more than make up for all the disadvantages of FairPlay.
1. Competition in the DRM marketplace is good for consumers, because the more complex and difficult DRM is to use, the less acceptable people will find it. I like the fact that I have to jump through extra hoops to unlock my music to play on a generic player, because if it's extra work for a geek it means it's a lot of extra work for a typical user... so they won't be inclined to put up with it. If they used Microsoft's DRM and everything Just Worked, then people would ignore it the way they ignore the DRM on DVDs.
Protesting Apple's DRM plays into the hands of the Intellectual Property Misers. Protest PlaysForSure instead, because if Apple actually caves in that'll be the only alternative... and with everyone using it it'll be invisible and surprisingly easy. And easy DRM is a boot stamping on a music-lover's face, forever.
2. Apple's DRM is practically "honor system". They even ran ads telling you how to bypass it, if you paid attention when they were telling you to "Rip Mix Burn". Just change the order... "Mix Burn Rip". And if that's not good enough don't forget that they have no Microsoftian "Trusted Audio Path", so you can use Wiretap on the Mac or equivalent programs on Windows to save the cost of a CDR. And to top it all off, iTunes Music Store downloads the file in unencrypted format and encrypts it when you download it...
Protesting Apple's DRM plays into the hands of the Intellectual Property Misers. Protest PlaysForSure instead, because it's more effective. And effective DRM is a boot... you know the drill...
The treo keyboard is far from unusable for me, and I've got pretty fat fingers. It -looks- bad, I'll give you that, but it is in fact very functional.
I've used thumb keyboards... and not just on the Treo: I bought one for my Visor. What kills them for me is that they make me pay too much attention to the process. Yes, they're faster... even when I get going I can't graffiti as fast as I can thumb... but I can graffiti faster than I can write and I can do it without looking at the screen. And that more than makes up for the slight speed advantage of the Treo.
I actually prefer T9 (i think that's what it's called... predictive text entry) on a 3x4 keypad to the Treo's thumboard.
As for the click wheel, it's what's made the ipod so good.
I bought an iPod, and after a week I gave it to my daughter and bought an iPod Shuffle instead because it doesn't have a click wheel. Same problem... I can't use the click-wheel by feel, I have to look at the iPod. The Nintendo D-pad style on the iPod Shuffle is much better for anything but scrolling through huge playlists, and a stylus and text entry is even better for that.
Don't forget the flying cars (not Moller's - the ones that fold up into a briefcase), robot butlers (ASIMO doesn't count, damn it), food pills, and 3d videophones that make you look great on the screen even if you just woke up on the morning after the night before and you haven't taken your hangover pill (there's another one) yet.
Games with 30 minutes worth of content suck
on
Just Let Me Play!
·
· Score: 1
If I go to a place in the real world, let's say new York City, and I spend 10 hours there, that doesn't mean I spent 9:30 hours unlocking levels to get to "empire state building observation deck" or "central park", it means I spent most of those ten hours at places where there were hours of actual things to do. The closest thing the real world has to "unlocking levels" would be "calling a cab", "riding the subway", "waiting for a table to open up"... the things that people complain about in the real world and (I would hope) you don't want to emulate in a game.
At least I hope not. I mean, "Elevator Action" doesn't put you in a box with Muzak and slowly changing numbers.
Give me things to do that are themselves interesting. Don't give me the equivalent of finding an unoccupied cab in Times Square.
The mini & MacBook only have a GMA950 which is about the same performance as Radeon 9200.
The GMA950 is significantly faster than the Radeon 9200 for 2d, but for 3d?
Let's put it this way... for hardware T&L, the Mac mini Core Duo - with two cores and the GMA950 together - is only marginally faster than the Mac mini Power PC.
For gaming, the Radeon 9200 is massively faster than the GMA950. It's only the 4x faster CPU on the new Mini that lets it even keep up with its anemic precursor, and that machine was not acceptable for gaming. They could have put in a Radeon X200 instead, and get the price advantage of integrated graphics with the same GPU as the X1300. I wonder if Intel twisted Steve's arm on that one?
But if you're going to put a battery sucking iPod in a phone... do it right.
I can't imagine how neat an Appleified treo with a wheel control grafted onto the back of it would be.
Not a treo...
I much preferred the Qualcomm PDQ to the treo. NORMAL cellphone dialing pad for cellphone stuff, and it flipped open to give you a regular Palm, not a trimmed down one with the graffiti area replaced by an unusably small keyboard.
Then you could put the Apple click wheel on the backside of the keypad, where it wouldn't be subject to random jittering in your pocket. Or even better, just control it with the cellphone keypad. 2 and 8 for volume up/down, 4 and 6 for back/skip, 5 for play/pause, 1 and 3 for jog-skip, and 7 and 9 for playlist prev/next.
Why? Because you have the PDA interface for the complex part of the user interface, there's no point in keeping the click wheel when you have a stylus... if you really want it bad enough, simulate it on the touch screen.
The higher cost of the sticks is only partially due to volumes but also due to the large profit tacked on the top.
While I am by no means a fan of memory stick (most of my devices are CF or MMS/SD, the sole exception being my Clie):
1. My third-party (non-Sony) MS was cheaper at the time than a comparable sized SD stick, and didn't have part of the memory wasted on the "secure" part of "secure digital".
2. If your device is a camera, you want one that uses CF or xD anyway.
3. If you were using SD, your new camera's mini-SD, and your old memory is useless.
4. If you were using MS, your new device is MS-Duo, and your old memory is useless.
5. If you can use the sticks, they're a quarter the size of new ones and your new higher res camera needs bigger sticks anyway...
6. Smartmedia, CF, CF-II, CF-1e, MMC, SD, Mini-SD, MS, xD, MS-Duo, what's next? I vote for a USB host mode interface so you can save your snaps from your camera direct to your iPod.
One thing Apple needs to do to really get gaming down is to get the whole control and user interface situation under control. If I buy a non-Mac-specific control device, whether it's a keyboard or a joystick or a dance pad or a head-mounted theremin, I should be able to map any control to any input on any program in one central place.
You can buy third-party applications that do some of this, and many applications have very sophisticated preferences for input as well, but really this should be handled the same way everywhere.
Obviously this isn't a general solution to the problem, but it's part of a solution.
The other half to this is output. If I'm playing a game - whether it's full screen or in a window - I should be able to interact with other apps without having the game go through a lengthy restore process when I return my attention to it. And with the GUI in the GPU I shouldn't have any flickering from composition whether it's compositing two Aqua texture-based translucent windows, or an OpenGL translucent overlay on top of an OpenGL window.
Similarly, I should be able to run an app and have it limited to a certain amount of VRAM, real RAM, and swap... or reserve a certain amount for it. So a game can have a guaranteed 128M VRAM, 800MB RAM, and no more than 384M VRAM and 1.5GB RAM... even if I have 512M and 2GB. And find that out, so it can scale its resource use so it's never paging to disk and never having textures flushed from the GPU behind its back...
(oh, and emulate Mach as much as you need to... but don't actually use it more than you have to)
It's no secret that all software has bugs and vulnerabilities - and like other software companies, we are committed to building software as secure as we can make it and finding and fixing bugs as quickly as possible.
You've had almost 10 years to fix the fundamental design flaw that's by far the biggest source of security problems - the integration of the Browser and the Desktop using ActiveX - and not only has Microsoft NOT backed out that unfixable problem and the layers of kludges (like "security zones") plastered over it, Microsoft risked getting the company torn apart by the DoJ to keep that design in place.
If you had taken the class, the instuctor would have pointed you towards the maintaince and service contracts that have been part of the consumer marketplace for over one hundred years.
This isn't a maintainance or service contract.
This is like having your car recalled because the engine was prone to exploding, and the only fix up to now had been paying a mechanic every week to look for cracks... and when you get to the dealer to have the work done you find that instead of replacing the faulty components in your engine they try to sell you their crack-detection service.
Someone at Microsoft should be criminally liable for the damage done by their arrogant and incompetant design.
Because obviously there's no message board based support for windows that's free.
Obviously there is, and there was back in the '90s, when the "free" support by Microsoft cost me half a day downtime for 100 people... see my original response to your post for more details.
The only difference between Free UNIX (such as Linux) and Windows support is that you're likely to waste time trying to get some use out of that support that you're paying for with your Windows license before going to the online discussion forums to actually get your problem solved.
There's no point in Apple even trying to emulate a Windows-specific and Microsoft-controlled API.
On the other hand, Microsoft's support for OpenGL is shoddy at best, and what they did to OpenGL flight sims should have gotten them an antitrust suit.
On the third hand, Apple's OpenGL is consistent across the product line... they implement missing features in software, so OpenGL just works even if the GPU doesn't do (for example) T&L.
So that's why you write for the Mac. You only have to do it once.
It's gotta be Intel making them do it, even the Radeon X200 would be better and it shouldn't cost any more. Yeh, it's "integrated graphics" and eats into the RAM, but at least they don't have to blow one of the CPUs for software OpenGL.
Dialog boxes may reduce security for some people by training them to automatically approve them, particularly on Windows where almost all the time they're completely superfluous.
Apple has started to go down the stupid dialog boxes route, though, because people have come to associate the illusion of security for the real thing.
To me, any time a programmer thinks "Oh, this might be dangerous, let me add a warning"... they need to change the design so the decision to perform a dangerous operation can be deferred and taken on the user's schedule rather than the application writer's. But don't leave the dialog in there as well!
The "Trash Can" is an example of this... it seems like Microsoft saw how useful it was on the Mac, but didn't understand why, so it asks you "do you want to move this to the trash" and "do you want to emopty the trash", even after changing the dangerous (delete) operation to a deferred (trash... then empty trash) one.
For the example at hand...
Don't automatically install or run components. Just download them, if you don't have a sandbox (a real application level one, not a 'low privilege user') to examine them in, and let the user open them later from the desktop or download manager.
People will learn not to open dangerous documents, if they don't have to make a snap decision about them in a hurry. And that will give them REAL security.
Yep, it's still true for XP SP2. And it'll be true for Vista, Vista II, Vista XP, and successors, until Microsoft gets serious about removing the inherently unsafe components from the system like most UNIX distributions removed IP-based "security" along with the Berkeley "r suite" applications that used it.
You don't get security by adding band aids, you get security by fixing and removing the components or processes that cause the problem.
But most malware nowadays doesn't rely on OS flaws, but rather user foolishness (downloading trojans from warez sites or P2P, clicking on malware email attachments, etc).
The fact that just clicking on an attachment or a link... not even downloading and opening it... can execute malicious code locally is a fundamental design flaw in one of Microsoft's flagship operating system components... the HTML control. Remember, Microsoft went to the wall with the Department of Justice to avoid having this removed from the OS, even risking splitting the company up rather than splitting up the HTML control into multiple components.
And I guess that was smart. If they hadn't left this criminally incompetant design stand, they wouldn't be able to charge for a security service now.
But don't for one minute think that it's all just social engineering and people being tricked into opening malware.
People can actually learn not to be socially engineered, I've seen it happen... for the decade and a half I was a system administrator for a Windows network I never once had someone come to me twice with a tale of being tricked into downloading a virus and launching it from their desktop or the command line.
Computers, though, don't learn. I've had plenty of people infected through Outlook, Internet Explorer, and other programs that use the HTML control over and over again.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using BSD since before Finder 0.9 was a glint in Jef Raskin's eye. Mac OS before OS X (before Jaguar, really) was exactly the kind of joke you're trying to make it. Today it's a decent desktop OS, and better than Windows as a server, but only because it's fired the creaky old 1960-quality OS that was holding it back. What's there now is no more "Mac OS" than Linux or FreeBSD are. Pity Microsoft can't bring themselves to bury the horrorshow of misdirected grad theses in the NT kernel and the crippled Win32 subsystem and start over from scratch.
I haven't read the iTMS EULA, but it's probably the case that burning a song to CD and then ripping the resulting CD is not allowed by it.
The EULA can't override traditional fair use.
Besides, is this really the process that you want to go through in order to make a personal backup copy of your music? Is this what you would expect the average consumer to go through?
Absolutely. When even "honor system" DRM makes users jump through hoops like this to do normal and expected operations, that makes DRM as a whole look bad. Which is good.
Apple is the largest single purveyor of DRM so we started there.
Sony's bigger.
Microsoft's bigger AND more dangerous.
Blockbuster's bigger.
Apple is small potatoes.
Read my response in more detail, paying particular care to the reasons why Apple's clunky, incompetant, incomplete, and inconvenient DRM is good for the consumer.
Windows users are easy targets for trolling. They've been sucked in to putting up with the most outrageous problems for the sake of saving a few dollars on an overpowered computer, then feel the overwhelming need to try and convince themselves that they don't really care about Windows annoyances and disasters, apparently to justify their purchase of a fancy videogame console. I don't get it, but sometimes they can be amusing when they're trying to be dry and ironic.
They don't know that they're giving up rights that they have always had in order to get music on to their iPod.
If I buy a song from the iTMS and burn it to an audio CD, I can do anything with it I could do with the same song bought on an audio CD from the nearest music store.
What rights am I giving up?
It's not like I bought a DVD from France and wanted to play it on my DVD player in the US.
if the RIAA had stores set up in malls that gather lots of foot traffic we might be targetting them as well.
Every bookstore and video store is selling encrypted DRMed DVDs. They just don't happen to be inconvenient for you, I guess.
How cool would it be if there was a law that said it was illegal to create a copy protection mechanism that offered the copyright holder more rights than the law did.
Wow. A law that would keep me from encrypting my own personal documents on my own computer.
The question is, that I have seen asked before, is whether an independent label or artist whether can have my music on iTunes without DRM and ask for automatic global distribution.
Remember that Apple has managed to get the big labels to all accept exactly the same terms for their distribution, the famous "99c a track" across the board. I can't imagine that these contracts leave much more room for alternate terms on Apple's side than they do on the label's side. Otherwise the labels would just use that as leverage in their current attempt to dump the flat rate for songs.
Have you investigated this possibility?
Well, they may not be lying. They may be terminally clueless. Nobody who's even just been following the debate could have missed this stuff:
They claimed that Apple limits the number of copies you can make of a song. That's not true, you can burn as many copies of a song as you want. You just have to make a new playlist now and then (which is pretty easy, it's about 3 clicks and a drag).
They claimed that Apple was the biggest distributor of DRM in the world. Not even close. Microsoft beats them hollow, and the DVD industry makes both look like small potatoes.
Why on Earth would the music industry want Apple to licence FairPlay?
Because a balkanized DRM "marketplace" is good for consumers, and bad for the Intellectual Property Misers that run the labels. So since Apple's not caving in to Microsoft they want to see Apple "win" in the DRM wars. Luckily, Apple doesn't want to "win", because they know the only way to win is not to play.
I wish Sony's DRM and Real's DRM were still seriously fighting it out with Microsoft's Trusted Computing software.
But I'll take what I can get.
Expanded on this comment here.
Also noted some of the major inaccuracies in the original article.
I get the feeling that these folks are less concerned about DRM and more concerned about their own convenience.
There's actually a couple of good things about Apple's DRM.
Here's two HUGE advantages of having Apple in the DRM market that more than make up for all the disadvantages of FairPlay.
1. Competition in the DRM marketplace is good for consumers, because the more complex and difficult DRM is to use, the less acceptable people will find it. I like the fact that I have to jump through extra hoops to unlock my music to play on a generic player, because if it's extra work for a geek it means it's a lot of extra work for a typical user... so they won't be inclined to put up with it. If they used Microsoft's DRM and everything Just Worked, then people would ignore it the way they ignore the DRM on DVDs.
Protesting Apple's DRM plays into the hands of the Intellectual Property Misers. Protest PlaysForSure instead, because if Apple actually caves in that'll be the only alternative... and with everyone using it it'll be invisible and surprisingly easy. And easy DRM is a boot stamping on a music-lover's face, forever.
2. Apple's DRM is practically "honor system". They even ran ads telling you how to bypass it, if you paid attention when they were telling you to "Rip Mix Burn". Just change the order... "Mix Burn Rip". And if that's not good enough don't forget that they have no Microsoftian "Trusted Audio Path", so you can use Wiretap on the Mac or equivalent programs on Windows to save the cost of a CDR. And to top it all off, iTunes Music Store downloads the file in unencrypted format and encrypts it when you download it...
Protesting Apple's DRM plays into the hands of the Intellectual Property Misers. Protest PlaysForSure instead, because it's more effective. And effective DRM is a boot... you know the drill...
The treo keyboard is far from unusable for me, and I've got pretty fat fingers. It -looks- bad, I'll give you that, but it is in fact very functional.
I've used thumb keyboards... and not just on the Treo: I bought one for my Visor. What kills them for me is that they make me pay too much attention to the process. Yes, they're faster... even when I get going I can't graffiti as fast as I can thumb... but I can graffiti faster than I can write and I can do it without looking at the screen. And that more than makes up for the slight speed advantage of the Treo.
I actually prefer T9 (i think that's what it's called... predictive text entry) on a 3x4 keypad to the Treo's thumboard.
As for the click wheel, it's what's made the ipod so good.
I bought an iPod, and after a week I gave it to my daughter and bought an iPod Shuffle instead because it doesn't have a click wheel. Same problem... I can't use the click-wheel by feel, I have to look at the iPod. The Nintendo D-pad style on the iPod Shuffle is much better for anything but scrolling through huge playlists, and a stylus and text entry is even better for that.
Don't forget the flying cars (not Moller's - the ones that fold up into a briefcase), robot butlers (ASIMO doesn't count, damn it), food pills, and 3d videophones that make you look great on the screen even if you just woke up on the morning after the night before and you haven't taken your hangover pill (there's another one) yet.
If I go to a place in the real world, let's say new York City, and I spend 10 hours there, that doesn't mean I spent 9:30 hours unlocking levels to get to "empire state building observation deck" or "central park", it means I spent most of those ten hours at places where there were hours of actual things to do. The closest thing the real world has to "unlocking levels" would be "calling a cab", "riding the subway", "waiting for a table to open up"... the things that people complain about in the real world and (I would hope) you don't want to emulate in a game.
At least I hope not. I mean, "Elevator Action" doesn't put you in a box with Muzak and slowly changing numbers.
Give me things to do that are themselves interesting. Don't give me the equivalent of finding an unoccupied cab in Times Square.
The mini & MacBook only have a GMA950 which is about the same performance as Radeon 9200.
The GMA950 is significantly faster than the Radeon 9200 for 2d, but for 3d?
Let's put it this way... for hardware T&L, the Mac mini Core Duo - with two cores and the GMA950 together - is only marginally faster than the Mac mini Power PC.
For gaming, the Radeon 9200 is massively faster than the GMA950. It's only the 4x faster CPU on the new Mini that lets it even keep up with its anemic precursor, and that machine was not acceptable for gaming. They could have put in a Radeon X200 instead, and get the price advantage of integrated graphics with the same GPU as the X1300. I wonder if Intel twisted Steve's arm on that one?
I'd rather have a cellphone with FEWER features.
But if you're going to put a battery sucking iPod in a phone... do it right.
I can't imagine how neat an Appleified treo with a wheel control grafted onto the back of it would be.
Not a treo...
I much preferred the Qualcomm PDQ to the treo. NORMAL cellphone dialing pad for cellphone stuff, and it flipped open to give you a regular Palm, not a trimmed down one with the graffiti area replaced by an unusably small keyboard.
Then you could put the Apple click wheel on the backside of the keypad, where it wouldn't be subject to random jittering in your pocket. Or even better, just control it with the cellphone keypad. 2 and 8 for volume up/down, 4 and 6 for back/skip, 5 for play/pause, 1 and 3 for jog-skip, and 7 and 9 for playlist prev/next.
Why? Because you have the PDA interface for the complex part of the user interface, there's no point in keeping the click wheel when you have a stylus... if you really want it bad enough, simulate it on the touch screen.
The higher cost of the sticks is only partially due to volumes but also due to the large profit tacked on the top.
While I am by no means a fan of memory stick (most of my devices are CF or MMS/SD, the sole exception being my Clie):
1. My third-party (non-Sony) MS was cheaper at the time than a comparable sized SD stick, and didn't have part of the memory wasted on the "secure" part of "secure digital".
2. If your device is a camera, you want one that uses CF or xD anyway.
3. If you were using SD, your new camera's mini-SD, and your old memory is useless.
4. If you were using MS, your new device is MS-Duo, and your old memory is useless.
5. If you can use the sticks, they're a quarter the size of new ones and your new higher res camera needs bigger sticks anyway...
6. Smartmedia, CF, CF-II, CF-1e, MMC, SD, Mini-SD, MS, xD, MS-Duo, what's next? I vote for a USB host mode interface so you can save your snaps from your camera direct to your iPod.
7. The moral of the story is, all formats suck.
One thing Apple needs to do to really get gaming down is to get the whole control and user interface situation under control. If I buy a non-Mac-specific control device, whether it's a keyboard or a joystick or a dance pad or a head-mounted theremin, I should be able to map any control to any input on any program in one central place.
You can buy third-party applications that do some of this, and many applications have very sophisticated preferences for input as well, but really this should be handled the same way everywhere.
Obviously this isn't a general solution to the problem, but it's part of a solution.
The other half to this is output. If I'm playing a game - whether it's full screen or in a window - I should be able to interact with other apps without having the game go through a lengthy restore process when I return my attention to it. And with the GUI in the GPU I shouldn't have any flickering from composition whether it's compositing two Aqua texture-based translucent windows, or an OpenGL translucent overlay on top of an OpenGL window.
Similarly, I should be able to run an app and have it limited to a certain amount of VRAM, real RAM, and swap... or reserve a certain amount for it. So a game can have a guaranteed 128M VRAM, 800MB RAM, and no more than 384M VRAM and 1.5GB RAM... even if I have 512M and 2GB. And find that out, so it can scale its resource use so it's never paging to disk and never having textures flushed from the GPU behind its back...
(oh, and emulate Mach as much as you need to... but don't actually use it more than you have to)
It's no secret that all software has bugs and vulnerabilities - and like other software companies, we are committed to building software as secure as we can make it and finding and fixing bugs as quickly as possible.
You've had almost 10 years to fix the fundamental design flaw that's by far the biggest source of security problems - the integration of the Browser and the Desktop using ActiveX - and not only has Microsoft NOT backed out that unfixable problem and the layers of kludges (like "security zones") plastered over it, Microsoft risked getting the company torn apart by the DoJ to keep that design in place.
Nobody else has anything like that. Even the dumbest things Apple has done like Open "Safe" Files After Downloading" are miles less daft.
When's Microsoft going th seriously address this?
If you had taken the class, the instuctor would have pointed you towards the maintaince and service contracts that have been part of the consumer marketplace for over one hundred years.
This isn't a maintainance or service contract.
This is like having your car recalled because the engine was prone to exploding, and the only fix up to now had been paying a mechanic every week to look for cracks... and when you get to the dealer to have the work done you find that instead of replacing the faulty components in your engine they try to sell you their crack-detection service.
Someone at Microsoft should be criminally liable for the damage done by their arrogant and incompetant design.
Because obviously there's no message board based support for windows that's free.
Obviously there is, and there was back in the '90s, when the "free" support by Microsoft cost me half a day downtime for 100 people... see my original response to your post for more details.
The only difference between Free UNIX (such as Linux) and Windows support is that you're likely to waste time trying to get some use out of that support that you're paying for with your Windows license before going to the online discussion forums to actually get your problem solved.
1) No direct X implementation
There's no point in Apple even trying to emulate a Windows-specific and Microsoft-controlled API.
On the other hand, Microsoft's support for OpenGL is shoddy at best, and what they did to OpenGL flight sims should have gotten them an antitrust suit.
On the third hand, Apple's OpenGL is consistent across the product line... they implement missing features in software, so OpenGL just works even if the GPU doesn't do (for example) T&L.
So that's why you write for the Mac. You only have to do it once.
It's gotta be Intel making them do it, even the Radeon X200 would be better and it shouldn't cost any more. Yeh, it's "integrated graphics" and eats into the RAM, but at least they don't have to blow one of the CPUs for software OpenGL.
Dialog boxes may reduce security for some people by training them to automatically approve them, particularly on Windows where almost all the time they're completely superfluous.
Apple has started to go down the stupid dialog boxes route, though, because people have come to associate the illusion of security for the real thing.
To me, any time a programmer thinks "Oh, this might be dangerous, let me add a warning"... they need to change the design so the decision to perform a dangerous operation can be deferred and taken on the user's schedule rather than the application writer's. But don't leave the dialog in there as well!
The "Trash Can" is an example of this... it seems like Microsoft saw how useful it was on the Mac, but didn't understand why, so it asks you "do you want to move this to the trash" and "do you want to emopty the trash", even after changing the dangerous (delete) operation to a deferred (trash... then empty trash) one.
For the example at hand...
Don't automatically install or run components. Just download them, if you don't have a sandbox (a real application level one, not a 'low privilege user') to examine them in, and let the user open them later from the desktop or download manager.
People will learn not to open dangerous documents, if they don't have to make a snap decision about them in a hurry. And that will give them REAL security.
Time to be bitchslapped back to reality. Linux is not ready for the masses just because you can use it.
UNIX is, though.
Under the shiny Mac OS skin beats the heart of a hero.
Yep, it's still true for XP SP2. And it'll be true for Vista, Vista II, Vista XP, and successors, until Microsoft gets serious about removing the inherently unsafe components from the system like most UNIX distributions removed IP-based "security" along with the Berkeley "r suite" applications that used it.
You don't get security by adding band aids, you get security by fixing and removing the components or processes that cause the problem.
But most malware nowadays doesn't rely on OS flaws, but rather user foolishness (downloading trojans from warez sites or P2P, clicking on malware email attachments, etc).
The fact that just clicking on an attachment or a link... not even downloading and opening it... can execute malicious code locally is a fundamental design flaw in one of Microsoft's flagship operating system components... the HTML control. Remember, Microsoft went to the wall with the Department of Justice to avoid having this removed from the OS, even risking splitting the company up rather than splitting up the HTML control into multiple components.
And I guess that was smart. If they hadn't left this criminally incompetant design stand, they wouldn't be able to charge for a security service now.
But don't for one minute think that it's all just social engineering and people being tricked into opening malware.
People can actually learn not to be socially engineered, I've seen it happen... for the decade and a half I was a system administrator for a Windows network I never once had someone come to me twice with a tale of being tricked into downloading a virus and launching it from their desktop or the command line.
Computers, though, don't learn. I've had plenty of people infected through Outlook, Internet Explorer, and other programs that use the HTML control over and over again.
That's not "user foolishness". That's "OS flaws".