I wonder if this is an economy push ay MS. Any reasonable size firm already has a site license to MS Windows and MS Office. Parallels is no great expense. In the end it is probably better for MS to get money for and OS and MS Office rather than just the later.
This is also part of a trend to limit solutions available on the Mac platform. Over the past 10 years, the products that MS sells for the mac has shrunk. In particular, they buy cross platform products and kill them on the Mac Platform. Virtual PC and Foxpro are two examples. Connectix would have create a version for the Intel Mac. I believe the only reason we have MS Office for the Mac is because MS Office is a mac product, and was only ported to MS Windows.
It is becoming more clear that the casual user should use OO.org
I agree with you. A big problem on Linux and MS Windows is that OEM tend to use the cheapest parts available, even on machines they charge real money for, and then MS has to deal with it. OTOH, that is MS job. It is, after all, the OS of the commodity machine, and people choose ti because it is such a good value. Also, I wonder if we have these issue on hardware that is vista certified.
Just as a point of comparison, since you mention external devices and motherboards, I have a oldish Powerbook, say I got it in 2000. It is not in great shape, for instance the screen and internal DVD drive does not work. It has an external HD, and external DVD burner, an external bluetooth adapter, and external scanner, an external remote sensor, and is often hooked to my phone. Always wakes up. No problem. So, while it is easy to put the blame elsewhere, if the problem continue to be persistent, then there is something wrong with vista. To be fair, XP also does a bang up job with sleep on any hardware.
I wonder if the release of the Zune has anything to do with this. With MS turning it's back on play for sure, the DRM format war has pretty much fizzled. There is the Apple option, with the iPod, and then there are a few other DRM options that might eventually share 25% or so of the music. So how do you sell music, and not piss off customers who want to play it on their chosen device. Fairplay won't work on a zune, but an unencumbered MP3 will. it will also play on the iPod. And you don't have to be a slave to the Apple pricing scheme.
It could be that MS did us a favor by abandoning play for sure.
Lets look at reality. Why do I buy a motorola Razr. Because it automagically integrated with my Mac, and I needed no additional software. Why do PC users buy a blackberry. Because it integrates automagically with Outlook. Why did I eventually have to replace my Newton with a Palm. Because the Newton never suitably integrated with my mac applications, even though the Newton was on the LAN, and I had all the third party software. Why do I not use a Palm anymore? Because it no longer suitably automagically integrates with iCal.
The masses, even I, do not really want to spend a long time trying to get simple things to work the way they should. That is why I have a Mac. Any phone is going to have to sync with my Mac, and with my.Mac account. Having to buy the phone, and then the software to run the phone, is the same scam that Motorola is pulling on PC users.
Since I have no idea what this exploit is, or how it is transmitted, simply that it does something bad if I open a document, the article summary seems to be better advice than the article. When one does not understand a vector or virus, the best thing to do is to err on the side of caution until the vector and virus is understood. This means that perhaps MS Office documents not originated on the local machine should not be opened for the next couple days. This quarantine, while inconvenient, would probably be useful.
At the end of the day, articles from major outlets will soften the advice so as not to upset the advertisers. It is up to the user to read between the lines and interpret the appropriate course of action. Of course, most will ignore the advice and continue with status quo by, for example, exchanging essentially static data in a dynamic form, thus allowing such problems to exist.
If a person is trained to value organization, process, and orthogonality, then no matter what the environment this what will be generated. If a person is trained simply to put commands in a workable order, with no regard to how the data is protected, or the number of places that must now the storage structure, then this is what will produced. Any language can be used to write spaghetti code,while even something as ancient as C and Forth can be used to write well structured and compartmentalized code.
What happens with business, science, or whatever, is that people become greedy or sloppy,and demand immediate reward even if it significantly reduces future viability. The benefit of certain languages, as the benefit of certain oversight agencies, is that certain policies are enforced in an effort to deter those person that would take dangerous shortcuts. Of course the well trained ethical person does not require such oversight.
Also, correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't OO.org already read and write MS formats, in many cases better than MS.
Honestly, a version of OO.org that does not read MS formats would be much less useful. Of course, there may be some licensing issues, since MS has gotten much more aggressive about protecting it's monopoly, and the MS documents are only open for an extremely restricted definition of open. Probably somewhat akin to the open enrollment of private schools in the late 60's and early 70's.
Which means that no one will use Vista, and everyone will continue to use XP. The fact that MS is not allowing Vista to be virtualized is good news, as it means that users will even has less reason to switch to Vista. As the only ones that will be forced to moved to vista will be those that buy new PCs, parallel users will be buy XP. Remember that 2000 is still widely available.
At the end of the day, this is just another reason why Vista is mostly going to the OS for cheap business machine and those that want to play games. Everyone else will move to the various OS that allows the flexibility we need to run efficient firms and lives.
Ok, so code cannot be written that honors memory boundaries. But code can be written that randomizes where in memory pointers begins, so that there is no guarantee that This is in fact a clever solution, and does deserve a high five. But it also adds a level of complexity, and, depending on how it is implemented, the complexity may be too complex.
So here are my questions. First, one assumes that this randomizer is turned off during debugging, and there is, therefore, some default locations. So, is this off switch available at run time, that is, can a machine be forced to use the default values. Second, how random is the randomizer. Are there specific locations that are going to recur? Is it possible that even if an attack can't effect 100K machines, it might effect 5K? And even if specific locations do not recur, is the range small enough so that attacks can at least cause a machine to crash, if not execute arbitrary code. And third is a simple matter of complexity. Can the randomizer code itself be used as an exploit? On this later one, only time will tell.
Overall a cleaver solution to a dicey problem. It shows that there is still some actual talent at MS, and not just grunts trying to manage 2^n relationships.
Ignoring the fact that the launch site is far away from the equator, which is probably not that big of deal, there is still the issue of safety and the fact that rockets still blow up quite dramatically. To compensate for this eventuality, it seems common practice to launch over the ocean where the area can be cleared of humans and all that get killed are is the presumably non-sentient marine life. If the craft tracks toward the northeast, it could get over the ocean in several minutes, but that still seems a long time to be over land. OTOH, A Texas launch can probably get over ocean, presuming a southeast ground track, in a few minutes and not pass over an densely inhabited real estate.
I also wonder what all the commercial air traffic is going to do for the couple minutes it is going to take for the craft to get out of the way. I am sure the FAA computers are up to the task of managing that situation.
Overall I think it is not a bad idea. More spaceports will eventually be needed, and they will have to be spaced throughout the country. At this point, however, it would seem that testing would be better done on the coasts or in the desert.
As the article stated, the military has a right to use the frequency, so I don't see what everyone is complaining about, especially around there. IAs far as I can tell, the county voted overwhelmingly for Bush, which seems to suggest that the county is conservative and values national security. One also assumes, that since the AFB is nearby, much of their economy depends on it, and they would be toast without it, or at least that what seems to be said everytime an base closure is suggested.
So, this is just one sacrifice that has to made in this time of war. Certainly opening up your own garage door is not too much to ask when Americans are being killed everyday overseas. It is like higher gas prices. If we are going to be at war, then everyone has to sacrifice a little.
The web link feature in quicktime is the main reason I have never paid for quicktime. Like mail, and the default to HTML mail, with no GUI interface to turn it off, the quicktime feature smacks of tacky marketing. Worse, it one again shows that such marketing tactics inevitable leads to security issues.
So, I just use VLC to play movies. It is free, allows full screen presentation, and there is no risk that if I click on the movie I will be sent into the bad old days of the web when an accidental click would bring up multiple windows, and the only way to stop them was to force the browser to quit.
Another piece of evidence proving that Apple is going the direction of monotizing customers rather than just building excellent product that people want to pay good money for.
Ok, lets take this further. As a private citizen, with private money, one can pick and choose what to do, and does is not responsible for meeting any needs but his own. A the head of a corporation, he is only responsble to shareholders, and can basically force anyone to whatever he wants. He must follow some laws of the land, but can choose to use the money to circumvent said laws. in both cases, he is a dictator in his own kingdom.
What i think many people have trouble with is moving from being a dictator to a part of a democracy. I can imagine that having to ask before you spend a billion dollars on war, or having to ask before you wiretap a phone. How many corportate exectives actually keep track if they use funds to mail personal letters? How many congressmen have been caught doing things, like propositioning children, that would have had no effect on thier bussiness life.
On of the worst fallacies is the analogy between business and war might be very disorienting? How many firms are going to strap explosive on the children in an effort to destroy a competitor. How many mothers are going to say they wish they had more children that they could sacrifice to shut down a emerging technology? How many are gong to plant roadside bombs to insure that people cannot make it the big box grocery store that is destroying main street?
At the end of the day the rules of world politics is different from the rules of business.
As much as the free market rails against bureaucracy and inefficiency, be it corporate of government, the natural tendency is to accumulate staff and resources. Unfortunately added staff does not linearly increase productivity, and at some point will exponentially negatively effect productivity as anaging relationships between personal becomes the dominant activity. This manifests as continuous meeting.
So this is really no big deal. MS has fallen into the trap that every major corporation falls into. Try to do too much too fast, and end up with an unproductive staff. They will either become;ess wasteful and align to the needs of the customer or they will wither.
Simply put, if one person can move a 100 pound rock, there is little reason to believe that 100 people can move a 10000 pound rock.
From my limited work with bolts, they have issues. First, it seems you have to be more skilled/careful to use bolts. The area on the head of the joining surface is greater, so they can apply more stress to the material, and more stress to the bolt. To apply a bolt properly, one really should use a torque wrench. This means that on each bolt you start with a pneumatic power driver and end with a manual torque check. Two tools. The added torque also leads to bow. Of course if one is talking a bolt/nut situation, then the issue becomes more complex, especially if one is working in a space that is hard to access. Then one has to glue with bolt with something like locktite, and if one wants to really protect from an extended situation, perhaps even wire it in.
Which of course is carrying the whole thing to far. It seems to me the that the benefits of nails is that they are quick and can be applied by semi-skilled cheap labor. A screw almost certainly is marginally superior, but when accounting for the ease of use of the nail, the benefit of of this research becomes apparent. A fastener that is competitive with the screw, but can be applied with a cost on the order of a nail.
One must recall that ultimately final quality is not determined solely by the materials use, but also by the usability of the materials. It does little good to pay for the finest materials if no one has the skill or the patience or the time to use them.
I could, in principle, copy a phone, say the motorola RAZR, call it something else, and sell it. There should be nothing wrong with this. Innovation and ingenuity is promoted by such action. Perhaps one reason that the technology in the West, particularly the US is so backwards is because we protect manufacturers against the need to innovate. That one can expect a product to survive for years, without innovation, is silly.
As most of us know, the rules of patents and copyrights are there to allow an innovator to recoup expenses and some profit. We have taken it to the point where the rules are now used to insure financial security for the entire corporation into perpetuity. It seems like now that manufacture is so cheap, and the design process is so streamlined, that the big shops should be able to get a products refreshed pretty frequently. The big reason that large firms cannot is the sheer amount of overhead these mammoth corporations carry. Many will complain, like the car companies, that things like health care adds 5-10% to every car. But how much does overhead like luxury building, private airplanes, and golden parachutes add?
Perhaps if money was put into hiring and training people, and encouraging innovation, we would have nothing to fear from the knockoff artist.
I have OS X running on older G4 machines. I find the X11 performance on these machines, for instance OO.org, to as bad as the OS X performance, although the performance of most applications is good. Really, the only applications that are horrible are the iLife application, which run slow even on the high end G4 machines.
I will say this. Make sure that services that do not need to run, like the dock or Apache, are not running. If you want to run X11, things like emacs are great, if you get to know to use them. There is really no reason to not have most things running in X11, although I have gotten used to mail.app.
Of course, the big issue in these machines seems to be memory. *nix likes memory and always has. It has seldom been the OS for small footprints. Most G4 macs can accommodate at least 512 MB, and if you running a G3 mac, you likely have other difficulties.
It is my experience that MS does a good job with coding standard processes in such a way that a minimally trained person can execute those processes to create standard bussiness environments. In other words, if one uses MS products, then one can hire cheap labor to get things done. This is a very useful thing. I certainly have, at time, benefitted from their work. There is no reason for firms to pay to reinvent what has already been done.
However, a side effect of this is that one has lower skills workers developing the delivery mechanism and products. Now, this is not a result of what MS has a done, or a direct reflection of the quality of the products, but rather a side effect of the philosophy. In my experience, MS markets these things as a cheap solution, and in many cases what results are unusable systems. I have seen such system result in several cases. It is not a matter of bad MS products, but rather lack of funding for the project, resulting from the philosophy that IT should be cheap. This of course is penny wise and pound foolish. What one ends up with is a system that does not meet the criteria, and the money is, in effect, wasted. If the system is useful at all, it is not cost effective. For instance, on one system, which is to be regularly used by about 600 people, the design wastes about two minutes of user time with redundant navigation. This flaw alone costs around $100K a year in lost productivity.
And this is my issue with MS products. Certainly development costs a lot of money. But if the product is going to be used by hundreds of people on a daily basis, and those people need to be paid, and you are trying to squeeze every bit of work out of them, isn't it better to expect and pay for high quality development, rather than taking the long term hit in productivity? The critical issue is not how much development costs, or how much it costs to maintain the server(within reasonable limits, of course). The critical issue is how the hundreds of people who depend on the service are going to become more productive.
The claim is that the carriers sell the equipment at a loss, and then make the profits on the multiyear contracts. The current argument is that the cost of acquiring the customer and the discount is so great, that the customer now has to pay extra if only on a one year contract.
But if the claim that they are losing money on the phone is true, then why won't the activate a phone the customer supplies. The carrier is not losing money on the sale of the phone. The carrier is still getting a contract. The phone is part number equivalent to what they sell. A friend lost a phone, and I tried to get the carrier to use a phone the sold me a couple years previous, and they refused. They wanted another two years of contract.
Like so many other things, the issue is control. Control your customer and you control your revenue. With the recent merger of SBC and ATT, some wonder if the fight to break them up was worth it. If you recall the lock that ATT had on the consumer, the answer is yes. ATT charged huge fees if the customer ran more than one line in the house. Not had more than one phone number, just had multiple phones. ATT charged huge rents on phones. ATT charged husge long distance fees, some of which were justified due to limited bandwidth and cost of launching satellites, but they cost kept rising even though bandwidth was growing and the technology was maturing rapidly. The consumer lock in kept prices high, just like land lines providers can still charge huge sums of money for to call someone 20 miles away.
Actually, come to think of it, I have no idea how come religion (specifically, christianism) is so powerful in such a developped(sic) country as the USA...
If you are curious I suggest you read some history on the matter, but here are my recollections from history class. It should best be considered a myth, with bits of truth.
At some point, the apprentice-craftsman relationship broke down due to the emergence of the middle class. Specifically, the craftsman and his family became middle class, while the apprentice overwhelmingly came from the lower classes. The implication of this was that the craftsman began to keep the apprentice at arms length, instead of allowing the apprentice to somewhat integrate with the family and learn the ways of the family. As a result, the apprentice did not learn responsibility. This was also true of the working class of the industrial revolution. Workers, who no longer had the oversight of their family on the farm, were free to act as they wish. The younger generation became out of control.
One way of dealing with this was to have the church teach the values of the working class through revivals. The lot of the working was to work. You would be poor. Some would make it, particularly those that listened to and completely subjugated themselves to their master. Getting to work was critical, and long hours were mandated. Also mandated were no drink and no gambling. Both these hurt productivity. Faith in the lord was all that was needed, and prayer was all you needed to do. God would advance you to your desired state in life. These revivals were very helpful to the middle and upper class, so they supported the philosophy. Anything to keep the workers in line.
So, there it is. We still see elements of this in many christian churches today, particularly megachurches. Gone is the notion of Jesus that if someone does you harm, or treats you unfairly, you have the right to show the world that that person has done harm. Gone is the idea the if some one take your shirt, give him your coat as well, and stand naked, showing the world that this person who has everything, chose to be greedy and take the little you had. Now some churches advocate that you pray for the success of your boss or husband, so that you may be pulled up on his coattails. Or you should pray for a good meeting or a good deal at the cell phone store. It is all about making the best of the position in the world that god has determine for you, and not causing trouble for your betters by challenging the divine social norm.
Purchasing is not the issue. I could purchase Vista with full due diligence and later find that the copy was not legal, and as a result have my machine cut off. Now, it is quite possible that I 'should have known.' It is quite possible that I can report the person who sold it to me and get a 'real' copy. It could be that I am up and running in a day.
But what if I only had an hour to complete a project. What if something happened and days of work were lost. Why should MS be punishing the customer. Even if this policy result in even a single inconvinence of a single customer, is it worthwhile? Would we have a car not start if a car payment is later, even if that puts the driver in a dangerous situation. Sure the driver should know better. But are we putting cash ahead of human life?
This policy is FUD, but it is MS FUD. MS makes many sales on scaring people into buying only MS products. If you are not all MS, we may raise the price of acquisition. Now they are saying if you are not absolutely sure that every copy of MS Windows is legal, you better buy another one. Not sure if the license that came with your computer is legal for your application. Go out and buy another copy. Because one day, we might turn off your machine, and you could lose a lot more that the $400 license fee.
If they did not want to instill such fear, the could go with the status quo that has made them rich. Do what you wish. If we catch you, you will pay threefold. That way Windows is on every PC, and MS gets the money one way or ther other.
There are three major parts to this, just like any other issue. The first is the research. Gather and organize observable. Draw conclusions. Use conclusions to predict other effects. In hard sciences we have the full chain. The conclusions that are supported by the predictions are the conclusions that are accepted, at least for a certain domain. For example, evolution, at least at some level, exists, because we see organisms evolving to be resistant to poisons. Therefore, the predictions of evolution validate the other conclusions at least in the domain of the predictions.
Second, we have application. Theories, even outdated theories, can be true for certain domains. We know the laws of physics are true, at least for certain domains, because we can build things that work based on the theories. We calculate targeting solutions based on classical mechanics, even though classical mechanics is even an approximation. The power of the theory is not only that we can predict things, but we can plan and create novel devices.
Third is economics and politics. Even if the first two are suitably met, there is an issue of politics. Just like the church knew that Gallleo would significantly crimp the revenue stream if people started believing in the power of humanity rather than the power of hell, modern buggy whip companies fear the power of science that does not support their business plans.
And this is where we are. It is unclear what we can do, or if we should do anything, or even if anything is happening. What is clear is, just like the advent of the internal combustion engine and the mass produced car, technology is going to leave some behind, and let other in. The ones left behind certainly don't want to be left behind. The ones eyeing the prize really don't have the power to push the luddites out. Acknowledging that our petroleum based economy, just like the peat based economy, is in it's dying days is difficult. It means that some new people will be in the manor house. Obviously this is an eventuality that many want to push out as far as possible, while other want it to happen tomorrow. Both these desires are absurd. Equally absurd is using science to fight what is essentially a political issue.
Let's just resolve these two issues. First, the low hanging fruit is long gone. Resources are going to be increasingly difficult to realize. Second, we like clean spaces, and technology is making things increasingly clean,at least by some measurements. It would be foolish to believe that we must live with our polluted air.
It seems to me that a lot of effort is being to made to push MS Office upgrades, when most of the money comes from MS WIndows OEM and general site licenses. Most users will upgrade with site license. A few will buy their copy with the computer. I suspect most will not upgrade without a shift to Vista.
With these assumption, MS might be tying both upgrades together. The upgrade to vista is likely more of an issue as it seems that the OS availability is more tied to long term licensing. So it would seem that the deal is to enable sales to use MS Office as another reason to upgrade to MS Windows Vista. This may be an issue as 20% of user might still be using pre XP SP2 OS. There is a fear of change.
I think what MS has allowed to happen is the creation of an XP world. Users are convinced that switching an OS is a catastrophic event, with phenomenal training costs. A myth created and perpetuated by MS. For many user XP is all they know, and MS was perfectly happy insuring that XP was all they knew. For many admins, XP is all they know, and all they have been trained to do is monkey in XP. In such a world, who in their right mind would upgrade?
I also think people forget that chips are often separate because of technical limitations. For that matter we used to have individual transistors instead of integrated circuits.
In the near past, things like the FPU, the GPU, and even the PMMU had to be fabricated separately and then connected with expensive and inefficient busses. This made the computer slower, and, as you mentioned, bigger. However, offloading work to these ancillary chips, even though there were inefficiencies, made the overall computer much faster, and made things like a GUI usable. Recall that computers that depends on the CPU for graphics require a much heftier CPU.
Finally, there is the issue of reliability. One huge issue in the early computers were the sheer number of components that had to work together. For example, it took 8-16 slots to achieve the memory that now takes 2-4 slots. We may complain about lack of expandability, but the reliability to price ratio is phenomenal. I recall reading that in manufacturing the cheap computers, Dell and HP will leave off features for a 50 cent savings. Sound small but it is big for them.
Ultimately, complaining about this is like complaining that the computer does not a separate floating point unit. Why should we not be able to upgrade the floating point capability of our computer without replacing the entire CPU. Sounds like a conspiracy to me.
In my mind, the question presupposes that many christians believe that a significant percentage of Muslims are plotting terrorist attacks on Americas. Given the sermons that I have heard about, where the ministers instill fear and hatred of Muslims, saying the large number of Mosques in America predict the end days, my tendency would be to agree.
OTOH, I have not seen a Muslim person hung from a tree, or tortured and drowned in a river, or dragged behind a pickup by a civilian christian in the US. Therefore I would really question if Muslims are the new blacks. Now, perhaps we have not seen this because the US is now a more subtle country, and deals it's bigotry in less actionable ways. What Muslims are is a religious minority, and they are treated as all religious minorities. Threats to the status quo, where a fear of hell is used to keep the otherwise uncivilized masses in line. In this way they are probably more like the Jews, who were allowed to exist comfortably, but not with the Christian Whites that were their superiors.
As I have mentioned before, there is an argument to be made that the fear is of Muslims, not christians. Christian terrorism does not incite a war against christendom, and often will lead to incredible creative defenses that often lead not to the death penalty. Equal terrorism by non christians have the states falling over each other trying to be the first to kill the humans.
That said, the religious views of a leader are likely not as important as the leaders ability to fully visualize outside perspectives. An understanding that not everyone has a rich family that can supply a trust fund. Not everyone has the opportunity to go to the best University with the best resources, and use those resources for no addition funds to develop experience. Not everyone can be bailed out of bad business decisions, and not everyone can suckle at the public purse for their personal gain. To be sure, Bill Gates is not as guilty of these things as some, and perhaps has a better perspective than some, but I prefer my leaders to have some hardships, have to fight a bit for what they have, and not be confident that no matter what happens, no matter how many wars they state, they will be insured of an upper class existence.
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This is also part of a trend to limit solutions available on the Mac platform. Over the past 10 years, the products that MS sells for the mac has shrunk. In particular, they buy cross platform products and kill them on the Mac Platform. Virtual PC and Foxpro are two examples. Connectix would have create a version for the Intel Mac. I believe the only reason we have MS Office for the Mac is because MS Office is a mac product, and was only ported to MS Windows.
It is becoming more clear that the casual user should use OO.org
Just as a point of comparison, since you mention external devices and motherboards, I have a oldish Powerbook, say I got it in 2000. It is not in great shape, for instance the screen and internal DVD drive does not work. It has an external HD, and external DVD burner, an external bluetooth adapter, and external scanner, an external remote sensor, and is often hooked to my phone. Always wakes up. No problem. So, while it is easy to put the blame elsewhere, if the problem continue to be persistent, then there is something wrong with vista. To be fair, XP also does a bang up job with sleep on any hardware.
It could be that MS did us a favor by abandoning play for sure.
The masses, even I, do not really want to spend a long time trying to get simple things to work the way they should. That is why I have a Mac. Any phone is going to have to sync with my Mac, and with my .Mac account. Having to buy the phone, and then the software to run the phone, is the same scam that Motorola is pulling on PC users.
At the end of the day, articles from major outlets will soften the advice so as not to upset the advertisers. It is up to the user to read between the lines and interpret the appropriate course of action. Of course, most will ignore the advice and continue with status quo by, for example, exchanging essentially static data in a dynamic form, thus allowing such problems to exist.
If a person is trained to value organization, process, and orthogonality, then no matter what the environment this what will be generated. If a person is trained simply to put commands in a workable order, with no regard to how the data is protected, or the number of places that must now the storage structure, then this is what will produced. Any language can be used to write spaghetti code,while even something as ancient as C and Forth can be used to write well structured and compartmentalized code.
What happens with business, science, or whatever, is that people become greedy or sloppy,and demand immediate reward even if it significantly reduces future viability. The benefit of certain languages, as the benefit of certain oversight agencies, is that certain policies are enforced in an effort to deter those person that would take dangerous shortcuts. Of course the well trained ethical person does not require such oversight.
Honestly, a version of OO.org that does not read MS formats would be much less useful. Of course, there may be some licensing issues, since MS has gotten much more aggressive about protecting it's monopoly, and the MS documents are only open for an extremely restricted definition of open. Probably somewhat akin to the open enrollment of private schools in the late 60's and early 70's.
At the end of the day, this is just another reason why Vista is mostly going to the OS for cheap business machine and those that want to play games. Everyone else will move to the various OS that allows the flexibility we need to run efficient firms and lives.
So here are my questions. First, one assumes that this randomizer is turned off during debugging, and there is, therefore, some default locations. So, is this off switch available at run time, that is, can a machine be forced to use the default values. Second, how random is the randomizer. Are there specific locations that are going to recur? Is it possible that even if an attack can't effect 100K machines, it might effect 5K? And even if specific locations do not recur, is the range small enough so that attacks can at least cause a machine to crash, if not execute arbitrary code. And third is a simple matter of complexity. Can the randomizer code itself be used as an exploit? On this later one, only time will tell.
Overall a cleaver solution to a dicey problem. It shows that there is still some actual talent at MS, and not just grunts trying to manage 2^n relationships.
I also wonder what all the commercial air traffic is going to do for the couple minutes it is going to take for the craft to get out of the way. I am sure the FAA computers are up to the task of managing that situation.
Overall I think it is not a bad idea. More spaceports will eventually be needed, and they will have to be spaced throughout the country. At this point, however, it would seem that testing would be better done on the coasts or in the desert.
So, this is just one sacrifice that has to made in this time of war. Certainly opening up your own garage door is not too much to ask when Americans are being killed everyday overseas. It is like higher gas prices. If we are going to be at war, then everyone has to sacrifice a little.
So, I just use VLC to play movies. It is free, allows full screen presentation, and there is no risk that if I click on the movie I will be sent into the bad old days of the web when an accidental click would bring up multiple windows, and the only way to stop them was to force the browser to quit.
Another piece of evidence proving that Apple is going the direction of monotizing customers rather than just building excellent product that people want to pay good money for.
What i think many people have trouble with is moving from being a dictator to a part of a democracy. I can imagine that having to ask before you spend a billion dollars on war, or having to ask before you wiretap a phone. How many corportate exectives actually keep track if they use funds to mail personal letters? How many congressmen have been caught doing things, like propositioning children, that would have had no effect on thier bussiness life. On of the worst fallacies is the analogy between business and war might be very disorienting? How many firms are going to strap explosive on the children in an effort to destroy a competitor. How many mothers are going to say they wish they had more children that they could sacrifice to shut down a emerging technology? How many are gong to plant roadside bombs to insure that people cannot make it the big box grocery store that is destroying main street?
At the end of the day the rules of world politics is different from the rules of business.
So this is really no big deal. MS has fallen into the trap that every major corporation falls into. Try to do too much too fast, and end up with an unproductive staff. They will either become ;ess wasteful and align to the needs of the customer or they will wither.
Simply put, if one person can move a 100 pound rock, there is little reason to believe that 100 people can move a 10000 pound rock.
Which of course is carrying the whole thing to far. It seems to me the that the benefits of nails is that they are quick and can be applied by semi-skilled cheap labor. A screw almost certainly is marginally superior, but when accounting for the ease of use of the nail, the benefit of of this research becomes apparent. A fastener that is competitive with the screw, but can be applied with a cost on the order of a nail.
One must recall that ultimately final quality is not determined solely by the materials use, but also by the usability of the materials. It does little good to pay for the finest materials if no one has the skill or the patience or the time to use them.
As most of us know, the rules of patents and copyrights are there to allow an innovator to recoup expenses and some profit. We have taken it to the point where the rules are now used to insure financial security for the entire corporation into perpetuity. It seems like now that manufacture is so cheap, and the design process is so streamlined, that the big shops should be able to get a products refreshed pretty frequently. The big reason that large firms cannot is the sheer amount of overhead these mammoth corporations carry. Many will complain, like the car companies, that things like health care adds 5-10% to every car. But how much does overhead like luxury building, private airplanes, and golden parachutes add?
Perhaps if money was put into hiring and training people, and encouraging innovation, we would have nothing to fear from the knockoff artist.
I will say this. Make sure that services that do not need to run, like the dock or Apache, are not running. If you want to run X11, things like emacs are great, if you get to know to use them. There is really no reason to not have most things running in X11, although I have gotten used to mail.app.
Of course, the big issue in these machines seems to be memory. *nix likes memory and always has. It has seldom been the OS for small footprints. Most G4 macs can accommodate at least 512 MB, and if you running a G3 mac, you likely have other difficulties.
However, a side effect of this is that one has lower skills workers developing the delivery mechanism and products. Now, this is not a result of what MS has a done, or a direct reflection of the quality of the products, but rather a side effect of the philosophy. In my experience, MS markets these things as a cheap solution, and in many cases what results are unusable systems. I have seen such system result in several cases. It is not a matter of bad MS products, but rather lack of funding for the project, resulting from the philosophy that IT should be cheap. This of course is penny wise and pound foolish. What one ends up with is a system that does not meet the criteria, and the money is, in effect, wasted. If the system is useful at all, it is not cost effective. For instance, on one system, which is to be regularly used by about 600 people, the design wastes about two minutes of user time with redundant navigation. This flaw alone costs around $100K a year in lost productivity.
And this is my issue with MS products. Certainly development costs a lot of money. But if the product is going to be used by hundreds of people on a daily basis, and those people need to be paid, and you are trying to squeeze every bit of work out of them, isn't it better to expect and pay for high quality development, rather than taking the long term hit in productivity? The critical issue is not how much development costs, or how much it costs to maintain the server(within reasonable limits, of course). The critical issue is how the hundreds of people who depend on the service are going to become more productive.
But if the claim that they are losing money on the phone is true, then why won't the activate a phone the customer supplies. The carrier is not losing money on the sale of the phone. The carrier is still getting a contract. The phone is part number equivalent to what they sell. A friend lost a phone, and I tried to get the carrier to use a phone the sold me a couple years previous, and they refused. They wanted another two years of contract.
Like so many other things, the issue is control. Control your customer and you control your revenue. With the recent merger of SBC and ATT, some wonder if the fight to break them up was worth it. If you recall the lock that ATT had on the consumer, the answer is yes. ATT charged huge fees if the customer ran more than one line in the house. Not had more than one phone number, just had multiple phones. ATT charged huge rents on phones. ATT charged husge long distance fees, some of which were justified due to limited bandwidth and cost of launching satellites, but they cost kept rising even though bandwidth was growing and the technology was maturing rapidly. The consumer lock in kept prices high, just like land lines providers can still charge huge sums of money for to call someone 20 miles away.
If you are curious I suggest you read some history on the matter, but here are my recollections from history class. It should best be considered a myth, with bits of truth.
At some point, the apprentice-craftsman relationship broke down due to the emergence of the middle class. Specifically, the craftsman and his family became middle class, while the apprentice overwhelmingly came from the lower classes. The implication of this was that the craftsman began to keep the apprentice at arms length, instead of allowing the apprentice to somewhat integrate with the family and learn the ways of the family. As a result, the apprentice did not learn responsibility. This was also true of the working class of the industrial revolution. Workers, who no longer had the oversight of their family on the farm, were free to act as they wish. The younger generation became out of control.
One way of dealing with this was to have the church teach the values of the working class through revivals. The lot of the working was to work. You would be poor. Some would make it, particularly those that listened to and completely subjugated themselves to their master. Getting to work was critical, and long hours were mandated. Also mandated were no drink and no gambling. Both these hurt productivity. Faith in the lord was all that was needed, and prayer was all you needed to do. God would advance you to your desired state in life. These revivals were very helpful to the middle and upper class, so they supported the philosophy. Anything to keep the workers in line.
So, there it is. We still see elements of this in many christian churches today, particularly megachurches. Gone is the notion of Jesus that if someone does you harm, or treats you unfairly, you have the right to show the world that that person has done harm. Gone is the idea the if some one take your shirt, give him your coat as well, and stand naked, showing the world that this person who has everything, chose to be greedy and take the little you had. Now some churches advocate that you pray for the success of your boss or husband, so that you may be pulled up on his coattails. Or you should pray for a good meeting or a good deal at the cell phone store. It is all about making the best of the position in the world that god has determine for you, and not causing trouble for your betters by challenging the divine social norm.
But what if I only had an hour to complete a project. What if something happened and days of work were lost. Why should MS be punishing the customer. Even if this policy result in even a single inconvinence of a single customer, is it worthwhile? Would we have a car not start if a car payment is later, even if that puts the driver in a dangerous situation. Sure the driver should know better. But are we putting cash ahead of human life?
This policy is FUD, but it is MS FUD. MS makes many sales on scaring people into buying only MS products. If you are not all MS, we may raise the price of acquisition. Now they are saying if you are not absolutely sure that every copy of MS Windows is legal, you better buy another one. Not sure if the license that came with your computer is legal for your application. Go out and buy another copy. Because one day, we might turn off your machine, and you could lose a lot more that the $400 license fee.
If they did not want to instill such fear, the could go with the status quo that has made them rich. Do what you wish. If we catch you, you will pay threefold. That way Windows is on every PC, and MS gets the money one way or ther other.
Second, we have application. Theories, even outdated theories, can be true for certain domains. We know the laws of physics are true, at least for certain domains, because we can build things that work based on the theories. We calculate targeting solutions based on classical mechanics, even though classical mechanics is even an approximation. The power of the theory is not only that we can predict things, but we can plan and create novel devices.
Third is economics and politics. Even if the first two are suitably met, there is an issue of politics. Just like the church knew that Gallleo would significantly crimp the revenue stream if people started believing in the power of humanity rather than the power of hell, modern buggy whip companies fear the power of science that does not support their business plans.
And this is where we are. It is unclear what we can do, or if we should do anything, or even if anything is happening. What is clear is, just like the advent of the internal combustion engine and the mass produced car, technology is going to leave some behind, and let other in. The ones left behind certainly don't want to be left behind. The ones eyeing the prize really don't have the power to push the luddites out. Acknowledging that our petroleum based economy, just like the peat based economy, is in it's dying days is difficult. It means that some new people will be in the manor house. Obviously this is an eventuality that many want to push out as far as possible, while other want it to happen tomorrow. Both these desires are absurd. Equally absurd is using science to fight what is essentially a political issue.
Let's just resolve these two issues. First, the low hanging fruit is long gone. Resources are going to be increasingly difficult to realize. Second, we like clean spaces, and technology is making things increasingly clean,at least by some measurements. It would be foolish to believe that we must live with our polluted air.
With these assumption, MS might be tying both upgrades together. The upgrade to vista is likely more of an issue as it seems that the OS availability is more tied to long term licensing. So it would seem that the deal is to enable sales to use MS Office as another reason to upgrade to MS Windows Vista. This may be an issue as 20% of user might still be using pre XP SP2 OS. There is a fear of change.
I think what MS has allowed to happen is the creation of an XP world. Users are convinced that switching an OS is a catastrophic event, with phenomenal training costs. A myth created and perpetuated by MS. For many user XP is all they know, and MS was perfectly happy insuring that XP was all they knew. For many admins, XP is all they know, and all they have been trained to do is monkey in XP. In such a world, who in their right mind would upgrade?
In the near past, things like the FPU, the GPU, and even the PMMU had to be fabricated separately and then connected with expensive and inefficient busses. This made the computer slower, and, as you mentioned, bigger. However, offloading work to these ancillary chips, even though there were inefficiencies, made the overall computer much faster, and made things like a GUI usable. Recall that computers that depends on the CPU for graphics require a much heftier CPU.
Finally, there is the issue of reliability. One huge issue in the early computers were the sheer number of components that had to work together. For example, it took 8-16 slots to achieve the memory that now takes 2-4 slots. We may complain about lack of expandability, but the reliability to price ratio is phenomenal. I recall reading that in manufacturing the cheap computers, Dell and HP will leave off features for a 50 cent savings. Sound small but it is big for them.
Ultimately, complaining about this is like complaining that the computer does not a separate floating point unit. Why should we not be able to upgrade the floating point capability of our computer without replacing the entire CPU. Sounds like a conspiracy to me.
OTOH, I have not seen a Muslim person hung from a tree, or tortured and drowned in a river, or dragged behind a pickup by a civilian christian in the US. Therefore I would really question if Muslims are the new blacks. Now, perhaps we have not seen this because the US is now a more subtle country, and deals it's bigotry in less actionable ways. What Muslims are is a religious minority, and they are treated as all religious minorities. Threats to the status quo, where a fear of hell is used to keep the otherwise uncivilized masses in line. In this way they are probably more like the Jews, who were allowed to exist comfortably, but not with the Christian Whites that were their superiors.
As I have mentioned before, there is an argument to be made that the fear is of Muslims, not christians. Christian terrorism does not incite a war against christendom, and often will lead to incredible creative defenses that often lead not to the death penalty. Equal terrorism by non christians have the states falling over each other trying to be the first to kill the humans.
That said, the religious views of a leader are likely not as important as the leaders ability to fully visualize outside perspectives. An understanding that not everyone has a rich family that can supply a trust fund. Not everyone has the opportunity to go to the best University with the best resources, and use those resources for no addition funds to develop experience. Not everyone can be bailed out of bad business decisions, and not everyone can suckle at the public purse for their personal gain. To be sure, Bill Gates is not as guilty of these things as some, and perhaps has a better perspective than some, but I prefer my leaders to have some hardships, have to fight a bit for what they have, and not be confident that no matter what happens, no matter how many wars they state, they will be insured of an upper class existence.