I'm sorry if what I said was unclear. I was not attempting to imply that Microsoft invented all of the terms at that website I linked. Obviously they didn't! There are tons of famous terms there, some of which date back to the original Von Neumann stored-program computer designs. So clearly they're not all due to Microsoft employees.
But vaporware, dogfood, and a few others are supposedly Microsoft-specific.
The term 'vaporware' was in industry-wide usage as early as 1984.
I'm sure it spread fast, but according to most sources I've found, the term started floating around internally at Microsoft in the early 80s, with widespread use coming when the "Ovation" DOS software package failed to materialize. I'm sure the laptop you're referring to helped the term gain even more momentum.
Really, the only reason I brought it up was to make my point about Microsoft's extensive dogfooding of their own software internally. There are some things that Microsoft does well, and it makes no sense to deny it.
But your point that MS did not spawn those other terms is well taken, and I should have clarified my statement. In fact, I don't believe the website makes such claims either. The site just says those terms are jargon in common use at Microsoft. No more, no less.
In fact, this is a huge debate at Microsoft. Should you, or should you not fix stupid API problems and bugs? The answer is not as easy as you think.
Microsoft was sued several times in the 90s for breaking 3rd party apps with new versions of Windows. "If my app worked on Windows 95, and it quit working on Windows 98, then it's must be Microsoft's fault! Right?" (Sure, it's got NOTHING to do with your complete unwillingness to release a patch for your own software...)
Microsoft lost several of these lawsuits. By all accounts, Microsoft was only fixing bugs that had been reported by other customers. But if the result of the fix is that Other Software Company's precious GoldMine application stops running, then for some reason that is legally not the fault of Other Software Company. Go figure.
Since that time, Microsoft has gone out of its way to test as many 3rd party applications as possible any time a fix or change is submitted to an external API. There is an entire team at Microsoft dedicated to testing these issues. If a major 3rd party app is busted as a result of a bug fix (i.e., the app was depending on the bug in the API), in general the policy is to leave the bug alone. It won't be fixed. It's just too much of a legal hassle to fix a bug that ends up breaking a vendor's app, and fighting the ensuing legal battle.
Kind of sad isn't it? Makes you want to strangle the lawyers responsible for such lawsuits...
Microsoft uses Exchange Server for its entire 65,000 person world-wide corporate network. Saying that Exchange Server doesn't scale is ludicrous. The DoD also runs NT with Exchange Server: over 100,000 client machines to serve there. No, I don't have the exact numbers, just estimates.
Once upon a time, Sun systems ran Hotmail. Microsoft purchased Hotmail and tried to switch to NT (not Exchange), but the switch failed initially. This embarrassment has since been rectified. But I must iterate: this has NOTHING to do with Exchange Server! Exchange Server is for corporate email systems, not for Internet-wide public web mail systems!
So the great-grandparent poster was either lying or horribly confused. He was suggesting that Microsoft's "55,000+ users" (which would have to be Microsoft's corporate network) run off of Sun servers. But Microsoft uses Exchange Server internally for literally everything: mail, address books, schedules, appointments, discussion groups, etc. So in order to MS to use Sun servers for this internally, those Sun servers would have to magically run Exchange Server somehow, now wouldn't they?
You are confusing retail pricing for OEM pricing, plain and simple. The two are NOT comparable, period.
If you compare the RETAIL price of Office 2003 with Office 2004, you will see that they are almost identical. Buying them at any retail/wholesale store will show you the exact same thing.
OEM pricing will ALWAYS be better on the PC because OEMs are who sell computers. Apple is the only Mac OEM, and therefore they're the only ones authorized to sell you Office 2004 at OEM prices.
You'll probably argue with me and say, "But you can buy hard drives for a Mac, why can't you buy the OEM Office suite with it?" OEMs can only purchase OEM-discounted software if they MAKE COMPUTERS. They can only sell said software if they also sell a piece of hardware. But the fact remains that until there are Apple OEMs that actually MAKE computers, they will not be able to purchase OEM-discounted software.
I realize that you didn't make the comment above about Microsoft "secretly using Sun servers", but those are the kind of statements that really make me upset because they are demonstrably false. If you ever had an opportunity to visit the Redmond campus, you would see that.
Microsoft invented the term "dogfood." Eating your own dogfood was slang introduced in the DOS days. Dogfood is software that's not even in BETA yet: in other words, not ready for public consumption. Microsoft is famous for having its people eat their own dogfood. It is not like the networking company you worked at.
Other terms first used at Microsoft? Vaporware. Death March. OOF. See other Microsoft jargon.
How many of you were running 2.3.x or 2.5.x kernels before 2.4.x and 2.6.x came out? It's amazing how people on Slashdot just can't seem to give Microsoft credit.
We patch a hole 1 hour after it's discovered (not like that ever happened) and then it takes three months (also overly optimistic estimate) for the average user to actually download a patch with the next service pack, if ever.
You aren't even paying attention to what he's saying. Anderson is AGREEING with you. The Patch deployment he's referring to shrinking IS the time it takes "the average user to actually download a patch...." That time is what Microsoft is working to reduce, not the "time until a patch is released."
If you look at recent exploit history, Anderson is exactly right. Blaster, Slammer, etc... All of the exploits came out AFTER the patch was released. The primary reason they were so destructive is that users did not patch, and the patch itself advertised the hole to the exploit writers like a green lighthouse on a clear night. I'm glad that MS is focusing on the right problem in that respect: user deployment of patches.
But quick patching process is no replacement for code that is secure to start with!!!
Of course not. But keep in mind that even the Linux kernel needs to be patched and updated! There have been two security holes in the 2.4.x kernels over the past 6 months. Each one required a new or patched kernel to fix. How many n00b linux users do you think actually did that?
It's the same problem for both sides. Problems will be found in all software. Patches are absolutely necessary to fix those problems. The hard part is getting those patches deployed. If patches aren't deployed promptly, what was a simple coding error can easily become an enormously expensive nightmare.
Searching for viruses on my 2.8GHz SATA 150 through less than 30GB of data on a RAID 0 drive takes HOURS.
Then you have some really slow anti-virus software. This should only take that much time ONCE. Subsequent runs should be very quick because all of the scanned files have hash values which are stored. The files will only be re-scanned if the hash value does not match.
Besides even normal users can install stuff in linux (contained to their home directory, only)
No one actually installs apps in Linux this way. Only small toy programs or utilities that are of no consequence and aren't shared with other users on the machine are installed this way. That probably accounts for about 1% of the software you install on a computer. When you install an RPM or an application shared across many users, you HAVE to "root up" just as Windows users have to "Admin up." Whether you use SUDO or the application does it for you and asks for your root password, it's the exact same process. The fact that Windows users don't start the install programs using runas simply means they're uninformed and improperly educated. Windows provides the SAME mechanisms that Unix does for running in least privileged mode: users simply do not do it.
Plus the file structure is alot more accessable to normal users in Windows.
Check your facts. Just TRY to clobber an NTFS directory to which you have no write permissions. The "Limited Account" in Windows won't let you write to \Windows or \Program Files or other people's user folders. How is this "a lot more accessible"? Only Administrators have complete access to the file system, the same as in Unix/Linux. If you are logging in as Administrator, it's your own damned fault if you run a Trojan and it trashes your files.
I mean, even the "Run as.." function is hidden in windows! you have to hold the Shift key down while right mouse clicking to get it!
I don't know what version of Windows YOU have, but in XP simply right clicking on an executable file offers "Run As..." as the first menu option! Does KDE offer this in their shell? How about GNOME? And of course, at the Command Prompt in Windows you can still use the runas command.
According to the Mac News Network, independent sources put its latest sales figures of desktop systems at around 3.8% market share.
CNet News.com puts Apple's latest (3rd Quarter 2003) market share figures slightly lower: "Apple, meanwhile, saw shipments rise, but not as fast as the market. The company's U.S. market share is now 3 percent, while its worldwide share is below 3 percent."
While it is true that Apple has taken as much as 7% market share in the laptop market of the US in some months (see this MacLinks article) this only translates to 4% worldwide share. And HP is still the world laptop leader.
Apple, despite what you might think, has not significantly improved its market share over the last few years, except in laptops. You could make the argument that they have managed to keep market share from declining (which was the trend up until 1999), but they have failed to translate their new products into market share leadership.
I know it's hard to believe all of this when you get your news from Slashdot posters, but luckily industry analysts don't.
All editing features (such as copy/cut/paste) are explicitly disabled in a DRM Office 2003 document. Print Screen also does not capture the screenshot bitmap of a DRM Office 2003 document. It seems that [gasp] Microsoft knew these activities might be possible and decided to prevent them.
As of today, the ONLY method known to "forward" an email or document with access permissions restricted is for its intended recipient to manually sight-copy it character by character. And if the document includes non-text items (such as an image), this is obviously quite difficult or even impossible.
You are obviously correct in that there is no way to prevent an intended recipient from giving away "secrets" he or she has seen in a protected document. No protection mechanism can stop that. But you can absolutely prevent an intended recipient from copying the original document and sending it along to someone else whose view the author did not indend.
First of all, if you read the article, you will understand that Microsoft has not been advertising these "Word document passwords" as true security mechanisms. Microsoft has been pushing its new DRM Features in Office 2003 as the Microsoft-approved method to secure Office documents.
In fact, I doubt Microsoft really put much effort into making these document-modification passwords all that secure. They have been around for quite some time, and I doubt they have changed much or improved much over the years. I don't know anyone who was relying on these document passwords for their security, and Microsoft did not advertise this as a great feature of Word. In fact, the bug itself is limited in scope to protecting Word FORMS from being modified.
In any case, the new DRM features in Office 2003 are much more sophisticated and will no doubt be much more difficult to crack. THESE are the security features that Microsoft is pushing today, and if you really want to lambast Microsoft Security, then you must point out a way to subvert these newer technologies that Microsoft is actually pushing.
It would be very big news indeed if someone could succeed in copying an Outlook 2003 email marked with a "Do Not Forward" permissions flag. Indeed, if someone could even READ such an email on an unauthorized email client, Microsoft's newest security policies would be questionable. Until then, I'm not convinced this is anything more than FUD trying to convince people that Office is inherently insecure.
And thank goodness SOMEONE is working to keep the computer field new and exciting!
I've heard of tech people supporting true innovation, but marketing innovation? Give me a break!
Instead, why not heap your praise upon REAL innovators, like the designers and implementor of Strained Silicon, which hits the market this year and will boost processor performance (and other transistor technology switching times, such as DRAM) by 25-30%. This is the type of invention which takes genius to discover and implement.
The mini-iPod is nothing more than a small multi-colored mp3 player. Gee whiz. It was conceived at a conference table, designed on a whiteboard, and handed to marketing for polishing. Talk about anti-septic. It's nothing more than an mp3 player. There is very little innovative there, aside from some good Apple UI which is honestly not very revolutionary. If Apple had innovated an improvement to the Modified Discrete Cosine Transform that magically made Mp3s better, I would consider that innovation. But Apple's gift is one of marketing, not invention.
The idea behind the Apple iPod seems to be: "Let's take a small mp3 player which is not technically any better than our competitors product (battery is actually inferior) and market it so well that people absolutely MUST have it and will pay a significant price premium to get it. These outstanding portable device profit margins will help to make up for our dismal 5% market share in the computer industry."
When I hear an argument like this, I see why Microsoft isn't too worried about Open Source competition (even though they consider it the biggest threat around). Microsoft is simply keeping its eyes open in the back of its head to see how closely it's being followed.
The same thing is now happening to MS. What does MS office have that OpenOffice doesn't? Nothing that mattered to Israel.
Have you ever actually used the Hebrew version of Office? I have. The right-to-left support is very impressive. It is much more elegant and complete than anything Open Office has to offer. It is also well-tested, which is something that can't be said for OO's right-to-left support at the moment. I ran into bugs left and right (pardon the pun) in Open Office on Linux, primarily because Windows has support for right-to-left languages throughout the OS now and it therefore feels much more integrated and "natural". It is much more difficult to find that level of end-to-end support for these languages in free software. This may change, but I'm simply pointing out the current state of things.
In fact, this whole episode seems to be nothing more than an effort to attain some bargaining power. Which is their right to do, absolutely. In fact, Israel would be stupid not to shop around.
But in the end, if Israel is seriously interested in obtaining the best software with the most support for its localized culture, it will probably stick with MS Office. In fact, I'm sure they would LOVE to stick with Microsoft Office right now because they LIKE it, but are facing a bit of a budget shortfall and want to see what they can squeeze out of Microsoft's profit margins.
Just compare some of the licensing of Mac OS to MS. The new, fully loaded version of OSX? ~$130. The new fully loaded version of Windows XP? ~$200.
Apple makes money selling its hardware, period. In order to buy the $130 version of OSX (which by the way should be called an upgrade, since it is impossible to buy a Mac without an Apple OS installed), you have already forked over a premium for the Apple hardware. When you look at total cost, Apple loses every time, and always will as long as its market share stays at 5%.
Yep. And making this feature work better has been one of the cooler new features in Outlook 2003, mainly because of the re-arranged index / reading panes. This was my primary reason for upgrading to Outlook 2003 from 2000. It makes reading through e-mail discussions SO much easier that I no longer advocate setting up an office web forum.
You can see a screenshot of the result (actually taken from Outlook XP I think, not 2003) here.
Have any of you used RealPlayer lately? While WMP 9 has been getting more and more functional in terms of quality and features (surround-sound media formats, HD-quality video, built-in ripping and encoding, a usable Media Library), RealPlayer has become progressively bloated, ad-ridden, and full of spy-ware. The fact that I have to search through the registry to disable the stupid "Real Message Center" background app is infuriating to me, and is the major reason why I avoid it and tell others to do the same.
And the fact that they make it almost impossible to remove WMP in XP will make the case that much more believable.
First of all, why must the two be mutually exclusive? I have both of them installed on my PC quite happily. When I double-click on a RealMedia file, the Windows Shell launches RealPlayer. When I double-click on a WindowsMedia file, the shell launches WMP 9. How is this "lock-out"?
Second of all, how can there really be "lock-out" when there is so much competition in the Media Player market? Aside from iTunes for Windows, there is also Winamp 2/3/5, QuickTime, Sonique, Media Player Classic, and several other lesser-known ones. They all work great on Windows, and co-exist just fine with Media Player.
The only argument I see here is Real whining that Microsoft should have to distribute RealPlayer for them. In other words, Media Player has an unfair advantage because it ships with Windows. Well, duh. But now the government should protect RealPlayer because it is not installed with Windows?
Here's a suggestion for Real: Make a better player, and you'll gain market share the old-fashioned way. Through customers who WANT to use your software, not just because it's there.
And just what the fuck is that supposed to mean in this context? How is it more proprietary than WinAmp?
Good lord, man. If you don't stop being so defensive, you're going to combust spontaneously.
I call what you have "Apple Defensiveness Syndrome" (ADS) and it isn't healthy. I've lost many friends to the (dis)order. Suddenly, all Apple jokes and/or criticisms (or even mention of rivals) become lightning rods that threaten to ignite flamewars of gigantic proportions.
Try repeating this to yourself every time you get upset: "It's only a computer, it does not reflect my self worth."
You are right, of course. But expecting Forno to avoid name-calling would mean expecting him to avoid feeding the Troll. This one was so cute, and looked so hungry... Maybe just a LITTLE food would be okay...
Crap. Slashdot picked it up. So much for keeping the Troll population down this Christmas season!
But I'm not just referring to disk files. I'm referring to the countless other "system objects" (like devices, locks, etc) that need security protection from the operating system. Using a different file system will not magically create ACL-type security for these non-disk-filesystem objects.
Think of it as the difference between Playdough (Windows) and Lego (Unix). Windows is like a big lump of playdough. Sure it's pliable in the beginning, but over time it hardens into a big, unusable clump that needs to be tossed (reloaded). Unix on the other hand is like legos. Its modular design lends itself to be mixed and matched into unlimited configurations.
I'm sick of this ridiculous argument. Have you ever been to Legoland? Sure, you can make some incredible things out of Legos. But you just can't make everything you want.
Unix has some significant shortcomings, and modern unices have attempted to address these issues in various ways, but at some level your very argument stops such progress because the end-result is no longer "time-proven" and might lead to problems.
The lack of Access Control Lists in Unix are a great example. Access control lists are a powerful concept that have been around for decades now in the computer security literature. The richness and configuration power available to systems employing ACL security are well documented. Every object in the NT kernel has an ACL associated with it, and that includes things like files, shares, memory, jobs, mutexes, pipes, etc. This doesn't mean that NT is "more secure" but it means that it is now easier to set up a fully functional operating system because of the rich set of access control possibilities. In many cases, the "file descriptor" security in Unix is very limited and causes people to go out of their way to construct a new group just to get access to a particular file (which, btw, could be anything under the "everything is a file" paradigm). This is cumbersome and decidedly inelegant. It leads to massively complicated group permissions headaches.
I could point out several other inelegant hacks now employed in Unix that are more elegantly achieved in modern operating systems. But my point is this: Sitting around wallowing in the dark ages of computing because "it has worked well up until now" is no way to improve the state of the art in software. And there is a Long, Long way to go.
Yeah yeah mod me down if you must but I'd feel much better having embedded Linux (or some other proven secure system) watching my money thank you.
When you find a "proven secure" operating system, make sure you let everyone know about it. As of the 25th of November 2003, they are as common as the Unicorn and the Free Lunch. That is to say, they don't exist.
I've read modern histories of the Roman Empire. I've also read Gibbon.
Gibbon, like other original authors, heavily influenced the study of Roman history, but he simply did not have the access to original texts that modern historians now enjoy. He worked from a limited 18th century library, and the biases of Catholicism clouded his judgments. In short, if you read The Rise and Fall... make sure it's a supplemental read, and not the mainstay of your investigation.
I would suggest the same with most original papers and texts in the scientific community as well. Their value today rests primarily in their importance in the history of ideas. Great ideas and arguments deserve mention, but only rarely do they deserve direct attention. It is usually an inefficient use of intellectual energy that could better be spent on original contributions.
I'll point you to a scientific example... You can go read Maxwell's brilliant papers on electromagnetism if you choose, but you will find yourself wondering what this mysterious "ether" substance is to which Maxwell continuously refers. Of course, there is no such thing: but Maxwell was simply referring to what the scientific community believed at the time. It doesn't make his work less important to the history of physics ideas, but it certainly makes it less useful to a modern student. The mathematical language he uses to describe differential equations is also somewhat dissimilar to what a modern student would expect. A modern summary of Maxwell's work would be superior for any physics student.
It all boils down to this: do you want to spend your time in a historical admiration of other people's work? Or do you want to learn about their ideas in the most efficient manner possible, so that you can build on their ideas and make your own contributions to the history of ideas?
Why do you care whether WMP or IE is there? Do you really need those 20 megabytes of disk space?
I'm just curious... I mean, Windows has ALWAYS had little add-on programs that were part of the system and weren't easy to uninstall. Why is this any different? Are they preventing you from using your computer somehow?
I think you're basically making my argument for me here.
I work on Learjets so perhaps the planes I play with have better equipment, however I doubt there is a single commercial jet out there without a full navigation suit onboard.
Yes, I understand that! Do you think bus drivers know how to navigate a great circle path? Do you think they understand magnetic deviation? If you fly Lears, you know as well as I do that the question isn't what happens when all the equipment is working: it's what happens when the equipment doesn't work. You have to be able to fly the airplane without navigational aids, or with "archaic" backup systems like VORTACs. You think your average bus driver can plot his location given a sectional chart and a VOR radio while he's flying the plane? Maybe the bus drivers in your area have more technical competence than they do in my area.
Planes have pressurized cabins and O2 systems.
Yes, of course they do. But my point is that you have yet another system that bus operators don't worry about, and would have no clue how to operate. Sure, new two-seater jets have computers that control their operation, but older jets force you to manually set the cabin pressure altitude. Does a bus driver know about hypoxia? What would happen above 10000 feet without a pressurized cabin? These are the questions that NO ONE with the level of training and responsibility a typical bus driver has would be able to answer if he/she were tasked with flying an airplane.
#1 Eng to start... Throttle lever to idle. Lights look normal.. #2 to start etc...
I could teach a bus driver to start one of these things in half an hour.
Sure, you could teach a bus driver to start them. Heck, you could probably even teach a bus driver the concept of independent engine throttle. But how do gas turbines operate? What happens if the compressor stall light comes on? How do the fire extinguishers work? When is it OK to deploy them? Heck, what about planes that require an APU just to start one of the mains? Or when the first officer does a walk-around preflight, would a bus driver know what to look for around the engine compartment to make sure nothing is amiss?
Basically, my argument is that it isn't good enough to expect that the systems are automated, because automated systems will fail. Yes, it's rare. But it happens, and I guarantee you that pilots will always be expected to know how to operate a plane manually in the case of an emergency. Some failures are so catastrophic that no backup systems exist, and I'm aware of that fact. In those rarest of rare circumstances, even trained pilots would fail. But don't try to tell me that someone with the same level of training a bus driver receives would be even REMOTELY capable of landing an MD-11 in, say, Salt Lake City. Or recovering from an engine failure on takeoff in a max-loaded 777. The whole notion is ridiculous!
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I'm sorry if what I said was unclear. I was not attempting to imply that Microsoft invented all of the terms at that website I linked. Obviously they didn't! There are tons of famous terms there, some of which date back to the original Von Neumann stored-program computer designs. So clearly they're not all due to Microsoft employees.
But vaporware, dogfood, and a few others are supposedly Microsoft-specific.
I'm sure it spread fast, but according to most sources I've found, the term started floating around internally at Microsoft in the early 80s, with widespread use coming when the "Ovation" DOS software package failed to materialize. I'm sure the laptop you're referring to helped the term gain even more momentum.
Really, the only reason I brought it up was to make my point about Microsoft's extensive dogfooding of their own software internally. There are some things that Microsoft does well, and it makes no sense to deny it.
But your point that MS did not spawn those other terms is well taken, and I should have clarified my statement. In fact, I don't believe the website makes such claims either. The site just says those terms are jargon in common use at Microsoft. No more, no less.
In fact, this is a huge debate at Microsoft. Should you, or should you not fix stupid API problems and bugs? The answer is not as easy as you think.
Microsoft was sued several times in the 90s for breaking 3rd party apps with new versions of Windows. "If my app worked on Windows 95, and it quit working on Windows 98, then it's must be Microsoft's fault! Right?" (Sure, it's got NOTHING to do with your complete unwillingness to release a patch for your own software...)
Microsoft lost several of these lawsuits. By all accounts, Microsoft was only fixing bugs that had been reported by other customers. But if the result of the fix is that Other Software Company's precious GoldMine application stops running, then for some reason that is legally not the fault of Other Software Company. Go figure.
Since that time, Microsoft has gone out of its way to test as many 3rd party applications as possible any time a fix or change is submitted to an external API. There is an entire team at Microsoft dedicated to testing these issues. If a major 3rd party app is busted as a result of a bug fix (i.e., the app was depending on the bug in the API), in general the policy is to leave the bug alone. It won't be fixed. It's just too much of a legal hassle to fix a bug that ends up breaking a vendor's app, and fighting the ensuing legal battle.
Kind of sad isn't it? Makes you want to strangle the lawyers responsible for such lawsuits...
Try reading between the lines?
Microsoft uses Exchange Server for its entire 65,000 person world-wide corporate network. Saying that Exchange Server doesn't scale is ludicrous. The DoD also runs NT with Exchange Server: over 100,000 client machines to serve there. No, I don't have the exact numbers, just estimates.
Once upon a time, Sun systems ran Hotmail. Microsoft purchased Hotmail and tried to switch to NT (not Exchange), but the switch failed initially. This embarrassment has since been rectified. But I must iterate: this has NOTHING to do with Exchange Server! Exchange Server is for corporate email systems, not for Internet-wide public web mail systems!
So the great-grandparent poster was either lying or horribly confused. He was suggesting that Microsoft's "55,000+ users" (which would have to be Microsoft's corporate network) run off of Sun servers. But Microsoft uses Exchange Server internally for literally everything: mail, address books, schedules, appointments, discussion groups, etc. So in order to MS to use Sun servers for this internally, those Sun servers would have to magically run Exchange Server somehow, now wouldn't they?
You are confusing retail pricing for OEM pricing, plain and simple. The two are NOT comparable, period.
If you compare the RETAIL price of Office 2003 with Office 2004, you will see that they are almost identical. Buying them at any retail/wholesale store will show you the exact same thing.
OEM pricing will ALWAYS be better on the PC because OEMs are who sell computers. Apple is the only Mac OEM, and therefore they're the only ones authorized to sell you Office 2004 at OEM prices.
You'll probably argue with me and say, "But you can buy hard drives for a Mac, why can't you buy the OEM Office suite with it?" OEMs can only purchase OEM-discounted software if they MAKE COMPUTERS. They can only sell said software if they also sell a piece of hardware. But the fact remains that until there are Apple OEMs that actually MAKE computers, they will not be able to purchase OEM-discounted software.
I realize that you didn't make the comment above about Microsoft "secretly using Sun servers", but those are the kind of statements that really make me upset because they are demonstrably false. If you ever had an opportunity to visit the Redmond campus, you would see that.
Microsoft invented the term "dogfood." Eating your own dogfood was slang introduced in the DOS days. Dogfood is software that's not even in BETA yet: in other words, not ready for public consumption. Microsoft is famous for having its people eat their own dogfood. It is not like the networking company you worked at.
Other terms first used at Microsoft? Vaporware. Death March. OOF. See other Microsoft jargon.
How many of you were running 2.3.x or 2.5.x kernels before 2.4.x and 2.6.x came out? It's amazing how people on Slashdot just can't seem to give Microsoft credit.
You aren't even paying attention to what he's saying. Anderson is AGREEING with you. The Patch deployment he's referring to shrinking IS the time it takes "the average user to actually download a patch...." That time is what Microsoft is working to reduce, not the "time until a patch is released."
If you look at recent exploit history, Anderson is exactly right. Blaster, Slammer, etc... All of the exploits came out AFTER the patch was released. The primary reason they were so destructive is that users did not patch, and the patch itself advertised the hole to the exploit writers like a green lighthouse on a clear night. I'm glad that MS is focusing on the right problem in that respect: user deployment of patches.
Of course not. But keep in mind that even the Linux kernel needs to be patched and updated! There have been two security holes in the 2.4.x kernels over the past 6 months. Each one required a new or patched kernel to fix. How many n00b linux users do you think actually did that?
It's the same problem for both sides. Problems will be found in all software. Patches are absolutely necessary to fix those problems. The hard part is getting those patches deployed. If patches aren't deployed promptly, what was a simple coding error can easily become an enormously expensive nightmare.
Then you have some really slow anti-virus software. This should only take that much time ONCE. Subsequent runs should be very quick because all of the scanned files have hash values which are stored. The files will only be re-scanned if the hash value does not match.
No one actually installs apps in Linux this way. Only small toy programs or utilities that are of no consequence and aren't shared with other users on the machine are installed this way. That probably accounts for about 1% of the software you install on a computer. When you install an RPM or an application shared across many users, you HAVE to "root up" just as Windows users have to "Admin up." Whether you use SUDO or the application does it for you and asks for your root password, it's the exact same process. The fact that Windows users don't start the install programs using runas simply means they're uninformed and improperly educated. Windows provides the SAME mechanisms that Unix does for running in least privileged mode: users simply do not do it.Check your facts. Just TRY to clobber an NTFS directory to which you have no write permissions. The "Limited Account" in Windows won't let you write to \Windows or \Program Files or other people's user folders. How is this "a lot more accessible"? Only Administrators have complete access to the file system, the same as in Unix/Linux. If you are logging in as Administrator, it's your own damned fault if you run a Trojan and it trashes your files.
I don't know what version of Windows YOU have, but in XP simply right clicking on an executable file offers "Run As..." as the first menu option! Does KDE offer this in their shell? How about GNOME? And of course, at the Command Prompt in Windows you can still use the runas command.According to the Mac News Network, independent sources put its latest sales figures of desktop systems at around 3.8% market share.
CNet News.com puts Apple's latest (3rd Quarter 2003) market share figures slightly lower: "Apple, meanwhile, saw shipments rise, but not as fast as the market. The company's U.S. market share is now 3 percent, while its worldwide share is below 3 percent."
While it is true that Apple has taken as much as 7% market share in the laptop market of the US in some months (see this MacLinks article) this only translates to 4% worldwide share. And HP is still the world laptop leader.
Apple, despite what you might think, has not significantly improved its market share over the last few years, except in laptops. You could make the argument that they have managed to keep market share from declining (which was the trend up until 1999), but they have failed to translate their new products into market share leadership.
I know it's hard to believe all of this when you get your news from Slashdot posters, but luckily industry analysts don't.
All editing features (such as copy/cut/paste) are explicitly disabled in a DRM Office 2003 document. Print Screen also does not capture the screenshot bitmap of a DRM Office 2003 document. It seems that [gasp] Microsoft knew these activities might be possible and decided to prevent them.
As of today, the ONLY method known to "forward" an email or document with access permissions restricted is for its intended recipient to manually sight-copy it character by character. And if the document includes non-text items (such as an image), this is obviously quite difficult or even impossible.
You are obviously correct in that there is no way to prevent an intended recipient from giving away "secrets" he or she has seen in a protected document. No protection mechanism can stop that. But you can absolutely prevent an intended recipient from copying the original document and sending it along to someone else whose view the author did not indend.
First of all, if you read the article, you will understand that Microsoft has not been advertising these "Word document passwords" as true security mechanisms. Microsoft has been pushing its new DRM Features in Office 2003 as the Microsoft-approved method to secure Office documents.
In fact, I doubt Microsoft really put much effort into making these document-modification passwords all that secure. They have been around for quite some time, and I doubt they have changed much or improved much over the years. I don't know anyone who was relying on these document passwords for their security, and Microsoft did not advertise this as a great feature of Word. In fact, the bug itself is limited in scope to protecting Word FORMS from being modified.
In any case, the new DRM features in Office 2003 are much more sophisticated and will no doubt be much more difficult to crack. THESE are the security features that Microsoft is pushing today, and if you really want to lambast Microsoft Security, then you must point out a way to subvert these newer technologies that Microsoft is actually pushing.
It would be very big news indeed if someone could succeed in copying an Outlook 2003 email marked with a "Do Not Forward" permissions flag. Indeed, if someone could even READ such an email on an unauthorized email client, Microsoft's newest security policies would be questionable. Until then, I'm not convinced this is anything more than FUD trying to convince people that Office is inherently insecure.
I've heard of tech people supporting true innovation, but marketing innovation? Give me a break!
Instead, why not heap your praise upon REAL innovators, like the designers and implementor of Strained Silicon, which hits the market this year and will boost processor performance (and other transistor technology switching times, such as DRAM) by 25-30%. This is the type of invention which takes genius to discover and implement.
The mini-iPod is nothing more than a small multi-colored mp3 player. Gee whiz. It was conceived at a conference table, designed on a whiteboard, and handed to marketing for polishing. Talk about anti-septic. It's nothing more than an mp3 player. There is very little innovative there, aside from some good Apple UI which is honestly not very revolutionary. If Apple had innovated an improvement to the Modified Discrete Cosine Transform that magically made Mp3s better, I would consider that innovation. But Apple's gift is one of marketing, not invention.
The idea behind the Apple iPod seems to be: "Let's take a small mp3 player which is not technically any better than our competitors product (battery is actually inferior) and market it so well that people absolutely MUST have it and will pay a significant price premium to get it. These outstanding portable device profit margins will help to make up for our dismal 5% market share in the computer industry."
This is either an attempt to be funny, or it is one of the most disturbing things I have heard in a while.
When I hear an argument like this, I see why Microsoft isn't too worried about Open Source competition (even though they consider it the biggest threat around). Microsoft is simply keeping its eyes open in the back of its head to see how closely it's being followed.
Have you ever actually used the Hebrew version of Office? I have. The right-to-left support is very impressive. It is much more elegant and complete than anything Open Office has to offer. It is also well-tested, which is something that can't be said for OO's right-to-left support at the moment. I ran into bugs left and right (pardon the pun) in Open Office on Linux, primarily because Windows has support for right-to-left languages throughout the OS now and it therefore feels much more integrated and "natural". It is much more difficult to find that level of end-to-end support for these languages in free software. This may change, but I'm simply pointing out the current state of things.
In fact, this whole episode seems to be nothing more than an effort to attain some bargaining power. Which is their right to do, absolutely. In fact, Israel would be stupid not to shop around.
But in the end, if Israel is seriously interested in obtaining the best software with the most support for its localized culture, it will probably stick with MS Office. In fact, I'm sure they would LOVE to stick with Microsoft Office right now because they LIKE it, but are facing a bit of a budget shortfall and want to see what they can squeeze out of Microsoft's profit margins.
Apple makes money selling its hardware, period. In order to buy the $130 version of OSX (which by the way should be called an upgrade, since it is impossible to buy a Mac without an Apple OS installed), you have already forked over a premium for the Apple hardware. When you look at total cost, Apple loses every time, and always will as long as its market share stays at 5%.
Yep. And making this feature work better has been one of the cooler new features in Outlook 2003, mainly because of the re-arranged index / reading panes. This was my primary reason for upgrading to Outlook 2003 from 2000. It makes reading through e-mail discussions SO much easier that I no longer advocate setting up an office web forum.
You can see a screenshot of the result (actually taken from Outlook XP I think, not 2003) here.
I disagree...
Have any of you used RealPlayer lately? While WMP 9 has been getting more and more functional in terms of quality and features (surround-sound media formats, HD-quality video, built-in ripping and encoding, a usable Media Library), RealPlayer has become progressively bloated, ad-ridden, and full of spy-ware. The fact that I have to search through the registry to disable the stupid "Real Message Center" background app is infuriating to me, and is the major reason why I avoid it and tell others to do the same.
First of all, why must the two be mutually exclusive? I have both of them installed on my PC quite happily. When I double-click on a RealMedia file, the Windows Shell launches RealPlayer. When I double-click on a WindowsMedia file, the shell launches WMP 9. How is this "lock-out"?
Second of all, how can there really be "lock-out" when there is so much competition in the Media Player market? Aside from iTunes for Windows, there is also Winamp 2/3/5, QuickTime, Sonique, Media Player Classic, and several other lesser-known ones. They all work great on Windows, and co-exist just fine with Media Player.
The only argument I see here is Real whining that Microsoft should have to distribute RealPlayer for them. In other words, Media Player has an unfair advantage because it ships with Windows. Well, duh. But now the government should protect RealPlayer because it is not installed with Windows?
Here's a suggestion for Real: Make a better player, and you'll gain market share the old-fashioned way. Through customers who WANT to use your software, not just because it's there.
Good lord, man. If you don't stop being so defensive, you're going to combust spontaneously.
I call what you have "Apple Defensiveness Syndrome" (ADS) and it isn't healthy. I've lost many friends to the (dis)order. Suddenly, all Apple jokes and/or criticisms (or even mention of rivals) become lightning rods that threaten to ignite flamewars of gigantic proportions.
Try repeating this to yourself every time you get upset: "It's only a computer, it does not reflect my self worth."
You are right, of course. But expecting Forno to avoid name-calling would mean expecting him to avoid feeding the Troll. This one was so cute, and looked so hungry... Maybe just a LITTLE food would be okay...
Crap. Slashdot picked it up. So much for keeping the Troll population down this Christmas season!
But I'm not just referring to disk files. I'm referring to the countless other "system objects" (like devices, locks, etc) that need security protection from the operating system. Using a different file system will not magically create ACL-type security for these non-disk-filesystem objects.
A lot of people like *BSD because they don't like the draconian nature of the GPL.
*BSD is totally free (for commercial use too). Linux is free, IFF you follow the terms of the GPL to the letter...
I'm sick of this ridiculous argument. Have you ever been to Legoland? Sure, you can make some incredible things out of Legos. But you just can't make everything you want.
Unix has some significant shortcomings, and modern unices have attempted to address these issues in various ways, but at some level your very argument stops such progress because the end-result is no longer "time-proven" and might lead to problems.
The lack of Access Control Lists in Unix are a great example. Access control lists are a powerful concept that have been around for decades now in the computer security literature. The richness and configuration power available to systems employing ACL security are well documented. Every object in the NT kernel has an ACL associated with it, and that includes things like files, shares, memory, jobs, mutexes, pipes, etc. This doesn't mean that NT is "more secure" but it means that it is now easier to set up a fully functional operating system because of the rich set of access control possibilities. In many cases, the "file descriptor" security in Unix is very limited and causes people to go out of their way to construct a new group just to get access to a particular file (which, btw, could be anything under the "everything is a file" paradigm). This is cumbersome and decidedly inelegant. It leads to massively complicated group permissions headaches.
I could point out several other inelegant hacks now employed in Unix that are more elegantly achieved in modern operating systems. But my point is this: Sitting around wallowing in the dark ages of computing because "it has worked well up until now" is no way to improve the state of the art in software. And there is a Long, Long way to go.
When you find a "proven secure" operating system, make sure you let everyone know about it. As of the 25th of November 2003, they are as common as the Unicorn and the Free Lunch. That is to say, they don't exist.
Gibbon, like other original authors, heavily influenced the study of Roman history, but he simply did not have the access to original texts that modern historians now enjoy. He worked from a limited 18th century library, and the biases of Catholicism clouded his judgments. In short, if you read The Rise and Fall... make sure it's a supplemental read, and not the mainstay of your investigation.
I would suggest the same with most original papers and texts in the scientific community as well. Their value today rests primarily in their importance in the history of ideas. Great ideas and arguments deserve mention, but only rarely do they deserve direct attention. It is usually an inefficient use of intellectual energy that could better be spent on original contributions.
I'll point you to a scientific example... You can go read Maxwell's brilliant papers on electromagnetism if you choose, but you will find yourself wondering what this mysterious "ether" substance is to which Maxwell continuously refers. Of course, there is no such thing: but Maxwell was simply referring to what the scientific community believed at the time. It doesn't make his work less important to the history of physics ideas, but it certainly makes it less useful to a modern student. The mathematical language he uses to describe differential equations is also somewhat dissimilar to what a modern student would expect. A modern summary of Maxwell's work would be superior for any physics student.
It all boils down to this: do you want to spend your time in a historical admiration of other people's work? Or do you want to learn about their ideas in the most efficient manner possible, so that you can build on their ideas and make your own contributions to the history of ideas?
Why do you care whether WMP or IE is there? Do you really need those 20 megabytes of disk space?
I'm just curious... I mean, Windows has ALWAYS had little add-on programs that were part of the system and weren't easy to uninstall. Why is this any different? Are they preventing you from using your computer somehow?
I think you're basically making my argument for me here.
Yes, I understand that! Do you think bus drivers know how to navigate a great circle path? Do you think they understand magnetic deviation? If you fly Lears, you know as well as I do that the question isn't what happens when all the equipment is working: it's what happens when the equipment doesn't work. You have to be able to fly the airplane without navigational aids, or with "archaic" backup systems like VORTACs. You think your average bus driver can plot his location given a sectional chart and a VOR radio while he's flying the plane? Maybe the bus drivers in your area have more technical competence than they do in my area.
Yes, of course they do. But my point is that you have yet another system that bus operators don't worry about, and would have no clue how to operate. Sure, new two-seater jets have computers that control their operation, but older jets force you to manually set the cabin pressure altitude. Does a bus driver know about hypoxia? What would happen above 10000 feet without a pressurized cabin? These are the questions that NO ONE with the level of training and responsibility a typical bus driver has would be able to answer if he/she were tasked with flying an airplane.
Sure, you could teach a bus driver to start them. Heck, you could probably even teach a bus driver the concept of independent engine throttle. But how do gas turbines operate? What happens if the compressor stall light comes on? How do the fire extinguishers work? When is it OK to deploy them? Heck, what about planes that require an APU just to start one of the mains? Or when the first officer does a walk-around preflight, would a bus driver know what to look for around the engine compartment to make sure nothing is amiss?
Basically, my argument is that it isn't good enough to expect that the systems are automated, because automated systems will fail. Yes, it's rare. But it happens, and I guarantee you that pilots will always be expected to know how to operate a plane manually in the case of an emergency. Some failures are so catastrophic that no backup systems exist, and I'm aware of that fact. In those rarest of rare circumstances, even trained pilots would fail. But don't try to tell me that someone with the same level of training a bus driver receives would be even REMOTELY capable of landing an MD-11 in, say, Salt Lake City. Or recovering from an engine failure on takeoff in a max-loaded 777. The whole notion is ridiculous!