Sorry, I meant this year (2011). And I linked to the second page of the list instead of the first one. Here is the link to the start page. Rule number one: don't post without sleep:)
Adobe: 5, Microsoft: 4, Cisco: 2, Oracle: 2, IBM: 1, all out of 58. Now, if you take into consideration the number of products Microsoft ships and its installed user base it is a hell lot better than it used to be (remember the days when a new root exploit for IIS came out every week?)
Also, please understand I'm not saying Microsoft is good at security. I'm just saying they're much better than what they used to be. Of course you can argue that -Inf + x = -Inf, for any x:) but that's a totally different issue.
Real science gives you the best known model (or explanation) for all observed phenomena. It is not fixed, it is permanently evolving. But it is the best you have to grab yourself too as long as you understand its limitations.
Global warming is no longer about science. It is about politics. And there things get much more complicated (or simpler, depending on the perspective but definitely not truer or factual). Now mix politics with sensationalist journalism pretending their reporting on science and things get out of control... just check this out if you haven't yet:)
Actually, Microsoft is suffering from bad fame more than anything else. Looking at the CERT database you can see 4 vulnerabilities in MS products in the middle of tons of others. They effectively have taken security somewhat seriously (it did that a long time but that is another story).
On the other hand, Adobe seems to be doing a nice work making sure Flash goes down the drain!
No but you cannot be convicted of a crime which is not a crime in the place you commit it... the US seem to disregard that fact all the time. Especially when copyright is involved!
Most people are too immature in basic high school to understand Economics -- at least to a useful level. And they are too concerned with tagging their photos in Facebook to care...
Don't waste your time and register a patent for that:) It has already done (at least in research). Lookup Pastiche. It was published in Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, 2002.
Abstract:
Backup is cumbersome and expensive. Individual users almost never back up their data, and backup is a signicant cost in large organizations. This paper
presents Pastiche, a simple and inexpensive backup system. Pastiche exploits excess disk capacity to perform peer-to-peer backup with no administrative costs. Each node minimizes storage overhead by selecting peers that share a signicant amount of data. It is easy for common installations to nd suitable peers, and peers with high overlap can be identied with only hundreds of bytes. Pastiche provides mechanisms for condentiality, integrity, and detection of failed or malicious peers. A Pastiche prototype suffers only 7.4% overhead for a modied Andrew Benchmark, and restore performance is comparable to cross-machine copy.
He's an american, obviously. Probably the only place in the so called "Civilized World" where people are pride of having guns... everywhere else we have already learned that guns are used for one thing: kill. And that's a bad one, IMO...
Looking at my electricity bill (Portugal) I can see:
34.5% wind generation
21.1% hydraulic
13.6% co-generation and micro-production
3% Nuclear
13.3% Gas
11% Coal
I live in a major city (Lisbon) and never had any power problems. It seems 50% renewable energy is perfectly possible! I don't really see why we would need Nuclear... BTW our Nuclear energy is imported, we don't have nuclear plants...
I don't know why security gets so much airtime in here. It's as if a generation of MS haters have been bred on this diet purely because it was the only argument they could use against one of the most successful companies of all time, and now they can't get off it.
This over-use of security as an argument is the probably what Dick Cheney would use if he worked in IT. The simple truth is that there is some minimal amount of danger out there in the real world, but it's not worth adjusting you way of life for. I've been using Windows since it came out and never had any real dramas over the last 20 odd years. Got a virus once or twice which caused less issues then the time I had rodents in my roof, or the time my car got broken into. Yes kids, shit happens, the trick is not to be scared of real life and lock yourself away in some padded cell. The only thing to fear is fear itself. Fuck you Apple:)
There is a simple explanation and it has nothing to do with Microsoft.
Humans are, in general, honest and expect other people to be so. They expect companies that provide products to abide to a set of "common sense" standards.
Let me give you a car analogy. My car has electronic protection. I know that someone can break in my car and still steal it if they possess enough knowledge. But I *assume* my car maker has made it hard enough so that the common car thief will be able to break the windows and get in but not steal the car itself. I have no way of easily verifying this but I assume it is this way.
Much in the same way, the average world citizen will assume that their data is safe on devices. My mom will have a hard time understanding that it *may* be (I'm not arguing it currently is) possible for someone on the internet to access her cell phone and, say, steal her contact list. It doesn't make sense for her. Computer-savvy people know about this is a *security* issue. We know *security* is important, *privacy* is important, *reliability* is important. But most users take them for granted. I'm not going to get into *why* but they do.
Being an honest person, I hate companies that do not provide enough security or enough privacy because their customers are expecting that. But they have no practical way of knowing that. It is not about Apple, Microsoft, Google, Sony, or whatever. It is about *honesty*. And security is a major problem for these companies. It is expensive, it is complex and has serious implications on time to market. So many companies just don't care. And -- because they know their customers won't check -- they cheat on their expectations in order to have more profit.
Now you can argue that people *should* know about these things. Well, honestly, they can't. Think about it. I'm looking around me. I'm sitting on a chair I assume it is *safe* (with no means of checking that), on a table made mostly of glass which I *assume* can handle the weight I placed on it. My front door is closed but I assume it is safe and the lock is hard to tamper with. I assume my lamps don't emit any sort of evil radiation. Nor does my router. Nor does my laptop, etc, etc,etc. Of course, I could check every of those things myself but it would hardly work, right? People do the same with cell phones. They buy, they *pay*, and they assume they are safe... so security *IS* important.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I meant this year (2011). And I linked to the second page of the list instead of the first one. Here is the link to the start page. Rule number one: don't post without sleep :)
Adobe: 5, Microsoft: 4, Cisco: 2, Oracle: 2, IBM: 1, all out of 58. Now, if you take into consideration the number of products Microsoft ships and its installed user base it is a hell lot better than it used to be (remember the days when a new root exploit for IIS came out every week?)
Also, please understand I'm not saying Microsoft is good at security. I'm just saying they're much better than what they used to be. Of course you can argue that -Inf + x = -Inf, for any x :) but that's a totally different issue.
Real science gives you the best known model (or explanation) for all observed phenomena. It is not fixed, it is permanently evolving. But it is the best you have to grab yourself too as long as you understand its limitations.
Global warming is no longer about science. It is about politics. And there things get much more complicated (or simpler, depending on the perspective but definitely not truer or factual). Now mix politics with sensationalist journalism pretending their reporting on science and things get out of control... just check this out if you haven't yet :)
Actually, Microsoft is suffering from bad fame more than anything else. Looking at the CERT database you can see 4 vulnerabilities in MS products in the middle of tons of others. They effectively have taken security somewhat seriously (it did that a long time but that is another story).
On the other hand, Adobe seems to be doing a nice work making sure Flash goes down the drain!
No but you cannot be convicted of a crime which is not a crime in the place you commit it... the US seem to disregard that fact all the time. Especially when copyright is involved!
C'mon, the US never really cared about jurisdiction in the first place... Dmitry Sklyarov anyone?
Most people are too immature in basic high school to understand Economics -- at least to a useful level. And they are too concerned with tagging their photos in Facebook to care...
Don't waste your time and register a patent for that :) It has already done (at least in research). Lookup Pastiche. It was published in Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, 2002.
Abstract: Backup is cumbersome and expensive. Individual users almost never back up their data, and backup is a signicant cost in large organizations. This paper presents Pastiche, a simple and inexpensive backup system. Pastiche exploits excess disk capacity to perform peer-to-peer backup with no administrative costs. Each node minimizes storage overhead by selecting peers that share a signicant amount of data. It is easy for common installations to nd suitable peers, and peers with high overlap can be identied with only hundreds of bytes. Pastiche provides mechanisms for condentiality, integrity, and detection of failed or malicious peers. A Pastiche prototype suffers only 7.4% overhead for a modied Andrew Benchmark, and restore performance is comparable to cross-machine copy.
It might be the other way around: sensationalist media exists because of stupidity in this world... :)
<sarcasm> Why do we assume people are stupid because of something? Many of them were just born that way ;) </sarcasm>
He's an american, obviously. Probably the only place in the so called "Civilized World" where people are pride of having guns... everywhere else we have already learned that guns are used for one thing: kill. And that's a bad one, IMO...
Looking at my electricity bill (Portugal) I can see: 34.5% wind generation 21.1% hydraulic 13.6% co-generation and micro-production 3% Nuclear 13.3% Gas 11% Coal I live in a major city (Lisbon) and never had any power problems. It seems 50% renewable energy is perfectly possible! I don't really see why we would need Nuclear... BTW our Nuclear energy is imported, we don't have nuclear plants...
I don't know why security gets so much airtime in here. It's as if a generation of MS haters have been bred on this diet purely because it was the only argument they could use against one of the most successful companies of all time, and now they can't get off it. This over-use of security as an argument is the probably what Dick Cheney would use if he worked in IT. The simple truth is that there is some minimal amount of danger out there in the real world, but it's not worth adjusting you way of life for. I've been using Windows since it came out and never had any real dramas over the last 20 odd years. Got a virus once or twice which caused less issues then the time I had rodents in my roof, or the time my car got broken into. Yes kids, shit happens, the trick is not to be scared of real life and lock yourself away in some padded cell. The only thing to fear is fear itself. Fuck you Apple :)
There is a simple explanation and it has nothing to do with Microsoft.
Humans are, in general, honest and expect other people to be so. They expect companies that provide products to abide to a set of "common sense" standards.
Let me give you a car analogy. My car has electronic protection. I know that someone can break in my car and still steal it if they possess enough knowledge. But I *assume* my car maker has made it hard enough so that the common car thief will be able to break the windows and get in but not steal the car itself. I have no way of easily verifying this but I assume it is this way.
Much in the same way, the average world citizen will assume that their data is safe on devices. My mom will have a hard time understanding that it *may* be (I'm not arguing it currently is) possible for someone on the internet to access her cell phone and, say, steal her contact list. It doesn't make sense for her. Computer-savvy people know about this is a *security* issue. We know *security* is important, *privacy* is important, *reliability* is important. But most users take them for granted. I'm not going to get into *why* but they do.
Being an honest person, I hate companies that do not provide enough security or enough privacy because their customers are expecting that. But they have no practical way of knowing that. It is not about Apple, Microsoft, Google, Sony, or whatever. It is about *honesty*. And security is a major problem for these companies. It is expensive, it is complex and has serious implications on time to market. So many companies just don't care. And -- because they know their customers won't check -- they cheat on their expectations in order to have more profit.
Now you can argue that people *should* know about these things. Well, honestly, they can't. Think about it. I'm looking around me. I'm sitting on a chair I assume it is *safe* (with no means of checking that), on a table made mostly of glass which I *assume* can handle the weight I placed on it. My front door is closed but I assume it is safe and the lock is hard to tamper with. I assume my lamps don't emit any sort of evil radiation. Nor does my router. Nor does my laptop, etc, etc,etc. Of course, I could check every of those things myself but it would hardly work, right? People do the same with cell phones. They buy, they *pay*, and they assume they are safe... so security *IS* important.