I'll do one better - use P2P and cryptography. The botnet administrator has a private key and embeds his public key into the malware. Then he signs his commands with his private key and distributes them to an infected host. The infected hosts keep track of other infected hosts (such as those that they infected) and distribute the message to those hosts.
Better yet, add a timecode to the signature to prevent replay attacks. And write the malware to screw your system over if you try to change the clock.
It's not like people need 14 months to save up for a digital TV. A 'good enough' off-brand 32" TV runs $700 now, and it'll probably be more like $500 later.
It's not like you need a new TV. Maybe you missed the part where the feds were giving out coupons to buy $50 ATSC converter boxes.
I am personally tired of the stupid "insecure" talk. My iMac runs my servers with ports 80, 443, 22, 5900 open. I watch my logs and have not seen any bad stuff.
This kind of cavalier attitude is what gets people hacked. Clearly you aren't watching your logs very carefully (or you're blocking those ports externally with some kind of firewall), because anyone who runs an SSH server (which is presumably what you're doing on port 22) knows that you get TONS of dictionary attacks. Before I disabled password authentication (and switched to using key-based authentication exclusively), I would sometimes get 20-30MiB of logs, all failed PAM logins with common usernames and from a variety of hosts. Clearly I'm not alone either.
As a programmer with more than a decade of experience, I don't care about the number of releases for an OS. I care about the timely releases. From my experience, Apple and especially Linux will release a fix as soon as they have it.
From your experience? How do you even know when Apple has a fix? How do you know when the vulnerability has been reported? Are you basing this opinion on fact, or is it your "feel" that Apple is better than Microsoft about this?
Microsoft releases most patches during the Tuesday release cycle.
As someone who works in IT, I can tell you that we don't want patches released "as soon as they are ready". Patches need to be tested, and they need to be tested with other patches. You may not think that Apple patches cause issues, and usually they don't - but even one incompatibility could result in thousands of our users being down for hours or even days. 1000 employees being down costs us $1000000 per day. That's a damn big incentive to get it right.
With the Tuesday cycle, we can test ALL of the critical patches at once, together (about 2 weeks of both automated and manual testing). Then we can roll them ALL out to a pioneer group for a week, and see if any problems arise. If they don't, everyone gets the patch on the 4th week - and the process restarts. Our IT department has people dedicated to doing this cycle.
Guess what? We use the same Tuesday cycle for Mac and Linux patches. So what does Apple's "when it's ready" release process buy us? More time for the script kiddies to reverse-engineer the patch and exploit the vulnerability.
Comparing XP in 2007 to OS X 10.4 or 10.5 is just stupid
Agreed. Why don't we compare something like Windows Vista? Oh, wait, they did. Vista has fewer reported vulnerabilities than XP now, and far fewer than XP had in its first year of release. Not to mention far, far fewer than Mac OS X.
So, what does this mean? Do these numbers mean that Vista is more secure than Mac OS? No. The number of vulnerabilities is a poor measure for how secure an operating system is.
What it does mean, though, is that all is not well in Wonderland. Security is a process, and that process needs to be well-developed regardless of the software used. Mac OS X is not a silver bullet. Neither is Linux.
Stop using the euphemism. We're not talking about tying down someone and sprinkling a bit of water on them. We're talking about preventing them from breathing and tricking their senses into believing that they are drowning. Which, in a very real sense, they are.
I think a suitable term for something like that is "controlled drowning".
No crazy graphic bugs (INSERTED TO DEFEAT LAMENESS FILTER)
Tell that to anyone who has used crappy NV or ATI drivers over the past 5 years and had their machine bluescreen because of it. This is particularly laughable because Vista's graphics subsystem is so much more robust than XP's. Anyone who overclocks GPUs or run beta drivers knows this.
It's faster and more responsive (INSERTED TO DEFEAT LAMENESS FILTER)
Partially subjective, partially true. Vista certainly isn't faster than XP, and some things are much slower (GDI). But in general, the difference is under 10%, which is far, far less than the performance difference I experienced when I upgraded to a new notebook.
No system lock on login (INSERTED TO DEFEAT LAMENESS FILTER)
Doesn't happen to me on Vista - ironically it did happen on my old XP notebook, because it was still trying to map a network drive that I had deleted.
Better multitasking (INSERTED TO DEFEAT LAMENESS FILTER)
Vista is better than XP in this regard. There are articles on the scheduler improvements if you care to Google.
File copying and deleting are quicker
File copy performance was caused by a bug which invoked the thumbnailer routines for every file copied. This was fixed in a hotfix that you can download, and it's fixed in SP1.
Automatic update is less resource hungry (INSERTED TO DEFEAT LAMENESS FILTER)
The Windows Update service on my Vista box is using 11MiB of memory right now (9MiB of it paged out) and 0% CPU. I don't consider that resource hungry.
Drivers are stable (INSERTED TO DEFEAT LAMENESS FILTER)
Newer NVIDIA and Intel drivers are quite good. Realtek and ATI had good drivers from the start. I can't comment on other things.
Drivers are easy to find (INSERTED TO DEFEAT LAMENESS FILTER)
Vista downloads most drivers from Windows Update automatically, unlike XP where this didn't actually work. Other drivers are available from the manufacturer website, just as always.
Drivers are reliable (INSERTED TO DEFEAT LAMENESS FILTER)
You already said this, and I already addressed it.
Requires less hardware (INSERTED TO DEFEAT LAMENESS FILTER)
Vista is a memory hog, but memory costs $60 for 2 GiB nowadays, so I don't really care. Vista runs fine with Intel Integrated graphics, which are about as low-end as you can get today.
Much more reliable generally (INSERTED TO DEFEAT LAMENESS FILTER)
Subjective. Vista hasn't blue-screened on any of my hardware, except when I was overclocking my CPU (and you can hardly blame Vista for that).
Internet Explorer 7 doesn't crash (INSERTED TO DEFEAT LAMENESS FILTER)
IE7 sucks. Use Firefox, which works great on Vista.
Less need to reboot (INSERTED TO DEFEAT LAMENESS FILTER)
Subjective. My Vista boxes are rebooted once a month, when MS releases new patches.
Ctrl-Alt-Del actually works and can prevent a hard-reset (INSERTED TO DEFEAT LAMENESS FILTER)
CTRL+ALT+DEL works fine on my Vista box.
Games are more responsive, have higher frame rates and are more reliable
Games run fine on my boxes without crashing, from WoW to Unreal Tournament 3 to Half-Life 2 to StarCraft. With the latest ATI/NV drivers, single-GPU performance (non-SLI) is within 5% of XP. Look at the actual benchmarks.
Better multimedia support (INSERTED TO DEFEAT LAMENESS FILTER)
Subjective. KL Codec Pack works fine on my box and plays pretty much everything using FFDShow, just like it does under XP. Hardware overlay doesn't work (for obvious reasons), but VMR9
Previous versions. This alone is worth the upgrade to Vista.
You don't understand how important this feature is until it saves your ass. Maybe you forgot to put that important document into a version control system. Maybe your version control system screwed up. Maybe you haven't been conscientious about doing nightly backups.
Previous versions is there. It's on by default, it snapshots at least once per day (more if you request it), and it's easy to use if you need to recover something. It doesn't take much disk space, because it stores deltas rather than complete copies.
It's not as sexy as Time Machine, but it's there by default, ready and waiting for you to make a mistake.
That may be accurate in some cases, but it appears that it has more to do with the REQUIREMENT from Microsoft to only use their SOFTWARE mixer in Vista, thus breaking nearly all Hardware audio effects (my read is: for *DRM* requirements):
There is no requirement in Vista to use software audio effects. Creative's OpenAL works directly on the hardware, and Creative has even released software that allows DirectSound games to access the audio hardware through OpenAL.
Software-mode DirectSound had nothing to do with DRM and everything to do with making the audio system run in the userspace. With the audio system moving out of the kernel, it doesn't make sense from both a security and abstraction perspective to expose the hardware to individual applications directly. That means that third-party hacks like EAX, useful as they may be, don't have a place in the audio stack.
The vast, vast majority of users have integrated audio - even gamers. Integrated audio nearly always uses software emulation anyway, and it's often of poor quality. Moving to a standardized software implementation that is the same regardless of the audio chipset just makes sense.
You make some good points, but you miss the fact that the DRM technologies in Vista aren't new.
PUMA is a new version of the Secure Audio Path that shipped in Windows XP with Windows Media Player 9.
WM-DRM requires applications to either use the Windows Media framework or obtain a certificate, as you say. What you didn't say is that this is also the case on XP. In fact, WM-DRM is OS agnostic - it is the files that are encrypted to prevent playback without an "approved" player (or a DRM crack).
PVP-OPM is new in Vista, but it was previously implemented in device drivers on XP. Anyone who has tried to play a DVD with an official player (e.g. PowerDVD or WinDVD) over component on an ATI or NV card knows this.
TPM support in Vista is only used for BitLocker, which is only in two versions of Vista (Enterprise and Ultimate) anyway. Most consumer systems do not ship with a TPM.
DRM "like Vista has" has already existed for a long time. It's called WM-DRM, and it has been a part of Windows for almost 6 years now, ever since Windows Media Player 8 came out.
There are no makers building HD-DVD players apart from Toshiba and some efforts Toshiba has made to get Chinese companies to duplicate it.
LG and Samsung have dual-format players. Thomson (RCA) is making players. There's the 360 HD-DVD drive. Onkyo has a high-end player. And, yes, now there are cheap Chinese made players too. Something that Blu-ray doesn't have.
There really isn't a controversy however. The market has decided.
Yes, the market has decided to stick with DVDs for the time being. DVDs are outselling both formats combined by a margin of 1000:1. Neither format has momentum here.
From that standpoint, the massive number of PS3s out there that will be sold, particularly in the next 6 months
I don't know if you're a Sony fanboy or just stupid. PS3 sales have hardly been "massive". Even if Sony moves 10 million units in the next 6 months, we're talking about a tiny fraction of the number of DVD players out there.
This is so obvious that its painful to hear delusional stuff from HD-DVD buyers who insist that the format has legs because Microsoft promises cheap Chinese players.
Now you manage to flame Microsoft in the same post. If only it made sense. Microsoft has never "promised" cheap Chinese players. People have looked at statements from Wal-Mart and other big-box retailers, and concluded that the market will be flooded with cheap HD-DVD players soon. Which it will.
DVD took off when DVD players dropped below $100. Remember Apex? Remember all of the other cheap no-name DVD players? They are what got the format into practically every home.
Microsoft said it would ship a video iPod platform and take over the market in 2004. I was late by half a year or so, and then Media2Go fizzled.
This statement is poorly written ("I" was late?), and completely irrelevant to the HD format war. But that never stopped you DECS, did it?
Microsoft planned to sell a million Zunes by June. That's really not very many, but it's still selling them at fire sale prices six months later. Apple sold 40 million in that time.
Microsoft did sell a million Zunes. The fire sale prices were used to get rid of 30GB Zune inventory before the new Zunes launched. This is exactly what Nintendo did with the GameCube and GBA. It's what Apple does with the iPod. Look at the Apple store "Hot Deals" section.
Microsoft is saying that Windows 7 in 2011-2012 (?) will improve upon the iPhone of 2007. Wow, I'd hope so.
Windows 7 is scheduled for release in 2010, but they probably will miss that. How a desktop OS is going to compete with the iPhone I have no idea, which leads me to the conclusion that you pulled that information straight out of your ass.
Everyone, go read this guy's website. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that he's a crackpot Apple shill. His website has a Soviet propaganda poster modified to include the Windows logo (real tasteful there). It compares the Apple TV (which doesn't record TV) to the TiVo, and concludes that the Apple TV is better. It trashes the Zune using the installer bug that last was a problem 12 months ago. It claims that not having third-praty app compatibility is a good thing for the iPhone.
This guy is the WORST of the WORST. He makes other Apple fanboys look tame, which really takes a lot of effort. Even Windows fans like Paul Thurrott give Apple products their fair due (Thurrott owns a Mac and uses it regularly).
DECS will lie and misleed to prove his point, which is something that pisses me off greatly. It's people like you that make me think twice before I recommend Apple products (which, by the way, I do - I'm even giving an iPhones for Christmas).
Oh, you again. For everyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about, go read this guy's page (roughlydrafted). You'll see how much of a crackpot Apple fanboy he is.
Unless, of course, you honestly believe that not having third-party apps on the iPhone is a good thing. In which case you are the crackpot Apple fanboy.
Uhh, this is old news. Akamai uses a variety of operating systems, including Linux and Solaris. That's why Microsoft.com used to show up as running "IIS" on "Linux" when you looked at it on Netcraft.
Are you suggesting that Microsoft should never use a non-Microsoft solution? Because for the kind of traffic Microsoft serves (think 700 million systems updating every month - that's something like 50 petabytes of data), Akamai has a unique level of capability that no other organization can offer.
There are eight possible orientations for inserting the DVD into the envelope
Incorrect. There are only 4 possible orientations. Go ahead, try it. Neither the compartment in the mailers nor the disk sleeves themselves are square.
My cheapshit Syntax Olevia LCD TV will sync to anything. It can handle NTSC, PAL, and SECAM, component input from 480i to 1080p (including PAL-style progressive/interlaced modes). It will tune ATSC or DVB-T (selectable in menu). It also runs on 100-240V, 50 or 60 Hz.
It's pretty clear than the manufacturers don't want to make two products.
Note that the UK alone musters T-mobile, Orange, Vodafone, O2 and 3 as real physical national carriers with very high coverage.
How many of those are actual carriers and how many are MVNOs?
Also, remember that to be a "national" carrier in the US you have to cover a vast, vast area.
Alltel, for example, which is a large "regional" carrier in the US covers an area larger than Western Europe. Alltel also has over 10 million customers, which is 1/6th of the entire population of the UK.
SunCom (which is being purchased by T-Mobile), Edge Wireless, LEAP, Western Wireless, and dozens of other regional carriers cover an area larger than the UK, and none of them have more than 3 million subscribers.
I'm not saying the situation is better here than in the UK. UMTS deployment has been slow here (although EVDO was deployed more quickly), there are bizzare contracts and credit checks, and providers like Sprint and (particularly) Verizon lock down their phones to increase their revenue. We also have a shortage of good UMTS devices, probably because the US uses different bands from most of the rest of the world.
But GSM is very much alive here. You can buy prepaid SIMs at supermarkets and other places. You can get unlocked phones (T-Mobile and AT&T will unlock most phones for free after 6 months). There's a vibrant smartphone market (mostly BlackBerry and Windows Mobile).
The market is very, very different here. Covering Wyoming is an absolute nightmare, with 500 000 people in an area larger than the entire UK and population density 6x lower than Norway. Yet you can get GSM/GPRS/EDGE in Wyoming, in part because of regional players that fill in the gaps (and I don't pay to roam onto their networks either).
HTC Excalibur Windows Mobile 6 Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE
T-Mobile USA 500 minutes ($60/mo, shared between 3 handsets) Unlimited nights, weekends, in-network Free roaming anywhere in the US $0.49/min in Canada, $0.99/min in Europe, more elsewhere Unlimited EDGE ($20/mo extra)
Ie, if you have a GSM or 3G phone and a SIM card then you can just use it in the UK.
This is exactly the way it works in the US with AT&T and T-Mobile, the two national GSM carriers in the US. AT&T offers UMTS (GSM 3G) and HSDPA, too (T-Mobile is waiting for the spectrum they purchased to become available).
PS. I think most Europeans, used to being behind on technology, are baffled by the US phone 'notwork'...
I'm not sure I'd describe Europe as 'behind on technology', but I would recommend that they learn more about the mobile phone situation in the US before judging. There are five national mobile phone networks, using three different technologies (GSM/UMTS, IDEN, CDMA2000) on four different bands (850/1900/1700/FMR). That's not even considering the hundreds of local and regional players, many of whom have more subscribers than major European carriers.
This seems typical of the "standard European comment about US mobile phone networks". The US has over 100 million GSM subscribers. You could at least bother to scan the Wikipedia article about Verizon Wireless before talking about how "poor" our mobile service is here. Yes, things are billed differently here (we pay for incoming calls but typically pay less per minute). Some things are better (unlimited EDGE/UMTS/HSDPA for $20/mo, "free" nights/weekends/in-network calling), some things are worse ($0.15 per SMS - send AND receive). But we're not some kind of mobile backwater. Evil providers notwithstanding.
At which point, if they stop buying dollars to support the trade deficit
See, this is what people don't get: China doesn't want a worthless US dollar. All of the dollars that they received (as part of funding our national debt and trade defect) aren't good just sitting around. At some point, China is going to want to spend them, and if we see massive inflation (because our currency becomes worthless), suddenly China is left with a lot of worthless dollars (as are we). It's not good for either side.
Compared to 30 years ago, there's very little manufacturing that actually still creates goods in the US.
This is actually a myth. Manufacturing in the US has grown since 30 years ago. However, demand for consumer goods has grown faster, which is why we are importing so much from
Of course, when the US can no longer afford to buy foreign goods, especially basic items like steel, and all their manufacturing capacity has been dismantled, why that might just be a good time for the Peep's Republic to invade Taiwan.
That would be a particularly poor idea, considering that the US has dramatic naval and air superiority compared with China. Whether or not that will be true in 30 years is very much up in the air, but the PRC has a lot of catching up to do - particularly on the naval side.
New install/imaging system which is much quicker and more configurable
Stable images across different hardware
Lots of group policy improvements, including such things as the ability to lock out USB flash drives (important in many businesses)
Fast user switching when on AD (very useful for service calls)
BitLocker whole-disk encryption
Previous versions (kind of like Time Machine)
UAC and other new security features
Better firewall (inbound/outbound, more configurable)
The problem is that many businesses already use third-party solutions to accomplish these things. Whole-disk encryption is available from a number of companies, as are a plethora of firewalls and imaging utilities.
I work IT at a large corporation. We're testing with Vista, so that we can be ready to migrate sometime next year. Our migration will occur in sync with our PC lifecycle - PCs get refreshed every 3 years, and starting mid-2008 our default image will be Vista.
There's a lot of complaining and a lot of bellyaching. I had to fight a number of IT "professionals" who wanted to disable UAC because one of our internal apps wasn't compatible with it (uhh, maybe we should fix the one broken app?).
IT is slow to change and often out of touch with business and user needs. There are some very bright people who work IT at my company, but there are far more who are more interested in covering their ass than they are in meeting user needs.
This is a stupid, stupid article headline. Of course you can have a memory leak in a managed language! Any Java programmer who's decent understands that.
It's not C#'s fault. The team had references to the obstacle list (event handlers), which prevented garbage collection. The.NET CLR did its job, just like it was supposed to.
Modern 7200 RPM SATA drives can deliver 70-100MB/s in sequential reads, depending on where the data is stored on the platters.
Most people don't know it, but hard drives have been getting steadily faster. Not crazy-insane-faster like semiconductors, but they have been making some sizable gains.
Sometimes it helps to write sentences that people can understand.
MVNO = Mobile Virtual Network Operator "bi doin" = be doing (I think?)
OK, let's try that, and a few more fixes:
It's called reverse MVNO. The Open Handset Alliance Mobile Operator partners will be operating or servicing that spectrum that Google will be doing as a Google MVNO in reverse with the Google brand name. Sometimes it does help to ask a mobile expert.
Well, it still doesn't make sense.
Let me rephrase entirely:
Google intends to lease the spectrum to traditional carriers (MNOs, or Mobile Network Operators). The MNOs will handle things like network operations, billing, and possibly customer support. Google gets to brand the resulting service (e.g. as Google Mobile), develops the hardware and/or software, and gets a share of the revenue made by the MNO.
This is similar to what Apple has done with the iPhone, except that:
Google can brand the service
Google owns the spectrum
The end result is that Google probably will have more control over service pricing, and will probably get a bigger share of the revenue.
Stop pushing your shitty blog on Slashdot. You're clearly an Apple apologist (seriously - read the article about how much we "don't need" third party apps on the iPhone).
Something like 30% of iPhone owners have unlocked their iPhones. Apple is releasing an SDK. Clearly Apple thinks it's a shortcoming, as do many of their customers. Saying that it's not makes you look like the Apple fanboy that you are.
T-Mobile reps at direct (corporate) stores can activate a phone in about 4 minutes.
I can type 40WPM on a "real" mobile keyboard. I have yet to see anyone break 20WPM on the iPhone.
Apple did lock the phone. That's why you can't use it on anything but AT&T and why you can't load your own software.
You can't claim that my unlocked HTC Excalibur is "locked" because it doesn't work with other technologies. Locking refers to artificial limitations imposed on the phone, not to real technological limitations.
My email, tasks, contacts, and calendar sync with Exchange automatically the air. My calendar is a particularly large deal, because it means that I get reminders for meetings without having to sync with my desktop.
Javascript/HTML apps don't come close to native apps. If you need someone to tell you why, get your head checked.
So, please, stop telling us how you rationalize the iPhone's shortcomings. We don't care that all of the things it's missing don't matter to you. We care what matters to us, and for many of us that rules the iPhone right out.
Your link is every bit as much crap as Pogue. It's written by a Mac fanboy trying to crap on MS because Windows Mobile devices are trouncing the iPhone. Note that the same site has articles like "More Absurd iPhone Myths: Third Party Software Panic", which tells us how much we don't need to be able to load third party apps on our devices.
Talk about the Jobs Reality Distortion Field: every time there's a shortcoming in an Apple product, the Apple fanboys leap in to tell us how it somehow doesn't matter.
Don't get me wrong: WinMo has some serious usability issues. It's slow (not unusably slow, but it's most definitely slower than the iPhone or Palm Devices), buggy (my Dash sometimes takes a 5-minute "timeout" from working with the cell network, although some of this may be T-Mobile), and hard for a lot of people to use.
But let's be frank here. There are a lot of slow, buggy phones out there. Symbian is notorious for this. And at least WinMo phones don't lock and reboot frequently like Palm OS devices. Even many Linux smartphones have problems. My Linux-based Nokia 770 is piss slow, and it kernel panics from time to time.
Now, WinMo isn't going to kill Symbian, and it's not going to kill Linux. But a lot of the phones that run Linux don't expose that to the user. Many Motorola phones run Linux, but you can't load apps on them using anything but Java.
As for your comment about UMPCs and the XBOX not running CE: both have PC class x86 processors. It doesn't make sense to run an embedded OS designed primarily for ARM systems on them. UMPCs are actual Windows-based PCs, not embedded devices. And, FYI, HTC makes a UMPC that runs both CE and full Windows (it runs vastly longer on batteries in CE mode, because it uses a lower-power ARM CPU rather than the x86).
No, WinMo is doing exactly what MS wanted it to do. It's not intended for mass-market phones, at least not yet. It's intended as a BlackBerry competitor, and in that it's doing quite well. People comparing WinMo to Symbian or Linux miss the point.
Make that 151. Here's a scathing review of Windows Mobile 6 on what the reviewer thinks is a really great piece of hardware.
Two words: David Pogue. If you know ANYTHING about the guy, you know that he's been crapping on Microsoft for YEARS. I have a 1992 "Macs for Dummies" book by Pogue, and it contains numerous jabs at Microsoft. Pogue even gave the overpriced, limited Apple TV a glowing review.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll do one better - use P2P and cryptography. The botnet administrator has a private key and embeds his public key into the malware. Then he signs his commands with his private key and distributes them to an infected host. The infected hosts keep track of other infected hosts (such as those that they infected) and distribute the message to those hosts.
Better yet, add a timecode to the signature to prevent replay attacks. And write the malware to screw your system over if you try to change the clock.
It's not like you need a new TV. Maybe you missed the part where the feds were giving out coupons to buy $50 ATSC converter boxes.
If the chip is codenamed John, as the article claims, it's a VIA chipset. VIA uses biblical names for their CPU codenames.
Previous VIA CPU codenames:
Samuel
Esther
Nehemiah
Ezra
Note also that VIA combined a C3 CPU and a northbridge into a single package - it was codenamed "Luke".
This kind of cavalier attitude is what gets people hacked. Clearly you aren't watching your logs very carefully (or you're blocking those ports externally with some kind of firewall), because anyone who runs an SSH server (which is presumably what you're doing on port 22) knows that you get TONS of dictionary attacks. Before I disabled password authentication (and switched to using key-based authentication exclusively), I would sometimes get 20-30MiB of logs, all failed PAM logins with common usernames and from a variety of hosts. Clearly I'm not alone either.
From your experience? How do you even know when Apple has a fix? How do you know when the vulnerability has been reported? Are you basing this opinion on fact, or is it your "feel" that Apple is better than Microsoft about this?
Microsoft releases most patches during the Tuesday release cycle.
As someone who works in IT, I can tell you that we don't want patches released "as soon as they are ready". Patches need to be tested, and they need to be tested with other patches. You may not think that Apple patches cause issues, and usually they don't - but even one incompatibility could result in thousands of our users being down for hours or even days. 1000 employees being down costs us $1000000 per day. That's a damn big incentive to get it right.
With the Tuesday cycle, we can test ALL of the critical patches at once, together (about 2 weeks of both automated and manual testing). Then we can roll them ALL out to a pioneer group for a week, and see if any problems arise. If they don't, everyone gets the patch on the 4th week - and the process restarts. Our IT department has people dedicated to doing this cycle.
Guess what? We use the same Tuesday cycle for Mac and Linux patches. So what does Apple's "when it's ready" release process buy us? More time for the script kiddies to reverse-engineer the patch and exploit the vulnerability.
Agreed. Why don't we compare something like Windows Vista? Oh, wait, they did. Vista has fewer reported vulnerabilities than XP now, and far fewer than XP had in its first year of release. Not to mention far, far fewer than Mac OS X.
So, what does this mean? Do these numbers mean that Vista is more secure than Mac OS? No. The number of vulnerabilities is a poor measure for how secure an operating system is.
What it does mean, though, is that all is not well in Wonderland. Security is a process, and that process needs to be well-developed regardless of the software used. Mac OS X is not a silver bullet. Neither is Linux.
Stop using the euphemism. We're not talking about tying down someone and sprinkling a bit of water on them. We're talking about preventing them from breathing and tricking their senses into believing that they are drowning. Which, in a very real sense, they are.
I think a suitable term for something like that is "controlled drowning".
Tell that to anyone who has used crappy NV or ATI drivers over the past 5 years and had their machine bluescreen because of it. This is particularly laughable because Vista's graphics subsystem is so much more robust than XP's. Anyone who overclocks GPUs or run beta drivers knows this.
Partially subjective, partially true. Vista certainly isn't faster than XP, and some things are much slower (GDI). But in general, the difference is under 10%, which is far, far less than the performance difference I experienced when I upgraded to a new notebook.
Doesn't happen to me on Vista - ironically it did happen on my old XP notebook, because it was still trying to map a network drive that I had deleted.
Vista is better than XP in this regard. There are articles on the scheduler improvements if you care to Google.
File copy performance was caused by a bug which invoked the thumbnailer routines for every file copied. This was fixed in a hotfix that you can download, and it's fixed in SP1.
The Windows Update service on my Vista box is using 11MiB of memory right now (9MiB of it paged out) and 0% CPU. I don't consider that resource hungry.
Newer NVIDIA and Intel drivers are quite good. Realtek and ATI had good drivers from the start. I can't comment on other things.
Vista downloads most drivers from Windows Update automatically, unlike XP where this didn't actually work. Other drivers are available from the manufacturer website, just as always.
You already said this, and I already addressed it.
Vista is a memory hog, but memory costs $60 for 2 GiB nowadays, so I don't really care. Vista runs fine with Intel Integrated graphics, which are about as low-end as you can get today.
Subjective. Vista hasn't blue-screened on any of my hardware, except when I was overclocking my CPU (and you can hardly blame Vista for that).
IE7 sucks. Use Firefox, which works great on Vista.
Subjective. My Vista boxes are rebooted once a month, when MS releases new patches.
CTRL+ALT+DEL works fine on my Vista box.
Games run fine on my boxes without crashing, from WoW to Unreal Tournament 3 to Half-Life 2 to StarCraft. With the latest ATI/NV drivers, single-GPU performance (non-SLI) is within 5% of XP. Look at the actual benchmarks.
Subjective. KL Codec Pack works fine on my box and plays pretty much everything using FFDShow, just like it does under XP. Hardware overlay doesn't work (for obvious reasons), but VMR9
Previous versions. This alone is worth the upgrade to Vista.
You don't understand how important this feature is until it saves your ass. Maybe you forgot to put that important document into a version control system. Maybe your version control system screwed up. Maybe you haven't been conscientious about doing nightly backups.
Previous versions is there. It's on by default, it snapshots at least once per day (more if you request it), and it's easy to use if you need to recover something. It doesn't take much disk space, because it stores deltas rather than complete copies.
It's not as sexy as Time Machine, but it's there by default, ready and waiting for you to make a mistake.
There is no requirement in Vista to use software audio effects. Creative's OpenAL works directly on the hardware, and Creative has even released software that allows DirectSound games to access the audio hardware through OpenAL.
Software-mode DirectSound had nothing to do with DRM and everything to do with making the audio system run in the userspace. With the audio system moving out of the kernel, it doesn't make sense from both a security and abstraction perspective to expose the hardware to individual applications directly. That means that third-party hacks like EAX, useful as they may be, don't have a place in the audio stack.
The vast, vast majority of users have integrated audio - even gamers. Integrated audio nearly always uses software emulation anyway, and it's often of poor quality. Moving to a standardized software implementation that is the same regardless of the audio chipset just makes sense.
You make some good points, but you miss the fact that the DRM technologies in Vista aren't new.
PUMA is a new version of the Secure Audio Path that shipped in Windows XP with Windows Media Player 9.
WM-DRM requires applications to either use the Windows Media framework or obtain a certificate, as you say. What you didn't say is that this is also the case on XP. In fact, WM-DRM is OS agnostic - it is the files that are encrypted to prevent playback without an "approved" player (or a DRM crack).
PVP-OPM is new in Vista, but it was previously implemented in device drivers on XP. Anyone who has tried to play a DVD with an official player (e.g. PowerDVD or WinDVD) over component on an ATI or NV card knows this.
TPM support in Vista is only used for BitLocker, which is only in two versions of Vista (Enterprise and Ultimate) anyway. Most consumer systems do not ship with a TPM.
DRM "like Vista has" has already existed for a long time. It's called WM-DRM, and it has been a part of Windows for almost 6 years now, ever since Windows Media Player 8 came out.
LG and Samsung have dual-format players. Thomson (RCA) is making players. There's the 360 HD-DVD drive. Onkyo has a high-end player. And, yes, now there are cheap Chinese made players too. Something that Blu-ray doesn't have.
Yes, the market has decided to stick with DVDs for the time being. DVDs are outselling both formats combined by a margin of 1000:1. Neither format has momentum here.
I don't know if you're a Sony fanboy or just stupid. PS3 sales have hardly been "massive". Even if Sony moves 10 million units in the next 6 months, we're talking about a tiny fraction of the number of DVD players out there.
Now you manage to flame Microsoft in the same post. If only it made sense. Microsoft has never "promised" cheap Chinese players. People have looked at statements from Wal-Mart and other big-box retailers, and concluded that the market will be flooded with cheap HD-DVD players soon. Which it will.
DVD took off when DVD players dropped below $100. Remember Apex? Remember all of the other cheap no-name DVD players? They are what got the format into practically every home.
This statement is poorly written ("I" was late?), and completely irrelevant to the HD format war. But that never stopped you DECS, did it?
Microsoft did sell a million Zunes. The fire sale prices were used to get rid of 30GB Zune inventory before the new Zunes launched. This is exactly what Nintendo did with the GameCube and GBA. It's what Apple does with the iPod. Look at the Apple store "Hot Deals" section.
Windows 7 is scheduled for release in 2010, but they probably will miss that. How a desktop OS is going to compete with the iPhone I have no idea, which leads me to the conclusion that you pulled that information straight out of your ass.
Everyone, go read this guy's website. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that he's a crackpot Apple shill. His website has a Soviet propaganda poster modified to include the Windows logo (real tasteful there). It compares the Apple TV (which doesn't record TV) to the TiVo, and concludes that the Apple TV is better. It trashes the Zune using the installer bug that last was a problem 12 months ago. It claims that not having third-praty app compatibility is a good thing for the iPhone.
This guy is the WORST of the WORST. He makes other Apple fanboys look tame, which really takes a lot of effort. Even Windows fans like Paul Thurrott give Apple products their fair due (Thurrott owns a Mac and uses it regularly).
DECS will lie and misleed to prove his point, which is something that pisses me off greatly. It's people like you that make me think twice before I recommend Apple products (which, by the way, I do - I'm even giving an iPhones for Christmas).
Oh, you again. For everyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about, go read this guy's page (roughlydrafted). You'll see how much of a crackpot Apple fanboy he is.
Unless, of course, you honestly believe that not having third-party apps on the iPhone is a good thing. In which case you are the crackpot Apple fanboy.
Uhh, this is old news. Akamai uses a variety of operating systems, including Linux and Solaris. That's why Microsoft.com used to show up as running "IIS" on "Linux" when you looked at it on Netcraft.
Are you suggesting that Microsoft should never use a non-Microsoft solution? Because for the kind of traffic Microsoft serves (think 700 million systems updating every month - that's something like 50 petabytes of data), Akamai has a unique level of capability that no other organization can offer.
Incorrect. There are only 4 possible orientations. Go ahead, try it. Neither the compartment in the mailers nor the disk sleeves themselves are square.
My cheapshit Syntax Olevia LCD TV will sync to anything. It can handle NTSC, PAL, and SECAM, component input from 480i to 1080p (including PAL-style progressive/interlaced modes). It will tune ATSC or DVB-T (selectable in menu). It also runs on 100-240V, 50 or 60 Hz.
It's pretty clear than the manufacturers don't want to make two products.
How many of those are actual carriers and how many are MVNOs?
Also, remember that to be a "national" carrier in the US you have to cover a vast, vast area.
Alltel, for example, which is a large "regional" carrier in the US covers an area larger than Western Europe. Alltel also has over 10 million customers, which is 1/6th of the entire population of the UK.
SunCom (which is being purchased by T-Mobile), Edge Wireless, LEAP, Western Wireless, and dozens of other regional carriers cover an area larger than the UK, and none of them have more than 3 million subscribers.
I'm not saying the situation is better here than in the UK. UMTS deployment has been slow here (although EVDO was deployed more quickly), there are bizzare contracts and credit checks, and providers like Sprint and (particularly) Verizon lock down their phones to increase their revenue. We also have a shortage of good UMTS devices, probably because the US uses different bands from most of the rest of the world.
But GSM is very much alive here. You can buy prepaid SIMs at supermarkets and other places. You can get unlocked phones (T-Mobile and AT&T will unlock most phones for free after 6 months). There's a vibrant smartphone market (mostly BlackBerry and Windows Mobile).
The market is very, very different here. Covering Wyoming is an absolute nightmare, with 500 000 people in an area larger than the entire UK and population density 6x lower than Norway. Yet you can get GSM/GPRS/EDGE in Wyoming, in part because of regional players that fill in the gaps (and I don't pay to roam onto their networks either).
HTC Excalibur
Windows Mobile 6
Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE
T-Mobile USA
500 minutes ($60/mo, shared between 3 handsets)
Unlimited nights, weekends, in-network
Free roaming anywhere in the US
$0.49/min in Canada, $0.99/min in Europe, more elsewhere
Unlimited EDGE ($20/mo extra)
This is exactly the way it works in the US with AT&T and T-Mobile, the two national GSM carriers in the US. AT&T offers UMTS (GSM 3G) and HSDPA, too (T-Mobile is waiting for the spectrum they purchased to become available).
I'm not sure I'd describe Europe as 'behind on technology', but I would recommend that they learn more about the mobile phone situation in the US before judging. There are five national mobile phone networks, using three different technologies (GSM/UMTS, IDEN, CDMA2000) on four different bands (850/1900/1700/FMR). That's not even considering the hundreds of local and regional players, many of whom have more subscribers than major European carriers.
This seems typical of the "standard European comment about US mobile phone networks". The US has over 100 million GSM subscribers. You could at least bother to scan the Wikipedia article about Verizon Wireless before talking about how "poor" our mobile service is here. Yes, things are billed differently here (we pay for incoming calls but typically pay less per minute). Some things are better (unlimited EDGE/UMTS/HSDPA for $20/mo, "free" nights/weekends/in-network calling), some things are worse ($0.15 per SMS - send AND receive). But we're not some kind of mobile backwater. Evil providers notwithstanding.
See, this is what people don't get: China doesn't want a worthless US dollar. All of the dollars that they received (as part of funding our national debt and trade defect) aren't good just sitting around. At some point, China is going to want to spend them, and if we see massive inflation (because our currency becomes worthless), suddenly China is left with a lot of worthless dollars (as are we). It's not good for either side.
This is actually a myth. Manufacturing in the US has grown since 30 years ago. However, demand for consumer goods has grown faster, which is why we are importing so much from
That would be a particularly poor idea, considering that the US has dramatic naval and air superiority compared with China. Whether or not that will be true in 30 years is very much up in the air, but the PRC has a lot of catching up to do - particularly on the naval side.
The problem is that many businesses already use third-party solutions to accomplish these things. Whole-disk encryption is available from a number of companies, as are a plethora of firewalls and imaging utilities.
I work IT at a large corporation. We're testing with Vista, so that we can be ready to migrate sometime next year. Our migration will occur in sync with our PC lifecycle - PCs get refreshed every 3 years, and starting mid-2008 our default image will be Vista.
There's a lot of complaining and a lot of bellyaching. I had to fight a number of IT "professionals" who wanted to disable UAC because one of our internal apps wasn't compatible with it (uhh, maybe we should fix the one broken app?).
IT is slow to change and often out of touch with business and user needs. There are some very bright people who work IT at my company, but there are far more who are more interested in covering their ass than they are in meeting user needs.
This is a stupid, stupid article headline. Of course you can have a memory leak in a managed language! Any Java programmer who's decent understands that.
.NET CLR did its job, just like it was supposed to.
It's not C#'s fault. The team had references to the obstacle list (event handlers), which prevented garbage collection. The
Modern 7200 RPM SATA drives can deliver 70-100MB/s in sequential reads, depending on where the data is stored on the platters.
Most people don't know it, but hard drives have been getting steadily faster. Not crazy-insane-faster like semiconductors, but they have been making some sizable gains.
MVNO = Mobile Virtual Network Operator
"bi doin" = be doing (I think?)
OK, let's try that, and a few more fixes:
Well, it still doesn't make sense.
Let me rephrase entirely:
Google intends to lease the spectrum to traditional carriers (MNOs, or Mobile Network Operators). The MNOs will handle things like network operations, billing, and possibly customer support. Google gets to brand the resulting service (e.g. as Google Mobile), develops the hardware and/or software, and gets a share of the revenue made by the MNO.
This is similar to what Apple has done with the iPhone, except that:
The end result is that Google probably will have more control over service pricing, and will probably get a bigger share of the revenue.
Stop pushing your shitty blog on Slashdot. You're clearly an Apple apologist (seriously - read the article about how much we "don't need" third party apps on the iPhone).
Something like 30% of iPhone owners have unlocked their iPhones. Apple is releasing an SDK. Clearly Apple thinks it's a shortcoming, as do many of their customers. Saying that it's not makes you look like the Apple fanboy that you are.
So, please, stop telling us how you rationalize the iPhone's shortcomings. We don't care that all of the things it's missing don't matter to you. We care what matters to us, and for many of us that rules the iPhone right out.
Your link is every bit as much crap as Pogue. It's written by a Mac fanboy trying to crap on MS because Windows Mobile devices are trouncing the iPhone. Note that the same site has articles like "More Absurd iPhone Myths: Third Party Software Panic", which tells us how much we don't need to be able to load third party apps on our devices.
Talk about the Jobs Reality Distortion Field: every time there's a shortcoming in an Apple product, the Apple fanboys leap in to tell us how it somehow doesn't matter.
Don't get me wrong: WinMo has some serious usability issues. It's slow (not unusably slow, but it's most definitely slower than the iPhone or Palm Devices), buggy (my Dash sometimes takes a 5-minute "timeout" from working with the cell network, although some of this may be T-Mobile), and hard for a lot of people to use.
But let's be frank here. There are a lot of slow, buggy phones out there. Symbian is notorious for this. And at least WinMo phones don't lock and reboot frequently like Palm OS devices. Even many Linux smartphones have problems. My Linux-based Nokia 770 is piss slow, and it kernel panics from time to time.
Now, WinMo isn't going to kill Symbian, and it's not going to kill Linux. But a lot of the phones that run Linux don't expose that to the user. Many Motorola phones run Linux, but you can't load apps on them using anything but Java.
As for your comment about UMPCs and the XBOX not running CE: both have PC class x86 processors. It doesn't make sense to run an embedded OS designed primarily for ARM systems on them. UMPCs are actual Windows-based PCs, not embedded devices. And, FYI, HTC makes a UMPC that runs both CE and full Windows (it runs vastly longer on batteries in CE mode, because it uses a lower-power ARM CPU rather than the x86).
No, WinMo is doing exactly what MS wanted it to do. It's not intended for mass-market phones, at least not yet. It's intended as a BlackBerry competitor, and in that it's doing quite well. People comparing WinMo to Symbian or Linux miss the point.
Two words: David Pogue. If you know ANYTHING about the guy, you know that he's been crapping on Microsoft for YEARS. I have a 1992 "Macs for Dummies" book by Pogue, and it contains numerous jabs at Microsoft. Pogue even gave the overpriced, limited Apple TV a glowing review.
Why didn't you go full out and quote Mossberg?