I don't think so either: Photoshop CS4 costs $699.00 in the US for direct download from Adobe, or EUR 887.12, the equivalent of $1115.00. That's considerably more than 30%. The VAT accounts for about EUR 110 of the difference, tho'.
Adobe collects VAT on download sales for the country that the download customer lives in? I know this can be done on the basis of credit card data, though not very reliably since I can get a US registered credit card with relatively little trouble (which I unfortunately only found out after I bought that Adobe product form Amazon.co.uk). So pardon me if I express some scepticism here that this is either necessary or that the price difference, especially on the online sales, can be explained by VAT alone (which you did point out). Another point to consider is that some European countries including mine either have extra low VAT or no VAT at all for software and computers in an effort to boost innovation. I have bought quite a bit of software from all sorts of entities on the internet including The Omni Group, VMWare, Parallels and any number of little shareware developers. None of them discriminated by region like Adobe (or Apple) does and I rather doubt any of them paid a red cent's worth of VAT to the government of my country. Their business model is simple: you pay, you download, you get instant gratification - same price for everybody we since don't give a f*ck where you live as long as you pay, no VAT no customs charges no bullshit. I think the reason for the regional price difference at Adobe's download store has a lot more to do with Adobe thinking it can rip Europeans off more than they can do to US residents. The 70% mark-up on the boxed sets is already outrageous even if it can possibly be partly explained away by higher European VAT and customs charges but pricing the download option the same as the boxed sets is total bullshit.
Check out the sales of Eve online on march 10th. They are putting it out in a box set for the first time (well practically the first time). Before now it's been download only. If the number of people playing shoot up, that's a good indicator. Likewise if the box set falls flat.
Whether or not online sales are good or not depends on the sales system adopted by the vendor. Personally I am very much in favour of credit card enabled instant gratification when it comes to Music/Movies/Software purchases but some online sellers can be pretty idiotic about selling their products. The model adopted by Apple with iTunes for example is pretty nice, unless you live in a country that doesn't have a national iTunes division. Where I live (a small European country) Apple happily sells iPod touch players but they don't have a national iTunes store so I have to drive to a neighbouring country every once in a while (which I do regularly anyway) and buy iTunes gift certificates. And it's not as if I need those just to buy music on iTunes but even to do simple stuff like the time I decided that I wanted to upgrade my iPod Touch to software version 2.0. The same goes for Adobe they price their products differently depending on where the customer lives. I tried to buy one of their products by download once only to find that it was less expensive to buy if you are in the US, for me it was actually somewhat more expensive than for US residents since I am living in Europe.... Why??? Does it cost 20%-30% more when a EU resident downloads an Adobe product form their store than if a US resident does the same? I don't think so. I bought a $50 license for Omnigraffle and paid the same price the Yanks do since The Omni Group doesn't discriminate. To add insult to injury I also don't live in a country listed in the drop down menu in Adobe's stupid online store so I couldn't buy the product by download anyway. Thankfully Amazon.co.uk doesn't seem to care where in Europe it sends the products it is selling so I could acquire the Adobe product product in question by the good old DVD over snail-mail route. This is cheaper than buying it from one of the local stores who tend to overprice this stuff even more obscenely than it already is by online sellers. I am definitely going to miss the DVD option.
...it would 'devalue all patents, invite infringement -- including from companies in China, India and other countries...
Pardon my ignorance, but even if that is true does it matter? These countries, especially China, have a long history of not respecting patents and they don't look set to change that attitude.
Here's hoping...... that some of this research actually helps Microsoft in turning in to a company that derives its revenues from the fruits of its innovations rather than monopoly-based marketing hacks, and lock-ins into poorly written code.
To steal a line form Dilbert: I respectfully decline your kind offer to join your delusion.
So... what negative thing do you get from the US 92% that you don't get from the France 96%?
That's simplistic. There is a difference between 92% of US Americans *saying* they believe in god (assuming that statistic is true) and inferring from the fact that 96% of the French nominally belong to a religious organisation that every one of those 96% believes in god. European statistics on religious affiliation based on census or tax data are not especially accurate. Myself I am not a practising christian even though I was baptised into the church as a baby and convinced by my family undergo confirmation as teenager. Today I am an agnostic. The bureaucratic system in my country does not allow me to change my affiliation to 'agnostic' or 'atheist' you either belong to a religious community or you can be de-registered. In this country, once you are registered into the church after being baptised, it is a hassle get de-registered and even if you do decide to go through that process it is pretty pointless since you still have to pay church tax regardless of your or lack of religious affiliation. For this reason very few people bother to get de-registered and that includes myself. I am therefore still counted in the CIA fact-book as belonging to the local 'protestant christian' community along with significant numbers of other similar minded people who consider them selves to be non-religious.
Nintendo, get a fucking life. Seriously, pirating is not costing video game companies much of anything, because not many people pirate new video games. Most of the "pirated" video games are games that can no longer be purchased and/or are out of print.
You poor misguided wretch. That makes it even worse doesn't it? When people are busy playing old games there is less profit to be made from selling them new ones.
The Spanish Armada was defeated in 1588, so maybe everybody else had caught up by the mid 17th century?
Elizabeth wasn't exactly unique in trying to standardize artillery. Land based artillery was organised into classes of guns that used uniform calibres and ammo as early as the 15th and early 16th century in France and Germany. The article is also misleading. There is no way Elizabethan gunners could have hit anything consistently with a smoothbore black powder gun and roundshot at a range of one mile. There is a difference between being able to throw a cannon ball a mile with a 16th century smoothbore gun and being able to score pinpoint hits on targets at that range, especially if you are firing from the deck of a ship. They same guy who was testing the gun in that BBC video did a similar Armada gunnery experiment on a Discovery (or was it a History channel?) program with a replica of a 16th century bronze culverin. Basically they couldn't hit the broad side of a barn even at shorter ranges. Of course that probably had as much to do with the inexperience of the modern day gunners as the gun it self. Nevertheless, the conclusion they reached in that program was that long range gunnery was a general failure against the Armada. What worked turned to be going in nice and close, 100 yards sounds about right, load as much powder as your piece could take and make up for lack of accuracy with massive broadsides. Another point to remember about the Armada is that it was defeated as much by the weather, the currents, the over-ambitiousness of the plan and Medina Sidonia's total lack of initiative and rigid adherence to orders as it was by any inherent technological, tactical or strategic superiority of the British. By the evening of the 19 of July 1588 Mendina Sedonia had the British fleet trapped at anchor in Plymouth and he knew it. He could have attacked the fleet at anchor and even landed a major portion of the 18.000 troops he had with him to establish a beachhead before going on to ferry over the remaining 30.000 troops of the army of the Netherlands. That many Spanish troops loose in Southern Britain would have been a major headache. He chose to ignore this opportunity much to the annoyance of his subordinates.
Have you ever actually compared Windows to MacOS? Microsoft most definitely did NOT choose simplicity, rather they have always chosen flexibility - the ability to configure and reconfigure the system to run on different hardware and to do different things.
Define flexibility... I suppose if you are talking about the spectrum of hardware Windows runs on you have a point. On the other hand there are tasks on Windows Servers that can't be done from the command-line, they can only be done through GUIs. This is OK up to a point I suppose, it allows you to give certain jobs to relatively untrained admins and save wage costs. The problem starts when you have to do something like merge 30 MS IIS web servers onto a few new machines and no two or three of those web servers have the same setup, security policies, etc... if you want to do that with the GUI expect to wear out your mouse and die of boredom in the process. This sort of a task has to be done with a script, or VB/C# program or it did when I last worked with IIS 6.0 a few years back and the documentation you needed to write such a migration tool wasn't easy to come by back then. It may be that Microsoft has coughed up a decent IIS migration tool and generally documented the inner workings ofit's products in great detail since then but I rather doubt it.
Apple is the new Microsoft. Any criticism of Microsoft is at this point misdirection from the real threat.
Just think of what would happen if the fanboy dream became reality: one cellphone, one mobile platform, and Apple has complete control. The future of mobile computing, of communication, of the Internet everywhere not chained to a desk, would be theirs to direct and constrain.
And you know they will do it, too, are doing it, because it is in their nature. Software is a means to an end for them, it is just the sugar that moves hardware. Choice in software is antithetical to their existence, much more than it is to Microsoft.
Admit it... It pisses you off that Microsoft has to pay it's fanboys but Apple and Linux get thousands of them for free.
How did Zhen He travel the world in leviathan sized ships and even left traces in California then?
Eh? As far as I know the only pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact with N-America and it's indigenous peoples that has been archeologically proven beyond a shadow of a doubt was by Norse seafarers from Iceland and Greenland. Apart from the Norse the only other candidates for any significant pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact with the Americas their indigenous peoples are Polynesian seafarers. Everything else including America bound voyages by: Africans, Andalusians, Arabs, Moors, Australians, Irish, Chinese, Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Indians, Israelites, Romans, Greeks, Phoenicians and the Welsh is unproved supposition.
A Mac fan extolling the merits of the command line.
It's going to take some time to get used to. Forgive me.
Why? Quite a few current OS X users switched to OS X from various other *NIX'es and Linux. It really isn't so surprising that many OS X users are command line freaks.
Blame your government. What kind of idiot gives money away without oversight into how it is spent?
The last one was a guy named George Walker Bush, it looks like the next one might be a dude named Barack Hussein Obama. I'm hoping Mr Obama will be a pleasant disappointment on this score and actually spend the money sensibly and kick people in the nuts for misusing bailout money but given past experience I'm not holding my breath. I did get a kick out it when Mr Obama called up those Citigroup executives personally and chewed them out for buying a new $50 million corporate jet some 24 hours after receiving $45 billion in taxpayer bailout money but I'll wait and see if that was a publicity stunt or if it is actually a sign of things to come.
Nonsense. Unless you're using bleeding edge UI widgets, a browser UI is quite easy to replicate accross browsers with the use of targeted CSS or simply thoughtful design. Even with a JS framework for your UI elements, browser diferences are simply not a huge consideration. Unless you want that ActiveX goodness...
Web-apps have their place but so do stand-alone clients a good developer will know select what is right for a given project. The moment you start using that 'ActiveX goodness' you have essentially created a WebApp that only runs in IE on Windows. Which begs the question why not just write a stand alone GUI client in.NET? That would open up a whole world of UI features ad behaviour web-apps can only emulate either clumsily, with difficulty or not at all. Then there is the security issue ActiveX brings with it. The only thing an ActiveX enabled web-app has going for it is redeploy-once-update-everywhere. The whole point of a web-app is platform independence and that went out the window with the 'ActiveX goodnees'.
I don't understand all the hubbub either. So MS bundles a browser with their operating system... so what?
Back in the DOS days, word processing software didn't have a spellchecker built in. You had to buy a separate spellchecker if you wanted that functionality and the spellchecker companies had a nice little profit centre for themselves. Then one day, word processing software started coming with a spellchecker built right in! Sure it was bad for the people selling spellcheckers, but it was a win for the consumer.
Operating systems evolve... they start including things that weren't included in the past... things like internet browsers. If the (free, bundled, zero cost) browser doesn't suit your needs or tastes, it takes less than 5 minutes to download and install Firefox or Chrome.
Because when Microsoft began to bundle IE on their OS they effectively killed off anybody who was making money selling browsers. What's more MS took issue with the fact that some PC manufacturers wanted to ship Windows pre installed on their PCs with a non MS browser set as the default browser. Entire branches of the software industry still live in fear of the day that Microsoft sees profit in moving into their particular market segment and the PHBs in Redmond decide to increase Microsoft's market share the quickest way they know, by bundling the relevant Microsoft product with Windows which effectively slaughters the competition. You may argue that the browser wars are ancient history in computing terms and you would be right but the precedent the Netscape affair set is still very real even if it has become more difficult for Microsoft to pull stunts like that nowadays. I think it is pretty rediculous to force Microsoft or PC manufacturers to bundle all the common browsers on the market: Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari etc.. Internet Explorer with Windows by default. I find the suggestion more reasonably that a PC manufacturer should be able to bundle any software he wants pre-installed on Windows with his PCs. This should be the case even if this PC manufacturer's opinions of what should be pre-installed conflicts with Microsoft's marketing strategies for IE or any other MS software Microsoft has decided to 'bundle' with Windows as a shortcut to gaining market share. Basically PC manufacturers should be able to bundle alternative software with the Windows they ship on their machines and even leave out the Microsoft alternative if they see a reason to do so. Most users will use the software pre-installed on the machine. Installing Firefox or some other alternative to the software MS bundles with Windows isn't necessarily second nature to the average user... strange as that may seem to some nerds.
... with President Obama's executive orders banning torture by US forces and requiring the closure of Guantánamo Bay, there's a dire need for alternative interrogation tools.
2 hours of those absolutely inhuman renditions of 'Roxanne' and 'Sgt Peppers', together with the MS infomercial, would be enough to break even the staunchest jihadist.
"Please, PLEASE NOOOO!! I'll give you current GPS coordinates for Osama bin Laden! Just turn it off PLEASE!!!"
I don't want to dampen your enthusiasm but you would get much better results in a lot less than two hours using a couple of Japanese tourists, a karaoke machine and a some carefully selected music from the 1980s. Cheesy period outfits with big shoulder-pads wouldn't hurt either.
Well, if as few as 10% of the pirated software has viruses, then anyone who downloads and installs 10 software apps has roughly a 66% chance of getting something. It seems bizarre that malware creators wouldn't use pirated software to spread keyloggers and other nasty stuff. I mean - if I went to a website and got a popup to download and install an exe, or I got something in my email that said to run an exe, I'd NEVER do it. And neither would most tech-savy people. But, people who pirate software are installing the software they're downloading. That's a malware-creator's dream come true. I'm sure mafia and identity-theft criminals love the idea (and they can create lots of seeders to create the illusion of being legit).
The fact that people believe pirated software is malware free by definition and that all reports to the contrary are evil propaganda by the BSA & friends has always amazed me as well. If it is really true that only 10% of pirated software is infected or has been carefully modified for use as a malware carrier that is even stranger since using pirated software for that purpose seems like such an obvious thing to do. Embed your custom Trojan in a software installation package and people will install the malware for you without giving it a second thought. After that all you have to do is flood the P2P networks with your spiked software. You could even build a root-kit/malware package directly into a WIndows XP/Vista/7 installation bundle, voilà instant bot-net node. With a properly constructed root-kit your malware would be nigh invisible post install to any garden variety PC security suite anyway and if it was a design that hadn't been seen before it would take quite a while before somebody flagged it.
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I don't think so either: Photoshop CS4 costs $699.00 in the US for direct download from Adobe, or EUR 887.12, the equivalent of $1115.00. That's considerably more than 30%. The VAT accounts for about EUR 110 of the difference, tho'.
Adobe collects VAT on download sales for the country that the download customer lives in? I know this can be done on the basis of credit card data, though not very reliably since I can get a US registered credit card with relatively little trouble (which I unfortunately only found out after I bought that Adobe product form Amazon.co.uk). So pardon me if I express some scepticism here that this is either necessary or that the price difference, especially on the online sales, can be explained by VAT alone (which you did point out). Another point to consider is that some European countries including mine either have extra low VAT or no VAT at all for software and computers in an effort to boost innovation. I have bought quite a bit of software from all sorts of entities on the internet including The Omni Group, VMWare, Parallels and any number of little shareware developers. None of them discriminated by region like Adobe (or Apple) does and I rather doubt any of them paid a red cent's worth of VAT to the government of my country. Their business model is simple: you pay, you download, you get instant gratification - same price for everybody we since don't give a f*ck where you live as long as you pay, no VAT no customs charges no bullshit. I think the reason for the regional price difference at Adobe's download store has a lot more to do with Adobe thinking it can rip Europeans off more than they can do to US residents. The 70% mark-up on the boxed sets is already outrageous even if it can possibly be partly explained away by higher European VAT and customs charges but pricing the download option the same as the boxed sets is total bullshit.
Check out the sales of Eve online on march 10th. They are putting it out in a box set for the first time (well practically the first time). Before now it's been download only. If the number of people playing shoot up, that's a good indicator. Likewise if the box set falls flat.
Whether or not online sales are good or not depends on the sales system adopted by the vendor. Personally I am very much in favour of credit card enabled instant gratification when it comes to Music/Movies/Software purchases but some online sellers can be pretty idiotic about selling their products. The model adopted by Apple with iTunes for example is pretty nice, unless you live in a country that doesn't have a national iTunes division. Where I live (a small European country) Apple happily sells iPod touch players but they don't have a national iTunes store so I have to drive to a neighbouring country every once in a while (which I do regularly anyway) and buy iTunes gift certificates. And it's not as if I need those just to buy music on iTunes but even to do simple stuff like the time I decided that I wanted to upgrade my iPod Touch to software version 2.0. The same goes for Adobe they price their products differently depending on where the customer lives. I tried to buy one of their products by download once only to find that it was less expensive to buy if you are in the US, for me it was actually somewhat more expensive than for US residents since I am living in Europe.... Why??? Does it cost 20%-30% more when a EU resident downloads an Adobe product form their store than if a US resident does the same? I don't think so. I bought a $50 license for Omnigraffle and paid the same price the Yanks do since The Omni Group doesn't discriminate. To add insult to injury I also don't live in a country listed in the drop down menu in Adobe's stupid online store so I couldn't buy the product by download anyway. Thankfully Amazon.co.uk doesn't seem to care where in Europe it sends the products it is selling so I could acquire the Adobe product product in question by the good old DVD over snail-mail route. This is cheaper than buying it from one of the local stores who tend to overprice this stuff even more obscenely than it already is by online sellers. I am definitely going to miss the DVD option.
...it would 'devalue all patents, invite infringement -- including from companies in China, India and other countries...
Pardon my ignorance, but even if that is true does it matter? These countries, especially China, have a long history of not respecting patents and they don't look set to change that attitude.
Here's hoping ... ... that some of this research actually helps Microsoft in turning in to a company that derives its revenues from the fruits of its innovations rather than monopoly-based marketing hacks, and lock-ins into poorly written code.
To steal a line form Dilbert: I respectfully decline your kind offer to join your delusion.
Mono will always be behind and you can count on MacOSX support being dropped quite soon.
I agree with the first statement. However, when did Microsoft decide to drop Silverlight for OS X?
Who is this Linux Torvalds you keep talking about? Is that a new distro I don't know?
Linus Torwalds' firstborn son?
bash$ defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool FALSE
So... what negative thing do you get from the US 92% that you don't get from the France 96%?
That's simplistic. There is a difference between 92% of US Americans *saying* they believe in god (assuming that statistic is true) and inferring from the fact that 96% of the French nominally belong to a religious organisation that every one of those 96% believes in god. European statistics on religious affiliation based on census or tax data are not especially accurate. Myself I am not a practising christian even though I was baptised into the church as a baby and convinced by my family undergo confirmation as teenager. Today I am an agnostic. The bureaucratic system in my country does not allow me to change my affiliation to 'agnostic' or 'atheist' you either belong to a religious community or you can be de-registered. In this country, once you are registered into the church after being baptised, it is a hassle get de-registered and even if you do decide to go through that process it is pretty pointless since you still have to pay church tax regardless of your or lack of religious affiliation. For this reason very few people bother to get de-registered and that includes myself. I am therefore still counted in the CIA fact-book as belonging to the local 'protestant christian' community along with significant numbers of other similar minded people who consider them selves to be non-religious.
So there you go, you'd buy something with fewer features, because often, fewer features but well implemented is better..
That pretty much sums up the iPod/iPhone's appeal. Not that the feature crazy among us will ever understand why.
Nintendo, get a fucking life. Seriously, pirating is not costing video game companies much of anything, because not many people pirate new video games. Most of the "pirated" video games are games that can no longer be purchased and/or are out of print.
You poor misguided wretch. That makes it even worse doesn't it? When people are busy playing old games there is less profit to be made from selling them new ones.
The Spanish Armada was defeated in 1588, so maybe everybody else had caught up by the mid 17th century?
Elizabeth wasn't exactly unique in trying to standardize artillery. Land based artillery was organised into classes of guns that used uniform calibres and ammo as early as the 15th and early 16th century in France and Germany. The article is also misleading. There is no way Elizabethan gunners could have hit anything consistently with a smoothbore black powder gun and roundshot at a range of one mile. There is a difference between being able to throw a cannon ball a mile with a 16th century smoothbore gun and being able to score pinpoint hits on targets at that range, especially if you are firing from the deck of a ship. They same guy who was testing the gun in that BBC video did a similar Armada gunnery experiment on a Discovery (or was it a History channel?) program with a replica of a 16th century bronze culverin. Basically they couldn't hit the broad side of a barn even at shorter ranges. Of course that probably had as much to do with the inexperience of the modern day gunners as the gun it self. Nevertheless, the conclusion they reached in that program was that long range gunnery was a general failure against the Armada. What worked turned to be going in nice and close, 100 yards sounds about right, load as much powder as your piece could take and make up for lack of accuracy with massive broadsides. Another point to remember about the Armada is that it was defeated as much by the weather, the currents, the over-ambitiousness of the plan and Medina Sidonia's total lack of initiative and rigid adherence to orders as it was by any inherent technological, tactical or strategic superiority of the British. By the evening of the 19 of July 1588 Mendina Sedonia had the British fleet trapped at anchor in Plymouth and he knew it. He could have attacked the fleet at anchor and even landed a major portion of the 18.000 troops he had with him to establish a beachhead before going on to ferry over the remaining 30.000 troops of the army of the Netherlands. That many Spanish troops loose in Southern Britain would have been a major headache. He chose to ignore this opportunity much to the annoyance of his subordinates.
Have you ever actually compared Windows to MacOS? Microsoft most definitely did NOT choose simplicity, rather they have always chosen flexibility - the ability to configure and reconfigure the system to run on different hardware and to do different things.
Define flexibility... I suppose if you are talking about the spectrum of hardware Windows runs on you have a point. On the other hand there are tasks on Windows Servers that can't be done from the command-line, they can only be done through GUIs. This is OK up to a point I suppose, it allows you to give certain jobs to relatively untrained admins and save wage costs. The problem starts when you have to do something like merge 30 MS IIS web servers onto a few new machines and no two or three of those web servers have the same setup, security policies, etc... if you want to do that with the GUI expect to wear out your mouse and die of boredom in the process. This sort of a task has to be done with a script, or VB/C# program or it did when I last worked with IIS 6.0 a few years back and the documentation you needed to write such a migration tool wasn't easy to come by back then. It may be that Microsoft has coughed up a decent IIS migration tool and generally documented the inner workings ofit's products in great detail since then but I rather doubt it.
Why on earth must every criticism of some Apple policy or product be immediately countered by "but MS does it too"?
Hint: This is Slashdot...
That Microsoft has opened their platform up to free hobbiest development should be applauded.
**golf clap**
Happy now?
Apple is the new Microsoft. Any criticism of Microsoft is at this point misdirection from the real threat.
Just think of what would happen if the fanboy dream became reality: one cellphone, one mobile platform, and Apple has complete control. The future of mobile computing, of communication, of the Internet everywhere not chained to a desk, would be theirs to direct and constrain.
And you know they will do it, too, are doing it, because it is in their nature. Software is a means to an end for them, it is just the sugar that moves hardware. Choice in software is antithetical to their existence, much more than it is to Microsoft.
Admit it... It pisses you off that Microsoft has to pay it's fanboys but Apple and Linux get thousands of them for free.
Now they can make money re-educating the same students they educated before! Think of the student loan debt!
Who cares about ripping off students. I want to forget the Bush administration ever happened... oh and the entire 1980s.
How did Zhen He travel the world in leviathan sized ships and even left traces in California then?
Eh? As far as I know the only pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact with N-America and it's indigenous peoples that has been archeologically proven beyond a shadow of a doubt was by Norse seafarers from Iceland and Greenland. Apart from the Norse the only other candidates for any significant pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact with the Americas their indigenous peoples are Polynesian seafarers. Everything else including America bound voyages by: Africans, Andalusians, Arabs, Moors, Australians, Irish, Chinese, Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Indians, Israelites, Romans, Greeks, Phoenicians and the Welsh is unproved supposition.
A Mac fan extolling the merits of the command line.
It's going to take some time to get used to. Forgive me.
Why? Quite a few current OS X users switched to OS X from various other *NIX'es and Linux. It really isn't so surprising that many OS X users are command line freaks.
Blame your government. What kind of idiot gives money away without oversight into how it is spent?
The last one was a guy named George Walker Bush, it looks like the next one might be a dude named Barack Hussein Obama. I'm hoping Mr Obama will be a pleasant disappointment on this score and actually spend the money sensibly and kick people in the nuts for misusing bailout money but given past experience I'm not holding my breath. I did get a kick out it when Mr Obama called up those Citigroup executives personally and chewed them out for buying a new $50 million corporate jet some 24 hours after receiving $45 billion in taxpayer bailout money but I'll wait and see if that was a publicity stunt or if it is actually a sign of things to come.
Nonsense. Unless you're using bleeding edge UI widgets, a browser UI is quite easy to replicate accross browsers with the use of targeted CSS or simply thoughtful design. Even with a JS framework for your UI elements, browser diferences are simply not a huge consideration. Unless you want that ActiveX goodness...
Web-apps have their place but so do stand-alone clients a good developer will know select what is right for a given project. The moment you start using that 'ActiveX goodness' you have essentially created a WebApp that only runs in IE on Windows. Which begs the question why not just write a stand alone GUI client in .NET? That would open up a whole world of UI features ad behaviour web-apps can only emulate either clumsily, with difficulty or not at all. Then there is the security issue ActiveX brings with it. The only thing an ActiveX enabled web-app has going for it is redeploy-once-update-everywhere. The whole point of a web-app is platform independence and that went out the window with the 'ActiveX goodnees'.
I don't understand all the hubbub either. So MS bundles a browser with their operating system ... so what?
Back in the DOS days, word processing software didn't have a spellchecker built in. You had to buy a separate spellchecker if you wanted that functionality and the spellchecker companies had a nice little profit centre for themselves. Then one day, word processing software started coming with a spellchecker built right in! Sure it was bad for the people selling spellcheckers, but it was a win for the consumer.
Operating systems evolve ... they start including things that weren't included in the past ... things like internet browsers. If the (free, bundled, zero cost) browser doesn't suit your needs or tastes, it takes less than 5 minutes to download and install Firefox or Chrome.
Because when Microsoft began to bundle IE on their OS they effectively killed off anybody who was making money selling browsers. What's more MS took issue with the fact that some PC manufacturers wanted to ship Windows pre installed on their PCs with a non MS browser set as the default browser. Entire branches of the software industry still live in fear of the day that Microsoft sees profit in moving into their particular market segment and the PHBs in Redmond decide to increase Microsoft's market share the quickest way they know, by bundling the relevant Microsoft product with Windows which effectively slaughters the competition. You may argue that the browser wars are ancient history in computing terms and you would be right but the precedent the Netscape affair set is still very real even if it has become more difficult for Microsoft to pull stunts like that nowadays. I think it is pretty rediculous to force Microsoft or PC manufacturers to bundle all the common browsers on the market: Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari etc.. Internet Explorer with Windows by default. I find the suggestion more reasonably that a PC manufacturer should be able to bundle any software he wants pre-installed on Windows with his PCs. This should be the case even if this PC manufacturer's opinions of what should be pre-installed conflicts with Microsoft's marketing strategies for IE or any other MS software Microsoft has decided to 'bundle' with Windows as a shortcut to gaining market share. Basically PC manufacturers should be able to bundle alternative software with the Windows they ship on their machines and even leave out the Microsoft alternative if they see a reason to do so. Most users will use the software pre-installed on the machine. Installing Firefox or some other alternative to the software MS bundles with Windows isn't necessarily second nature to the average user... strange as that may seem to some nerds.
... with President Obama's executive orders banning torture by US forces and requiring the closure of Guantánamo Bay, there's a dire need for alternative interrogation tools.
2 hours of those absolutely inhuman renditions of 'Roxanne' and 'Sgt Peppers', together with the MS infomercial, would be enough to break even the staunchest jihadist.
"Please, PLEASE NOOOO!! I'll give you current GPS coordinates for Osama bin Laden! Just turn it off PLEASE!!!"
I don't want to dampen your enthusiasm but you would get much better results in a lot less than two hours using a couple of Japanese tourists, a karaoke machine and a some carefully selected music from the 1980s. Cheesy period outfits with big shoulder-pads wouldn't hurt either.
Windows is actually far more secure than Linux. Get the facts, people.
... Please don't feed the trolls.
Well, if as few as 10% of the pirated software has viruses, then anyone who downloads and installs 10 software apps has roughly a 66% chance of getting something. It seems bizarre that malware creators wouldn't use pirated software to spread keyloggers and other nasty stuff. I mean - if I went to a website and got a popup to download and install an exe, or I got something in my email that said to run an exe, I'd NEVER do it. And neither would most tech-savy people. But, people who pirate software are installing the software they're downloading. That's a malware-creator's dream come true. I'm sure mafia and identity-theft criminals love the idea (and they can create lots of seeders to create the illusion of being legit).
The fact that people believe pirated software is malware free by definition and that all reports to the contrary are evil propaganda by the BSA & friends has always amazed me as well. If it is really true that only 10% of pirated software is infected or has been carefully modified for use as a malware carrier that is even stranger since using pirated software for that purpose seems like such an obvious thing to do. Embed your custom Trojan in a software installation package and people will install the malware for you without giving it a second thought. After that all you have to do is flood the P2P networks with your spiked software. You could even build a root-kit/malware package directly into a WIndows XP/Vista/7 installation bundle, voilà instant bot-net node. With a properly constructed root-kit your malware would be nigh invisible post install to any garden variety PC security suite anyway and if it was a design that hadn't been seen before it would take quite a while before somebody flagged it.
... drop