What I'm almost sure practically no big company in their right mind would do right now, in these times, is upgrade to Windows Vista or Windows 7. Those OSes require greater hardware resources than WinXP does and more than Linux does.
Most companies work on a 3-5 year replacement cycle. So ca. 2010, pretty much every machine in any business will be quite capable of running Vista or Windows 7. Unlike nerds, companies aren't shopping around to try and save $10 (or even $50) on a $500 machine.
It boggles my mind that people still carry on about Vista's hardware requirements. Brand new PCs that can run it fine cost under US$350. It was a non-issue when Vista was released and it's even more of a non-issue now.
I am sure that companies will try to use the very cheapest lowest cost hardware they can find to run their businesses.
Most businesses are far more interested in consistent, reliable and well-supported hardware than they are in saving a few hundred per machine, amortised over 3-5 years. The inevitably higher personnel costs that are incurred from shitty, bottom-of-the-barrel hardware more than make up for any initial purchase savings. That is why businesses prefer, say, Dell's Optiplex line over their Inspiron line, even though they're noticably more expensive.
Actually no. You're wrong. Try knowing something about what you're talking abouut.
I do, which is why I'm right.
DirectX 10 would require fundamental changes to the XP driver model and kernel to work, after which you'd have done a significant chunk of the work to get Vista.
This will help you:
You'll have to excuse me if I don't consider the tech equivalent of the Weekly World News as a reliable source of information. Especially when they're talking about Microsoft.
Here, try something that actually has a bit of real information and testing behind it. Here'smore.
Why are there going to be different 32/64 bit disks? How is it that Apple can make a installer DVD with 4 different platforms (Intel/PPC, 32-bit/64-bit) but the 800 lb gorilla still has a different "64-Bit Edition"? Are fat binaries that hard to work with?
The fact that having 32 and 64 bit binaries on the same machine, for 99.9% of people, is nothing more than a waste of disk space, probably plays a significant part.
It takes quite a bit of effort to buy yourself a PC cheaper than a Mac these days. The lowend Mac is actually very price competitive considering what sort of machine you need for Vista and how expensive lower profile systems are generally.
Er, no.
The cheapest Mac is a Mac Mini @ US$600.
A Dell Inspiron 530s, with a dual core CPU roughly 50% faster than the Mac Mini's, twice the RAM, four times the disk space, and a DVD-RW costs US$340.
Moving up the tree a bit, if you want a machine with such outrageous features as the ability to connect two LCDs, your minimum Apple buy-in point is US$2,500. On the PC side, it's about US$500 (wow, nearly as much as the Mac Mini).
But it gets even better. For less than half the cost of the cheapest Mac Pro, you can buy a Dell XPS Core i7 system with, well, roughly twice as much of everything (CPU performance, RAM, disk space, etc).
Apple is so far behind the price/performance curve it's not even funny any more.
You are more likely to end up with a machine of the same cost as a Mac in order to deal with Vista's bloat.
Vista has the same hardware requirements as OS X for decent performance.
There was no architectural reason why DX10 couldn't have been ported to XP.
Er, yes, yes there is. Indeed, the reasons you won't see DX10 on XP are completely architectural - by the time you'd "ported" it, you'd have implemented a fair chunk of Vista.
Seriously. It's like arguing there's no architectural reason Quartz couldn't have been "ported" to MacOS Classic.
To say nothing of that "Mhz myth" tripe they carried on with for years, trying to pretend that a few corner cases were representative of average performance.
Can't be apathy. If that were the case, unrated games wouldn't be illegal for sale because they wouldn't care.
Er, no. Any unrated media (eg: films as well) is illegal to sell. Ergo, apathy applies quite well (they can't be bothered extending the R and X categories to cover games).
Incompetence I'll grant as a possibility, but, George W Bush notwithstanding, mouth-breathers with room-temperature IQs tend to have trouble getting into high office. The level of incompetence would have to be staggering even by US Government standards[0], so that's not a particularly simple explanation.
Incompetence fits because the situation exists in no small part due to fools who think games are for kids (so why on Earth would they need an "adult" category ?).
Pandering to special interests == they want it banned because they were bribed by those who want it banned.
No, pandering to special interests means they won't make an active attempt to change an existing situation to keep the conservative independent loonies happy to gain their support on other issues.
The sort of nudge-nudge, wink-wink, "bribery" that is rife in American politics is still, thankfully, absent from Australia.
If they do not do not create a rating appropriate for "games where you impale babies on spikes," Occam's Razor says it's because they don't want to rate it == they want it illegal.
You have choices like apathy, incompetence and pandering to special interests, but the simplest explanation you can come up with for boobies and gore in computer games (when the same thing shown on IMAX screens is fine) not getting a rating is because the government is trying to ban them ?
How will people know about it if it can't be released?
Possibly because various news rags would be all over it like a bad smell ?
If it's really minor it'd be trivial to fix. Seems to me like there's deliberate intent to keep that bug (or is it a feature) in place. That would indeed be censorship.
From a procedural perspective, it is trivial to fix. All they need to do is expand the current R and X ratings to encompass computer games as well as other media. There are lots of minor problems in the world that would be trivial to fix. That they are not is rarely indicative of government oppression.
The problem in this particular example is not an active attempt to ban "adult" content, it's the pandering to a handful of conservative twats who can't get their heads around the idea that people other than 12 year old boys play computer games.
But by your own account, it is illegal to own unrated games, so that is state-sponsored censorship.
It's not illegal to own unrated media.
And, again, "not rated" and "banned" are different in both execution and intent. One is a passive action, the other is an active one. It's like the difference between manslaughter and premeditated murder.
I guess you've never sold anything before. People pay for better service despite higher costs. Cost is not the end all be all.
Generally speaking it is, you just need to keep it in context. For any given product or service (which includes the consideration of whether it is "better", "worse", or something else) a seller is trying to get as much as he can for it and a buyer is trying to pay as little as possible.
An atom processor doesn't have the ability to be scaled up to a 3Ghz processor but every version of Windows is really just Ultimate with features turned off.
And every Red Hat support contract is the same thing just with different response times, priorities, and other differentiating factors. Your problems still end up getting solved by the same pool of people.
Speaking of bad analogies, yours is far, far worse than mine. You are taking two substantially different products (Atom and Core 2 are completely different CPU families), and scaling the lower one up to the higher one. Whereas mine took two practically identical products, and scaling the higher one down (ie: exactly what you are complaining about Microsoft doing).
Microsoft sells ONE operating system under 6 different SKUs all at different price points.
How many different speed bins do you think a given wafer of Core 2 Duo CPUs will go into ? 1 ? 2 ? 4 ? All those CPUs cost the same to make, but they will sell at a wide variety of price points.
Incidentally, as far as I know there's no difference in pricing between 32 or 64 bit versions. So it's 6 SKUs at 3 price points, which in reality translates to 3 different versions (32 vs 64 bit is generally a decision made for you, not by you) at 3 different price points. Which then really boils down to only 2 options, since hardly anyone will even consider Home Basic.
You must be right then. After all a dozen Americans can surely represent the entire US. Give me some credit here. I LIVE here.
Let's just say one guy on Slashdot is going to have to work a lot harder to convince me most other interactions I've had with Americans up until this point have been arse-about-face.
How so? Just because there is a loud group of evangelical christians in this country doesn't make it popular opinion.
Actually the fact said group of loud evangelical Christians consistently keep representing their majority in elections (in the last example, by electing a slightly quieter, slightly less evangelical Christian) does make it "popular opinion". Americans are _very_ religious, tend to be overtly so, and not just about Christianity.
Really, the idea you can separate culture and politics in a democracy like the US's is, in itself, fairly silly. Nobody votes for a representative whose views are dramatically different from their own.
They don't seem to be doing so well with their biggest customer's, corporations. Just look at Vista's adoption rate.
Vista's adoption rate looks fairly typical to me. There weren't any widespread XP rollouts until a good 3-4 years after its release (and it's still not uncommon to find Windows 2000 environments). Vista is one of the biggest OS updates Microsoft has ever done, introducing numerous wide-ranging implications to both products and processes. No sane person would have expected any sort of large-scale corporate adoption until *at least* 3 years after its release (12-18 months before it was even considered, 6-12 months making a decision, 12-18 months testing).
From the looks of it, Windows 7 will hit soon enough, and be similar enough to Vista, that many will just skip straight to it. There is nothing at all strange in this, either, and it's happened before (Windows 3.11 -> NT4 was quite common, as was NT4 -> XP).
Like I said before, they are not doing well in corporations with their newest product line, the very same line we are talking about. In fact MS just announced that they are dropping Home Basic.
When there are laws connected to the ratings, preventing unrated games from being sold, and the same group can refuse to rate, it is censorship. The government is deciding what can and cannot be expressed. There's no other word for it, and no equivocation is going to make it not the case.
There is a difference between not rating because no suitable rating exists, and not rating because the objective is to ban it.
Conflating the two is neither valid, nor productive.
The distinction between something being at the highest or "worst" rating and being unclassified is akin to censorship. Watch the movie "This film is not yet rated." It shows how the MPAA is censoring films that it doesn't agree with, and that's in the United States with a non-public controlled rating system.
Er, you sound surprised, but this is exactly the kind of result that would be expected from a privately (or "industry") -run ratings system. They have movies to sell, after all, so it pays well to come up with ways of excluding movies that they don't derive an income from.
Stores are afraid to stock NC-17 titles, because they're usually associated with porn. The problem with Australia's method is that the board that makes the rating decision could, someday soon, decide that a game is sending the message that the Aussie government is evil, and refuse it classification.
Which will be very quickly reported on and general public outrage will fix the problem.
I would trust our Government-funded, but independent, ratings board (and its publicly disclosed membership and standards) for objective and reasonable ratings long, long, longbefore I would trust any group of media companies attempting to do the same.
Now, you won't get arrested for having the game yet, but you can't even buy the unrated version like you can here in the US. It IS censorship by another name, and if you believe otherwise, the spin doctoring that the Australian government is doing seems to be working its magic.
Censorship is the active banning of material, it also means it is illegal to own the material.
Refusing classification because the rating system lacks a suitable rating even though one exists for identical content in other media is a minor lacking in the ratings system.
If you think the two are identical then you're just trying to use paranoia to sensationalise the real problem which, as I said previously, is extremely counter-productive.
Adults should be free to buy whatever the hell games they want. Requiring a rating on games, movies, music, etc, is just censorship by another name.
No, it's not, and conflating the two is extremely counter-productive.
Not all media purchasers are adults. Not all adult media purchasers are purchasing the media for their own use. A ratings system is they so they are able to make *educated decisions* about what it is they are purchasing. A ratings systems - in and of itself - does not prevent an adult from buying anything they want.
Now, a ratings system might have a "Not Rated" or "Illegal" rating that means no-one is allowed to sell anything that is rated as such, however, that is simply a problem with the individual ratings system, not with the entire concept. Australia has such a problem, in that there is no "R" equivalent for games. This doesn't mean all the other ratings given out to games are meaningless or pointless.
Ratings systems are _good_ and should be encouraged. They allow consumers to make educated decisions about their purchases and substantially deflate genuine pro-censorship arguments.
You implied that capitalism is about screwing people, which is the exact opposite of the intent of a free market economy.
Er, no. It's the fundamental basis of "a free market economy". The sellers are trying to screw the buyers, and the buyers are trying to screw the sellers (generally, both within the limits that the law allows them to). The whole system relies on people being selfish, which is its elegant beauty.
You can try and dress it up in flowery language and intellectual masturbation if you want, but at the end of the day that's what it boils down to - the sellers wants to extract as much money as possible out of the buyer, and the buyer wants to pay the least amount he can.
I knew you would pick this example but your argument doesn't hold water. Overclocking isn't illegal. Upgrading your version of Windows without a license is.
Holy non-sequiturs, Batman ! How is overclocking or upgrading Windows without a license even remotely related to:
Hardware and software are two completely different things. It doesn't take more R&D to turn on features that already exist.
So CPUs with different clock speeds [...]
You insist that hardware and software cannot be compared, with the implication that "better" hardware inherently requires a greater expenditure ("R&D"), therefore justifying it's higher costs. I give you a perfect example of where that is not true (it's not even slightly uncommon for faster chips to be "down binned" and sold at lower speeds), and you leap off on some tangent about overclocking and unlicensed software.
To be explicit: the point here, is that CPU makers have spent $X, to produce a CPU capable of a given maximum speed. However, they are now taking the same product, making minor changes, and selling it at different price points, and multiple speeds.
You don't just pay more to get more.
Yes, you do. You may get more than you want, or you may not get as much as you want, but that is a completely, utterly, and totally, separate topic to this discussion.
Like I said before, I can't pay to just get bitlocker support. I have the option of paying an exorbitant amount for an operating system (more than some computers cost!) or deal with crippleware. The problem is with bundling, and lack of options.
No, now you're changing the argument to be about how much you get for your extra $$$, which is a completely separate issue.
However, in the interests of humour, and following on from the prior example, do you similarly castigate Intel because they won't offer you hundreds of different CPU options in 10Mhz clock speed increments ? Or L2 cache sizes in 512kb increments ? Would you argue the toss with Brocade because you can only enable ports on an FC switch in blocks of 8, rather than individually ? Do you refuse to buy a car because the engine options are only 1.6, 2 and 3 litres, rather than 0.1L increments from 1.6 to 3 ?
I guess I just have to call rank here. I am an American and I know a shitload more about this country than you do. Gun control, health care, and corporate regulation are all political issues that are completely out of whack with the culture. The majority of Americans support more gun control, more coporate regulation, and government sponsored healthcare. The laws of a country don't reflect cultural attitudes.
I work with a few dozen Americans. I have a reasonable idea of their attitudes towards these things, and they're further right wing than any of the Europeans, Australians, NZers, Canadians, or pretty much everyone else I've ever met - and most of them consider themselves to be relatively left-wing Americans.
It's actually kind of funny that you brin up religion. While the US is much more religious in general than other first world countries, religious freedom in the US is far beyond most first world countries. Laws forbid i
What? why not just "su" and give the damn root password.
1. It's a security risk (you need to know root's password).
2. The root account doesn't have a password set by default (so you can't use su). This is a good thing.
What? When you are logged in as root, you do not need sudo to change password.
It was meant to be a separate command to the first.
Is this somekind "Ubuntu" logic that you need to run everything as sudo? For Ubuntu users the sudo command seems to often to mean "run".
Keeping a least-privileged login and selectively raising privilege levels when necessary by using 'sudo' is a basic best practice. Any well-managed environment will require this and make getting a full root shell difficult, if not impossible - not only for security reasons, but also for auditing.
Ubuntu users do not even understand the problems of sudo what Canonical has mde because it use sudo as root replacement and not as why sudo was designed in first place.
And why do you think "sudo was designed in the first place" ?
"There are APIs in Windows that applications have been written to use, that should not be exposed to untrusted applications. These APIs can not be blocked without breaking too many legacy applications, so UAC makes the user responsible for deciding when they should be allowed."
Which APIs, and what are the "inherent security flaws" ?
The password is pretty meaningless. It only makes a difference if:
* the attacker is local, at the console
* cannot simply reboot the machine to completely circumvent all OS security
* the regular user is not present (or is complicit)
* the regular user has not secured their console before walking away
Hardly a significant vector. For those where it is relevant, UAC can be configured to prompt for a password.
Also, in OS X you can not create "root account", and login into your session as root. It is simply not allowed and impossible to do.
sudo su -
Congratulations, you're logged in as root.
sudo passwd
Even more congratulations are due, you now have the ability to login from the login window as root.
So, to recap, being an Administrator and just executing rm -rf / will not delete system files.
Actually, on an OS X system there are (or were, I haven't looked for a while) a lot of system-level files (including a lot of stuff in/Applications, like Installer.app) that are writable by any 'admin' user. So even without elevating, an 'admin' user could do a lot of damage to an OS X machine.
UAC is a hack to deal with the problem that the Win32 API is full of inherent security holes that would require changing lots third-party software to fix.
[Citation Needed]
UAC is (basically) a somewhat-friendlier implementation of sudo. What is the purpose of sudo, then ?
Because Microsoft does not have a proper installer interface that installs programs for you.. instead each program has it's own installer/updater Windows has no control over the process and does not know if the user has been asked or not... Unix style package management systems are one solution where the install is managed by one system which asks the users permission then monitors the installation process...
You appear to be suggesting that package (well, software in general) installation cannot be automated on UNIX systems.
Slashdot Mirror
What I'm almost sure practically no big company in their right mind would do right now, in these times, is upgrade to Windows Vista or Windows 7. Those OSes require greater hardware resources than WinXP does and more than Linux does.
Most companies work on a 3-5 year replacement cycle. So ca. 2010, pretty much every machine in any business will be quite capable of running Vista or Windows 7. Unlike nerds, companies aren't shopping around to try and save $10 (or even $50) on a $500 machine.
It boggles my mind that people still carry on about Vista's hardware requirements. Brand new PCs that can run it fine cost under US$350. It was a non-issue when Vista was released and it's even more of a non-issue now.
I am sure that companies will try to use the very cheapest lowest cost hardware they can find to run their businesses.
Most businesses are far more interested in consistent, reliable and well-supported hardware than they are in saving a few hundred per machine, amortised over 3-5 years. The inevitably higher personnel costs that are incurred from shitty, bottom-of-the-barrel hardware more than make up for any initial purchase savings. That is why businesses prefer, say, Dell's Optiplex line over their Inspiron line, even though they're noticably more expensive.
Actually no. You're wrong. Try knowing something about what you're talking abouut.
I do, which is why I'm right.
DirectX 10 would require fundamental changes to the XP driver model and kernel to work, after which you'd have done a significant chunk of the work to get Vista.
This will help you:
You'll have to excuse me if I don't consider the tech equivalent of the Weekly World News as a reliable source of information. Especially when they're talking about Microsoft.
Here, try something that actually has a bit of real information and testing behind it. Here's more.
Why are there going to be different 32/64 bit disks? How is it that Apple can make a installer DVD with 4 different platforms (Intel/PPC, 32-bit/64-bit) but the 800 lb gorilla still has a different "64-Bit Edition"? Are fat binaries that hard to work with?
The fact that having 32 and 64 bit binaries on the same machine, for 99.9% of people, is nothing more than a waste of disk space, probably plays a significant part.
You CAN get DX10 on XP because it's already been done. Try googling it, you'll find installers, hacks, notes on how to do it, etc:
No, I won't. They haven't "ported" DirectX 10 to XP, although they might have fooled a few games into running.
Indeed, they guy even says as much himself when he calls it a "compatibility wrapper".
It takes quite a bit of effort to buy yourself a PC cheaper than a Mac these days. The lowend Mac is actually very price competitive considering what sort of machine you need for Vista and how expensive lower profile systems are generally.
Er, no.
The cheapest Mac is a Mac Mini @ US$600.
A Dell Inspiron 530s, with a dual core CPU roughly 50% faster than the Mac Mini's, twice the RAM, four times the disk space, and a DVD-RW costs US$340.
Moving up the tree a bit, if you want a machine with such outrageous features as the ability to connect two LCDs, your minimum Apple buy-in point is US$2,500. On the PC side, it's about US$500 (wow, nearly as much as the Mac Mini).
But it gets even better. For less than half the cost of the cheapest Mac Pro, you can buy a Dell XPS Core i7 system with, well, roughly twice as much of everything (CPU performance, RAM, disk space, etc).
Apple is so far behind the price/performance curve it's not even funny any more.
You are more likely to end up with a machine of the same cost as a Mac in order to deal with Vista's bloat.
Vista has the same hardware requirements as OS X for decent performance.
There was no architectural reason why DX10 couldn't have been ported to XP.
Er, yes, yes there is. Indeed, the reasons you won't see DX10 on XP are completely architectural - by the time you'd "ported" it, you'd have implemented a fair chunk of Vista.
Seriously. It's like arguing there's no architectural reason Quartz couldn't have been "ported" to MacOS Classic.
For some time PPC WAS great...
Nowhere near as long as Apple held on.
To say nothing of that "Mhz myth" tripe they carried on with for years, trying to pretend that a few corner cases were representative of average performance.
Can't be apathy. If that were the case, unrated games wouldn't be illegal for sale because they wouldn't care.
Er, no. Any unrated media (eg: films as well) is illegal to sell. Ergo, apathy applies quite well (they can't be bothered extending the R and X categories to cover games).
Incompetence I'll grant as a possibility, but, George W Bush notwithstanding, mouth-breathers with room-temperature IQs tend to have trouble getting into high office. The level of incompetence would have to be staggering even by US Government standards[0], so that's not a particularly simple explanation.
Incompetence fits because the situation exists in no small part due to fools who think games are for kids (so why on Earth would they need an "adult" category ?).
Pandering to special interests == they want it banned because they were bribed by those who want it banned.
No, pandering to special interests means they won't make an active attempt to change an existing situation to keep the conservative independent loonies happy to gain their support on other issues.
The sort of nudge-nudge, wink-wink, "bribery" that is rife in American politics is still, thankfully, absent from Australia.
Thus, my statement holds.
Your Occam's Razor is still pretty dull.
If they do not do not create a rating appropriate for "games where you impale babies on spikes," Occam's Razor says it's because they don't want to rate it == they want it illegal.
You have choices like apathy, incompetence and pandering to special interests, but the simplest explanation you can come up with for boobies and gore in computer games (when the same thing shown on IMAX screens is fine) not getting a rating is because the government is trying to ban them ?
Clearly Occam's Razor needs some sharpening.
How will people know about it if it can't be released?
Possibly because various news rags would be all over it like a bad smell ?
If it's really minor it'd be trivial to fix. Seems to me like there's deliberate intent to keep that bug (or is it a feature) in place. That would indeed be censorship.
From a procedural perspective, it is trivial to fix. All they need to do is expand the current R and X ratings to encompass computer games as well as other media. There are lots of minor problems in the world that would be trivial to fix. That they are not is rarely indicative of government oppression.
The problem in this particular example is not an active attempt to ban "adult" content, it's the pandering to a handful of conservative twats who can't get their heads around the idea that people other than 12 year old boys play computer games.
But by your own account, it is illegal to own unrated games, so that is state-sponsored censorship.
It's not illegal to own unrated media.
And, again, "not rated" and "banned" are different in both execution and intent. One is a passive action, the other is an active one. It's like the difference between manslaughter and premeditated murder.
I guess you've never sold anything before. People pay for better service despite higher costs. Cost is not the end all be all.
Generally speaking it is, you just need to keep it in context. For any given product or service (which includes the consideration of whether it is "better", "worse", or something else) a seller is trying to get as much as he can for it and a buyer is trying to pay as little as possible.
An atom processor doesn't have the ability to be scaled up to a 3Ghz processor but every version of Windows is really just Ultimate with features turned off.
And every Red Hat support contract is the same thing just with different response times, priorities, and other differentiating factors. Your problems still end up getting solved by the same pool of people.
Speaking of bad analogies, yours is far, far worse than mine. You are taking two substantially different products (Atom and Core 2 are completely different CPU families), and scaling the lower one up to the higher one. Whereas mine took two practically identical products, and scaling the higher one down (ie: exactly what you are complaining about Microsoft doing).
Microsoft sells ONE operating system under 6 different SKUs all at different price points.
How many different speed bins do you think a given wafer of Core 2 Duo CPUs will go into ? 1 ? 2 ? 4 ? All those CPUs cost the same to make, but they will sell at a wide variety of price points.
Incidentally, as far as I know there's no difference in pricing between 32 or 64 bit versions. So it's 6 SKUs at 3 price points, which in reality translates to 3 different versions (32 vs 64 bit is generally a decision made for you, not by you) at 3 different price points. Which then really boils down to only 2 options, since hardly anyone will even consider Home Basic.
You must be right then. After all a dozen Americans can surely represent the entire US. Give me some credit here. I LIVE here.
Let's just say one guy on Slashdot is going to have to work a lot harder to convince me most other interactions I've had with Americans up until this point have been arse-about-face.
How so? Just because there is a loud group of evangelical christians in this country doesn't make it popular opinion.
Actually the fact said group of loud evangelical Christians consistently keep representing their majority in elections (in the last example, by electing a slightly quieter, slightly less evangelical Christian) does make it "popular opinion". Americans are _very_ religious, tend to be overtly so, and not just about Christianity.
Really, the idea you can separate culture and politics in a democracy like the US's is, in itself, fairly silly. Nobody votes for a representative whose views are dramatically different from their own.
They don't seem to be doing so well with their biggest customer's, corporations. Just look at Vista's adoption rate.
Vista's adoption rate looks fairly typical to me. There weren't any widespread XP rollouts until a good 3-4 years after its release (and it's still not uncommon to find Windows 2000 environments). Vista is one of the biggest OS updates Microsoft has ever done, introducing numerous wide-ranging implications to both products and processes. No sane person would have expected any sort of large-scale corporate adoption until *at least* 3 years after its release (12-18 months before it was even considered, 6-12 months making a decision, 12-18 months testing).
From the looks of it, Windows 7 will hit soon enough, and be similar enough to Vista, that many will just skip straight to it. There is nothing at all strange in this, either, and it's happened before (Windows 3.11 -> NT4 was quite common, as was NT4 -> XP).
Like I said before, they are not doing well in corporations with their newest product line, the very same line we are talking about. In fact MS just announced that they are dropping Home Basic.
When there are laws connected to the ratings, preventing unrated games from being sold, and the same group can refuse to rate, it is censorship. The government is deciding what can and cannot be expressed. There's no other word for it, and no equivocation is going to make it not the case.
There is a difference between not rating because no suitable rating exists, and not rating because the objective is to ban it.
Conflating the two is neither valid, nor productive.
The distinction between something being at the highest or "worst" rating and being unclassified is akin to censorship. Watch the movie "This film is not yet rated." It shows how the MPAA is censoring films that it doesn't agree with, and that's in the United States with a non-public controlled rating system.
Er, you sound surprised, but this is exactly the kind of result that would be expected from a privately (or "industry") -run ratings system. They have movies to sell, after all, so it pays well to come up with ways of excluding movies that they don't derive an income from.
Stores are afraid to stock NC-17 titles, because they're usually associated with porn. The problem with Australia's method is that the board that makes the rating decision could, someday soon, decide that a game is sending the message that the Aussie government is evil, and refuse it classification.
Which will be very quickly reported on and general public outrage will fix the problem.
I would trust our Government-funded, but independent, ratings board (and its publicly disclosed membership and standards) for objective and reasonable ratings long, long, long before I would trust any group of media companies attempting to do the same.
Now, you won't get arrested for having the game yet, but you can't even buy the unrated version like you can here in the US. It IS censorship by another name, and if you believe otherwise, the spin doctoring that the Australian government is doing seems to be working its magic.
Censorship is the active banning of material, it also means it is illegal to own the material.
Refusing classification because the rating system lacks a suitable rating even though one exists for identical content in other media is a minor lacking in the ratings system.
If you think the two are identical then you're just trying to use paranoia to sensationalise the real problem which, as I said previously, is extremely counter-productive.
Adults should be free to buy whatever the hell games they want. Requiring a rating on games, movies, music, etc, is just censorship by another name.
No, it's not, and conflating the two is extremely counter-productive.
Not all media purchasers are adults. Not all adult media purchasers are purchasing the media for their own use. A ratings system is they so they are able to make *educated decisions* about what it is they are purchasing. A ratings systems - in and of itself - does not prevent an adult from buying anything they want.
Now, a ratings system might have a "Not Rated" or "Illegal" rating that means no-one is allowed to sell anything that is rated as such, however, that is simply a problem with the individual ratings system, not with the entire concept. Australia has such a problem, in that there is no "R" equivalent for games. This doesn't mean all the other ratings given out to games are meaningless or pointless.
Ratings systems are _good_ and should be encouraged. They allow consumers to make educated decisions about their purchases and substantially deflate genuine pro-censorship arguments.
You implied that capitalism is about screwing people, which is the exact opposite of the intent of a free market economy.
Er, no. It's the fundamental basis of "a free market economy". The sellers are trying to screw the buyers, and the buyers are trying to screw the sellers (generally, both within the limits that the law allows them to). The whole system relies on people being selfish, which is its elegant beauty.
You can try and dress it up in flowery language and intellectual masturbation if you want, but at the end of the day that's what it boils down to - the sellers wants to extract as much money as possible out of the buyer, and the buyer wants to pay the least amount he can.
I knew you would pick this example but your argument doesn't hold water. Overclocking isn't illegal. Upgrading your version of Windows without a license is.
Holy non-sequiturs, Batman ! How is overclocking or upgrading Windows without a license even remotely related to:
Hardware and software are two completely different things. It doesn't take more R&D to turn on features that already exist.
So CPUs with different clock speeds [...]
You insist that hardware and software cannot be compared, with the implication that "better" hardware inherently requires a greater expenditure ("R&D"), therefore justifying it's higher costs. I give you a perfect example of where that is not true (it's not even slightly uncommon for faster chips to be "down binned" and sold at lower speeds), and you leap off on some tangent about overclocking and unlicensed software.
To be explicit: the point here, is that CPU makers have spent $X, to produce a CPU capable of a given maximum speed. However, they are now taking the same product, making minor changes, and selling it at different price points, and multiple speeds.
You don't just pay more to get more.
Yes, you do. You may get more than you want, or you may not get as much as you want, but that is a completely, utterly, and totally, separate topic to this discussion.
Like I said before, I can't pay to just get bitlocker support. I have the option of paying an exorbitant amount for an operating system (more than some computers cost!) or deal with crippleware. The problem is with bundling, and lack of options.
No, now you're changing the argument to be about how much you get for your extra $$$, which is a completely separate issue.
However, in the interests of humour, and following on from the prior example, do you similarly castigate Intel because they won't offer you hundreds of different CPU options in 10Mhz clock speed increments ? Or L2 cache sizes in 512kb increments ? Would you argue the toss with Brocade because you can only enable ports on an FC switch in blocks of 8, rather than individually ? Do you refuse to buy a car because the engine options are only 1.6, 2 and 3 litres, rather than 0.1L increments from 1.6 to 3 ?
I guess I just have to call rank here. I am an American and I know a shitload more about this country than you do. Gun control, health care, and corporate regulation are all political issues that are completely out of whack with the culture. The majority of Americans support more gun control, more coporate regulation, and government sponsored healthcare. The laws of a country don't reflect cultural attitudes.
I work with a few dozen Americans. I have a reasonable idea of their attitudes towards these things, and they're further right wing than any of the Europeans, Australians, NZers, Canadians, or pretty much everyone else I've ever met - and most of them consider themselves to be relatively left-wing Americans.
It's actually kind of funny that you brin up religion. While the US is much more religious in general than other first world countries, religious freedom in the US is far beyond most first world countries. Laws forbid i
Try playing a FPS with a trackpoint instead of a touchpad.
It's been a while since I've seen such a good example of "damning with faint praise".
What? why not just "su" and give the damn root password.
1. It's a security risk (you need to know root's password).
2. The root account doesn't have a password set by default (so you can't use su). This is a good thing.
What? When you are logged in as root, you do not need sudo to change password.
It was meant to be a separate command to the first.
Is this somekind "Ubuntu" logic that you need to run everything as sudo? For Ubuntu users the sudo command seems to often to mean "run".
Keeping a least-privileged login and selectively raising privilege levels when necessary by using 'sudo' is a basic best practice. Any well-managed environment will require this and make getting a full root shell difficult, if not impossible - not only for security reasons, but also for auditing.
Ubuntu users do not even understand the problems of sudo what Canonical has mde because it use sudo as root replacement and not as why sudo was designed in first place.
And why do you think "sudo was designed in the first place" ?
"There are APIs in Windows that applications have been written to use, that should not be exposed to untrusted applications. These APIs can not be blocked without breaking too many legacy applications, so UAC makes the user responsible for deciding when they should be allowed."
Which APIs, and what are the "inherent security flaws" ?
The Win32 API has its flaws, but security issues are due to problems with the underlying OS, not the API.
What problems ?
I don't use Windows much so perhaps I'm missing something obvious, but why is it so hard for MS to implement this sort of system?
Because Windows tries to accommodate incompetent developers and ignorant users, rather than telling them to "RTFM or GTFO !".
It should ask for a password
The password is pretty meaningless. It only makes a difference if:
* the attacker is local, at the console
* cannot simply reboot the machine to completely circumvent all OS security
* the regular user is not present (or is complicit)
* the regular user has not secured their console before walking away
Hardly a significant vector. For those where it is relevant, UAC can be configured to prompt for a password.
Also, in OS X you can not create "root account", and login into your session as root. It is simply not allowed and impossible to do.
sudo su -
Congratulations, you're logged in as root.
sudo passwd
Even more congratulations are due, you now have the ability to login from the login window as root.
So, to recap, being an Administrator and just executing rm -rf / will not delete system files.
Actually, on an OS X system there are (or were, I haven't looked for a while) a lot of system-level files (including a lot of stuff in /Applications, like Installer.app) that are writable by any 'admin' user. So even without elevating, an 'admin' user could do a lot of damage to an OS X machine.
UAC is a hack to deal with the problem that the Win32 API is full of inherent security holes that would require changing lots third-party software to fix.
[Citation Needed]
UAC is (basically) a somewhat-friendlier implementation of sudo. What is the purpose of sudo, then ?
Because Microsoft does not have a proper installer interface that installs programs for you.. instead each program has it's own installer/updater Windows has no control over the process and does not know if the user has been asked or not ... Unix style package management systems are one solution where the install is managed by one system which asks the users permission then monitors the installation process ...
You appear to be suggesting that package (well, software in general) installation cannot be automated on UNIX systems.