Suppose you were made the CEO of Dell tomorrow. Now, you're building computer systems for the desktop and OS's are one vital component if you want to get any sales. How many options do you have that won't get you fired by the end of the week? That would be Microsoft and Vista. Apple won't sell OS X to you (for good reason). Linux has not been optimized for home users and is a poor fit and very little mainstream software runs on it. If you choose it you're gambling the entire company on the slight chance that you can convince developers to target that platform and that people would rather switch and abandon their old software then go to a different vendor. That is an unacceptable risk by any objective comparison, and possibly criminal.
Translation: Dell are "forced" to buy Windows because the potential alternatives are either a) unavailable or b) t3h suck.
By your logic, I was forced to buy my Triumph Sprint ST, because it is the best motorbike in its market segment. Do you think the courts will let me sue my dealer ?
No, a company should be punished because they knowingly broke the law by leveraging their monopoly to take over other markets by foisting inferior products on customers.
"Inferior" is meaningless. Every product is an "inferior product" by some measure.
MS is guilty because if I buy a Windows system including the Vista OS (monopoly), that choice provides me with unfair incentive to use IE, Windows Media Player, PlaysForSure DRM, DirectX, XPS format, MS Office, and Windows server among other products.
Fantastic logic. Microsoft aren't allowed to make their products actually do anything useful, because they are a monopoly.
You sure do hate Microsoft's customers, don't you ? Why is that ?
With a monopoly in one market, I can (illegally) leverage that monopoly to make the correct choice for consumers acting in their own best interest to choose the inferior product, by introducing artificial problems with the other product. For example, assume I have a monopoly on electrical distribution. Now assume I go into the cheese business. With every month of electrical service I send along a free month's supply of cheese and I raise the price of electricity to cover the cost and give me a profit.
Where in this example are you "introducing artificial problems" into the "other product" (which can only be another electrical supply, for the analogy to be valid) ?
What MS has done that is both unethical and illegal is not force people to buy Windows, but to tie the purchase of Windows to numerous other products, halting innovation and competition in those markets.
False. Microsoft have improved their products in line with a) competitors' products and b) customer demands.
Millions of people are victims of the Gates juggernaut. Some lost $50 by being forced to buy Dos or Windows.
No-one, anywhere, ever, has been "forced" to spend a cent on Microsoft software, for any meaningfully useful definition of the word "forced".
Others lost their livelihoods by daring to compete on a rigged playing field.
Claims like this might get close to passing the laugh test, but for numerous others who have become multi-millionaires (if not billionaires) competing in that exact same "rigged playing field".
I disagree. There is a lot of concern for energy usage, global warming, etc, around the world today. When Microsoft completely ignores all those sentiments and produce an operating system that require much more computing power, i.e. energy, to run, that could surely be seen as evil.
Ignoring for a second the tortuous reasoning, the false assumption that Vista delivers no benefits to justify its "higher resource usage", the fact that even the assumption of "higher resource usage" is questionable, at best, given PCs up to around 5 years old are quite capable of running Vista and the fact that most computer upgrades are to run applications and games, rather than the OS...
Why is Microsoft being singled out for such criticism, when essentially everyone's software is doing exactly the same thing ?
Or take a look a look at story covered in following post: UK Greens Declare Vista Bad For Environment - maybe the attempt to give customers "better experience" and also "satisfying *IAA" is supported by good intentions but here you are: at least greens consider it evil.
If the UK Greens are anything like the Australian Greens, they'd consider anything that didn't end up with everyone starving in the dark, "evil".
I watched the Vista introduction video this morning. On most of the stuff they demoed I was thinking to myself, "I've had this on Mac OS X for a few years now."
Ah, I remember thinking the same thing when OS X was released...
I'd happily pay $750 to set up a full Windows AD domain at home with Win2K3 + five Vista clients. While my needs may not be mainstream, there are more people like me that you'd think.
And what we do is go and download an evaluation copy of Windows 2003 from Microsoft and use that to build our AD environment.
(Or we grab a volume-licensed copy from work, but I'm assuming you want to keep the discussion within the realms of legal.)
Regarding the insulting moniker "hobbiest", my main problem is that it downplays the need that the average home has for enterprise class storage, user and resource management, print management and distributed computing.
That's because the need in the average home for those things is zero.
We don't call electricians who work on their wiring at home or plumbers who work on their plumbing at home, "hobbiests". In fact we tend to praise them as being self-sufficient and skilled. The same metric should be applied to the IT guy who sets up enterprise class centralized storage (Global Network Block Devices or iSCSI), hardware assisted virtualization or paravirtualization (Xen + AMD SVM or Intel VT) and centralized application serving (persistent remote desktops using VNC or NX protocols).
The difference is the need in the average home for electricity and water is acute. The "need" in the average home for enterprise-class storage solutions (which most certainly are _not_ based around roll-your-own GNBDs or iSCSI targets) and virtualised servers is next to nothing, at best.
This might be a good time to consider MacOS X. Any machine Apple makes will run their operating system just fine, quickly and with all features enabled.
No, they won't. OS X is even more RAM-hungry than Vista - Mac Minis and low-end MacBooks and iMacs are still shipping with only 512MB RAM (then subtract another 64MB for the video card).
Both OS X and Vista are usable in 512M for basic, light tasks. Both benefit dramatically from an additional 512MB (>1GB delivers diminshing returns unless your workload is heavy).
Given the price of RAM today and the significant, all-round performance boost it delivers, there's really no reason to have less than 1GB.
As a gamer, I like having my Athlon 3.5+ GHz system with 2GB of RAM only report that I've breached my first 1GB when I'm running a memory intensive game, like X3. Some of these games actually use > 1GB of RAM. Sorry, but until I see the how-tos for cutting all of the excess fat from the OS to make room for my games, not to mention assurances that DRM isn't going to get in my way, I'm not touching Vista.
You clearly do not understand memory management and, as such, should refrain on both a) commentary and b) purchasing decisions based in that lack of knowledge.
Please RTFA before responding. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. The article applied this term to include registration processes and MS's ability to remove arbitrary software. Both of those are digital and both of them are managing my rights. If you don't want to be labeled a troll don't make comments that my terminology is wrong when I'm simply using the terms as they were used in the article we're supposedly discussing.
The article does _not_ use the term in that context. In fact, it doesn't use the term "Digital Rights Management" at all.
Yeah, there is always the danger that if I install a patch it will break something. If you don't see the difference between me applying a tested patch after waiting to see if it is stable, and Microsoft deleting something without any prior notification or testing or intervention on my part, then you are hopeless.
And if you equate an anti-spyware program deleting particularly high-risk spyware with Microsoft deleting arbitrary files, you are a liar.
This contradicts the article. When you are going to make a claim that contradicts one of the items presented as fact in the article, you have to provide a citation if you want anyone to take you seriously. Assuming you are correct (big assumption) then MS is still reserving the right in their software license to remove software without my permission which means they can change this at any time. That is still a pretty enormous liability.
Windows Defender is doing the same thing some other anti-malware programs do - automatically removing particularly high-risk executables. Additionally, this behaviour can be easily disabled by the end user. This is easily determined by actually _reading_ the Vista EULA and not trying to publish agenda-laden alarmist trolling, as the author of this article is attempting to do.
The crux of the issue is that Microsoft do _not_ have free reign to delete whatever they want, whenever they want, from a user's computer - contrary to the implication this article is (deceptively) trying to make. Firstly, deletions can only happen in the context of a Windows Defender scan, to spyware that has been marked above a certain danger level and secondly, it can be disabled at will by the end user (by reconfiguring Windows Defender).
Who cares about 99% of users. As a pragmatist I care about how it affects me. If I had upgraded a Windows box as much as my old mac media server, I would have had to re-register which is annoying and a pain in the butt.
No, it would be a quick and painless procedure (assuming it even happened, I'd be surprised if you've upgraded your "old mac media server" that much).
The chances of that server ceasing operation because someone with a serial number generator happens upon the same serial and installs a bunch of pirate copies is zero. The chances with a comparable Windows machine is non-zero. The chances that MS will decide to use Defender to remove some software without informing me in the future is likewise non-zero. These are all real risks and concerns that apply to Vista, but not to OS X.
Certainly. They apply in the same way that some rogue cosmic ray might scramble all the data on your computer is a "real risk and concern".
As such, it is perfectly reasonable to conclude that the DRM functions of Vista are more of a liability than OS X, for me, and as such it is not hypocritical for me to be concerned about those in Vista while being unconcerned about DRM in OS X. That of course, was my original point which you seem to have missed as you did not address it at all. Go back and read the article before replying to this please.
Your use of the term "DRM" is not in line with the article, which - apart from not actually even using the term - is primarily focussed on the legal implications of Vista's EULA, vis-a-vis registration and Windows Defender (these might be considered "DRM" issues, but not in the same way restricting "premium content" is).
You obviously have a very far-reaching moral compass...
I don't consider private arrangements entered into voluntarily for almost completely selfish desires to be particularly high on my outrage thermometre, no.
Did you not recently try to rebut my assertion that MS were being "forced" to implement DRM? That's the orders Gutmann is talking about...
Possibly. I rarely take notice of the authors of posts I am replying to as I prefer to concentrate on what they're saying.
Regardless, the analogy is specious and, in comparing what is ultimately a voluntary agreement between private parties for access to a luxury item, to the genocide of World War 2, simply offensive.
Microsoft have been "forced" to implement DRM only in the same sense Apple have been "forced" to make intel-based Macintoshes, or TV manufacturers have been "forced" to put HDMI and component inputs on their TVs, or car manufacturers have been "forced" to offer airbags in their cars.
Yes, MS made a lot of weak rebuttals, which we all saw through a week ago. Where were you?
Laughing at how (predictably) paranoid hysteria and blatant bias on Slashdot apparently classes as "rebuttal".
This sort of statement comes up all the time and it pisses me off. Firstly, Gutmann explained (and the weak Microsoft rebuttals confirmed) that Vista's content protection schemes will waste CPU cycles even if there is no protected content running. It requires all drivers to continually poll for attacks.
Only when protected content is being viewed since, when it isn't, the DRM-protected paths are not invoked (at least according to all the design documentation and specifications).
Secondly, it is not trivial to avoid buying DRM-encumbered content. The reason I hate DRM is not because it's attacking my grandmother. It's because I want to watch movies. I want to watch movies in my own home that I have paid for. There is no way for me to do that without buying DRM-encumbered content. Do you understand this: you can't avoid DRM unless you avoid content itself.
I understand it perfectly. Unlike you, however, I also understand that this is at the behest of the copyright owners and that it would _still_ be present even if Vista didn't have a shred of DRM in it, because the vast majority of content is not consumed via computers [running Windows]. Hence, I place the blame where it actually belongs, at the feet of the media cartels and government (ie: copyright law and its cronies like the DMCA).
I agree that copyright holders are at fault - but it is quite clear that DRM benefits everybody - the OS vendors, the hardware vendors, the **AAs and the copyright holders. It benefits everybody except the consumer because every single company all down the line stands to make a hefty profit when consumers repurchase their media, their hardware, and their software, to be re-compatible.
DRM - as in the DRM to reduce and/or restrict the playback of "premium content", ie. the stuff the MPAA and co are mostly responsible for - offers essentially zero direct benefit to Microsoft. Additionally, it requires they incur significant cost, both in terms of development and QA time and in terms of PR (when a non-HDCP-capable screen won't play back a HD-DVD at full quality at some point in the future, it will be Microsoft who get the blame). I have little doubt Microsoft would rather have not implemented it, had that been a realistic option.
DRM is the biggest scam in history, and don't think for one second that anybody in the industry is not going to profit from it.
I don't and, quite frankly, am mystified as to why you think I would. I don't like DRM at all. I don't even like copyright (although between the two I'd prefer DRM, assuming it came in leiu of copyright and DMCA-like laws). How on Earth you've managed to come to the conclusion I support DRM is beyond me, because I sure as hell haven't made any (non-sarcastic/toungue-in-cheek) comments in support of it.
Not trying to start a flame war/major argument, but that statement doesn't quite make sense. Why would you want to cache something (data on the hard drive) that can be read natively at a somewhere between 40 and 70MB/s to a medium that I have never seen work any faster that about 18 MB/s on reads?
Because the latency is dramatically less. For small - and especially random - reads, latency is a _significant_ component of total transfer time.
Now if the flash memory is used as a "blow-off valve" for situations where the OS becomes so resource starved that it or the user must resort to such tactics, I would have to call into question the ability of the OS to manage its resources.
It's nothing like that at all. It's effectively an additional read-ahead cache for your hard disk or, as I said elsewhere, basically a DIY hybrid hard disk. It offers benefits for all machine configurations, not just "resource-starved" ones - although obviously the more system RAM the less of an impact it will have.
It's an excellent idea and, I imagine, there will be some workloads where it will offer a substantial performance boost.
OK let's simplify this a bit... it's bad right? Whether or not MS is forced to or they could or couldn't have done anything about it is irrelevant - the product contains these nasty, repugnant features - therefore it is a bad product.
If Vista does what most of its customers want it to, it would be difficult to describe as a "bad product" simply because it - or its developer - doesn't align perfectly with my moral compass.
By that measure, just about every product on Earth is "bad".
I'll just quote the recent rebuttal by Peter Gutmann,
"We were only following orders" has historically worked rather poorly as an excuse
This analogy is as insulting as it is specious. Mr Gutmann should be ashamed to have made it. The only "orders" Microsoft are following are the ones their customers were giving with regards to "accessing premium content".
(More here - search for "Microsoft is only").
Most of the alarmist suppositions this article makes have been refuted as the FUD that they are. Slashdot linked to it about a week ago.
DRM is wholely and solely the "fault" of copyright holders. All the DRM infrastructure in the world is completely and utterly meaningless in the face of media that has no DRM restrictions applied to it. The method for avoiding DRM in Vista is trivial: don't buy DRM-encumbered content.
It seems to me that Microsoft needs someone to publish this sort of exploit. Vista would appear to be going nowhere in the market with the DRM mill-stone around its neck.
What makes you say that ? Outside of hysterical, mostly ill-informed posters on Slashdot (and their ilk), the knowledge of - let alone concern about - DRM in Vista is vanishingly small.
This is why I don't understand why you guys spent so much time bitching about Vista and not saying a word about the same DRM that's in dedicated players. You guys boycott and badmouth Vista over DRM, yet go out and buy these dedicated players without blinking an eye. And I bet you're like most people, in that you'll watch movie discs on dedicated players more than computers, so it would seem that you'd be more concerned about the DRM on those players than on some OS, but logic has never been an attribute that slashdotters possess.
The logic exists, is perfectly valid and is applied rationally.
It's just that Microsoft don't make dedicated players...
The Mac user writes: "I find it hard to find things to criticise, except perhaps to say that new versions of iWork and iLife are produced each year and it is hard to resist buying each new version, modestly priced as they are." Does anybody else smell a shill?
I can only really think of two _major_ issues I have with OS X - performance/UI responsiveness and the Finder (especially regarding network resources).
I don't normally do this, but -- this claim is so contrary to everything I've ever seen or heard about web server security that I have to ask, do you have an objective source for your assertion?
Consult the vulnerability graphs on www.secunia.com.
I understand t hat there are currently problems with minors o nthe internet, but within 20-30 years all of these problems iwll be resolved with parents that are technologicaly sound.
No, they won't. Firstly because those parents won't be "technologically sound" and secondly because they'll think they are and, thus, that they can ignore their parenting responsibilities by letting the machine do it for them.
Currently, parents have no idea how to use parental controls or how to supervise their kids, and I know my parents can't figure out what I'm doing.
Guess what ? If/when you have kids, the situation will be exactly the same.
Except that it's true. If you were a spammer, would you rather own a botnet of Win98 machines on dialup, or a cluster of Unix boxes sitting on a fiber ring?
Neither, I'd rather own a bunch of Windows machines on high-speed broadband connections.
Machines on dialup are worthless. Professionally run, closely monitored machines (your unix machines) are equally worthless, because any compromise is noticed and fixed very quickly.
The best place to be is machines with adequate bandwidth and clueless users, who will never notice their machines doing anything "strange".
And why has Apache had so very few in-the-wild exploits compared to IIS?
It doesn't. IIS has had a better security record than Apache for some years now.
(Although if you're counting actual installations, rather than hostnames, Apache and IIS have much closer shares of the market.)
There are far fewer Unix machines than Windows, true, but I'd say that the typical Unix host would be a far more attractive prize than the typical Windows desktop.
Doubtful. The average unix machine will be much closely monitored and much better protected.
This is the first I've heard of this feature. What are they smoking at MS that they though allowing users to dump virtual memory to a USB thumb drive would be a good idea?
Exactly the same stuff those guys who think sticking flash RAM onto a hard disk is a good idea are.
It's not going to be any faster than storing virtual memory on a SATA connected HDD [...]
Yes, it is.
[...] and it is going to eat the flash memory.
No, it's not.
Don't people know those things wear out? They're going to learn the hard way.
Indeed. Particularly persistent ones might find their flash drives lasts only 5 - 7 years instead of 8 - 10.
No, it's a DIY hybrid hard disk. It's an additional layer of caching between the system RAM and the physical drive.
Sure, the fact that it's easy (may be) a good thing (though how many people are going to keep an empty flash drive around for this?
Anyone whose workload includes lots of small random disk accesses, as that is where the most significant improvement is. Laptop users will also benefit if their "working set" is small as it will allow the drive to spend more time spun down.
Easier to get the kid down the street to install more ram for you and be done with it if you cant do it yourself. However, unique? I can put a swap file on flash drive and itd do the same thing...
Slashdot Mirror
If it were an empty argument, the DOJ wouldn't have been able to get their case off the ground.
Since when was the legal process bothered by facts ?
Suppose you were made the CEO of Dell tomorrow. Now, you're building computer systems for the desktop and OS's are one vital component if you want to get any sales. How many options do you have that won't get you fired by the end of the week? That would be Microsoft and Vista. Apple won't sell OS X to you (for good reason). Linux has not been optimized for home users and is a poor fit and very little mainstream software runs on it. If you choose it you're gambling the entire company on the slight chance that you can convince developers to target that platform and that people would rather switch and abandon their old software then go to a different vendor. That is an unacceptable risk by any objective comparison, and possibly criminal.
Translation: Dell are "forced" to buy Windows because the potential alternatives are either a) unavailable or b) t3h suck.
By your logic, I was forced to buy my Triumph Sprint ST, because it is the best motorbike in its market segment. Do you think the courts will let me sue my dealer ?
No, a company should be punished because they knowingly broke the law by leveraging their monopoly to take over other markets by foisting inferior products on customers.
"Inferior" is meaningless. Every product is an "inferior product" by some measure.
MS is guilty because if I buy a Windows system including the Vista OS (monopoly), that choice provides me with unfair incentive to use IE, Windows Media Player, PlaysForSure DRM, DirectX, XPS format, MS Office, and Windows server among other products.
Fantastic logic. Microsoft aren't allowed to make their products actually do anything useful, because they are a monopoly.
You sure do hate Microsoft's customers, don't you ? Why is that ?
With a monopoly in one market, I can (illegally) leverage that monopoly to make the correct choice for consumers acting in their own best interest to choose the inferior product, by introducing artificial problems with the other product. For example, assume I have a monopoly on electrical distribution. Now assume I go into the cheese business. With every month of electrical service I send along a free month's supply of cheese and I raise the price of electricity to cover the cost and give me a profit.
Where in this example are you "introducing artificial problems" into the "other product" (which can only be another electrical supply, for the analogy to be valid) ?
What MS has done that is both unethical and illegal is not force people to buy Windows, but to tie the purchase of Windows to numerous other products, halting innovation and competition in those markets.
False. Microsoft have improved their products in line with a) competitors' products and b) customer demands.
Millions of people are victims of the Gates juggernaut. Some lost $50 by being forced to buy Dos or Windows.
No-one, anywhere, ever, has been "forced" to spend a cent on Microsoft software, for any meaningfully useful definition of the word "forced".
Others lost their livelihoods by daring to compete on a rigged playing field.
Claims like this might get close to passing the laugh test, but for numerous others who have become multi-millionaires (if not billionaires) competing in that exact same "rigged playing field".
I disagree. There is a lot of concern for energy usage, global warming, etc, around the world today. When Microsoft completely ignores all those sentiments and produce an operating system that require much more computing power, i.e. energy, to run, that could surely be seen as evil.
Ignoring for a second the tortuous reasoning, the false assumption that Vista delivers no benefits to justify its "higher resource usage", the fact that even the assumption of "higher resource usage" is questionable, at best, given PCs up to around 5 years old are quite capable of running Vista and the fact that most computer upgrades are to run applications and games, rather than the OS...
Why is Microsoft being singled out for such criticism, when essentially everyone's software is doing exactly the same thing ?
Or take a look a look at story covered in following post: UK Greens Declare Vista Bad For Environment - maybe the attempt to give customers "better experience" and also "satisfying *IAA" is supported by good intentions but here you are: at least greens consider it evil.
If the UK Greens are anything like the Australian Greens, they'd consider anything that didn't end up with everyone starving in the dark, "evil".
I watched the Vista introduction video this morning. On most of the stuff they demoed I was thinking to myself, "I've had this on Mac OS X for a few years now."
Ah, I remember thinking the same thing when OS X was released...
I'd happily pay $750 to set up a full Windows AD domain at home with Win2K3 + five Vista clients. While my needs may not be mainstream, there are more people like me that you'd think.
And what we do is go and download an evaluation copy of Windows 2003 from Microsoft and use that to build our AD environment.
(Or we grab a volume-licensed copy from work, but I'm assuming you want to keep the discussion within the realms of legal.)
Regarding the insulting moniker "hobbiest", my main problem is that it downplays the need that the average home has for enterprise class storage, user and resource management, print management and distributed computing.
That's because the need in the average home for those things is zero.
We don't call electricians who work on their wiring at home or plumbers who work on their plumbing at home, "hobbiests". In fact we tend to praise them as being self-sufficient and skilled. The same metric should be applied to the IT guy who sets up enterprise class centralized storage (Global Network Block Devices or iSCSI), hardware assisted virtualization or paravirtualization (Xen + AMD SVM or Intel VT) and centralized application serving (persistent remote desktops using VNC or NX protocols).
The difference is the need in the average home for electricity and water is acute. The "need" in the average home for enterprise-class storage solutions (which most certainly are _not_ based around roll-your-own GNBDs or iSCSI targets) and virtualised servers is next to nothing, at best.
This might be a good time to consider MacOS X. Any machine Apple makes will run their operating system just fine, quickly and with all features enabled.
No, they won't. OS X is even more RAM-hungry than Vista - Mac Minis and low-end MacBooks and iMacs are still shipping with only 512MB RAM (then subtract another 64MB for the video card).
Both OS X and Vista are usable in 512M for basic, light tasks. Both benefit dramatically from an additional 512MB (>1GB delivers diminshing returns unless your workload is heavy).
Given the price of RAM today and the significant, all-round performance boost it delivers, there's really no reason to have less than 1GB.
As a gamer, I like having my Athlon 3.5+ GHz system with 2GB of RAM only report that I've breached my first 1GB when I'm running a memory intensive game, like X3. Some of these games actually use > 1GB of RAM. Sorry, but until I see the how-tos for cutting all of the excess fat from the OS to make room for my games, not to mention assurances that DRM isn't going to get in my way, I'm not touching Vista.
You clearly do not understand memory management and, as such, should refrain on both a) commentary and b) purchasing decisions based in that lack of knowledge.
Please RTFA before responding. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. The article applied this term to include registration processes and MS's ability to remove arbitrary software. Both of those are digital and both of them are managing my rights. If you don't want to be labeled a troll don't make comments that my terminology is wrong when I'm simply using the terms as they were used in the article we're supposedly discussing.
The article does _not_ use the term in that context. In fact, it doesn't use the term "Digital Rights Management" at all.
Yeah, there is always the danger that if I install a patch it will break something. If you don't see the difference between me applying a tested patch after waiting to see if it is stable, and Microsoft deleting something without any prior notification or testing or intervention on my part, then you are hopeless.
And if you equate an anti-spyware program deleting particularly high-risk spyware with Microsoft deleting arbitrary files, you are a liar.
This contradicts the article. When you are going to make a claim that contradicts one of the items presented as fact in the article, you have to provide a citation if you want anyone to take you seriously. Assuming you are correct (big assumption) then MS is still reserving the right in their software license to remove software without my permission which means they can change this at any time. That is still a pretty enormous liability.
Windows Defender is doing the same thing some other anti-malware programs do - automatically removing particularly high-risk executables. Additionally, this behaviour can be easily disabled by the end user. This is easily determined by actually _reading_ the Vista EULA and not trying to publish agenda-laden alarmist trolling, as the author of this article is attempting to do.
The crux of the issue is that Microsoft do _not_ have free reign to delete whatever they want, whenever they want, from a user's computer - contrary to the implication this article is (deceptively) trying to make. Firstly, deletions can only happen in the context of a Windows Defender scan, to spyware that has been marked above a certain danger level and secondly, it can be disabled at will by the end user (by reconfiguring Windows Defender).
Who cares about 99% of users. As a pragmatist I care about how it affects me. If I had upgraded a Windows box as much as my old mac media server, I would have had to re-register which is annoying and a pain in the butt.
No, it would be a quick and painless procedure (assuming it even happened, I'd be surprised if you've upgraded your "old mac media server" that much).
The chances of that server ceasing operation because someone with a serial number generator happens upon the same serial and installs a bunch of pirate copies is zero. The chances with a comparable Windows machine is non-zero. The chances that MS will decide to use Defender to remove some software without informing me in the future is likewise non-zero. These are all real risks and concerns that apply to Vista, but not to OS X.
Certainly. They apply in the same way that some rogue cosmic ray might scramble all the data on your computer is a "real risk and concern".
As such, it is perfectly reasonable to conclude that the DRM functions of Vista are more of a liability than OS X, for me, and as such it is not hypocritical for me to be concerned about those in Vista while being unconcerned about DRM in OS X. That of course, was my original point which you seem to have missed as you did not address it at all. Go back and read the article before replying to this please.
Your use of the term "DRM" is not in line with the article, which - apart from not actually even using the term - is primarily focussed on the legal implications of Vista's EULA, vis-a-vis registration and Windows Defender (these might be considered "DRM" issues, but not in the same way restricting "premium content" is).
You obviously have a very far-reaching moral compass...
I don't consider private arrangements entered into voluntarily for almost completely selfish desires to be particularly high on my outrage thermometre, no.
Did you not recently try to rebut my assertion that MS were being "forced" to implement DRM? That's the orders Gutmann is talking about...
Possibly. I rarely take notice of the authors of posts I am replying to as I prefer to concentrate on what they're saying.
Regardless, the analogy is specious and, in comparing what is ultimately a voluntary agreement between private parties for access to a luxury item, to the genocide of World War 2, simply offensive.
Microsoft have been "forced" to implement DRM only in the same sense Apple have been "forced" to make intel-based Macintoshes, or TV manufacturers have been "forced" to put HDMI and component inputs on their TVs, or car manufacturers have been "forced" to offer airbags in their cars.
Yes, MS made a lot of weak rebuttals, which we all saw through a week ago. Where were you?
Laughing at how (predictably) paranoid hysteria and blatant bias on Slashdot apparently classes as "rebuttal".
This sort of statement comes up all the time and it pisses me off. Firstly, Gutmann explained (and the weak Microsoft rebuttals confirmed) that Vista's content protection schemes will waste CPU cycles even if there is no protected content running. It requires all drivers to continually poll for attacks.
Only when protected content is being viewed since, when it isn't, the DRM-protected paths are not invoked (at least according to all the design documentation and specifications).
Secondly, it is not trivial to avoid buying DRM-encumbered content. The reason I hate DRM is not because it's attacking my grandmother. It's because I want to watch movies. I want to watch movies in my own home that I have paid for. There is no way for me to do that without buying DRM-encumbered content. Do you understand this: you can't avoid DRM unless you avoid content itself.
I understand it perfectly. Unlike you, however, I also understand that this is at the behest of the copyright owners and that it would _still_ be present even if Vista didn't have a shred of DRM in it, because the vast majority of content is not consumed via computers [running Windows]. Hence, I place the blame where it actually belongs, at the feet of the media cartels and government (ie: copyright law and its cronies like the DMCA).
I agree that copyright holders are at fault - but it is quite clear that DRM benefits everybody - the OS vendors, the hardware vendors, the **AAs and the copyright holders. It benefits everybody except the consumer because every single company all down the line stands to make a hefty profit when consumers repurchase their media, their hardware, and their software, to be re-compatible.
DRM - as in the DRM to reduce and/or restrict the playback of "premium content", ie. the stuff the MPAA and co are mostly responsible for - offers essentially zero direct benefit to Microsoft. Additionally, it requires they incur significant cost, both in terms of development and QA time and in terms of PR (when a non-HDCP-capable screen won't play back a HD-DVD at full quality at some point in the future, it will be Microsoft who get the blame). I have little doubt Microsoft would rather have not implemented it, had that been a realistic option.
DRM is the biggest scam in history, and don't think for one second that anybody in the industry is not going to profit from it.
I don't and, quite frankly, am mystified as to why you think I would. I don't like DRM at all. I don't even like copyright (although between the two I'd prefer DRM, assuming it came in leiu of copyright and DMCA-like laws). How on Earth you've managed to come to the conclusion I support DRM is beyond me, because I sure as hell haven't made any (non-sarcastic/toungue-in-cheek) comments in support of it.
Not trying to start a flame war/major argument, but that statement doesn't quite make sense. Why would you want to cache something (data on the hard drive) that can be read natively at a somewhere between 40 and 70MB/s to a medium that I have never seen work any faster that about 18 MB/s on reads?
Because the latency is dramatically less. For small - and especially random - reads, latency is a _significant_ component of total transfer time.
Now if the flash memory is used as a "blow-off valve" for situations where the OS becomes so resource starved that it or the user must resort to such tactics, I would have to call into question the ability of the OS to manage its resources.
It's nothing like that at all. It's effectively an additional read-ahead cache for your hard disk or, as I said elsewhere, basically a DIY hybrid hard disk. It offers benefits for all machine configurations, not just "resource-starved" ones - although obviously the more system RAM the less of an impact it will have.
It's an excellent idea and, I imagine, there will be some workloads where it will offer a substantial performance boost.
OK let's simplify this a bit... it's bad right? Whether or not MS is forced to or they could or couldn't have done anything about it is irrelevant - the product contains these nasty, repugnant features - therefore it is a bad product.
If Vista does what most of its customers want it to, it would be difficult to describe as a "bad product" simply because it - or its developer - doesn't align perfectly with my moral compass.
By that measure, just about every product on Earth is "bad".
I'll just quote the recent rebuttal by Peter Gutmann,
"We were only following orders" has historically worked rather poorly as an excuse
This analogy is as insulting as it is specious. Mr Gutmann should be ashamed to have made it. The only "orders" Microsoft are following are the ones their customers were giving with regards to "accessing premium content".
(More here - search for "Microsoft is only").
Most of the alarmist suppositions this article makes have been refuted as the FUD that they are. Slashdot linked to it about a week ago.
DRM is wholely and solely the "fault" of copyright holders. All the DRM infrastructure in the world is completely and utterly meaningless in the face of media that has no DRM restrictions applied to it. The method for avoiding DRM in Vista is trivial: don't buy DRM-encumbered content.
It seems to me that Microsoft needs someone to publish this sort of exploit. Vista would appear to be going nowhere in the market with the DRM mill-stone around its neck.
What makes you say that ? Outside of hysterical, mostly ill-informed posters on Slashdot (and their ilk), the knowledge of - let alone concern about - DRM in Vista is vanishingly small.
Imagine how pissed I would be if I couldn't watch them at native resolution because according to Microsoft I had the wrong connector.
Microsoft are not making that decision. The publisher of the movies and, possibly, the developer of the player application are.
This is why I don't understand why you guys spent so much time bitching about Vista and not saying a word about the same DRM that's in dedicated players. You guys boycott and badmouth Vista over DRM, yet go out and buy these dedicated players without blinking an eye. And I bet you're like most people, in that you'll watch movie discs on dedicated players more than computers, so it would seem that you'd be more concerned about the DRM on those players than on some OS, but logic has never been an attribute that slashdotters possess.
The logic exists, is perfectly valid and is applied rationally.
It's just that Microsoft don't make dedicated players...
The Mac user writes: "I find it hard to find things to criticise, except perhaps to say that new versions of iWork and iLife are produced each year and it is hard to resist buying each new version, modestly priced as they are." Does anybody else smell a shill?
I can only really think of two _major_ issues I have with OS X - performance/UI responsiveness and the Finder (especially regarding network resources).
I don't normally do this, but -- this claim is so contrary to everything I've ever seen or heard about web server security that I have to ask, do you have an objective source for your assertion?
Consult the vulnerability graphs on www.secunia.com.
I understand t hat there are currently problems with minors o nthe internet, but within 20-30 years all of these problems iwll be resolved with parents that are technologicaly sound.
No, they won't. Firstly because those parents won't be "technologically sound" and secondly because they'll think they are and, thus, that they can ignore their parenting responsibilities by letting the machine do it for them.
Currently, parents have no idea how to use parental controls or how to supervise their kids, and I know my parents can't figure out what I'm doing.
Guess what ? If/when you have kids, the situation will be exactly the same.
Except that it's true. If you were a spammer, would you rather own a botnet of Win98 machines on dialup, or a cluster of Unix boxes sitting on a fiber ring?
Neither, I'd rather own a bunch of Windows machines on high-speed broadband connections.
Machines on dialup are worthless. Professionally run, closely monitored machines (your unix machines) are equally worthless, because any compromise is noticed and fixed very quickly.
The best place to be is machines with adequate bandwidth and clueless users, who will never notice their machines doing anything "strange".
And why has Apache had so very few in-the-wild exploits compared to IIS?
It doesn't. IIS has had a better security record than Apache for some years now.
(Although if you're counting actual installations, rather than hostnames, Apache and IIS have much closer shares of the market.)
There are far fewer Unix machines than Windows, true, but I'd say that the typical Unix host would be a far more attractive prize than the typical Windows desktop.
Doubtful. The average unix machine will be much closely monitored and much better protected.
This is the first I've heard of this feature. What are they smoking at MS that they though allowing users to dump virtual memory to a USB thumb drive would be a good idea?
Exactly the same stuff those guys who think sticking flash RAM onto a hard disk is a good idea are.
It's not going to be any faster than storing virtual memory on a SATA connected HDD [...]
Yes, it is.
[...] and it is going to eat the flash memory.
No, it's not.
Don't people know those things wear out? They're going to learn the hard way.
Indeed. Particularly persistent ones might find their flash drives lasts only 5 - 7 years instead of 8 - 10.
Wait, are you saying that you can just rip out the USB stick and nothing bad will happen?
Yes.
That doesn't make any sense.
Yes, it does, as soon as you realise the flash drive isn't being used as virtual memory, but as a read caching mechanism for the hard disk.
Unique? That's Virtual Memory.
No, it's a DIY hybrid hard disk. It's an additional layer of caching between the system RAM and the physical drive.
Sure, the fact that it's easy (may be) a good thing (though how many people are going to keep an empty flash drive around for this?
Anyone whose workload includes lots of small random disk accesses, as that is where the most significant improvement is. Laptop users will also benefit if their "working set" is small as it will allow the drive to spend more time spun down.
Easier to get the kid down the street to install more ram for you and be done with it if you cant do it yourself. However, unique? I can put a swap file on flash drive and itd do the same thing...
No, it wouldn't.
Does it use the thumbdrive as core or swap?
Neither. It's essentially a DIY hybrid hard disk.
"the APPLICATION DEVELOPERS chose not to write cross-platform software" due to the economic realities of Microsoft's MONOPOLY position.
How is making software development substantially cheaper an abuse of monopoly power ?