Intel and AMD actually did this with the Pentium Pro and K5, respectively (AMD actually beat Intel to market with with the first uOp-cored-x86-decoder CPU by a few months, using the technology they bought from NexGen - pity the K5 was a bit of a dog in actual performance).
My Intel notebook, which I've been told is pretty typical, runs hotter than a pancake griddle and won't run for an hour from a full charge, if you're using WiFi and doing anything that involves disk I/O.
Either your laptop isn't really comparable (ie: it's one of those 17", desktop replacement behemoths) or it's broken.
I offloaded my Latitude D600 a few years ago, but I used to get 2-3 hours out of that on a single charge, and I don't remember it being overly hot.
Staggering, certainly, mainly because more porn than anybody could ever possibly use can be obtained for free (albeit usually via copyright infringement).
Macs actually generally age better than PCs, [...]
This was a dubious claim in the past, and it's downright ludicrous when taking into account the resource-intensiveness of OS X.
Macs don't "age better", it's just that PCs give you much more power/$, advance quicker and are cheaper to replace, so replacing them is less of an event and more of an improvement.
if you're innocent, you shouldn't have to worry (true, but only if the government isn't violating the rights of the innocent, and leads to the possibility of forfeiting other rights).
Since Governments define laws, Governments define whether or not you are "innocent". Just because you're innocent today doesn't mean you're innocent tomorrow.
I think it's a direct shot at both Microsoft & Dell.
No, it's just another reinforcement of Apple's target market.
If you use a Mac you're *different*. People without Macs only do mundane stuff on their computers, but us Mac people are always doing interesting and exciting stuff. YEAH ! Yay us !
The PowerPC has always been a great performing chip [...]
Except for those few years between the G4 stalling at ~500 Mhz and the G5s being released...
I agree with the original poster. Who would pay $$$ for an Apple Intel server, when they can pay far less money for a similarly configured server running Linux or BSD? Just for OS X? OS X is not worth the premium hardware price, IMO.
Unless, of course, you've got a network full of Macs and want an easy to use server, in which case it's a steal.
I don't get this geeky thing where you'll spend godawful amounts of money on hardware (and create a huge electricity bill and cooling problem to boot) but take a hissy fit about paying for a DVD or a CD you want to enjoy. It reminds me of clients my law firm had who'd spend gobs of money for us to fight their personal tax assessments.
Both examples look like matters of principle to me.
Compressing videos. 1TB fills up pretty quick with uncompressed HDTV (heck, it fills up pretty quick with Xvid).
AFAIK, win32 currently doesn't really take advantage of dual core.
"Win32" - by which you presumably mean Windows - has been SMP since the day it was released.
NTFS is one of the least stable, worst performing filesystems around.
From someone who doesn't even know Windows supports SMP, I'll take your filesystem criticisms with a grain of salt. All I'll say is that I've lost a hell of a lot more data on various Linux filesystems than I have on Solaris, FreeBSD, OS X or Windows filesystems.
I'm talking about things like DirectX API's requiring it...
They don't.
(I realise you've just picked DirectX as a well known example of a Windows API and are trying to make a generalised point, but AFAIK you're still wrong. There aren't any APIs that "require" Admin access to use - although obviously some things you might try to do with certain APIs will be restricted by privilege level. Basically, there aren't any architectural/programmatical reasons for a "normal" application to not work as a regular user).
But at some point that choice was obviously wrong and they could have changed it. I'm not arguing about the initial choice, everyone makes mistakes - I'm arguing against the repeated making of the same mistake.
But when ? They can't change products that have shipped, and you can't really make a change like that in a patch. It pretty much requires a new OS release.
No. My point is that vulnerabilities in Windows actually lead to real, serious exploits unlike other platforms. Like the Sony Rootkit if you want one that's not even lited in the 10k.
But that's not because the vulnerabilities on other systems aren't similar in severity, it's because no-one writes exploits for the other platforms.
There are vulnerabilities on other systems but they do not lead to exploits, and it's rediculous to claim that just because there are "only" ten million + Macs around they are not a tempting target.
It's not just as simple as "tempting target". OS X shares a similar user demographic to Windows, it's true - typically a technically ignorant end user with little knowledge or understanding of safe computing practices. However, OS X has several advantages in its favour to help mitigate the problem - being rarer, it's not targetted anywhere near as much, either in terms of "ROI" for crackers, or the proportion of people out there who have the technical skills to do so. Also benefitting from it's relative rarity is propogation speed - even if OS X had an automated, remote exploit published it would spread far, far slower since there are far, far fewer machines to infect. Exploit propogation is an exponetial-type curve, so the relative number of machines out there _dramatically_ affects how quickly an exploit will spread and how many machines (both as an absolute number and a proportion) it will affect before it is stopped. Then there's the culture aspect - Mac users, being something out of the ordinary, are more likely to communicate with each other *as Mac users*, and inform each other of available updates, circulating scams, etc. These things have a *massive* impact on propogation, because most malware infections require some sort of human interaction to execute and/or are exploiting a hole that's already been patched. The biggest hole in any (contemporary) OS is the user - and the user is a multiplicative factor - so by limiting that exposure, end results can be significant impacted.
This is before even getting into the technical issues[0] like every OS X machine having automatic updates on by default, no network services listening[1] and a relatively limited user account[2] by default.
Linux is another game entirely. Its user demographic is _completely_ different (unmanaged Linux machines with ignorant end users are exceptionally rare) and extremely malware-hostile. The typical Linux user will notice in relatively short order whether his machine is acting differently, and is likely to be able to identify *and fix* "unusual" behaviour independently and quickly.
[0] IMHO technical issues surrounding security are relatively insignificant with regards to security, assuming contemporary OSes and equivalent maintenance practices.
[1] This one is a biggie I think Microsoft should fix ASAP. Turning the firewall on in SP2 "basically" fixed it, but there are deeper issues that should be addressed.
[2] This is _way_ overplayed IMHO. Most malware doesn't intrinsically need elevated privileges to "work" - the onl
Maybe retail prices will go up for awhile. But in the long run the free market will set the price. And if the guy next door can deliver a better product at a cheaper price then consumers will vote with their money.
This does not mean the end result will be cheaper than the previous generations of "liability free" software.
An analogy: Any new technology (like plasma televisions for an example)will be expensive when they are first made available to the public. But then economy of scale kicks in and prices go down.
I don't think that's an appropriate analogy. This isn't about economies of scale, it's about fundamentally changing the processes of consumer-oriented computer software (and hardware) development. Sure, it would get cheaper compared to the costs of the initial change to "liable" software, but it's highly questionable if it would end up cheaper than "non liable" software was.
If I'm understanding what you said, they log all HTTP traffic, and keep the logs forever? Holy smokes! Where do they keep it all? Even if a student only generated (for the sake of argument) 10k of log per day, when you multiply that by (again, say) 1000 students, at school for (say) 240 days a year (Sept to April), with logs kept for ten years (so far, and more years to come), you're looking at close to 23GB of nothing but HTTP logs. Wasteful.
Bear in mind logfiles like that will compress at upwards of 20:1. 23G of raw logs would only be about a gig compressed.
While the computer itself works fine, its the OS and Applications that need constant patching. When the OS makers and Application sellers are held to the same standards as other products are, then maybe you will see your cost of doing buisness with computers go down.
More like it will go way, way up as software manufacturers raise prices to cover the costs of longer development cycles and legal liability and hardware manufacturers raise prices to cover the costs of certification and proper driver development (low-cost hardware and "free" software would most likely become unviable).
I'm afraid you are mistaken. AMD hasn't gained so much market share by maintaining pairity, they did it by being consistently faster, as well as lower power and cheaper.
I think you'll find "cheaper" is the one you're after.
Of course they are, but that doesn't change the fact that Intel was heavily marketing MHz, and designed the P4 just so that it could get a very high MHz rating, even without particularly good performance.
Except they *did* have good - or at least equal - performance.
P4s are slower compared to AMD CPUs on the market at similar points in time.
Typically, the company with the fastest CPU at any given point in time will be the one who most recently updated their product line. The page I linked to previously supports this.
Not true, except on a very, very narrow range of applications.
I don't care enough to go chasing down dozens of benchmarks, but some highlights from a big timeline of processors here.:
October 2001, AMD introduces the Athlon XP 1800+. Fastest P4 at the time: 2Ghz.
March 2002, Athlon XP 2100+. P4: 2.2Ghz
June 2002, Athlon XP 2200+. P4: 2.53Ghz
November 2002, Athlon XP 2800+. P4: 3Ghz (HT)
June 2003, Athlon XP 3200+. P4: 3.2Ghz
The point here is that it's been a game of leapfrogging for most of the last few years.
No, you can very easily over inflate a clock-speed. Just increase the pipeline, then the MHz are meaningless, because you then need many more of them to get the same performance.
Mhz are always meaningless on their own. Something everyone seems to say, but no-one seems to understand.
You're somewhat correct. PR numbers could EASILY have been over inflated. That's why it's so significant that AMD has never done so, despite having nothing to stop them.
That's not strictly true. The PR numbers used for the old K5 chips were...optimisitic... Which was why AMD coppsed so much flack for going back to it with the Athlon - people had bad memories of the K5 days.
That's funny, because I never said anything even remotely close to that... Not even REMOTELY.
Certainly seems to me you're implying P4s are slower when clock speeds are kept constant (or, as you prefer to put it, their "Mhz ratings").
Clock speeds cannot be compared between chips of different architectures. This means it's just as wrong to say an Athlon at 2Ghz is faster than a P4 at 2Ghz as it is to say a 2.4Ghz P4 is faster than a 2Ghz Athlon.
The P4 made a big tradeoff between clock-for-clock speed in exchange for ghz. A 1.3 ghz P3 was faster than a 1.4 ghz P4, which is why Intel waited until faster P4's were available for release the last P3.
As I keep trying to say, clock-for-clock performance comparisons are meaningless.
You're saying that AMD, having a superior product, started the MHz war (just a few years ago) forcing Intel to introduce the underperforming mess that is the P4?
For most of its life, the P4 wasn't "underperforming", it was as fast - if not faster - than the Athlon.
First of all, The MHz numbers for AMD CPUs have never been over-inflated as far as I can remember, as Intel did with the P4.
Uh, you can't "over inflate" a clock speed. It is what it is. "PR" numbers, OTOH...
Athlons had a higher MHz rating because they were legitimately faster (although at the expense of being hotter).
P4s were as fast - if not faster than Athlons. The fact that they used a higher clock speed to do this is irrelevant.
It always amazes me the number of people who say "clock speed doesn't matter" then immediately turn around (often in the same sentence !) and say "$CPU is faster than the Pentium 4 at the same Mhz".
No, actually it's intended to provide a reasonable comparison to Pentium 4s, despite the disparity in MHz that Intel caused.
The PR rating is a number that relates to the original Athlon, not the P4.
What Intel did seems to be the attempt to cause confusion.
Huh ? Intel labelled their chips with the clock speed and processor type, AMD uses an approximate number relating a chips performance to the original Athlon, but it's *Intel* attempting to cause confusion ?
No need then to blame the people that write API's that require it, [...]
Which APIs require it ?
[...] or design the system so game makers come to expect it as normal.
That admin is the default is no justification for writing software that assumes it has free reign to modify parts of the system it has no business accessing. Not storing runtime and/or configuration data in the available per-user locations is just plain bad coding.
But if you look there are reasons why many of these apps do things that require admin - they need to touch some part of the system untouchable otherwise.
No, they don't. 99% of apps I've ever seen that "require" Administrator level privileges to run, do so because:
* They're trying to write HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE when they should be using HKEY_CURRENT_USER.
* They're trying to write to files somewhere in %SYSTEMROOT% (ie: C:\Windows).
* They're trying to write to files somewhere in the program's own directory.
This has nothing to do with Windows, it's just bad/lazy/ignorant/stupid coding. There's no reason for the average program to be trying to write to or modify system locations or its own directory in normal usage.
So the configurations came to spring form thin air, no-one sat down and thoguht about what they should be.
I have no doubt it was agonised about and that making the default user an Administrator was considered the least worst option.
It's also worth noting that in domain environments, the default user *isn't* an admin, because the impact is much lower.
The group a user is in by default is in no way a design issue. Multiuser is a design issue. ACLs are a design issue. Multithreading is a design issue. CPU scheduling and memory management are design issues.
What group a user is in by default is a barely significant configuration semantic.
Even grudgingly you have to admit understanding my point. There is the reality of little numbes on a pretty chart, and then what actually is in this world.
Your point is apparently that because Windows has lots of viruses around (most of which are just reimplementations of the same thing with a different name) it's got a relatively high bug count than other products. Presumably you also think that the higher numbers of published exploits (again, many of which are just the same thing over and over again with different names) and has a bigger reputation of being "insecure" support this view.
If you really believe this, then there's probably not much I can do to convince you that your logic is flawed and that you actually need relevant numbers to support your assertion. Relevant numbers would be things that reported numbers of unique vulnerabilities and compared them to similar type of vulnerabilities on other platforms. Gathering numbers like that isn't a trivial task, however, and certainly none of the security sites/mailing lists/teams I've ever seen do so in a manner suitable for such good comparisons (they tend to mix in things like vulnerabilities in irrelevant bits of software like Open Office).
The simple fact is that, given exploits of equal severity, the impact on Windows machines will be far, far, *far* greater than any other platform because there's so many of them. Heck, OS X has had vulnerabilities in the past that potentially left the entire system wide open and no-one even bothered to write an exploit, let alone release it into the wild (not that it would have spread particularly fast, with only about 1 in every 80 - 100 machines being vulnerable).
The point I'm trying to get across here is that simplistic looks at the number of viruses, how many machines are exploited, how long an unpatched machine takes to be exploited and the like are _atrocious_ metrics to use for trying to make any sort of qualitative comparison. Or, as the statisticians like to say, "correlation is not causation".
Few publishers own this "infrastructure". For the most part anyone can plug into it, and they do.
Well, in that particular comment I was thinking back to when things like the printing press were new and the reproduction of printed material was an expensive and uncommon operation.
Actually, my job, working for publishers, is to take the steaming piles of crap that authors produce and turn them into readable attractive priducts. Have you ever read a self-published book? Few seem to know how to use the spellcheck for a start. Would you like all books to be of that standard? If no one pays people like me, they will be.
If enough people want books that aren't "steaming piles of crap", you'll get paid.
"Logically"? I can shoplift and sell the goods, am I then then more "deserving" and efficient than the shopkeeper?
You take a serious credibility hit when you try and equate theft and copyright infringment. Find a better argument.
This is good?
Is it bad ? It's not like 90% of material today isn't already formulaic.
What this means is DRM to the maximum extent. Products will be fucked up and made harder to use; books may be released in some proprietary digital format that can only be used on certain locked-down reading devices. This would create a corporate monopoly and barriers to entry much worse than now unless you just want to give away your work.
On the other hand, companies that release products that are hard to use or too restrictive will go out of business because no-one will buy their products.
Why not? Everyone's "business model" is protected. E.g., your average working stiff has legislation to protect his "business model" of toiling and being paid at the end of the month; a farmer to protect him from people harvesting from his fields, etc.
Please don't tell me you're trying to equate anti-slavery and generic property laws with copyright. The former is just ludicrous and the latter doesn't even come *close* to the scope of copyright.
As mentioned, I work in publishing, so I know how thin the margins are. I do believe that copyright is too long, but I know that removing it entirely would not give you better books to read, would not reward the creators and encourage them to do better.
You haven't convinced me it would be any _worse_. I'm not a free market zealot (firm believe in publically-owned/funded utilities, education and healthcare, for example), but I really think the free market would do a better job of balancing content availability and protection than government can. Legislation is too easy to buy.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds pretty free market to me !
Intel and AMD actually did this with the Pentium Pro and K5, respectively (AMD actually beat Intel to market with with the first uOp-cored-x86-decoder CPU by a few months, using the technology they bought from NexGen - pity the K5 was a bit of a dog in actual performance).
Either your laptop isn't really comparable (ie: it's one of those 17", desktop replacement behemoths) or it's broken.
I offloaded my Latitude D600 a few years ago, but I used to get 2-3 hours out of that on a single charge, and I don't remember it being overly hot.
Sick ?
Staggering, certainly, mainly because more porn than anybody could ever possibly use can be obtained for free (albeit usually via copyright infringement).
This was a dubious claim in the past, and it's downright ludicrous when taking into account the resource-intensiveness of OS X.
Macs don't "age better", it's just that PCs give you much more power/$, advance quicker and are cheaper to replace, so replacing them is less of an event and more of an improvement.
When the fundamental basis of your argument is "all life is sacred, no matter what" then, yes, both most certainly do deserve the same treatment.
It is the only safe option when dealing with Governments.
It's a philosophical thing, too - when you assume the worst, you can only ever be pleasantly surprised.
Since Governments define laws, Governments define whether or not you are "innocent". Just because you're innocent today doesn't mean you're innocent tomorrow.
No, it's just another reinforcement of Apple's target market.
If you use a Mac you're *different*. People without Macs only do mundane stuff on their computers, but us Mac people are always doing interesting and exciting stuff. YEAH ! Yay us !
Except for those few years between the G4 stalling at ~500 Mhz and the G5s being released...
I agree with the original poster. Who would pay $$$ for an Apple Intel server, when they can pay far less money for a similarly configured server running Linux or BSD? Just for OS X? OS X is not worth the premium hardware price, IMO.
Unless, of course, you've got a network full of Macs and want an easy to use server, in which case it's a steal.
OS X "admin" != Windows "Administrator".
The closest equivalent to an OS X "admin" in Windows would be someone in the "Power Users" group.
Vista is about as much a "small upgrade from XP" as OS X was a "small upgrade from NeXT".
Both examples look like matters of principle to me.
Another hard disk is probably cheaper (and a hell of a lot easier) as a method of protecting against drive failure.
Compressing videos. 1TB fills up pretty quick with uncompressed HDTV (heck, it fills up pretty quick with Xvid).
AFAIK, win32 currently doesn't really take advantage of dual core.
"Win32" - by which you presumably mean Windows - has been SMP since the day it was released.
NTFS is one of the least stable, worst performing filesystems around.
From someone who doesn't even know Windows supports SMP, I'll take your filesystem criticisms with a grain of salt. All I'll say is that I've lost a hell of a lot more data on various Linux filesystems than I have on Solaris, FreeBSD, OS X or Windows filesystems.
They don't.
(I realise you've just picked DirectX as a well known example of a Windows API and are trying to make a generalised point, but AFAIK you're still wrong. There aren't any APIs that "require" Admin access to use - although obviously some things you might try to do with certain APIs will be restricted by privilege level. Basically, there aren't any architectural/programmatical reasons for a "normal" application to not work as a regular user).
But at some point that choice was obviously wrong and they could have changed it. I'm not arguing about the initial choice, everyone makes mistakes - I'm arguing against the repeated making of the same mistake.
But when ? They can't change products that have shipped, and you can't really make a change like that in a patch. It pretty much requires a new OS release.
No. My point is that vulnerabilities in Windows actually lead to real, serious exploits unlike other platforms. Like the Sony Rootkit if you want one that's not even lited in the 10k.
But that's not because the vulnerabilities on other systems aren't similar in severity, it's because no-one writes exploits for the other platforms.
There are vulnerabilities on other systems but they do not lead to exploits, and it's rediculous to claim that just because there are "only" ten million + Macs around they are not a tempting target.
It's not just as simple as "tempting target". OS X shares a similar user demographic to Windows, it's true - typically a technically ignorant end user with little knowledge or understanding of safe computing practices. However, OS X has several advantages in its favour to help mitigate the problem - being rarer, it's not targetted anywhere near as much, either in terms of "ROI" for crackers, or the proportion of people out there who have the technical skills to do so. Also benefitting from it's relative rarity is propogation speed - even if OS X had an automated, remote exploit published it would spread far, far slower since there are far, far fewer machines to infect. Exploit propogation is an exponetial-type curve, so the relative number of machines out there _dramatically_ affects how quickly an exploit will spread and how many machines (both as an absolute number and a proportion) it will affect before it is stopped. Then there's the culture aspect - Mac users, being something out of the ordinary, are more likely to communicate with each other *as Mac users*, and inform each other of available updates, circulating scams, etc. These things have a *massive* impact on propogation, because most malware infections require some sort of human interaction to execute and/or are exploiting a hole that's already been patched. The biggest hole in any (contemporary) OS is the user - and the user is a multiplicative factor - so by limiting that exposure, end results can be significant impacted.
This is before even getting into the technical issues[0] like every OS X machine having automatic updates on by default, no network services listening[1] and a relatively limited user account[2] by default.
Linux is another game entirely. Its user demographic is _completely_ different (unmanaged Linux machines with ignorant end users are exceptionally rare) and extremely malware-hostile. The typical Linux user will notice in relatively short order whether his machine is acting differently, and is likely to be able to identify *and fix* "unusual" behaviour independently and quickly.
[0] IMHO technical issues surrounding security are relatively insignificant with regards to security, assuming contemporary OSes and equivalent maintenance practices.
[1] This one is a biggie I think Microsoft should fix ASAP. Turning the firewall on in SP2 "basically" fixed it, but there are deeper issues that should be addressed.
[2] This is _way_ overplayed IMHO. Most malware doesn't intrinsically need elevated privileges to "work" - the onl
This does not mean the end result will be cheaper than the previous generations of "liability free" software.
An analogy: Any new technology (like plasma televisions for an example)will be expensive when they are first made available to the public. But then economy of scale kicks in and prices go down.
I don't think that's an appropriate analogy. This isn't about economies of scale, it's about fundamentally changing the processes of consumer-oriented computer software (and hardware) development. Sure, it would get cheaper compared to the costs of the initial change to "liable" software, but it's highly questionable if it would end up cheaper than "non liable" software was.
Bear in mind logfiles like that will compress at upwards of 20:1. 23G of raw logs would only be about a gig compressed.
More like it will go way, way up as software manufacturers raise prices to cover the costs of longer development cycles and legal liability and hardware manufacturers raise prices to cover the costs of certification and proper driver development (low-cost hardware and "free" software would most likely become unviable).
I think you'll find "cheaper" is the one you're after.
Of course they are, but that doesn't change the fact that Intel was heavily marketing MHz, and designed the P4 just so that it could get a very high MHz rating, even without particularly good performance.
Except they *did* have good - or at least equal - performance.
P4s are slower compared to AMD CPUs on the market at similar points in time.
Typically, the company with the fastest CPU at any given point in time will be the one who most recently updated their product line. The page I linked to previously supports this.
I don't care enough to go chasing down dozens of benchmarks, but some highlights from a big timeline of processors here.:
October 2001, AMD introduces the Athlon XP 1800+. Fastest P4 at the time: 2Ghz.
March 2002, Athlon XP 2100+. P4: 2.2Ghz
June 2002, Athlon XP 2200+. P4: 2.53Ghz
November 2002, Athlon XP 2800+. P4: 3Ghz (HT)
June 2003, Athlon XP 3200+. P4: 3.2Ghz
The point here is that it's been a game of leapfrogging for most of the last few years.
No, you can very easily over inflate a clock-speed. Just increase the pipeline, then the MHz are meaningless, because you then need many more of them to get the same performance.
Mhz are always meaningless on their own. Something everyone seems to say, but no-one seems to understand.
You're somewhat correct. PR numbers could EASILY have been over inflated. That's why it's so significant that AMD has never done so, despite having nothing to stop them.
That's not strictly true. The PR numbers used for the old K5 chips were ...optimisitic... Which was why AMD coppsed so much flack for going back to it with the Athlon - people had bad memories of the K5 days.
That's funny, because I never said anything even remotely close to that... Not even REMOTELY.
Certainly seems to me you're implying P4s are slower when clock speeds are kept constant (or, as you prefer to put it, their "Mhz ratings").
Clock speeds cannot be compared between chips of different architectures. This means it's just as wrong to say an Athlon at 2Ghz is faster than a P4 at 2Ghz as it is to say a 2.4Ghz P4 is faster than a 2Ghz Athlon.
As I keep trying to say, clock-for-clock performance comparisons are meaningless.
For most of its life, the P4 wasn't "underperforming", it was as fast - if not faster - than the Athlon.
First of all, The MHz numbers for AMD CPUs have never been over-inflated as far as I can remember, as Intel did with the P4.
Uh, you can't "over inflate" a clock speed. It is what it is. "PR" numbers, OTOH...
Athlons had a higher MHz rating because they were legitimately faster (although at the expense of being hotter).
P4s were as fast - if not faster than Athlons. The fact that they used a higher clock speed to do this is irrelevant.
It always amazes me the number of people who say "clock speed doesn't matter" then immediately turn around (often in the same sentence !) and say "$CPU is faster than the Pentium 4 at the same Mhz".
No, actually it's intended to provide a reasonable comparison to Pentium 4s, despite the disparity in MHz that Intel caused.
The PR rating is a number that relates to the original Athlon, not the P4.
What Intel did seems to be the attempt to cause confusion.
Huh ? Intel labelled their chips with the clock speed and processor type, AMD uses an approximate number relating a chips performance to the original Athlon, but it's *Intel* attempting to cause confusion ?
Which APIs require it ?
[...] or design the system so game makers come to expect it as normal.
That admin is the default is no justification for writing software that assumes it has free reign to modify parts of the system it has no business accessing. Not storing runtime and/or configuration data in the available per-user locations is just plain bad coding.
But if you look there are reasons why many of these apps do things that require admin - they need to touch some part of the system untouchable otherwise.
No, they don't. 99% of apps I've ever seen that "require" Administrator level privileges to run, do so because:
* They're trying to write HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE when they should be using HKEY_CURRENT_USER.
* They're trying to write to files somewhere in %SYSTEMROOT% (ie: C:\Windows).
* They're trying to write to files somewhere in the program's own directory.
This has nothing to do with Windows, it's just bad/lazy/ignorant/stupid coding. There's no reason for the average program to be trying to write to or modify system locations or its own directory in normal usage.
So the configurations came to spring form thin air, no-one sat down and thoguht about what they should be.
I have no doubt it was agonised about and that making the default user an Administrator was considered the least worst option.
It's also worth noting that in domain environments, the default user *isn't* an admin, because the impact is much lower.
The group a user is in by default is in no way a design issue. Multiuser is a design issue. ACLs are a design issue. Multithreading is a design issue. CPU scheduling and memory management are design issues.
What group a user is in by default is a barely significant configuration semantic.
Even grudgingly you have to admit understanding my point. There is the reality of little numbes on a pretty chart, and then what actually is in this world.
Your point is apparently that because Windows has lots of viruses around (most of which are just reimplementations of the same thing with a different name) it's got a relatively high bug count than other products. Presumably you also think that the higher numbers of published exploits (again, many of which are just the same thing over and over again with different names) and has a bigger reputation of being "insecure" support this view.
If you really believe this, then there's probably not much I can do to convince you that your logic is flawed and that you actually need relevant numbers to support your assertion. Relevant numbers would be things that reported numbers of unique vulnerabilities and compared them to similar type of vulnerabilities on other platforms. Gathering numbers like that isn't a trivial task, however, and certainly none of the security sites/mailing lists/teams I've ever seen do so in a manner suitable for such good comparisons (they tend to mix in things like vulnerabilities in irrelevant bits of software like Open Office).
The simple fact is that, given exploits of equal severity, the impact on Windows machines will be far, far, *far* greater than any other platform because there's so many of them. Heck, OS X has had vulnerabilities in the past that potentially left the entire system wide open and no-one even bothered to write an exploit, let alone release it into the wild (not that it would have spread particularly fast, with only about 1 in every 80 - 100 machines being vulnerable).
The point I'm trying to get across here is that simplistic looks at the number of viruses, how many machines are exploited, how long an unpatched machine takes to be exploited and the like are _atrocious_ metrics to use for trying to make any sort of qualitative comparison. Or, as the statisticians like to say, "correlation is not causation".
Except you can't run a lot of apps then...
Fortunately,
Well, in that particular comment I was thinking back to when things like the printing press were new and the reproduction of printed material was an expensive and uncommon operation.
Actually, my job, working for publishers, is to take the steaming piles of crap that authors produce and turn them into readable attractive priducts. Have you ever read a self-published book? Few seem to know how to use the spellcheck for a start. Would you like all books to be of that standard? If no one pays people like me, they will be.
If enough people want books that aren't "steaming piles of crap", you'll get paid.
"Logically"? I can shoplift and sell the goods, am I then then more "deserving" and efficient than the shopkeeper?
You take a serious credibility hit when you try and equate theft and copyright infringment. Find a better argument.
This is good?
Is it bad ? It's not like 90% of material today isn't already formulaic.
What this means is DRM to the maximum extent. Products will be fucked up and made harder to use; books may be released in some proprietary digital format that can only be used on certain locked-down reading devices. This would create a corporate monopoly and barriers to entry much worse than now unless you just want to give away your work.
On the other hand, companies that release products that are hard to use or too restrictive will go out of business because no-one will buy their products.
Why not? Everyone's "business model" is protected. E.g., your average working stiff has legislation to protect his "business model" of toiling and being paid at the end of the month; a farmer to protect him from people harvesting from his fields, etc.
Please don't tell me you're trying to equate anti-slavery and generic property laws with copyright. The former is just ludicrous and the latter doesn't even come *close* to the scope of copyright.
As mentioned, I work in publishing, so I know how thin the margins are. I do believe that copyright is too long, but I know that removing it entirely would not give you better books to read, would not reward the creators and encourage them to do better.
You haven't convinced me it would be any _worse_. I'm not a free market zealot (firm believe in publically-owned/funded utilities, education and healthcare, for example), but I really think the free market would do a better job of balancing content availability and protection than government can. Legislation is too easy to buy.