What really bothers me is that this is truly "lazy man's crypto." MS could have made a nice GUI for gpg and better PGP support in its XP products, but they deliver this instead? MS is in a position where it can bring crypto to the masses and other goodies.
Why would Microsoft want to promote something which is open and multi-platform? That just dosn't fit with their proprietary software business model/religion.
It's neither wrong or frightening. It's simply good for consumers. Nobody cares if you import digital watches or microchips, so why should anyone care about books?
But there are plenty of products where a big fuss is made. Including court orders against retailers preventing their use of grey or parallel imports.
I do not understand the prevailing viewpoint that we can't hand count all ballots and not have safe elections.
It's only a common viewpoint in the US.
Our biggest problem is that we don't count the votes at the voting place in most areas. Most areas lock up the ballot box and haul them to the court house. The first chance to rig the vote is at the poll, the second when the ballots are in transit, and the third when they are counted out of public view in some upstairs court house room.
The solution to this is simple, do everything in public. Let anyone who wants to photograph the ballot box when it is locked and when it arrives for the count. Transport it only in a vehicle with non tinted windows.
Voting machines or counting machines are just devices designed to hide the vote counting process from the public and thus rig the vote.
The more mechanisation you have the easier it is for a small number of people to get away with rigging a vote. If you have things done transparently if would take a massive conspiracy to rig things and only one person to stop this happening.
The ideal ballot is one that results in a piece of paper that is both human-readable and machine readable. There hasn't been many problems with the "fill in the bubble" system of balloting, even though that system is open to a risk of users who don't understand that an X or checkmark in the bubble doesn't work.
That's a problem with machine design. It's perfectly possible to have an OMR which can recognise the difference between an unmarked area and a marked area.
why is it so hard to have the voter write a number on a paper, put the paper in a box, once the box is full few volunteers(from all parties&political groups) go through them and enter them to a machine(basically this is how most western nations do it already).
The USA is very strongly NIA about plenty of things.
(yeah yeah, usa may have more people than most western countries Hardly relevent since manual vote counting systems scale very well. AFAIK the USA has never held a national election anyway.
but really that is a pathetic excuse to pursuit cheapness in votings,
Cheap? You could buy a lot of ballot boxes and pencils for the cost of one of these machines.
You're assuming a company's time is worth nothing. How much is it going to cost a company to hack together enough open source applications to get close to replacing all of Exchange's functionality
N.B. "Functionality" in this context equates to what they actually use rather than whatever "functionality plug bells & whistles" the thing might come with. Also you need to consider the cost of getting exhange to work and maintaining it.
You have to measure everything from purchase price, to implementation costs, to maintenance costs and so on. Microsoft software may be more in the purchase price department compared to open source software, but if it's less in implementation costs or maintenance costs, its TCO will be lower.
If you actually really do measure everything then Microsoft is going to have a hard time competing with OSS since catagories of TCO such as "Maintaining a perfect inventory of software licences in case the BSA come knocking" only apply to proprietary software. With MS Windows there is anti-virus software, patching all sorts of things Microsoft has chosen to "integrate" into the OS for no very good reason, forced "upgrades" to push the TCO up still further.
Costs that come up when switch.
Testing (QA) on the new product, mainly to help develop some means of support across the organization; ie standards. You also have to determine the best install of the package and how to deliver it. (is it easy to push?)
One thing to remember is that if you "stick with" Microsoft you effectivly have to "switch" every couple of years anyway.
Training. Sure it might LOOK like package X. The key is finding the quirks that generate support calls and find solutions.
"It" could well be office 2003 against Office 2000 or Office XP.
Prior investment. If it works, its even cheaper to not upgrade and keep the old stuff.
Considerably easier with an open source system where support is always possible, than with a proprietary system which may have been EOLed or require as part of your licence to always use the latest version.
Why do people even bother watching TV with that many adverts? 22 minutes per hour is insane. I find the 7.5 minutes allowed here (UK, terrestrial stations) annoying enough.
If you have a US produced "hour long" programme then there is only actually 42-43 minutes of content. So it's a choice between either a 50 minute slot and the 7.5 minutes of adverts. Or an hour long slot including, in addition, 10 minutes of station promotion and trailers.
I've spent the last 6 months working with professional and broadcast level digital tv encoders and decoders, even writing a fair amount of software on both sides. This flag is pretty pointless, and is often a laugh when discussed at work. With the hardware we build and work with, the sort which a broadcaster would use to both create and monitor their transport stream, the ability is needed to record and play back at will, thus, such a flag would pretty much be ignored by our systems if implemented.
Of course, TV station employees are never the source of any of the files on filesharing systems...
Incidentally, there would be substantially less file swapping going on of TV shows if the networks made them available on DVD or electronically.
As well as episodes being broadcast everywhere at the same time (or at least within 24-36 hours). Thing is that US broadcasters would have to start following the rest of the world and broadcast series in order.
I'd love to be able to go FOX and buy the episode of the Futurama I missed the other night for a reasonable - considering it was free on the air price.
Region 1 tends to be last for getting TV series on DVD. Especially those originally produced for the North American market. Because US broadcasters have a well organised system for repeat showings, the rest of the world's broadcasters do not.
Do you think you could log in and shut off RPC fast enough to avoid picking up a worm or two while on a network (like, say, when you register XP over the internet)? Just to let you know, my friend brought his laptop over and hooked it to the internet for the first time, and he picked up the worm while we were still waiting for windows update to get started downloading the fixes.
It probably isn't that hard for a worm to subvert anything which might be subsequently download from Windows Update or an anti-virus software update site. Thus you end up with an infected machine which appears to be fully up to date.
Having worked at multiple large corporations, it is very common to spin the news. "Yes Mr VP, we always call back within 15 minutes per process" Just don't mention that the call was to tell the person that they were going to have to wait another hour or two for real help.
As in there are "lies, damned lies and statistics":)
Microsoft doesn't employ idiots perhaps, but they are ruled by the marketing departmenet. They add features based on what customers want
This is only likely to be the place in a cometitive market, a situation Microsoft hasn't been in for a long time. Anyway different groups of customers will want different things, some of which are mutually exclusive.
and stability isn't what most customers want.
Really when did customers specifically request an unreliable over complex system.
I bitched about rebooting Win9x twice a week at my last job and someone asked what the big deal was. He didn't believe a computer could stay up and running for two weeks, let alone the year or two that some machines are up, essentially zero reboots between kernel upgrades.
Sounds more like Microsoft's marketing working to convince people that a very poor level of reliability, which would never be acceptable with any other machine, is ok.
Linux is different in that its developers add features that they, the developers, want. Developers tend to care more about stability than users and because Linux's development is led by Linus, an developer, we'll see stability continue to be a fairly high priority.
A lot of the time Linux developers either are users or work for users. Thus implying that left to their own devices users do consider reliability to be important. As opposed to all sorts of bells and whistles which some marketing people claim are user requests, without putting up any evidence.
A few months ago, my sister-in-law and her husband bought a new computer (loaded with XP as most are). They are average users: they browse the www, send email, write letters, and play games. The know how to use their box, but they don't know how to administer it.
This a big (if not the biggest) problem with Windows. The lack of proper separation between "user" and "admin" tasks
Many companies promise features and functionality to their existing customers. It's called 'good business'. Many of these companies deliver, that's considered 'good business'. Some companies don't deliver...that's 'bad business'. The 'bad business' companies usually fail to get repeat business...that's the choice of the 'consumer' and exactly what we're seeing here.
This situation only really applies where there is a competitive market. When you have a monopoly the balance of power is toward the supplier.
On the one hand, I'm glad that packages such as OpenOffice are available, but you have got to realize that, if you really need to exchange a large number of Office documents, there is no real alternative except Office.
Except if MS Office dosn't support the language you wish to write the document in the first place:)
Many American principles may have been heavily influenced by, or based upon, Christian doctrine, but they were also based upon a crazy mix of French, English, German, Greek, America, etc. philosophies.
Even more obvious would be Roman, since one of the houses of Congress has a Roman name...
America was formed on Christian principles, not Buddhist principles. It is a Christian country and it is defined and based on those assumptions.
Quite a lot of Christianity was co-opted from all over the place anyway. Also the idea that the US was founded mostly by "Christians" appears to be something of a modern myth.
But America == democracy so if the majority wants God in the government and in public areas then shutup about it.
Actually the US is a federal republic with an explicit consitution. Separation between religion and state is specifically refered to in that constitution. There is also the issue of very often in politics a "majority" turns out to actually be a vocal minority.
Congressmen pray all the time before meetings and no one has a problem with it.
It depends if they do this on their own time or if they do this whilst they are ment to be serving the public.
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What really bothers me is that this is truly "lazy man's crypto." MS could have made a nice GUI for gpg and better PGP support in its XP products, but they deliver this instead? MS is in a position where it can bring crypto to the masses and other goodies.
Why would Microsoft want to promote something which is open and multi-platform? That just dosn't fit with their proprietary software business model/religion.
It's neither wrong or frightening. It's simply good for consumers. Nobody cares if you import digital watches or microchips, so why should anyone care about books?
But there are plenty of products where a big fuss is made. Including court orders against retailers preventing their use of grey or parallel imports.
No should be: how the free market internet has enabled capitalism to trump corporate price fixing.
Possibly soon to become "How big corporates use the courts to counter globalization when it hurts their price fixing..."
I do not understand the prevailing viewpoint that we can't hand count all ballots and not have safe elections.
It's only a common viewpoint in the US.
Our biggest problem is that we don't count the votes at the voting place in most areas. Most areas lock up the ballot box and haul them to the court house. The first chance to rig the vote is at the poll, the second when the ballots are in transit, and the third when they are counted out of public view in some upstairs court house room.
The solution to this is simple, do everything in public. Let anyone who wants to photograph the ballot box when it is locked and when it arrives for the count. Transport it only in a vehicle with non tinted windows.
Voting machines or counting machines are just devices designed to hide the vote counting process from the public and thus rig the vote.
The more mechanisation you have the easier it is for a small number of people to get away with rigging a vote. If you have things done transparently if would take a massive conspiracy to rig things and only one person to stop this happening.
The ideal ballot is one that results in a piece of paper that is both human-readable and machine readable. There hasn't been many problems with the "fill in the bubble" system of balloting, even though that system is open to a risk of users who don't understand that an X or checkmark in the bubble doesn't work.
That's a problem with machine design. It's perfectly possible to have an OMR which can recognise the difference between an unmarked area and a marked area.
why is it so hard to have the voter write a number on a paper, put the paper in a box, once the box is full few volunteers(from all parties&political groups) go through them and enter them to a machine(basically this is how most western nations do it already).
The USA is very strongly NIA about plenty of things.
(yeah yeah, usa may have more people than most western countries
Hardly relevent since manual vote counting systems scale very well. AFAIK the USA has never held a national election anyway.
but really that is a pathetic excuse to pursuit cheapness in votings,
Cheap? You could buy a lot of ballot boxes and pencils for the cost of one of these machines.
You're assuming a company's time is worth nothing. How much is it going to cost a company to hack together enough open source applications to get close to replacing all of Exchange's functionality
N.B. "Functionality" in this context equates to what they actually use rather than whatever "functionality plug bells & whistles" the thing might come with.
Also you need to consider the cost of getting exhange to work and maintaining it.
You have to measure everything from purchase price, to implementation costs, to maintenance costs and so on. Microsoft software may be more in the purchase price department compared to open source software, but if it's less in implementation costs or maintenance costs, its TCO will be lower.
If you actually really do measure everything then Microsoft is going to have a hard time competing with OSS since catagories of TCO such as "Maintaining a perfect inventory of software licences in case the BSA come knocking" only apply to proprietary software. With MS Windows there is anti-virus software, patching all sorts of things Microsoft has chosen to "integrate" into the OS for no very good reason, forced "upgrades" to push the TCO up still further.
Prior Investment: you're absolutely correct here, except for the fact that MS produces notoriously buggy software that it EOLs after a few years.
:)
Possibly this means in practice that it gets discontinued just as you are getting on top of its quirks
Costs that come up when switch.
Testing (QA) on the new product, mainly to help develop some means of support across the organization; ie standards. You also have to determine the best install of the package and how to deliver it. (is it easy to push?)
One thing to remember is that if you "stick with" Microsoft you effectivly have to "switch" every couple of years anyway.
Training. Sure it might LOOK like package X. The key is finding the quirks that generate support calls and find solutions.
"It" could well be office 2003 against Office 2000 or Office XP.
Prior investment. If it works, its even cheaper to not upgrade and keep the old stuff.
Considerably easier with an open source system where support is always possible, than with a proprietary system which may have been EOLed or require as part of your licence to always use the latest version.
On some channels, there are so few commercials that we actually show US "hour-long" TV shows in 45 minutes.
Which is the same timeslot the, commercial free, BBC allocates for such programmes. With around 2.5 minutes left for trailers and self promotion.
Why do people even bother watching TV with that many adverts? 22 minutes per hour is insane. I find the 7.5 minutes allowed here (UK, terrestrial stations) annoying enough.
If you have a US produced "hour long" programme then there is only actually 42-43 minutes of content. So it's a choice between either a 50 minute slot and the 7.5 minutes of adverts. Or an hour long slot including, in addition, 10 minutes of station promotion and trailers.
I've spent the last 6 months working with professional and broadcast level digital tv encoders and decoders, even writing a fair amount of software on both sides. This flag is pretty pointless, and is often a laugh when discussed at work.
With the hardware we build and work with, the sort which a broadcaster would use to both create and monitor their transport stream, the ability is needed to record and play back at will, thus, such a flag would pretty much be ignored by our systems if implemented.
Of course, TV station employees are never the source of any of the files on filesharing systems...
Incidentally, there would be substantially less file swapping going on of TV shows if the networks made them available on DVD or electronically.
As well as episodes being broadcast everywhere at the same time (or at least within 24-36 hours). Thing is that US broadcasters would have to start following the rest of the world and broadcast series in order.
I'd love to be able to go FOX and buy the episode of the Futurama I missed the other night for a reasonable - considering it was free on the air price.
Region 1 tends to be last for getting TV series on DVD. Especially those originally produced for the North American market. Because US broadcasters have a well organised system for repeat showings, the rest of the world's broadcasters do not.
Do you think you could log in and shut off RPC fast enough to avoid picking up a worm or two while on a network (like, say, when you register XP over the internet)? Just to let you know, my friend brought his laptop over and hooked it to the internet for the first time, and he picked up the worm while we were still waiting for windows update to get started downloading the fixes.
It probably isn't that hard for a worm to subvert anything which might be subsequently download from Windows Update or an anti-virus software update site. Thus you end up with an infected machine which appears to be fully up to date.
Having worked at multiple large corporations, it is very common to spin the news. "Yes Mr VP, we always call back within 15 minutes per process" Just don't mention that the call was to tell the person that they were going to have to wait another hour or two for real help.
:)
As in there are "lies, damned lies and statistics"
Because Windows is so highly integrated
Or as the rest of the world knows it "deliberatly written in sphagetti code"...
Microsoft doesn't employ idiots perhaps, but they are ruled by the marketing departmenet. They add features based on what customers want
This is only likely to be the place in a cometitive market, a situation Microsoft hasn't been in for a long time. Anyway different groups of customers will want different things, some of which are mutually exclusive.
and stability isn't what most customers want.
Really when did customers specifically request an unreliable over complex system.
I bitched about rebooting Win9x twice a week at my last job and someone asked what the big deal was. He didn't believe a computer could stay up and running for two weeks, let alone the year or two that some machines are up, essentially zero reboots between kernel upgrades.
Sounds more like Microsoft's marketing working to convince people that a very poor level of reliability, which would never be acceptable with any other machine, is ok.
Linux is different in that its developers add features that they, the developers, want. Developers tend to care more about stability than users and because Linux's development is led by Linus, an developer, we'll see stability continue to be a fairly high priority.
A lot of the time Linux developers either are users or work for users. Thus implying that left to their own devices users do consider reliability to be important. As opposed to all sorts of bells and whistles which some marketing people claim are user requests, without putting up any evidence.
A few months ago, my sister-in-law and her husband bought a new computer (loaded with XP as most are). They are average users: they browse the www, send email, write letters, and play games. The know how to use their box, but they don't know how to administer it.
This a big (if not the biggest) problem with Windows. The lack of proper separation between "user" and "admin" tasks
They were pretty happy that MS products didn't work on the sabbath.
It would actually be quite complex to get a computer program to stop working on the sabbath. Since it would need to know the exact time of sunset.
Many companies promise features and functionality to their existing customers. It's called 'good business'. Many of these companies deliver, that's considered 'good business'. Some companies don't deliver...that's 'bad business'. The 'bad business' companies usually fail to get repeat business...that's the choice of the 'consumer' and exactly what we're seeing here.
This situation only really applies where there is a competitive market. When you have a monopoly the balance of power is toward the supplier.
On the one hand, I'm glad that packages such as OpenOffice are available, but you have got to realize that, if you really need to exchange a large number of Office documents, there is no real alternative except Office.
:)
Except if MS Office dosn't support the language you wish to write the document in the first place
Many American principles may have been heavily influenced by, or based upon, Christian doctrine, but they were also based upon a crazy mix of French, English, German, Greek, America, etc. philosophies.
Even more obvious would be Roman, since one of the houses of Congress has a Roman name...
America was formed on Christian principles, not Buddhist principles. It is a Christian country and it is defined and based on those assumptions.
Quite a lot of Christianity was co-opted from all over the place anyway. Also the idea that the US was founded mostly by "Christians" appears to be something of a modern myth.
People like you would be at the front of the line screaming Bloody Murder if the pledge were changed to "one nation, under Allah"
the irony here being that "Allah" simply means "God" in Arabic. An Arabic speaking Christian would not be offended at all...
But America == democracy so if the majority wants God in the government and in public areas then shutup about it.
Actually the US is a federal republic with an explicit consitution. Separation between religion and state is specifically refered to in that constitution.
There is also the issue of very often in politics a "majority" turns out to actually be a vocal minority.
Congressmen pray all the time before meetings and no one has a problem with it.
It depends if they do this on their own time or if they do this whilst they are ment to be serving the public.