"You can have my keys, they are useless without my pass phrases and you can have my pass phrases, when you extract them from my cold dead brain (using mnemonic sensors, probably)."
Wow! You got a little carried away there, didn't you? Totally missed my point too, didn't you?
I was talking about being arrested for a crime and then not cooperating with the police. That's probably illegal in any country - there's nothing special about this act in Australia. If they demand that you give the key to the safety deposit box where you hid your child porn and you refuse, you're basically doing the same thing as if they demand the keys and pass phrases to your data. There's nothing special about digital data and there shouldn't be anything special about it.
I think you need to relax a little.. You don't need to check if your doors are locked 10 times before you go to bed either. There is no black van outside your window.
.. someone read the article and realized that they are already acknowledging that system admins and other professionals need "hacker tools" and before the bill is accepted, there would be adjustments to the bill because of this very reason.
Also, if you encrypt your hard drive, then get somehow arrested for say.. distributing child porn, the police would tell you to give them the key to open the encryption. If you just say "nope.. I won't do it", I'm pretty sure you get into a lot of trouble in ANY country - not just Australia. You SHOULD be in a lot of trouble too!
So what is it that is so bad about this bill? And YES I've read 1984 and NO, this is nothing like that.
Something just hit me.. Suppose you go along with the Microsoft activation thing.. Suppose you install Windows XP and activate it. Now suppose you also install Office XP and activate that. Now suppose that it's 3 years later and you have 10 pieces of Microsoft software on your machine, all activated.
Now suppose you do a major upgrade on your computer.. enough to cause the activations to think they are on a different computer and thus de-activating themselves. Sure, you can call Microsoft.. but you have 10 pieces of software that are all de-activated. Activating it will be a MAJOR pain in the ass!
Now suppose it's not just one machine. What if you're a system admin in a company with 150 workstations and they all upgraded on the same day.
What am I missing? It can't possibly be THIS bad can it?!
Terrible API Documentation? Hello? Microsoft's documentation is of *very* high quality! Have you ever used the MSDN Library? It rocks! Feel free to diss MS where they do things wrong, but documentation is one of the few things they're great at!
While I'm not a big fan of WAP, this article is just plain wrong. I read this from "The Feature", quoting an "Industry Standard" article describing the M-Services guidelines:
"For instance, the guidelines call for phones to be compliant with WAP 1.2 this year and, looking into next year, the next generation of M-Services phones should be compatible with WAP 2.0."
Remember what WAP 2.0 is? The markup language used is no longer WML but XHTML. If that's not standard enough for you, I don't know what is!
Umm.. Could it be that they cost 25% more because the people are prepared to pay 25% more? The price is set so that they get maximum profits from the sales. If they put a higher price, they would lose money because people wouldn't buy the DVD's anymore. If they put a lower price, they would lose money because people would buy just the same but for a cheaper price. It's quite simple really and I don't see what there is to whine about it. I own close to 50 DVD's and God knows how many CD's and it would never occur to me to bitch about the prices. If you can't afford it, don't buy it! It's not like we're talking about a basic life necessity here, like food or water or something. Do you also cry about that Ferrari's cost too much?
DVD zoning sucks, of course, since it means you can't really buy DVD's from, let's say Amazon.com if you live in Europe but it's not like they put the zones there just to piss people off. There's a good reason for it and the Slashdot crowd that gets all music for free from Napster / Limewire / Gnutella / whatever and pirates movies with DivX is a good example of why the zones are there. They probably don't work too well since it's very easy to get a zone-free DVD player, but that's besides the point.
You say that for rendering speed, Mozilla 0.9.1 would beat IE 6. That's not what the Mozilla developers are saying tho. For network loading, I don't know, but pure rendering speed should still be faster in IE.
Interface speed.. IE is *WAY* faster than Mozilla. On a fast computer, you may not notice much difference but on a slower one like some laptops, the difference is huge.
Sidebar. IE ripped Mozilla? Hello? The sidebar in Mozilla is based on the sidebar that appeared in IE 4. It has gone through several iterations of development, first being called Aurora, then having these "flash notification" thingies that would show you that you have a new email etc., and now finally, the version we see in Mozilla now. Microsoft has said that it will drop the content-panes (news, media player etc.) for the release of IE6 because the public didn't like it in usuability testing. But to say that Microsoft ripped the idea from Mozilla is just wrong as Mozilla really ripped the idea from IE4.
Yes, that's the kind of stats I've seen too. What's even more shocking is that Mozilla and Netscape 6.x combined have less than 0.5% market share and IE 6 beta has above 1%, despite the fact that Mozilla and Netscape 6.x have been out WAY longer. Netscape's market share is hovering around 10% and dropping, IE's is closing in on 90%.
Netscape still has a very strong brand name and while it's no longer the case that Netscape == the Internet, the brand is still very valuable and recognized. Wasn't there a story here a couple of days ago about the top-4 web sites receiving 60% of all clicks. Netscape was one of those sites and it sounds like AOL will start pushing it even more now. It's much easier to build on something existing than starting from scratch. When AOL bought Netscape, everyone assumed it was because of the browser. Even if that was the case, the weight has definitely shifted now and unfortunately, it's much because of the failure of Mozilla.
And yes, I know Mozilla (1.0) hasn't been released yet so it's theoretically too early to call it a failure. But that's the whole point - three years later, it's still not at 1.0 and Netscape 6.x was a flop of monumental proportions. Neoplanet has backed away from it and now it seems AOL is too.
No, it doesn't mean www.microsoft.com, even though it's one of the most frequently visited sites on the net. It means MSN and all sites that belong to that "division" such as Hotmail, Expedia and possibly MSNBC too, though I'm not sure about that.
And let's not diss Microsoft about their site because quite frankly, MSDN is one of the best tech documentation sites on the net! The MS knowledge base is also very good..
Considering that IE has a market share of over 75% and Mozilla and Netscape 6 *COMBINED* have less than 0.5%, I think maybe you should wait a little before you announce Mozilla as "the new king".
What would running Linux have helped? The attack was choking his network connection cause it used up all the bandwidth. It wasn't the fault of the OS's in use. Geez.
There *IS* a good web browser available on these platforms - Internet Explorer. Why would anyone want to change, except for political reasons? Do you have any idea how little people care about the politics about IT? I bet 2 out of 3 people have never even heard that Microsoft would be "evil" and even if they did, they wouldn't care enough to download some other browser that was more politically correct.
MSIE 3.0 did support JavaScript (1.0), while Netscape 3.0 was at version 1.1. MSIE 3 also had limited support for CSS1.
Now.. 7 years for MS is grossly changing history. If you count MSIE 2.0 for MS, you should also be counting Netscape 1.0 for Mozilla. MSIE 4 was a major rewrite and just about everything from MSIE 3 was thrown out the window.
And look at Opera.. There's a small group of people in Norway, in a company nobody has ever heard about, who put together a browser that stomps all over Mozilla. And they did that in what? 2 years?
People seem to under estimate the cross platformness of Internet Explorer. Remeber that it's available on Windows and Mac with very good quality implementations. That already gives it a good 97-98% market. And then there's HP-UX and Solaris, putting the total near 99%.
Even though Mozilla is ported to many more platforms in absolute numbers, the coverage percentage isn't much better than that of IE.
I agree about your points with Linux as a PDA OS but I think you're a little impartial regarding Pocket PC (Win CE) and Palm OS. Palm's are great - I have one, but it's not in the same league as, say, a Compaq iPAQ running Pocket PC (which I also have). A Palm is more like an organizer.. calendar, memo and some cute apps.. A Pocket PC is really a handheld computer.
You can get Visual C++ Embedded Edition from www.microsoft.com (msdn really) for free and the API is almost identical to the normal Win32 API - including MFC! No other PDA platform can compete in development tools and the step from Win32 to Pocket PC (Win CE) is very short. The same evening I had installed VC++ EE, I was already coding apps for Pocket PC without any problems.
As far as usability goes, I think the Palm OS is easier to use and learn than Pocket PC, but calling Pocket PC bloated is exaggerating..
The bundle-opoly is probably true to some extent (actually it's quite true) but it doesn't explain why so many people use IE 5.5, which isn't bundled with anything. Also, it doesn't explain why more people use IE 6.0 beta than Mozilla and Netscape 6 *combined*. This is only explained by people CHOOSING to download IE over Mozilla / Netscape 6.
Mozilla + Netscape 6 still have less than 0.5% of market share. If that doesn't get your attention about Netscape being dead, what does?
I'm not going to argue things one way or another but I have to comment about Windows stability. I used to run Windows 98 at home and I rebooted the machine about once in two weeks or so.. Stability was never an issue.
Now I run Windows 2000 on two machines (a laptop and a desktop) and not ONCE has the OS crashed in the about 6 months I've had them.
At my old job, I had an NT 4 workstation and when I left, I checked the uptime - roughly 6 months. It had never even occured to me to reboot, and I had never any problems with that machine even though I developed software on it and the software in development (obviously) crashes all the time.
In my new job, it's all Win2k for desktops and I've seen no crashes on any of the machines yet.
My point? Linux may be stable but stability is definitely not an issue on the Windows side either, except on the Windows 9x machines. However, even for Windows 9x's, it's nowhere near the problem some Slashdot posters make it out to be. Of course there will be people who have had Windows 9x (or even NT) installations that crashed once an hour, but for some odd reason, it usually always seems to happen to those people who are the most fanatic anti Microsofters.
"All strongly held opinions should be strongly opposed."
Let me get this straight; we have a site that shows defaced (cracked) sites and it shuts down because there are simply too many of them these days. And this is a bad thing because..?? Why?
Listing security bugs so people can protect themselves is a good thing. But what possible good does showing defaced sites do anyone? If anything, it encourages more cracking. Please tell me that we all agree that cracking sites is a bad thing! I can't imagine why anyone would be interested in looking at the work of 14 year old script kiddies anyway (who read about the latest IIS exploit)!
Linus Torvalds actually *DID* serve in the army in Finland, just like any other finnish male. 11 months and I think his rank is (alikersantti), which is "corporal" (squad leader) in english.
The rest of the post is quite accurate, but regarding Linus Torvalds, I have to comment. I'm a swedish speaking finn, just like Linus Torvalds and we have absolutely nothing to do with Sweden except that we speak swedish as our mother tounge. That's all. Think about french speaking Canadians. They aren't really French but just as Canadian as english speaking Canadians.
Maybe Linus (or mine) great great great grandfather was a Swede, but then you could also argue that [insert favorite American here] isn't really American but really [irish|german|french|whatever].
BTW, if you've read Rebel Code by Glyn Moody, it talks about "the duck pond". Well, that is a very real concept among swedish speaking finns in Finland. It really almost is as if every swedish speaking finn knows every other swedish speaking finn, at least indirectly. A friend of mine studied with Linus Torvalds. An army buddy of mine claimed to be a close friend of Linus Torvalds (this was in 1994 before he was even all that famous) etc. Personally I've never met or even seen him even tho I live quite close to where he lived before he went to work in the USA.
Considering that Raskin could be considered the father of the Apple Macintosh, I think it's a little unfair to say he hasn't done anything for making user interfaces beter.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, check out the moderation on that one.. "Informative". Hello? How about "funny"? Geez.
"You can have my keys, they are useless without my pass phrases and you can have my pass phrases, when you extract them from my cold dead brain (using mnemonic sensors, probably)."
Wow! You got a little carried away there, didn't you? Totally missed my point too, didn't you?
I was talking about being arrested for a crime and then not cooperating with the police. That's probably illegal in any country - there's nothing special about this act in Australia. If they demand that you give the key to the safety deposit box where you hid your child porn and you refuse, you're basically doing the same thing as if they demand the keys and pass phrases to your data. There's nothing special about digital data and there shouldn't be anything special about it.
I think you need to relax a little.. You don't need to check if your doors are locked 10 times before you go to bed either. There is no black van outside your window.
.. someone read the article and realized that they are already acknowledging that system admins and other professionals need "hacker tools" and before the bill is accepted, there would be adjustments to the bill because of this very reason.
Also, if you encrypt your hard drive, then get somehow arrested for say.. distributing child porn, the police would tell you to give them the key to open the encryption. If you just say "nope.. I won't do it", I'm pretty sure you get into a lot of trouble in ANY country - not just Australia. You SHOULD be in a lot of trouble too!
So what is it that is so bad about this bill? And YES I've read 1984 and NO, this is nothing like that.
Something just hit me.. Suppose you go along with the Microsoft activation thing.. Suppose you install Windows XP and activate it. Now suppose you also install Office XP and activate that. Now suppose that it's 3 years later and you have 10 pieces of Microsoft software on your machine, all activated.
Now suppose you do a major upgrade on your computer.. enough to cause the activations to think they are on a different computer and thus de-activating themselves. Sure, you can call Microsoft.. but you have 10 pieces of software that are all de-activated. Activating it will be a MAJOR pain in the ass!
Now suppose it's not just one machine. What if you're a system admin in a company with 150 workstations and they all upgraded on the same day.
What am I missing? It can't possibly be THIS bad can it?!
Terrible API Documentation? Hello? Microsoft's documentation is of *very* high quality! Have you ever used the MSDN Library? It rocks! Feel free to diss MS where they do things wrong, but documentation is one of the few things they're great at!
While I'm not a big fan of WAP, this article is just plain wrong. I read this from "The Feature", quoting an "Industry Standard" article describing the M-Services guidelines:
"For instance, the guidelines call for phones to be compliant with WAP 1.2 this year and, looking into next year, the next generation of M-Services phones should be compatible with WAP 2.0."
Remember what WAP 2.0 is? The markup language used is no longer WML but XHTML. If that's not standard enough for you, I don't know what is!
Umm.. Could it be that they cost 25% more because the people are prepared to pay 25% more? The price is set so that they get maximum profits from the sales. If they put a higher price, they would lose money because people wouldn't buy the DVD's anymore. If they put a lower price, they would lose money because people would buy just the same but for a cheaper price. It's quite simple really and I don't see what there is to whine about it. I own close to 50 DVD's and God knows how many CD's and it would never occur to me to bitch about the prices. If you can't afford it, don't buy it! It's not like we're talking about a basic life necessity here, like food or water or something. Do you also cry about that Ferrari's cost too much?
DVD zoning sucks, of course, since it means you can't really buy DVD's from, let's say Amazon.com if you live in Europe but it's not like they put the zones there just to piss people off. There's a good reason for it and the Slashdot crowd that gets all music for free from Napster / Limewire / Gnutella / whatever and pirates movies with DivX is a good example of why the zones are there. They probably don't work too well since it's very easy to get a zone-free DVD player, but that's besides the point.
A couple of comments..
You say that for rendering speed, Mozilla 0.9.1 would beat IE 6. That's not what the Mozilla developers are saying tho. For network loading, I don't know, but pure rendering speed should still be faster in IE.
Interface speed.. IE is *WAY* faster than Mozilla. On a fast computer, you may not notice much difference but on a slower one like some laptops, the difference is huge.
Sidebar. IE ripped Mozilla? Hello? The sidebar in Mozilla is based on the sidebar that appeared in IE 4. It has gone through several iterations of development, first being called Aurora, then having these "flash notification" thingies that would show you that you have a new email etc., and now finally, the version we see in Mozilla now. Microsoft has said that it will drop the content-panes (news, media player etc.) for the release of IE6 because the public didn't like it in usuability testing. But to say that Microsoft ripped the idea from Mozilla is just wrong as Mozilla really ripped the idea from IE4.
Yes, that's the kind of stats I've seen too. What's even more shocking is that Mozilla and Netscape 6.x combined have less than 0.5% market share and IE 6 beta has above 1%, despite the fact that Mozilla and Netscape 6.x have been out WAY longer. Netscape's market share is hovering around 10% and dropping, IE's is closing in on 90%.
Netscape still has a very strong brand name and while it's no longer the case that Netscape == the Internet, the brand is still very valuable and recognized. Wasn't there a story here a couple of days ago about the top-4 web sites receiving 60% of all clicks. Netscape was one of those sites and it sounds like AOL will start pushing it even more now. It's much easier to build on something existing than starting from scratch. When AOL bought Netscape, everyone assumed it was because of the browser. Even if that was the case, the weight has definitely shifted now and unfortunately, it's much because of the failure of Mozilla.
And yes, I know Mozilla (1.0) hasn't been released yet so it's theoretically too early to call it a failure. But that's the whole point - three years later, it's still not at 1.0 and Netscape 6.x was a flop of monumental proportions. Neoplanet has backed away from it and now it seems AOL is too.
No, it doesn't mean www.microsoft.com, even though it's one of the most frequently visited sites on the net. It means MSN and all sites that belong to that "division" such as Hotmail, Expedia and possibly MSNBC too, though I'm not sure about that.
And let's not diss Microsoft about their site because quite frankly, MSDN is one of the best tech documentation sites on the net! The MS knowledge base is also very good..
Considering that IE has a market share of over 75% and Mozilla and Netscape 6 *COMBINED* have less than 0.5%, I think maybe you should wait a little before you announce Mozilla as "the new king".
Yes - and what's even more sad is that a lot of people seem to be buying all the crap, judging from the "testimonials". Scary!
What would running Linux have helped? The attack was choking his network connection cause it used up all the bandwidth. It wasn't the fault of the OS's in use. Geez.
There *IS* a good web browser available on these platforms - Internet Explorer. Why would anyone want to change, except for political reasons? Do you have any idea how little people care about the politics about IT? I bet 2 out of 3 people have never even heard that Microsoft would be "evil" and even if they did, they wouldn't care enough to download some other browser that was more politically correct.
MSIE 3.0 did support JavaScript (1.0), while Netscape 3.0 was at version 1.1. MSIE 3 also had limited support for CSS1.
Now.. 7 years for MS is grossly changing history. If you count MSIE 2.0 for MS, you should also be counting Netscape 1.0 for Mozilla. MSIE 4 was a major rewrite and just about everything from MSIE 3 was thrown out the window.
And look at Opera.. There's a small group of people in Norway, in a company nobody has ever heard about, who put together a browser that stomps all over Mozilla. And they did that in what? 2 years?
People seem to under estimate the cross platformness of Internet Explorer. Remeber that it's available on Windows and Mac with very good quality implementations. That already gives it a good 97-98% market. And then there's HP-UX and Solaris, putting the total near 99%.
Even though Mozilla is ported to many more platforms in absolute numbers, the coverage percentage isn't much better than that of IE.
I agree about your points with Linux as a PDA OS but I think you're a little impartial regarding Pocket PC (Win CE) and Palm OS. Palm's are great - I have one, but it's not in the same league as, say, a Compaq iPAQ running Pocket PC (which I also have). A Palm is more like an organizer.. calendar, memo and some cute apps.. A Pocket PC is really a handheld computer.
You can get Visual C++ Embedded Edition from www.microsoft.com (msdn really) for free and the API is almost identical to the normal Win32 API - including MFC! No other PDA platform can compete in development tools and the step from Win32 to Pocket PC (Win CE) is very short. The same evening I had installed VC++ EE, I was already coding apps for Pocket PC without any problems.
As far as usability goes, I think the Palm OS is easier to use and learn than Pocket PC, but calling Pocket PC bloated is exaggerating..
The bundle-opoly is probably true to some extent (actually it's quite true) but it doesn't explain why so many people use IE 5.5, which isn't bundled with anything. Also, it doesn't explain why more people use IE 6.0 beta than Mozilla and Netscape 6 *combined*. This is only explained by people CHOOSING to download IE over Mozilla / Netscape 6.
Mozilla + Netscape 6 still have less than 0.5% of market share. If that doesn't get your attention about Netscape being dead, what does?
I'm not going to argue things one way or another but I have to comment about Windows stability. I used to run Windows 98 at home and I rebooted the machine about once in two weeks or so.. Stability was never an issue.
Now I run Windows 2000 on two machines (a laptop and a desktop) and not ONCE has the OS crashed in the about 6 months I've had them.
At my old job, I had an NT 4 workstation and when I left, I checked the uptime - roughly 6 months. It had never even occured to me to reboot, and I had never any problems with that machine even though I developed software on it and the software in development (obviously) crashes all the time.
In my new job, it's all Win2k for desktops and I've seen no crashes on any of the machines yet.
My point? Linux may be stable but stability is definitely not an issue on the Windows side either, except on the Windows 9x machines. However, even for Windows 9x's, it's nowhere near the problem some Slashdot posters make it out to be. Of course there will be people who have had Windows 9x (or even NT) installations that crashed once an hour, but for some odd reason, it usually always seems to happen to those people who are the most fanatic anti Microsofters.
"All strongly held opinions should be strongly opposed."
Let me get this straight; we have a site that shows defaced (cracked) sites and it shuts down because there are simply too many of them these days. And this is a bad thing because..?? Why?
Listing security bugs so people can protect themselves is a good thing. But what possible good does showing defaced sites do anyone? If anything, it encourages more cracking. Please tell me that we all agree that cracking sites is a bad thing! I can't imagine why anyone would be interested in looking at the work of 14 year old script kiddies anyway (who read about the latest IIS exploit)!
Linus Torvalds actually *DID* serve in the army in Finland, just like any other finnish male. 11 months and I think his rank is (alikersantti), which is "corporal" (squad leader) in english.
The rest of the post is quite accurate, but regarding Linus Torvalds, I have to comment. I'm a swedish speaking finn, just like Linus Torvalds and we have absolutely nothing to do with Sweden except that we speak swedish as our mother tounge. That's all. Think about french speaking Canadians. They aren't really French but just as Canadian as english speaking Canadians.
Maybe Linus (or mine) great great great grandfather was a Swede, but then you could also argue that [insert favorite American here] isn't really American but really [irish|german|french|whatever].
BTW, if you've read Rebel Code by Glyn Moody, it talks about "the duck pond". Well, that is a very real concept among swedish speaking finns in Finland. It really almost is as if every swedish speaking finn knows every other swedish speaking finn, at least indirectly. A friend of mine studied with Linus Torvalds. An army buddy of mine claimed to be a close friend of Linus Torvalds (this was in 1994 before he was even all that famous) etc. Personally I've never met or even seen him even tho I live quite close to where he lived before he went to work in the USA.
Considering that Raskin could be considered the father of the Apple Macintosh, I think it's a little unfair to say he hasn't done anything for making user interfaces beter.
Got any facts to back that up?