> you can find out all kinds of things about it, such as any shares it has open.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but "anonymous connections" have been disabled in recent versions of Windows... ie, you can't see shares without authenticating first. Admittedly this was a big problem back with NT4.
Except the big security issue with IE is that the security zones tend not to work properly.
Furthermore, it would be totally unrealistic to ship IE with no ActiveX support, just like you would never want Firefox with no Plugin or Extention support -- too much useful stuff plugs into the browser.. and ActiveX is IE's plugin interface.
However, MS could do is completely remove the Package Download & Install feature. You could still go to Windows Update (etc), but you would need to install the WU software from outside of the browser.
Free marketing? When BMW or Ford is deciding which engine controller chip to buy, I don't think they put much value in Steve Jobs' Photoshop benchmarks.
68060 was the same story as per usual with Mac CPUs -- it came out three years too late. Apple was stuck with a lagging 040 line up for several years, and was already shipping 80Mhz PowerPCs by the time 060 hit the streets. (And yeah, the emulation sucked, but so be it.)
It's like the other day when some guy was arguing for an upcoming IBM POWER5-Lite Chip in Macs... even though it probably won't be out until 2008 or something.
Google Analytics is like a cut-down copy of Omniture SiteCatalyst, a product widely used by Fortune 500 type corporations.
What's interesting about Google's product is that it seems like it might be priced and targetted at smaller sites. But the product itself is not necessarily new and exciting.
I'm curious as to what exactly their script does - is it solely clicks or is tracking users over a session?
Creates a webbug (pixel), counts the page view, and probably (ab)uses your existing google.com cookie. You can bet it's tracking sessions because unique page visits is an important metric.
When Apple introduce iWork, Steve Jobs said about twenty times that it wasn't intended to compete with MS Office.
Calling this a "defeat" is ridiclous. MS Office Support has always been one of the Mac's strongest advantages, and Apple's will always bend-over backwards to keep it.
So Microsoft is still charging a lot of money for this software so it's not like they're taking a profit hit or just handing this out.
One important fact to keep in mind is that very few Windows users pay "retail price" for MS Office. It's either bundled cheaply as an OEM edition, or corporations get massive discount. The actual cost of MS Office for Windows is usually around $100-$150
Meanwhile, on the Mac side, there's no volume discounts and the OEM packages are limited. So the average Mac Office user is paying much closer to the MSRP of $600.
Back in the 90s, Microsoft bragged that they made more revenue per computer for Macs than PCs. That might not be true anymore, but I imagine it's very close.
Almost all of the design programs are built on cross-platform frameworks, so there really that much of a platform advantage as some would believe. Photoshop/Illustrator/Quark/etc don't use exotic Mac APIs. The color-matching is better on Mac, but perhaps more importantly, most Apple displays have similar properties, unlike the mess of stuff you seen in the PC world.
Office 2004 for OS X is light years better than Office 2003 for Windows.
Ridiclous -- the featuresets between the two suites have diverged. While the Mac version has some consumer and student-oriented features not found in the Windows version, there's a TON of corporate/groupware stuff that's not in the Mac version.
And that proves my point -- Gibson is obsessed with raw sockets, but makes barely a mention of the crappy Least-Privileged User support in Windows. Microsoft could have held up XP and fixed the real issue. Raw Sockets only make a difference *after* your machine has been owned.
It seems like the only thing you've proven is that PowerBooks and ThinkPads that had probably similar retail prices also have similar resale values.
Plus without knowing what people paid for those things originally, it's worthless data. I'm pretty sure that very few Dell Latitudes sold for $2500 new.
Also, like I said, one can buy a NEW laptop for $700.
Gibson brought this up during the XP Beta period and could have addressed the issue in terms of "Users should not be Admin". Instead he framed it as "Raw Sockets are a dangerous feature that should be removed".
However, I don't think MS took out the feature because of Gibson. Instead they got sick of being DDoSed from exploited Windows boxes and went for the quick fix in XP2.
Either that, or there are one or two obscure buggy old Windows applications which rely on the "wrong" behavior. Microsoft reverse-engineered them and figured out this only happens when the WMF header is incorrect, and coded around that. WINE reverse-engineered them and allowed the behavior at all times.
I only say this because it's well known that WINE aims for app compatibility rather than a complete implementation of Win32, so it's highly likely that they would have taken the easiest route to getting something or other to work.
You seem to have missed the point that old PC hardware is worthless because you can buy a relatively kick-ass brand-new PC for $500. In a matter of time, you will be able to buy a similar kick-ass Mac for $600. Furthermore, that Mac model will be upgraded @ 2-3 month increments. Welcome to Intel, Macboys.
Furthermore, if you are so concerned about the resale value of your sub-$1000 computer, allow me to suggest that you aren't exactly Apple's target market in the first place.
When I checked out MyFaces, the sample controls on their site were completely buggy. We also experimented with Oracle's and it was a nightmare. IMO, if you want to use JSF, you should stick with the stock package and roll your own custom controls.
I don't think the collectors market has much relevance for what we're talking about.
I think if you look at the 90s, when PowerPC was scaling up quickly, the depreciation value of Macs wasn't that out of line with PCs. It was only after the G4 languished for years (and Apple actually raised their prices) did you see huge resale value on 3-4 year old Macs.
How much will a 2 year old 1.8Ghz MacBook Pro sell for when Apple is selling a 2.2Ghz iBook for $799?
Finally, the bulk of the PC market is now so cheap that nobody really cares about resale value.
Dual processor powermacs when it was mostly only the/. crowd that knew what dual processors could do.
Back then, the slashdot crowd was well aware that Apple shipped an OS that didn't support SMP. It was the uneducated Mac crowd that bought those mostly useless things up after Jobs BSed them.
Also, in those days PC dual-proc support was quite ubiquitious due to the BX chipset, hacked celerons, etc. However, when PCs tripled in speed for half the price, it was clear to a lot of users that they didn't *need* dual-procs (unlike the poor G4 users).
Now that Apple is on the Intel obsolesce cycle don't expect to see those depreciation values you saw with the poorly scaling G4 & G5. Especially since Apple also seems to be going in the direct of producing cheaper consumer hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
I assume that you also do not use things like NFS, RPC (Unix or Windows), yp, NetInfo, and so on.
> you can find out all kinds of things about it, such as any shares it has open.
... ie, you can't see shares without authenticating first. Admittedly this was a big problem back with NT4.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but "anonymous connections" have been disabled in recent versions of Windows
Except the big security issue with IE is that the security zones tend not to work properly.
.. and ActiveX is IE's plugin interface.
Furthermore, it would be totally unrealistic to ship IE with no ActiveX support, just like you would never want Firefox with no Plugin or Extention support -- too much useful stuff plugs into the browser
However, MS could do is completely remove the Package Download & Install feature. You could still go to Windows Update (etc), but you would need to install the WU software from outside of the browser.
Free marketing? When BMW or Ford is deciding which engine controller chip to buy, I don't think they put much value in Steve Jobs' Photoshop benchmarks.
68060 was the same story as per usual with Mac CPUs -- it came out three years too late. Apple was stuck with a lagging 040 line up for several years, and was already shipping 80Mhz PowerPCs by the time 060 hit the streets. (And yeah, the emulation sucked, but so be it.)
... even though it probably won't be out until 2008 or something.
It's like the other day when some guy was arguing for an upcoming IBM POWER5-Lite Chip in Macs
Google Analytics is like a cut-down copy of Omniture SiteCatalyst, a product widely used by Fortune 500 type corporations.
What's interesting about Google's product is that it seems like it might be priced and targetted at smaller sites. But the product itself is not necessarily new and exciting.
I'm curious as to what exactly their script does - is it solely clicks or is tracking users over a session?
Creates a webbug (pixel), counts the page view, and probably (ab)uses your existing google.com cookie. You can bet it's tracking sessions because unique page visits is an important metric.
When Apple introduce iWork, Steve Jobs said about twenty times that it wasn't intended to compete with MS Office.
Calling this a "defeat" is ridiclous. MS Office Support has always been one of the Mac's strongest advantages, and Apple's will always bend-over backwards to keep it.
So Microsoft is still charging a lot of money for this software so it's not like they're taking a profit hit or just handing this out.
One important fact to keep in mind is that very few Windows users pay "retail price" for MS Office. It's either bundled cheaply as an OEM edition, or corporations get massive discount. The actual cost of MS Office for Windows is usually around $100-$150
Meanwhile, on the Mac side, there's no volume discounts and the OEM packages are limited. So the average Mac Office user is paying much closer to the MSRP of $600.
Back in the 90s, Microsoft bragged that they made more revenue per computer for Macs than PCs. That might not be true anymore, but I imagine it's very close.
Almost all of the design programs are built on cross-platform frameworks, so there really that much of a platform advantage as some would believe. Photoshop/Illustrator/Quark/etc don't use exotic Mac APIs. The color-matching is better on Mac, but perhaps more importantly, most Apple displays have similar properties, unlike the mess of stuff you seen in the PC world.
Office 2004 for OS X is light years better than Office 2003 for Windows.
Ridiclous -- the featuresets between the two suites have diverged. While the Mac version has some consumer and student-oriented features not found in the Windows version, there's a TON of corporate/groupware stuff that's not in the Mac version.
Yeah it was about 9 months ago. Unfortunately our architecture is pretty much frozen right now. Maybe next time.
And that proves my point -- Gibson is obsessed with raw sockets, but makes barely a mention of the crappy Least-Privileged User support in Windows. Microsoft could have held up XP and fixed the real issue. Raw Sockets only make a difference *after* your machine has been owned.
It seems like the only thing you've proven is that PowerBooks and ThinkPads that had probably similar retail prices also have similar resale values.
Plus without knowing what people paid for those things originally, it's worthless data. I'm pretty sure that very few Dell Latitudes sold for $2500 new.
Also, like I said, one can buy a NEW laptop for $700.
You sound a lot like those right-wing looneys that blamed Enron's collapse on "overzealous regulation".
Hey, you want to invest your money into companies that are cooking their books, go right ahead. It's a free market.
Gibson brought this up during the XP Beta period and could have addressed the issue in terms of "Users should not be Admin". Instead he framed it as "Raw Sockets are a dangerous feature that should be removed".
However, I don't think MS took out the feature because of Gibson. Instead they got sick of being DDoSed from exploited Windows boxes and went for the quick fix in XP2.
> Something complex and secure is likely to stick out.
/* The following check is for compatibility with WinWordPerfect 5.1, the buggy piece of shit that it is */
Just comment it:
Now, who is going to go back and double check if the comment is for real or not? Maybe it was compatibility, maybe it was intentional...
> If spy agencies aren't using this exploit, they're slacking bigtime.
Well there's a big difference between using an exploit and ordering a company to put it in the first place.
If the NSA isn't aware of 50 non-public exploits for Windows (and for MacOSX and for Linux), they are slacking bigtime.
Either that, or there are one or two obscure buggy old Windows applications which rely on the "wrong" behavior. Microsoft reverse-engineered them and figured out this only happens when the WMF header is incorrect, and coded around that. WINE reverse-engineered them and allowed the behavior at all times.
I only say this because it's well known that WINE aims for app compatibility rather than a complete implementation of Win32, so it's highly likely that they would have taken the easiest route to getting something or other to work.
You seem to have missed the point that old PC hardware is worthless because you can buy a relatively kick-ass brand-new PC for $500. In a matter of time, you will be able to buy a similar kick-ass Mac for $600. Furthermore, that Mac model will be upgraded @ 2-3 month increments. Welcome to Intel, Macboys.
Furthermore, if you are so concerned about the resale value of your sub-$1000 computer, allow me to suggest that you aren't exactly Apple's target market in the first place.
When I checked out MyFaces, the sample controls on their site were completely buggy. We also experimented with Oracle's and it was a nightmare. IMO, if you want to use JSF, you should stick with the stock package and roll your own custom controls.
I don't think the collectors market has much relevance for what we're talking about.
I think if you look at the 90s, when PowerPC was scaling up quickly, the depreciation value of Macs wasn't that out of line with PCs. It was only after the G4 languished for years (and Apple actually raised their prices) did you see huge resale value on 3-4 year old Macs.
How much will a 2 year old 1.8Ghz MacBook Pro sell for when Apple is selling a 2.2Ghz iBook for $799?
Finally, the bulk of the PC market is now so cheap that nobody really cares about resale value.
Because EFI will (eventually) become an industry standard, which will allow Macs to be a lot more compatible with expansion cards.
Furthermore, Apple can save some money by firing or reassigning their OF programmers.
Dual processor powermacs when it was mostly only the /. crowd that knew what dual processors could do.
Back then, the slashdot crowd was well aware that Apple shipped an OS that didn't support SMP. It was the uneducated Mac crowd that bought those mostly useless things up after Jobs BSed them.
Also, in those days PC dual-proc support was quite ubiquitious due to the BX chipset, hacked celerons, etc. However, when PCs tripled in speed for half the price, it was clear to a lot of users that they didn't *need* dual-procs (unlike the poor G4 users).
Now that Apple is on the Intel obsolesce cycle don't expect to see those depreciation values you saw with the poorly scaling G4 & G5. Especially since Apple also seems to be going in the direct of producing cheaper consumer hardware.
> Does MS have a reason to pull people away from Macs or not?
Well, there's 2% of the market that pays $600 for MS Office, while everyone else pays around $100. Why would Microsoft want to change that?