My own experience with OCZ drives is a 100% failure rate and no support to speak of.
Far more significantly, though, my supplier's experience with them was that they saw such a high proportion of returns that they dropped the brand entirely. My anecdotal data point might have been down to bad luck, but the odds of the pattern my supplier told me about being down to luck would be tiny.
The assertion that Microsoft Word should be deprecated in favour of a hodgepodge solution like yours, in the majority of situations, is laughable.
Did anyone here actually assert that, or anything remotely resembling that? I don't see it.
The point here isn't that there is a viable alternative to Word that does these things right now. The point is that it is unfortunate no-one is even trying to write that viable alternative when there are much better ideas out there than what Word does today. If you want a WYSIWYG document preparation tool, you're stuck with Word, including many horrible limitations it comes with that were solved in related fields literally decades ago.
Word is likewise at a point of being Mature, small improvements can be made but really unless somebody comes up with something drastically new there isn't much room to go.
This is a valid point, but I think you nailed it with your qualifier there: "unless somebody comes up with something drastically new". Plenty of related fields offer inspiration for how that drastically new alternative might work, but we're stuck in a rut and not bothering to look at them.
However, I don't think it's true that maturity is the explanation for most of the examples I gave before anyway. It's easy to suggest substantial improvements that could be made in almost every case, and the wish list sites and discussion forums for these software products are full of repeated feature or bug fix requests from people who actually use the software. But as long as those people keep on paying for what is already there, what is the incentive to improve it for them?
No, Google Docs (Drive, whatever) is actually about as far from what I want as you could get and still be talking about software that actually exists. Google Docs is a gimmick, a toy with a poorly designed user interface, barely any features for serious content creation, and no powerful/flexible formatting tools whatsoever.
I have had the misfortune to work on projects where the clients used Google Docs. To my knowledge, not one of those projects was still relying on Google Docs at completion. Everyone switched back to grown-up software, or at least permitted its use for the serious documentation work.
Whether we like it or not, Word is the document standard.
Right. You did read my post before you replied to it, particularly the 90% of it that was about how it's a problem when one technology becomes dominant and people wind up going with that technology not because it's good but because it's the "safe bet"?
All I want is my documents to look exact the same across all programs.
Then create them using TeX and send the output using PDF. You've got a much higher chance that everything will still work identically next week, or next year, or next decade with these kinds of tools, because they are designed with reasonably well-specified underlying models.
Of course, in practice having a consistent appearance isn't all you want, and that's why most people won't find the TeX world a useful alternative to Word. It's another instructive example of how some things could be done much better, though.
Microsoft Word has far more formatting capabilities than any HTML + CSS content I'm familiar with.
Then, with respect, the problem here is partly that you're not familiar with what these other technologies can do. In a way, you're making my point for me: people stand by Word believing that it's a good tool, because they haven't seen ideas from different fields where things are done much better.
Some of your specific examples can be done directly in HTML and CSS. Others might be better done using related but more specialised tools such as MathML and SVG, but then in Word they tend to be done by placing a box generated by a separate tool as well (and the tools in Word for things like creating equations are weak, as anyone who has actually tried to do serious mathematical typesetting in Word is painfully aware).
However, my point wasn't to consider specific effects, it was to consider the underlying foundations.
In HTML+CSS, you have a degree of structure in your document, and you can apply styles (and combinations of styles, and context-dependent styles) quite flexibly. There's plenty of room for improvement, but even what's there already makes the stylesheet facilities in typical word processor or DTP software look crude. One paragraph style and one character style, exclusive with all others? Really? And even then, a character style can't change its behaviour depending on which paragraph style it's in, so semantic styling is difficult.
Then there's the general layout model. In HTML+CSS, we can easily position content relative to other content or to the screen/page in various ways, and we can even change those positions depending on the size or other properties of the output medium. Again, there's plenty of room for improvement, but in typical word processors or DTP packages, all you really get is some basic anchoring tools, and everything else has to be done (and redone) by hand.
As a footnote, I want to emphasize that my goal here is not to compare Word with any one specific alternative model, such as HTML+CSS. My point is that there are other, better ways of doing things. HTML+CSS just happens to be a widely-used, practical example of how one type of thing could be done much better.
Then consider that fact that many people using word processors in business today are capable of doing all these things without knowing a single thing about coding.
Given the relatively high number of hideous documents I've seen created by those people and the relatively low number of polished, professional-looking ones, I'm not sure you're making a very compelling argument there.
In any case, there is no reason we couldn't have a WYSIWYG interface that had a powerful, flexible underlying model instead of the crude and dubiously specified mess that most contemporary word processors and DTP packages use.
Do you really believe Word has advanced and improved since 2006?
There is a recurring problem with software development in recent years, where one player has become dominant, the barriers to competition are so high that it has no real challenger for a long time, and the result is stagnation. There are numerous examples: Microsoft Office for business documents and spreadsheets, Adobe Creative Suite for graphics, Autodesk applications in the 3D modelling space, IE6 as the classic beloved of web developers everywhere, and as an odd one out just to make the point, Linux if you want an OSS operating system.
There are a few ways out of the trap, but the big problem is that the people making purchasing decisions often aren't interested in assessing the quality or productivity benefits of alternative software, or even able to make informed judgements about those things if they wanted to. No-one ever got fired for buying the market leader, so while they know that the new subscription pricing model will give vendors even less incentive to actually improve anything or the support contracts are probably far more expensive than they're actually worth or the TCO will be horrendous because of usability problems, they'll carry on using these leading products anyway so their careers aren't at risk.
That creates a vicious circle where no-one is willing to invest the staggering amounts of time and money required to build a heavyweight competitor that can effectively challenge an incumbent. Instead, we get open source clones or cheap-and-simple web/mobile apps, which do a good enough job to save some users paying for the heavyweight commercial software, but in most cases offer little real innovation and almost invariably lack the quality and feature set of the established big names. That's why the professionals spending serious money keep buying those big names, and so the cycle continues, with little incentive for software giants like Microsoft to improve their cash cows or innovate with entirely new products.
I think the most likely way out of this in the long term is for a new product to arrive that changes the rules and moves the market. With formal printed documents becoming less popular and an increasing emphasis on on-screen presentation and collaborative editing, is a word processor still a good model to manage business information? We have far more powerful (and systematic) formatting capabilities in numerous browsers that can render HTML+CSS content. Probably every programmer reading this routinely uses far more powerful editing, review and collaboration capabilities in their everyday tools. I don't just want Word 2014 any more. I want something that helps me collect, organise and share information in ways that match how we'll be living and working in 2014. And a tool that does that might have a small chance of breaking the Word stranglehold.
His own reputation might be less than exemplary at this point, but I don't see that his ministerial position was particularly relevant here. Any MP, minister or otherwise, is the highest directly elected representative of their constituents in our government system. As a basic principle of representative democracy, it seems very dubious to me that anything like this should be "off limits" to someone in that position, or to people in that position acting collectively by asking questions in Parliament. I can accept reasonable arguments for keeping the specifics of individual cases or ongoing operations on a need-to-know basis and not routinely disclosing them to a few hundred MPs, but not the underlying principles and the existence of systemic practices.
That is only true if the loser is guaranteed to pay, which isn't strictly the case in any jurisdiction I'm familiar with (though IANAL and YMMV). Where I am, as I understand it there is effectively a presumption that the loser will cover the costs of both parties in most cases. However, the judge still has to actually award those costs as part of the process and they can exercise some discretion in the sort of situation you're describing where the two parties have wildly different resources available.
For example, if a company with professional lawyers on retainer deliberately caused the proceedings to drag on more than was reasonable necessary to make their case, in the process incurring professional expenses many times greater than the damages involved in the first place, the judge might decide that they should have known better and not award the costs. Thus the court has a way to avoid the systemic trap you described.
That's a great theory, which will survive about 5 seconds when an army of corporate lawyers come after you under the United States' legal system. Corporate shields are good for some things, but they are not completely judgement-proof, and the US does not have a general loser-pays policy to guard against bringing cases of questionable merit against people without the resources to defend themselves effectively.
But "toy" is even easier to roll off the tongue, and more appropriate when the devices they're calling "drones" are $50 (or even $500) toys.
How much it costs doesn't matter much if it weighs a few pounds and falls on your head from 100m up, or flies into your windscreen while you're driving through a residential neighbourhood, or sits outside your home with its cameras pointing through a gap in your daughter's curtains while she gets changed.
Soon most Windows software will be sold and downloaded from Microsoft's app store.
I find that very hard to believe as a general principle. Professional software developers are not necessary fans of app stores, because such stores can create all kinds of technical and financial hurdles to shipping your stuff and getting paid for it. Businesses are not necessarily fans of apps stores, because middlemen push prices up and the businesses are probably going to have IT people do the serious installations anyway. If Microsoft is a market-maker that alienates the pros on one or both sides of the market, in the same way various other "platform" brands have recently, then there is really no good reason left for those people to concentrate on developing/buying Windows exclusives, and one upgrade cycle later Microsoft is finished as a serious force in the software world.
Whether most Windows games will wind up being sold via Microsoft's preferred app store route is a different question. As Valve themselves have demonstrated, the gaming market finds the convenience of a store (and the related functionality that Steam offers) a powerful motivator. So on that score, I think we agree, and this is why I'm not entirely sure recent moves from Valve are really about entering the console market other than coincidentally as a means to an end.
...that Half-Life is popular enough among the console crowd to be the system's killer app.
I think this skips over an earlier question we could ask: Is this move by Valve meant primarily to take on the consoles or to be an evolution for PC gaming so they can't be boxed in by Microsoft (or both, or something else entirely)?
All fair points, but I think possibly you're overestimating your chances of getting IT management to sign off on authorising an outside organisation's custom CA in, say, a government department or healthcare provider or financial services company. They probably don't even allow the standard ones in that environment, preferring to use only their own, which won't have been used to sign the certificate used with a third party's applet unless major hoop-jumping has been involved. Even if they did allow standard ones, if you've got no connection to the outside world to verify the chain of trust, it's not worth much from a security point of view.
In any case, we're talking about an applet embedded in a device that was probably physically supplied, in person, by a background-checked contact from the supplier, and then handed over for installation by senior IT people in the receiving organisation. It's not as if the identity of the supplier or anyone else who ever touches the box is going to be in doubt in this kind of environment.
(Obviously at this point I'm talking about an extreme example and most applets aren't going to be running in that kind of highly secured environment. I'm just illustrating the folly of assuming that absolutely requiring a signed applet regardless of what the local security experts want is necessarily good for security.)
That's only worth anything if the buyer's identity has been reliably confirmed and you can expect to find them later. The odds of that happening with someone writing serious malware seem... less than favourable.
Part of the problem here is that Oracle keep moving the goalposts. Even if what you describe is true today, it seems unwise to trust that it will remain true tomorrow and they won't do something crazy like lock it down to a predetermined list of "approved partner" CAs. What they've been doing in the name of improved security over the past year is already crazy on several counts anyway.
It could be argued that they should have done this a long time ago.
But it wouldn't be argued by anyone who actually knew what they were talking about.
For one thing, signing a Java applet proves exactly nothing about how trustworthy it is. You can easily get a signing certificate by spending a small amount of money and waiting a small amount of time. The whole concept of granting increased permissions to untrusted software just because it's been signed is absurd.
Secondly, blocking unsigned applets will break numerous existing web-enabled devices, which has been one of the significant remaining use cases for applets in recent years. These are effectively running embedded web servers and serving up the applets from there, so you can't just go in and upgrade them later when your certificate expires (and the longest cert periods you can get from major CAs are only about 2-3 years, a fraction of the normal lifetime of some of these devices).
The craziest thing is that the kinds of device I'm thinking of are typically used by the IT guys in large organisations. Some of them are going to go through months of approval process before they get installed, and when they do it will be in server rooms or data centres, accessed electronically via a separate management network with no connection to the outside world, and accessed physically via biometric security that would make James Bond cry. But in order to keep those applets safe, now they need to be signed too, just in case? Seriously?
Not everyone using applets accesses them from a public web site. They can't necessarily upgrade or replace them on a whim. The kinds of environments still using them are more likely to be exactly the kind of long-running projects where whipping up a quick replacement in JavaScript isn't a sensible option and where backward compatibility really matters.
Also, to anyone who thinks alternative technologies like JavaScript and HTML5 canvas/SVG offer the same flexibility and speed as Java applets, I know a prince in Nigeria who'd like to sell you a classic car from his collection for a great price.
Because unlike most presenters he actually seems passionate about the subjects he presents on?
Bingo. If you're going to show popular science programmes, you have to start with a presenter who can actually engage popular interest. Stuffy old academics are not the ideal population to search for such presenters, even if they might be world class authorities on the latest research in their field.
Cox has a long way to go before he's up there with the likes of David Attenborough, but then again he's only half the latter's age, with a presenting career that has so far collected only a tiny fraction of Attenborough's experience. I can see why not everyone is a fan, but I'll take what appears to be genuine enthusiasm over the ability to read a script wearing the correct shirt and tie any day.
I agree that it is probably unwise for the BBC to compete too much with commercial channels. However, compared to what's on most of those commercial channels, the BBC remains a very different broadcaster with a much broader spectrum of programming. Of the major commercial alternatives, only Channel 4 comes anywhere close.
I think it's fair to claim that, among other things, the BBC offers by far the best news and current affairs reporting of any major UK TV network (investigative/undercover journalism programmes, Newsnight, political debate and parliamentary coverage, several niche programmes on the BBC News channel, plus of course their main news bulletins), numerous excellent science and human interest series (Planet Earth, Human Planet, Our World, Wonders of the Solar System; notably, they cover a range from special interest programmes like The Sky at Night through to popular science with the likes of Dara O'Briain's Science Club), numerous original drama miniseries, better-than-average coverage of major sporting events, a broad range of films, and sometimes just good, old-fashioned entertainment (numerous Saturday night BBC One family shows, thoughtful/satirical/informative comedy like QI and Mock the Week). And of course we get all of this without disruptive commercial breaks every few minutes or having graphics advertising the next tacky programme that appear just to spoil the critical moment in what you're watching.
Compared to spending Saturday nights watching Simon Cowell smugly mocking children who were brave enough to have a go at something, news coverage on Sky that really does make Fox seem fair and balanced, and Celebrity Big Brother 174, I'd gladly pay a lot more than the current licence fee if the BBC did go commercial. In fact, I could happily take the BBC channels and the Channel 4 family and dump almost everything else, because I don't watch that much live any more but almost everything I do find worth watching is on a very limited set of the available channels.
Security that actually stops you doing your job isn't an improvement, it's just broken.
Also, a lot of the Java bashing that goes on here on Slashdot is little better than trolling. Take a look at how many security issues quietly get fixed in your favourite OSS browser every few weeks. Take a look at any popular browser plug-in. Java plug-ins do have a long and unimpressive history of security vulnerabilities, but they're hardly alone.
The thing that really annoys me about the current trend with Java is that the supposedly increased security is mostly a work of fiction anyway. Signing your applet the way they want you to doesn't prove anything about its behaviour or trustworthiness. All it proves is that you got hold of a certificate from some recognised CA and figured out how to use it, and any halfway competent malware author could do that with a bit of money and a bit of time. Meanwhile, the experience for legitimate users running legitimate applets is becoming more and more hostile.
But it isn't the government's business to regulate socially acceptable behavior. When we used to give it those sorts of powers, it used to penalize lots of behavior among consenting adults.
The behaviour I described before is unacceptable precisely because it is not done with the subject's consent.
Facebook and Google are only revealing this information because governments force them to do so.
That may be true for those particular organisations and today, though it's already clear that plenty of commercial organisations have in fact provided sensitive data to governments without any legal obligation to do so. There are unfortunate systematic influences that clearly promote such behaviour in the absence of laws actively preventing it. ("Well, you don't have to give us this data without a warrant, but it'll be a shame for that multi-million dollar government contract you're bidding on if you don't.")
Moreover, there have already been reports of insurance companies trying to run background checks against applicants via less than clear channels, and then adjusting rates in light of what they find. If you're talking about something like car insurance without which you can't legally drive or health insurance without which you quite literally might not live at all, that is about as serious a privacy concern as I can imagine. This isn't anything that directly involves the government, though of course that government made the law that you need motor insurance to drive and set the policy on how healthcare is funded. And again, this sort of arrangement is likely to become more common, given that it is probably a mutually beneficial deal for all commercial parties involved, unless something actively stops them and protects the individuals whose data is involved.
No, it wasn't supposed to be an insult, it was an observation: your beliefs are similar to European beliefs, and the European beliefs about privacy are wrong and inconsistent.
FWIW, you have an interesting idea of "not an insult". I am British, so I am European, though also well aware that there is no single "European belief" on just about any political matter. That said, from my point of view, the European trend for preferring privacy to more liberal freedom of speech seems just fine. In fact, as I get older and hopefully wiser, I increasingly favour the view that strong privacy protection is essential to safeguard many other valuable freedoms, including the freedom to express your own political views and to associate with others who hold similar views, which I claim is self-evidently necessary to maintaining a functioning democracy.
It's the same with privacy - of course I don't enjoy the thought that some odious lowlife may be poring over my innermost secrets, but it's just part of life, whether we like it or not.
Why? If that behaviour is against our moral values, what is to stop us from prohibiting it by law and punishing those who act in socially unacceptable ways?
regulating this would be an unacceptable intrusion on private conduct.
Well, if you really believe that someone should be free to tell anything about anyone to anyone else, regardless of how sensitive the information might be or whether it was provided in confidence, then I guess you and I just have very different views on socially acceptable behaviour.
You postulate nebulous threats and demonize a couple of companies that have never done you any harm.
The position I'm advocating here is not specific to Facebook or Google. They are just examples, and I also gave numerous other examples in my very first post to this thread. In fact, my main point here is that while you don't have to use Facebook or Google, there are other activities that are essential to living in modern society but carry similar risks of allowing surveillance as a side effect. If those risks aren't balanced, the system is open to abuse.
Also, you have no idea whether using Facebook or Google has ever done me, or you, or anyone else any harm. Given all the recent revelations about governmental abuse, anything you ever told Facebook or Google, or anything anyone else ever told them on your behalf, might be used against you in all kinds of ways. There have already been plenty of examples of people being arrested, prosecuted, sued, or otherwise attacked, and in several different countries, because of things they said on social networks or terms they put into search engines. (Some of those cases were probably legitimate, too, though others obviously weren't. I'm not judging the individuals here, just demonstrating the risk.)
In fact, your views about data protection are so naive and distorted that it sounds to me like you might be European
Was that supposed to be some sort of insult? I promise you that calling me names and insulting my background doesn't make your argument more convincing to me, and I doubt it's going to look good to anyone else reading this either.
But safeguards against what? [...] I mean, if you have something to hide, don't put it on Facebook at all.
Well, we could start with safeguards against Facebook collecting personal data about you from your friends without your consent. For example, I don't understand how anyone could think it's OK for Facebook to grab and store entire address books, giving them e-mail addresses to match to names. It's obviously rude for friends to give up that information if it was shared in confidence, but that doesn't excuse actively soliciting it on a massive scale.
Indeed, the scale on which organisations like Facebook and Google aim to collect data is precisely why different standards need to be established to protect the principles and benefits of privacy today. Merely relying on rules and conventions that might have protected us adequately 20 years ago is no longer sufficient in the face of modern mass surveillance, data mining, and automated decision making technologies.
Google instant search is a keylogger, plain and simple.
You're obviously presenting only the cynic's side of the argument, but even so, it's even more obvious now than ever that combining the address and search text boxes in a web browser really is a security/privacy risk.
As it turns out, there are many things we don't need to do, but that are nice to do nonetheless.
Indeed. My point is not that the above isn't true, merely that there are also stronger needs that are impractical to do without and still live anything resembling a normal life in modern society. Safeguards aren't a luxury at that point, they are a necessity, which conveniently can also protect the things you don't need to do but that are nice to do nonetheless in exactly the same ways.
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My own experience with OCZ drives is a 100% failure rate and no support to speak of.
Far more significantly, though, my supplier's experience with them was that they saw such a high proportion of returns that they dropped the brand entirely. My anecdotal data point might have been down to bad luck, but the odds of the pattern my supplier told me about being down to luck would be tiny.
The assertion that Microsoft Word should be deprecated in favour of a hodgepodge solution like yours, in the majority of situations, is laughable.
Did anyone here actually assert that, or anything remotely resembling that? I don't see it.
The point here isn't that there is a viable alternative to Word that does these things right now. The point is that it is unfortunate no-one is even trying to write that viable alternative when there are much better ideas out there than what Word does today. If you want a WYSIWYG document preparation tool, you're stuck with Word, including many horrible limitations it comes with that were solved in related fields literally decades ago.
Word is likewise at a point of being Mature, small improvements can be made but really unless somebody comes up with something drastically new there isn't much room to go.
This is a valid point, but I think you nailed it with your qualifier there: "unless somebody comes up with something drastically new". Plenty of related fields offer inspiration for how that drastically new alternative might work, but we're stuck in a rut and not bothering to look at them.
However, I don't think it's true that maturity is the explanation for most of the examples I gave before anyway. It's easy to suggest substantial improvements that could be made in almost every case, and the wish list sites and discussion forums for these software products are full of repeated feature or bug fix requests from people who actually use the software. But as long as those people keep on paying for what is already there, what is the incentive to improve it for them?
So you want Google Docs?
No, Google Docs (Drive, whatever) is actually about as far from what I want as you could get and still be talking about software that actually exists. Google Docs is a gimmick, a toy with a poorly designed user interface, barely any features for serious content creation, and no powerful/flexible formatting tools whatsoever.
I have had the misfortune to work on projects where the clients used Google Docs. To my knowledge, not one of those projects was still relying on Google Docs at completion. Everyone switched back to grown-up software, or at least permitted its use for the serious documentation work.
Whether we like it or not, Word is the document standard.
Right. You did read my post before you replied to it, particularly the 90% of it that was about how it's a problem when one technology becomes dominant and people wind up going with that technology not because it's good but because it's the "safe bet"?
All I want is my documents to look exact the same across all programs.
Then create them using TeX and send the output using PDF. You've got a much higher chance that everything will still work identically next week, or next year, or next decade with these kinds of tools, because they are designed with reasonably well-specified underlying models.
Of course, in practice having a consistent appearance isn't all you want, and that's why most people won't find the TeX world a useful alternative to Word. It's another instructive example of how some things could be done much better, though.
Microsoft Word has far more formatting capabilities than any HTML + CSS content I'm familiar with.
Then, with respect, the problem here is partly that you're not familiar with what these other technologies can do. In a way, you're making my point for me: people stand by Word believing that it's a good tool, because they haven't seen ideas from different fields where things are done much better.
Some of your specific examples can be done directly in HTML and CSS. Others might be better done using related but more specialised tools such as MathML and SVG, but then in Word they tend to be done by placing a box generated by a separate tool as well (and the tools in Word for things like creating equations are weak, as anyone who has actually tried to do serious mathematical typesetting in Word is painfully aware).
However, my point wasn't to consider specific effects, it was to consider the underlying foundations.
In HTML+CSS, you have a degree of structure in your document, and you can apply styles (and combinations of styles, and context-dependent styles) quite flexibly. There's plenty of room for improvement, but even what's there already makes the stylesheet facilities in typical word processor or DTP software look crude. One paragraph style and one character style, exclusive with all others? Really? And even then, a character style can't change its behaviour depending on which paragraph style it's in, so semantic styling is difficult.
Then there's the general layout model. In HTML+CSS, we can easily position content relative to other content or to the screen/page in various ways, and we can even change those positions depending on the size or other properties of the output medium. Again, there's plenty of room for improvement, but in typical word processors or DTP packages, all you really get is some basic anchoring tools, and everything else has to be done (and redone) by hand.
As a footnote, I want to emphasize that my goal here is not to compare Word with any one specific alternative model, such as HTML+CSS. My point is that there are other, better ways of doing things. HTML+CSS just happens to be a widely-used, practical example of how one type of thing could be done much better.
Then consider that fact that many people using word processors in business today are capable of doing all these things without knowing a single thing about coding.
Given the relatively high number of hideous documents I've seen created by those people and the relatively low number of polished, professional-looking ones, I'm not sure you're making a very compelling argument there.
In any case, there is no reason we couldn't have a WYSIWYG interface that had a powerful, flexible underlying model instead of the crude and dubiously specified mess that most contemporary word processors and DTP packages use.
Do you really believe Word has advanced and improved since 2006?
There is a recurring problem with software development in recent years, where one player has become dominant, the barriers to competition are so high that it has no real challenger for a long time, and the result is stagnation. There are numerous examples: Microsoft Office for business documents and spreadsheets, Adobe Creative Suite for graphics, Autodesk applications in the 3D modelling space, IE6 as the classic beloved of web developers everywhere, and as an odd one out just to make the point, Linux if you want an OSS operating system.
There are a few ways out of the trap, but the big problem is that the people making purchasing decisions often aren't interested in assessing the quality or productivity benefits of alternative software, or even able to make informed judgements about those things if they wanted to. No-one ever got fired for buying the market leader, so while they know that the new subscription pricing model will give vendors even less incentive to actually improve anything or the support contracts are probably far more expensive than they're actually worth or the TCO will be horrendous because of usability problems, they'll carry on using these leading products anyway so their careers aren't at risk.
That creates a vicious circle where no-one is willing to invest the staggering amounts of time and money required to build a heavyweight competitor that can effectively challenge an incumbent. Instead, we get open source clones or cheap-and-simple web/mobile apps, which do a good enough job to save some users paying for the heavyweight commercial software, but in most cases offer little real innovation and almost invariably lack the quality and feature set of the established big names. That's why the professionals spending serious money keep buying those big names, and so the cycle continues, with little incentive for software giants like Microsoft to improve their cash cows or innovate with entirely new products.
I think the most likely way out of this in the long term is for a new product to arrive that changes the rules and moves the market. With formal printed documents becoming less popular and an increasing emphasis on on-screen presentation and collaborative editing, is a word processor still a good model to manage business information? We have far more powerful (and systematic) formatting capabilities in numerous browsers that can render HTML+CSS content. Probably every programmer reading this routinely uses far more powerful editing, review and collaboration capabilities in their everyday tools. I don't just want Word 2014 any more. I want something that helps me collect, organise and share information in ways that match how we'll be living and working in 2014. And a tool that does that might have a small chance of breaking the Word stranglehold.
His own reputation might be less than exemplary at this point, but I don't see that his ministerial position was particularly relevant here. Any MP, minister or otherwise, is the highest directly elected representative of their constituents in our government system. As a basic principle of representative democracy, it seems very dubious to me that anything like this should be "off limits" to someone in that position, or to people in that position acting collectively by asking questions in Parliament. I can accept reasonable arguments for keeping the specifics of individual cases or ongoing operations on a need-to-know basis and not routinely disclosing them to a few hundred MPs, but not the underlying principles and the existence of systemic practices.
That is only true if the loser is guaranteed to pay, which isn't strictly the case in any jurisdiction I'm familiar with (though IANAL and YMMV). Where I am, as I understand it there is effectively a presumption that the loser will cover the costs of both parties in most cases. However, the judge still has to actually award those costs as part of the process and they can exercise some discretion in the sort of situation you're describing where the two parties have wildly different resources available.
For example, if a company with professional lawyers on retainer deliberately caused the proceedings to drag on more than was reasonable necessary to make their case, in the process incurring professional expenses many times greater than the damages involved in the first place, the judge might decide that they should have known better and not award the costs. Thus the court has a way to avoid the systemic trap you described.
That's a great theory, which will survive about 5 seconds when an army of corporate lawyers come after you under the United States' legal system. Corporate shields are good for some things, but they are not completely judgement-proof, and the US does not have a general loser-pays policy to guard against bringing cases of questionable merit against people without the resources to defend themselves effectively.
But "toy" is even easier to roll off the tongue, and more appropriate when the devices they're calling "drones" are $50 (or even $500) toys.
How much it costs doesn't matter much if it weighs a few pounds and falls on your head from 100m up, or flies into your windscreen while you're driving through a residential neighbourhood, or sits outside your home with its cameras pointing through a gap in your daughter's curtains while she gets changed.
Soon most Windows software will be sold and downloaded from Microsoft's app store.
I find that very hard to believe as a general principle. Professional software developers are not necessary fans of app stores, because such stores can create all kinds of technical and financial hurdles to shipping your stuff and getting paid for it. Businesses are not necessarily fans of apps stores, because middlemen push prices up and the businesses are probably going to have IT people do the serious installations anyway. If Microsoft is a market-maker that alienates the pros on one or both sides of the market, in the same way various other "platform" brands have recently, then there is really no good reason left for those people to concentrate on developing/buying Windows exclusives, and one upgrade cycle later Microsoft is finished as a serious force in the software world.
Whether most Windows games will wind up being sold via Microsoft's preferred app store route is a different question. As Valve themselves have demonstrated, the gaming market finds the convenience of a store (and the related functionality that Steam offers) a powerful motivator. So on that score, I think we agree, and this is why I'm not entirely sure recent moves from Valve are really about entering the console market other than coincidentally as a means to an end.
...that Half-Life is popular enough among the console crowd to be the system's killer app.
I think this skips over an earlier question we could ask: Is this move by Valve meant primarily to take on the consoles or to be an evolution for PC gaming so they can't be boxed in by Microsoft (or both, or something else entirely)?
All fair points, but I think possibly you're overestimating your chances of getting IT management to sign off on authorising an outside organisation's custom CA in, say, a government department or healthcare provider or financial services company. They probably don't even allow the standard ones in that environment, preferring to use only their own, which won't have been used to sign the certificate used with a third party's applet unless major hoop-jumping has been involved. Even if they did allow standard ones, if you've got no connection to the outside world to verify the chain of trust, it's not worth much from a security point of view.
In any case, we're talking about an applet embedded in a device that was probably physically supplied, in person, by a background-checked contact from the supplier, and then handed over for installation by senior IT people in the receiving organisation. It's not as if the identity of the supplier or anyone else who ever touches the box is going to be in doubt in this kind of environment.
(Obviously at this point I'm talking about an extreme example and most applets aren't going to be running in that kind of highly secured environment. I'm just illustrating the folly of assuming that absolutely requiring a signed applet regardless of what the local security experts want is necessarily good for security.)
That's only worth anything if the buyer's identity has been reliably confirmed and you can expect to find them later. The odds of that happening with someone writing serious malware seem... less than favourable.
Part of the problem here is that Oracle keep moving the goalposts. Even if what you describe is true today, it seems unwise to trust that it will remain true tomorrow and they won't do something crazy like lock it down to a predetermined list of "approved partner" CAs. What they've been doing in the name of improved security over the past year is already crazy on several counts anyway.
It could be argued that they should have done this a long time ago.
But it wouldn't be argued by anyone who actually knew what they were talking about.
For one thing, signing a Java applet proves exactly nothing about how trustworthy it is. You can easily get a signing certificate by spending a small amount of money and waiting a small amount of time. The whole concept of granting increased permissions to untrusted software just because it's been signed is absurd.
Secondly, blocking unsigned applets will break numerous existing web-enabled devices, which has been one of the significant remaining use cases for applets in recent years. These are effectively running embedded web servers and serving up the applets from there, so you can't just go in and upgrade them later when your certificate expires (and the longest cert periods you can get from major CAs are only about 2-3 years, a fraction of the normal lifetime of some of these devices).
The craziest thing is that the kinds of device I'm thinking of are typically used by the IT guys in large organisations. Some of them are going to go through months of approval process before they get installed, and when they do it will be in server rooms or data centres, accessed electronically via a separate management network with no connection to the outside world, and accessed physically via biometric security that would make James Bond cry. But in order to keep those applets safe, now they need to be signed too, just in case? Seriously?
Not everyone using applets accesses them from a public web site. They can't necessarily upgrade or replace them on a whim. The kinds of environments still using them are more likely to be exactly the kind of long-running projects where whipping up a quick replacement in JavaScript isn't a sensible option and where backward compatibility really matters.
Also, to anyone who thinks alternative technologies like JavaScript and HTML5 canvas/SVG offer the same flexibility and speed as Java applets, I know a prince in Nigeria who'd like to sell you a classic car from his collection for a great price.
Because unlike most presenters he actually seems passionate about the subjects he presents on?
Bingo. If you're going to show popular science programmes, you have to start with a presenter who can actually engage popular interest. Stuffy old academics are not the ideal population to search for such presenters, even if they might be world class authorities on the latest research in their field.
Cox has a long way to go before he's up there with the likes of David Attenborough, but then again he's only half the latter's age, with a presenting career that has so far collected only a tiny fraction of Attenborough's experience. I can see why not everyone is a fan, but I'll take what appears to be genuine enthusiasm over the ability to read a script wearing the correct shirt and tie any day.
I agree that it is probably unwise for the BBC to compete too much with commercial channels. However, compared to what's on most of those commercial channels, the BBC remains a very different broadcaster with a much broader spectrum of programming. Of the major commercial alternatives, only Channel 4 comes anywhere close.
I think it's fair to claim that, among other things, the BBC offers by far the best news and current affairs reporting of any major UK TV network (investigative/undercover journalism programmes, Newsnight, political debate and parliamentary coverage, several niche programmes on the BBC News channel, plus of course their main news bulletins), numerous excellent science and human interest series (Planet Earth, Human Planet, Our World, Wonders of the Solar System; notably, they cover a range from special interest programmes like The Sky at Night through to popular science with the likes of Dara O'Briain's Science Club), numerous original drama miniseries, better-than-average coverage of major sporting events, a broad range of films, and sometimes just good, old-fashioned entertainment (numerous Saturday night BBC One family shows, thoughtful/satirical/informative comedy like QI and Mock the Week). And of course we get all of this without disruptive commercial breaks every few minutes or having graphics advertising the next tacky programme that appear just to spoil the critical moment in what you're watching.
Compared to spending Saturday nights watching Simon Cowell smugly mocking children who were brave enough to have a go at something, news coverage on Sky that really does make Fox seem fair and balanced, and Celebrity Big Brother 174, I'd gladly pay a lot more than the current licence fee if the BBC did go commercial. In fact, I could happily take the BBC channels and the Channel 4 family and dump almost everything else, because I don't watch that much live any more but almost everything I do find worth watching is on a very limited set of the available channels.
As I wrote before:
Security that actually stops you doing your job isn't an improvement, it's just broken.
Also, a lot of the Java bashing that goes on here on Slashdot is little better than trolling. Take a look at how many security issues quietly get fixed in your favourite OSS browser every few weeks. Take a look at any popular browser plug-in. Java plug-ins do have a long and unimpressive history of security vulnerabilities, but they're hardly alone.
The thing that really annoys me about the current trend with Java is that the supposedly increased security is mostly a work of fiction anyway. Signing your applet the way they want you to doesn't prove anything about its behaviour or trustworthiness. All it proves is that you got hold of a certificate from some recognised CA and figured out how to use it, and any halfway competent malware author could do that with a bit of money and a bit of time. Meanwhile, the experience for legitimate users running legitimate applets is becoming more and more hostile.
But it isn't the government's business to regulate socially acceptable behavior. When we used to give it those sorts of powers, it used to penalize lots of behavior among consenting adults.
The behaviour I described before is unacceptable precisely because it is not done with the subject's consent.
Facebook and Google are only revealing this information because governments force them to do so.
That may be true for those particular organisations and today, though it's already clear that plenty of commercial organisations have in fact provided sensitive data to governments without any legal obligation to do so. There are unfortunate systematic influences that clearly promote such behaviour in the absence of laws actively preventing it. ("Well, you don't have to give us this data without a warrant, but it'll be a shame for that multi-million dollar government contract you're bidding on if you don't.")
Moreover, there have already been reports of insurance companies trying to run background checks against applicants via less than clear channels, and then adjusting rates in light of what they find. If you're talking about something like car insurance without which you can't legally drive or health insurance without which you quite literally might not live at all, that is about as serious a privacy concern as I can imagine. This isn't anything that directly involves the government, though of course that government made the law that you need motor insurance to drive and set the policy on how healthcare is funded. And again, this sort of arrangement is likely to become more common, given that it is probably a mutually beneficial deal for all commercial parties involved, unless something actively stops them and protects the individuals whose data is involved.
No, it wasn't supposed to be an insult, it was an observation: your beliefs are similar to European beliefs, and the European beliefs about privacy are wrong and inconsistent.
FWIW, you have an interesting idea of "not an insult". I am British, so I am European, though also well aware that there is no single "European belief" on just about any political matter. That said, from my point of view, the European trend for preferring privacy to more liberal freedom of speech seems just fine. In fact, as I get older and hopefully wiser, I increasingly favour the view that strong privacy protection is essential to safeguard many other valuable freedoms, including the freedom to express your own political views and to associate with others who hold similar views, which I claim is self-evidently necessary to maintaining a functioning democracy.
It's the same with privacy - of course I don't enjoy the thought that some odious lowlife may be poring over my innermost secrets, but it's just part of life, whether we like it or not.
Why? If that behaviour is against our moral values, what is to stop us from prohibiting it by law and punishing those who act in socially unacceptable ways?
regulating this would be an unacceptable intrusion on private conduct.
Well, if you really believe that someone should be free to tell anything about anyone to anyone else, regardless of how sensitive the information might be or whether it was provided in confidence, then I guess you and I just have very different views on socially acceptable behaviour.
You postulate nebulous threats and demonize a couple of companies that have never done you any harm.
The position I'm advocating here is not specific to Facebook or Google. They are just examples, and I also gave numerous other examples in my very first post to this thread. In fact, my main point here is that while you don't have to use Facebook or Google, there are other activities that are essential to living in modern society but carry similar risks of allowing surveillance as a side effect. If those risks aren't balanced, the system is open to abuse.
Also, you have no idea whether using Facebook or Google has ever done me, or you, or anyone else any harm. Given all the recent revelations about governmental abuse, anything you ever told Facebook or Google, or anything anyone else ever told them on your behalf, might be used against you in all kinds of ways. There have already been plenty of examples of people being arrested, prosecuted, sued, or otherwise attacked, and in several different countries, because of things they said on social networks or terms they put into search engines. (Some of those cases were probably legitimate, too, though others obviously weren't. I'm not judging the individuals here, just demonstrating the risk.)
In fact, your views about data protection are so naive and distorted that it sounds to me like you might be European
Was that supposed to be some sort of insult? I promise you that calling me names and insulting my background doesn't make your argument more convincing to me, and I doubt it's going to look good to anyone else reading this either.
But safeguards against what? [...] I mean, if you have something to hide, don't put it on Facebook at all.
Well, we could start with safeguards against Facebook collecting personal data about you from your friends without your consent. For example, I don't understand how anyone could think it's OK for Facebook to grab and store entire address books, giving them e-mail addresses to match to names. It's obviously rude for friends to give up that information if it was shared in confidence, but that doesn't excuse actively soliciting it on a massive scale.
Indeed, the scale on which organisations like Facebook and Google aim to collect data is precisely why different standards need to be established to protect the principles and benefits of privacy today. Merely relying on rules and conventions that might have protected us adequately 20 years ago is no longer sufficient in the face of modern mass surveillance, data mining, and automated decision making technologies.
Google instant search is a keylogger, plain and simple.
You're obviously presenting only the cynic's side of the argument, but even so, it's even more obvious now than ever that combining the address and search text boxes in a web browser really is a security/privacy risk.
As it turns out, there are many things we don't need to do, but that are nice to do nonetheless.
Indeed. My point is not that the above isn't true, merely that there are also stronger needs that are impractical to do without and still live anything resembling a normal life in modern society. Safeguards aren't a luxury at that point, they are a necessity, which conveniently can also protect the things you don't need to do but that are nice to do nonetheless in exactly the same ways.