OSX uses GPT partition maps on x86 machines, they only had their own partition map on PPC systems. Current OSX running on x86 macs can still read disks which use the PPC partition map (as can linux), but can't boot from them.
Linux has supported EFI for a long time, and Intel have been pushing EFI for a long time.... We would have had EFI many years ago, only MS never bothered to support it until very recently.
That's only short term thinking, if a large portion of people buy systems with windows preinstalled, and then wipe it to install something else sooner or later OEMs will catch on to this and start providing systems either blank or with whatever people are replacing windows with... At which point, MS stop making any money.
Also MS want to sell you other products, which generally only run on their OS... If you've wiped it and installed something else you won't be sending any more money their way.
They absolutely want to prevent users installing any other OS, security is and always has been of very little concern to MS. Ensuring continued sales is the overriding goal, and MS only bothered paying any attention whatsoever to security when their lack of it started driving users to other systems.
Remember the crappier a system is, the more money they can make selling you extras to fix it, as well as expensive consultancy etc. A system which is reliable doesn't need fixing, nor upgrading and is therefore bad for business.
The best part about html is that it is open, and as such will be implemented independently by all the major browser makers... This is in contrast to flash, where there is generally only one implementation, making any security holes in it extremely attractive indeed. This is made even worse by the fact that this implementation is extremely slow/buggy especially on non windows platforms, wont be fixed by its vendor and cannot be fixed by anyone else due to being closed source.
MS have a history of doing bad things, they might claim its to combat malware when the real purpose is to reduce competition from Linux...
It's possible to implement a secure boot system while still allowing the legitimate owner to boot whatever OS they want, but based on past history MS would intentionally choose an implementation that makes Linux use harder.
Apple have not implemented any such system on their Mac line... They have on their phone/tablets, but phones were never open platforms to begin with... And speaking of which, windows mobile devices often have locked bootloaders, as does the xbox. Apple aren't taking away something that users already have.
Also Apple have not been found to wield monopoly control over any market by a court, for any product that Apple makes there is a viable alternative available from someone else.
Of course, being tied to a single supplier for one of the necessary components is extremely bad for the market... It makes you utterly beholden to that one supplier, and makes it extremely difficult to differentiate your product from that of your competitors. You effectively become a simple reseller for that one supplier.
This is one of the main reasons IBM and soon HP are getting out of the market, and the reason why Apple are the only supplier who aren't forced to have razor thin margins.
And the IBM PC was largely successful because it was a general purpose and relatively open device... There were plenty of less open but otherwise superior hardware designs around at the time, and yet they largely failed... Apple is the only one thats still around, they nearly died and are still a small player in the market.
Which is exactly how it works right now... You could start manufacturing a car right now from raw materials and all the information required to do so is readily available, the only reason people don't do this is because the time, effort and intermediate steps (ie with only raw materials you would first need to manufacture appropriate tools before you even start making vehicle components) that would be required to make a car, mean that the process of building your own car from scratch is not a viable action.
A printer that can simplify the creation of some or all of those components and/or tools benefit the existing car companies as much as they do you. They would still have larger printers, bigger factories to operate them in, better supply chains to bring the raw materials etc.
One of the banks here fitted grey plastic devices in the card slots supposedly to prevent skimming, unfortunately the devices they fitted look exactly like skimmers.
Similarly while the requirement for a pin is a stumbling block, as i would need to find some method of acquiring the pin such as using a card skimmer...
The requirement for a signature however provides no protection whatsoever... If i clone your card, i can simply sign the back of the fake card myself. If i steal your card i now have a copy of your signature which i can replicate. In either case, it is very rare for anyone to check, and even if they do signatures never look exactly the same anyway so its very easy to pass off an imperfect copy.
Most of the cards allowing instant low value purchases have strict limits on the value of an individual transaction, and some also require you to pre load a certain amount of credit onto the card which is then depleted as you use the card, which is less dangerous than carrying cash.
Credit cards however are a fundamentally flawed method for most online transactions... The problem being that the system is pull rather than push based. When you purchase something with a card online, you are effectively giving the retailer access to all your available credit and trusting them to only take what they're supposed to. And the problem is that when a retailer gets hacked all their customers get screwed too... On the other hand, with a push system you authorise the sending of the exact amount to the retailer, they have no ability to take more than you give them, similar to cash. And then if the retailer gets hacked, the only thing the hacker can steal is the retailer's money rather than the customer's money.
That's the problem, backwards compatibility exists on the cards so someone will read the magstrip and then take your card to an ATM which accepts them. Perhaps a short term solution would be to require a different pin number for magstrip use, and for ATMs which use the chip to tell the user so. Users could then choose not to use magstrip ATMs, and if they got skimmed on a chip ATM the pin number wouldn't be usable by the thieves.
How does a tablet pose really more risk than paper? Assuming you have to give the content to people in one form or another, they will have the same content either on an ipad, on a laptop or printed on paper in their briefcase...
The laptop might be encrypted... The tablet might be encrypted... The paper almost certainly wont be.
The laptop or tablet, even if not encrypted requires some level of technical knowledge to extract the data (bypass passwords etc)... The paper requires someone who isn't blind to read it.
If stolen, a laptop or tablet has monetary value as an electronic device, and is likely to get wiped and resold. Paper has no monetary value other than the data on it.
What are you more likely to lose (or notice if it goes missing):
Your one and only ipad? A small number of papers from a stack of thousands?
Why are you using adobe reader? PDF is an open standard, there are lots of PDF readers out there... I find it utterly ridiculous how many people seem to stick with the worst software available for this particular task.
The way to fix it is to simply abandon software that doesn't do what you need, and find a replacement that does. Open standards make this easy.
Marking up is cumbersome on a computer with mouse/keyboard, but a tablet can make this a lot more paper-like, especially if you use a stylus (using a finger feels odd)...
Paper can be tampered with just as easily as digital copies, and a hand written signature is an utterly ridiculous thing to use as a judge of authenticity... On the other hand digital files can be digitally signed, which is MUCH harder to tamper with.
But on the subject of digital signatures you do have a point, people need to rethink things and realise that a digital signature is a far more secure method of determining the legitimacy of a document than a random mark that anyone can make with a pen.
HP touchpad is cheaper, and technically faster (1.2ghz dual core vs 1ghz dual core, and twice the ram). Motorola Xoom is cheaper, has a 1ghz dualcore like the ipad2 but has a higher resolution screen, more ram and more storage.
"better" is totally subjective depending on your requirements, for geeks wanting to hack with linux these tablets are better, for other users perhaps not.
You can get an HP Touchpad for $100US... Other tablets can be had for not a lot more... Even a brand new ipad2 is just $400US, 33% more than your thinkpad but its a new device actively supported by its manufacturer including a warranty. Government won't buy used devices. Not sure what the first gen ipad is selling for these days, but i believe apple are still selling them and at a lower price than the 2.
Initially its a case of "ipads are new and cool, we want them"... Then you have to find a way to justify the purchase, but the demand comes long before the justification.
You can scan, edit and reprint a paper copy... You can bleach out the ink and reprint parts of it, you could just transcribe it and make a new modified copy... A signature on paper is also totally worthless, its trivially easy to copy.
The trouble is, people have trust in paper and no trust in electronic devices, largely thanks to the likes of microsoft creating an impression among the general public that computers are always insecure and unreliable.
Charging for printing is fine, so long as you provide a system whereby employees can recover those costs for legitimate work related printing.
This is actually another benefit of home working, people can use their own printer to print things, and then reclaim the expenses for any work related printing they did.
Things to avoid tho... 1, make sure that everything printed is logged... this also makes it harder to steal data via printing it 2, make sure users cant connect direct to the printer, a lot of network printers also have usb ports and users might connect their laptops to these.. also most printers dont implement logging or accounting themselves, so you need to print via a server that does only this system falls apart if users can connect direct to the printer itself.
Hard copy is useful sometimes, but there are MANY occasions when its simply not necessary... Not just in politics, but during daily working most people encounter printed documents that they read *once* and then discard.
I'm sitting in an office right now and can see notepads all over the place full of non-searchable handwritten notes, piles of paperwork that's not moved for months, post-it notes everywhere etc. Paper goes missing, gets damages, blows around in the wind, gets liquid spilled on it etc... If you have one tablet instead of 200 pieces of paper your far less likely to lose it.
Not to mention the other inefficiencies... Inefficient storage, all that space wasted... Difficult to back up - photocopy every page? you probably should, what if your storage place burns down?
The sooner we move to the true paperless office the better.
Coca-Cola lost the ability to sell the first bottle of coke, and in order to sell more bottles of Coke they had to manufacture more. They have to continue manufacturing Coke for as long as they want to sell it, therefore they are continually working and continually purchasing new raw materials in order to make Coke.
They cannot, having manufactured the first bottle of Coke, produce infinite more bottles for free and with no effort.
And copyright doesn't give you the ability to sell something, it simply makes it more profitable by artificially eliminating the threat of free market competition and creating a monopoly on this particular product (but without the normal controls that apply to monopolies). You can sell something which is not copyrighted, and so can anyone else. But you can't demand ridiculous markup, because someone else will simply provide it at a cheaper price... This is called competition.
As for an ipad, well if apple charged $5000 then very few people would buy them, which is why they cost roughly the same as their nearest competitors, and then sell more due to the extra perceived value of their brand.
When it becomes harder to obtain drugs, basic laws of supply and demand simply mean that whatever drugs are still available now cost more, and new dealers will enter the market to replace those who got busted, meanwhile the government is now paying to keep those dealers in prison where they are now most likely supplying drugs to fellow inmates.
Ofcourse you also have to consider, what effect do increased prices and limited supply have on the addicts?
Exactly, and RIM are doing quite well in business and at least in some countries, among schoolkids (blackberry messenger is free, sms is not)... HP are also having a last gasp due to their fire sale prices.
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OSX uses GPT partition maps on x86 machines, they only had their own partition map on PPC systems. Current OSX running on x86 macs can still read disks which use the PPC partition map (as can linux), but can't boot from them.
Linux has supported EFI for a long time, and Intel have been pushing EFI for a long time.... We would have had EFI many years ago, only MS never bothered to support it until very recently.
That's only short term thinking, if a large portion of people buy systems with windows preinstalled, and then wipe it to install something else sooner or later OEMs will catch on to this and start providing systems either blank or with whatever people are replacing windows with... At which point, MS stop making any money.
Also MS want to sell you other products, which generally only run on their OS... If you've wiped it and installed something else you won't be sending any more money their way.
They absolutely want to prevent users installing any other OS, security is and always has been of very little concern to MS. Ensuring continued sales is the overriding goal, and MS only bothered paying any attention whatsoever to security when their lack of it started driving users to other systems.
Remember the crappier a system is, the more money they can make selling you extras to fix it, as well as expensive consultancy etc. A system which is reliable doesn't need fixing, nor upgrading and is therefore bad for business.
The best part about html is that it is open, and as such will be implemented independently by all the major browser makers...
This is in contrast to flash, where there is generally only one implementation, making any security holes in it extremely attractive indeed. This is made even worse by the fact that this implementation is extremely slow/buggy especially on non windows platforms, wont be fixed by its vendor and cannot be fixed by anyone else due to being closed source.
But is it a case of explicitly locking you out, or a case of linux simply not having support for the hardware yet?
MS have a history of doing bad things, they might claim its to combat malware when the real purpose is to reduce competition from Linux...
It's possible to implement a secure boot system while still allowing the legitimate owner to boot whatever OS they want, but based on past history MS would intentionally choose an implementation that makes Linux use harder.
Apple have not implemented any such system on their Mac line... They have on their phone/tablets, but phones were never open platforms to begin with... And speaking of which, windows mobile devices often have locked bootloaders, as does the xbox. Apple aren't taking away something that users already have.
Also Apple have not been found to wield monopoly control over any market by a court, for any product that Apple makes there is a viable alternative available from someone else.
Of course, being tied to a single supplier for one of the necessary components is extremely bad for the market... It makes you utterly beholden to that one supplier, and makes it extremely difficult to differentiate your product from that of your competitors. You effectively become a simple reseller for that one supplier.
This is one of the main reasons IBM and soon HP are getting out of the market, and the reason why Apple are the only supplier who aren't forced to have razor thin margins.
And the IBM PC was largely successful because it was a general purpose and relatively open device...
There were plenty of less open but otherwise superior hardware designs around at the time, and yet they largely failed... Apple is the only one thats still around, they nearly died and are still a small player in the market.
Which is exactly how it works right now...
You could start manufacturing a car right now from raw materials and all the information required to do so is readily available, the only reason people don't do this is because the time, effort and intermediate steps (ie with only raw materials you would first need to manufacture appropriate tools before you even start making vehicle components) that would be required to make a car, mean that the process of building your own car from scratch is not a viable action.
A printer that can simplify the creation of some or all of those components and/or tools benefit the existing car companies as much as they do you. They would still have larger printers, bigger factories to operate them in, better supply chains to bring the raw materials etc.
One of the banks here fitted grey plastic devices in the card slots supposedly to prevent skimming, unfortunately the devices they fitted look exactly like skimmers.
Similarly while the requirement for a pin is a stumbling block, as i would need to find some method of acquiring the pin such as using a card skimmer...
The requirement for a signature however provides no protection whatsoever...
If i clone your card, i can simply sign the back of the fake card myself.
If i steal your card i now have a copy of your signature which i can replicate.
In either case, it is very rare for anyone to check, and even if they do signatures never look exactly the same anyway so its very easy to pass off an imperfect copy.
Most of the cards allowing instant low value purchases have strict limits on the value of an individual transaction, and some also require you to pre load a certain amount of credit onto the card which is then depleted as you use the card, which is less dangerous than carrying cash.
Credit cards however are a fundamentally flawed method for most online transactions... The problem being that the system is pull rather than push based. When you purchase something with a card online, you are effectively giving the retailer access to all your available credit and trusting them to only take what they're supposed to. And the problem is that when a retailer gets hacked all their customers get screwed too...
On the other hand, with a push system you authorise the sending of the exact amount to the retailer, they have no ability to take more than you give them, similar to cash. And then if the retailer gets hacked, the only thing the hacker can steal is the retailer's money rather than the customer's money.
That's the problem, backwards compatibility exists on the cards so someone will read the magstrip and then take your card to an ATM which accepts them.
Perhaps a short term solution would be to require a different pin number for magstrip use, and for ATMs which use the chip to tell the user so.
Users could then choose not to use magstrip ATMs, and if they got skimmed on a chip ATM the pin number wouldn't be usable by the thieves.
How does a tablet pose really more risk than paper?
Assuming you have to give the content to people in one form or another, they will have the same content either on an ipad, on a laptop or printed on paper in their briefcase...
The laptop might be encrypted...
The tablet might be encrypted...
The paper almost certainly wont be.
The laptop or tablet, even if not encrypted requires some level of technical knowledge to extract the data (bypass passwords etc)...
The paper requires someone who isn't blind to read it.
If stolen, a laptop or tablet has monetary value as an electronic device, and is likely to get wiped and resold.
Paper has no monetary value other than the data on it.
What are you more likely to lose (or notice if it goes missing):
Your one and only ipad?
A small number of papers from a stack of thousands?
Why are you using adobe reader?
PDF is an open standard, there are lots of PDF readers out there... I find it utterly ridiculous how many people seem to stick with the worst software available for this particular task.
The way to fix it is to simply abandon software that doesn't do what you need, and find a replacement that does. Open standards make this easy.
Marking up is cumbersome on a computer with mouse/keyboard, but a tablet can make this a lot more paper-like, especially if you use a stylus (using a finger feels odd)...
Paper can be tampered with just as easily as digital copies, and a hand written signature is an utterly ridiculous thing to use as a judge of authenticity... On the other hand digital files can be digitally signed, which is MUCH harder to tamper with.
But on the subject of digital signatures you do have a point, people need to rethink things and realise that a digital signature is a far more secure method of determining the legitimacy of a document than a random mark that anyone can make with a pen.
HP touchpad is cheaper, and technically faster (1.2ghz dual core vs 1ghz dual core, and twice the ram).
Motorola Xoom is cheaper, has a 1ghz dualcore like the ipad2 but has a higher resolution screen, more ram and more storage.
"better" is totally subjective depending on your requirements, for geeks wanting to hack with linux these tablets are better, for other users perhaps not.
You can get an HP Touchpad for $100US...
Other tablets can be had for not a lot more...
Even a brand new ipad2 is just $400US, 33% more than your thinkpad but its a new device actively supported by its manufacturer including a warranty. Government won't buy used devices. Not sure what the first gen ipad is selling for these days, but i believe apple are still selling them and at a lower price than the 2.
Initially its a case of "ipads are new and cool, we want them"...
Then you have to find a way to justify the purchase, but the demand comes long before the justification.
You can scan, edit and reprint a paper copy... You can bleach out the ink and reprint parts of it, you could just transcribe it and make a new modified copy...
A signature on paper is also totally worthless, its trivially easy to copy.
The trouble is, people have trust in paper and no trust in electronic devices, largely thanks to the likes of microsoft creating an impression among the general public that computers are always insecure and unreliable.
Charging for printing is fine, so long as you provide a system whereby employees can recover those costs for legitimate work related printing.
This is actually another benefit of home working, people can use their own printer to print things, and then reclaim the expenses for any work related printing they did.
Things to avoid tho...
1, make sure that everything printed is logged... this also makes it harder to steal data via printing it
2, make sure users cant connect direct to the printer, a lot of network printers also have usb ports and users might connect their laptops to these.. also most printers dont implement logging or accounting themselves, so you need to print via a server that does only this system falls apart if users can connect direct to the printer itself.
Hard copy is useful sometimes, but there are MANY occasions when its simply not necessary... Not just in politics, but during daily working most people encounter printed documents that they read *once* and then discard.
I'm sitting in an office right now and can see notepads all over the place full of non-searchable handwritten notes, piles of paperwork that's not moved for months, post-it notes everywhere etc. Paper goes missing, gets damages, blows around in the wind, gets liquid spilled on it etc...
If you have one tablet instead of 200 pieces of paper your far less likely to lose it.
Not to mention the other inefficiencies...
Inefficient storage, all that space wasted...
Difficult to back up - photocopy every page? you probably should, what if your storage place burns down?
The sooner we move to the true paperless office the better.
Only on mainstream computers, which cause MAJOR hassle for consumers on a daily basis... Updates, malware, etc...
On any other consumer technology, there is even less to change... Updates are rare, devices are generally not meant to be customised.
Computers today are geek tools, they really are not suitable for use by the general public.
And with the numbers on the keypad 1-5 being shiny clean, while the remaining numbers are dirty due to never being used...
Coca-Cola lost the ability to sell the first bottle of coke, and in order to sell more bottles of Coke they had to manufacture more. They have to continue manufacturing Coke for as long as they want to sell it, therefore they are continually working and continually purchasing new raw materials in order to make Coke.
They cannot, having manufactured the first bottle of Coke, produce infinite more bottles for free and with no effort.
And copyright doesn't give you the ability to sell something, it simply makes it more profitable by artificially eliminating the threat of free market competition and creating a monopoly on this particular product (but without the normal controls that apply to monopolies).
You can sell something which is not copyrighted, and so can anyone else. But you can't demand ridiculous markup, because someone else will simply provide it at a cheaper price... This is called competition.
As for an ipad, well if apple charged $5000 then very few people would buy them, which is why they cost roughly the same as their nearest competitors, and then sell more due to the extra perceived value of their brand.
When it becomes harder to obtain drugs, basic laws of supply and demand simply mean that whatever drugs are still available now cost more, and new dealers will enter the market to replace those who got busted, meanwhile the government is now paying to keep those dealers in prison where they are now most likely supplying drugs to fellow inmates.
Ofcourse you also have to consider, what effect do increased prices and limited supply have on the addicts?
Exactly, and RIM are doing quite well in business and at least in some countries, among schoolkids (blackberry messenger is free, sms is not)...
HP are also having a last gasp due to their fire sale prices.