On the contrary... Windows aims to keep people locked in, through proprietary applications, proprietary file formats and protocols etc... They aim to keep market share by making it as difficult as possible to use any other platform. If Linux became the dominant desktop system, then it would open the door for BSD, Solaris, and any other desktop system willing to comply with the same published open standards.
Down from 21% last month, and 22% the month before... You will also find that the survey is based on hostnames, many of those sites will have no useful content and little or no visitors. There is also historical precedent of microsoft paying large hosting providers to put their parked sites on iis, that is thousands of completely empty websites specifically to push the stats up.
You make a very good point, while Linux may have annoying quirks and bugs, Windows has just as many if not more, and the only difference is that users have already got used to and accepted the windows bugs...
I am in a similar boat, i use linux or mac primarily and only use windows on the odd occasion... And to add to your list:
* Most updates require a reboot, this is especially annoying for an occasional user like myself since each time i use it (once every couple of months) there will be updates available and most of them need a reboot, even for stuff that really shouldnt. * Updates often don't install, they say they've installed but if you check the version of the individual files and compare them to the ms advisory, you will see they're not installed at all. * No package management - having to manually find software (and run the risk of it being malware), download it and then run through an irritating next next next clickfest is extremely annoying, and updating third party apps is similarly painful. * No virtual desktops - doesn't matter so much if i'm just playing games, but for any serious work once you get used to virtual desktops you'll never want to live without em. * Needs a firewall - because there are network services running by default (netbios, rpc etc), even on a workstation (why?), you need a firewall to block access to them, only a firewall also gets in the way of other things like p2p apps, voip apps etc. On any other platform i would just ensure nothing was listening on my workstation. * When something breaks, theres no simple commented textfiles to edit, your left with the registry which is much worse... Also you need specialist tools to edit the registry, can't just boot a livecd and use a text editor. * I've had windows installs fail to boot because of simple changes in the bios (or a bios update), a dual boot linux install coped with it just fine... Also recovery mode often doesn't work in cases like this, or basically returns your system to an unpatched worm-fodder state. * No recognition of dual boot, if you install linux, freebsd or pretty much anything like that it will recognise other systems being installed and offer to give you a boot menu, windows just blindly overwrites the bootloader of whatever else you might have had installed. * Refusal to format fat32 volumes over 32GB and refusal to support any other openly supported filesystems - if you want to exchange data between systems, your stuck with crufty old fat32 which you need to format using a third party tool, while ms try and force you towards their proprietary ntfs filesystem. * Lack of ISO/image mounting software by default - some stuff is distributed as iso images, having to burn it to physical media is a huge hassle, and some third party iso mounting tools cause problems with the drm cruft on games. * Lack of many other things (pdf reader, video codecs etc) by default, and to make matters worse, installing these is not simple - see lack of package management. * The apps which are bundled by default feel like crippleware, designed to make you buy the expensive proper versions. * Onerous licensing crap - entering a code at install is hassle enough, WGA is even worse... It shows what a company thinks of its customers when its willing to divert significant resources away from improving the product and into developing code that is only ever detrimental to the customers. * Uninstall - removing apps is often flakey, sometimes they fail to remove, often they don't remove completely and leave detritus laying about, sometimes a failed uninstall will also make it impossible to install a new version, and fixing it manually is often very difficult involving removal of various files and registry keys most of which are not documented or obvious. * No SSH by default, pretty much all networking gear has standardised on ssh these days, windows is the last os without ssh by default (but it does have old insecure/obsolete crap like rsh and telnet!).
Or perhaps the revenue from tobacco taxes is outweighed by the cost of tobacco related health problems.
Smokers do die off, but the dying process (ie the time from when they start being unhealthy and requiring medical help to their death) is often longer.
No drug company will provide a cure unless they're forced to, there is far more profit in providing temporary relief from the symptoms so that the patient has to keep buying your drugs indefinitely.
Netbooks were originally a good idea, when they were small and cheap... Now they are getting bigger and more expensive, largely to run increasingly bloated software... It's not surprised they are dying since they have now just become "lowend overpriced laptops".
The Amiga was considerably cheaper, and superior to DOS based machines of the day.
Software competitors weren't less open than DOS, but they weren't more open either... On the other hand the hardware required to run DOS was considerably more open than the hardware that ran other systems, and software was considered a triviality alongside the price of hardware.
Torrents may end up being the only way to preserve media... If the only non torrent versions of the media available are DRM encumbered and the keys are lost, you may find that the only remaining usable copies are the torrented versions.
For a bank it's fairly easy, you already have an existing relationship with the bank and they will already have sent you username, password, possibly a physical authentication device like a token not to mention all the other stuff like cards and check books etc... For them to send you an SSL certificate fingerprint and a small booklet explaining how to install it is not a huge additional burden.
Commerce sites with whom you do not necessarily have an existing relationship are more problematic...
Speaking of which, a push system of funds transfer for purchases would make a lot more sense than the current pull system of credit cards...
These are called stealth taxes... If you double the income tax then people will notice immediately and be up in arms about it, so instead you add lots of small taxes on different things hoping each one individually will be less noticeable.
Having all these small taxes however is extremely inefficient, and introduces a huge administrative overhead at multiple levels, and the complexity of any system increases the chances of vulnerabilities being found, where vulnerabilities in this case are ways to avoid paying taxes.
You really want to increase the sprawl, and making the cities less dense... Only instead of all the businesses being in one area and the residentials in another, mix them up.
If you have a city where everything is densely packed but segregated then you end up with transport chaos, during peak hours roads and rails are completely overcrowded and during off-peak hours you have large power hungry empty buses and trains roaming around.
Another issue is that of working hours, if they were spread out then you could make far more efficient use of the transport facilities too.
Because as a fellow indian you are more used to the accent and the language quirks common in india... As a fellow indian you also don't look upon indian call centers with derision... You do not feel a sense of anger because your call centers have not been outsourced to a foreign country...
I can see this simply blowing up in MS' face... Those chinese companies won't want to increase their costs by buying software, as while that might increase their ability to sell products to the US it would make them less competitive when selling products elsewhere. Instead, you can expect to see a lot of companies moving to free software, so the chinese products will be as cheap as ever.
Although it may slightly benefit other US companies, since they will now be able to compete by using the same free software, rather than being at an unfair advantage having to pay for what the chinese obtain for free... The net effect will be negative for microsoft.
These certificate authorities are for-profit companies, and admitting to a breach is extremely bad for business... If a breach occurs and is detected before it becomes public, there's every chance that these companies would try to hide what happened and hope nothing comes of it. Similarly a hacker who has breached such a site, is likely to keep it to themselves and use it in highly targeted attacks rather than setting up thousands of phishing sites which will rapidly get the problem noticed.
EV certs don't help, they are more expensive and *supposed* to do a more thorough background check of who requested the cert, however original ssl certs were supposed to do thorough checks too but now they just boil down to "can receive email on the domain in question"... Companies issuing certs will always aim to increase profit, so reducing the level of work required to issue a certificate is an effective way to increase profits in the short term.
Personally i think organisations like banks should issue their own certificates, that way you are not trusting any third party. For other sites, who knows...
Society takes away some of your freedoms (such as the freedom to take what you want and kill people) in exchange for giving everyone a reasonable set of freedoms...
If you had a system where you gave people complete freedom, then a small number of people would abuse that system to sieze power and thus remove those freedoms from everyone else, ie an anarchy would quickly degenerate into war followed by an oppressive dictatorship.
The GPL works like society, it restricts *some* freedoms in order to protect many more.
That explains why the performance on that page is so pitiful under OSX, and so much faster under Linux on the same hardware. Is there any ETA on when 2d acceleration will be implemented for OSX?
On windows, you can authenticate using the password hash instead of the plain text password (ie you can just retrieve the hash from the disk, no need to crack it), does doing so still provide access to the encrypted data?
If resetting the password destroys the private key, how is this performed? IS the destruction of the key a separate process which could be bypassed by resetting the password using a livecd, or is it destroyed because the privkey is encrypted using the password and thus can no longer be decrypted by the newly changed password?
Even assuming that this doesnt work, windows password encryption is much weaker than modern unix systems (especially if lanman is still enabled) so there is still a high possibility of simply cracking the password and using it.
And what if they want to replace a broken node? No new units being sold today have OtherOS capability, so their cluster would gradually shrink in size until it became useless.
Sony chose to sell the PS3 units at a loss, the air force is merely taking advantage of the system. The slim ps3 models are apparently no longer sold at a loss, and they also consume less power and produce less heat making them a better choice for supercomputing... However the OtherOS option is not available at all on the slim models...
Ofcourse the air force could always jailbreak the slim models, that would not only give them the power benefits and a source of new hardware, but on a jailbroken system you get access to 7 SPUs instead of 6, and there is the potential to enable the 8th which was disabled to improve yields, most slim ps3 should have a working 8th spu by now since the production process will have improved... They could also potentially program the GPU to get extra performance.
As a buyer, data is the least of my concerns, its trivially easy to wipe it... However you must be pretty stupid to return an item to a store while it still has your own data on it!
I would however want a small discount if the packaging was opened/damaged... Even if the item inside was perfectly clean.
Even at half price they still make a profit. They could also sell it as reconditioned, where the reconditioning process involves wiping and reinstalling with a clean image, and re-packaging the item.
Also many places are not obliged to permit returns unless the packaging is unopened, or the item is incorrect in some way (defective, damaged, not what was ordered etc).
Isn't EFS just using your password hash as the key, or at least using that hash as the key to encrypt the actual certificate... In any case, it's supposed to be pretty weak and quite easy to retrieve data from.
Also, the reason most windows users go for full disk encryption instead of user level encryption is because of just how many places on disk windows could store personal information, whereas on a unix system it pretty much only goes in $HOME,/tmp (which you can put in ram) and swap (which you can encrypt using a random key at bootup)
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On the contrary...
Windows aims to keep people locked in, through proprietary applications, proprietary file formats and protocols etc... They aim to keep market share by making it as difficult as possible to use any other platform.
If Linux became the dominant desktop system, then it would open the door for BSD, Solaris, and any other desktop system willing to comply with the same published open standards.
Down from 21% last month, and 22% the month before...
You will also find that the survey is based on hostnames, many of those sites will have no useful content and little or no visitors.
There is also historical precedent of microsoft paying large hosting providers to put their parked sites on iis, that is thousands of completely empty websites specifically to push the stats up.
You make a very good point, while Linux may have annoying quirks and bugs, Windows has just as many if not more, and the only difference is that users have already got used to and accepted the windows bugs...
I am in a similar boat, i use linux or mac primarily and only use windows on the odd occasion... And to add to your list:
* Most updates require a reboot, this is especially annoying for an occasional user like myself since each time i use it (once every couple of months) there will be updates available and most of them need a reboot, even for stuff that really shouldnt.
* Updates often don't install, they say they've installed but if you check the version of the individual files and compare them to the ms advisory, you will see they're not installed at all.
* No package management - having to manually find software (and run the risk of it being malware), download it and then run through an irritating next next next clickfest is extremely annoying, and updating third party apps is similarly painful.
* No virtual desktops - doesn't matter so much if i'm just playing games, but for any serious work once you get used to virtual desktops you'll never want to live without em.
* Needs a firewall - because there are network services running by default (netbios, rpc etc), even on a workstation (why?), you need a firewall to block access to them, only a firewall also gets in the way of other things like p2p apps, voip apps etc. On any other platform i would just ensure nothing was listening on my workstation.
* When something breaks, theres no simple commented textfiles to edit, your left with the registry which is much worse... Also you need specialist tools to edit the registry, can't just boot a livecd and use a text editor.
* I've had windows installs fail to boot because of simple changes in the bios (or a bios update), a dual boot linux install coped with it just fine... Also recovery mode often doesn't work in cases like this, or basically returns your system to an unpatched worm-fodder state.
* No recognition of dual boot, if you install linux, freebsd or pretty much anything like that it will recognise other systems being installed and offer to give you a boot menu, windows just blindly overwrites the bootloader of whatever else you might have had installed.
* Refusal to format fat32 volumes over 32GB and refusal to support any other openly supported filesystems - if you want to exchange data between systems, your stuck with crufty old fat32 which you need to format using a third party tool, while ms try and force you towards their proprietary ntfs filesystem.
* Lack of ISO/image mounting software by default - some stuff is distributed as iso images, having to burn it to physical media is a huge hassle, and some third party iso mounting tools cause problems with the drm cruft on games.
* Lack of many other things (pdf reader, video codecs etc) by default, and to make matters worse, installing these is not simple - see lack of package management.
* The apps which are bundled by default feel like crippleware, designed to make you buy the expensive proper versions.
* Onerous licensing crap - entering a code at install is hassle enough, WGA is even worse... It shows what a company thinks of its customers when its willing to divert significant resources away from improving the product and into developing code that is only ever detrimental to the customers.
* Uninstall - removing apps is often flakey, sometimes they fail to remove, often they don't remove completely and leave detritus laying about, sometimes a failed uninstall will also make it impossible to install a new version, and fixing it manually is often very difficult involving removal of various files and registry keys most of which are not documented or obvious.
* No SSH by default, pretty much all networking gear has standardised on ssh these days, windows is the last os without ssh by default (but it does have old insecure/obsolete crap like rsh and telnet!).
If you spend time getting used to linu
China have done perfectly well up to now by not paying for software, why would they suddenly start?
Or perhaps the revenue from tobacco taxes is outweighed by the cost of tobacco related health problems.
Smokers do die off, but the dying process (ie the time from when they start being unhealthy and requiring medical help to their death) is often longer.
No drug company will provide a cure unless they're forced to, there is far more profit in providing temporary relief from the symptoms so that the patient has to keep buying your drugs indefinitely.
Netbooks were originally a good idea, when they were small and cheap...
Now they are getting bigger and more expensive, largely to run increasingly bloated software... It's not surprised they are dying since they have now just become "lowend overpriced laptops".
The Amiga was considerably cheaper, and superior to DOS based machines of the day.
Software competitors weren't less open than DOS, but they weren't more open either... On the other hand the hardware required to run DOS was considerably more open than the hardware that ran other systems, and software was considered a triviality alongside the price of hardware.
Torrents may end up being the only way to preserve media...
If the only non torrent versions of the media available are DRM encumbered and the keys are lost, you may find that the only remaining usable copies are the torrented versions.
For a bank it's fairly easy, you already have an existing relationship with the bank and they will already have sent you username, password, possibly a physical authentication device like a token not to mention all the other stuff like cards and check books etc... For them to send you an SSL certificate fingerprint and a small booklet explaining how to install it is not a huge additional burden.
Commerce sites with whom you do not necessarily have an existing relationship are more problematic...
Speaking of which, a push system of funds transfer for purchases would make a lot more sense than the current pull system of credit cards...
These are called stealth taxes... If you double the income tax then people will notice immediately and be up in arms about it, so instead you add lots of small taxes on different things hoping each one individually will be less noticeable.
Having all these small taxes however is extremely inefficient, and introduces a huge administrative overhead at multiple levels, and the complexity of any system increases the chances of vulnerabilities being found, where vulnerabilities in this case are ways to avoid paying taxes.
You really want to increase the sprawl, and making the cities less dense...
Only instead of all the businesses being in one area and the residentials in another, mix them up.
If you have a city where everything is densely packed but segregated then you end up with transport chaos, during peak hours roads and rails are completely overcrowded and during off-peak hours you have large power hungry empty buses and trains roaming around.
Another issue is that of working hours, if they were spread out then you could make far more efficient use of the transport facilities too.
Because as a fellow indian you are more used to the accent and the language quirks common in india...
As a fellow indian you also don't look upon indian call centers with derision...
You do not feel a sense of anger because your call centers have not been outsourced to a foreign country...
I can see this simply blowing up in MS' face... Those chinese companies won't want to increase their costs by buying software, as while that might increase their ability to sell products to the US it would make them less competitive when selling products elsewhere.
Instead, you can expect to see a lot of companies moving to free software, so the chinese products will be as cheap as ever.
Although it may slightly benefit other US companies, since they will now be able to compete by using the same free software, rather than being at an unfair advantage having to pay for what the chinese obtain for free... The net effect will be negative for microsoft.
These certificate authorities are for-profit companies, and admitting to a breach is extremely bad for business... If a breach occurs and is detected before it becomes public, there's every chance that these companies would try to hide what happened and hope nothing comes of it. Similarly a hacker who has breached such a site, is likely to keep it to themselves and use it in highly targeted attacks rather than setting up thousands of phishing sites which will rapidly get the problem noticed.
EV certs don't help, they are more expensive and *supposed* to do a more thorough background check of who requested the cert, however original ssl certs were supposed to do thorough checks too but now they just boil down to "can receive email on the domain in question"... Companies issuing certs will always aim to increase profit, so reducing the level of work required to issue a certificate is an effective way to increase profits in the short term.
Personally i think organisations like banks should issue their own certificates, that way you are not trusting any third party. For other sites, who knows...
Society takes away some of your freedoms (such as the freedom to take what you want and kill people) in exchange for giving everyone a reasonable set of freedoms...
If you had a system where you gave people complete freedom, then a small number of people would abuse that system to sieze power and thus remove those freedoms from everyone else, ie an anarchy would quickly degenerate into war followed by an oppressive dictatorship.
The GPL works like society, it restricts *some* freedoms in order to protect many more.
That explains why the performance on that page is so pitiful under OSX, and so much faster under Linux on the same hardware. Is there any ETA on when 2d acceleration will be implemented for OSX?
On windows, you can authenticate using the password hash instead of the plain text password (ie you can just retrieve the hash from the disk, no need to crack it), does doing so still provide access to the encrypted data?
If resetting the password destroys the private key, how is this performed? IS the destruction of the key a separate process which could be bypassed by resetting the password using a livecd, or is it destroyed because the privkey is encrypted using the password and thus can no longer be decrypted by the newly changed password?
Even assuming that this doesnt work, windows password encryption is much weaker than modern unix systems (especially if lanman is still enabled) so there is still a high possibility of simply cracking the password and using it.
So you have the registry for one...
Then you have the swap file, is there any option to encrypt that?
And what if they want to replace a broken node? No new units being sold today have OtherOS capability, so their cluster would gradually shrink in size until it became useless.
Sony chose to sell the PS3 units at a loss, the air force is merely taking advantage of the system.
The slim ps3 models are apparently no longer sold at a loss, and they also consume less power and produce less heat making them a better choice for supercomputing... However the OtherOS option is not available at all on the slim models...
Ofcourse the air force could always jailbreak the slim models, that would not only give them the power benefits and a source of new hardware, but on a jailbroken system you get access to 7 SPUs instead of 6, and there is the potential to enable the 8th which was disabled to improve yields, most slim ps3 should have a working 8th spu by now since the production process will have improved... They could also potentially program the GPU to get extra performance.
As a buyer, data is the least of my concerns, its trivially easy to wipe it...
However you must be pretty stupid to return an item to a store while it still has your own data on it!
I would however want a small discount if the packaging was opened/damaged... Even if the item inside was perfectly clean.
Even at half price they still make a profit.
They could also sell it as reconditioned, where the reconditioning process involves wiping and reinstalling with a clean image, and re-packaging the item.
Also many places are not obliged to permit returns unless the packaging is unopened, or the item is incorrect in some way (defective, damaged, not what was ordered etc).
Or just horribly inefficient file formats, excessively high resolution images etc... It's not hard to fill 10GB these days.
Isn't EFS just using your password hash as the key, or at least using that hash as the key to encrypt the actual certificate... In any case, it's supposed to be pretty weak and quite easy to retrieve data from.
Also, the reason most windows users go for full disk encryption instead of user level encryption is because of just how many places on disk windows could store personal information, whereas on a unix system it pretty much only goes in $HOME, /tmp (which you can put in ram) and swap (which you can encrypt using a random key at bootup)