The problem is a lack of user education, the average end user doesn't understand how their freedoms are being restricted by such products... The only way to educate those users, is through the mass media, and unfortunately that mass media is controlled by the very people who are trying to enforce restrictions upon them.
I would much rather media companies work on more competitive pricing and superior products, rather than actively spending their time and money to make their product inferior to the pirate copies. Look at asia, where the cinemas are nicer and companies like nokia are offering much cheaper music services than we get elsewhere, all thanks to the competition from piracy.
The tier-1 carriers, who don't have to pay for transit could easily offer a service like this without losing money...
This setup however, will simply assume that not all users will saturate their 1gbps pipe all of the time... At that speed, it's actually very difficult to keep the line maxed out. If you download flat out, it will only take a matter of hours to fill a 2TB drive, and even streaming 1080p video won't saturate a gigabit link. Also if this service has a lot of users p2p applications (as well as certain games etc) will prefer local peers, and i expect the service provider to mirror or cache a lot of the most often downloaded content anyway so a lot of the traffic will stay local.
Windows doesn't come with wireless drivers for every chipset either... Unless you're using an OEM install which has them added in (and you could do the same with linux) you will have to acquire and install the drivers somehow too. Linux generally does better than windows because distros are updated more often and therefore more likely to have the necessary drivers.
If a higher display resolution makes things harder to read, you're doing it wrong... Font sizes are specified in points, 1 point is supposed to be 1/72 of an inch regardless of how many pixels are required to display it... So a higher resolution screen will just result in text which is more detailed while being the same physical size.
The solution is for non technical users to have simpler devices that only serve their needs and don't provide anything else.... When was the last time you heard of a games console, printer, typewriter or microwave being exploited remotely, or being used to download malware? Having a general purpose computer with an excessively complicated OS is just asking for trouble. Such things are simply not appropriate for the general public.
Antivirus is just a filter that will detect and stop the lowest hanging fruit... I have done incident response jobs for many many different clients, and without exception every single compromised machine i've ever looked at had some kind of av product installed at the very least. Aside from detecting the most trivial of attacks, it provides a false sense of security and encourages users to be less careful.
Sure improvements can be made, but now a lot of effort is wasted trying to find non patented ways to achieve the same result rather than trying to achieve new results.
If you look at what the content industry is doing in places like china and russia, they get legitimate music (like the service nokia recently launched) much cheaper than its available in the west, plus its drm free... Similarly, cinemas are much more pleasant places to be in asia, not the dirty smelly overpriced places you get in europe... And they get DVDs released a lot earlier than other places.
Why is this? because piracy is rampant in these places and its forcing the industry to try and compete, in the west the level of competition is kept artificially low because the content industry has the government in their pocket, and so we get an inferior service at a much higher price.
IE9 is just another attempt at catching up, it's pretty feeble when a browser thats "coming soon" is only going to be "on-par" with whats already available, and will be behind what everyone else has coming soon.
The current speed limits in the US and some other countries are extremely inefficient... Having a static speed limit at all times of the day and night is inefficient, when the road is less busy its safer to drive at higher speed, especially if the road is well lit, straight and wide.
Similarly, the speed limit of what, 55mph on US highways is ridiculously low... Considering how many miles of highway exist which are straight empty roads.. If you have a 100 mile long road, which is dead straight with several miles of visibility and little or no other traffic there is no reason to be crawling along it at 55...
The speed limits were also set many years ago, since then the technology used to build roads, tires and vehicles has improved massively.. What was unsafe with 1960s technology could well be fine today.
You have the autobahns in germany where in some cases there is no speed limit whatsoever, you can drive as fast as you like. People aren't usually suicidal so they drive as fast as they feel safe, and the accident record on the autobahn is actually pretty good.
If your driving along at 55mph, modern cars will be making very little noise.. It's quite relaxing, and this actually increases your chances of falling asleep. On the other hand, if you're driving at the edge of what you feel is safe you will pay a lot more attention.
In south korea the problem is because their online commerce system is locked into a proprietary system that requires an ie-only plugin, rather than using standard ssl like everywhere else.
America also has a relatively large percentage of IE users... Europe however, has far lower IE market share than anywhere else.
Not at all, ditching windows would be like divorcing a leeching spouse who is only there for your money... The divorce settlement may cost a lot, but its a one off payment and once you're free you won't be hemorrhaging cash year on year.
The problem is that the standards process moves too slowly, and the web has traditionally moved very fast (except for the few years when IE6 was stifling progress)... Not implementing a draft standard is one thing, but not implementing the same fully documented standards, draft or not, that are implemented by everyone else is just ridiculous.
They haven't caught up, IE8 is still way behind the current releases of other browsers... They've shrunk the gap slightly, but they're woefully far behind. Look at their acid3 score, or the html5test site, or there was another site which showed what percentage of the various standards were supported by various browsers... Whatever metric you use, IE comes up laughably short compared to all the other major browsers.
It's perfectly fair to gripe, when for several years now not just one but several other browser makers have been light years ahead... Why can't MS at the very least try to be in the same league as webkit/opera/mozilla?
Don't rely on group policy to "lock down" anything, the best you can hope for with group policy is to distribute a set of defaults... DO NOT rely on it for any kind of security whatsoever.
So people will make do with an inferior browser, because its more efficient than the only other alternative of having an inferior browser *AND* a better one at the same time. Does that not sound extremely stupid to anyone else?
So basically the most secure configuration of windows is still weaker than that of any other platform.
Glad i don't use windows, and can therefore have only the browser(s) i want installed and can easily remove anything which is unwanted therefore having even less exposure, configuration and patch maintenance.
If one machine gets infected, that infection may spread... If all the workstations are part of a domain and share authentication details it becomes far easier to spread too.
The fact IE comes by default, and isn't easily removable is even more reason not to use it, it shows that it cant (and never could) stand on its own merit as a browser, they have to use dirty tricks like this to get people to use it.
If filesharing is legal, there will be no reason to hide the act of filesharing... Thus it becomes easier to generate statistics about what's being shared, so who gets the cut should be based on how widespread their media gets shared. If noone wants your crap, you get nothing.
Which means more flash sites will pop up telling Android users to install flash, wether they want to or not. You don't have much choice if an entire site is written in flash, or has an unskipable splash screen etc. If a site offers a non flash version alongside a flash version, i will always choose the non flash version even if i'm using a system capable of displaying flash but many sites don't give the option.
I, as a heavy Linux user, was against flash on moral grounds long before Apple made a stand with the iPhone... I used to run Linux on an Alphastation and used an SGI Octane long before i ever used a modern mac (anything newer than a quadra 900), i've also experimented with various other systems such as BeOS and various *BSD, and was an early adopter of Linux/x86_64... Flash has always been painful for me due to it being proprietary. All these systems were able to run Mozilla just fine, but no or very half assed flash support.
I don't like flash because it reduces my platform choice to only those officially blessed by Adobe. I am glad Apple made a stand and were big enough to get noticed. Regardless of what their reasons were, it has become a bit less painful to browse without flash these days.
Could you not call them up and make a reservation by phone, or perhaps by email... I would also mention that i was unable to use their website due to it being flash only. They will soon change it if they're losing custom. I also imagine that there was nothing on their site that couldn't be done with html, especially a reservation form...
The trouble with flash, is that it's tied to a single supplier, html5 is not... There are plenty of devices other than the iphone which cannot be used to view flash content because adobe can't be bothered to support them, and plenty of platform on which flash is available but in a half assed manner (eg linux). The prevalence of flash on the web effectively excludes any device or OS which is not blessed by adobe (look at the delays on arm based smartbooks).
The web should not be at the whim of any single vendor, not microsoft, not adobe, not netscape, not apple, not google, not mozilla... Users should have a choice, and as it stands HTML5 is free to be implemented by anyone and on any device they choose while flash is not. Whatever their reasons, i'm glad Apple made a stand because thanks to them, many sites are now accessible to people who don't have flash for whatever reason.
Flash has also become a security nightmare, malware authors don't target the browser so much anymore because IE is no longer over 90% market share, instead they target things like flash where exactly the same code (complete with exploitable holes) is present on over 90% of users systems regardless of what browser they use. Diversity in the browser market is great for everyone, don't ruin it by tying everyone to a monoculture plugin.
If flash is so great, what's to stop it being standardised as part of HTML6 and implemented by every browser maker.
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The problem is a lack of user education, the average end user doesn't understand how their freedoms are being restricted by such products...
The only way to educate those users, is through the mass media, and unfortunately that mass media is controlled by the very people who are trying to enforce restrictions upon them.
I would much rather media companies work on more competitive pricing and superior products, rather than actively spending their time and money to make their product inferior to the pirate copies. Look at asia, where the cinemas are nicer and companies like nokia are offering much cheaper music services than we get elsewhere, all thanks to the competition from piracy.
By the time the current generation are making laws, there will already be a new generation that finds the laws outdated...
The tier-1 carriers, who don't have to pay for transit could easily offer a service like this without losing money...
This setup however, will simply assume that not all users will saturate their 1gbps pipe all of the time... At that speed, it's actually very difficult to keep the line maxed out. If you download flat out, it will only take a matter of hours to fill a 2TB drive, and even streaming 1080p video won't saturate a gigabit link.
Also if this service has a lot of users p2p applications (as well as certain games etc) will prefer local peers, and i expect the service provider to mirror or cache a lot of the most often downloaded content anyway so a lot of the traffic will stay local.
Windows doesn't come with wireless drivers for every chipset either... Unless you're using an OEM install which has them added in (and you could do the same with linux) you will have to acquire and install the drivers somehow too. Linux generally does better than windows because distros are updated more often and therefore more likely to have the necessary drivers.
If a higher display resolution makes things harder to read, you're doing it wrong...
Font sizes are specified in points, 1 point is supposed to be 1/72 of an inch regardless of how many pixels are required to display it... So a higher resolution screen will just result in text which is more detailed while being the same physical size.
The solution is for non technical users to have simpler devices that only serve their needs and don't provide anything else.... When was the last time you heard of a games console, printer, typewriter or microwave being exploited remotely, or being used to download malware?
Having a general purpose computer with an excessively complicated OS is just asking for trouble. Such things are simply not appropriate for the general public.
Antivirus is just a filter that will detect and stop the lowest hanging fruit...
I have done incident response jobs for many many different clients, and without exception every single compromised machine i've ever looked at had some kind of av product installed at the very least. Aside from detecting the most trivial of attacks, it provides a false sense of security and encourages users to be less careful.
Which in many cases they can't do, since they're locked in.
Sure improvements can be made, but now a lot of effort is wasted trying to find non patented ways to achieve the same result rather than trying to achieve new results.
If you look at what the content industry is doing in places like china and russia, they get legitimate music (like the service nokia recently launched) much cheaper than its available in the west, plus its drm free...
Similarly, cinemas are much more pleasant places to be in asia, not the dirty smelly overpriced places you get in europe... And they get DVDs released a lot earlier than other places.
Why is this? because piracy is rampant in these places and its forcing the industry to try and compete, in the west the level of competition is kept artificially low because the content industry has the government in their pocket, and so we get an inferior service at a much higher price.
IE9 is just another attempt at catching up, it's pretty feeble when a browser thats "coming soon" is only going to be "on-par" with whats already available, and will be behind what everyone else has coming soon.
The current speed limits in the US and some other countries are extremely inefficient...
Having a static speed limit at all times of the day and night is inefficient, when the road is less busy its safer to drive at higher speed, especially if the road is well lit, straight and wide.
Similarly, the speed limit of what, 55mph on US highways is ridiculously low... Considering how many miles of highway exist which are straight empty roads.. If you have a 100 mile long road, which is dead straight with several miles of visibility and little or no other traffic there is no reason to be crawling along it at 55...
The speed limits were also set many years ago, since then the technology used to build roads, tires and vehicles has improved massively.. What was unsafe with 1960s technology could well be fine today.
You have the autobahns in germany where in some cases there is no speed limit whatsoever, you can drive as fast as you like. People aren't usually suicidal so they drive as fast as they feel safe, and the accident record on the autobahn is actually pretty good.
If your driving along at 55mph, modern cars will be making very little noise.. It's quite relaxing, and this actually increases your chances of falling asleep. On the other hand, if you're driving at the edge of what you feel is safe you will pay a lot more attention.
In south korea the problem is because their online commerce system is locked into a proprietary system that requires an ie-only plugin, rather than using standard ssl like everywhere else.
America also has a relatively large percentage of IE users...
Europe however, has far lower IE market share than anywhere else.
Not at all, ditching windows would be like divorcing a leeching spouse who is only there for your money...
The divorce settlement may cost a lot, but its a one off payment and once you're free you won't be hemorrhaging cash year on year.
The problem is that the standards process moves too slowly, and the web has traditionally moved very fast (except for the few years when IE6 was stifling progress)...
Not implementing a draft standard is one thing, but not implementing the same fully documented standards, draft or not, that are implemented by everyone else is just ridiculous.
They haven't caught up, IE8 is still way behind the current releases of other browsers... They've shrunk the gap slightly, but they're woefully far behind. Look at their acid3 score, or the html5test site, or there was another site which showed what percentage of the various standards were supported by various browsers... Whatever metric you use, IE comes up laughably short compared to all the other major browsers.
It's perfectly fair to gripe, when for several years now not just one but several other browser makers have been light years ahead...
Why can't MS at the very least try to be in the same league as webkit/opera/mozilla?
Don't rely on group policy to "lock down" anything, the best you can hope for with group policy is to distribute a set of defaults... DO NOT rely on it for any kind of security whatsoever.
So people will make do with an inferior browser, because its more efficient than the only other alternative of having an inferior browser *AND* a better one at the same time. Does that not sound extremely stupid to anyone else?
So basically the most secure configuration of windows is still weaker than that of any other platform.
Glad i don't use windows, and can therefore have only the browser(s) i want installed and can easily remove anything which is unwanted therefore having even less exposure, configuration and patch maintenance.
If one machine gets infected, that infection may spread... If all the workstations are part of a domain and share authentication details it becomes far easier to spread too.
The fact IE comes by default, and isn't easily removable is even more reason not to use it, it shows that it cant (and never could) stand on its own merit as a browser, they have to use dirty tricks like this to get people to use it.
If filesharing is legal, there will be no reason to hide the act of filesharing...
Thus it becomes easier to generate statistics about what's being shared, so who gets the cut should be based on how widespread their media gets shared. If noone wants your crap, you get nothing.
Which means more flash sites will pop up telling Android users to install flash, wether they want to or not.
You don't have much choice if an entire site is written in flash, or has an unskipable splash screen etc. If a site offers a non flash version alongside a flash version, i will always choose the non flash version even if i'm using a system capable of displaying flash but many sites don't give the option.
I, as a heavy Linux user, was against flash on moral grounds long before Apple made a stand with the iPhone...
I used to run Linux on an Alphastation and used an SGI Octane long before i ever used a modern mac (anything newer than a quadra 900), i've also experimented with various other systems such as BeOS and various *BSD, and was an early adopter of Linux/x86_64... Flash has always been painful for me due to it being proprietary.
All these systems were able to run Mozilla just fine, but no or very half assed flash support.
I don't like flash because it reduces my platform choice to only those officially blessed by Adobe. I am glad Apple made a stand and were big enough to get noticed. Regardless of what their reasons were, it has become a bit less painful to browse without flash these days.
Could you not call them up and make a reservation by phone, or perhaps by email... I would also mention that i was unable to use their website due to it being flash only. They will soon change it if they're losing custom. I also imagine that there was nothing on their site that couldn't be done with html, especially a reservation form...
The trouble with flash, is that it's tied to a single supplier, html5 is not...
There are plenty of devices other than the iphone which cannot be used to view flash content because adobe can't be bothered to support them, and plenty of platform on which flash is available but in a half assed manner (eg linux). The prevalence of flash on the web effectively excludes any device or OS which is not blessed by adobe (look at the delays on arm based smartbooks).
The web should not be at the whim of any single vendor, not microsoft, not adobe, not netscape, not apple, not google, not mozilla... Users should have a choice, and as it stands HTML5 is free to be implemented by anyone and on any device they choose while flash is not.
Whatever their reasons, i'm glad Apple made a stand because thanks to them, many sites are now accessible to people who don't have flash for whatever reason.
Flash has also become a security nightmare, malware authors don't target the browser so much anymore because IE is no longer over 90% market share, instead they target things like flash where exactly the same code (complete with exploitable holes) is present on over 90% of users systems regardless of what browser they use. Diversity in the browser market is great for everyone, don't ruin it by tying everyone to a monoculture plugin.
If flash is so great, what's to stop it being standardised as part of HTML6 and implemented by every browser maker.