Running exchange through the web api over HTTPS would be more secure... Why? because the encryption and lower levels of the HTTPS protocol are a known quantity and well understood, even if the higher levels are still proprietary. There are also plenty of products offering similar functionality over secure channels (see IMAPS, CalDAV, LDAPS, HTTPS etc).
Just because there are no exploits for remote desktop doesn't mean none will be discovered. As you pointed out its not enabled by default, and most people have been concentrating on services which are enabled by default. The fact is the service exposes far more functionality pre-authentication than it needs to which shows bad design.
There is a reason why people use these protocols over a VPN or tunnelled over SSL and that's because the protocols are not securely enough designed to be run directly over an untrusted network. On the other hand, people are quite happy to run SSL and SSH based services directly over the Internet.
As you pointed out, any system has vulnerabilities, but there are plenty of things you can do at the design stage to minimise both the risk and impact of vulnerabilities... Not least of all is making a clear separation between authenticated and unauthenticated functionality, with the latter being absolutely minimised.
Apple only appear to be doing that in on the iphone and ipad... They are not doing it on their computer systems, which are arguably far more open than microsoft in many ways.
Apple don't hold a dominant position in any market, and there are still viable competitors to their lock-in. Apple can be ignored, you can totally ignore their products, use alternatives and be in no way impaired. MS cannot be ignored, as sooner or later you will be faced with something thats tied to windows be it a broken website that requires ie, a proprietary file format or a niche application that only runs on windows... There are countries in which Apple simply don't exist.
Personally i don't care how badly a company screws their customers so long as it doesn't affect me.
Growing yes, but growing much slower than they used to... It's hard for them not to grow when they control a large percentage of a growing market. Most of their growth is their existing market share carrying on as the market itself expands, and the market cannot keep growing indefinitely.
Their overall market share in their core markets is decreasing (ie they are growing slower than the market as a whole) and they are being pushed towards open standards and lower prices, their attempts to break into new markets are losing a lot of money with limited success (see xbox, msn etc), windows mobile seems to be tanking, they are facing antitrust problems from various places, older versions of their products (xp, office 2003 etc) are considered good enough and users are avoiding or delaying upgrades...
It's not looking great for them overall, and i would certainly be very wary of investing... Especially now that the founder has jumped ship.
Most of the games they ported never had amd64 windows versions either... But are they native x86 linux, or do they use wine? I had the mac version of X3 and it used its own bundled version of wine and doesn't run correctly on my current macbook pro.
The Wii has never been sold at a loss... To Nintendo a Wii sold for purposes of running homebrew is still a profit that they wouldn't have got otherwise. Having a modded wii also makes playing legitimate games easier, for instance you can install USBLoaderGX and copy games to a usb drive and play from there, far more convenient than dealing with discs.
I use a Cisco 1801 for my home connection too, it doesn't do wireless but there's another model that does... It was the only router i could find that supports ipv6 over adsl.
I also have an airport extreme (older version which cant do 5ghz and 2.4 at the same time) which is very stable, tho i have snmp disabled on it so can't be sure exactly how long it's been online...
That said, i also have a Fonera+ running OpenWRT which is stable...
root@OpenWrt:~# uname -a ; uptime Linux OpenWrt 2.6.30.10 #24 Tue Apr 6 14:59:59 CEST 2010 mips GNU/Linux
22:00:20 up 33 days, 20:42, load average: 0.20, 0.05, 0.01
33 days since i updated it to the current version (its on 10.03 now, was on 8.x before i think which was also very stable)..
ADSL connections are not really fast enough to justify anything faster than 802.11g anyway... If your using an integrated router/ap then chances are that's the only thing your devices will ever be talking to anyway so 802.11n speeds would be wasted.
All software will have bugs, either known or as yet undiscovered... What matters really is that these known bugs are disclosed to users, so the users can decide wether they can live with them or they need them fixed.
For any good there is an up front creation cost... In order to grow food you need to buy land, cultivate it, buy farming tools etc... Then there are lower (but still significant) ongoing costs to continue growing more food.
When you have a product whereby repeated sales don't incur any additional costs, it's not to cover the initial costs, the whole intention is to make extortionate profit margins - its a legal form of printing money, only better because money is actually more expensive to produce.
The problem in the PC market is more to do with Microsoft than Intel... Intel would certainly prefer to stagnate, but when they've done this in the past competitors (most notably AMD) have taken market share away from them. Perhaps not much, but enough to force Intel to compete. These days i would imagine processor innovation proceeds at the speed of AMD... Intel want to stay ahead, but not too far ahead.
Infact, Intel would love to be where ARM are in the smartphone market, sure ARM don't manufacture processors but they license designs to the vast majority of phone manufacturers. The smartphone market has more competition and innovation from the user's perspective because the software and packaging is far more visible to the user than what processor is inside it.
I would rather have a small screen at a high resolution, than a large screen with a poor resolution... Otherwise i could use a 50" HDTV running at 1920x1080 which costs less than a good 30" monitor.
Provision of last-mile services are not commercially viable, virtually every network of this type has been built with government funds.. If such a network comes under private ownership it will always be a monopoly because it isn't commercially viable to build any competing infrastructure. Such infrastructure should always have remained controlled by a non profit wholesale provider, and let third parties brand and offer services to end users.
Or they just don't care... The people who write these tools are not the same people who run them, script kiddies run the tools because they aren't smart enough to write their own and nor are they smart enough to verify that the code isn't broken or even full of blatant backdoors. Nor do they care at all since the machines they will be running the tools on are compromised systems which were obviously vulnerable to something else already.
Data was always unlimited, or rather only limited by the speed of the connection... There was nothing to stop you running your 300bps modem flat out 24/7, the problem is that end user connections have increased in speed faster than the carriers have invested in backbones to carry that data...
How many people actually repair defective machines? They're either under warranty and get replaced by the manufacturer, or are obsolete and get replaced. Very few people will even strip a broken desktop to retrieve any parts which are still functional.
How many people actually need specs like this? And despite being the cpu, video and memory being upgradeable, how many average users will actually do that rather than simply replacing the machine?
Also, i have yet to find any "computer speakers" (or built in laptop speakers for that matter) which were any good, my laptop has optical spdif output which i connect to a proper amplifier if i want to listen to music on it.
Handle printing server side if you can, assuming your printers are all networked this shouldn't be difficult - especially if this whole thing is running inside of a closed network... The server can render the content appropriately and feed it to the appropriate network printer...
I've never really tried printing through the browser much, what problems does it have?
If you don't live very high up then clothes lines outside the windows are likely to result in stolen clothes... And if any of your clothes come off the line you can usually kiss goodbye to them, if they fall down into traffic or onto someone else's land etc... Also the windows are quite often inconveniently placed or too small to try and hang clothes out of them.
A lot of people live in small city apartments, many of which simply have no space for clothes lines... Also using clothes drying racks inside the house tends to increase the moisture in the air which can encourage mould to grow which is highly undesirable.
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Running exchange through the web api over HTTPS would be more secure...
Why? because the encryption and lower levels of the HTTPS protocol are a known quantity and well understood, even if the higher levels are still proprietary. There are also plenty of products offering similar functionality over secure channels (see IMAPS, CalDAV, LDAPS, HTTPS etc).
Just because there are no exploits for remote desktop doesn't mean none will be discovered. As you pointed out its not enabled by default, and most people have been concentrating on services which are enabled by default. The fact is the service exposes far more functionality pre-authentication than it needs to which shows bad design.
There is a reason why people use these protocols over a VPN or tunnelled over SSL and that's because the protocols are not securely enough designed to be run directly over an untrusted network. On the other hand, people are quite happy to run SSL and SSH based services directly over the Internet.
As you pointed out, any system has vulnerabilities, but there are plenty of things you can do at the design stage to minimise both the risk and impact of vulnerabilities... Not least of all is making a clear separation between authenticated and unauthenticated functionality, with the latter being absolutely minimised.
Apple only appear to be doing that in on the iphone and ipad... They are not doing it on their computer systems, which are arguably far more open than microsoft in many ways.
Apple don't hold a dominant position in any market, and there are still viable competitors to their lock-in. Apple can be ignored, you can totally ignore their products, use alternatives and be in no way impaired. MS cannot be ignored, as sooner or later you will be faced with something thats tied to windows be it a broken website that requires ie, a proprietary file format or a niche application that only runs on windows... There are countries in which Apple simply don't exist.
Personally i don't care how badly a company screws their customers so long as it doesn't affect me.
Growing yes, but growing much slower than they used to... It's hard for them not to grow when they control a large percentage of a growing market. Most of their growth is their existing market share carrying on as the market itself expands, and the market cannot keep growing indefinitely.
Their overall market share in their core markets is decreasing (ie they are growing slower than the market as a whole) and they are being pushed towards open standards and lower prices, their attempts to break into new markets are losing a lot of money with limited success (see xbox, msn etc), windows mobile seems to be tanking, they are facing antitrust problems from various places, older versions of their products (xp, office 2003 etc) are considered good enough and users are avoiding or delaying upgrades...
It's not looking great for them overall, and i would certainly be very wary of investing... Especially now that the founder has jumped ship.
Most of the games they ported never had amd64 windows versions either...
But are they native x86 linux, or do they use wine? I had the mac version of X3 and it used its own bundled version of wine and doesn't run correctly on my current macbook pro.
The Wii has never been sold at a loss... To Nintendo a Wii sold for purposes of running homebrew is still a profit that they wouldn't have got otherwise.
Having a modded wii also makes playing legitimate games easier, for instance you can install USBLoaderGX and copy games to a usb drive and play from there, far more convenient than dealing with discs.
I use a Cisco 1801 for my home connection too, it doesn't do wireless but there's another model that does...
It was the only router i could find that supports ipv6 over adsl.
I also have an airport extreme (older version which cant do 5ghz and 2.4 at the same time) which is very stable, tho i have snmp disabled on it so can't be sure exactly how long it's been online...
That said, i also have a Fonera+ running OpenWRT which is stable...
root@OpenWrt:~# uname -a ; uptime
Linux OpenWrt 2.6.30.10 #24 Tue Apr 6 14:59:59 CEST 2010 mips GNU/Linux
22:00:20 up 33 days, 20:42, load average: 0.20, 0.05, 0.01
33 days since i updated it to the current version (its on 10.03 now, was on 8.x before i think which was also very stable)..
Less points of failure, *but*
Greater chance of the device failing relative to a simpler device...
More damage as a result of the failure...
Not to mention less flexibility, less choice, more difficult path for upgrades etc.
ADSL connections are not really fast enough to justify anything faster than 802.11g anyway... If your using an integrated router/ap then chances are that's the only thing your devices will ever be talking to anyway so 802.11n speeds would be wasted.
First, if it's really open source someone else could have fixed it...
Second, virtually every software company releases software with known bugs... For example, windows 2000 had 63000 known bugs of various severity when released: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/it-strategy/2000/02/14/bugfest-win2000-has-63000-defects-2076967/
All software will have bugs, either known or as yet undiscovered... What matters really is that these known bugs are disclosed to users, so the users can decide wether they can live with them or they need them fixed.
For any good there is an up front creation cost...
In order to grow food you need to buy land, cultivate it, buy farming tools etc... Then there are lower (but still significant) ongoing costs to continue growing more food.
When you have a product whereby repeated sales don't incur any additional costs, it's not to cover the initial costs, the whole intention is to make extortionate profit margins - its a legal form of printing money, only better because money is actually more expensive to produce.
The problem in the PC market is more to do with Microsoft than Intel...
Intel would certainly prefer to stagnate, but when they've done this in the past competitors (most notably AMD) have taken market share away from them. Perhaps not much, but enough to force Intel to compete. These days i would imagine processor innovation proceeds at the speed of AMD... Intel want to stay ahead, but not too far ahead.
Infact, Intel would love to be where ARM are in the smartphone market, sure ARM don't manufacture processors but they license designs to the vast majority of phone manufacturers. The smartphone market has more competition and innovation from the user's perspective because the software and packaging is far more visible to the user than what processor is inside it.
I would rather have a small screen at a high resolution, than a large screen with a poor resolution...
Otherwise i could use a 50" HDTV running at 1920x1080 which costs less than a good 30" monitor.
Provision of last-mile services are not commercially viable, virtually every network of this type has been built with government funds.. If such a network comes under private ownership it will always be a monopoly because it isn't commercially viable to build any competing infrastructure.
Such infrastructure should always have remained controlled by a non profit wholesale provider, and let third parties brand and offer services to end users.
Maybe someone can encourage MS not to do unnecessary stuff in kernel space? IIS is a prime offender for this...
Or they just don't care...
The people who write these tools are not the same people who run them, script kiddies run the tools because they aren't smart enough to write their own and nor are they smart enough to verify that the code isn't broken or even full of blatant backdoors. Nor do they care at all since the machines they will be running the tools on are compromised systems which were obviously vulnerable to something else already.
Data was always unlimited, or rather only limited by the speed of the connection...
There was nothing to stop you running your 300bps modem flat out 24/7, the problem is that end user connections have increased in speed faster than the carriers have invested in backbones to carry that data...
How many people actually repair defective machines?
They're either under warranty and get replaced by the manufacturer, or are obsolete and get replaced. Very few people will even strip a broken desktop to retrieve any parts which are still functional.
How many people actually need specs like this?
And despite being the cpu, video and memory being upgradeable, how many average users will actually do that rather than simply replacing the machine?
Also, i have yet to find any "computer speakers" (or built in laptop speakers for that matter) which were any good, my laptop has optical spdif output which i connect to a proper amplifier if i want to listen to music on it.
A 1080p resolution is pretty poor for a 24" screen, and the 17" macbook pro does 1920x1200 - slightly higher than 1080p...
Handle printing server side if you can, assuming your printers are all networked this shouldn't be difficult - especially if this whole thing is running inside of a closed network... The server can render the content appropriately and feed it to the appropriate network printer...
I've never really tried printing through the browser much, what problems does it have?
If you don't live very high up then clothes lines outside the windows are likely to result in stolen clothes...
And if any of your clothes come off the line you can usually kiss goodbye to them, if they fall down into traffic or onto someone else's land etc...
Also the windows are quite often inconveniently placed or too small to try and hang clothes out of them.
Or how about go back to traditional hard off switches, instead of the software controlled standby switches most appliances have these days?
A lot of people live in small city apartments, many of which simply have no space for clothes lines...
Also using clothes drying racks inside the house tends to increase the moisture in the air which can encourage mould to grow which is highly undesirable.
Gates is a businessman first and foremost, jobs too...
What both of these have in common, is that they were the business side of a partnership which included someone else technically minded.