It's not discriminatory providing cards are available to everyone without having to pay fees... Providing there are prepaid cards widely available, anyone can go to a convenience store and exchange their cash for a prepaid card.
However, by using cards we're handing too much power to the card issuers.. Cash is issued by the government, but cards are entirely commercial so the companies wouldnt think twice about cranking up the costs once you're locked in and cashless becomes the norm.
There's also the issue of standardisation... Visa and Mastercard are pretty universal and work almost anywhere, but there's also various local payment schemes. Many customers of restaurants are tourists, so if they're accepting a payment method that's only open to local residents you're cutting out these foreign tourists.
Websites designed specifically for IE may not display specifically because they violated the open HTML specs and did their own proprietary crap, which is exactly the problem the previous poster was complaining about.
Under UK law you can claim for up to 6 years from the date of purchase against a manufacturing defect which caused a device to stop working, assuming the type of device in questionable is generally expected to last that long.
Aside from reduced battery life, it's reasonable to expect a portable music player to continue working for much longer than 6 years so if that customer had bought the device in the UK they'd have a reasonable claim under consumer law. There are many ipods out there much older than this which still work. I still have an ipod mini which i bought in 2005 and it still works fine now.
They did, a lot of windows mobile devices were dirt cheap and most of the people who bought them did so for precisely that reason. But most of those users were replacing dumb or feature phones, and didn't make use of many of the features, or they always felt frustrated because they wanted an iphone but couldnt afford one. But as the dirt cheap chinese androids improved, windows phone becomes less and less attractive even at a low price.
If they brand it windows, people will assume its compatible with what they know as windows - ie desktops... When it's incompatible they become disappointed. The brand is also tarnished, windows is associated with crashing and malware but people put up with it because they now think computers are inherently unreliable and insecure, just look at all the movies and tv shows featuring "hackers" who gain access to anything they want at the drop of a hat. People have become to expect this as the norm and tolerate it on desktop computers, but they don't expect the same from other products.
Apple made it very clear that the iphone and ipad were separate products, not compatible with existing macos software. Their marketing did not give users incorrect expectations, so they weren't disappointed with the product.
Before the iphone they were selling windows mobile (the 6.x versions and below), had the iphone and android not come out they never would have developed windows phone 7+, they would have continued selling 6.x until they got bored of it.
Development stagnates without competition, the reason windows mobile 6 was so terrible you'd like to forget it ever existed is because the competition wasn't much better at the time.
The examples given are in the UK, the UK government provides all kinds of welfare systems including education programs. There are many people in the UK who never work and claim welfare their entire lives.
Well it depends, if amazon is no longer able to operate warehouses this way they're not going to just shut up shop and go home... They still need to operate their warehouses, so they will start offering better conditions.
The downside is that complying with all these regulations increases costs, which are then passed onto the customers, labour in third world countries is cheaper largely because they don't have the same regulatory hoops to jump through.
The increased costs also push companies to explore cheaper alternatives, in a lot of third world countries everything is done manually while in richer countries machines will be used, parking meters for example aren't common in third world countries where someone will be sitting in a booth collecting your parking fees.
In which case you block normal chinese or russian citizens from accessing sites hosted abroad...
Just because you see attacks coming from russia or china, doesn't mean that's where they originated. Chances are the boxes launching the attacks are compromised and someone elsewhere is pulling the strings. Network security is simply not taken seriously in many countries, they make little or no effort to secure boxes and don't care if they are infected with malware so long as they still barely function. Pirate software is also the norm in places like russia/china, and update features are subsequently turned off incase the updates interfere with their cracks.
Power4 is an expensive niche processor, as are the others... The number of people who have access to such hardware, let alone the desire and knowledge to run linux on them are extremely small. The m68k series on the other hand was extremely widespread used in all kinds of devices, including devices with niche followings like certain apple models and the amiga etc.
On the other hand, power4 servers were expensive when new, rarely crop up on ebay and the few people who would buy them typically do so to run AIX which doesn't run on any cheaper or more widely available hardware.
Ergo there are far more people interested in running old m68k machines than old power4 servers.
Or perhaps they are planning to include an emulator on their ARM systems to run older binaries, and making it support only x86_64 instead of 32bit as well could be less work for them. They included emulators before on the m68k->ppc and ppc->x86 transitions, and the ppc->x86 emulator only supported 32bit ppc (although there was very little 64bit ppc software available at the time).
Legacy unmaintained code is a significant security risk...
64bit is not a new thing, 64bit processors have been around for nearly 30 years and have been mainstream for more than 10, apple have not produced a 32bit mac for more than 10 years now, and they are just starting to deprecate 32bit support, so 32bit apps will continue to run and be supported for a few years yet.
If you're running software that hasn't been updated in such a long time then you should seriously be considering replacing it with something that is actively maintained for many reasons.
It makes sense to have a 32bit userland on platforms like Sparc and MIPS.. On x86 less so, there are various other benefits such as extra registers which provide improved performance even if you aren't using large amounts of memory or doing 64bit calculations.
The 32bit x86 version of MacOS was very short lived and was arguably a mistake... Availability of 64bit PPC hardware to run OSX predates the 32bit x86 version, so they actually took a step backwards. The only non 64bit x86 macs are the very first model laptops, IIRC even the first gen mac pro was 64bit from the start.
Apple should never have supported 32bit x86 at all, and should have moved directly from PPC64 to x86_64.
We do exactly that for gateway devices (mail/web filters) and it works out ok, and severely reduces the amount of crap which reaches end user's systems. For a desktop this would incur an overhead and make the AV product slower and more bloated than it already is, and there would still need to be part of it running with a high privilege in order to intercept data.
It's extremely common for contracts to contain unenforceable clauses, it's designed to scare people into compliance. Most people don't realise their rights, don't seek an expert opinion (doing so would usually cost more than the dispute is worth), and just comply with the demands blindly.
Similar things happen everywhere there are consumer protection law... For instance in europe someone who sells you a product is required to provide a 2 year guarantee, but most manufacturers will loudly advertise a 1 year guarantee and then in small print "your statutory rights are not affected", meaning that the 1 year guarantee is a service provided by the manufacturer and unrelated to the one you get by law. They will then intentionally not train their support staff on the legislation, knowing that most customers are unaware of the law and won't assert their rights. Those who do know their rights usually have to push to be escalated to someone higher up who does understand the law.
I spent hours configuring DOpus to work just right, and be usable in 640x256 to avoid interlacing on an old commodore monitor... Spent ages training it to recognise filetypes etc (you feed it a bunch of example files and it works out what they all have in common - eg the file headers, then uses that pattern to match future files).
A lot of very old unix applications will still build and run on modern linux systems today, including a lot of code that actually predates linux.
Windows is generally better at binary compatibility, largely due to keeping all the legacy dll files present in the default install while linux distros have long since removed old libs from the default install as very few people would ever use them (almost anything old that you might still want to use will have since been recompiled against the new libs).
NTFS does, but the ui from windows was carried over from the dos days so most user visible software is written to use file extensions and will rarely if ever use the alternate data streams for anything. I've only ever seen streams being used by malware as a way to hide.
OSX went the other way, because they moved from their custom kernel to a unix-based system, where unix filesystems (osx originally supported UFS) don't have a concept of resource forks.
Pre-OSX MacOS didn't use file extensions at all... The filesystem used a separate metadata fork to determine file type, and wasn't reliant on something as arbitrary as the file name.
For a system which depends upon and makes decisions based upon the file extension, hiding them is stupid, and for a system that makes no use of the file extensions hiding them (if even present at all) is irrelevant.
There is a difference however.. Ubuntu is a distribution of an OS and a set of application software, windows is just an OS which comes with some simple example programs expecting you to acquire real applications separately (and still manages to have a huge installation footprint).
Then you just hide some malware inside a compressed archive and it goes through, although setting a password on the archive works too as the scanner doesn't know the password and can't look at the contents.
The fundamental flaw with AV software, especially on endpoints, is that you have extremely complex code parsing potentially hostile data while running at a high privilege level. Anyone with a basic understanding of security knows what a huge risk this is.
mostly our standard for excellence is very low and people's motivation to do a good job reach only to the point where their get their wages, with absolutely no desire to go beyond, learn more, or do better.
This applies to first world countries too...
However, there is generally a higher standard of education available and ability to speak english is a given in the US and other english speaking countries.
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It's not discriminatory providing cards are available to everyone without having to pay fees... Providing there are prepaid cards widely available, anyone can go to a convenience store and exchange their cash for a prepaid card.
However, by using cards we're handing too much power to the card issuers.. Cash is issued by the government, but cards are entirely commercial so the companies wouldnt think twice about cranking up the costs once you're locked in and cashless becomes the norm.
There's also the issue of standardisation... Visa and Mastercard are pretty universal and work almost anywhere, but there's also various local payment schemes. Many customers of restaurants are tourists, so if they're accepting a payment method that's only open to local residents you're cutting out these foreign tourists.
Websites from the 90s display just fine in modern browsers, you can find many such examples on web.archive.org.
Here you can see yahoo.com from 1996:
https://web.archive.org/web/19...
And a version of netscape.com from 1996:
https://web.archive.org/web/19...
Websites designed specifically for IE may not display specifically because they violated the open HTML specs and did their own proprietary crap, which is exactly the problem the previous poster was complaining about.
Under UK law you can claim for up to 6 years from the date of purchase against a manufacturing defect which caused a device to stop working, assuming the type of device in questionable is generally expected to last that long.
Aside from reduced battery life, it's reasonable to expect a portable music player to continue working for much longer than 6 years so if that customer had bought the device in the UK they'd have a reasonable claim under consumer law.
There are many ipods out there much older than this which still work. I still have an ipod mini which i bought in 2005 and it still works fine now.
They did, a lot of windows mobile devices were dirt cheap and most of the people who bought them did so for precisely that reason.
But most of those users were replacing dumb or feature phones, and didn't make use of many of the features, or they always felt frustrated because they wanted an iphone but couldnt afford one.
But as the dirt cheap chinese androids improved, windows phone becomes less and less attractive even at a low price.
The problem was also with the branding...
If they brand it windows, people will assume its compatible with what they know as windows - ie desktops... When it's incompatible they become disappointed.
The brand is also tarnished, windows is associated with crashing and malware but people put up with it because they now think computers are inherently unreliable and insecure, just look at all the movies and tv shows featuring "hackers" who gain access to anything they want at the drop of a hat. People have become to expect this as the norm and tolerate it on desktop computers, but they don't expect the same from other products.
Apple made it very clear that the iphone and ipad were separate products, not compatible with existing macos software. Their marketing did not give users incorrect expectations, so they weren't disappointed with the product.
Before the iphone they were selling windows mobile (the 6.x versions and below), had the iphone and android not come out they never would have developed windows phone 7+, they would have continued selling 6.x until they got bored of it.
Development stagnates without competition, the reason windows mobile 6 was so terrible you'd like to forget it ever existed is because the competition wasn't much better at the time.
The examples given are in the UK, the UK government provides all kinds of welfare systems including education programs. There are many people in the UK who never work and claim welfare their entire lives.
Well it depends, if amazon is no longer able to operate warehouses this way they're not going to just shut up shop and go home... They still need to operate their warehouses, so they will start offering better conditions.
The downside is that complying with all these regulations increases costs, which are then passed onto the customers, labour in third world countries is cheaper largely because they don't have the same regulatory hoops to jump through.
The increased costs also push companies to explore cheaper alternatives, in a lot of third world countries everything is done manually while in richer countries machines will be used, parking meters for example aren't common in third world countries where someone will be sitting in a booth collecting your parking fees.
In which case you block normal chinese or russian citizens from accessing sites hosted abroad...
Just because you see attacks coming from russia or china, doesn't mean that's where they originated. Chances are the boxes launching the attacks are compromised and someone elsewhere is pulling the strings.
Network security is simply not taken seriously in many countries, they make little or no effort to secure boxes and don't care if they are infected with malware so long as they still barely function. Pirate software is also the norm in places like russia/china, and update features are subsequently turned off incase the updates interfere with their cracks.
Power4 is an expensive niche processor, as are the others... The number of people who have access to such hardware, let alone the desire and knowledge to run linux on them are extremely small.
The m68k series on the other hand was extremely widespread used in all kinds of devices, including devices with niche followings like certain apple models and the amiga etc.
On the other hand, power4 servers were expensive when new, rarely crop up on ebay and the few people who would buy them typically do so to run AIX which doesn't run on any cheaper or more widely available hardware.
Ergo there are far more people interested in running old m68k machines than old power4 servers.
Or perhaps they are planning to include an emulator on their ARM systems to run older binaries, and making it support only x86_64 instead of 32bit as well could be less work for them.
They included emulators before on the m68k->ppc and ppc->x86 transitions, and the ppc->x86 emulator only supported 32bit ppc (although there was very little 64bit ppc software available at the time).
The x32 ABI is part of amd64, most 32bit x86 software uses the i386 abi.
Legacy unmaintained code is a significant security risk...
64bit is not a new thing, 64bit processors have been around for nearly 30 years and have been mainstream for more than 10, apple have not produced a 32bit mac for more than 10 years now, and they are just starting to deprecate 32bit support, so 32bit apps will continue to run and be supported for a few years yet.
If you're running software that hasn't been updated in such a long time then you should seriously be considering replacing it with something that is actively maintained for many reasons.
It makes sense to have a 32bit userland on platforms like Sparc and MIPS..
On x86 less so, there are various other benefits such as extra registers which provide improved performance even if you aren't using large amounts of memory or doing 64bit calculations.
The 32bit x86 version of MacOS was very short lived and was arguably a mistake...
Availability of 64bit PPC hardware to run OSX predates the 32bit x86 version, so they actually took a step backwards. The only non 64bit x86 macs are the very first model laptops, IIRC even the first gen mac pro was 64bit from the start.
Apple should never have supported 32bit x86 at all, and should have moved directly from PPC64 to x86_64.
We do exactly that for gateway devices (mail/web filters) and it works out ok, and severely reduces the amount of crap which reaches end user's systems.
For a desktop this would incur an overhead and make the AV product slower and more bloated than it already is, and there would still need to be part of it running with a high privilege in order to intercept data.
It's extremely common for contracts to contain unenforceable clauses, it's designed to scare people into compliance. Most people don't realise their rights, don't seek an expert opinion (doing so would usually cost more than the dispute is worth), and just comply with the demands blindly.
Similar things happen everywhere there are consumer protection law...
For instance in europe someone who sells you a product is required to provide a 2 year guarantee, but most manufacturers will loudly advertise a 1 year guarantee and then in small print "your statutory rights are not affected", meaning that the 1 year guarantee is a service provided by the manufacturer and unrelated to the one you get by law. They will then intentionally not train their support staff on the legislation, knowing that most customers are unaware of the law and won't assert their rights. Those who do know their rights usually have to push to be escalated to someone higher up who does understand the law.
I spent hours configuring DOpus to work just right, and be usable in 640x256 to avoid interlacing on an old commodore monitor... Spent ages training it to recognise filetypes etc (you feed it a bunch of example files and it works out what they all have in common - eg the file headers, then uses that pattern to match future files).
A lot of very old unix applications will still build and run on modern linux systems today, including a lot of code that actually predates linux.
Windows is generally better at binary compatibility, largely due to keeping all the legacy dll files present in the default install while linux distros have long since removed old libs from the default install as very few people would ever use them (almost anything old that you might still want to use will have since been recompiled against the new libs).
For source compatibility it's hard to beat linux.
NTFS does, but the ui from windows was carried over from the dos days so most user visible software is written to use file extensions and will rarely if ever use the alternate data streams for anything. I've only ever seen streams being used by malware as a way to hide.
OSX went the other way, because they moved from their custom kernel to a unix-based system, where unix filesystems (osx originally supported UFS) don't have a concept of resource forks.
Pre-OSX MacOS didn't use file extensions at all... The filesystem used a separate metadata fork to determine file type, and wasn't reliant on something as arbitrary as the file name.
For a system which depends upon and makes decisions based upon the file extension, hiding them is stupid, and for a system that makes no use of the file extensions hiding them (if even present at all) is irrelevant.
There is a difference however..
Ubuntu is a distribution of an OS and a set of application software, windows is just an OS which comes with some simple example programs expecting you to acquire real applications separately (and still manages to have a huge installation footprint).
Then you just hide some malware inside a compressed archive and it goes through, although setting a password on the archive works too as the scanner doesn't know the password and can't look at the contents.
The fundamental flaw with AV software, especially on endpoints, is that you have extremely complex code parsing potentially hostile data while running at a high privilege level. Anyone with a basic understanding of security knows what a huge risk this is.
mostly our standard for excellence is very low and people's motivation to do a good job reach only to the point where their get their wages, with absolutely no desire to go beyond, learn more, or do better.
This applies to first world countries too...
However, there is generally a higher standard of education available and ability to speak english is a given in the US and other english speaking countries.