Or a web server gets hacked, and someone inserts the exploit code into the sites hosted there... If it's subtle enough, it would take ages to get noticed by the admins or legit viewers, unlike a defacement which is immediately obvious. As for getting access to web servers, how many run IIS and have IE installed on them? Not to mention how many people admin their web servers from windows workstations, own the admin's workstation and you can keylog your way into the server too.
I've had the opposite experience... Most programs install cleanly, but having to manually locate the installer, and usually click through multiple pages of license agreements, other bullshit and ads before you can download it is incredibly annoying. For those few apps which dont install correctly, the error messages are useless for diagnosing why it didn't install and you often have to give up and accept not having the app. Package managers on the other hand, debian's apt is usually problem free (although you cant mix and match stable/unstable packages since theyre linked against different library/gcc versions)... Gentoo's emerge is also pretty good, and you can mix and match nicely... When it does fail, and gentoo does fail far more than debian (since it's more of a power user tool) the error messages are usually pretty descriptive, and you can paste them into google and usually find someone else with the same problem.
Because browsers are not all equal... Despite the standards that exist, microsoft often doesn't follow them. Their browsers are very much nonstandard, and implement things in ways contrary to the standards. Because of their widespread use, many websites and web based apps code for microsoft's broken and nonstandard implementation instead of to the published standards, which causes sites to require that particular browser. Since microsoft only make a browser for one platform, it also creates an artificial dependency on that platform, which they do make money from. If everyone used firefox, then market share of linux/bsd would be significantly higher in areas where web based apps or websites are being used.
This gives yet another reason not to get locked in to any proprietary products... If microsoft can pull out of one country, they can pull out of another. If all your data is locked in to their formats, and they stop selling their products in your country, your pretty screwed!
China is in a position to commit human rights abuses, microsoft is not... who's to say they wouldn't if they were in a position to do so?
On the other hand, microsoft is very guilty of taking away people's freedoms, by using proprietary apis, formats and protocols to force people to continue using their products. There have been many people far more evil than Adolf Hitler, just that these people never achieved the same level of power that he did.
The same thing will happen as it does in every other country that MS doesn't directly do business with. Another country will act as go-between, while many people in the country will simply use pirated copies anyway.
But what will the quality of the final code be? There's a reason some programmers are more expensive than others, and it has a lot to do with the quality of code they write and the speed with which they write it.
I have a 1600x1024 widescreen LCD... X picked it up automatically by reading the supported resolutions from the display itself. It also worked out the physical dimensions of the screen and set the DPI appropriately, so the fonts are fully readable and the same physical size as on any other screen.
The same is true of any OS, especially windows... If it works out of the box, it's easy enough... But as soon as something breaks, the error messages are useless, debugging information is useless, the registry is hardly what i'd call intuitive or easy to use, and the closed source nature of it makes it much harder for even the most skilled people to debug and fix your problems.
Not to mention the fact that commandline is much easier to debug remotely. cut+paste the error into google and when it gives you answers, cut+paste the answers back.
Iraqi construction companies should be rebuilding iraq... Financed by the american government. The Iraqi construction companies built the country in the first place, and the american government destroyed it. American companies shouldn't be profiting at the expense of Iraq, Iraq should be compensated for their losses and this compensation should go into the local economy.
And they would be free to do that. You wouldn't lose anything by buying a vehicle from another manufacturer instead, VW, Ford etc. It's not like you need to buy new garages for the new brand of vehicles, and have your drivers take a new driving test before they can drive the new brand of vehicles....
It's a big problem with commercial software nowadays, they concentrate far more on anti piracy measures like this than actually improving the product... Their developers are struggling against the cracking groups instead of improving the product, and every end user has to waste processor cycles running this crap and decrypting these binaries. Meanwhile, every version will eventually get cracked and put up on a p2p network. Whatever Apple do, people will run pirate copies of OSX... But it doesn't run quite so well, it's slow and unstable... Even so, it lets far more people get experience with the OS than would have otherwise, i know several people who ran pirated osx on generic whiteboxes and then went out and bought a mac. Widespread piracy never hurt microsoft either, do you really think windows would be so prevelant in asia and russia if everyone had to pay full price for it? A pirated OSX is a sub standard experience, like running a demo, and the people who pirate it are people who would never have bought macs to start with... Isn't it better to give them a taster in the hope that a few of them will change their opinion and buy a mac having had a small experience of osx? From my experience, one of the guys i mentioned above hadn't used a mac since the days of system 7, and didn't like those old versions of macos at all. He'd heard OSX was much better, but had never used it and wasn't willing to buy a mac just to try it... Having run a pirated OSX for a couple of weeks, he bought an imac and now has a macbook too.
In Europe at least, Nintendo/Sega had competition from Commodore (Amiga, CD32) and Atari (Jaguar)... The CD32 especially (first 32bit cd based conole, vastly superior to sega's megacd and cheaper), was going very well for Commodore UK until it's US parent company went belly up and took them down with it.
It gets it a lot better than IE does, but is still behind Opera and Safari/Konqueror... Apparently the next version of Gecko, on which firefox 3.0 will be based, will include much better support for this. It seems firefox is more concerned with making a browser that renders most existing websites out there, rather than concentrating on supporting standards that aren't yet being used anywhere (ie doesnt support them, so most webmasters never bother on the basis a lot of their viewers wont be able to see them, very wrong but unfortunately true)
Those who DO have the sourcecode and use it to find exploits, won't publicise them...Exploits are bad for business, so they either get left in a pile, or silently fixed and released with the next fix for a publicly disclosed exploit. Do you really think microsoft will ever admit to a bug that hasn't been found and publicised by someone else?
Over 1gig of ram you get a performance hit (using highmem) and over 4gig that hit becomes worse (PAE), have a read of: http://kerneltrap.org/node/2450 Also if you have enough swap to go over that tipping point, there will be a performance hit, albeit negligible since swap is slow enough already. Plus the extra registers that were added to AMD64 can often improve performance significantly.
I must also say, that it is mostly thanks to the Alpha that such a large amount of open source software compiled cleanly right from the start on AMD64. Alpha was the first architecture that was pure 64bit, without any kind of 32bit mode, so people couldnt easily just run their apps in 32bit mode and leave them broken.
Before it's death, the Alpha had a java implementation too, i believe it got canned at revision 1.3.1, but it was obviously 64bit clean and for the reason you state... UltraSparc was always a target platform for java.
There was also a flash plugin for IRIX and Solaris in those days, but that too was 32bit... The difference here, is that sparc/mips are not so braindead as x86, and so actually run most things faster in 32bit mode (tho obviously with memory addressing limitations)... They can still perform 64bit calculations in a single cycle too, just don't deal with 64bit memory addressing. With pointers being half the size, memory is saved and more variables can be shoved around at once, only calculations which need to be 64bit are... AMD64 actually adds a lot more to x86 than sparc64 does to sparc.
Not only do you need a set of 32bit libraries on disk, but when you run the apps you need to load them into memory too... So, you have a full set of 64bit libs *AND* a full set of 32bit libs loaded, 64bit architectures don't address larger amounts of memory just so you can waste it like this!
Plus, with more complex things coming out all the time (which would have been much faster, had microsoft not stifled innovation on the web for the last 6 or so years) like video in the browser, and very complex ajax apps... The extra performance from the 64bit registers could come in very handy... Not to mention the extra memory addressing if people make really heavy use of tabs to load lots of complex ajax apps!
Yes, i too am curious exactly what type of usb to serial adapter works with OSX, i have a few here but none will work with OSX, and linux has different drivers for many different types of such adapters...
As for taking a laptop into a data center, why don't you have a terminal server there? We have some old boxes with 24 serial connectors on them going into the back of each machine... You can connect to it over the network (via telnet unfortunately, newer ones support ssh) or via serial (one server also acts as a serial client to talk to the terminal server)
I wonder if a cracked version exists which doesn't require the dongle... You highlight a danger of proprietary software tho, what if the company hadn't produced a usb dongle? What if they went bust and your dongle broke or got lost, or you needed to have more machines?
Their keyboards have always been pretty good, and the xbox/xbox360 machines were nice... I have had huge problems with microsoft mice tho, so i ended up buying logitech.
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Or a web server gets hacked, and someone inserts the exploit code into the sites hosted there... If it's subtle enough, it would take ages to get noticed by the admins or legit viewers, unlike a defacement which is immediately obvious.
As for getting access to web servers, how many run IIS and have IE installed on them? Not to mention how many people admin their web servers from windows workstations, own the admin's workstation and you can keylog your way into the server too.
I've had the opposite experience...
Most programs install cleanly, but having to manually locate the installer, and usually click through multiple pages of license agreements, other bullshit and ads before you can download it is incredibly annoying.
For those few apps which dont install correctly, the error messages are useless for diagnosing why it didn't install and you often have to give up and accept not having the app.
Package managers on the other hand, debian's apt is usually problem free (although you cant mix and match stable/unstable packages since theyre linked against different library/gcc versions)... Gentoo's emerge is also pretty good, and you can mix and match nicely... When it does fail, and gentoo does fail far more than debian (since it's more of a power user tool) the error messages are usually pretty descriptive, and you can paste them into google and usually find someone else with the same problem.
Because browsers are not all equal...
Despite the standards that exist, microsoft often doesn't follow them. Their browsers are very much nonstandard, and implement things in ways contrary to the standards. Because of their widespread use, many websites and web based apps code for microsoft's broken and nonstandard implementation instead of to the published standards, which causes sites to require that particular browser. Since microsoft only make a browser for one platform, it also creates an artificial dependency on that platform, which they do make money from.
If everyone used firefox, then market share of linux/bsd would be significantly higher in areas where web based apps or websites are being used.
This gives yet another reason not to get locked in to any proprietary products...
If microsoft can pull out of one country, they can pull out of another. If all your data is locked in to their formats, and they stop selling their products in your country, your pretty screwed!
China is in a position to commit human rights abuses, microsoft is not... who's to say they wouldn't if they were in a position to do so?
On the other hand, microsoft is very guilty of taking away people's freedoms, by using proprietary apis, formats and protocols to force people to continue using their products.
There have been many people far more evil than Adolf Hitler, just that these people never achieved the same level of power that he did.
The same thing will happen as it does in every other country that MS doesn't directly do business with.
Another country will act as go-between, while many people in the country will simply use pirated copies anyway.
But what will the quality of the final code be? There's a reason some programmers are more expensive than others, and it has a lot to do with the quality of code they write and the speed with which they write it.
I have a 1600x1024 widescreen LCD...
X picked it up automatically by reading the supported resolutions from the display itself. It also worked out the physical dimensions of the screen and set the DPI appropriately, so the fonts are fully readable and the same physical size as on any other screen.
The same is true of any OS, especially windows...
If it works out of the box, it's easy enough... But as soon as something breaks, the error messages are useless, debugging information is useless, the registry is hardly what i'd call intuitive or easy to use, and the closed source nature of it makes it much harder for even the most skilled people to debug and fix your problems.
Not to mention the fact that commandline is much easier to debug remotely. cut+paste the error into google and when it gives you answers, cut+paste the answers back.
Iraqi construction companies should be rebuilding iraq... Financed by the american government.
The Iraqi construction companies built the country in the first place, and the american government destroyed it. American companies shouldn't be profiting at the expense of Iraq, Iraq should be compensated for their losses and this compensation should go into the local economy.
Antitrust only comes into play when someone has a monopoly... Neither Apple nor BMW do.
But your right about copyright being a blank cheque....
And they would be free to do that.
You wouldn't lose anything by buying a vehicle from another manufacturer instead, VW, Ford etc.
It's not like you need to buy new garages for the new brand of vehicles, and have your drivers take a new driving test before they can drive the new brand of vehicles....
It's a big problem with commercial software nowadays, they concentrate far more on anti piracy measures like this than actually improving the product...
Their developers are struggling against the cracking groups instead of improving the product, and every end user has to waste processor cycles running this crap and decrypting these binaries. Meanwhile, every version will eventually get cracked and put up on a p2p network.
Whatever Apple do, people will run pirate copies of OSX... But it doesn't run quite so well, it's slow and unstable... Even so, it lets far more people get experience with the OS than would have otherwise, i know several people who ran pirated osx on generic whiteboxes and then went out and bought a mac. Widespread piracy never hurt microsoft either, do you really think windows would be so prevelant in asia and russia if everyone had to pay full price for it?
A pirated OSX is a sub standard experience, like running a demo, and the people who pirate it are people who would never have bought macs to start with... Isn't it better to give them a taster in the hope that a few of them will change their opinion and buy a mac having had a small experience of osx?
From my experience, one of the guys i mentioned above hadn't used a mac since the days of system 7, and didn't like those old versions of macos at all. He'd heard OSX was much better, but had never used it and wasn't willing to buy a mac just to try it... Having run a pirated OSX for a couple of weeks, he bought an imac and now has a macbook too.
In Europe at least, Nintendo/Sega had competition from Commodore (Amiga, CD32) and Atari (Jaguar)...
The CD32 especially (first 32bit cd based conole, vastly superior to sega's megacd and cheaper), was going very well for Commodore UK until it's US parent company went belly up and took them down with it.
It gets it a lot better than IE does, but is still behind Opera and Safari/Konqueror...
Apparently the next version of Gecko, on which firefox 3.0 will be based, will include much better support for this.
It seems firefox is more concerned with making a browser that renders most existing websites out there, rather than concentrating on supporting standards that aren't yet being used anywhere (ie doesnt support them, so most webmasters never bother on the basis a lot of their viewers wont be able to see them, very wrong but unfortunately true)
Those who DO have the sourcecode and use it to find exploits, won't publicise them...Exploits are bad for business, so they either get left in a pile, or silently fixed and released with the next fix for a publicly disclosed exploit.
Do you really think microsoft will ever admit to a bug that hasn't been found and publicised by someone else?
Over 1gig of ram you get a performance hit (using highmem) and over 4gig that hit becomes worse (PAE), have a read of:
http://kerneltrap.org/node/2450
Also if you have enough swap to go over that tipping point, there will be a performance hit, albeit negligible since swap is slow enough already.
Plus the extra registers that were added to AMD64 can often improve performance significantly.
I must also say, that it is mostly thanks to the Alpha that such a large amount of open source software compiled cleanly right from the start on AMD64. Alpha was the first architecture that was pure 64bit, without any kind of 32bit mode, so people couldnt easily just run their apps in 32bit mode and leave them broken.
Before it's death, the Alpha had a java implementation too, i believe it got canned at revision 1.3.1, but it was obviously 64bit clean and for the reason you state... UltraSparc was always a target platform for java.
There was also a flash plugin for IRIX and Solaris in those days, but that too was 32bit...
The difference here, is that sparc/mips are not so braindead as x86, and so actually run most things faster in 32bit mode (tho obviously with memory addressing limitations)... They can still perform 64bit calculations in a single cycle too, just don't deal with 64bit memory addressing. With pointers being half the size, memory is saved and more variables can be shoved around at once, only calculations which need to be 64bit are...
AMD64 actually adds a lot more to x86 than sparc64 does to sparc.
Not only do you need a set of 32bit libraries on disk, but when you run the apps you need to load them into memory too...
So, you have a full set of 64bit libs *AND* a full set of 32bit libs loaded, 64bit architectures don't address larger amounts of memory just so you can waste it like this!
Plus, with more complex things coming out all the time (which would have been much faster, had microsoft not stifled innovation on the web for the last 6 or so years) like video in the browser, and very complex ajax apps... The extra performance from the 64bit registers could come in very handy...
Not to mention the extra memory addressing if people make really heavy use of tabs to load lots of complex ajax apps!
Hmm, YouTube works perfectly well for me, running flashplayer 7.0r63 on linux (32bit thinkpad).
Yes, i too am curious exactly what type of usb to serial adapter works with OSX, i have a few here but none will work with OSX, and linux has different drivers for many different types of such adapters...
As for taking a laptop into a data center, why don't you have a terminal server there? We have some old boxes with 24 serial connectors on them going into the back of each machine... You can connect to it over the network (via telnet unfortunately, newer ones support ssh) or via serial (one server also acts as a serial client to talk to the terminal server)
I wonder if a cracked version exists which doesn't require the dongle...
You highlight a danger of proprietary software tho, what if the company hadn't produced a usb dongle? What if they went bust and your dongle broke or got lost, or you needed to have more machines?
// (not that they normally print shares anymore)
Isn't that the point?
Their keyboards have always been pretty good, and the xbox/xbox360 machines were nice...
I have had huge problems with microsoft mice tho, so i ended up buying logitech.