They're not direct urls into a cc transaction process.
Go to the apple store, and click on anything, and you'll get your session stuffed into the url. So you can't send anyone a link to a product. The session info doesn't interest the user and should not be shown to them. A direct url to a product they want to show someone else would.
Whenever I use the Apple store, I always wonder what genius thought up that url scheme - a Universal Resource Locator which is only valid during a short time frame for one person. It's very difficult to send anyone a link to a product from the store for that reason.
Due to the deep complexity of the US economy, this model works.
For certain values of 'works'
Just look at EDS, its a shadow of what it once was because of firing on a whim management policy
So are you against 'at will' employment or not?
There are many other factors which constrain (and rightly so) the individual liberty of the employer to treat their employees as they see fit. Even in the US, the economy is nowhere near a 'free' market. A question which people don't often address is whether a free market, left to its own devices, tends towards a freer market, or tends to the concentration of capital and the build up of monopolies and ever-larger conglomerates. You imply in this post that if there was no government regulation, the market would be a self-regulating haven of free agents.
In fact there is no such thing as a free agent. (If I may parody Thatcher for a moment.)
Finally the UK and other countries in Europe have a different balance of rights, with the workers' rights more strictly enforced, it's not a different system, just a different emphasis. An employer can fire their employees, but only when it is justified by the employee's actions or the economic situation, not on a whim.
You missed out one very big reason on your list. Anyone who designs web pages or programs web applications will need to check their work under IE - currently this means switching over to a PC to check the page.
Running Windows in a VM would be perfect for checking out websites during development.
The fact is *all* security gaps are important. If there's a network hack that can only get you a non-priviledged account, but you can then jack that up to root access using this local hole, then that hole was mighty significant. This whole "Mac has no security faults" meme is dangerously delusional. It's significantly more secure than Win32, but at least own up to faults (small as they may be) and get them fixed, don't bury your heads in the sand.
He doesn't say it's invulnerable, and he doesn't say the local hole is unimportant, just that it's unimportant to desktop users (which it is), and applicable only to servers giving out ssh accounts. At present there is no network hack that can get you a local account, and most desktops wouldn't even have the services he has turned on enabled. Once something has a local account, you can only try to contain it, and for most desktop users it's game over, as it has access to all their files, address book etc. The worst hole so far has been due to Apple's stupidity in adding a feature to open downloaded files automatically to Safari, allowing trojans an easier route to trick users.
I haven't heard anyone say 'The Mac has no security faults', almost everyone here will readily admit that it has faults, and the stream of security updates from Apple attest to that. What people do say is that it's fairly secure, and more secure than Windows, by design.
I find it interesting he took the test down so quickly though, it's almost as if he was worried : )
there is still no tuner, no DVR software to support a tuner
There will never be a tuner in the mini; broadcast television is dying and Apple wants it dead (for selfish reasons).
The other things you mentioned are included in OS X - (games, integrated internet apps etc). This product obviously isn't for you though, so why not use any other SFF PC and run MythTV on it if you want to?
WebObjects wasn't built around Java, or even on top of it. It was ported to Java after being written in Objective C.
However your point still stands, there are many frameworks to choose from on both platforms, there doesn't have to be One True Way, in fact, it's harmful to think that way.
The SOLUTION is to refuse to buy DRM'd files in the first place. If everyone would friggin' wise up and do just that, Digitally Restricted Media (DRM) would be history. But they've convinced the world that a little DRM is OK and your comments show that you've bought right into that too. It's just a little DRM now. And then a little more and a little more and a little more until 20 years from now, you'll look back on your comment and wonder how on earth transporting media that you purchased to another format or another player was so easy and FREE those 20 years ago.
Or maybe, just maybe, due to the evil small amount of DRM Apple have put it now, the iTMS will steamroller the music companies and musicians will start to get direct online contracts with places like cdbaby, cutting out a lot of middle men. The Record companies will die, and the desire for draconian DRM will die with them.
The reason Apple has not licensed Fairplay is to protect themselves in a cutthroat industry. The record companies and MS would like nothing better than to adopt and extend Apple's format so that it only works with their blessed players and software, and thus crush Apple in this market too by bundling the MS version with Windows (see Java for the perfect example of this). I am hopeful that at some point due to public pressure they will open it up, and if they don't they should be forced to by the US Government or EU when they become close to a monopoly in this space (they're on the way, but not there yet).
I think perhaps 'As you like it', would be more appropriate, given some of the crowing comments about candy-coated proprietary OSs in the threads above.
I sincerely hope there is more than one other side and always will be. Your post implies that a story must be clearly 'from' one side or the other. If you're not with us you're against us right?
Which is a goal only idealistic OSS leaders have, not normal users who would have been better served with OS X. The underlying UNIX of OS X is all open source, and users would have been able to do plenty of hacking with gcc and bash.
I use OS X every day and love it, but you are in the wrong here.
Yes the users could do lots of hacking with gcc and bash etc, but they *are* better served with an open source solution because there are no strings attached. If you contract with a company to provide the OS for your computers, and those very cheap computers start to flood the markets that company profits from, what is the only rational choice for that company?
They're going to try to shut you down. Apple would not tolerate being undermined in a profitable market by a 'good enough' cheap solution running their own OS, no matter what promises Jobs made (we don't actually know what his offer was exactly, for what term, and on what terms). If they withdrew support a couple of years in to the project, it would be a real blow.
This way the project can win or lose on its own merits, with no companies which have direct commercial interests involved (Red Hat wins by association and the promotion of Linux, and they can't stop the project).
In addition Linux can be stripped down and a custom distro made for these machines made more easily than you would be able to persuade Jobs to give up the trademark shiny effects of OS X. Apple wouldn't tolerate open copying of the OS either.
Congratulations - your content-free post, peppered with ersatz macho bluster and spelling errors, has been rated even higher. Does this prove your theory that crap gets rated highly?
The original point the poster made warrants discussion - he actually attempted to address the question, unlike yourself; you seem to be obsessed with the Slashdot moderation system, frankly, who cares if his post gets rated high or not?
The design of such a system is important, and the people who brought you net send possibly aren't the ones you want to trust in creating a global network. Good design is important, and admitting that is the first step towards producing secure networks. Yes of course this is common sense if you've thought about the subject, but unfortunately most people haven't. Shame the original article is such a one-sided rant with very little factual information, because it could be an interesting discussion.
PS I don't think anyone advocating BSD can be accused of getting 'sheep' to follow them - most of the people reading this page are using Windows to do so.
Thanks for the summary, it's remarkably like the argument between a square and a sphere in this book (later on, after he's been shown his 2 dimensional world has a third dimension).
Thus, they have plenty of time to spawn more idiot children than intelligent people, holding down jobs to pay for this vermin.
What does Chav mean to you? Who are Chavs? From reading your post it seems to mean 'people I hate, who I choose not to understand, and who make a convenient scapegoat for the problems in modern day Britain', with the implicit understanding that none of your audience are Chavs. But of course you don't really care who Chavs are or why because it's nicer to keep them a nebulous other that you can slag off to your friends.
They are everything that you are not; you work hard, and they're all the slackers who scrounge off the dole; you wear nice reserved clothes, and they dress up in silly costumes and wear (gasp) Burberry; you read the guardian and slashdot, and they read the sun, or perhaps don't read at all (snigger). Obviously they don't know their place. And did you see the way they breed? Like rats, like vermin. 30 years ago they would be black, 50 years ago Jews, 200 years ago the Irish etc etc. The faces change, but everyone likes to hate now and then.
PS £50 a week for the dole is close to the bare minimum, try it some time, it's not fun, and there is a lot of pressure to take any job (which is fair enough). (I'm not on the dole)
PPS If you want to get a job posting your idiot diatribes on slashdot with a link to your cv might not be the best strategy.
I have also noticed extremist Apple fanboy... from a Powerbook (running Linux admittedly)... It seems Apple fanboys...abusing...Unfortunately this isn't new behaviour for Apple fanboys... As far back as I can remember...most intolerant, the least receptive to criticism, the most judgemental and often the least educated.....never seen an Apple fanboy in full swing. Even the Amiga users were never so extreme. That sort of stupid fanatacism...goddamn I hate Apple users.
everything I hate about Apple fanboyism...Steve...deceitful bullshit...a lying bastard...Yet when Steve does...the Apple fanboys are...rationalising the lies, and moderating or shouting down...anybody who points out that the emperor has no clothes. Apple gets "special treatment" and I find that despicable.
Maybe there is a cabal of Apple users (or fanboys if you prefer) all moderating you down, or maybe you're just gratuitously inflammatory?
As for the speculation that hating Apple is the new badge of honour round here, seems like you got modded up for your rant on Apple fanboys, so really QED.
Active-X provides one click access from a web page to the users computer, and if they become used to installing active-x plugins for random websites, they're getting used to giving carte-blanche access to their system to web pages, just with one click on a dialog. This is a bad thing and it wasn't a good idea at any time. If nothing else the apps should have been running in a clearly defined sandbox like java applets.
Dashboard runs apps on your machine that happen to be like web pages, not web pages that happen to be programs. It's a step closer to MS in that Apple is encouraging you to download and run small applications that just about anyone can build, however it's not possible for the web page to just download and install them, simply because you click ok (at least, not any more:). I agree you should be able to disable it.
Applescript is a scripting language, I fail to see how it's relevant (you may as well include the ability to run VB, shell scripts or compiled C code as being insecure).
You failed to address the other points on which Windows is weak.
A platform which doesn't have Active-X, doesn't have services running out of the box, doesnt' have autorun for CDs with Sony Malware, and doesn't have an unfortunate legacy meaning almost all apps require continual admin access, is more secure in my book. There's a couple of operating systems that fit the bill, one of which you seem to hate : )
Having no known viruses at this point is an extra bonus.
Not immune of course, but then I don't hear many people claim that, in fact, I've never heard anyone say that, just heard it repeated as a truism (Mac users think this) on websites.
It's just a shame that for them to be proven wrong, a lot of people and their PC's have to get hurt
A lot of people and their PCs get hurt continually at present, but they come back for more and keep running the same broken system.
Agreed. Especially when you consider that all of the programs in TFA were installed after the user clicked the "I Agree" button five, six, seven times. The OS could be totally secure and only allow the installed apps to affect the logged-in user. They'll still be there annoying that one user, though, since the user is the one who said it was okay to put them there. This is where informing the user comes in. And the user has already shown many times over that they don't care to be informed. This sort of crap is gonna be around for a long long time...
Yes and No. The user has to agree, but on XP the user has been trained to agree -
A big difference I notice between Windows XP and OS X (one of those nix) is the number of times I have to click 'Next' or 'Previous' in dialogs in Windows, just to get anything done at all. In my opinion the main reason for the growth of spyware on Windows (before ubiquity) is the way the OS trains you to click,click, click to do anything at all. You end up not reading any of the dialogs because you read the first few words and guess the rest. The user is inured to warning dialogs of any sort, and starts to click through the forest of 'Next' buttons to get to where they want to go (or thought they wanted to go:). There's also the problem with users running as admin all the time, meaning the only line of defence is the security policy of the web browser, not the users' permissions.
In contrast on OS X you very rarely have to say 'ok, do this, then that, next, next, finish', you are asked one simple question (usually) with an 'OK' the first time you open a document type with an application. And you very, very rarely have to enter your admin password, practically only when you are installing big applications like Photoshop which need to install libraries. So if a website pops up an authentication dialog (which they can't anyway BTW), you know something is wrong; you stop and think about it.
That said user ignorance of what constitutes safe computing is a problem too.
If you don't like Entourage's Exchange implementation, complain. [microsoft.com] I know it's unlikely they'll actually listen to us and redo it right, but it can't hurt to try.
Are there serious reasons for staying with an exchange solution and at the mercy of MS or is it more inertia? The corporate environments I've been in which used exchange didn't use many of the features other than straight email, and the other ones (collaborative calendaring for one) could easily be dealt with using other solutions (not in one integrated package).
It would make a lot of sense for MS to cripple Entourage for the reasons you have stated, but if no one ever migrates from Exchange servers as a consequence, what's to stop them continuing to sabotage any of your IT operations which don't profit them? Why should they?
They could solve this problem (and the problem of data entry on the move) by integrating one of those light projectors which create a keyboard on a smooth surface in front of the phone/ipod. That would be far more satisfactory anyway for SMS than the current broken solution of 3 letters per key or a tiny keyboard. It would also make sending email on the move a practical option.
I agree with the grandparent - the click wheel is really the obvious interface for this sort of device. I can't even remember when I last had to key in a number in my phone - it happens so rarely.
Slashdot Mirror
They're not direct urls into a cc transaction process.
Go to the apple store, and click on anything, and you'll get your session stuffed into the url. So you can't send anyone a link to a product. The session info doesn't interest the user and should not be shown to them. A direct url to a product they want to show someone else would.
It's all about choice, we like to give the users the choice.
WebObjects URLs with a "/wo/" are session-based;
Whenever I use the Apple store, I always wonder what genius thought up that url scheme - a Universal Resource Locator which is only valid during a short time frame for one person. It's very difficult to send anyone a link to a product from the store for that reason.
You have a hardware problem - just send the machine back already.
It seems people who've actually tried HD on a new mini would disagree
n al/index.php
http://www.macworld.com/2006/03/firstlooks/minifi
Due to the deep complexity of the US economy, this model works.
For certain values of 'works'
Just look at EDS, its a shadow of what it once was because of firing on a whim management policy
So are you against 'at will' employment or not?
There are many other factors which constrain (and rightly so) the individual liberty of the employer to treat their employees as they see fit. Even in the US, the economy is nowhere near a 'free' market. A question which people don't often address is whether a free market, left to its own devices, tends towards a freer market, or tends to the concentration of capital and the build up of monopolies and ever-larger conglomerates. You imply in this post that if there was no government regulation, the market would be a self-regulating haven of free agents.
In fact there is no such thing as a free agent. (If I may parody Thatcher for a moment.)
Finally the UK and other countries in Europe have a different balance of rights, with the workers' rights more strictly enforced, it's not a different system, just a different emphasis. An employer can fire their employees, but only when it is justified by the employee's actions or the economic situation, not on a whim.
You missed out one very big reason on your list. Anyone who designs web pages or programs web applications will need to check their work under IE - currently this means switching over to a PC to check the page.
Running Windows in a VM would be perfect for checking out websites during development.
The fact is *all* security gaps are important. If there's a network hack that can only get you a non-priviledged account, but you can then jack that up to root access using this local hole, then that hole was mighty significant. This whole "Mac has no security faults" meme is dangerously delusional. It's significantly more secure than Win32, but at least own up to faults (small as they may be) and get them fixed, don't bury your heads in the sand.
Have you read the page at http://test.doit.wisc.edu/ ?
He doesn't say it's invulnerable, and he doesn't say the local hole is unimportant, just that it's unimportant to desktop users (which it is), and applicable only to servers giving out ssh accounts. At present there is no network hack that can get you a local account, and most desktops wouldn't even have the services he has turned on enabled. Once something has a local account, you can only try to contain it, and for most desktop users it's game over, as it has access to all their files, address book etc. The worst hole so far has been due to Apple's stupidity in adding a feature to open downloaded files automatically to Safari, allowing trojans an easier route to trick users.
I haven't heard anyone say 'The Mac has no security faults', almost everyone here will readily admit that it has faults, and the stream of security updates from Apple attest to that. What people do say is that it's fairly secure, and more secure than Windows, by design.
I find it interesting he took the test down so quickly though, it's almost as if he was worried : )
there is still no tuner, no DVR software to support a tuner
There will never be a tuner in the mini; broadcast television is dying and Apple wants it dead (for selfish reasons).
The other things you mentioned are included in OS X - (games, integrated internet apps etc). This product obviously isn't for you though, so why not use any other SFF PC and run MythTV on it if you want to?
WebObjects wasn't built around Java, or even on top of it. It was ported to Java after being written in Objective C.
However your point still stands, there are many frameworks to choose from on both platforms, there doesn't have to be One True Way, in fact, it's harmful to think that way.
Why would you want to design a near silent ship when future American wars are being fought against Americans?
The SOLUTION is to refuse to buy DRM'd files in the first place. If everyone would friggin' wise up and do just that, Digitally Restricted Media (DRM) would be history. But they've convinced the world that a little DRM is OK and your comments show that you've bought right into that too. It's just a little DRM now. And then a little more and a little more and a little more until 20 years from now, you'll look back on your comment and wonder how on earth transporting media that you purchased to another format or another player was so easy and FREE those 20 years ago.
Or maybe, just maybe, due to the evil small amount of DRM Apple have put it now, the iTMS will steamroller the music companies and musicians will start to get direct online contracts with places like cdbaby, cutting out a lot of middle men. The Record companies will die, and the desire for draconian DRM will die with them.
The reason Apple has not licensed Fairplay is to protect themselves in a cutthroat industry. The record companies and MS would like nothing better than to adopt and extend Apple's format so that it only works with their blessed players and software, and thus crush Apple in this market too by bundling the MS version with Windows (see Java for the perfect example of this). I am hopeful that at some point due to public pressure they will open it up, and if they don't they should be forced to by the US Government or EU when they become close to a monopoly in this space (they're on the way, but not there yet).
I think perhaps 'As you like it', would be more appropriate, given some of the crowing comments about candy-coated proprietary OSs in the threads above.
you want to drive away the other side
I sincerely hope there is more than one other side and always will be. Your post implies that a story must be clearly 'from' one side or the other. If you're not with us you're against us right?
Goodnight, and good luck.
PS Nitpick
Whose is the possessive form of who
Which is a goal only idealistic OSS leaders have, not normal users who would have been better served with OS X. The underlying UNIX of OS X is all open source, and users would have been able to do plenty of hacking with gcc and bash.
I use OS X every day and love it, but you are in the wrong here.
Yes the users could do lots of hacking with gcc and bash etc, but they *are* better served with an open source solution because there are no strings attached. If you contract with a company to provide the OS for your computers, and those very cheap computers start to flood the markets that company profits from, what is the only rational choice for that company?
They're going to try to shut you down. Apple would not tolerate being undermined in a profitable market by a 'good enough' cheap solution running their own OS, no matter what promises Jobs made (we don't actually know what his offer was exactly, for what term, and on what terms). If they withdrew support a couple of years in to the project, it would be a real blow.
This way the project can win or lose on its own merits, with no companies which have direct commercial interests involved (Red Hat wins by association and the promotion of Linux, and they can't stop the project).
In addition Linux can be stripped down and a custom distro made for these machines made more easily than you would be able to persuade Jobs to give up the trademark shiny effects of OS X. Apple wouldn't tolerate open copying of the OS either.
Congratulations - your content-free post, peppered with ersatz macho bluster and spelling errors, has been rated even higher. Does this prove your theory that crap gets rated highly?
The original point the poster made warrants discussion - he actually attempted to address the question, unlike yourself; you seem to be obsessed with the Slashdot moderation system, frankly, who cares if his post gets rated high or not?
The design of such a system is important, and the people who brought you net send possibly aren't the ones you want to trust in creating a global network. Good design is important, and admitting that is the first step towards producing secure networks. Yes of course this is common sense if you've thought about the subject, but unfortunately most people haven't. Shame the original article is such a one-sided rant with very little factual information, because it could be an interesting discussion.
PS
I don't think anyone advocating BSD can be accused of getting 'sheep' to follow them - most of the people reading this page are using Windows to do so.
Thanks for the summary, it's remarkably like the argument between a square and a sphere in this book (later on, after he's been shown his 2 dimensional world has a third dimension).
Flatland
Thus, they have plenty of time to spawn more idiot children than intelligent people, holding down jobs to pay for this vermin.
What does Chav mean to you? Who are Chavs? From reading your post it seems to mean 'people I hate, who I choose not to understand, and who make a convenient scapegoat for the problems in modern day Britain', with the implicit understanding that none of your audience are Chavs. But of course you don't really care who Chavs are or why because it's nicer to keep them a nebulous other that you can slag off to your friends.
They are everything that you are not; you work hard, and they're all the slackers who scrounge off the dole; you wear nice reserved clothes, and they dress up in silly costumes and wear (gasp) Burberry; you read the guardian and slashdot, and they read the sun, or perhaps don't read at all (snigger). Obviously they don't know their place. And did you see the way they breed? Like rats, like vermin. 30 years ago they would be black, 50 years ago Jews, 200 years ago the Irish etc etc. The faces change, but everyone likes to hate now and then.
PS £50 a week for the dole is close to the bare minimum, try it some time, it's not fun, and there is a lot of pressure to take any job (which is fair enough). (I'm not on the dole)
PPS If you want to get a job posting your idiot diatribes on slashdot with a link to your cv might not be the best strategy.
I have also noticed extremist Apple fanboy... from a Powerbook (running Linux admittedly)... It seems Apple fanboys...abusing...Unfortunately this isn't new behaviour for Apple fanboys... As far back as I can remember...most intolerant, the least receptive to criticism, the most judgemental and often the least educated.....never seen an Apple fanboy in full swing. Even the Amiga users were never so extreme. That sort of stupid fanatacism...goddamn I hate Apple users.
everything I hate about Apple fanboyism...Steve...deceitful bullshit...a lying bastard...Yet when Steve does...the Apple fanboys are...rationalising the lies, and moderating or shouting down...anybody who points out that the emperor has no clothes. Apple gets "special treatment" and I find that despicable.
Maybe there is a cabal of Apple users (or fanboys if you prefer) all moderating you down, or maybe you're just gratuitously inflammatory?
As for the speculation that hating Apple is the new badge of honour round here, seems like you got modded up for your rant on Apple fanboys, so really QED.
Active-X provides one click access from a web page to the users computer, and if they become used to installing active-x plugins for random websites, they're getting used to giving carte-blanche access to their system to web pages, just with one click on a dialog. This is a bad thing and it wasn't a good idea at any time. If nothing else the apps should have been running in a clearly defined sandbox like java applets.
:). I agree you should be able to disable it.
Dashboard runs apps on your machine that happen to be like web pages, not web pages that happen to be programs. It's a step closer to MS in that Apple is encouraging you to download and run small applications that just about anyone can build, however it's not possible for the web page to just download and install them, simply because you click ok (at least, not any more
Applescript is a scripting language, I fail to see how it's relevant (you may as well include the ability to run VB, shell scripts or compiled C code as being insecure).
You failed to address the other points on which Windows is weak.
A platform which doesn't have Active-X, doesn't have services running out of the box, doesnt' have autorun for CDs with Sony Malware, and doesn't have an unfortunate legacy meaning almost all apps require continual admin access, is more secure in my book. There's a couple of operating systems that fit the bill, one of which you seem to hate : )
Having no known viruses at this point is an extra bonus.
Not immune of course, but then I don't hear many people claim that, in fact, I've never heard anyone say that, just heard it repeated as a truism (Mac users think this) on websites.
It's just a shame that for them to be proven wrong, a lot of people and their PC's have to get hurt
A lot of people and their PCs get hurt continually at present, but they come back for more and keep running the same broken system.
If a graphics house can buy commodity PC hardware and run OSX + apps on it
Because the graphics house is a limited company and it's illegal! Companies tend to get sued when they openly do things which are illegal.
Apple is irrelevant to mainstream users.
Troll harder.
Agreed. Especially when you consider that all of the programs in TFA were installed after the user clicked the "I Agree" button five, six, seven times. The OS could be totally secure and only allow the installed apps to affect the logged-in user. They'll still be there annoying that one user, though, since the user is the one who said it was okay to put them there. This is where informing the user comes in. And the user has already shown many times over that they don't care to be informed. This sort of crap is gonna be around for a long long time...
:). There's also the problem with users running as admin all the time, meaning the only line of defence is the security policy of the web browser, not the users' permissions.
Yes and No. The user has to agree, but on XP the user has been trained to agree -
A big difference I notice between Windows XP and OS X (one of those nix) is the number of times I have to click 'Next' or 'Previous' in dialogs in Windows, just to get anything done at all. In my opinion the main reason for the growth of spyware on Windows (before ubiquity) is the way the OS trains you to click,click, click to do anything at all. You end up not reading any of the dialogs because you read the first few words and guess the rest. The user is inured to warning dialogs of any sort, and starts to click through the forest of 'Next' buttons to get to where they want to go (or thought they wanted to go
In contrast on OS X you very rarely have to say 'ok, do this, then that, next, next, finish', you are asked one simple question (usually) with an 'OK' the first time you open a document type with an application. And you very, very rarely have to enter your admin password, practically only when you are installing big applications like Photoshop which need to install libraries. So if a website pops up an authentication dialog (which they can't anyway BTW), you know something is wrong; you stop and think about it.
That said user ignorance of what constitutes safe computing is a problem too.
If you don't like Entourage's Exchange implementation, complain. [microsoft.com] I know it's unlikely they'll actually listen to us and redo it right, but it can't hurt to try.
Are there serious reasons for staying with an exchange solution and at the mercy of MS or is it more inertia? The corporate environments I've been in which used exchange didn't use many of the features other than straight email, and the other ones (collaborative calendaring for one) could easily be dealt with using other solutions (not in one integrated package).
It would make a lot of sense for MS to cripple Entourage for the reasons you have stated, but if no one ever migrates from Exchange servers as a consequence, what's to stop them continuing to sabotage any of your IT operations which don't profit them? Why should they?
They could solve this problem (and the problem of data entry on the move) by integrating one of those light projectors which create a keyboard on a smooth surface in front of the phone/ipod. That would be far more satisfactory anyway for SMS than the current broken solution of 3 letters per key or a tiny keyboard. It would also make sending email on the move a practical option.
I agree with the grandparent - the click wheel is really the obvious interface for this sort of device. I can't even remember when I last had to key in a number in my phone - it happens so rarely.