As opposed to almost any other company I know, they speak English and Hacker (Unix meaning off the word) not corporate (or maybe they know that language, I never initiated a conversation in it).
They do know that language, and every employee in the company has a duty to do product support - even the Wine maintainer himself. So, if you are technically conversant you can usually get talking to the person who wrote the misbehaving code in question and there is also an IRC channel, #crossover on FreeNode, where you can go talk to the developers, CEO, support guys etc.
All of these are available as Mac Native apps except IE 6. Now maybe thereis some small app I need to run, but why not just wait until the free version of Wine is ported to OS X?
Those are the most commonly used apps because Crossover currently is used by Linux users. IE6 is pretty valuable incidentally - depressingly, it's one of the most commonly required apps for desktop Linux migrations in business. There's an entire industry of web app developers out there who wouldn't know browser portability if it walked up and told them its name.
The real value of Crossover is the fact that it can, in fact, run many other apps just fine. The ones you listed are the supported ones, ie the ones they promise will work. There's a big database called C4 which shows you which other apps have been tested.... some won't work, others will. If there is an app you want to run you can check to find out if it works, and often it will quite well but don't try guessing, it's a bit hit and miss.
As time goes on, the idea is that more and more apps start working. In practice, this happens quite slowly because a lot of effort in recent years has gone into eliminating reliance on downloaded Microsoft components like MSI, which are still provided for Windows 98 users but will one day disappear. Still, a massive amount of code and improvements goes into every Crossover release - much of it written by CW employees but also a lot comes from the WineHQ community. There has definitely been a lot of progress in the last few years.
Mac users expect a superior interface. Among other things, that means consistency.
I suppose it's redundant to point out that Apple do not make consistent interfaces. Whether they are "superior" or not depends largely on your taste, I personally can't stand iTunes.
Emulated, virtualized, or poorly ported applications will always look like intruders.
Believe it or not, for people who don't take operating systems religiously things like features, performance etc usually win out over interface consistency. There are plenty of happy users of Picasa, which doesn't look native on any platform even Windows. Besides, ironically the only OS today that actually has a consistent UI is Linux, if you stick to GNOMEish/GTK+ apps. Out of the box Ubuntu - for instance - is basically consistent. Out of the box, both Windows and MacOS X ship with a bunch of apps that look different to the norm.
The same argument holds true for VMware and Crossover on Linux. Really, when Crossover works properly the experience is light years ahead of running Windows inside a VM. What kind of business would deploy Macs (or Linux) and then have their employees run Windows in a VM all day? Only a stupid one.... it would just beg the question of why not run Windows anyway, seeing as how you need the license?
My understanding is that the groups in question were little more subtle than "Hey guys, let's get together at 5pm tonight and go kill some gays" or worse still "Hey, that sucker we killed at 5pm is one less gay in the world!".
The Brazilian police were, not surprisingly, rather pissed off that criminals could communicate in anonymity like this, which was having a very real impact on the Brazilian communities those gangs operated in. If Google did not hand over the data about these specific groups, that would have been Evil, because it would have been a brainless knee-jerk anti-government reaction.... very American but not very well thought out.
One thing to remember is that in some parts of the world, notably Europe and some of the nicer parts of Latin America, there isn't a distrust-by-default attitude to government and the police. The culture isn't one where privacy overrules every other consideration. Though that may be slowly changing.
I have used Macs many times, thanks. Doesn't change my opinions of them - they are overrated and boring. 70s technology, 70s ideas... a grandma with lipstick.
More secure actually has tangible benefits. It means less interruptions to update software.... I don't have a window that says "the computer will reboot in 10 minutes" unless you press the button. And I don't press it 10 times before I'm finally ready to reboot.
You realise that this nag-screen exists because there are lots of people in the world who [a] never switch off their computer and [b] completely ignore any and all online updates that are downloaded, right? If you think Microsoft does this simply because it's Evil then you clearly never did much tech support... unless nagged to reboot these people will simply never have updates to core system services (kernel, display server etc) applied. One girl I knew was still dismissing the "please let me install service pack 2" balloon half a year after it had been downloaded!
Like others have said - it's all about market share;)
Yawn. Same arguments have been done to death on Linux for years, despite clear evidence to the contrary (see Second Life).
A few apps won't be ported because you can run them via Crossover Mac, but those apps wouldn't have been ported anyway. Life goes on. As a society we collectively have better things to do than port from one shitty C based API (Win32) to another shitty C based API (Carbon), simply to get glowing buttons. Sorry, but for the vast majority of specialist/single-use software in the world, dat be the truth.
Within our current economic system, companies must continually grow to survive.
That isn't quite right, even public companies can not grow at all and they will definitely survive. You're getting mixed up; our current economic system requires that the money supply constantly grows, which is very different to saying companies must continually grow. The constant growth of the money supply implies that the economy itself must also constantly grow, however that can be achieved without companies themselves constantly growing (eg by new companies being created or an increase in monetary velocity).
It's also not quite right that the economy doesn't survive if the money supply stops growing. Rather what happens is that the system enters a negative feedback loop and we get into recession... perhaps even into a great depression though thanks to buffers provided by things like social security this is less likely in modern times. So the system itself survives but it starts to collapse.
I think you mean authors, artists, journalists, researchers, software developers etc... I guess you could consider Joe Blow novelist a "baron" but it's a bit of a stretch.
A place where all information could be free
A common dream amongst people who don't produce information for a living.
I think this would be a pointless and confusing solution, at least for the scenario I was talking about. The whole point of making Program Files read-only for the average home PC user is so viruses and other things can't get in and silently modify them. If you allow modifications it doesn't matter that it's unioned with a RO filesystem - the net result is the same - which is that anything can go in and modify the program files. Who really cares if it's restricted to that user, if there is only one user on the system anyway?
What I meant was that if you have a piece of software you need, and it requires Windows+Admin privs, then Apple don't have a solution for you. The closest they can get is "Well, this piece of Mac software might be a replacement, mostly, hopefully" and a lot of the time for the more specialist stuff there won't be any Mac equivalent at all.
It was poorly phrased, I apologise. Essentially it bugs me when people blame Microsoft (or anybody, really) for the faults of legacy software. Apple can't magically fix all the stuff out there that was written in the time before DAC security became common. In fact they basically abandoned their own collection of pre-security era software, and got away with it because by that point nobody was using Macs anyway. Instead they choose to ignore the problem and hope it goes away - making them look better at the expense of poor old Microsoft who are sort of expected to keep that incredibly expensive electronics design package that wasn't updated since 2000 working.
First of all launchd replaced init and xinetd with one process. This is a bit scary as we now basically have init listening in a bunch of different ways for something to tell it to start a job. The security implications of this aren't really known yet with launchd being as young as it is.
Secondly, and in the same vein, launchd is process 1 and it has the potential to take down the whole system. I've already seen unconfirmed reports of a ssh scan on a network causing launchd to freak out and make systems inaccessible. Having at least some sort of resource limit set on jobs might help here.
I guess I'm struggling to see how yet another way to launch things is a revolution in security, given that it's a brand new (and therefore untested) codebase and already has reports of it "freaking out".
The default in Windows is now to have no open ports as well due to the Firewall, so for any up to date installation of Windows the primary ways crap gets in is via browser exploits and malware. I am not seeing anything that Apple does fundamentally different here - Safari has already had several serious security problems, some of them near identical re-runs of problems Microsoft had before (eg help exploits). Malware is just a massively hard problem that nobody is really attacking right now, except maybe Microsoft with Vista, and there's certainly nothing in MacOS that would make it hard to write malware. Indeed there is very simple example code showing how to dump secure form information from Safari and you know how much marketeers would love that.
A lot of the points made in TFA aren't valid either, they are apparently the result of an extreme lack of thought or knowledge:
The purpose of most of the DLLs in SYSTEM32 is documented, just look at the summary tab in Explorer, the problem is that with any complex operating system it's trivial to make up fake names that sound plausible. So it doesn't help as much as you might think. 3rd parties are "duty bound" to produce man pages? Please, how ridiculous. You could argue the same for Linux yet people routinely write new programs without man pages.
Windows requires users to use Administrator to install software? No, buggy software requires that. Historically a few Mac programs have had the same requirements... iTunes springs to mind. Anyway, the Apple solution to buggy software requiring elevated privileges is "you can't run that software" - not very helpful if you need it.
"Microsoft made it easy for commercial applications to refuse a debugger's attempt to attach to a process or thread"... no they didn't, there is no API to prevent yourself from being debugged. This is a total fantasy. Why should I believe this guy at all, when he is talking such nonsense? There are various tricks you can use to detect a debugger being attached but none of these are reliable and none have OS support. If you detect a debugger you cannot force it to detach, the best you can do is stop the program and put up a message box. I think he has seen these messages from copy protection software and assumed it's a flaw in Windows. Not so.
"Malicious code or data can be concealed in NTFS files' secondary streams. These are similar to HFS forks, but so few would think to look at these"... a feature that OS X has as well.
"OS X's nearest equivalent to the Registry is Netinfo, but this requires authentication for modification. In later releases of OS X, it is fairly sparse"... no it isn't, the "equivalent" is a mish-mash of Netinfo, XML plist files dotted around the filing system, UNIX style config files and proprietary datastores. I fail to see how this is an improvement.
I could go on, most of these points are either wrong or very biased. The article seems worthless as a serious security analysis. I suggest the author go research exactly what modern malware does and how it works.
I'm not sure what the Brazilian police are wanting here. IP addresses? Botnets are so widespread now that anybody can claim they know nothing about this, that their PC was hijacked and turned into an anonymous proxy for criminals. And how to disprove it? Bots are designed to not be found, so it's rather difficult to prove they're lying by not finding one.
A quick way to compare KHTML to Gecko (the rendering engine of Firefox) is to look at the source code for each. What one will immediately notice is that while both are written in C++, the code of KHTML is far cleaner than that of Gecko. Gecko suffers from an over-architecturing, which directly leads to code bloat and unnecessary complexity. KHTML, on the other hand, has been designed to be simple and clear, without an overly convoluted architecture.
That's a little unfair. In fact I have read the source code to each and I wouldn't say one is far clearer than the other. Maybe that used to be the case but they've cleaned Gecko up a lot in the past few years. It's true that the Mozilla dialect of C++ is a little more obtuse than the Qt dialect, however, Mozilla is a hell of a lot more portable than KHTML is not only between operating systems but also between compilers, and that makes a big difference. Gecko also has a lot of features that KHTML does not have - for instance the combination of the fact that its objects are easily exposed to JavaScript and XUL is what makes the Firefox extensions culture so vibrant. Where are the extensions to Konqueror? There might be a few, I guess, but nothing like what you have with Firefox. It's hard to see how they could have made extensions so powerful without the platform parts like XPCOM which make the C++ harder to read.
What we end up getting with KHTML is a rendering engine that is of a far higher quality than that of Gecko
Meaningless assertion, not backed up by fact. I claim the opposite. Gecko is fast, very standards compliant and trivial to extend using reasonably well documented APIs and technologies. For instance look at XTF. It has support for a lot of new things like SVG, MathML, designMode and so on. KHTML might support these things, depending if you use the Apple fork... or it might not.
With the upcoming KDE 4 release, which will likely be portable to Windows and Mac OS X, the portability advantages of Gecko's architecture will be rendered obsolete.
No, I rather think it won't. The portability of Geckos architecture already allowed it to make massive gains on Windows, the only platform that matters statistically. Where was KHTML in all of this? Now don't get me wrong, it's not a bad rendering engine at all, but to claim a Windows port of KHTML will make Gecko obsolete is rather naive. Maybe KDE 4 will rock my world but right now it's mostly a set of marketing web pages and fancy codenames for various abstractions over already quite abstract technologies (HAL, gstreamer etc).
Which fields did it manage 20% increase in recoverable oil from? The studies I've seen are somewhat equivocal, some even suggest overuse can reduce the amount of recoverable oil in a field by damaging it.
Alright, I'll give you that, but it's just playing with semantics. If it is uneconomic to work a field, then that may as well be called a 'shortage'. You are right to consider the price of oil to be the most important thing and that this can rise even as we open new, previously uneconomic fields.
The main problem with the idea that technology increases the amount of oil we can recover is that it doesn't seem to be true. Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) technology, the main innovation in the past 30 years, allows you to increase the rate of extraction but not the amount. So what happens is that instead of a smooth production decline, it slackens off very rapidly. Technologies that actually increase the amount extractable from a field, or make previously uneconomic fields economic, seem quite rare. It's usually rising oil prices that will do that.
No, the long term outlook is big shortfalls, it's called "peak oil" and the only debate amongst credible scientists is when it occurs, not if. I'll give you a hint, the most optimistic estimates are for around 2035, with most realistic estimates coming in at about 2010. Unless you consider 20 years to be long term (I wouldn't) then it's not right to say the long term outlook is of a surplus.
Currently, production is higher than it's ever been
That's correct, but then, it's always been correct. The worst we've ever had is a plateau of production, but that's actually all we need to create price rises because demand constantly accelerates. In fact oil production can still rise year on year yet there can still be shortages, if demand rises faster.
increasing capacity occurring in the Gulf of Mexico, Canada and other places.
Increasing capacity? Where did you get that idea from? The tar sands and oil shales are largely uneconomic to extract - the costs being bandied about by Shell are simply wild guesses that have a history of being totally wrong. So that seems to largely rule Canada out, unless they develop some radical new techniques. Gulf of Mexico was largely wiped out by Katrina so you'd expect increasing capacity there, but it's simply catching up to what it once was. Meanwhile Mexican production itself is slacking off as Cantarell continues its downwards slide.
The current price hike has nothing to do with capacity and everything to do with fear.
Well, I disagree. I say maybe $10 per barrel of the current cost is speculation. The rest is supply/demand in action. OPEC know full well what is going on, but they are known for lying out of their backsides about anything to do with hard statistics - they still claim they have has much oil in the ground as they did in the 70s. 30 years of constant production and their claimed reserves have never even moved! Internal Kuwaiti reports indicate that the true figures are far, far worse than the published figures.
The main problem is that the world crude supply is starting to shift towards heavy sour (the undesirable, hard to refine stuff) away from the easy to refine light sweet. This tends to show up in newspaper reporting etc as a "refinery bottleneck" when in fact it's to do with the changing composition of the original supply as we exhaust the easy to obtain oil. The other problem is very rapidly increasing demand from Asia, and the Asian countries are routinely now locking in supplies from new fields like Yadavaran, effectively taking that oil off the world spot markets. Combine that with increasing internal demand in places like Saudi Arabia and you have a recipe for more demand and less supply - therefore higher prices. Which is what we're seeing.
Actually, big difference. At home I can choose not to be connected to the internet. I can choose to use open source software and be reasonably sure that there are no persons looking over my shoulder while I type, so to speak. I can store seriously sensitive information encrypted.
That business model doesn't change anything at all, it simply replaces a distribution form with no DRM (CDs) with one that has some DRM (iTMS purchases). So they're hardly "giving the fucking sound away".
Should a farmer be compensated for each ear of corn that gets duplicated by the machine? But why should anyone have to pay for food when there's an unlimited amount of it
Arguably not, and I guess you would get far fewer farmers in future. But in practice, people wouldn't want to duplicate ears of corn. They'd want to duplicate edible food - entire meals. Now, who creates the meal? Who creates the perfect dining experience for the duplicator to copy? That's something unique, and their time is valuable because not everybody is a wonderful chef.
So in fact we'd have exactly the same issues, except the problem would be one of how to reward chefs instead of artists. Who creates new exciting kinds of food when there's no way to get paid? Sure, people could do it in their spare time, but then what are they going to do for their main job when everything can be copied for free?
Is money even necessary in a situation like this?
I would say yes, but it wouldn't bear much resemblence to todays money. Right now our money is designed to allocate goods in a market that balances supply and demand. In a world where there is infinite supply of everything, that market collapses and we need some alternative method to reward people, eliminate the bad products and spread the good ones. Nobody really knows what such a system might look like, which is why we use copyright to hack content onto todays existing markets. Maybe one day someone will figure this problem out (google "post scarcity economics"). Until then, we'll have to make do with what we've got, which is a market that depends on artificial restriction of supply (so a price can be set).
I think the solution is to eliminate the little green pieces of paper and just say to the artist, "Give this person an apple. They deserve it!"
Nice idea, but the gift economy is one of the most rudimentary forms there is and doesn't scale at all. That's why market economies were developed. I think we're going to need something a little more robust than relying entirely on peoples charity. Maybe if we had some kind of iron-clad honor code it could work, but we don't, that's what the original article is about pretty much.
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They do know that language, and every employee in the company has a duty to do product support - even the Wine maintainer himself. So, if you are technically conversant you can usually get talking to the person who wrote the misbehaving code in question and there is also an IRC channel, #crossover on FreeNode, where you can go talk to the developers, CEO, support guys etc.
Those are the most commonly used apps because Crossover currently is used by Linux users. IE6 is pretty valuable incidentally - depressingly, it's one of the most commonly required apps for desktop Linux migrations in business. There's an entire industry of web app developers out there who wouldn't know browser portability if it walked up and told them its name.
The real value of Crossover is the fact that it can, in fact, run many other apps just fine. The ones you listed are the supported ones, ie the ones they promise will work. There's a big database called C4 which shows you which other apps have been tested .... some won't work, others will. If there is an app you want to run you can check to find out if it works, and often it will quite well but don't try guessing, it's a bit hit and miss.
As time goes on, the idea is that more and more apps start working. In practice, this happens quite slowly because a lot of effort in recent years has gone into eliminating reliance on downloaded Microsoft components like MSI, which are still provided for Windows 98 users but will one day disappear. Still, a massive amount of code and improvements goes into every Crossover release - much of it written by CW employees but also a lot comes from the WineHQ community. There has definitely been a lot of progress in the last few years.
Crossover runs games as well.
I suppose it's redundant to point out that Apple do not make consistent interfaces. Whether they are "superior" or not depends largely on your taste, I personally can't stand iTunes.
Believe it or not, for people who don't take operating systems religiously things like features, performance etc usually win out over interface consistency. There are plenty of happy users of Picasa, which doesn't look native on any platform even Windows. Besides, ironically the only OS today that actually has a consistent UI is Linux, if you stick to GNOMEish/GTK+ apps. Out of the box Ubuntu - for instance - is basically consistent. Out of the box, both Windows and MacOS X ship with a bunch of apps that look different to the norm.
The same argument holds true for VMware and Crossover on Linux. Really, when Crossover works properly the experience is light years ahead of running Windows inside a VM. What kind of business would deploy Macs (or Linux) and then have their employees run Windows in a VM all day? Only a stupid one .... it would just beg the question of why not run Windows anyway, seeing as how you need the license?
My understanding is that the groups in question were little more subtle than "Hey guys, let's get together at 5pm tonight and go kill some gays" or worse still "Hey, that sucker we killed at 5pm is one less gay in the world!".
The Brazilian police were, not surprisingly, rather pissed off that criminals could communicate in anonymity like this, which was having a very real impact on the Brazilian communities those gangs operated in. If Google did not hand over the data about these specific groups, that would have been Evil, because it would have been a brainless knee-jerk anti-government reaction .... very American but not very well thought out.
One thing to remember is that in some parts of the world, notably Europe and some of the nicer parts of Latin America, there isn't a distrust-by-default attitude to government and the police. The culture isn't one where privacy overrules every other consideration. Though that may be slowly changing.
Haha, how bizarre. I have two very healthy grandmas and love them to bits (not in that way), actually
I have used Macs many times, thanks. Doesn't change my opinions of them - they are overrated and boring. 70s technology, 70s ideas ... a grandma with lipstick.
You realise that this nag-screen exists because there are lots of people in the world who [a] never switch off their computer and [b] completely ignore any and all online updates that are downloaded, right? If you think Microsoft does this simply because it's Evil then you clearly never did much tech support ... unless nagged to reboot these people will simply never have updates to core system services (kernel, display server etc) applied. One girl I knew was still dismissing the "please let me install service pack 2" balloon half a year after it had been downloaded!
Like others have said - it's all about market share ;)
Yawn. Same arguments have been done to death on Linux for years, despite clear evidence to the contrary (see Second Life).
A few apps won't be ported because you can run them via Crossover Mac, but those apps wouldn't have been ported anyway. Life goes on. As a society we collectively have better things to do than port from one shitty C based API (Win32) to another shitty C based API (Carbon), simply to get glowing buttons. Sorry, but for the vast majority of specialist/single-use software in the world, dat be the truth.
That isn't quite right, even public companies can not grow at all and they will definitely survive. You're getting mixed up; our current economic system requires that the money supply constantly grows, which is very different to saying companies must continually grow. The constant growth of the money supply implies that the economy itself must also constantly grow, however that can be achieved without companies themselves constantly growing (eg by new companies being created or an increase in monetary velocity).
It's also not quite right that the economy doesn't survive if the money supply stops growing. Rather what happens is that the system enters a negative feedback loop and we get into recession ... perhaps even into a great depression though thanks to buffers provided by things like social security this is less likely in modern times. So the system itself survives but it starts to collapse.
So do you work for a bank or in telecoms?
I think you mean authors, artists, journalists, researchers, software developers etc ... I guess you could consider Joe Blow novelist a "baron" but it's a bit of a stretch.
A common dream amongst people who don't produce information for a living.
I think this would be a pointless and confusing solution, at least for the scenario I was talking about. The whole point of making Program Files read-only for the average home PC user is so viruses and other things can't get in and silently modify them. If you allow modifications it doesn't matter that it's unioned with a RO filesystem - the net result is the same - which is that anything can go in and modify the program files. Who really cares if it's restricted to that user, if there is only one user on the system anyway?
What I meant was that if you have a piece of software you need, and it requires Windows+Admin privs, then Apple don't have a solution for you. The closest they can get is "Well, this piece of Mac software might be a replacement, mostly, hopefully" and a lot of the time for the more specialist stuff there won't be any Mac equivalent at all.
It was poorly phrased, I apologise. Essentially it bugs me when people blame Microsoft (or anybody, really) for the faults of legacy software. Apple can't magically fix all the stuff out there that was written in the time before DAC security became common. In fact they basically abandoned their own collection of pre-security era software, and got away with it because by that point nobody was using Macs anyway. Instead they choose to ignore the problem and hope it goes away - making them look better at the expense of poor old Microsoft who are sort of expected to keep that incredibly expensive electronics design package that wasn't updated since 2000 working.
Only if they also add +5 Prey
From your article:
I guess I'm struggling to see how yet another way to launch things is a revolution in security, given that it's a brand new (and therefore untested) codebase and already has reports of it "freaking out".
The default in Windows is now to have no open ports as well due to the Firewall, so for any up to date installation of Windows the primary ways crap gets in is via browser exploits and malware. I am not seeing anything that Apple does fundamentally different here - Safari has already had several serious security problems, some of them near identical re-runs of problems Microsoft had before (eg help exploits). Malware is just a massively hard problem that nobody is really attacking right now, except maybe Microsoft with Vista, and there's certainly nothing in MacOS that would make it hard to write malware. Indeed there is very simple example code showing how to dump secure form information from Safari and you know how much marketeers would love that.
A lot of the points made in TFA aren't valid either, they are apparently the result of an extreme lack of thought or knowledge:
The purpose of most of the DLLs in SYSTEM32 is documented, just look at the summary tab in Explorer, the problem is that with any complex operating system it's trivial to make up fake names that sound plausible. So it doesn't help as much as you might think. 3rd parties are "duty bound" to produce man pages? Please, how ridiculous. You could argue the same for Linux yet people routinely write new programs without man pages.
Windows requires users to use Administrator to install software? No, buggy software requires that. Historically a few Mac programs have had the same requirements ... iTunes springs to mind. Anyway, the Apple solution to buggy software requiring elevated privileges is "you can't run that software" - not very helpful if you need it.
"Microsoft made it easy for commercial applications to refuse a debugger's attempt to attach to a process or thread" ... no they didn't, there is no API to prevent yourself from being debugged. This is a total fantasy. Why should I believe this guy at all, when he is talking such nonsense? There are various tricks you can use to detect a debugger being attached but none of these are reliable and none have OS support. If you detect a debugger you cannot force it to detach, the best you can do is stop the program and put up a message box. I think he has seen these messages from copy protection software and assumed it's a flaw in Windows. Not so.
"Malicious code or data can be concealed in NTFS files' secondary streams. These are similar to HFS forks, but so few would think to look at these" ... a feature that OS X has as well.
"OS X's nearest equivalent to the Registry is Netinfo, but this requires authentication for modification. In later releases of OS X, it is fairly sparse" ... no it isn't, the "equivalent" is a mish-mash of Netinfo, XML plist files dotted around the filing system, UNIX style config files and proprietary datastores. I fail to see how this is an improvement.
I could go on, most of these points are either wrong or very biased. The article seems worthless as a serious security analysis. I suggest the author go research exactly what modern malware does and how it works.
I'm not sure what the Brazilian police are wanting here. IP addresses? Botnets are so widespread now that anybody can claim they know nothing about this, that their PC was hijacked and turned into an anonymous proxy for criminals. And how to disprove it? Bots are designed to not be found, so it's rather difficult to prove they're lying by not finding one.
That's a little unfair. In fact I have read the source code to each and I wouldn't say one is far clearer than the other. Maybe that used to be the case but they've cleaned Gecko up a lot in the past few years. It's true that the Mozilla dialect of C++ is a little more obtuse than the Qt dialect, however, Mozilla is a hell of a lot more portable than KHTML is not only between operating systems but also between compilers, and that makes a big difference. Gecko also has a lot of features that KHTML does not have - for instance the combination of the fact that its objects are easily exposed to JavaScript and XUL is what makes the Firefox extensions culture so vibrant. Where are the extensions to Konqueror? There might be a few, I guess, but nothing like what you have with Firefox. It's hard to see how they could have made extensions so powerful without the platform parts like XPCOM which make the C++ harder to read.
Meaningless assertion, not backed up by fact. I claim the opposite. Gecko is fast, very standards compliant and trivial to extend using reasonably well documented APIs and technologies. For instance look at XTF. It has support for a lot of new things like SVG, MathML, designMode and so on. KHTML might support these things, depending if you use the Apple fork ... or it might not.
No, I rather think it won't. The portability of Geckos architecture already allowed it to make massive gains on Windows, the only platform that matters statistically. Where was KHTML in all of this? Now don't get me wrong, it's not a bad rendering engine at all, but to claim a Windows port of KHTML will make Gecko obsolete is rather naive. Maybe KDE 4 will rock my world but right now it's mostly a set of marketing web pages and fancy codenames for various abstractions over already quite abstract technologies (HAL, gstreamer etc).
Which fields did it manage 20% increase in recoverable oil from? The studies I've seen are somewhat equivocal, some even suggest overuse can reduce the amount of recoverable oil in a field by damaging it.
Alright, I'll give you that, but it's just playing with semantics. If it is uneconomic to work a field, then that may as well be called a 'shortage'. You are right to consider the price of oil to be the most important thing and that this can rise even as we open new, previously uneconomic fields.
The main problem with the idea that technology increases the amount of oil we can recover is that it doesn't seem to be true. Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) technology, the main innovation in the past 30 years, allows you to increase the rate of extraction but not the amount. So what happens is that instead of a smooth production decline, it slackens off very rapidly. Technologies that actually increase the amount extractable from a field, or make previously uneconomic fields economic, seem quite rare. It's usually rising oil prices that will do that.
No, the long term outlook is big shortfalls, it's called "peak oil" and the only debate amongst credible scientists is when it occurs, not if. I'll give you a hint, the most optimistic estimates are for around 2035, with most realistic estimates coming in at about 2010. Unless you consider 20 years to be long term (I wouldn't) then it's not right to say the long term outlook is of a surplus.
That's correct, but then, it's always been correct. The worst we've ever had is a plateau of production, but that's actually all we need to create price rises because demand constantly accelerates. In fact oil production can still rise year on year yet there can still be shortages, if demand rises faster.
Increasing capacity? Where did you get that idea from? The tar sands and oil shales are largely uneconomic to extract - the costs being bandied about by Shell are simply wild guesses that have a history of being totally wrong. So that seems to largely rule Canada out, unless they develop some radical new techniques. Gulf of Mexico was largely wiped out by Katrina so you'd expect increasing capacity there, but it's simply catching up to what it once was. Meanwhile Mexican production itself is slacking off as Cantarell continues its downwards slide.
Well, I disagree. I say maybe $10 per barrel of the current cost is speculation. The rest is supply/demand in action. OPEC know full well what is going on, but they are known for lying out of their backsides about anything to do with hard statistics - they still claim they have has much oil in the ground as they did in the 70s. 30 years of constant production and their claimed reserves have never even moved! Internal Kuwaiti reports indicate that the true figures are far, far worse than the published figures.
The main problem is that the world crude supply is starting to shift towards heavy sour (the undesirable, hard to refine stuff) away from the easy to refine light sweet. This tends to show up in newspaper reporting etc as a "refinery bottleneck" when in fact it's to do with the changing composition of the original supply as we exhaust the easy to obtain oil. The other problem is very rapidly increasing demand from Asia, and the Asian countries are routinely now locking in supplies from new fields like Yadavaran, effectively taking that oil off the world spot markets. Combine that with increasing internal demand in places like Saudi Arabia and you have a recipe for more demand and less supply - therefore higher prices. Which is what we're seeing.
But most people don't ...
That business model doesn't change anything at all, it simply replaces a distribution form with no DRM (CDs) with one that has some DRM (iTMS purchases). So they're hardly "giving the fucking sound away".
Arguably not, and I guess you would get far fewer farmers in future. But in practice, people wouldn't want to duplicate ears of corn. They'd want to duplicate edible food - entire meals. Now, who creates the meal? Who creates the perfect dining experience for the duplicator to copy? That's something unique, and their time is valuable because not everybody is a wonderful chef.
So in fact we'd have exactly the same issues, except the problem would be one of how to reward chefs instead of artists. Who creates new exciting kinds of food when there's no way to get paid? Sure, people could do it in their spare time, but then what are they going to do for their main job when everything can be copied for free?
I would say yes, but it wouldn't bear much resemblence to todays money. Right now our money is designed to allocate goods in a market that balances supply and demand. In a world where there is infinite supply of everything, that market collapses and we need some alternative method to reward people, eliminate the bad products and spread the good ones. Nobody really knows what such a system might look like, which is why we use copyright to hack content onto todays existing markets. Maybe one day someone will figure this problem out (google "post scarcity economics"). Until then, we'll have to make do with what we've got, which is a market that depends on artificial restriction of supply (so a price can be set).
Nice idea, but the gift economy is one of the most rudimentary forms there is and doesn't scale at all. That's why market economies were developed. I think we're going to need something a little more robust than relying entirely on peoples charity. Maybe if we had some kind of iron-clad honor code it could work, but we don't, that's what the original article is about pretty much.