I dont know what planet you live on but well designed? Access was a very good example since its so incompatible its not even compatible with itself. I have supported some Access databases and its pure vodoo, sacrifice a chicken and hope for teh best style code.
The reason people use Microsoft is because everybody else does it. If they had a real choice Microsoft would be long down the list of preferred companies. There have been numerous competitors with viable products who wore stomped to peices by Microsoft, not by real competition but shoddy business practices. Its funny how people tend to forget that.
The fact that Microsoft has succeded in killing the competition is not a proof of the merits of alternatives. Its more a proof of how much of a leg up Microsoft has with its installed base.
The catch is that they hadnt gone F/OSS at all. Only the branch office servers was linux. If you switched your firewalls at your branch offices to Borderware and added samba have you then gone "BorderWare" even if all else is not Borderware?
I concede it was a smart move but it should be duly noted that the press has gotten it awfully wrong as have many people here.
Apparantly the network was linuxservers at branch offices with MS Windows Desktops running StarOffice. To top it off expensive Sun servers running Staroffice stuff was in the mix. This was not what i would call a Linux migration in the first place! It was more of a Sun -> Microsoft migration.
Even more astonoshing is the fact that Microsoft apparantly promised to help develop an application that according to the Scottish would cost £100.00!
They only paid £60.000 for the licenses so i would say they got a VERY sweat deal on this. Can you get any cheaper than to get paid to use a product?
Is it me or is IE 7 upside down mirrored? What a horrid interface.
I get the feeling that the placing of the tabs is more about not following suit with Opera/Firefox and all the addons for IE wich implements tabs. IE7 will be an empty marketing ploy as usual. They should toss that ugly baby out the bathwater and follow apples lead as the usually do.
I have heard that reasoning before, the problem is they often never did a security review on IE. Its just what they say when they really cant justify using IE. If they had it would have been tossed bits first out the window. If worse, they did a review and let that pile of swiss cheese go unmarked they should really be subject for a truckload of atomic wedgies. Next time, ask for the report they "did" on it;D
I dont believe in keeping an exploit away from the public until the vendor gets his thumbs out of the dark place that smells funny. First of all i really think much more work needs to be put down into securing the systems before they are released, this includes various linux vendors. Its insane today with the user being the Q&A and security department for the vendors.
Full disclosure is a nice cushion for people who really didnt do their job in the first place. It doesnt in no way help the users. Before the exploit is released publicly you can bet your backside its used for company spying and other shoddy activities.
A company shouldnt be afraid of scriptkiddies, theyre harmless compared to their competitors armed with their most secret info. Full disclosure makes it possible for a company to atlest try to mitigate that threat. Other disclosure puts them in the whims of the vendors.
I always thought the problem was the crappy plasma tech. TFT should adress this problem but its probably not cheap enough thus the ugly hack they try to pull. I watch both movies and tv on my 17" LCD (TFT) and i cant say i have ever even noticed any ghosts in the picture. On cheap laptops with plasma screens on the other hand its all a crappy blur.
You obviously doesn't know about this, the foul language has been exchanged for marketing support. That is, any OEM not toeing the line loose significant rebates in the form of marketing support. Its the same old in a different form. Microsoft just side stepped the DOJ and with current administration nobody cares.
"Some things never change. The Slashdot crowd is still playing the blame game, working on the assumption that if Windows didn't have a large monopoly, Linux usage would be more widespread."
If Microsoft didnt have a monopoly Linux would compete against a slew of other OS out there. It would have an easier time compeeting since it would probably mean that applications was made more platform agnostic.
"Still ignoring the fact that the vast majority of people just don't want to use Linux even if given a choice, because it still has serious usability issues that show no signs of being solved."
Most people dont even know linux exist or what it is. Most people arent given any choice whatsoever to choose their OS, thats done for by the OEM. I cant really understand what kind of usability issues youre talking about. You can do exactly every possible task in graphical mode. Just choose a simple distro instead of LFS or Gentoo and youre done.
"Mostly because even though it is "one OS" it still suffers from the fragmentation that killed UNIX as a viable platform. Instead of kernel/system call fragmentation, it is fragmentation of desktops (KDE, Gnome, etc) and services (different print systems, different X servers, different window managers, each with slightly incompatible ways to cut & paste, etc)."
Thats not fragmentation, its choice. Some poeple like being spoonfed, most dont. There are distros that adress theese issues but until they are delivered with new systems by OEM's they wont take such a big hold. Again, the people who would love those dists arent the ones who install their own OS and like to tinker around.
Cut and paste works like a charm and i havent had any problems in years. Please give an example of what you have a problem doing and ill tell you what you do wrong.
"Not to mention how much easier it is for developers to develop for Windows due to the fact that you don't have to worry about a billion different differences between distros, libc versions, kernel branches, etc."
Like how you have to worry about a million security patches that breaks your application? Compile your application statically for linux and be done with it or compile it a couple of times for the biggest distros. Most of the small ones is based on bigger dists and as such they can use whatever app thats compiled for their "parent" dist.
"But go ahead and keep blaming Microsoft's business practices... why stop now? It is easier than trying to actually compete for users."
You really think the market is doing well and we should just shut up when the sole competition to Microsoft is a free OS? I think thats a pretty big sign of just how screwed up the market really is. There should be atleast a couple of actors more on the OS market if it wore healthy.
By the contracts signed by Dell, HP and other OEM's that they pay much more than their competitors if they ship Linux. Also they cant install Linux in a dualboot config, see the fall of BeOS for reference. Its a big difference to have your OS installed by an expert than doing it yourself. Most people never install Windows, they ask me and my likes. The desktop analogy is their biggest enemy, not the placing of the icons on the desktop.
What in Windows is intuitive? The way you can do the same thing in 30 ways? The way they just throws the dices and rearrange the menus with every version? The way the logs just says "application error in memory exception 22F8800GC"? It's as transparent as a brick, something fails and your stuck reinstalling either the application, a newer version or the OS, never ever with more knowledge about wtf really happened.
Microsoft has mainained their price at a high level while the rest of the market has substantially lowered their prices. You explain how yourself.
By adding a browser, a media player and such they have been able to aviod lowering prices wich is the normal thing to happen once you have saturated the market with your products. If they hadn't included those things Windows would cost less, much less than today. The thing is, what happens they have incorporated every possible application thats not a niche one? Is that good, with one player controlling the entire market and everything around it?
Think for a moment about all those little uppstarts with fresh angles about howto make an OS? Do you really seriously think for a second that Windows Longhorn is a state of the art OS?
Damnit there are ideas out there waiting to be implemented that makes our crappy computers look like old T-Fords. The reason they dont get implemented is that no sane company is that stupid. Competing with microsofts monopoly is certain death. As evident in the DOJ trial there isnt anything they wouldnt do to kill a competitor except build a better product themselves. To compute how much is lost by all those uppstarts who was quashed by MS is impossible,
Imagine if the OS market had evolved like the hardware market. Take a look at some of the experimental OS around to get a taste of whats really possible with a modern OS under the hood.
Apple is not per definition a monopoly in its market, ie they dont own a big chunk of either the OS nor the hardware market. In both they are a tiny piece of the market, unless you define the market for "a machine with Mac OS built by Apple" as an isolated market?
Yes, but this perhaps makes crypting the HD and such very very worthless? In theory a hacker just boots the darn thing, plug in the USB stick up and has access to the encrypted HD.
I have NEVER seen that even if i use the emoticon XP very often when i chat. Pretty often when describing a problem i have with Windows in my work as an admin.:D
Microsofts constant nagging on Linux is good free advertising. The more they nag the more people realize it's good enough to be a competitor to Microsoft. Even the sponsored SCO case is good for linux because it gives Linux a clean bill of health, something Microsoft sure doesn't have.
"They claim to be wanting to learn more about Open Source when they try and justify hiring guys who are just getting by financially but are huge braintrusts of the Linux movement."
The problem for Microsoft is that in doing so they would create a whole new market. Im not that worried. Code good things for OSS and get a six figure salary! Can you think of a better way of getting more people onboard?
If im not totally mistaken Daniel had a pretty big debt he had to pay. I fully understand he took the offer from Microsoft in that situation. It was sad that he wasnt hired away by some OSS friendly company but he wasnt exactly linux personified.
Hopefully he will return someday with new insights and knowledge of the enemy.
Wouldnt that be funny, if he's just a spy sent out by some OSS friendly company?
The backside with theese kinds of weapons is that they will be used with much less restriction than other weapons. If it doesnt kill its an effective weapon against large groups of people demonstrating. Police will just cite public safety and beam away.
This is an opressors weapon since it targets large groups of ordinary people. Terrorists mostly dont travel in groups of thousands do they?
The irony is that people who demonstrate and is cut off of showing their beliefs will get pretty pissed by something like this. The chance are a new terrorist is created.
Heck, England would never had been bombed if it wasnt for them supporting the US in the illegal invasion of Iraq. Imagine what this weapon can do for making life easier for Al Queda talent scoutes?
Swedish banks use amongst others a system with both pin code and onetime codes. The onetime codes are delivered by either a kind of scratch card or an electronic code generator. Theese kinds of security mesures atleast makes it impossible to sniff your codes since one of the login credentials is always changing. Without your scratch card or code generator a hacker cant gain access to your account even if they have your pin code.
The bank identifying its really them is something we dont have in Sweden. It really sounds like a good idea to implement for all traders on the internet. A common framework should be built around this in my opinion.
One of the bigger gripes i have with DRM is that it lets the seller decide what you can do with your own product. Often the seller is mostly interested in money. When the customer becomes the sellers biggest enemy you know something is wrong.
DRM is a tool to create a physical market out of a purely abstract one. DRM lets the companies make media you bought be impossible (in theory) to copy and only be at one place at a time. It can place all kinds of fictional physical boundaries up.
I think using DRM is living in denial. People have X money to spend and the battle isn't between the media companies and the pirates, its between the clothes companies, the mobile operators, insurance, utilities and so on. Even the most succelsful DRM in the world isnt going to put more money in the pockets of the media companies, people just dont have them or rather put htem on something else. Their valuation of the product is way below the industrys.
Thats why DRM is such a drag. It wont solve anything. All it does is making media technology a big PITA.
I feel like the ones complaining the most is thoose who just want a free Windows. GNU/Linux aint MS Windows, period. If you want Windows then by all means stick with what MS is offering. I hate how Windows behaives and i really LIKE how linux works.
I dont feel that world domination is the key goal with GNU/Linux. The risk is that in the strife for userbase Linux looses its soul and just becomes another MS Windows. The key to a bigger userbase is the OEM's like Dell and alike, not Joe User who dont ever install and OS, Windows or whatever it may be.
One point is good in TFA, the one about stable API's. It is coming up to the point where the API's should be a bit more stable.
Does statically compiled binaries solve this issue? If so its just a case of packaging in a neat way.
While the Chineese, the Russians and the Arianne is launching rockets like it was the 4th of July the Shuttle is firmly stationed at the ground. How come the US abandoned the rockets for the Shuttle? The cost/launches factor of the Shuttle must be awful compared to the Russian and the Chineese rockets.
I dont know much about space vehicles but it sure looks like NASA dont either.
I use Ubuntu on my machine at home and at work on my laptop. On both machines Ubuntu was a total success. I like the fact that Ubuntu seems to focus more on the desktop than on the server side of things. A server has totally different needs than a desktop and shouldnt be mixed up in my opinion. The hardware reporting tool is really nice. All in all Ubuntu is a very nice distro to use on the desktop.
Disclaimer, i havent used either Linspire nor Xandros but i guess i should try those out too.
The GPL makes the code avaliable wich is an enormous difference for the developer who wants to make his product continue to be compatible. With the BSD license the vendor can hide his changes and not tell anyone about them. With the GPL you have the source at hand and you can see what it does. I think the difference is huge.
GPL is a bridge that lets competing companies work on the same code without worrying that the other part will just screw it up making it incompatible with everybody elses. It levels the playing field in a way the BSD license doesnt. BSD is fine in theory but human/corporate nature just rape, pillage and move on.
The BSD people doesnt seem to understand that the biggest reason people use GPL is that they dont want to watch while someone takes their code, alter it and then charges them a bucket of money for their own code. If *BSD would switch to GPL they would take of like a rocket.
Slashdot Mirror
I dont know what planet you live on but well designed? Access was a very good example since its so incompatible its not even compatible with itself. I have supported some Access databases and its pure vodoo, sacrifice a chicken and hope for teh best style code.
The reason people use Microsoft is because everybody else does it. If they had a real choice Microsoft would be long down the list of preferred companies. There have been numerous competitors with viable products who wore stomped to peices by Microsoft, not by real competition but shoddy business practices. Its funny how people tend to forget that.
The fact that Microsoft has succeded in killing the competition is not a proof of the merits of alternatives. Its more a proof of how much of a leg up Microsoft has with its installed base.
The catch is that they hadnt gone F/OSS at all. Only the branch office servers was linux. If you switched your firewalls at your branch offices to Borderware and added samba have you then gone "BorderWare" even if all else is not Borderware?
I concede it was a smart move but it should be duly noted that the press has gotten it awfully wrong as have many people here.
Apparantly the network was linuxservers at branch offices with MS Windows Desktops running StarOffice. To top it off expensive Sun servers running Staroffice stuff was in the mix. This was not what i would call a Linux migration in the first place! It was more of a Sun -> Microsoft migration.
i shpolice_1.html
Even more astonoshing is the fact that Microsoft apparantly promised to help develop an application that according to the Scottish would cost £100.00!
They only paid £60.000 for the licenses so i would say they got a VERY sweat deal on this. Can you get any cheaper than to get paid to use a product?
Read this article for some facts:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/08/11/HNscott
Is it me or is IE 7 upside down mirrored? What a horrid interface.
I get the feeling that the placing of the tabs is more about not following suit with Opera/Firefox and all the addons for IE wich implements tabs. IE7 will be an empty marketing ploy as usual. They should toss that ugly baby out the bathwater and follow apples lead as the usually do.
I have heard that reasoning before, the problem is they often never did a security review on IE. Its just what they say when they really cant justify using IE. If they had it would have been tossed bits first out the window. If worse, they did a review and let that pile of swiss cheese go unmarked they should really be subject for a truckload of atomic wedgies. Next time, ask for the report they "did" on it ;D
I know i know, the dog ate it!
I dont believe in keeping an exploit away from the public until the vendor gets his thumbs out of the dark place that smells funny. First of all i really think much more work needs to be put down into securing the systems before they are released, this includes various linux vendors. Its insane today with the user being the Q&A and security department for the vendors.
Full disclosure is a nice cushion for people who really didnt do their job in the first place. It doesnt in no way help the users. Before the exploit is released publicly you can bet your backside its used for company spying and other shoddy activities.
A company shouldnt be afraid of scriptkiddies, theyre harmless compared to their competitors armed with their most secret info. Full disclosure makes it possible for a company to atlest try to mitigate that threat. Other disclosure puts them in the whims of the vendors.
I always thought the problem was the crappy plasma tech. TFT should adress this problem but its probably not cheap enough thus the ugly hack they try to pull. I watch both movies and tv on my 17" LCD (TFT) and i cant say i have ever even noticed any ghosts in the picture. On cheap laptops with plasma screens on the other hand its all a crappy blur.
You obviously doesn't know about this, the foul language has been exchanged for marketing support. That is, any OEM not toeing the line loose significant rebates in the form of marketing support. Its the same old in a different form. Microsoft just side stepped the DOJ and with current administration nobody cares.
"Some things never change. The Slashdot crowd is still playing the blame game, working on the assumption that if Windows didn't have a large monopoly, Linux usage would be more widespread."
If Microsoft didnt have a monopoly Linux would compete against a slew of other OS out there. It would have an easier time compeeting since it would probably mean that applications was made more platform agnostic.
"Still ignoring the fact that the vast majority of people just don't want to use Linux even if given a choice, because it still has serious usability issues that show no signs of being solved."
Most people dont even know linux exist or what it is. Most people arent given any choice whatsoever to choose their OS, thats done for by the OEM. I cant really understand what kind of usability issues youre talking about. You can do exactly every possible task in graphical mode. Just choose a simple distro instead of LFS or Gentoo and youre done.
"Mostly because even though it is "one OS" it still suffers from the fragmentation that killed UNIX as a viable platform. Instead of kernel/system call fragmentation, it is fragmentation of desktops (KDE, Gnome, etc) and services (different print systems, different X servers, different window managers, each with slightly incompatible ways to cut & paste, etc)."
Thats not fragmentation, its choice. Some poeple like being spoonfed, most dont. There are distros that adress theese issues but until they are delivered with new systems by OEM's they wont take such a big hold. Again, the people who would love those dists arent the ones who install their own OS and like to tinker around.
Cut and paste works like a charm and i havent had any problems in years. Please give an example of what you have a problem doing and ill tell you what you do wrong.
"Not to mention how much easier it is for developers to develop for Windows due to the fact that you don't have to worry about a billion different differences between distros, libc versions, kernel branches, etc."
Like how you have to worry about a million security patches that breaks your application? Compile your application statically for linux and be done with it or compile it a couple of times for the biggest distros. Most of the small ones is based on bigger dists and as such they can use whatever app thats compiled for their "parent" dist.
"But go ahead and keep blaming Microsoft's business practices... why stop now? It is easier than trying to actually compete for users."
You really think the market is doing well and we should just shut up when the sole competition to Microsoft is a free OS? I think thats a pretty big sign of just how screwed up the market really is. There should be atleast a couple of actors more on the OS market if it wore healthy.
By the contracts signed by Dell, HP and other OEM's that they pay much more than their competitors if they ship Linux. Also they cant install Linux in a dualboot config, see the fall of BeOS for reference. Its a big difference to have your OS installed by an expert than doing it yourself. Most people never install Windows, they ask me and my likes. The desktop analogy is their biggest enemy, not the placing of the icons on the desktop.
What in Windows is intuitive? The way you can do the same thing in 30 ways? The way they just throws the dices and rearrange the menus with every version? The way the logs just says "application error in memory exception 22F8800GC"? It's as transparent as a brick, something fails and your stuck reinstalling either the application, a newer version or the OS, never ever with more knowledge about wtf really happened.
Microsoft has mainained their price at a high level while the rest of the market has substantially lowered their prices. You explain how yourself.
By adding a browser, a media player and such they have been able to aviod lowering prices wich is the normal thing to happen once you have saturated the market with your products. If they hadn't included those things Windows would cost less, much less than today. The thing is, what happens they have incorporated every possible application thats not a niche one? Is that good, with one player controlling the entire market and everything around it?
Think for a moment about all those little uppstarts with fresh angles about howto make an OS? Do you really seriously think for a second that Windows Longhorn is a state of the art OS?
Damnit there are ideas out there waiting to be implemented that makes our crappy computers look like old T-Fords. The reason they dont get implemented is that no sane company is that stupid. Competing with microsofts monopoly is certain death. As evident in the DOJ trial there isnt anything they wouldnt do to kill a competitor except build a better product themselves. To compute how much is lost by all those uppstarts who was quashed by MS is impossible,
Imagine if the OS market had evolved like the hardware market. Take a look at some of the experimental OS around to get a taste of whats really possible with a modern OS under the hood.
Apple is not per definition a monopoly in its market, ie they dont own a big chunk of either the OS nor the hardware market. In both they are a tiny piece of the market, unless you define the market for "a machine with Mac OS built by Apple" as an isolated market?
Nobody's that stupid.
Yes, but this perhaps makes crypting the HD and such very very worthless? In theory a hacker just boots the darn thing, plug in the USB stick up and has access to the encrypted HD.
*laughing my ass off*
:D
I have NEVER seen that even if i use the emoticon XP very often when i chat. Pretty often when describing a problem i have with Windows in my work as an admin.
Microsofts constant nagging on Linux is good free advertising. The more they nag the more people realize it's good enough to be a competitor to Microsoft. Even the sponsored SCO case is good for linux because it gives Linux a clean bill of health, something Microsoft sure doesn't have.
= 2005010107100653
http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page
"They claim to be wanting to learn more about Open Source when they try and justify hiring guys who are just getting by financially but are huge braintrusts of the Linux movement."
The problem for Microsoft is that in doing so they would create a whole new market. Im not that worried. Code good things for OSS and get a six figure salary! Can you think of a better way of getting more people onboard?
If im not totally mistaken Daniel had a pretty big debt he had to pay. I fully understand he took the offer from Microsoft in that situation. It was sad that he wasnt hired away by some OSS friendly company but he wasnt exactly linux personified.
Hopefully he will return someday with new insights and knowledge of the enemy.
Wouldnt that be funny, if he's just a spy sent out by some OSS friendly company?
XD
The backside with theese kinds of weapons is that they will be used with much less restriction than other weapons. If it doesnt kill its an effective weapon against large groups of people demonstrating. Police will just cite public safety and beam away.
This is an opressors weapon since it targets large groups of ordinary people. Terrorists mostly dont travel in groups of thousands do they?
The irony is that people who demonstrate and is cut off of showing their beliefs will get pretty pissed by something like this. The chance are a new terrorist is created.
Heck, England would never had been bombed if it wasnt for them supporting the US in the illegal invasion of Iraq. Imagine what this weapon can do for making life easier for Al Queda talent scoutes?
XD
Swedish banks use amongst others a system with both pin code and onetime codes. The onetime codes are delivered by either a kind of scratch card or an electronic code generator. Theese kinds of security mesures atleast makes it impossible to sniff your codes since one of the login credentials is always changing. Without your scratch card or code generator a hacker cant gain access to your account even if they have your pin code.
The bank identifying its really them is something we dont have in Sweden. It really sounds like a good idea to implement for all traders on the internet. A common framework should be built around this in my opinion.
One of the bigger gripes i have with DRM is that it lets the seller decide what you can do with your own product. Often the seller is mostly interested in money. When the customer becomes the sellers biggest enemy you know something is wrong.
DRM is a tool to create a physical market out of a purely abstract one. DRM lets the companies make media you bought be impossible (in theory) to copy and only be at one place at a time. It can place all kinds of fictional physical boundaries up.
I think using DRM is living in denial. People have X money to spend and the battle isn't between the media companies and the pirates, its between the clothes companies, the mobile operators, insurance, utilities and so on. Even the most succelsful DRM in the world isnt going to put more money in the pockets of the media companies, people just dont have them or rather put htem on something else. Their valuation of the product is way below the industrys.
Thats why DRM is such a drag. It wont solve anything. All it does is making media technology a big PITA.
I feel like the ones complaining the most is thoose who just want a free Windows. GNU/Linux aint MS Windows, period. If you want Windows then by all means stick with what MS is offering. I hate how Windows behaives and i really LIKE how linux works.
I dont feel that world domination is the key goal with GNU/Linux. The risk is that in the strife for userbase Linux looses its soul and just becomes another MS Windows. The key to a bigger userbase is the OEM's like Dell and alike, not Joe User who dont ever install and OS, Windows or whatever it may be.
One point is good in TFA, the one about stable API's. It is coming up to the point where the API's should be a bit more stable.
Does statically compiled binaries solve this issue? If so its just a case of packaging in a neat way.
While the Chineese, the Russians and the Arianne is launching rockets like it was the 4th of July the Shuttle is firmly stationed at the ground. How come the US abandoned the rockets for the Shuttle? The cost/launches factor of the Shuttle must be awful compared to the Russian and the Chineese rockets.
I dont know much about space vehicles but it sure looks like NASA dont either.
I use Ubuntu on my machine at home and at work on my laptop. On both machines Ubuntu was a total success. I like the fact that Ubuntu seems to focus more on the desktop than on the server side of things. A server has totally different needs than a desktop and shouldnt be mixed up in my opinion. The hardware reporting tool is really nice. All in all Ubuntu is a very nice distro to use on the desktop.
Disclaimer, i havent used either Linspire nor Xandros but i guess i should try those out too.
The GPL makes the code avaliable wich is an enormous difference for the developer who wants to make his product continue to be compatible. With the BSD license the vendor can hide his changes and not tell anyone about them. With the GPL you have the source at hand and you can see what it does. I think the difference is huge.
GPL is a bridge that lets competing companies work on the same code without worrying that the other part will just screw it up making it incompatible with everybody elses. It levels the playing field in a way the BSD license doesnt. BSD is fine in theory but human/corporate nature just rape, pillage and move on.
The BSD people doesnt seem to understand that the biggest reason people use GPL is that they dont want to watch while someone takes their code, alter it and then charges them a bucket of money for their own code. If *BSD would switch to GPL they would take of like a rocket.