I won't argue that the price point for Vista onwards is probably a tad high, but 7 doesn't require the hardware upgrades that Vista did, and even Vista would run fine on pretty much anything made in the last 3 years.
If your PCs are substantially older than 5 years or so, then you've probably got bigger problems.
It's quite a bit better in actuality, as of Vista they stripped out an awful lot of the backward compatibility stuff, and 7 is better by far than Vista was.
That doesn't mean that idiot users and/or a targeted attack won't get past it, or that it's perfect, but it's a getting close to a reasonable approximation of a good balance between usability and security on a single user system.
If Google really believes that switching from Windows to Linux is going to protect them from a targeted attack funded by a super power(the Chinese government), they're drinking more than the kool-aid up there.
Unplugging the server from the network won't buy you protection from that sort of thing.
Just about the only thing which is likely to kill Microsoft is if they can't pry everyone off of XP which is an outdated, insecure pile of shit, which, for some reason, even people who know better seem to love. Even Vista for all its faults was better than XP, and Windows 7 is miles ahead of Vista. Things have changed quite a lot in the last 5 years, security wise and otherwise, but you're not going to see them if you don't leave an OS which is 9 years old.
In their defense, interpreting strings beginning with a zero as being in octal is fucking retarded, and that's the cause of that particular bug. It's even been deprecated in the spec.
Actually Microsoft provides an awful lot of drivers, very few of the drivers which come preloaded into Windows are third party, nearly all of them have been rewritten by Microsoft.
Which is still longer than most consumer grade static drives will give you, and when those fail you can't read from them.
Presuming you don't buy a drive which is far too small for your needs and you don't have particularly odd usage patterns(SSD's don't have particularly good performance on large sequential reads so sticking your movie collection on them is fairly worthless), the average SSD will likely outlast the average HDD.
Mainly because people don't want a desktop OS in a slate form factor.
This is actually patently incorrect. People do what their desktop in a slate form factor, they want all the power and all the applications they're used to running.
The caveat however is that they want all that with reasonable performance and they want their old apps to magically adapt their user interfaces so that they don't suck on a touch screen, and they want it at about a third of the price point most of these things hit.
The iPad, to the degree that it is successful for reasons other that "ooh shiny apple", is so because while it offers fairly limited functionality it does so meeting those three criteria. That doesn't mean that users don't want more than the iPad can offer them, it just hints that some of the functionality with those criteria is better than all of the functionality without it.
Microsoft is of course at a serious disadvantage here, simply because they're never going to be able to meet the user interface criteria for all the third party windows apps, and people will want all the apps which run on windows to run on the slate version thereof. Apple and Google on the other hand didn't have any software which runs on their Operating Systems(or any Operating Systems) prior to releasing their mobile offerings so they don't have that issue.
Someone putting their drunken photos up on Facebook for all their friends to see is not a privacy violation. It's opt in and no different than taking the photos and showing your friends. Yes, people have too many friends who aren't friends, and yes sharing that information is probably questionable, but sharing it is perfectly within the right of the individual and not a privacy violation. Facebook constantly changing their privacy policies and settings so that people get to see your drunken photos who couldn't see them when you put them up, that's a privacy violation. If we don't separate those issues then we'll never win the privacy battle because no one will understand how someone voluntarily sharing their information is a privacy issue.
Google is just another problem all together, and one I'm not sure there is a solution to. Google has always been the way google is, but because they offer really good products a lot of us seem to forget. Analytics and the search history was bad, street View should probably never have been allowed, cool as it is, and this whole wi-fi thing is just absolutely obscene. Just the fact that they were collecting anything let alone the fact that they collected extra. Might have to change my default search engine to Bing.
No, it means that they think they can make a buck on Novell.
Now that may mean they believe Novell has potential for long term growth, but it more likely means they believe that if they sell off all the bits Novell bought up over the last 5 years(and never really absorbed properly) they can make more money than they paid for it, or that the Unix copyrights are worth it.
You might see a competitor like IBM try to swallow them up, but that hasn't been what most of the bids are interested in. Novell's market share and profits are shrinking, SuSe just about breaks even, but eDirectory and Groupwise are being replace by AD and Exchange pretty much everywhere you look.
I work for a company using their products, and they're not exactly great, even their new middle-ware products, the ones they bought(and which most likely are going to get sold off piece meal are only moderately successful. The only thing which has kept Novell going all these years is how badly the open source market misunderstands the enterprise so badly.
When you go on Facebook and publish something for world and dog to see, you haven't given up any privacy, you've merely decided that something is not to you private. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with that, nor is that Facebook's fault. It may not be the best idea, but it's not actually a loss of privacy, any more than opening your windows is.
The issue with Facebook is actually that you don't have sufficient control over what information you share and with whom you share it. Some of that is the fact that Facebook's privacy controls aren't granular enough and the privacy UI is confusing. Some of it has to do with the fact that other people can post things about you that you don't like(though technically publishing a photo of someone where they are recognizable without their consent is illegal) so there ought to be some degree of protection there already.
The biggest problem though is that they keep changing the settings on you so that it's impossible to pick who you want to share what with whom. The reasons they do this are quite understandable, they are a giant advertising database and they want to make money off that, but it doesn't change the facts.
There's no inherent violation of privacy when you share your most intimate private details with the world on Facebook, or anywhere else, it might not be the brightest idea, and only time will tell whether any of those people get more out of doing it than they lose, but it's not a problem.
The problem is when things get shared without your consent, and outside of your control. That is a violation of privacy and is not in any way good, or for the best.
I don't think they really meant for it to turn out the way it did, and lord knows it works better in every other browser, but the XMLHttpRequest which is the backbone of AJAX was created by Microsoft for the web version of exchange. It was a grotty non standard ActiveX control back then, but it's standard now, and while there's a lot of hate on Slashdot for javascript and the new web, it's Microsoft who brought it to us(even if they didn't mean to).
Remember, we're not talking about filming the sunset and picking up some stray people, this is the equivalent of zooming your camera right in on someone, they set out to gain information about these people.
Don't believe me that there are rules about that shit, follow someone around with a camera, or go down to a park and start filming other peoples kids, and see how long before there's a couple of police officers telling you what laws you broke.
Seeing someone walk down the street, is not the same as following them and recording them, accidentally intercepting broadcasts is not the same as purposely recording them.
Sure people should encrypt their wireless, but Google shouldn't be doing any of this shit, sure street view is cool, but it's also seriously alarming and seriously unnecessary. As I said before, if someone found out the US government was doing this, they'd be calling for the entire government to be executed, but when google does it, it's apparently just fine.
There's a very big difference between connecting to an access point, and viewing what other people are sending over it, and there's an even bigger jump to recording that information.
You can perfectly legally watch me go down the street, but in most jurisdictions you better have a damned good reason if you're filming me. That doesn't mean you can't incidentally film me in the background of something, but that's not what is going on here.
Intercepting this information accidentally is a whole leap from sending someone around to record it.
Privacy in every country that has a legal definition of it(including the US) is generally about reasonable expectation. The fact that your broadcasting something(like the sounds you make on your keyboard when you type your password, or the sounds of the secret you told your partner, or the light absorbed vs bouncing off your body, doesn't mean that it's legal for people to look at it.
The key legal issue is usually about expectation. If I dance around naked in my front yard, I can reasonably expect that people who walk by will see me, whether they want to or not. It doesn't necessarily follow that it's legal for them to film me doing it. It could be arguable that I have an expectation that I won't be filmed by strangers on my own property.
The same thing is true of wifi. I might have a reasonable expectation that other people with wifi devices might accidentally pick up some of that data, but I might also have a reasonable expectation that they won't record it, or that people will go out of their way to look for it.
The thing which pisses me off the most about this whole issue is the fact that if the government sent people around to do this, all of slashdot would be up in arms about how the people responsible should be burned at the stake, but because it's google, it's just peachy.
You see, passing it on to consumers is exactly the point of cap and trade(and a carbon tax for that matter).
The general idea is that in the current system, dirty energy is too cheap because it's not the people selling or buying it who have to pay for cleaning it up. This distorts the market because the technology which is actually cheaper, appears to be more expensive. This means that goods or services produced in a way which emits pollution will always be cheaper than goods which are not. This means no market motivation to fix anything.
With a cost attributed to the producers of carbon, the price of carbon intensive goods goes up, ideally to a level which is higher than the non carbon intensive goods. This means that more carbon neutral goods become in comparison cheaper than the carbon intensive ones. Market forces then take care of the problem.
The market is a wonderful optimizing agent, it's just never been, nor ever will be free, so we have to try and set the constraints on it to get the results we want and let it work everything out for us.
Personally I rather agree with you with regards to targetted advertising. I think that generally speaking it probably doesn't have much better ROI than regular advertisement.
The issue is that advertisers, or at least the people wh pay them, think that it does. This means that targetted advertising, and more importantly, the data sets required to target it, are incredibly valuable. Even more importantly that data is why so many companies paid so much money for facebook.
There is a slight difference between an idea being new and the implementation being new.
Just because Star Trek has used it for years wouldn't make the invention of a real transporter any less patentable, knowing that a transporter would be cool isn't the same thing as knowing how to do it.
Facebook's value for its investors is that it's a gigantic comprehensive advertising database where the marks *cough* I mean customers input all the data on their own. People put information into Facebook that they'd never tell someone taking a survey and you don't even have to pay someone to ask them the questions. Achieving this goal is basically top on Facebook's list of long term priorities, just as it will be on any other free social networking site which doesn't want to operate at a massive loss.
The conflict is that the users of facebook didn't sign up for that. They want and quite rightfully expect a certain level of privacy for the content they post on the site. You might argue that telling everyone about your personal life is the antithesis of privacy, but privacy is about your ability to determine your own level of disclosure, not having some specific level of disclosure which the older generations find appropriate.
Essentially the end result of all of this is that every 6 months or so, facebook tries to turn all the information it has into cold hard cash and shortly thereafter their userbase throws a wobbly and they have to back out.
It's hard to remember that you generally have to actually do something useful to get an MBA since everyone seems to forget how to do anything at all once they have one.
To get into most MBA programs you have to have worked for at least 3 years after you got your undergrad degree, generally doing something that's not flipping burgers. Given the program is generally 2 years and these guys are graduating and that the average US college student graduates at the age of 22, that would put these guys at 27 or so. Not exactly your typical beer and video games before anything crowd.
I do believe the market is fairly powerful. I just think that the market is never going to be entirely free, so presuming that it is is rather idiotic.
The "free market" hasn't been defiled, it's just a fantasy.
The market is an optimizing algorithm, like any other. Over time it finds the optimal solution given a certain set of constraints. Generally speaking it's really quite good at this. Unfortunately at the moment our constraints seem to be "x => x makes rich people richer", but that's neither here nor there.
The big issue is that people a lot of people keep thinking that there is some sort of magical way in which this market can generate the best of all possible worlds even if we don't actually know how to define that best of all possible worlds or what constraints we need to set to generate it.
It's a bit like when you take physics and you learn all those formulas which define what an object would do in a vacuum. It's all well and good to know what a ball will do if you throw it in a vacuum, but you're never actually going to do that. There are always going to be all those complex factors like wind resistance and all the other things which turn the nice simple formula into 3 months worth of computation on a super computer.
The "free market" doesn't exist because fundamentally the market can never be 100% absolutely free. That doesn't mean the market can't be an incredibly useful tool for generating the best possible outcome, just that it's not going to do that by magic.
Slashdot Mirror
I won't argue that the price point for Vista onwards is probably a tad high, but 7 doesn't require the hardware upgrades that Vista did, and even Vista would run fine on pretty much anything made in the last 3 years.
If your PCs are substantially older than 5 years or so, then you've probably got bigger problems.
It's quite a bit better in actuality, as of Vista they stripped out an awful lot of the backward compatibility stuff, and 7 is better by far than Vista was.
That doesn't mean that idiot users and/or a targeted attack won't get past it, or that it's perfect, but it's a getting close to a reasonable approximation of a good balance between usability and security on a single user system.
If Google really believes that switching from Windows to Linux is going to protect them from a targeted attack funded by a super power(the Chinese government), they're drinking more than the kool-aid up there.
Unplugging the server from the network won't buy you protection from that sort of thing.
The biggest threat to Microsoft is currently FUD.
Just about the only thing which is likely to kill Microsoft is if they can't pry everyone off of XP which is an outdated, insecure pile of shit, which, for some reason, even people who know better seem to love. Even Vista for all its faults was better than XP, and Windows 7 is miles ahead of Vista. Things have changed quite a lot in the last 5 years, security wise and otherwise, but you're not going to see them if you don't leave an OS which is 9 years old.
In their defense, interpreting strings beginning with a zero as being in octal is fucking retarded, and that's the cause of that particular bug. It's even been deprecated in the spec.
Actually Microsoft provides an awful lot of drivers, very few of the drivers which come preloaded into Windows are third party, nearly all of them have been rewritten by Microsoft.
Which is still longer than most consumer grade static drives will give you, and when those fail you can't read from them.
Presuming you don't buy a drive which is far too small for your needs and you don't have particularly odd usage patterns(SSD's don't have particularly good performance on large sequential reads so sticking your movie collection on them is fairly worthless), the average SSD will likely outlast the average HDD.
Mainly because people don't want a desktop OS in a slate form factor.
This is actually patently incorrect. People do what their desktop in a slate form factor, they want all the power and all the applications they're used to running.
The caveat however is that they want all that with reasonable performance and they want their old apps to magically adapt their user interfaces so that they don't suck on a touch screen, and they want it at about a third of the price point most of these things hit.
The iPad, to the degree that it is successful for reasons other that "ooh shiny apple", is so because while it offers fairly limited functionality it does so meeting those three criteria. That doesn't mean that users don't want more than the iPad can offer them, it just hints that some of the functionality with those criteria is better than all of the functionality without it.
Microsoft is of course at a serious disadvantage here, simply because they're never going to be able to meet the user interface criteria for all the third party windows apps, and people will want all the apps which run on windows to run on the slate version thereof. Apple and Google on the other hand didn't have any software which runs on their Operating Systems(or any Operating Systems) prior to releasing their mobile offerings so they don't have that issue.
Someone putting their drunken photos up on Facebook for all their friends to see is not a privacy violation. It's opt in and no different than taking the photos and showing your friends. Yes, people have too many friends who aren't friends, and yes sharing that information is probably questionable, but sharing it is perfectly within the right of the individual and not a privacy violation. Facebook constantly changing their privacy policies and settings so that people get to see your drunken photos who couldn't see them when you put them up, that's a privacy violation. If we don't separate those issues then we'll never win the privacy battle because no one will understand how someone voluntarily sharing their information is a privacy issue.
Google is just another problem all together, and one I'm not sure there is a solution to. Google has always been the way google is, but because they offer really good products a lot of us seem to forget. Analytics and the search history was bad, street View should probably never have been allowed, cool as it is, and this whole wi-fi thing is just absolutely obscene. Just the fact that they were collecting anything let alone the fact that they collected extra. Might have to change my default search engine to Bing.
From my understanding from people who deal with it, Unbreakable Linux isn't even that different, apparently support calls go straight to redhat.
No, it means that they think they can make a buck on Novell.
Now that may mean they believe Novell has potential for long term growth, but it more likely means they believe that if they sell off all the bits Novell bought up over the last 5 years(and never really absorbed properly) they can make more money than they paid for it, or that the Unix copyrights are worth it.
You might see a competitor like IBM try to swallow them up, but that hasn't been what most of the bids are interested in. Novell's market share and profits are shrinking, SuSe just about breaks even, but eDirectory and Groupwise are being replace by AD and Exchange pretty much everywhere you look.
I work for a company using their products, and they're not exactly great, even their new middle-ware products, the ones they bought(and which most likely are going to get sold off piece meal are only moderately successful. The only thing which has kept Novell going all these years is how badly the open source market misunderstands the enterprise so badly.
When you go on Facebook and publish something for world and dog to see, you haven't given up any privacy, you've merely decided that something is not to you private. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with that, nor is that Facebook's fault. It may not be the best idea, but it's not actually a loss of privacy, any more than opening your windows is.
The issue with Facebook is actually that you don't have sufficient control over what information you share and with whom you share it. Some of that is the fact that Facebook's privacy controls aren't granular enough and the privacy UI is confusing. Some of it has to do with the fact that other people can post things about you that you don't like(though technically publishing a photo of someone where they are recognizable without their consent is illegal) so there ought to be some degree of protection there already.
The biggest problem though is that they keep changing the settings on you so that it's impossible to pick who you want to share what with whom. The reasons they do this are quite understandable, they are a giant advertising database and they want to make money off that, but it doesn't change the facts.
There's no inherent violation of privacy when you share your most intimate private details with the world on Facebook, or anywhere else, it might not be the brightest idea, and only time will tell whether any of those people get more out of doing it than they lose, but it's not a problem.
The problem is when things get shared without your consent, and outside of your control. That is a violation of privacy and is not in any way good, or for the best.
AJAX without question.
I don't think they really meant for it to turn out the way it did, and lord knows it works better in every other browser, but the XMLHttpRequest which is the backbone of AJAX was created by Microsoft for the web version of exchange. It was a grotty non standard ActiveX control back then, but it's standard now, and while there's a lot of hate on Slashdot for javascript and the new web, it's Microsoft who brought it to us(even if they didn't mean to).
In actuality, it's illegal in the US too.
Remember, we're not talking about filming the sunset and picking up some stray people, this is the equivalent of zooming your camera right in on someone, they set out to gain information about these people.
Don't believe me that there are rules about that shit, follow someone around with a camera, or go down to a park and start filming other peoples kids, and see how long before there's a couple of police officers telling you what laws you broke.
Seeing someone walk down the street, is not the same as following them and recording them, accidentally intercepting broadcasts is not the same as purposely recording them.
Sure people should encrypt their wireless, but Google shouldn't be doing any of this shit, sure street view is cool, but it's also seriously alarming and seriously unnecessary. As I said before, if someone found out the US government was doing this, they'd be calling for the entire government to be executed, but when google does it, it's apparently just fine.
There's a very big difference between connecting to an access point, and viewing what other people are sending over it, and there's an even bigger jump to recording that information.
You can perfectly legally watch me go down the street, but in most jurisdictions you better have a damned good reason if you're filming me. That doesn't mean you can't incidentally film me in the background of something, but that's not what is going on here.
Intercepting this information accidentally is a whole leap from sending someone around to record it.
Privacy in every country that has a legal definition of it(including the US) is generally about reasonable expectation. The fact that your broadcasting something(like the sounds you make on your keyboard when you type your password, or the sounds of the secret you told your partner, or the light absorbed vs bouncing off your body, doesn't mean that it's legal for people to look at it.
The key legal issue is usually about expectation. If I dance around naked in my front yard, I can reasonably expect that people who walk by will see me, whether they want to or not. It doesn't necessarily follow that it's legal for them to film me doing it. It could be arguable that I have an expectation that I won't be filmed by strangers on my own property.
The same thing is true of wifi. I might have a reasonable expectation that other people with wifi devices might accidentally pick up some of that data, but I might also have a reasonable expectation that they won't record it, or that people will go out of their way to look for it.
The thing which pisses me off the most about this whole issue is the fact that if the government sent people around to do this, all of slashdot would be up in arms about how the people responsible should be burned at the stake, but because it's google, it's just peachy.
You see, passing it on to consumers is exactly the point of cap and trade(and a carbon tax for that matter).
The general idea is that in the current system, dirty energy is too cheap because it's not the people selling or buying it who have to pay for cleaning it up. This distorts the market because the technology which is actually cheaper, appears to be more expensive. This means that goods or services produced in a way which emits pollution will always be cheaper than goods which are not. This means no market motivation to fix anything.
With a cost attributed to the producers of carbon, the price of carbon intensive goods goes up, ideally to a level which is higher than the non carbon intensive goods. This means that more carbon neutral goods become in comparison cheaper than the carbon intensive ones. Market forces then take care of the problem.
The market is a wonderful optimizing agent, it's just never been, nor ever will be free, so we have to try and set the constraints on it to get the results we want and let it work everything out for us.
Personally I rather agree with you with regards to targetted advertising. I think that generally speaking it probably doesn't have much better ROI than regular advertisement.
The issue is that advertisers, or at least the people wh pay them, think that it does. This means that targetted advertising, and more importantly, the data sets required to target it, are incredibly valuable. Even more importantly that data is why so many companies paid so much money for facebook.
There is a slight difference between an idea being new and the implementation being new.
Just because Star Trek has used it for years wouldn't make the invention of a real transporter any less patentable, knowing that a transporter would be cool isn't the same thing as knowing how to do it.
The issue with facebook is really rather simple.
Facebook's value for its investors is that it's a gigantic comprehensive advertising database where the marks *cough* I mean customers input all the data on their own. People put information into Facebook that they'd never tell someone taking a survey and you don't even have to pay someone to ask them the questions. Achieving this goal is basically top on Facebook's list of long term priorities, just as it will be on any other free social networking site which doesn't want to operate at a massive loss.
The conflict is that the users of facebook didn't sign up for that. They want and quite rightfully expect a certain level of privacy for the content they post on the site. You might argue that telling everyone about your personal life is the antithesis of privacy, but privacy is about your ability to determine your own level of disclosure, not having some specific level of disclosure which the older generations find appropriate.
Essentially the end result of all of this is that every 6 months or so, facebook tries to turn all the information it has into cold hard cash and shortly thereafter their userbase throws a wobbly and they have to back out.
It's hard to remember that you generally have to actually do something useful to get an MBA since everyone seems to forget how to do anything at all once they have one.
To get into most MBA programs you have to have worked for at least 3 years after you got your undergrad degree, generally doing something that's not flipping burgers. Given the program is generally 2 years and these guys are graduating and that the average US college student graduates at the age of 22, that would put these guys at 27 or so. Not exactly your typical beer and video games before anything crowd.
That we are.
Sorry bout that, misread it.
I do believe the market is fairly powerful. I just think that the market is never going to be entirely free, so presuming that it is is rather idiotic.
The "free market" hasn't been defiled, it's just a fantasy.
The market is an optimizing algorithm, like any other. Over time it finds the optimal solution given a certain set of constraints. Generally speaking it's really quite good at this. Unfortunately at the moment our constraints seem to be "x => x makes rich people richer", but that's neither here nor there.
The big issue is that people a lot of people keep thinking that there is some sort of magical way in which this market can generate the best of all possible worlds even if we don't actually know how to define that best of all possible worlds or what constraints we need to set to generate it.
It's a bit like when you take physics and you learn all those formulas which define what an object would do in a vacuum. It's all well and good to know what a ball will do if you throw it in a vacuum, but you're never actually going to do that. There are always going to be all those complex factors like wind resistance and all the other things which turn the nice simple formula into 3 months worth of computation on a super computer.
The "free market" doesn't exist because fundamentally the market can never be 100% absolutely free. That doesn't mean the market can't be an incredibly useful tool for generating the best possible outcome, just that it's not going to do that by magic.