I had much the same thoughts on ad-hoc networking enabling file-sharing of an entire directory. I've yet to hear anyone say anything intelligent on the subject yet.
While they can perform a man-in-the-middle attack, that does require changing what keys a website uses (or possibly disabling encryption).
Well, the more troubling attack is disabling encryption. Most sites start out in HTTPS, and then have a link to the secure sight. If there's a man-in-the-middle, he can change all the links that send you to https://website.com/ to http://website.com./ Then just continue acting as a proxy and figure out which URLs should really be contacting the HTTPS sight, while continuing to talk to the client/victim in http. Sure, the victim could look down at what's supposed to be a "secure" website, but how often do you do that? I haven't in the past.. but I'll certainly try to more now.
Is the administrator password on an OS X machine non-trivial by default
I'm not a Mac guy, but I'm pretty sure the admin account is disabled by default. I'm also pretty certain that OS X doesn't accept telnet connections, nor is it running an ssh server.
But even worse, he could emulate (and forward data to) popular sites like Gmail, Yahoo, Ebay and Paypal but without any SSL. Like, a site that looks and acts like Gmail and even has your messages but is in reality a non-encrypted site that acts as a proxy.
I never thought about that, but that's an excellent point. It's a good reason not to trust web based mail sites.
In fact, it calls into question the security of all websites, since they start out in unencrypted mode. How often do you check when logging into a secure website that it's really using https, and not http?
As far as a man-in-the-middle attack goes, of course. The attack is a property of the networking technology, not the OS. If you connect to a wireless network, then connect to your bank or whatever via SSL, then blindly accept the error message that's going to come up when the SSL certificate comes up (since the attacker is going to give you his own SSL cert, not the real one), the attacker can read anything you send to the other side, and anything that comes back to you.
The only solution is to not accept invalid SSL certs, or setup your own VPN tunnel.
eg. if I ssh to my home computer, or use access an https site am I still ok?
As long as you exchange keys with the actual end host, and not the man-in-the-middle, you're fine.
If the Man-in-the-middle tries to give you his own SSL key, your browser will throw up an error message that the key is invalid. If you click "accept key", then you're hosed and the attacker can read all your traffic.
As far as ssh goes, if you've connected to the host before, SSH will (or at least on the clients I've used) throw up a big warning message that someone is trying to hack you. If you haven't connected, no such warning will appear and if you type in your password the attacker will get your password, and everything you type in your ssh session.
The article says that if you connect to another host via an ad-hoc network, you somehow turn on filesharing in Windows (presumably to your entire HD). I wasn't aware of this feature in Windows. Can someone confirm it and provide some references, because the last people I'll trust to get the facts straight are journalists.
Where did it ever say that "Testing on the Toilet" is required reading?
And where did I say or imply it was required reading? My comments are about this reflecting the Google Culture. The blog also indicated this was something that was all over Google worldwide (over 500 stalls). That's part of the culture at Google, and that's what disturbs the people responding to this story. This isn't the brainchild idea of a dozen executives in suits trying to boost productivity
Actually I'd be less disturbed if it were the brainchild of some execs. Since it's all internal, it's an indication to me that people actually think intruding on time on the toilet is something that's OK for people to promote. Almost nothing about working at Google is mandatory, save the obvious requirement of doing one's job.
I know how culture works too. It may not be mandatory, but you won't get anywhere if you don't do what's expected. Sorry, but I (and apparently a lot of others) find the whole idea disturbing. I think it's because people consider the damn bathroom to be private, and not be invaded by work. The fact that some people at Google think they can invade other people's space with work is disturbing. It's indicative of something strange going on. Saying that it's not mandatory really kind of misses the point.
It took me a while to figure out why, then I realised that it was faintly reminiscent of a cult.
You're not the only one who thought that. There's something about putting work in a bathroom and just expecting everyone to be onboard that smacks of weirdo groupthink. The fact that it was done independently is quite telling.
If this is a reflection of the Google Culture, then count me out. Are they all insane enough to think that every moment (including taking a shit) should be spent thinking about The Company? It seems to me they've developed a culture of True Believers that wouldn't even think there's something wrong with invading the bathroom with more work.
I know someone is going to come back to me with "It's not work.. it's fun!". Just keep drinking that kool-aid buddy. Eventually you're going to figure out that there's more to life than work.
Next up at google.. Google Dreams. A quiet voice plays back a list of abstract google-related words while you sleep, some of which will certainly influence your dreams.
Hmm.. I'm not convinced there's not a nitch that these journals couldn't fill. They still need someone to figure out who reviews each paper for publication. They still need someone to do layout, manage publication, etc. Who's to say that scientific writers don't want/need help writing papers? Other scientists still will want to go to a respected authority that's done some filtering of junk. If the publications don't adapt, that respected authority is just going to be large Universities, or a large government.
That obviously means a changing business model, and probbably merging with other publishing companies. But that's kind of my point. The problem of course is that businesses get too used to just raking in the dough doing the same thing over and over. They don't like risk or change because it might mean they'll lose money. Of course if they do nothing but pursue propaganda campaigns, it's a certainty that they'll lose money.
Maybe this kind of propoganda campaign might work for the masses (see death tax, global climate change, and Fox News), but I kind of doubt it'll work on the scientific community who by their very nature tend to question. The other nail against them is that from what I've heard, many scientists don't like the high fees they have to pay for publishing in journals, so there's not exactly a friendly trusting relationship between the two.
Instead of trying to trick people into thinking that free access to information is somehow "bad", maybe they should be emphasizing the things they do provide? I'm not expert on the scientific journals, but I thought one of the things they provided was seperating out the complete junk from legit research. A filter of sorts. Do they currently offer help in editing scientific papers? If not, maybe they should? The question the industry should be asking itself is "What do we provide beyond actually printing and sending out paper?" Previously they've been able to take advantage of controlling distribution, since printing and distribution of information was relatively difficult. Now it's obviously trivial and extremely inexpensive.
It seems to me that free access to scientific information is a reality. Both the people who create the information (the scientists) and the people who read it (mostly scientists) want it to be freely available. Trying to fight it rather than adapt to it is a path towards bankruptcy.
Verbal taunting by other kids is *not* child abuse
I'm not saying that taunting is child abuse. I'm comparing the two to make a point. It sounds like you're of the opinion that if something made YOU a better person, it must make everyone a better person. I'm pointing out instances where a horrible experience might make someone stronger, but no one in their right mind would say we should tolerate that kind of behaviour. It's an analogy that doesn't prove anything, but is an attempt to get you to think about your opinion in a different way.
Anyway, the main point here is that people react differently to different situations. We can't target policies of stopping bullying based on figuring out if the kid is like you and will benefit, or like a lot of other people (I'd say most) and will be harmed.
You're confusing expansion of a company into ever increasing markets with illegal behaviour. All businesses will try to expand to whatever capacity they can sustain. But that doesn't mean it's inevidible they'll engage in illegal behaviour like is alleged here.
I don't expect large companies to behave ethically (small companies maybe). They'll do whatever they like without regard to anyone else. I do expect companies to behave within the bounds of the law. They often don't of course, but my point is that illegal behaviour isn't a given for a company.
Its just a matter of the handshake for HDCP not waiting long enough. The PS3 expects a reply to the handshake within a certain amount of time
And within the HDCP documentation is their a timeout value specified when the sending unit should give up? If so, is Sony giving up before the specified timeout?
If there's no timeout value specified, I'd say it's the designers of the specification that are to blame. This kind of problem crops up all the time. There's some critical spec that isn't specified, and one manufacturer does it one way, another does it a different way.
It took a toll on me but in the end I ended up being a much stronger and thick skinned individual for it.
Did you ever think that people are different, and bullying might affect them differently? I'm sure there's people out their that are stronger people because they were abused as a child.. but that doesn't mean we should tolerate child abuse.
Sheesh. When will people stop assuming their personal experiences aren't always universal?
For most people, a microwave is a black box contraption in their kitchen that makes food hot.
You don't have to understand how a microwave works to understand that putting completely dry things in a place where they get hot might start a fire. Should people be surprised if the sponge started on fire in an oven? I'll be most people don't understand convection, conduction, and radiation forms of heat transfer, but they still know not to put dry things in a hot oven. I would then ask you why light is both a particle and a wave and why electrons jump to a different energy level when hit by the right frequencey of light.
Science doesn't really answer why questions. The electron jumps to a different energy level because that's how electrons work. You can certainly describe in more detail the particulars of how it happens (and there's millions of people that can tell you that), but why is a question without an answer.
I expect Easy to be easy. I very much doubt that "mean minus standard deviation" of some enthuiastic professional testers or Beta players is really going to be down at my level.
Maybe, but that would be a problem of not getting a representative sample. Statisticians aren't normally fools. They know that anyone willing to sign up for a beta isn't going to be a good sample of the people who buy the game. They can either try to somehow correct for this based on previous data (beta players are 30% faster at finishing the level than the real players) or some other correction technique, or work hard to make sure they get a good representative sample in the first place.
This is a story about Vista. While the opinion of $random_blogger isn't really worthy of a mention on Slashdot alone, it fits well within the context of the entire story.
Of course, it'd be a lot more interesting if we could actually read the other slashdotted links. But even the "one blogger" story is at least interesting. Just because he's not some respected journalist (or even a disrespected journalist like Cringley or Dvorak) doesn't mean his opinion of Vista isn't just as valid.
And they're able to state this from a sample size of 45?
I'm getting a bit tired of this criticism. It really depends on what they're trying to measure if the sample size is statistically significant. If you were an alien from the planet Zenon, you wouldn't need a large sample size of humans to determine there's two sexes. You would need a far large sample size to find trans-gendered people. Obviously because the two different sexes occour in equal numbers (so a small sample is very likely to contain both), whereas trans-gendered people are rare.
This is grossly deceptive, to the point that I am quite happy to call it lying, since in all likelihood for any remotely recent machine the all you'll need is a hundred bucks (US) worth of upgrades.
Well, I think you're reading a lot into the review. I didn't see anywhere where hundreds or thousands of dollars were mentioned. Also, hardware upgrades are more difficult for some people than an OS upgrade. I know it takes more actual work to do the OS re-install, but hardware is arcane for a lot of people, so it can be a stumbling block. That, to me, brands XP as an excellent system if, ~5 years down the track its replacement - with significant improvements - isn't particularly compelling to consumers.
I guess that's one school of thought. The other is that Vista doesn't offer anything all that compelling, at least at first glance. I find it hard to believe there's not some whiz-bang new thing that Microsoft could have created if they were visionary enough. What that is I don't know.. or I'd create it myself. That's the view from orbit. It's somewhat disingenuous to compare two peices of software which are about 95% different and were targeted at quite different markets.
I guess we simply just disagree then. I personally have seen them used in the same environments, doing the exact same things. University computer labs running Word, Excel, and learning software, or businesses running various small-business type software. How you can claim they can't be compared is beyond me. The model-T and a modern car are also worlds apart.. yet they're both mass-produced automobiles driven by average people trying to drive on roads from point A to B. Comparing one to another is perfectly valid. You remember wrong. Windows 3.11 was a significant success, a non-trivial upgrade (should have been at least Windows 3.5) and a measurable improvement over Windows 3.1 - and especially 3.0 - in every way. Quite arguably, it hammered the penultimate nail into OS/2's coffin.
Yah, and it was still a piece of utter trash. I remember all the crashing, lockups, poor performance, stupid UI, etc quite well. Comparing it to other poor products misses the point. Because the vast majority of changes are in areas most reviewers (and their readers) are a) ignorant of and b) utterly disinterested in.
That may be true, but I don't think it's the whole story. Anyone who's read up on Vista knows there's a lot of changes underneath. But it's not clear if those changes will ultimately improve the OS. OS X is "new" when you compare it to OS9 (which is about as valid as comparing Windows 9x to 2000 - only useful in an abstract sense).
Well, I'd disagree. Comparing what the user actually gets in the end is the only thing that really matters... at least the people who actually have to use the OS. What do I as a guy-who-wants-to-run-software care about what Apple did to change NextStep into OS X? I don't.. what I DO care about is the end user experience, and that's totally different from OS9 to OSX. It's different in the same way that 9x is to 2000.
Maybe if you're an academic, an OS developer, or computer historian those differences in comparing one OS to another matter. But to the rest of us they're trivial curiosities.
All those features sound pretty good. But why did it take 5+ years to get them? I'll probbably upgrade to Vista, but even with all the improvements you've mentioned it doesn't sound like a slam-dunk. Maybe I'll change my mind when I actually get the product... but it still doesn't exactly sound "exciting" like the 3.1->95, or 98->2000 upgrades were.
Given the _massive_ amount of improvements in Vista and the fact that it runs quite usably on 3 - 5 year old hardware, then, it would appear he has somewhat unrealistic expectations.
Huh. From what I've seen the vast majority of 3-5 year old hardware doesn't had a gigabyte of RAM. You're lucky if it has 512 megs, which is quite sufficient to run the vast majority of Windows 2000/XP apps.
There's also quite a few machines out there with integrated graphics controllers that have no prayer of running Aero.
Which is flat-out lying... although you would likely need a (very cheap) video card upgrade for Aero since it uses features that didn't exist at the time
Huh.. So that would be part of the "vast majority of PCs can't take advantage of Vista" statement. So exactly how is stating what's true (that PCs would need upgraded hardware to run Vista) now considered lying? Strange, it seems to me the relative yawns that Vista is getting are a glowing compliment to just how good XP is.
What a strange statement. "No one thinks the new product is all that great... therefore the old product must be REALLY great!". So you honestly don't think it's possible to improve on XP? The second comparison isn't really valid (fundamentally different products),
Funny. I thought they were both operating systems that ran software on desktops. One isn't an embedded OS and the other a server OS. Sure, 2000 was marketed as a "business machine", but that hardly matters. They're both desktop operating systems that run 32 bit Windows software. There's no reason they aren't perfectly comparable. Vista is *easily* as big a change as Windows 3.11 -> Windows 98.
-snicker- we'll see, but the reviews certainly don't show that so far. I remember windows 3.11. It was a disaster. If Vista were THAT enormous of an improvement then why aren't the reviews of it stunning? . Firstly, OS X isn't "new" any more than Vista is "new".
Are you smoking crack? OS9->OS10 completely swapped out the entire OS and started over with an entirely new base. It swapped out decades old crappy ideas, for a modern OS with memory protection, pre-emptive multi-tasking, etc. Are you really saying that Vista has done the same thing?
The improvements from 3.1 to 95 were both "under the hood", and of a UI nature. The UI improvements were obvious right away. The "under the hood" improvements became obvious (not crashing, apps not locking up, apps not crashing other apps) after only a short time using 95.
The difference with Vista is that the "under the hood" improvements are unlikely to ever be very apparent to the user, or at best might take years to reveal themselves. It's also uncertain if the improvements will actually do what they're designed to do.
Slashdot Mirror
I had much the same thoughts on ad-hoc networking enabling file-sharing of an entire directory. I've yet to hear anyone say anything intelligent on the subject yet.
While they can perform a man-in-the-middle attack, that does require changing what keys a website uses (or possibly disabling encryption).
Well, the more troubling attack is disabling encryption. Most sites start out in HTTPS, and then have a link to the secure sight. If there's a man-in-the-middle, he can change all the links that send you to https://website.com/ to http://website.com./ Then just continue acting as a proxy and figure out which URLs should really be contacting the HTTPS sight, while continuing to talk to the client/victim in http. Sure, the victim could look down at what's supposed to be a "secure" website, but how often do you do that? I haven't in the past.. but I'll certainly try to more now.
Is the administrator password on an OS X machine non-trivial by default
I'm not a Mac guy, but I'm pretty sure the admin account is disabled by default. I'm also pretty certain that OS X doesn't accept telnet connections, nor is it running an ssh server.
But even worse, he could emulate (and forward data to) popular sites like Gmail, Yahoo, Ebay and Paypal but without any SSL. Like, a site that looks and acts like Gmail and even has your messages but is in reality a non-encrypted site that acts as a proxy.
I never thought about that, but that's an excellent point. It's a good reason not to trust web based mail sites.
In fact, it calls into question the security of all websites, since they start out in unencrypted mode. How often do you check when logging into a secure website that it's really using https, and not http?
Is Mac OS X at risk to these kinds of attacks?
As far as a man-in-the-middle attack goes, of course. The attack is a property of the networking technology, not the OS. If you connect to a wireless network, then connect to your bank or whatever via SSL, then blindly accept the error message that's going to come up when the SSL certificate comes up (since the attacker is going to give you his own SSL cert, not the real one), the attacker can read anything you send to the other side, and anything that comes back to you.
The only solution is to not accept invalid SSL certs, or setup your own VPN tunnel.
eg. if I ssh to my home computer, or use access an https site am I still ok?
As long as you exchange keys with the actual end host, and not the man-in-the-middle, you're fine.
If the Man-in-the-middle tries to give you his own SSL key, your browser will throw up an error message that the key is invalid. If you click "accept key", then you're hosed and the attacker can read all your traffic.
As far as ssh goes, if you've connected to the host before, SSH will (or at least on the clients I've used) throw up a big warning message that someone is trying to hack you. If you haven't connected, no such warning will appear and if you type in your password the attacker will get your password, and everything you type in your ssh session.
The article says that if you connect to another host via an ad-hoc network, you somehow turn on filesharing in Windows (presumably to your entire HD). I wasn't aware of this feature in Windows. Can someone confirm it and provide some references, because the last people I'll trust to get the facts straight are journalists.
Where did it ever say that "Testing on the Toilet" is required reading?
And where did I say or imply it was required reading? My comments are about this reflecting the Google Culture. The blog also indicated this was something that was all over Google worldwide (over 500 stalls). That's part of the culture at Google, and that's what disturbs the people responding to this story.
This isn't the brainchild idea of a dozen executives in suits trying to boost productivity
Actually I'd be less disturbed if it were the brainchild of some execs. Since it's all internal, it's an indication to me that people actually think intruding on time on the toilet is something that's OK for people to promote.
Almost nothing about working at Google is mandatory, save the obvious requirement of doing one's job.
I know how culture works too. It may not be mandatory, but you won't get anywhere if you don't do what's expected. Sorry, but I (and apparently a lot of others) find the whole idea disturbing. I think it's because people consider the damn bathroom to be private, and not be invaded by work. The fact that some people at Google think they can invade other people's space with work is disturbing. It's indicative of something strange going on. Saying that it's not mandatory really kind of misses the point.
It took me a while to figure out why, then I realised that it was faintly reminiscent of a cult.
You're not the only one who thought that. There's something about putting work in a bathroom and just expecting everyone to be onboard that smacks of weirdo groupthink. The fact that it was done independently is quite telling.
If this is a reflection of the Google Culture, then count me out. Are they all insane enough to think that every moment (including taking a shit) should be spent thinking about The Company? It seems to me they've developed a culture of True Believers that wouldn't even think there's something wrong with invading the bathroom with more work.
I know someone is going to come back to me with "It's not work.. it's fun!". Just keep drinking that kool-aid buddy. Eventually you're going to figure out that there's more to life than work.
Next up at google.. Google Dreams. A quiet voice plays back a list of abstract google-related words while you sleep, some of which will certainly influence your dreams.
Hmm.. I'm not convinced there's not a nitch that these journals couldn't fill. They still need someone to figure out who reviews each paper for publication. They still need someone to do layout, manage publication, etc. Who's to say that scientific writers don't want/need help writing papers? Other scientists still will want to go to a respected authority that's done some filtering of junk. If the publications don't adapt, that respected authority is just going to be large Universities, or a large government.
That obviously means a changing business model, and probbably merging with other publishing companies. But that's kind of my point. The problem of course is that businesses get too used to just raking in the dough doing the same thing over and over. They don't like risk or change because it might mean they'll lose money. Of course if they do nothing but pursue propaganda campaigns, it's a certainty that they'll lose money.
Maybe this kind of propoganda campaign might work for the masses (see death tax, global climate change, and Fox News), but I kind of doubt it'll work on the scientific community who by their very nature tend to question. The other nail against them is that from what I've heard, many scientists don't like the high fees they have to pay for publishing in journals, so there's not exactly a friendly trusting relationship between the two.
Instead of trying to trick people into thinking that free access to information is somehow "bad", maybe they should be emphasizing the things they do provide? I'm not expert on the scientific journals, but I thought one of the things they provided was seperating out the complete junk from legit research. A filter of sorts. Do they currently offer help in editing scientific papers? If not, maybe they should? The question the industry should be asking itself is "What do we provide beyond actually printing and sending out paper?" Previously they've been able to take advantage of controlling distribution, since printing and distribution of information was relatively difficult. Now it's obviously trivial and extremely inexpensive.
It seems to me that free access to scientific information is a reality. Both the people who create the information (the scientists) and the people who read it (mostly scientists) want it to be freely available. Trying to fight it rather than adapt to it is a path towards bankruptcy.
And did you ever act like you knew everything?
Heh. Like maybe a certain poster who read a short response by someone on slashdot, and then assumed he knew exactly why the person was bullied?
Verbal taunting by other kids is *not* child abuse
I'm not saying that taunting is child abuse. I'm comparing the two to make a point. It sounds like you're of the opinion that if something made YOU a better person, it must make everyone a better person. I'm pointing out instances where a horrible experience might make someone stronger, but no one in their right mind would say we should tolerate that kind of behaviour. It's an analogy that doesn't prove anything, but is an attempt to get you to think about your opinion in a different way.
Anyway, the main point here is that people react differently to different situations. We can't target policies of stopping bullying based on figuring out if the kid is like you and will benefit, or like a lot of other people (I'd say most) and will be harmed.
I've heard of this before. It's called Forum, or Court shopping. In fact I've read that the recent lawsuit against spamhauswas a case of forum shopping.
You're confusing expansion of a company into ever increasing markets with illegal behaviour. All businesses will try to expand to whatever capacity they can sustain. But that doesn't mean it's inevidible they'll engage in illegal behaviour like is alleged here.
I don't expect large companies to behave ethically (small companies maybe). They'll do whatever they like without regard to anyone else. I do expect companies to behave within the bounds of the law. They often don't of course, but my point is that illegal behaviour isn't a given for a company.
Its just a matter of the handshake for HDCP not waiting long enough. The PS3 expects a reply to the handshake within a certain amount of time
And within the HDCP documentation is their a timeout value specified when the sending unit should give up? If so, is Sony giving up before the specified timeout?
If there's no timeout value specified, I'd say it's the designers of the specification that are to blame. This kind of problem crops up all the time. There's some critical spec that isn't specified, and one manufacturer does it one way, another does it a different way.
It took a toll on me but in the end I ended up being a much stronger and thick skinned individual for it.
Did you ever think that people are different, and bullying might affect them differently? I'm sure there's people out their that are stronger people because they were abused as a child.. but that doesn't mean we should tolerate child abuse.
Sheesh. When will people stop assuming their personal experiences aren't always universal?
For most people, a microwave is a black box contraption in their kitchen that makes food hot.
You don't have to understand how a microwave works to understand that putting completely dry things in a place where they get hot might start a fire. Should people be surprised if the sponge started on fire in an oven? I'll be most people don't understand convection, conduction, and radiation forms of heat transfer, but they still know not to put dry things in a hot oven.
I would then ask you why light is both a particle and a wave and why electrons jump to a different energy level when hit by the right frequencey of light.
Science doesn't really answer why questions. The electron jumps to a different energy level because that's how electrons work. You can certainly describe in more detail the particulars of how it happens (and there's millions of people that can tell you that), but why is a question without an answer.
I expect Easy to be easy. I very much doubt that "mean minus standard deviation" of some enthuiastic professional testers or Beta players is really going to be down at my level.
Maybe, but that would be a problem of not getting a representative sample. Statisticians aren't normally fools. They know that anyone willing to sign up for a beta isn't going to be a good sample of the people who buy the game. They can either try to somehow correct for this based on previous data (beta players are 30% faster at finishing the level than the real players) or some other correction technique, or work hard to make sure they get a good representative sample in the first place.
This is a story about Vista. While the opinion of $random_blogger isn't really worthy of a mention on Slashdot alone, it fits well within the context of the entire story.
Of course, it'd be a lot more interesting if we could actually read the other slashdotted links. But even the "one blogger" story is at least interesting. Just because he's not some respected journalist (or even a disrespected journalist like Cringley or Dvorak) doesn't mean his opinion of Vista isn't just as valid.
And they're able to state this from a sample size of 45?
I'm getting a bit tired of this criticism. It really depends on what they're trying to measure if the sample size is statistically significant. If you were an alien from the planet Zenon, you wouldn't need a large sample size of humans to determine there's two sexes. You would need a far large sample size to find trans-gendered people. Obviously because the two different sexes occour in equal numbers (so a small sample is very likely to contain both), whereas trans-gendered people are rare.
This is grossly deceptive, to the point that I am quite happy to call it lying, since in all likelihood for any remotely recent machine the all you'll need is a hundred bucks (US) worth of upgrades.
Well, I think you're reading a lot into the review. I didn't see anywhere where hundreds or thousands of dollars were mentioned. Also, hardware upgrades are more difficult for some people than an OS upgrade. I know it takes more actual work to do the OS re-install, but hardware is arcane for a lot of people, so it can be a stumbling block.
That, to me, brands XP as an excellent system if, ~5 years down the track its replacement - with significant improvements - isn't particularly compelling to consumers.
I guess that's one school of thought. The other is that Vista doesn't offer anything all that compelling, at least at first glance. I find it hard to believe there's not some whiz-bang new thing that Microsoft could have created if they were visionary enough. What that is I don't know.. or I'd create it myself.
That's the view from orbit. It's somewhat disingenuous to compare two peices of software which are about 95% different and were targeted at quite different markets.
I guess we simply just disagree then. I personally have seen them used in the same environments, doing the exact same things. University computer labs running Word, Excel, and learning software, or businesses running various small-business type software. How you can claim they can't be compared is beyond me. The model-T and a modern car are also worlds apart.. yet they're both mass-produced automobiles driven by average people trying to drive on roads from point A to B. Comparing one to another is perfectly valid.
You remember wrong. Windows 3.11 was a significant success, a non-trivial upgrade (should have been at least Windows 3.5) and a measurable improvement over Windows 3.1 - and especially 3.0 - in every way. Quite arguably, it hammered the penultimate nail into OS/2's coffin.
Yah, and it was still a piece of utter trash. I remember all the crashing, lockups, poor performance, stupid UI, etc quite well. Comparing it to other poor products misses the point.
Because the vast majority of changes are in areas most reviewers (and their readers) are a) ignorant of and b) utterly disinterested in.
That may be true, but I don't think it's the whole story. Anyone who's read up on Vista knows there's a lot of changes underneath. But it's not clear if those changes will ultimately improve the OS.
OS X is "new" when you compare it to OS9 (which is about as valid as comparing Windows 9x to 2000 - only useful in an abstract sense).
Well, I'd disagree. Comparing what the user actually gets in the end is the only thing that really matters... at least the people who actually have to use the OS. What do I as a guy-who-wants-to-run-software care about what Apple did to change NextStep into OS X? I don't.. what I DO care about is the end user experience, and that's totally different from OS9 to OSX. It's different in the same way that 9x is to 2000.
Maybe if you're an academic, an OS developer, or computer historian those differences in comparing one OS to another matter. But to the rest of us they're trivial curiosities.
All those features sound pretty good. But why did it take 5+ years to get them? I'll probbably upgrade to Vista, but even with all the improvements you've mentioned it doesn't sound like a slam-dunk. Maybe I'll change my mind when I actually get the product... but it still doesn't exactly sound "exciting" like the 3.1->95, or 98->2000 upgrades were.
Given the _massive_ amount of improvements in Vista and the fact that it runs quite usably on 3 - 5 year old hardware, then, it would appear he has somewhat unrealistic expectations.
Huh. From what I've seen the vast majority of 3-5 year old hardware doesn't had a gigabyte of RAM. You're lucky if it has 512 megs, which is quite sufficient to run the vast majority of Windows 2000/XP apps.
There's also quite a few machines out there with integrated graphics controllers that have no prayer of running Aero.
Which is flat-out lying...
although you would likely need a (very cheap) video card upgrade for Aero since it uses features that didn't exist at the time
Huh.. So that would be part of the "vast majority of PCs can't take advantage of Vista" statement. So exactly how is stating what's true (that PCs would need upgraded hardware to run Vista) now considered lying?
Strange, it seems to me the relative yawns that Vista is getting are a glowing compliment to just how good XP is.
What a strange statement. "No one thinks the new product is all that great... therefore the old product must be REALLY great!". So you honestly don't think it's possible to improve on XP?
The second comparison isn't really valid (fundamentally different products),
Funny. I thought they were both operating systems that ran software on desktops. One isn't an embedded OS and the other a server OS. Sure, 2000 was marketed as a "business machine", but that hardly matters. They're both desktop operating systems that run 32 bit Windows software. There's no reason they aren't perfectly comparable.
Vista is *easily* as big a change as Windows 3.11 -> Windows 98.
-snicker- we'll see, but the reviews certainly don't show that so far. I remember windows 3.11. It was a disaster. If Vista were THAT enormous of an improvement then why aren't the reviews of it stunning?
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Firstly, OS X isn't "new" any more than Vista is "new".
Are you smoking crack? OS9->OS10 completely swapped out the entire OS and started over with an entirely new base. It swapped out decades old crappy ideas, for a modern OS with memory protection, pre-emptive multi-tasking, etc. Are you really saying that Vista has done the same thing?
The improvements from 3.1 to 95 were both "under the hood", and of a UI nature. The UI improvements were obvious right away. The "under the hood" improvements became obvious (not crashing, apps not locking up, apps not crashing other apps) after only a short time using 95.
The difference with Vista is that the "under the hood" improvements are unlikely to ever be very apparent to the user, or at best might take years to reveal themselves. It's also uncertain if the improvements will actually do what they're designed to do.