IANAL, but unless you have a better citation, I'll believe 17 USC 512:
(f) Misrepresentations. - Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section -
(1) that material or activity is infringing, or
(2) that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification,
shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys' fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner's authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it.
I'm pretty sure I got an email from them at some point asking if I wanted to "monetize" them. I'm not sure how they decide who, but it seems to be invitation-based (but with very loose criteria).
You HAVE to have rights to the content claimed to make a filing or commit an act of Perjury.
First, it's only abuse if ContentID were filing actual DMCA notices, which it isn't. That's Google's own system, and it's independent. It was put into place to appease the MPAA and RIAA a bit.
Secondly, it's not an either or. The law DMCA specifically makes misrepresentation an offense only if it is done knowingly. In particular, recklessly isn't sufficient, so there'd probably be a pretty high bar if you were to actually try to argue that perjury count in court if the notices are generated by an automatic system.
Since the first one was silent, I found a recording of some vintage jazz that fit, and voila, I had a PD replacement for the laserdisc that my college had bought for hundreds of dollars.
I know this isn't what you meant, but I am now envisioning that video of the collapse set to Yakety Sax.
I feel a little bit bad for it, but that's a price I'm willing to pay.
And you know what? YouTube didn't try to crush me. They didn't sue me. They didn't send me a DMCA notice. They didn't take down the video or make me take it down. They simply started pulling revenue from it and giving some of that revenue to the copyright owner. Really not a problem.
On the flip side, that response was the decision of the rights holder. If they had said "we want the video down", it would have gone down.
YouTube is under no obligation whatsoever to subsidize the distribution of these films. If YouTube decided that they would only distribute films whose titles started with the letters "A," "B," and "Q," they would be within their rights.
I don't think that anyone is arguing that YouTube is legally in the wrong. It's more of some combination of that the copyright laws in the country are screwed up (which you may or may not agree with, or could agree with but think that this case doesn't really illustrate the problems) and that YouTube should have some modification to their counterclaim procedures to give accounts like FedFlix more recourse.
Open Office does a perfectly acceptable job of editing and presenting overheads...
As a one-time (2009-era) heavy user of presentation software, I felt at the time that Impress was absolute crap compared to PowerPoint. At the time, I'd have rather used PPT 2000 and possibly earlier than the current version of Impress. And ribbons notwithstanding (I'm one of those rare people who is actually indifferent on that issue), I felt like PPT 2007 was a huge leap over the previous versions.
I'll admit to not having given OO a fair shake recently, but I haven't seen anything in the feature lists to give me much hope my evaluation would be much different.
I can't speak to the other parts of OO. I could probably count the number of times I've used either a spreadsheet or word processor (besides to look at a document) in the last couple years on one hand, especially if you let me do the binary counting thing.
Eclipse is actually a more functional and better designed IDE than Visual Studio.
Eh that's debatable. Perhaps it's because I haven't put enough time in to really learn it and get everything configured and such, but I've have more moderate annoyances about Eclipse than about Visual Studio, though no deal-breakers for either. This especially applies for C++. Though I will say that Eclipse makes programming in Java an almost pleasant activity, which is impressive in and of itself.
(I should give Eclipse's C++ support another go now that I think about it. It's been some time since I've decided I'd rather have the editing power of Emacs.)
I also fall into that category (though I know many people who do run it on their personal machines.)
As a very-tech-literate person who has his home desktop set up to triple boot between Fedora, Ubuntu, and Win 7 and basically always runs Win 7 (in fact I have both Fedora and Ubuntu because I forgot I already had the other installed), I do it for two reasons:
1. The games reason someone else mentioned. Sure, I could spend some time (in my experience from many years ago, quite a lot of time, though this may have changed) getting things to work under Wine etc.. But I take the opinion that if you're going to work so hard to be able to run Windows stuff, why not just run Windows? (Conversely, if you're a Windows user who does all your work from Cygwin or something, why are you using Windows?)
2. I use Linux at work. Both Linux and Windows piss me off an incredible amount, but in different ways. It's "nice" to get some variety in my annoyances.
I'm not completely positive on this but I think that at least the video ads are only shown if the owner user has agreed. (And in turn they get a take of it.)
(The (IMO-more-annoying) little banner popups seem to appear on too many videos for that to be the case.)
s this sigma terminology coming from some discipline? I've taken plenty of grad statistics and we've always called them alpha-significance levels.
Surely if you've taken plenty of grad statistics, you've seen sigma used for the standard deviation.
They're saying something like the observed difference is 3.5 times sigma. That corresponds to an alpha=0.05% (or is it 99.95%?); they're not saying that sigma itself is 0.05%.
Even according to the spiel, 3D is only useful for landing.
You must have read a different spiel than the one your parent quoted, which gives two others: in-air refueling and flying close to other aircraft (i.e. in formation).
Its also FAA certified for training, though you do have to pay a small fortune to get the USB key that 'enables certification'
Well, to be fair, you also have to pay a small fortune to get the hardware that enables it as well. Your gaming PC won't cut it; there are fake plane controls to buy as well.
Um I'll buy the control, weight (sort of), cost, and feel options... and will add in worrying about battery life and not being able to take notes if your battery runs out.
But "ability to erase"? Really? What crap-ass software have you been using that doesn't let you erase?
Maybe not all setups are this easy, but I used an x60 tablet with OneNote for my last year or two of classes... and you know what you do to erase? You turn the stylus upside down and go over the part you want to erase. Sound familiar?
Why adopt a more expensive, inferior solution?
Two killer features for me: easy backup (no scanning) and search.
Other possible partial answers: you can pull in, say, PPT slides and take notes on them. (Depending on your school, and especially as an undergrad, you may not have enough free printer pages for a PowerPoint-heavy course to print them all out.) Easy sharing. (Again, no need for access to a fast scanner. If you'd have your laptop with you anyway, weight(tablet laptop) < weight(normal laptop) + a couple notebooks, which negates almost all of your weight argument. As compared with not having your laptop with you, a convertible tablet makes it so that you can turn around and work on computer stuff.
No tablet as exists today are incapable of taking good usable notes, or if they are (Microsoft OneNote running on a Samsung Series 7 with Windows 7) then they certainly won't exceed a regular laptop with a keyboard.
I disagree with this. What's your problem with a convertible tablet and OneNote? You say things like:
The "main issue" I've found is two things, first off handwriting recognition is crap... but OneNote's handwriting recognition is still oodles better than paper. (And in my experience is perfectly usable unless you insist on actually converting your handwriting to text, in which case it's crap. But if you leave your handwriting as handwriting, you can still search and as long as you're looking for an actual word and not math symbol or something, it works pretty well.)
Secondly that even when it works there isn't any real integration with the rest of the system, so the resulting text and diagrams is an uncategorised orphan unusable by anything of use.
And meanwhile the notes that you take on paper are really well-integrated into... well, whatever it is you want?
FWIW, I used an x60 tablet and OneNote for my last year or two of classes -- and I loved it. I thought it worked great. Which is not something I say about software much.
I have an x60 tablet and used it for notetaking for a couple years before I stopped taking classes. OneNote is absolutely fabulous; I tend to whine incessantly about almost all of the software that I use, but I was almost always very pleased with OneNote.
In my mind there is a very clear hierarchy of notetaking mechanisms. At the low end is typing. This is obnoxious to classmates unless you have an unusually quiet keyboard, and is awful for anything except straight text, which is easily less than half of my notes. I tried that for a short while and hated it. In the middle is pencil/pen and paper. At the best is software like OneNote. Has almost all the benefits of pencil/pen, but comes with decent text searching, easy backup, easy distribution, and the other benefits of digital. (The handwriting recognition really is pretty good if you leave it in hand-written format. It seems to do sort of a fuzzy search -- a scribble can match more than one word. This means it works even better than the standard Windows input panel (which is already surprisingly decent), which has to commit to one particular recognition because it's actually doing handwriting-to-text conversion. You're lost if you want to search for something that isn't English text -- but that's still a way better situation to be in than pencil/paper.)
I'm not sure what there is in the iPad world, but I'd be surprised if there's anything nearly as well-developed. By its very nature, it would likely only be useful to a very small segment of the iPad population -- those who have and use a stylus. Taking notes with just your fingers doesn't seem fun.
But that's something that home users will almost never need to care about, and it'd be nice to make it possible to put it somewhere else and set things up that way by default for home systems.
It may well already be that you can set this up./root is listed as the home directory for root in/etc/passwd along with everyone else's home directory, so maybe that would work. But even if so, this seems like one of those things that, even if it is technically possible, is probably done so rarely that I'd really worry about what would break.
Like I said, I'd rather move/root to/home/root and then fix the "separate volume" issue another way.
So I guess back to your original point: a "transactional filesystem" abstraction layer sounds like an itch worth scratching, but it's not innovation by any means.
IMO if transactional file systems aren't an innovation... I'm not sure what is.
Sure, it's standing on the shoulders of DB transactions and whatnot, but that's pretty much true of every innovation.
Indeed, unless UEFI contained signatures for all Windows system files, I'm quite certain that it would be fairly easy for an interested party to circumvent.
I'm pretty sure that's exactly what they have in mind.
Well, not exactly. More likely, UEFI will validate the bootloader and the bootloader will validate the rest of the system... but getting a system up and running which is trusted from first power on is pretty much what this is designed to do.
Process 2 would have to use the failure of the rm to detect a conflict and roll back. Does this protocol guarantee atomicity? I think it might... but if I were actually writing this program, I'd want to see a proof of it.
Thinking about it more, it can definitely violate consistency in an "undetectable" way:
# Create temporary files 1: link foo.txt foo.txt.1 1: link bar.txt bar.txt.1 2: link foo.txt foo.txt.2 2: link foo.txt foo.txt.2
# Copy temporary files to "real" files 1: rm foo.txt 1: rm bar.txt 1: link foo.txt.1 foo.txt
2: rm foo.txt 2: link foo.txt.2 foo.txt
1: link bar.txt.1 bar.txt
# At this point: # foo.txt exists and is process 2's # bar.txt exists and is process 1's
That final rm is the step that destroys the old data, so all you need to do is loop through all "uncommitted moves" for foo.txt and bar.txt, then once everything else works you remove foo.txt.old and bar.txt.old. If anything fails, you just relink the old names on the way out.
That doesn't give a consistent view. During your work, there are times when the file system isn't in a consistent state. Sure, you can tell it's not consistent because there are missing files, but it's still not consistent.
There are also subtleties you have to work out so you get atomicity. What happens if two processes do that at the same time? If you're not careful, you could wind up with this (.1 files are tmp files belonging to process 1 and.2 files belong to process 2):
1: link foo.txt foo.txt.1 1: link bar.txt bar.txt.1 2: link foo.txt foo.txt.2 2: link foo.txt foo.txt.2 1: rm foo.txt 1: rm bar.txt 2: rm foo.txt [fails] 2: rm bar.txt [fails] 1: link foo.txt.1 foo.txt 2: link foo.txt.2 foo.txt 2: link bar.txt.2 bar.txt 1: link bar.txt.1 bar.txt 1: rm foo.txt.1 bar.txt.1 2: rm foo.txt.2 bar.txt.2
and now the state has process 1's bar.txt and process 2's foo.txt.
Process 2 would have to use the failure of the rm to detect a conflict and roll back. Does this protocol guarantee atomicity? I think it might... but if I were actually writing this program, I'd want to see a proof of it. There are too many subtleties. For instance, if you change from a rm foo.txt; rm bar.txt; link foo.tmp foo.txt; link bar.tmp bar.txt protocol to a rm foo.txt; link foo.tmp foo.txt; rm bar.txt; link bar.tmp bar.txt protocol, it is now definitely incorrect.
Yeah, I prefer the "everything is a file (descriptor)" approach. This is more of a "misfeature" in the Windows approach to configuration, IMHO.
"Everything is a file descriptor" is only half the story. To do the above, your file descriptor needs to support all the operations you use in your protocol. You could totally imagine a file-descriptor-based API to the Windows registry, but that's not enough if you can't link registry entries. Using my DBMS example, how many DBMSs allow you to create hard links of records?
I'm not saying that transactions are essential -- clearly they aren't. But look at the database world. You don't have DBMS implementers telling application devs to do the sorts of things that we're talking about in order to get sort-of-but-not-completely-ACID properties at the application level. No, DBMSs support transactions natively. It makes programming applications much easier, much less error prone, and allows for more efficient implementations. And I think it's high-time to bring the same benefits to the file system.
Hey, I don't say I do that, I say there are a lot of crappy developers that do that.:-) And their programs break if you move stuff around.
And yeah, it sucks. I've decided to not install programs in the past because they've hard-coded install paths and such. For instance, at least last I checked, Chrome. (Not that I'd use it on Windows anyway.)
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, you can't blame him. 2009 and 2011 are almost the same year, right?
Pants on fire!
The NDAA hasn't even cleared Congress yet, just the Senate.
IANAL, but unless you have a better citation, I'll believe 17 USC 512:
I'm pretty sure I got an email from them at some point asking if I wanted to "monetize" them. I'm not sure how they decide who, but it seems to be invitation-based (but with very loose criteria).
You HAVE to have rights to the content claimed to make a filing or commit an act of Perjury.
First, it's only abuse if ContentID were filing actual DMCA notices, which it isn't. That's Google's own system, and it's independent. It was put into place to appease the MPAA and RIAA a bit.
Secondly, it's not an either or. The law DMCA specifically makes misrepresentation an offense only if it is done knowingly. In particular, recklessly isn't sufficient, so there'd probably be a pretty high bar if you were to actually try to argue that perjury count in court if the notices are generated by an automatic system.
Since the first one was silent, I found a recording of some vintage jazz that fit, and voila, I had a PD replacement for the laserdisc that my college had bought for hundreds of dollars.
I know this isn't what you meant, but I am now envisioning that video of the collapse set to Yakety Sax.
I feel a little bit bad for it, but that's a price I'm willing to pay.
And you know what? YouTube didn't try to crush me. They didn't sue me. They didn't send me a DMCA notice. They didn't take down the video or make me take it down. They simply started pulling revenue from it and giving some of that revenue to the copyright owner. Really not a problem.
On the flip side, that response was the decision of the rights holder. If they had said "we want the video down", it would have gone down.
YouTube is under no obligation whatsoever to subsidize the distribution of these films. If YouTube decided that they would only distribute films whose titles started with the letters "A," "B," and "Q," they would be within their rights.
I don't think that anyone is arguing that YouTube is legally in the wrong. It's more of some combination of that the copyright laws in the country are screwed up (which you may or may not agree with, or could agree with but think that this case doesn't really illustrate the problems) and that YouTube should have some modification to their counterclaim procedures to give accounts like FedFlix more recourse.
That is a crazy enough solution that it might actually work...
Open Office does a perfectly acceptable job of editing and presenting overheads...
As a one-time (2009-era) heavy user of presentation software, I felt at the time that Impress was absolute crap compared to PowerPoint. At the time, I'd have rather used PPT 2000 and possibly earlier than the current version of Impress. And ribbons notwithstanding (I'm one of those rare people who is actually indifferent on that issue), I felt like PPT 2007 was a huge leap over the previous versions.
I'll admit to not having given OO a fair shake recently, but I haven't seen anything in the feature lists to give me much hope my evaluation would be much different.
I can't speak to the other parts of OO. I could probably count the number of times I've used either a spreadsheet or word processor (besides to look at a document) in the last couple years on one hand, especially if you let me do the binary counting thing.
Eclipse is actually a more functional and better designed IDE than Visual Studio.
Eh that's debatable. Perhaps it's because I haven't put enough time in to really learn it and get everything configured and such, but I've have more moderate annoyances about Eclipse than about Visual Studio, though no deal-breakers for either. This especially applies for C++. Though I will say that Eclipse makes programming in Java an almost pleasant activity, which is impressive in and of itself.
(I should give Eclipse's C++ support another go now that I think about it. It's been some time since I've decided I'd rather have the editing power of Emacs.)
I also fall into that category (though I know many people who do run it on their personal machines.)
As a very-tech-literate person who has his home desktop set up to triple boot between Fedora, Ubuntu, and Win 7 and basically always runs Win 7 (in fact I have both Fedora and Ubuntu because I forgot I already had the other installed), I do it for two reasons:
1. The games reason someone else mentioned. Sure, I could spend some time (in my experience from many years ago, quite a lot of time, though this may have changed) getting things to work under Wine etc.. But I take the opinion that if you're going to work so hard to be able to run Windows stuff, why not just run Windows? (Conversely, if you're a Windows user who does all your work from Cygwin or something, why are you using Windows?)
2. I use Linux at work. Both Linux and Windows piss me off an incredible amount, but in different ways. It's "nice" to get some variety in my annoyances.
I'm not completely positive on this but I think that at least the video ads are only shown if the owner user has agreed. (And in turn they get a take of it.)
(The (IMO-more-annoying) little banner popups seem to appear on too many videos for that to be the case.)
I started using zsh the instant I read about ** globs.
Bash has them now, but I see little reason to switch back.
s this sigma terminology coming from some discipline? I've taken plenty of grad statistics and we've always called them alpha-significance levels.
Surely if you've taken plenty of grad statistics, you've seen sigma used for the standard deviation.
They're saying something like the observed difference is 3.5 times sigma. That corresponds to an alpha=0.05% (or is it 99.95%?); they're not saying that sigma itself is 0.05%.
Even according to the spiel, 3D is only useful for landing.
You must have read a different spiel than the one your parent quoted, which gives two others: in-air refueling and flying close to other aircraft (i.e. in formation).
Its also FAA certified for training, though you do have to pay a small fortune to get the USB key that 'enables certification'
Well, to be fair, you also have to pay a small fortune to get the hardware that enables it as well. Your gaming PC won't cut it; there are fake plane controls to buy as well.
Um I'll buy the control, weight (sort of), cost, and feel options... and will add in worrying about battery life and not being able to take notes if your battery runs out.
But "ability to erase"? Really? What crap-ass software have you been using that doesn't let you erase?
Maybe not all setups are this easy, but I used an x60 tablet with OneNote for my last year or two of classes... and you know what you do to erase? You turn the stylus upside down and go over the part you want to erase. Sound familiar?
Why adopt a more expensive, inferior solution?
Two killer features for me: easy backup (no scanning) and search.
Other possible partial answers: you can pull in, say, PPT slides and take notes on them. (Depending on your school, and especially as an undergrad, you may not have enough free printer pages for a PowerPoint-heavy course to print them all out.) Easy sharing. (Again, no need for access to a fast scanner. If you'd have your laptop with you anyway, weight(tablet laptop) < weight(normal laptop) + a couple notebooks, which negates almost all of your weight argument. As compared with not having your laptop with you, a convertible tablet makes it so that you can turn around and work on computer stuff.
No tablet as exists today are incapable of taking good usable notes, or if they are (Microsoft OneNote running on a Samsung Series 7 with Windows 7) then they certainly won't exceed a regular laptop with a keyboard.
I disagree with this. What's your problem with a convertible tablet and OneNote? You say things like:
The "main issue" I've found is two things, first off handwriting recognition is crap ... but OneNote's handwriting recognition is still oodles better than paper. (And in my experience is perfectly usable unless you insist on actually converting your handwriting to text, in which case it's crap. But if you leave your handwriting as handwriting, you can still search and as long as you're looking for an actual word and not math symbol or something, it works pretty well.)
Secondly that even when it works there isn't any real integration with the rest of the system, so the resulting text and diagrams is an uncategorised orphan unusable by anything of use.
And meanwhile the notes that you take on paper are really well-integrated into... well, whatever it is you want?
FWIW, I used an x60 tablet and OneNote for my last year or two of classes -- and I loved it. I thought it worked great. Which is not something I say about software much.
I have an x60 tablet and used it for notetaking for a couple years before I stopped taking classes. OneNote is absolutely fabulous; I tend to whine incessantly about almost all of the software that I use, but I was almost always very pleased with OneNote.
In my mind there is a very clear hierarchy of notetaking mechanisms. At the low end is typing. This is obnoxious to classmates unless you have an unusually quiet keyboard, and is awful for anything except straight text, which is easily less than half of my notes. I tried that for a short while and hated it. In the middle is pencil/pen and paper. At the best is software like OneNote. Has almost all the benefits of pencil/pen, but comes with decent text searching, easy backup, easy distribution, and the other benefits of digital. (The handwriting recognition really is pretty good if you leave it in hand-written format. It seems to do sort of a fuzzy search -- a scribble can match more than one word. This means it works even better than the standard Windows input panel (which is already surprisingly decent), which has to commit to one particular recognition because it's actually doing handwriting-to-text conversion. You're lost if you want to search for something that isn't English text -- but that's still a way better situation to be in than pencil/paper.)
I'm not sure what there is in the iPad world, but I'd be surprised if there's anything nearly as well-developed. By its very nature, it would likely only be useful to a very small segment of the iPad population -- those who have and use a stylus. Taking notes with just your fingers doesn't seem fun.
I like it. Now all I need is a spare couple years when I'm not doing anything else, and I can rewrite all of Linux and its userland. :-)
I did pretty much say exactly that. :-)
But that's something that home users will almost never need to care about, and it'd be nice to make it possible to put it somewhere else and set things up that way by default for home systems.
It may well already be that you can set this up. /root is listed as the home directory for root in /etc/passwd along with everyone else's home directory, so maybe that would work. But even if so, this seems like one of those things that, even if it is technically possible, is probably done so rarely that I'd really worry about what would break.
Like I said, I'd rather move /root to /home/root and then fix the "separate volume" issue another way.
So I guess back to your original point: a "transactional filesystem" abstraction layer sounds like an itch worth scratching, but it's not innovation by any means.
IMO if transactional file systems aren't an innovation... I'm not sure what is.
Sure, it's standing on the shoulders of DB transactions and whatnot, but that's pretty much true of every innovation.
Indeed, unless UEFI contained signatures for all Windows system files, I'm quite certain that it would be fairly easy for an interested party to circumvent.
I'm pretty sure that's exactly what they have in mind.
Well, not exactly. More likely, UEFI will validate the bootloader and the bootloader will validate the rest of the system... but getting a system up and running which is trusted from first power on is pretty much what this is designed to do.
Oh wait, ignore that sequence: I got process 2's steps out of order. (It does the link of foo before the rm of bar.)
Process 2 would have to use the failure of the rm to detect a conflict and roll back. Does this protocol guarantee atomicity? I think it might... but if I were actually writing this program, I'd want to see a proof of it.
Thinking about it more, it can definitely violate consistency in an "undetectable" way:
I think you need the lock file.
That final rm is the step that destroys the old data, so all you need to do is loop through all "uncommitted moves" for foo.txt and bar.txt, then once everything else works you remove foo.txt.old and bar.txt.old. If anything fails, you just relink the old names on the way out.
That doesn't give a consistent view. During your work, there are times when the file system isn't in a consistent state. Sure, you can tell it's not consistent because there are missing files, but it's still not consistent.
There are also subtleties you have to work out so you get atomicity. What happens if two processes do that at the same time? If you're not careful, you could wind up with this (.1 files are tmp files belonging to process 1 and .2 files belong to process 2):
and now the state has process 1's bar.txt and process 2's foo.txt.
Process 2 would have to use the failure of the rm to detect a conflict and roll back. Does this protocol guarantee atomicity? I think it might... but if I were actually writing this program, I'd want to see a proof of it. There are too many subtleties. For instance, if you change from a rm foo.txt; rm bar.txt; link foo.tmp foo.txt; link bar.tmp bar.txt protocol to a rm foo.txt; link foo.tmp foo.txt; rm bar.txt; link bar.tmp bar.txt protocol, it is now definitely incorrect.
Yeah, I prefer the "everything is a file (descriptor)" approach. This is more of a "misfeature" in the Windows approach to configuration, IMHO.
"Everything is a file descriptor" is only half the story. To do the above, your file descriptor needs to support all the operations you use in your protocol. You could totally imagine a file-descriptor-based API to the Windows registry, but that's not enough if you can't link registry entries. Using my DBMS example, how many DBMSs allow you to create hard links of records?
I'm not saying that transactions are essential -- clearly they aren't. But look at the database world. You don't have DBMS implementers telling application devs to do the sorts of things that we're talking about in order to get sort-of-but-not-completely-ACID properties at the application level. No, DBMSs support transactions natively. It makes programming applications much easier, much less error prone, and allows for more efficient implementations. And I think it's high-time to bring the same benefits to the file system.
Hey, I don't say I do that, I say there are a lot of crappy developers that do that. :-) And their programs break if you move stuff around.
And yeah, it sucks. I've decided to not install programs in the past because they've hard-coded install paths and such. For instance, at least last I checked, Chrome. (Not that I'd use it on Windows anyway.)