I don't know if you're trying to be really cynical or if it just comes off that way on accident, but... MSN has been on a big push to support web standards fully in all their existing and new stuff. It's not an overnight thing, because that's a hell of a lot of code to get through, but nobody in the place will tell their devs "make it work on IE, we don't care about other browsers". I suspect that this will support Firefox just as well as IE 6, although Opera has some standards compatibility issues that may make that end of things a bit tougher.
Well, I guess I'm an advocate for every damn group that's ever created anything for somebody else to use, because I think that the user always has a responsibility to learn to use the products correctly.
It's not that I don't see your point, re computers. I agree that the OS developers should take all reasonable steps to limit damage from stupid user actions. But the fact remains, the users are going to, from time to time, want and need to do potentially stupid things in order to make the most use of their computers. Maybe you need to do totally remote administration, and so you HAVE to have a userland application that can open ports and write to the kernel space on the hard drive. It's unavoidable. If a computer's usable, you'll always have the ability to run an unsecure program that will let somebody malicious take over your system.
Now you're just being stubborn. Anybody who calls users incompetent for not being able to safely use Linux is an advocate for Linux? Anybody who calls drivers incompetent if they drive off a cliff is an advocate for Ford?
That's an interesting position... what would you change to make it secure enough to meet those standards? The problem I have with that attitude is, no matter what system you write, a user is always going to need the ability to come in and run an application as root. If that application is unsecure... what's the operating system supposed to do, prevent the user from running applications? I'd rather not give up functionality that is usefull and necessary in the right hands, just because it can sometimes be abused. And that's where user education comes in.
And I maintain that this attitude isn't zealotry... it's just a different opinion on system design.
So I'm a Linux zealot AND a Windows zealot at the same time? Sweet!
And just to be clear, you would agree with me if I said that Linus was at fault for anybody who got rooted in the last couple OpenSSH and Apache security flaws, right?
I fail to see how running a unsecure 3rd party app invalidates Microsoft's marketing around XP.
Try it from the other side. If someone ports CuteFTP to linux, complete with gaping security holes, you can run it and get rooted just as easily. Does that make it Linus' fault? No, because it has nothing to do with the OS. The user made the choice to run poorly made applications, it's the user's fault, and primarily the 3rd party developer's fault. It has nothing to do with the OS at all.
And please realize: when you call someone who's just looking at the situation logically and not trying to take sides a zealot, you look like a troll.
The holy hell are you talking about? I'm by no means a Windows zealot. I think Microsoft has done the world a dis-service by pretending that running a computer should require you to know nothing about the damn thing, when the tech clearly isn't ready for such a state yet. I think users SHOULD be forced to understand the concept of a file system, and the difference between hard drive space and RAM before they're allowed to buy a computer which will in short order become another zombie on a bot net, fucking up everyone else's bandwidth.
That doesn't mean I have to be un-realistic, though. Someone running a blatantly unsecure 3rd party application has no right to blame the operating system developers when they get rooted. (except for the run-as-administrator thing which I noted above).
That still doesn't make it Microsoft's fault, though. You can run a buggy FTP client on Linux just as easily as on Microsoft, and you can get your system rooted just as quickly. The only way for Microsoft to keep your system safe from stupid user actions like that is for them to mandate that you WILL NOT run any networked programs not approved by them. And you can imagine how much of an uproar there would be if they actually tried something like that.
The one major issue that allows this (running as Administrator by default) HAS been addressed in Vista. I'm no fan of the registry, but config files can get hacked just as easily. It's still no protection against opening a barn door and hanging a "Free Stuff Inside" sign over it, with strobe lights going off. And then he complains when someone comes and steals his toaster.
I see your point, but you're talking as if MS has stopped development on their Search product. They're hardly going to throw all that money at it, then decide, "oh, we got beat, and badly. let's just give up." They're going to scale up the project. Say what you like about Gates and his underlings, but he's not out of touch with the market. He's still a very shrewd guy.
Interesting... you make up a plan for Microsoft, with little basis in fact, then start predicting legal action based on said plan. Is step 4 profit?
Microsoft is not going to buy Yahoo. They have plenty invested in MSN and Microsoft Search as it is. Buying Yahoo invalidates all the money spent so far, and gains them not very much. IM is A component of a successful internet strategy, but it's nowhere near the key component.
You know, it's psychotic trolls like you that give the open source community a bad name. For the record, I'm a huge fan of web interoperability, and use Firefox religiously, usually on linux. I've made a fair number of web pages, and never used an activex control in a single one. I never said or implied that I thought activex was a good thing. I said clearly that the tech I was talking about MIGHT have been activex, but I can't remember because I read the example from which I got the class names back when gmail introduced RTF, which was a while ago. And I have actually implemented a partially-functional text editor purely in javascript, so I'm aware of the technical difficulties.
I haven't kept my code samples for this builtin control, and haven't been able to find the article again through google. But the fact that you jump on my posts and take a bunch of stuff out of context just so you can feel superior by "educating the wayward script kiddie" on proper development techniques is just bullshit. If all open standards and open source people were like you, I'd fucking worship the ground Bill Gates walks on, because it's a much better alternative than putting up with your bullshit.
And if you're so sure it wouldn't work outside of IE, then it must not have been activex, because the test version I tried worked in Firefox, and was still about 30 lines of code.
God, you're dense. I'm not saying it was hard. I'm not saying it's real coding. In fact, that was exactly my point! IT WAS 30 lines of javascript and all of the functionality was pre-written, meaning IT WAS JUST AS EASY FOR GMAIL'S PROGRAMMERS. And if you'd bothered to read the entire post, I DID say at the bottom that to get the same functionality for platforms that don't support activex would actually take some effort. Try understanding the point of a post before responding, instead of jumping on one or two sentances and taking them completely out of context.
I know you think it's trolling, but it's not. I'm not saying 2 days because I think I'm that badass of a coder... I'm saying it because it's built into the major browsers.
I read this back when gmail's rtf editor first came out, but I from-scratch coded a text area with bolding, text coloring, italics, etc, in about 5 minutes. It was maybe 30 lines of code, because literally all you have to do is create this object (I believe it was an activex control, but my memory is a bit fuzzy on specifics) and then call toggleBold(), toggleItalics(), setColor() on it, and there's a function to pull out the RTF-encoded contents.
Now, if they do something like this on platforms or browsers that don't support activex or whatever the builtin thing is, then yes it would take a lot longer than 2 days. But for IE and Firefox, an RTF text editing field is piss easy.
I'm convinced that the partnership (the ACTUAL one, not the speculation) is done for a very good reason. That means that Google wants Java available for an app, and bundling like they've done is a way to get it without making people hunt for a seperate install. That said, OO.o is not a Java app. They've got something else in mind.
There's been a lot of talk the last year or so about Google implanting a web server in Google Desktop, so they could run gmail while offline, and other apps as well. Maybe a web server written in Java? It frees them from writing to a certain OS, at least.
Except there hasn't usually been enough time between a rumor and the actual release to allow them to develop an entire new product driven off of customer speculation alone.
They're not a great achievement at all. RTF editing capabilities are built into the major browsers, all that gmail has to do is pass some control commands from the buttons ("setBold()", "setColor()", etc). The builtin editor type takes care of the rest of it. I or any other competent javascript programmer could implement the same thing in about 2 days.
for a site with however many hundreds of thousands of readers as/. to have correct spelling in its stories? I'm not usually a grammar nazi, but come on.
Give me cheap downloads (~$.30 a song). Allow me to pay by bandwidth or length rather than per track, so I don't feel ripped off when I download a 40 minute album that has 18 songs on it, when Thick as a Brick was $2. Let ME choose the codec and bitrate, so I'm not stuck with crappy AAC files. And above all, don't try to prevent me from copying the files to as many cds, music players, and other computers as I like. I bought the music, and now the transaction is over... you have no right to tell me what to do with it from that point on.
That would be worth the money to me, and in fact I get a lot of music from http://www.allofmp3.com/ which has all those features. It's much easier than hunting for some obscure record on p2p, and not even knowing what quality of encoding you're going to get. I've spent at least $50 there in the past couple months, and I even plan to buy actual CDs of some of the music I got, as I want to have it in lossless format. But if iTunes, with all their stupid pricing and restrictions on what you can do with the files once you get them, was the only way to get music online... I'd go p2p in a heartbeat. I'm not going to pay anybody to give me LESS functional copies of the music than copyright law entitles me to, no matter how good it is.
The author says that although liability requirements would essentially kill free software, it's just too bad. Car manufacturers learned to deal with it too. Well, I'm pretty sure I can go get some guy with an arc welder to build me a custom car, and he may well require that I sign a waiver stating that I know the risks of driving it, and will not hold him responsible if something fails. That doesn't mean I can't still go buy a car that DOES have some guarantees of reliability... it's just that due to the costs, the software market is predominantly on the other side of things from the auto industry.
Why not sue the credit bureaus for distributing false and reputation-damaging information about you? An identity thief can just as easily go through your trash and cause the exact same kind of trouble. It wouldn't be such an issue with "digital security" if we didn't place such a high trust on the information we choose to store in these systems.
I don't think the story hits it quite right. I'm 22, and I feel the same way as the writer. It's not that technology is somehow outstripping old folks' ability to use it to the fullest potential... it's that a lot of people who grow up with the tech have no sense of boundaries with respect to it. The sales rep who says they routinely sell 2000 minute packages to teenagers illustrate it well; who actually NEEDS that much time? Nobody. And it costs an extra $50-$100 a month for the luxery. Our consumer culture invites people to throw away money on more and more things that people got along without just fine for the rest of history, but have suddenly become indespensable to the easily amused. So many people today would never voluntarily pick up a book and read it for fun. Is that somehow an indication that books are no longer necessary? Of course not. It just means that commercial technology invites you to waste time in pointless networking when you could be learning something useful, or expanding your intellect. So it's not that somehow people who are glued to their phone are more technologically advanced than those that have a sense of proportion... it's just that they don't realize that there are more valuable things they could be doing with their time and money.
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I don't know if you're trying to be really cynical or if it just comes off that way on accident, but... MSN has been on a big push to support web standards fully in all their existing and new stuff. It's not an overnight thing, because that's a hell of a lot of code to get through, but nobody in the place will tell their devs "make it work on IE, we don't care about other browsers". I suspect that this will support Firefox just as well as IE 6, although Opera has some standards compatibility issues that may make that end of things a bit tougher.
Well, I guess I'm an advocate for every damn group that's ever created anything for somebody else to use, because I think that the user always has a responsibility to learn to use the products correctly.
It's not that I don't see your point, re computers. I agree that the OS developers should take all reasonable steps to limit damage from stupid user actions. But the fact remains, the users are going to, from time to time, want and need to do potentially stupid things in order to make the most use of their computers. Maybe you need to do totally remote administration, and so you HAVE to have a userland application that can open ports and write to the kernel space on the hard drive. It's unavoidable. If a computer's usable, you'll always have the ability to run an unsecure program that will let somebody malicious take over your system.
too bad DaVinci Code sucked :-)
Now you're just being stubborn. Anybody who calls users incompetent for not being able to safely use Linux is an advocate for Linux? Anybody who calls drivers incompetent if they drive off a cliff is an advocate for Ford?
That's an interesting position... what would you change to make it secure enough to meet those standards? The problem I have with that attitude is, no matter what system you write, a user is always going to need the ability to come in and run an application as root. If that application is unsecure... what's the operating system supposed to do, prevent the user from running applications? I'd rather not give up functionality that is usefull and necessary in the right hands, just because it can sometimes be abused. And that's where user education comes in.
And I maintain that this attitude isn't zealotry... it's just a different opinion on system design.
So I'm a Linux zealot AND a Windows zealot at the same time? Sweet!
And just to be clear, you would agree with me if I said that Linus was at fault for anybody who got rooted in the last couple OpenSSH and Apache security flaws, right?
I fail to see how running a unsecure 3rd party app invalidates Microsoft's marketing around XP.
Try it from the other side. If someone ports CuteFTP to linux, complete with gaping security holes, you can run it and get rooted just as easily. Does that make it Linus' fault? No, because it has nothing to do with the OS. The user made the choice to run poorly made applications, it's the user's fault, and primarily the 3rd party developer's fault. It has nothing to do with the OS at all.
And please realize: when you call someone who's just looking at the situation logically and not trying to take sides a zealot, you look like a troll.
I've seen 5-year-old twinkies... trust me, you don't want them. Something starts to go bad, and they begin breaking down into an oily liquid...
The holy hell are you talking about? I'm by no means a Windows zealot. I think Microsoft has done the world a dis-service by pretending that running a computer should require you to know nothing about the damn thing, when the tech clearly isn't ready for such a state yet. I think users SHOULD be forced to understand the concept of a file system, and the difference between hard drive space and RAM before they're allowed to buy a computer which will in short order become another zombie on a bot net, fucking up everyone else's bandwidth.
That doesn't mean I have to be un-realistic, though. Someone running a blatantly unsecure 3rd party application has no right to blame the operating system developers when they get rooted. (except for the run-as-administrator thing which I noted above).
That still doesn't make it Microsoft's fault, though. You can run a buggy FTP client on Linux just as easily as on Microsoft, and you can get your system rooted just as quickly. The only way for Microsoft to keep your system safe from stupid user actions like that is for them to mandate that you WILL NOT run any networked programs not approved by them. And you can imagine how much of an uproar there would be if they actually tried something like that.
The one major issue that allows this (running as Administrator by default) HAS been addressed in Vista. I'm no fan of the registry, but config files can get hacked just as easily. It's still no protection against opening a barn door and hanging a "Free Stuff Inside" sign over it, with strobe lights going off. And then he complains when someone comes and steals his toaster.
I see your point, but you're talking as if MS has stopped development on their Search product. They're hardly going to throw all that money at it, then decide, "oh, we got beat, and badly. let's just give up." They're going to scale up the project. Say what you like about Gates and his underlings, but he's not out of touch with the market. He's still a very shrewd guy.
Interesting... you make up a plan for Microsoft, with little basis in fact, then start predicting legal action based on said plan. Is step 4 profit?
Microsoft is not going to buy Yahoo. They have plenty invested in MSN and Microsoft Search as it is. Buying Yahoo invalidates all the money spent so far, and gains them not very much. IM is A component of a successful internet strategy, but it's nowhere near the key component.
You know, it's psychotic trolls like you that give the open source community a bad name. For the record, I'm a huge fan of web interoperability, and use Firefox religiously, usually on linux. I've made a fair number of web pages, and never used an activex control in a single one. I never said or implied that I thought activex was a good thing. I said clearly that the tech I was talking about MIGHT have been activex, but I can't remember because I read the example from which I got the class names back when gmail introduced RTF, which was a while ago. And I have actually implemented a partially-functional text editor purely in javascript, so I'm aware of the technical difficulties.
I haven't kept my code samples for this builtin control, and haven't been able to find the article again through google. But the fact that you jump on my posts and take a bunch of stuff out of context just so you can feel superior by "educating the wayward script kiddie" on proper development techniques is just bullshit. If all open standards and open source people were like you, I'd fucking worship the ground Bill Gates walks on, because it's a much better alternative than putting up with your bullshit.
And if you're so sure it wouldn't work outside of IE, then it must not have been activex, because the test version I tried worked in Firefox, and was still about 30 lines of code.
God, you're dense. I'm not saying it was hard. I'm not saying it's real coding. In fact, that was exactly my point! IT WAS 30 lines of javascript and all of the functionality was pre-written, meaning IT WAS JUST AS EASY FOR GMAIL'S PROGRAMMERS. And if you'd bothered to read the entire post, I DID say at the bottom that to get the same functionality for platforms that don't support activex would actually take some effort. Try understanding the point of a post before responding, instead of jumping on one or two sentances and taking them completely out of context.
I know you think it's trolling, but it's not. I'm not saying 2 days because I think I'm that badass of a coder... I'm saying it because it's built into the major browsers.
I read this back when gmail's rtf editor first came out, but I from-scratch coded a text area with bolding, text coloring, italics, etc, in about 5 minutes. It was maybe 30 lines of code, because literally all you have to do is create this object (I believe it was an activex control, but my memory is a bit fuzzy on specifics) and then call toggleBold(), toggleItalics(), setColor() on it, and there's a function to pull out the RTF-encoded contents.
Now, if they do something like this on platforms or browsers that don't support activex or whatever the builtin thing is, then yes it would take a lot longer than 2 days. But for IE and Firefox, an RTF text editing field is piss easy.
I'm convinced that the partnership (the ACTUAL one, not the speculation) is done for a very good reason. That means that Google wants Java available for an app, and bundling like they've done is a way to get it without making people hunt for a seperate install. That said, OO.o is not a Java app. They've got something else in mind.
There's been a lot of talk the last year or so about Google implanting a web server in Google Desktop, so they could run gmail while offline, and other apps as well. Maybe a web server written in Java? It frees them from writing to a certain OS, at least.
Except there hasn't usually been enough time between a rumor and the actual release to allow them to develop an entire new product driven off of customer speculation alone.
They're not a great achievement at all. RTF editing capabilities are built into the major browsers, all that gmail has to do is pass some control commands from the buttons ("setBold()", "setColor()", etc). The builtin editor type takes care of the rest of it. I or any other competent javascript programmer could implement the same thing in about 2 days.
Yes, that would be the mistake I was pointing out...
Give me cheap downloads (~$.30 a song). Allow me to pay by bandwidth or length rather than per track, so I don't feel ripped off when I download a 40 minute album that has 18 songs on it, when Thick as a Brick was $2. Let ME choose the codec and bitrate, so I'm not stuck with crappy AAC files. And above all, don't try to prevent me from copying the files to as many cds, music players, and other computers as I like. I bought the music, and now the transaction is over... you have no right to tell me what to do with it from that point on.
That would be worth the money to me, and in fact I get a lot of music from http://www.allofmp3.com/ which has all those features. It's much easier than hunting for some obscure record on p2p, and not even knowing what quality of encoding you're going to get. I've spent at least $50 there in the past couple months, and I even plan to buy actual CDs of some of the music I got, as I want to have it in lossless format. But if iTunes, with all their stupid pricing and restrictions on what you can do with the files once you get them, was the only way to get music online... I'd go p2p in a heartbeat. I'm not going to pay anybody to give me LESS functional copies of the music than copyright law entitles me to, no matter how good it is.
The author says that although liability requirements would essentially kill free software, it's just too bad. Car manufacturers learned to deal with it too. Well, I'm pretty sure I can go get some guy with an arc welder to build me a custom car, and he may well require that I sign a waiver stating that I know the risks of driving it, and will not hold him responsible if something fails. That doesn't mean I can't still go buy a car that DOES have some guarantees of reliability... it's just that due to the costs, the software market is predominantly on the other side of things from the auto industry.
Why not sue the credit bureaus for distributing false and reputation-damaging information about you? An identity thief can just as easily go through your trash and cause the exact same kind of trouble. It wouldn't be such an issue with "digital security" if we didn't place such a high trust on the information we choose to store in these systems.
I don't think the story hits it quite right. I'm 22, and I feel the same way as the writer. It's not that technology is somehow outstripping old folks' ability to use it to the fullest potential... it's that a lot of people who grow up with the tech have no sense of boundaries with respect to it. The sales rep who says they routinely sell 2000 minute packages to teenagers illustrate it well; who actually NEEDS that much time? Nobody. And it costs an extra $50-$100 a month for the luxery. Our consumer culture invites people to throw away money on more and more things that people got along without just fine for the rest of history, but have suddenly become indespensable to the easily amused. So many people today would never voluntarily pick up a book and read it for fun. Is that somehow an indication that books are no longer necessary? Of course not. It just means that commercial technology invites you to waste time in pointless networking when you could be learning something useful, or expanding your intellect. So it's not that somehow people who are glued to their phone are more technologically advanced than those that have a sense of proportion... it's just that they don't realize that there are more valuable things they could be doing with their time and money.