GMail is not an enterprise solution, it's ad-supported webmail. Seriously folks, get some perspective.
Many slashdotters have been advocating GMail as an enterprise solution for business email, and Google claims that they use GMail for their internal corp mail. I wouldn't use it for such, myself, mind you.
I recall the story where after AOL bought Time/Warner, they tried to force Time/Warner to switch from their current corp mail solution (I think it was Exchange) to AOL mail. That experiment was a complete fiasco, and Time/Warner switched back to their old mail solution pretty quickly.
"To clarify that a bit... IF Google actually had a defacto monopoly (which it doesn't) AND there was a significant barrier to entry into the search engine market (which I doubt there is), ONLY THEN would anti-trust laws start to apply which would force Google to be fair about not promoting their other products artificially."
Those are arbitatry determinations made by a judge that might happen to be a moron. Google is a household word for "search" and a judge could easily rule that they do have a defacto monopoly. AOL didn't have a monopoly in IM, but the DOJ made threats to force them to open their protocols because tat the time their marketshare was so dominant.
You're referring to "Sponsored Link", which is different from Google's "Tips". Their "Tips" don't look all that different than the top search results, and the "tip" always refers to a Google product.
Their "Sponsored Links" is another issue. Whenever the search relates to an area for which a Google product is available, the "Sponsored Link" is always the Google product.
So, whenever you use Google search, you're bound to have a Google "Tip" or a Google "Sponsored Link" appear above the search results, if the search is an area in which Google competes. Given the fact that Google's products are not best of breed, and are not the most popular in their class, this is how Google drives searches intended to find best of breed and/or most popular products to their own 2nd class less popular offerings.
The problem is that Google has a monopoly on web search, and as such, they cannot simply do what other companies would do. As it is, Google is using its web search monopoly as leverage to promote its non-search products (Picasa, Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Talk, Gmail, Blogger, etc), to the disadvantage of others that produce better products in those areas.
Wouldn't the AACS's "managed copy" scheme work for copying movies to a media server for personal use? And it requirs no hacking and is completly kocher. But I don't know if HD-DVD discs are supporting it yet.
It's more likely that software players simply won't be granted keys in the first place, so only hardware players will be able to play the discs. Which screws over HTPC users. But, I guess it's worth killing off the HTPC market for some losers to pirate a few movies.
You don't need to crack DRM to do what you've mentioned. The Analog hole still exists (no HD-DVD or BR discs use the analog flag yet), so you could always make smaller copies for an iPod (God, you're a geek; what normal person would care about watching an HD-DVD on an iPod when the DVD (or even the VHS) would do just as well).
You make a good point, but your talking about "legit" uses for cracking DRM, such as storing DVDs on your own media server harddrive. Most people that cheer this are imagining bittorrenting HD-DVDs to their harddrive, burning them to a HD-DVD-R, deleting the HD-DVD image from their harddrive (thus recovering the space), then repeating the process for the next movie they want to pirate.
I think they're trying to patent the system wide RSS API that Vista provides and that IE7 on XP provides. The API allows apps to hook into a "common feed" for all their RSS/Atom needs. So any app that supports RSS show the same feeds (if they use the api), allowing for easy switching of RSS readers, browsers, etc.
And just how will Vista's DRM "drive people towards free systems", by which you mean Linux? Vista's DRM support is required to play protected HD-DVDs and BR discs, but Linux won't be able to play those discs at all. As for non-DRMed content, Vista will play those just as well as any other system. So what advantage does Linux bring to the table regarding DRM? The inability to play DRMed content? *That's* going to "drive people to free systems"? Your theory makes no sense at all.
"Historically, unprotected content outperforms protected content; because you spend nothing trying to stop people from stealing it, you recover more revenue than you were losing to theft anyway."
I don't necessarily agree with this. "Historically", people didn't have the ability to "share" (i.e. make copies of) material with millions of strangers nearly instantaneously. That's quite different from the old days where someone would buy an album and make a handful of cassettes for his friends/family.
And I also recall that in the 80's, piracy essentially killed off the Atari ST. Atari ST software had the highest piracy rate in history at the time, and it killed the industry as devs simply stopped making software for the platform (and Atari ST had a major presense in Europe before piracy choked it off).
Rampant, easy piracy also helped kill the Dreamcast. You didn't need modchips, software hacks, and/or firmware flashes to pirate Dreamcast games. If Sega had spent just a small amount on protection such that you couldn't pirate out of the box (the protection doesn't have to be fullproof, just enough to present a barrier to would-be casual pirates), they and the game developers would have been much better off. The money saved by having zero protection did NOT recoup the losses due to the resultant rampant piracy, as your theory would suggest.
I agree that DRM sucks. But so does rampant piracy. Too many around here condemn DRM while giving piracy a pass. Piracy is the true root of the problem, not the efforts to curtail it.
I agree with the gist of the rest of your point; the article is FUD. Vista has protected media data paths, but publishers don't have to use them. They can release non-DRM'ed content and Vista will play them just fine.
Also, DRM support is *required* to play protected HD-DVDs and BluRay discs. So Mac OS X Leopard will have protected data path DRM support as well (Apple is a member of BDA (BluRay Disc Association)), so this is not a Vista-specific thing anyway.
To those of you calling for class action lawsuits against MS, try this on for size: If I put up my own online shopping site, with a homebrewed SSL certificate, Firefox will put up a message box to the user warning that my site's SSL certificate isn't authorized by a recognized certificate authority (e.g. Verisign) (because the root cert isn't installed on the local computer). Should I then be able to sue Firefox for not treating my site the same that it does for shopping sites with SSL certs authorized by recognized authorities?
We don't know that the exploits are legit. Microsoft buying them would be giving in to blackmail. And, these hackers clearly have zero scruples, so what's to prevent them from selling the exploits to others after Microsoft bought them? Get real.
99.9999999% of the time, programs will be manipulating these documents, not humans. Both formats are XML, so XML parsers will be able to handle them, and the parsers don't care about how "human readable" a document is. So you take a standard XML parser, and build on top of that the "domain" knowledge regarding these formats, and you're good to go. Human beings eyeballing the XML is not going to be the norm by any stretch of the imagination.
Note also that this MS product, while I don't think it's quite as easy to navigate as Google's, is very specifically about putting books online, and giving them to anyone that wants them. No "previews." No gimmicks. Just books. Sure, they call it Book Search, but once you find the book, there's a link to "Download The Entire Book" in pdf format.
"Buying up small, agile, creative companies" is what Google does, if you haven't noticed. Same for Apple, they bought GarageBand. Hell, they bought their whole OS.
Your belittling of XNA only goes to show that you don't know anything about it. You clearly didn't watch the video. And you fully show your ignorance with your "An Xbox is just a PC" crap. XNA is for Xbox 360, which runs a custom CPU that is a triple core PPC processor, each with two hardware cpu threads. That's not "just a PC" by any stretch of the imagination.
And regarding your "MS will never innovate" BS, DEMMX obviously disagrees, considering that MS won two innovation awards, including "Innovator of the Year" last week.
Turns out that Microsoft's XNA won two categories at last week's DEMMX Awards: Best of Show: Innovator of the Year Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express (Microsoft Corporation)
Game Innovation of the Year Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express (Microsoft Corporation)
Speaking of XNA (a framework allowing normal folk to make Windows and Xbox 360 games (without the need for a devkit), a great video of it was released last week at Channel 9: http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=2612 54 The video shows coding, debugging, and deployment of Xbox 360 games using XNA. Although XNA uses C# managed code, one of the sample games shown in the video, XNA Racer, runs at 1080p 30fps with 2x antialiasing. It's a very cool video. Beyond anything you'd see from Apple, Google, et al.
The notion that Microsoft does no innovation is nonsense.
Re:Surley we will not see Vista viruses for some t
on
Vista Hackers Get Busy
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I take it, from your tone, that you're implying that the lack of attacks against Mac OS has nothing to do with its small marketshare. Interesting that you post this one day after Apple patched 31 security holes. And there were three months earlier this year when Apple patched 40+, 20+, and 20+ security holes. So the holes are there aplenty, but they're not being exploited for some reason. If small marketshare isn't the reason that those holes haven't been exploited, then what is the reason? Why don't you suggest a reason?
Maybe it isn't small marketshare, but it certainly isn't that the holes aren't there (like Mac fanboys like to suggest).
All I see in your referenced article is that faulty third party email clients might be tricked into running executable attachment malware. How is this Vista's fault? The faulty third party email clients are at fault. Sophos is making a big deal out of this because they sell security software and want to make sure people still buy their stuff.
At least the malware run by these clients won't run with admin priveledges under Vista, so it's at least as good as Linux wrt that. And Vista's builtin mail client blocks the cited worms.
The GGP said that Spotlight and Dashboard were worth upgrading to OSX Tiger (I diagree, and therefore am still on Panther). If Spotlight and Dashboard merit an OSX upgrade, then the Vista features, which include Spotlight and Dashboard equivalents, and a boat load of other stuff, merit a Windows upgrade. Your post saying that other OSes had corresponding features before Vista is irrelevant. Also, other OSes had desktop search and dashboard functionality before OSX (either built in or via third party software), yet Slashdot hailed Tiger as the second coming.
Which is it? If desktop search and dashboard make Tiger the Second Coming, despite those features being previously available in other OSes, then why don't desktop search and dashboard functionality (plus a bunch of other stuff) make Vista as compelling as Tiger or even more so? Why did you guys orgasm over Tiger getting desktop search and dashboard, but trash Vista for getting those same things (and more)? Hypocrisy at its finest.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it used c:\winnt\users.
Many slashdotters have been advocating GMail as an enterprise solution for business email, and Google claims that they use GMail for their internal corp mail. I wouldn't use it for such, myself, mind you.
I recall the story where after AOL bought Time/Warner, they tried to force Time/Warner to switch from their current corp mail solution (I think it was Exchange) to AOL mail. That experiment was a complete fiasco, and Time/Warner switched back to their old mail solution pretty quickly.
"To clarify that a bit... IF Google actually had a defacto monopoly (which it doesn't) AND there was a significant barrier to entry into the search engine market (which I doubt there is), ONLY THEN would anti-trust laws start to apply which would force Google to be fair about not promoting their other products artificially."
Those are arbitatry determinations made by a judge that might happen to be a moron.
Google is a household word for "search" and a judge could easily rule that they do have a defacto monopoly. AOL didn't have a monopoly in IM, but the DOJ made threats to force them to open their protocols because tat the time their marketshare was so dominant.
"If you're a firefox user, you're stuck with Google's search bar in the toolbar, whether you like it or not."
That's the case for Safari, but not Firefox, which allows you to add search engines and change the default.
You're referring to "Sponsored Link", which is different from Google's "Tips". Their "Tips" don't look all that different than the top search results, and the "tip" always refers to a Google product.
Their "Sponsored Links" is another issue. Whenever the search relates to an area for which a Google product is available, the "Sponsored Link" is always the Google product.
So, whenever you use Google search, you're bound to have a Google "Tip" or a Google "Sponsored Link" appear above the search results, if the search is an area in which Google competes. Given the fact that Google's products are not best of breed, and are not the most popular in their class, this is how Google drives searches intended to find best of breed and/or most popular products to their own 2nd class less popular offerings.
The problem is that Google has a monopoly on web search, and as such, they cannot simply do what other companies would do. As it is, Google is using its web search monopoly as leverage to promote its non-search products (Picasa, Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Talk, Gmail, Blogger, etc), to the disadvantage of others that produce better products in those areas.
Wouldn't the AACS's "managed copy" scheme work for copying movies to a media server for personal use? And it requirs no hacking and is completly kocher. But I don't know if HD-DVD discs are supporting it yet.
It's more likely that software players simply won't be granted keys in the first place, so only hardware players will be able to play the discs. Which screws over HTPC users. But, I guess it's worth killing off the HTPC market for some losers to pirate a few movies.
You don't need to crack DRM to do what you've mentioned. The Analog hole still exists (no HD-DVD or BR discs use the analog flag yet), so you could always make smaller copies for an iPod (God, you're a geek; what normal person would care about watching an HD-DVD on an iPod when the DVD (or even the VHS) would do just as well).
You make a good point, but your talking about "legit" uses for cracking DRM, such as storing DVDs on your own media server harddrive. Most people that cheer this are imagining bittorrenting HD-DVDs to their harddrive, burning them to a HD-DVD-R, deleting the HD-DVD image from their harddrive (thus recovering the space), then repeating the process for the next movie they want to pirate.
I think they're trying to patent the system wide RSS API that Vista provides and that IE7 on XP provides. The API allows apps to hook into a "common feed" for all their RSS/Atom needs. So any app that supports RSS show the same feeds (if they use the api), allowing for easy switching of RSS readers, browsers, etc.
And just how will Vista's DRM "drive people towards free systems", by which you mean Linux? Vista's DRM support is required to play protected HD-DVDs and BR discs, but Linux won't be able to play those discs at all. As for non-DRMed content, Vista will play those just as well as any other system. So what advantage does Linux bring to the table regarding DRM? The inability to play DRMed content? *That's* going to "drive people to free systems"? Your theory makes no sense at all.
"Historically, unprotected content outperforms protected content; because you spend nothing trying to stop people from stealing it, you recover more revenue than you were losing to theft anyway."
I don't necessarily agree with this.
"Historically", people didn't have the ability to "share" (i.e. make copies of) material with millions of strangers nearly instantaneously. That's quite different from the old days where someone would buy an album and make a handful of cassettes for his friends/family.
And I also recall that in the 80's, piracy essentially killed off the Atari ST. Atari ST software had the highest piracy rate in history at the time, and it killed the industry as devs simply stopped making software for the platform (and Atari ST had a major presense in Europe before piracy choked it off).
Rampant, easy piracy also helped kill the Dreamcast. You didn't need modchips, software hacks, and/or firmware flashes to pirate Dreamcast games. If Sega had spent just a small amount on protection such that you couldn't pirate out of the box (the protection doesn't have to be fullproof, just enough to present a barrier to would-be casual pirates), they and the game developers would have been much better off. The money saved by having zero protection did NOT recoup the losses due to the resultant rampant piracy, as your theory would suggest.
I agree that DRM sucks. But so does rampant piracy. Too many around here condemn DRM while giving piracy a pass. Piracy is the true root of the problem, not the efforts to curtail it.
I agree with the gist of the rest of your point; the article is FUD. Vista has protected media data paths, but publishers don't have to use them. They can release non-DRM'ed content and Vista will play them just fine.
Also, DRM support is *required* to play protected HD-DVDs and BluRay discs. So Mac OS X Leopard will have protected data path DRM support as well (Apple is a member of BDA (BluRay Disc Association)), so this is not a Vista-specific thing anyway.
What's interesting is that through the MS deal, Novell picked up a new customer. That's one less customer for Novell's competitors (i.e. Red Hat).
To those of you calling for class action lawsuits against MS, try this on for size:
If I put up my own online shopping site, with a homebrewed SSL certificate, Firefox will put up a message box to the user warning that my site's SSL certificate isn't authorized by a recognized certificate authority (e.g. Verisign) (because the root cert isn't installed on the local computer). Should I then be able to sue Firefox for not treating my site the same that it does for shopping sites with SSL certs authorized by recognized authorities?
We don't know that the exploits are legit.
Microsoft buying them would be giving in to blackmail.
And, these hackers clearly have zero scruples, so what's to prevent them from selling the exploits to others after Microsoft bought them?
Get real.
I think this sucks.
Note that this was reported months ago, August 7, 2006, to be exact.
Microsoft kills VirtualPC, VB for Mac
Here's the arstechnica.com forum discussion about it (started on August 7, 2006), with lots of pissed off users:
MS Killing VB in Next Version of Office for Mac
Here are two blogs (Aug 8 and 9) by MacBU devs Erik Schwiebert and Rick Schaut, trying to explain this decision.
Erik Schwiebert - Saying goodbye to Visual Basic
Rick Schaut - Virtual PC and Visual Basic
99.9999999% of the time, programs will be manipulating these documents, not humans.
Both formats are XML, so XML parsers will be able to handle them, and the parsers don't care about how "human readable" a document is. So you take a standard XML parser, and build on top of that the "domain" knowledge regarding these formats, and you're good to go. Human beings eyeballing the XML is not going to be the norm by any stretch of the imagination.
This blows away what Google is doing.
"Buying up small, agile, creative companies" is what Google does, if you haven't noticed.
Same for Apple, they bought GarageBand. Hell, they bought their whole OS.
Your belittling of XNA only goes to show that you don't know anything about it. You clearly didn't watch the video.
And you fully show your ignorance with your "An Xbox is just a PC" crap. XNA is for Xbox 360, which runs a custom CPU that is a triple core PPC processor, each with two hardware cpu threads. That's not "just a PC" by any stretch of the imagination.
And regarding your "MS will never innovate" BS, DEMMX obviously disagrees, considering that MS won two innovation awards, including "Innovator of the Year" last week.
I got this from a post to Scoble's blog last week:
Speaking of XNA (a framework allowing normal folk to make Windows and Xbox 360 games (without the need for a devkit), a great video of it was released last week at Channel 9:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=261
The video shows coding, debugging, and deployment of Xbox 360 games using XNA. Although XNA uses C# managed code, one of the sample games shown in the video, XNA Racer, runs at 1080p 30fps with 2x antialiasing.
It's a very cool video. Beyond anything you'd see from Apple, Google, et al.
The notion that Microsoft does no innovation is nonsense.
I take it, from your tone, that you're implying that the lack of attacks against Mac OS has nothing to do with its small marketshare. Interesting that you post this one day after Apple patched 31 security holes. And there were three months earlier this year when Apple patched 40+, 20+, and 20+ security holes. So the holes are there aplenty, but they're not being exploited for some reason. If small marketshare isn't the reason that those holes haven't been exploited, then what is the reason? Why don't you suggest a reason?
Maybe it isn't small marketshare, but it certainly isn't that the holes aren't there (like Mac fanboys like to suggest).
All I see in your referenced article is that faulty third party email clients might be tricked into running executable attachment malware. How is this Vista's fault? The faulty third party email clients are at fault. Sophos is making a big deal out of this because they sell security software and want to make sure people still buy their stuff.
At least the malware run by these clients won't run with admin priveledges under Vista, so it's at least as good as Linux wrt that. And Vista's builtin mail client blocks the cited worms.
What is your point?
The GGP said that Spotlight and Dashboard were worth upgrading to OSX Tiger (I diagree, and therefore am still on Panther). If Spotlight and Dashboard merit an OSX upgrade, then the Vista features, which include Spotlight and Dashboard equivalents, and a boat load of other stuff, merit a Windows upgrade. Your post saying that other OSes had corresponding features before Vista is irrelevant. Also, other OSes had desktop search and dashboard functionality before OSX (either built in or via third party software), yet Slashdot hailed Tiger as the second coming.
Which is it? If desktop search and dashboard make Tiger the Second Coming, despite those features being previously available in other OSes, then why don't desktop search and dashboard functionality (plus a bunch of other stuff) make Vista as compelling as Tiger or even more so? Why did you guys orgasm over Tiger getting desktop search and dashboard, but trash Vista for getting those same things (and more)? Hypocrisy at its finest.
Microsoft said publicly months ago that they won't be in any position to challenge the iPod for at least 5 years.