They also do this because it allows those large corporate customers (and others but that's not so much the issue) to update their systems with the new patches the day the patches are released.
Contrary to popular Slashdot thinking, very few windows vulnerabilities have been exploited before the patches were issued (ignoring the person who discovered and verified the exploit.) Most of the big-name viruses that have spread based on Windows security flaws spread after the patches were available.
A previous poster suggested that 'Microsoft should release the fixes as soon as possible and the customer can decide on what schedule to take them.' This is exactly the WRONG approach to take. The more people that decide 'ahh, I'll patch once a month' in a world where patches are issued on any given day - the more vulnerable they are to widespread exploits.
Windows has a lot of users and and a lot of people are interested in exploiting it. Once the patch is out it is only a matter of time before someone reverse engineers the change to find the exploit that will exist on unpatched systems.
Perhaps by 'human caused' he meant the damage caused by people building levees and trying to live below sea level - virtually guaranteeing that something like this would eventually happen.
I love New Orleans - but doesn't the whole idea of living on the gulf coast below sea level seem the slightest bit... dumb?
There has never been any actual proof that Microsoft sold the XBox at a loss. Merely conjecture based on the amount of money made (or not made) by the division that XBox is part of. Microsoft does not provide a detailed enough breakdown of their financial costs to make the factual assertion that the XBox lost money on a per-unit basis.
That said, based on the division numbers it looks very likely that they did lose money initially. It isn't at all clear whether or not this is still the case.
When my canon ink cartridges are getting low and the print driver tells me they are empty I take them out and look at them to see how close they really are. By putting them back in the printer have I 'used them a second time'?
They're just trying to get me to throw out the cartridge when the print driver says to!:)
They also wouldn't be supported. If you can 'make xp home into xp pro' using the contents of the xp home disc (not extra binaries stolen from an xp pro disc you don't own) - have fun. Don't expect support though. Ford certainly won't support your modded engine so don't expect anything more of software vendors.
Your real desktop? Are you suggesting that RDP doesn't allow this? If you want the console session you might want to try looking at the help some time:
mstsc/console machine-name
There are also group policy settings that allow you to make this the default for a given host.
I don't understand why anyone would bother with VNC (for connecting to a Windows machine from a Windows machine or other platform with an RDP client). More 'server' software with open ports = more holes. I highly doubt that VNC is as secure as RDP - RDP is on every windows box (and has not been hacked yet) - VNC is now a niche product.
And it makes a difference why? The paying customers don't care and it's sometimes cheaper to not compile them out (and deal with the complexities ang bugs that may arise.) Some features of XP Pro are completely 'compiled out' of XP Home - others are not. It's not like the decisions about what would be in each SKU were finalized when all of the features were designed.
There would be a very significant perf hit associated with making ints 64-bit and no clear gain. If a counter or other numeric value didn't need to be 64-bit before it doesn't need to now. If it's a memory size it should be a size_t anyway.
Or their ability to do business. It is the goal of every corporation to make money you know... if a corporation isn't putting money making first (which can and often does include making choices that make people like them and buy their products) then they are doing their shareholders a disservice.
The gp post mentioned 'losers coping the winner' - and without a doubt Microsoft is the winner, whether their software is better or not, winning in business is defined by sales and money. So gp is saying that Apple is copying Microsoft - right?
What a troll. I've been using XP Media Center for years with plenty of 6+ GB files (2 hour TV recordings at 6 mbit/sec) - and files of this size have been supported since long before that. In fact I think NTFS has always supported this.
You are asking MS to include the codecs and playback mechanisms but not the UI - it is very much the same as asking real to do that - and it makes no sense. Windows Media Player includes the components of windows that play media - come on now think about it with rabbit-ms-hater mode turned off.
Why on earth would they do that? Give away the hard-to-implement technology without getting the mindshare benefit of people using the front end? What are they going to demand that Real offer their codecs up for download without including the UI in the package? Sure, I'd love this as a user - but there's absolutely no business model that would justify Real (or Microsoft) doing this.
The system default is NOT to have Java enabled. Java isn't even part of the Windows package anymore - you have to go download it from Sun. Of course, many OEMs prepackage it with their systems - but whose fault is that?
It's about simplicity. The game can still cache lots of content to the HD for performance reasons. The idea is to eliminate the install phase because it is an unnecessary complication for many users. This makes the PC model a lot more like the XBOX model - drop it in and it works. The hard drive is a cache and a storage location for patches and updates. All your points are moot - other than the copy protection bit which is nothing new as many PC games have required the disk in the drive to work for years.
In most modern apartment buildings each unit has it's own breaker box. It should be pretty easy to isolate the network at this box providing each unit with the full 170MB. All this discussion about line sharing is nothing but FUD.
Article says it supports WMA. That's a significant selling point over Apple's offering to me. The problem is that the 'shuffle' design doesn't really offer anything special over the well established pen drive/music player market. Now if they'd make a clone of the regular iPod that supported WMA I'd be sold. I can't see ever buying an iPod when it doesn't support my music but the design looks nice and with WMA support I might even pay the Apple premium.
It is a lot easier to integrate decent WMA/MP3 playback into a device than it is to integrate decent camera functionality or even PDA functionality. Cameras are big (relatively speaking) - the smallest digital cameras make use of every last square millimeter to fit into their casings - and they are still bigger than many phones.
MP3 players... the size of a flash based MP3 player is based primarily on how big you need the buttons to be, how big the battery needs to be, and how big the earphone jack is. All three of these factors are already taken care of in the average flip phone.
This is probably the first integration (of portable electronics) that really makes sense given the current state of technology and does not detract from the ability of the device to perform both functions as well as stand alone devices would.
PDA and Camera functionality will continue to improve - but at this point both of those functions require significant sacrafices to fit into the space of a cell phone that make them poor alternatives for many users.
They became services because it made sense for them to become services. Applications need to be able to render HTML and access web content - applications need to be able to play and work with media files. These things are useful across the platform. The IE and WMP that everyone objects to is the UI portion - which is really a pretty small subset of what makes up the IE and WMP windows components.
Making an API that other media players could implement... while this sounds nice in theory it would take many many years to get everyone to agree on such an API and in the meantime everyone would need to include whatever multimedia app their app builds on top of with every little shareware program - or they would need to write the code themselves.
Furthermore the bug-finger-pointing that would go on if there were many different browsers implementing the IE APIs or different media players implementing the WMP APIs would be a nightmare for consumers.
You could also argue for defining an API for filesystems (which does exist) and allowing different vendors to ship with different filesystems should be a government mandated requirement. Of course when the drive gets corrupted who is going to take the blame? When someone calls MS are they going to have to debug a 3rd party filesystem? No one asks for this because it isn't nearly so visible to the end user or flashy - but it isn't all that different.
Who cares if these APIs are bundled with the operating system? It makes it easier for other developers to write applications on the platform - and it sets a bar beyond which 3rd party equivalents must pass before they are interesting. In a similar way WordPad sets a bar (albeit a very low one) beyond which all word processors must pass before they become interesting to end users.
Linux users LOVE to complain about how Microsoft bundles things with their OS - and how doing so adds additional security risks.
Windows may be compared fairly to a full Linux distribution - not to the Linux kernel alone. Compare in terms of features, bundled software, and security.
If Linux bundles (as you put it yourself) 10 times as many non-OS apps with their OS then they have to accept the security issues that come with those apps.
Except that as a consumer / web searcher when I search for "Louis Vuitton" (not that I have ever even heard of that brand) I *want* to see everything about it and everything like it.
Seeing ads that are for direct and relevant competitors when searching for a trademarked term makes web searches more useful. Ok, perhaps the trademark holder should always get the first result - but preventing me from seeing competitor's adds... is just lame.
Next thing you know they are going to prevent sites that are critical of a brand from buying search terms - i.e. say some site has important dirt on Nike regarding child labor allegations - is it going to be illegal for that site to buy an adword to show up when someone searches for Nike?
Slashdot Mirror
They also do this because it allows those large corporate customers (and others but that's not so much the issue) to update their systems with the new patches the day the patches are released.
Contrary to popular Slashdot thinking, very few windows vulnerabilities have been exploited before the patches were issued (ignoring the person who discovered and verified the exploit.) Most of the big-name viruses that have spread based on Windows security flaws spread after the patches were available.
A previous poster suggested that 'Microsoft should release the fixes as soon as possible and the customer can decide on what schedule to take them.' This is exactly the WRONG approach to take. The more people that decide 'ahh, I'll patch once a month' in a world where patches are issued on any given day - the more vulnerable they are to widespread exploits.
Windows has a lot of users and and a lot of people are interested in exploiting it. Once the patch is out it is only a matter of time before someone reverse engineers the change to find the exploit that will exist on unpatched systems.
Perhaps by 'human caused' he meant the damage caused by people building levees and trying to live below sea level - virtually guaranteeing that something like this would eventually happen.
... dumb?
I love New Orleans - but doesn't the whole idea of living on the gulf coast below sea level seem the slightest bit
There has never been any actual proof that Microsoft sold the XBox at a loss. Merely conjecture based on the amount of money made (or not made) by the division that XBox is part of. Microsoft does not provide a detailed enough breakdown of their financial costs to make the factual assertion that the XBox lost money on a per-unit basis.
That said, based on the division numbers it looks very likely that they did lose money initially. It isn't at all clear whether or not this is still the case.
When my canon ink cartridges are getting low and the print driver tells me they are empty I take them out and look at them to see how close they really are. By putting them back in the printer have I 'used them a second time'?
:)
They're just trying to get me to throw out the cartridge when the print driver says to!
They also wouldn't be supported. If you can 'make xp home into xp pro' using the contents of the xp home disc (not extra binaries stolen from an xp pro disc you don't own) - have fun. Don't expect support though. Ford certainly won't support your modded engine so don't expect anything more of software vendors.
Your real desktop? Are you suggesting that RDP doesn't allow this? If you want the console session you might want to try looking at the help some time:
/console machine-name
mstsc
There are also group policy settings that allow you to make this the default for a given host.
I don't understand why anyone would bother with VNC (for connecting to a Windows machine from a Windows machine or other platform with an RDP client). More 'server' software with open ports = more holes. I highly doubt that VNC is as secure as RDP - RDP is on every windows box (and has not been hacked yet) - VNC is now a niche product.
And it makes a difference why? The paying customers don't care and it's sometimes cheaper to not compile them out (and deal with the complexities ang bugs that may arise.) Some features of XP Pro are completely 'compiled out' of XP Home - others are not. It's not like the decisions about what would be in each SKU were finalized when all of the features were designed.
There would be a very significant perf hit associated with making ints 64-bit and no clear gain. If a counter or other numeric value didn't need to be 64-bit before it doesn't need to now. If it's a memory size it should be a size_t anyway.
Or their ability to do business. It is the goal of every corporation to make money you know ... if a corporation isn't putting money making first (which can and often does include making choices that make people like them and buy their products) then they are doing their shareholders a disservice.
The gp post mentioned 'losers coping the winner' - and without a doubt Microsoft is the winner, whether their software is better or not, winning in business is defined by sales and money. So gp is saying that Apple is copying Microsoft - right?
What a troll. I've been using XP Media Center for years with plenty of 6+ GB files (2 hour TV recordings at 6 mbit/sec) - and files of this size have been supported since long before that. In fact I think NTFS has always supported this.
I imagine IE 32bit is included so that it can be embedded in 32bit applications that rely on it.
You are asking MS to include the codecs and playback mechanisms but not the UI - it is very much the same as asking real to do that - and it makes no sense. Windows Media Player includes the components of windows that play media - come on now think about it with rabbit-ms-hater mode turned off.
Why on earth would they do that? Give away the hard-to-implement technology without getting the mindshare benefit of people using the front end? What are they going to demand that Real offer their codecs up for download without including the UI in the package? Sure, I'd love this as a user - but there's absolutely no business model that would justify Real (or Microsoft) doing this.
The system default is NOT to have Java enabled. Java isn't even part of the Windows package anymore - you have to go download it from Sun. Of course, many OEMs prepackage it with their systems - but whose fault is that?
It's about simplicity. The game can still cache lots of content to the HD for performance reasons. The idea is to eliminate the install phase because it is an unnecessary complication for many users. This makes the PC model a lot more like the XBOX model - drop it in and it works. The hard drive is a cache and a storage location for patches and updates. All your points are moot - other than the copy protection bit which is nothing new as many PC games have required the disk in the drive to work for years.
In most modern apartment buildings each unit has it's own breaker box. It should be pretty easy to isolate the network at this box providing each unit with the full 170MB. All this discussion about line sharing is nothing but FUD.
Article says it supports WMA. That's a significant selling point over Apple's offering to me. The problem is that the 'shuffle' design doesn't really offer anything special over the well established pen drive/music player market. Now if they'd make a clone of the regular iPod that supported WMA I'd be sold. I can't see ever buying an iPod when it doesn't support my music but the design looks nice and with WMA support I might even pay the Apple premium.
It's a good start though - if we can eventually trust the electronic voting mechanism then eventually we can eliminate the paper.
Or then can buy (at least for a PC) a $10 USB 2.0 PCI Card.
It is a lot easier to integrate decent WMA/MP3 playback into a device than it is to integrate decent camera functionality or even PDA functionality. Cameras are big (relatively speaking) - the smallest digital cameras make use of every last square millimeter to fit into their casings - and they are still bigger than many phones.
... the size of a flash based MP3 player is based primarily on how big you need the buttons to be, how big the battery needs to be, and how big the earphone jack is. All three of these factors are already taken care of in the average flip phone.
MP3 players
This is probably the first integration (of portable electronics) that really makes sense given the current state of technology and does not detract from the ability of the device to perform both functions as well as stand alone devices would.
PDA and Camera functionality will continue to improve - but at this point both of those functions require significant sacrafices to fit into the space of a cell phone that make them poor alternatives for many users.
They became services because it made sense for them to become services. Applications need to be able to render HTML and access web content - applications need to be able to play and work with media files. These things are useful across the platform. The IE and WMP that everyone objects to is the UI portion - which is really a pretty small subset of what makes up the IE and WMP windows components.
... while this sounds nice in theory it would take many many years to get everyone to agree on such an API and in the meantime everyone would need to include whatever multimedia app their app builds on top of with every little shareware program - or they would need to write the code themselves.
Making an API that other media players could implement
Furthermore the bug-finger-pointing that would go on if there were many different browsers implementing the IE APIs or different media players implementing the WMP APIs would be a nightmare for consumers.
You could also argue for defining an API for filesystems (which does exist) and allowing different vendors to ship with different filesystems should be a government mandated requirement. Of course when the drive gets corrupted who is going to take the blame? When someone calls MS are they going to have to debug a 3rd party filesystem? No one asks for this because it isn't nearly so visible to the end user or flashy - but it isn't all that different.
Who cares if these APIs are bundled with the operating system? It makes it easier for other developers to write applications on the platform - and it sets a bar beyond which 3rd party equivalents must pass before they are interesting. In a similar way WordPad sets a bar (albeit a very low one) beyond which all word processors must pass before they become interesting to end users.
Linux users LOVE to complain about how Microsoft bundles things with their OS - and how doing so adds additional security risks.
Windows may be compared fairly to a full Linux distribution - not to the Linux kernel alone. Compare in terms of features, bundled software, and security.
If Linux bundles (as you put it yourself) 10 times as many non-OS apps with their OS then they have to accept the security issues that come with those apps.
Everyone else is using the new MSN search!
Except that as a consumer / web searcher when I search for "Louis Vuitton" (not that I have ever even heard of that brand) I *want* to see everything about it and everything like it.
... is just lame.
Seeing ads that are for direct and relevant competitors when searching for a trademarked term makes web searches more useful. Ok, perhaps the trademark holder should always get the first result - but preventing me from seeing competitor's adds
Next thing you know they are going to prevent sites that are critical of a brand from buying search terms - i.e. say some site has important dirt on Nike regarding child labor allegations - is it going to be illegal for that site to buy an adword to show up when someone searches for Nike?
Lame.