The summary is not accurate. Just because 50% or fewer of those hitting their pages are using XP to browse the web doesn't mean that it has less than 50% of the desktop.
True, but there is no reliable (and practical) way to measure the OS usage other than to look at web server hits. And since it is a purely arbitrary statistic which should not be used to determine which OS is right for you then it really doesn't matter how accurate the percentage is.
Something tells me that an Australian company would not be using inches to track anything. TFA seems to agree. Our official conversion tables between metric and "ye olde worlde" include the phrase "an inch is as good as a mile", which does not bode well for its accuracy.
Back in the day we had fun stealing cars for joy rides and doing jewlery store heists. These These days kids have fun attacking computers, much more victim less crime.
I think that Sony would disagree with you there. I doubt that the total value of your stolen cars and jewellery would add up to anywhere near what Sony has lost due to its recent hacks.
A fair point, but the fact they were overpaying by a factor of nine for the copier paper too, which I'm assuming didn't come with a support contract or licensing, seems to imply there was still significant waste going on.
That is assuming that it is true. Has anyone been able to find where it mentions copier paper for £73? I did a quick search of the report and found no mention of this example.
I wanted to see just what kind of paper you would get for this much money. A quick search of the net found a real-world example. I can't think of a reason why anyone in government would need parchment paper, but was this the kind of thing being purchased? If it was a specialty paper then the comparison to the £8 variety might not be valid.
If commentary on Groklaw concerning this very subject is any indication of probably outcome, then the case is pretty much already lost because of the doctrine of estoppel.
That is interesting. If this is a valid defense then I wonder why we also find warnings on Groklaw to avoid Mono because of patent concerns. Surely the same doctrine would cover Mono even more than this case, because Microsoft have been way more enthusiastic a simple press release.
I understand that in regular speech it just means "going faster" and the direction component is dropped. Understand that NASA is full of scientists and they may use science terms in a more precise manner.
Quite right. It is just the units of measurement that NASA does not always get right. Miles, kilometers; what's the difference?
Apple has a litigation page too. Your link does not really show much out of the ordinary. Every large company who has a portfolio of patents will most likely have a history of lawsuits. Is there any evidence of Microsoft having a disproportionately large number of patent disputes for its size?
If anything, its willingness to provide licenses for their IP shows a preference for keeping disagreements out of the legal system.
After 7 years, Mono have still yet to be sued by Microsoft, Oracle or anyone. It seems that you have a bigger chance of your tinfoil hat falling off your head than Mono threatening FOSS.
How about this: It's a bad idea to use the money of tax payers to do anything involving risk outside of national defense. Leave the whole capitalism thing to the capitalists.
Because capitalists always have the best interests of the human race at heart, and will never do anything that will adversely affect the economy. (How did that global financial crisis work out for you?)
The world is based on technology and infrastructure created by government investment. Sure there have been failures, but no system will have a 100% success rate.
Microsoft is very good at this. It is a formula that has worked for them since the early 80s.
Really? I am struggling to think of an example of this from Microsoft. Of the leaks that they have had, I can't think of an instance when they have been caught out doing it deliberately (as opposed to bloggers just speculating this). Microsoft are much more likely to blatantly put out a press release to announce something long before it is ready to be released, in the hope that this will kill off the competition.
The next time you see something leak about that new Rick Roll of an OS they plan to call "Windows 8" look closely, it is no accident, it is pure marketing.
Why would they need to leak information about Windows 8 when they are actively previewing it?
No, it is not. Even if there was parity between the A$ and US$ (which there is not), $0.99 to $1.19 markup would be a 20% tax. A $1.99 to $2.49 markup would be a 25% tax.
I will upgrade when my games require me to. In three years I will probably need a new rig anyway.
That is exactly what you should do. In fact, it is exactly what the majority of people do. This explains why there are so many XP users: computers from that era still fast enough to run standard office apps so they do not need to be updated. Even games have stagnated a bit as developers do not push the bounds of computers anymore because they want to ensure they work on the rather long-in-the-tooth next gen consoles too.
I wouldn't loose too much sleep if N. Korea was no longer in the UN.
(It is lose, not loose). How is shunning the country going to help to encourage them to become better members of the world community? If you stop listening to any group of people then it causes resentment to fester. This is never a good thing at any time, but especially when talking about nuclear weapons.
North Korea should have a role in a dispute of which they are part, especially at a time when the country is falling into disarray need to be given shown the path of enlightenment(1). The alternative is to have a country with nothing to lose by going to war.
---------- (1) Yes, I know that sounds a bit hippie!
Opening the source would not have prevented Google from inadvertently collecting that information and it won't do anything to help Microsoft not get caught in the same problem.
The difference is that Google used someone else's code whereas Microsoft wrote their own. Neither company actually wants to log everyone's WiFi packets, but it would be far easier for Google to accidentally click a checkbox in a third party app to enable this feature than for Microsoft to accidentally write code to do the same thing.
Both companies had access to their respective source code, and I would argue that in this case it was the closed source code that received more scrutiny. Microsoft would have actually looked closer at their source (because they wrote it themselves), while Google could easily use their package without giving the code a glance.
IMHO, releasing only part of the source code is indeed, like GP said, more dangerous than no release at all. Just that he forgot to mention that it's potentially dangerous in both directions - both to the world at large ("oh look, stuff to test for exploits!"), and to Microsoft ("OAMG they're hiding something! You can't even test what's there without violating a license!").
That is not correct in this case. The problem is that everyone believed the article when they said that this was the code from Windows Phone 7. This is actually the code from Microsoft's vans that collected geolocation data. (similar to Google's vans that logged everyone's WiFi packets that got them into strife). The fact that they didn't release the entire code is irrelevant because none of us have the binaries with which to compare the source code. Therefore there are also no security problems with them releasing this code either.
It's very likely Microsoft will never release anything that will satiate people who understand licenses and value freedom. Microsoft likes you to sign crazy NDAs for access to specs and source and ties their own developers and evangelists hands.
And yet here they are releasing the code without requiring crazy NDAs. That is not to say that they haven't required NDAs in the past (like when they have released the full code for Windows for specialised uses), but that doesn't mean that everytime they release some code that it get tied up in paperwork.
He couldn't hook the WP7 phone he had to the projector like he normally does because Microsoft's legal department took away the cable he had been using for presentations...
Why? Was there an actual legal reason behind this, or did someone just pinch his cable? It seems pretty unlikely that the legal department would prevent them from advertising a released product.
Isn't it annoying when people's real world experience doesn't match your biased rantings. If you find that death wishes do not solve your problem, you can always try closing you eyes, blocking your ears and yelling "I'm not listening".
You haven't tripled shit. The article here is about how xbox live people aren't making jack on their games so how is that tripling your income?
And do you really think that iOS, Android and PC games have a better chance of making money? All of the markets are heavily saturated. You say that developers should just pick one platform? So which platform should it be if you want to make money?
Probably your best bet at getting noticed would probably to develop for Windows Phone 7, because I don't imagine that there is much competition in their app store (unless you are making a tumbleweed app).
I'm not infallible. The market results described in this article demonstrate that my previous advice of using Mono was ill founded.
You are being too harsh on yourself. If you develop in a cross platform way then you do not have to be completely profitable on each individual platform. Your code can target mobile, console and PC simultaneously, so you have tripled your income for the same game. Granted it does cost a bit more to target multiple platforms, but it would not triple the production costs.
What would you use to export your user data from Exchange Server? PSTs will contain all your messages, calendar entries, tasks and notes in one single file, which can then be easily imported into Microsoft's cloud servers. I can't see what is the downside to this file format for this purpose.
Dropbox is probably bigger and better engineered than anything the NHS could whip up using NIH (not invented here)
And you have fallen into the trap of assuming that a private company must be able to do it better than a government department. Seriously, why would you think that Dropbox must be the "pros" and the NHS be "amateurs"? Dropbox was created by a couple of guys who got seed funding from a venture capital company. Given the criticism that Dropbox has received in regards to security then it seems crazy to use that company as the epitome of professionalism.
Here is that criticism section from Wikipedia in full in case you can't be bothered following the link:
Dropbox has been criticized by independent security researcher Derek Newton. Derek Newton has argued that Dropbox's authentication architecture is inherently insecure by design.
Dropbox has been criticized for not supporting the ability for users to use their own AES-256 keys and for automatically signing in.
Dropbox was also criticized for their accidental use of a fake DMCA takedown notice in an attempt to kill off an open source software project that took advantage of security flaws in their API. The software, known as Dropship, has since been mirrored widely.
In May 2011, a complaint was filed with the US FTC alleging Dropbox misled users about the privacy and security of their files. At the heart of the complaint was the policy of "deduplication", where the system checks if a file has been uploaded before by any other user, and links to the existing copy if so; and the policy of using a single AES-256 key for every file on the system so Dropbox can (and does, for deduplication) look at encrypted files stored on the system, with the consequence that any intruder who gets the key (as well as Dropbox employees) could decrypt any file if they had access to Dropbox's backend storage infrastructure.
On 20 June 2011, all DropBox accounts could be accessed without password for 4 hours as reported by TechCrunch. The error was caused by a code update made at 1:54 pm Pacific Time. The error was detected at 5:41 pm and immediately fixed. Less than 1 percent of Dropbox's users were logged in at that time. All logged in sessions were ended since then. All users with compromised accounts were notified by emails. Dropbox could potentially face a class action lawsuit over this incident. The lawsuit is being initiated by Cristina Wong of Los Angeles and claims violation of the California Unfair Competition Law.
In June 2011, a tool called Dropbox Reader was released by Architecture Technology Corporation (ATC) of New York, and the tool is very similar to Dropship. It allows outsiders to achieve long-term access to any user's files by locally running a Python script on the victim's computer to obtain the proprietary access token. Dropbox was roundly criticized for this vulnerability in their product despite having released a beta version of their desktop client that fixes the vulnerability almost two month prior.
Slashdot Mirror
The summary is not accurate. Just because 50% or fewer of those hitting their pages are using XP to browse the web doesn't mean that it has less than 50% of the desktop.
True, but there is no reliable (and practical) way to measure the OS usage other than to look at web server hits. And since it is a purely arbitrary statistic which should not be used to determine which OS is right for you then it really doesn't matter how accurate the percentage is.
Something tells me that an Australian company would not be using inches to track anything. TFA seems to agree. Our official conversion tables between metric and "ye olde worlde" include the phrase "an inch is as good as a mile", which does not bode well for its accuracy.
Back in the day we had fun stealing cars for joy rides and doing jewlery store heists. These These days kids have fun attacking computers, much more victim less crime.
I think that Sony would disagree with you there. I doubt that the total value of your stolen cars and jewellery would add up to anywhere near what Sony has lost due to its recent hacks.
A fair point, but the fact they were overpaying by a factor of nine for the copier paper too, which I'm assuming didn't come with a support contract or licensing, seems to imply there was still significant waste going on.
That is assuming that it is true. Has anyone been able to find where it mentions copier paper for £73? I did a quick search of the report and found no mention of this example.
I wanted to see just what kind of paper you would get for this much money. A quick search of the net found a real-world example. I can't think of a reason why anyone in government would need parchment paper, but was this the kind of thing being purchased? If it was a specialty paper then the comparison to the £8 variety might not be valid.
And whatever you do, don't mention the war.
You started it.
lewko mentioned it once, but I think he got away with it.
I believe this to be true, and 10% of my friends agree!
If commentary on Groklaw concerning this very subject is any indication of probably outcome, then the case is pretty much already lost because of the doctrine of estoppel.
That is interesting. If this is a valid defense then I wonder why we also find warnings on Groklaw to avoid Mono because of patent concerns. Surely the same doctrine would cover Mono even more than this case, because Microsoft have been way more enthusiastic a simple press release.
I understand that in regular speech it just means "going faster" and the direction component is dropped. Understand that NASA is full of scientists and they may use science terms in a more precise manner.
Quite right. It is just the units of measurement that NASA does not always get right. Miles, kilometers; what's the difference?
Apple has a litigation page too. Your link does not really show much out of the ordinary. Every large company who has a portfolio of patents will most likely have a history of lawsuits. Is there any evidence of Microsoft having a disproportionately large number of patent disputes for its size?
If anything, its willingness to provide licenses for their IP shows a preference for keeping disagreements out of the legal system.
After 7 years, Mono have still yet to be sued by Microsoft, Oracle or anyone. It seems that you have a bigger chance of your tinfoil hat falling off your head than Mono threatening FOSS.
Who's gonna pay for that? You?
Good call. It is inconceivable that anybody would pay for a mobile, net connected technology.
On another matter, can anyone tell me how this Amish Anonymous Coward managed to make this post on Slashdot?
How about this: It's a bad idea to use the money of tax payers to do anything involving risk outside of national defense. Leave the whole capitalism thing to the capitalists.
Because capitalists always have the best interests of the human race at heart, and will never do anything that will adversely affect the economy. (How did that global financial crisis work out for you?)
The world is based on technology and infrastructure created by government investment. Sure there have been failures, but no system will have a 100% success rate.
Microsoft is very good at this. It is a formula that has worked for them since the early 80s.
Really? I am struggling to think of an example of this from Microsoft. Of the leaks that they have had, I can't think of an instance when they have been caught out doing it deliberately (as opposed to bloggers just speculating this). Microsoft are much more likely to blatantly put out a press release to announce something long before it is ready to be released, in the hope that this will kill off the competition.
The next time you see something leak about that new Rick Roll of an OS they plan to call "Windows 8" look closely, it is no accident, it is pure marketing.
Why would they need to leak information about Windows 8 when they are actively previewing it?
Remove the tax and the prices are the same.
No, it is not. Even if there was parity between the A$ and US$ (which there is not), $0.99 to $1.19 markup would be a 20% tax. A $1.99 to $2.49 markup would be a 25% tax.
I will upgrade when my games require me to. In three years I will probably need a new rig anyway.
That is exactly what you should do. In fact, it is exactly what the majority of people do. This explains why there are so many XP users: computers from that era still fast enough to run standard office apps so they do not need to be updated. Even games have stagnated a bit as developers do not push the bounds of computers anymore because they want to ensure they work on the rather long-in-the-tooth next gen consoles too.
I wouldn't loose too much sleep if N. Korea was no longer in the UN.
(It is lose, not loose). How is shunning the country going to help to encourage them to become better members of the world community? If you stop listening to any group of people then it causes resentment to fester. This is never a good thing at any time, but especially when talking about nuclear weapons.
North Korea should have a role in a dispute of which they are part, especially at a time when the country is falling into disarray need to be given shown the path of enlightenment(1). The alternative is to have a country with nothing to lose by going to war.
----------
(1) Yes, I know that sounds a bit hippie!
Opening the source would not have prevented Google from inadvertently collecting that information and it won't do anything to help Microsoft not get caught in the same problem.
The difference is that Google used someone else's code whereas Microsoft wrote their own. Neither company actually wants to log everyone's WiFi packets, but it would be far easier for Google to accidentally click a checkbox in a third party app to enable this feature than for Microsoft to accidentally write code to do the same thing.
Both companies had access to their respective source code, and I would argue that in this case it was the closed source code that received more scrutiny. Microsoft would have actually looked closer at their source (because they wrote it themselves), while Google could easily use their package without giving the code a glance.
IMHO, releasing only part of the source code is indeed, like GP said, more dangerous than no release at all. Just that he forgot to mention that it's potentially dangerous in both directions - both to the world at large ("oh look, stuff to test for exploits!"), and to Microsoft ("OAMG they're hiding something! You can't even test what's there without violating a license!").
That is not correct in this case. The problem is that everyone believed the article when they said that this was the code from Windows Phone 7. This is actually the code from Microsoft's vans that collected geolocation data. (similar to Google's vans that logged everyone's WiFi packets that got them into strife). The fact that they didn't release the entire code is irrelevant because none of us have the binaries with which to compare the source code. Therefore there are also no security problems with them releasing this code either.
It's very likely Microsoft will never release anything that will satiate people who understand licenses and value freedom. Microsoft likes you to sign crazy NDAs for access to specs and source and ties their own developers and evangelists hands.
And yet here they are releasing the code without requiring crazy NDAs. That is not to say that they haven't required NDAs in the past (like when they have released the full code for Windows for specialised uses), but that doesn't mean that everytime they release some code that it get tied up in paperwork.
He couldn't hook the WP7 phone he had to the projector like he normally does because Microsoft's legal department took away the cable he had been using for presentations...
Why? Was there an actual legal reason behind this, or did someone just pinch his cable? It seems pretty unlikely that the legal department would prevent them from advertising a released product.
If you really must bury something somewhere like that, go get a policeman you doing it, preferably with a sheet of paper that explains its legalities.
What are the legalities? I presumed that this would actually be considered to be littering.
Die in a fire.
Isn't it annoying when people's real world experience doesn't match your biased rantings. If you find that death wishes do not solve your problem, you can always try closing you eyes, blocking your ears and yelling "I'm not listening".
You haven't tripled shit. The article here is about how xbox live people aren't making jack on their games so how is that tripling your income?
And do you really think that iOS, Android and PC games have a better chance of making money? All of the markets are heavily saturated. You say that developers should just pick one platform? So which platform should it be if you want to make money?
Probably your best bet at getting noticed would probably to develop for Windows Phone 7, because I don't imagine that there is much competition in their app store (unless you are making a tumbleweed app).
I'm not infallible. The market results described in this article demonstrate that my previous advice of using Mono was ill founded.
You are being too harsh on yourself. If you develop in a cross platform way then you do not have to be completely profitable on each individual platform. Your code can target mobile, console and PC simultaneously, so you have tripled your income for the same game. Granted it does cost a bit more to target multiple platforms, but it would not triple the production costs.
Really? PSTs? The ginormous outlook files?
What would you use to export your user data from Exchange Server? PSTs will contain all your messages, calendar entries, tasks and notes in one single file, which can then be easily imported into Microsoft's cloud servers. I can't see what is the downside to this file format for this purpose.
Dropbox is probably bigger and better engineered than anything the NHS could whip up using NIH (not invented here)
And you have fallen into the trap of assuming that a private company must be able to do it better than a government department. Seriously, why would you think that Dropbox must be the "pros" and the NHS be "amateurs"? Dropbox was created by a couple of guys who got seed funding from a venture capital company. Given the criticism that Dropbox has received in regards to security then it seems crazy to use that company as the epitome of professionalism.
Here is that criticism section from Wikipedia in full in case you can't be bothered following the link:
Dropbox has been criticized by independent security researcher Derek Newton. Derek Newton has argued that Dropbox's authentication architecture is inherently insecure by design.
Dropbox has been criticized for not supporting the ability for users to use their own AES-256 keys and for automatically signing in.
Dropbox was also criticized for their accidental use of a fake DMCA takedown notice in an attempt to kill off an open source software project that took advantage of security flaws in their API. The software, known as Dropship, has since been mirrored widely.
In May 2011, a complaint was filed with the US FTC alleging Dropbox misled users about the privacy and security of their files. At the heart of the complaint was the policy of "deduplication", where the system checks if a file has been uploaded before by any other user, and links to the existing copy if so; and the policy of using a single AES-256 key for every file on the system so Dropbox can (and does, for deduplication) look at encrypted files stored on the system, with the consequence that any intruder who gets the key (as well as Dropbox employees) could decrypt any file if they had access to Dropbox's backend storage infrastructure.
On 20 June 2011, all DropBox accounts could be accessed without password for 4 hours as reported by TechCrunch. The error was caused by a code update made at 1:54 pm Pacific Time. The error was detected at 5:41 pm and immediately fixed. Less than 1 percent of Dropbox's users were logged in at that time. All logged in sessions were ended since then. All users with compromised accounts were notified by emails. Dropbox could potentially face a class action lawsuit over this incident. The lawsuit is being initiated by Cristina Wong of Los Angeles and claims violation of the California Unfair Competition Law.
In June 2011, a tool called Dropbox Reader was released by Architecture Technology Corporation (ATC) of New York, and the tool is very similar to Dropship. It allows outsiders to achieve long-term access to any user's files by locally running a Python script on the victim's computer to obtain the proprietary access token. Dropbox was roundly criticized for this vulnerability in their product despite having released a beta version of their desktop client that fixes the vulnerability almost two month prior.