Question: so why is it that MS's OS is the only operating system that NEEDS anti-virus and anti-malware products? Why is it that "Other" operating systems are secure by design?
Windows isn't the only OS that has security problems, otherwise competitions like Pwn2own would only successfully hack Windows.
The big failure of Microsoft was to not insist on creating two accounts during the Windows installation - one for administration and one for actual usage. I guess they thought that people were so used to being admin by default in Windows 9x that they had to continue it 2000 and XP. To some extent they were correct. Witness the complaints about Vista and the terrible inconvenience of having to jump through more hoops to changes system settings. People like me who have always run a restricted user account couldn't see what the fuss was about.
Really why wasn't Windows7 free to those who bought Vista? After all Vista is broken by design.
No, Vista was different by design, not broken. After all, Windows 7 is still quite similar to Vista and a lot of people rave about it. Vista's big problem was that it had all new driver designs requiring new 3rd party drivers to be written. Early Vista adopters had to use buggy, beta drivers (hello Nvidia) and so any instabilities were attributed to the operating system.
I never tried Windows ME, but I do wonder how much of its bad reputation was due to the same problem. ME got rid of real mode DOS, which caused havoc for driver developers.
No you should still NEVER run a Windows box on a un-trusted network. Read any book on network security and it will tell you that.
What book says that? In these days of public WiFi, more and more people are connecting to untrusted networks. Any modern Windows will cope fine with that.
Not true. A firewall cannot prevent from a virus taking over your computer, it only protects from accessing specific ports.
The big problem that Windows had prior to XP Service Pack 2 was that it had numerous, unnecessary ports open by default that were riddled with security holes. It was so bad that you just had to connect to the Internet without going to ANY sites and you would get infected. It was that problem to which I referred in my original post.
But you are quite right that once you start actually going to sites that you will need some antivirus software, like the Microsoft Security Essentials that I wrote about earlier. Although, I found that if you disable ActiveX then you hugely diminish the need for antivirus software just for general web browsing. I used to do that and use ClamWin so I could scan files I downloaded. It didn't have realtime protection that slowed down the computer.
I have a PC that exceeds the recommended system requirements for Phantasy Star Universe, and it runs crappily on it at low settings.
Seriously? The recommended specs called for a 2.6GHz Pentium 4. I'm surprised that you would have problems with something from 2006. Perhaps it is a networking issue. Or maybe it belongs in my category of poorly performing console ports to which I referred in my previous post.
PS3 playing PS2 games upscaled to HD.
Ah yes, I had forgotten about that since I don't own a PS3. Does it make a noticable difference? Do the textures get higher resolution or something?
The proof is in the pudding: even if you're right, and Microsoft is truly doing all that it can in this regard (and, let's be clear here, it is not) whatever they are doing is not enough. Not nearly enough.
So let's see. You originally tried to prove your original ascertian that Microsoft ignores home users by saying that they made a mistake about the Internet over 15 years ago, then misrepresented the current state of Windows security to be like it was 6 years ago, and now you say that while they might not be ignoring those user's needs, what they are doing for them is not enough. I am sure that if we wait long enough, you will try to prove your original statement by saying that 8.3 filename limits are user-unfriendly! Go on! I would love to reminisce about the 80s.
If you've ever spent an evening cleaning malware from a badly infected Windows system, you will understand exactly what I'm talking about.
Yes, I have done that. But I haven't had to do that in quite a while. These days, I can set up a system using pretty much the default configuration (but with non-administrator accounts plus MSE). I don't remember the last time I had to fix up a virused system. It does help my that my family and friends have heard my nags enough times that they don't run random executables that are sent to them.
Of the dozen infections that I had to clean from a friend's computer last night, you know how many that free Microsoft package found? One guess. That's right. ZERO. I had to run several different scanners to get rid of most of them (a couple I had to remove the hard way, removing entries from the registry and manually deleting executables.)
I can't speak about a setup that I hadn't seen - perhaps this friend was one of those people who turns off UAC and runs as administrator because otherwise it is annoying. But in general, no antivirus solution will catch everything. You yourself said that you had to use several different scanners to catch the infections. I do wonder how many of those infections were false positives or "dangerous" advertiser cookies. And maybe that computer already ran MSE so that it had already blocked the malware that it could handle. Or maybe the friend and his computer didn't exist. I'm sorry, but the way you are wildly and desperately throwing around unrelated and out-of-date Microsoft complaints to justify your original statement, I just can't completely trust your story.
However, if you google "microsoft security essential review" then you will find quite a number of reviews that all tend to conclude that while MSE doesn't catch everything, it is lightweight and a good free solution. My google of "anti virus comparison" gave me http://www.av-comparatives.org/ as the first match. The first PDF of results I found there showed MSE had a 97.6% detection rate. Not the top of the list, but not the bottom either. Does that result really warrant your vitriol about this product? No.
The fact that there are security holes in Windows doesn't prove that Microsoft doesn't care. The only thing that would is if they hadn't made any improvements to the operating system over the years. Do you really believe that Windows 7 is a bad a XP when it was first released? How about Windows ME?
Just look at the newest games and how badly they perform on supposedly "powerful" machines.
That is wrong. At the default (mainstream) settings virtually all games play well on the current level of gaming computers. Although I will concede that there have been some console ports that perform so poorly that you wonder whether they are running under a console emulator. But that is not representative of all PC games.
The people who complain about poor performance are those who insist on pushing all the game settings up to maximum. The reason they have the adjustable settings in PC games is for those people who spend stupid amounts of money on their systems, to extend the shelf life of the game by future-proofing it, and to make pretty screenshots to help sell the game.
People often use your argument as a reason for why console gaming is better, but that it because console games don't have the option of increasing the video settings to maximum. They are fixed at the mainstream level. And often the default mainstream settings on a PC game will still look better than the console versions.
Finally, if you decide to revisit an old game in a few years time, your console game won't age as well as a PC game because you will be able to use all the maximum settings on your upgraded PC. That comparison is assuming your PS4 or XBOX 720 will actually run the old software.
MS only cares when something affects their bottom line. They, like most corporations, only care about profit.
I addressed that when I pointed out that half their market share was with clueless home users. It would be exceedingly unprofitable to ignore a massive part of their user base. Having people use their software at home also helps their market penetration with the businesses. A large factor in choosing the Windows platform at work is that the training costs are reduced because most people use Windows at home and will be familiar with how it works.
And that feeds back to their market share with home users because people will buy the product that they already know how to use at work. The cycle continues. This is the reason why Microsoft offers the Office 2010 Starter edition for only $2 per licence (for OEMs). They can't make a profit out of that, but it keeps home users familiar with Microsoft's products.
So you can see that while their motives may be profit driven, they certainly care about the user experience of the home user market (clueless or otherwise).
Nothing you said there has ANYTHING to do with Microsoft not caring about "clueless home users". I called you on that comment and you just changed the subject.
You say Microsoft misread the importance of the Internet. Absolutely, although it was 15 years ago! But what has that got to do with them not caring about home users?
You claim Windows can't be used safely on an untrusted network? That is false, the current version ships with the firewall turned on and most of the useless network services turned off. Gone are the days when you would be infected within 15 minutes of connecting to the Internet with a vanilla install.
Despite what you say, you don't have to install a third party firewall and run third party anti-malware software. My original post to you linked to the free Microsoft supplied anti-malware software. Why did you just ignore that? All the reports that I have seen about it have been quite positive.
And I still don't see any evidence of Microsoft ignoring the plight of clueless home users.
This bolting on of security solutions like UAC isn't going to to cut it anymore.
Why? And what will be improved by rewriting the OS? There still has to be some permission system to be able to install software without having to login to another account. What mechanism would you suggest they use? How would that be immune to security bugs?
...what Apple did by porting OSX for Intel in parallel says volumes about their company.
What does it say about them? How does that compare with Microsoft writing Windows NT for Intel x86 PC compatible, DEC Alpha, and ARC-compliant MIPS platforms, with PowerPC being added later?
If they stripped it down and provided only core services like OpenBSD it would be even better.
Then you want the Server Core installation option of Windows Server. About bloody time too!
The problems really exist in user space where you have a lot of naive people running random executables provided by some very bad people who spend all day looking for holes.
That is easily fixed. Don't give them a mouse. They won't be able to run ANY software then! It won't affect power users, as they should be able to do just about everything using keyboard shortcuts.
When has anyone, especially Microsoft, ever cared about them?
What a completely uncalled for comment. When did Microsoft care for clueless home users? When half their market share was with clueless home users. When they implemented the UAC (the corporate world already knew to setup limited domain user accounts). When they came out with the free Microsoft Security Essentials, which was designed for home users. When they implemented automatic updates because clueless home users never applied service packs. Or maybe when they did a better job of locking down the default settings in the latest Windows/Internet Explorer.
Sure, they don't do a perfect job, as this case shows. But you will find privilege escalation bugs on most operating systems and Microsoft WILL come out with a patch to fix the bug. All the clueless home users have to do is wait for it to be automatically downloaded and applied.
That raises an interesting point. These ships travel a lot farther than any car ever would. If the ships could be replaced by cars driving the same route, how many cars would it take to produce the same amount of pollution? I wager it would be far fewer than 50 million.
Emissions were reduced due to economic decline. Atmospheric levels were reduced due to a climate cycle that increased absorption. Atmospheric levels actually increased due to increased emissions.
So emissions went down and up, and levels went down and up. All in the same year.
Science. We could use some here.
I see why you are getting confused. The climate is a complicated system. There isn't just one mechanism controlling the global temperature. The one you always hear about in the news is CO2 (which is a complicated system of its own), but as you have learned here today, there are other factors like the variations in the sun's output and La Niña & El Niño. El Niño was the reason that 1998 was so hot (which is why if anyone tries to use that year to argue either for or against climate change then you know that they are being deliberately misleading).
To explain how CO2 emissions can go down and yet the temperature can go up (ignoring the other factors), imagine that you have a bath filled with water. If you pull the plug then the water level drops. But if you turn on the tap to pour in the same amount of water that is going down the drain, then the water level will remain steady. It is not that the water stops going down the drain, but that the lost water is being replaced. This represents the CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
CO2 is absorbed out of the atmosphere by various means, and more is emitted into the atmosphere from various sources - some of which are man made.
Back to the bath, what happens if you turn up the tap so that more water is going into the bath than can go down the plug hole? The water level rises. If you put in an extra 5% of water then the level will increase by that amount because it simply has nowhere else to go.
So does the water level go down if you reduce the water emissions by 1.3%? No, because you are still adding in 3.7% more water than the equilibrium. That is why your quoted text said "even at the reduced pace, humans are pumping CO2 into the atmosphere faster than natural processes can scrub the gas".
That quote is a bit misleading, because as I said before there are many sources of CO2, so it is not just the amount pumped out by humans that is causing the problem. Some people have tried to use this fact as a reason for not doing anything about global warming, saying that it is not man's fault. It is a dubious argument, and in the end a pointless one. If we want to control the environment then the easiest solution is to adjust the portion of CO2 that is generated by man.
Do you seriously see lots of superfluous, empty return statements at the end of functions in javascript? As an example, I just had a quick look at the source to this/. page and didn't find a single example of this. The only time you will ever see a return statement is if there is an early return within a function or a function returns a value. While it is valid to have an empty return statement at the end of a function, nobody ever does it.
In terms of optimising the javascript, the code in question contains a small loop with some straightforward calculations. There were no object handling, memory allocation, string manipulation, or DOM access. There is some array access, but obviously it is able to cope with that. It is a prime candidate for aggressive optimisation, which I suspect is why it performs so well.
Perhaps the mere existence of a return statement in a function is enough of a trigger for the optimiser to go into a conservative mode to ensure that it doesn't inadvertently introduce errors. Remember, the optimisation runs at runtime, and so has to be faster than one from an compiler and therefore must be fairly simple. If the optimisation process is too complicated, then it will end up being slower than just interpreting as you go.
It is actually a couple of months old. The thing that makes me doubt the claims of cheating is that nobody has been able to find other examples of performance variations in this benchmark in all the time since this came to light. If they were going to cheat, why limit it to the cordic test? Nobody would base their browser choice on this obscure test.
I don't have the beta installed yet, but what I would like to see is the actual calculation changed and then run the tests again. Don't just put in weird code like "true;" but make the javascript plausible. It could be that the addition of these unusual statements are enough to confuse the optimiser so that it resorts back to a completely unoptimised version.
do companies not use a certain software because its not certified my Microsoft?
No. Only a small minority of software is certified, so you would be limiting your options way too much if you discounted the non-certified options. However, it is useful when comparing software to know which ones are certified, because it gives you the confidence that it will work in most environments. I have used non-administrator accounts since the days of NT4, and being certified meant that you knew the software would not have a fit as soon as it couldn't write into your C:\Windows folder.
And heck, maybe even a.NET application could now seek to be certified!
.NET applications have been certified for years. Spend a couple of minutes on Google and you will find examples for both the server platform and the desktop edition.
As for SilverStripe, I imagine the reason that open source software would be rare on the list of certified products is that there are costs involved with doing it, and the kind of audience who generally use open souce products probably don't care a damn about any official "certified" logo.
That has nothing to do with the topic that we are discussing here - namely that Microsoft is going to have a sudden change of heart and use it's patents to stuff the open source genie back into the bottle. Right from the beginnings, Mono has had critics that said that Microsoft would kill it off. Back then it was completely unfounded FUD and it continues to be so today.
I think Wine and ReactOS have not been targeted because they aren't big enough to be worth the major bad PR.
I agree that ReactOS is pretty insignificant at the moment (although I do have hopes for it), but Wine is the poster-child for running Windows apps on non-Microsoft platforms. I think it is definitely big enough to be on the radar.
Example, what about WISE ?
I don't see how WISE could be considered to be similar. I found it quite difficult to get any real details about the case, since most reports are vague about the details. However, according to the summary in Tech Law Journal:
"Bristol had a contract with Microsoft that commenced in September 1994, and expired in September 1997, under which Microsoft provided Bristol with source code for Windows NT 3.0 and earlier OS software. Microsoft was not obligated under this contract to provide Bristol with Windows NT 4.0 or 5.0 source code, and Microsoft has not provided it to Bristol. Bristol and Microsoft negotiated, but did not reach, a contract to provide 4.0 and 5.0 source code."
So it appears that Microsoft had contracted to supply the source to v3.0, and Bristol complained when MS wanted more money for a contact for 4.0 and up. That is nothing like what people are claiming that they will do with Mono.
What a stupid article. It complains because Microsoft implemented the standards strictly. I have always found it amusing that people complained when the file format of Office 2007 was different to the standardised Office Open XML (due to later changes in the standard), but then Micrsoft also copped flak because they implemented the ODF standard rather than the extensions used by OpenOffice.org. It seems that embracing and extending is good, but only if you are not Microsoft.
It seems quite clear that the original poster was describing his/her personal experience with the language. It is like asking for a citation when someone says that their favourite colour is blue. The better response would be to ask for an example of the problem.
With Microsofts history over the past 20 years, I'd say they won't pull any strange tricks until enough people have adapted it and are locked in, then they will suddenly have a change of heart.
When have Microsoft ever had a "change of heart" and clamped down on something of theirs that was previously open? What is the precedent over the 20 year period to which you refer?
Before anyone answers with FAT32/Tom Tom, Microsoft never opened (or encouraged anyone to use) FAT32 before they started licensing it. They also didn't sue anyone for years after they began their licensing program.
And how about those software projects that have not been officially sanctioned by Microsoft? How is Wine going? And ReactOS (even after there were claims of disassembled MS code in the project)? Still no legal action.
What I want to know is why the regulatory bodies of so many countries want to launch their own investigations into this. When has anything been discovered by these investigations that wasn't originally disclosed by Google? It was Google itself that announced to the world that this was going on, although only after Germany asked them about what they recorded. But it seems the only way to safeguard the privacy of the general public is for these government agencies to pick through the data, rather than just deleting it without looking.
Every time I hear of another country investigating Google about this, I am reminded of The Simpsons:
Lionel Hutz: How could you have seen all this, Bart? Weren't you supposed to be in school?
Bart: I sort of skipped school.
Principal Skinner: I knew it! I knew you'd slip up sooner or later, Simpson!
Apu: What slip up? What are you talking about? He confessed it!
Principal Skinner: Quiet, I need this.
I'm afraid it is not that simple. You should always be wary of assuming that the rules used in your locality are universal. There are two styles in general use regarding punctuation and quotation marks. See the wikipedia entry on the subject:
In the U.S., the standard style is called American style, typesetters' rules, printers' rules, typographical usage, or traditional punctuation, whereby commas and periods are almost always placed inside closing quotation marks. This style of punctuation is common in the U.S., Canada, and in the U.K. in fiction and journalism.
The other standard style--called British style or logical punctuation--is to include within quotation marks only those punctuation marks that appeared in the quoted material, but otherwise to place punctuation outside the closing quotation marks.
Using the British style is less ambiguous in this case.
IE8 (I have not tested IE9) makes me wait until the "tab home" is loaded before I'm allowed to open my bookmarks and click on a site to go there.
I have noticed something similar on my XP notebook when it gets really slow (when it uses up its 768MB of ram), but I haven't been able to test it on my Windows 7 system because it loads everything up too fast.
The other PITA I've noticed with IE is that you can't middle click on bookmarks to open them in new tabs. You have to open a new tab... then click your bookmark.
No, you don't have to do that. Although I do it with links, I had never thought about middle clicking on a bookmark (so thanks for the tip), but I just tried it and it actually does open in a new tab. This is in IE8/Win7.
The other thing I dislike about IE is it's restricted layout options (in Firefox I can move everything. Address bar and all.)
I can't see any reason to move the address and search, but the forward/back buttons and refresh/stop buttons position have always annoyed me. I would rather have them grouped together. (Also, refresh and stop should be the one button depending on if the page is still loading). I suppose the reasoning is that it keeps it consistent with the standard placement in the rest of the operating system.
The problem with Windows is the stable API which they can't kill off because no-one would buy Windows if it didn't support proprietary binaries from 1990 that they still run.
Actually, the 64-bit version of Windows wouldn't run binaries from 1990 since it doesn't include the WOW subsystem for 16-bit code. The inability to run Window 3.1 software doesn't seem to have affected the adoption of the 64-bit version of Windows 7.
And since the old code was handled by a separate subsystem (eg. GDI system is in gdi.exe for 16-bit and gdi32.dll for 32-bit), it didn't stop Micrsoft from making changes to the API when the moved to 32-bit (and later 64-bit).
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Question: so why is it that MS's OS is the only operating system that NEEDS anti-virus and anti-malware products? Why is it that "Other" operating systems are secure by design?
Windows isn't the only OS that has security problems, otherwise competitions like Pwn2own would only successfully hack Windows.
The big failure of Microsoft was to not insist on creating two accounts during the Windows installation - one for administration and one for actual usage. I guess they thought that people were so used to being admin by default in Windows 9x that they had to continue it 2000 and XP. To some extent they were correct. Witness the complaints about Vista and the terrible inconvenience of having to jump through more hoops to changes system settings. People like me who have always run a restricted user account couldn't see what the fuss was about.
Really why wasn't Windows7 free to those who bought Vista? After all Vista is broken by design.
No, Vista was different by design, not broken. After all, Windows 7 is still quite similar to Vista and a lot of people rave about it. Vista's big problem was that it had all new driver designs requiring new 3rd party drivers to be written. Early Vista adopters had to use buggy, beta drivers (hello Nvidia) and so any instabilities were attributed to the operating system.
I never tried Windows ME, but I do wonder how much of its bad reputation was due to the same problem. ME got rid of real mode DOS, which caused havoc for driver developers.
No you should still NEVER run a Windows box on a un-trusted network. Read any book on network security and it will tell you that.
What book says that? In these days of public WiFi, more and more people are connecting to untrusted networks. Any modern Windows will cope fine with that.
Not true. A firewall cannot prevent from a virus taking over your computer, it only protects from accessing specific ports.
The big problem that Windows had prior to XP Service Pack 2 was that it had numerous, unnecessary ports open by default that were riddled with security holes. It was so bad that you just had to connect to the Internet without going to ANY sites and you would get infected. It was that problem to which I referred in my original post.
But you are quite right that once you start actually going to sites that you will need some antivirus software, like the Microsoft Security Essentials that I wrote about earlier. Although, I found that if you disable ActiveX then you hugely diminish the need for antivirus software just for general web browsing. I used to do that and use ClamWin so I could scan files I downloaded. It didn't have realtime protection that slowed down the computer.
I have a PC that exceeds the recommended system requirements for Phantasy Star Universe, and it runs crappily on it at low settings.
Seriously? The recommended specs called for a 2.6GHz Pentium 4. I'm surprised that you would have problems with something from 2006. Perhaps it is a networking issue. Or maybe it belongs in my category of poorly performing console ports to which I referred in my previous post.
PS3 playing PS2 games upscaled to HD.
Ah yes, I had forgotten about that since I don't own a PS3. Does it make a noticable difference? Do the textures get higher resolution or something?
The proof is in the pudding: even if you're right, and Microsoft is truly doing all that it can in this regard (and, let's be clear here, it is not) whatever they are doing is not enough. Not nearly enough.
So let's see. You originally tried to prove your original ascertian that Microsoft ignores home users by saying that they made a mistake about the Internet over 15 years ago, then misrepresented the current state of Windows security to be like it was 6 years ago, and now you say that while they might not be ignoring those user's needs, what they are doing for them is not enough. I am sure that if we wait long enough, you will try to prove your original statement by saying that 8.3 filename limits are user-unfriendly! Go on! I would love to reminisce about the 80s.
If you've ever spent an evening cleaning malware from a badly infected Windows system, you will understand exactly what I'm talking about.
Yes, I have done that. But I haven't had to do that in quite a while. These days, I can set up a system using pretty much the default configuration (but with non-administrator accounts plus MSE). I don't remember the last time I had to fix up a virused system. It does help my that my family and friends have heard my nags enough times that they don't run random executables that are sent to them.
Of the dozen infections that I had to clean from a friend's computer last night, you know how many that free Microsoft package found? One guess. That's right. ZERO. I had to run several different scanners to get rid of most of them (a couple I had to remove the hard way, removing entries from the registry and manually deleting executables.)
I can't speak about a setup that I hadn't seen - perhaps this friend was one of those people who turns off UAC and runs as administrator because otherwise it is annoying. But in general, no antivirus solution will catch everything. You yourself said that you had to use several different scanners to catch the infections. I do wonder how many of those infections were false positives or "dangerous" advertiser cookies. And maybe that computer already ran MSE so that it had already blocked the malware that it could handle. Or maybe the friend and his computer didn't exist. I'm sorry, but the way you are wildly and desperately throwing around unrelated and out-of-date Microsoft complaints to justify your original statement, I just can't completely trust your story.
However, if you google "microsoft security essential review" then you will find quite a number of reviews that all tend to conclude that while MSE doesn't catch everything, it is lightweight and a good free solution. My google of "anti virus comparison" gave me http://www.av-comparatives.org/ as the first match. The first PDF of results I found there showed MSE had a 97.6% detection rate. Not the top of the list, but not the bottom either. Does that result really warrant your vitriol about this product? No.
The fact that there are security holes in Windows doesn't prove that Microsoft doesn't care. The only thing that would is if they hadn't made any improvements to the operating system over the years. Do you really believe that Windows 7 is a bad a XP when it was first released? How about Windows ME?
Just look at the newest games and how badly they perform on supposedly "powerful" machines.
That is wrong. At the default (mainstream) settings virtually all games play well on the current level of gaming computers. Although I will concede that there have been some console ports that perform so poorly that you wonder whether they are running under a console emulator. But that is not representative of all PC games.
The people who complain about poor performance are those who insist on pushing all the game settings up to maximum. The reason they have the adjustable settings in PC games is for those people who spend stupid amounts of money on their systems, to extend the shelf life of the game by future-proofing it, and to make pretty screenshots to help sell the game.
People often use your argument as a reason for why console gaming is better, but that it because console games don't have the option of increasing the video settings to maximum. They are fixed at the mainstream level. And often the default mainstream settings on a PC game will still look better than the console versions.
Finally, if you decide to revisit an old game in a few years time, your console game won't age as well as a PC game because you will be able to use all the maximum settings on your upgraded PC. That comparison is assuming your PS4 or XBOX 720 will actually run the old software.
MS only cares when something affects their bottom line. They, like most corporations, only care about profit.
I addressed that when I pointed out that half their market share was with clueless home users. It would be exceedingly unprofitable to ignore a massive part of their user base. Having people use their software at home also helps their market penetration with the businesses. A large factor in choosing the Windows platform at work is that the training costs are reduced because most people use Windows at home and will be familiar with how it works.
And that feeds back to their market share with home users because people will buy the product that they already know how to use at work. The cycle continues. This is the reason why Microsoft offers the Office 2010 Starter edition for only $2 per licence (for OEMs). They can't make a profit out of that, but it keeps home users familiar with Microsoft's products.
So you can see that while their motives may be profit driven, they certainly care about the user experience of the home user market (clueless or otherwise).
Nothing you said there has ANYTHING to do with Microsoft not caring about "clueless home users". I called you on that comment and you just changed the subject.
You say Microsoft misread the importance of the Internet. Absolutely, although it was 15 years ago! But what has that got to do with them not caring about home users?
You claim Windows can't be used safely on an untrusted network? That is false, the current version ships with the firewall turned on and most of the useless network services turned off. Gone are the days when you would be infected within 15 minutes of connecting to the Internet with a vanilla install.
Despite what you say, you don't have to install a third party firewall and run third party anti-malware software. My original post to you linked to the free Microsoft supplied anti-malware software. Why did you just ignore that? All the reports that I have seen about it have been quite positive.
And I still don't see any evidence of Microsoft ignoring the plight of clueless home users.
This bolting on of security solutions like UAC isn't going to to cut it anymore.
Why? And what will be improved by rewriting the OS? There still has to be some permission system to be able to install software without having to login to another account. What mechanism would you suggest they use? How would that be immune to security bugs?
...what Apple did by porting OSX for Intel in parallel says volumes about their company.
What does it say about them? How does that compare with Microsoft writing Windows NT for Intel x86 PC compatible, DEC Alpha, and ARC-compliant MIPS platforms, with PowerPC being added later?
If they stripped it down and provided only core services like OpenBSD it would be even better.
Then you want the Server Core installation option of Windows Server. About bloody time too!
The problems really exist in user space where you have a lot of naive people running random executables provided by some very bad people who spend all day looking for holes.
That is easily fixed. Don't give them a mouse. They won't be able to run ANY software then! It won't affect power users, as they should be able to do just about everything using keyboard shortcuts.
When has anyone, especially Microsoft, ever cared about them?
What a completely uncalled for comment. When did Microsoft care for clueless home users? When half their market share was with clueless home users. When they implemented the UAC (the corporate world already knew to setup limited domain user accounts). When they came out with the free Microsoft Security Essentials, which was designed for home users. When they implemented automatic updates because clueless home users never applied service packs. Or maybe when they did a better job of locking down the default settings in the latest Windows/Internet Explorer.
Sure, they don't do a perfect job, as this case shows. But you will find privilege escalation bugs on most operating systems and Microsoft WILL come out with a patch to fix the bug. All the clueless home users have to do is wait for it to be automatically downloaded and applied.
Let us DRIVE our containers across the ocean!
That raises an interesting point. These ships travel a lot farther than any car ever would. If the ships could be replaced by cars driving the same route, how many cars would it take to produce the same amount of pollution? I wager it would be far fewer than 50 million.
Emissions were reduced due to economic decline.
Atmospheric levels were reduced due to a climate cycle that increased absorption.
Atmospheric levels actually increased due to increased emissions.
So emissions went down and up, and levels went down and up. All in the same year.
Science. We could use some here.
I see why you are getting confused. The climate is a complicated system. There isn't just one mechanism controlling the global temperature. The one you always hear about in the news is CO2 (which is a complicated system of its own), but as you have learned here today, there are other factors like the variations in the sun's output and La Niña & El Niño. El Niño was the reason that 1998 was so hot (which is why if anyone tries to use that year to argue either for or against climate change then you know that they are being deliberately misleading).
To explain how CO2 emissions can go down and yet the temperature can go up (ignoring the other factors), imagine that you have a bath filled with water. If you pull the plug then the water level drops. But if you turn on the tap to pour in the same amount of water that is going down the drain, then the water level will remain steady. It is not that the water stops going down the drain, but that the lost water is being replaced. This represents the CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
CO2 is absorbed out of the atmosphere by various means, and more is emitted into the atmosphere from various sources - some of which are man made.
Back to the bath, what happens if you turn up the tap so that more water is going into the bath than can go down the plug hole? The water level rises. If you put in an extra 5% of water then the level will increase by that amount because it simply has nowhere else to go.
So does the water level go down if you reduce the water emissions by 1.3%? No, because you are still adding in 3.7% more water than the equilibrium. That is why your quoted text said "even at the reduced pace, humans are pumping CO2 into the atmosphere faster than natural processes can scrub the gas".
That quote is a bit misleading, because as I said before there are many sources of CO2, so it is not just the amount pumped out by humans that is causing the problem. Some people have tried to use this fact as a reason for not doing anything about global warming, saying that it is not man's fault. It is a dubious argument, and in the end a pointless one. If we want to control the environment then the easiest solution is to adjust the portion of CO2 that is generated by man.
Do you seriously see lots of superfluous, empty return statements at the end of functions in javascript? As an example, I just had a quick look at the source to this /. page and didn't find a single example of this. The only time you will ever see a return statement is if there is an early return within a function or a function returns a value. While it is valid to have an empty return statement at the end of a function, nobody ever does it.
In terms of optimising the javascript, the code in question contains a small loop with some straightforward calculations. There were no object handling, memory allocation, string manipulation, or DOM access. There is some array access, but obviously it is able to cope with that. It is a prime candidate for aggressive optimisation, which I suspect is why it performs so well.
Perhaps the mere existence of a return statement in a function is enough of a trigger for the optimiser to go into a conservative mode to ensure that it doesn't inadvertently introduce errors. Remember, the optimisation runs at runtime, and so has to be faster than one from an compiler and therefore must be fairly simple. If the optimisation process is too complicated, then it will end up being slower than just interpreting as you go.
It is actually a couple of months old. The thing that makes me doubt the claims of cheating is that nobody has been able to find other examples of performance variations in this benchmark in all the time since this came to light. If they were going to cheat, why limit it to the cordic test? Nobody would base their browser choice on this obscure test.
I don't have the beta installed yet, but what I would like to see is the actual calculation changed and then run the tests again. Don't just put in weird code like "true;" but make the javascript plausible. It could be that the addition of these unusual statements are enough to confuse the optimiser so that it resorts back to a completely unoptimised version.
do companies not use a certain software because its not certified my Microsoft?
No. Only a small minority of software is certified, so you would be limiting your options way too much if you discounted the non-certified options. However, it is useful when comparing software to know which ones are certified, because it gives you the confidence that it will work in most environments. I have used non-administrator accounts since the days of NT4, and being certified meant that you knew the software would not have a fit as soon as it couldn't write into your C:\Windows folder.
And heck, maybe even a .NET application could now seek to be certified!
.NET applications have been certified for years. Spend a couple of minutes on Google and you will find examples for both the server platform and the desktop edition.
As for SilverStripe, I imagine the reason that open source software would be rare on the list of certified products is that there are costs involved with doing it, and the kind of audience who generally use open souce products probably don't care a damn about any official "certified" logo.
That has nothing to do with the topic that we are discussing here - namely that Microsoft is going to have a sudden change of heart and use it's patents to stuff the open source genie back into the bottle. Right from the beginnings, Mono has had critics that said that Microsoft would kill it off. Back then it was completely unfounded FUD and it continues to be so today.
I think Wine and ReactOS have not been targeted because they aren't big enough to be worth the major bad PR.
I agree that ReactOS is pretty insignificant at the moment (although I do have hopes for it), but Wine is the poster-child for running Windows apps on non-Microsoft platforms. I think it is definitely big enough to be on the radar.
Example, what about WISE ?
I don't see how WISE could be considered to be similar. I found it quite difficult to get any real details about the case, since most reports are vague about the details. However, according to the summary in Tech Law Journal:
"Bristol had a contract with Microsoft that commenced in September 1994, and expired in September 1997, under which Microsoft provided Bristol with source code for Windows NT 3.0 and earlier OS software. Microsoft was not obligated under this contract to provide Bristol with Windows NT 4.0 or 5.0 source code, and Microsoft has not provided it to Bristol. Bristol and Microsoft negotiated, but did not reach, a contract to provide 4.0 and 5.0 source code."
So it appears that Microsoft had contracted to supply the source to v3.0, and Bristol complained when MS wanted more money for a contact for 4.0 and up. That is nothing like what people are claiming that they will do with Mono.
A open standard isn't really enough : http://tuxdeluxe.org/node/296
What a stupid article. It complains because Microsoft implemented the standards strictly. I have always found it amusing that people complained when the file format of Office 2007 was different to the standardised Office Open XML (due to later changes in the standard), but then Micrsoft also copped flak because they implemented the ODF standard rather than the extensions used by OpenOffice.org. It seems that embracing and extending is good, but only if you are not Microsoft.
Citation needed
Here you go.
It seems quite clear that the original poster was describing his/her personal experience with the language. It is like asking for a citation when someone says that their favourite colour is blue. The better response would be to ask for an example of the problem.
With Microsofts history over the past 20 years, I'd say they won't pull any strange tricks until enough people have adapted it and are locked in, then they will suddenly have a change of heart.
When have Microsoft ever had a "change of heart" and clamped down on something of theirs that was previously open? What is the precedent over the 20 year period to which you refer?
Before anyone answers with FAT32/Tom Tom, Microsoft never opened (or encouraged anyone to use) FAT32 before they started licensing it. They also didn't sue anyone for years after they began their licensing program.
And how about those software projects that have not been officially sanctioned by Microsoft? How is Wine going? And ReactOS (even after there were claims of disassembled MS code in the project)? Still no legal action.
What I want to know is why the regulatory bodies of so many countries want to launch their own investigations into this. When has anything been discovered by these investigations that wasn't originally disclosed by Google? It was Google itself that announced to the world that this was going on, although only after Germany asked them about what they recorded. But it seems the only way to safeguard the privacy of the general public is for these government agencies to pick through the data, rather than just deleting it without looking.
Every time I hear of another country investigating Google about this, I am reminded of The Simpsons:
Lionel Hutz: How could you have seen all this, Bart? Weren't you supposed to be in school?
Bart: I sort of skipped school.
Principal Skinner: I knew it! I knew you'd slip up sooner or later, Simpson!
Apu: What slip up? What are you talking about? He confessed it!
Principal Skinner: Quiet, I need this.
Source: Episode 1F19, The Boy Who Knew Too Much
I'm afraid it is not that simple. You should always be wary of assuming that the rules used in your locality are universal. There are two styles in general use regarding punctuation and quotation marks. See the wikipedia entry on the subject:
In the U.S., the standard style is called American style, typesetters' rules, printers' rules, typographical usage, or traditional punctuation, whereby commas and periods are almost always placed inside closing quotation marks. This style of punctuation is common in the U.S., Canada, and in the U.K. in fiction and journalism.
The other standard style--called British style or logical punctuation--is to include within quotation marks only those punctuation marks that appeared in the quoted material, but otherwise to place punctuation outside the closing quotation marks.
Using the British style is less ambiguous in this case.
After reading about this, I am completely {outraged}{amused}{indifferent}{turned on} by this practice.
Javascript error. Aborting script.
IE8 (I have not tested IE9) makes me wait until the "tab home" is loaded before I'm allowed to open my bookmarks and click on a site to go there.
I have noticed something similar on my XP notebook when it gets really slow (when it uses up its 768MB of ram), but I haven't been able to test it on my Windows 7 system because it loads everything up too fast.
The other PITA I've noticed with IE is that you can't middle click on bookmarks to open them in new tabs. You have to open a new tab... then click your bookmark.
No, you don't have to do that. Although I do it with links, I had never thought about middle clicking on a bookmark (so thanks for the tip), but I just tried it and it actually does open in a new tab. This is in IE8/Win7.
The other thing I dislike about IE is it's restricted layout options (in Firefox I can move everything. Address bar and all.)
I can't see any reason to move the address and search, but the forward/back buttons and refresh/stop buttons position have always annoyed me. I would rather have them grouped together. (Also, refresh and stop should be the one button depending on if the page is still loading). I suppose the reasoning is that it keeps it consistent with the standard placement in the rest of the operating system.
The problem with Windows is the stable API which they can't kill off because no-one would buy Windows if it didn't support proprietary binaries from 1990 that they still run.
Actually, the 64-bit version of Windows wouldn't run binaries from 1990 since it doesn't include the WOW subsystem for 16-bit code. The inability to run Window 3.1 software doesn't seem to have affected the adoption of the 64-bit version of Windows 7.
And since the old code was handled by a separate subsystem (eg. GDI system is in gdi.exe for 16-bit and gdi32.dll for 32-bit), it didn't stop Micrsoft from making changes to the API when the moved to 32-bit (and later 64-bit).