I'm convinced that this was one of the nails in OS/2's coffin. Once OS/2 got good Windows support (pre-Win95), the incentive for developers to develop native OS/2 apps went through the floor. Why should they develop for OS/2? Develop for OS/2, it runs on OS/2, develop for Windows and it runs on Windows and OS/2. But without native apps, OS/2 became just a marginally better GUI. It lost all those stability and performance advantages that were its reason for existence in the first place.
Fortunately, this should only effect developers who are developing for profit. Open source developers aren't likely to change because they don't care about profitability. They'll develop on the OS they like. This could certainly effect how proprietary developers work, though.
BTW, Someone mentioned that "no one programs using the Win32 API directly these days". While this is certainly true, I must point out that Microsoft gives you the source to at least two important wrappers (MFC and ATL) with their development kit. MFC should run pretty much unchanged (Though why you'd want to I can't imagine). ATL would need COM, obviously, but I'd guess that that would be the next logical step.
Personally, I'm not much interested in this WINE stuff because it goes against the whole reason I put together my Linux system. I am sick and tired of the damn Windows APIs and Windows bloat. I have to suffer through it eight hours a day. I've no interest to suffer through it at home one minute longer than I have to.
This is really the book that killed cyberpunk, I think. I haven't been able to read an old school "cyberpunk" book since without finding it wanting. I remember reading Mona Lisa Overdrive (I think that was it) shortly after reading this, and finding it to be a great disappointment, not because it was any worse then any other Gibson books, but because Stephenson had just stamped the perfect statement on my brain. (It didn't help that the Gibson book had a courier character much like YT.)
The satire in Snow Crash is just utterly brilliant. The private jails. The mafia pizza delivery service. The "Central Information Service". The nuclear bomb in the sidecar.
Stephenson also has more guts then any other writer I've ever read. Who else would have the guts to name their protagonist "Protagonist"? Who else would drop a five page dissertion on Sumerian mythology in the middle of an action book?
Re:William Gibson books...
on
Snow Crash
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· Score: 2
The trouble with Gibson is that he tends to write the same book every time (thematically speaking). In 1983, "cyberspace" was an amazing thing. Today, it is getting passe.
The thing that impresses me so much about Stephenson is that he writes something wholly original with each book.
Bujold's books are very good space opera, but they don't really have anything in particular to do with tech stuff. It is all your basic spaceships and death-ray stuff. That's not a knock, they're great books, but they don't obviously fit into the "geeky" category the way Stephenson's books do.
I doubt this means as much as people think. I suspect that IBM sells far more PCs to businesses then through the retail market. There are still a lot of managers out there (usually with "VP" in their title) who still remember the old adage "no one ever got fired for buying IBM". They tend to buy PCs in lots of 100 or 1000.
Because of this, I've used a number of IBM PCs. Some sucked rocks, others were really nice. I actually have an odd affection for the old original microchannel line. Those machines were solid as a rock and could be disassembled with a quarter.
It is so sad when computers go obsolete. The day after I started at my first real job, the head programmer got an IBM Model 80 (a 25 Mhz 386). I remember feeling incredibly jealous. Just a few months ago, I worked for a company that was finally putting 150 of them out of service. They are only so much junk, now. sigh...
Back in 1989, when Windows looked like crap, and they had many competing GUI's (OS/2, DESQview, among many others!), MS hired the designers of the Mac GUI's look and feel to work on Windows 3.0's.
Bear in mind that OS/2 was originally a joint IBM/Microsoft project.
Re:Note: I am Insured. So is Nate.
on
Hemos is Homeless
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· Score: 4
That really sucks, and I'm sorry to hear it.
I know how you feel. About ten years ago, a roomate of mine and a friend (of his) were using a plastic bag as an ashtray. Burned out one room and destroyed most personal belongings on the top floor. The worst part: I was renting the condo from my mother.
Fortunately, while I lost every stitch of clothing except what I had been wearing, the computer and stereo, both downstairs, were unscathed. (I lost a record player, though, remember those?)
But in the end, it was probably good for me. It drive me to live alone for the first time in my life. It drove me to quite the job where they had troubles paying me on time Events like these can be learning experiences. They aren't necessarily all bad. (When it is just property that is lost.)
And now the real question. Is your insurance policy "Replacement value" or "Actual Cash Value"? That is one of the things I learned the hard way. For those who aren't in the middle of this, you want the former as it saves you huge headaches.
Some of this could be accomplished by moving away from text editors, to "structure editors". The idea is that instead of editing the text, you edit the structure of the program directly. In other words, you are editing the symbol table/parse tree directly. So, for example, if you changed the name of a variable, all occurances of that variable would immediately change.
The idea has been around for a long time (I first heard about it in 1987) and Stroustrup talks about it briefly near the end of The Design and Evolution of C++. Unfortunately, no such project has ever gotten off the ground. I'd dearly like to do something like this myself, but I don't have the time, alas...
Anyway, to the particulars of your comments, I agree mostly with your negatives, however, I thought I'd let you know one thing: If you use the mouse to grab a pane, and drag it to the editor window, you can make it into a floating window. (It takes practice as it will keep trying to stick to an edge.) If you then right click on it, you can make it go away, temporarily, by choosing "hide". Selecting from the view menu then brings it back.
- is Sun an enemy? Or is the enemy of my enemy my friend?
I'd say that talk of "enemies" is dangerous. Forget "enemies". Forget talk of "Beating Company X".
Remember, the goal isn't for Linux to rule, or for FreeBSD to rule, are whatever. The goal is "Software that doesn't suck". Personally, I don't care who writes it, or what it is. It could be Windows. It could be Solaris. It could be Linux. Who cares? I just want it to work well, without being a hassle. And quite frankly, no OS I've used is there yet. In fifteen years, many of these religious wars will sound as stupid as the "C-64 vs. Apple ][+" debates that raged on the BBSes in 1984.
Hell, if the long term of destiny Linux was nothing more than to force Microsoft to start competing by producing better software instead of using shady business practices, I'd call it a victory for all of us.
If you want good software, well I'd say that the key is to stop worrying about "enemies" and instead:
1) Write good software. 2) Calmly and rationally explain the good points and bad points of any software you encounter. 3) Promote development methods that promote good software.
The only way Sun could be "The enemy", in my mind, is if they break the law. (By, for example, stealing GPL'd software.) Otherwise, they are just a company that may or may not have a product worth having. No need to worry unless you are buying.
These stories remind me a lot of the alarmism about communism a couple decades back. The theory was that the free market was more efficient than communism. If you truly believed that, than there was no need to "fight" communism, as the free market, being more efficient, was bound to emerge victorious. Same goes here. If "Open Source" really does produce better software than the alternatives, then there is no need to fight for it. It will "win" on its own, and the companies that support it will survive. Those that don't, won't. All that is important is that we ensure that everyone fights fair.
Which reminds me. One thing that I've seen elsewhere that/. lacks is the ability to deliberately "hide" your own posts. This is useful both for spoilers and for offtopic posts. The reader can decide whether or not to read based on the title.
In addition, a "Spoiler" moderation option might be nice.
Well, it is nice to see some reality about NT around here. I've been somewhat annoyed at the some of the propaganda that seems to infect some Linux advocates. WinNT does not crash hourly. In fact, WinNT is a pretty stable OS.
I code for WinNT for a living, so I push it pretty hard. My box crashes maybe once every couple weeks. Now, that's not perfect, but given what I do to the thing daily, it isn't too bad, either. (Hell, I remember working in the old DOS days when a mere wild pointer could force a reboot.) Machines in our lab have little trouble running for months.
I used to code for OS/2, and that OS was slightly better than NT, but only slightly. I haven't worked full time on Linux yet, but my experience so far seems to be that it is also better, though not by any means perfect. I've crashed that box, too. (And yes, they were really XWindows crashes, but that doesn't really mean much when you are swearing at the screen!)
In my mind, all of this "Linux never crashes, NT crashes hourly" stuff hurts Linux far more than it helps. It hurts because anyone who has worked with NT much knows that that it is not true. Knowing this, one doubts anything these advocates say. The danger is that it isn't so easy to tell the good advocacy from the bad from the outside. The tendency is to ignore them all and discount any claim for the new OS. I saw that happen with OS/2, and IMO, that is one of the things that killed OS/2.
You are so right about the danger of "Service Packs", though. My personal opinion is that this is caused by the desire at Microsoft to tie everything together for marketting reasons. Very, very bad in an industry where modularity is important. With something the size of an OS, it is impossible to test all combinations, so you should be damn sure that all parts are discrete and modular. This is a great opening for Linux to succeed, but currently, Carmack is right. WinNT is a better platform for certain sorts of development.
Yes, I remember reading this before a last Wednesday, just before dinner, while ignoring a jack in the box commercial before the channel 7 news. It is great for long term memory but lousy for short..
Well, I don't know about that. There are very few that I think would deserve a "Nobel Prize in Computing". Alan Turing. Claude Shannon. Uh....
Most that happens in this field isn't Nobel calibre stuff. We are in an evolutionary, not revolutionary field.
Anyway, certainly not Linus as Linux, though a revolution organizationally, is not particularly revolutionary technically. It is a very good OS, but at its root, it is merely a clone of something else. You don't get Nobels for copying someone else's work.
I'm not trying to diss anyone here. Linux is a great thing, but what is great about it is the method with which it was created, not the OS itself.
One thing to keep in mind is that IBM has always thought of itself as a hardware company and all their sales guys are hardware oriented. To them, software is secondary.
Remember, they farmed out the OS when coming out with their new "personal computer". To them, it was really just a frill they didn't care about.
This should be good for those who worry about IBM monkeying with "Open Source". If they follow their own track record, they won't bother to mess with too much simply because they don't see it important. To them, Linux is just a means to move hardware, not a product in and of itself.
Not that they couldn't do something bad, but I'd say that they are less likely then the average software company.
But remember, it isn't a matter of "trusting them with a single order". If you make a single order, they have your credit card information. This is no different from if you signed up for "Microsoft Passport". They could just as easily make your card number available to others in either case.
Perhaps the misunderstanding comes here:...and it was a one-time thing, because they would (at least theoretically) simply pass the number straight to their processor, without actually saving it on their servers.
In actuality, the card authorizers, accounting departments, etc. all require audit trails for everything, including card numbers. The last retailer I worked for kept this information for at least a month in the "live" system and essentially forever in their backups. They weren't unusual.
They have to save this data for the simple reason that if you contest the purchase, they have to be able to show what actually occurred. Not to mention the plethora of systems problems that might require the retailer to go to original data simply to get paid.
(Of course, the marketting department often gets its greedy little mitts on the data, but that is a different story.)
...where there's no implicit connection with the outside world.
It is actually much easier to intercept a phone conversation then to install a packet sniffer. It takes only a few dollars worth of equipment from radio shack. (And lest you think that this is rare, the people two houses from me down got a $900 phone bill last month caused by two kids who did exactly that.) Also, in a phone conversation, you are essentially giving your card number to someone who likely makes around $6/hr.
One of the advantages of e-Commerce is that fewer people see your card number. In fact, if all goes correctly, no human being will actually see it. Contrast that to real world purchases, where we often hand our cards to low-paid teenagers without thought. (Most of whom are honest, but it only takes one with a head for numbers...)
5) Creates another company which has detailed records of your spending profile complete with name, address, phone number, etc. Hooray for "targeted marketing".
Too late for that. If you buy from catalogs, or buy on the internet, or shop at the grocery store with those "club" cards, the battle is lost. The data is being collected, and most likely exchanged.
The only real way to prevent that is to only use cash.
4) Creates a massive SPOF. What happens if the passport servers are off-line? Can I still shop with my AmEx or are the stores basically out of business?
It would obviously be in the store's best interest to keep a backup system that works buy taking your number directly. Stores would have to have this anyway for customers who aren't in this program. No retailer is going to turn you away because you don't use this system.
3) Okay, now instead of Visa charging 1% on all of my transactions, I'll have Visa charging the retailer 1% AND Microsoft charging the retailer 1%. Likely result? They'll pass the costs to me!
Perhaps not. This will likely lower their liability as the chance of some two-bit small retailer absconding with the card will go down. Remember that if someone charges $5000 on your card, it costs you $50 max and the retailer's involved $4950.
2) If a large amount of people start using this, then smaller on-line retailers will suffer. Yay, monopolistic control of another market!
It should have the opposite effect. It should make people less fearful of spending at a site they know little about. They are more likely to push "submit" at "Paul's Pleasure Palace" if they know that they aren't actually sending their card number to Paul.
1) Who will audit this? Who will ensure the security? Microsoft? This isn't a microsoft bash, I wouldn't trust ANY company to audit themselves properly.
Then you better not be spending online. If you've bought anything for Microsoft online, then you've already given them exactly the same info that they'd have here. Same goes for any other company you've got from.
The concerns about "corporations having my information" are very valid, but unfortunately, this battle is pretty much over. The battle was basically lost before there even was "e-Commerce".
Working at the headquarters of a major retailler, I used to see huge, hundred page printouts of charge numbers just laying on a table outside of an unsecured room. Those charge numbers were given to the company by customers at their brick and morter stores. Those numbers were also used for "marketting purposes".
This is not a new idea, and this is not a particularly dangerous idea, either. If you've bought more than once from Amazon, you've used a similar system.
Basically, Amazon saves your card number the first time you buy, so that when you come back, they can say "Charge card XXXX XXXX XXXX 1234?". The fact that you don't have to key the number is only a trivial advantage. The real advantage is that you don't have to send the number over the wire. Amazon knows what it is already, so they can simply charge the number they have, avoiding the need for sending the number where it could potentially be seen by evil criminal types.
(An overblown danger, but that's another story...)
This is all a good thing. It is not even a matter of "trusting" Amazon more than you otherwise would, because simply to buy things, you've got to trust them with your number. They will have it, and they will be saving it for financial purposes for at least a month, regardless. If you don't trust them with this, you shouldn't buy from them. (Note that the same goes for any retailer, internet or physical!)
Now most people probably trust a company like Amazon at least in terms of finances. Amazon is not likely to go charging your card up randomally. Most people assume they will be fairly careful with your number. (They probably won't be as careful as you think, but that's another story.) They are a big, known company. Where the trouble comes in is with tiny little companies that no one has ever heard of. Do you trust them with your number? That officially looking site could just be one guy in a basement. Give him your number, and you give him the ability to charge thousands of dollars in your name.
So what to do? An obvious solution is to do what is being done above. You give your charge number to some large company that you know will not abscond with it, charging it to the limit. Then you tell the little podunk companies to charge the big company. Your liability goes down. Your charge number doesn't fly across the wire every time you make a purchase from a new company. These are good things. This is more secure then sending your card number directly to everyone you buy from.
The only question is whether or not you trust Microsoft to secure your data. This is the same question you should be asking were you to make a purchase from Microsoft over the wire (or over the phone), as the data is the same.
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I'm convinced that this was one of the nails in OS/2's coffin. Once OS/2 got good Windows support (pre-Win95), the incentive for developers to develop native OS/2 apps went through the floor. Why should they develop for OS/2? Develop for OS/2, it runs on OS/2, develop for Windows and it runs on Windows and OS/2. But without native apps, OS/2 became just a marginally better GUI. It lost all those stability and performance advantages that were its reason for existence in the first place.
Fortunately, this should only effect developers who are developing for profit. Open source developers aren't likely to change because they don't care about profitability. They'll develop on the OS they like. This could certainly effect how proprietary developers work, though.
BTW, Someone mentioned that "no one programs using the Win32 API directly these days". While this is certainly true, I must point out that Microsoft gives you the source to at least two important wrappers (MFC and ATL) with their development kit. MFC should run pretty much unchanged (Though why you'd want to I can't imagine). ATL would need COM, obviously, but I'd guess that that would be the next logical step.
Personally, I'm not much interested in this WINE stuff because it goes against the whole reason I put together my Linux system. I am sick and tired of the damn Windows APIs and Windows bloat. I have to suffer through it eight hours a day. I've no interest to suffer through it at home one minute longer than I have to.
This is really the book that killed cyberpunk, I think. I haven't been able to read an old school "cyberpunk" book since without finding it wanting. I remember reading Mona Lisa Overdrive (I think that was it) shortly after reading this, and finding it to be a great disappointment, not because it was any worse then any other Gibson books, but because Stephenson had just stamped the perfect statement on my brain. (It didn't help that the Gibson book had a courier character much like YT.)
The satire in Snow Crash is just utterly brilliant. The private jails. The mafia pizza delivery service. The "Central Information Service". The nuclear bomb in the sidecar.
Stephenson also has more guts then any other writer I've ever read. Who else would have the guts to name their protagonist "Protagonist"? Who else would drop a five page dissertion on Sumerian mythology in the middle of an action book?
The trouble with Gibson is that he tends to write the same book every time (thematically speaking). In 1983, "cyberspace" was an amazing thing. Today, it is getting passe.
The thing that impresses me so much about Stephenson is that he writes something wholly original with each book.
Bujold's books are very good space opera, but they don't really have anything in particular to do with tech stuff. It is all your basic spaceships and death-ray stuff. That's not a knock, they're great books, but they don't obviously fit into the "geeky" category the way Stephenson's books do.
I doubt this means as much as people think. I suspect that IBM sells far more PCs to businesses then through the retail market. There are still a lot of managers out there (usually with "VP" in their title) who still remember the old adage "no one ever got fired for buying IBM". They tend to buy PCs in lots of 100 or 1000.
Because of this, I've used a number of IBM PCs. Some sucked rocks, others were really nice. I actually have an odd affection for the old original microchannel line. Those machines were solid as a rock and could be disassembled with a quarter.
It is so sad when computers go obsolete. The day after I started at my first real job, the head programmer got an IBM Model 80 (a 25 Mhz 386). I remember feeling incredibly jealous. Just a few months ago, I worked for a company that was finally putting 150 of them out of service. They are only so much junk, now. sigh...
Back in 1989, when Windows looked like crap, and they had many competing GUI's (OS/2, DESQview, among many others!), MS hired the designers of the Mac GUI's look and feel to work on Windows 3.0's.
Bear in mind that OS/2 was originally a joint IBM/Microsoft project.
That really sucks, and I'm sorry to hear it.
I know how you feel. About ten years ago, a roomate of mine and a friend (of his) were using a plastic bag as an ashtray. Burned out one room and destroyed most personal belongings on the top floor. The worst part: I was renting the condo from my mother.
Fortunately, while I lost every stitch of clothing except what I had been wearing, the computer and stereo, both downstairs, were unscathed. (I lost a record player, though, remember those?)
But in the end, it was probably good for me. It drive me to live alone for the first time in my life. It drove me to quite the job where they had troubles paying me on time Events like these can be learning experiences. They aren't necessarily all bad. (When it is just property that is lost.)
And now the real question. Is your insurance policy "Replacement value" or "Actual Cash Value"? That is one of the things I learned the hard way. For those who aren't in the middle of this, you want the former as it saves you huge headaches.
It is doubtful that we will even consider SP5 until Q2.
FYI: There is a SP6 that is due to be released pretty soon, now.
Though oddly enough, if you built a Flexible structure editor, you could actually modify the language syntax on the fly.
Some of this could be accomplished by moving away from text editors, to "structure editors". The idea is that instead of editing the text, you edit the structure of the program directly. In other words, you are editing the symbol table/parse tree directly. So, for example, if you changed the name of a variable, all occurances of that variable would immediately change.
The idea has been around for a long time (I first heard about it in 1987) and Stroustrup talks about it briefly near the end of The Design and Evolution of C++. Unfortunately, no such project has ever gotten off the ground. I'd dearly like to do something like this myself, but I don't have the time, alas...
Anyway, to the particulars of your comments, I agree mostly with your negatives, however, I thought I'd let you know one thing: If you use the mouse to grab a pane, and drag it to the editor window, you can make it into a floating window. (It takes practice as it will keep trying to stick to an edge.) If you then right click on it, you can make it go away, temporarily, by choosing "hide". Selecting from the view menu then brings it back.
- is Sun an enemy? Or is the enemy of my enemy my friend?
I'd say that talk of "enemies" is dangerous. Forget "enemies". Forget talk of "Beating Company X".
Remember, the goal isn't for Linux to rule, or for FreeBSD to rule, are whatever. The goal is "Software that doesn't suck". Personally, I don't care who writes it, or what it is. It could be Windows. It could be Solaris. It could be Linux. Who cares? I just want it to work well, without being a hassle. And quite frankly, no OS I've used is there yet. In fifteen years, many of these religious wars will sound as stupid as the "C-64 vs. Apple ][+" debates that raged on the BBSes in 1984.
Hell, if the long term of destiny Linux was nothing more than to force Microsoft to start competing by producing better software instead of using shady business practices, I'd call it a victory for all of us.
If you want good software, well I'd say that the key is to stop worrying about "enemies" and instead:
1) Write good software.
2) Calmly and rationally explain the good points and bad points of any software you encounter.
3) Promote development methods that promote good software.
The only way Sun could be "The enemy", in my mind, is if they break the law. (By, for example, stealing GPL'd software.) Otherwise, they are just a company that may or may not have a product worth having. No need to worry unless you are buying.
These stories remind me a lot of the alarmism about communism a couple decades back. The theory was that the free market was more efficient than communism. If you truly believed that, than there was no need to "fight" communism, as the free market, being more efficient, was bound to emerge victorious. Same goes here. If "Open Source" really does produce better software than the alternatives, then there is no need to fight for it. It will "win" on its own, and the companies that support it will survive. Those that don't, won't. All that is important is that we ensure that everyone fights fair.
Yep. Woz created Apple's new, innovative product. Jobs later sheparded the creation of the product they stole from Xerox.
(Gates wasn't the only one to use someone else's idea!)
Actually, there was an OS/2 version of DOOM at one point. Unfortunately, the port wasn't all that great. It only ran in a little window.
Of course, you could always use "Dual Boot", which is pretty much what Win95 required you to do for all those old DOS games.
The real killer was that OS/2 never really got Win32 support.
Which reminds me. One thing that I've seen elsewhere that /. lacks is the ability to deliberately "hide" your own posts. This is useful both for spoilers and for offtopic posts. The reader can decide whether or not to read based on the title.
In addition, a "Spoiler" moderation option might be nice.
Oops.
I guess you guys now know it's not Leia.
Sorry for the inadvertent spoiler.
Book sales must be going down.
As soon as sales go down again, they'll probably find him as a child on whatever planet they drop his body on.
He's more like Wozniak. The guy who did the work and let other people worry about being flashy.
Well, it is nice to see some reality about NT around here. I've been somewhat annoyed at the some of the propaganda that seems to infect some Linux advocates. WinNT does not crash hourly. In fact, WinNT is a pretty stable OS.
I code for WinNT for a living, so I push it pretty hard. My box crashes maybe once every couple weeks. Now, that's not perfect, but given what I do to the thing daily, it isn't too bad, either. (Hell, I remember working in the old DOS days when a mere wild pointer could force a reboot.) Machines in our lab have little trouble running for months.
I used to code for OS/2, and that OS was slightly better than NT, but only slightly. I haven't worked full time on Linux yet, but my experience so far seems to be that it is also better, though not by any means perfect. I've crashed that box, too. (And yes, they were really XWindows crashes, but that doesn't really mean much when you are swearing at the screen!)
In my mind, all of this "Linux never crashes, NT crashes hourly" stuff hurts Linux far more than it helps. It hurts because anyone who has worked with NT much knows that that it is not true. Knowing this, one doubts anything these advocates say. The danger is that it isn't so easy to tell the good advocacy from the bad from the outside. The tendency is to ignore them all and discount any claim for the new OS. I saw that happen with OS/2, and IMO, that is one of the things that killed OS/2.
You are so right about the danger of "Service Packs", though. My personal opinion is that this is caused by the desire at Microsoft to tie everything together for marketting reasons. Very, very bad in an industry where modularity is important. With something the size of an OS, it is impossible to test all combinations, so you should be damn sure that all parts are discrete and modular. This is a great opening for Linux to succeed, but currently, Carmack is right. WinNT is a better platform for certain sorts of development.
Yes, I remember reading this before a last Wednesday, just before dinner, while ignoring a jack in the box commercial before the channel 7 news. It is great for long term memory but lousy for short..
...er...what was I saying?
Well, I don't know about that. There are very few that I think would deserve a "Nobel Prize in Computing". Alan Turing. Claude Shannon. Uh....
Most that happens in this field isn't Nobel calibre stuff. We are in an evolutionary, not revolutionary field.
Anyway, certainly not Linus as Linux, though a revolution organizationally, is not particularly revolutionary technically. It is a very good OS, but at its root, it is merely a clone of something else. You don't get Nobels for copying someone else's work.
I'm not trying to diss anyone here. Linux is a great thing, but what is great about it is the method with which it was created, not the OS itself.
One thing to keep in mind is that IBM has always thought of itself as a hardware company and all their sales guys are hardware oriented. To them, software is secondary.
Remember, they farmed out the OS when coming out with their new "personal computer". To them, it was really just a frill they didn't care about.
This should be good for those who worry about IBM monkeying with "Open Source". If they follow their own track record, they won't bother to mess with too much simply because they don't see it important. To them, Linux is just a means to move hardware, not a product in and of itself.
Not that they couldn't do something bad, but I'd say that they are less likely then the average software company.
I'm not exactly sure, but isn't 6-G enough to make you black out?
A human being in good health will black out somewhere between 9 and 11 Gs. At least that's what they say about fighter pilots.
But remember, it isn't a matter of "trusting them with a single order". If you make a single order, they have your credit card information. This is no different from if you signed up for "Microsoft Passport". They could just as easily make your card number available to others in either case.
...and it was a one-time thing, because they would (at least theoretically) simply pass the number straight to their processor, without actually saving it on their servers.
...where there's no implicit connection with the outside world.
Perhaps the misunderstanding comes here:
In actuality, the card authorizers, accounting departments, etc. all require audit trails for everything, including card numbers. The last retailer I worked for kept this information for at least a month in the "live" system and essentially forever in their backups. They weren't unusual.
They have to save this data for the simple reason that if you contest the purchase, they have to be able to show what actually occurred. Not to mention the plethora of systems problems that might require the retailer to go to original data simply to get paid.
(Of course, the marketting department often gets its greedy little mitts on the data, but that is a different story.)
It is actually much easier to intercept a phone conversation then to install a packet sniffer. It takes only a few dollars worth of equipment from radio shack. (And lest you think that this is rare, the people two houses from me down got a $900 phone bill last month caused by two kids who did exactly that.) Also, in a phone conversation, you are essentially giving your card number to someone who likely makes around $6/hr.
One of the advantages of e-Commerce is that fewer people see your card number. In fact, if all goes correctly, no human being will actually see it. Contrast that to real world purchases, where we often hand our cards to low-paid teenagers without thought. (Most of whom are honest, but it only takes one with a head for numbers...)
5) Creates another company which has detailed records of your spending profile complete with name, address, phone number, etc. Hooray for "targeted marketing".
Too late for that. If you buy from catalogs, or buy on the internet, or shop at the grocery store with those "club" cards, the battle is lost. The data is being collected, and most likely exchanged.
The only real way to prevent that is to only use cash.
4) Creates a massive SPOF. What happens if the passport servers are off-line? Can I still shop with my AmEx or are the stores basically out of business?
It would obviously be in the store's best interest to keep a backup system that works buy taking your number directly. Stores would have to have this anyway for customers who aren't in this program. No retailer is going to turn you away because you don't use this system.
3) Okay, now instead of Visa charging 1% on all of my transactions, I'll have Visa charging the retailer 1% AND Microsoft charging the retailer 1%. Likely result? They'll pass the costs to me!
Perhaps not. This will likely lower their liability as the chance of some two-bit small retailer absconding with the card will go down. Remember that if someone charges $5000 on your card, it costs you $50 max and the retailer's involved $4950.
2) If a large amount of people start using this, then smaller on-line retailers will suffer. Yay, monopolistic control of another market!
It should have the opposite effect. It should make people less fearful of spending at a site they know little about. They are more likely to push "submit" at "Paul's Pleasure Palace" if they know that they aren't actually sending their card number to Paul.
1) Who will audit this? Who will ensure the security? Microsoft? This isn't a microsoft bash, I wouldn't trust ANY company to audit themselves properly.
Then you better not be spending online. If you've bought anything for Microsoft online, then you've already given them exactly the same info that they'd have here. Same goes for any other company you've got from.
The concerns about "corporations having my information" are very valid, but unfortunately, this battle is pretty much over. The battle was basically lost before there even was "e-Commerce".
Working at the headquarters of a major retailler, I used to see huge, hundred page printouts of charge numbers just laying on a table outside of an unsecured room. Those charge numbers were given to the company by customers at their brick and morter stores. Those numbers were also used for "marketting purposes".
This is not a new idea, and this is not a particularly dangerous idea, either. If you've bought more than once from Amazon, you've used a similar system.
Basically, Amazon saves your card number the first time you buy, so that when you come back, they can say "Charge card XXXX XXXX XXXX 1234?". The fact that you don't have to key the number is only a trivial advantage. The real advantage is that you don't have to send the number over the wire. Amazon knows what it is already, so they can simply charge the number they have, avoiding the need for sending the number where it could potentially be seen by evil criminal types.
(An overblown danger, but that's another story...)
This is all a good thing. It is not even a matter of "trusting" Amazon more than you otherwise would, because simply to buy things, you've got to trust them with your number. They will have it, and they will be saving it for financial purposes for at least a month, regardless. If you don't trust them with this, you shouldn't buy from them. (Note that the same goes for any retailer, internet or physical!)
Now most people probably trust a company like Amazon at least in terms of finances. Amazon is not likely to go charging your card up randomally. Most people assume they will be fairly careful with your number. (They probably won't be as careful as you think, but that's another story.) They are a big, known company. Where the trouble comes in is with tiny little companies that no one has ever heard of. Do you trust them with your number? That officially looking site could just be one guy in a basement. Give him your number, and you give him the ability to charge thousands of dollars in your name.
So what to do? An obvious solution is to do what is being done above. You give your charge number to some large company that you know will not abscond with it, charging it to the limit. Then you tell the little podunk companies to charge the big company. Your liability goes down. Your charge number doesn't fly across the wire every time you make a purchase from a new company. These are good things. This is more secure then sending your card number directly to everyone you buy from.
The only question is whether or not you trust Microsoft to secure your data. This is the same question you should be asking were you to make a purchase from Microsoft over the wire (or over the phone), as the data is the same.