gimme the old MediaPlayer from Win98, you bastards
Start->Run
mplayer2.exe
View->Options->Formats
Select all media types you don't play in winamp.
The only thing I've found that won't play in Mediaplayer 6.4 is Microsoft's latest 6 channel pro audio codec (and I have only seen one file that uses it, since you have to pay for the encoder and it isn't useful for most normal audio). Everything else can be played if you install the codecs (you might need to go to Microsoft and do search for their 6.4 network codec pack)
Because apart from real alternative (which is too low on the radar for most users to ever see) there is no other way to play real content. So when sites like NPR decide to only provide their audio in real format, it forces people to install realplayer for that one site. And because of how the install works most people end up having their system taken over.
So how much can we expect Linux and OSS to be exploited for oppression and control of the population? China already takes a lot of measures to control the internet (students get arrested just for entering key phrases like "taiwan", "human rights" and "democracy" into google), if they can control the OS too what is to stop them from using that to further control (and while the GPL forces it to be open source, they can easily make it a political crime to use any clean/lite version of their distro)
Actually there is truth to your statement. Previous it was easier to hide vulnerabilities in open source projects or keep them on some obscure page.
For instance do a search on Mozilla. They are issuing reports on vulnerabilities in 1.6. That represents a very big hole in Mozilla's normally security model, which relies on keeping all the vulnerability they have a secret for 2 minor versions. If this site starts making public the almost monthly arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities in Mozilla, while a lot of people are still using those versions, it could be a very, very bad thing. With Mozilla becoming an ever more popular browser you could see people starting to make trojan installs and spyware targeted at Mozilla just like it is at IE now.
Why 1GB of storage may dazzle, what I think could really be revolutionary is the possiblity of Google searching your email. Even with mail folders it's still easy to "lose" some piece of information you want to find later on. With 100 messages carrying the subject "re: meeting" its a pain to find (especially with webmail where each message requires a page load) the one that actually tells you when the meeting is.
Steve Jobs has been highly critical of iPod clones with video and gaming features
Why has it become such a common conception that any harddrive based mp3 player is an iPod knockoff? Last time I checked Rio "invented" the mp3 player (Oct 1998, 32MB PMP300), and Creative "invented" the harddrive subcategory (Aug 2000, 6GB NOMAD Jukebox). It took over a year after Creative, and 3 years after MP3 players first appeared for Apple to enter the game with the original iPod (Oct 2001, 5GB iPod). By that time Creative was already releasing second generation harddrive players with twice capacity as Apple's best ipod at almost the same price.
So obviously iPod had nothing to do with creating the harddrive player. Maybe everyone is copying the iPod look? A general examination of the market doesn't seem to agree with this. iPod has a unique style of smooth curves and controls that blend into the unit. It's coloration and texture make it look almost ceramic from a distance. Compare that with just about every other player on the market: Rubberized edges and buttons, contrasting colors like sharp blues and reds stripping plastic silver. Where as the iPod look is like a bar of Ivory soap, the rest of the market is flooded with devices that look like tiny boom boxes. The only device that seems to come close to iPods smooth colors is the original Nomad Jukebox, the very product the iPod was copying (even then the Nomad retains more of the mainstream consumer electronics feel with its metallic silver highlights). Even the iPod look and feel is basically confined to the Apple court. The navigation system, an evolution of Sony's jogdial thumb navigation, is patented, and the placement of controls below and screen above is nothing new (the granddaddy of all MP3 players used that arrangement). Everything about the iPod screams different (a good reason for its success).
The logic that just because the iPod has market dominance now means that all products that meet the same need are clones is silly. If that kind of crazy logic where true then every desktop OS would be a "clone" of Microsoft Windows, even Mac OS X.
Only when those people are in your website contents demograph. Having a bunch of people visiting with little or no interest in your product or your advertisers is just wasted bandwidth. Sure, there is such a thing as "general" advertising that can make some money from almost anyone - it's called hit the monkey, you've won $1000, and nude girls here. However last time I checked this kind of advertising didn't give enough of a return to fund anything more then cheap porn sites and other zero content redirectors. Would Slashdot stay in business if you directed everyone in South Africa to visit every few days using some sort of public terminal? Unlikely, since a billion or so hits in bandwidth usage from 3rd world people wouldn't be very useful to advertisers selling servers, caffine beverages, and girls who pretend to be dating you.
CNN, Feb 2003
Among other interesting things the system uses to determine if you are a terrorist and should be denied to right to move freely about the country: Your credit rating. Remember, only terrorists miss a payment on their car.
People think a bank might be financially shaky.
Consequence:
People start to withdraw their money.
Result:
Pretty soon, it is financially shaky.
"Everything in this world...operates not on reality - But the perception of reality."
Which is no different then the tax you pay to W&W Communications for their H.264 (one of the other codecs in the new standard) licencing fees.
For reference their cost structure is:
No charge for units produced up to Dec 2004 (first they get you hooked)
First 100,000 units are free
Then its $0.10-0.20 (twice MS's fee) per unit depending of the exact nature of use.
The MPEG-2 tax can be even more, as there are many different patents tied up with it. Depending on which patents licencing fees you are exempt from or get a discount it will cost you $0.04-0.40 per unit.
The Microsoft licencing cost is no different then the other. You've already paid licencing fees for your normal DVD player, even though you might only use it to play VCDs and MP3 CDs and never se an MPEG2 DVD (or vice versa).
For anyone who is interested - Recorded DVD Player sales (numbers are from the Consumer Electronics Association):
1997: 315,136
1998: 1,089,261
1999: 4,019,389
2000: 8,498,545
2001: 12,706,584
2002: 17,089,823
2003: 21,994,389
2004: 26,000,000?
Note that these numbers are only for stand alone DVD players sold by US retailers. DVD-ROM drives and other devices capable of playing DVDs as a secondary function are not included.
Microsoft submitted a codec standard. That standard was accepted as one of the new codecs that will be implimented (by the manufacturers) into the new style DVD players. MS has no control over individual implimentations. This is no different then how some DVD players can now play DivX DVDs (DVDs containing a DivX 5 compatiblity mode encoded avi), except that it will be standard on all units, not just a few special ones.
How does this benefit Microsoft? Since it doesn't give them any control over your DVD player, no special software installed (you can't install software on a DVD player) like the crackhead suggests, they must be getting something. What they are getting is a foot in the DVD door. They can now make more comprehensive DVD burning tools in Longhorn (MS is also likely looking at trying to get digital video camera makers to support the codec too, so you can seamlessly move video from camera, to computer, to DVD-R). The other $advantage$ is that they are now the IBM of one of the new DVD codecs. If studios want to encode DVDs in this manner (which MS will of course strongly market it as the being the "best" choice) they'll want to use tools from the people who know the codec best, which means MS can make lots of money licencing encoders to the people who have lots of money to spend.
Just like Windows 95B and Windows 98SE where good things in their own way, a second edition or "reloaded" version of XP for those who haven't bought it yet would certainly help. For one thing they could do what they're trying to do in SP2 - correct their mistake of assuming the average user is more intelligent then a potted plant (the plant will actually move towards sunlight at an incredibly slow rate). By locking down Windows hard out of the box they can make the trade off of more tech support calls about people who don't know that they have to open ports to run game servers, rather then the constent barrage of bad press because their users open exe files using a 6 year old version of Outlook and run them because the anonymous email with spelling mistakes told them to.
Perhaps a comparison is in order to determine if keeping exploits a secret really does help? Take a product that is open source, but which practices security through obscurity by keeping security bug fixes under raps. The first piece of popular OSS that fits this bill is Mozilla. Security bugs are reported to the bug list, where they are only known to a small circle of developers. Those bugs can then be fixed at the developers leisure (for instance the new Packages.sun.plugin.javascript.navig5.JSObject(1,1 ) bug which caused Mozilla to instantly crash taking every tab with it was fixed about 10 months after it was originally reported [reported in March 2003, silently fixed in a late January 2004 build of Mozilla 1.6]). After the bug is fixed however it is not formally announced, no advisory is issued to tell anyone to update to the latest build. Only after 2 version changes do the bugs appear on the vulnerabilities list (right now you can see 1.4 vulnerabilities, once 1.7 goes gold you'll see the 1.5 vulnerabilities).
This method has greatly increased the security of Mozilla users browsing experience (when was the last time you where the victim of a Mozilla exploit?). This is despite a long track record of arbitrary code vulnerabilities (almost averaging 1 per month so far as the official list admits), frequent problems with javascript and cross site vulnerabilities, URL spoofing, reading local file and password vulnerabilities in almost every minor version (1.2 being the exception for file reading, unless you count the 1.3 or 1.4 vulnerabilities), and some of the most original mail client vulnerabilities out there (in addition to standard arbitrary code execution) such as being able to permanently DoS a mailbox using a webmail account and a message of less then 20 byte.
The simple fact is that most Mozilla users aren't downloading nightly builds to keep themselves secured with all the latest secret patches (though this has its own risk, like the recent bug that deleted everything in the program files folder) they have remained much more secure than users of IE, who are frequently burned because they only (sometimes) apply the publicly announced and electronically pushed patches after someone takes a month or more to come up with a virus based on them (i.e. Blaster). Of course other software users get burned in the same way too: Redhat servers (including some at NASA) got rooted by the Ramen/Lion virus which was made possible by the public announcement and patching of the TSIG vulnerability 6 months earlier. phpBB2 boards that aren't constantly updated get hacked by script kiddies all the time thanks to open security mailing lists.
The simple fact is that the easiest method of writing a virus (if you want it to succeed) is to lookup a known vulnerability (even though its likely patched by that time) and use it. The people most likely not to notice or understand how to deal with the infection are the same people using totally unpatched copies of Linux kernel 1.8 or Windows 98. Look at the "please run this attachment" user vulnerability - while almost all email clients from the last few years physically prevent this vulnerability (for some time Outlook has even gone so far as to remove executable files from zips) viruses like MyDoom still spread at an alarming rate. The people most likely to let their machine become and remain compromised due to carelessness are also the least likely to watch for updates and apply patches.
And no, I don't think companies should withhold patches, but there is a lot of truth to the concept that telling the world about a vulnerability is the fastest way to get a virus written.
So where does the line come between MS enhancing Windows and using Windows to force competitors out of the market?
Should Windows not come with a firewall because someone else makes a firewall (Zone Alarm)? Should Windows not come with a browser, because someone else makes a browser(Netscape)? Should Windows not come with a TCP/IP stack, because someone else makes one(Trumpet)? Should Windows not include multitasking, a GUI or a memory manager because someone else makes those things? (DESQVIEW, Dr-DOS, QEMM)?
As time marches on things progress. In 1993 it was perfectly acceptable for a computer to require $80 worth of additional software just to browse the Internet. In 1998 you expected to be able to plug in a brand new Windows machine, tell it the number of your ISP, and be browsing the web right away.
Now if the only way you could buy Windows was by also buying Office that would be an abuse. But does anyone complain that a perfectly usable word processor, WordPad, is included with Windows? No, because it's a basic application. It's designed to give the casual, out of the box user the basic functionality they expect from their Windows computer. Windows XP included a basic firewall, the idea being that security was becoming a requirement rather then a luxury and so users should have something out of the box. Now is the included firewall very sophisticated? No. If you want a professional firewall you get one yourself. Same could be said for a lot of other features; you want a browser with tabs, popup blocking, automatic history on open, etc? Get a "professional" browser like Opera. The time has come that virus scanning is a requirement, not a luxury that only the 5% of users with a clue should have. MyDoom spread like wildfire, despite it being an easily detectable virus totally blocked by any version of Outlook updated in the last few years and requiring total user stupidity. MyDoom makes MS look bad because the child like masses expect someone else to take care of them. While some people want a professional virus scanner, the average 90% user wants it to be dealt with from the moment they turn on their Gateway machine.
He's got his own console type thing (it seems to be directed at developers, since it's of the "make it yourself" breed not seen in the last 20 years).
Try the official site XGameStation
Read Linus Torvald's book "Just for Fun". IIRC somewhere around the part where he is trashing Apple for bloating up BSD and claiming they made every mistake possible in "enhancing" it, he talks about how Jobs approached him in 1997 about joining Apple. The way Linus writes it makes it sound very much like Steve Jobs didn't think that Linux had any chance at all, and that he thought Linus would be more then happy to jump ship and join the side which (Job's percieved) had the only real chance of taking Microsoft's market share.
5) php developers are heartlessy disgarding every kind of
backward compatibility with every new minor version they
write, e.g. your old scripts which worked finely for 4-5
months may be buggy without you even knowing it after 1
mysterious update.
That has to be the absolute worst. Not only do the minor versions break large numbers of scripts, they do it for the sillest reasons - php has some incredible powerful and language changing
options (like magic quotes, which entirely change how you handle input), yet they insist on changing the defaults for these every time they increment a number. The real business world doesn't have the time and re$ource$ to be constantly updating code and mangling configurations just because some open source team can't make up their mind.
No. In fact you would have a very, very hard time finding a Sony PDA with a 320x240 screen. 320x240 is the defacto standard on Windows PDAs at the moment, though Windows CE can actually support other resolutions quite easily, its just that most of the 3rd party software is hardcoded for that size. Sony makes Palm OS PDAs, which can use 160x160 (from the 1996 Palm Pilot 1000), the high resolution 320x320 first used by Sony (low res apps are easily scaled up, so no compatible problems) and also pioneered by Sony, 320x480 in portrait and landscape mode.
That's what they already do. Blaster used a vulnerability that had been patched a month before by Microsoft, and was actively pushed by MS Update (which would popup asking to install it on anyone with an internet connection and default install). Lion and its variants infected Redhat servers all over the world, including ones at NASA using a flaw that had been patched half a year before.
People smart enough to find exploits rarely seem to be the ones to actually use them on a wide scale. It's script kiddies with subscriptions to bugtraqs mailing list who are doing the most damage, because users of closed and open source systems don't update. True 0-day exploits seem to be a rare thing indeed (such as the rooting of Debians servers). Companies need to inform users of updates, and users need to download them (for instance if you are still using an initial release version of Mozilla 1.6 you should download the latest build. While it hasn't been advertised it seems to fix the fatal java crash exploit discovered last March)
Actually there is a company that has designed such a device for women, however it requires a surgical implant to work (it's controlled by a remote). Last I heard they where having trouble getting it to market because they couldn't find any willing test subjects.
The place to cut is in military spending. The war in Iraq would have paid for a lot of space travel, unfortunately it paid for blowing up buildings instead. We have lots of highly specialized weapons that are very expensive - millions of dollars per explosion. Military aircraft are not built using standard parts. Everything is custom. So everything is brutally expensive. Cut back on the custom nature of this hardware, and you'd save a lot of money. Cut back on unilateral foreign wars, and you'd save even more.
To perhaps put a more direct example in the light, the US has (by civilian knowledge) 21 plane B2 bomber bomber (mostly built in the last 3 years or so). While originally designed to fly long range missions to drop nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union, they now only have regular bombing duty, a role already filled by the enormous fleet of B1 and B52s. In fact the US General Accounting Office found the B2s actually have trouble doing even those missions; since they where originally designed to fly a single M.A.D. mission, they are not very sturdy. In fact every mission they fly causes extensive and expensive damage because of moisture in the air damaging the stealth covering.
The cost, as stated, for this space program is 13 billion. The cost for the handful of B2s was $45 billion (even if you exclude research costs and assume mass production, each plane costs over $1 billion to produce, let alone actually maintain). What worse is that the B2 is a somewhat cost efficent project as compared to others in the military industrial complex.
Slashdot Mirror
gimme the old MediaPlayer from Win98, you bastards
Start->Run
mplayer2.exe
View->Options->Formats
Select all media types you don't play in winamp.
The only thing I've found that won't play in Mediaplayer 6.4 is Microsoft's latest 6 channel pro audio codec (and I have only seen one file that uses it, since you have to pay for the encoder and it isn't useful for most normal audio). Everything else can be played if you install the codecs (you might need to go to Microsoft and do search for their 6.4 network codec pack)
Because apart from real alternative (which is too low on the radar for most users to ever see) there is no other way to play real content. So when sites like NPR decide to only provide their audio in real format, it forces people to install realplayer for that one site. And because of how the install works most people end up having their system taken over.
So how much can we expect Linux and OSS to be exploited for oppression and control of the population? China already takes a lot of measures to control the internet (students get arrested just for entering key phrases like "taiwan", "human rights" and "democracy" into google), if they can control the OS too what is to stop them from using that to further control (and while the GPL forces it to be open source, they can easily make it a political crime to use any clean/lite version of their distro)
Actually there is truth to your statement. Previous it was easier to hide vulnerabilities in open source projects or keep them on some obscure page.
For instance do a search on Mozilla. They are issuing reports on vulnerabilities in 1.6. That represents a very big hole in Mozilla's normally security model, which relies on keeping all the vulnerability they have a secret for 2 minor versions. If this site starts making public the almost monthly arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities in Mozilla, while a lot of people are still using those versions, it could be a very, very bad thing. With Mozilla becoming an ever more popular browser you could see people starting to make trojan installs and spyware targeted at Mozilla just like it is at IE now.
Why 1GB of storage may dazzle, what I think could really be revolutionary is the possiblity of Google searching your email. Even with mail folders it's still easy to "lose" some piece of information you want to find later on. With 100 messages carrying the subject "re: meeting" its a pain to find (especially with webmail where each message requires a page load) the one that actually tells you when the meeting is.
Steve Jobs has been highly critical of iPod clones with video and gaming features
Why has it become such a common conception that any harddrive based mp3 player is an iPod knockoff? Last time I checked Rio "invented" the mp3 player (Oct 1998, 32MB PMP300), and Creative "invented" the harddrive subcategory (Aug 2000, 6GB NOMAD Jukebox). It took over a year after Creative, and 3 years after MP3 players first appeared for Apple to enter the game with the original iPod (Oct 2001, 5GB iPod). By that time Creative was already releasing second generation harddrive players with twice capacity as Apple's best ipod at almost the same price.
So obviously iPod had nothing to do with creating the harddrive player. Maybe everyone is copying the iPod look? A general examination of the market doesn't seem to agree with this. iPod has a unique style of smooth curves and controls that blend into the unit. It's coloration and texture make it look almost ceramic from a distance. Compare that with just about every other player on the market: Rubberized edges and buttons, contrasting colors like sharp blues and reds stripping plastic silver. Where as the iPod look is like a bar of Ivory soap, the rest of the market is flooded with devices that look like tiny boom boxes. The only device that seems to come close to iPods smooth colors is the original Nomad Jukebox, the very product the iPod was copying (even then the Nomad retains more of the mainstream consumer electronics feel with its metallic silver highlights). Even the iPod look and feel is basically confined to the Apple court. The navigation system, an evolution of Sony's jogdial thumb navigation, is patented, and the placement of controls below and screen above is nothing new (the granddaddy of all MP3 players used that arrangement). Everything about the iPod screams different (a good reason for its success).
The logic that just because the iPod has market dominance now means that all products that meet the same need are clones is silly. If that kind of crazy logic where true then every desktop OS would be a "clone" of Microsoft Windows, even Mac OS X.
Only when those people are in your website contents demograph. Having a bunch of people visiting with little or no interest in your product or your advertisers is just wasted bandwidth. Sure, there is such a thing as "general" advertising that can make some money from almost anyone - it's called hit the monkey, you've won $1000, and nude girls here. However last time I checked this kind of advertising didn't give enough of a return to fund anything more then cheap porn sites and other zero content redirectors. Would Slashdot stay in business if you directed everyone in South Africa to visit every few days using some sort of public terminal? Unlikely, since a billion or so hits in bandwidth usage from 3rd world people wouldn't be very useful to advertisers selling servers, caffine beverages, and girls who pretend to be dating you.
CNN, Feb 2003
Among other interesting things the system uses to determine if you are a terrorist and should be denied to right to move freely about the country: Your credit rating. Remember, only terrorists miss a payment on their car.
People think a bank might be financially shaky. Consequence: People start to withdraw their money. Result: Pretty soon, it is financially shaky. "Everything in this world...operates not on reality - But the perception of reality."
I just wonder how they where able to graft X-Windows into their current source code.
Which is no different then the tax you pay to W&W Communications for their H.264 (one of the other codecs in the new standard) licencing fees.
For reference their cost structure is:
No charge for units produced up to Dec 2004 (first they get you hooked)
First 100,000 units are free
Then its $0.10-0.20 (twice MS's fee) per unit depending of the exact nature of use.
The MPEG-2 tax can be even more, as there are many different patents tied up with it. Depending on which patents licencing fees you are exempt from or get a discount it will cost you $0.04-0.40 per unit.
The Microsoft licencing cost is no different then the other. You've already paid licencing fees for your normal DVD player, even though you might only use it to play VCDs and MP3 CDs and never se an MPEG2 DVD (or vice versa).
For anyone who is interested - Recorded DVD Player sales (numbers are from the Consumer Electronics Association): 1997: 315,136 1998: 1,089,261 1999: 4,019,389 2000: 8,498,545 2001: 12,706,584 2002: 17,089,823 2003: 21,994,389 2004: 26,000,000? Note that these numbers are only for stand alone DVD players sold by US retailers. DVD-ROM drives and other devices capable of playing DVDs as a secondary function are not included.
Paranoia anyone?
Microsoft submitted a codec standard. That standard was accepted as one of the new codecs that will be implimented (by the manufacturers) into the new style DVD players. MS has no control over individual implimentations. This is no different then how some DVD players can now play DivX DVDs (DVDs containing a DivX 5 compatiblity mode encoded avi), except that it will be standard on all units, not just a few special ones.
How does this benefit Microsoft?
Since it doesn't give them any control over your DVD player, no special software installed (you can't install software on a DVD player) like the crackhead suggests, they must be getting something. What they are getting is a foot in the DVD door. They can now make more comprehensive DVD burning tools in Longhorn (MS is also likely looking at trying to get digital video camera makers to support the codec too, so you can seamlessly move video from camera, to computer, to DVD-R). The other $advantage$ is that they are now the IBM of one of the new DVD codecs. If studios want to encode DVDs in this manner (which MS will of course strongly market it as the being the "best" choice) they'll want to use tools from the people who know the codec best, which means MS can make lots of money licencing encoders to the people who have lots of money to spend.
Just like Windows 95B and Windows 98SE where good things in their own way, a second edition or "reloaded" version of XP for those who haven't bought it yet would certainly help. For one thing they could do what they're trying to do in SP2 - correct their mistake of assuming the average user is more intelligent then a potted plant (the plant will actually move towards sunlight at an incredibly slow rate). By locking down Windows hard out of the box they can make the trade off of more tech support calls about people who don't know that they have to open ports to run game servers, rather then the constent barrage of bad press because their users open exe files using a 6 year old version of Outlook and run them because the anonymous email with spelling mistakes told them to.
Perhaps a comparison is in order to determine if keeping exploits a secret really does help? Take a product that is open source, but which practices security through obscurity by keeping security bug fixes under raps. The first piece of popular OSS that fits this bill is Mozilla. Security bugs are reported to the bug list, where they are only known to a small circle of developers. Those bugs can then be fixed at the developers leisure (for instance the new Packages.sun.plugin.javascript.navig5.JSObject(1,1 ) bug which caused Mozilla to instantly crash taking every tab with it was fixed about 10 months after it was originally reported [reported in March 2003, silently fixed in a late January 2004 build of Mozilla 1.6]). After the bug is fixed however it is not formally announced, no advisory is issued to tell anyone to update to the latest build. Only after 2 version changes do the bugs appear on the vulnerabilities list (right now you can see 1.4 vulnerabilities, once 1.7 goes gold you'll see the 1.5 vulnerabilities).
This method has greatly increased the security of Mozilla users browsing experience (when was the last time you where the victim of a Mozilla exploit?). This is despite a long track record of arbitrary code vulnerabilities (almost averaging 1 per month so far as the official list admits), frequent problems with javascript and cross site vulnerabilities, URL spoofing, reading local file and password vulnerabilities in almost every minor version (1.2 being the exception for file reading, unless you count the 1.3 or 1.4 vulnerabilities), and some of the most original mail client vulnerabilities out there (in addition to standard arbitrary code execution) such as being able to permanently DoS a mailbox using a webmail account and a message of less then 20 byte.
The simple fact is that most Mozilla users aren't downloading nightly builds to keep themselves secured with all the latest secret patches (though this has its own risk, like the recent bug that deleted everything in the program files folder) they have remained much more secure than users of IE, who are frequently burned because they only (sometimes) apply the publicly announced and electronically pushed patches after someone takes a month or more to come up with a virus based on them (i.e. Blaster). Of course other software users get burned in the same way too: Redhat servers (including some at NASA) got rooted by the Ramen/Lion virus which was made possible by the public announcement and patching of the TSIG vulnerability 6 months earlier. phpBB2 boards that aren't constantly updated get hacked by script kiddies all the time thanks to open security mailing lists.
The simple fact is that the easiest method of writing a virus (if you want it to succeed) is to lookup a known vulnerability (even though its likely patched by that time) and use it. The people most likely not to notice or understand how to deal with the infection are the same people using totally unpatched copies of Linux kernel 1.8 or Windows 98. Look at the "please run this attachment" user vulnerability - while almost all email clients from the last few years physically prevent this vulnerability (for some time Outlook has even gone so far as to remove executable files from zips) viruses like MyDoom still spread at an alarming rate. The people most likely to let their machine become and remain compromised due to carelessness are also the least likely to watch for updates and apply patches.
And no, I don't think companies should withhold patches, but there is a lot of truth to the concept that telling the world about a vulnerability is the fastest way to get a virus written.
So where does the line come between MS enhancing Windows and using Windows to force competitors out of the market?
Should Windows not come with a firewall because someone else makes a firewall (Zone Alarm)? Should Windows not come with a browser, because someone else makes a browser(Netscape)? Should Windows not come with a TCP/IP stack, because someone else makes one(Trumpet)? Should Windows not include multitasking, a GUI or a memory manager because someone else makes those things? (DESQVIEW, Dr-DOS, QEMM)?
As time marches on things progress. In 1993 it was perfectly acceptable for a computer to require $80 worth of additional software just to browse the Internet. In 1998 you expected to be able to plug in a brand new Windows machine, tell it the number of your ISP, and be browsing the web right away.
Now if the only way you could buy Windows was by also buying Office that would be an abuse. But does anyone complain that a perfectly usable word processor, WordPad, is included with Windows? No, because it's a basic application. It's designed to give the casual, out of the box user the basic functionality they expect from their Windows computer. Windows XP included a basic firewall, the idea being that security was becoming a requirement rather then a luxury and so users should have something out of the box. Now is the included firewall very sophisticated? No. If you want a professional firewall you get one yourself. Same could be said for a lot of other features; you want a browser with tabs, popup blocking, automatic history on open, etc? Get a "professional" browser like Opera. The time has come that virus scanning is a requirement, not a luxury that only the 5% of users with a clue should have. MyDoom spread like wildfire, despite it being an easily detectable virus totally blocked by any version of Outlook updated in the last few years and requiring total user stupidity. MyDoom makes MS look bad because the child like masses expect someone else to take care of them. While some people want a professional virus scanner, the average 90% user wants it to be dealt with from the moment they turn on their Gateway machine.
He's got his own console type thing (it seems to be directed at developers, since it's of the "make it yourself" breed not seen in the last 20 years). Try the official site XGameStation
Read Linus Torvald's book "Just for Fun". IIRC somewhere around the part where he is trashing Apple for bloating up BSD and claiming they made every mistake possible in "enhancing" it, he talks about how Jobs approached him in 1997 about joining Apple. The way Linus writes it makes it sound very much like Steve Jobs didn't think that Linux had any chance at all, and that he thought Linus would be more then happy to jump ship and join the side which (Job's percieved) had the only real chance of taking Microsoft's market share.
5) php developers are heartlessy disgarding every kind of backward compatibility with every new minor version they write, e.g. your old scripts which worked finely for 4-5 months may be buggy without you even knowing it after 1 mysterious update.
That has to be the absolute worst. Not only do the minor versions break large numbers of scripts, they do it for the sillest reasons - php has some incredible powerful and language changing options (like magic quotes, which entirely change how you handle input), yet they insist on changing the defaults for these every time they increment a number. The real business world doesn't have the time and re$ource$ to be constantly updating code and mangling configurations just because some open source team can't make up their mind.
No. In fact you would have a very, very hard time finding a Sony PDA with a 320x240 screen. 320x240 is the defacto standard on Windows PDAs at the moment, though Windows CE can actually support other resolutions quite easily, its just that most of the 3rd party software is hardcoded for that size. Sony makes Palm OS PDAs, which can use 160x160 (from the 1996 Palm Pilot 1000), the high resolution 320x320 first used by Sony (low res apps are easily scaled up, so no compatible problems) and also pioneered by Sony, 320x480 in portrait and landscape mode.
That's what they already do. Blaster used a vulnerability that had been patched a month before by Microsoft, and was actively pushed by MS Update (which would popup asking to install it on anyone with an internet connection and default install). Lion and its variants infected Redhat servers all over the world, including ones at NASA using a flaw that had been patched half a year before. People smart enough to find exploits rarely seem to be the ones to actually use them on a wide scale. It's script kiddies with subscriptions to bugtraqs mailing list who are doing the most damage, because users of closed and open source systems don't update. True 0-day exploits seem to be a rare thing indeed (such as the rooting of Debians servers). Companies need to inform users of updates, and users need to download them (for instance if you are still using an initial release version of Mozilla 1.6 you should download the latest build. While it hasn't been advertised it seems to fix the fatal java crash exploit discovered last March)
No volunteers for orgasm implant
Actually there is a company that has designed such a device for women, however it requires a surgical implant to work (it's controlled by a remote). Last I heard they where having trouble getting it to market because they couldn't find any willing test subjects.
Then how exactly did he afford a Mac?
The place to cut is in military spending. The war in Iraq would have paid for a lot of space travel, unfortunately it paid for blowing up buildings instead. We have lots of highly specialized weapons that are very expensive - millions of dollars per explosion. Military aircraft are not built using standard parts. Everything is custom. So everything is brutally expensive. Cut back on the custom nature of this hardware, and you'd save a lot of money. Cut back on unilateral foreign wars, and you'd save even more.
To perhaps put a more direct example in the light, the US has (by civilian knowledge) 21 plane B2 bomber bomber (mostly built in the last 3 years or so). While originally designed to fly long range missions to drop nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union, they now only have regular bombing duty, a role already filled by the enormous fleet of B1 and B52s. In fact the US General Accounting Office found the B2s actually have trouble doing even those missions; since they where originally designed to fly a single M.A.D. mission, they are not very sturdy. In fact every mission they fly causes extensive and expensive damage because of moisture in the air damaging the stealth covering.
The cost, as stated, for this space program is 13 billion. The cost for the handful of B2s was $45 billion (even if you exclude research costs and assume mass production, each plane costs over $1 billion to produce, let alone actually maintain). What worse is that the B2 is a somewhat cost efficent project as compared to others in the military industrial complex.