They are driving customers away from any future sales.
If you can make your fortune by scamming now, why are you going to care that you're destroying the ability of other people to do the same 10 years from now? By then you'll have retired to your yacht.
If a user doesn't have the time and/or inclination to leave their browser of (informed) choice downloading critical updates to browser, OS, AV, anti-spyware and so on, then they're more likely to go "Ah, skip it - I can get them later, and anything dodgy will get cleared out then."
Even more of a problem - what if the user is on a dialup connection. My dad wasn't impressed when I told him that XPSP2 would be of 60 meg (he has a 33k6 pay-per-minute dialup connection)... I burned it to CD and took it with me when I visited. (Yes, I know that SP2 was available on CD anyway, but the vast other numbers of updates are not). This is a problem that I think noone has solved - from this perspective the only way you're better off in Linux is that hopefully the security holes that you're not patching are less serious.
I'm not gonna convince my parents to pay 15ukp / month for a DSL connection when they only use the Internet for 30 minutes a month as it is. (and before anyone says "if they're only online for 30 minutes a month they're not very vulnerable", this is simply not true - Windows machines often get compromised in under 30 minutes)
For the vast majority of people (most of whom only need web browser, email, office suite, maybe tax/financial software, some basic photo/video/audio manipulation), OS X will work just fine.
OS X suffers the same problems that prevent me from installing Linux on my dad's machine though: He wants to go to $random_shop, buy $random_software and install it - this is something he can't do in Linux (although there are probably (free) alternatives to the software he just bought, that takes more clue).
There are basically 3 types of computer users:
1. People who aren't very technical but know what they want to use a computer for and will keep using it for (more or less) that purpose. 2. People who are really technical 3. People who aren't that technical but want to play with random new toys on their computers.
My mum falls into category 1 - she wants to word process, surf the web, do email, etc. There's no problem with me setting up Linux for her and she will be perfectly happy with it. It will let her do all the stuff she wants, she will never/rarely want to fiddle and install more software, and it will require not much maintenance once it's set up.
I fall into category 2 - I want to do lots of cool stuff with my computer, and I am technical and well connected enough to (99% of the time) find some free software that runs under Linux to do what I want (and it's probably better than the expensive software to do the same thing under Windows).
Unfortunately my dad falls into category 3 - he wants to do all the same stuff as my mum, but he also wants to mail order and install new versions of his Fritz chess software, Encyclopedia Britanica and various other things. I have read I could get Fritz to work under WINE, and he could use Wikipedia instead of his Britanica CD. However, I live 160 miles away from him so visiting to do the odd software configuration isn't just a quick walk down the road and he's on dialup which makes remote admin difficult. He isn't technical enough to do stuff like set up WINE, etc. And whilest I can do it for him when I visit, what happens when he wants to upgrade or install $random_other_software?
For the last 2 weeks i've been trying MS Antispyware
Do you not find it worrying that the vendor of Windows (MS) is sticking band-aids over their security holes with an anti spyware program instead of actually fixing the holes that let it in in the first place?
The cable company said they just need their service. But someone, somewhere along the line, should have said, "Yeah, but you'll need a firewall with that."
I'm sorry, but you don't need a firewall - if you don't want a service to be accessible (i.e. you want it firewalled) you should be asking yourself why you're running it in the first place. (Yes, I know that there are advantages in firewalls which pop up messages asking if it's ok for an application to use a specific port, but thats usually negated by the fact that people will click yes to anything).
Of course, I'm still agreeing that someone along the line (probably MS) should've built in the protections the user needs, but a firewall is in many cases just a band aid to cover the fact that your services are completely misconfigured.
Dell could have had a hardware solution built-in somehow.
Why do you say "a hardware solution"? Where's the advantage? If it's built in then it's going to have to be addressable by software running on the computer itself in order to make it nice and userfriendly, and at that point you've opened it up to all the vulnerabilities of having a personal software firewall. (This is a big arguement against ever having uPNP enabled hardware firewalls).
Why the heck can't they virus scan everything passing through? It won't catch everything, but it will stop all those Netsky.P's still flowing into my inbox.
What about those of us not vulnerable to Netsky.P? Why should we pay the cost of the ISP running these services and put up with any false positives that may get rejected?
Your ISP probably can't be blamed for spyware, but they sure as hell deserve some of the blame for spam, the large ones at least.
This is like blaming the road maintenance crews for a drunk driver crashing into you.
The only ISPs to blame for spam are those who ignore abuse and virus reports. And TBH, if this is *your* ISP that's ignoring the reports and letting people spam from their network, I have to ask why you're still subscribed to (and thus supporting) them?
Some encryption schemes have been peer-reviewed for many, many years without flaws being found. Short of a "Sneakers"-style mathmatical breakthrough, its doubtful that some of these schemes will ever be broken.
This is wrong - chances are that eventually computers will be powerful enough to brute force it. However, you can choose an encryption algorithm/key length by deciding:
1. Is the data useful by the time we can decrypt it? (probably no for most people if it takes more than a few months to decrypt). 2. Is the data worth more than it would cost to decrypt it in a short amount of time (if the data is worth $10 million, but the computing power to crack the encryption will cost you $20 million it's obviously not worth bothering).
So most encryption schemes will likely be broken eventually, but for most people that's probably not an issue since by the time it's broken the data is worthless (e.g. it nolonger applies, or is common knowledge by that time).
(none of the above applies to OTP algorithms, but they have their own problems, such as how do you transmit a massive pad to a remote client securely? If you transmit the pad via a traditional encryption scheme then the pad (and hence the data is is encrypting) is again vulnerable).
What have these companies given back to the community? They have saved considerable resources by riding on free code. It only seems fitting they write a few checks to a foundation or two. Maybe release some of their own code? No? Hmm.
Ok, see it this way - you want to start a company, the advantages to using linux seem to be:
1. You get a "free ride". I.e. less development costs, etc. This is important when starting a company with minimal funding. 2. You find a bug in Linux that's seriously affecting your customers then you can fix it yourself (or employ someone to fix it). So an important bug, maybe one that's not affecting many people, is fixable in a reasonably short time. Compare to closed systems like Windows in which the bug will take months to get fixed if it even ever does.
If the company is successful (helped by point 1 above), the chances are they will find bugs that need fixing or features that need adding to the open parts of software and so at that point they will (hopefully) be helping the community.
So in the short term, I see nothing wrong with the "free ride" to help the company get off the ground, and in the long term I expect most companies will be making fixes and features in the open code and should be submitting them back to the community.
Of course, even though the GPL doesn't require it, IMHO all enhancements made to open software should be submitted back to the project author/team and put up on a publically accessable and googleable website. (GPL requires neither of these - GPL simply requires that you hand out the code if someone requests it, whereas I believe you should be actively publishing the code for all to see).
And naturally there will always be companies who are breaking the GPL by not releasing any of their patches, whcih is a Bad Thing. But short of the author taking them to court (if he even finds out about it), there doesn't seem much you can do about it.
What do you all people see as uses for faster PC's if you could have 10gihz on a desktop machine or even laptop
Photo stitching... My Athlon XP 2100+ can spend hours running Sift, Hugin and Enblend to stitch a large panorama together. Of course that also wants nice fast memory since there is lots of data involved.
I didn't say it was - reread my comment. I said it was designed from a monopolistic point of view (i.e. "we are (almost) a monopoly so we can do WTF we want and everyone else will have to follow suit")
most people do not associate IE with being crappy.
That could well be down to not realising that there is anything better... which again reenforces my point that crappy software doesn't always fail in favor of good software. If someone is prevented from seeing the good software (e.g. by whatever buying practices their company uses) then they will assume that the bad softwaer is all that exists and will have to put up with it.
Additionally, much of IE's market share is related directly to the fact that a modified version is used by AOL for their 20M+ (or whatever it is today) users.
Unlikely - I know plenty of people who do/did use IE and I know noone who uses or has ever used AOL - the two are reasonably unrelated.
Finally, IE is - despite its security problems - a decent product.
It could be argued it is a "decent product" from a monopolistic point of view (i.e. ignoring all standards because people will have to comply with the monopoly anyway). From a technical point of view I have seen very little software which behaves worse than IE.
Right. There is a programming elite, and that elite should be trained to keep the unwashed masses from touching a compiler.
Ok, badly worded - I didn't mean "prevent", I just meant to not make it too easy. The problem is that 9 times out of 10 the people buying the software aren't the people who are going to use it. So the buyers will pay for the cheaper software if it *looks* good, even if it's a bugridden pile of crap. This is bad for everyone in the long run.
What ever happened to freedom? Open Source is about freedom - the freedom to have a compiler, to tinker, and to create value.
That works fine if the freedom also applies to the people who are actually using the software. However, in business that doesn't happen - the manager will buy something and you will be told to use it. This has been seen many many times (especially in government organisations, probably because they are forced to be more open about cockups). Many times have systems been implemented where it is clear that the people who will actually be using them have never been consulted. (Often results in them finding the system completely unusable).
In the marketplace and the wider world, crappy programs of any stripe fail.
There is plenty of proof that this is completely untrue. Even in a sector where the _users_ get the choice, we see crappy software like Internet Explorer having a massive market share over better software such as FireFox.
Of course the same is true in other markets, not just software. Look for example at the people who still insist on contracting the likes of EDS even after they've made well publicised and massive cockups.
I have always seen VB as a Bad Thing (and I see this in the same light).
IMHO BASIC is not and never has been a suitable language for writing real world applications. Gluing all the extra functionality needed onto a language such as BASIC has always seemed like a really bad idea to me and IMHO a lot of the VB syntax is very inconsistent because of this.
Additionally, I think that VB has probably single handedly cause a lot of buggy software to be introduced:
- Any muppet can create something in VB that _looks_ good - Said muppets are not trained in how to program so the back end logic is probably screwed and bugridden to hell. - Managers don't use the software they buy for their underlings so they buy based on the fact that it looks good rather than how well it works. - The underlings who actually use the software now have to put up with the bugs. - Managers perceive that they are getting a "good deal" by getting the pretty software from cheap untrained coders. - People who actually can program lose their jobs in favor of the cheaper untrained people (who are producing software that looks as good but is full of bugs). - planes and satellites fall out of the sky - nuclear reactors melt down - world ends:-/
Writing languages which make things easier for people who _can_ code is a Good Thing, but care must be taken to prevent people who can't code from producing bug ridden applications that they can sell to the managers. Like it or not, no matter how much pointy-and-clickyness you add to a programming language, you need some brain work at the back end to write the logic that ties it all together - people who don't have the mental discipline can't do a good job of this.
I think everyone here that likes firefox should give the Opera beta a try. I've used it since yesterday and it's a top quality piece of software in my opinion.
I had to do some web work a while ago and tested againsted FireFox, Opera, Safari and IE (yuck).
Now, don't get me wrong - having Opera out there is a Good Thing since it adds more weight to the non-IE scene.
However, while doing the design (all fully complient XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.1), Safari and Firefox had some small off-by-one bugs in, etc which were a pain. However I found some glaring places where Opera just completely failed to stick to the spec.
That and the fact that I don't like the UI on Opera means that I won't be using it.
There is one other thing that winds me up in Opera - why oh why must it ship with it's user agent defaulted to look like IE? That just gives web masters false statistics.
So how long until I can remove the block on a pair of CNLink's/20 networks from my firewall?
My web server was getting massively log spammed from them (even though I don't publish my web stats). The first time round I actually bothered to report the attacks to their abuse address but naturally got no response at all. So the second time I got attacked I had no choice but to just drop all traffic from both their/20's.
When will these ISPs realise they're shooting themselves in the foot by forcing everyone to just outright block their networks?
I bought Dido's second album, for example, only to discover that you can only play it on a PC through a proprietary software player (assuming your OS will run it, naturally).
Worked for me - I read on the box "won't play on PCs" so I slapped it in my machine, fired up GRIP and a few minutes later the MP3s were sitting on my hard drive.:)
(I should clarify - I don't distribute MP3s, I simply find it a lot easier to have all my music sat on my hard drive so I can listen to it without going and finding the CD).
but I'm reliably informed that it doesn't work in some car CD players
It plays on my car CD player, but it plays past the end of the disk by about 10 minutes, which my home stereo and my cdrom drive do not.
The concept of corrupt CDs really annoy me, but I have yet to find one that actually causes me real problems (i.e. I haven't found one where the "copy protection" actually does it's job). As soon as I find one that I can't rip or can't play in the car it'll go straight back to the shop. I should point out that the _only_ OS I use is Linux, so any "copy protection" systems which are designed specifically for windows won't affect me in the slightest.
I imagine that if all record shops were suddenly required to separate out normal CDs and copy-protected not-quite-CDs in an obvious way, sales of the latter would probably drop PDQ
I think it would be too much effort for the shops, they would simply stop labelling all the CDs as "compact discs" - you'd go into the music shop and just see "Music Discs" or something and once they do that the trademark is worth even less and noone's any better off.
In any case, the people producing the "copy protection" systems can't win - the CD drive manufacturers will just start designing their drives to deal with the corrupt discs in the same way audio CD players do.
It's your own fault if you buy their products. Their existance in your country doesn't effect you in an way but giving you (or your government) another choice.
I neither buy nor use their products. But nor do I have any influence on my government - last time I checked, withholding taxes because I don't agree with what the government is spending them on is illegal.
Now if we can just get someone to sue Redhat for packaging up2date with Linux and preventing other package managers such as yum and apt-get from becoming widely used.
The point is that Red Hat package up2date, but they also package yum - you've got a choice as to which you use.
If MicroSoft packaged RealPlayer and Quicktime as well then probably noone would complain. In the same way, if Ford made 95% of the world's cars and they only put Ford stereos in them the other stereo manufacturers would have cause for complaint.
Now what's needed is either a ban on MS shipping IE and MSN Messenger with windows, or a requirement for them to also ship FireFox, Opera, a Jabber client and an AIM client.
If the OS comes with nothing or it comes with several different products then the customer will make a choice (either informed or otherwise) and all the manufacturers get a chance. If the OS comes with a single program to do the job then most customers will use that in preference to bothering to download a different one, even if the bundled product is crap. It also produces the effect we have at the moment with IE where as far as many users are concerned, IE is "the internet" and the thought that IE is just a piece of software of which there are many other products to do the same job just never occurs to them.
It doesn't matter if the product they're bundling is a pile of crap or the greatest in the world - by bundling it with practically every PC sold and not bundling competing software they are abusing their monopoly and preventing any competetors from gaining market share. It's even worse when they move into a market that already exists because then suddenly they're putting legitimate businesses out of business (see Netscape vs IE for details).
Watch the movie in the theatres and don't buy the DVD's and watch the DVD portion of the profits plummet.
Doesn't work - this has already been shown in the CD industry. CD profits are down - must be piracy, lets shove more DRM crap on them, profits go down more, rinse, repeat.
Slashdot Mirror
They are driving customers away from any future sales.
If you can make your fortune by scamming now, why are you going to care that you're destroying the ability of other people to do the same 10 years from now? By then you'll have retired to your yacht.
If a user doesn't have the time and/or inclination to leave their browser of (informed) choice downloading critical updates to browser, OS, AV, anti-spyware and so on, then they're more likely to go "Ah, skip it - I can get them later, and anything dodgy will get cleared out then."
Even more of a problem - what if the user is on a dialup connection. My dad wasn't impressed when I told him that XPSP2 would be of 60 meg (he has a 33k6 pay-per-minute dialup connection)... I burned it to CD and took it with me when I visited. (Yes, I know that SP2 was available on CD anyway, but the vast other numbers of updates are not). This is a problem that I think noone has solved - from this perspective the only way you're better off in Linux is that hopefully the security holes that you're not patching are less serious.
I'm not gonna convince my parents to pay 15ukp / month for a DSL connection when they only use the Internet for 30 minutes a month as it is. (and before anyone says "if they're only online for 30 minutes a month they're not very vulnerable", this is simply not true - Windows machines often get compromised in under 30 minutes)
Why not just install Firefox and Thunderbird on your Windows machine?
:)
Great until some website fires up a windows media file in media player, whcih promptly downloads a load of spyware through the IE engine.
For the vast majority of people (most of whom only need web browser, email, office suite, maybe tax/financial software, some basic photo/video/audio manipulation), OS X will work just fine.
OS X suffers the same problems that prevent me from installing Linux on my dad's machine though: He wants to go to $random_shop, buy $random_software and install it - this is something he can't do in Linux (although there are probably (free) alternatives to the software he just bought, that takes more clue).
There are basically 3 types of computer users:
1. People who aren't very technical but know what they want to use a computer for and will keep using it for (more or less) that purpose.
2. People who are really technical
3. People who aren't that technical but want to play with random new toys on their computers.
My mum falls into category 1 - she wants to word process, surf the web, do email, etc. There's no problem with me setting up Linux for her and she will be perfectly happy with it. It will let her do all the stuff she wants, she will never/rarely want to fiddle and install more software, and it will require not much maintenance once it's set up.
I fall into category 2 - I want to do lots of cool stuff with my computer, and I am technical and well connected enough to (99% of the time) find some free software that runs under Linux to do what I want (and it's probably better than the expensive software to do the same thing under Windows).
Unfortunately my dad falls into category 3 - he wants to do all the same stuff as my mum, but he also wants to mail order and install new versions of his Fritz chess software, Encyclopedia Britanica and various other things. I have read I could get Fritz to work under WINE, and he could use Wikipedia instead of his Britanica CD. However, I live 160 miles away from him so visiting to do the odd software configuration isn't just a quick walk down the road and he's on dialup which makes remote admin difficult. He isn't technical enough to do stuff like set up WINE, etc. And whilest I can do it for him when I visit, what happens when he wants to upgrade or install $random_other_software?
For the last 2 weeks i've been trying MS Antispyware
Do you not find it worrying that the vendor of Windows (MS) is sticking band-aids over their security holes with an anti spyware program instead of actually fixing the holes that let it in in the first place?
The cable company said they just need their service. But someone, somewhere along the line, should have said, "Yeah, but you'll need a firewall with that."
I'm sorry, but you don't need a firewall - if you don't want a service to be accessible (i.e. you want it firewalled) you should be asking yourself why you're running it in the first place. (Yes, I know that there are advantages in firewalls which pop up messages asking if it's ok for an application to use a specific port, but thats usually negated by the fact that people will click yes to anything).
Of course, I'm still agreeing that someone along the line (probably MS) should've built in the protections the user needs, but a firewall is in many cases just a band aid to cover the fact that your services are completely misconfigured.
Dell could have had a hardware solution built-in somehow.
Why do you say "a hardware solution"? Where's the advantage? If it's built in then it's going to have to be addressable by software running on the computer itself in order to make it nice and userfriendly, and at that point you've opened it up to all the vulnerabilities of having a personal software firewall. (This is a big arguement against ever having uPNP enabled hardware firewalls).
Why the heck can't they virus scan everything passing through? It won't catch everything, but it will stop all those Netsky.P's still flowing into my inbox.
What about those of us not vulnerable to Netsky.P? Why should we pay the cost of the ISP running these services and put up with any false positives that may get rejected?
Your ISP probably can't be blamed for spyware, but they sure as hell deserve some of the blame for spam, the large ones at least.
This is like blaming the road maintenance crews for a drunk driver crashing into you.
The only ISPs to blame for spam are those who ignore abuse and virus reports. And TBH, if this is *your* ISP that's ignoring the reports and letting people spam from their network, I have to ask why you're still subscribed to (and thus supporting) them?
using software without a software firewall and surfing the web without virus protection and Spyware detection I really don't feel sorry for you.
I don't have a virus scanner or spyware detector... of course I happen to not use Windows at all...
Your beer would be less watered down in the pub
You could only get someone convicted, if they spammed to advertise something illegal.
Or of the spammer made unauthorised use of someone else's computer to send spam... No, no, you're right, spammers don't do illegal things like that.
Some encryption schemes have been peer-reviewed for many, many years without flaws being found. Short of a "Sneakers"-style mathmatical breakthrough, its doubtful that some of these schemes will ever be broken.
This is wrong - chances are that eventually computers will be powerful enough to brute force it. However, you can choose an encryption algorithm/key length by deciding:
1. Is the data useful by the time we can decrypt it? (probably no for most people if it takes more than a few months to decrypt).
2. Is the data worth more than it would cost to decrypt it in a short amount of time (if the data is worth $10 million, but the computing power to crack the encryption will cost you $20 million it's obviously not worth bothering).
So most encryption schemes will likely be broken eventually, but for most people that's probably not an issue since by the time it's broken the data is worthless (e.g. it nolonger applies, or is common knowledge by that time).
(none of the above applies to OTP algorithms, but they have their own problems, such as how do you transmit a massive pad to a remote client securely? If you transmit the pad via a traditional encryption scheme then the pad (and hence the data is is encrypting) is again vulnerable).
What have these companies given back to the community? They have saved considerable resources by riding on free code. It only seems fitting they write a few checks to a foundation or two. Maybe release some of their own code? No? Hmm.
Ok, see it this way - you want to start a company, the advantages to using linux seem to be:
1. You get a "free ride". I.e. less development costs, etc. This is important when starting a company with minimal funding.
2. You find a bug in Linux that's seriously affecting your customers then you can fix it yourself (or employ someone to fix it). So an important bug, maybe one that's not affecting many people, is fixable in a reasonably short time. Compare to closed systems like Windows in which the bug will take months to get fixed if it even ever does.
If the company is successful (helped by point 1 above), the chances are they will find bugs that need fixing or features that need adding to the open parts of software and so at that point they will (hopefully) be helping the community.
So in the short term, I see nothing wrong with the "free ride" to help the company get off the ground, and in the long term I expect most companies will be making fixes and features in the open code and should be submitting them back to the community.
Of course, even though the GPL doesn't require it, IMHO all enhancements made to open software should be submitted back to the project author/team and put up on a publically accessable and googleable website. (GPL requires neither of these - GPL simply requires that you hand out the code if someone requests it, whereas I believe you should be actively publishing the code for all to see).
And naturally there will always be companies who are breaking the GPL by not releasing any of their patches, whcih is a Bad Thing. But short of the author taking them to court (if he even finds out about it), there doesn't seem much you can do about it.
What do you all people see as uses for faster PC's if you could have 10gihz on a desktop machine or even laptop
Photo stitching... My Athlon XP 2100+ can spend hours running Sift, Hugin and Enblend to stitch a large panorama together. Of course that also wants nice fast memory since there is lots of data involved.
Finally, a last point. IE is not a monopoly
I didn't say it was - reread my comment. I said it was designed from a monopolistic point of view (i.e. "we are (almost) a monopoly so we can do WTF we want and everyone else will have to follow suit")
most people do not associate IE with being crappy.
That could well be down to not realising that there is anything better... which again reenforces my point that crappy software doesn't always fail in favor of good software. If someone is prevented from seeing the good software (e.g. by whatever buying practices their company uses) then they will assume that the bad softwaer is all that exists and will have to put up with it.
Additionally, much of IE's market share is related directly to the fact that a modified version is used by AOL for their 20M+ (or whatever it is today) users.
Unlikely - I know plenty of people who do/did use IE and I know noone who uses or has ever used AOL - the two are reasonably unrelated.
Finally, IE is - despite its security problems - a decent product.
It could be argued it is a "decent product" from a monopolistic point of view (i.e. ignoring all standards because people will have to comply with the monopoly anyway). From a technical point of view I have seen very little software which behaves worse than IE.
Right. There is a programming elite, and that elite should be trained to keep the unwashed masses from touching a compiler.
Ok, badly worded - I didn't mean "prevent", I just meant to not make it too easy. The problem is that 9 times out of 10 the people buying the software aren't the people who are going to use it. So the buyers will pay for the cheaper software if it *looks* good, even if it's a bugridden pile of crap. This is bad for everyone in the long run.
What ever happened to freedom? Open Source is about freedom - the freedom to have a compiler, to tinker, and to create value.
That works fine if the freedom also applies to the people who are actually using the software. However, in business that doesn't happen - the manager will buy something and you will be told to use it. This has been seen many many times (especially in government organisations, probably because they are forced to be more open about cockups). Many times have systems been implemented where it is clear that the people who will actually be using them have never been consulted. (Often results in them finding the system completely unusable).
In the marketplace and the wider world, crappy programs of any stripe fail.
There is plenty of proof that this is completely untrue. Even in a sector where the _users_ get the choice, we see crappy software like Internet Explorer having a massive market share over better software such as FireFox.
Of course the same is true in other markets, not just software. Look for example at the people who still insist on contracting the likes of EDS even after they've made well publicised and massive cockups.
I have always seen VB as a Bad Thing (and I see this in the same light).
:-/
IMHO BASIC is not and never has been a suitable language for writing real world applications. Gluing all the extra functionality needed onto a language such as BASIC has always seemed like a really bad idea to me and IMHO a lot of the VB syntax is very inconsistent because of this.
Additionally, I think that VB has probably single handedly cause a lot of buggy software to be introduced:
- Any muppet can create something in VB that _looks_ good
- Said muppets are not trained in how to program so the back end logic is probably screwed and bugridden to hell.
- Managers don't use the software they buy for their underlings so they buy based on the fact that it looks good rather than how well it works.
- The underlings who actually use the software now have to put up with the bugs.
- Managers perceive that they are getting a "good deal" by getting the pretty software from cheap untrained coders.
- People who actually can program lose their jobs in favor of the cheaper untrained people (who are producing software that looks as good but is full of bugs).
- planes and satellites fall out of the sky
- nuclear reactors melt down
- world ends
Writing languages which make things easier for people who _can_ code is a Good Thing, but care must be taken to prevent people who can't code from producing bug ridden applications that they can sell to the managers. Like it or not, no matter how much pointy-and-clickyness you add to a programming language, you need some brain work at the back end to write the logic that ties it all together - people who don't have the mental discipline can't do a good job of this.
I think everyone here that likes firefox should give the Opera beta a try. I've used it since yesterday and it's a top quality piece of software in my opinion.
I had to do some web work a while ago and tested againsted FireFox, Opera, Safari and IE (yuck).
Now, don't get me wrong - having Opera out there is a Good Thing since it adds more weight to the non-IE scene.
However, while doing the design (all fully complient XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.1), Safari and Firefox had some small off-by-one bugs in, etc which were a pain. However I found some glaring places where Opera just completely failed to stick to the spec.
That and the fact that I don't like the UI on Opera means that I won't be using it.
There is one other thing that winds me up in Opera - why oh why must it ship with it's user agent defaulted to look like IE? That just gives web masters false statistics.
Uh... why would they stop those kinds of sites? That kind of service those sites provide bring in dollars to china.
Right, because China's internet access is going to be so great when the rest of the world have blocked the whole country...
So how long until I can remove the block on a pair of CNLink's /20 networks from my firewall?
/20's.
My web server was getting massively log spammed from them (even though I don't publish my web stats). The first time round I actually bothered to report the attacks to their abuse address but naturally got no response at all. So the second time I got attacked I had no choice but to just drop all traffic from both their
When will these ISPs realise they're shooting themselves in the foot by forcing everyone to just outright block their networks?
I bought Dido's second album, for example, only to discover that you can only play it on a PC through a proprietary software player (assuming your OS will run it, naturally).
:)
Worked for me - I read on the box "won't play on PCs" so I slapped it in my machine, fired up GRIP and a few minutes later the MP3s were sitting on my hard drive.
(I should clarify - I don't distribute MP3s, I simply find it a lot easier to have all my music sat on my hard drive so I can listen to it without going and finding the CD).
but I'm reliably informed that it doesn't work in some car CD players
It plays on my car CD player, but it plays past the end of the disk by about 10 minutes, which my home stereo and my cdrom drive do not.
The concept of corrupt CDs really annoy me, but I have yet to find one that actually causes me real problems (i.e. I haven't found one where the "copy protection" actually does it's job). As soon as I find one that I can't rip or can't play in the car it'll go straight back to the shop. I should point out that the _only_ OS I use is Linux, so any "copy protection" systems which are designed specifically for windows won't affect me in the slightest.
I imagine that if all record shops were suddenly required to separate out normal CDs and copy-protected not-quite-CDs in an obvious way, sales of the latter would probably drop PDQ
I think it would be too much effort for the shops, they would simply stop labelling all the CDs as "compact discs" - you'd go into the music shop and just see "Music Discs" or something and once they do that the trademark is worth even less and noone's any better off.
In any case, the people producing the "copy protection" systems can't win - the CD drive manufacturers will just start designing their drives to deal with the corrupt discs in the same way audio CD players do.
It's your own fault if you buy their products. Their existance in your country doesn't effect you in an way but giving you (or your government) another choice.
I neither buy nor use their products. But nor do I have any influence on my government - last time I checked, withholding taxes because I don't agree with what the government is spending them on is illegal.
Now if we can just get someone to sue Redhat for packaging up2date with Linux and preventing other package managers such as yum and apt-get from becoming widely used.
The point is that Red Hat package up2date, but they also package yum - you've got a choice as to which you use.
If MicroSoft packaged RealPlayer and Quicktime as well then probably noone would complain. In the same way, if Ford made 95% of the world's cars and they only put Ford stereos in them the other stereo manufacturers would have cause for complaint.
Now what's needed is either a ban on MS shipping IE and MSN Messenger with windows, or a requirement for them to also ship FireFox, Opera, a Jabber client and an AIM client.
If the OS comes with nothing or it comes with several different products then the customer will make a choice (either informed or otherwise) and all the manufacturers get a chance. If the OS comes with a single program to do the job then most customers will use that in preference to bothering to download a different one, even if the bundled product is crap. It also produces the effect we have at the moment with IE where as far as many users are concerned, IE is "the internet" and the thought that IE is just a piece of software of which there are many other products to do the same job just never occurs to them.
It doesn't matter if the product they're bundling is a pile of crap or the greatest in the world - by bundling it with practically every PC sold and not bundling competing software they are abusing their monopoly and preventing any competetors from gaining market share. It's even worse when they move into a market that already exists because then suddenly they're putting legitimate businesses out of business (see Netscape vs IE for details).
Watch the movie in the theatres and don't buy the DVD's and watch the DVD portion of the profits plummet.
Doesn't work - this has already been shown in the CD industry. CD profits are down - must be piracy, lets shove more DRM crap on them, profits go down more, rinse, repeat.