That's not really the point, it's to protect the path of video or other media to the consumer.
Bullshit, that's the perfect excuse to convince media conglomerates to only support drm products.
Itunes? Oh yes, really nice, except than in 5 years, you're not going to be able to play your music in anything else than apple's music players, and if other company starts doing better and more beautiful players than apple you're screwed - you've to buy an apple music player.
Being the most succesful online music store of the world, this helps them just like.doc helped microsoft. There were always alternatives to office. "But do you support.doc, which is the format that 100% of my documents use? Oh sorry, I'll stick with office". The closed fairplay format helps them here, the more songs you buy from itunes the more tied to apple you are. Apple is really being evil here, and if you think you've many alternatives available think again in the previous office example - there were always alternatives to office, still we kept asking microsoft to document the.doc standard.
Take a look at Office 2003. Do you really believe that microsoft disclosed the document format which allows microsoft to get 30% of their income through office just for fun? Office 2003 also features DRMed documents, and only office can open those. Ding ding, XML "open standard" matter NOTHING.
DRM is Yet Another closed file format. It's just like what.doc format was, in the 90's but better. This time, they've used crypto to make sure that nobody else can reverse-engineered it. Every time you buy/use DRM shit you're condemning yourself to buy/use products from one single company as they want.
Why isn't forcing Apple & friends to disclose the fairplay format to other hardware manufacturers? I like to choose, but this DRM shit is just breaking the capitalims principles. The government should force them to do it to protect users and let other companies compete as God intended, period.
In vista (in IE7, actually), everytime you enter a url in the browser, the browser sends the url to microsoft to know if the url is safe or not
This is sold as a "phising protection" - microsoft has a list of "bad" sites and the browser will know when you're being a victim of phising.
On the other hand, this is also a useful trick to know what pages are visiting the 90% of the world population, a really interesting data source for a search engine.
It doesn't matter how good the next MSN search is. If they decide to degrade the service in favour of trying to make more money, users will flee to another provider. It's that simple.
No shit - according to alexa 73% of the people who uses msn uses it just for for hotmail, only a 8% uses the search engine and only 3% bothers to go the main page
And of course, gmail beats both yahoo and hotmail - both have a ajax-like email interface in development but google has been eroding their market share for too many time.
So it doesn't come as a surprise that google is winning market share, and both msn and yahoo are losing it. MSN in fact lost for first time their #2 position in 2006. I'm not surprise that msn is taking "radical movements" and doing optimistic announcements like this, they don't want to lose the #2.
Google, however, has won a lot of users the last year, and it will win more if yahoo and msn doesn't stop being stupid and bring a bit of USABILITY to their pages. MSN is developing a new search engine? Good luck, google is years ahead of you, the first product the msn search geniuses produced was search.msn.com, and according to some web page, the microsoft directives laughed at them for doing something that offers nothing that google doesn't already do.
How many times has Gates announced that he's building a better google? Just the same number of times that he has said that this next version of windows was going to be great.
Re:Non story, this is a technical issue.
on
AMD Subpoenas Skype
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· Score: 1
It could be a problem of optimization ie: they could have hand-optimized the hot path for intel and not for amd. But Skype should clarify this to people...
As you pointed out, the unaware user may remove the stick, leaving the app hanging in mid air...
No. This thing just duplicates data from disk. If the usb stick is removed, the system reads things from disk
Flash memory wears out from writing to it. This is not a problem when used reasonably, but it will fry the stick within a couple of weeks if used as a swap device...
It's not used as a swap device. This is used as a sort of "raid" of the most used blocks - something that does not really changes that often.
Security implications. What happens if you want to give a file to somebody by writing it to his USB stick?
"In Vista, it should be much more difficult for unauthorized programs (like Viruses and Trojans) to affect the core of the OS and secretly harm your system."
Except that Extremetech is actually analyzing the real technology behind it instead of just talking like marketing androids. There're *real* improvements in vista, ej: it seems they have a selinux-like technology which allows them to run IE and run activex controls safely because they configured the system to not allow IE to be able to write or delete or read files from user etc.. To me, sounds like a *real* improvement - even if IE has a huge security hole (activex involved or not) hackers will *not* be able to do things in your system no matter how hard they try, they'll just be able to do things in the IE environment, nothing else. This goes beyond of the "don't run your system with root privileges" - even if you run things as user a virus can delete all the files in your home directory, be it linux or windows. There's so much talk about selinux in linux, still there're (AFAIK) zero linux distros which do the same for firefox.
"if read fails, stop reading from the device and read instead from hard disk" I don't see what's so "unsafe" with it.
I'd rather be worried by how much is going to last that usb key - flash memory has a limited number of writes you know, this vista thing may very well end up killing it if it's used for cache. But AFAIK it's not used really used for cache. Instead, vista records what programs you use more often, and will duplicate the blocks used by those programs (ecnrypted) in the usb key so programs load faster in startup. I assume you can use raid to implement this in other systems? dunno.
Right, in the XXI century people doesn't change their jobs because of their salary, because they don't like the company where they're working, they're "stolen".
No it,s not. I'm not against capitalism, but companies have tons of methods to win money than using code from students with acne.
Apple has lots of $$$. Want to collaborate with open source? Release your changes. You don't want? Well, there'snothign wrong with it - you're a company, you sure have enought money to pay developers.
You don't want anybody to play your game unless they play by your rules
Yeah, the game must be played with Apple's rules, right? That's what bsd is about, right...
You just don't get the WHOLE point of GPL. GPL is not about forcing people using code and not being "friendly enougth". It's about don't allowing _unfriendly_ people, and it's not exactly that the ntfs people is putting rules, it's APPLE who is trying to force other to follow their rules. It's not ntfs developers who is being kiddy and stupid here.
This is like arguing that democracy is crap because I'm not free to kill anyone I want under it. Please.
Sure. Which is why "microkernel" has the word "kernel" on it.
When I said "A microkernel, in essence, it's not a kernel", I mean that a microkernel by itself can do NOTHING, until you start to implement all the stuff that monolithic kernels have on it and userspace servers are supposed to implement. It's like when people says "ooh, qnx microkernel fits on the L2 cache". Sure it does, but then when you start to implement the necessary stuff it's going to get more or less as huge as a monolithic kernel is.
I highly doubt the two kernels are built from identical source code.
For the architecture-dependent code, sure. For the vast majority of the rest of the code (filesystem, tcp/ip stack, vm) no.
I looked a week ago at the mac os x 10.4.5 ppc sources and x86 sources. A wekk ago, there were just sources for the things that GPL forces apple to release - gcc, bash, etc - but you wouldn't find anything else, not only the kernel but userspace libraries made by apple aswell.
Today, it looks like they've added userspace libraries like "libsecurity" and stuff. Maybe they're too busy with the transition and they're releasing it slowly, who knows. But if that's the case, it'd be interesting to have a note from apple explaining that the x86 sources would take a while to release. And as you said, they aren't forced to release the TPM modules.
Anyway, it's not that open darwin has been too succesful....sure, there're people using it (including slashdot readers) but it doesn't seems like open darwin has been as succesful as, say, opensolaris.
Please, can stop having posts about this in slashdot?
Mac OS X DOES include lots of freebsd code - the tcp/ip stack, the whole POSIX layer implementation - it's not just a "BSD API". There's REAL bsd code there.
They use a derived mach microkernel (you know, just like NT) for things like the process scheduler etc, which is not that much code compared with the derived bsd code. A microkernel, in essence, it's not a kernel, it's just something that can be used to implement servers which implement the functionality which traditionally would be implemented in a monolithic kernel. In Mac OS X, it's derived freebsd code what does that. And it does it running in the same privileged address space where the derived microkernel runs for performance reasons, which makes mac os x have pretty the same disadvantages that monolithic kernels have, which is why mac os x is not a real microkernel. I need to look up that presentation from an apple developer where he showed statistics that showed how the bsd code was most of mac os x and mach and the io kit were just a minority when looking at the number of lines of code...
Oh well, Google has managed to write a somewhat-crappy frontpage equivalent with undo/redo functionality, autosave...if someone had told me that he was trying to do such thing using javashit and making it work even with IE 5.5 i'd have told him he was crazy. Standards can come later (BTW, it's in beta stage), the difficult part is there.
So what? How does the number of windows users affect linux developers? We're not using windows. Linux does what I need it for
It affects linux in the server market. Linux servers need to deal with windows clients, period, and if it doesn't do it well, nobody will choose linux even if it's a good OS.
$1.1B, even over ten years, is a lot of money that could be reinvested in the company to provide more jobs and grow the company
I'm happy that google chooses to waste that money in other places instead. Is nto that it's money what it's going to make google beat microsoft either...
I never said it is not a good property. "This wouldn't be a problem if Microsoft weren't using propietary and closed technologies to forbid other companies from competing."
You know, the only time I've had a long filename truncated with ~1 in the past decade is on Linux machines
It's weird, because a decade ago people were using the crappy Windows 95 OS, and you needed to know how to handle truncated filenames in that os even when using the desktop (shorcuts and things like that)
In fact, Windows XP still supports installation on a fat filesystem, so even in the 2005 you can be faced with truncated filenames. In fact, if I remember correctly, I think that even when you install XP on a NTFS filesystem, the operative system generates automatically truncated filenames, even if just to preserve compatibility with old msdos apps (which work under a emulated environment in xp, but they still need to be able to use the available files and directories in the filesystem)
So either you don't use microsoft operative systems, or you don't use them beyond of IE and explorer.exe
Slashdot Mirror
That's not really the point, it's to protect the path of video or other media to the consumer.
.doc helped microsoft. There were always alternatives to office. "But do you support .doc, which is the format that 100% of my documents use? Oh sorry, I'll stick with office". The closed fairplay format helps them here, the more songs you buy from itunes the more tied to apple you are. Apple is really being evil here, and if you think you've many alternatives available think again in the previous office example - there were always alternatives to office, still we kept asking microsoft to document the .doc standard.
.doc format was, in the 90's but better. This time, they've used crypto to make sure that nobody else can reverse-engineered it. Every time you buy/use DRM shit you're condemning yourself to buy/use products from one single company as they want.
Bullshit, that's the perfect excuse to convince media conglomerates to only support drm products.
Itunes? Oh yes, really nice, except than in 5 years, you're not going to be able to play your music in anything else than apple's music players, and if other company starts doing better and more beautiful players than apple you're screwed - you've to buy an apple music player.
Being the most succesful online music store of the world, this helps them just like
Take a look at Office 2003. Do you really believe that microsoft disclosed the document format which allows microsoft to get 30% of their income through office just for fun? Office 2003 also features DRMed documents, and only office can open those. Ding ding, XML "open standard" matter NOTHING.
DRM is Yet Another closed file format. It's just like what
Why isn't forcing Apple & friends to disclose the fairplay format to other hardware manufacturers? I like to choose, but this DRM shit is just breaking the capitalims principles. The government should force them to do it to protect users and let other companies compete as God intended, period.
In vista (in IE7, actually), everytime you enter a url in the browser, the browser sends the url to microsoft to know if the url is safe or not
This is sold as a "phising protection" - microsoft has a list of "bad" sites and the browser will know when you're being a victim of phising.
On the other hand, this is also a useful trick to know what pages are visiting the 90% of the world population, a really interesting data source for a search engine.
It doesn't matter how good the next MSN search is. If they decide to degrade the service in favour of trying to make more money, users will flee to another provider. It's that simple.
No shit - according to alexa 73% of the people who uses msn uses it just for for hotmail, only a 8% uses the search engine and only 3% bothers to go the main page
Yahoo is pretty similar. 53% of their visitors do it just for email, only 8% for search and 2% for the main page
And of course, gmail beats both yahoo and hotmail - both have a ajax-like email interface in development but google has been eroding their market share for too many time.
So it doesn't come as a surprise that google is winning market share, and both msn and yahoo are losing it. MSN in fact lost for first time their #2 position in 2006. I'm not surprise that msn is taking "radical movements" and doing optimistic announcements like this, they don't want to lose the #2.
Google, however, has won a lot of users the last year, and it will win more if yahoo and msn doesn't stop being stupid and bring a bit of USABILITY to their pages. MSN is developing a new search engine? Good luck, google is years ahead of you, the first product the msn search geniuses produced was search.msn.com, and according to some web page, the microsoft directives laughed at them for doing something that offers nothing that google doesn't already do.
How many times has Gates announced that he's building a better google? Just the same number of times that he has said that this next version of windows was going to be great.
It could be a problem of optimization ie: they could have hand-optimized the hot path for intel and not for amd. But Skype should clarify this to people...
It's just me, or the latest slashdot stories don't have many modded articles because apparently people has no mod points to moderate them?
As you pointed out, the unaware user may remove the stick, leaving the app hanging in mid air...
No. This thing just duplicates data from disk. If the usb stick is removed, the system reads things from disk
Flash memory wears out from writing to it. This is not a problem when used reasonably, but it will fry the stick within a couple of weeks if used as a swap device...
It's not used as a swap device. This is used as a sort of "raid" of the most used blocks - something that does not really changes that often.
Security implications. What happens if you want to give a file to somebody by writing it to his USB stick?
Data stored in the usb key in encrypted.
"In Vista, it should be much more difficult for unauthorized programs (like Viruses and Trojans) to affect the core of the OS and secretly harm your system."
Except that Extremetech is actually analyzing the real technology behind it instead of just talking like marketing androids. There're *real* improvements in vista, ej: it seems they have a selinux-like technology which allows them to run IE and run activex controls safely because they configured the system to not allow IE to be able to write or delete or read files from user etc.. To me, sounds like a *real* improvement - even if IE has a huge security hole (activex involved or not) hackers will *not* be able to do things in your system no matter how hard they try, they'll just be able to do things in the IE environment, nothing else. This goes beyond of the "don't run your system with root privileges" - even if you run things as user a virus can delete all the files in your home directory, be it linux or windows. There's so much talk about selinux in linux, still there're (AFAIK) zero linux distros which do the same for firefox.
"if read fails, stop reading from the device and read instead from hard disk" I don't see what's so "unsafe" with it.
I'd rather be worried by how much is going to last that usb key - flash memory has a limited number of writes you know, this vista thing may very well end up killing it if it's used for cache. But AFAIK it's not used really used for cache. Instead, vista records what programs you use more often, and will duplicate the blocks used by those programs (ecnrypted) in the usb key so programs load faster in startup. I assume you can use raid to implement this in other systems? dunno.
Right, in the XXI century people doesn't change their jobs because of their salary, because they don't like the company where they're working, they're "stolen".
Ultimately it boils down to pure selfishness
No it,s not. I'm not against capitalism, but companies have tons of methods to win money than using code from students with acne.
Apple has lots of $$$. Want to collaborate with open source? Release your changes. You don't want? Well, there'snothign wrong with it - you're a company, you sure have enought money to pay developers.
You don't want anybody to play your game unless they play by your rules
Yeah, the game must be played with Apple's rules, right? That's what bsd is about, right...
You just don't get the WHOLE point of GPL. GPL is not about forcing people using code and not being "friendly enougth". It's about don't allowing _unfriendly_ people, and it's not exactly that the ntfs people is putting rules, it's APPLE who is trying to force other to follow their rules. It's not ntfs developers who is being kiddy and stupid here.
This is like arguing that democracy is crap because I'm not free to kill anyone I want under it. Please.
Sure. Which is why "microkernel" has the word "kernel" on it.
When I said "A microkernel, in essence, it's not a kernel", I mean that a microkernel by itself can do NOTHING, until you start to implement all the stuff that monolithic kernels have on it and userspace servers are supposed to implement. It's like when people says "ooh, qnx microkernel fits on the L2 cache". Sure it does, but then when you start to implement the necessary stuff it's going to get more or less as huge as a monolithic kernel is.
I highly doubt the two kernels are built from identical source code.
For the architecture-dependent code, sure. For the vast majority of the rest of the code (filesystem, tcp/ip stack, vm) no.
I looked a week ago at the mac os x 10.4.5 ppc sources and x86 sources. A wekk ago, there were just sources for the things that GPL forces apple to release - gcc, bash, etc - but you wouldn't find anything else, not only the kernel but userspace libraries made by apple aswell.
Today, it looks like they've added userspace libraries like "libsecurity" and stuff. Maybe they're too busy with the transition and they're releasing it slowly, who knows. But if that's the case, it'd be interesting to have a note from apple explaining that the x86 sources would take a while to release. And as you said, they aren't forced to release the TPM modules.
Anyway, it's not that open darwin has been too succesful....sure, there're people using it (including slashdot readers) but it doesn't seems like open darwin has been as succesful as, say, opensolaris.
Please, can stop having posts about this in slashdot?
Mac OS X DOES include lots of freebsd code - the tcp/ip stack, the whole POSIX layer implementation - it's not just a "BSD API". There's REAL bsd code there.
They use a derived mach microkernel (you know, just like NT) for things like the process scheduler etc, which is not that much code compared with the derived bsd code. A microkernel, in essence, it's not a kernel, it's just something that can be used to implement servers which implement the functionality which traditionally would be implemented in a monolithic kernel. In Mac OS X, it's derived freebsd code what does that. And it does it running in the same privileged address space where the derived microkernel runs for performance reasons, which makes mac os x have pretty the same disadvantages that monolithic kernels have, which is why mac os x is not a real microkernel. I need to look up that presentation from an apple developer where he showed statistics that showed how the bsd code was most of mac os x and mach and the io kit were just a minority when looking at the number of lines of code...
Except that google alreadyhaves a spam filter that works great...
Oh well, Google has managed to write a somewhat-crappy frontpage equivalent with undo/redo functionality, autosave...if someone had told me that he was trying to do such thing using javashit and making it work even with IE 5.5 i'd have told him he was crazy. Standards can come later (BTW, it's in beta stage), the difficult part is there.
http://pages.google.com works fine for me.
So what? How does the number of windows users affect linux developers? We're not using windows. Linux does what I need it for
It affects linux in the server market. Linux servers need to deal with windows clients, period, and if it doesn't do it well, nobody will choose linux even if it's a good OS.
Bill Gates also helps lots of people via charity - would you work for microsoft aswell?
I'd rather try to fix the mechanisms that didn't avoid to get the world so wrong in first place
$1.1B, even over ten years, is a lot of money that could be reinvested in the company to provide more jobs and grow the company
I'm happy that google chooses to waste that money in other places instead. Is nto that it's money what it's going to make google beat microsoft either...
Is not that google can change their government anyway
I mean, it's wrong to help that government, but it's not that google can or should do. Chinese people need to awake.
Maybe you didn't read the question well: Q. How does this affect application developers?
Why would I want to work on Active Directory compatibility?
Because it's the reason Unix is losing the market share against windows servers, integration with clients (which happen to be 95% windows users)
Since you got the first comment, I assume youw aste those 10 hours reloading slashdot
I never said it is not a good property. "This wouldn't be a problem if Microsoft weren't using propietary and closed technologies to forbid other companies from competing."
You know, the only time I've had a long filename truncated with ~1 in the past decade is on Linux machines
It's weird, because a decade ago people were using the crappy Windows 95 OS, and you needed to know how to handle truncated filenames in that os even when using the desktop (shorcuts and things like that)
In fact, Windows XP still supports installation on a fat filesystem, so even in the 2005 you can be faced with truncated filenames. In fact, if I remember correctly, I think that even when you install XP on a NTFS filesystem, the operative system generates automatically truncated filenames, even if just to preserve compatibility with old msdos apps (which work under a emulated environment in xp, but they still need to be able to use the available files and directories in the filesystem)
So either you don't use microsoft operative systems, or you don't use them beyond of IE and explorer.exe