Hence the importance of compiling from source, rather than using packaged binaries.
Still, most people just packaged binaries.
Also, trojans can be quite cleverly and effectively hidden even in source for a long time before anyone discovers them.
But even so, compiling from source will always be the most reliable and secure method, compared to any other distribution method. It's like capitalism - not perfect, but better than any other system.
Who the hell signs important contracts like that though only electronically? NDAs, employment contracts, there is no way I'd ever sign anything but the paper versions of those. These days, faxed signatures are pretty much accepted, so even faxing actual signed print documents is better.
The terms "gambling" and "investing" overlap semantically in some contexts.
Many people invest funds in indexes like the S&P 500 entirely "blindly", in which case it amounts to betting/gambling, doesn't it? I mean you can lose money on these funds.
Also, while you were still laying foundations, clients would phone your manager up and say "I know the house is only supposed to be finished six months from now, but I'd like to come round in one month and try out the flushing toilets already".
And your manager would immediately say, "yes, sure". And then come to you and say "is there any way we could have the toilets working already next month... ?"
Approaching a smaller enemy under the pretense of cooperation is classic "divide and conquer" strategy. The intended effect is to split a currently united enemy, into two divided camps that now instead oppose one another and disagree on how to proceed. Typically some percentage will be tricked and will argue "MS is turning good, we should work with them", while the rest will yell "no it's a trap, stay away". Then the two weakened sides would spend their time arguing against one another, instead of working together against the common enemy, who of course just continue with unethical "business as usual".
I don't know how effective the strategy can be against OpenSource though, as OpenSource coders are not really some group with centralised leadership united together under a common ideological banner; most are just coders hacking away relatively obliviously, and doing what they're doing because they enjoy it, because of the recognition, and/or because they're being paid to.
I think the "bottom line" regarding Microsoft products, that will get to them in the long term, is that they are far more expensive than such products need to be. Everyone knows they're locked in, everyone knows they're paying too much, and eventually companies and economies as a whole will collectively realise that they can lower costs and increase wealth in the long term by investing in alternate solutions that are not so badly overpriced.
Actually only "children" have such 'black and white' views of the world as you exhibit.
Are you even capable of realising that patents can be bad and MS's ethics can be bad? That doesn't seem like a difficult concept at all to grasp.
This patent is bad, because not only does it prevent anyone else from doing anything as basic as writing a data converter between a spreadsheet and database (e.g. OpenOffice?), now only Microsoft will be allowed to do so, and for the paltry "purchase price" of $9 million.
Everyone loses, except some Guatamalan (sp?) individual and MS.
- They're trying to divert attention away from all the security problems that XP has had. XP is BY FAR the "biggest disaster" of any OS in the history of humankind when it comes to security. Something like 25% of XP boxes are still to this day infected zombie machines. Typical time-to-infection of any pre-SP2 XP system hooked up to the Net was something in the order of seconds or minutes. But wait, let's rewrite history by claiming that 2K was far worse, so that people think don't XP was so bad in retrospect, and that people think MS were already improving their security between 2K and XP.
- They're trying to pretend, yet again, that 2K and XP were written in "more innocent times" when "security problems" were unknown - so that the public is tricked into thinking that their shocking neglect of security was somehow excusable. Spin, spin, spin. All of today's security problems were very well-known by any IT professional even by the 80's; even Java in the 90's touted security over and over as one of its major selling points, and when started pushing their ActiveX-based "trust" model in response ('hey, we have an object model, let's just pretend it's secure and market it heavily') anyone who knew anything was already warning that that was going to be a disaster.
Microsoft knew that security was going to get this bad, but they ignored it in favour of pushing for better time to market to be ready for upgrade cycles and attrition sales.
You may be able to find Chinese people who can speak French, but not as well as a mother-tongue speaker, and not without an accent.
I saw a documentary about an Indian call center firm that was hiring young Europeans. One of the main attractions in doing so is that they speak fluently in the language of the person they're helping - so the person they're helping feels like they're being helped by a local, not a low-paid foreigner far away.
But here's the thing. Europe has a problem with rising unemployment, and particularly so amongst the youth - 60% of the unemployed are under 25. So they are currently unable to meaningfully integrate young people coming out of the school systems into the economy. And so increasingly young people are living in poorer and poorer conditions, with no "place" in European society anymore. So it is the poorest of the Europeans, those young people with nothing to lose and everything to gain, that are increasingly willing to go to places like India for jobs. In that documentary, you could see all of the hired Europeans were all young, and all from the lower European classes, unemployable back home. They are generally unskilled. They can get these low-paying jobs because practically the only requirement is ability to speak their mother tongue.
So it's not so much engineering jobs that are necessarily being created for foreigners in India - India has plenty of its own engineers. It's jobs that attract the poor, the unskilled, the desparate. They are starting to import unskilled foreigners to fill a need in their economy (that should sound familiar to countries like France). I'm not sure what the long-term net effect of that would be in a country that already has low living standards, especially if the newcomers cannot meaningfully be culturally integrated either, as with France's immigration problem. Maybe they'll just become a new bunch of low-paid people in India with low quality of life - only white. Still, if all this grows their economy, as it seems to be, it must ultimately (surely) create higher level jobs at some point in the future. And then eventually everyone just wants to move there because it's "where all the opportunities are". If they diversify enough and industrialise successfully.
I mean, if you think about it, the US also started out, and became very successful, by being a country that attracted the 'poorest of the poor', the tired, the desperate, those people who had no "place" in their own homelands anymore (insert famous Statue of Liberty 'huddled masses' quote here.)
In any case, something odd seems to be happening with economies globally, and through globalisation... we seem to be entering unchartered territory here; what the long-term effects are really going to be will probably only be clear many decades from now.
Price is not the reason people stick to Wintel, especially not if the price difference you cite is so close to the price of the anti-virus software they'd need for their Windows PC anyway. The reason people stick with Wintel is because "everyone else uses it", and "all the software is available for it". It's called the network effect. If Apple dropped the Mini's price by $100 it would barely make a tiny blip of difference.
You could call FUD and I'll debunk your argument just as fast, because reverse engineering is not the problem in itself: The problem is that it's illegal to do so under the DMCA and you will go to jail if you do it.
I was about to jump all over you for that flamebait, then I looked over to my Pentium 2 Linux box:)
Seriously though, there are many Linux users who use top-range hardware, especially in the area that concerns companies like Microsoft the most --- the server market. Also you need to be a bit more forward-thinking... in five to ten years the DRM PCs will be today's "Pentium 2"s, and there will only be a tiny percentage of old non-DRM PCs left. PCs turn over remarkably fast as part of the usual upgrade cycles.
The market is weak because people today pride themselves on their ignorance. Most people don't want to think, and they'll even tell you as much. So they're all just suckers, ripe for the picking by big corps to push whatever they want on them.
Make no mistake, DRM is not intended for the benefit of customers.
It can always tell you what you want to listen and not complain.
Actually with a salted key system, the only way to "always tell the server what it wants" is if the hardware DRM is reverse engineered and a virtual software implementation is written and used.
You used Microsoft's page as your source? You're joking, right? Of course they're going to only put a positive spin on it... I mean, these are the people who label the Media Player option to "collect information on every single thing I watch and send it to Microsoft" under the heading "Customer Experience Improvement Program".
In other news, I consulted the Chinese government's website to get information on human rights abuses in China, and it just proved that everyone was making a fuss about nothing, there are no human rights abuses going on there. I also checked old Bob Mugabe's website to see if there is political violence being perpetrated there, but again it proved to me that all the fuss was over nothing. Etc.
"Trusted computing" is not about "anti-piracy", it's not about "virus protection" and it's not about "protecting copyrighted materials". These are all being spun as excuses for implementing DRM. But the real reason for this is so for the industry giants to be able to create a powerful cartel that controls the platform, deciding who is or is not "trusted" to develop software --- in other words, they're trying to never have to worry about competition again.
This is not paranoia, it makes perfect sense for them to do what they're doing, and it is absolutely the most logical thing for them to do. They will definitely try to do this; whether or not they succeed is questionable, although they definitely have a decent chance at succeeding. But think about it - they have everything to win and nothing to lose by just trying this.
OK, just seemed like you were dissing Apple for unfounded reasons. I fully agree, DRM is 'bad news'. Apart from AMD though, Apple's approach to DRM has actually been one of the most consumer-friendly of all of the "industry giants".
BTW, according to today's/., Intel has denied that there will be DRM in the Pentium D / 945, so in this rumour (Apple wants DRM) based on another rumour (Apple chooses Intel) based on another rumour (Intel is putting DRM into their CPUs), seems the first one in the chain is already wrong.
Still, DRM is coming, sooner or later, the industry giants will keep pushing it because locking out competitors and controlling the platform with DRM is easier than actually competing on traditional factors like price, features etc. DRM must be fought at every turn.
The thing is, there are two main reasons why viruses spread: (1) flaws in the OS and (2) social engineering (aka "user stupidity", a claim which has only partial validity). The MS astroturfers here however love to continuously repeat the false claim that (2) is the only reason. If anyone brings up (1), point out that other platforms have bugs too, making it seem like a discrete yes/no black/white issue when in fact MS have far far many more critical vulnerabilities than any other OS.
Today's top-range graphics cards are not AGP 4x - it was dumb of me to choose old technology as an example - they are at least AGP 8x and already designed for PCI Express.
So if you really look around you can find a few exceptions that will apply to a tiny minority of people? Wow, I'm so humbled. That really proves that "most PC users are looking for a $600 graphics card for their 5 year old PCs".
"Market share" often implies number of users, not number of computers sold, depending on the context.
Question: If you have one Wintel user, and one Mac user, what percentage of users use Wintel computers?
a. 50%
I agree, it's a very silly question/statistic when you put it that way, but the submitter does make a point, that number of computers sold does not equate to percentage users of a platform.
Most PC people I know are more interested in buying a $600 video card for their 5 year old PC.
You're full of it. No 5-year old PC motherboard can possibly support an AGP 4x or higher graphics card. Might as well chuck out that whole PC if you want a new graphics card.
Likewise, no AGP-based motherboard made today is going to be able to take a (PCI Express?) graphics card made 5 years from now. You will have to chuck out today's PC if you want to upgrade your graphics in 5 years.
The only PC user demographic where your claim might even be remotely true is the kiddie gaming market, i.e. the average pimple-faced teenager who spends his weekends at LANs, and I suspect this is exactly where you're getting your slanted views. This is a tiny minority of the market.
Few people in the real world ever truly "upgrade" PCs much - the interfaces (e.g. RAM, IDE vs ATA, CPU sockets, AGP vs PCI Express etc.) change too fast for a five-year old PC to be upgradable.
Just be aware that you are the rare exception, not the norm. The statistical facts however indicate that you are full of __it.
You suggest that people get infected by viruses because they're stupid, this is not the case, most virus infections are not the user's fault. Whether you are infected by a virus or not has almost everything to do with your OS.
Slashdot Mirror
Hence the importance of compiling from source, rather than using packaged binaries.
Still, most people just packaged binaries.
Also, trojans can be quite cleverly and effectively hidden even in source for a long time before anyone discovers them.
But even so, compiling from source will always be the most reliable and secure method, compared to any other distribution method. It's like capitalism - not perfect, but better than any other system.
Who the hell signs important contracts like that though only electronically? NDAs, employment contracts, there is no way I'd ever sign anything but the paper versions of those. These days, faxed signatures are pretty much accepted, so even faxing actual signed print documents is better.
The terms "gambling" and "investing" overlap semantically in some contexts.
Many people invest funds in indexes like the S&P 500 entirely "blindly", in which case it amounts to betting/gambling, doesn't it? I mean you can lose money on these funds.
Also, while you were still laying foundations, clients would phone your manager up and say "I know the house is only supposed to be finished six months from now, but I'd like to come round in one month and try out the flushing toilets already".
And your manager would immediately say, "yes, sure". And then come to you and say "is there any way we could have the toilets working already next month ... ?"
Approaching a smaller enemy under the pretense of cooperation is classic "divide and conquer" strategy. The intended effect is to split a currently united enemy, into two divided camps that now instead oppose one another and disagree on how to proceed. Typically some percentage will be tricked and will argue "MS is turning good, we should work with them", while the rest will yell "no it's a trap, stay away". Then the two weakened sides would spend their time arguing against one another, instead of working together against the common enemy, who of course just continue with unethical "business as usual".
I don't know how effective the strategy can be against OpenSource though, as OpenSource coders are not really some group with centralised leadership united together under a common ideological banner; most are just coders hacking away relatively obliviously, and doing what they're doing because they enjoy it, because of the recognition, and/or because they're being paid to.
I think the "bottom line" regarding Microsoft products, that will get to them in the long term, is that they are far more expensive than such products need to be. Everyone knows they're locked in, everyone knows they're paying too much, and eventually companies and economies as a whole will collectively realise that they can lower costs and increase wealth in the long term by investing in alternate solutions that are not so badly overpriced.
[OT] Does your ISP use a transparent proxy? Slashdot is buggy as hell when it comes to users behind transparent proxies.
Actually only "children" have such 'black and white' views of the world as you exhibit.
Are you even capable of realising that patents can be bad and MS's ethics can be bad? That doesn't seem like a difficult concept at all to grasp.
This patent is bad, because not only does it prevent anyone else from doing anything as basic as writing a data converter between a spreadsheet and database (e.g. OpenOffice?), now only Microsoft will be allowed to do so, and for the paltry "purchase price" of $9 million.
Everyone loses, except some Guatamalan (sp?) individual and MS.
Article is pure MS propaganda.
- They're trying to divert attention away from all the security problems that XP has had. XP is BY FAR the "biggest disaster" of any OS in the history of humankind when it comes to security. Something like 25% of XP boxes are still to this day infected zombie machines. Typical time-to-infection of any pre-SP2 XP system hooked up to the Net was something in the order of seconds or minutes. But wait, let's rewrite history by claiming that 2K was far worse, so that people think don't XP was so bad in retrospect, and that people think MS were already improving their security between 2K and XP.
- They're trying to pretend, yet again, that 2K and XP were written in "more innocent times" when "security problems" were unknown - so that the public is tricked into thinking that their shocking neglect of security was somehow excusable. Spin, spin, spin. All of today's security problems were very well-known by any IT professional even by the 80's; even Java in the 90's touted security over and over as one of its major selling points, and when started pushing their ActiveX-based "trust" model in response ('hey, we have an object model, let's just pretend it's secure and market it heavily') anyone who knew anything was already warning that that was going to be a disaster.
Microsoft knew that security was going to get this bad, but they ignored it in favour of pushing for better time to market to be ready for upgrade cycles and attrition sales.
You may be able to find Chinese people who can speak French, but not as well as a mother-tongue speaker, and not without an accent.
I saw a documentary about an Indian call center firm that was hiring young Europeans. One of the main attractions in doing so is that they speak fluently in the language of the person they're helping - so the person they're helping feels like they're being helped by a local, not a low-paid foreigner far away.
But here's the thing. Europe has a problem with rising unemployment, and particularly so amongst the youth - 60% of the unemployed are under 25. So they are currently unable to meaningfully integrate young people coming out of the school systems into the economy. And so increasingly young people are living in poorer and poorer conditions, with no "place" in European society anymore. So it is the poorest of the Europeans, those young people with nothing to lose and everything to gain, that are increasingly willing to go to places like India for jobs. In that documentary, you could see all of the hired Europeans were all young, and all from the lower European classes, unemployable back home. They are generally unskilled. They can get these low-paying jobs because practically the only requirement is ability to speak their mother tongue.
So it's not so much engineering jobs that are necessarily being created for foreigners in India - India has plenty of its own engineers. It's jobs that attract the poor, the unskilled, the desparate. They are starting to import unskilled foreigners to fill a need in their economy (that should sound familiar to countries like France). I'm not sure what the long-term net effect of that would be in a country that already has low living standards, especially if the newcomers cannot meaningfully be culturally integrated either, as with France's immigration problem. Maybe they'll just become a new bunch of low-paid people in India with low quality of life - only white. Still, if all this grows their economy, as it seems to be, it must ultimately (surely) create higher level jobs at some point in the future. And then eventually everyone just wants to move there because it's "where all the opportunities are". If they diversify enough and industrialise successfully.
I mean, if you think about it, the US also started out, and became very successful, by being a country that attracted the 'poorest of the poor', the tired, the desperate, those people who had no "place" in their own homelands anymore (insert famous Statue of Liberty 'huddled masses' quote here.)
In any case, something odd seems to be happening with economies globally, and through globalisation ... we seem to be entering unchartered territory here; what the long-term effects are really going to be will probably only be clear many decades from now.
Price is not the reason people stick to Wintel, especially not if the price difference you cite is so close to the price of the anti-virus software they'd need for their Windows PC anyway. The reason people stick with Wintel is because "everyone else uses it", and "all the software is available for it". It's called the network effect. If Apple dropped the Mini's price by $100 it would barely make a tiny blip of difference.
You could call FUD and I'll debunk your argument just as fast, because reverse engineering is not the problem in itself: The problem is that it's illegal to do so under the DMCA and you will go to jail if you do it.
I was about to jump all over you for that flamebait, then I looked over to my Pentium 2 Linux box :)
Seriously though, there are many Linux users who use top-range hardware, especially in the area that concerns companies like Microsoft the most --- the server market. Also you need to be a bit more forward-thinking ... in five to ten years the DRM PCs will be today's "Pentium 2"s, and there will only be a tiny percentage of old non-DRM PCs left. PCs turn over remarkably fast as part of the usual upgrade cycles.
My mistake, Intel are just 'playing with words' to do PR / damage control .. they're definitely moving forward with DRM.
The market is weak because people today pride themselves on their ignorance. Most people don't want to think, and they'll even tell you as much. So they're all just suckers, ripe for the picking by big corps to push whatever they want on them.
Make no mistake, DRM is not intended for the benefit of customers.
It can always tell you what you want to listen and not complain.
Actually with a salted key system, the only way to "always tell the server what it wants" is if the hardware DRM is reverse engineered and a virtual software implementation is written and used.
You used Microsoft's page as your source? You're joking, right? Of course they're going to only put a positive spin on it ... I mean, these are the people who label the Media Player option to "collect information on every single thing I watch and send it to Microsoft" under the heading "Customer Experience Improvement Program".
In other news, I consulted the Chinese government's website to get information on human rights abuses in China, and it just proved that everyone was making a fuss about nothing, there are no human rights abuses going on there. I also checked old Bob Mugabe's website to see if there is political violence being perpetrated there, but again it proved to me that all the fuss was over nothing. Etc.
"Trusted computing" is not about "anti-piracy", it's not about "virus protection" and it's not about "protecting copyrighted materials". These are all being spun as excuses for implementing DRM. But the real reason for this is so for the industry giants to be able to create a powerful cartel that controls the platform, deciding who is or is not "trusted" to develop software --- in other words, they're trying to never have to worry about competition again.
This is not paranoia, it makes perfect sense for them to do what they're doing, and it is absolutely the most logical thing for them to do. They will definitely try to do this; whether or not they succeed is questionable, although they definitely have a decent chance at succeeding. But think about it - they have everything to win and nothing to lose by just trying this.
OK, just seemed like you were dissing Apple for unfounded reasons. I fully agree, DRM is 'bad news'. Apart from AMD though, Apple's approach to DRM has actually been one of the most consumer-friendly of all of the "industry giants".
BTW, according to today's /., Intel has denied that there will be DRM in the Pentium D / 945, so in this rumour (Apple wants DRM) based on another rumour (Apple chooses Intel) based on another rumour (Intel is putting DRM into their CPUs), seems the first one in the chain is already wrong.
Still, DRM is coming, sooner or later, the industry giants will keep pushing it because locking out competitors and controlling the platform with DRM is easier than actually competing on traditional factors like price, features etc. DRM must be fought at every turn.
The thing is, there are two main reasons why viruses spread: (1) flaws in the OS and (2) social engineering (aka "user stupidity", a claim which has only partial validity). The MS astroturfers here however love to continuously repeat the false claim that (2) is the only reason. If anyone brings up (1), point out that other platforms have bugs too, making it seem like a discrete yes/no black/white issue when in fact MS have far far many more critical vulnerabilities than any other OS.
Today's top-range graphics cards are not AGP 4x - it was dumb of me to choose old technology as an example - they are at least AGP 8x and already designed for PCI Express.
So if you really look around you can find a few exceptions that will apply to a tiny minority of people? Wow, I'm so humbled. That really proves that "most PC users are looking for a $600 graphics card for their 5 year old PCs".
"Market share" often implies number of users, not number of computers sold, depending on the context.
Question: If you have one Wintel user, and one Mac user, what percentage of users use Wintel computers?
a. 50%
I agree, it's a very silly question/statistic when you put it that way, but the submitter does make a point, that number of computers sold does not equate to percentage users of a platform.
Most PC people I know are more interested in buying a $600 video card for their 5 year old PC.
You're full of it. No 5-year old PC motherboard can possibly support an AGP 4x or higher graphics card. Might as well chuck out that whole PC if you want a new graphics card.
Likewise, no AGP-based motherboard made today is going to be able to take a (PCI Express?) graphics card made 5 years from now. You will have to chuck out today's PC if you want to upgrade your graphics in 5 years.
The only PC user demographic where your claim might even be remotely true is the kiddie gaming market, i.e. the average pimple-faced teenager who spends his weekends at LANs, and I suspect this is exactly where you're getting your slanted views. This is a tiny minority of the market.
Few people in the real world ever truly "upgrade" PCs much - the interfaces (e.g. RAM, IDE vs ATA, CPU sockets, AGP vs PCI Express etc.) change too fast for a five-year old PC to be upgradable.
You are what is known as a "statistical outlier".
Just be aware that you are the rare exception, not the norm. The statistical facts however indicate that you are full of __it.
You suggest that people get infected by viruses because they're stupid, this is not the case, most virus infections are not the user's fault. Whether you are infected by a virus or not has almost everything to do with your OS.