stop selling printers for $80 and try a new buisness model
Problem is 'Joe Public' isn't very well aware that the printer industry is doing this, and mostly only considers the initial price when choosing a printer, assuming the cartridges must surely be relatively inexpensive (especially first-time buyers). This means the fiercest competition is for the initial sale of a printer. This will inherently drive down the printer cost, because Joe Public will choose the $80 printer over the $180 printer even if the cartridges for the latter are much cheaper (because bottom line let's face it Joe Public mostly isn't smart enough to make intelligent purchasing decisions); thus any printer manufacturer that doesn't 'play the same game' will stop getting new customers fast. In a sense each manufacturer is "forced" to adopt the "sell printer at a loss and make it back off ink cartridges" business model. Then the market gets flooded with cheaper knock-off cartridges made by 3rd party companies who don't need to spend as much R&D on printer development or take the hit on the printer cost that the printer manufacturer does.. then they struggle to make money off either printers or cartridges. What's worse is that now, even when Joe Public is aware of the overcharging for cartridges, they don't care because they can just buy knock-offs, so they can simply buy the cheapest printer.
It's easy to say "try a new business model", but what? Seems like they're stuck between a rock and a hard place... I'm sometimes glad I'm not in the printer business.
+1 insightful.. wish I had mod points for you. The plain and simple fact is a majority of Windows users have problems with malware. And although TrappedByMyself would like us all to pretend otherwise (for whatever biased reason), this (taken on the whole) really does say more about Microsoft's software than about their users.
(I seem to recall seeing a statistic somewhere that over 70% of support calls are related in some way to viruses/spyware.)
it will face a validity attack when the assignee attempts to enforce it. Examiners at the USPTO have extremely tight deadlines and can only devote so much time to arguing whether or not this invention was anticipated or obvious. A validity attack by a team of corporate lawyers in the presence of a judge is a far more critical test.
That sounds so nice and easy - for a large corporation. However to a smaller startup, who cannot afford all the lawyer/court fees, it's practically impossible. So now "only the big companies can play"... and do you think that another big company is going to come along and challenge this patent? No, because big companies seldom challenge patents, they rather collect large "patent portfolios" of their own, and then "cross-license" patents from one another when needed. This is why people "get uptight", and it strikes me as a perfectly valid reason. The patent system was created in order to foster innovation, but since it's an effective method for a few large companies to create unreasonable barriers to market entry for small startups, it stifles innovation more often than it fosters it.
Some of the local indigenous people had stories handed down over generations from their ancestors who had also suffered through a tsunami, and from these stories some of them recognized the warning signs and knew what to do. No mystical explanation required in that case.
A good example of the value that even conventional science holds over anything paranormal is the 10-year old British girl who recognized the warning signs from having listened in her geography class, and saved hundreds of lives by warning those on the beach and nearby hotel to evacuate.
By comparison: Even though there are millions of psychics/clairvoyants and other people who claim to be able to predict the future worldwide, not one predicted the tsunami! Remarkable?
This is not to say that there isn't something to the study descibed in the article; animals and aboriginals may all have 'felt' the earthquake (even from far - elephants' feet for example have specially adapted sensors that are very sensitive to vibrations), and just thought it prudent to get out of the way just in case. However the use of the term "sixth sense" implies a paranormal explanation, when in fact you can pretty much bet that the true explanation, whatever it turns out to be, is going to be quite logical and rational. This is perhaps more likely just poor journalism rather than poor science.
(These stories with a 'pseudoscientific bent' seem to reveal a creeping trend away from rational thinking on slashdot, which several years ago used to feel like one of the few good places on the Net where one could get away from that sort of gullible mainstream uninformed discourse:/ Is Slashdot now officially "mainstream"?)
Uh - real mature reply there, wow, I think that just goes to show the level of maturity of the Microsoft apologists on slashdot.
FYI you are wrong on, well, every single sentence in your post!
I see a lot of people on this thread "rewriting history" by outright lying, e.g. claiming that Microsoft was never found guilty of any antitrust violations such as product tying in the antitrust trial and so on, that they've never done anything unethical, that they're not a monopoly etc. Repeating lies over and over and over until everyone believes it and it becomes "uncool" to state the contradictory truth is rewriting history. Just take a look around this thread.
Good luck with your life, must be tough being unable to think for yourself, and just blindly believing all the paid-for media hype that Bill Gates is really just this real nice guy who never harmed anyone, when the facts are just a big of google research away and you're too lazy to do even that little bit.
All I hear from them is, "Yup, global warming is true, and we have all the answers and computer models to prove it, and nope our computer models can't be wrong
Wow. I take it you don't read much scientific literature or scientific discourse. You couldn't be more wrong. From the sounds of it you've only discussed this in unscientific debates with normal "man on the street" people e.g. friends, colleagues etc.
Just how many people are Microsoft paying to post on/. these days anyway? (Most of which are outright lying and seemingly attempting to "rewrite history") Redefining MS-bashing as an ideological bandwagon rather than something logical based on the facts of MS's unethical past. 'Hey guys, it's no longer "cool" to bash Microsoft'.. WTF?
Oh yes, I don't bash Microsoft because I'm "going for karma". I couldn't care less about karma, and these days there are so many blindly pro-Microsoft zealots on/. that I sometimes get -1 troll or flamebait because of it. I bash Microsoft because I really don't like the company, and I really don't like the company because I'm just one of those "old-timers" who's really been around a long time and watched all their shady unethical moves over the last 15 years and watched all their technically inferior product offerings usurp better products because of clever strategy and deceptive marketing.
I know Microsoft's marketing is churning out the "new, kindler gentler Microsoft" image in full force, and a lot of people even here are buying into it, but when you actually bother to read about their strategies, they haven't changed a bit. E.g. they still often blatantly outright lie in press releases. I've also had direct experience with Microsoft as our company has tendered for and done work for them, and I can tell you they are, well, 'not nice people'.
I'd be most happy if you could point out anything in my post history that is false. Saying something negative isn't FUD if it's true. There's an increasing tendency on/. these days to criticise any "Microsoft-bashing", even when it's true.
hating Microsoft more than you care about liking Linux.
Who said I like Linux? I can't recall saying that anywhere for at least several years now. I think it certainly has a better overall design in terms of security than Windows, and other (but not all) aspects of the operating system design are better too, but I'm really not crazy about Linux and although I think it makes a great server system (for a clued up admin), I don't advocate it as anything other than a server system, because it is definitely not ready for home users i.e. joe public. I think that Mac is currently the best operating system for home users (unless of course someone wants to run games or some other critical Windows-only application, then Windows is the way to go, but that's not because Windows is better, it's because the games just don't run on Macs).
You suggest that the best solution to malware problems is user education, i.e. a technically literate user base. I used to think like that too, some years ago. Eventually I came to the conclusion that computer systems should be designed for humans, not the other way round, and people should not need to have to spend so much time learning about computers especially when it is possible to build better computers that aren't so susceptible to malware. MS systems are as susceptible as they are not because "that is just the way computers are" but because MS has never cared about quality, and this should be obvious to anyone who has been developing for MS systems since DOS 3.
Now, although I think that the general Linux security model is better designed than that of Windows (e.g. default user is essentially root), I don't suggest that Linux is super-secure compared to Windows. Why? Because there are still many exploitable bugs that crop up in the software written for Linux, e.g. Apache, SSH, sendmail and so on. Now these are mostly server applications, sure, but until recently many distros default install would enable some of these. And invariably somebody finds the exploits, and then joe "Home User of Linux" is screwed. This has improved in recent years, with distro publishers realising 'the obvious' that these things should be turned off by default (and in fact I recall they were slammed at the time even by "anti-Microsoft" Linux advocates on/., because these were known principles at least a decade prior). Anyway, this is a similar story on Windows --- many of the security problems historically were not because of the 'lesser' underlying design i.e. spec, but because of flaws, i.e. mistakes in implementation, e.g. MS Blaster exploited a buffer overflow in the RPC service. Then there were stupid decisions, e.g. up until XP SP2 a number of ports e.g. SMB were open by default to the whole world and could not be restricted based on subnet - just enabled totally or disabled totally. The XP SP2 firewall however was absolutely the best thing that ever happened to Windows security, as well as enabling automatic updates by default. Ultimately, Linux is not all that dissimilar to Windows, in that both are crazy, hodge-podge systems hacked together at an unreasonable pace to market, although there are many differences too that such a statement hides. I've always liked the more disciplined BSD approach to security. One of the BSD versions used to boast on the front page of their website: "Four years without a root exploit in the default install". Now that reveals some devotion to security that historically has been "somewhat absent" from Linux and "largely absent" from Microsoft. Both have improved.
I don't care much for Microsoft for other reasons as well though, e.g. their shady anti-competitive product practices, product tying and so on. But mostly I dislike like that they have always placed "quality" at the bottom of the list of priorities (all other problems stem from this), and this will always remain true as long as Bill Gates runs Microsoft.
But that alone won't get me to make the leap from "We're heating the planet enough that, over the next century, the ideal regions to grow each crop will be about a quarter of a tier of states farther north than it is now." to "The world is about to end unless we gut all industry and drive the economy down to the hunter-gatherer level."
Nobody is suggesting that the solution to the problem of global climate change is to "get rid of technology and go back to the stone age". At least not outside the US. There are plenty of sensible ideas that involve using technology or developing or improving technology to solve the problem in a way that fits in with modern industrialised economies. Why is it that Americans seem to think that the only alternative to polluting, is getting rid of technology and going back to the stone age? It's a straw-man... it's like there's this massive straw-man ever-present in American discourse on this issue.... "Man's pollution is causing climate change".. "Oh yeah? Well what are we supposed to do, go back to the stone age?".. "Hmm.. no, of course not.. I guess we should just leave it then".
Your post seemed very rational up until I read that paragraph, which seemed so out of place to me as a non-US citizen. Maybe you have a few highly ideologized and overly loud zealots who really do advocate essentially a return to the stone age? I don't know. But those people and their views don't belong in a rational discussion on problems like this, and (over-)reacting to them with an equally zealous fervour of doing the opposite of whatever they say, is just as blind.
Yes, the "push" has begun... "this is why computers should only run software from 'trusted', 'licensed' software vendors, and only on 'trusted', 'licensed' hardware", they will say... the ultimate industry lockout to new potential competitors. And the sad thing is the excuse is a flawed premise; the current widespread and rapidly increasing malware problems are primarily because Windows is such a mess internally. Windows is imploding. And they must have known it was going to happen, over a year ago already, when they suddenly decided to start this massive new focus on security.. they knew their security sucked, they saw this coming, and now they're doing two things: (a) trying to patch Windows fast enough to prevent a total implosion and sudden mass exodus from the platform, and (b) try to capitalise on all the spyware and viruses to push 'trusted' computing platforms in order to gain control of the platform to create artificial barriers to entry for new small competitors.
You DO know there are and have been many bugs in IE that allow a website to install spyware right onto your computer by so much as VIEWING the website, don't you? Would you like to point out where these bugs also exist in Linux? Would you like to show me how the Linux model allows for a user in a web browser to install software as root even by clicking on something in a web browser? Thanks for your "insight", but sorry, -1 FUD. Honestly, learn something about software system design before rushing to defend Microsoft and blaming the users, you might be surprised.
Hate to break it you, but there are very well-defined laws against this kind of product tying for monopolies. Google for "product tying", you should get all the info you need. Microsoft have in fact been found guilty and convicted on these laws before.
You still have issues of lost productivity. This is more likely to stimulate demand on the corporate level than on the consumer level though.
True, although corporate systems tend to be a bit easier to secure than home systems, e.g. you have an IT guy who installs a firewall. But it's still a big problem even in corporations, I've seen examples of truly massive productivity losses due to being overwhelmed with viruses and spyware in organizations where there was little in-house expertise, so the people didn't understand what was happening at all. But because they don't understand, they just end up paying a 3rd party a lot of money to clean it up, and assume that all this is just a normal part of using computers, that that's just the way things are. ("Microsoft's biggest and most dangerous contribution to the software industry may be the degree to which it has lowered user expectations." - Esther Schindler)
On the consumer level, Windows is a serious problem, and I think the only thing still holding Microsoft up in this market is the massive army of "geeks" who voluntarily run around continually patching up their friends/relatives/girl-they-have-crush-on etc.'s PCs.
You've just hit on the real reason people don't switch... it's because they always find some geek they can sucker into cleaning up the mess each time, for free! Most people don't even have to lift a finger to keep their systems free of malware - there are geeks running around everywhere literally doing free maintenance - it doesn't even so much as inconvenience them, why would they change?
Why exactly are we all running around spending hours of our own weekends/evenings etc. cleaning up the mess Microsoft made for them for free? Is your time and expertise worth nothing? You feel "expected" to do it because it's a family member? Or some hot chick sweet-talked you into doing it by flirting a little? (We all know we've done that before). Utter nonsense... start charging for it!
People will start considering alternatives when they realise it's going to cost them a tidy little packet every time their systems get jammed up with the latest MS malware.
I simply told my folks last time they bought a computer, if they buy Windows, I'm not supporting it for them, if they buy a Mac I'll support it for them. Don't expect me to spend my Saturday doing free support work for Microsoft.
History teaches us that when you give a law enforcement agency powers, they use those powers
There's a funny kind of "positive-feedback" that can occur with power if you're not careful. The thing about power is, the more you get, the more able you become (in general) to get even more. It can grow exponentially if the balance tips in favour of whoever has it. This is why corrupt totalitarian governments often rise so quickly.
According to the stats of the 3 different websites I maintain, the top 5 are IE, Gecko, Opera, Netscape, and Safari/Konqueror. Obviously mentioning "Netscape" is a little misleading since the new Netscapes are Gecko-based.
My stats also reflect that Netscape 4 is now under 0.5% share (I still see some Netscape 3 even, although who knows if some joker or spambot is spoofing their UA here). I don't put much effort into NS4, my general strategy is that I want the site to just work *functionally* in NS4 (e.g. pages can't be blank) but don't care if it's ugly. In newer browsers I want it to look nice and be functional. I think I agree with you, it's time to stop supporting NS4 though.
Below the major ones, I see an increasingly wide *variety* of user agents occupying the bottom +/- 1% of hits. These include grabbers like Teleport wget and WebCopier, then I also see Camino, Galeon, iCab, WebTV, MultiZilla (?), Dillo, NetNewsWire, K-Meleon, Lynx, ANT Fresco, AWeb, Chimera, iBrowse, and libs like curl, libWWW etc. Then there are a bunch of PDA type things. I don't know what some of these things are, e.g. ANT Fresco, but awStats recognizes these and has icons for them, so they're not just made up forged UA strings.
Yup, you're right, it should have been! But I noticed long ago that the/. editors avoid sensibly and unambiguously written submissions and sensible titles, because that doesn't provide nearly as many 'hooks' to generate a lot of "lively discussion", and "lively discussion" = pageviews = ad revenue. If two people submit the same story, but one is clear, well-written and objective, the other subjective with some confused ambiguous sentences and a few typos, they'll always pick the latter.
My whole office is on a 2 carrots a day scheme after we calculated that 1/3 of us has a direct relative (or by direct relative marriage) dying of cancer.
That's pretty interesting.. and a good policy. Interesting from a purely economic perspective too; healthy employees are probably more productive, and the cost of the carrots and tomatoes is probably less than the economic cost if an employee gets cancer. I've also recently tried to start eating at least one carrot and tomato daily, but don't always remember.
From what I've seen people resort to manually outputting HTML
There's a good reason that they do it --- CSS support is so spotty and buggy on many of the platforms out there, that it's often impossible to get the particular effect you want using CSS in a way that works properly even on the top 5 browsers and all their sub-versions, and in fact can cause serious problems (e.g. Netscape 4 has a bug when using certain border styles in tables that will cause the entire page to be rendered blank! And the only workaround that works properly in all the major browsers is a hack that uses nested tables to get the same effect.)
If you're making a Web page for a corporate Intranet and you can easily enforce that all users use a particular browser (e.g. the latest IE or Firefox), or you're one of those people who really think it's OK to tell your visitors what browser to use, then it's dead easy to stick properly to CSS. But for any real company web page it's not so easy. Don't get me wrong, I really like CSS, and wish I could use it everywhere.
3.) To all the folks who complain that Windows is hard to protect against malware: you're clueless.
Oh come ooon -- I challenge you to repeat this statement and your instructions to any of the 50+ million "average home users" out there to which Microsoft Windows is marketed without sounding like a fool.
Or are you really just admitting that although Windows is a usable solution for controlled corporate environments where experts can be hired to secure the desktops, but an abysmal solution as a home OS? (I'm sorry, but even if the steps aren't as complex in a limited home setup, they're still way too complex for Joe Public, so you can skip the straw men already thanks.)
Uh... maybe if they actually came up with some ideas of their own for a change? Think you missed the point. Because all they ever do is copy. (In fact it's extremely difficult to think of any worthy ideas in computing that MS have come up with that everyone else 'followed' by copying, and for a software company of that size and which has spent so much on R&D, and with a founder who consistently touts himself as some sort of innovative visionary in the media, that is incredibly remarkable.)
MS has been pretty smug in saying they provide what their customers are asking for
Hmmm... [light bulb *ding*]... maybe there's MS's problem, all along, right there! Listening to their customers! I think you're on to something here.. it explains everything. Because the vast majority of customers really aren't capable of imagining up any ideas for improving software whatsoever -- most just blindly accept that however the software in front of them works, that that's what "normal" is.
Tabbed browsing seems like a great example: Before Firefox started to become well-known, the actual idea of tabbed browsing simply never occurred to the vast majority of users at all and the concept was largely unknown to them. So how exactly could that majority of customers have ever asked for a concept they weren't aware of? Many people who see tabbed browsing for the first time go something like "ooooh.. that's a
great idea, that's going to be useful" --- after the fact, i.e. after they've seen it.
Microsoft claims to be an "innovator", but innovators by definition are not "listening to their customers", but rather coming up with those new ideas that your customers have never even thought of. In other words being a market "leader". 'Listening to your customers' only makes you a follower, which is in fact exactly MS's primary Modus Operandi, wait until an innovator conequors a market, then enter that market by copying it and integrating it into Windows. Tabbed browsing is but one small example of many thousands of MS trailing the pack. Maybe they're just "listening to their customers", who are ahead of them in the pack and getting their ideas from the innovators leading them.
Slashdot Mirror
stop selling printers for $80 and try a new buisness model
Problem is 'Joe Public' isn't very well aware that the printer industry is doing this, and mostly only considers the initial price when choosing a printer, assuming the cartridges must surely be relatively inexpensive (especially first-time buyers). This means the fiercest competition is for the initial sale of a printer. This will inherently drive down the printer cost, because Joe Public will choose the $80 printer over the $180 printer even if the cartridges for the latter are much cheaper (because bottom line let's face it Joe Public mostly isn't smart enough to make intelligent purchasing decisions); thus any printer manufacturer that doesn't 'play the same game' will stop getting new customers fast. In a sense each manufacturer is "forced" to adopt the "sell printer at a loss and make it back off ink cartridges" business model. Then the market gets flooded with cheaper knock-off cartridges made by 3rd party companies who don't need to spend as much R&D on printer development or take the hit on the printer cost that the printer manufacturer does .. then they struggle to make money off either printers or cartridges. What's worse is that now, even when Joe Public is aware of the overcharging for cartridges, they don't care because they can just buy knock-offs, so they can simply buy the cheapest printer.
It's easy to say "try a new business model", but what? Seems like they're stuck between a rock and a hard place ... I'm sometimes glad I'm not in the printer business.
+1 insightful .. wish I had mod points for you. The plain and simple fact is a majority of Windows users have problems with malware. And although TrappedByMyself would like us all to pretend otherwise (for whatever biased reason), this (taken on the whole) really does say more about Microsoft's software than about their users.
(I seem to recall seeing a statistic somewhere that over 70% of support calls are related in some way to viruses/spyware.)
-1 "Lame paid 'guerilla marketing' attempt" .. hint: don't sound like a marketing brochure when you're trying to fake grassroots product support.
it will face a validity attack when the assignee attempts to enforce it. Examiners at the USPTO have extremely tight deadlines and can only devote so much time to arguing whether or not this invention was anticipated or obvious. A validity attack by a team of corporate lawyers in the presence of a judge is a far more critical test.
That sounds so nice and easy - for a large corporation. However to a smaller startup, who cannot afford all the lawyer/court fees, it's practically impossible. So now "only the big companies can play" ... and do you think that another big company is going to come along and challenge this patent? No, because big companies seldom challenge patents, they rather collect large "patent portfolios" of their own, and then "cross-license" patents from one another when needed. This is why people "get uptight", and it strikes me as a perfectly valid reason. The patent system was created in order to foster innovation, but since it's an effective method for a few large companies to create unreasonable barriers to market entry for small startups, it stifles innovation more often than it fosters it.
Some of the local indigenous people had stories handed down over generations from their ancestors who had also suffered through a tsunami, and from these stories some of them recognized the warning signs and knew what to do. No mystical explanation required in that case.
A good example of the value that even conventional science holds over anything paranormal is the 10-year old British girl who recognized the warning signs from having listened in her geography class, and saved hundreds of lives by warning those on the beach and nearby hotel to evacuate.
By comparison: Even though there are millions of psychics/clairvoyants and other people who claim to be able to predict the future worldwide, not one predicted the tsunami! Remarkable?
This is not to say that there isn't something to the study descibed in the article; animals and aboriginals may all have 'felt' the earthquake (even from far - elephants' feet for example have specially adapted sensors that are very sensitive to vibrations), and just thought it prudent to get out of the way just in case. However the use of the term "sixth sense" implies a paranormal explanation, when in fact you can pretty much bet that the true explanation, whatever it turns out to be, is going to be quite logical and rational. This is perhaps more likely just poor journalism rather than poor science.
(These stories with a 'pseudoscientific bent' seem to reveal a creeping trend away from rational thinking on slashdot, which several years ago used to feel like one of the few good places on the Net where one could get away from that sort of gullible mainstream uninformed discourse :/ Is Slashdot now officially "mainstream"?)
Uh - real mature reply there, wow, I think that just goes to show the level of maturity of the Microsoft apologists on slashdot.
FYI you are wrong on, well, every single sentence in your post!
I see a lot of people on this thread "rewriting history" by outright lying, e.g. claiming that Microsoft was never found guilty of any antitrust violations such as product tying in the antitrust trial and so on, that they've never done anything unethical, that they're not a monopoly etc. Repeating lies over and over and over until everyone believes it and it becomes "uncool" to state the contradictory truth is rewriting history. Just take a look around this thread.
Good luck with your life, must be tough being unable to think for yourself, and just blindly believing all the paid-for media hype that Bill Gates is really just this real nice guy who never harmed anyone, when the facts are just a big of google research away and you're too lazy to do even that little bit.
All I hear from them is, "Yup, global warming is true, and we have all the answers and computer models to prove it, and nope our computer models can't be wrong
Wow. I take it you don't read much scientific literature or scientific discourse. You couldn't be more wrong. From the sounds of it you've only discussed this in unscientific debates with normal "man on the street" people e.g. friends, colleagues etc.
OMW, your nick is perfect!
Just how many people are Microsoft paying to post on /. these days anyway? (Most of which are outright lying and seemingly attempting to "rewrite history") Redefining MS-bashing as an ideological bandwagon rather than something logical based on the facts of MS's unethical past. 'Hey guys, it's no longer "cool" to bash Microsoft' .. WTF?
daveschroeder seems to be a frequent troll around /..
Well, if I was going for karma
Oh yes, I don't bash Microsoft because I'm "going for karma". I couldn't care less about karma, and these days there are so many blindly pro-Microsoft zealots on /. that I sometimes get -1 troll or flamebait because of it. I bash Microsoft because I really don't like the company, and I really don't like the company because I'm just one of those "old-timers" who's really been around a long time and watched all their shady unethical moves over the last 15 years and watched all their technically inferior product offerings usurp better products because of clever strategy and deceptive marketing.
I know Microsoft's marketing is churning out the "new, kindler gentler Microsoft" image in full force, and a lot of people even here are buying into it, but when you actually bother to read about their strategies, they haven't changed a bit. E.g. they still often blatantly outright lie in press releases. I've also had direct experience with Microsoft as our company has tendered for and done work for them, and I can tell you they are, well, 'not nice people'.
through your post history (speaking of FUD)
I'd be most happy if you could point out anything in my post history that is false. Saying something negative isn't FUD if it's true. There's an increasing tendency on /. these days to criticise any "Microsoft-bashing", even when it's true.
hating Microsoft more than you care about liking Linux.
Who said I like Linux? I can't recall saying that anywhere for at least several years now. I think it certainly has a better overall design in terms of security than Windows, and other (but not all) aspects of the operating system design are better too, but I'm really not crazy about Linux and although I think it makes a great server system (for a clued up admin), I don't advocate it as anything other than a server system, because it is definitely not ready for home users i.e. joe public. I think that Mac is currently the best operating system for home users (unless of course someone wants to run games or some other critical Windows-only application, then Windows is the way to go, but that's not because Windows is better, it's because the games just don't run on Macs).
You suggest that the best solution to malware problems is user education, i.e. a technically literate user base. I used to think like that too, some years ago. Eventually I came to the conclusion that computer systems should be designed for humans, not the other way round, and people should not need to have to spend so much time learning about computers especially when it is possible to build better computers that aren't so susceptible to malware. MS systems are as susceptible as they are not because "that is just the way computers are" but because MS has never cared about quality, and this should be obvious to anyone who has been developing for MS systems since DOS 3.
Now, although I think that the general Linux security model is better designed than that of Windows (e.g. default user is essentially root), I don't suggest that Linux is super-secure compared to Windows. Why? Because there are still many exploitable bugs that crop up in the software written for Linux, e.g. Apache, SSH, sendmail and so on. Now these are mostly server applications, sure, but until recently many distros default install would enable some of these. And invariably somebody finds the exploits, and then joe "Home User of Linux" is screwed. This has improved in recent years, with distro publishers realising 'the obvious' that these things should be turned off by default (and in fact I recall they were slammed at the time even by "anti-Microsoft" Linux advocates on /., because these were known principles at least a decade prior). Anyway, this is a similar story on Windows --- many of the security problems historically were not because of the 'lesser' underlying design i.e. spec, but because of flaws, i.e. mistakes in implementation, e.g. MS Blaster exploited a buffer overflow in the RPC service. Then there were stupid decisions, e.g. up until XP SP2 a number of ports e.g. SMB were open by default to the whole world and could not be restricted based on subnet - just enabled totally or disabled totally. The XP SP2 firewall however was absolutely the best thing that ever happened to Windows security, as well as enabling automatic updates by default. Ultimately, Linux is not all that dissimilar to Windows, in that both are crazy, hodge-podge systems hacked together at an unreasonable pace to market, although there are many differences too that such a statement hides. I've always liked the more disciplined BSD approach to security. One of the BSD versions used to boast on the front page of their website: "Four years without a root exploit in the default install". Now that reveals some devotion to security that historically has been "somewhat absent" from Linux and "largely absent" from Microsoft. Both have improved.
I don't care much for Microsoft for other reasons as well though, e.g. their shady anti-competitive product practices, product tying and so on. But mostly I dislike like that they have always placed "quality" at the bottom of the list of priorities (all other problems stem from this), and this will always remain true as long as Bill Gates runs Microsoft.
wacky anti-US industry restrictions
?? Care to elaborate on this? With references?
Also, has the US proposed a better alternative to the Kyoto treaty, that I'm not aware of?
But that alone won't get me to make the leap from "We're heating the planet enough that, over the next century, the ideal regions to grow each crop will be about a quarter of a tier of states farther north than it is now." to "The world is about to end unless we gut all industry and drive the economy down to the hunter-gatherer level."
Nobody is suggesting that the solution to the problem of global climate change is to "get rid of technology and go back to the stone age". At least not outside the US. There are plenty of sensible ideas that involve using technology or developing or improving technology to solve the problem in a way that fits in with modern industrialised economies. Why is it that Americans seem to think that the only alternative to polluting, is getting rid of technology and going back to the stone age? It's a straw-man ... it's like there's this massive straw-man ever-present in American discourse on this issue .... "Man's pollution is causing climate change" .. "Oh yeah? Well what are we supposed to do, go back to the stone age?" .. "Hmm .. no, of course not .. I guess we should just leave it then".
Your post seemed very rational up until I read that paragraph, which seemed so out of place to me as a non-US citizen. Maybe you have a few highly ideologized and overly loud zealots who really do advocate essentially a return to the stone age? I don't know. But those people and their views don't belong in a rational discussion on problems like this, and (over-)reacting to them with an equally zealous fervour of doing the opposite of whatever they say, is just as blind.
Yes, the "push" has begun ... "this is why computers should only run software from 'trusted', 'licensed' software vendors, and only on 'trusted', 'licensed' hardware", they will say ... the ultimate industry lockout to new potential competitors. And the sad thing is the excuse is a flawed premise; the current widespread and rapidly increasing malware problems are primarily because Windows is such a mess internally. Windows is imploding. And they must have known it was going to happen, over a year ago already, when they suddenly decided to start this massive new focus on security .. they knew their security sucked, they saw this coming, and now they're doing two things: (a) trying to patch Windows fast enough to prevent a total implosion and sudden mass exodus from the platform, and (b) try to capitalise on all the spyware and viruses to push 'trusted' computing platforms in order to gain control of the platform to create artificial barriers to entry for new small competitors.
You DO know there are and have been many bugs in IE that allow a website to install spyware right onto your computer by so much as VIEWING the website, don't you? Would you like to point out where these bugs also exist in Linux? Would you like to show me how the Linux model allows for a user in a web browser to install software as root even by clicking on something in a web browser? Thanks for your "insight", but sorry, -1 FUD. Honestly, learn something about software system design before rushing to defend Microsoft and blaming the users, you might be surprised.
Hate to break it you, but there are very well-defined laws against this kind of product tying for monopolies. Google for "product tying", you should get all the info you need. Microsoft have in fact been found guilty and convicted on these laws before.
You still have issues of lost productivity. This is more likely to stimulate demand on the corporate level than on the consumer level though.
True, although corporate systems tend to be a bit easier to secure than home systems, e.g. you have an IT guy who installs a firewall. But it's still a big problem even in corporations, I've seen examples of truly massive productivity losses due to being overwhelmed with viruses and spyware in organizations where there was little in-house expertise, so the people didn't understand what was happening at all. But because they don't understand, they just end up paying a 3rd party a lot of money to clean it up, and assume that all this is just a normal part of using computers, that that's just the way things are. ("Microsoft's biggest and most dangerous contribution to the software industry may be the degree to which it has lowered user expectations." - Esther Schindler)
On the consumer level, Windows is a serious problem, and I think the only thing still holding Microsoft up in this market is the massive army of "geeks" who voluntarily run around continually patching up their friends/relatives/girl-they-have-crush-on etc.'s PCs.
She found someone else to fix it
You've just hit on the real reason people don't switch ... it's because they always find some geek they can sucker into cleaning up the mess each time, for free! Most people don't even have to lift a finger to keep their systems free of malware - there are geeks running around everywhere literally doing free maintenance - it doesn't even so much as inconvenience them, why would they change?
Why exactly are we all running around spending hours of our own weekends/evenings etc. cleaning up the mess Microsoft made for them for free? Is your time and expertise worth nothing? You feel "expected" to do it because it's a family member? Or some hot chick sweet-talked you into doing it by flirting a little? (We all know we've done that before). Utter nonsense ... start charging for it!
People will start considering alternatives when they realise it's going to cost them a tidy little packet every time their systems get jammed up with the latest MS malware.
I simply told my folks last time they bought a computer, if they buy Windows, I'm not supporting it for them, if they buy a Mac I'll support it for them. Don't expect me to spend my Saturday doing free support work for Microsoft.
History teaches us that when you give a law enforcement agency powers, they use those powers
There's a funny kind of "positive-feedback" that can occur with power if you're not careful. The thing about power is, the more you get, the more able you become (in general) to get even more. It can grow exponentially if the balance tips in favour of whoever has it. This is why corrupt totalitarian governments often rise so quickly.
According to the stats of the 3 different websites I maintain, the top 5 are IE, Gecko, Opera, Netscape, and Safari/Konqueror. Obviously mentioning "Netscape" is a little misleading since the new Netscapes are Gecko-based.
My stats also reflect that Netscape 4 is now under 0.5% share (I still see some Netscape 3 even, although who knows if some joker or spambot is spoofing their UA here). I don't put much effort into NS4, my general strategy is that I want the site to just work *functionally* in NS4 (e.g. pages can't be blank) but don't care if it's ugly. In newer browsers I want it to look nice and be functional. I think I agree with you, it's time to stop supporting NS4 though.
Below the major ones, I see an increasingly wide *variety* of user agents occupying the bottom +/- 1% of hits. These include grabbers like Teleport wget and WebCopier, then I also see Camino, Galeon, iCab, WebTV, MultiZilla (?), Dillo, NetNewsWire, K-Meleon, Lynx, ANT Fresco, AWeb, Chimera, iBrowse, and libs like curl, libWWW etc. Then there are a bunch of PDA type things. I don't know what some of these things are, e.g. ANT Fresco, but awStats recognizes these and has icons for them, so they're not just made up forged UA strings.
'anti-carinogen isolated in carrots'
Yup, you're right, it should have been! But I noticed long ago that the /. editors avoid sensibly and unambiguously written submissions and sensible titles, because that doesn't provide nearly as many 'hooks' to generate a lot of "lively discussion", and "lively discussion" = pageviews = ad revenue. If two people submit the same story, but one is clear, well-written and objective, the other subjective with some confused ambiguous sentences and a few typos, they'll always pick the latter.
My whole office is on a 2 carrots a day scheme after we calculated that 1/3 of us has a direct relative (or by direct relative marriage) dying of cancer.
That's pretty interesting .. and a good policy. Interesting from a purely economic perspective too; healthy employees are probably more productive, and the cost of the carrots and tomatoes is probably less than the economic cost if an employee gets cancer. I've also recently tried to start eating at least one carrot and tomato daily, but don't always remember.
From what I've seen people resort to manually outputting HTML
There's a good reason that they do it --- CSS support is so spotty and buggy on many of the platforms out there, that it's often impossible to get the particular effect you want using CSS in a way that works properly even on the top 5 browsers and all their sub-versions, and in fact can cause serious problems (e.g. Netscape 4 has a bug when using certain border styles in tables that will cause the entire page to be rendered blank! And the only workaround that works properly in all the major browsers is a hack that uses nested tables to get the same effect.)
If you're making a Web page for a corporate Intranet and you can easily enforce that all users use a particular browser (e.g. the latest IE or Firefox), or you're one of those people who really think it's OK to tell your visitors what browser to use, then it's dead easy to stick properly to CSS. But for any real company web page it's not so easy. Don't get me wrong, I really like CSS, and wish I could use it everywhere.
3.) To all the folks who complain that Windows is hard to protect against malware: you're clueless.
Oh come ooon -- I challenge you to repeat this statement and your instructions to any of the 50+ million "average home users" out there to which Microsoft Windows is marketed without sounding like a fool.
Or are you really just admitting that although Windows is a usable solution for controlled corporate environments where experts can be hired to secure the desktops, but an abysmal solution as a home OS? (I'm sorry, but even if the steps aren't as complex in a limited home setup, they're still way too complex for Joe Public, so you can skip the straw men already thanks.)
Microsoft just can't win with you idiots
Uh ... maybe if they actually came up with some ideas of their own for a change? Think you missed the point. Because all they ever do is copy. (In fact it's extremely difficult to think of any worthy ideas in computing that MS have come up with that everyone else 'followed' by copying, and for a software company of that size and which has spent so much on R&D, and with a founder who consistently touts himself as some sort of innovative visionary in the media, that is incredibly remarkable.)
MS has been pretty smug in saying they provide what their customers are asking for
Hmmm ... [light bulb *ding*] ... maybe there's MS's problem, all along, right there! Listening to their customers! I think you're on to something here .. it explains everything. Because the vast majority of customers really aren't capable of imagining up any ideas for improving software whatsoever -- most just blindly accept that however the software in front of them works, that that's what "normal" is.
Tabbed browsing seems like a great example: Before Firefox started to become well-known, the actual idea of tabbed browsing simply never occurred to the vast majority of users at all and the concept was largely unknown to them. So how exactly could that majority of customers have ever asked for a concept they weren't aware of? Many people who see tabbed browsing for the first time go something like "ooooh .. that's a
great idea, that's going to be useful" --- after the fact, i.e. after they've seen it.
Microsoft claims to be an "innovator", but innovators by definition are not "listening to their customers", but rather coming up with those new ideas that your customers have never even thought of. In other words being a market "leader". 'Listening to your customers' only makes you a follower, which is in fact exactly MS's primary Modus Operandi, wait until an innovator conequors a market, then enter that market by copying it and integrating it into Windows. Tabbed browsing is but one small example of many thousands of MS trailing the pack. Maybe they're just "listening to their customers", who are ahead of them in the pack and getting their ideas from the innovators leading them.