The only problem is IIRC that MS software doesn't work on layers, lots of stuff is bound into the "operating system".
Microsoft don't ship what I use to know an operating system to be. They ship things as part of it that I would class as applications (web browser/IIS for instance).
From a security viewpoint, having them separate means that you have more layers and at the same time, you don't pollute your kernel code with unnecessary functionality just to improve speed when you need it.
If Microsoft were really serious about security, they'd have the firewall in XP switched on by default, they'd have a
Just because you don't want to have a rental-type service doesn't mean that others don't.
And you (like me) probably know a lot of the tricks of hackers and how to protect yourself with Firewall, Anti-virus, not downloading.exes sent in the mail, patching, whatever.
A huge number of people who don't work in the computer industry or have office jobs don't.
The following could all be delivered via Java Applets within a web page: email, office, games, small business accounts, graphical design, instant messenging, video playback, games, project management software. Database software could just run as server side websites. Outside of those applications, I can't think of much else that tens of millions of home users use. And what's left could be easily built.
The only thing I would struggle with from an applet POV would be digital camera upload where you'd have to interface with the USB port (and there's probably a way around that).
It's odd, there's very few accidents involving people cutting off their fingers in electric coffee grinders.
Why? Because the manufacturers put in a switch which makes it hard to do it. The blade won't operate without the lid on.
Now you CAN work out a way to remove the guard and cut off your fingers...if you really want to.
If Windows had been a little better thought through, they'd have locked it down, done more sandboxing and helped people run it in idiot mode, or allow people who know what they are doing to run in non-idiot mode.
I know heaps of people who use their PCs for Word, Excel, web surfing, reading emails, viewing pictures, and playing games. They don't want to install much, and would probably love it if the operating system made it difficult for them to install garbage on their machine.
They want to use it as an appliance, not as a piece of geek tech.
It's sad that the idea of net stations didn't take off, where everything is accessed across a network, and a hard drive is only there for caching. All your data lives on it, and all your programs (which could be rented with services being added).
Of course, you think Microsoft would go for such an idea?
But the subtext as I see it what is dangerous. That is, that there are more important ways of being secure than the code - that firewalls and patching will cover your arse, or why say it.
It's a way of taking the problem away from Microsoft and passing it somewhere else.
The only problem is, that a firewall gives limited protection.
What if there's a problem with IIS? What is a firewall going to do to protect you then? You can't block the port, but someone can exploit it.
To my mind, firewalls have two uses... to prevent users doing things they shouldn't and to stop operating system holes from being exploited. For Bill to use them as an excuse is like a TV manufacturer suggesting you should install a CO2 foam system in case their TV catches fire.
When you say "generally bad" do you mean in terms of HTML efficiency, presentation or both.
I did something for someone in FP (as they had to add content to it later) with a little PHP and it looks OK (it was a job for a friend, and not my normal line of work). If I'd have done it in HTML and PHP, it would have looked better, but they'd have turned it into an awful mess in no time.
As for a bit more HTML overhead, sure, it's not good, but a few hundred bytes or ever a couple of K on a website doesn't make that much difference. Not justifying it, just saying it ain't that important.
Say what you like about FrontPage, but when I had to deliver a solution for content creation for a non-techy, it was my only choice.
This person was knowledgable at a "word user" level, and didn't want something where they had to put in HTML tags and the like. They have a real job to do apart from looking after the website.
They also wanted consistent look and feel, and to be able to have any new content automatically searchable - and to be able to add pages and get new menus.
Personally, I'd rather give them a content management system like Geeklog, but it's not as user-friendly as FP.
One solution would be that the local open source users groups can prove it to them that open source solution would work out cheaper. any other ideas?
They don't have time for that! They're too busy writing Yet Another Tiki/BitTorrent client.
Personally, I'm trying to get people to think about open source and am in the process of putting together a CD presentation pack of OpenOffice for MPs.
Do it. I'm building a machine for word processing and web browsing for a guy using a P2 300.
My advice would be to get at least 64mb of RAM and pref. at least 6GB of storage. And get an external modem. Getting Winmodems to work is more trouble than it is worth.
If you've never used Linux, try it. I tried installing both RedHat and Mandrake and both were no bother.
An old episode of Grange Hill (BBC drama set in a school) I saw recently had them talking about buying a computer and that they might be able to get one for "about UKP1000".
You say "Every industry relies on people doing something for a cost". An industry does, but the same activity of your industry can be done as "community". There are people who see Free Software as more of a political issue - that standards should be open and free. If I go and train a charity how to use software in my own time and that 'ruins' your industry, then that is just too bad. I have helped to write the Good Beer Guide for CAMRA, but didn't get paid. Too bad for the other pub guide writers (most of whose guides are not as good and some of which are subject to listing fees/corporate interests).
Software fits this very well because of the cost of provision. Unlike training or clothing which have quite high resource costs per item, software does not. If I write a utility, it might cost me a week of my time. If 1 person has a copy, it's a week of my time. If 1 million people have a copy, it's still a week of my time. The only extra costs are hosting or media (very cheap - and there's lots of companies selling Linux CDs for beer money for people who can't be bothered downloading).
One of the things that switched me on to Open Office was a corruption I had with a huge Office 97 document containing an OLE Visio object.
If I tried to edit part of the document around the object, it just corrupted. Went back to backups, and all recent backups had the same corruption. Spent a few days retyping the darn thing.
I figure that if it's stored as XML, there's a much better chance that I can read it or parse it and maybe fix it myself.
Personally, I've read the specs on the versions after Office 2000, and it's like the difference between buying a PC with a 1.8Ghz processor and one with a 1.9Ghz processor.
I imagine that by the time this takes off, people will have replaced their VHS equipment with DVD recorders.
For years, people have been trying to replace the CD with something else for various reasons. Nothing has replaced it because for most people it is "good enough".
The thing is that it only takes one person with the time (not much) and equipment (a video capture card to read from the monitor output) and the skills (knowing how to operate an OCR package) and you've taken that output and converted it back into a text file.
Then, the millions of people on the internet can read it as a circulated item.
Would the record companies like to work with Microsoft on this?
If the record companies sign a deal with Microsoft, all sorts of things will start to happen once Microsoft gain monopoly status. They would be able to call the shots over the RIAA and smaller record companies.
They probably figure that Apple are big enough and smart enough, but can't overpower them.
My point is really this (and maybe open source muddies the waters)...
If people can get in with MPs by giving them support for their offices at real cut prices, there's a possibility that we can start to influence them.
Most of them know very little and are lobbied hard by large corporates who make donations to party funds. Getting the MPs to realise that there are serious alternatives to the models proposed by those companies to improve the software industry is what is required.
Is it really fair to call it technological regression? There's more to flight than raw speed.
There's also the whole question of the total time for the journey, and that people want to travel from their regional location to another regional location without going via the major capital airport with all the time delays/hassle.
If you have to travel from say Bristol to London to get on a Concorde, that's an hour and a half that you could have been in the air from Bristol Airport. The difference would be quite small.
If you want to go London to Chicago, you can go direct. The Concorde option would mean getting a connecting flight, with all the time delays that that incurs.
Is the Eurofighter just another job creation exercise, and would Europe be better off buying MiGs? I've heard it rumoured, but you seem to be quite knowledgable.
"fun" and "upbeat" are good things to be, but sometimes, someone has to stand up and say that something is a stinker. Sadly, most government people and many journalists are just sheep and won't stand up.
We're not dealing with a little project like a public theatre company, where relatively small amounts of financing are concerned and where losses can be put down to bad risk. This cost $20 billion in today's money to UK and French taxpayers. To build aircraft that were given to their national airlines who never made more than a miniscule profit on them and eventually scrapped them. If that's a success, then I dread to see what a failure is.
That $20 billion had to come from somewhere, and it was taxpayers, and meant that something else cool couldn't be done.
OK, technically, it's cool. But so is a TGV train, and that is used by millions of people in France and has the additional benefit of taking people off the roads and delivering something for the tax spend. The French are also exporting their know-how to other countries.
I'm just imagining how much of the UKs rail network could be improved for $20billion.
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Microsoft don't ship what I use to know an operating system to be. They ship things as part of it that I would class as applications (web browser/IIS for instance).
From a security viewpoint, having them separate means that you have more layers and at the same time, you don't pollute your kernel code with unnecessary functionality just to improve speed when you need it.
If Microsoft were really serious about security, they'd have the firewall in XP switched on by default, they'd have a
And you (like me) probably know a lot of the tricks of hackers and how to protect yourself with Firewall, Anti-virus, not downloading .exes sent in the mail, patching, whatever.
A huge number of people who don't work in the computer industry or have office jobs don't.
The following could all be delivered via Java Applets within a web page: email, office, games, small business accounts, graphical design, instant messenging, video playback, games, project management software. Database software could just run as server side websites. Outside of those applications, I can't think of much else that tens of millions of home users use. And what's left could be easily built.
The only thing I would struggle with from an applet POV would be digital camera upload where you'd have to interface with the USB port (and there's probably a way around that).
Why? Because the manufacturers put in a switch which makes it hard to do it. The blade won't operate without the lid on.
Now you CAN work out a way to remove the guard and cut off your fingers...if you really want to.
If Windows had been a little better thought through, they'd have locked it down, done more sandboxing and helped people run it in idiot mode, or allow people who know what they are doing to run in non-idiot mode.
I know heaps of people who use their PCs for Word, Excel, web surfing, reading emails, viewing pictures, and playing games. They don't want to install much, and would probably love it if the operating system made it difficult for them to install garbage on their machine.
They want to use it as an appliance, not as a piece of geek tech.
It's sad that the idea of net stations didn't take off, where everything is accessed across a network, and a hard drive is only there for caching. All your data lives on it, and all your programs (which could be rented with services being added).
Of course, you think Microsoft would go for such an idea?
It's a way of taking the problem away from Microsoft and passing it somewhere else.
Because MS write more bloated code, it allows them to reduce their average of exploited lines.
On Bill's rating, an security hole in Apache is more significant than one in IIS because IIS is bigger.
This is stupid. What that matters is the number of errors based on the functional use, and the severity and risk of damage of the error.
What if there's a problem with IIS? What is a firewall going to do to protect you then? You can't block the port, but someone can exploit it.
To my mind, firewalls have two uses... to prevent users doing things they shouldn't and to stop operating system holes from being exploited. For Bill to use them as an excuse is like a TV manufacturer suggesting you should install a CO2 foam system in case their TV catches fire.
I remember seeing the price of a replacement keyboard for a TRS-80 in my local Tandy and it was UKP100.
You can build straightforward pages, or you can build pages bound to datasources.
Any user wanting to update the database would just use a browser to do it.
Lot of work, though!
I did something for someone in FP (as they had to add content to it later) with a little PHP and it looks OK (it was a job for a friend, and not my normal line of work). If I'd have done it in HTML and PHP, it would have looked better, but they'd have turned it into an awful mess in no time.
As for a bit more HTML overhead, sure, it's not good, but a few hundred bytes or ever a couple of K on a website doesn't make that much difference. Not justifying it, just saying it ain't that important.
This person was knowledgable at a "word user" level, and didn't want something where they had to put in HTML tags and the like. They have a real job to do apart from looking after the website.
They also wanted consistent look and feel, and to be able to have any new content automatically searchable - and to be able to add pages and get new menus.
Personally, I'd rather give them a content management system like Geeklog, but it's not as user-friendly as FP.
Any ideas however are gratefully received.
They don't have time for that! They're too busy writing Yet Another Tiki/BitTorrent client.
Personally, I'm trying to get people to think about open source and am in the process of putting together a CD presentation pack of OpenOffice for MPs.
My advice would be to get at least 64mb of RAM and pref. at least 6GB of storage. And get an external modem. Getting Winmodems to work is more trouble than it is worth.
If you've never used Linux, try it. I tried installing both RedHat and Mandrake and both were no bother.
The computer? A Commodore PET.
Any lawyer co-operating in prosecuting other lawyers should be generously rewarded to prevent the old club looking after each other.
They should then have no right to work in any job above janitor for the rest of their lives.
Software fits this very well because of the cost of provision. Unlike training or clothing which have quite high resource costs per item, software does not. If I write a utility, it might cost me a week of my time. If 1 person has a copy, it's a week of my time. If 1 million people have a copy, it's still a week of my time. The only extra costs are hosting or media (very cheap - and there's lots of companies selling Linux CDs for beer money for people who can't be bothered downloading).
If I tried to edit part of the document around the object, it just corrupted. Went back to backups, and all recent backups had the same corruption. Spent a few days retyping the darn thing.
I figure that if it's stored as XML, there's a much better chance that I can read it or parse it and maybe fix it myself.
And would you seriously trust Microsoft to take care of your document keys?
Personally, I've read the specs on the versions after Office 2000, and it's like the difference between buying a PC with a 1.8Ghz processor and one with a 1.9Ghz processor.
For years, people have been trying to replace the CD with something else for various reasons. Nothing has replaced it because for most people it is "good enough".
Then, the millions of people on the internet can read it as a circulated item.
If the record companies sign a deal with Microsoft, all sorts of things will start to happen once Microsoft gain monopoly status. They would be able to call the shots over the RIAA and smaller record companies.
They probably figure that Apple are big enough and smart enough, but can't overpower them.
If people can get in with MPs by giving them support for their offices at real cut prices, there's a possibility that we can start to influence them.
Most of them know very little and are lobbied hard by large corporates who make donations to party funds. Getting the MPs to realise that there are serious alternatives to the models proposed by those companies to improve the software industry is what is required.
There's also the whole question of the total time for the journey, and that people want to travel from their regional location to another regional location without going via the major capital airport with all the time delays/hassle.
If you have to travel from say Bristol to London to get on a Concorde, that's an hour and a half that you could have been in the air from Bristol Airport. The difference would be quite small.
If you want to go London to Chicago, you can go direct. The Concorde option would mean getting a connecting flight, with all the time delays that that incurs.
Is the Eurofighter just another job creation exercise, and would Europe be better off buying MiGs? I've heard it rumoured, but you seem to be quite knowledgable.
We're not dealing with a little project like a public theatre company, where relatively small amounts of financing are concerned and where losses can be put down to bad risk. This cost $20 billion in today's money to UK and French taxpayers. To build aircraft that were given to their national airlines who never made more than a miniscule profit on them and eventually scrapped them. If that's a success, then I dread to see what a failure is.
That $20 billion had to come from somewhere, and it was taxpayers, and meant that something else cool couldn't be done.
OK, technically, it's cool. But so is a TGV train, and that is used by millions of people in France and has the additional benefit of taking people off the roads and delivering something for the tax spend. The French are also exporting their know-how to other countries.
I'm just imagining how much of the UKs rail network could be improved for $20billion.