Great...if we take this logic to it's end point you've pretty much declared that the only photograph anyone is allowed to sell are nude pictures taken in nature.
Yo' mamma may object though. I'm pretty sure she owns the rights to your ass.
On the other hand, I believe the world would only benefit from such piccies. Go on girls, make a statement. And don't forget that "nature" also means donkeys and cucumbers.
No, because the GP doesn't know what he's talking about. And people would realise that if they thought why the hell would Microsoft pay a billion for a local file search engine.
Back to FAST, it's much more than that. It has a plugin architecture capable of gathering data from pretty much anything. The core analyses the data nearly by itself and only requires human assistance in regard to output. It has huge libraries of natural languages and names such as World cities, brands of cars and people names to help it recognize them and put them into proper context.
One of the most interesting examples of FAST at work is giving it a database of products to crawl, tweak the output, and watch it organize products into categories automagically, by itself. It is actually being used by online shopping sites and regional news aggregators.
I know these things because I attended one of their sales pitches a few months back. I must say, the bloody thing is impressive. If half of what the sales guy told us is true then I think it can give Google a run for its money. I'm definitely not surprised to see Microsoft trying to pick it up.
Remains to be seen whether they'll accept the offer. A billion is still a billion. Pretty nifty for what is a relatively small company.
Give the man a cigar. He's absolutely right. The article was filed with "boo hoo, those keyboards weren't like today's keyboards, the drama".
The author completely missed the fact that those machines worked differently from modern PC's. For instance, he complained about how hard must've been to do word processing on the Sinclair and Spectrum. Except you didn't do that. You either programmed in Basic, in which case the keyboard was modal, the cursor would tell you what mode you were in, and it was simply great to be able to push one key and get a full command. Or you were playing games, in which case you enjoyed the shitload of buttons (or played with a joystick).
I don't remember ever having any trouble with those keyboards, in spite of the lack of Backspace or the small Space key. They were perfect for the job they were meant for.
The GP is probably talking about how, for most Windows users, if you move their taskbar their brain explodes. Because that's the extent of what Windows has "thaught" them: to point and click. Which I seriously believe you can train a monkey or a dog to do. On the other hand, if they actually understood something about modern computer desktops, they'd be able to recognize a taskbar for what it is and simply adapt. And as an interesting side effect it wouldn't matter anymore if it was a Windows or Linux desktop.
What exactly in the copyright law and/or GPL allows for this? Re-licensing, I mean. You say it "may" work, but that's not really helping. Is it just your speculation? Is it based on solid fact? Should we start expecting that, technically, you can wake up one day to find your code that you contributed to a GPLv2 project licensed under another license?
I think this is fucked up and I still have trouble believing that GPLv2 and the copyright law in the US allows for this.
If I contribute code to a GPLv2 project I expect it to remain licensed as GPLv2 until I make an explicit decision to change it to something else. I don't want to wake up a year later and discover that for some reason I missed a notification and that the default was to relicense my code to something else. I'd expect the default to be to pull my code from the relicensed version completely and replace it, if necessary, with a version written by someone else, whose author explicitly agrees to the new license.
IANAL, but for every programmer these days a certain understanding of copyright and licensing is needed. So it's news to me and my understanding of these things that, I say it again, GPLv2 and the copyright law would allow for this. IF it's true, and if someone pulled this on me, I'd be seriously pissed. FWIW, I seriously advice Linus and whoever else it thinking of doing something like this, to consider it very very carefully. It can and will create a lot of ill-will.
Personally, I would instantly cease any contribution to any public project with multiple copyright holders if this was proven possible. Taking one's code and relicensing it against their explicit intention, no matter how legal it can be, is fucked up. Sure, you can argue that it was there all along and I just didn't have the legal training to notice it, in which case I'd reply that GPLv2 can kiss my black ass and forget any other contribution from me in the future. Being screwed is being screwed, no matter how you justify it.
Having sessions/passwords etc sync would be great, once I could get over the privacy issues.
Maybe they should do what Foxmark does: allow you to use your own server as the back end, instead of their own. Since all the support that's needed is a standard protocol (FTP or WebDav) I'm able to use my own home server without a hitch. End of privacy issues.
Frankly, I see absolutely no reason why someone can't whip up an extension storing and syncing the TB address book from several TB installations in a common WebDav-enabled webserver or other kind of fileserver. It's bloody trivial, all it takes is uploading/downloading a CSV file and diffing and merging it on the fly. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to learn it's already been done.
FoxMarks does this for the bookmarks in Firefox and I've been using it to keep the bookmarks in sync between my work installation, my home installation and the portable Firefox-on-a-stick I have on my keychain USB stick. All it takes is FoxMarks installed in Firefox and a central always-online webdav webserver (on my home router). It can also use FTP, but I like the added security of HTTPS.
It's not accurate to say that Microsoft only targets Windows and OS X. They target Linux as well. Except they don't have to do anything about that, since the Mono crowd are doing their work for them.
Now back to my troubles, I won't be the one to "blink". I have to deliver what the customer wants. So if I eventually find myself buying a Mac and running both Linux and Windows as virtual machines, so be it. Since Apple is the only one of the three that ties its OS to its hardware, it's the one OS I can't very easily get my hands on to emulate in a VM.
Using Silverlight on their site is one thing, making it almost exclusively depend on it is another.
Let me ask you this: if Silverlight is such a great product, why not let it stand on its own merit? Why do they have to use such underhard tactics to push it?
Ok so tell me how often are you going to be visiting the Microsoft website if you happen to be a Linux and Firefox user? Probably 0....
Not so, for me. As a Web developer, I often have to visit MSDN to understand why Explorer does some of the idiotic things it does. Last I checked, MSDN was under.microsoft.com. Now, whether that means they'll make it Silverlight-only as well remains to be seen. But if they do, under the circumstances it will be their browser that will suffer first in my implementations.
I'm not saying I will give up supporting IE or accessing MSDN somehow, even if I have to use a VM to do it -- the clients need their sites to be seen properly in IE too. But it will definitely not make my view of Microsoft any better.
For some reason people seem to think that this will make companies release FOSS drivers.
That's not it at all. The API changes as the kernel evolves. Not having to maintain backwards API compatibility ensures that the kernel evolves freely. It's not done out of spite or to force anybody's hand.
How the companies deal with API changes is their problem. If they really wanted to issue FOSS drivers then they'd assign people to work with the kernel devs or sponsor a dev, and those people would keep up with the API. If they don't want to open their drivers than no amount of API changes will make them do it.
And remember that often it's not entirely their choice. Parts of the driver or specs may be covered by NDA's or contracts that prohibit opening the source.
Using car crashes as a solution is funny, but seriously now--I live in Romania and one thing I can testify for is that no sane person wants anything to do with the legal system here. I don't mean it's crazy with overuse like in the US; I mean it's corrupt to the gills. The side that shells out the most dough wins, period. A [successful] eBay scammer will have no problem paying his way out of a tight spot.
Where cybercrime is concerned the problem is compounded by the fact the Police is near computer-illiterate, a sad truth which also applies to a large part of the population; but I digress. Also consider corrupt politicians and officials who are just as computer-illiterate themselves and have no interest whatsoever in fighting something so abstract as computer crimes when they could spend the time stealing public money and fighting each other.
So it comes down that the only cyber-criminals ever punished are those who couldn't afford to pay the right people; it's a paradox of a corrupt system: the more you steal, the safer you are. Or, some exceedingly stupid individuals that manage to get the FBI involved and are made an example of as a token of ass-kissing from the pro-American local Government.
Romania made it into the EU as a buffer to the Russian zone, as a marketplace for the other EU countries and as a source of cheap labor. It has absolutely nothing else to offer that the EU didn't already have bigger and better.
But ALL THREE will try to execute an attachment that I double click on and tell it to.
You're probably confused by what it means to "execute" an attachment. There's one thing to treat it as executable code and launch it as a program (which many Windows programs will do, sometimes automatically). And it's quite another to launch the associated application and pass the file to it.
I have yet to see a Linux email program that will actually allow an attachment to be treated as executable code and run. Therefore I call bullshit (or ignorance) on your claim.
Which is worse? It's severity and time of exposure.
That's why a relevant view of these matters should be a graph that shows how much time vulnerabilities for an OS spent unpatched. Time spent unpatched on the X axis, amount of vulnerabilities as stacked blobs on the Y axis, color to indicate severity. Then we see whose graph (OS X or Windows) shows the longest and highest red hills.
Both linux and osx have viruses and exploits which have been used "in the wild".
Could that have something to do with the fact that "Linux" means tens of thousands of different applications? In fact, how exactly is a SquirrelMail a Linux security threat? Why not a Windows security threat? Doesn't it run on Windows too? It's a web app.
Please make a difference between security threats targeted at GNU/Linux itself (the kernel and GNU tools) and something targeted at a 3rd-party app which may very well run on other OS as well.
As for viruses for linux and osx, there are some out there. However, the reason they aren't as widespread as windows viruses is widely known... the amount of linux and osx machines on the network isn't dense enough.
Are you actually dumb as a rock or just trolling? How can you say there aren't enough Linux machines out there? What do you think most of servers of all kinds run on? Don't you think that a virus or worm would have a lot more to gain by breaking into servers than personal desktop computers?
If you email 100 people at random with an email with a linux virus attached, it may not be received by a single linux user, thus that propagation mechanism just doesn't work. This is impossible with a windows virus.
That settles it, you ARE as dumb as a rock. You seem to really believe that somehow Linux apps are staying out of harm's way by sheer luck and hiding behind the poor Windows computers. Has it ever crossed your brain that perhaps Linux apps are designed with security first in mind? Such as, I dunno, NOT ALLOWING BLOODY EMAIL ATTACHMENTS TO BE EXECUTED?
I've had Vista installed for months, and I can tell you there is no DRM problem in Vista. The stuff you hear about has something to do with playing HD content from their computer over HDMI -- or something -- and nobody does that.
Ah, the old "but it doesn't prevent you from playing non-DRM content" excuse. "It's only there in case you need to play something with DRM in it", right?
Why do I have a problem with this? Because it's used as smoke in the eyes by Microsoft and hardware manufacturers. Meanwhile, they slip you DRM everywhere. If you have recently bought a PC it's quite possible it's stuffed to the gills with DRM. It may have it in the video card, the sound card, the optical storage, the LCD screen and CPU. And the OS from Microsoft, of course.
Once this happens, all it takes is one little update from Microsoft one day and bingo, suddenly you can only play and run DRM content and nothing else. And that is what I don't like about it.
Honestly, I'm amazed at how blind some people are. I would think this to be a dead obvious scheme. DRM has no chance in hell of working as long as you can still get the same content without DRM from other sources. The only way it can work is if the whole PC is controlled by it. That's what they're pushing for. The rest is bullshit they're using to pull the wool over your eyes until then.
How long until MS puts out some hit game that requires Vista to run? Or how long until they put out a new version of Office that requires Vista? How long until Visual Studio only runs on Vista?
They'd be walking a very fine line there. How many people like things shoved down their throats? (Hold the dirty jokes, please.) Having something offered to you and choosing it because you see some advantages is one thing; having the change forced on you because the vendor wants to make more money is quite another.
Which brings us to a very interesting speculation: if XP had a standard and open skin support, instead of hacks from various 3rd party vendors, then many people would be content with just downloading and installing skins instead of Vista.
Entrust the admin password to little Johnny/Jilly and you deserve what you get, I suppose.
Personally, I prefer to give my little Johnny/Jilly a box with no admin access. I'll manage their updates and software installations, thank you. Their job is to use the thing and wipe the dust off every week, period.
Or you can trust them with admin rights, but then I'd expect them to show some common sense and treat the computer just like any other piece of hardware I entrust to them. Meaning that if they break it, they get smacked upside the head.
I don't see why breaking your brand new computer is different from breaking your brand new bike. They both cost time and/or money to fix, and you can get into trouble/accidents using both. If the kid's not going to be sensible about it then she can ride the bike in the backyard with full protective gear and forget about admin rights on the computer.
Once malware gets to run on your machine, you're screwed. Replicating the looks of a legitimate password prompt is possible and I dare say easy. It doesn't matter if it's the Ubuntu graphical sudo or the Vista UAC. Linux or Windows, luser or guru, you will definitely fall for a security prompt that looks just like the real thing.
So the only real protection is not letting malware penetrate and run in the first place.
Blacklisting obviously doesn't work (look at Windows), so antivirus, antispyware and the other similar "solutions" are out. I prefer blanket restrictions, such as noexec,nosuid,nodev flag combos on/home and other partitions, or whitelisting. May I say that with the latest version Mac OS X does a great job of combining such security techniques with transparence for the user.
Not if that company is Microsoft... Trust me, it's their strategy to eliminate XP just as much as they want to eliminate Linux. Both are hurting the bottom line now.
If that's true, an obvious question springs to mind: what if they held back on SP3? Maybe it could run even better than 10% increase in performance, but they didn't take it there because they want to sell Vista.
I'm guessing SP3 won't include just the updates accumulated since SP2, otherwise you'd be just as well off upgrading regularly. They added something extra to the mix to obtain that performance increase. But did they add all they could add?
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Yo' mamma may object though. I'm pretty sure she owns the rights to your ass.
On the other hand, I believe the world would only benefit from such piccies. Go on girls, make a statement. And don't forget that "nature" also means donkeys and cucumbers.
I usually put this another way: if they can't do well in their native language, how can they be expected to do well in programming languages?
No, because the GP doesn't know what he's talking about. And people would realise that if they thought why the hell would Microsoft pay a billion for a local file search engine.
Back to FAST, it's much more than that. It has a plugin architecture capable of gathering data from pretty much anything. The core analyses the data nearly by itself and only requires human assistance in regard to output. It has huge libraries of natural languages and names such as World cities, brands of cars and people names to help it recognize them and put them into proper context.
One of the most interesting examples of FAST at work is giving it a database of products to crawl, tweak the output, and watch it organize products into categories automagically, by itself. It is actually being used by online shopping sites and regional news aggregators.
I know these things because I attended one of their sales pitches a few months back. I must say, the bloody thing is impressive. If half of what the sales guy told us is true then I think it can give Google a run for its money. I'm definitely not surprised to see Microsoft trying to pick it up.
Remains to be seen whether they'll accept the offer. A billion is still a billion. Pretty nifty for what is a relatively small company.
Give the man a cigar. He's absolutely right. The article was filed with "boo hoo, those keyboards weren't like today's keyboards, the drama".
The author completely missed the fact that those machines worked differently from modern PC's. For instance, he complained about how hard must've been to do word processing on the Sinclair and Spectrum. Except you didn't do that. You either programmed in Basic, in which case the keyboard was modal, the cursor would tell you what mode you were in, and it was simply great to be able to push one key and get a full command. Or you were playing games, in which case you enjoyed the shitload of buttons (or played with a joystick).
I don't remember ever having any trouble with those keyboards, in spite of the lack of Backspace or the small Space key. They were perfect for the job they were meant for.
The GP is probably talking about how, for most Windows users, if you move their taskbar their brain explodes. Because that's the extent of what Windows has "thaught" them: to point and click. Which I seriously believe you can train a monkey or a dog to do. On the other hand, if they actually understood something about modern computer desktops, they'd be able to recognize a taskbar for what it is and simply adapt. And as an interesting side effect it wouldn't matter anymore if it was a Windows or Linux desktop.
What exactly in the copyright law and/or GPL allows for this? Re-licensing, I mean. You say it "may" work, but that's not really helping. Is it just your speculation? Is it based on solid fact? Should we start expecting that, technically, you can wake up one day to find your code that you contributed to a GPLv2 project licensed under another license?
I think this is fucked up and I still have trouble believing that GPLv2 and the copyright law in the US allows for this.
If I contribute code to a GPLv2 project I expect it to remain licensed as GPLv2 until I make an explicit decision to change it to something else. I don't want to wake up a year later and discover that for some reason I missed a notification and that the default was to relicense my code to something else. I'd expect the default to be to pull my code from the relicensed version completely and replace it, if necessary, with a version written by someone else, whose author explicitly agrees to the new license.
IANAL, but for every programmer these days a certain understanding of copyright and licensing is needed. So it's news to me and my understanding of these things that, I say it again, GPLv2 and the copyright law would allow for this. IF it's true, and if someone pulled this on me, I'd be seriously pissed. FWIW, I seriously advice Linus and whoever else it thinking of doing something like this, to consider it very very carefully. It can and will create a lot of ill-will.
Personally, I would instantly cease any contribution to any public project with multiple copyright holders if this was proven possible. Taking one's code and relicensing it against their explicit intention, no matter how legal it can be, is fucked up. Sure, you can argue that it was there all along and I just didn't have the legal training to notice it, in which case I'd reply that GPLv2 can kiss my black ass and forget any other contribution from me in the future. Being screwed is being screwed, no matter how you justify it.
Frankly, I see absolutely no reason why someone can't whip up an extension storing and syncing the TB address book from several TB installations in a common WebDav-enabled webserver or other kind of fileserver. It's bloody trivial, all it takes is uploading/downloading a CSV file and diffing and merging it on the fly. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to learn it's already been done.
FoxMarks does this for the bookmarks in Firefox and I've been using it to keep the bookmarks in sync between my work installation, my home installation and the portable Firefox-on-a-stick I have on my keychain USB stick. All it takes is FoxMarks installed in Firefox and a central always-online webdav webserver (on my home router). It can also use FTP, but I like the added security of HTTPS.
It's not accurate to say that Microsoft only targets Windows and OS X. They target Linux as well. Except they don't have to do anything about that, since the Mono crowd are doing their work for them.
Now back to my troubles, I won't be the one to "blink". I have to deliver what the customer wants. So if I eventually find myself buying a Mac and running both Linux and Windows as virtual machines, so be it. Since Apple is the only one of the three that ties its OS to its hardware, it's the one OS I can't very easily get my hands on to emulate in a VM.
Using Silverlight on their site is one thing, making it almost exclusively depend on it is another.
Let me ask you this: if Silverlight is such a great product, why not let it stand on its own merit? Why do they have to use such underhard tactics to push it?
It's not required. I update Windows uzing WindizUpdate, with Firefox. Although I wonder what the switch to Silverlight will mean for them too.
Not so, for me. As a Web developer, I often have to visit MSDN to understand why Explorer does some of the idiotic things it does. Last I checked, MSDN was under
I'm not saying I will give up supporting IE or accessing MSDN somehow, even if I have to use a VM to do it -- the clients need their sites to be seen properly in IE too. But it will definitely not make my view of Microsoft any better.
How the companies deal with API changes is their problem. If they really wanted to issue FOSS drivers then they'd assign people to work with the kernel devs or sponsor a dev, and those people would keep up with the API. If they don't want to open their drivers than no amount of API changes will make them do it.
And remember that often it's not entirely their choice. Parts of the driver or specs may be covered by NDA's or contracts that prohibit opening the source.
Using car crashes as a solution is funny, but seriously now--I live in Romania and one thing I can testify for is that no sane person wants anything to do with the legal system here. I don't mean it's crazy with overuse like in the US; I mean it's corrupt to the gills. The side that shells out the most dough wins, period. A [successful] eBay scammer will have no problem paying his way out of a tight spot.
Where cybercrime is concerned the problem is compounded by the fact the Police is near computer-illiterate, a sad truth which also applies to a large part of the population; but I digress. Also consider corrupt politicians and officials who are just as computer-illiterate themselves and have no interest whatsoever in fighting something so abstract as computer crimes when they could spend the time stealing public money and fighting each other.
So it comes down that the only cyber-criminals ever punished are those who couldn't afford to pay the right people; it's a paradox of a corrupt system: the more you steal, the safer you are. Or, some exceedingly stupid individuals that manage to get the FBI involved and are made an example of as a token of ass-kissing from the pro-American local Government.
Romania made it into the EU as a buffer to the Russian zone, as a marketplace for the other EU countries and as a source of cheap labor. It has absolutely nothing else to offer that the EU didn't already have bigger and better.
I have yet to see a Linux email program that will actually allow an attachment to be treated as executable code and run. Therefore I call bullshit (or ignorance) on your claim.
That's why a relevant view of these matters should be a graph that shows how much time vulnerabilities for an OS spent unpatched. Time spent unpatched on the X axis, amount of vulnerabilities as stacked blobs on the Y axis, color to indicate severity. Then we see whose graph (OS X or Windows) shows the longest and highest red hills.
And here's what you'd get that way: a security graph that actually means something.
Could that have something to do with the fact that "Linux" means tens of thousands of different applications? In fact, how exactly is a SquirrelMail a Linux security threat? Why not a Windows security threat? Doesn't it run on Windows too? It's a web app.
Please make a difference between security threats targeted at GNU/Linux itself (the kernel and GNU tools) and something targeted at a 3rd-party app which may very well run on other OS as well.
Are you actually dumb as a rock or just trolling? How can you say there aren't enough Linux machines out there? What do you think most of servers of all kinds run on? Don't you think that a virus or worm would have a lot more to gain by breaking into servers than personal desktop computers?
That settles it, you ARE as dumb as a rock. You seem to really believe that somehow Linux apps are staying out of harm's way by sheer luck and hiding behind the poor Windows computers. Has it ever crossed your brain that perhaps Linux apps are designed with security first in mind? Such as, I dunno, NOT ALLOWING BLOODY EMAIL ATTACHMENTS TO BE EXECUTED?
Ah, the old "but it doesn't prevent you from playing non-DRM content" excuse. "It's only there in case you need to play something with DRM in it", right?
Why do I have a problem with this? Because it's used as smoke in the eyes by Microsoft and hardware manufacturers. Meanwhile, they slip you DRM everywhere. If you have recently bought a PC it's quite possible it's stuffed to the gills with DRM. It may have it in the video card, the sound card, the optical storage, the LCD screen and CPU. And the OS from Microsoft, of course.
Once this happens, all it takes is one little update from Microsoft one day and bingo, suddenly you can only play and run DRM content and nothing else. And that is what I don't like about it.
Honestly, I'm amazed at how blind some people are. I would think this to be a dead obvious scheme. DRM has no chance in hell of working as long as you can still get the same content without DRM from other sources. The only way it can work is if the whole PC is controlled by it. That's what they're pushing for. The rest is bullshit they're using to pull the wool over your eyes until then.
They'd be walking a very fine line there. How many people like things shoved down their throats? (Hold the dirty jokes, please.) Having something offered to you and choosing it because you see some advantages is one thing; having the change forced on you because the vendor wants to make more money is quite another.
Which brings us to a very interesting speculation: if XP had a standard and open skin support, instead of hacks from various 3rd party vendors, then many people would be content with just downloading and installing skins instead of Vista.
Entrust the admin password to little Johnny/Jilly and you deserve what you get, I suppose.
Personally, I prefer to give my little Johnny/Jilly a box with no admin access. I'll manage their updates and software installations, thank you. Their job is to use the thing and wipe the dust off every week, period.
Or you can trust them with admin rights, but then I'd expect them to show some common sense and treat the computer just like any other piece of hardware I entrust to them. Meaning that if they break it, they get smacked upside the head.
I don't see why breaking your brand new computer is different from breaking your brand new bike. They both cost time and/or money to fix, and you can get into trouble/accidents using both. If the kid's not going to be sensible about it then she can ride the bike in the backyard with full protective gear and forget about admin rights on the computer.
Once malware gets to run on your machine, you're screwed. Replicating the looks of a legitimate password prompt is possible and I dare say easy. It doesn't matter if it's the Ubuntu graphical sudo or the Vista UAC. Linux or Windows, luser or guru, you will definitely fall for a security prompt that looks just like the real thing.
/home and other partitions, or whitelisting. May I say that with the latest version Mac OS X does a great job of combining such security techniques with transparence for the user.
So the only real protection is not letting malware penetrate and run in the first place.
Blacklisting obviously doesn't work (look at Windows), so antivirus, antispyware and the other similar "solutions" are out. I prefer blanket restrictions, such as noexec,nosuid,nodev flag combos on
I'm guessing SP3 won't include just the updates accumulated since SP2, otherwise you'd be just as well off upgrading regularly. They added something extra to the mix to obtain that performance increase. But did they add all they could add?