I agree about the bundling. I really don't like that it's an either-or thing. Unfortunately, these laws exist because in a "Free Market", a monopoly destroys things. Thus, when you reach monopoly status, since it's not a free market any more, you don't get to go by free market rules.
A better example would be the mandatory bundling rules. Microsoft is a monopoly. They can shut down OEMs at whim. With this power comes responsibility - you're not allowed to squash competitors by telling retailers that they're not allowed to provide those competitors' products to customers.
If it were a free market, then it wouldn't be a problem - retailers would be able to safely say "fuck you" and Microsoft would just have to deal with it. It's not a free market though, there's a monopoly in that market. Thus retailers cannot, in all honesty, say "fuck you" and continue to do business. The market isn't allowed to decide, because the market doesn't exist - or, if it does, the market *is* Microsoft.
For example, it took upper management over a decade to finally see that users didn't trust Microsoft products. The rest of the world knew it all along, but management had to wait for mountains of hard data to come pouring in before taking any action. The Trustworthy Computing effort is genuine, sincere, and effective, but it's also about fifteen years overdue.
Good point, by the way. Not that I'm convinced "Trustworthy Computing" is sincere yet. But even assuming it is, there's a good example of one of the problems at MS.
I don't have anything to do with it, so the rudeness you directed toward me is not only completely out of line, but pretty juvenile as well.
He, like myself, is reacting to "Microsoft isn't a bad company.", and the words that followed it. You work for the company in question and you defend it. How come the *huge* number of problems with MS-the-company can't let somebody say "Microsoft sucks" but a few good examples in small parts of the company let you say "Microsoft isn't a bad company"?
Of course, both are too cut-and-dry. Saying one is as stupid as saying the other. See my other posts in this thread for a personal pet peeve I have with Microsoft (which I think is the root of MS' problems) as an example of the kinds of things we have to deal with on a regular basis.
Microsoft took their sales upstairs. Welcome to the world of sales, any good salesman will go to the person making decisions as far up as they can go. The sales tactics you outlined sure as hell are NOT limited to Microsoft, it's just that MS can afford the sort of potlach that selling to the top execs takes. As head IT guy, you have to wade in to some of those politics yourself, or at least get the CIO on your side. Ultimately either your execs respect your technical acumen, or they don't and it's time to find another shop.
I would submit however, that "threatening" to move to Linux as a defensive move against a sales tactic does nothing to sell a Linux solution within your company.
Read both of the rants in their entirety - most of what I'll say below I already said.
First, just because selling to idiots is the "world of sales" doesn't make it right. Microsoft's products are either used or maintained by *professionals*. Maybe it doesn't matter when you're trying to sell a glass figurine, but it sure as hell matters when you're trying to sell surgical instruments. You can be damned sure that the executives in a hospital are made up largely of people who are medical experts, who used to be, or who know to delegate such decisions to the experts. In the case of IT, the products are no less important, and maybe MS could get away with selling crap to senior execs ten years ago, but those days are numbered.
Second, I know these tactics aren't limited to Microsoft. Duh. In fact, the worst boondogle(sp?) I've seen in an IT rollout was using products from a vendor other than MS. I actually give them credit where credit is due here; their products may be sub-standard, but they're better than some of the *real* crap that people buy.
Third, I don't like the word "politics". There's a negative connotation to that. As I said in my last rant, the last head IT guy at this company here wasn't able to communicate as effectively as MS' salespeople, to the point where the executives trusted the MS reps more than their own employee. He left, and now I'm here, and my first job (took at least three months) was getting the executives to realise the mistakes which had been made in the past, and getting the gears in motion on correcting them. It wasn't an easy job, so don't bother trying to tell me that it's hard;) The last IT guy was decent, but not great. He had too much attitude.
Lastly, I've already sold the "Linux solution" within my company. We're already using it extensively. After six months, two different MS representatives have been kicked out of executives' offices and told to talk to me. The executives have made it clear in no uncertain terms that if MS tries to take advantage of them again, MS will not be getting any new business from them. Right now we've got a good amount of Microsoft software, and we plan on upgrading them as time goes. If, however, MS tries its bullshit sales tactics again (trying to sell them high-margin software which MS *knows* is unsuitable for the task [or software they *should* know is unsuitable for the task]), we'll instead begin migration plans. Don't mistake a plan of action for a baseless threat. There's only so many times a merchant can knowingly perform actions which would be of great harm to the customer before the customer says "okay, enough of this, you guys just can't be trusted for even the most basic things."
In short: don't teach your grandmother to suck eggs:)
I might add that I haven't seen an innovative product come out of MS in years. Either they bought the product lock, stock, and barrel, or they copied somebody else. I don't want to say it's bad to copy some good ideas from elsewhere, but the fact that Ballmer is now saying that the company is "still innovative" because it's "filing 2,000 patents a year" is pretty bloody scary. Patents do not equal innovation, they can *only* be used to shut down competitors or extort money from them. That's all they exist for. There's nothing wrong with that, that *is* what they're there for - except that since MS really isn't coming out with any innovative products, much less inventive. So I have serious doubts about my ability to get a good deal from MS in ten years' time.
It does seem like they're on their way down, and part of the reason why we haven't bought any new MS software in the past year (and why we don't plan on buying any more if they continue their bullshit "business" tactics - see the above paragraph about specifically targetting those members of our company who aren't capable of making good IT purchasing decisions [by their own account]) is that their crash may start happening sooner rather than later. Things seem to be accellerating, and we don't want to get caught up in the middle of it.
So yeah, just to flesh out the "starting our full Linux migration" thing, what I meant was that we'll not purchase any more MS software, and will begin our migration plans. It'll take a couple of years, of course - I didn't mean to imply that the next time an MS rep gets kicked out of an executive's office we'll be an all-Linux shop the next day:)
Microsoft isn't a bad company. People here really do care about satisfying customers and making the best stuff in the world. I really hate the false accusations so many people make about this company. But I also have to say that this company has grown timid and too slow to act, and that is our real challenge.
You work in a big company, so you're going to have to get used to it. Parts of your company engage in dirty, despicable "business" tactics to get on top, at which point they ignore the user base and move onto the next hill. These actions directly harm people. If you can't take that, then maybe you shouldn't be working for them.
(P.S.: Next time an MS representative tries to go over my head [I'm head IT guy at a mid-sized company] by going directly to the executives who now *willingly* admit that they don't have the expertise necessary to make good IT decisions, we begin our full migration to Linux. The execs have told MS representatives twice already that they are *not* interested in buying some widget so they can get their business done, and when it comes to IT, I'm the guy. Of all the needlessly harmful and destructive things MS can do, marketing directly to executives by taking them out for ski-weekends and fancy lunches is the worst. You guys nearly ruined the company I work for because of these tactics, and we're not the only ones. If their last IT guy hadn't quit [he didn't have the skill required to get the executives on "his" - aka the company's - side], they'd be out of business by now. I'm not exaggerating, it's a genetics company and their entire revenue stream is based on their data warehouse. When your company finally gets their act in gear by making realistically decent products, *and* stop preying on professionals like myself by going over their head to make the sale, maybe you'll get a modicum of respect. Expect it to take at least a decade for it to become a healthy amount of respect.)
The problem is that innovation (?) is getting more and more expensive. And in order to keep revenues up, they need to spend huge amounts of money on advertising, etc.
If by "more and more expensive" you mean "more and more difficult to do without stepping on the cash cow's toes", then you'd be correct. Look at all the medium-sized companies Microsoft has bought out in the past 5-10 years. When was the last time Microsoft themselves came up with an innovative product? I'll give you a hint - it wasn't SQL Server, or Virtual PC, IE, or even its new security stuff. It either bought those technologies wholesale from other companies, or simply built upon what was already done (Netscape in the case of IE).
These companies were typically well-funded, but they couldn't compare to Microsoft's coffers. They were able to innovate quite well on a decent budget, so can Microsoft. So it's not "more expensive", they just aren't doing it. Why? There could be a lot of reasons. The most often-touted is that Microsoft simply can't be interested in any market where there isn't a half-billion dollars a year in revenue. So they have to wait for an innovator to *create* a market, at which point Microsoft will buy out the biggest player that'll have them and then dominate that particular segment. The most recent one was the purchase of Virtual PC - I'm already seeing it show up in a lot of places. There's also the anti-virus firm they purchased. Neither of these have gotten to the point where they've managed to lock out all the competition - and they may never get that way with the anti-trust lawsuits that seem to constantly harass MS. But *that's* why they don't innovate - not due to some mythical lack of funds.
This is kind of odd, really; I can get good capable-of-all-relevant-formats DVD burners for about $100CAD (about $75USD) each. Good CD burners cost around $60CAD. So what, DVD burners are going to go down to that level soon? Not that I won't be happy, but it's kind of hard to believe. The March of Technology goes on, I suppose.
Ok, I'm going to file for my own patent. I'll call it "Geek Apartment" and it will consist of empty soda cans, dirty laundry, an unmade bed, and between 6 and 14 computers in various states of assembly (all running however). There's your fair warning, soon you'll all be paying me royalties, or cleaning your apartments.
Finally, you have given us a reason to get off our collective asses and clean up that funny stuff that's been growing in the corner.
The last time I tried to clean up the funny smell that's been growing in the corner, it beat me with a stick and made me feed it Doritos crumbs.
If you won't pay for an OS, why would you pay for music?
There's a difference between won't and don't. Some of us, though you may find it hard to believe, don't care much about the sticker price of a working environment, so long as it gets the job done in a manner that's acceptable. It just happens to be that one of the best environments available today can be downloaded for free off the 'net (or paid for from a vendor like Red Hat).
I, for one, would be perfectly happy to pay for an iTunes-like service (their restrictions are acceptable to me, though I'd prefer either MP3- or Ogg Vorbis-formatted files; the former is extremely portable, the latter is very nice and reasonably portable), just like I'd be happy to pay for an operating system which suited me. It's a pity that since my operating system *happens* to be free, I can't pay anybody to let me access their service:)
Often, the open source community has a very narrow and selfish view when it comes to certain things. Like, why make software easy to install, like OS X? No need- any Linux user (present or future) is smart enough to compile his own software, resolve dependencies, etc.
1996 called. They wanted to know why you're compiling from scratch as opposed to using a distribution and its package manager. (*cough* Debian, Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, Connectiva, Slackware, hell even Gentoo *cough*)
I bought a Sony Clie SJ-22 a few months ago mainly for reading. I got it for $170CAD, which works out to about $120USD these days. It'd be even cheaper now. So if you can find one it's a great deal. I use Plucker almost exclusively, but I also have Acrobat's reader and AvantGo installed too.
As far as the hardware is concerned, it's a very sharp little package, really great screen (excellent backlight, works great in direct sunlight, and is colour), and has enough built-in memory for my purposes (16MB). Its only expansion option is a Memory Stick slot. Original Memory Stick though, so you're limited to 128MB sticks (or at best, 256MB, but you can only access 128MB at a time). And of course it's Memory Stick as opposed to a more ubiquitous format like SD/MMC, which I find quite irritating. I don't use the Memory Stick slot:)
It has a built-in rechargable battery which seems to last me a good long while. I've taken it out to the cabin for a week at a time and it didn't run out of juice (no electricity at the cabin, and I don't use those 9V portable chargers or anything). I haven't been able to find a cradle for it, unfortunately, which is irritating. This particular model was discontinued ages ago.
I'm really happy with it, and if you can find one it'd probably be an excellent deal and would do probably whatever you're after. Maybe a newer model would be okay too, I don't know.
Just for reference, a "full" review would take up several thousand pages. Think about what's being reviewed - a full GNU/Linux distribution. Thousands of applications built atop a *NIX workalike. That's a lot of material to cover.
So, then, people will tend to focus on the more important things to users new to a given distribution. Which are also the things which tend to differ most from distribution to distribution. Installation, configuration, and applications (or rather, how recently the software included was released). If that isn't "interesting", then maybe you want a review catered to somebody who doesn't already use the software they mention? For instance, I wouldn't expect an MS Office 97 user to be interested in all the functionality that they're already using when reading a MS Office 2000 review.
As far as impartiality is concerned... well, I find most of the stuff OSNews puts out to be pretty crappy. Even if they're the only kids on the block who do regular distribution reviews, I wouldn't bother reading theirs.
Oh, right, and that's the other thing - in almost every case you don't need a review. You're not talking about plonking down $300USD for a distribution. In almost every case you can simply download and install the distribution your own damned self. The best review is the one you yourself write;)
Slashdot editors consistently write misleading headlines in order to get more hits. Same as any other mainstream media. "Oh, but they're geeks" (say the stupid suckers who flock to the site...)
I know. I'm not going to let it slide without saying anything, though.
What the hell? They're going to just start exploiting schools in order to dump their brainwashing propaganda on young people? Does anyone else think this is completely ridiculous?
Sure, they would be talking about something which is illegal, but that doesn't make this right. The children and parents should have time to discuss things like this and make their own decisions, without being misguided by the people who want to make money.
Actually, they're brainwashing kids into thinking that things which aren't illegal actually are (fair use). Read the article.
I believe the references to JPEG and MP3 were just examples of other popular standards, not meant to point out patent-encumbered standards.
That being said, the companies involved are all heavy users of patents, in many cases aggresively. They're also using ECMA as their standards body, who has a very premissive policy on patents. For anybody who reads that link, "reasonable and non-discrimantory licensing" means "everybody who uses this 'standard' can be made to cough up some dough."
So yes, in all likelyhood, this "standard" will be patent-encumbered and will require any new kids on the block to pay what will likely be extortion-rate fees (though they'll be "reasonable" fees in that any multinational with billions in the bank can afford them). The companies involved in creating the standard (the ones who don't like competition and in some cases have been convicted for price-fixing and illegal monopolistic practices) will simply cross-license the relevant patents amongst themselves, meaning they're free to implement it without cost.
A truly desktop-ready operating system would never display an error like that. I mean, hell; is it so much to ask that if an error has to be cryptic, it should at least be grammatically correct?
That's a common misconception, that "cryptic error messages are bad." Think about it for a moment - short of displaying four or five pages of text explaining from the ground up what the error *might* mean, you're going to end up simplifying the error to the point that it's useless for everybody, including the user.
Far more useful would be to keep these "cryptic" error messages so that the user knows something went wrong, and knows that they don't know what. Then they can talk to one of their friends who might be more familiar with these things, who can then fix the problem because the error was actually useful.
Now, if you want an improvement over what's there, a good one would be figuring out a way to let the user know that something bad happened but they can continue working. Of course, if an application could do that, you'd think they'd simply recover gracefully instead of displaying an error box...
However, the advisory also discusses how to obtain new software for their equipment. So it appears that there is a fix to the problem, via a software upgrade. In light of this, the 'no workarounds' stuff is rather misleading -- and when I first read it, it made my draw drop.
It's pretty much understood, at least by sysadmins if not the general public, that an issue can always be fixed by a software upgrade. Any vendor saying that an issue *really* can't be fixed, no matter what, typically means that it's a design choice and if you don't like it, switch to another vendor (*cough* Microsoft? *cough*).
Given that, when a vendor says "no workaround available," they mean that your only choice is to upgrade the software. For example, a workaround to a vulnerability in, say, Microsoft's CIFS stack would be to firewall off the ports it uses (though you need to do that on every machine, of course - otherwise it won't be effective, as we've seen so many times).
So, to sum up: workaround = quick fix via configuration or similar, and it's a given that you can fix the problem via a (typically time-consuming) software update.
Why does a protected stack need hardware modification ? IANACE, but doesn't OpenBSD do this on standard hardware?
You're quite right, OpenBSD has software-based stack protection (I believe their term for it is "W^X"). It incurs a major performance hit though, and it's not foolproof.
Just as a bit of background to others who might not be familiar with the concepts, most buffer overrun exploits work by overwriting a portion of data memory, and then overwriting a function pointer to point to that data memory instead of the executable memory. On x86, data and executable memory are actually treated the exact same. On AMD64 and on many other platforms, data segments of memory are/can be non-executable. So when the now-compromised application attempts to run the exploit payload (contained in data segments), the processor raises an exception and the app stops running.
The CPU doing this (as well as all the other memory protection stuff it does) is far preferrable to a software solution.
I personally think that people are too hard on him anyways. Its not like he is trying to perpetuate SCO's attack on the world, he was just trying to protect his company and his customers, thats decent to me.
At the short-term expense of everybody else who uses Linux (competitor or no), and at the long-term expense of everybody, including him and his company.
People were right to express their disappointment, and an apology is only the first step in making amends for either total stupidity that was harmful to others, or downright maliciousness (they're a Microsoft partner, I believe). Now we need to watch and see if they do anything else.
How can a spam filter be more accurate than humans? Humans are always the last step in spam filtering.. i use popfile and it catches 99% but it still needs me.. because im the only one capable of identifying spam 100% of the time.
And if the study posted about is accruate, of those 1% that are left, you will (if you're a perfectly average person) accidentally delete 0.16% of good messages. Surely you've deleted a valid message by accident before? I do it regularily, deleting 25 spam messages with a single good one embedded in it when I just woke up before I had my coffee is not a good thing;)
At the very least, if you were given the same data as these tests, that would be true. Consider if you *didn't* use popfile - how many spams would you be deleting every day, and how many good messages would be accidentally deleted? I know that if I had to manually delete the two or three hundred spams interspersed with good messages, my false-positive rate (the percentage of good mail I accidentally deleted) would skyrocket.
So just be glad you've got popfile. Not only do you not have to go through as much spam, but you're also more accurate while going through the little you must.
I was under the impression that their fix was simply make http(s)://user:password@www.address.net invalid. If so, that's not so much a fix, as just deciding to break some functionality. Can someone confirm that this is what the "fix" actually is?
I just fired up Windows, and yes, that's correct - http://foo:bar@foo.bar/ URLs result in a "This page cannot be displayed" error. The standard one, at that, not even indicating why it can't be displayed.
https://foo:bar@foo.bar/ also appears nonfunctional. However, IE just sits there with its little spinner going. I didn't wait for it to time out. It may be that it's unintentionally broken.
For the more technically-minded of you out there, HTTP AUTH is still functional if you omit the username and password from the URL. It will pop up the regular authentication box and you can go in normally. At least over HTTPS. I didn't try HTTP.
Worth noting here that a *LOT* of sites embed the username and password into generated URLs - especially porn sites. This is a pretty major fuckup, and a lot of companies will be real pissed off at Microsoft over this.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree about the bundling. I really don't like that it's an either-or thing. Unfortunately, these laws exist because in a "Free Market", a monopoly destroys things. Thus, when you reach monopoly status, since it's not a free market any more, you don't get to go by free market rules.
A better example would be the mandatory bundling rules. Microsoft is a monopoly. They can shut down OEMs at whim. With this power comes responsibility - you're not allowed to squash competitors by telling retailers that they're not allowed to provide those competitors' products to customers.
If it were a free market, then it wouldn't be a problem - retailers would be able to safely say "fuck you" and Microsoft would just have to deal with it. It's not a free market though, there's a monopoly in that market. Thus retailers cannot, in all honesty, say "fuck you" and continue to do business. The market isn't allowed to decide, because the market doesn't exist - or, if it does, the market *is* Microsoft.
Good point, by the way. Not that I'm convinced "Trustworthy Computing" is sincere yet. But even assuming it is, there's a good example of one of the problems at MS.
He, like myself, is reacting to "Microsoft isn't a bad company.", and the words that followed it. You work for the company in question and you defend it. How come the *huge* number of problems with MS-the-company can't let somebody say "Microsoft sucks" but a few good examples in small parts of the company let you say "Microsoft isn't a bad company"?
Of course, both are too cut-and-dry. Saying one is as stupid as saying the other. See my other posts in this thread for a personal pet peeve I have with Microsoft (which I think is the root of MS' problems) as an example of the kinds of things we have to deal with on a regular basis.
Read both of the rants in their entirety - most of what I'll say below I already said.
First, just because selling to idiots is the "world of sales" doesn't make it right. Microsoft's products are either used or maintained by *professionals*. Maybe it doesn't matter when you're trying to sell a glass figurine, but it sure as hell matters when you're trying to sell surgical instruments. You can be damned sure that the executives in a hospital are made up largely of people who are medical experts, who used to be, or who know to delegate such decisions to the experts. In the case of IT, the products are no less important, and maybe MS could get away with selling crap to senior execs ten years ago, but those days are numbered.
Second, I know these tactics aren't limited to Microsoft. Duh. In fact, the worst boondogle(sp?) I've seen in an IT rollout was using products from a vendor other than MS. I actually give them credit where credit is due here; their products may be sub-standard, but they're better than some of the *real* crap that people buy.
Third, I don't like the word "politics". There's a negative connotation to that. As I said in my last rant, the last head IT guy at this company here wasn't able to communicate as effectively as MS' salespeople, to the point where the executives trusted the MS reps more than their own employee. He left, and now I'm here, and my first job (took at least three months) was getting the executives to realise the mistakes which had been made in the past, and getting the gears in motion on correcting them. It wasn't an easy job, so don't bother trying to tell me that it's hard ;) The last IT guy was decent, but not great. He had too much attitude.
Lastly, I've already sold the "Linux solution" within my company. We're already using it extensively. After six months, two different MS representatives have been kicked out of executives' offices and told to talk to me. The executives have made it clear in no uncertain terms that if MS tries to take advantage of them again, MS will not be getting any new business from them. Right now we've got a good amount of Microsoft software, and we plan on upgrading them as time goes. If, however, MS tries its bullshit sales tactics again (trying to sell them high-margin software which MS *knows* is unsuitable for the task [or software they *should* know is unsuitable for the task]), we'll instead begin migration plans. Don't mistake a plan of action for a baseless threat. There's only so many times a merchant can knowingly perform actions which would be of great harm to the customer before the customer says "okay, enough of this, you guys just can't be trusted for even the most basic things."
In short: don't teach your grandmother to suck eggs :)
I might add that I haven't seen an innovative product come out of MS in years. Either they bought the product lock, stock, and barrel, or they copied somebody else. I don't want to say it's bad to copy some good ideas from elsewhere, but the fact that Ballmer is now saying that the company is "still innovative" because it's "filing 2,000 patents a year" is pretty bloody scary. Patents do not equal innovation, they can *only* be used to shut down competitors or extort money from them. That's all they exist for. There's nothing wrong with that, that *is* what they're there for - except that since MS really isn't coming out with any innovative products, much less inventive. So I have serious doubts about my ability to get a good deal from MS in ten years' time.
:)
It does seem like they're on their way down, and part of the reason why we haven't bought any new MS software in the past year (and why we don't plan on buying any more if they continue their bullshit "business" tactics - see the above paragraph about specifically targetting those members of our company who aren't capable of making good IT purchasing decisions [by their own account]) is that their crash may start happening sooner rather than later. Things seem to be accellerating, and we don't want to get caught up in the middle of it.
So yeah, just to flesh out the "starting our full Linux migration" thing, what I meant was that we'll not purchase any more MS software, and will begin our migration plans. It'll take a couple of years, of course - I didn't mean to imply that the next time an MS rep gets kicked out of an executive's office we'll be an all-Linux shop the next day
You work in a big company, so you're going to have to get used to it. Parts of your company engage in dirty, despicable "business" tactics to get on top, at which point they ignore the user base and move onto the next hill. These actions directly harm people. If you can't take that, then maybe you shouldn't be working for them.
(P.S.: Next time an MS representative tries to go over my head [I'm head IT guy at a mid-sized company] by going directly to the executives who now *willingly* admit that they don't have the expertise necessary to make good IT decisions, we begin our full migration to Linux. The execs have told MS representatives twice already that they are *not* interested in buying some widget so they can get their business done, and when it comes to IT, I'm the guy. Of all the needlessly harmful and destructive things MS can do, marketing directly to executives by taking them out for ski-weekends and fancy lunches is the worst. You guys nearly ruined the company I work for because of these tactics, and we're not the only ones. If their last IT guy hadn't quit [he didn't have the skill required to get the executives on "his" - aka the company's - side], they'd be out of business by now. I'm not exaggerating, it's a genetics company and their entire revenue stream is based on their data warehouse. When your company finally gets their act in gear by making realistically decent products, *and* stop preying on professionals like myself by going over their head to make the sale, maybe you'll get a modicum of respect. Expect it to take at least a decade for it to become a healthy amount of respect.)
If by "more and more expensive" you mean "more and more difficult to do without stepping on the cash cow's toes", then you'd be correct. Look at all the medium-sized companies Microsoft has bought out in the past 5-10 years. When was the last time Microsoft themselves came up with an innovative product? I'll give you a hint - it wasn't SQL Server, or Virtual PC, IE, or even its new security stuff. It either bought those technologies wholesale from other companies, or simply built upon what was already done (Netscape in the case of IE).
These companies were typically well-funded, but they couldn't compare to Microsoft's coffers. They were able to innovate quite well on a decent budget, so can Microsoft. So it's not "more expensive", they just aren't doing it. Why? There could be a lot of reasons. The most often-touted is that Microsoft simply can't be interested in any market where there isn't a half-billion dollars a year in revenue. So they have to wait for an innovator to *create* a market, at which point Microsoft will buy out the biggest player that'll have them and then dominate that particular segment. The most recent one was the purchase of Virtual PC - I'm already seeing it show up in a lot of places. There's also the anti-virus firm they purchased. Neither of these have gotten to the point where they've managed to lock out all the competition - and they may never get that way with the anti-trust lawsuits that seem to constantly harass MS. But *that's* why they don't innovate - not due to some mythical lack of funds.
This is kind of odd, really; I can get good capable-of-all-relevant-formats DVD burners for about $100CAD (about $75USD) each. Good CD burners cost around $60CAD. So what, DVD burners are going to go down to that level soon? Not that I won't be happy, but it's kind of hard to believe. The March of Technology goes on, I suppose.
The last time I tried to clean up the funny smell that's been growing in the corner, it beat me with a stick and made me feed it Doritos crumbs.
There's a difference between won't and don't. Some of us, though you may find it hard to believe, don't care much about the sticker price of a working environment, so long as it gets the job done in a manner that's acceptable. It just happens to be that one of the best environments available today can be downloaded for free off the 'net (or paid for from a vendor like Red Hat).
I, for one, would be perfectly happy to pay for an iTunes-like service (their restrictions are acceptable to me, though I'd prefer either MP3- or Ogg Vorbis-formatted files; the former is extremely portable, the latter is very nice and reasonably portable), just like I'd be happy to pay for an operating system which suited me. It's a pity that since my operating system *happens* to be free, I can't pay anybody to let me access their service :)
1996 called. They wanted to know why you're compiling from scratch as opposed to using a distribution and its package manager. (*cough* Debian, Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, Connectiva, Slackware, hell even Gentoo *cough*)
I bought a Sony Clie SJ-22 a few months ago mainly for reading. I got it for $170CAD, which works out to about $120USD these days. It'd be even cheaper now. So if you can find one it's a great deal. I use Plucker almost exclusively, but I also have Acrobat's reader and AvantGo installed too.
:)
As far as the hardware is concerned, it's a very sharp little package, really great screen (excellent backlight, works great in direct sunlight, and is colour), and has enough built-in memory for my purposes (16MB). Its only expansion option is a Memory Stick slot. Original Memory Stick though, so you're limited to 128MB sticks (or at best, 256MB, but you can only access 128MB at a time). And of course it's Memory Stick as opposed to a more ubiquitous format like SD/MMC, which I find quite irritating. I don't use the Memory Stick slot
It has a built-in rechargable battery which seems to last me a good long while. I've taken it out to the cabin for a week at a time and it didn't run out of juice (no electricity at the cabin, and I don't use those 9V portable chargers or anything). I haven't been able to find a cradle for it, unfortunately, which is irritating. This particular model was discontinued ages ago.
I'm really happy with it, and if you can find one it'd probably be an excellent deal and would do probably whatever you're after. Maybe a newer model would be okay too, I don't know.
Just for reference, a "full" review would take up several thousand pages. Think about what's being reviewed - a full GNU/Linux distribution. Thousands of applications built atop a *NIX workalike. That's a lot of material to cover.
... well, I find most of the stuff OSNews puts out to be pretty crappy. Even if they're the only kids on the block who do regular distribution reviews, I wouldn't bother reading theirs.
;)
So, then, people will tend to focus on the more important things to users new to a given distribution. Which are also the things which tend to differ most from distribution to distribution. Installation, configuration, and applications (or rather, how recently the software included was released). If that isn't "interesting", then maybe you want a review catered to somebody who doesn't already use the software they mention? For instance, I wouldn't expect an MS Office 97 user to be interested in all the functionality that they're already using when reading a MS Office 2000 review.
As far as impartiality is concerned
Oh, right, and that's the other thing - in almost every case you don't need a review. You're not talking about plonking down $300USD for a distribution. In almost every case you can simply download and install the distribution your own damned self. The best review is the one you yourself write
This is a test post. MY GOD DON'T READ IT! :)
Extra characters inserted for lame filter:
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I know. I'm not going to let it slide without saying anything, though.
This Slashdot post is misleading (not very unusual, I understand). From the article:
It's the mascot for their school-targetted marketing. And pretty bloody appropriate for young kids, I think.
Actually, they're brainwashing kids into thinking that things which aren't illegal actually are (fair use). Read the article.
I believe the references to JPEG and MP3 were just examples of other popular standards, not meant to point out patent-encumbered standards.
That being said, the companies involved are all heavy users of patents, in many cases aggresively. They're also using ECMA as their standards body, who has a very premissive policy on patents. For anybody who reads that link, "reasonable and non-discrimantory licensing" means "everybody who uses this 'standard' can be made to cough up some dough."
So yes, in all likelyhood, this "standard" will be patent-encumbered and will require any new kids on the block to pay what will likely be extortion-rate fees (though they'll be "reasonable" fees in that any multinational with billions in the bank can afford them). The companies involved in creating the standard (the ones who don't like competition and in some cases have been convicted for price-fixing and illegal monopolistic practices) will simply cross-license the relevant patents amongst themselves, meaning they're free to implement it without cost.
ARGH! LINUX!?!?
Not that Google's magic isn't in their own software, but the least they could do is mention that it's running on Linux.
That's a common misconception, that "cryptic error messages are bad." Think about it for a moment - short of displaying four or five pages of text explaining from the ground up what the error *might* mean, you're going to end up simplifying the error to the point that it's useless for everybody, including the user.
Far more useful would be to keep these "cryptic" error messages so that the user knows something went wrong, and knows that they don't know what. Then they can talk to one of their friends who might be more familiar with these things, who can then fix the problem because the error was actually useful.
Now, if you want an improvement over what's there, a good one would be figuring out a way to let the user know that something bad happened but they can continue working. Of course, if an application could do that, you'd think they'd simply recover gracefully instead of displaying an error box ...
It's pretty much understood, at least by sysadmins if not the general public, that an issue can always be fixed by a software upgrade. Any vendor saying that an issue *really* can't be fixed, no matter what, typically means that it's a design choice and if you don't like it, switch to another vendor (*cough* Microsoft? *cough*).
Given that, when a vendor says "no workaround available," they mean that your only choice is to upgrade the software. For example, a workaround to a vulnerability in, say, Microsoft's CIFS stack would be to firewall off the ports it uses (though you need to do that on every machine, of course - otherwise it won't be effective, as we've seen so many times).
So, to sum up: workaround = quick fix via configuration or similar, and it's a given that you can fix the problem via a (typically time-consuming) software update.
You're quite right, OpenBSD has software-based stack protection (I believe their term for it is "W^X"). It incurs a major performance hit though, and it's not foolproof.
Just as a bit of background to others who might not be familiar with the concepts, most buffer overrun exploits work by overwriting a portion of data memory, and then overwriting a function pointer to point to that data memory instead of the executable memory. On x86, data and executable memory are actually treated the exact same. On AMD64 and on many other platforms, data segments of memory are/can be non-executable. So when the now-compromised application attempts to run the exploit payload (contained in data segments), the processor raises an exception and the app stops running.
The CPU doing this (as well as all the other memory protection stuff it does) is far preferrable to a software solution.
At the short-term expense of everybody else who uses Linux (competitor or no), and at the long-term expense of everybody, including him and his company.
People were right to express their disappointment, and an apology is only the first step in making amends for either total stupidity that was harmful to others, or downright maliciousness (they're a Microsoft partner, I believe). Now we need to watch and see if they do anything else.
And if the study posted about is accruate, of those 1% that are left, you will (if you're a perfectly average person) accidentally delete 0.16% of good messages. Surely you've deleted a valid message by accident before? I do it regularily, deleting 25 spam messages with a single good one embedded in it when I just woke up before I had my coffee is not a good thing ;)
At the very least, if you were given the same data as these tests, that would be true. Consider if you *didn't* use popfile - how many spams would you be deleting every day, and how many good messages would be accidentally deleted? I know that if I had to manually delete the two or three hundred spams interspersed with good messages, my false-positive rate (the percentage of good mail I accidentally deleted) would skyrocket.
So just be glad you've got popfile. Not only do you not have to go through as much spam, but you're also more accurate while going through the little you must.
I just fired up Windows, and yes, that's correct - http://foo:bar@foo.bar/ URLs result in a "This page cannot be displayed" error. The standard one, at that, not even indicating why it can't be displayed.
https://foo:bar@foo.bar/ also appears nonfunctional. However, IE just sits there with its little spinner going. I didn't wait for it to time out. It may be that it's unintentionally broken.
For the more technically-minded of you out there, HTTP AUTH is still functional if you omit the username and password from the URL. It will pop up the regular authentication box and you can go in normally. At least over HTTPS. I didn't try HTTP.
Worth noting here that a *LOT* of sites embed the username and password into generated URLs - especially porn sites. This is a pretty major fuckup, and a lot of companies will be real pissed off at Microsoft over this.