The Fine Article talks about several elements working together to pull off this new stuff. One of the technologies is "dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model".
So if DOM is essential to the "display and interaction" (that is, the user interface), what does that do to non-Windows users? When they browse, do they just get nothing? Or do they get a crippled user interface?
I can sue you for wasting the planet's oxygen. (You're breathing, right?) The court will throw the suit out immediately, but I can file it. This also forces you to defend it, which means hire a lawyer, spend money, etc. It's a form of bullying.
So what it really comes down to is, these slimeballs are saying, "If you call our stuff spyware, we're going to harass you, make your life difficult, and cost you a bunch of money". It's a form of bullying.
Welcome to the United States, home of the "free" (how come we aren't free from this kind of nonsense?)
You want control turned over to an international body. OK, that sounds reasonable. But the UN? I mean... how about somebody with a little more tech savvy and a little less politics?
You know, I think that, if I tried hard enough, I could build an OS that no admin could secure.
Moving on from deliberate incompetence, we come to Microsoft. They didn't deliberately try to make an impossible-to-secure OS, they merely made so many bad architectural choices, and added so many features that are inherently insecure, that the effect was close to the same.
Now, in fairness, they are getting better. Windows doesn't fight the admin who tries to secure it nearly as hard as it used to...
It means that Microsoft has (at least on paper) a process that (at least in theory) they follow that (at least in theory) will insure that the software they develop is (supposedly) secure.
Car dealerships do that. It's called the "owner's manual".
So, um, where's the owner's manual for Windows that tells me that if I don't have a firewall, anti-virus, and anti-spyware running, it's going to be like running a car with no oil in it?
Yeah, I know, you and I don't need to be told. We aren't average computer users, though, and Microsoft isn't aiming their OS at us. It's aimed at the non-techie user (which is a brilliant move by Microsoft, by the way, since there are lots more of them). But the non-techie user doesn't know what they have to do to protect their machine, and Microsoft doesn't tell them.
Now, credit where due, Microsoft finally turned on the firewall by default, turned on Windows Update by default, and if you let it go that way, Windows Update will also keep your anti-spyware up to date. (Still no anti-virus, though.)
But the original point was valid, and I don't think your response addresses it very well: Microsoft releases software with features that constitute gaping security flaws. Rather than remove the features, they put on a bunch of bandaids, trying to keep the feature but not let it be misused. But since the feature itself is inherently a security flaw, the bandaids leave a lot of room for new exploits to keep appearing.
To go back to your analogy: If you sell me a car that needs an oil change every 10 miles, and other cars need an oil change every 3000 miles, and you're not going to fix the car, you better be giving me the oil for free. And it's not "sour grapes" to be disappointed even then, and to have the expectation that you really ought to fix the car.
Disclaimer: I work for Symantec, and they are also starting to get into the spyware removal game. I don't think that my viewpoint is biased because of this, but feel free to ascribe bias anyway. And, of course, I don't speak for Symantec...
Depends on what problem you are trying to fix. If I've been convicted of being a pedophile, and I see an elementary school and decide to go do my thing, this will let the cops know what I'm up to, but it won't stop me, and the cops may well get there too late. It will let them convict me, but it won't stop me (unless the threat of conviction is enough to stop me, which, given the mental acuity of many criminals, it probably isn't).
Just for the sake of argument, let's assume that I have committed a crime. Let's assume that I have been convicted and sentenced to prison.
And let's assume that I can be given parole, but I have a restricted area that I can't go into as a condition of my parole, or else an area that I can't leave.
And let's suppose I am given the choice: I can stay in prison and serve the full sentence (and work for 11 cents an hour), or I can go out on parole, get a job that pays at least minimum wage, and have to pay $300 a month for the monitoring.
What do you think I'm going to pick? I'll take parole, and be glad of the chance. I may gripe about the $300/month, but I'll pay it...
No, it makes perfect sense that Martin isn't a real technical guy. Microsoft is very focused on customers - they don't actually care very much what the/. crowd thinks of them. They care about the guy who wants the computer to do something for him, and they care about making it easier for that guy to use Windows than the competition. That guy isn't a technical guy. So Martin is actually in a pretty good position to do what Microsoft is trying to do, which is to compare things from that guy's point of view.
No, it's not just that software companies don't want to make a guarantee that the software is fit for a particular purpose, it's that they can't make the guarantee.
In other words, nobody knows how to make software that they are sure will work. This stuff isn't real engineering yet...
Wind River is an embedded software powerhouse. I don't know if the anonymous poster works for them or not, but what he (or she) said is genuinely true.
And, no, I don't work for Wind River. But I did work as a programmer on a product that used vxWorks as the OS for about 3 years. Really nice RTOS.
"That would allow them to prevent this"? You're kidding, right? The only way to prevent this is to not allow MS Anti-spyware to be disabled - ever - once it's installed. Let MS try that and see how loud the screaming on/. is...
"Regular users"? Come on, this is Windows we're talking about here. Granted, you can run as other than administrator, and if your head is bolted on tight, you do, but realistically... how many people do that? One percent? And they're the smart ones, who aren't as likely to run a trojan in the first place.
I think the trojan is probably pretty safe from that particular OS protection...
Are you asserting that things are better in North Korea than they are at Guantanamo? If so, give some sources, don't just complain that I get my info from US media. (As it happens, I get probably the majority of my news from the US media, but certainly not all of it.)
And if you're not asserting that conditions are better in North Korea, well, you may have a valid point about the US media not giving a clear picture of what goes on in Guantanamo, but you aren't answering my (grandparent) post at all...
You could never do it, but if you somehow could offer the citizens of North Korea the chance to go to Guantanamo, and live like the prisoners do there, they would take it in a heartbeat. It's a paradise. At least the prisoners aren't starving. They aren't being executed.
If you think that Guantanamo is the standard of "the worst possible human condition", you have no clue about how bad things can get.
But, see, Alan Kay is coming from an academic/research environment. He cares about creating the Perfect Solution in theoretical terms. People in business are much more pragmatic. They (mostly) aren't trying to sell computer languages, they are trying to find languages that are Good Enough to build what the business does sell.
And it's all good. We need people like Alan Kay, because better languages are good for businesses, too. And we need the businesses, because stuff kept locked up where only the academics can admire the beauty of the Perfect Solution doesn't do the rest of us a bit of good...
Many people have criticised the methodology of these studies - for example, comparing TCO of Windows on a PC to Linux on an IBM mainframe. Do you really believe that these studies represent reality? If so, why? And if they do, then why do you have to use such flawed methodologies to show it?
Well, what I think they've done in the past is "make it deviate to the point that it's not very accurate", but "not very accurate" is relative.
The "low accuracy" version of GPS is good enough for ship navigation in almost all instances. If your navigation requires accuracy within 3 meters to keep you off the rocks, you're going to have problems even with GPS running in high-accuracy mode. One big wave and you're aground...
The point isn't users. The point is developers. Developers, developers, developers, developers...
/me winces at the sudden karma-dectomy...
Anyway, the point of Longhorn is, with Indigo and Avalon, to make it easier to develop cool new stuff. Then more cool new stuff gets written for Windows, and so more people buy Windows.
Want to pre-empt Longhorn? Make some slick open-source developer tools for XML-based user interfaces (can't remember the X-acronym at the moment - XUL or XAML or some such) and web services. Win over the developers. Let them develop the cool new stuff on Linux.
The users will follow if the new stuff is cool enough. At least, that's been Microsoft's game plan for a long time now, and it's worked pretty well for them...
Cracking open is an interesting problem. Once the pebbles aren't in a spherical packing arrangement, you don't have the spacing anymore, and the concentration goes up. However...
The reactor design (when functioning normally) is basically self-moderating. The "constant expansion and contraction" should only be a few degrees - it shouldn't be enough to cause serious thermal stress and/or fatigue on the pebbles.
I am not a nuclear engineer, so take this with a grain of salt...
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The Fine Article talks about several elements working together to pull off this new stuff. One of the technologies is "dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model".
So if DOM is essential to the "display and interaction" (that is, the user interface), what does that do to non-Windows users? When they browse, do they just get nothing? Or do they get a crippled user interface?
Who needs a crime?
I can sue you for wasting the planet's oxygen. (You're breathing, right?) The court will throw the suit out immediately, but I can file it. This also forces you to defend it, which means hire a lawyer, spend money, etc. It's a form of bullying.
So what it really comes down to is, these slimeballs are saying, "If you call our stuff spyware, we're going to harass you, make your life difficult, and cost you a bunch of money". It's a form of bullying.
Welcome to the United States, home of the "free" (how come we aren't free from this kind of nonsense?)
You want control turned over to an international body. OK, that sounds reasonable. But the UN? I mean... how about somebody with a little more tech savvy and a little less politics?
"Might have been proven to work"? Um, yeah, whatever...
You know, I think that, if I tried hard enough, I could build an OS that no admin could secure.
Moving on from deliberate incompetence, we come to Microsoft. They didn't deliberately try to make an impossible-to-secure OS, they merely made so many bad architectural choices, and added so many features that are inherently insecure, that the effect was close to the same.
Now, in fairness, they are getting better. Windows doesn't fight the admin who tries to secure it nearly as hard as it used to...
It means that Microsoft has (at least on paper) a process that (at least in theory) they follow that (at least in theory) will insure that the software they develop is (supposedly) secure.
However, as they say, "your mileage may vary".
So, um, where's the owner's manual for Windows that tells me that if I don't have a firewall, anti-virus, and anti-spyware running, it's going to be like running a car with no oil in it?
Yeah, I know, you and I don't need to be told. We aren't average computer users, though, and Microsoft isn't aiming their OS at us. It's aimed at the non-techie user (which is a brilliant move by Microsoft, by the way, since there are lots more of them). But the non-techie user doesn't know what they have to do to protect their machine, and Microsoft doesn't tell them.
Now, credit where due, Microsoft finally turned on the firewall by default, turned on Windows Update by default, and if you let it go that way, Windows Update will also keep your anti-spyware up to date. (Still no anti-virus, though.)
But the original point was valid, and I don't think your response addresses it very well: Microsoft releases software with features that constitute gaping security flaws. Rather than remove the features, they put on a bunch of bandaids, trying to keep the feature but not let it be misused. But since the feature itself is inherently a security flaw, the bandaids leave a lot of room for new exploits to keep appearing.
To go back to your analogy: If you sell me a car that needs an oil change every 10 miles, and other cars need an oil change every 3000 miles, and you're not going to fix the car, you better be giving me the oil for free. And it's not "sour grapes" to be disappointed even then, and to have the expectation that you really ought to fix the car.
Disclaimer: I work for Symantec, and they are also starting to get into the spyware removal game. I don't think that my viewpoint is biased because of this, but feel free to ascribe bias anyway. And, of course, I don't speak for Symantec...
Depends on what problem you are trying to fix. If I've been convicted of being a pedophile, and I see an elementary school and decide to go do my thing, this will let the cops know what I'm up to, but it won't stop me, and the cops may well get there too late. It will let them convict me, but it won't stop me (unless the threat of conviction is enough to stop me, which, given the mental acuity of many criminals, it probably isn't).
Just for the sake of argument, let's assume that I have committed a crime. Let's assume that I have been convicted and sentenced to prison.
And let's assume that I can be given parole, but I have a restricted area that I can't go into as a condition of my parole, or else an area that I can't leave.
And let's suppose I am given the choice: I can stay in prison and serve the full sentence (and work for 11 cents an hour), or I can go out on parole, get a job that pays at least minimum wage, and have to pay $300 a month for the monitoring.
What do you think I'm going to pick? I'll take parole, and be glad of the chance. I may gripe about the $300/month, but I'll pay it...
No, it makes perfect sense that Martin isn't a real technical guy. Microsoft is very focused on customers - they don't actually care very much what the /. crowd thinks of them. They care about the guy who wants the computer to do something for him, and they care about making it easier for that guy to use Windows than the competition. That guy isn't a technical guy. So Martin is actually in a pretty good position to do what Microsoft is trying to do, which is to compare things from that guy's point of view.
In other words, nobody knows how to make software that they are sure will work. This stuff isn't real engineering yet...
You beat me to it. But, IIRC, he did design Borland's Turbo Pascal.
Who modded this OT? It is, in fact, directly on-topic, and funny to boot.
And no, I am not the original poster...
Under-the-table payments to board members is the only plausible reason that comes to mind. Are there other explanations?
Whatever the explanation is, I have a hard time seeing how "increasing shareholder value" comes in to it...
And, no, I don't work for Wind River. But I did work as a programmer on a product that used vxWorks as the OS for about 3 years. Really nice RTOS.
"That would allow them to prevent this"? You're kidding, right? The only way to prevent this is to not allow MS Anti-spyware to be disabled - ever - once it's installed. Let MS try that and see how loud the screaming on /. is...
I think the trojan is probably pretty safe from that particular OS protection...
And if you're not asserting that conditions are better in North Korea, well, you may have a valid point about the US media not giving a clear picture of what goes on in Guantanamo, but you aren't answering my (grandparent) post at all...
You could never do it, but if you somehow could offer the citizens of North Korea the chance to go to Guantanamo, and live like the prisoners do there, they would take it in a heartbeat. It's a paradise. At least the prisoners aren't starving. They aren't being executed.
If you think that Guantanamo is the standard of "the worst possible human condition", you have no clue about how bad things can get.
And, yes, there is a specification, at least for the CLR. Of course, Microsoft controls it.
And it's all good. We need people like Alan Kay, because better languages are good for businesses, too. And we need the businesses, because stuff kept locked up where only the academics can admire the beauty of the Perfect Solution doesn't do the rest of us a bit of good...
Many people have criticised the methodology of these studies - for example, comparing TCO of Windows on a PC to Linux on an IBM mainframe. Do you really believe that these studies represent reality? If so, why? And if they do, then why do you have to use such flawed methodologies to show it?
Well, what I think they've done in the past is "make it deviate to the point that it's not very accurate", but "not very accurate" is relative.
The "low accuracy" version of GPS is good enough for ship navigation in almost all instances. If your navigation requires accuracy within 3 meters to keep you off the rocks, you're going to have problems even with GPS running in high-accuracy mode. One big wave and you're aground...
Anyway, the point of Longhorn is, with Indigo and Avalon, to make it easier to develop cool new stuff. Then more cool new stuff gets written for Windows, and so more people buy Windows.
Want to pre-empt Longhorn? Make some slick open-source developer tools for XML-based user interfaces (can't remember the X-acronym at the moment - XUL or XAML or some such) and web services. Win over the developers. Let them develop the cool new stuff on Linux.
The users will follow if the new stuff is cool enough. At least, that's been Microsoft's game plan for a long time now, and it's worked pretty well for them...
Cracking open is an interesting problem. Once the pebbles aren't in a spherical packing arrangement, you don't have the spacing anymore, and the concentration goes up. However...
The reactor design (when functioning normally) is basically self-moderating. The "constant expansion and contraction" should only be a few degrees - it shouldn't be enough to cause serious thermal stress and/or fatigue on the pebbles.
I am not a nuclear engineer, so take this with a grain of salt...