You heard wrong. Please, bash Microsoft on the merits. There's plenty of stuff to deride them for without resorting to falsehoods.
As to the topic, as much as I dislike Microsoft, I think Google's in the wrong on this one. They're paying Mozilla a lot of money (presumably; I don't think the actual amount has been disclosed publically) to be the default in Firefox. If they want to be the default in Internet Explorer, they should offer the same amount to Microsoft.
Besides, Google's doing the same thing with IE that Yahoo is doing with Firefox - their home pages provide instructions on how to set the default search engine. There's enough people using Google that they'll figure it out.
I really don't understand the paranoia some people have with ID cards.
I think for many people (myself included), the problem is not the ID card but the gigantic government-run database that backs them. What we don't want is for the government to amass so much data on us that they can manipulate us.
Consider the staggering amount of information that businesses and the government know about you. They know how much money you make. They know how you earn that money, and where you keep it. In many cases, they know how you spend that money. They know where you live. They know what kind of car you drive, and if you don't drive, they can make an educated guess about your means of transportation. They know when you leave the state or travel in or out of the country. They know what kind of music you listen to. They know who you communicate with, and in many cases they know the nature of those communications. They know much, much, more, and they know who your family is, so they can find all this information out about them.
The logical objection to this is that different businesses and/or government agencies have different subsets of this information, and that's true. However, the U.S. has the Patriot Act, which essentially gives the government a blank check to subpoena all this information. Most of it is linked to your Social Security Number, which makes it trivial to correlate given a powerful enough computer - and we know that the U.S. has that, too.
I'll make the U.S. a deal - I'll take their ID card if they delete all this stuff out of their computers and repeal the Patriot Act.
The ideal news site for me would have the following four features:
1. Unobtrusive advertising. 1a. No "free registration" nag. 2. Higher quality pictures and videos (in terms of size and resolution, not necessarily content). 3. Open ended syndication - let your visitors set up your home page to show not only your news, but those of your competitors, if they choose to do so. Let them drag boxes around the page, and provide an API to get modules on your page. (RSS or Atom with support for headline images as enclosures would fit the bill nicely.)
I currently get my news from three places: My Yahoo!, Netvibes (when I get comfortable enough about their privacy practices, it'll be my new home page), and Google News. The thing they have in common is the ability to do massive customization of their home page.
There is a case that governments should rule that no college which receives any kind of taxpayer funding should be allowed to mandate the use of a product from one particular company to its students, but don't hold your breath waiting.
its all a game of getting what you want by saying as many of these emotive words as you can in as short a time possible whilst camouflaging the fact that you are doing it.
So, in essence, speechwriters are just like spammers?
Yes, but you're downplaying the significance of those blinky lights. The GUI is what catapaulted computers from being a geek toy to an essential for every American business, and a "very nice to have" for most American homes. Every time somebody benefits from a computer, I think Steve Jobs deserves some credit. Restricting his accomplishments merely to what Apple has sold would be somewhat disingenuous, because so many competitors launched products based off Apple designs.
No, Jobs hasn't saved the children, or given out laptops to poor countries, but he has made a significant contribution to computers, the Web (remember, WorldWideWeb was coded on a NeXT computer), animation, broadcasting, music, and more. I think he's at least as influential as, say, Edison.
Not at all. My point was that I don't think Opera is trying to actively compete for market share like Mozilla and Microsoft are (except possibly in their mobile phone browser). They're content to be #3 (4?) and still make money.
For Microsoft, the primary objective is to keep people using Windows. Internet Explorer is a loss leader: its purpose was to kill Netscape and steer web application development toward Microsoft technologies.
At the time, Netscape was selling servers and heading in the direction of offering primitive web applications. This was a threat because if people started developing apps for the Web, any platform that ran Netscape could connect to them, and a Linux license is a lot cheaper than a Windows license plus client access license(s) to the necessary server(s).
Netscape was essentially planning to center their business on Web 2.0. The problem is that Microsoft's giveaway of Internet Explorer was enough to keep businesses on Microsoft development platforms like ActiveX, which Netscape couldn't support. I think the developments we're seeing today in web applications would have come 10 years ago if Microsoft hadn't gotten involved.
As for Mozilla, I don't think they had a business model until Google fortuitously came along. Now, they get a chunk of the revenue of every click on a Google ad. Beyond the obvious mindshare reasons, Google's motivation is to ensure that there's a stable, cross-platform browser with the necessary functionality to enable their apps. Many people think Apple is going to begin to overtake Microsoft's dominance as the PC platform of choice. Having Firefox around is an insurance policy for Google.
It also puts Microsoft in the same place they were ten years ago - threatened by a paradigm shift that could render Windows obsolete. Unfortunately for them, there's no revenue stream to choke this time, unless MSN somehow overtakes Google in popularity.
(For most of the other browsers, their purpose seems obvious to me - Opera is just in it for the money, Safari's around so newbie Mac users can get on the Web, and other browsers are open source projects that integrate with their respective distros.)
Actually, that's a great idea. You could have a rolling sweepstakes where every $CURRENCY you donate gets you one entry automatically. (Of course, you also take 3x5" index card entries through snail mail for those who choose not to donate.) At the end of each review period, ship the review hardware out.
Also, ABC doesn't get a dime from your cable bill.
I hate to nitpick, but that's (probably) inaccurate. Almost all channels carried by cable get a chunk of the bill. It's true that premium channels like HBO, Cinemax, and so forth get a lot more, but even basic cable channels usually take between 10 cents and $2 per subscriber. For example, BusinessWeek reported in 2003 that ESPN charges an average of $1.93 per subscriber per month.
Now, ABC itself usually doesn't get paid by your cable company, but the local broadcast affiliate that carries ABC probably does. Federal law provides both "must carry" and "retransmission consent" provisions that cable companies have to abide by. In essence, a local broadcaster can try to negotiate with the cable company to permit transmission in exchange for a fee. If the cable company refuses to pay, the broadcaster has the choice to block the cable company from transmitting its signal, or to demand that it do so for free. Early this year, a dispute with an ABC affiliate caused the cable company to pull the station off the cable system at the station's request.
With these provisions, the amount of money a broadcaster can get from the cable company depends on how popular the station is. Local affiliates of the "big 5" networks usually have bargaining power to compel the cable companies to pay. Independent broadcasters and religious stations, on the other hand, usually opt for more viewers through asserting the "must carry" rule.
I agree with the rest of your post; I just wanted to point out these facts, which most people don't seem to know about.
Stick this all in a central control panel and it's unlikely to take up more than 10 minutes of your time.
I basically gave up on blogging because I had to sort through 500 spam comments a day. I know another blogger who had to clean 7,000 (yes, thousand) spams out of his blog every day.
I've wondered what would happen if you distorted the CAPTCHA using a site's name or URL instead of a random background. Do you think at least some people would hesitate a moment if you went to some random porn site and had to type a CAPTCHA with slashdot.org watermarked in the background?
No, your parent is correct. The EULA for all recent OEM versions of Windows ties the license to the computer. You cannot transfer it. Here's the relevant text from my copy of the Windows XP Professional EULA:
THIS LICENSE MAY NOT BE SHARED, TRANSFERRED TO OR USED CONCURRENTLY ON DIFFERENT COMPUTERS. The SOFTWARE is licensed with the HARDWARE as a single integrated product and may only be used with the HARDWARE. If the SOFTWARE is not accompanied by new HARDWARE, you may not use the SOFTWARE. You may permanently transfer all of your rights under this EULA only as part of a permanent sale or transfer of the HARDWARE, provided you retain no copies, if you transfer all of the SOFTWARE (including all component parts, the media and printed materials, any upgrades, this EULA and the Certificate of Authenticity), and the recipient agrees to the terms of this EULA.
Here's that restated in simpler terms: "If the software is pre-installed, the software lives and dies with the PC and can never be transferred to another PC."
Now, I think this is unethical and should be illegal, but unfortunately the U.S. legal system doesn't agree with me.
The people who should be most concerned are the likes of Dell et al.
There's no doubt that this will bolster Microsoft's bottom line in the short-term, but Microsoft has reason to worry about this development in the long-run. If Dell and company start to have difficulty selling computers, they're going to start purchasing fewer Windows licenses from Microsoft. When people switch from Dell to Apple, not all of them are going to purchase Windows. Initially, Microsoft's going to be okay because the retail versions bring in more revenue per unit than the OEM licenses do, but in the long-run, Microsoft may find themselves selling fewer copies of Windows, and that would be a bad thing for their bottom line.
Because not every Mac user will be willing to purchase Windows. I don't think Apple is going to sell Windows any time soon, and the requirement to have an original, non-upgrade, $199 retail Windows XP SP2 CD is a large enough barrier to entry that no software developer can reasonably assume that any given Mac user will have Windows installed. They'll be in the minority.
I'd like to mention that limiting the argument to handhelds only does something of a disservice to the community. There are many applications on desktop and notebook PCs that require login information from various web sites to do their job.
The problem is not really the software, but rather the web services. It would make more sense for the web services to give out disposable access tokens than to require users to give their account information to untrusted programs. Yahoo! is sort of using this approach with their developer IDs. If they added the ability to remove existing IDs, you'd have a fairly secure system to authenticate to web services via third-party programs, which wouldn't require that much additional effort or infrastructure.
I gave up on making my e-mail address public a while ago. I've received 3,358 spam messages since the beginning of this year on an address that hasn't been used since 1998. That averages to 38 messages a day - on an e-mail address that might as well not exist.
I've found that form mail is the most effective balance of easy access to protection from spammers. I have never received spam from my web site's contact form, yet the link is easily found at the bottom of every page.
(If any Slashdotters try it, remember to look for and/or write a form mail solution that doesn't expose the protected address as a hidden form field - some spammers find those).
Slashdot Mirror
It should be pretty easy to do with a Greasemonkey script. You'd probably need to write it yourself, but it shouldn't be that hard.
IE 7 does not even support PNG's alpha channel
You heard wrong. Please, bash Microsoft on the merits. There's plenty of stuff to deride them for without resorting to falsehoods.
As to the topic, as much as I dislike Microsoft, I think Google's in the wrong on this one. They're paying Mozilla a lot of money (presumably; I don't think the actual amount has been disclosed publically) to be the default in Firefox. If they want to be the default in Internet Explorer, they should offer the same amount to Microsoft.
Besides, Google's doing the same thing with IE that Yahoo is doing with Firefox - their home pages provide instructions on how to set the default search engine. There's enough people using Google that they'll figure it out.
Here's a link to the Wikipedia article: Vitameatavegamin (it currently redirects to I Love Lucy).
The latter.
I really don't understand the paranoia some people have with ID cards.
I think for many people (myself included), the problem is not the ID card but the gigantic government-run database that backs them. What we don't want is for the government to amass so much data on us that they can manipulate us.
Consider the staggering amount of information that businesses and the government know about you. They know how much money you make. They know how you earn that money, and where you keep it. In many cases, they know how you spend that money. They know where you live. They know what kind of car you drive, and if you don't drive, they can make an educated guess about your means of transportation. They know when you leave the state or travel in or out of the country. They know what kind of music you listen to. They know who you communicate with, and in many cases they know the nature of those communications. They know much, much, more, and they know who your family is, so they can find all this information out about them.
The logical objection to this is that different businesses and/or government agencies have different subsets of this information, and that's true. However, the U.S. has the Patriot Act, which essentially gives the government a blank check to subpoena all this information. Most of it is linked to your Social Security Number, which makes it trivial to correlate given a powerful enough computer - and we know that the U.S. has that, too.
I'll make the U.S. a deal - I'll take their ID card if they delete all this stuff out of their computers and repeal the Patriot Act.
The ideal news site for me would have the following four features:
1. Unobtrusive advertising.
1a. No "free registration" nag.
2. Higher quality pictures and videos (in terms of size and resolution, not necessarily content).
3. Open ended syndication - let your visitors set up your home page to show not only your news, but those of your competitors, if they choose to do so. Let them drag boxes around the page, and provide an API to get modules on your page. (RSS or Atom with support for headline images as enclosures would fit the bill nicely.)
I currently get my news from three places: My Yahoo!, Netvibes (when I get comfortable enough about their privacy practices, it'll be my new home page), and Google News. The thing they have in common is the ability to do massive customization of their home page.
There is a case that governments should rule that no college which receives any kind of taxpayer funding should be allowed to mandate the use of a product from one particular company to its students, but don't hold your breath waiting.
I won't. That would essentially outlaw textbooks.
its all a game of getting what you want by saying as many of these emotive words as you can in as short a time possible whilst camouflaging the fact that you are doing it.
So, in essence, speechwriters are just like spammers?
Yes, but you're downplaying the significance of those blinky lights. The GUI is what catapaulted computers from being a geek toy to an essential for every American business, and a "very nice to have" for most American homes. Every time somebody benefits from a computer, I think Steve Jobs deserves some credit. Restricting his accomplishments merely to what Apple has sold would be somewhat disingenuous, because so many competitors launched products based off Apple designs.
No, Jobs hasn't saved the children, or given out laptops to poor countries, but he has made a significant contribution to computers, the Web (remember, WorldWideWeb was coded on a NeXT computer), animation, broadcasting, music, and more. I think he's at least as influential as, say, Edison.
All CSS does is copy protection. It has nothing to do with disabling remote control buttons - that's in the DVD spec itself.
Not at all. My point was that I don't think Opera is trying to actively compete for market share like Mozilla and Microsoft are (except possibly in their mobile phone browser). They're content to be #3 (4?) and still make money.
For Microsoft, the primary objective is to keep people using Windows. Internet Explorer is a loss leader: its purpose was to kill Netscape and steer web application development toward Microsoft technologies.
At the time, Netscape was selling servers and heading in the direction of offering primitive web applications. This was a threat because if people started developing apps for the Web, any platform that ran Netscape could connect to them, and a Linux license is a lot cheaper than a Windows license plus client access license(s) to the necessary server(s).
Netscape was essentially planning to center their business on Web 2.0. The problem is that Microsoft's giveaway of Internet Explorer was enough to keep businesses on Microsoft development platforms like ActiveX, which Netscape couldn't support. I think the developments we're seeing today in web applications would have come 10 years ago if Microsoft hadn't gotten involved.
As for Mozilla, I don't think they had a business model until Google fortuitously came along. Now, they get a chunk of the revenue of every click on a Google ad. Beyond the obvious mindshare reasons, Google's motivation is to ensure that there's a stable, cross-platform browser with the necessary functionality to enable their apps. Many people think Apple is going to begin to overtake Microsoft's dominance as the PC platform of choice. Having Firefox around is an insurance policy for Google.
It also puts Microsoft in the same place they were ten years ago - threatened by a paradigm shift that could render Windows obsolete. Unfortunately for them, there's no revenue stream to choke this time, unless MSN somehow overtakes Google in popularity.
(For most of the other browsers, their purpose seems obvious to me - Opera is just in it for the money, Safari's around so newbie Mac users can get on the Web, and other browsers are open source projects that integrate with their respective distros.)
Actually, that's a great idea. You could have a rolling sweepstakes where every $CURRENCY you donate gets you one entry automatically. (Of course, you also take 3x5" index card entries through snail mail for those who choose not to donate.) At the end of each review period, ship the review hardware out.
I think he meant this.
Also, ABC doesn't get a dime from your cable bill.
I hate to nitpick, but that's (probably) inaccurate. Almost all channels carried by cable get a chunk of the bill. It's true that premium channels like HBO, Cinemax, and so forth get a lot more, but even basic cable channels usually take between 10 cents and $2 per subscriber. For example, BusinessWeek reported in 2003 that ESPN charges an average of $1.93 per subscriber per month.
Now, ABC itself usually doesn't get paid by your cable company, but the local broadcast affiliate that carries ABC probably does. Federal law provides both "must carry" and "retransmission consent" provisions that cable companies have to abide by. In essence, a local broadcaster can try to negotiate with the cable company to permit transmission in exchange for a fee. If the cable company refuses to pay, the broadcaster has the choice to block the cable company from transmitting its signal, or to demand that it do so for free. Early this year, a dispute with an ABC affiliate caused the cable company to pull the station off the cable system at the station's request.
With these provisions, the amount of money a broadcaster can get from the cable company depends on how popular the station is. Local affiliates of the "big 5" networks usually have bargaining power to compel the cable companies to pay. Independent broadcasters and religious stations, on the other hand, usually opt for more viewers through asserting the "must carry" rule.
I agree with the rest of your post; I just wanted to point out these facts, which most people don't seem to know about.
Stick this all in a central control panel and it's unlikely to take up more than 10 minutes of your time.
I basically gave up on blogging because I had to sort through 500 spam comments a day. I know another blogger who had to clean 7,000 (yes, thousand) spams out of his blog every day.
It took both of us longer than 10 minutes.
I've wondered what would happen if you distorted the CAPTCHA using a site's name or URL instead of a random background. Do you think at least some people would hesitate a moment if you went to some random porn site and had to type a CAPTCHA with slashdot.org watermarked in the background?
You either didn't understand the question or completely ignored it.
Here's the non-affiliate link.
Here's that restated in simpler terms: "If the software is pre-installed, the software lives and dies with the PC and can never be transferred to another PC."
Now, I think this is unethical and should be illegal, but unfortunately the U.S. legal system doesn't agree with me.
The people who should be most concerned are the likes of Dell et al.
There's no doubt that this will bolster Microsoft's bottom line in the short-term, but Microsoft has reason to worry about this development in the long-run. If Dell and company start to have difficulty selling computers, they're going to start purchasing fewer Windows licenses from Microsoft. When people switch from Dell to Apple, not all of them are going to purchase Windows. Initially, Microsoft's going to be okay because the retail versions bring in more revenue per unit than the OEM licenses do, but in the long-run, Microsoft may find themselves selling fewer copies of Windows, and that would be a bad thing for their bottom line.
Because not every Mac user will be willing to purchase Windows. I don't think Apple is going to sell Windows any time soon, and the requirement to have an original, non-upgrade, $199 retail Windows XP SP2 CD is a large enough barrier to entry that no software developer can reasonably assume that any given Mac user will have Windows installed. They'll be in the minority.
Actually, it's worse. John C. Dvorak now has a reason to gloat.
Where's JVC when we need them?
I'd like to mention that limiting the argument to handhelds only does something of a disservice to the community. There are many applications on desktop and notebook PCs that require login information from various web sites to do their job.
The problem is not really the software, but rather the web services. It would make more sense for the web services to give out disposable access tokens than to require users to give their account information to untrusted programs. Yahoo! is sort of using this approach with their developer IDs. If they added the ability to remove existing IDs, you'd have a fairly secure system to authenticate to web services via third-party programs, which wouldn't require that much additional effort or infrastructure.
I gave up on making my e-mail address public a while ago. I've received 3,358 spam messages since the beginning of this year on an address that hasn't been used since 1998. That averages to 38 messages a day - on an e-mail address that might as well not exist.
I've found that form mail is the most effective balance of easy access to protection from spammers. I have never received spam from my web site's contact form, yet the link is easily found at the bottom of every page.
(If any Slashdotters try it, remember to look for and/or write a form mail solution that doesn't expose the protected address as a hidden form field - some spammers find those).