And just what is the mechanism by which a program asks for a particular sandbox? That requires a change to the program, and if the developer is willing to change the program, why not just change it so it doesn't do stupid stuff (like write preferences to a file in the \program files tree) to begin with?
Microsoft has been pushing programmers for years to get out of the mode of requiring admin access, and for the huge majority of apps out there it is nothing more complicated than changing some default directories. But because so many developers and users run as admin it doesn't happen.
I run Vista at home and rarely get UAC prompts. When I do it is for things that I expect - trying to change firewall settings, installing new software, etc. It comes up seldom enough that I have never been tempted to turn it off, and if a UAC prompt comes up I didn't expect it would set off some major alarms in my head.
The comments above were all about coca-cola, and for a moment I thought we were still talking about coke.
But there is a parallel - Coke put out a new version of their main product that had tested better than their old one in focus groups. In the real world it was widely ridiculed, sales went down and their brand suffered.
And yet coca-cola is still (or again) the #1 brand.
In fact, the real problem with this is that, in case of ambiguities, people will code increasingly to Microsoft's source code instead of the specification.
Come now. One of the benefits of open source that we constantly hear is that if any question of the actual behavior of something comes up, the developer can go straight to the source. Now you are saying that this is a bad thing?
I agree with you that developers should code to the interface as documented, but if that is the case then most open source developers should not look at the source code for the underlying packages they use.
I think MS is doing this to make life simpler for their customers and to cut down on developer support costs. It isn't aimed at the FOSS community and has no particular impact on them either way. And contrary to what many people claim, MS developer support is really pretty good.
More encryption may be a desirable side effect (to us anyway), but if they control the network I am sure that they can find ways around that. Like simply blocking all traffic deemed suspicious, but then opening a hole where various applications can get whitelisted.
For instance, suppose Exchange/Outlook encrypt all mail by default, and get blocked as "suspicious" traffic. MS simply adds a private key digital signature to all messages, and the big backbone providers allow an exemption if the content is signed by something on a white list.
I'm glossing over the whole distinction between an email and its constituent packets of course, but if highly intrusive filtering ever became a reality we could well reach a point where everything not whitelisted is blacklisted.
While I hate the idea of content filtering, and have no love for big content, I am honest enough to admit that piracy (copyright infringement if you must be pedantic) is a very real problem and one that is only going to grow as more and more of our lives move into the digital realm. The people who create and distribute content, whether it is software, music, photos or video, have a right to set the conditions of sale of that content. If you don't like their terms, don't buy it, buy something else that has terms you can live with.
Even with Google's computing resources, I think attempting to do natural language analysis of the entire Internet would be a daunting proposition.
Even though the number of queries processed every day is immense, the amount of text to analyze pales in comparison to the amount of text on the pages they crawl every day.
Of course, they could prune their search set considerably if they just assumed that there is no semantic content in most MySpace pages and blog entries.
It doesn't mean not ship with a browser. It means the ability to un-install/get rid of IE without breaking windows so an OEM can for example do a deal with Opera to have their browser as default instead of IE.
Try looking in the control panel in Windows XP - go to add/remove programs, then click on the link at the left that says "Program access and defaults".
OEMs already have the ability to ship a configuration with a default browser/mail/media player that is different from IE/OE/WMP. It doesn't uninstall IE, but it makes the other programs the default.
It makes no sense that a shitty, commercially-architected pop group can gross $10m on a single album while truly talented artists can't even get off the ground
I see statements like that all the time, and I just shake my head in disbelief. The reason that comercially-architected pop groups succeed is simple - more people like them and are willing to pay for their music than that of the "truly talented artists". Deal with it.
We see this all the time, in different areas. Windows outsells Mac OS, and both are more widely used than Linux. More people watched "Transformers" than will ever see "No Country for Old Men", regardless of how many film critics rave about it. More people will read Harry Potter books than will read "War and Peace", despite English Lit being a required course in most (U.S.) schools.
You can't force people to like something against their will, and ridiculing their taste will just piss them off.
Hell, Free/Open Source software gives me that for free, and yet some profit-making enterprise can't afford to do it?
Free/Open Source software does not give you what the grandparent was asking for - a promise to fix bugs so long as the app is in use. FOSS is really more like code escrow. If there is a bug you can fix it, hire someone to fix it, or hope someone else has the same problem and fixes it for you. But the fix won't come automatically.
IANAL, but I think the doctrine of an attractive nuisance could be stretched to fit. That says that even though your pool is on your private property and kids have to trespass to swim in it, you are still required to take proactive steps to prevent that trespass from happening.
Yes, because every marketing exec's wet dream is to get such a reputation as an anti-establishment house that Best Buy and Wal-Mart decide to not carry any Rockstar produced titles.
Get a grip. The major distributors have so much power in the market that keeping them happy is paramount, and none of them want to have trouble based on a game that is going to bring in a miniscule amount of revenue compared to their overall business.
Now I realize this is Slashdot and all, but perhaps Microsoft is doing this because they think that in a head to head competition Windows with all of its attendant baggage and network effects is actually a viable competitor to Linux on the XO?
Remember, the XO is supposed to be sold in lots of a million or more. MS can wine and dine the person placing that order, and try to convince them that having their children growing up knowing Windows is actually a good thing for the children and the local economy. They may even be right, though of course we can't admit that here.
Preserving ubiquity is another good reason, and makes sense for MS even if they expect it to be a money loser. If I were an MS board member I would be concerned about something that had the potential to have millions of Indian or Vietnamese children growing up knowing Linux instead of Windows. It's worth spending money to attempt to head off that future. That is merely a company trying to stay in business, and neither good nor evil in its own right, unless you accept the RMS view that any use of closed software is a moral failing.
As a long time PC gamer I am disappointed to have to agree with you on this.
My PC monitor still has more usable information (i.e. I can see more text and finer detail from 2 feet away than I can on my big screen TV 10 feet away), and I prefer keyboard/mouse gaming to button mashing on a console. And playing on my PC does not prevent my wife from watching TV.
But, and it is becoming an increasingly large concern, I can drop in BioShock or Halo or any other console game and pretty much assume it is going to work. The XBox 360 even makes patching a painless process.
Sadly, gaming on a PC usually means hunting down a bunch of driver updates and game patches before it will run properly, not to mention install programs that seem to take forever.
The console wins on convenience, and that advantage has been getting wider, not narrower.
And why would you say that is relevant? We can't control what happens to soldiers once they are captured. We do control what happens to people we capture, and the laws are fairly explicit and used to be viewed as quite clear cut.
The fact that American soldiers can be tortured or killed is not sufficient cause to threaten to torture and kill the families of terrorism *suspects*.
And of course in this case, the FBI had to admit that this guy was innocent all along.
Or perhaps you think that the people who do torture or kill our soldiers will see how we are mistreating our own prisoners and be moved to change their behavior?
Your first two complaints you mention about Office is that you think it defaulted preference items the wrong way. I think auto-correct should default to on, and I suspect my position is more common than yours. I sometimes find the grammar checker annoying, but usually leave it on since it is a good proofreading aid.
Features like auto-correct, spell check and grammar check should be on for a different reason though - people who don't like them will be motivated to find the item that turns them off. But if they weren't turned on in the first place, most people would never know they were even available and wouldn't go looking for something they assume doesn't exist.
Saving in rich text instead of.doc seems like a petulant reaction that hurts you far more than MS. Does anybody but MS even use rich text anymore?
If your system is virus free, why would a.doc file you save contain a virus? And how does your save preference affect the presence or absence of viruses in.doc files sent to you by others.
And trust me, Bill Gates is not losing any sleep at night worrying about your use of the passive voice.
I admit the summary is inflammatory, but strip away the hyperbole and the implication is there.
Nacchio is claiming that he expected to receive classified government contracts that would have prevented the revenue shortfall, and that therefore he was not guilty of insider trading because he believed the revenue forecasts to be accurate.
Nacchio is clearly not a disinterested party to this, so his assertions have to be examined carefully, but it is at least plausible that after Qwest declined to give the NSA access to their network, NSA decided to give the contract to someone else in retaliation.
I haven't followed the story closely enough to pretend to have an informed opinion on the merits of the argument. Of course, this is/., so I guess that doesn't matter here.
Based on the mods your post received, clearly your sig is correct - people do not know what Troll and Flamebait mean.
Ars Technica had a pretty lengthy article on this case, and it was clear that the woman's defense was extremely implausible. The killer was the judges instruction to the jury that merely sharing something on Kazaa was tantamount to distribution, so the plaintiffs did not have to show actual distribution.
What you are ignoring is that MS has created the financial ecosystem under which these craplets are delivered, thus MS is responsible for them.
That's ridiculous. Craplets harm the customer perception of Windows, with no corresponding financial gain for Microsoft. MS would prefer OEMs to ship clean installs of Windows.
With a clean install they are back to a simpler configuration, and one that was exercised heavily in their QA testing. Boot times are faster because less is getting loaded, and the initial user experience matches what their GUI team intended.
The craplets are a financial windfall to the OEMs, and to the extent that they offset the "Windows tax" they help MS maintain market share, but they definitely do impact customer satisfaction. And despite what the tin-foil brigade believes, MS is in business to make money, and it is easier to make money when your customers are happy.
In the game options there is something along the lines of "auto tutorial". I forget the exact wording, but it is intended to give you clues about things you could be doing but aren't. I notice with things like reminders to "Press X to reload your weapon" and the like.
I don't know for certain, but I could well believe that the Little Sister/Big Daddy message is tied to that option.
In my mind that makes it a training aid, not an immersion breaker.
And here I thought I was the only person who used the style margin. It is insanely useful.
The other thing I miss when using OO.o is the Word Normal view, where it skips header/footers and simply shows a dotted line to indicate a page break. It gives me a much more compact representation of the data while I am still writing, giving me more context to work with.
I'll admit that whether or not you like the ribbon is going to be a matter of personal preference. My wife and I are long time Office 97/XP/2003 users, but in pretty casual use of Office 2007 we felt that the ribbon was an improvement. Things were where we were looking for them, and most often the items we wanted were right there, not buried in a menu. But again, that is mostly going to hinge on personal preference.
But how in the hell does he manage a casual assertion that Word is unusable for documents over 40 pages? Most book manuscripts are submitted in Word these days, and they will normally be in the hundreds of pages. I have produced/edited far more 200+ page documents than I like to think about, and can't recall ever having an instance of crashing or corruption. I've never used master documents in Word mostly because I've never felt the need.
Actually people flock in huge numbers is correct, but I will concede that Americans are far and away the largest subset of those people.
But I think the point still holds. Even if the Europeans and Canadians get disgusted with flocks of Americans and go away, flock of Americans, is still, well, flocks.
While I can't cite any statistics, I can say with near certainty that the US embargo against Cuba is dramatically affecting their tourist trade.
Do the math. The largest economy in the world, with a population of over 300 million, many of whom live in a climate where it is cold and snowy for 4-6 months of the year, many of whom like to vacation in warm climes. IIRC, Cuba is something like 90 miles away from Florida, so it is closer than most of the Caribbean vacation destinations.
People flock in huge numbers to Florida, Mexico, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, etc. Why would they not go to Cuba if the choice were available, and the price was right?
Take away the embargo and I'd be willing to bet Cuban tourism more than doubles.
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Lots of standards have revisions. I presume that before we had 802.11 a/b/g/n we simply had 802.11.
Just hours ago I was reading the TWAIN 1.9a specification. 1.9a being a big tip-off that the spec has changed over time.
My TV and DVD player are connected with HDMI 1.3 compliant cables.
So yes, if there are problems with the standard they will change the standard. That is standard behavior if you will.
And just what is the mechanism by which a program asks for a particular sandbox? That requires a change to the program, and if the developer is willing to change the program, why not just change it so it doesn't do stupid stuff (like write preferences to a file in the \program files tree) to begin with?
Microsoft has been pushing programmers for years to get out of the mode of requiring admin access, and for the huge majority of apps out there it is nothing more complicated than changing some default directories. But because so many developers and users run as admin it doesn't happen.
I run Vista at home and rarely get UAC prompts. When I do it is for things that I expect - trying to change firewall settings, installing new software, etc. It comes up seldom enough that I have never been tempted to turn it off, and if a UAC prompt comes up I didn't expect it would set off some major alarms in my head.
The comments above were all about coca-cola, and for a moment I thought we were still talking about coke.
But there is a parallel - Coke put out a new version of their main product that had tested better than their old one in focus groups. In the real world it was widely ridiculed, sales went down and their brand suffered.
And yet coca-cola is still (or again) the #1 brand.
Come now. One of the benefits of open source that we constantly hear is that if any question of the actual behavior of something comes up, the developer can go straight to the source. Now you are saying that this is a bad thing?
I agree with you that developers should code to the interface as documented, but if that is the case then most open source developers should not look at the source code for the underlying packages they use.
I think MS is doing this to make life simpler for their customers and to cut down on developer support costs. It isn't aimed at the FOSS community and has no particular impact on them either way. And contrary to what many people claim, MS developer support is really pretty good.
More encryption may be a desirable side effect (to us anyway), but if they control the network I am sure that they can find ways around that. Like simply blocking all traffic deemed suspicious, but then opening a hole where various applications can get whitelisted.
For instance, suppose Exchange/Outlook encrypt all mail by default, and get blocked as "suspicious" traffic. MS simply adds a private key digital signature to all messages, and the big backbone providers allow an exemption if the content is signed by something on a white list.
I'm glossing over the whole distinction between an email and its constituent packets of course, but if highly intrusive filtering ever became a reality we could well reach a point where everything not whitelisted is blacklisted.
While I hate the idea of content filtering, and have no love for big content, I am honest enough to admit that piracy (copyright infringement if you must be pedantic) is a very real problem and one that is only going to grow as more and more of our lives move into the digital realm. The people who create and distribute content, whether it is software, music, photos or video, have a right to set the conditions of sale of that content. If you don't like their terms, don't buy it, buy something else that has terms you can live with.
Even with Google's computing resources, I think attempting to do natural language analysis of the entire Internet would be a daunting proposition.
Even though the number of queries processed every day is immense, the amount of text to analyze pales in comparison to the amount of text on the pages they crawl every day.
Of course, they could prune their search set considerably if they just assumed that there is no semantic content in most MySpace pages and blog entries.
Try looking in the control panel in Windows XP - go to add/remove programs, then click on the link at the left that says "Program access and defaults".
OEMs already have the ability to ship a configuration with a default browser/mail/media player that is different from IE/OE/WMP. It doesn't uninstall IE, but it makes the other programs the default.
Technically Safety Dance was not a one hit wonder either - Men Without Hats also did "Pop Goes the World", which I remember hearing on the radio.
I see statements like that all the time, and I just shake my head in disbelief. The reason that comercially-architected pop groups succeed is simple - more people like them and are willing to pay for their music than that of the "truly talented artists". Deal with it.
We see this all the time, in different areas. Windows outsells Mac OS, and both are more widely used than Linux. More people watched "Transformers" than will ever see "No Country for Old Men", regardless of how many film critics rave about it. More people will read Harry Potter books than will read "War and Peace", despite English Lit being a required course in most (U.S.) schools.
You can't force people to like something against their will, and ridiculing their taste will just piss them off.
Free/Open Source software does not give you what the grandparent was asking for - a promise to fix bugs so long as the app is in use. FOSS is really more like code escrow. If there is a bug you can fix it, hire someone to fix it, or hope someone else has the same problem and fixes it for you. But the fix won't come automatically.
IANAL, but I think the doctrine of an attractive nuisance could be stretched to fit. That says that even though your pool is on your private property and kids have to trespass to swim in it, you are still required to take proactive steps to prevent that trespass from happening.
Because you know, think of the children.
Yes, because every marketing exec's wet dream is to get such a reputation as an anti-establishment house that Best Buy and Wal-Mart decide to not carry any Rockstar produced titles.
Get a grip. The major distributors have so much power in the market that keeping them happy is paramount, and none of them want to have trouble based on a game that is going to bring in a miniscule amount of revenue compared to their overall business.
Now I realize this is Slashdot and all, but perhaps Microsoft is doing this because they think that in a head to head competition Windows with all of its attendant baggage and network effects is actually a viable competitor to Linux on the XO?
Remember, the XO is supposed to be sold in lots of a million or more. MS can wine and dine the person placing that order, and try to convince them that having their children growing up knowing Windows is actually a good thing for the children and the local economy. They may even be right, though of course we can't admit that here.
Preserving ubiquity is another good reason, and makes sense for MS even if they expect it to be a money loser. If I were an MS board member I would be concerned about something that had the potential to have millions of Indian or Vietnamese children growing up knowing Linux instead of Windows. It's worth spending money to attempt to head off that future. That is merely a company trying to stay in business, and neither good nor evil in its own right, unless you accept the RMS view that any use of closed software is a moral failing.
As a long time PC gamer I am disappointed to have to agree with you on this.
My PC monitor still has more usable information (i.e. I can see more text and finer detail from 2 feet away than I can on my big screen TV 10 feet away), and I prefer keyboard/mouse gaming to button mashing on a console. And playing on my PC does not prevent my wife from watching TV.
But, and it is becoming an increasingly large concern, I can drop in BioShock or Halo or any other console game and pretty much assume it is going to work. The XBox 360 even makes patching a painless process.
Sadly, gaming on a PC usually means hunting down a bunch of driver updates and game patches before it will run properly, not to mention install programs that seem to take forever.
The console wins on convenience, and that advantage has been getting wider, not narrower.
And why would you say that is relevant? We can't control what happens to soldiers once they are captured. We do control what happens to people we capture, and the laws are fairly explicit and used to be viewed as quite clear cut.
The fact that American soldiers can be tortured or killed is not sufficient cause to threaten to torture and kill the families of terrorism *suspects*.
And of course in this case, the FBI had to admit that this guy was innocent all along.
Or perhaps you think that the people who do torture or kill our soldiers will see how we are mistreating our own prisoners and be moved to change their behavior?
You really need to switch to decaf.
.doc seems like a petulant reaction that hurts you far more than MS. Does anybody but MS even use rich text anymore?
.doc file you save contain a virus? And how does your save preference affect the presence or absence of viruses in .doc files sent to you by others.
Your first two complaints you mention about Office is that you think it defaulted preference items the wrong way. I think auto-correct should default to on, and I suspect my position is more common than yours. I sometimes find the grammar checker annoying, but usually leave it on since it is a good proofreading aid.
Features like auto-correct, spell check and grammar check should be on for a different reason though - people who don't like them will be motivated to find the item that turns them off. But if they weren't turned on in the first place, most people would never know they were even available and wouldn't go looking for something they assume doesn't exist.
Saving in rich text instead of
If your system is virus free, why would a
And trust me, Bill Gates is not losing any sleep at night worrying about your use of the passive voice.
I admit the summary is inflammatory, but strip away the hyperbole and the implication is there.
/., so I guess that doesn't matter here.
Nacchio is claiming that he expected to receive classified government contracts that would have prevented the revenue shortfall, and that therefore he was not guilty of insider trading because he believed the revenue forecasts to be accurate.
Nacchio is clearly not a disinterested party to this, so his assertions have to be examined carefully, but it is at least plausible that after Qwest declined to give the NSA access to their network, NSA decided to give the contract to someone else in retaliation.
I haven't followed the story closely enough to pretend to have an informed opinion on the merits of the argument. Of course, this is
Based on the mods your post received, clearly your sig is correct - people do not know what Troll and Flamebait mean.
Ars Technica had a pretty lengthy article on this case, and it was clear that the woman's defense was extremely implausible. The killer was the judges instruction to the jury that merely sharing something on Kazaa was tantamount to distribution, so the plaintiffs did not have to show actual distribution.
That's ridiculous. Craplets harm the customer perception of Windows, with no corresponding financial gain for Microsoft. MS would prefer OEMs to ship clean installs of Windows.
With a clean install they are back to a simpler configuration, and one that was exercised heavily in their QA testing. Boot times are faster because less is getting loaded, and the initial user experience matches what their GUI team intended.
The craplets are a financial windfall to the OEMs, and to the extent that they offset the "Windows tax" they help MS maintain market share, but they definitely do impact customer satisfaction. And despite what the tin-foil brigade believes, MS is in business to make money, and it is easier to make money when your customers are happy.
No can I download some GPL'ed software and incorporate it into my closed source app which I then sell to others.
In both cases the creator of content puts restrictions on the use of that content.
In all the cases I have the option of finding an alternative - a different OS, different movies, different source code.
In the game options there is something along the lines of "auto tutorial". I forget the exact wording, but it is intended to give you clues about things you could be doing but aren't. I notice with things like reminders to "Press X to reload your weapon" and the like.
I don't know for certain, but I could well believe that the Little Sister/Big Daddy message is tied to that option.
In my mind that makes it a training aid, not an immersion breaker.
And here I thought I was the only person who used the style margin. It is insanely useful.
The other thing I miss when using OO.o is the Word Normal view, where it skips header/footers and simply shows a dotted line to indicate a page break. It gives me a much more compact representation of the data while I am still writing, giving me more context to work with.
I'll admit that whether or not you like the ribbon is going to be a matter of personal preference. My wife and I are long time Office 97/XP/2003 users, but in pretty casual use of Office 2007 we felt that the ribbon was an improvement. Things were where we were looking for them, and most often the items we wanted were right there, not buried in a menu. But again, that is mostly going to hinge on personal preference.
But how in the hell does he manage a casual assertion that Word is unusable for documents over 40 pages? Most book manuscripts are submitted in Word these days, and they will normally be in the hundreds of pages. I have produced/edited far more 200+ page documents than I like to think about, and can't recall ever having an instance of crashing or corruption. I've never used master documents in Word mostly because I've never felt the need.
Actually people flock in huge numbers is correct, but I will concede that Americans are far and away the largest subset of those people.
But I think the point still holds. Even if the Europeans and Canadians get disgusted with flocks of Americans and go away, flock of Americans, is still, well, flocks.
While I can't cite any statistics, I can say with near certainty that the US embargo against Cuba is dramatically affecting their tourist trade.
Do the math. The largest economy in the world, with a population of over 300 million, many of whom live in a climate where it is cold and snowy for 4-6 months of the year, many of whom like to vacation in warm climes. IIRC, Cuba is something like 90 miles away from Florida, so it is closer than most of the Caribbean vacation destinations.
People flock in huge numbers to Florida, Mexico, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, etc. Why would they not go to Cuba if the choice were available, and the price was right?
Take away the embargo and I'd be willing to bet Cuban tourism more than doubles.