Make a list of five (out of thirty-four) games that just happen to be sequels? Brilliant!
Maybe you should take a look at the list of games sometime, for both the PS3 and the Wii. Pretending that games that don't support your argument don't exist just makes you a fanboy.
How is this Insightful? It is nothing more than an excuse.
The problem is that Windows XP shipped 5 years ago.
That's the problem, right there. Microsoft's operating system doesn't contain that many drivers, but that's because a new version hasn't come out for five years - but hang on, isn't that Microsoft's fault too?
If you walk to work and arrive two or three hours late, would your boss accept that you can't be bothered to drive a car, or aren't too fond of public transport? No, you'd get in trouble for it, and any excuses you make would be ignored.
Windows Vista is coming out four or five years late, and (to use my awful analogy even more) isn't even trying to run. Linux is throwing stuff at it from the top of the bus.
You can't complain that the rest of the world is moving too fast when you're the one being slow.
To them, malware isn't a security issue, it's a potential revenue center.
It's more than that, it's a whole new business model. I wonder how much "malware" will get automatically downgraded once Microsoft and the offending company become "partners".
I'm with you here. My sibling post (correct term?) and you make nice points about lazy programmers, so I'm going to go and bash some bad designers, too.
I've found that Windows and its applications are really, really stupid with the way they handle dialog boxes. Kind of off-topic, I know, but since most security issues are luser error, I can guess that most of those are caused by blind click-click-clicking Yes to dialog boxes.
I get a dialog box when I try to delete a file. I get several dialog boxes whenever a program crashes - something about an error report. At my school, they've managed to set up Word so you get three dialog boxes when you open it: one asking you to disable macros (to which the average user goes What?), another telling you that macros have been disabled (yes, that's why I clicked that button) and another telling you that there's a window open.
With so many dialog boxes around, most of them unnecessary, I don't blame the average user for ignoring the important ones. If you press Yes, the nasty evil dialog box will go away. Sooner or later the times comes when you install some spyware trying to get rid of the dialog box.
And what has Vista done? Put even more of them in. Quoth even Paul Thurrott: The problem with UAP is that it throws up an unbelievable number of warning dialogs for even the simplest of tasks. That these dialogs pop up repeatedly for the same action would be comical if it weren't so amazingly frustrating. It would be hilarious if it weren't going to affect hundreds of millions of people in a few short months. It is, in fact, almost criminal in its insidiousness. Gah, showering the user with more dialog boxes is useless, as they ignore them all anyway!
I'm on a roll here. What else?
When I want to Save a document, I go to the button marked Save. At least, I do on Gnome and OS X: Windows likes to have buttons called "Yes", "No" and "Cancel" instead. So instead of doing what I want (Saving), I have to read the dialog to find out which button Saves my document. And most people wouldn't even try to read it; they'd just click Yes and hope it was the right one. Oh, and the dialog text is often in a small font with no discernable main point about what it does.
Windows dialog boxes are obtrusive enough that people would rather make them go away (think: click Yes) than working out what they do. Here's an example of a Mac one - I can tell what each button does before reading, and even if I have to read, there's some nice bold text so I don't have to read it all. Here's the worst example of a Windows one I could find. Note none of the above things that the Mac does right. This isn't the best example, I know, but it points out where Windows fails best.
I reckon you could've eliminated a fair few spyware installs if the "Yes" button was labelled "Install Software", or the "Next" button was lebelled "Accept this Licence", or whatever it is. No more "Let's click Yes to make the nasty evil dialog box go away", but some people will think "Do I really want to install this software?" or "Do I really want to run this program?". It makes people think, and thinking is good when you're trying to make decisions.
Oh, and:
"How dare you try to type at another window when I am here, infidel scum!"
"And Vista dyes the rest of the screen black, just in case you didn't notice me the first time. See?"
Where was I? Oh yes, computer security. I don't think it's fair to blame any and all spyware installations on user error. Windows places you on a path above a crevasse with a bicycle, and expects you to pedal to the other side. Sure, you might get blown off by wind (read: security holes in the OS). Many people
That's great, the post directly below this one says that it won't be turned on by default. In that case, I'll go back to saying that I don't see what the problem is.
I hate that sort of reasoning. Just because most users don't use a feature, doesn't mean they shouldn't include it to make the lives of those who do use it easier.
Oh come on, I know what you're getting at, and it's wrong. There's no way that Norton Internet Security could prevent serious infection from computer viruses.
That's the thing, though - many people don't care. "They're installing a what? Root... kit? But I can't play my music without it, so I'll just click OK."
Same reason why people use Windows. Hotmail was good once (no really, it was!), then it got worse (ads, minuscule storage space, awful spam filtering), and although it's been overtaken (Gmail, Yahoo Mail) people still use what they used to use. Sigh.
Who Cares? I've seen this a lot lately, but I can't see the point. Whenever Product $Bar comes along, people moan about how Product $Foo had this feature first, as if it's going to make any difference to how it operates. I'm not going to use the product that's out first, I'm going to use the product that's best at doing it.
Whenever I use a Mac, I can't get over the way you have to resize windows from the corner only. Windows lets me drag, Mac makes me move then jiggle about a bit then drag. Until the Dock came along, I often got lost in the mountains of windows I had open - Windows organised them all into the taskbar. Back in the day, the Mac zealots boasted how Apple had the whole window managing idea first. This didn't change the fact that I didn't like Apple's window management at all, though. (Luckily it got better with OS X).
Another example: Popup blocking. Opera was the first browser to stop new windows from being opened while browsing. Then Mozilla came along, took Opera's feature, and improved it by only blocking windows while the page loads. To this day, Opera weenies still proudly proclaim "Don't forget, Opera had popup blocking first!". Screw you guys, Opera's implementation sucked. I went with Mozilla's implementation because it didn't block new windows opened by me.
That being said, Microsoft have a long track record for making bad products - IE still uses Opera's old braindead popup blocking method. Heck, DRM had me sold before I heard any other features.
Microsoft isn't an innovator? Oh. There are plenty of reasons to dislike Vista, but I don't care about originality being one of them.
GeoCities was a nice service, but was let down by the ads pane (pain?) taking over half the screen. Yahoo! mail was nice but suffered from too low storage. Lots of people here are turned off by "portal"-style pages with loads of links on them - Google put their search page first and moved all the links someplace else.
I've noticed that Google seem to wait for a technology to develop, see where it trips up, then make its own GVersion. Kind of nifty, really.
In mythology, Atlas and the Titans revolted against the Olympians, lost, had his brothers betray him, and was punished to carry the world. Is this some sort of metaphor for the IE development cycle?
Slashdot Mirror
Make a list of five (out of thirty-four) games that just happen to be sequels? Brilliant!
Maybe you should take a look at the list of games sometime, for both the PS3 and the Wii. Pretending that games that don't support your argument don't exist just makes you a fanboy.
How is this Insightful? It is nothing more than an excuse.
The problem is that Windows XP shipped 5 years ago.
That's the problem, right there. Microsoft's operating system doesn't contain that many drivers, but that's because a new version hasn't come out for five years - but hang on, isn't that Microsoft's fault too?
If you walk to work and arrive two or three hours late, would your boss accept that you can't be bothered to drive a car, or aren't too fond of public transport? No, you'd get in trouble for it, and any excuses you make would be ignored.
Windows Vista is coming out four or five years late, and (to use my awful analogy even more) isn't even trying to run. Linux is throwing stuff at it from the top of the bus.
You can't complain that the rest of the world is moving too fast when you're the one being slow.
what in Ruby's syntax is borrowed from Perl?
$_
MS just wants to sell insecure products and then sell you repair kits to fix them.
Bingo.
To them, malware isn't a security issue, it's a potential revenue center.
It's more than that, it's a whole new business model. I wonder how much "malware" will get automatically downgraded once Microsoft and the offending company become "partners".
Yes, breaks are important.
Of course. Otherwise all your code ends up on one line, and it gets really hard to read.
I'm with you here. My sibling post (correct term?) and you make nice points about lazy programmers, so I'm going to go and bash some bad designers, too.
I've found that Windows and its applications are really, really stupid with the way they handle dialog boxes. Kind of off-topic, I know, but since most security issues are luser error, I can guess that most of those are caused by blind click-click-clicking Yes to dialog boxes.
I get a dialog box when I try to delete a file. I get several dialog boxes whenever a program crashes - something about an error report. At my school, they've managed to set up Word so you get three dialog boxes when you open it: one asking you to disable macros (to which the average user goes What?), another telling you that macros have been disabled (yes, that's why I clicked that button) and another telling you that there's a window open.
With so many dialog boxes around, most of them unnecessary, I don't blame the average user for ignoring the important ones. If you press Yes, the nasty evil dialog box will go away. Sooner or later the times comes when you install some spyware trying to get rid of the dialog box.
And what has Vista done? Put even more of them in. Quoth even Paul Thurrott: The problem with UAP is that it throws up an unbelievable number of warning dialogs for even the simplest of tasks. That these dialogs pop up repeatedly for the same action would be comical if it weren't so amazingly frustrating. It would be hilarious if it weren't going to affect hundreds of millions of people in a few short months. It is, in fact, almost criminal in its insidiousness. Gah, showering the user with more dialog boxes is useless, as they ignore them all anyway!
I'm on a roll here. What else?
When I want to Save a document, I go to the button marked Save. At least, I do on Gnome and OS X: Windows likes to have buttons called "Yes", "No" and "Cancel" instead. So instead of doing what I want (Saving), I have to read the dialog to find out which button Saves my document. And most people wouldn't even try to read it; they'd just click Yes and hope it was the right one. Oh, and the dialog text is often in a small font with no discernable main point about what it does.
Windows dialog boxes are obtrusive enough that people would rather make them go away (think: click Yes) than working out what they do. Here's an example of a Mac one - I can tell what each button does before reading, and even if I have to read, there's some nice bold text so I don't have to read it all. Here's the worst example of a Windows one I could find. Note none of the above things that the Mac does right. This isn't the best example, I know, but it points out where Windows fails best.
I reckon you could've eliminated a fair few spyware installs if the "Yes" button was labelled "Install Software", or the "Next" button was lebelled "Accept this Licence", or whatever it is. No more "Let's click Yes to make the nasty evil dialog box go away", but some people will think "Do I really want to install this software?" or "Do I really want to run this program?". It makes people think, and thinking is good when you're trying to make decisions.
Oh, and:
"How dare you try to type at another window when I am here, infidel scum!"
"And Vista dyes the rest of the screen black, just in case you didn't notice me the first time. See?"
Where was I? Oh yes, computer security. I don't think it's fair to blame any and all spyware installations on user error. Windows places you on a path above a crevasse with a bicycle, and expects you to pedal to the other side. Sure, you might get blown off by wind (read: security holes in the OS). Many people
I guess if he makes more than one prediction at once, there's more of a chance that he'll be right with at least one of them!
More importantly, what the heck is "wibbling"?
That's great, the post directly below this one says that it won't be turned on by default. In that case, I'll go back to saying that I don't see what the problem is.
I'm worried if BitLocker will be turned on by default, without the user knowing. "Hey, this Linux thing won't let me read my Windows files!"
That's a very rational idea
Shell? Most users never even know it's there.
I hate that sort of reasoning. Just because most users don't use a feature, doesn't mean they shouldn't include it to make the lives of those who do use it easier.
Halo?
Hi!
Oh come on, I know what you're getting at, and it's wrong. There's no way that Norton Internet Security could prevent serious infection from computer viruses.
Haven't they already done a thing like this before? Maybe they've only just patented it. Either way I don't see a story here.
If you're suffering from information overload, the last place you want to be is here.
Soooo many stories...
That's the thing, though - many people don't care. "They're installing a what? Root... kit? But I can't play my music without it, so I'll just click OK."
Same reason why people use Windows. Hotmail was good once (no really, it was!), then it got worse (ads, minuscule storage space, awful spam filtering), and although it's been overtaken (Gmail, Yahoo Mail) people still use what they used to use. Sigh.
Someone's been watching too much Star Trek. It's "what do you get when you multiply six by nine?", not seven.
Who Cares? I've seen this a lot lately, but I can't see the point. Whenever Product $Bar comes along, people moan about how Product $Foo had this feature first, as if it's going to make any difference to how it operates. I'm not going to use the product that's out first, I'm going to use the product that's best at doing it.
Whenever I use a Mac, I can't get over the way you have to resize windows from the corner only. Windows lets me drag, Mac makes me move then jiggle about a bit then drag. Until the Dock came along, I often got lost in the mountains of windows I had open - Windows organised them all into the taskbar. Back in the day, the Mac zealots boasted how Apple had the whole window managing idea first. This didn't change the fact that I didn't like Apple's window management at all, though. (Luckily it got better with OS X).
Another example: Popup blocking. Opera was the first browser to stop new windows from being opened while browsing. Then Mozilla came along, took Opera's feature, and improved it by only blocking windows while the page loads. To this day, Opera weenies still proudly proclaim "Don't forget, Opera had popup blocking first!". Screw you guys, Opera's implementation sucked. I went with Mozilla's implementation because it didn't block new windows opened by me.
That being said, Microsoft have a long track record for making bad products - IE still uses Opera's old braindead popup blocking method. Heck, DRM had me sold before I heard any other features.
Microsoft isn't an innovator? Oh. There are plenty of reasons to dislike Vista, but I don't care about originality being one of them.
You ain't seen nothin' yet
... they're just becoming the next Yahoo.
Is that so bad a thing? I kind of liked Yahoo.
GeoCities was a nice service, but was let down by the ads pane (pain?) taking over half the screen. Yahoo! mail was nice but suffered from too low storage. Lots of people here are turned off by "portal"-style pages with loads of links on them - Google put their search page first and moved all the links someplace else.
I've noticed that Google seem to wait for a technology to develop, see where it trips up, then make its own GVersion. Kind of nifty, really.
In mythology, Atlas and the Titans revolted against the Olympians, lost, had his brothers betray him, and was punished to carry the world. Is this some sort of metaphor for the IE development cycle?