Marketing has one goal: to make you think different about something. I'm not so sure about that.
Let me give you an example. It was when my dad first went on the internet. I, having been on the world wild web for many years, mentally filter out all ads on the web pages. What he saw, and got interested in, was an ad for a boat trip. It was nothing fancy, nothing persuasive, it was just basically "hey, we have some extra cheap tours going from here to there this and that weekend. Interested? Click here for more information."
Now, I honestly can see nothing wrong with that one. Since all marketing is bad, according to you, this must be bad too. But as I said, I can't see why. Could you help me out here a bit?
As for the trip, he didn't take it, because he didn't have the time for it. Just incase anyone wondered about it.
A software flaw.. I wouldn't call it that. Design flaw maybe.
The real problem is that the software player need to decode the video at some point, and for that it needs to use the key. The question is rather, can a program use a set of data (the key) in a way that no other programs can read it? The way it is now, no.
This may change with the trusted computing stuff that is coming, unless someone find a weakness there too..
So, until then, the key will be revoked, and the company have two choices. Update with a new key (that will probably be copied out from the player the same day), or get a lot of angry customers complaining that their program don't work anymore.
Sure, they could add some fancy trickery to make it harder to read the key, but commercial software have tried that for years and years (copy protection) and still aren't even close to the goal.
Point 1 have never been a problem for me. I usually use the built in gnome burner, and for the occasions that ain't enough, I use k3b. Never had to type in my password for burning a cd.
Second part, nr 3 and your last straw. The first made me suspicious, the second confirmed it. I'm 99% certain that you don't have the right drivers for your graphics card. (either running some vesa stuff, or a suboptimal driver (happens often with nvidia and ati cards, where the open source drivers usually don't give direct rendering.))
And nr 4, true, by default setting up wireless is horrible in ubuntu, but a little gem called "network manager" pretty much fixes that. It haven't been in default install because of some bugs, but is planned to be installed by default in the next ubuntu release.
As for 5 - that's why I use windows now. Games, to be exact. Wine doesn't quite cut it.. yet:)
I have been running vista for a month now, and that goddamn thing is DAMN annoying, popping up several times a day. Sudo at least assume that you are going to use the machine for a few minutes after typing in the password. So if you do some sysadmining task, it pop up up maybe 2-3 times total. UAC pops up about 500 times.. the first minute.
When I think about it, the times UAC pops up is when you need deeper access (changes in firewall, installing a program, deleting a file you dont own, run any system tools (defrag, scandisk for example), installing a browser plugin, displaying all the processes on the pc, things like that. But maybe linux is built different, and you dont need to do stuff like that as much. Plus the caching part probably help a lot.
Another thing that's really irritating about UAC. Lets say a program opens a listening port. Windows firewall pops up, and then you click Unblock, and then UAC pops up and ask if the dialog you just clicked Unblock on should be allowed to do what you just said it should do. Half of the places UAC pops up, its a response to a dialog you answered half a second ago. It's extremely annoying. As a bonus it use a second on dimming the screen, and then a second undimming it again.
As I've said, I've been running vista for a month now as my only OS, and I'm sick and tired of it already. Aero gets boring after a week, and uac gets boring after half a minute. The new folder system feels extremely messy for me, and the warning dialogs pop up all the time. And the "something went oops, figuring out what to do" dialogs are damn annoying. Lets say your program crash. It spend 20 seconds "figuring out what to do", then it ask if it can contact microsoft. After that it thinks for 20 more seconds, then "the program died, close it". Next time, it spends 20 seconds finding out the same thing. You want to scream to it "Just get the thing the HELL away from my screen so I can restart the program!"
This is getting a bit long. Basically, UAC is just as irritating as you've heard, and it have company. Something to look forward to, aint it?:)
And while reading that, a Pratchett quote popped into my head. And I never miss a chance to quote Pratchett, so here it comes:
People whose concept of ancient history is the first series of Star Trek may be treated with patience, because it's usually not their fault they were reduced to getting their education from school.
-- (Terry Pratchett, alt.books.pratchett)
From my studies of evil genius documentaries, it seems that they like cats just as much as atomic bombs. I haven't figured out why yet, but my current theory is that cats are the only beings in the universe that are more evil than the geniuses themselves.
8 character passwords are in the realm of today's private sector computers. And if you think people will sit at the prompt, well.. think again:p An attacker would make a backup of the disc, find the encryption used, and start cracking.
even a separate boot disk cannot even recognize the HD as being a bootable disk; it looks like an unformatted drive.
Well, thats how encrypted data should look like. But the machine will need to be able to read it, and for that it needs some software. Which means that there must be something unencrypted a standard computer can read. But that's beside the point.
You've yet to explain how it stops for example a very small usb key, set to boot first, that have this logic: 1st boot, provide a fake prompt, get password from user, save on usb key, display "wrong password", and pass to real pw window. Next boots, skip directly to real pw prompt. (don't do the mistake many people do, center their reply on the "usb" part. it could also have been a cd, diskette, a change in the boot loader for the encrypted program, who knows, some really smart people might have gotten it all in a modified BIOS. Or just attaching a small physical key logger on the keyboard cable. And maybe a few more ways i haven't thought about.) Of course, this would be a targeted attack by determined people. But if you aren't expecting such attacks, then why have all that security?
As I said, I've been theorizing about how to secure a laptop, and every idea I've had, I've also found a weakness that I would be able to use to break it. The only thing I've seen yet is hardware like Trusted Computing.
Laptops are imaged using an image that is encrypted using a good encryption program that encrypts the entire hard drive using a 512 bit key, and NO laptops are allowed to be bought without going through our recieving process where that image is installed.
I was just wondering, how do you do that? Where is the key saved? Is the user required to type in a 512 bit key every time they start?
If it's saved in hardware, something along the trusted computing stuff, I can understand it. But how many laptops have that?
Otherwise, it brings me a feeling of uneasiness. Let me explain
If the user need to type the password :
Does the user need to remember the exact 512bit key (the hex equiv)? I bet he's written it down somewhere easily accessible.
Does the user write in a password which is then hashed? Won't the security hinge on the password, then? A 512bit key is uncrackable, true. But is a 8 char password?
If the user require to type the password in, is it software based? Can a potential cracker change the boot loader to get the password, type "Wrong password" and then save the pw and give the user the real prompt?
If the user dont need to type the password, where do the system get the password from, and is that storage location safe from a potential cracker?
I've been thinking on securing my own laptop, but the problem is, as long as I dont have special hardware, every idea I've had I would have been able to get around. So I'm curious how you've done it.
Faction points: endlessly repeat same task for hours and hours. ive never seen the point in that.
Honor : Meet new and interesting people, and get killed by them. Its a bit like "normal" deathmatch, really.
Raid : endlessly repeat same task for hours and hours. With 39 other players that need to work coordinated as one team. A bit more
fun, and quite social actually.
"The Auction House game" :
- Virtual Stock Market. well, virtual merchant game anyway. Tried that once, spent some time finding
cheap stuff at AH and selling it at market value (read: what some nutcase would pay for it).
Quite fun, actually, and a good change from the grind.
He forgot the #1 thing a lvl 60 does (at least it seems like that leveling up): Killing lowbies that dont stand a chance against you.
How about every 100th patent automatically goes into the public domain?
You know, that is truly a brilliant idea!
..... Patent 98 : Method for extracting gold from common dirt Patent 99 : Cure for every disease known to man Patent 100 : Method for eating waffels upside down Patent 101 : Method of gaining unlimited energy from nothing .....
A nice use of the pervasive desktop search integrated into the explorer windows is in Control Panel. We're pretty good about changing control panel wildly between releases, and I never remember which menu your system environment variables or enabling remote desktop or changing it so that the "Explorer:Start Navigation" sound is (none). Now i just hit "start->control panel", click in the search box for something like "sound" and i get search-as-i-type results that are pretty accurate and take me right to the control panel i want to go to.
Yes, tried that. Went back to classic view pretty fast. Want to know why? First, lets try with the "new" way. Click in search box, type in "s o u n", oh, there it is. move hand to mouse, click on icon.
Classic view: Click on icon.
You might spot a difference there. Sure, it takes a bit of time to find the right icon to click, but its still much faster than using the search system.
I've tried a few 3d packages, and in most of them I could just sit down and wing it until I started to understand how things worked. Not blender. However, when I sat down and used a day on actually LEARNING the system, I found it both faster and easier than the other packages (mainly lightwave and 3ds max).
It kinda reminds me of what Neal Stephenson wrote in the essay "In the beginning was the command line".
"So we are now asking the GUI to do a lot more than serve as a glorified typewriter. Now we want to become a generalized tool for dealing with reality. This has become a bonanza for companies that make a living out of bringing new technology to the mass market.
Obviously you cannot sell a complicated technological system to people without some sort of interface that enables them to use it. The internal combustion engine was a technological marvel in its day, but useless as a consumer good until a clutch, transmission, steering wheel and throttle were connected to it. That odd collection of gizmos, which survives to this day in every car on the road, made up what we would today call a user interface. But if cars had been invented after Macintoshes, carmakers would not have bothered to gin up all of these arcane devices. We would have a computer screen instead of a dashboard, and a mouse (or at best a joystick) instead of a steering wheel, and we'd shift gears by pulling down a menu:
A few lines of computer code can thus be made to substitute for any imaginable mechanical interface. The problem is that in many cases the substitute is a poor one. Driving a car through a GUI would be a miserable experience. Even if the GUI were perfectly bug-free, it would be incredibly dangerous, because menus and buttons simply can't be as responsive as direct mechanical controls. My friend's dad, the gentleman who was restoring the MGB, never would have bothered with it if it had been equipped with a GUI. It wouldn't have been any fun.
The steering wheel and gearshift lever were invented during an era when the most complicated technology in most homes was a butter churn. Those early carmakers were simply lucky, in that they could dream up whatever interface was best suited to the task of driving an automobile, and people would learn it. Likewise with the dial telephone and the AM radio. By the time of the Second World War, most people knew several interfaces: they could not only churn butter but also drive a car, dial a telephone, turn on a radio, summon flame from a cigarette lighter, and change a light bulb."
I think this especially fits the discussion about Blender VS other 3d packages. May it be that the simplest interface might not neccesarily be the best interface for a job?
name me one major hollywood movie with more realistic IT in it.
Hackers.
I've read the book Digital Fortress, and I've seen hackers several times. And seriously, that movie is actually more realistic... It's scary, but true.
Major Kernel Overhaul The whole kernel has been reorganized and rewritten to help prevent software from affecting the system in unsavory ways. In Vista, it should be much more difficult for unauthorized programs (like Viruses and Trojans) to affect the core of the OS and secretly harm your system.
Yep, linux got a lot of catching up to do here... Also, they'll try to increase various small stuff in their kernel (about bloody time..) and, oh look here(screenshot), set up automatic defrag. How novel.
A key improvement to the root file system and memory management of Vista is a technology called SuperFetch. SuperFetch learns which applications and bits and pieces of the OS you use most and preloads them into memory, so you don't have to wait for a bunch of hard drive paging before your apps or documents load. Microsoft has developed a pretty sophisticated prioritization scheme that can even differentiate which applications you are most likely to use at different times (on the weekend vs. during the week, or late at night vs. in the middle of the afternoon).
Sorry, im just to cynical to call this a good thing yet.. MS have shown a remarkable talent to screw things like this up.
Networking Good support of ipv6, better firewall and decent performance. Yay. Who's catching up to who?
Major Audio Changes Ok, ill admit they have some neat ideas here.
DirectX 10 I'll quote this : DX10 is going to be Vista-only. - which means we probably wont see this in use for many years. Besides, dont see the big connection between dx10 and "linux playing catch up". Linux tend to promote opengl and SDL for that kind of stuff. I have no experience in either, so cannot do any real comparison.
New Built-In Apps hmmm, some kind of automated backup of files, protected by the OS? I sure hope they dont let viruses in on the fun.. personally, I think i would prefer a versioning file system instead..
mail, calendar stuff, photo gallery, movie maker, wmp11... many linux distros already have equal or better alternatives for most of those programs (maybe except movie maker.. and wmp11, if you think of the itunes-clone part)
Aero Glass and the New UI Ok, this is a bit interesting, eyecandy ftw! But Xgl, Cairo, kde4, E17... also very interesting.. Calling it catch-up? no, lets call it a race instead.
Security, Security, and more Security It'll be interesting to see the result, but who's catching up to who?
I'd say that linux already have raised the bar, and microsoft is playing catch-up right this moment, and hope they can raise the bar again, or at least come out equal. I'm mostly writing this comparison based on my experiences with ubuntu, and what I've read and seen of dapper.
Oh, and I've seen the new microsoft backup program mentioned a lot in the article, but havent commented on it, because i dont find it fit in specifically under any of those headings. But I want to mention that ubuntu dapper have something in its specslist, https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/home-us er-backup
Slashdot Mirror
Let me give you an example.
It was when my dad first went on the internet. I, having been on the world wild web for many years, mentally filter out all ads on the web pages. What he saw, and got interested in, was an ad for a boat trip. It was nothing fancy, nothing persuasive, it was just basically "hey, we have some extra cheap tours going from here to there this and that weekend. Interested? Click here for more information."
Now, I honestly can see nothing wrong with that one. Since all marketing is bad, according to you, this must be bad too. But as I said, I can't see why. Could you help me out here a bit?
As for the trip, he didn't take it, because he didn't have the time for it. Just incase anyone wondered about it.
A software flaw.. I wouldn't call it that. Design flaw maybe.
The real problem is that the software player need to decode the video at some point, and for that it needs to use the key.
The question is rather, can a program use a set of data (the key) in a way that no other programs can read it? The way it is now, no.
This may change with the trusted computing stuff that is coming, unless someone find a weakness there too..
So, until then, the key will be revoked, and the company have two choices. Update with a new key (that will probably be copied out from the player the same day), or get a lot of angry customers complaining that their program don't work anymore.
Sure, they could add some fancy trickery to make it harder to read the key, but commercial software have tried that for years and years (copy protection) and still aren't even close to the goal.
Sometimes reinventing the wheel can be a good thing
Just a few things.
:)
Point 1 have never been a problem for me. I usually use the built in gnome burner, and for the occasions that ain't enough, I use k3b. Never had to type in my password for burning a cd.
Second part, nr 3 and your last straw. The first made me suspicious, the second confirmed it. I'm 99% certain that you don't have the right drivers for your graphics card. (either running some vesa stuff, or a suboptimal driver (happens often with nvidia and ati cards, where the open source drivers usually don't give direct rendering.))
And nr 4, true, by default setting up wireless is horrible in ubuntu, but a little gem called "network manager" pretty much fixes that. It haven't been in default install because of some bugs, but is planned to be installed by default in the next ubuntu release.
As for 5 - that's why I use windows now. Games, to be exact. Wine doesn't quite cut it.. yet
You can hear it from me, then.
:)
I have been running vista for a month now, and that goddamn thing is DAMN annoying, popping up several times a day.
Sudo at least assume that you are going to use the machine for a few minutes after typing in the password. So if you do some sysadmining task, it pop up up maybe 2-3 times total. UAC pops up about 500 times.. the first minute.
When I think about it, the times UAC pops up is when you need deeper access (changes in firewall, installing a program, deleting a file you dont own, run any system tools (defrag, scandisk for example), installing a browser plugin, displaying all the processes on the pc, things like that. But maybe linux is built different, and you dont need to do stuff like that as much. Plus the caching part probably help a lot.
Another thing that's really irritating about UAC. Lets say a program opens a listening port. Windows firewall pops up, and then you click Unblock, and then UAC pops up and ask if the dialog you just clicked Unblock on should be allowed to do what you just said it should do. Half of the places UAC pops up, its a response to a dialog you answered half a second ago. It's extremely annoying. As a bonus it use a second on dimming the screen, and then a second undimming it again.
As I've said, I've been running vista for a month now as my only OS, and I'm sick and tired of it already. Aero gets boring after a week, and uac gets boring after half a minute. The new folder system feels extremely messy for me, and the warning dialogs pop up all the time. And the "something went oops, figuring out what to do" dialogs are damn annoying. Lets say your program crash. It spend 20 seconds "figuring out what to do", then it ask if it can contact microsoft. After that it thinks for 20 more seconds, then "the program died, close it". Next time, it spends 20 seconds finding out the same thing. You want to scream to it "Just get the thing the HELL away from my screen so I can restart the program!"
This is getting a bit long. Basically, UAC is just as irritating as you've heard, and it have company. Something to look forward to, aint it?
lets get all science about it
Science? In a school? You must be kidding.
And while reading that, a Pratchett quote popped into my head.
And I never miss a chance to quote Pratchett, so here it comes:
People whose concept of ancient history is the first series of Star Trek
may be treated with patience, because it's usually not their fault they
were reduced to getting their education from school.
-- (Terry Pratchett, alt.books.pratchett)
I would never put fedora on my wii. Much too painful.
Or were you talking about the game console?
With a hammer.
Actually, with wine 0.9.25 you dont need any patches.
Dont worry. There is still lots of cats around.
From my studies of evil genius documentaries, it seems that they like cats just as much as atomic bombs.
I haven't figured out why yet, but my current theory is that cats are the only beings in the universe
that are more evil than the geniuses themselves.
Ok, a few points.
:p
8 character passwords are in the realm of today's private sector computers. And if you think people will sit at the prompt, well.. think again
An attacker would make a backup of the disc, find the encryption used, and start cracking.
even a separate boot disk cannot even recognize the HD as being a bootable disk; it looks like an unformatted drive.
Well, thats how encrypted data should look like. But the machine will need to be able to read it, and for that it needs some software. Which means that there must be something unencrypted a standard computer can read. But that's beside the point.
You've yet to explain how it stops for example a very small usb key, set to boot first, that have this logic: 1st boot, provide a fake prompt, get password from user, save on usb key, display "wrong password", and pass to real pw window. Next boots, skip directly to real pw prompt. (don't do the mistake many people do, center their reply on the "usb" part. it could also have been a cd, diskette, a change in the boot loader for the encrypted program, who knows, some really smart people might have gotten it all in a modified BIOS. Or just attaching a small physical key logger on the keyboard cable. And maybe a few more ways i haven't thought about.) Of course, this would be a targeted attack by determined people. But if you aren't expecting such attacks, then why have all that security?
As I said, I've been theorizing about how to secure a laptop, and every idea I've had, I've also found a weakness that I would be able to use to break it. The only thing I've seen yet is hardware like Trusted Computing.
I was just wondering, how do you do that? Where is the key saved? Is the user required to type in a 512 bit key every time they start?
If it's saved in hardware, something along the trusted computing stuff, I can understand it. But how many laptops have that?
Otherwise, it brings me a feeling of uneasiness. Let me explain
If the user need to type the password :
If the user dont need to type the password, where do the system get the password from, and is that storage location safe from a potential cracker?
I've been thinking on securing my own laptop, but the problem is, as long as I dont have special hardware, every idea I've had I would have been able to get around. So I'm curious how you've done it.
Faction points: endlessly repeat same task for hours and hours. ive never seen the point in that.
Honor : Meet new and interesting people, and get killed by them. Its a bit like "normal" deathmatch, really.
Raid : endlessly repeat same task for hours and hours. With 39 other players that need to work coordinated as one team. A bit more
fun, and quite social actually.
"The Auction House game" :
- Virtual Stock Market. well, virtual merchant game anyway. Tried that once, spent some time finding
cheap stuff at AH and selling it at market value (read: what some nutcase would pay for it).
Quite fun, actually, and a good change from the grind.
He forgot the #1 thing a lvl 60 does (at least it seems like that leveling up): Killing lowbies that dont stand a chance against you.
Microsoft word is the law, you commie hippie zealot!
How about every 100th patent automatically goes into the public domain?
.....
.....
You know, that is truly a brilliant idea!
Patent 98 : Method for extracting gold from common dirt
Patent 99 : Cure for every disease known to man
Patent 100 : Method for eating waffels upside down
Patent 101 : Method of gaining unlimited energy from nothing
http://www.ariel.com.au/jokes/The_Evolution_of_a_P rogrammer.html
A nice use of the pervasive desktop search integrated into the explorer windows is in Control Panel. We're pretty good about changing control panel wildly between releases, and I never remember which menu your system environment variables or enabling remote desktop or changing it so that the "Explorer:Start Navigation" sound is (none). Now i just hit "start->control panel", click in the search box for something like "sound" and i get search-as-i-type results that are pretty accurate and take me right to the control panel i want to go to.
Yes, tried that. Went back to classic view pretty fast. Want to know why? First, lets try with the "new" way. Click in search box, type in "s o u n", oh, there it is. move hand to mouse, click on icon.
Classic view: Click on icon.
You might spot a difference there. Sure, it takes a bit of time to find the right icon to click, but its still much faster than using the search system.
I've tried a few 3d packages, and in most of them I could just sit down and wing it until I started to understand how things worked. Not blender. However, when I sat down and used a day on actually LEARNING the system, I found it both faster and easier than the other packages (mainly lightwave and 3ds max).
It kinda reminds me of what Neal Stephenson wrote in the essay "In the beginning was the command line".
"So we are now asking the GUI to do a lot more than serve as a glorified typewriter. Now we want to become a generalized tool for dealing with reality. This has become a bonanza for companies that make a living out of bringing new technology to the mass market.
Obviously you cannot sell a complicated technological system to people without some sort of interface that enables them to use it. The internal combustion engine was a technological marvel in its day, but useless as a consumer good until a clutch, transmission, steering wheel and throttle were connected to it. That odd collection of gizmos, which survives to this day in every car on the road, made up what we would today call a user interface. But if cars had been invented after Macintoshes, carmakers would not have bothered to gin up all of these arcane devices. We would have a computer screen instead of a dashboard, and a mouse (or at best a joystick) instead of a steering wheel, and we'd shift gears by pulling down a menu:
PARK
---
REVERSE
---
NEUTRAL
----
3
2
1
---
Help...
A few lines of computer code can thus be made to substitute for any imaginable mechanical interface. The problem is that in many cases the substitute is a poor one. Driving a car through a GUI would be a miserable experience. Even if the GUI were perfectly bug-free, it would be incredibly dangerous, because menus and buttons simply can't be as responsive as direct mechanical controls. My friend's dad, the gentleman who was restoring the MGB, never would have bothered with it if it had been equipped with a GUI. It wouldn't have been any fun.
The steering wheel and gearshift lever were invented during an era when the most complicated technology in most homes was a butter churn. Those early carmakers were simply lucky, in that they could dream up whatever interface was best suited to the task of driving an automobile, and people would learn it. Likewise with the dial telephone and the AM radio. By the time of the Second World War, most people knew several interfaces: they could not only churn butter but also drive a car, dial a telephone, turn on a radio, summon flame from a cigarette lighter, and change a light bulb."
I think this especially fits the discussion about Blender VS other 3d packages. May it be that the simplest interface might not neccesarily be the best interface for a job?
name me one major hollywood movie with more realistic IT in it.
Hackers.
I've read the book Digital Fortress, and I've seen hackers several times. And seriously, that movie is actually more realistic... It's scary, but true.
Did I forget anything?
You forgot that the apparent bad guy is the good guy in the end, and the helpful good non-hero character is the criminal mastermind.
About http://www.winsupersite.com/images/reviews/vista_5 342_rev5_01.jpg ... Hope you like it, hope you really like it. I tried the beta a bit, just looking around, and it popped up constantly. We're talking 5-10 DPM (dialogs per minute) average.
This will be turned off as soon as people can find the right button.. And we're all back where we started.
order to, er, protect my girlfriend's sensibilities. Can't have her unwittingly downloading such naughty stuff you know.
Just download with your left hand, then.
Sorry, just cant help myself :)
... also very interesting.. Calling it catch-up? no, lets call it a race instead.
s er-backup
s table
Major Kernel Overhaul
The whole kernel has been reorganized and rewritten to help prevent software from affecting the system in unsavory ways. In Vista, it should be much more difficult for unauthorized programs (like Viruses and Trojans) to affect the core of the OS and secretly harm your system.
Yep, linux got a lot of catching up to do here...
Also, they'll try to increase various small stuff in their kernel (about bloody time..) and, oh look here(screenshot), set up automatic defrag. How novel.
A key improvement to the root file system and memory management of Vista is a technology called SuperFetch. SuperFetch learns which applications and bits and pieces of the OS you use most and preloads them into memory, so you don't have to wait for a bunch of hard drive paging before your apps or documents load. Microsoft has developed a pretty sophisticated prioritization scheme that can even differentiate which applications you are most likely to use at different times (on the weekend vs. during the week, or late at night vs. in the middle of the afternoon).
Sorry, im just to cynical to call this a good thing yet.. MS have shown a remarkable talent to screw things like this up.
Networking
Good support of ipv6, better firewall and decent performance. Yay. Who's catching up to who?
Major Audio Changes
Ok, ill admit they have some neat ideas here.
DirectX 10
I'll quote this : DX10 is going to be Vista-only. - which means we probably wont see this in use for many years. Besides, dont see the big connection between dx10 and "linux playing catch up". Linux tend to promote opengl and SDL for that kind of stuff. I have no experience in either, so cannot do any real comparison.
New Built-In Apps
hmmm, some kind of automated backup of files, protected by the OS? I sure hope they dont let viruses in on the fun.. personally, I think i would prefer a versioning file system instead..
mail, calendar stuff, photo gallery, movie maker, wmp11... many linux distros already have equal or better alternatives for most of those programs (maybe except movie maker.. and wmp11, if you think of the itunes-clone part)
Aero Glass and the New UI
Ok, this is a bit interesting, eyecandy ftw! But Xgl, Cairo, kde4, E17
Security, Security, and more Security
It'll be interesting to see the result, but who's catching up to who?
I'd say that linux already have raised the bar, and microsoft is playing catch-up right this moment, and hope they can raise the bar again, or at least come out equal. I'm mostly writing this comparison based on my experiences with ubuntu, and what I've read and seen of dapper.
Oh, and I've seen the new microsoft backup program mentioned a lot in the article, but havent commented on it, because i dont find it fit in specifically under any of those headings. But I want to mention that ubuntu dapper have something in its specslist, https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/home-u
Dapper specstable : https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/dapper/+spec
Its not just vista, theres lots of interesting stuff going on there too.
"Your IP address has scored: -2. This is ranked #7166 of the 7166 IP's spotted so far."
My life in a nutshell, really..
no, not on the comment, the mods :) The comment itself is okay, as it is good practice to salt anyway ;)