Vista is selling slow on Planet Slashdot only; in RL, Microsoft just announced today the financial results, and it roundly beat analysts' expectations. Here is MarketWatch's take on this.
the writer seems to think encryption can solve this problem, encryption cant help here as the system is unable to communicate back to negotiate the setup, and if the signals are encrypted with a predetermined key it will be susceptible to replay attacks
Actually, the newer GPS navigators Garmin makes (the Nuvi 680 for example) get their data from the MSN Direct network, which uses encryption. A denial of service is possible against them (by jamming the radio signal, which would require a lot of power, and will draw the FCC's ire), but the kind of attack described here would be much more dificult. A replay attack wouldn't be easy either; there are a number of mechanisms dealing with that. For example, the current time (read from the GPS network) can be used as part of the key, or of the IV for CBC. If the attacker would then try to replay old frames, the messages wouldn't decrypt.
I was talking about upgrading to Vista and kinda highlighted it to draw attention to the outrageousness of the statement. With the recent lawsuit about the sales of computers up to the release of Vista as "Vista ready" even though they were really not, points out that the upgrade process to Vista is pretty damn steep.
I see.
Well, anecdotally, of course, I upgraded one of my XP machines to Vista and the upgrade worked well. I don't see any compelling reason yet to upgrade the others, especially since I'm running Server 2003, which has been rather stable for me, but I had no particular difficulty with the Vista installation. It was a pretty vanilla machine though; with more exotic hardware I'd expect some driver-related headaches.
I guess you're ridiculing me when you say "I get the joke", because I wasn't really joking
No, I wasn't trying to ridicule you - I really thought you were kidding. Vista has launched very recently; it's really too early for it to have more than a few percent penetration. I thought your original post was riffing on that, mocking the slashbot inclination to put everything about MSFT in a bad light, no matter how unreasonable the argument.
Compare that with the ONLY way to upgrade on the PC side - buy a new machine, and you begin to see the appeal of Vista over OS X when it comes to hardware sales.
I'm sorry, what?
Maybe I misunderstand, but what do you mean, the only way to upgrade on the PC side is to buy a new machine? That is *so* not true it's not even funny. I certainly upgraded my PCs dozens of times; I still have a chimera machine somewhere that started it's life back in the dark ages as a 486/66 running DOS and Windows 3.1 and is now a Pentium II running Windows ME, after being upgraded to Win 3.11, 95 and 98 in the meantime. It also went through quite a few hardware upgrades (at least 3 different video cards, at least 4 hard drive changes, CD and DVD readers added and removed, and so on). I think the only original parts still in are the case/power supply and an ancient Soundblaster. Oh, and the keyboard. They made good keyboards in the old days, nothing like the mushy modern stuff.
I get the joke, but Vista seems to do rather well on retail (at least that's what big retailers say here). And MSFT commented somewhere (says the article in the link) that Vista sold more licenses in the first month after release than XP sold in twice that time.
Why stop at thousands of years? if the deity likes to plant false evidence, how about creating the Earth three years ago, and planting false memories in your head? Or three hours ago. Or three seconds. Anyone supporting creationism must support this argument too.
the figures you cite... don't in any way refute my statement as to what is widely reported.
Uhh... Yes, they do. Sorry.
Here, for example, is a report of the type that I mentioned, which is the first hit returned by Google on "Microsoft profit breakdown Office Windows".
If you had bothered to look at the article you're citing you may have observed it was published in 2002. Long past its shelf life, in an industry as dynamic as software.
You will of course note that I indicated that I didn't know whether the reports were true. Don't be so quick to criticize.
You posted false information (even if you got moderated informative) and I corrected you. That's not criticism. It's more like a public service.
It is widely reported that Microsoft makes its money on Windows and Office. The other products earn little or even lose money
No, it isn't reported, and no, other products do make (lots of) money. It's very easy to look it up too: the breakdown of earnings per division can be found here. You can see that out of 5 divisions, 3 are operating at a gain, and two at a loss. The Entertainment and Devices Division (XBox) and Online Services Business (MSN) are in the red. Windows, Office and SQL Server are in the black
The business division of interest for this particular article is Server And Tools, makers of SQL Server. Here's what Business Week says about this division here: Microsoft's server and tools business, long Microsoft's lone growth engine, had another blowout period, posting its 18th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth. Its SQL server database software posted particularly sharp gains, up 30% for the period. That helped the division's sales jump 17% to $2.9 billion
It's an ancient legal doctrine, dating since Roman times: "Ignorantia juris non excusat" (ignorance of the law is no excuse). It would be much to easy to break any law and plead ignorance.
Here's the thing. If the people submitting to Exxon/Mobil are submitting made up bullshit then it shouldn't withstand review and become a laughingstock. If nothing else, that should help to strengthen the human derived global warming stance.
You're right, it probably won't withstand review. This is unfortunately not the point at all. Passing a peer review is an important benchmark for scientists, but it's completely meaningless to the public. Exxon/Mobil doesn't want to argue scientifically. They want to confuse the public, and especially the politicians. They'll point to the study, and say things like "Scientists can't even agree with each other", and "there is no consensus". Then their lobbyists and pet politicians can fight a rearguard action and maintain the extremely profitable status quo (have you seen the latest profit numbers for Exxon?). The whole thing is FUD written large.
Why does it matter? What is the business reason for developing more female engineers? Do computers designed by women run quicker?
Computers designed by women may be more attractive to women; that will let you tap a market currently underserved and increase your customer count. That directly translates into more cash, so it matters.
You're ignoring a simple fact that invalidates all your points. If Apple dies, OS X dies with it. If OS X dies, so does the hypothetical clone Mac market.
Not at all; first, even if Apple fails, current OSX users would still be able to run their existing programs and get hardware and application support from their hardware vendor and the application developer.
Second, if Apple failed, OSX would be one of the major saleable assets - one of the clone manufacturers would buy it immediately. It's not unprecedented in the industry - a company develops an OS, then fails and the OS is purchased by somebody else. Look at for example at Be and NeXT. And if the buyer was a serious Mac clone maker users should get (almost) uninterrupted support.
And third, even if OSX died, the users and Mac clone vendors can switch to Linux, Windows or other operating systems running on their Mac compatibles. They would still have hardware support and would be able to upgrade or fix their computer when they need to. There will be a transition period, with users dual booting or using Parallels or some equivalent tool for OSX-only apps; all new Mac applications will target the new OS.
Wouldn't users be better off this way, rather than putting all their eggs in Apple's basket?
The reason Jobs got rid of the 3rd party manufacturers is because it was cannibalizing their own sales. It almost put them out of business the first time, and the prospects look about the same if they entered that arena again. Please explain how Apple bankrupting themselves is good for Mac users.
Ok, here are a few ways
users would have choice (choice is good, remember?)
competing companies will have a strong motivation to come up with innovation
smaller companies will expand into vertical markets and narrower niches currently too small or specialized for Apple to care about
competition will push prices down and that will increase the user base
a larger user base will provide incentives for more companies to develop Mac software (games, anyone?) and hardware (drivers)
Mac users won't be left high and dry if Apple fails.
and maybe we won't get any more "I'm a Mac" "I'm a PC" ads (ok, that's a joke)
Their donor's list reads like a Who's Who of the Far Left. And THAT, my friend, is their only agenda
Note that you haven't actually argued about the truth or falsehood of the UCS's statement. You're comitting a logical fallacy which is unfortunately all too common in conservative circles. It's known as bulverism and it means substituting an argument about some subject with an argument about the opponent. For example:
"X is true"
"You're only saying that because you're a (man/woman/Christian/Muslim/liberal/conservative)"
While this type of "reasoning" is quite widespread on Fox News (with the argument about the opponent often a personal attack), it's still completely wrong.
I think that this analogy still misses it. With a barn raising by twenty people, at the end, just one family has the barn. No one else uses that barn.
The problem with all these analogies is that software is not analogous to physical things. Software is more analogous to the design of the barn. If I decide that it would make more sense to have a barn with two doors rather than one door, it doesn't hurt me in any way for every other barn to have two doors.
Thinking about barn doors, designing and debugging the concept will take some of your time though. This is time you're not using to create income. Since you're giving the results of your thinking away without compensation, you have a net loss - so it *does* hurt you. There is no direct material advantage to come up with new concepts and designs - an individual is better off building his barns (and earning income) and incorporating somebody else's new designs as they become available (since they're free). Non-thinkers will therefore be more successful than thinkers (at least, from the net income point of view).
Now I've heard two main counter-arguments to that: first, that by contributing to the global pool of knowledge, the whole community is better off (so it's a moral obligation to contribute without asking for compensation). That may be true for the community, but people *don't* think that way. While the open-source as communism trope is really too simplistic, this is a similarity - and it was one of the big failures of communism. Communism also required that individuals put the common good over the individual good. They tried to force that through indoctrination (AKA "education", "creation of the new man"), coupled with enforcement. Of course, it didn't work. A system designed around people as they are, as opposed to how we'd like them to be has more chances of success.
The second argument I heard is that people can earn non-material compensation from putting their intellectual work in the public domain. That compensation can be respect, reputation, karma, whuffie, or other types. I don't really think that works though (and the failure of the model is pretty obvious in the failure of shareware). People can respect the )(*& out of somebody, but very few will translate the respect in material contributions. And when push comes to shove, your kids can't eat respect.
Not a good example; I don't think professional atletes interbreed enough to become a separate subspecies, and 2 generations is much too short anyway.
My beef with the article is that it's so parochial: I'd expect medicine and genetics to advance enough in the next 50-100 years to make standard darwinian evolution pretty much obsolete for humans. People will be able to tailor themselves (or at least their children) pretty much any way they feel like. When this happens, fashion will become the engine of evolution. Biological evolution will start behaving like cultural evolution: it will change to a lamarckian model: acquired traits (i.e., things the parent has *learned*) will become transmissible to the offspring without requiring the random mutation/selection mechanism. And one of the characteristics of the lamarckian model is that it's so much faster: in 100000 years I'd expect not just 2 varieties of humans; I'd expect probably as many varieties as there are people.
You have to be kidding, I'm not particularly an apologist of Linux on the desktop (although that's what I use and that's what I install in managed corporate settings) but install the Windows OS and basically all you've got is a broken web browser and a fairly bad text editor.
What else would you want? A media player? [chicken type=little]Monopoly! Monopoly! Monopoly![/chicken]
Slashdot Mirror
Vista is selling slow on Planet Slashdot only; in RL, Microsoft just announced today the financial results, and it roundly beat analysts' expectations. Here is MarketWatch's take on this.
Actually, the newer GPS navigators Garmin makes (the Nuvi 680 for example) get their data from the MSN Direct network, which uses encryption. A denial of service is possible against them (by jamming the radio signal, which would require a lot of power, and will draw the FCC's ire), but the kind of attack described here would be much more dificult. A replay attack wouldn't be easy either; there are a number of mechanisms dealing with that. For example, the current time (read from the GPS network) can be used as part of the key, or of the IV for CBC. If the attacker would then try to replay old frames, the messages wouldn't decrypt.
It's a standard way for measuring mineral's hardness, used extensively in geology for identifying and classifying minerals. More here
I don't really care about literature. I prefer to read a good book.
(Thanks to Terry Pratchett for the wonderful quip)
I was talking about upgrading to Vista and kinda highlighted it to draw attention to the outrageousness of the statement. With the recent lawsuit about the sales of computers up to the release of Vista as "Vista ready" even though they were really not, points out that the upgrade process to Vista is pretty damn steep.
I see.
Well, anecdotally, of course, I upgraded one of my XP machines to Vista and the upgrade worked well. I don't see any compelling reason yet to upgrade the others, especially since I'm running Server 2003, which has been rather stable for me, but I had no particular difficulty with the Vista installation. It was a pretty vanilla machine though; with more exotic hardware I'd expect some driver-related headaches.
I guess you're ridiculing me when you say "I get the joke", because I wasn't really joking
No, I wasn't trying to ridicule you - I really thought you were kidding. Vista has launched very recently; it's really too early for it to have more than a few percent penetration. I thought your original post was riffing on that, mocking the slashbot inclination to put everything about MSFT in a bad light, no matter how unreasonable the argument.
Compare that with the ONLY way to upgrade on the PC side - buy a new machine, and you begin to see the appeal of Vista over OS X when it comes to hardware sales.
I'm sorry, what?
Maybe I misunderstand, but what do you mean, the only way to upgrade on the PC side is to buy a new machine? That is *so* not true it's not even funny. I certainly upgraded my PCs dozens of times; I still have a chimera machine somewhere that started it's life back in the dark ages as a 486/66 running DOS and Windows 3.1 and is now a Pentium II running Windows ME, after being upgraded to Win 3.11, 95 and 98 in the meantime. It also went through quite a few hardware upgrades (at least 3 different video cards, at least 4 hard drive changes, CD and DVD readers added and removed, and so on). I think the only original parts still in are the case/power supply and an ancient Soundblaster. Oh, and the keyboard. They made good keyboards in the old days, nothing like the mushy modern stuff.
This strikes me as low for a brand new windows OS
I get the joke, but Vista seems to do rather well on retail (at least that's what big retailers say here). And MSFT commented somewhere (says the article in the link) that Vista sold more licenses in the first month after release than XP sold in twice that time.
Why stop at thousands of years? if the deity likes to plant false evidence, how about creating the Earth three years ago, and planting false memories in your head? Or three hours ago. Or three seconds. Anyone supporting creationism must support this argument too.
Also known as Last Thursdayism
the figures you cite ... don't in any way refute my statement as to what is widely reported.
Uhh... Yes, they do. Sorry.
Here, for example, is a report of the type that I mentioned, which is the first hit returned by Google on "Microsoft profit breakdown Office Windows".
If you had bothered to look at the article you're citing you may have observed it was published in 2002. Long past its shelf life, in an industry as dynamic as software.
You will of course note that I indicated that I didn't know whether the reports were true. Don't be so quick to criticize.
You posted false information (even if you got moderated informative) and I corrected you. That's not criticism. It's more like a public service.
It is widely reported that Microsoft makes its money on Windows and Office. The other products earn little or even lose money
No, it isn't reported, and no, other products do make (lots of) money. It's very easy to look it up too: the breakdown of earnings per division can be found here. You can see that out of 5 divisions, 3 are operating at a gain, and two at a loss. The Entertainment and Devices Division (XBox) and Online Services Business (MSN) are in the red. Windows, Office and SQL Server are in the black
The business division of interest for this particular article is Server And Tools, makers of SQL Server. Here's what Business Week says about this division here: Microsoft's server and tools business, long Microsoft's lone growth engine, had another blowout period, posting its 18th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth. Its SQL server database software posted particularly sharp gains, up 30% for the period. That helped the division's sales jump 17% to $2.9 billion
>>Why knowingly? Ignorance is not an excuse;
>Why not?
It's an ancient legal doctrine, dating since Roman times: "Ignorantia juris non excusat" (ignorance of the law is no excuse). It would be much to easy to break any law and plead ignorance.
Here's the thing. If the people submitting to Exxon/Mobil are submitting made up bullshit then it shouldn't withstand review and become a laughingstock. If nothing else, that should help to strengthen the human derived global warming stance.
You're right, it probably won't withstand review. This is unfortunately not the point at all. Passing a peer review is an important benchmark for scientists, but it's completely meaningless to the public. Exxon/Mobil doesn't want to argue scientifically. They want to confuse the public, and especially the politicians. They'll point to the study, and say things like "Scientists can't even agree with each other", and "there is no consensus". Then their lobbyists and pet politicians can fight a rearguard action and maintain the extremely profitable status quo (have you seen the latest profit numbers for Exxon?). The whole thing is FUD written large.
Why does it matter? What is the business reason for developing more female engineers? Do computers designed by women run quicker?
Computers designed by women may be more attractive to women; that will let you tap a market currently underserved and increase your customer count. That directly translates into more cash, so it matters.
If you can do that, why not just stick with the DVD and upgrade the players to play MPEG4?
:(
They are, in a limited way; see here for example. Of course, you need to burn your own HD media for now
You're ignoring a simple fact that invalidates all your points. If Apple dies, OS X dies with it. If OS X dies, so does the hypothetical clone Mac market.
Not at all; first, even if Apple fails, current OSX users would still be able to run their existing programs and get hardware and application support from their hardware vendor and the application developer.
Second, if Apple failed, OSX would be one of the major saleable assets - one of the clone manufacturers would buy it immediately. It's not unprecedented in the industry - a company develops an OS, then fails and the OS is purchased by somebody else. Look at for example at Be and NeXT. And if the buyer was a serious Mac clone maker users should get (almost) uninterrupted support.
And third, even if OSX died, the users and Mac clone vendors can switch to Linux, Windows or other operating systems running on their Mac compatibles. They would still have hardware support and would be able to upgrade or fix their computer when they need to. There will be a transition period, with users dual booting or using Parallels or some equivalent tool for OSX-only apps; all new Mac applications will target the new OS.
Wouldn't users be better off this way, rather than putting all their eggs in Apple's basket?
Ok, here are a few ways
Good enough for a start?
Their donor's list reads like a Who's Who of the Far Left. And THAT, my friend, is their only agenda
"
Note that you haven't actually argued about the truth or falsehood of the UCS's statement. You're comitting a logical fallacy which is unfortunately all too common in conservative circles. It's known as bulverism and it means substituting an argument about some subject with an argument about the opponent. For example:
"X is true"
"You're only saying that because you're a (man/woman/Christian/Muslim/liberal/conservative)
While this type of "reasoning" is quite widespread on Fox News (with the argument about the opponent often a personal attack), it's still completely wrong.
I think that this analogy still misses it. With a barn raising by twenty people, at the end, just one family has the barn. No one else uses that barn.
The problem with all these analogies is that software is not analogous to physical things. Software is more analogous to the design of the barn. If I decide that it would make more sense to have a barn with two doors rather than one door, it doesn't hurt me in any way for every other barn to have two doors.
Thinking about barn doors, designing and debugging the concept will take some of your time though. This is time you're not using to create income. Since you're giving the results of your thinking away without compensation, you have a net loss - so it *does* hurt you. There is no direct material advantage to come up with new concepts and designs - an individual is better off building his barns (and earning income) and incorporating somebody else's new designs as they become available (since they're free). Non-thinkers will therefore be more successful than thinkers (at least, from the net income point of view).
Now I've heard two main counter-arguments to that: first, that by contributing to the global pool of knowledge, the whole community is better off (so it's a moral obligation to contribute without asking for compensation). That may be true for the community, but people *don't* think that way. While the open-source as communism trope is really too simplistic, this is a similarity - and it was one of the big failures of communism. Communism also required that individuals put the common good over the individual good. They tried to force that through indoctrination (AKA "education", "creation of the new man"), coupled with enforcement. Of course, it didn't work. A system designed around people as they are, as opposed to how we'd like them to be has more chances of success.
The second argument I heard is that people can earn non-material compensation from putting their intellectual work in the public domain. That compensation can be respect, reputation, karma, whuffie, or other types. I don't really think that works though (and the failure of the model is pretty obvious in the failure of shareware). People can respect the )(*& out of somebody, but very few will translate the respect in material contributions. And when push comes to shove, your kids can't eat respect.
Just take a look at professional athletes
Not a good example; I don't think professional atletes interbreed enough to become a separate subspecies, and 2 generations is much too short anyway.
My beef with the article is that it's so parochial: I'd expect medicine and genetics to advance enough in the next 50-100 years to make standard darwinian evolution pretty much obsolete for humans. People will be able to tailor themselves (or at least their children) pretty much any way they feel like. When this happens, fashion will become the engine of evolution. Biological evolution will start behaving like cultural evolution: it will change to a lamarckian model: acquired traits (i.e., things the parent has *learned*) will become transmissible to the offspring without requiring the random mutation/selection mechanism. And one of the characteristics of the lamarckian model is that it's so much faster: in 100000 years I'd expect not just 2 varieties of humans; I'd expect probably as many varieties as there are people.
Microsoft is actually releasing DirectX 9.L, which will have features of DirectX 10 and also allow DX10 games under Windows XP.
Seems not to be the case
Slipstream SP2
Slipstream security updates as well
Or get updates as ISO images and burn your own CDs
Windows doesn't know how to do software RAID either
You mean like that?
You have to be kidding, I'm not particularly an apologist of Linux on the desktop (although that's what I use and that's what I install in managed corporate settings) but install the Windows OS and basically all you've got is a broken web browser and a fairly bad text editor.
What else would you want? A media player? [chicken type=little]Monopoly! Monopoly! Monopoly![/chicken]
Microsoft has sold about five million consoles in eight months.
They wouldn't be talking about a goal of 6M in 12 months then. I'd be surprised if they sold substantially more than half
And they aren't; they're talking 10 million