I unfortunately know him well enough to understand that he is a borderline psychopath in regards to his empathy for other human beings.
I believe there is some cause and effect here. People with antisocial personality disorder have little empathy towards others and many emotions are muted. As a result, they learn rules for what actions and appearance of emotion will elicit a given reaction from other people. Instead of empathizing with a woman who is emotionally distressed, they think of themselves, what it is they want from that person, and what action is likely to get them what it is they want. Anyone can do this and learn to manipulate others, but not many people really do study it. People with antisocial personality disorder are forced to learn it from a young age just to get by, and tend to be very good at it.
When will people realise that Freeness and open-sourceness is not a measure of quality. How many people use Gobuntu and can seriously say it's better than Ubuntu?
Being free and open is a feature, from the perspective of the end user. It provides a small amount of future proofing for the software, allows users to fix bugs or customize things or audit for security holes if they have the skill or money, and it prevents the popularity of a given package being leveraged by the developer to hurt end users. As such, being free and open is a measure of quality, just as much as the inclusion of any other feature is.
Now for some people being free and open is a very important feature (like enterprises looking to do a widespread deployment of some new application). or other people, it is not a very important feature at all. And for still others, it is an important feature, but they don't understand why that is or by what mechanism it brings benefits. "Better" is a very relative term depending upon your needs and wants.
You know, in abstract, I don't think this is all bad. If you ask me, companies like Microsoft and Apple (and anyone else making office suites) should be involved in making ODF v2. If it's really going to be the common, standard interchange format for office suites, everyone should have input.
Agreed. The problem is, MS doesn't play nice. They'll provide input, but more importantly they'll likely try to derail useful features from others while they try to create proprietary extensions to do the same things all while failing to comply fully with the standards and not bothering to implement any portions that might be too useful and lead customers to buy more powerful competing applications (in some specific way).
We all saw how this worked with MS's input into Web standards... which they've managed to single handedly prevent real progress in the use of, for many years now.
If you download a file using Internet Explorer, an NTFS file attribute is set that marks it as "downloaded - untrusted". Double click the file and you get a popup asking "DO you want to run this executable?"
As I recall, that is true of Vista, but in XP only explorer knows about the flag, not the entire OS, so running it from the command line of via a script bypasses this... as does using windows explorer to autorun the files as in the demo.
Use Firefox or other browser, and the attribute isn't set, or copy to a fileserver that doesn't support extended attributes, and it's lost.
Firefox on Vista, currently does set the attribute for new files.
No reason why Apple couldn't figure out what flag IE sets and have Safari do same on Windows, either.
I know. I mentioned this specifically as something Apple should fix. I did point out, however, that on OS X, downloaded files from any application are set to this by default and developers need to figure out how to set a flag to override this. On Windows, downloaded files need to be set by each application and the default is to not flag them. Ignoring Safari and IE, this is an issue for all programs that download files and MS chose a poor default.
This is a laugh an a half. I am pretty sure if I took an informal survey of my acquaintances many would not even know what a download manager was if I asked them. People nowadays just instinctively close the download manager window, both in Firefox and Safari.
Maybe they don't now the name, but most know what the little window showing their downloads is and even if they click to close it, they still know it is happening and see the icon. It certainly is not any more a conditioned response to close it than it is to click through the warning in Firefox.
Like I said before, there is no social engineering required *AT ALL*. Just pick a common application name and odds are they already have it installed and it *WILL* be clicked.
That is social engineering. You're tricking people into thinking it is a different program than it is. In order for it to work, you have to guess what application shortcuts they have on their desktop (if they have any), including the right icon.
Yeah, except for the fact that aside from the former Safari flaw there *IS NO WAY* to do this with any of the top web browsers, they all prompt for confirmation before downloading a file.
So what? People just click past them as often as not and they can even disguise the program as data with a clever name.
I am going to go out on a limb here and even argue on MS's side, in that IMO, this is not an IE flaw at all.
Automatically running a program without the user explicitly requesting that, just because it is on the desktop? Please. How often is that useful, compared to the risk it presents? That is a serious flaw.
If your security model relies on the fact that an application never has the working directory set to an alternate location, then you have big problems.
It's not security relying upon it. It is Windows making an exception and auto-running things from their default location for new files. That's just stupid.
Namely, you should not be storing.EXE or.DLL file son your desktop for any reason
Why not? Using the desktop metaphor and the fact that most users store things on their desktop and that shortcuts to programs are on the desktop, why would you expect a normal user to not store said files on the desktop?
The EU went too far. I mean... a new version, that can't include Media Player, and can't even be labelled properly? Seriously?
The EU did not go far enough. The media player software market is still pretty destroyed. Can you really argue that if WMA was not bundled into Windows it would even be used by anyone? You're right that the particular remedy they tried was stupid, but wrong about the direction. OEMs should be choosing which media player to include, be it WMP, iTunes, Realplayer, or Mplayer. MS should not be able to force everyone to have WMP, just because they have a monopoly on desktop OS's. The market would be much better for al of us, if OEMs were able to pick the one they think would be best for their users, without having to deal with MS's illegal incentives.
The real question is why are you defending Apple's unethical bundling - when the same is performed by Microsoft we criticize it.
Actually, in Apple's case it is tying, but not bundling. The concept is the same, except for two things. First, it has to be tying to a monopolized product. In this case Apple is tying iTunes to the iPod (which is nearly a monopoly force) and which they, in turn, tied to Safari. In this case, however, those markets are both already destroyed by MS's prior monopoly abuse into those same markets. Apple is actually helping those markets by leveraging the iPod to bring some choice into those markets. Compare, for example, MS's affect upon Web standards and compare it to Apple's influence.
For me, no. For millions of uneducated end users, it is. Get it?
You injected this in a discussion of technical merits and flaws. This is neither. This is an economic issue, you've brought up. You should not confuse the two. I don't see this as a technical issue, and as an economic issue so far the affect has been positive.
Just letting it download and then moving on to the next file is...well such an obviously stupid behaviour[sic].
I disagree. If I click a link to download something, well obviously I want to download it. Clicking a second time to confirm is an annoyance. Apple's solution is to let things download, but put them in the downloads folder and flag them as untrusted content from the internet (well not flag them as trusted, since the default is untrusted). That is to say, that is their solution on OS X. On Windows, there is no download folder and for some reason they screwed up and did not flag it as untrusted in Vista (XP does not support that either). In my mind, their solution on OS X is superior, because it also helps solve the problem of executables masquerading as data. It means I can download a picture without any extra clicking and when I open it, I know it is just a picture. When I download an executable and then run it, I get a warning that it is a new executable (thus informing me it isn't data). I also get a link to open up the originating page so if it was downloaded a while ago, I can go see if it was something I wanted or a drive-by download or a trojan I thought was data at the time I downloaded it. From a larger perspective, I think it makes more sense to handle this type of solution at the OS level, since there are so many different programs that download files. It is better to have one good, consistent solution than a bunch of different ones of different quality levels. This fix from Apple is actually a work-around for Windows lack of support for Apple's better (IMHO) solution.
That is not to say everything is kosher. As far as I know Apple still isn't flagging executables as new on Vista where they stupidly default to trusted. Apple should have had a limit on the number of automatic downloads in response to a click or page load (probably one file) instead of letting one link download a dozen or more files. Apple also should have looked more closely at the way Windows works and tuned their solution from the start. One of the biggest problems with Safari on Windows is that it is a port and Apple has to recreate bits of OS X that Windows is missing as well as work around weird flaws in the Windows way of handling things. Apple has been less than stellar at this both with Safari and other software for Windows.
Still, I think downloading files in Safari on OS X is still a lot better designed security concept than downloading files in Firefox on Windows. Firefox might be a more secure practical solution at this point though, because although their concept is not as secure, their code has been hammered on and tested a lot more resulting in a less buggy implementation.
Last I checked the "new" software was still checked by default - and I really don't feel like installing anything that ASU comes with right now. So does anyone know if they finally fix THAT idiocy?
Why would they need to "fix" it. It is operating as they prefer it, the same as all the software MS includes in Windows that most of us would prefer we did not have to install. Is it so difficult for you to uncheck that box if you're performing an update?
Surely anyone with half a brain HAS TO ADMIT that the Safari vulnerability is FAR WORSE than IE setting it's current path to the windows desktop.
Certainly not for the average Slashdot user and arguably not for anyone. Safari won't overwrite a user's existing icons, just add new ones. I also opens a download manager so users know something is being added. There are some pretty ignorant users out there, but not many that won't take not that some random Web site is downloading something called "Firefox.exe" to their desktop with an icon that looks just like their Web browser's. Finally, I notice you use the present tense. The ability to do this in Safari has been fixed, whereas the flaw with Windows has not. So, yeah I'd say the flaw in Windows is currently a FAR WORSE vulnerability, as you put it.
The main thing here, is the Safari flaw requires user interaction to work by itself, which means you have to manage a social engineering feat and get people to do something (double click and icon). With the flaw in Windows, any download from any source that they can get on a user's desktop can be automatically run.
Considering that they have an open source codebase to work from, which wasn't true of Java at the time, they don't have much of an excuse to write a buggy implementation.
They didn't have an excuse at the time, either, which is why the courts convicted them of antitrust abuse for doing it.
I just don't believe the last part "and edit the document you were sending" comes up very often.
For some of us, it comes up quite often. As tools get better and more people are online with easy networking, I think collaboration on documents will also become more common and choice of tools to use with a real, open standard becomes more important as well.
In those cases I'd much rather get a PDF.
Usually I agree (although.doc is better if I'm mining it for data the user didn't know they sent). For the average person, however, this may be a different story for a number of reasons. First, the most popular PDF reader (Adobe's) is horribly slow and bloated in tis default configuration and most users don't know of better option or how to use it. Most users are not even capable of copying and pasting text from it into something else. Combine this with PDFs on the Web using IE+WinXP+Adobe's plugin and you have a terrible experience for the average person reading PDFs from the Web. This leads a lot of people to avoid the format altogether and.doc is the next closest thing the average person has seen for communications of that sort.
If it's a collaborative editing situation, I'd rather use something like Google docs (and have).
Google docs is fairly new and is still a bit lacking in features for many people. It is also not really an option for a lot of internal communications in a work environment. I do think collaborative editing will move to ODF unless MS manages to upset things.
So after all of the time and money and arm twisting MS engaged in because they had to have THE open standard, they're just going to say 'Oh well, ODF was better anyway'?
Well, yes. But that's just what they say in public. In private they're probably saying, "oh shit, we were way too obvious and public about our criminal behavior and the EU looks ready to stomp on us hard for this one. Maybe if we pretend to roll over and pretend to support ODF for a while, the EU will not make this a priority and use the courts to force us to play nice, with real consequences and oversight. At least if we look like we're willing to be open, we can subtly break compatibility with others and try to extend it with proprietary DRM or something. Really anything that stops us from being declared to have monopoly influence in the office suite market and doesn't make us compete purely on our software's merits is workable."
Now we shall all have to wait and see if MS plays nice with ODF because they are scared of the EU, or if they try to extend and break the standard to prevent true interoperability, as they have done with HTML, CSS, etc. since being late to the Web standards game.
The oil companies pay more taxes than, say software companies.
Oil companies pay less in taxes than most companies with similar overall profits. Moreover, taxes are often used by society to repay costs to society incurred by a given industry. The oil industry is polluting my air, even if I don't drive a car or use it for heat. Why can't I bill them for the deleterious effects upon my health? Moreover, why isn't the government taxing them and using the money to pay back society for the less direct costs of their business, costs borne by all of us.
A thief did not steal money from me today - I suppose you will call that a break.
If it were economical to harness energy from all those sources, don't you think the greedy capitalists would've been all over it?
Geothermal is comprised of a number of different technologies. The one I was referring to was one where you pump water out of underground mines to heat collectors, then back underground. It uses, well, no toxic anything released anywhere. The only geothermal energy I can think of that does involve toxic chemicals is harnessing thermal vents, which are already emitting toxic gasses into the atmosphere. They just run it past some turbines (corroding them in the process).
If it were economical to harness energy from all those sources, don't you think the greedy capitalists would've been all over it?
Actually, those are all economical ways if the US government would stop subsidizing the oil companies, giving them tax breaks (and I mean all subsidies, including the expense of wars to defend oil fields). But there is a climate opposing change and distrusting alternative energy because business see it as being pushed by charities as an expense. This often leads companies to ignore and not even consider alternative energy.
For example, several companies have demonstrated they can get cheaper, cleaner power for a very small investment in geothermal, if they're in a city or area with flooded mines. a plastics manufacturer installed such a system and was paid back in less than a year and their ongoing energy costs are not only gone, but generating a profit by selling it. At the same time, the power was cleaner, allowing them to move into food grade plastics for higher profit. That company has since opened another facility in another town and used the same power scheme, but their advance has been virtually ignored by industry and no one (so far) seems interested in copying it.
Another problem is the corporate culture in the US no longer rewards executives for long term successes and executive switch companies long before and long-term effects of the actions are felt. This discourages any long term action that has a short term cost or any investment in the future of the company beyond a few years. Most alternative energy sources have a longer payback period, on the order of many years.
Please. I won't argue how slowly things are progressing, but it sure isn't fast. Nine years ago I used to use voice commands to check my e-mail and have it read to me. Since then, voice commands have not improved significantly. But there is an easy market where we can see stagnation. How about Web technologies. IE partially supports 8 year old standards and fails to implement significantly anything since. For high-tech, that is extreme stagnation.
Further, DRM isn't an "anti-feature". At worst, it's irrelevant (you have no DRM-encumbered content). At best, it's a distinctly useful feature because it allows you to access said DRM-encumbered content.
Disabling or degrading the quality of video output is an anti-feature because no user wants that to happen. When your OS cripples itself because you upgraded your hardware that is an anti-feature. MS has enough power to stop DRM from negatively effecting their customers, but they don't because they don't need to because they don't compete with anyone.
To be blunt, your assertion that Windows has "slowed innovation" has _zero_ supporting evidence...
Please. Pick up an economics text for a change. Monopolies always slow innovation. There is plenty of evidence, but you'll never see it because you don't want to. You're the worst MS apologist I've ever heard. You don't seem interested in reason or evidence, just support for what you've already decided.
Especially given that, as of now, pretty much all the mainstream, mass-market OSes have arrived at essentially the same basic feature set, at around the same time (+/- a year or two).
There is only one mass market desktop OS. There are other major OS, just not in the OS market. The whole point is that innovation has slowed because investors are not motivated to put money into making better ones, because the market is monopolized.
There's as much a "market" for spell checkers (most word processors come with them, to say nothing of things like aspell) as there was a "market" for web browsers in the mid 90s.
Not true at all. There were several browsers for sale in the 90s and still more supported by advertising (which is a market). Aspell is nonprofit and not ad supported. Spell checkers built into other programs for other purposes are not the same market. We've ahd similar discussions before. You're just being intentionally obtuse because you just don't want to admit anything that might conflict with what you want to believe. It's rather sad.
I know/. hates MS, but any sincere customer centric resolution to anti-trust *outside* of the corpration's home country would be done diplomatically with that countries[sic] government.
The corporation's home country sold out and did jack and shit after MS was convicted because MS made huge donations to campaign funds and the prosecutors were replaced by those politicians right after the election. When american companies file suit against other american companies in the EU it is significant vote of "no confidence" in the US court system... and they're right. The US courts took many many years to do nothing about obvious criminal actions on MS's part. The EU has been super-lenient, and has been very diplomatic, but they, at least, have made MS stop a few of their most obvious abuses. But, MS is still breaking the law every day. They know they're going to be convicted and fined. It is part of their business plan to break the law and hope the fines are less than the profits. Personally, I hope someone fines them enough and requires enough reparations that it does become unprofitable. That's the only way MS will ever stop.
At that point, generally, innovation slows to a slow crawl because it's cheaper to get sales by breaking compatibility with your competitors than doing real work. Which explains why Windows has remained unchanged and unimproved since the early 1990s.
Oh, wait, it hasn't.
No it hasn't. It slows innovation, rather than stops it completely. You'll note they've mostly integrated features from other markets and added anti-features like DRM.
If Microsoft provided a spellchecker component with Windows, people like you would be screaming antitrust at the top of their lungs, just like they do about every other piece of functionality Windows provides.
They'd have no real grounds. MS has implemented dozens of integrations that are clear-cut antitrust abuse, but since there is no separate, existing market for a universally available spell checker that I know of, they don't have to worry about that. It is a real innovation they could add, one of many. But MS has done very little to actually advance the state of the art for operating systems.
On a slightly more serious note, I think the people attacking Microsoft's "monopoly" position are out of line.
I see. So you think the US and EU antitrust experts don't understand what constitutes a monopoly, but that you do. Do enlighten us.
Not only are there alternatives, like OS X, but there are FREE alternatives that clearly produce similar results, like the many flavors of Linux including Ubuntu.
So the top two "competitors" are an OS only sold bundled with hardware so it does not have to compete in the desktop OS market and an OS created by a non-profit cooperative in order to make a profit in other markets. And this is your evidence that the desktop OS market is not broken? Brilliant!
Furthermore, Microsoft products don't force you to use more Microsoft products, it's just generally more efficient if you do.
MS's monopoly and what they do with it makes it less expensive for you to use other products of theirs instead of those of competitors. This is called leveraging a monopoly in one market to gain an advantage in another. That's also illegal antitrust abuse. It doesn't have to make it impossible to use something else, just provide incentive competitors can't provide without a monopoly of their own. It kind of undermines the whole benefit of capitalism in the first place because the best product doesn't win the most money.
But that's the case with any market, even kitchen appliances, car parts, and oral hygiene to name a few.
And which of the above markets are you claiming is monopolized?
If everyone would just leave Microsoft alone they'll likely destroy themselves - look at Vista.
Everyone pretty much has left MS alone. The US claimed they would do something, convicted them, then certain politicians got elected using MS's donations and no punishment was brought to bear. As a result the desktop OS market has stagnated for a decade. Other markets, like Web technology have been stagnant nearly as long and MS keeps taking over more and more markets. Exactly how long should we wait? Do you want them to take over the server OS market before we act? When do you think would be an appropriate time for the laws to be enforced and for us to start have a regular rate of progress again? How many decades should we let MS retard the progress in the computing industry while making obscene profits before we say, "enough" ?!?
The world's leader in Microsoft software piracy launching an anti-trust probe against a company they've been violating for years...
So? China is lax about enforcing IP laws, for everyone. What does that have to do with anti-trust abuses? Should MS also be free to commit murders for hire in China, since China doesn't bother enforcing IP laws on MS's behalf?
Slashdot Mirror
I believe there is some cause and effect here. People with antisocial personality disorder have little empathy towards others and many emotions are muted. As a result, they learn rules for what actions and appearance of emotion will elicit a given reaction from other people. Instead of empathizing with a woman who is emotionally distressed, they think of themselves, what it is they want from that person, and what action is likely to get them what it is they want. Anyone can do this and learn to manipulate others, but not many people really do study it. People with antisocial personality disorder are forced to learn it from a young age just to get by, and tend to be very good at it.
Being free and open is a feature, from the perspective of the end user. It provides a small amount of future proofing for the software, allows users to fix bugs or customize things or audit for security holes if they have the skill or money, and it prevents the popularity of a given package being leveraged by the developer to hurt end users. As such, being free and open is a measure of quality, just as much as the inclusion of any other feature is.
Now for some people being free and open is a very important feature (like enterprises looking to do a widespread deployment of some new application). or other people, it is not a very important feature at all. And for still others, it is an important feature, but they don't understand why that is or by what mechanism it brings benefits. "Better" is a very relative term depending upon your needs and wants.
Agreed. The problem is, MS doesn't play nice. They'll provide input, but more importantly they'll likely try to derail useful features from others while they try to create proprietary extensions to do the same things all while failing to comply fully with the standards and not bothering to implement any portions that might be too useful and lead customers to buy more powerful competing applications (in some specific way).
We all saw how this worked with MS's input into Web standards... which they've managed to single handedly prevent real progress in the use of, for many years now.
As I recall, that is true of Vista, but in XP only explorer knows about the flag, not the entire OS, so running it from the command line of via a script bypasses this... as does using windows explorer to autorun the files as in the demo.
Use Firefox or other browser, and the attribute isn't set, or copy to a fileserver that doesn't support extended attributes, and it's lost.Firefox on Vista, currently does set the attribute for new files.
No reason why Apple couldn't figure out what flag IE sets and have Safari do same on Windows, either.I know. I mentioned this specifically as something Apple should fix. I did point out, however, that on OS X, downloaded files from any application are set to this by default and developers need to figure out how to set a flag to override this. On Windows, downloaded files need to be set by each application and the default is to not flag them. Ignoring Safari and IE, this is an issue for all programs that download files and MS chose a poor default.
Maybe they don't now the name, but most know what the little window showing their downloads is and even if they click to close it, they still know it is happening and see the icon. It certainly is not any more a conditioned response to close it than it is to click through the warning in Firefox.
Like I said before, there is no social engineering required *AT ALL*. Just pick a common application name and odds are they already have it installed and it *WILL* be clicked.That is social engineering. You're tricking people into thinking it is a different program than it is. In order for it to work, you have to guess what application shortcuts they have on their desktop (if they have any), including the right icon.
Yeah, except for the fact that aside from the former Safari flaw there *IS NO WAY* to do this with any of the top web browsers, they all prompt for confirmation before downloading a file.So what? People just click past them as often as not and they can even disguise the program as data with a clever name.
I am going to go out on a limb here and even argue on MS's side, in that IMO, this is not an IE flaw at all.Automatically running a program without the user explicitly requesting that, just because it is on the desktop? Please. How often is that useful, compared to the risk it presents? That is a serious flaw.
If your security model relies on the fact that an application never has the working directory set to an alternate location, then you have big problems.It's not security relying upon it. It is Windows making an exception and auto-running things from their default location for new files. That's just stupid.
Namely, you should not be storingWhy not? Using the desktop metaphor and the fact that most users store things on their desktop and that shortcuts to programs are on the desktop, why would you expect a normal user to not store said files on the desktop?
FreeBSD is their reference platform for compatibility. They all share a lot of code in common.
The EU did not go far enough. The media player software market is still pretty destroyed. Can you really argue that if WMA was not bundled into Windows it would even be used by anyone? You're right that the particular remedy they tried was stupid, but wrong about the direction. OEMs should be choosing which media player to include, be it WMP, iTunes, Realplayer, or Mplayer. MS should not be able to force everyone to have WMP, just because they have a monopoly on desktop OS's. The market would be much better for al of us, if OEMs were able to pick the one they think would be best for their users, without having to deal with MS's illegal incentives.
Actually, in Apple's case it is tying, but not bundling. The concept is the same, except for two things. First, it has to be tying to a monopolized product. In this case Apple is tying iTunes to the iPod (which is nearly a monopoly force) and which they, in turn, tied to Safari. In this case, however, those markets are both already destroyed by MS's prior monopoly abuse into those same markets. Apple is actually helping those markets by leveraging the iPod to bring some choice into those markets. Compare, for example, MS's affect upon Web standards and compare it to Apple's influence.
For me, no. For millions of uneducated end users, it is. Get it?You injected this in a discussion of technical merits and flaws. This is neither. This is an economic issue, you've brought up. You should not confuse the two. I don't see this as a technical issue, and as an economic issue so far the affect has been positive.
I disagree. If I click a link to download something, well obviously I want to download it. Clicking a second time to confirm is an annoyance. Apple's solution is to let things download, but put them in the downloads folder and flag them as untrusted content from the internet (well not flag them as trusted, since the default is untrusted). That is to say, that is their solution on OS X. On Windows, there is no download folder and for some reason they screwed up and did not flag it as untrusted in Vista (XP does not support that either). In my mind, their solution on OS X is superior, because it also helps solve the problem of executables masquerading as data. It means I can download a picture without any extra clicking and when I open it, I know it is just a picture. When I download an executable and then run it, I get a warning that it is a new executable (thus informing me it isn't data). I also get a link to open up the originating page so if it was downloaded a while ago, I can go see if it was something I wanted or a drive-by download or a trojan I thought was data at the time I downloaded it. From a larger perspective, I think it makes more sense to handle this type of solution at the OS level, since there are so many different programs that download files. It is better to have one good, consistent solution than a bunch of different ones of different quality levels. This fix from Apple is actually a work-around for Windows lack of support for Apple's better (IMHO) solution.
That is not to say everything is kosher. As far as I know Apple still isn't flagging executables as new on Vista where they stupidly default to trusted. Apple should have had a limit on the number of automatic downloads in response to a click or page load (probably one file) instead of letting one link download a dozen or more files. Apple also should have looked more closely at the way Windows works and tuned their solution from the start. One of the biggest problems with Safari on Windows is that it is a port and Apple has to recreate bits of OS X that Windows is missing as well as work around weird flaws in the Windows way of handling things. Apple has been less than stellar at this both with Safari and other software for Windows.
Still, I think downloading files in Safari on OS X is still a lot better designed security concept than downloading files in Firefox on Windows. Firefox might be a more secure practical solution at this point though, because although their concept is not as secure, their code has been hammered on and tested a lot more resulting in a less buggy implementation.
Why would they need to "fix" it. It is operating as they prefer it, the same as all the software MS includes in Windows that most of us would prefer we did not have to install. Is it so difficult for you to uncheck that box if you're performing an update?
Certainly not for the average Slashdot user and arguably not for anyone. Safari won't overwrite a user's existing icons, just add new ones. I also opens a download manager so users know something is being added. There are some pretty ignorant users out there, but not many that won't take not that some random Web site is downloading something called "Firefox.exe" to their desktop with an icon that looks just like their Web browser's. Finally, I notice you use the present tense. The ability to do this in Safari has been fixed, whereas the flaw with Windows has not. So, yeah I'd say the flaw in Windows is currently a FAR WORSE vulnerability, as you put it.
The main thing here, is the Safari flaw requires user interaction to work by itself, which means you have to manage a social engineering feat and get people to do something (double click and icon). With the flaw in Windows, any download from any source that they can get on a user's desktop can be automatically run.
They didn't have an excuse at the time, either, which is why the courts convicted them of antitrust abuse for doing it.
For some of us, it comes up quite often. As tools get better and more people are online with easy networking, I think collaboration on documents will also become more common and choice of tools to use with a real, open standard becomes more important as well.
In those cases I'd much rather get a PDF.Usually I agree (although .doc is better if I'm mining it for data the user didn't know they sent). For the average person, however, this may be a different story for a number of reasons. First, the most popular PDF reader (Adobe's) is horribly slow and bloated in tis default configuration and most users don't know of better option or how to use it. Most users are not even capable of copying and pasting text from it into something else. Combine this with PDFs on the Web using IE+WinXP+Adobe's plugin and you have a terrible experience for the average person reading PDFs from the Web. This leads a lot of people to avoid the format altogether and .doc is the next closest thing the average person has seen for communications of that sort.
If it's a collaborative editing situation, I'd rather use something like Google docs (and have).Google docs is fairly new and is still a bit lacking in features for many people. It is also not really an option for a lot of internal communications in a work environment. I do think collaborative editing will move to ODF unless MS manages to upset things.
There are more hybrid cars every day.
Well, yes. But that's just what they say in public. In private they're probably saying, "oh shit, we were way too obvious and public about our criminal behavior and the EU looks ready to stomp on us hard for this one. Maybe if we pretend to roll over and pretend to support ODF for a while, the EU will not make this a priority and use the courts to force us to play nice, with real consequences and oversight. At least if we look like we're willing to be open, we can subtly break compatibility with others and try to extend it with proprietary DRM or something. Really anything that stops us from being declared to have monopoly influence in the office suite market and doesn't make us compete purely on our software's merits is workable."
Now we shall all have to wait and see if MS plays nice with ODF because they are scared of the EU, or if they try to extend and break the standard to prevent true interoperability, as they have done with HTML, CSS, etc. since being late to the Web standards game.
Oil companies pay less in taxes than most companies with similar overall profits. Moreover, taxes are often used by society to repay costs to society incurred by a given industry. The oil industry is polluting my air, even if I don't drive a car or use it for heat. Why can't I bill them for the deleterious effects upon my health? Moreover, why isn't the government taxing them and using the money to pay back society for the less direct costs of their business, costs borne by all of us.
A thief did not steal money from me today - I suppose you will call that a break.Grow up. Your oversimplifications are childish.
Geothermal is comprised of a number of different technologies. The one I was referring to was one where you pump water out of underground mines to heat collectors, then back underground. It uses, well, no toxic anything released anywhere. The only geothermal energy I can think of that does involve toxic chemicals is harnessing thermal vents, which are already emitting toxic gasses into the atmosphere. They just run it past some turbines (corroding them in the process).
Actually, those are all economical ways if the US government would stop subsidizing the oil companies, giving them tax breaks (and I mean all subsidies, including the expense of wars to defend oil fields). But there is a climate opposing change and distrusting alternative energy because business see it as being pushed by charities as an expense. This often leads companies to ignore and not even consider alternative energy.
For example, several companies have demonstrated they can get cheaper, cleaner power for a very small investment in geothermal, if they're in a city or area with flooded mines. a plastics manufacturer installed such a system and was paid back in less than a year and their ongoing energy costs are not only gone, but generating a profit by selling it. At the same time, the power was cleaner, allowing them to move into food grade plastics for higher profit. That company has since opened another facility in another town and used the same power scheme, but their advance has been virtually ignored by industry and no one (so far) seems interested in copying it.
Another problem is the corporate culture in the US no longer rewards executives for long term successes and executive switch companies long before and long-term effects of the actions are felt. This discourages any long term action that has a short term cost or any investment in the future of the company beyond a few years. Most alternative energy sources have a longer payback period, on the order of many years.
Please. I won't argue how slowly things are progressing, but it sure isn't fast. Nine years ago I used to use voice commands to check my e-mail and have it read to me. Since then, voice commands have not improved significantly. But there is an easy market where we can see stagnation. How about Web technologies. IE partially supports 8 year old standards and fails to implement significantly anything since. For high-tech, that is extreme stagnation.
Further, DRM isn't an "anti-feature". At worst, it's irrelevant (you have no DRM-encumbered content). At best, it's a distinctly useful feature because it allows you to access said DRM-encumbered content.Disabling or degrading the quality of video output is an anti-feature because no user wants that to happen. When your OS cripples itself because you upgraded your hardware that is an anti-feature. MS has enough power to stop DRM from negatively effecting their customers, but they don't because they don't need to because they don't compete with anyone.
To be blunt, your assertion that Windows has "slowed innovation" has _zero_ supporting evidence...Please. Pick up an economics text for a change. Monopolies always slow innovation. There is plenty of evidence, but you'll never see it because you don't want to. You're the worst MS apologist I've ever heard. You don't seem interested in reason or evidence, just support for what you've already decided.
Especially given that, as of now, pretty much all the mainstream, mass-market OSes have arrived at essentially the same basic feature set, at around the same time (+/- a year or two).There is only one mass market desktop OS. There are other major OS, just not in the OS market. The whole point is that innovation has slowed because investors are not motivated to put money into making better ones, because the market is monopolized.
There's as much a "market" for spell checkers (most word processors come with them, to say nothing of things like aspell) as there was a "market" for web browsers in the mid 90s.Not true at all. There were several browsers for sale in the 90s and still more supported by advertising (which is a market). Aspell is nonprofit and not ad supported. Spell checkers built into other programs for other purposes are not the same market. We've ahd similar discussions before. You're just being intentionally obtuse because you just don't want to admit anything that might conflict with what you want to believe. It's rather sad.
The corporation's home country sold out and did jack and shit after MS was convicted because MS made huge donations to campaign funds and the prosecutors were replaced by those politicians right after the election. When american companies file suit against other american companies in the EU it is significant vote of "no confidence" in the US court system... and they're right. The US courts took many many years to do nothing about obvious criminal actions on MS's part. The EU has been super-lenient, and has been very diplomatic, but they, at least, have made MS stop a few of their most obvious abuses. But, MS is still breaking the law every day. They know they're going to be convicted and fined. It is part of their business plan to break the law and hope the fines are less than the profits. Personally, I hope someone fines them enough and requires enough reparations that it does become unprofitable. That's the only way MS will ever stop.
Did you, perhaps, reply to the wrong post?
No it hasn't. It slows innovation, rather than stops it completely. You'll note they've mostly integrated features from other markets and added anti-features like DRM.
If Microsoft provided a spellchecker component with Windows, people like you would be screaming antitrust at the top of their lungs, just like they do about every other piece of functionality Windows provides.They'd have no real grounds. MS has implemented dozens of integrations that are clear-cut antitrust abuse, but since there is no separate, existing market for a universally available spell checker that I know of, they don't have to worry about that. It is a real innovation they could add, one of many. But MS has done very little to actually advance the state of the art for operating systems.
I see. So you think the US and EU antitrust experts don't understand what constitutes a monopoly, but that you do. Do enlighten us.
Not only are there alternatives, like OS X, but there are FREE alternatives that clearly produce similar results, like the many flavors of Linux including Ubuntu.So the top two "competitors" are an OS only sold bundled with hardware so it does not have to compete in the desktop OS market and an OS created by a non-profit cooperative in order to make a profit in other markets. And this is your evidence that the desktop OS market is not broken? Brilliant!
Furthermore, Microsoft products don't force you to use more Microsoft products, it's just generally more efficient if you do.MS's monopoly and what they do with it makes it less expensive for you to use other products of theirs instead of those of competitors. This is called leveraging a monopoly in one market to gain an advantage in another. That's also illegal antitrust abuse. It doesn't have to make it impossible to use something else, just provide incentive competitors can't provide without a monopoly of their own. It kind of undermines the whole benefit of capitalism in the first place because the best product doesn't win the most money.
But that's the case with any market, even kitchen appliances, car parts, and oral hygiene to name a few.And which of the above markets are you claiming is monopolized?
If everyone would just leave Microsoft alone they'll likely destroy themselves - look at Vista.Everyone pretty much has left MS alone. The US claimed they would do something, convicted them, then certain politicians got elected using MS's donations and no punishment was brought to bear. As a result the desktop OS market has stagnated for a decade. Other markets, like Web technology have been stagnant nearly as long and MS keeps taking over more and more markets. Exactly how long should we wait? Do you want them to take over the server OS market before we act? When do you think would be an appropriate time for the laws to be enforced and for us to start have a regular rate of progress again? How many decades should we let MS retard the progress in the computing industry while making obscene profits before we say, "enough" ?!?
So? China is lax about enforcing IP laws, for everyone. What does that have to do with anti-trust abuses? Should MS also be free to commit murders for hire in China, since China doesn't bother enforcing IP laws on MS's behalf?