First, it's only a few governments, and those cases are not as black and white as Slashdot articles would have you believe.
Massachusetts, Sweden, the entire European Union all have proposed or passed open format laws. Mind you, the laws themselves are interpretable. Those writing the laws want the advantages of open standard formats, but most of the legislators have a limited understanding of the subject, and so may be tricked into approving things that are called "open" but which actually remove the benefits they are seeking. Still, this is a common trend and a significant number of governments are looking into this subject and some will certainly required an approved standard format (which is why MS is pursuing this farce).
...it's what the majority of Big Corporate Business does.
How many big businesses do you suppose have to do business with governments including exchanging documents? So if all those companies then make provisions for handling ODF files, what is to stop other businesses from emulating the government and saving money on licensing? Exchanging documents is no longer a big problem, since everyone can handle ODF since it is required by so many governments.
And the reality is that Big Corporate Business loves Microsoft.
Corporate business, loves MS, but they also love IBM; especially in enterprise. You know what else they love, money. In particular they like making a "cost saving" move that catapults them into the limelight and sets them up for a big promotion. More and more American businesses are feeling the crunch these days and there has been some real trends towards alternatives, both OpenOffice and even the corporate version of Google docs and other, similar services.
The truth is, MS doesn't like to compete either on price or features. They like to avoid competing using lock-in strategies and their file formats are their biggest customer lock-in. Government adoption of ODF undermines that lock-in and makes it easier for companies to use alternatives for some or all of their needs. Once Google and the like get their offerings to compete with the big, expensive CMS solutions in use by big corporations, I predict we'll see a lot more companies opting for all-in-one solutions that are better integrated than MSOffice+Documentum or Livelink. You know IBM will be pushing FileNet and Domino pretty hard.
Will MS lose significant market share? Maybe, maybe not, but there is a real chance they will have to fight on price and features for the first time in a decade and that will be good for everyone (except MS).
I would argue that disk I/O is the biggest bottleneck. Disk access times are measured in milliseconds. Memory access times are measured in nanoseconds.
But disk access bottlenecks are not very common, and are usually in response to a user interaction, which is less objectionable to most users. If I tell my machine to open a picture and it has to load from disk, sure that is a delay, but that is pretty rare. Usually, when working or playing, everything is loaded into memory after the initial startup of the program (which I only do once every week or so). The really problematic bottlenecks are when I'm working and in the middle of a workflow and suddenly have to wait because my CPU cores are maxed out.
Unless your your load average is almost always greater than 1.0, you will benefit more by having faster disks than by having more CPUs.
Well here I am at home on a typical evening, posting to Slashdot and my load average is 1.3. At work, that average tends closer to 3.0. Good thing this machine is dual core, huh?
That's the immediate gain from a second core. I think that second one pretty much takes care of it, though.
That's the gain from multiple cores in combination with good multithreaded code. But if I'm running Windows in a VM and it is using one core, then the benefit is completely lost; or if I'm running a large application or even OS processes taking up a signifiant portion of one core, the browser itself may well, hang anyway.
There are plenty of potential uses, not the least of which is ACL jails for all applications in order to mitigate the majority of malware problems we suffer today.
Speaking of the constitution, doesn't the government have first amendment rights too?
No. Individuals have the rights. The government has a very few, specifically granted powers. The first amendment protects the right of an individual to speak, but not the right of a person acting as an official representative of the government.
...as long as it doesn't say vote for me or vote against him we are fine.
Nope. The government has a very specific mandate and when they exceed that authority they are a threat to the people. For example, would you claim it is my first amendment right to go to your home and take your money from you by force and then use that money to spread pamphlets espousing my opinion? What if you're in a minority and most people agree it would be good for me to take your money and spread pamphlets? The government will throw you in jail and take your things if you don't pay them and they're using that money to spread this propaganda. That is unconstitutional.
Exactly what areas of "personal computing" are requiring this horsepower?
Video, audio, gaming, emulators, and VMs are starters. But I think you're missing some of the picture. Most computer users have one or two programs open at a time and end up quitting everything when they want to run something processor intensive like a game or photoshop. With the move towards multi-core and with a little work from developers, people might be able to leave 90% of the apps they use running, all the time. Multiple cores also provides something of a buffer. When a thread goes rogue, their machine does not grind to a halt. Heck, just yesterday my girlfriend was complaining because she tried to open a page in Firefox and it locked up the whole application including the other 8 tabs she had open. That means she had to kill it (which took a while itself) and then try to decide if she wanted to reopen all those tabs and risk it locking up again, or just try to remember what she had open and reopen them all by hand. If each tab, however is running in its own thread and there are enough cores to handle it, this could easily have been a much better experience for her. She could have just closed the unresponsive tab.
Basically, I'd argue that if you provide the resources, smart developers will find a way to make clever use of those resources. Dual core has already sparked a revolution for virtualization and led to some other, really cool OS changes to increase speed. Many cores will provide diminishing returns (we have 2 eyes for a reason), but I bet 8 cores will be well utilized within a few years.
Some algorithms are inherently not amenable to parallelization. If you have eight cores instead of one, then the performance boost you can get can be anywhere from eight times faster to none at all.
Part of the article's point is that programmers need to learn new algorithms to replace algorithms that are not easily made parallel. Now not all tasks can be easily parallelized either, but a lot are and are not being taken advantage of.
So far, multiple cores have boosted performance mostly because the typical user has multiple applications running at a time. But as the number of cores increases, the beneficial effects diminish dramatically.
Well, also multiple OS's running at the same time as well, which may become more popular. The point is, programmers need to make applications more parallel so this is not the main benefit anymore. This has already happened in CPU intensive fields and is happening more and more in OS development.
In addition, most applications these days are not CPU bound. Having eight cores doesn't help you much when three are waiting on socket calls, four are waiting on disk access calls and the last is waiting for the graphics card.
I'm not sure this is true. It certainly is not the only bottleneck, but it seems to be the biggest one. There will be other bottlenecks, but many can be alleviated if they become the real choke point. Disk issues can be mitigated by faster interconnects and multiple disks/platters to increase read/write. As for graphics cards, that is one area where multiple cores are already helping. OS X Leopard, for example, now spawns an OpenGL feeder process that can be moved to another core removing what is one of the biggest actual bottlenecks for GPU use, the CPU time in handing over data. This one OS improvement can theoretically double the speed of some, existing OpenGL applications, while realistically it is seeing much more modest improvements, that is the type of rethinking that needs to be done to take advantage of multiple cores and it is the type of improvement that has not really been happening enough because many programmers are too set in their ways.
Homosexual groups routinely monitor and edit any Wiki page having to do with the accurate perception of their identity dysphoria.
Way to miss the F'ing point. I don't care, so long as they aren't doing so using my involuntarily claimed tax dollars. The constitution is predicated upon the belief that the US government is the greatest danger to the freedom of the people. When homosexual groups start taxing me under threat of imprisonment, then I'll take offense. Until then, the point is what the government is doing.
Public relations? Winning of hearts and minds? Press liaison? All are fairly legit functions of any administration, as is outright propaganda.
Bullshit. Even the former director of the CIA disagrees with you, as he stated that some of the misinformation campaigns we've run in the middle east have made their way into US news, which is counter to the interests of the US populace and unconstitutional. The army/executive branch may have a legal mandate to plant misinformation overseas, but as soon as it is meant for the US population, they've overstepped their authority. The people should rightly be outraged by this and should require such programs have their funding removed, especially at a time when Bush is claiming it is too expensive to help pay sick children's medical bills.
Here, they spin things anyway they can to try to make themselves look good. Are you surprised about this? Do you think this is a new thing?
Of course not, but when they are caught they need to be punished and more importantly, stopped.
Be indignant that Wikipedia is not encouraging its users to question the data it contains, be indignant that Wikipedia does not have disclaimers and warnings as to its potential inaccuracies -- that's your true crime, your true deception, right there.
No it isn't. The crime is the government overstepping its mandate and working against the people it is supposed to serve. That is the crime. Wikipedia has no obligation to anyone.
Don't blame the Government (or anyone else's Government, or NGO, or Political party, or Corporation or cabal...) for the propaganda, they are only doing their jobs.
The government is the one that should be blamed. Their job is defined by the constitution. Read it. Whenever they overstep that, they aren't doing their job, they're violating the public trust and need to be called onto the carpet by the electorate. What are you some sort of paid shill trying to divert attention to a charitable project for not doing what you think they should? They aren't funded with tax dollars and have no responsibility to do anything and are thus, blameless.
Exactly... Isn't the whole point of Wikipedia that *anyone* can change it!
That is the point of wikipedia. That is not the important part of this story and, in fact, it mentions Digg and several other sites. The point of this story is the government is spending our tax dollars to spread "positive reviews" and misinformation related to government projects, thereby undermining the fourth estate. The other point of this story is they are incompetent at it and admit to doing it. Can't you muster up just a little bit of indignation that instead of providing ten poverty stricken youth with full scholarships to university we're paying at least one incompetent hack that money to lie to us on Web forums?
I would be hard pressed to call editing wikipedia articles to favor oneself "conducting a propaganda campaign", much in the same way that I would feel awkward referring to updating my blog as a press release.
When it is a government employee doing this, on the clock, paid for by tax dollars, as part of their official duties... well that is what propaganda is. Why the hell are we paying for "mass communications officers" in the first place? Does anyone support their tax dollars going to pay for someone to go post positive comments on Digg about government programs? Say, are you by any chance a "mass communications officer?"
Might I suggest you champion the inclusion of SELinux by default in distros. It would at least allow security minded application designers to solve their part of the problem.
Basically an app will announce what sort of template sandbox it would want to be run as, and a user will decide whether it's OK or not. If OK, the OS will enforce the sandbox.
I think this is about 1/3 of the solution. First, if an app is going to announce itself, it might as well be specific and come with a full ACL describing what it should be doing, thus providing finer grained security and preventing some overflow style attacks. Second, since such a system does not address malware, it needs to be paired with a way to verify the source of code and with an assigned level of trust for that source. To that end you need a way to sign applications (preferably, free, open, and cross-platform) and a way to pair that identity/signature with a given level of trust.
Whereas if an app claims to be a "guest game/applet" but actually requests "Full System Privileges" (the OS/GUI should pop up the usual warnings) it should be a lot easier to educate people not to run that sort of stuff.
The problem with this is the amount of software people want to use or think they do, compared to the actual amount of spyware/malware. You end up conditioning users to allow everything to do most everything. This can be somewhat mitigated by a good and intelligent UI, but not completely.
I have an alternative. Many people subscribe to blacklists of malware signatures, but as malware becomes more adaptive, these become less effective. What we need to supplement this are whitelists of software, including verification of the ACLs, paired with the application signature. These whitelists could be provided by free projects or by commercial security companies or both and should be user editable/overrrideable.
Tis way, in a common use case the user just has to decide which whitelist providers they trust and how much each. Then 99% of the time, when they run an application, the OS could silently verify the signature and reference the whitelist, comparing the ACL verified with the ACL included. Based upon who the user trusts, the application could access a resource without any user intervention, until it exceeds it's level of trust and then the user is alerted that it may have been hijacked or is being malicious and provide specific information as to what it is trying to access.
I think some people are already working on stuff like that. It's not easy to do, but I believe it is possible. Maybe Apple or Microsoft might be able to pull it off. Microsoft might not want to do it badly enough though.
The latest version of OS X ships with the sandboxing framework and an application signature framework. It is still missing a framework to accept ACL evaluations from Apple or third parties. It is still missing the UI component. The sandboxing framework, however, is in use in Leopard for various services as an extra layer of security and with hard-coded ACLs. As for MS, I suspect they plan to tackle this from a completely different perspective in keeping with their corporate culture. They'll probably require all applications be singed by them and then charge both developers and users for verification, applied with a very broken UI and a lot of holes. I'm actually hoping Apple is hit with some serious malware problems in the next year, to motivate them to build out and activate such a system. If nothing else, it could get security firms on board with an open ACL interchange format, that could cause MS more antitrust grief if they tried to take it over at a later date.
I truly wish someone would pick up the ball. Can you imagine subscribing to a free project like ClamAV, for app signatures, plus having a set from your OS vendor and from a security firm like Symantec, all evaluated against what ships
...chuckling not only at the security issues that are popping up, but at Apple's reaction to all of them.
I've been working in the security industry for years. I've submitted bugs to Apple, MS, and various Linux and BSD projects. Apple's reaction to such submissions has been better than average. For the most part, they seem to acknowledge security related bugs and fix them before they are exploited, including providing credit to the bug reporter. I guess what I'm saying is, if you're judging "Apple's" response to security related bugs, maybe looking at how they handle problems reported to them through their publicly accessible bug reporting system is a better measuring stick, than looking at how they handle posts in forums. Not that I approve of censoring their forums, it just doesn't seem to be an important aspect of how they respond with regard to security. Not to sound like an Apple fan or anything, but I've frankly been impressed by Apple's quick turnaround on serious bugs.
Saying apple makes good hardware though? Don't they just order and piece together hardware just like joe shmoe's computer shop would? Do they manufacture motherboards, CPUs, ram or hard drives? They might make the cases, I doubt they make the power supplies.
Apple is an OEM like Dell or actually, more like Sony. Most of the components they use are standardized, but they do have motherboards designed just for them, they design how all the components go together, which ones to use, and what the required specifications (acceptable failure rate) are. Not all machines are created equal in this regard. Just take a look at the percentage of machines returned due to failed hardware that consumer reports publishes each year and you'll see Apple at the top of the list, closely followed by Sony, Lenovo and (surprisingly Dell this year as they've managed to turn around their laptop manufacturing, although not desktops). Other vendors have up to five times the percentage of hardware failure.
So they made a good OS? Naw, they made a darn good windowing system to replace X though. Of course, all the concepts were out there--nothing technically groundbreaking.
They (or Next who took over Apple) made a lot more than the windowing system. They made the kernel, the APIs the filesystem, the services framework, much of the userspace apps and daemons, and don't forget openstep. As for the graphics, well a PDF (vector) based windowing system was certainly ahead of it's time, although the networking capabilities were retrograde.
So what does Apple actually make?
They make the software, minus some pieces where they share development with the OSS community. They make the hardware.
They restrict the hardware which must avoid thousands of "little annoyances" PC users see (like laptop suspend being flaky).
Ummm. The flakey driver annoyances are always a problem for the hardware vendor, not the OS vendor. MS doesn't write drivers for Dell hardware, Dell does. Each OEM is usually responsible for getting drivers together and each OEM supports a subset of hardware, just like Apple.
They let someone else create the multi-threading OS kernel for them because that's hard.
Mach? Mach has been so remade by the Next engineers that it is pretty much their baby at this point. When Next was acquired by (or acquired) Apple they remade it further making it more monolithic and they've been reworking it ever since. Apple certainly does their own kernel.
The other thing they bring is a lot of people who grab onto anything that they can latch onto to make them appear different--the VW bug, iPod, blackberry...
How does an iPod make one appear different? They make up nearly 70% of portables.
...security-wize, but if they ever start doing any ground-breaking work, they will most likely start seeing some serious problems.
You mean like being the first desktop OS to implement an SELinux style mandatory access control system by default and use it to sandbox services? The verdict is still out, but they seem to have done a pretty kick-ass job with that one so far. Apple has a lot of really good security people from Next and from BSD and other UNIX backgrounds that have been hired into the company in the last five years. Some of them do some solid, cutting-edge work. Apple's problem is that they are such a mixed bag when it comes to engineering, a lot of the userspace and services people are at the opposite end of the spectrum and don't think about security at all. Still, Apple is ready and poised to kick some serious butt when it comes to security enhancements, when and if, security ever becomes a real problem for the majority of their users. They are also getting a lot of free testing and fixes from the community, since so many people in the computer security industry are now using OS X on their own system
However, there is one thing that I am very troubled by and it is simply this: Apple apparent arrogance and ignorance when it comes to security.
Apple is a mixed bag when it comes to security. They have employees they acquired from other companies specializing in Web technologies, graphics, video, and numerous other topics, as well as old-school Apple employees many of whom do not take security seriously enough. On the other hand they have all the Next employees and all the old-school Unix guys they've hired on to manage the guts, who live and breath security. As a result, in some ways Apple is way ahead of the game for security (like with their new sandboxing and signing frameworks in Leopard) and in others they seem oblivious. I can't think of another consumer desktop oriented OS that ships with so few services running, and with almost all of those sandboxed. Then you get to other things Apple, like some of their userland applications and Web services and you wonder that the same company could produce both of them. Apple is pretty schizo in this regard.
Apple has enjoyed a "blanket" of security because it is low profile and a niche. However, as its market share and mind share expands, this period of respite will soon fade.
I disagree. Apple is a juicy target for exploitation for many reasons. They are less likely to be exploited due to a number of market and social factors, but in general, Apple's security has been fairly sound and that is why they are not worm food. Further, I don't see Apple's security record becoming poor in the future. Apple, Linux, Solaris, etc. all have one major thing that will keep them more secure than Windows is today... motivation. If Apple's security starts to fail for their users, Apple loses money as they move away. Thus, Apple has direct financial motivation to fix the problem, and they will. This is the advantage of a free market. Microsoft, however, has a monopoly, so even when their users are screaming out for better security, MS loses very few, if any, if they ignore their customers and focus instead on locking in a new market and this latter action will make them more money. They have direct financial motivation to do little more than provide the appearance that they are doing something security-wise, and that is what they keep delivering.
You would think that, during this time, Apple would have used the opportunity to develop and internal culture, policies and procedures, as well as infrastructure for dealing effectively with security issues. However, the complete opposite appears to be the case. Apple has failed miserably to publicly and actively address such issues. It also fails to respond in anything that could be called a rapid manner to reports of exploitable security holes. Taking actions such as deleting posts that point out security problems makes the situation worse, not better. Failing to publicly document the existence, status and nature of defects makes the situation worse, not better. Being secretive makes the situation worse, not better.
Here is my experience with Apple's security response. My co-worker found a potentially exploitable hole in OS X. He went to Apple's Web site and reported it as a security bug in the bug report section, not commenting the forums that are for users not Apple employees. Apple sent him a message a few days later saying they'd look into it. A few weeks later the next security update for OS X came out and fixed the problem, including crediting my co-worker with discovering it. It was painless and quite rapid for that large of a project, considering the time for research, coding a fix, testing, and rollout, in fact a lot faster than our average response time to that same priority of bug (and we sell much more critical security devices). From everything I've seen, Apple responds fairly quickly to security issues reported to them and the only instances where there are major problems are where researchers refuse to give Apple details before p
I agree with improving the browser and following the standards, but why ask to untie Windows and IE?
Because it is illegal to tie a product you have monopolized to one in a different market.
...what about MacOS X and Linux?
It is illegal for them to tie products in markets they have monopolized with one in a different market. That is why the EU is investigating Apple's market share with the iPod (since they are close to having monopoly influence in that market) and may force them to remove the ties between the iPod and the ItTunes store and iTunes software.
why should Microsoft sell an OS without a web browser
Because it has destroyed both the market for Web browsers and slowed progress of Web technologies to a crawl. Standards that were finalized over a decade ago and implemented by every other browser are still not viable technologies because of MS's refusal to implement them and the importance of that due to their monopoly in desktop OS's. Why do you object to IE having to compete on even ground with other browsers? All MS has to do is ship all the other browsers with Windows as well as IE or stop shipping IE with it or agree to abide by the standards so the Web can move forward. What, exactly is your objection to that?
why punish a company out to extinction?
Are you implying that if MS has to compete fairly in the browser market they will become extinct?
Is just because it isn't European?
The EU has enforced their antitrust laws against dozens of European companies in the past 5 years. For that matter, the US courts ordered even more drastic measures then this when they convicted MS of abusing US antitrust law, but then there was an election where MS was one of the largest contributors to both the Republican and Democratic parties and suddenly the new people running the DoJ decided MS's punishment should be changed from being broken up, to the absolutely nothing at all would be done.
but what business do they have with the OS?
Windows is a monopoly. When you have a monopoly, you can tie it to other markets to undermine capitalist free trade in those markets. Thus, when you have a monopoly, you can't tie that monopoly to other markets, because it breaks capitalism. For years IE has been inferior to other browsers in almost every way, and yet it still has the lion's share of the market. That is a market failure. The only thing wrong with Firefox is it can't handle Web pages intentionally broken to work with IE, or using MS proprietary technologies that only work with IE. Both of those problems exist only because of MS's monopoly abuse, thus they are artificial problems introduced into a competing product, through the use of a monopoly in another market. That is criminal, in both the US and the EU. Even american companies like Sun, however, have been forced to go to the European courts because the US ones are so corrupt and bribable. Before you go slandering the EU courts as anti-american, maybe you should research how the US courts have been behaving.
Sure, and the beige box builders get a browser how then?
Umm, how many people do you know that have the know-how to build a box from scratch but don't have a second computer to use to download a browser and can't burn one to disk to use for new systems?
I, personally, have no qualms with Microsoft shipping IE with Windows. It is their product, after all.
This argument is analogous to "I, personally, have no qualms with Bob stabbing Sue with that knife. It is their knife, after all." It completely misses the point. Just because MS made both of them does not mean it is legal or ethical to bundle the two together and undermine the free market.
BUT they should give OEMs the option to strip it out and replace it with Firefox/Opera/Safari/K-Meleon if they so desire. Which, really, is what this is all about.
No it isn't. This is about providing a level playing field for browser developers so the best browsers are the ones with the most market share, thus providing incentive for all the developers to provide the best product for customers, not for their own agendas. Providing the option is not good enough. OEMs have to be in a position where they have to choose which browser to include and developers have to be in the position where either they know all the browsers will be on every Windows box or they can't be sure any of the browsers will be on every Windows box. Otherwise, developers still have incentive to code primarily for IE and OEMs have incentive to include IE because of the results of the developers actions.
I can't even begin to fathom why so many people here think MS should be given a free pass to make IE the most popular browser, regardless of its quality, just because they have a monopoly on desktop OS's. Is it really so unfair for them to have to compete with other browsers based upon the actual quality of their application instead of on artificial disadvantages they introduce into competitive offerings? What ever happened to capitalism and the free market and "may the best product win?"
So when is Apple going to open up and let people run OS X on whatever hardware platform they choose?
The law says you can't use a monopoly in one market to gain an advantage in another. Apple has no monopoly on operating systems or hardware, so what would restrict them? They are, however, restricted from leveraging a monopoly in portable music players to gain an advantage in say, music download services or music jukebox software markets. In fact the courts are looking at compelling Apple to change their behaviors with regard to the DRM supported on iPods right now.
Why is it OK to tell Microsoft they can't include their own browser in their OS and yet Apple can tell you you must by their hardware to run their OS?
Because MS has been found by the courts to have monopoly influence in the desktop OS market, so using that to gain market share for their browser, rather than having it compete on its own merits, is illegal. Bundling, is the most common form of tying and is specifically mentioned in antitrust law.
Windows and OS X are both very restrictive.
Yup, but only Windows wields monopoly influence in a market.
These days, it seems like few computers other than Macs ship with FireWire standard, and I've never seen a laptop in the wild outside of Macs with a six-pin FireWire 400 port, let alone 800.
Toshiba laptops come with Firewire ports as well. It is, however, a rarity... which is sad. The main reason OS X is my base OS running my VMs, instead of in a VM under Linux is Apple's "boot in firewire" mode along with the "upgrade from previous computer" option for installs. When I get new hardware I enjoy the one-click feature to have all my old stuff on my new machine and it all configured for me. The easiest way to do this with Linux and Windows is to run them in VMs and let OS X handle it. Unless Firewire becomes more common, this option will never be cloned by Windows(and probably not by Linux) since the feature doesn't work for USB-2 (as it requires an active CPU).
Frankly Firewire should be used for video cameras and USB should be used for flash card readers. eSATA should be used for external SATA drives (the clue is in the name!)
Ahh, but can you plug an eSATA drive into your (dumb) video recorder and transfer data straight to it? That's one of the big reasons Firewire is still here, because it works for both computers and other device types without CPUs like drives, cameras, stereo receivers, etc. I mean if I already have a Firewire port on my laptop for my video camera, why do I want a eSATA port as well?
USB is slow and cheap. Firewire is fast and cost more.
For an OEM to add a firewire port costs about $1.50 more than a USB port. Not exactly a huge difference.
Do we 'need' usb? no. We could get by on just firewire. But usb is cheaper and a penny saved is a penny earned.
There is nothing wrong with USB for what it was designed for. The problem is when it is applied to a task it just isn't very good at, like hard drives. Even if you have USB-2 for a hard drive, it is still pretty inferior. It uses up your CPU, you need software to manage it, it is slower, and you can't just plug it into your video camera and go, because it needs a computer in between. Intel's insistence on pushing USB-2 is just holding back progress, hopefully this will help solve that problem.
Well, first there is the distinction between 'package management' (managing what owns what and what needs what, but not downloads and repository management (the ability to track versions of aforementioned packages).
Well, it is fine to make that distinction, but it is just semantics. Package managers should handle installation, upgrades and facilitate discovery in conjunction with the ways those offering packages want to provide them. Content is king.
I've seen commercial linux software provide rpms with license acceptance programs/registrations that must be done before the application will start...
So have I, but mostly for server software, very, very rarely for desktop/workstation oriented software.
In terms of downloads and such, absolutely they handle web downloads...
For some definition of "handle." I can download a package and my Linux distro will recognize it, but it won't keep it up to date nor will it handle registering the software package with the developer and managing my license. As far as I know, none of the package formats support licensing or even referencing a repository for updates. If such a mechanism is available, no one uses it.
...it's just most companies don't understand it and end up abusing the situation, sadly.
I'm a believer in "if you build it, they will come." Maybe the trick is figuring out why they aren't using them? There are several fairly obvious reasons I know. One is lack of easy packaging tools. Another is getting packages that will work on all Linux distros and common package managers is a pain, so they just use an installer.
Though not restricted, Adobe provides a yum repository for flash plugin.
Yup and that's about it. They have never offered any of their non-free software using a repository (and there used to be several such applications).
Unfortunately you are right, the reality is that the bulk of the commercial linux world doesn't adopt the repository management for some reason or another, but at least the underlying distribution provides such a feature, so the blame can solely be placed on the application vendor rather than the underlying platform.
Who cares about blame? I want working features! It needs to be easy and attractive enough to developers or it is useless.
The great thing is, 'Linux' doesn't have to do anything. Canonical, or RedHat, or Novell, or whoever, they are all communities that can change things without every other Linux platform adopting, and the free market can decide.
The problem with that is interoperability is a huge feature, so unless they are all willing to migrate at once, even really cool features cannot be implemented unless they are agreed upon by all parties or are just incremental improvements. One of the reasons I see OS X leapfrogging Linux in many areas is because they are willing to make big changes and don't have to worry about interoperability with other vendors as much.
In any event, Apple and Microsoft don't provide any facility for repository management, so they receive the blame rather than the software vendors.
What is your obsession with assigning blame? We're comparing OS's not figuring out who's to blame for the functions that are lacking. If you want, you can blame Linux vendors for refusing to standardize on one package format and for failing to make it easy enough for commercial developers to use.
That's true *if* the application relies on no third party bundles it doesn't include itself.
Which is true for every single bundle I've ever seen.
The problem is that such requirements either must be manually resolved through documentation specified action before attempting to run the application, an installer to check the situation itself programatically , or duplicat
I find it hard to blame Microsoft for actions of third parties.
Please. MS is using their monopoly to manipulate the market and make the most profitable thing for developers to do is break standards. They do it intentionally as several leaked e-mails and subpoenaed documents during their case with the DoJ showed. They are responsible.
Even when making bullet lists of user-friendly features, distributions have implemented a lot of niceties nowhere to be found in Windows or OSX.
I can think of a couple, but the same is true in the reverse. Both OS X and Vista have features that have not made it into Linux distros yet.
My favorite example is the yum or apt facility.
Actually, there are a couple of nice package managers for OS X that handle both Linux/BSD ports and native OS X apps. It would be nice if it was there in a default install though.
...it provides a common methodology for third parties to register repositories of their own and not have to provide tools to help with dependencies themselves or to have their own update programs.
Which is nice, but realistically that does not happen for commercial software. Linux package managers lack the ability to handle Web and Bittorrent downloads or software registration, so commercial entities buy installer systems that do handle those instead. Commercial software is not only not kept up to date on Linux, but installation generally requires you to run a random binary and uninstallation is a mess.
Linux wins when it comes to installing OSS freeware, but OS X wins on installing commercial software from Web sites or from CD/DVD. The sad thing is, the OpenStep style packages OS X uses are the perfect vehicle for extending Linux style package managers to better handle this type of software, but no desktop Linux developers are interested because most of them are of the opinion that they only think people should run freeware/OSS and all of them are scared of making such a big change. I sometimes fear Linux will never make any large improvement again, simply because there is no one who can make a decision to make a big change.
The OSX world of 'just drag and drop the appfolder' can still leave you without required Library bundles, so it too is damned to having arbitrary installers for complex apps just like windows.
Whaaa?!? Umm, the only things that require an installer and can't be drag and drop are things that install kernel modules. Even MS Office is drag and drop. Some software does use installers, but mostly so they can install DRM or manage licensing and registration.
Even if you can drag and drop it, that doesn't mean bugfixes/security fixes will come down for you automatically without some other arbitrary service to track it for you.
This is true and one of the reasons I wish Apple, Sun and some major Linux devs would get together and agree on an extended version of OpenStep and a protocol for updating from repositories, Web, FTP and bittorrent as well as an official protocol for licensing an registration of commercial software. I doubt it will ever happen though. Trying to push a big improvement for desktop Linux is like pulling teeth and is often derailed by Linux server users who classify anything like that as "unnecessary bloat." It is one of the reasons I don't see Linux on the desktop really making a lot of headway anytime soon.
If you're referring to the apt repository behind Synaptic, a central repository for all applications is conventional Linux wisdom that fosters a lack of standard layout and management systems. This is a key weakness of Linux as it prevents commercial vendors from easily writing deployable software.
I think the package manager is both an advantage and a disadvantage. I think a package manager could be written that would handle commercial apps well. The easiest way would be a modified version of OpenStep for application bundles, extended to include a reference to either a repository or a Web/FTP/Bittorrent for updated versions. Commercial vendors like shipping on CD or from their own Web site or repository, but there is no reason a package manager cannot handle that. The real killer would be if it included a built in mechanism for software registration and licensing.
In my dream world representatives from Apple, Canonical, Redhat, and Sun are sitting down tomorrow to finalize a standard for the new OpenStep bundle and registration service.
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Massachusetts, Sweden, the entire European Union all have proposed or passed open format laws. Mind you, the laws themselves are interpretable. Those writing the laws want the advantages of open standard formats, but most of the legislators have a limited understanding of the subject, and so may be tricked into approving things that are called "open" but which actually remove the benefits they are seeking. Still, this is a common trend and a significant number of governments are looking into this subject and some will certainly required an approved standard format (which is why MS is pursuing this farce).
...it's what the majority of Big Corporate Business does.How many big businesses do you suppose have to do business with governments including exchanging documents? So if all those companies then make provisions for handling ODF files, what is to stop other businesses from emulating the government and saving money on licensing? Exchanging documents is no longer a big problem, since everyone can handle ODF since it is required by so many governments.
And the reality is that Big Corporate Business loves Microsoft.Corporate business, loves MS, but they also love IBM; especially in enterprise. You know what else they love, money. In particular they like making a "cost saving" move that catapults them into the limelight and sets them up for a big promotion. More and more American businesses are feeling the crunch these days and there has been some real trends towards alternatives, both OpenOffice and even the corporate version of Google docs and other, similar services.
The truth is, MS doesn't like to compete either on price or features. They like to avoid competing using lock-in strategies and their file formats are their biggest customer lock-in. Government adoption of ODF undermines that lock-in and makes it easier for companies to use alternatives for some or all of their needs. Once Google and the like get their offerings to compete with the big, expensive CMS solutions in use by big corporations, I predict we'll see a lot more companies opting for all-in-one solutions that are better integrated than MSOffice+Documentum or Livelink. You know IBM will be pushing FileNet and Domino pretty hard.
Will MS lose significant market share? Maybe, maybe not, but there is a real chance they will have to fight on price and features for the first time in a decade and that will be good for everyone (except MS).
But disk access bottlenecks are not very common, and are usually in response to a user interaction, which is less objectionable to most users. If I tell my machine to open a picture and it has to load from disk, sure that is a delay, but that is pretty rare. Usually, when working or playing, everything is loaded into memory after the initial startup of the program (which I only do once every week or so). The really problematic bottlenecks are when I'm working and in the middle of a workflow and suddenly have to wait because my CPU cores are maxed out.
Unless your your load average is almost always greater than 1.0, you will benefit more by having faster disks than by having more CPUs.Well here I am at home on a typical evening, posting to Slashdot and my load average is 1.3. At work, that average tends closer to 3.0. Good thing this machine is dual core, huh?
That's the gain from multiple cores in combination with good multithreaded code. But if I'm running Windows in a VM and it is using one core, then the benefit is completely lost; or if I'm running a large application or even OS processes taking up a signifiant portion of one core, the browser itself may well, hang anyway.
There are plenty of potential uses, not the least of which is ACL jails for all applications in order to mitigate the majority of malware problems we suffer today.
No. Individuals have the rights. The government has a very few, specifically granted powers. The first amendment protects the right of an individual to speak, but not the right of a person acting as an official representative of the government.
...as long as it doesn't say vote for me or vote against him we are fine.Nope. The government has a very specific mandate and when they exceed that authority they are a threat to the people. For example, would you claim it is my first amendment right to go to your home and take your money from you by force and then use that money to spread pamphlets espousing my opinion? What if you're in a minority and most people agree it would be good for me to take your money and spread pamphlets? The government will throw you in jail and take your things if you don't pay them and they're using that money to spread this propaganda. That is unconstitutional.
Video, audio, gaming, emulators, and VMs are starters. But I think you're missing some of the picture. Most computer users have one or two programs open at a time and end up quitting everything when they want to run something processor intensive like a game or photoshop. With the move towards multi-core and with a little work from developers, people might be able to leave 90% of the apps they use running, all the time. Multiple cores also provides something of a buffer. When a thread goes rogue, their machine does not grind to a halt. Heck, just yesterday my girlfriend was complaining because she tried to open a page in Firefox and it locked up the whole application including the other 8 tabs she had open. That means she had to kill it (which took a while itself) and then try to decide if she wanted to reopen all those tabs and risk it locking up again, or just try to remember what she had open and reopen them all by hand. If each tab, however is running in its own thread and there are enough cores to handle it, this could easily have been a much better experience for her. She could have just closed the unresponsive tab.
Basically, I'd argue that if you provide the resources, smart developers will find a way to make clever use of those resources. Dual core has already sparked a revolution for virtualization and led to some other, really cool OS changes to increase speed. Many cores will provide diminishing returns (we have 2 eyes for a reason), but I bet 8 cores will be well utilized within a few years.
Part of the article's point is that programmers need to learn new algorithms to replace algorithms that are not easily made parallel. Now not all tasks can be easily parallelized either, but a lot are and are not being taken advantage of.
So far, multiple cores have boosted performance mostly because the typical user has multiple applications running at a time. But as the number of cores increases, the beneficial effects diminish dramatically.Well, also multiple OS's running at the same time as well, which may become more popular. The point is, programmers need to make applications more parallel so this is not the main benefit anymore. This has already happened in CPU intensive fields and is happening more and more in OS development.
In addition, most applications these days are not CPU bound. Having eight cores doesn't help you much when three are waiting on socket calls, four are waiting on disk access calls and the last is waiting for the graphics card.I'm not sure this is true. It certainly is not the only bottleneck, but it seems to be the biggest one. There will be other bottlenecks, but many can be alleviated if they become the real choke point. Disk issues can be mitigated by faster interconnects and multiple disks/platters to increase read/write. As for graphics cards, that is one area where multiple cores are already helping. OS X Leopard, for example, now spawns an OpenGL feeder process that can be moved to another core removing what is one of the biggest actual bottlenecks for GPU use, the CPU time in handing over data. This one OS improvement can theoretically double the speed of some, existing OpenGL applications, while realistically it is seeing much more modest improvements, that is the type of rethinking that needs to be done to take advantage of multiple cores and it is the type of improvement that has not really been happening enough because many programmers are too set in their ways.
Way to miss the F'ing point. I don't care, so long as they aren't doing so using my involuntarily claimed tax dollars. The constitution is predicated upon the belief that the US government is the greatest danger to the freedom of the people. When homosexual groups start taxing me under threat of imprisonment, then I'll take offense. Until then, the point is what the government is doing.
Bullshit. Even the former director of the CIA disagrees with you, as he stated that some of the misinformation campaigns we've run in the middle east have made their way into US news, which is counter to the interests of the US populace and unconstitutional. The army/executive branch may have a legal mandate to plant misinformation overseas, but as soon as it is meant for the US population, they've overstepped their authority. The people should rightly be outraged by this and should require such programs have their funding removed, especially at a time when Bush is claiming it is too expensive to help pay sick children's medical bills.
Of course not, but when they are caught they need to be punished and more importantly, stopped.
Be indignant that Wikipedia is not encouraging its users to question the data it contains, be indignant that Wikipedia does not have disclaimers and warnings as to its potential inaccuracies -- that's your true crime, your true deception, right there.No it isn't. The crime is the government overstepping its mandate and working against the people it is supposed to serve. That is the crime. Wikipedia has no obligation to anyone.
Don't blame the Government (or anyone else's Government, or NGO, or Political party, or Corporation or cabal...) for the propaganda, they are only doing their jobs.The government is the one that should be blamed. Their job is defined by the constitution. Read it. Whenever they overstep that, they aren't doing their job, they're violating the public trust and need to be called onto the carpet by the electorate. What are you some sort of paid shill trying to divert attention to a charitable project for not doing what you think they should? They aren't funded with tax dollars and have no responsibility to do anything and are thus, blameless.
That is the point of wikipedia. That is not the important part of this story and, in fact, it mentions Digg and several other sites. The point of this story is the government is spending our tax dollars to spread "positive reviews" and misinformation related to government projects, thereby undermining the fourth estate. The other point of this story is they are incompetent at it and admit to doing it. Can't you muster up just a little bit of indignation that instead of providing ten poverty stricken youth with full scholarships to university we're paying at least one incompetent hack that money to lie to us on Web forums?
When it is a government employee doing this, on the clock, paid for by tax dollars, as part of their official duties... well that is what propaganda is. Why the hell are we paying for "mass communications officers" in the first place? Does anyone support their tax dollars going to pay for someone to go post positive comments on Digg about government programs? Say, are you by any chance a "mass communications officer?"
I've proposed sandbox security templates
Might I suggest you champion the inclusion of SELinux by default in distros. It would at least allow security minded application designers to solve their part of the problem.
Basically an app will announce what sort of template sandbox it would want to be run as, and a user will decide whether it's OK or not. If OK, the OS will enforce the sandbox.
I think this is about 1/3 of the solution. First, if an app is going to announce itself, it might as well be specific and come with a full ACL describing what it should be doing, thus providing finer grained security and preventing some overflow style attacks. Second, since such a system does not address malware, it needs to be paired with a way to verify the source of code and with an assigned level of trust for that source. To that end you need a way to sign applications (preferably, free, open, and cross-platform) and a way to pair that identity/signature with a given level of trust.
Whereas if an app claims to be a "guest game/applet" but actually requests "Full System Privileges" (the OS/GUI should pop up the usual warnings) it should be a lot easier to educate people not to run that sort of stuff.
The problem with this is the amount of software people want to use or think they do, compared to the actual amount of spyware/malware. You end up conditioning users to allow everything to do most everything. This can be somewhat mitigated by a good and intelligent UI, but not completely.
I have an alternative. Many people subscribe to blacklists of malware signatures, but as malware becomes more adaptive, these become less effective. What we need to supplement this are whitelists of software, including verification of the ACLs, paired with the application signature. These whitelists could be provided by free projects or by commercial security companies or both and should be user editable/overrrideable.
Tis way, in a common use case the user just has to decide which whitelist providers they trust and how much each. Then 99% of the time, when they run an application, the OS could silently verify the signature and reference the whitelist, comparing the ACL verified with the ACL included. Based upon who the user trusts, the application could access a resource without any user intervention, until it exceeds it's level of trust and then the user is alerted that it may have been hijacked or is being malicious and provide specific information as to what it is trying to access.
I think some people are already working on stuff like that. It's not easy to do, but I believe it is possible. Maybe Apple or Microsoft might be able to pull it off. Microsoft might not want to do it badly enough though.
The latest version of OS X ships with the sandboxing framework and an application signature framework. It is still missing a framework to accept ACL evaluations from Apple or third parties. It is still missing the UI component. The sandboxing framework, however, is in use in Leopard for various services as an extra layer of security and with hard-coded ACLs. As for MS, I suspect they plan to tackle this from a completely different perspective in keeping with their corporate culture. They'll probably require all applications be singed by them and then charge both developers and users for verification, applied with a very broken UI and a lot of holes. I'm actually hoping Apple is hit with some serious malware problems in the next year, to motivate them to build out and activate such a system. If nothing else, it could get security firms on board with an open ACL interchange format, that could cause MS more antitrust grief if they tried to take it over at a later date.
I truly wish someone would pick up the ball. Can you imagine subscribing to a free project like ClamAV, for app signatures, plus having a set from your OS vendor and from a security firm like Symantec, all evaluated against what ships
...chuckling not only at the security issues that are popping up, but at Apple's reaction to all of them.I've been working in the security industry for years. I've submitted bugs to Apple, MS, and various Linux and BSD projects. Apple's reaction to such submissions has been better than average. For the most part, they seem to acknowledge security related bugs and fix them before they are exploited, including providing credit to the bug reporter. I guess what I'm saying is, if you're judging "Apple's" response to security related bugs, maybe looking at how they handle problems reported to them through their publicly accessible bug reporting system is a better measuring stick, than looking at how they handle posts in forums. Not that I approve of censoring their forums, it just doesn't seem to be an important aspect of how they respond with regard to security. Not to sound like an Apple fan or anything, but I've frankly been impressed by Apple's quick turnaround on serious bugs.
Saying apple makes good hardware though? Don't they just order and piece together hardware just like joe shmoe's computer shop would? Do they manufacture motherboards, CPUs, ram or hard drives? They might make the cases, I doubt they make the power supplies.
Apple is an OEM like Dell or actually, more like Sony. Most of the components they use are standardized, but they do have motherboards designed just for them, they design how all the components go together, which ones to use, and what the required specifications (acceptable failure rate) are. Not all machines are created equal in this regard. Just take a look at the percentage of machines returned due to failed hardware that consumer reports publishes each year and you'll see Apple at the top of the list, closely followed by Sony, Lenovo and (surprisingly Dell this year as they've managed to turn around their laptop manufacturing, although not desktops). Other vendors have up to five times the percentage of hardware failure.
So they made a good OS? Naw, they made a darn good windowing system to replace X though. Of course, all the concepts were out there--nothing technically groundbreaking.
They (or Next who took over Apple) made a lot more than the windowing system. They made the kernel, the APIs the filesystem, the services framework, much of the userspace apps and daemons, and don't forget openstep. As for the graphics, well a PDF (vector) based windowing system was certainly ahead of it's time, although the networking capabilities were retrograde.
So what does Apple actually make?
They make the software, minus some pieces where they share development with the OSS community. They make the hardware.
They restrict the hardware which must avoid thousands of "little annoyances" PC users see (like laptop suspend being flaky).
Ummm. The flakey driver annoyances are always a problem for the hardware vendor, not the OS vendor. MS doesn't write drivers for Dell hardware, Dell does. Each OEM is usually responsible for getting drivers together and each OEM supports a subset of hardware, just like Apple.
They let someone else create the multi-threading OS kernel for them because that's hard.
Mach? Mach has been so remade by the Next engineers that it is pretty much their baby at this point. When Next was acquired by (or acquired) Apple they remade it further making it more monolithic and they've been reworking it ever since. Apple certainly does their own kernel.
The other thing they bring is a lot of people who grab onto anything that they can latch onto to make them appear different--the VW bug, iPod, blackberry...
How does an iPod make one appear different? They make up nearly 70% of portables.
...security-wize, but if they ever start doing any ground-breaking work, they will most likely start seeing some serious problems.
You mean like being the first desktop OS to implement an SELinux style mandatory access control system by default and use it to sandbox services? The verdict is still out, but they seem to have done a pretty kick-ass job with that one so far. Apple has a lot of really good security people from Next and from BSD and other UNIX backgrounds that have been hired into the company in the last five years. Some of them do some solid, cutting-edge work. Apple's problem is that they are such a mixed bag when it comes to engineering, a lot of the userspace and services people are at the opposite end of the spectrum and don't think about security at all. Still, Apple is ready and poised to kick some serious butt when it comes to security enhancements, when and if, security ever becomes a real problem for the majority of their users. They are also getting a lot of free testing and fixes from the community, since so many people in the computer security industry are now using OS X on their own system
However, there is one thing that I am very troubled by and it is simply this: Apple apparent arrogance and ignorance when it comes to security.
Apple is a mixed bag when it comes to security. They have employees they acquired from other companies specializing in Web technologies, graphics, video, and numerous other topics, as well as old-school Apple employees many of whom do not take security seriously enough. On the other hand they have all the Next employees and all the old-school Unix guys they've hired on to manage the guts, who live and breath security. As a result, in some ways Apple is way ahead of the game for security (like with their new sandboxing and signing frameworks in Leopard) and in others they seem oblivious. I can't think of another consumer desktop oriented OS that ships with so few services running, and with almost all of those sandboxed. Then you get to other things Apple, like some of their userland applications and Web services and you wonder that the same company could produce both of them. Apple is pretty schizo in this regard.
Apple has enjoyed a "blanket" of security because it is low profile and a niche. However, as its market share and mind share expands, this period of respite will soon fade.
I disagree. Apple is a juicy target for exploitation for many reasons. They are less likely to be exploited due to a number of market and social factors, but in general, Apple's security has been fairly sound and that is why they are not worm food. Further, I don't see Apple's security record becoming poor in the future. Apple, Linux, Solaris, etc. all have one major thing that will keep them more secure than Windows is today... motivation. If Apple's security starts to fail for their users, Apple loses money as they move away. Thus, Apple has direct financial motivation to fix the problem, and they will. This is the advantage of a free market. Microsoft, however, has a monopoly, so even when their users are screaming out for better security, MS loses very few, if any, if they ignore their customers and focus instead on locking in a new market and this latter action will make them more money. They have direct financial motivation to do little more than provide the appearance that they are doing something security-wise, and that is what they keep delivering.
You would think that, during this time, Apple would have used the opportunity to develop and internal culture, policies and procedures, as well as infrastructure for dealing effectively with security issues. However, the complete opposite appears to be the case. Apple has failed miserably to publicly and actively address such issues. It also fails to respond in anything that could be called a rapid manner to reports of exploitable security holes. Taking actions such as deleting posts that point out security problems makes the situation worse, not better. Failing to publicly document the existence, status and nature of defects makes the situation worse, not better. Being secretive makes the situation worse, not better.
Here is my experience with Apple's security response. My co-worker found a potentially exploitable hole in OS X. He went to Apple's Web site and reported it as a security bug in the bug report section, not commenting the forums that are for users not Apple employees. Apple sent him a message a few days later saying they'd look into it. A few weeks later the next security update for OS X came out and fixed the problem, including crediting my co-worker with discovering it. It was painless and quite rapid for that large of a project, considering the time for research, coding a fix, testing, and rollout, in fact a lot faster than our average response time to that same priority of bug (and we sell much more critical security devices). From everything I've seen, Apple responds fairly quickly to security issues reported to them and the only instances where there are major problems are where researchers refuse to give Apple details before p
Because it is illegal to tie a product you have monopolized to one in a different market.
...what about MacOS X and Linux?It is illegal for them to tie products in markets they have monopolized with one in a different market. That is why the EU is investigating Apple's market share with the iPod (since they are close to having monopoly influence in that market) and may force them to remove the ties between the iPod and the ItTunes store and iTunes software.
why should Microsoft sell an OS without a web browserBecause it has destroyed both the market for Web browsers and slowed progress of Web technologies to a crawl. Standards that were finalized over a decade ago and implemented by every other browser are still not viable technologies because of MS's refusal to implement them and the importance of that due to their monopoly in desktop OS's. Why do you object to IE having to compete on even ground with other browsers? All MS has to do is ship all the other browsers with Windows as well as IE or stop shipping IE with it or agree to abide by the standards so the Web can move forward. What, exactly is your objection to that?
why punish a company out to extinction?Are you implying that if MS has to compete fairly in the browser market they will become extinct?
Is just because it isn't European?The EU has enforced their antitrust laws against dozens of European companies in the past 5 years. For that matter, the US courts ordered even more drastic measures then this when they convicted MS of abusing US antitrust law, but then there was an election where MS was one of the largest contributors to both the Republican and Democratic parties and suddenly the new people running the DoJ decided MS's punishment should be changed from being broken up, to the absolutely nothing at all would be done.
but what business do they have with the OS?Windows is a monopoly. When you have a monopoly, you can tie it to other markets to undermine capitalist free trade in those markets. Thus, when you have a monopoly, you can't tie that monopoly to other markets, because it breaks capitalism. For years IE has been inferior to other browsers in almost every way, and yet it still has the lion's share of the market. That is a market failure. The only thing wrong with Firefox is it can't handle Web pages intentionally broken to work with IE, or using MS proprietary technologies that only work with IE. Both of those problems exist only because of MS's monopoly abuse, thus they are artificial problems introduced into a competing product, through the use of a monopoly in another market. That is criminal, in both the US and the EU. Even american companies like Sun, however, have been forced to go to the European courts because the US ones are so corrupt and bribable. Before you go slandering the EU courts as anti-american, maybe you should research how the US courts have been behaving.
Umm, how many people do you know that have the know-how to build a box from scratch but don't have a second computer to use to download a browser and can't burn one to disk to use for new systems?
I, personally, have no qualms with Microsoft shipping IE with Windows. It is their product, after all.This argument is analogous to "I, personally, have no qualms with Bob stabbing Sue with that knife. It is their knife, after all." It completely misses the point. Just because MS made both of them does not mean it is legal or ethical to bundle the two together and undermine the free market.
BUT they should give OEMs the option to strip it out and replace it with Firefox/Opera/Safari/K-Meleon if they so desire. Which, really, is what this is all about.No it isn't. This is about providing a level playing field for browser developers so the best browsers are the ones with the most market share, thus providing incentive for all the developers to provide the best product for customers, not for their own agendas. Providing the option is not good enough. OEMs have to be in a position where they have to choose which browser to include and developers have to be in the position where either they know all the browsers will be on every Windows box or they can't be sure any of the browsers will be on every Windows box. Otherwise, developers still have incentive to code primarily for IE and OEMs have incentive to include IE because of the results of the developers actions.
I can't even begin to fathom why so many people here think MS should be given a free pass to make IE the most popular browser, regardless of its quality, just because they have a monopoly on desktop OS's. Is it really so unfair for them to have to compete with other browsers based upon the actual quality of their application instead of on artificial disadvantages they introduce into competitive offerings? What ever happened to capitalism and the free market and "may the best product win?"
The law says you can't use a monopoly in one market to gain an advantage in another. Apple has no monopoly on operating systems or hardware, so what would restrict them? They are, however, restricted from leveraging a monopoly in portable music players to gain an advantage in say, music download services or music jukebox software markets. In fact the courts are looking at compelling Apple to change their behaviors with regard to the DRM supported on iPods right now.
Why is it OK to tell Microsoft they can't include their own browser in their OS and yet Apple can tell you you must by their hardware to run their OS?Because MS has been found by the courts to have monopoly influence in the desktop OS market, so using that to gain market share for their browser, rather than having it compete on its own merits, is illegal. Bundling, is the most common form of tying and is specifically mentioned in antitrust law.
Windows and OS X are both very restrictive.Yup, but only Windows wields monopoly influence in a market.
Toshiba laptops come with Firewire ports as well. It is, however, a rarity... which is sad. The main reason OS X is my base OS running my VMs, instead of in a VM under Linux is Apple's "boot in firewire" mode along with the "upgrade from previous computer" option for installs. When I get new hardware I enjoy the one-click feature to have all my old stuff on my new machine and it all configured for me. The easiest way to do this with Linux and Windows is to run them in VMs and let OS X handle it. Unless Firewire becomes more common, this option will never be cloned by Windows(and probably not by Linux) since the feature doesn't work for USB-2 (as it requires an active CPU).
Ahh, but can you plug an eSATA drive into your (dumb) video recorder and transfer data straight to it? That's one of the big reasons Firewire is still here, because it works for both computers and other device types without CPUs like drives, cameras, stereo receivers, etc. I mean if I already have a Firewire port on my laptop for my video camera, why do I want a eSATA port as well?
For an OEM to add a firewire port costs about $1.50 more than a USB port. Not exactly a huge difference.
Do we 'need' usb? no. We could get by on just firewire. But usb is cheaper and a penny saved is a penny earned.There is nothing wrong with USB for what it was designed for. The problem is when it is applied to a task it just isn't very good at, like hard drives. Even if you have USB-2 for a hard drive, it is still pretty inferior. It uses up your CPU, you need software to manage it, it is slower, and you can't just plug it into your video camera and go, because it needs a computer in between. Intel's insistence on pushing USB-2 is just holding back progress, hopefully this will help solve that problem.
Well, first there is the distinction between 'package management' (managing what owns what and what needs what, but not downloads and repository management (the ability to track versions of aforementioned packages).
Well, it is fine to make that distinction, but it is just semantics. Package managers should handle installation, upgrades and facilitate discovery in conjunction with the ways those offering packages want to provide them. Content is king.
I've seen commercial linux software provide rpms with license acceptance programs/registrations that must be done before the application will start...
So have I, but mostly for server software, very, very rarely for desktop/workstation oriented software.
In terms of downloads and such, absolutely they handle web downloads...
For some definition of "handle." I can download a package and my Linux distro will recognize it, but it won't keep it up to date nor will it handle registering the software package with the developer and managing my license. As far as I know, none of the package formats support licensing or even referencing a repository for updates. If such a mechanism is available, no one uses it.
...it's just most companies don't understand it and end up abusing the situation, sadly.
I'm a believer in "if you build it, they will come." Maybe the trick is figuring out why they aren't using them? There are several fairly obvious reasons I know. One is lack of easy packaging tools. Another is getting packages that will work on all Linux distros and common package managers is a pain, so they just use an installer.
Though not restricted, Adobe provides a yum repository for flash plugin.
Yup and that's about it. They have never offered any of their non-free software using a repository (and there used to be several such applications).
Unfortunately you are right, the reality is that the bulk of the commercial linux world doesn't adopt the repository management for some reason or another, but at least the underlying distribution provides such a feature, so the blame can solely be placed on the application vendor rather than the underlying platform.
Who cares about blame? I want working features! It needs to be easy and attractive enough to developers or it is useless.
The great thing is, 'Linux' doesn't have to do anything. Canonical, or RedHat, or Novell, or whoever, they are all communities that can change things without every other Linux platform adopting, and the free market can decide.
The problem with that is interoperability is a huge feature, so unless they are all willing to migrate at once, even really cool features cannot be implemented unless they are agreed upon by all parties or are just incremental improvements. One of the reasons I see OS X leapfrogging Linux in many areas is because they are willing to make big changes and don't have to worry about interoperability with other vendors as much.
In any event, Apple and Microsoft don't provide any facility for repository management, so they receive the blame rather than the software vendors.
What is your obsession with assigning blame? We're comparing OS's not figuring out who's to blame for the functions that are lacking. If you want, you can blame Linux vendors for refusing to standardize on one package format and for failing to make it easy enough for commercial developers to use.
That's true *if* the application relies on no third party bundles it doesn't include itself.
Which is true for every single bundle I've ever seen.
The problem is that such requirements either must be manually resolved through documentation specified action before attempting to run the application, an installer to check the situation itself programatically , or duplicat
Please. MS is using their monopoly to manipulate the market and make the most profitable thing for developers to do is break standards. They do it intentionally as several leaked e-mails and subpoenaed documents during their case with the DoJ showed. They are responsible.
I can think of a couple, but the same is true in the reverse. Both OS X and Vista have features that have not made it into Linux distros yet.
My favorite example is the yum or apt facility.Actually, there are a couple of nice package managers for OS X that handle both Linux/BSD ports and native OS X apps. It would be nice if it was there in a default install though.
...it provides a common methodology for third parties to register repositories of their own and not have to provide tools to help with dependencies themselves or to have their own update programs.Which is nice, but realistically that does not happen for commercial software. Linux package managers lack the ability to handle Web and Bittorrent downloads or software registration, so commercial entities buy installer systems that do handle those instead. Commercial software is not only not kept up to date on Linux, but installation generally requires you to run a random binary and uninstallation is a mess.
Linux wins when it comes to installing OSS freeware, but OS X wins on installing commercial software from Web sites or from CD/DVD. The sad thing is, the OpenStep style packages OS X uses are the perfect vehicle for extending Linux style package managers to better handle this type of software, but no desktop Linux developers are interested because most of them are of the opinion that they only think people should run freeware/OSS and all of them are scared of making such a big change. I sometimes fear Linux will never make any large improvement again, simply because there is no one who can make a decision to make a big change.
The OSX world of 'just drag and drop the appfolder' can still leave you without required Library bundles, so it too is damned to having arbitrary installers for complex apps just like windows.Whaaa?!? Umm, the only things that require an installer and can't be drag and drop are things that install kernel modules. Even MS Office is drag and drop. Some software does use installers, but mostly so they can install DRM or manage licensing and registration.
Even if you can drag and drop it, that doesn't mean bugfixes/security fixes will come down for you automatically without some other arbitrary service to track it for you.This is true and one of the reasons I wish Apple, Sun and some major Linux devs would get together and agree on an extended version of OpenStep and a protocol for updating from repositories, Web, FTP and bittorrent as well as an official protocol for licensing an registration of commercial software. I doubt it will ever happen though. Trying to push a big improvement for desktop Linux is like pulling teeth and is often derailed by Linux server users who classify anything like that as "unnecessary bloat." It is one of the reasons I don't see Linux on the desktop really making a lot of headway anytime soon.
I think the package manager is both an advantage and a disadvantage. I think a package manager could be written that would handle commercial apps well. The easiest way would be a modified version of OpenStep for application bundles, extended to include a reference to either a repository or a Web/FTP/Bittorrent for updated versions. Commercial vendors like shipping on CD or from their own Web site or repository, but there is no reason a package manager cannot handle that. The real killer would be if it included a built in mechanism for software registration and licensing.
In my dream world representatives from Apple, Canonical, Redhat, and Sun are sitting down tomorrow to finalize a standard for the new OpenStep bundle and registration service.