That's because you've started making suggestions that aren't just about punishing people who choose to use Windows:).
Umm, are you joking? That's the same solution I've been advocating in posts here for years. MS's monopoly and bundling is bad for users and the industry in general. I'd rather make their bundling a non-issue by removing their monopoly power than try to micro-manage things.
The only way for Apple to make a dent is to start the long road of releasing Mac OS for standard wintel hardware.
This will not happen until MS's monopoly market share is seriously weakened or broken completely. Look, MS has monopoly influence for desktop OS's. Trying to compete with them means expending more resources than they do, for the same amount of gain. It's just bad business. Every company that has tried has failed. MS's monopoly allows them to introduce artificial problems with their competitor's products. It is simply a losing proposition.
Apple has taken the classic route of dealing with the monopoly by bypassing it with a complete, vertical supply chain. By bundling OS X (their real innovative product) with their hardware, they put themselves in competition with Dell, Gateway, Lenovo, and Toshiba, none of whom have a monopoly that can be leveraged against them. While MS can arbitrarily break compatibility with OS X, Dell has no such ability. Sure they can make up nonstandard connectors for hardware, but unless they can get Gateway, Lenovo, and Toshiba on board as well it won't hurt Apple as much as Dell.
Apple would be stupid to un-bundle OS X and their hardware at this point. Slowly eating away small bit of market share and hoping others will do the same is their only viable business model. Maybe if they ever get to 30% share or thereabouts the situation will change. I know everyone wishes Apple would do this because they want to be able to buy the OS separately, but the likely cost is Apple going out of business or canceling their OS entirely. If you truly want to buy OS X for generic x86, the best bet is to hope the courts will actually break up MS's monopoly at which point the market will force Apple to unbundle to remain competitive. Otherwise, be prepared or a very long wait for this, if it ever happens.
I call BS. In 2000 instead of voting for who I wanted to vote for, the Libertarian candidate Harry Brown, I specifically voted against Bush by checking the box next to Gross, er Gore's name.
That's the problem. You should be able to vote for Brown first and then Gore without being penalized. With the voting system we have now and with the one you describe you are forced to choose. That is why rating candidates and then applying all a vote towards the least objectionable candidate is better than either what we have now, or what you propose.
I figured the lesser of two bads was better.
And the system that makes you choose and vote strategically and make that choice is what is broken.
But I still LOST! As did 1/2 the population. And because of it thousands have died.
Which is one reason effective electoral reform is needed.
With my system I can vote #1 for Ron Paul, who I voted for in 1988, then if there's anyone else I find acceptable I can vote #2 and not vote for Clinton or any right winger or neocon, Christian or otherwise, at all. Voting like this also helps third parties, that number #2 I vote for could be a Libertarian.
The problem is, with a system like you described, people still have incentive to vote strategically. If you don't give 5 points to the frontrunner against one of the two big parties, then that party gains an advantage if there are multiple "good" candidates. As a result people are less likely to give their highest point vote to the candidate they really want to win, because it makes it more likely the person they least want to win will do so.
That's called "semi-proportional" voting, but it does not address all the problems. In particular, it does not address the problem of multiple, similar candidates stealing votes from one another or of third party lock-out. For example, maybe I really want Stephen Colbert to win, but I know he won't so my second choice is democrat Joe Biden followed by republican Ron Paul. Above all I don't want Rudy Giuliani to win. With the system you describe, as wit the current system my best strategy is to give all my voting points to whomever is the leading democrat running against Giuliani and thus not vote for any of the people I really want.
A better system is a ranked system where the two top candidates are decided, then each is awarded a vote for each person who ranked them higher on their list than the other leading candidate. In this way I could vote for those candidates I listed, in order, and then the leading democrat without having to be strategic or play games. At the same time, my vote would count just as much against Giuliani as it would if I had voted strategically.
This solves both the problem of strategic voting and third-party lock-out while resulting in more people getting a president that, if not their first choice, is at least acceptable to them.
I've always felt that a better way would be to add a "none of the above" option to the ballot.
Better yet would be a switch to a ranked voting method. Instead of voting for candidate A, B, or None, you rank all candidates in the order you prefer them. When counting the votes, the two with the most are determined, then the winner is selected by how many people ranked that one higher.
The benefit of this system is multiple, similar candidates don't steal votes from each other in such a way that the majority gets a candidate they strongly disagree with. People no longer have to vote strategically. Have you ever heard a person say they'd vote for a third party candidate but they know they won't win and they want to stop the republican or democrat from winning? With such a system you could vote for three third party candidates then the democratic candidate and if none of the third party candidates had enough votes your vote would go for the democrat.
Sadly such a system will likely never be implemented in the US. All the people who could create voting reform were elected by the current system, so they almost always have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are and making sure it remains a two party system. I doubt there will ever be a grassroots movement because I don't think US citizens care or are educated or have confidence that the system is not rigged. Still, if you're advocating change, we might as well advocate the best option.
I agree though I would personally prefer that they were forced to open up the win32, directx, etc apis, so alternatives like WINE on linux could FULLY support all Windows applications.
It has been 7 years since the US Dept. of Justice ordered MS to document and license a limited subset of their APIs. As of 5.5 years ago MS admitted that they had not complied but were working on it and the DoJ said they had no problem with that. The reason this did not work and a order to open up all APIs will not work is because MS has too much money and too many lawyers and they can delay action using those lawyers until they can pay off someone to ignore their noncompliance.
I'm convinced at this point that the only way to stop MS from abusing their monopoly is to remove that monopoly. If the courts ordered MS to open up all their APIs they'd fight it in court for years and years, then they'd partially comply in a way that makes it unusable to the WINE team and fight about that in the courts for years and years. They'd also continue donating to campaign funds for both democrats and republicans until people were put in place that would ignore their behavior and we'd be no better off.
The US government is simply too corrupt to deal with a monopoly of their size piecemeal. Maybe the EU will be faster and less corrupt, but I'm not holding my breath.
What about a settlement that means something to competition and getting M$ to declare patent indemnity for all Linux Vendors or force them to publish the patents in question?
I'm not opposed to software patent reform, but I don't see it as related strongly to monopoly abuse.
Seems to me the competition only needs a little leeway to be able to move forward and that browser wars don't mean much anymore.
On the contrary, I think the browser tie-in is one of MS's biggest competition blockers. The prohibitive cost of moving away from technologies and services tied to IE is a large factor in preventing both companies and individuals from moving away from Windows and to other platforms. MS's refusal to support modern Web standards have prevented the Web from being a real platform for applications that would be OS agnostic.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. You cannot punish a corporation the same way you punish an individual, because they don't care about the same things.
I agree.
There's only one thing a corporation values, so there's only one thing you can take away from one: market share.
I disagree. The company cares about money and the people directing the company care about money, power, and their own well being.
Pass a measure forcing Microsoft and its subsidiaries to halve their advertising budget for, say, five years.
The brilliance of capitalism within a free market is that it relies upon greed and self interest to bring benefit to society. As companies compete with one another to give customers what they want, they are rewarded based upon how well customers believe they have succeeded in that.
Because of MS's monopoly, that is no longer the case and the only way I think things will be fixed is if MS loses that monopoly. Forget about fines or bans on advertising. Break MS up into at least two companies, each with full rights to the source code for Windows, patents, copyright, and trademarks, as well as half the resources (both manpower and money). Forbid these new companies from any collaboration or non-public communication. The desire of the new companies to make money will mean each will start working on a version of Windows that they think OEMs will like more than the other former MS company. OEMs will choose based upon which they think computer buyers will want. Both will be able to bundle anything they want and it won't be a problem because it won't be backed up with the monopoly influence since people can always choose to go with the other former MS company. In short order the market will open up, people will have real choices, and innovation will return.
The logical solution then is to order Firefox be preinstalled on all copies of Windows, OEM or otherwise.
Such a solution does not go far enough. For it to work all browser makers that wanted their browser pre-installed on Windows would have to be allowed to have theirs included. Of course bundling IE and Windows is only one of the dozens of abuses of MS's monopoly.
Inefficiently and slowly addressing the abuses one at a time is simply not going to work. The only solution I have confidence in is removing the monopoly so that MS has no ability to abuse it. Break MS into at least two companies with full rights to all the patents and code in Windows. Forbid those two companies from any collusion or even private communication. When both of them are fighting for market share with one another, they will give consumers versions of Windows that finally do what consumers want, instead of what will gouge the most money from them. Restore competition and the industry will recover. Barring that, government corruption and a glacial legal system will never fix this market and technology will continue to improve slowly and in a broken direction.
There is a difference. They can all be completely uninstalled except for IE.
That is not an important difference at all. The reason bundling Safari with OS X or Firefox with RedHat is not an issue is because Neither OS X nor Linux wields monopoly influence in a market. If Apple is ruled to have monopoly influence in the portable music player market, it will be just as illegal for them to bundle iTunes with every iPod sold, regardless of how easy it is to uninstall.
I just don't understand why it is so hard for people to understand what a monopoly is, why bundling and tying are an abuse of a monopoly, and why such actions are bad for society and illegal.
Actually the Chandler project (basically the source of the CalDAV standard)...
I thought the CalDAV standard was developed by IBM's Lotus team in conjunction with a few other players. The chandler project is a new attempt to take advantage of it, and run by some of the folks from the old days, but I don't see how it can be the origin of a standard that predates it by four years.
Is this akin to trusted computing? This is the first I heard Leopard having such a thing. So if you are a 3rd party developer you will have to contact apple or Verisign every time you want to release your app?
It looks like for Leopard, Apple has all the hooks needed to alter the behavior of the OS with regard to an application based upon verification of a signature, but they are not requiring apps to have signatures. Hopefully, Apple will soon combine this with the sandboxing technology in Leopard to require unsigned apps to run in a restricted sandbox by default and warn users of "risky" behaviors of those apps allowing users to stop them.
To date, I've seen no indication of signed apps phoning home every time they run, although I think you can configure an application to do so at the time of installation to verify the signature.
Jobs made several comments about securing iPhones and the network from malware, and the route Apple takes to do this is a big question mark. He mentioned application signing as a step in the right direction, with regard to other companies. Leopard brings support to OS X for both application signing and native sandboxing of applications for security. I wonder if Apple will employ either or both of these technologies to lock down the iPhone and, if so, how locked down they will be.
think you're stuck in the past. There was a time, around 2000-2002 where this was the case, but it pretty much ended with the later service packs of Office 2000/Outlook 2000.
Please, I've seen at least 7 advisories this year on exploitable, unpatched buffer overflows in current versions of Outlook. I don't recall any that have been wormed, but if a worm is made to exploit an e-mail program and it spreads widely, you can bet it will only be affecting Outlook users.
This further supports my belief that you've not been involved with these products in several years. The problem you're describing is also an old one. Since one of the releases of 2003, when you save a file, it will complain if there is extra information left on old versions. And the 'Accept all changes' on change tracking will remove all old history of change tracking.
It may be an old problem, but it is still a current one. Change tracking is not the only way data is mined from doc files. Regular.doc recovery programs as well as programs designed specifically for the purpose can often recover deleted parts of files and in some cases unrelated deleted data from the user's hard disk. Finally, Word suffers from the same monoculture problem as Outlook as seen with the targeted industrial espionage utilizing buffer overflows in Word and Excel, from earlier this year. In fact, those attacks were discovered by users whose company had standardized on StarOffice and thus questioned why their colleagues within the company were sending them.doc files.
Sorry, MS Office is still a very real security concern.
I can guarantee if you go to a professional writer and ask: Which would you rather have?
A) An outline view where you can instantly re-order your work, including notes and references?
B) A slightly more open document format?
There isn't a single one who's going to answer B.
Hi, I'm a professional writer. You're wrong. When doing layout and organization of writing I tend to use professional tools such as Framemaker, InDesign, Quark, or LaTeX. When writing individual topics within that writing (nonfiction) I use a variety of tools and formats including Word, OpenOffice, Pages, TextEdit, vi, emacs, Crimson, SubEthaEdit, etc. Because I often exchange short documents 1-20 pages with people running all sorts of different OS's (Wind2K, XP, Vista, OS X, Linux, OpenBSD, Solaris, etc.) I much prefer to do so using an open document format so that everyone can view and edit the same document. Many people do not have access to Word and because of the nature of.doc the file is interpreted differently by each program, including different versions of Word. It is a lot easier for everyone to collaborate using an open format.
Obviously this is not a big concern for all writers, but your assertion that there is not a single professional writer who would disagree with you is just incorrect.
Well der. The point, to spell it out more clearly, is that the people who are developing OpenOffice aren't coming up with features that big companies want, and big companies are the ones holding the majority of Office licenses.
Actually, from what I've seen most of the development of OpenOffice is features aimed at large businesses and government institutions. The average person that exchanges files is seriously hampered by lack of open standards and usually has to use Word eventually. It is medium to large businesses that can effectively save money by switching to OpenOffice and those that have adopted it (including Sun and their customers) seem to be the drivers of new features.
Not enough of a security threat to bother any of the hundreds of thousands of companies that have purchased it.
Are you joking? MS Office has been a serious security problem for many MS customers, but because of the nature of the current market, sometimes security has to take a back seat. Just because people buy something does not mean they are unconcerned about problems with it.
Outlook restricts everything...
It doesn't matter. Because it has such large market share it constitutes a monoculture. That just makes it a huge target for hackers. Because it ties to proprietary protocols, is perpetuates that monoculture, which is good for MS, but bad for security of users. Most credible security consultants will tell you, avoiding Outlook will likely improve your security, and they're correct. Like it or not, the next widespread exploit that compromises an e-mail system will probably only affect Outlook users. Technical merits aside, that is the hard truth.
Speaking of security, Office does have a nice feature where you can encrypt sensitive files before sending them out of the office to prevent your data being read by nefarious third-parties. Does OpenOffice have anything of the sort?
OpenOffice does support encrypting documents, but that is not the main security issue with MS Office. For the most part, files are not intercepted and are sent via e-mail (which can be encrypted) or over a VPN. The main security problem with Word is the accidental inclusion of information. The default settings and UI of MS Word often lead to files being sent that contain leftover information from a different version of the file, upon which the version being sent was based. Using free tools I've seen companies recover information such as the complete text of multiple bids for work that have been submitted to competitors. The information is invisible to the user editing the file so thy naturally assume it
Settling in a gravity well is just stupid... If you want settle off-planet, the reasonable course is to build a big spinning space station.
It is not stupid, it is a trade-off. Sure it is a gravity well, but a weak one that is not hard to overcome. That is in exchange for access to raw material for building things. Tunneling into the moon or using the material to build structures is a lot more practical than going to the expense of lifting every bit of material needed out of earth's gravity well. The moon is not a perfect site but it seems like a reasonable baby step to me, before we look at building a space station somewhere useful, like the asteroid belt.
You seem slightly confused about how the Internet works, so I'm guessing you work in sales.
Nope.
How exactly is your average Windows machine going to avoid these routes?
That's a good question. Seeing as no one seems to have any details on how this is supposed to work, that's the reason I brought the topic up.
Theoretically you can do some tricks with the various lesser known ICMP message types to change the routes that your packets take, but you don't seriously think that shit still works in real life do you?
Theoretically there are a lot of routing tricks you can use and there are even more if you don't mind violating standards. What I'm more concerned with is if they're using some routing tricks that cause problems now, but on a wide scale by Windows, then in systems where, for example, you're passing some traffic with a GRE tunnel that re-onramps it to a downstream router and blackholing other traffic you could end up causing a lot of stress on the system.
The point is, if MS has enabled some wacky routing features by default it may well cause problems for people using blackhole routing as a tool to overcome the problems created by the glut of MS's easily compromised systems.
A black hole router is a router that incorrectly handles MTUs that are bigger than it can pass.
The term "blackhole router" has a completely different meaning these days. A lot of ISPs intentionally claim to have a route for traffic and drop the traffic as a way of filtering malicious traffic, like DDoS attacks. Technically this may be "incorrect" but it keeps servers running an accessible during a DDoS attack and is a vital tool for network security engineers at tier 1 and 2 ISPs. How this feature will affect the situation depends upon how they implemented it and what it actually does.
black hole routers are not null routes. black hole routers just drop packets that are "too big"; null routes are self explanatory, and are how most ISP's stop DOS attacks.
Blackhole routing, refers to any routing of packets, where you claim you can deliver the route, then drop the packet anyway, whether because of the size or any other characteristic. At least that is how it is used in the industry. Both my company and several of our competitors who sell devices designed to protect against DDoS attacks have a mitigation method referred to as "blackhole route."
Regardless of what you want to call it, if Windows is starting to try some sort of verification and automated avoidance of such routes it could interfere with said defenses, possible resulting in routing loops, DDoSing a router somewhere, or use of more advanced defensive techniques. That's good for me, since we can make more money, but bad for ISPs and enterprise businesses and pretty much everyone but botnet operators.
Does anyone have any details on the blackhole routing avoidance feature? While the summary claims blackhole routers are "rogue" routers, blackhole routing is the most common way to stop DDoS attacks and excessive worm traffic from giant botnets of Windows machines. If the OS now offers botnet operators an easy way to bypass that rerouting of malware traffic, this could have serious detrimental affects upon the internet as a whole.
I believe the function you describe is still broken (completely absent) on Safari, which could also be the cause of confusion. I reported the problem months ago but always have to switch back to the old comment system to post a comment that is not a reply to some other post.
I'm not saying the argument is without merit. Apple could probably do a lot to promote games on their platform, but one really should consider the source a bit. Valve is about the only major game publisher not owned by MS that doesn't port their mainstream titles to the Mac. Everyone else sees the business case and makes money off of it, but Valve seems to have really drank the MS kool-aid. That's not exactly surprising seeing as both Mr. Newell and co-founder Mike Harrington were Microsoft employees before starting Valve. His argument about getting poorer support from Apple than from his old company falls a little flat in that light. I get better support too when I call companies I used to work and where I still know people, than calling some random company.
Now on the other hand, I think Apple could and should do a lot more to support gaming on the Mac. They should be collaborating with Sony to promote OpenGL toolkits to target multiple platforms more easily. If they have to, they should go the MS route and start buying up innovative gaming companies to secure them on Macs as first class citizens. In a normal market, this would not be an issue, but MS has been throwing their monopoly influence around a lot and in the past has bought some of the best Mac gaming companies (Bungie) resulting in problems for gaming on the Mac. MS gets double value for their lock-in dollars with the Xbox, which is why Apple needs to partner with Sony or Nintendo. Still, I'm not sure the guys at Valve provide an objective viewpoint. They are an anomaly and I'd much rather hear from Id, Blizzard, or EA for an objective opinion on this topic.
I am on safari and I am able to access Google docs. This is on Safari 3 Beta for mac.. no changes to user agent.
Try editing text in the presentation. It doesn't work in the Safari 3 Beta. If you click the undo button it complains your browser is not supported. Sadly, it s not even usable yet for Safari.
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Umm, are you joking? That's the same solution I've been advocating in posts here for years. MS's monopoly and bundling is bad for users and the industry in general. I'd rather make their bundling a non-issue by removing their monopoly power than try to micro-manage things.
This will not happen until MS's monopoly market share is seriously weakened or broken completely. Look, MS has monopoly influence for desktop OS's. Trying to compete with them means expending more resources than they do, for the same amount of gain. It's just bad business. Every company that has tried has failed. MS's monopoly allows them to introduce artificial problems with their competitor's products. It is simply a losing proposition.
Apple has taken the classic route of dealing with the monopoly by bypassing it with a complete, vertical supply chain. By bundling OS X (their real innovative product) with their hardware, they put themselves in competition with Dell, Gateway, Lenovo, and Toshiba, none of whom have a monopoly that can be leveraged against them. While MS can arbitrarily break compatibility with OS X, Dell has no such ability. Sure they can make up nonstandard connectors for hardware, but unless they can get Gateway, Lenovo, and Toshiba on board as well it won't hurt Apple as much as Dell.
Apple would be stupid to un-bundle OS X and their hardware at this point. Slowly eating away small bit of market share and hoping others will do the same is their only viable business model. Maybe if they ever get to 30% share or thereabouts the situation will change. I know everyone wishes Apple would do this because they want to be able to buy the OS separately, but the likely cost is Apple going out of business or canceling their OS entirely. If you truly want to buy OS X for generic x86, the best bet is to hope the courts will actually break up MS's monopoly at which point the market will force Apple to unbundle to remain competitive. Otherwise, be prepared or a very long wait for this, if it ever happens.
That's the problem. You should be able to vote for Brown first and then Gore without being penalized. With the voting system we have now and with the one you describe you are forced to choose. That is why rating candidates and then applying all a vote towards the least objectionable candidate is better than either what we have now, or what you propose.
I figured the lesser of two bads was better.And the system that makes you choose and vote strategically and make that choice is what is broken.
But I still LOST! As did 1/2 the population. And because of it thousands have died.Which is one reason effective electoral reform is needed.
The problem is, with a system like you described, people still have incentive to vote strategically. If you don't give 5 points to the frontrunner against one of the two big parties, then that party gains an advantage if there are multiple "good" candidates. As a result people are less likely to give their highest point vote to the candidate they really want to win, because it makes it more likely the person they least want to win will do so.
That's called "semi-proportional" voting, but it does not address all the problems. In particular, it does not address the problem of multiple, similar candidates stealing votes from one another or of third party lock-out. For example, maybe I really want Stephen Colbert to win, but I know he won't so my second choice is democrat Joe Biden followed by republican Ron Paul. Above all I don't want Rudy Giuliani to win. With the system you describe, as wit the current system my best strategy is to give all my voting points to whomever is the leading democrat running against Giuliani and thus not vote for any of the people I really want.
A better system is a ranked system where the two top candidates are decided, then each is awarded a vote for each person who ranked them higher on their list than the other leading candidate. In this way I could vote for those candidates I listed, in order, and then the leading democrat without having to be strategic or play games. At the same time, my vote would count just as much against Giuliani as it would if I had voted strategically.
This solves both the problem of strategic voting and third-party lock-out while resulting in more people getting a president that, if not their first choice, is at least acceptable to them.
Better yet would be a switch to a ranked voting method. Instead of voting for candidate A, B, or None, you rank all candidates in the order you prefer them. When counting the votes, the two with the most are determined, then the winner is selected by how many people ranked that one higher.
The benefit of this system is multiple, similar candidates don't steal votes from each other in such a way that the majority gets a candidate they strongly disagree with. People no longer have to vote strategically. Have you ever heard a person say they'd vote for a third party candidate but they know they won't win and they want to stop the republican or democrat from winning? With such a system you could vote for three third party candidates then the democratic candidate and if none of the third party candidates had enough votes your vote would go for the democrat.
Sadly such a system will likely never be implemented in the US. All the people who could create voting reform were elected by the current system, so they almost always have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are and making sure it remains a two party system. I doubt there will ever be a grassroots movement because I don't think US citizens care or are educated or have confidence that the system is not rigged. Still, if you're advocating change, we might as well advocate the best option.
Jumping Jesus on a pogostick! drsmithy agrees with something I posted! Surely the end is nigh. :)
It has been 7 years since the US Dept. of Justice ordered MS to document and license a limited subset of their APIs. As of 5.5 years ago MS admitted that they had not complied but were working on it and the DoJ said they had no problem with that. The reason this did not work and a order to open up all APIs will not work is because MS has too much money and too many lawyers and they can delay action using those lawyers until they can pay off someone to ignore their noncompliance.
I'm convinced at this point that the only way to stop MS from abusing their monopoly is to remove that monopoly. If the courts ordered MS to open up all their APIs they'd fight it in court for years and years, then they'd partially comply in a way that makes it unusable to the WINE team and fight about that in the courts for years and years. They'd also continue donating to campaign funds for both democrats and republicans until people were put in place that would ignore their behavior and we'd be no better off.
The US government is simply too corrupt to deal with a monopoly of their size piecemeal. Maybe the EU will be faster and less corrupt, but I'm not holding my breath.
I'm not opposed to software patent reform, but I don't see it as related strongly to monopoly abuse.
Seems to me the competition only needs a little leeway to be able to move forward and that browser wars don't mean much anymore.On the contrary, I think the browser tie-in is one of MS's biggest competition blockers. The prohibitive cost of moving away from technologies and services tied to IE is a large factor in preventing both companies and individuals from moving away from Windows and to other platforms. MS's refusal to support modern Web standards have prevented the Web from being a real platform for applications that would be OS agnostic.
I agree.
There's only one thing a corporation values, so there's only one thing you can take away from one: market share.I disagree. The company cares about money and the people directing the company care about money, power, and their own well being.
Pass a measure forcing Microsoft and its subsidiaries to halve their advertising budget for, say, five years.The brilliance of capitalism within a free market is that it relies upon greed and self interest to bring benefit to society. As companies compete with one another to give customers what they want, they are rewarded based upon how well customers believe they have succeeded in that.
Because of MS's monopoly, that is no longer the case and the only way I think things will be fixed is if MS loses that monopoly. Forget about fines or bans on advertising. Break MS up into at least two companies, each with full rights to the source code for Windows, patents, copyright, and trademarks, as well as half the resources (both manpower and money). Forbid these new companies from any collaboration or non-public communication. The desire of the new companies to make money will mean each will start working on a version of Windows that they think OEMs will like more than the other former MS company. OEMs will choose based upon which they think computer buyers will want. Both will be able to bundle anything they want and it won't be a problem because it won't be backed up with the monopoly influence since people can always choose to go with the other former MS company. In short order the market will open up, people will have real choices, and innovation will return.
Such a solution does not go far enough. For it to work all browser makers that wanted their browser pre-installed on Windows would have to be allowed to have theirs included. Of course bundling IE and Windows is only one of the dozens of abuses of MS's monopoly.
Inefficiently and slowly addressing the abuses one at a time is simply not going to work. The only solution I have confidence in is removing the monopoly so that MS has no ability to abuse it. Break MS into at least two companies with full rights to all the patents and code in Windows. Forbid those two companies from any collusion or even private communication. When both of them are fighting for market share with one another, they will give consumers versions of Windows that finally do what consumers want, instead of what will gouge the most money from them. Restore competition and the industry will recover. Barring that, government corruption and a glacial legal system will never fix this market and technology will continue to improve slowly and in a broken direction.
That is not an important difference at all. The reason bundling Safari with OS X or Firefox with RedHat is not an issue is because Neither OS X nor Linux wields monopoly influence in a market. If Apple is ruled to have monopoly influence in the portable music player market, it will be just as illegal for them to bundle iTunes with every iPod sold, regardless of how easy it is to uninstall.
I just don't understand why it is so hard for people to understand what a monopoly is, why bundling and tying are an abuse of a monopoly, and why such actions are bad for society and illegal.
I thought the CalDAV standard was developed by IBM's Lotus team in conjunction with a few other players. The chandler project is a new attempt to take advantage of it, and run by some of the folks from the old days, but I don't see how it can be the origin of a standard that predates it by four years.
It looks like for Leopard, Apple has all the hooks needed to alter the behavior of the OS with regard to an application based upon verification of a signature, but they are not requiring apps to have signatures. Hopefully, Apple will soon combine this with the sandboxing technology in Leopard to require unsigned apps to run in a restricted sandbox by default and warn users of "risky" behaviors of those apps allowing users to stop them.
To date, I've seen no indication of signed apps phoning home every time they run, although I think you can configure an application to do so at the time of installation to verify the signature.
Jobs made several comments about securing iPhones and the network from malware, and the route Apple takes to do this is a big question mark. He mentioned application signing as a step in the right direction, with regard to other companies. Leopard brings support to OS X for both application signing and native sandboxing of applications for security. I wonder if Apple will employ either or both of these technologies to lock down the iPhone and, if so, how locked down they will be.
Please, I've seen at least 7 advisories this year on exploitable, unpatched buffer overflows in current versions of Outlook. I don't recall any that have been wormed, but if a worm is made to exploit an e-mail program and it spreads widely, you can bet it will only be affecting Outlook users.
This further supports my belief that you've not been involved with these products in several years. The problem you're describing is also an old one. Since one of the releases of 2003, when you save a file, it will complain if there is extra information left on old versions. And the 'Accept all changes' on change tracking will remove all old history of change tracking.It may be an old problem, but it is still a current one. Change tracking is not the only way data is mined from doc files. Regular .doc recovery programs as well as programs designed specifically for the purpose can often recover deleted parts of files and in some cases unrelated deleted data from the user's hard disk. Finally, Word suffers from the same monoculture problem as Outlook as seen with the targeted industrial espionage utilizing buffer overflows in Word and Excel, from earlier this year. In fact, those attacks were discovered by users whose company had standardized on StarOffice and thus questioned why their colleagues within the company were sending them .doc files.
Sorry, MS Office is still a very real security concern.
I can guarantee if you go to a professional writer and ask: Which would you rather have? A) An outline view where you can instantly re-order your work, including notes and references? B) A slightly more open document format? There isn't a single one who's going to answer B.
Hi, I'm a professional writer. You're wrong. When doing layout and organization of writing I tend to use professional tools such as Framemaker, InDesign, Quark, or LaTeX. When writing individual topics within that writing (nonfiction) I use a variety of tools and formats including Word, OpenOffice, Pages, TextEdit, vi, emacs, Crimson, SubEthaEdit, etc. Because I often exchange short documents 1-20 pages with people running all sorts of different OS's (Wind2K, XP, Vista, OS X, Linux, OpenBSD, Solaris, etc.) I much prefer to do so using an open document format so that everyone can view and edit the same document. Many people do not have access to Word and because of the nature of .doc the file is interpreted differently by each program, including different versions of Word. It is a lot easier for everyone to collaborate using an open format.
Obviously this is not a big concern for all writers, but your assertion that there is not a single professional writer who would disagree with you is just incorrect.
Well der. The point, to spell it out more clearly, is that the people who are developing OpenOffice aren't coming up with features that big companies want, and big companies are the ones holding the majority of Office licenses.
Actually, from what I've seen most of the development of OpenOffice is features aimed at large businesses and government institutions. The average person that exchanges files is seriously hampered by lack of open standards and usually has to use Word eventually. It is medium to large businesses that can effectively save money by switching to OpenOffice and those that have adopted it (including Sun and their customers) seem to be the drivers of new features.
Not enough of a security threat to bother any of the hundreds of thousands of companies that have purchased it.
Are you joking? MS Office has been a serious security problem for many MS customers, but because of the nature of the current market, sometimes security has to take a back seat. Just because people buy something does not mean they are unconcerned about problems with it.
Outlook restricts everything...
It doesn't matter. Because it has such large market share it constitutes a monoculture. That just makes it a huge target for hackers. Because it ties to proprietary protocols, is perpetuates that monoculture, which is good for MS, but bad for security of users. Most credible security consultants will tell you, avoiding Outlook will likely improve your security, and they're correct. Like it or not, the next widespread exploit that compromises an e-mail system will probably only affect Outlook users. Technical merits aside, that is the hard truth.
Speaking of security, Office does have a nice feature where you can encrypt sensitive files before sending them out of the office to prevent your data being read by nefarious third-parties. Does OpenOffice have anything of the sort?
OpenOffice does support encrypting documents, but that is not the main security issue with MS Office. For the most part, files are not intercepted and are sent via e-mail (which can be encrypted) or over a VPN. The main security problem with Word is the accidental inclusion of information. The default settings and UI of MS Word often lead to files being sent that contain leftover information from a different version of the file, upon which the version being sent was based. Using free tools I've seen companies recover information such as the complete text of multiple bids for work that have been submitted to competitors. The information is invisible to the user editing the file so thy naturally assume it
It is not stupid, it is a trade-off. Sure it is a gravity well, but a weak one that is not hard to overcome. That is in exchange for access to raw material for building things. Tunneling into the moon or using the material to build structures is a lot more practical than going to the expense of lifting every bit of material needed out of earth's gravity well. The moon is not a perfect site but it seems like a reasonable baby step to me, before we look at building a space station somewhere useful, like the asteroid belt.
Nope.
How exactly is your average Windows machine going to avoid these routes?That's a good question. Seeing as no one seems to have any details on how this is supposed to work, that's the reason I brought the topic up.
Theoretically you can do some tricks with the various lesser known ICMP message types to change the routes that your packets take, but you don't seriously think that shit still works in real life do you?Theoretically there are a lot of routing tricks you can use and there are even more if you don't mind violating standards. What I'm more concerned with is if they're using some routing tricks that cause problems now, but on a wide scale by Windows, then in systems where, for example, you're passing some traffic with a GRE tunnel that re-onramps it to a downstream router and blackholing other traffic you could end up causing a lot of stress on the system.
The point is, if MS has enabled some wacky routing features by default it may well cause problems for people using blackhole routing as a tool to overcome the problems created by the glut of MS's easily compromised systems.
The term "blackhole router" has a completely different meaning these days. A lot of ISPs intentionally claim to have a route for traffic and drop the traffic as a way of filtering malicious traffic, like DDoS attacks. Technically this may be "incorrect" but it keeps servers running an accessible during a DDoS attack and is a vital tool for network security engineers at tier 1 and 2 ISPs. How this feature will affect the situation depends upon how they implemented it and what it actually does.
Blackhole routing, refers to any routing of packets, where you claim you can deliver the route, then drop the packet anyway, whether because of the size or any other characteristic. At least that is how it is used in the industry. Both my company and several of our competitors who sell devices designed to protect against DDoS attacks have a mitigation method referred to as "blackhole route."
Regardless of what you want to call it, if Windows is starting to try some sort of verification and automated avoidance of such routes it could interfere with said defenses, possible resulting in routing loops, DDoSing a router somewhere, or use of more advanced defensive techniques. That's good for me, since we can make more money, but bad for ISPs and enterprise businesses and pretty much everyone but botnet operators.
Does anyone have any details on the blackhole routing avoidance feature? While the summary claims blackhole routers are "rogue" routers, blackhole routing is the most common way to stop DDoS attacks and excessive worm traffic from giant botnets of Windows machines. If the OS now offers botnet operators an easy way to bypass that rerouting of malware traffic, this could have serious detrimental affects upon the internet as a whole.
I believe the function you describe is still broken (completely absent) on Safari, which could also be the cause of confusion. I reported the problem months ago but always have to switch back to the old comment system to post a comment that is not a reply to some other post.
I'm not saying the argument is without merit. Apple could probably do a lot to promote games on their platform, but one really should consider the source a bit. Valve is about the only major game publisher not owned by MS that doesn't port their mainstream titles to the Mac. Everyone else sees the business case and makes money off of it, but Valve seems to have really drank the MS kool-aid. That's not exactly surprising seeing as both Mr. Newell and co-founder Mike Harrington were Microsoft employees before starting Valve. His argument about getting poorer support from Apple than from his old company falls a little flat in that light. I get better support too when I call companies I used to work and where I still know people, than calling some random company.
Now on the other hand, I think Apple could and should do a lot more to support gaming on the Mac. They should be collaborating with Sony to promote OpenGL toolkits to target multiple platforms more easily. If they have to, they should go the MS route and start buying up innovative gaming companies to secure them on Macs as first class citizens. In a normal market, this would not be an issue, but MS has been throwing their monopoly influence around a lot and in the past has bought some of the best Mac gaming companies (Bungie) resulting in problems for gaming on the Mac. MS gets double value for their lock-in dollars with the Xbox, which is why Apple needs to partner with Sony or Nintendo. Still, I'm not sure the guys at Valve provide an objective viewpoint. They are an anomaly and I'd much rather hear from Id, Blizzard, or EA for an objective opinion on this topic.
Try editing text in the presentation. It doesn't work in the Safari 3 Beta. If you click the undo button it complains your browser is not supported. Sadly, it s not even usable yet for Safari.