MacWorld is running an analyst who says Vista is more secure than Mac OS X.
Actually he said the quality of the code in Vista (especially the new code), with regard to security vulnerabilities, is better in Vista than in OS X 10.4, in his opinion. That is not even close to the same thing as saying that Vista is more secure than Mac OS X, for traditional definitions of security.
As for the relative security of the systems, I have no doubt that if OS X was instantly catapulted into the same market share position that MS now has, OS X security would be insufficient to the task, the same as the way Vista security is. Anyone with that large of market share is a huge target and the security mechanisms implemented in OS X, or the common Linux desktop systems, like Ubuntu are all insufficient to the task.
The real difference in my opinion is that the security of those other desktops is sufficient for the current security needs of the users. Ubuntu and OS X are not regularly attacked by self-propagating worms and widespread Web exploits. Users on those platforms are normally not inconvenienced by the state of security on those platforms. Further, I'd argue that regardless of Linux's market share and if OS X market share were to grow up to about 50% of the market, there is every reason to believe that those OS's would rapidly adapt to increasing security threats and bring their security up to the level required by users. Without real competition, MS will not innovate.
I am of the opinion that MS has not implemented advanced security techniques to make users happy, simply because they don't really care about making users happy. If a WinXP or Vista user's machine is compromised, in general they don't know there are any other options so they end up buying another Windows machine anyway. As such, MS has no real financial incentive to invest in security that is appropriate for their level of risk so they don't. If you want to fix the security problems that plague users, bringing security measures almost up to the level of Ubuntu is not good enough. The problem needs to be solved at a higher level either by breaking up MS or by weakening their monopoly enough so that they have to take their user's security problems seriously.
Ug, are you saying that TPM is no longer shipped on the Intel Macs?
Yeah, they dropped them from macbooks, macbook pros and imacs before the end of 2006. I'm not sure about mac minis or mac pro, but I suspect they are dropped from those models as well.
this is more about painting Microsoft into a corner by first flipping back to selling XP on some of their systems, and now this. I suspect that Dell is going to be in a very interesting position when they go to re-negotiate their OEM agreement with Microsoft where they can try and dictate the terms that they want.
I suspect MS will play hardball with them. Dell is no longer the number one Windows reseller it once was. Dell is hoping for lower OEM pricing, but they may end up getting their throat cut ala MS deciding not to relicense XP to them removing it from the price list, and setting a very high price on Vista and office for Dell in order to make an example of them. Dell will be making concessions (although it is hard to say what those will be). We all have to see if they've gone too far.
MS is a monopolist and can bundle their technologies with IE, thereby forcing said proprietary technology on everyone, regardless of its merits. Adobe has not monopoly. Legally, MS is the problem. Adobe can write whatever licenses they want because I, as a user and developer, can ignore them and not use it. That is not the case with technologies MS forces on us.
The companies involved in this shit include: IBM, Sun, Apple...
Wow, I'm not sure how you fault Apple in this regard. They actually shipped TPM enabled machines for some time, but never used the TPM in their OS or software, only opening it up for developers interested in doing encryption with it and eventually dropping it due to lack of interest. They did implement EFI, but there is no indication of using it for trusted computing either only for a modern replacement to BIOS.
That is Jobs' pitch to the record companies: "We're not your competition, we just want to sell iPods." But is it really true?
Well, I think it is true, but at the same time he is trying to mislead the record companies about the future of the music industry, as Apple envisions it. Apple benefits from their cartel being undermined, but at the same time I don't think Apple wants to become the sole gatekeeper for a number of reasons.
With iTunes becoming huge, what young musician wouldn't be tempted to sign up with iTunes as a label? Particularly if, instead of the artists getting a small slice of the record companies' cut of an iTunes sale, they got most or all of it? Wouldn't that increase the artists' income from digital sales by something like 400%?
Labels manage multiple items, not just iTunes. They manage advertising and they manage hardcopy to store sales and in many cases live performances. Those needs aren't going away and it is so far outside of Apple's core competence that I doubt they want to try to extend themselves that way.What Apple is motivating is not a switch to Apple as a label, but a switch to an indy label where artists get a much, much larger cut, without losing the iTunes retail channel and without losing their advertising.
There are other problems with Apple becoming a label, including antitrust issues. The iTMS is tied to the iTunes software and the iPod. The iPod is dangerously close to having monopoly influence in a market. Leveraging that into a monopoly on online music distribution would be really shaky legal ground and Apple is a lot more susceptible to bad press about their antitrust actions than MS is.
I do think Apple wants to gradually undermine the big labels, but at the same time I think they plan to simply democratize the market and keep either MS or the RIAA from controlling it. Apple isn't afraid to compete on the merits of their hardware and software since those are their strengths. I think they'll count on those strengths and avoid the dangerous position you mention.
It is hard to determine if Apple is challenging the record labels to allow all music to be DRM free, or if this is just PR.
Between the public statements from Apple, and making a deal with EMI and announcing this option is for all record companies that will publish in it, I don't think it is hard to determine at all.
The deception is that if Apple really cared about the consumers then they would open iTunes/iStore to work with other players.
Perhaps you're confusing Apple with the Electronic Frontiers Foundation? Apple is a for profit venture and are trying to make money. The fact that they are challenging the existing recording industry cartel and their DRM has nothing to do with altruism. It just happens to align with their business plan. Enjoy the benefits and don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
This is possible, no matter how much the Apple brain trust tries to convince us otherwise.
This is capitalism. The question is not "is it possible" but "is it profitable." Apple sells music basically at break even as a way to sell iPods (which they profit on). Apple develops the iTunes store for this purpose. They don't care if it works with other players. They develop the iTunes software to also sell iPods and Macs, so they care a tiny amount if it works with other players.
What you're basically asking for is for Apple to subsidize other companies. If Creative or MS wants to sell hardware players, why should Apple facilitate that by providing all the infrastructure and software needed? Apple is using a standard format for non-DRM'd music. If other software companies want to support that format, nothing is stopping them. If other music sellers want to support it, nothing is stopping them. If other hardware players want to capitalize on the iTMS, let them support the mp4 format and build software that will manage their music in that format on that device.
Offering DRM-free content is good for those that own iPod, but mean nothing for those that don't or have not intention on purchasing one.
Actually i means there is nothing to stop you from interoperating with hardware and software of your choice or migrating software or hardware. That makes a significant difference to a consumer because it removes all lock-in.
Woah there cowboy. Word on the street is that ITMS now makes money.
Please don't pay attention to all those clueless articles. A slew of them were written and printed right after an analyst wrote about how he thinks Apple could start making money, in a best case scenario, assuming the record companies split the profits in the same proportions on DRM-free music as on DRM'd music and assuming the DRM free offerings take off. No one, but no one with a clue has offered up even a reasonable explanation as to how they think Apple is making any real money on the ITMS now, aside from via motivation for iPod sales.
Racist because of the crack about Islamic countries? Islam isn't a race - so how is that racist? (Hint: it isn't.)
You actually called out "Islamic countries" so I suppose I could call you a nationalist or a creedist, but how about we both just settle on calling you a prejudiced fuck.
Wow, I wonder what the definition of extreme violence is on your planet.
You seem to be having issues with the English language. I said, "Iraq doesn't have extreme violence because they don't have anti-gun laws." I did not say, "Iraq doesn't have extreme violence, because they don't have anti-gun laws." See what a difference a comma can make? To further clarify, I did not make the statement that Iraq does not have extreme violence, only a statement about the cause of Iraq's violence.
And very,very,very slightly is how much, and from what source? You mentioned statistics, let's see them. And the numbers are?
Umm, from pretty much every source I've ever been able to find. In fact, I've never seen a single study that showed a positive correlation between strict gun control laws and reductions in violent crime... ever. I've seen plenty that show no correlation or a slight negative correlation. I've seen studies that study "gun crime" but since that is an obvious misstatement of the problem, only diehard anti-gun fanatics would give them any credit, excepting those that misrepresent themselves as the former.
Here are a few citations if you're really interested:
http://www.ncpa.org/pub/st/st176/s176c.html
John R. Lott, Jr. & David B. Mustard, Crime, Deterrence and the Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns, 26 J. LEGAL STUD. 1 (1997); [yes I know about his poor methodology it is still better than just guessing though]
Gary Kleck & Marc Gertz, Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun, 86 J. CRIM. L & CRIMINOLOGY 150 (1995);
Marvin E. Wolfgang, A Tribute to a View I Have Opposed, 86 J. CRIM. L. & CRIMINOLOGY 188 (1995).
tbl. 3.109; BUREAU OF THE CENSUS, U.S. DEP'T OF COMMERCE, STATISTICAL ABSTRACT OF THE UNITED STATES, 1966, at 148 tbl. 206 (1966) (showing crime rates from 1959-1964).
Good to know, I guess we can now stop wasting all this money on prisons.
If the purpose of prisons is simply to punish, then yes they do a lot more harm than good in that they promote additional crime via cultural indoctrination and by introducing permanent lifestyle changes. The US has abnormally high rates of imprisonment of the citizenry, compared to the rest of the world and especially compared to industrialized nations with similar per capita. Our rehabilitation programs are broken and mostly our prisons are full of people originally arrested for nonviolent offenses such as drug possession, who later turn to violent crime after spending years in prison being physically and emotionally abused and indoctrinated into a criminal culture while removed from ordinary society.
Prisons are certainly not the answer to the US's violence problem, while decriminalization (not legalizing) drugs correlates to an enormous decrease in both violent crime and need for prisons. I believe it is the 2nd or third strongest correlation among sociological traits (depending upon the study you read), as opposed to gun control where the consensus is in the opposite direction and barely significant.
what's tenous is your repeated assertions of fact without any supporting evidence.
Look this topic has come up before and I'll repeat the same unanswered challenge to you. I linked to several studies, but only things quickly an easily available on the internet. Show me one credible study that links violent crime and gun control laws [not the idiotic gun crimes]. Just show me one. I dare you. No one has ever produced such a study in all the times I've issued said challenge. And yet people insist on this farcical belief that gun controls laws will somehow magically help because "guns are bad" is an easy thing to assume is right and gives people some hope that there is a single easy change that will help. Gun control laws are a placebo that politicians use to get votes instead of addressing the real problems: wealth disparity, healthcare, addiction treatment, and drug criminalization, all of which show very, very strong correlations with levels of violent crime.
The Swiss keep their weapons locked up AT HOME in case the nation is attacked, not as a system of defense against other citizens.
Your comment makes sense if you assume the previous posters comment, "And for an armed a polite society, check out Switzerland, where every adult male is required to keep a fully-automatic assault rifle (SIG 550) at home in case they're called up by the militia. Their crime rate is extremely low." was an argument that gun ownership rates correlate with low violent crime, which may have been his intention. If, however, you're arguing that high gun ownership rates and availability correlate to increased violent crime, then the previous poster has thoroughly debunked the argument since he has shown that a huge number of people have access to powerful firearms and it has not resulted in high crime.
Do you support Iran and North Korea in their pursuit of nuclear arms? They want the ability to shoot back if some nuclear armed state attacks them.
This is a completely different topic and if you're trying to equate an individual's right to defend themselves at the risk of possibly but not probably increasing the chances they will kill a relatively small number of people to a government's right to develop technologies that may kill the entire species, then you need some perspective. In any case, the original discussion was about law, and I don't think a law of any sort is likely to stop a sovereign nation from developing nuclear technologies if they feel they need them for survival (which we've given the Iranians good cause to think - you'll note we did invade Iraq which everyone knew did not have nukes while we did not invade Saudi Arabia despite the obvious connections to 911).
Why is this moderated as offtopic? A UK government official advocated a technological means of lowering/mitigating crime. The parent poster responded with an alternative proposal. I'm not saying that the previous poster was correct, simply that it seems pretty on topic to me.
So we give everyone a gun, and then the bad guys will think twice? What? That's insanity man...check out Iraq...an armed and polite society!
I thought it would have been clear with my previous post, but I guess not. The rate of gun ownership and gun laws in the US or the UK or Iraq is not really an important consideration for what is likely to result in a given level of violence. Iraq doesn't have extreme violence because they don't have anti-gun laws. If it was illegal to own them, they'd get them illegally or use bombs or knives or machetes. Likewise arming everyone isn't going to make the UK a whole lot less violent. Statistically, restricting gun ownership to violent criminals and people with mental problems, while encouraging it for everyone else will decrease crime, very, very, very slightly.
People still murder even though they know there is the possiblity of the death penalty. Your idea requires that the perp be in a rational state of mind before embarking....I propose that this is NOT the case.
Look you can argue the psychology and causation mechanisms all you like, but it won't change the numbers. Most criminals have an inherent belief they will not be caught, thus increasing penalties for crimes rarely is an effective mechanism for demotivating crime. Knowing that random people have guns makes them believe themselves to be more likely to be caught, since now there are a lot more armed people out there gunning for them.
Witness how many of these mass murderers suicided at the end...do you think that they were worried about dying?! Do you think they might not go on the rampage if they thought that their high score would be kept low by armed people shooting back?
First, mass murderers are the exceptional case, not the rule. No law is going to make much difference to the behavior of the killer in those exceptional cases. If 1 in 50 people, however, are carrying guns, that means there would have been hundreds of armed people at the VA tech massacre and they would likely have killed him before he managed to kill as many helpless victims as he did.
Do you think that the average US gun owner has the skills and training to avoid killing and injuring other bystanders?!
Those that have concealed pistol permits generally do, as there is required training in almost every US state that has such permits. Statistically speaking, however, location is more important than training. Police misidentify a person as a criminal and shoot them three times as often as non-police do, because non-police generally act when they are on the scene already and know what is going on, while police are almost always latecomers to the scene.
Seems tenuous.
The link between gun laws and violence is tenuous. For the most part, they have little or no affect upon murder and violence rates. The UK does not have lower rates of violent crime than the US because of their gun laws (as evidenced by an objective look at crime statistics in the UK). They have lower rates of violent crime because they have less wealth disparity, socialized healthcare, and partial decriminalization of drugs. If the UK truly wants to lower crime, they should be looking at this last line item and figuring out how to get rid of the rest of their drug-motivated crime. Sure, removing most of the gun restrictions they have might help, but not by enough to be worth wasting time on for that reason. Personally, I just want to make sure people understand that restrictive gun laws and knife laws and the like are simply empty PR designed to make you think the government is doing something, when in truth they are just making empty gestures in lieu of real progress on the violent crime issue.
It's somewhat like having a lock on your house. Is that going to keep the determined robber out? Of course not; anybody in their right mind would just jump through the window rather than try to crack the lock.
My first floor windows are glass block. Still your point is made.
I fail to see how these would be bad.
Life is a lot harder after some mugger cut off your thumb to use while disabling the security on your iPod. This has already happened with the case of cars with thumb locks. Do you really want to motivate criminals to cut body parts off of you?
No the real danger here is that it will encourage the use of biometrics as a primary security mechanism, an already prevalent trend. Biometrics have "whiz-bang" factor going for them and are all futuristic and cool, but in reality they make for a worse authentication mechanism than many other, simpler measures. I've already seen lots of tech magazines butchering years of good science into the field by adding a idiotic "something you are" category to the classic schemes to disguise what crappy "something you have" biometric characteristics are. Some ipods already come lockable with pin numbers, which is both more secure and less likely to result in you getting chopped up.
Nobody went on a rampage in England...killing 33 college students and wounding even more.
Ever heard of Thomas Hamilton? Yeah he only killed 16 elementary school students.
Kind of hard to do that with a knife, or a bow and arrow.
True, but it is a lot easier to do with an illegally owned gun when you know no one will be shooting back. Its also pretty easy with some homemade bombs as I'm sure the IRA has aptly demonstrated by now. It's also pretty easy using some sort of a poison.
Laws that make it illegal to own guns don't stop murder. They don't stop mass murder. Strangely people willing to break the law and commit murder for some reason also don't have a big problem breaking the law and buying or building weapons.
Just look at the numbers and it is pretty clear that strict gun control and gun bans correlate with a slight overall increase in violet crime and murder, just barely within statistical significance. You're not going to stop murder with gun bans as anyone with anything close to a scientific perspective can see.
So tired of your double standards... Even MSN Messenger is a standard 'format', just not fully open.
Can you really not understand the distinction? Anyone can implement mp4 because anyone can get access to the published standard. Apple has no ability to use the law to stop someone from implementing mp4 because it is not owned by them, but was an agreed upon standard defined within the MPEG specs. No one but MS and those it gives access can fully implement the same protocol as MSN messenger because only Microsoft has the specification and it is not published anywhere public. Further, that protocol is copyrighted by MS, so they can legally stop anyone they don't want to from implementing it. Current programs like Trillian that implement it do so using a reverse engineered version of the protocol thatmay or may not implement a given feature of it.
You need to go look up the MS issue with Kerebos, the problem wasn't they 'broke' it or did something that wasn't allowed. MS's changes to Kerebos are now support parts of the STANDARD. Go look it up.
MS intentionally took certain fields used for extra information, then made their implementation of Kereberos add data to them and refuse to process data from any version that did not add that arbitrary information. They did this to intentionally break interoperability. There was no other purpose to that part of the implementation.
MS fault on kerebos is they didn't disclose their changes as fast as they should have, period.
I believe you mean they didn't disclose them until the courts forced them to.
Bullcrap... Windows mixes into any environment, why do you think the industry sees it as almost 'viral'... You need to stop talking and learn about what you are talking about.
Most mixed environment have to make many special arrangements for Windows workstations. I can set up a regular old NFS-4 file server using Linux or Solaris or NetBSD or an old Amiga. That is because it is a defined standard and since it has been around for years everyone has implemented it, except MS. For MS, I either need to downgrade the service to V2 or I need to set up some sort of a portal through which the Windows machines can get to the files.
How about this. I do a little Web development. Since I'm working with XML, it is really easy to simply follow the specs and convert to XHTML and integrate with a standard CSS definition and I'm done. I go to test it and it works perfectly in every single browser I can get my hands on, from Firefox to Safari to Opera. Even Lynx gracefully degrades it to readable text. That is, of course, until I try to use IE at which point it is horribly broken because it provides basically no support for this seven year old standard that has been a W3C recommendation for all Web technologies for 6 years.
Both of the above are examples of MS intentionally ignoring standards in order to break compatibility with other desktop OS's. It is Windows not "playing nice" with everyone else.
The problem is companies wanting to support Windows specific functionality outside of Windows clients.
No. The problem is support for standards and interoperability with Windows in both directions because of that failure.
Registration, serial key validation and other anti-piracy systems are effectively a type of DRM, and DRM is fundamentally incompatible with F/OSS.
They are incompatible with free software, but not with open source software. Not everyone is an idealist of the same stripe as you.
If you can examine the source of a registration key validation system, it can be more easily broken.
Probably, but it need not rely upon security through obscurity.
If you could find out how a key is validated, it is highly probable that you could generate a fake key that passes validation.
Most well crafted registration systems generate a one time key on a server, which hands it off via a Web interface. There is no reason the key generation needs to be OSS and it probably would not be. Only the package manager portion of the exchange which handles installing the key and then keeps track of it and when it was used.
DRM is a way for content and software producers to make your computer work for them and not you, which is kind of the opposite of the F/OSS mentality.
Almost all software has functionality designed more for the benefit of the developer than the user. Simply including a copyright notice, for example, is of no benefit to the user, but protects the rights of the developer. If you want to be all ideological about it, then even the BSD license requires the presence of the copyright info.
Thus, I cannot see such mechanisms being integrated into the official packaging systems anytime soon.
This is the technological equivalent of holding ones hands over their ears and yelling, "la la la la I can't hear you!" I basically mention how Linux is poor at dealing with a certain class of software, which happens to include things like most commercial games. Further I point out the negative repercussions to users of a system which encourages each developer to use their own "binary installer that may fuck your system and install a rootkit." Ignoring that problem and not taking steps to make things better for users under some sort of ideological "if they run closed source software they get what they deserve" sentiment will simply drive more people back to Windows and OS X for their desktop. If Linux has no advantage, why put up with the other issues?
The company could have a repository, which could be added to the user's machine with a script or as part of the deb package when the application is installed....
In order for this to be done properly, the package format needs to include a standard location of a URI for the repository and package managers should just start adding those repositories to the list of repositories they manage, by default. Running a script when the software runs is a nasty hack that presumes the program will know what package manager is being used and presumes it know better than the user what should be done. The proper thing to do is to update package formats and package managers to fully support third-party repositories. That is the first and easiest part of bringing support for commercial software on Linux up to par with OSS software.
Bzzt, wrong! As described in another of my replies to your posts, the package could simply add its own repository configuration file and you would be set.
Yup, which would require there to be an official location within the package to keep said repository configuration file. This is called an update to the defined format.
Did you even read the post you're responding to? Go back and read it again. Then if you still don't understand what we're talking about, you probably don't have anything usefult to contribute to this conversation anyway.
That's strange... just today I was installing ubuntu on a laptop, and I went out to grab two programs which the user wanted, specifically Opera and Skype -- both sites detected that I was running linux, and pointed me at.deb files (which I then installed in an entirely pointy clicky way). Do opera and skype not count as commercial companies?
Of course they do, and Linux itself is heavily used/developed commercially. If you'd read the rest of the thread you'd have seen we were specifically discussing closed source 'for pay" software and specifically not discussing free downloads.
I'm sure there are other examples out there, but I haven't gone out looking for them, these are just things that I've run into in an ordinary day:P
There are lots of commercial packages distributed in the official package formats. There are even a few distributed in the official repositories (like adobe acrobat reader). The problem is it is not a good option for a commercial, for pay software package. And in the first case, just distributing it as a.deb does not gain you the main benefit of using a package manager (auto updates) because the package does not link back to the repository they are distributing it from.
If the software does not run without the registry key they can allow it to be distributed by any repository and updated through any repository. Anyone can install and update it, but only those with a key can actually use it.
Ahh, but legally, each repository needs to negotiate the rights to distribute said software (which most won't do) and it opens up the whole legal question as to whether a cracked copy (legally distributed/copied) is legal to use, since the user did not have to agree to a license to get the software. It also means they have to build their own mechanism for paid updates and contacting the registration server, a task complementary to updating the software. Basically, using an established repository for software that has a "for pay" license doesn't really bring much benefit to the developers and it does bring legal liabilities and hassle.
The discussion is not "what can software developers do if they go out of there way" but instead "what does it take for commercial, closed software to be a first class player on Linux in order to encourage use of Linux by users and development for Linux by commercial enterprises?" How hard is it to have package formats include a URI and have package managers add any unknown repositories in the package, to the list of repositories?
I guess you never heard about Linspire's Click 'n Run (CNR) system. It is a package management system designed with commercial payware in mind. It is supposed to be available for most of the major distros soon.
I've looked at CNR and for that matter free as in beer closed source, commercial binaries are available in major repositories now. The problem is they are all build upon the assumption of central distribution, instead of distribution from multiple publishers. Do you really want one commercial entity to be gatekeeper for all other commercial software, instead of building a slightly more flexible platform that everyone can use?
Why can they not use the package manager to install, but have the software refuse to run without a registration key?
They can use a package manager to install, but since the package manager does not know where there repository is, the software will not be kept up to date. So they can build their own update feature into the software. And they can build their own registration feature into the software. But if they're going to all that trouble, why shouldn't they just build both of those features into a stand alone installer? I mean the main benefit of a package manager to them is the auto-update feature. If it doesn't work, the only benefit it still provides is clean uninstalls and frankly most software companies stop caring about you when you uninstall their software. This is exacerbated by the fact that there are stand alone installer companies out there that target both Windows and Linux and will sell them a pre-made solution to cut dev time on the port. This is even further exacerbated by the fact that even if they rolled their own update and registration features and decided to use the native package system so users could cleanly uninstall, there is not just one package format for Linux, but a whole variety of them, so they need to build and distribute multiple kinds of packages.
Realistically, it is just a mess for them and some of them simply do not target linux at all because of it. All of this is rooted in the fact that Linux and the package managers are built on the preconception that software is open source and freely re-distributable, when that is simply not the case in the mainstream commercial software world. If Linux wants to join that world, it needs to adapt.
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Actually he said the quality of the code in Vista (especially the new code), with regard to security vulnerabilities, is better in Vista than in OS X 10.4, in his opinion. That is not even close to the same thing as saying that Vista is more secure than Mac OS X, for traditional definitions of security.
As for the relative security of the systems, I have no doubt that if OS X was instantly catapulted into the same market share position that MS now has, OS X security would be insufficient to the task, the same as the way Vista security is. Anyone with that large of market share is a huge target and the security mechanisms implemented in OS X, or the common Linux desktop systems, like Ubuntu are all insufficient to the task.
The real difference in my opinion is that the security of those other desktops is sufficient for the current security needs of the users. Ubuntu and OS X are not regularly attacked by self-propagating worms and widespread Web exploits. Users on those platforms are normally not inconvenienced by the state of security on those platforms. Further, I'd argue that regardless of Linux's market share and if OS X market share were to grow up to about 50% of the market, there is every reason to believe that those OS's would rapidly adapt to increasing security threats and bring their security up to the level required by users. Without real competition, MS will not innovate.
I am of the opinion that MS has not implemented advanced security techniques to make users happy, simply because they don't really care about making users happy. If a WinXP or Vista user's machine is compromised, in general they don't know there are any other options so they end up buying another Windows machine anyway. As such, MS has no real financial incentive to invest in security that is appropriate for their level of risk so they don't. If you want to fix the security problems that plague users, bringing security measures almost up to the level of Ubuntu is not good enough. The problem needs to be solved at a higher level either by breaking up MS or by weakening their monopoly enough so that they have to take their user's security problems seriously.
Yeah, they dropped them from macbooks, macbook pros and imacs before the end of 2006. I'm not sure about mac minis or mac pro, but I suspect they are dropped from those models as well.
I suspect MS will play hardball with them. Dell is no longer the number one Windows reseller it once was. Dell is hoping for lower OEM pricing, but they may end up getting their throat cut ala MS deciding not to relicense XP to them removing it from the price list, and setting a very high price on Vista and office for Dell in order to make an example of them. Dell will be making concessions (although it is hard to say what those will be). We all have to see if they've gone too far.
MS is a monopolist and can bundle their technologies with IE, thereby forcing said proprietary technology on everyone, regardless of its merits. Adobe has not monopoly. Legally, MS is the problem. Adobe can write whatever licenses they want because I, as a user and developer, can ignore them and not use it. That is not the case with technologies MS forces on us.
Wow, I'm not sure how you fault Apple in this regard. They actually shipped TPM enabled machines for some time, but never used the TPM in their OS or software, only opening it up for developers interested in doing encryption with it and eventually dropping it due to lack of interest. They did implement EFI, but there is no indication of using it for trusted computing either only for a modern replacement to BIOS.
Well, I think it is true, but at the same time he is trying to mislead the record companies about the future of the music industry, as Apple envisions it. Apple benefits from their cartel being undermined, but at the same time I don't think Apple wants to become the sole gatekeeper for a number of reasons.
With iTunes becoming huge, what young musician wouldn't be tempted to sign up with iTunes as a label? Particularly if, instead of the artists getting a small slice of the record companies' cut of an iTunes sale, they got most or all of it? Wouldn't that increase the artists' income from digital sales by something like 400%?Labels manage multiple items, not just iTunes. They manage advertising and they manage hardcopy to store sales and in many cases live performances. Those needs aren't going away and it is so far outside of Apple's core competence that I doubt they want to try to extend themselves that way.What Apple is motivating is not a switch to Apple as a label, but a switch to an indy label where artists get a much, much larger cut, without losing the iTunes retail channel and without losing their advertising.
There are other problems with Apple becoming a label, including antitrust issues. The iTMS is tied to the iTunes software and the iPod. The iPod is dangerously close to having monopoly influence in a market. Leveraging that into a monopoly on online music distribution would be really shaky legal ground and Apple is a lot more susceptible to bad press about their antitrust actions than MS is.
I do think Apple wants to gradually undermine the big labels, but at the same time I think they plan to simply democratize the market and keep either MS or the RIAA from controlling it. Apple isn't afraid to compete on the merits of their hardware and software since those are their strengths. I think they'll count on those strengths and avoid the dangerous position you mention.
Between the public statements from Apple, and making a deal with EMI and announcing this option is for all record companies that will publish in it, I don't think it is hard to determine at all.
The deception is that if Apple really cared about the consumers then they would open iTunes/iStore to work with other players.Perhaps you're confusing Apple with the Electronic Frontiers Foundation? Apple is a for profit venture and are trying to make money. The fact that they are challenging the existing recording industry cartel and their DRM has nothing to do with altruism. It just happens to align with their business plan. Enjoy the benefits and don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
This is possible, no matter how much the Apple brain trust tries to convince us otherwise.This is capitalism. The question is not "is it possible" but "is it profitable." Apple sells music basically at break even as a way to sell iPods (which they profit on). Apple develops the iTunes store for this purpose. They don't care if it works with other players. They develop the iTunes software to also sell iPods and Macs, so they care a tiny amount if it works with other players.
What you're basically asking for is for Apple to subsidize other companies. If Creative or MS wants to sell hardware players, why should Apple facilitate that by providing all the infrastructure and software needed? Apple is using a standard format for non-DRM'd music. If other software companies want to support that format, nothing is stopping them. If other music sellers want to support it, nothing is stopping them. If other hardware players want to capitalize on the iTMS, let them support the mp4 format and build software that will manage their music in that format on that device.
Offering DRM-free content is good for those that own iPod, but mean nothing for those that don't or have not intention on purchasing one.Actually i means there is nothing to stop you from interoperating with hardware and software of your choice or migrating software or hardware. That makes a significant difference to a consumer because it removes all lock-in.
Please don't pay attention to all those clueless articles. A slew of them were written and printed right after an analyst wrote about how he thinks Apple could start making money, in a best case scenario, assuming the record companies split the profits in the same proportions on DRM-free music as on DRM'd music and assuming the DRM free offerings take off. No one, but no one with a clue has offered up even a reasonable explanation as to how they think Apple is making any real money on the ITMS now, aside from via motivation for iPod sales.
You actually called out "Islamic countries" so I suppose I could call you a nationalist or a creedist, but how about we both just settle on calling you a prejudiced fuck.
"You make me frown, nazi clown."
Just so you know, your racism is unacceptable.
You seem to be having issues with the English language. I said, "Iraq doesn't have extreme violence because they don't have anti-gun laws." I did not say, "Iraq doesn't have extreme violence, because they don't have anti-gun laws." See what a difference a comma can make? To further clarify, I did not make the statement that Iraq does not have extreme violence, only a statement about the cause of Iraq's violence.
And very,very,very slightly is how much, and from what source? You mentioned statistics, let's see them. And the numbers are?Umm, from pretty much every source I've ever been able to find. In fact, I've never seen a single study that showed a positive correlation between strict gun control laws and reductions in violent crime... ever. I've seen plenty that show no correlation or a slight negative correlation. I've seen studies that study "gun crime" but since that is an obvious misstatement of the problem, only diehard anti-gun fanatics would give them any credit, excepting those that misrepresent themselves as the former.
Here are a few citations if you're really interested:
http://www.ncpa.org/pub/st/st176/s176c.html
John R. Lott, Jr. & David B. Mustard, Crime, Deterrence and the Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns, 26 J. LEGAL STUD. 1 (1997); [yes I know about his poor methodology it is still better than just guessing though]
Gary Kleck & Marc Gertz, Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun, 86 J. CRIM. L & CRIMINOLOGY 150 (1995);
Marvin E. Wolfgang, A Tribute to a View I Have Opposed, 86 J. CRIM. L. & CRIMINOLOGY 188 (1995).
tbl. 3.109; BUREAU OF THE CENSUS, U.S. DEP'T OF COMMERCE, STATISTICAL ABSTRACT OF THE UNITED STATES, 1966, at 148 tbl. 206 (1966) (showing crime rates from 1959-1964).
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs07/hosb0207 .pdf
Good to know, I guess we can now stop wasting all this money on prisons.If the purpose of prisons is simply to punish, then yes they do a lot more harm than good in that they promote additional crime via cultural indoctrination and by introducing permanent lifestyle changes. The US has abnormally high rates of imprisonment of the citizenry, compared to the rest of the world and especially compared to industrialized nations with similar per capita. Our rehabilitation programs are broken and mostly our prisons are full of people originally arrested for nonviolent offenses such as drug possession, who later turn to violent crime after spending years in prison being physically and emotionally abused and indoctrinated into a criminal culture while removed from ordinary society.
Prisons are certainly not the answer to the US's violence problem, while decriminalization (not legalizing) drugs correlates to an enormous decrease in both violent crime and need for prisons. I believe it is the 2nd or third strongest correlation among sociological traits (depending upon the study you read), as opposed to gun control where the consensus is in the opposite direction and barely significant.
what's tenous is your repeated assertions of fact without any supporting evidence.Look this topic has come up before and I'll repeat the same unanswered challenge to you. I linked to several studies, but only things quickly an easily available on the internet. Show me one credible study that links violent crime and gun control laws [not the idiotic gun crimes]. Just show me one. I dare you. No one has ever produced such a study in all the times I've issued said challenge. And yet people insist on this farcical belief that gun controls laws will somehow magically help because "guns are bad" is an easy thing to assume is right and gives people some hope that there is a single easy change that will help. Gun control laws are a placebo that politicians use to get votes instead of addressing the real problems: wealth disparity, healthcare, addiction treatment, and drug criminalization, all of which show very, very strong correlations with levels of violent crime.
Your comment makes sense if you assume the previous posters comment, "And for an armed a polite society, check out Switzerland, where every adult male is required to keep a fully-automatic assault rifle (SIG 550) at home in case they're called up by the militia. Their crime rate is extremely low." was an argument that gun ownership rates correlate with low violent crime, which may have been his intention. If, however, you're arguing that high gun ownership rates and availability correlate to increased violent crime, then the previous poster has thoroughly debunked the argument since he has shown that a huge number of people have access to powerful firearms and it has not resulted in high crime.
Do you support Iran and North Korea in their pursuit of nuclear arms? They want the ability to shoot back if some nuclear armed state attacks them.This is a completely different topic and if you're trying to equate an individual's right to defend themselves at the risk of possibly but not probably increasing the chances they will kill a relatively small number of people to a government's right to develop technologies that may kill the entire species, then you need some perspective. In any case, the original discussion was about law, and I don't think a law of any sort is likely to stop a sovereign nation from developing nuclear technologies if they feel they need them for survival (which we've given the Iranians good cause to think - you'll note we did invade Iraq which everyone knew did not have nukes while we did not invade Saudi Arabia despite the obvious connections to 911).
Why is this moderated as offtopic? A UK government official advocated a technological means of lowering/mitigating crime. The parent poster responded with an alternative proposal. I'm not saying that the previous poster was correct, simply that it seems pretty on topic to me.
I thought it would have been clear with my previous post, but I guess not. The rate of gun ownership and gun laws in the US or the UK or Iraq is not really an important consideration for what is likely to result in a given level of violence. Iraq doesn't have extreme violence because they don't have anti-gun laws. If it was illegal to own them, they'd get them illegally or use bombs or knives or machetes. Likewise arming everyone isn't going to make the UK a whole lot less violent. Statistically, restricting gun ownership to violent criminals and people with mental problems, while encouraging it for everyone else will decrease crime, very, very, very slightly.
People still murder even though they know there is the possiblity of the death penalty. Your idea requires that the perp be in a rational state of mind before embarking....I propose that this is NOT the case.Look you can argue the psychology and causation mechanisms all you like, but it won't change the numbers. Most criminals have an inherent belief they will not be caught, thus increasing penalties for crimes rarely is an effective mechanism for demotivating crime. Knowing that random people have guns makes them believe themselves to be more likely to be caught, since now there are a lot more armed people out there gunning for them.
Witness how many of these mass murderers suicided at the end...do you think that they were worried about dying?! Do you think they might not go on the rampage if they thought that their high score would be kept low by armed people shooting back?First, mass murderers are the exceptional case, not the rule. No law is going to make much difference to the behavior of the killer in those exceptional cases. If 1 in 50 people, however, are carrying guns, that means there would have been hundreds of armed people at the VA tech massacre and they would likely have killed him before he managed to kill as many helpless victims as he did.
Do you think that the average US gun owner has the skills and training to avoid killing and injuring other bystanders?!Those that have concealed pistol permits generally do, as there is required training in almost every US state that has such permits. Statistically speaking, however, location is more important than training. Police misidentify a person as a criminal and shoot them three times as often as non-police do, because non-police generally act when they are on the scene already and know what is going on, while police are almost always latecomers to the scene.
Seems tenuous.The link between gun laws and violence is tenuous. For the most part, they have little or no affect upon murder and violence rates. The UK does not have lower rates of violent crime than the US because of their gun laws (as evidenced by an objective look at crime statistics in the UK). They have lower rates of violent crime because they have less wealth disparity, socialized healthcare, and partial decriminalization of drugs. If the UK truly wants to lower crime, they should be looking at this last line item and figuring out how to get rid of the rest of their drug-motivated crime. Sure, removing most of the gun restrictions they have might help, but not by enough to be worth wasting time on for that reason. Personally, I just want to make sure people understand that restrictive gun laws and knife laws and the like are simply empty PR designed to make you think the government is doing something, when in truth they are just making empty gestures in lieu of real progress on the violent crime issue.
My first floor windows are glass block. Still your point is made.
I fail to see how these would be bad.Life is a lot harder after some mugger cut off your thumb to use while disabling the security on your iPod. This has already happened with the case of cars with thumb locks. Do you really want to motivate criminals to cut body parts off of you?
No the real danger here is that it will encourage the use of biometrics as a primary security mechanism, an already prevalent trend. Biometrics have "whiz-bang" factor going for them and are all futuristic and cool, but in reality they make for a worse authentication mechanism than many other, simpler measures. I've already seen lots of tech magazines butchering years of good science into the field by adding a idiotic "something you are" category to the classic schemes to disguise what crappy "something you have" biometric characteristics are. Some ipods already come lockable with pin numbers, which is both more secure and less likely to result in you getting chopped up.
Ever heard of Thomas Hamilton? Yeah he only killed 16 elementary school students.
Kind of hard to do that with a knife, or a bow and arrow.True, but it is a lot easier to do with an illegally owned gun when you know no one will be shooting back. Its also pretty easy with some homemade bombs as I'm sure the IRA has aptly demonstrated by now. It's also pretty easy using some sort of a poison.
Laws that make it illegal to own guns don't stop murder. They don't stop mass murder. Strangely people willing to break the law and commit murder for some reason also don't have a big problem breaking the law and buying or building weapons.
Just look at the numbers and it is pretty clear that strict gun control and gun bans correlate with a slight overall increase in violet crime and murder, just barely within statistical significance. You're not going to stop murder with gun bans as anyone with anything close to a scientific perspective can see.
Can you really not understand the distinction? Anyone can implement mp4 because anyone can get access to the published standard. Apple has no ability to use the law to stop someone from implementing mp4 because it is not owned by them, but was an agreed upon standard defined within the MPEG specs. No one but MS and those it gives access can fully implement the same protocol as MSN messenger because only Microsoft has the specification and it is not published anywhere public. Further, that protocol is copyrighted by MS, so they can legally stop anyone they don't want to from implementing it. Current programs like Trillian that implement it do so using a reverse engineered version of the protocol thatmay or may not implement a given feature of it.
You need to go look up the MS issue with Kerebos, the problem wasn't they 'broke' it or did something that wasn't allowed. MS's changes to Kerebos are now support parts of the STANDARD. Go look it up.MS intentionally took certain fields used for extra information, then made their implementation of Kereberos add data to them and refuse to process data from any version that did not add that arbitrary information. They did this to intentionally break interoperability. There was no other purpose to that part of the implementation.
MS fault on kerebos is they didn't disclose their changes as fast as they should have, period.I believe you mean they didn't disclose them until the courts forced them to.
Bullcrap... Windows mixes into any environment, why do you think the industry sees it as almost 'viral'... You need to stop talking and learn about what you are talking about.Most mixed environment have to make many special arrangements for Windows workstations. I can set up a regular old NFS-4 file server using Linux or Solaris or NetBSD or an old Amiga. That is because it is a defined standard and since it has been around for years everyone has implemented it, except MS. For MS, I either need to downgrade the service to V2 or I need to set up some sort of a portal through which the Windows machines can get to the files.
How about this. I do a little Web development. Since I'm working with XML, it is really easy to simply follow the specs and convert to XHTML and integrate with a standard CSS definition and I'm done. I go to test it and it works perfectly in every single browser I can get my hands on, from Firefox to Safari to Opera. Even Lynx gracefully degrades it to readable text. That is, of course, until I try to use IE at which point it is horribly broken because it provides basically no support for this seven year old standard that has been a W3C recommendation for all Web technologies for 6 years.
Both of the above are examples of MS intentionally ignoring standards in order to break compatibility with other desktop OS's. It is Windows not "playing nice" with everyone else.
The problem is companies wanting to support Windows specific functionality outside of Windows clients.No. The problem is support for standards and interoperability with Windows in both directions because of that failure.
They are incompatible with free software, but not with open source software. Not everyone is an idealist of the same stripe as you.
If you can examine the source of a registration key validation system, it can be more easily broken.Probably, but it need not rely upon security through obscurity.
If you could find out how a key is validated, it is highly probable that you could generate a fake key that passes validation.Most well crafted registration systems generate a one time key on a server, which hands it off via a Web interface. There is no reason the key generation needs to be OSS and it probably would not be. Only the package manager portion of the exchange which handles installing the key and then keeps track of it and when it was used.
DRM is a way for content and software producers to make your computer work for them and not you, which is kind of the opposite of the F/OSS mentality.Almost all software has functionality designed more for the benefit of the developer than the user. Simply including a copyright notice, for example, is of no benefit to the user, but protects the rights of the developer. If you want to be all ideological about it, then even the BSD license requires the presence of the copyright info.
Thus, I cannot see such mechanisms being integrated into the official packaging systems anytime soon.This is the technological equivalent of holding ones hands over their ears and yelling, "la la la la I can't hear you!" I basically mention how Linux is poor at dealing with a certain class of software, which happens to include things like most commercial games. Further I point out the negative repercussions to users of a system which encourages each developer to use their own "binary installer that may fuck your system and install a rootkit." Ignoring that problem and not taking steps to make things better for users under some sort of ideological "if they run closed source software they get what they deserve" sentiment will simply drive more people back to Windows and OS X for their desktop. If Linux has no advantage, why put up with the other issues?
In order for this to be done properly, the package format needs to include a standard location of a URI for the repository and package managers should just start adding those repositories to the list of repositories they manage, by default. Running a script when the software runs is a nasty hack that presumes the program will know what package manager is being used and presumes it know better than the user what should be done. The proper thing to do is to update package formats and package managers to fully support third-party repositories. That is the first and easiest part of bringing support for commercial software on Linux up to par with OSS software.
Yup, which would require there to be an official location within the package to keep said repository configuration file. This is called an update to the defined format.
Did you even read the post you're responding to? Go back and read it again. Then if you still don't understand what we're talking about, you probably don't have anything usefult to contribute to this conversation anyway.
Of course they do, and Linux itself is heavily used/developed commercially. If you'd read the rest of the thread you'd have seen we were specifically discussing closed source 'for pay" software and specifically not discussing free downloads.
I'm sure there are other examples out there, but I haven't gone out looking for them, these are just things that I've run into in an ordinary dayThere are lots of commercial packages distributed in the official package formats. There are even a few distributed in the official repositories (like adobe acrobat reader). The problem is it is not a good option for a commercial, for pay software package. And in the first case, just distributing it as a .deb does not gain you the main benefit of using a package manager (auto updates) because the package does not link back to the repository they are distributing it from.
Ahh, but legally, each repository needs to negotiate the rights to distribute said software (which most won't do) and it opens up the whole legal question as to whether a cracked copy (legally distributed/copied) is legal to use, since the user did not have to agree to a license to get the software. It also means they have to build their own mechanism for paid updates and contacting the registration server, a task complementary to updating the software. Basically, using an established repository for software that has a "for pay" license doesn't really bring much benefit to the developers and it does bring legal liabilities and hassle.
The discussion is not "what can software developers do if they go out of there way" but instead "what does it take for commercial, closed software to be a first class player on Linux in order to encourage use of Linux by users and development for Linux by commercial enterprises?" How hard is it to have package formats include a URI and have package managers add any unknown repositories in the package, to the list of repositories?
I've looked at CNR and for that matter free as in beer closed source, commercial binaries are available in major repositories now. The problem is they are all build upon the assumption of central distribution, instead of distribution from multiple publishers. Do you really want one commercial entity to be gatekeeper for all other commercial software, instead of building a slightly more flexible platform that everyone can use?
They can use a package manager to install, but since the package manager does not know where there repository is, the software will not be kept up to date. So they can build their own update feature into the software. And they can build their own registration feature into the software. But if they're going to all that trouble, why shouldn't they just build both of those features into a stand alone installer? I mean the main benefit of a package manager to them is the auto-update feature. If it doesn't work, the only benefit it still provides is clean uninstalls and frankly most software companies stop caring about you when you uninstall their software. This is exacerbated by the fact that there are stand alone installer companies out there that target both Windows and Linux and will sell them a pre-made solution to cut dev time on the port. This is even further exacerbated by the fact that even if they rolled their own update and registration features and decided to use the native package system so users could cleanly uninstall, there is not just one package format for Linux, but a whole variety of them, so they need to build and distribute multiple kinds of packages.
Realistically, it is just a mess for them and some of them simply do not target linux at all because of it. All of this is rooted in the fact that Linux and the package managers are built on the preconception that software is open source and freely re-distributable, when that is simply not the case in the mainstream commercial software world. If Linux wants to join that world, it needs to adapt.