If only that were the case. There's too many firearm advocates arguing that ANY attempt to regulate gun ownership or require certification for gun owners is unacceptable...
My reply is in two parts. First, no one here ever argued that so claiming that someone else is arguing something is kind of pointless, isn't it? Second, the threat of gun bans in general is main reason for lack of regulation as regulation is often (historically) a first step towards a ban, enabling an unconstitutional and illegal ban to be effectively enforced, and thus undermining the capability of the people at the time when the creators of our government argued we should be overthrowing that government and establishing a new one.
I'm all for allowing a well-regulated militia to bear arms. But it HAS to be well-regulated.
Why don't you look up the original meaning of the phrase " well regulated."
Every time a news of shooting breaks out, I always wonder why the possession of firearms is not banned entirely in this country.
Well there are several reasons, but basically it boils down to the fact that not banning guns saves more lives and stops more violent crime than banning them. That is, if you actually look at the numbers as an outside observer. Also, the US has a cultural bias towards personal responsibility and freedom which, while slowly eroding, does manifest in people often requiring a strong argument to restrict personal freedoms rather than grant them.
I live in New Jersey now, and I really miss a sense of security I used to have back home. Back there I never worried about getting killed and such, whereas I feel physically threatened where I live now since there have been a number of incidents of armed robberies on campus at Rutgers and in my neighborhood.
Great. Now logically, take a look at the statistical evidence with regard to violent crime and tell me, if there were a law passed banning gun ownership in the US, do you think the violent crimes would go up or down? If you think it would go down, I'd really like to see your math, because I've never, ever seen anyone provide any real numbers to support that. Remember I said "violent crime" not shootings. We can agree that we want to stop murder and violent crime, not murder and violent crime committed with an arbitrary device, right?
Seriously, it makes a huge difference when I have to take into consideration the possibility of the possession of firearms when some strangers attacked me.
Interestingly, the fact that violent criminals have to take into account the possibility of firearms possession when considering attacking you i a lot more likely to protect you than the other way around. If I'm 6' 6" and outweigh you by 50 pounds and I'm an experienced boxer and accustomed to fighting, well I can be pretty sure I can walk up to you and beat the snot out of you either to rob you or for some other reason. If you're smaller than average (like most women) or maybe an old person, well I can be even more sure. The possibility that you or that woman or old person has a gun, changes the calculation a whole lot.
Could anybody enlighten me as to why people want to carry guns at all?
Being from Japan and now living in New Jersey, I can forgive your ignorance. I was given my first firearm to use hunting for food. You know meat comes from animals, right? I bought my first handgun when I lived in a place where I had to walk a quarter of a mile through woods with a whole lot of bears in them, in order to get to my car. There are still a lot of places where a firearm is an important survival tool. Whether you have too shoot a coyote that is killing your livestock or shoot a cougar that attacks your child, a ban on firearms in all of the US would make many traditional places unlivable. It would also most probably lead to a net increase in violent crime and murder. The question then is, why should we ban guns? This shooter was not obeying the law, so what makes you think he would not have purchased an illegal gun? If he was unable, what makes you think he would not have built bombs from household materials? There was a gun ban in place at VA Tech. Did it stop him? Did it enable him to kill a lot more people since none of them were armed?
Virginia Tech not to blame... This is not an elementary school. This is not a high school... The only person to be blamed here is the shooter. And yes, he's dead. But Virginia Tech is not at fault.
I pulled together some various statements from your comment, but I believe I managed to accurately portray the intent of your post. A apologize if this is not the case. Obviously the shooter is the person most responsible for this and yes, he is dead. The people will not accept that and will need to find living people to punish so they can feel better and think they have done something, and in some small way believe they've stopped the potential for this to happen again.
I do not, however, hold VA Tech entirely blameless because they are the ones who instituted a ban on students possessing firearms on campus, thereby ensuring that the only person with a firearm was the person planning on breaking the rules anyway. I think their policy is moronic and is one of the reasons why this shooting claimed so many lives compared to incidences elsewhere where a few random students were able to fire back and mitigate the situation.
As you said, this was not an elementary school or a highschool. These were supposedly responsible adults and US citizens. Why were they denied the right to bear arms and defend themselves? Yes, this was the shooter's fault. VA Tech stupidly passed policies that made things worse, but it was the shooter who killed these people.
If morons carried guns everywhere, we'd have many more than 31 killed in spontaneous acts of stupidity every day.
I don't recall their previous poster advocating encouraging morons to carry guns. I believe he said the college rules shouldn't stop the students from carrying guns (likely assuming they have a permit which requires training and certification). If you want to argue that the students at VA tech are all morons, go ahead and present some evidence. If you are not prepared to present said evidence, however, maybe you should, "shut up with this shit" as you so eloquently put it, or at least expect to be modded as flamebait.
...I would not extend that trust of judgement to more than about 5% of the general population.
What the hell does this have to do with anything? Why do we care who you trust, unless you're the one certifying people to carry? That's why reasonable laws have impartial criteria, so arrogant jerks like you can't dictate who they think should carry and instead it is determined by the law in combination with expert trainers.
In the absence of meaningful regulation of who gets guns - which people like you have fought vehemently against
This is the logical fallacy, argument by association. The previous person argued that there should not be a ban on VA Tech's campus, not that everyone should be able to carry guns whenever they want. Claiming that the previous person must believe that because "people like you" have argued it is absurd and illogical.
If you want more of society to accept the wisdom of having armed citizens around, you'll have to convince us that there's some method of keeping them in the right hands - which clearly did NOT happen today.
Today we saw the folly of restricting the natural freedoms of citizens. In my mind, you need justification to take away freedom from the people, not allow them to keep it. Laws and rules don't stop shootings like this. Right to carry laws statistically do not increase shootings. What then is the justification for these kinds of bans in light of the potential for citizens to avert this kind of madness by having the tools to defend themselves?
On the one hand, I think it goes without saying that guns *should* be prohibited on college campuses, and they are.
Why does that go without saying? So we can condition college students to expect to have their civil liberties arbitrarily removed in certain locations or times? Gun bans like the one at VA Tech and gun laws both do the same thing, they stop people who obey the law from having guns. Since most people who go on shooting rampages aren't obeying the law in the first place, how do the bans help? We can see here how they hurt. In other places school shootings were stopped or at least mitigated when armed citizens fired back. Here people could only run away while the shooter walked all the way across campus and shot a bunch more people.
But the last thing we need is for college campuses to become police states. And it'll get ugly if too many campuses try to clamp down too much, especially on the more liberal campuses.
You're way too late. Banning the populace from owning/carrying weapons is indicative of a police state. VA Tech was already there. This is just on consequence thereof.
Actually I can't think of any desktop applications that would really benefit from supporting multithreading to actually warrant the extra effort. Most desktop applications for the average person run perfectly fast as single threaded programs.
A lot of desktop applications are already multithreaded. In addition, who says there has to be extra effort? In the upcoming version of OS X, for example, many programs that utilize OpenGL, including games, automatically will spawn a second, feeder thread that simply pumps OpenGL info to the graphics card resulting in up to (but almost certainly less than) twice the performance on multi-core systems. When we get to 4 or more cores as the common standard you'll see 1 core running the OS processes and maybe a few always running apps, and programmers of CPU intensive, and even simply common applications splitting out a few threads to speed up the performance of their apps. I don't know about you, but for me, MS Word is still pretty sluggish at times and could use a boost.
Maybe soon Google checkout will know when it's my wife's birthday, and tell me "No no, don't get her that, get her this instead" when I add something to the cart.
This is marked as "funny" but realistically this is one of the biggest benefits of such a system. Right now people have Amazon wishlists and wedding registries, but it is one short step from that to an integrated system where items you look at and buy online are combined with user reviews to make it easy for others to pick gifts you probably will like. Now here are some big privacy issues here. If your grandmother goes to buy you a birthday gift and Google recommends "baking erotic cakes for dummies" because you spend a lot of time baking and looking at porn, well some people might take issue with that.
On the other hand, globally available, wishlists with public and private tags and that allow you to comparison shop just might be the way of the future. I already use Amazon to help track books I'd like, but don't have time to read right now, as well as music and other misc items. I already go look at my brother's wishlist when christmas rolls around. All it really takes is for someone with more access to online shopping and integration with a personal organizer and we're there. Google may well have both. Maybe it won't tell you right away that your wife would prefer some other thing, but I can easily see Google looking in your calendar, seeing your wife's impending birthday, and tailoring ads to you that says something like, "you wife's birthday is coming up and she's been window shopping for erotic cake cookbooks for the last 6 months, why not buy her this one?"
Yeah... Why, that nasty ol' standard BIOS makes hardware-level DRM just so pesky.
Not really. It just makes improvements and DRM hacks. Add a TPM module to a BIOS-based system and include support in the OS and it will be just as effective for MS's purposes as an EFI one. BIOS makes modern hardware a pain in the butt. The fact that DRM modules are modern hardware is sort of orthogonal to the issue.
And vendor lock-in for replacement hardware? Almost impossible! Why, how will Dell ever survive if it can't force you to use Dell-branded video cards as your only upgrade option?
Umm, Dell is not even the biggest player in a market that is not monopolized. If Dell requires Dell branded video cards and people care (most probably won't) then people will switch to a vendor that does not do this and Dell will change or die. I don't think Dell or any other PC vendor has enough influence to force such a scheme upon the existing graphics card makers. Only MS really has that much influence and I don't think they have the motivation.
Bought a "OS-less" PC, did we? No soup for you!
I don't think you have to worry about this problem unless you're running Windows on it.
Sorry, EFI has some great potential, but it has far too much potential for vendor abuse.
I disagree. I don't see that vendors will abuse this any more than they already abuse BIOS. In any case, the change is coming. You just need to decide which side of the curve you want to be on. (Typed from an EFI laptop.)
Why? You are still going to have to pay for a windows license for each VM you run.
That's easy. If you were running MS would you rather people pay you for Windows and you're the only real option out there, or people pay both you and Apple, thus legitimizing OS X as a platform? One of the less technical people I work with has had a hatred for the mac platform that stems from trying to use it more than a decade ago. The new machine she's getting is going to be a mac and its going to be running OS X with Windows in virtualization. This is because she needs to run both Mac and PC software and one laptop is cheaper than two. So far on this deal, MS has lost nothing.
At some point in the next year or two, she'll upgrade her other software (MS Office, a lot of Adobe stuff, etc.). The majority of that software will run on both Windows and the Mac. Do you suppose she'll buy the Mac or PC versions of that software? Do you think she might favor products that run natively on OS X, since they are faster and allow her to use OS X's more featureful environment? Will that motivate companies to offer more Mac versions? The next time she buys hardware after that, do you think a PC will be an option?
Virtualization is basically a transitional technology that allows for a lot of people to have a slow and easy migration away from Windows and MS wants to make that a more expensive option in the hopes that it will stop it from happening as much as possible. Of course in so doing they're also emphasizing to the world that it is a bad idea to be locked in to a single vendor because they then have to power to arbitrarily make things you want to do more expensive.
So what situation is exactly the same for both kernel and userspace? Certainly not the percentage of design and implementation effort done by commercial companies for them. Or do you believe that Linus's contribution to the kernel was insignificant before he started being paid?
Both are mostly coded by commercially funded developers. The majority of the current Linux kernel was not coded by Linus but by others and you might notice Linus does receive funding from several commercial entities.
Your post makes eminent sense... except that I know a very different "typical" user than you do. I regularly encounter machines with crappy little spyware-infested utilities that were installed to do stupid things like change desktop backgrounds, add screen savers, and change mouse cursors. Anyone with teenagers has every social networking app, malevolent or not, installed on the machine - not to mention an abundance of porn-related cruft. The authors of this turd-ware are not going to bother getting any certification because they know that people will click through just about any warning in order to get a little kitty cat chasing their cursor, or to download free music.
The point is, people should be free to install little desktop background changers, add screen savers, mouse cursors, social networking apps, etc., without those applications having the potential to do real harm as malware. Think of it this way. There are two kinds of malware: ones that just do malicious things and ones that do malicious things and some other function. On a well designed system it should quickly become apparent to a user that the former programs will never do what they promise and the latter will work regardless of whether or not you give them permission to do the malicious behavior as well.
Assuming the malware says it will let you view naked people and it really just roots your machine the average user will be asked to relinquish total control. Assume they refuse and the software does not show them porn. So they run it again, but this time they allow it to do anything, but it still doesn't show them porn. Finally, they disable all security and run it and still it gives them no porn. Now they have a rooted box, but they have learned that disabling the security does not help. Eventually, even the slowest person will understand this.
Now assume the malware does allow people to look at porn, but it also wants to root the machine and it demands access to the machine first. So the user follows the same steps, but if they deny it the first time and it refuses to run, the OS can silently try again in the background, this time giving it dummy access or throwing it in a VM and letting it root the VM at which point the user gets their porn and still has not compromised their real machine, thus they have no incentive in either case to give programs more access than they want.
Theoretically, the malware could use methods to detect if it is in a VM, but realistically, I don't think it would go that far, as such is a lot harder to do and the benefit is pretty minor.
These users are very, very accustomed to blindly dismissing dialogs, and I'd bet constitute the majority of the idiots that would open up a password-protected zip and execute a trojan that they get in their email box.
I agree a lot of them would and a lot of them would assume that just running some "game" they got in their e-mail was not a risk. The point is to make their expectations a reality by letting them run anything they want, but still not letting things do anything malicious by default. It will ever be perfect and a good social engineering attack will work on some people, but right now Windows is not even giving the average user a fighting chance. They surrendered the malware war with hardly a shot fired.
My comment was relevent because you claimed that Linux was primarily developed by commerical companies and you sited userspace applications as part of your evidence.
No, I said both the Linux kernel and the Linux userspace apps were developed primarily by commercially paid developers. One is not evidence of the other. I made the comment specifically to preclude irrelevant comments about what constitutes Linux to a given individual.
Given that the definition of what constitutes "Linux" is very fluid on Slashdot...
"Slashdot" is not a person. It is a whole collection of people with differing opinions. Who cares whether someone is calling the kernel Linux or calling the kernel and userspace Linux when the exact same situation exists for both? Do you get off on pointlessly arguing semantics instead of discussing real issues?
I'd dispute that most people even know that they are infected... or really care.
They care that their computer is slow, even if they don't understand that is because of malware. Many, do understand that it is malware and try to fix it by restoring their machines following the instructions, resulting in all sorts of random things breaking (like their internet connection or their video card or anything else that was added by their halfway competent relative).
Aside from that, I really don't care if other people are infected - caveat emptor and all that... I don't typically get infected. My concern is more for the secondary effect... especially SPAM and the feeding of a whole new crime syndicate.
I don't get infected either, but I do care about the absurd measures I have to go to to insure my machine stays that way.
I still don't understand how your sandbox solution wouldn't simply present the user with more popups to dismiss... how would this foil social attacks? Many users will enter a password just as readily as they will click okay on a dialog box.
Users click a dialogue or enter a password because they are used to being presented with cryptic messages and asked to click a dialogue or enter a password without knowing what they are doing. Stop the system from constantly conditioning them with that crap and only give them real choices with real information in plain language once in a very great while and they will pay attention and make a choice.
I explained the system I think would work. You add ACLs and a signing framework together along with changes to applications to conform to them and certification services. Now let me present for you why it would work in given situations.
Most users never, install more than a handful of application on their computer, the rest being pre-installed. All pre-installed applications will be from a known source with ACLs provided y the vendor. None will ever show the user a dialogue box. Users will occasionally buy a program or two on disc. All these are from fairly large companies, with reasonable resources. It is no effort for them to include the required ACL with their program as well as a cert. Those programs will never show the user a dialogue box. Users download commercial apps from the internet and since the application will include a cert, all major software they download will also never show the user a dialogue box. There are really only two instances where a user might get a dialogue box. They could download some freeware e-mail or IM program, not made by a major company or well established organization and which is not certified or if they get malware. In either case, the user would be presented with a dialogue like, "The program 'ChatMonster' is not trusted or verified and would like to access the internet and your IM_Chat_buddies.db file (Stop it from accessing those resources)(Allow it to access access the internet and database once)(Always let it access the internet and database)(Advanced Options)" Further. Some users would let it access those resources because they trust it and some wouldn't but seeing as this is the only dialogue they have ever gotten like this, they would at least consider it. Also, since there is not an "OK" button they don't just automatically click the same thing they have been trained to. The other advantage to this, is that while it does not prevent trojans completely it does limit them to trojans posing as a program that the user expects to access the same type of resources as the malware. For example, the typical bot roots the machine right now in order to be flexible for DoS attacks. A dialogue that says "The program 'virus_cleaner_2' is not trusted or verified and would like to have complete control of your computer forever (Stop it from taking over)(Let it take over forever)(Advanced Options)" will surely make a few people actually stop and think about it. Finally, spambots and the like behave very differently from normal e-mai
So are we taking the position today that Linux development includes userspace applications and thus Linux's security and stability includes all of those applications, or are we taking the position that Linux is just a kernel and some GNU libraries? The story around here changes so much, it's hard to keep track.
Please stay on topic. You comment has nothing to do with the point I made. We were talking about cost of development and who does it. It is the same for the kernel, the userspace or both combined. If I had not already commented in this thread I'd mod you down as off topic or a troll, because you are both right now. How you have a score of two, when you can't even address the topic at hand are are instead trying to argue a completely different and irrelevant point is the real question here.
That sounds like a really annoying OS... are you saying that if I install a new application, the OS should ask me for permission every time it tries to access any kind of shared service?
Is that what I wrote? Of course it should not ask the user for everything. It should ask the user for rare exceptions. Here's your workflow today. You get an application in your e-mail. You double click on it and it does anything it wants to your computer, or you don't run it and don't know if it is legit or what it does. The OS tells you nothing about the reliability, origin, or behaviors of the program prior to running it or when it runs.
Here's what your workflow should be. You get an application in your e-mail and double click on it. All normal applications ship with an ACL to describe what they will want to do and most applications ship with a signature to verify origin and are certified by one or more free and pay services. The OS silently examines the ACL, signature, and cert. Then it executes the application restricting it both by the included ACL and by an ACL assigned to the program's trust level. It asks the user only if the application tries to exceed the privileges of that trust level and included ACL. A normal user would never, ever be asked to authorize anything unless it was malware, or some weird amateur made program that wanted unusual privileges.
I mean, I can't even imagine explaining that to a "normal" user... it's hard enough to explain how to use TeaTimer and ZoneAlarm to people, and they only block access to the registry and the network connection!
Both of those programs are hacks on top of Windows trying to make up for its deficiencies without the proper information and using applications designed to be used in a different way. If Windows is designed to deal with application level restrictions and requiresd them for smooth operation then developers will write application with that in mind.
I think that it is perfectly reasonable to try to structure the internet so that it is more resilient to bad actors instead of trying to plug every potential entry point... in fact, I'd say that is impossible.
The structure of the internet is resilient to bad actors. It even handles tens of thousands of bad actors all acting in concert fairly gracefully with modern traffic management. The problem is not with the internet, it is with the endpoints. People are less inconvenienced by the fact that bots are launching DDoS attacks and sending spam (both of which are mostly filtered) than they are by the fact that their computers are constantly being taken over and turned into bots. It is impossible to secure every endpoint as it is impossible to stop all bad actors in the network, but you need to make a reasonable effort at both, and that isn't happening right now. Windows is not designed so that it can reasonably be expected to deal with the current malware environment and the fact that machines are turned into bots does not cost MS significant money because users don't have any other real options. Windows is the only thing they can buy at Kmart, Walmart, Target, etc. Until we have a free market, we won't see the market respond to solve the problems of customers. We won't have a free market until the Windows monopoly is destroyed.
If the DoJ tomorrow ordered MS broken up into multiple companies, forbidden from any unmonitored communication or collusion and gave at least two companies complete rights to all the intellectual property and code in Windows, we'd see both new companies start solving this problem by the end of the month. Within a few years, malware would be rarity and other areas of innovation would start to progress at a normal pace again as well. I don't see a better way to make a real difference that will last.
I was responding to this: "Collaborate with competitors in the same field for the common product they all need, then compete in pursuit of their market." It might not be inherent in the open source model, but it was I was responding to.
I don't see why you're interpreting "collaborate" to imply that the collaboration has to take the form of hiring an internal developer, instead of hiring a contractor, or simply providing funding to a project along with recommendations.
In any case, I don't think that many open source projects are going to change priorities in response to outside companies' needs unless the contribution is very high.
I'm not sure I understand. My company uses a lot of open source software (as well as closed source). If we need that software to do something it does not already do, we either have a developer code that, or pay someone else to do so, then that code gets contributed to the project. Anyone can influence the priorities of an open source project to the extent they need by investing in just that need, while all other, shared needs have already been paid for.
Linux of course, is an atypical case, but the core development wasn't done by commercial companies anyway...
I think you are factually incorrect. The vast majority of both the Linux kernel and the userspace applications have been paid for by commercial companies.The same is true of all the BSD projects, apache, OpenOffice, GIMP, and almost every large project I can think of. There is this myth that most open source development is done by unpayed hobbyists, but every time anyone looks into it they discover that is not the case and almost all the major contributors are paid to work on a project by various interested companies. We've got a hundred or so developers at my current company and almost all of them contribute to one open source project or another to some degree, on the company dime because it benefits our company to do so. What Linux can't handle that many NICs in duplex mode, well we'd better fix that since we're selling servers built on it. What OpenBSD has issues with that graphics chipset, well, we'd better get that running for console mode on our offering based on that. What Apache has a security hole, well since we have a Web interface we'd better fix that. What the perl interpreter barfs on that, well we'd better fix it and submit a patch. That is how open source development is done.
but this trojan is not really something that they can (or should) prevent! This worm is not exploiting any flaw in MS's programs that I am aware of, it is simply social engineering.
The flaw in Windows is that it does not provide for an open signing framework that warns users when running unsigned, uncertified code. Further, the flaw in Windows is that it does not restrict such code to a sandbox by default and it does not inform the user of what the software is doing when run. Double clicking software should not be a black box where that implies the software has privileges to do anything it wants.
Unless you make Windows prevent a user from running arbitrary code, I don't know how you'd fix this.
You apply ACLs to all software, with more restrictive ACLs for software that is uncertified and unsigned and which does not ship with a recommended ACL.
If anyone should be sued, it should be the ISPs who allow zombies to sit there on their network. I don't like lawsuits, and would prefer to see some government incentive used to compel ISPs to remove the zombies.
Do tell. How is it the ISPs' responsibility to stop zombies any more than it is UPS's responsibility to stop unsolicited junk mailings? It is not their job or their responsibility and it should not be. It is up to the police to stop illegal behavior, through official channels. ISPs can do a fair bit, but they will never, ever be able to accurately distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate traffic, in general. You have to solve the problem at the weak end-point computers and this problem can be almost entirely stopped by actually redesigning Windows to deal with the current internet realities. That will happen just as soon as it is profitable for MS, which will happen when they start losing customers in large numbers because of malware problems which, in turn, will happen once MS's monopoly is broken up. Breaking up MS is the one thing that will stop malware, and really the only practical, long-term solution I can think of to the problem.
It's not at all clear that modifying an OS project is going to cost less than buying one.
Of course not, but conceptually, the larger a project is and the more used it is, the cheaper it should be by comparison. If you're a ten person company and need a special calculator, it may make a lot more financial sense to buy a commercial offering. If you're a 20,000 employee corporation and you need some software that everyone else also needs, the open source model will almost always provide it at a tiny fraction of the cost of buying a commercial license to it.
The collaborative model also carries added costs. There's the cost involved in managing the multiple-company development (e.g. Who's in charge?).
This is in no way inherent in the open source model. Open source does not even mean developed in house. There are many open source projects centrally managed by a core team who do work on that project on contract to anyone who wants to pay, or even whenever they get enough pledges for a given feature. In any case, the cost associated do not scale at the same rate as licensing costs. In many cases using open source is free, aside from the same incidental costs that come with commercial software.
When you look at this issue from a real-world perspective things become more complicated than an academic view can appreciate.
Linux. Who develops it? Lots of commercial companies and it saves them (including my company) a whole lot of money. The open source business model is not academic, it is a real world reality and has been for decades.
Of course, what you are pointing out is the basic flaw with the whole 'net neutrality' argument. It's not a public network, per se. It's owned and opperated by someone. They have the right and privledge to impose what ever restrictions they want on people.
This is a non sequitur. Just because it is an owned network does not mean they have the right to restrict people however they want. I may own a private road, but that does not automatically grant me the right to deny passage to the people that own the mineral rights to that same land. I may own a flower shop, but that does not grant me the right to deny service to blacks, without repercussions.
These privately owned networks were funded largely with our tax dollars, hundreds of billions of them the government provided in subsidies. Many of these privately owned networks run on public right of ways to which the government has granted them an exclusive monopoly. Further, those same private businesses are being granted exemption from obeying the law, namely copyright laws, libel laws, pornography laws, free trade laws, conspiracy laws, etc. Those exemptions from obeying the law are granted under "common carrier" statutes that say impartial carriers goods and information are not held liable for what they carry provided they impartially carry everything. I say it is just fine for these private businesses to decide not to be impartial and to slow down or block traffic from some people to gain a competitive advantage. What I object to is them doing that, and being exempted from punishment for the laws. Common carriers are a public service and that is the only reason they are protected. If you're not serving the common good and are just making money for yourself without benefiting society, why should you be given special privileges?
When I first got into the ISP business about 14 years ago, there were a few basic rules that we insisted people follow as terms of their service
So here's the problem... the rules you list have nothing to do with net neutrality. Net neutrality is simply about treating some traffic differently than others not based upon the type, nor the traffic levels, but based upon the person or location from which the traffic is being generated. You can block all users that send more than a gig a day. What you can't do is block just the black users that send more than a gig a day, or just the republican users that use more than a gig a day, or even the users that do business with your competitor and use more than a gig a day... if you still want to be given all the special privileges that are given to common carriers.
All I know is this, MSFT is far more sophisticated in playing Corporate pricing games, budget games and such things than any simple model used for research purposes by Open Source advocates.
Most of what you cite are simply strategic pricing by MS. Discounts for large customers help motivate buyers to remain loyal if they want to remain large customers instead of be undercut by the competition. This is differential pricing, classic monopoly maintenance. Pricing schemes for education help remove the tendency of price sensitive, but highly capable university clients to move to cheaper, open source products. None of this really relates to the models presented which are a point case revenue model.
My most common grouse is that the key is Open Standards, not Open Source. If MSOffice and OS products conform to a open standard and anyone can develop applications that cleanly interoperate with them...
Umm, great, but this doesn't have anything to do with the revenue schemes of open versus closed source software development. You're confusing two issues. With open standards the market can operate freely in a traditional, capitalist manner. Open source is not needed for this. With open source, some users and developers of software can more efficiently create software and undercut the pricing of the traditional closed source models. Basically this study asserts that in a free market, open source will win because it is more efficient, just like any other more efficient process for doing the same thing. Whether or not we have a free market, or if open source development can win in a non-free market, such as the current monopoly/lock-in situation is another topic. This isn't about whether MS will be toppled. It is about whether you can make more money and pay less with open source software in general, as compared to closed source software (using the development methods and pricing schemes they commonly do today).
honestly, i don't understand how i can't walk into best buy and not get a wii but the shelves are packed with 360's. Is the hate for M$ really that ingrained that people won't buy it even though it is by far the best system out right now?
Hate for MS? Are you joking? The average consumer vaguely knows MS is a cool technology company and might know they make Windows. The reason the Wii is in such demand is a series of well planned moves from Nintendo. They aimed at the casual gamer market instead of the traditional game console market. They continued their support for the younger children market. Maybe you are not understanding the demand because you are not the average buyer. The average buyer has an old console and is looking for one from this generation. They do not have two xbox 360's. The average buyer cares about price and the Wii is killing MS on price. The average consumer has seen the TV ads and the occasional article or news program commentary and what they took away from it is that the Wii is new and different with different controls and new types of games, while the Sony and MS systems are the same thing with slightly better graphics and a big price tag.
Nintendo took a big gamble in abandoning the traditional controller and focusing on a new type of gameplay. They took a big gamble in aiming at a nontraditional market. Those gambles paid off. Most of the big game developers expected them to fail and ignored the Wii as being too different from the others, figuring it likely either Sony or MS would win and they could make a quick port if they backed the wrong player. Those developers are all trying to reverse course and announcing Wii titles in the works.
I think you're right for the most part that the Wii only has a few good titles right now. That doesn't much matter to the average buyer though, because the average buyer only buys two games a year. I also think the strategic buyer on a budget, looking to the future will probably conclude that the Wii's popularity will result in it getting many of the best games a year from now. The only people it does matter to are people like you, who are going to buy several consoles and pick up a Wii anyway. You did buy one, right?
In summary, if you're looking to think hatred for MS is the cause, I only wish people were that conscious of MS's actions and that ethical and meticulous in their purchasing decisions. The Wii is winning on its merits, which are merits that don't apply to unusual buyers and hardcore gamers like yourself. Note, I am not a fanboy for any game console. I have a PS2 and an old dreamcast somewhere. I probably will not buy any current console for a year or more, or not at all. Right now, If someone gave me $600 on the condition I bought one, I'd get a Wii and a couple games and pocket the rest of the cash.
I'm not claiming a damn thing about Macs and other computers
I'd say your original statement, "The software is fairly good, but man the hardware.... It's enough to make me consider switching back." sort of implies that you think the hardware is less reliable than comparable PC hardware. Otherwise, why would you consider switching back as a way to ameliorate that problem?
Umm, that only covers Macs and pretty much only first generation ones (which have more problems for every vendor). In order to conclude that Apple are more unreliable than average you have actually compare it to other vendors using the same methodology. Take a look at my other response in this thread where I link to an article about the consumer reports hardware reliability study for 2006. You'll note Apple was the top rated vendor.
P.S. It's not that hard to change a URL into a link and test it before posting. Your URL is broken but I managed to fix it by deleting the unnecessary whitespace.
And as far as any of us can tell, you just lie when you talk. If you were to post verifable numbers your post might rank above anecdotal, but you didn't and it doesn't. So, your post is no more factual than the GP, but has a load more arrogance. Thanks.
I'd post numbers, but I don't have a lot of time to waste on arguing with people who are unlikely to be persuaded by facts anyway. Consumer Reports puts Apple hardware reliability as #1 overall. It put them #2 for laptops, right behind Sony. The study our IT guy bought access to only covers laptops but placed them #1 for laptop reliability for 2006 of all the major vendors. I'd post links if they were not both password protected, but buy an account at Consumer reports, it is well worth it.
If you're a real cheapskate you can read an article by someone who did pay for access to consumer reports, like this Ars Technica article. The most relevant excerpt might be, "As for reliability, Apple Computer crushes the competition, at least among desktops. Based on 77,700 responses, 11 percent of Macs bought between 2002 and 2006 went in for repair or had a serious problem. Sony was next best, at 15 percent, and Gateway was last at 19 percent. Among 50,100 respondents with laptops, Apple was at 18 percent, along with the majority of manufacturers. Sony was at 15 percent, but it should be noted that 3 points or less is not considered meaningful." That reference was in regard to their survey based study which suffers from self selection (but is still better than nothing) but their spot purchasing study concluded the same. In fact, pretty much every independent study I've seen comes up with similar results. Have you ever seen a real study (not an anecdote) that ranks Apple lower than #3 for hardware reliability?
Ummm, your evidence is anecdotal as well yes? Why is your evidence better than mine? I'm puzzled.
It is true that I presented an anecdote, but I also referred to the independent studies of hardware reliability. For example, Consumer Reports. Every one I've ever seen places Apple near the top of the list for hardware reliability.
If Apple continues to have hardware problems, they're going to drive away all their supporters...
Everyone has hardware problems. Apple, in general, seems to have fewer than the average by quite a bit according to said independent studies.
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My reply is in two parts. First, no one here ever argued that so claiming that someone else is arguing something is kind of pointless, isn't it? Second, the threat of gun bans in general is main reason for lack of regulation as regulation is often (historically) a first step towards a ban, enabling an unconstitutional and illegal ban to be effectively enforced, and thus undermining the capability of the people at the time when the creators of our government argued we should be overthrowing that government and establishing a new one.
I'm all for allowing a well-regulated militia to bear arms. But it HAS to be well-regulated.Why don't you look up the original meaning of the phrase " well regulated."
Well there are several reasons, but basically it boils down to the fact that not banning guns saves more lives and stops more violent crime than banning them. That is, if you actually look at the numbers as an outside observer. Also, the US has a cultural bias towards personal responsibility and freedom which, while slowly eroding, does manifest in people often requiring a strong argument to restrict personal freedoms rather than grant them.
I live in New Jersey now, and I really miss a sense of security I used to have back home. Back there I never worried about getting killed and such, whereas I feel physically threatened where I live now since there have been a number of incidents of armed robberies on campus at Rutgers and in my neighborhood.Great. Now logically, take a look at the statistical evidence with regard to violent crime and tell me, if there were a law passed banning gun ownership in the US, do you think the violent crimes would go up or down? If you think it would go down, I'd really like to see your math, because I've never, ever seen anyone provide any real numbers to support that. Remember I said "violent crime" not shootings. We can agree that we want to stop murder and violent crime, not murder and violent crime committed with an arbitrary device, right?
Seriously, it makes a huge difference when I have to take into consideration the possibility of the possession of firearms when some strangers attacked me.Interestingly, the fact that violent criminals have to take into account the possibility of firearms possession when considering attacking you i a lot more likely to protect you than the other way around. If I'm 6' 6" and outweigh you by 50 pounds and I'm an experienced boxer and accustomed to fighting, well I can be pretty sure I can walk up to you and beat the snot out of you either to rob you or for some other reason. If you're smaller than average (like most women) or maybe an old person, well I can be even more sure. The possibility that you or that woman or old person has a gun, changes the calculation a whole lot.
Could anybody enlighten me as to why people want to carry guns at all?Being from Japan and now living in New Jersey, I can forgive your ignorance. I was given my first firearm to use hunting for food. You know meat comes from animals, right? I bought my first handgun when I lived in a place where I had to walk a quarter of a mile through woods with a whole lot of bears in them, in order to get to my car. There are still a lot of places where a firearm is an important survival tool. Whether you have too shoot a coyote that is killing your livestock or shoot a cougar that attacks your child, a ban on firearms in all of the US would make many traditional places unlivable. It would also most probably lead to a net increase in violent crime and murder. The question then is, why should we ban guns? This shooter was not obeying the law, so what makes you think he would not have purchased an illegal gun? If he was unable, what makes you think he would not have built bombs from household materials? There was a gun ban in place at VA Tech. Did it stop him? Did it enable him to kill a lot more people since none of them were armed?
I pulled together some various statements from your comment, but I believe I managed to accurately portray the intent of your post. A apologize if this is not the case. Obviously the shooter is the person most responsible for this and yes, he is dead. The people will not accept that and will need to find living people to punish so they can feel better and think they have done something, and in some small way believe they've stopped the potential for this to happen again.
I do not, however, hold VA Tech entirely blameless because they are the ones who instituted a ban on students possessing firearms on campus, thereby ensuring that the only person with a firearm was the person planning on breaking the rules anyway. I think their policy is moronic and is one of the reasons why this shooting claimed so many lives compared to incidences elsewhere where a few random students were able to fire back and mitigate the situation.
As you said, this was not an elementary school or a highschool. These were supposedly responsible adults and US citizens. Why were they denied the right to bear arms and defend themselves? Yes, this was the shooter's fault. VA Tech stupidly passed policies that made things worse, but it was the shooter who killed these people.
I don't recall their previous poster advocating encouraging morons to carry guns. I believe he said the college rules shouldn't stop the students from carrying guns (likely assuming they have a permit which requires training and certification). If you want to argue that the students at VA tech are all morons, go ahead and present some evidence. If you are not prepared to present said evidence, however, maybe you should, "shut up with this shit" as you so eloquently put it, or at least expect to be modded as flamebait.
...I would not extend that trust of judgement to more than about 5% of the general population.What the hell does this have to do with anything? Why do we care who you trust, unless you're the one certifying people to carry? That's why reasonable laws have impartial criteria, so arrogant jerks like you can't dictate who they think should carry and instead it is determined by the law in combination with expert trainers.
In the absence of meaningful regulation of who gets guns - which people like you have fought vehemently againstThis is the logical fallacy, argument by association. The previous person argued that there should not be a ban on VA Tech's campus, not that everyone should be able to carry guns whenever they want. Claiming that the previous person must believe that because "people like you" have argued it is absurd and illogical.
If you want more of society to accept the wisdom of having armed citizens around, you'll have to convince us that there's some method of keeping them in the right hands - which clearly did NOT happen today.Today we saw the folly of restricting the natural freedoms of citizens. In my mind, you need justification to take away freedom from the people, not allow them to keep it. Laws and rules don't stop shootings like this. Right to carry laws statistically do not increase shootings. What then is the justification for these kinds of bans in light of the potential for citizens to avert this kind of madness by having the tools to defend themselves?
Why does that go without saying? So we can condition college students to expect to have their civil liberties arbitrarily removed in certain locations or times? Gun bans like the one at VA Tech and gun laws both do the same thing, they stop people who obey the law from having guns. Since most people who go on shooting rampages aren't obeying the law in the first place, how do the bans help? We can see here how they hurt. In other places school shootings were stopped or at least mitigated when armed citizens fired back. Here people could only run away while the shooter walked all the way across campus and shot a bunch more people.
But the last thing we need is for college campuses to become police states. And it'll get ugly if too many campuses try to clamp down too much, especially on the more liberal campuses.You're way too late. Banning the populace from owning/carrying weapons is indicative of a police state. VA Tech was already there. This is just on consequence thereof.
A lot of desktop applications are already multithreaded. In addition, who says there has to be extra effort? In the upcoming version of OS X, for example, many programs that utilize OpenGL, including games, automatically will spawn a second, feeder thread that simply pumps OpenGL info to the graphics card resulting in up to (but almost certainly less than) twice the performance on multi-core systems. When we get to 4 or more cores as the common standard you'll see 1 core running the OS processes and maybe a few always running apps, and programmers of CPU intensive, and even simply common applications splitting out a few threads to speed up the performance of their apps. I don't know about you, but for me, MS Word is still pretty sluggish at times and could use a boost.
This is marked as "funny" but realistically this is one of the biggest benefits of such a system. Right now people have Amazon wishlists and wedding registries, but it is one short step from that to an integrated system where items you look at and buy online are combined with user reviews to make it easy for others to pick gifts you probably will like. Now here are some big privacy issues here. If your grandmother goes to buy you a birthday gift and Google recommends "baking erotic cakes for dummies" because you spend a lot of time baking and looking at porn, well some people might take issue with that.
On the other hand, globally available, wishlists with public and private tags and that allow you to comparison shop just might be the way of the future. I already use Amazon to help track books I'd like, but don't have time to read right now, as well as music and other misc items. I already go look at my brother's wishlist when christmas rolls around. All it really takes is for someone with more access to online shopping and integration with a personal organizer and we're there. Google may well have both. Maybe it won't tell you right away that your wife would prefer some other thing, but I can easily see Google looking in your calendar, seeing your wife's impending birthday, and tailoring ads to you that says something like, "you wife's birthday is coming up and she's been window shopping for erotic cake cookbooks for the last 6 months, why not buy her this one?"
Not really. It just makes improvements and DRM hacks. Add a TPM module to a BIOS-based system and include support in the OS and it will be just as effective for MS's purposes as an EFI one. BIOS makes modern hardware a pain in the butt. The fact that DRM modules are modern hardware is sort of orthogonal to the issue.
And vendor lock-in for replacement hardware? Almost impossible! Why, how will Dell ever survive if it can't force you to use Dell-branded video cards as your only upgrade option?Umm, Dell is not even the biggest player in a market that is not monopolized. If Dell requires Dell branded video cards and people care (most probably won't) then people will switch to a vendor that does not do this and Dell will change or die. I don't think Dell or any other PC vendor has enough influence to force such a scheme upon the existing graphics card makers. Only MS really has that much influence and I don't think they have the motivation.
Bought a "OS-less" PC, did we? No soup for you!I don't think you have to worry about this problem unless you're running Windows on it.
Sorry, EFI has some great potential, but it has far too much potential for vendor abuse.I disagree. I don't see that vendors will abuse this any more than they already abuse BIOS. In any case, the change is coming. You just need to decide which side of the curve you want to be on. (Typed from an EFI laptop.)
That's easy. If you were running MS would you rather people pay you for Windows and you're the only real option out there, or people pay both you and Apple, thus legitimizing OS X as a platform? One of the less technical people I work with has had a hatred for the mac platform that stems from trying to use it more than a decade ago. The new machine she's getting is going to be a mac and its going to be running OS X with Windows in virtualization. This is because she needs to run both Mac and PC software and one laptop is cheaper than two. So far on this deal, MS has lost nothing.
At some point in the next year or two, she'll upgrade her other software (MS Office, a lot of Adobe stuff, etc.). The majority of that software will run on both Windows and the Mac. Do you suppose she'll buy the Mac or PC versions of that software? Do you think she might favor products that run natively on OS X, since they are faster and allow her to use OS X's more featureful environment? Will that motivate companies to offer more Mac versions? The next time she buys hardware after that, do you think a PC will be an option?
Virtualization is basically a transitional technology that allows for a lot of people to have a slow and easy migration away from Windows and MS wants to make that a more expensive option in the hopes that it will stop it from happening as much as possible. Of course in so doing they're also emphasizing to the world that it is a bad idea to be locked in to a single vendor because they then have to power to arbitrarily make things you want to do more expensive.
Both are mostly coded by commercially funded developers. The majority of the current Linux kernel was not coded by Linus but by others and you might notice Linus does receive funding from several commercial entities.
The point is, people should be free to install little desktop background changers, add screen savers, mouse cursors, social networking apps, etc., without those applications having the potential to do real harm as malware. Think of it this way. There are two kinds of malware: ones that just do malicious things and ones that do malicious things and some other function. On a well designed system it should quickly become apparent to a user that the former programs will never do what they promise and the latter will work regardless of whether or not you give them permission to do the malicious behavior as well.
Assuming the malware says it will let you view naked people and it really just roots your machine the average user will be asked to relinquish total control. Assume they refuse and the software does not show them porn. So they run it again, but this time they allow it to do anything, but it still doesn't show them porn. Finally, they disable all security and run it and still it gives them no porn. Now they have a rooted box, but they have learned that disabling the security does not help. Eventually, even the slowest person will understand this.
Now assume the malware does allow people to look at porn, but it also wants to root the machine and it demands access to the machine first. So the user follows the same steps, but if they deny it the first time and it refuses to run, the OS can silently try again in the background, this time giving it dummy access or throwing it in a VM and letting it root the VM at which point the user gets their porn and still has not compromised their real machine, thus they have no incentive in either case to give programs more access than they want.
Theoretically, the malware could use methods to detect if it is in a VM, but realistically, I don't think it would go that far, as such is a lot harder to do and the benefit is pretty minor.
These users are very, very accustomed to blindly dismissing dialogs, and I'd bet constitute the majority of the idiots that would open up a password-protected zip and execute a trojan that they get in their email box.I agree a lot of them would and a lot of them would assume that just running some "game" they got in their e-mail was not a risk. The point is to make their expectations a reality by letting them run anything they want, but still not letting things do anything malicious by default. It will ever be perfect and a good social engineering attack will work on some people, but right now Windows is not even giving the average user a fighting chance. They surrendered the malware war with hardly a shot fired.
No, I said both the Linux kernel and the Linux userspace apps were developed primarily by commercially paid developers. One is not evidence of the other. I made the comment specifically to preclude irrelevant comments about what constitutes Linux to a given individual.
Given that the definition of what constitutes "Linux" is very fluid on Slashdot..."Slashdot" is not a person. It is a whole collection of people with differing opinions. Who cares whether someone is calling the kernel Linux or calling the kernel and userspace Linux when the exact same situation exists for both? Do you get off on pointlessly arguing semantics instead of discussing real issues?
I'd dispute that most people even know that they are infected... or really care.
They care that their computer is slow, even if they don't understand that is because of malware. Many, do understand that it is malware and try to fix it by restoring their machines following the instructions, resulting in all sorts of random things breaking (like their internet connection or their video card or anything else that was added by their halfway competent relative).
Aside from that, I really don't care if other people are infected - caveat emptor and all that... I don't typically get infected. My concern is more for the secondary effect... especially SPAM and the feeding of a whole new crime syndicate.
I don't get infected either, but I do care about the absurd measures I have to go to to insure my machine stays that way.
I still don't understand how your sandbox solution wouldn't simply present the user with more popups to dismiss... how would this foil social attacks? Many users will enter a password just as readily as they will click okay on a dialog box.
Users click a dialogue or enter a password because they are used to being presented with cryptic messages and asked to click a dialogue or enter a password without knowing what they are doing. Stop the system from constantly conditioning them with that crap and only give them real choices with real information in plain language once in a very great while and they will pay attention and make a choice.
I explained the system I think would work. You add ACLs and a signing framework together along with changes to applications to conform to them and certification services. Now let me present for you why it would work in given situations.
Most users never, install more than a handful of application on their computer, the rest being pre-installed. All pre-installed applications will be from a known source with ACLs provided y the vendor. None will ever show the user a dialogue box. Users will occasionally buy a program or two on disc. All these are from fairly large companies, with reasonable resources. It is no effort for them to include the required ACL with their program as well as a cert. Those programs will never show the user a dialogue box. Users download commercial apps from the internet and since the application will include a cert, all major software they download will also never show the user a dialogue box. There are really only two instances where a user might get a dialogue box. They could download some freeware e-mail or IM program, not made by a major company or well established organization and which is not certified or if they get malware. In either case, the user would be presented with a dialogue like, "The program 'ChatMonster' is not trusted or verified and would like to access the internet and your IM_Chat_buddies.db file (Stop it from accessing those resources)(Allow it to access access the internet and database once)(Always let it access the internet and database)(Advanced Options)" Further. Some users would let it access those resources because they trust it and some wouldn't but seeing as this is the only dialogue they have ever gotten like this, they would at least consider it. Also, since there is not an "OK" button they don't just automatically click the same thing they have been trained to. The other advantage to this, is that while it does not prevent trojans completely it does limit them to trojans posing as a program that the user expects to access the same type of resources as the malware. For example, the typical bot roots the machine right now in order to be flexible for DoS attacks. A dialogue that says "The program 'virus_cleaner_2' is not trusted or verified and would like to have complete control of your computer forever (Stop it from taking over)(Let it take over forever)(Advanced Options)" will surely make a few people actually stop and think about it. Finally, spambots and the like behave very differently from normal e-mai
Please stay on topic. You comment has nothing to do with the point I made. We were talking about cost of development and who does it. It is the same for the kernel, the userspace or both combined. If I had not already commented in this thread I'd mod you down as off topic or a troll, because you are both right now. How you have a score of two, when you can't even address the topic at hand are are instead trying to argue a completely different and irrelevant point is the real question here.
Is that what I wrote? Of course it should not ask the user for everything. It should ask the user for rare exceptions. Here's your workflow today. You get an application in your e-mail. You double click on it and it does anything it wants to your computer, or you don't run it and don't know if it is legit or what it does. The OS tells you nothing about the reliability, origin, or behaviors of the program prior to running it or when it runs.
Here's what your workflow should be. You get an application in your e-mail and double click on it. All normal applications ship with an ACL to describe what they will want to do and most applications ship with a signature to verify origin and are certified by one or more free and pay services. The OS silently examines the ACL, signature, and cert. Then it executes the application restricting it both by the included ACL and by an ACL assigned to the program's trust level. It asks the user only if the application tries to exceed the privileges of that trust level and included ACL. A normal user would never, ever be asked to authorize anything unless it was malware, or some weird amateur made program that wanted unusual privileges.
I mean, I can't even imagine explaining that to a "normal" user... it's hard enough to explain how to use TeaTimer and ZoneAlarm to people, and they only block access to the registry and the network connection!Both of those programs are hacks on top of Windows trying to make up for its deficiencies without the proper information and using applications designed to be used in a different way. If Windows is designed to deal with application level restrictions and requiresd them for smooth operation then developers will write application with that in mind.
I think that it is perfectly reasonable to try to structure the internet so that it is more resilient to bad actors instead of trying to plug every potential entry point... in fact, I'd say that is impossible.The structure of the internet is resilient to bad actors. It even handles tens of thousands of bad actors all acting in concert fairly gracefully with modern traffic management. The problem is not with the internet, it is with the endpoints. People are less inconvenienced by the fact that bots are launching DDoS attacks and sending spam (both of which are mostly filtered) than they are by the fact that their computers are constantly being taken over and turned into bots. It is impossible to secure every endpoint as it is impossible to stop all bad actors in the network, but you need to make a reasonable effort at both, and that isn't happening right now. Windows is not designed so that it can reasonably be expected to deal with the current malware environment and the fact that machines are turned into bots does not cost MS significant money because users don't have any other real options. Windows is the only thing they can buy at Kmart, Walmart, Target, etc. Until we have a free market, we won't see the market respond to solve the problems of customers. We won't have a free market until the Windows monopoly is destroyed.
If the DoJ tomorrow ordered MS broken up into multiple companies, forbidden from any unmonitored communication or collusion and gave at least two companies complete rights to all the intellectual property and code in Windows, we'd see both new companies start solving this problem by the end of the month. Within a few years, malware would be rarity and other areas of innovation would start to progress at a normal pace again as well. I don't see a better way to make a real difference that will last.
I don't see why you're interpreting "collaborate" to imply that the collaboration has to take the form of hiring an internal developer, instead of hiring a contractor, or simply providing funding to a project along with recommendations.
In any case, I don't think that many open source projects are going to change priorities in response to outside companies' needs unless the contribution is very high.I'm not sure I understand. My company uses a lot of open source software (as well as closed source). If we need that software to do something it does not already do, we either have a developer code that, or pay someone else to do so, then that code gets contributed to the project. Anyone can influence the priorities of an open source project to the extent they need by investing in just that need, while all other, shared needs have already been paid for.
Linux of course, is an atypical case, but the core development wasn't done by commercial companies anyway...I think you are factually incorrect. The vast majority of both the Linux kernel and the userspace applications have been paid for by commercial companies.The same is true of all the BSD projects, apache, OpenOffice, GIMP, and almost every large project I can think of. There is this myth that most open source development is done by unpayed hobbyists, but every time anyone looks into it they discover that is not the case and almost all the major contributors are paid to work on a project by various interested companies. We've got a hundred or so developers at my current company and almost all of them contribute to one open source project or another to some degree, on the company dime because it benefits our company to do so. What Linux can't handle that many NICs in duplex mode, well we'd better fix that since we're selling servers built on it. What OpenBSD has issues with that graphics chipset, well, we'd better get that running for console mode on our offering based on that. What Apache has a security hole, well since we have a Web interface we'd better fix that. What the perl interpreter barfs on that, well we'd better fix it and submit a patch. That is how open source development is done.
The flaw in Windows is that it does not provide for an open signing framework that warns users when running unsigned, uncertified code. Further, the flaw in Windows is that it does not restrict such code to a sandbox by default and it does not inform the user of what the software is doing when run. Double clicking software should not be a black box where that implies the software has privileges to do anything it wants.
Unless you make Windows prevent a user from running arbitrary code, I don't know how you'd fix this.You apply ACLs to all software, with more restrictive ACLs for software that is uncertified and unsigned and which does not ship with a recommended ACL.
If anyone should be sued, it should be the ISPs who allow zombies to sit there on their network. I don't like lawsuits, and would prefer to see some government incentive used to compel ISPs to remove the zombies.Do tell. How is it the ISPs' responsibility to stop zombies any more than it is UPS's responsibility to stop unsolicited junk mailings? It is not their job or their responsibility and it should not be. It is up to the police to stop illegal behavior, through official channels. ISPs can do a fair bit, but they will never, ever be able to accurately distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate traffic, in general. You have to solve the problem at the weak end-point computers and this problem can be almost entirely stopped by actually redesigning Windows to deal with the current internet realities. That will happen just as soon as it is profitable for MS, which will happen when they start losing customers in large numbers because of malware problems which, in turn, will happen once MS's monopoly is broken up. Breaking up MS is the one thing that will stop malware, and really the only practical, long-term solution I can think of to the problem.
Of course not, but conceptually, the larger a project is and the more used it is, the cheaper it should be by comparison. If you're a ten person company and need a special calculator, it may make a lot more financial sense to buy a commercial offering. If you're a 20,000 employee corporation and you need some software that everyone else also needs, the open source model will almost always provide it at a tiny fraction of the cost of buying a commercial license to it.
The collaborative model also carries added costs. There's the cost involved in managing the multiple-company development (e.g. Who's in charge?).This is in no way inherent in the open source model. Open source does not even mean developed in house. There are many open source projects centrally managed by a core team who do work on that project on contract to anyone who wants to pay, or even whenever they get enough pledges for a given feature. In any case, the cost associated do not scale at the same rate as licensing costs. In many cases using open source is free, aside from the same incidental costs that come with commercial software.
When you look at this issue from a real-world perspective things become more complicated than an academic view can appreciate.Linux. Who develops it? Lots of commercial companies and it saves them (including my company) a whole lot of money. The open source business model is not academic, it is a real world reality and has been for decades.
This is a non sequitur. Just because it is an owned network does not mean they have the right to restrict people however they want. I may own a private road, but that does not automatically grant me the right to deny passage to the people that own the mineral rights to that same land. I may own a flower shop, but that does not grant me the right to deny service to blacks, without repercussions.
These privately owned networks were funded largely with our tax dollars, hundreds of billions of them the government provided in subsidies. Many of these privately owned networks run on public right of ways to which the government has granted them an exclusive monopoly. Further, those same private businesses are being granted exemption from obeying the law, namely copyright laws, libel laws, pornography laws, free trade laws, conspiracy laws, etc. Those exemptions from obeying the law are granted under "common carrier" statutes that say impartial carriers goods and information are not held liable for what they carry provided they impartially carry everything. I say it is just fine for these private businesses to decide not to be impartial and to slow down or block traffic from some people to gain a competitive advantage. What I object to is them doing that, and being exempted from punishment for the laws. Common carriers are a public service and that is the only reason they are protected. If you're not serving the common good and are just making money for yourself without benefiting society, why should you be given special privileges?
When I first got into the ISP business about 14 years ago, there were a few basic rules that we insisted people follow as terms of their serviceSo here's the problem... the rules you list have nothing to do with net neutrality. Net neutrality is simply about treating some traffic differently than others not based upon the type, nor the traffic levels, but based upon the person or location from which the traffic is being generated. You can block all users that send more than a gig a day. What you can't do is block just the black users that send more than a gig a day, or just the republican users that use more than a gig a day, or even the users that do business with your competitor and use more than a gig a day... if you still want to be given all the special privileges that are given to common carriers.
Most of what you cite are simply strategic pricing by MS. Discounts for large customers help motivate buyers to remain loyal if they want to remain large customers instead of be undercut by the competition. This is differential pricing, classic monopoly maintenance. Pricing schemes for education help remove the tendency of price sensitive, but highly capable university clients to move to cheaper, open source products. None of this really relates to the models presented which are a point case revenue model.
My most common grouse is that the key is Open Standards, not Open Source. If MSOffice and OS products conform to a open standard and anyone can develop applications that cleanly interoperate with them...Umm, great, but this doesn't have anything to do with the revenue schemes of open versus closed source software development. You're confusing two issues. With open standards the market can operate freely in a traditional, capitalist manner. Open source is not needed for this. With open source, some users and developers of software can more efficiently create software and undercut the pricing of the traditional closed source models. Basically this study asserts that in a free market, open source will win because it is more efficient, just like any other more efficient process for doing the same thing. Whether or not we have a free market, or if open source development can win in a non-free market, such as the current monopoly/lock-in situation is another topic. This isn't about whether MS will be toppled. It is about whether you can make more money and pay less with open source software in general, as compared to closed source software (using the development methods and pricing schemes they commonly do today).
Hate for MS? Are you joking? The average consumer vaguely knows MS is a cool technology company and might know they make Windows. The reason the Wii is in such demand is a series of well planned moves from Nintendo. They aimed at the casual gamer market instead of the traditional game console market. They continued their support for the younger children market. Maybe you are not understanding the demand because you are not the average buyer. The average buyer has an old console and is looking for one from this generation. They do not have two xbox 360's. The average buyer cares about price and the Wii is killing MS on price. The average consumer has seen the TV ads and the occasional article or news program commentary and what they took away from it is that the Wii is new and different with different controls and new types of games, while the Sony and MS systems are the same thing with slightly better graphics and a big price tag.
Nintendo took a big gamble in abandoning the traditional controller and focusing on a new type of gameplay. They took a big gamble in aiming at a nontraditional market. Those gambles paid off. Most of the big game developers expected them to fail and ignored the Wii as being too different from the others, figuring it likely either Sony or MS would win and they could make a quick port if they backed the wrong player. Those developers are all trying to reverse course and announcing Wii titles in the works.
I think you're right for the most part that the Wii only has a few good titles right now. That doesn't much matter to the average buyer though, because the average buyer only buys two games a year. I also think the strategic buyer on a budget, looking to the future will probably conclude that the Wii's popularity will result in it getting many of the best games a year from now. The only people it does matter to are people like you, who are going to buy several consoles and pick up a Wii anyway. You did buy one, right?
In summary, if you're looking to think hatred for MS is the cause, I only wish people were that conscious of MS's actions and that ethical and meticulous in their purchasing decisions. The Wii is winning on its merits, which are merits that don't apply to unusual buyers and hardcore gamers like yourself. Note, I am not a fanboy for any game console. I have a PS2 and an old dreamcast somewhere. I probably will not buy any current console for a year or more, or not at all. Right now, If someone gave me $600 on the condition I bought one, I'd get a Wii and a couple games and pocket the rest of the cash.
I'd say your original statement, "The software is fairly good, but man the hardware.... It's enough to make me consider switching back." sort of implies that you think the hardware is less reliable than comparable PC hardware. Otherwise, why would you consider switching back as a way to ameliorate that problem?
Umm, that only covers Macs and pretty much only first generation ones (which have more problems for every vendor). In order to conclude that Apple are more unreliable than average you have actually compare it to other vendors using the same methodology. Take a look at my other response in this thread where I link to an article about the consumer reports hardware reliability study for 2006. You'll note Apple was the top rated vendor.
P.S. It's not that hard to change a URL into a link and test it before posting. Your URL is broken but I managed to fix it by deleting the unnecessary whitespace.
I'd post numbers, but I don't have a lot of time to waste on arguing with people who are unlikely to be persuaded by facts anyway. Consumer Reports puts Apple hardware reliability as #1 overall. It put them #2 for laptops, right behind Sony. The study our IT guy bought access to only covers laptops but placed them #1 for laptop reliability for 2006 of all the major vendors. I'd post links if they were not both password protected, but buy an account at Consumer reports, it is well worth it.
If you're a real cheapskate you can read an article by someone who did pay for access to consumer reports, like this Ars Technica article. The most relevant excerpt might be, "As for reliability, Apple Computer crushes the competition, at least among desktops. Based on 77,700 responses, 11 percent of Macs bought between 2002 and 2006 went in for repair or had a serious problem. Sony was next best, at 15 percent, and Gateway was last at 19 percent. Among 50,100 respondents with laptops, Apple was at 18 percent, along with the majority of manufacturers. Sony was at 15 percent, but it should be noted that 3 points or less is not considered meaningful." That reference was in regard to their survey based study which suffers from self selection (but is still better than nothing) but their spot purchasing study concluded the same. In fact, pretty much every independent study I've seen comes up with similar results. Have you ever seen a real study (not an anecdote) that ranks Apple lower than #3 for hardware reliability?
It is true that I presented an anecdote, but I also referred to the independent studies of hardware reliability. For example, Consumer Reports. Every one I've ever seen places Apple near the top of the list for hardware reliability.
If Apple continues to have hardware problems, they're going to drive away all their supporters...Everyone has hardware problems. Apple, in general, seems to have fewer than the average by quite a bit according to said independent studies.