...it bothers me to see the mainstreaming of pedophilia with terms like this.
That's fine, but it is free speech. Better to have people discussing this than for it to be a forbidden topic that festers in darkness.
They were mentally and emotionally setting the stage for the same sort of battle for public acceptance that the gay community has fought and mostly won over the last few decades. I don't want them to 'come out', I don't want them to have supportive underground communities, and it was saddening to see the entirely appropriate discourse of public acceptance of homosexuality and queer identity perverted like this.
The important question is why? What is it that is different between pedophiles and homosexuals? Why should society accept one and not the other? Is there a fundamental difference of ethics in your mind that you can explain or are you just reacting emotionally?
This is exactly the slippery slope that the right uses to justify non-acceptance of gays, and we need to bring a big heavy boot down on crap like 'minor attracted adult' to demonstrate that we can make moral choices about who we will accept and who we won't
The "slippery slope" is a logical fallacy. What we need is reason and rational dialogue. We need an understanding of why pedophilia is wrong, not just an angry, emotional attack upon it.
The world's a better place because homosexuality has been mainstreamed. It'll be a better place still when pedophilia is absolutely and explicitly denied the same path and the same acceptance. It starts by calling bullshit on terms like 'minor attracted adult'.
I disagree. The "negativity constant" of a word is how much people react negatively to a given word. It is an emotional response, conditioned by society. Pedophiles are people who are attracted to minors. Rather than reacting to either set of terminology it should be made clear why either people who are attracted to minors or pedophiles should be forbidden from acting on their attraction.
In my mind the ethical principal is quite simply, responsibility. Children are not granted all the rights of an adult, nor are they held entirely responsible for their decisions because they have not yet developed the capacity to make rational, informed choices about their lives. As a result, they are taught to obey their elders as a matter of principal and to cede their will to authority figures, who "know better." They place great trust in their elders and society and that trust in turn engenders a greater responsibility for society to protect them. Sex with children is wrong similar to the way rape is wrong. A child is not socially in a position to make a correct choice and does not have the critical thinking capacity to properly make major life choices.
Sex is a major life choice, both from an emotional and social perspective and from a health risk perspective. Until a child reaches an appropriate level of maturity, every member of society is responsible for making sure to go out of their way to avoid letting children make such choices, whether they think they are ready for it or not.
Now no one with any reason believes that a child magically becomes responsible at the age of 18. Some people develop faster than others. I don't think some 25 year olds are ready to make life choices yet, while some 15 year olds are. Society has chosen an arbitrary age of 18, but ethically, we need to be aware that it is wrong to take advantage of immature 18 year olds. Let the ethical principal, not the law guide one's decision making in this regard.
I pity people who find themselves sexually attracted to children, but I do not forgive them any unethical actions they take. By understanding the issue, however, I think we can more intelligently make decisions and promote understanding within society, both of why one group should be legal and another not, and how we should all act with regard to the issue. Reason, not emotion should guide us.
Kind of hard to judge with absolutely no real information, but that has never stopped anybody on Slashdot before.
If the ISP shut anyone down without a court order, regardless of what content they're hosting, then they've forfeited their common carrier status in my mind. If they found the site and thought it was illegal, they should have contacted the authorities. Otherwise, they should have done nothing. With the facts we have, we can answer the question asked in the summary.
Ati and Nvidia's drivers are already multithreaded on windows but there is only a 10% improvement at best... Rendering frames to the screen is inherently serial so you can't make it much faster with more cores.
We're not talking about the drivers, per se. Many the libraries used by OpenGL programs and some of the OS interactions will be spawned as a second "feeder" process that does nothing but send data to the graphics card/drivers. This means programs who are CPU bound and single threaded, can offload one big task to the second processor without any work from the developers or even recompiling. Theoretically, the perfect storm would be a process where half the work is feeding the GPU and the bottleneck to the GPU is at least half as wide as the CPU bottleneck... resulting in twice the performance. This will never happen, of course, and I don't expect much benefit from this optimization in general, but it is still kinda neat and might be useful in some instances.
To me this article isn't so much about whether global warming is occurring or not but how politics has gotten involved in this field and has affected the science that gets reported in places like the UN where policy decisions are made.
I guess I have a different world view than you do. I assume all studies are motivated by politics or cash and from what I've experienced of the scientific fields, this is not far from the truth. Researchers outright lie all the time to get grant money or more corporate funding or both. The scientific method is designed to deal with this through peer review and repeatability. Unless a number of different researchers have all repeated the results of a particular experiment, it is very shaky, especially in certain fields. But that is part of what we're doing right now, exposing flaws in a given study so that the proper consensus on what is happening can be reached.
FTA: "A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.' "
I actually view this as less damning than other things I've seen. This could be interpreted as the medieval warm period is an anomaly that must be explained or whose statistical significance must be called into question based upon the rest of the results. I've seen instances of "add 10% to all these numbers to make them more dramatic" written on a sticky note in medical lab journals for cancer research. The comment is very suspicious, but the numbers are what is important.
1) So if you can find some phenomenon that correlates directly with temperature for all the time we've been able to record it, and you understand why it correlates, you don't think it is reasonable to assume that that record before we started recording is also a good indication of what the temperature was at that time? What about when you have dozens of such correlations by different mechanisms, but they all agree? 'Cuz that's where the temperature indications most scientists use come from.
2) Is being kicked in the face better than being kicked in the crotch? What about when the kick to the face is coming a hundred times faster than the kick to the crotch? A gradual change in temperature in either direction in a given location will cause problems. A rapid change in temperature will cause severe problems. What's better, a gradual cooling where it drop 1 degree every decade or all the ice caps melting tomorrow and the resulting rise in water level drowning everyone in every costal city?
It's not a simple matter of whether heating or cooling is better, especially given that rapid heating over a short time may lead to long term cooling. Climate is not so simple and it affects our world in profound ways from food production to dangerous species expansion, to hurricanes.
3) I haven't seen said movie. Your comment is empty of all value. I don't know when he photographed them and apparently neither do you so you're implying that it was misleading without presenting any reason for that implication. We do know the ice sheets are retreating, and rapidly. I've not seen any scientific study that did not conclude that.
...And I just read a very convincing article in the UK Telegraph that makes me think that the 'scientific consensus' on global warming is more than a little shaky. Now IANACS (I am not a climate scientist). And the Telegraph is notoriously reactionary. Can anyone out there go through this piece and tell me why it might be wrong?
The article referenced goes through several studies and papers and points out poor methodologies and statistical analysis that is likely fraudulent. From this you can conclude, these studies are possibly flawed. So where does that leave you? Can you logically conclude from this that global warming is not occurring or even not occurring faster than any time in the past? Of course not. Discrediting a study does not prove the opposite of that study is true. It simply provides you a reason to place more weight on other, more credible, studies.
From my reading I have little doubt that global warming is occurring. Just look in peer reviewed journals and other credible sources. It may not be as dramatic as some would like, and the dramatic, but ill-concieved, doomsday scenarios painted by the popular media are entertainment, not fact. The truth is, there are very real indications of climactic problems, which will probably be gradual, but may be practically irreversible by the time they are apparent to skeptics.
Just be careful of your sources and pay attention. Both industrial concerns and people working for government grant dollars have incentive to obtain particular results. Look for peer reviewed results from experiments and observations that have been repeated by numerous scientific studies. Be cautious of interpretations of this data by the popular media, who are more interested in selling ads than presenting the truth.
It is nice when software is rewritten to take advantage of multiple cores, and imagine that most new games will be designed to do this. For older games, however, Apple has announced that programs using the OpenGL APIs will automatically spawn a process that feeds the GPU, using a second thread. This means, theoretically, some programs could see up to 2X the performance when run on OS X 10.5 and a dual core system, without any changes from the developers.
It's a nice little optimization and hopefully Vista will have something similar (although I heard of such a thing yet).
No, it's not and it does not. Go search for OPK/WAIK on MSDN.
What does that have to do with it? Because many things are built upon the presumption that IE will be there, things from lots of places break when you try to install them without it.
So there were errors made in the past. Nobody is denying that. But it's time to move on and do the right thing moving forward.
Lets apply this logic to other criminal acts. So he stole a million dollars and used it to buy a house and a car and get his cousin elected mayor. That is in the past. There is no need to take the house and car away or repeal the laws passed to favor him. We need to move forward.
Doesn't that seem a little counterproductive to you?
No one is stopping the OEMs from pre-installing iTunes/Firefox/etc. on their systems.
That isn't good enough. It needs to be a level playing field.
Dell/HP/etc. spend *hours* tweaking their images, so it really doesn't take much on their part to replace the inbox browser. It's time for *them* to make a decision, Microsoft's not going to go out of their way to convince them.
What makes you think this? Their licensing agreements are "trade secrets" but we do know that in the past they charged much higher prices if companies would not agree to pay for a Windows license for all machines sold, in some cases even macs that could not run Windows. What makes you think they aren't applying that pressure now?
ah, bribing politicians. Are we really going to go there? What proof do you have?
The money MS legally donated to both parties is a matter of public record. Just because it is legal does not make it right. You do know all the Justice dept. officials were replaced right after the election, right? And MS was not punished at all and given no consequences after having been found guilty.
There are a set of compliance guidelines that were produced as a result of the anti-trust verdict and Microsoft does openly admit that it follows those religiously.
Actually, they failed to comply with those guidelines, as in regard to providing documentation, but the punishment for that is the government will observe them not comply longer. It is a fiasco, and if you followed the industry news you probably heard about it. They were given basically no punishment at all and it hasn't stopped them from introducing numerous other antitrust violations, like Windows Media player.
Retailers, be they virtual or brick and mortar, are places of public accommodation, and as such have to make themselves available to everyone. By this logic, Target could exclude , which would be patently illegal.
Legally, I think the ADA applies equally to Web sites and physical locations. Ethically, I think the ADA is on very shaky ground. But then, I support the right of individuals and companies to discriminate based upon sex or ethnicity as well. I think the government should be held to a standard of non-discrimination, but not private companies. Of course I also think such businesses should be ineligible for government granted benefits, such as the rights of incorporation. Unfortunately, life is not so simple. Because big businesses have so much affect upon our government and because of injustices in the past, restriction of freedom like the ADA and affirmative action programs are often a necessary evil.
Now, you probably argue that Microsoft should basically *not* ship IE with Windows at all because that would be leveraging its monopoly. I argue that users should have a way to get online (out of the box), find the best browser out there and have the ability of uninstalling the current one and using the one they lile.
You're making a few false assumptions. Microsoft not bundling IE with Windows does not mean the computer people buy does not have a browser bundled with it. There is no need to make a bowser easily removable, simply for MS to be forbidden from bundling so that OEMs like Dell can and must choose one or more browsers to install.
Even OEMs like Dell/HP/Gateway etc. have the ability of modifying the pre-install image of Windows to *remove* IE, add Firefox and ship their systems like that.
So here's the problem, doing that is hard and breaks things in Windows. Because the abuse has gone on as long as it has, the Web itself has been altered to cater to IE. As a result, OEMs have incentive to choose IE, even if it is not the best product, simply because of the damaged state of the industry.
With your understanding, once a particular OS company reaches a particular market share, they can only ship a barebones OS because everything else would be leveraging their monopoly. That is absurd.
Why is that absurd? Why shouldn't IE have to compete with Firefox when OEMs decide what to bundle? Why shouldn't iTunes compete evenly with WMP when OEMs decide what to ship? Why should MS be given control of a market simply because they have control of a different one?
I agree that IE7 is still not there yet. But the point is that they are making efforts.
No, they're not. Every other browser on the market has managed to implement the standards well enough that a random standards compliant set of pages I make works in them. They managed this years ago. Microsoft has a thousand times the resources of most of these companies/projects but they haven't? Either they are incompetent beyond reason or they are intentionally holding back the standards until they can lock people in.
They have realized that by isolating their users and themselves, they are only going to be making enemies.
Umm, no they're also making billions of dollars and stopping the industry from making their current monopoly less valuable. Monopoly abuse, if not stopped, is profitable. If the courts don't act, MS will not stop, ever.
In the meanwhile, feel free to convince Dell/HP/etc to bundle Firefox with their systems since it doesn't break your tests.
They won't and even if some of them do, that does not fix the market. The problem is not just that Firefox isn't bundled, it is that IE is bundled.
Not everything is Microsoft's fault. Yes, they are the bigger player out there, but there are many others who are making profit out of the business while Microsoft takes all the blame.
No, not everything is Microsoft's fault, but this is. They knowingly broke the law for profit, then bribed politicians to avoid being punished. They are still doing it and consumers, competitors, and the industry as a whole is suffering as a result. They are criminals breaking the law and should be stopped and punished.
If there were a market for a rendering engine alternative for explorer.exe, that would be against antitrust law, right?
Yes, under some conditions.
If there currently isn't a market, I could make it a market by developing my own rendering engine, or by just porting nautilus to windows. Could I then sue MS for millions for stifling me as the competition, and by locking users out of competing window managers?
Not really, since MS would have taken the bundling action before such a market existed. Besides, given the US court system it is a poor investment. It takes most companies half a decade to get their settlement from MS.
Forgetting the more logical applications for the law, doesn't this kind of strike you as illogical?
No, it doesn't. With power comes responsibility. If I build and carry a gun, laws apply to me that don't apply to others. I can't go get drunk in public. I can't go into a courthouse or jail. The same is true for monopolies. Once they acquire that kind of dangerous power, they are responsible to not abuse it.
It would be like suing a office machine company for manufacturing and distributing an all-in-one printer/scanner/photocopier/fax/phone. Why the hell didn't they make it modular?
Every time this topic is discussed people insist on using examples that aren't monopolies. Why don't you try this one with a monopoly. Back in the day, the phone company had a monopoly. You couldn't buy a phone, you had to rent it. That was a monopoly, akin to MS's OS monopoly. This would be akin, not to the phone company making a all-in-one printer/scanner/photocopier, but to the phone company making a printer/scanner/photocopier/phone and it being the only phone you could buy, thus forcing everyone who wanted a phone to also buy a printer/scanner/photocopier/phone.
Those are real problems with the abuse of antitrust, which I respect. However, for the sake of consistency, I think the OS should be considered a single, but modular product.
Your proposal is that a law regarding economics and restricting abuses that damage everyone should have a special case for one technological area. You have not, however, shown any way in which this market is fundamentally different from other markets to warrant such a special case and all you examples have dealt with non-monopolies. I disagree. The law needs to apply to OS's the same as other markets and the definition of markets does not need to be refined. The abuse of bundling IE resulted in real problems and your special case would encourage more of those problems.
If people want tabs or mp3s, they've got to wise up. It isn't that hard to find and download an alternative.
People aren't going to wise up. People are used to free markets and base their decisions on the fact that they are in a free market. If Slashdot has demonstrated anything it is that even smart, knowledgeable people don't understand monopolies and their affects. Assuming the public will, and thus act in anything other than their short term interests is naive. And for that matter, a monopoly allows you to establish artificial barriers, thus making choosing it the best business decision, only because of those barriers. People can be smart and make the right choices, but if they're dealing with an abuse monopoly, the market does not make the correct choices.
...I still believe them to be part of the OS.
Define terms however you want, it does not change the realities of the detrimental effects MS's actions have. It is those effects that need to be stopped, and changing the names, makes no difference.
You don't like it, don't use it, or find another OS.
People act in their own best interests. That is why capitalism works better than socialism. Expecting people to altruistically act to benefit society at their own expense will not work, and MS will expand gaining monopoly after monopoly, killing industry after industry, and ruining
One thing that you might be able to help me with is maybe a utility along the lines of partition magic to configure partions on my mac...
Have you tried Applications: Utilities: Disk Utility.app? I'm not sure what you're trying to do, but the disk utility can manage partitions on your mac and if you have an Intel machine, can nondestructively partition them.
Well if Google picked or made one distro, that would make for a stable target for them and anyone else who wanted to contribute. We're talking about the benefits to Google of Google sponsoring a distro.
Ubuntu, Open Suse, and even Gentoo are all good enough for for Google to deploy internally.
Sure, but it is a lot easier to standardize on one distro than many.
Frankly I am having less hope for a Desktop Linux by the minute...
You go on to list symptoms. Linux on the desktop will only really take off if a major company or group of companies takes the money they would be spending on Windows and OS X and dumps it into making Linux right for them. I have hope for Linux on the desktop, but it needs real support, and that support is vanishing from some sources. I know a lot of people who have abandoned Linux on the desktop and work from OS X, while contributing to Linux on the server. If Linux on the desktop is to survive, it should be looking at OS X and copying the real underlying innovations. Linux distro developers who want a desktop instead of a server should be going out of their way to be compatible with OS X to allow cross platform improvements. I doubt this will happen because of the biases within the remaining community, however.
Do you mind elaborating how exactly Microsoft is leveraging its monopoly to defeat Google?
Bundling IE is the major method, and then what they include and do not include in IE.
The only concrete example I see here is that they do not implement standards in IE - but pray, I ask you, does Firefox fully implement all the standards?
Well, Firefox does implement standards in general. Every time I've followed the W3C spec it has worked in Firefox (and Safari and Opera, etc.) but it has not worked in IE. IE implements about 50% of the standards while other browsers are close to 90% I'd guess. No one is perfect, but IE versus the industry shows a huge difference.
All of this, however, is academic. Firefox is not bundled with a monopoly and what works and what is included and what is broken does not help the Firefox team take over some other market. Unless you have a monopoly, you can't use that monopoly as leverage. If Firefox does not implement some feature, it is just as easy to use Opera. If IE fails to implement something, because it is bundled in Windows, most people will not switch because everything else is harder. It requires education, knowledge, and technical expertise to download, install, and run any browser but IE.
Last time I checked, Firefox 2 did not pass the ACID2 test (if that's any measure of standards).
The ACID2 test is edge cases for the most part, not a test of how comprehensively a given browser adheres to standards. It is like shining a laser on a mirror to see how reflective it is. Firefox and Opera and Safari are all consumer grade mirrors and the ACID2 test is useful for determining which is best. IE is like a piece of aluminum and using the ACID2 test on it is a waste of time.
IE7 is a great improvement over IE6 and an indication that Microsoft is listening, and doing something to change themselves.
I auto-generate some pages. I wrote the code based upon the spec. When I wrote it, I tested it. It worked fine in every single browser I could find, except IE, which completely failed because they did not implement most of CSS2 and any of XHTML that was not coincidentally HTML. When IE7 came out I tested it too. It completely failed to render as well, and added an additional random bug. From reading the IE dev teams comments it seems they're up to implementing about 50% of CSS2 and still haven't implemented any XHTML. They fixed some bugs, but are nowhere near implementing the standards the rest of the industry has had for many, many years.
My point is that with so many eyes watching Microsoft at any given moment and at their every move (DOJ, EU, *every* software company affected by Microsoft), this monopoly thing is getting old.
I agree, MS should stop abusing their monopoly or the courts should actually take meaningful action against them. MS won't stop though, because they're making a fortune breaking the law. The courts won't act though, because MS is one of the largest contributors to both the Republican and Democratic parties and our government is absurdly corrupt.
Perhaps when making this statement, you should provide concrete examples on how exactly that is happening.
I did and I've elaborated upon them, but I find explaining antitrust abuse tedious. I've explained it on Slashdot a hundred times by now, but the vast majority of the people who respond have no understanding of the law or the purpose of the law. Somehow they missed that chapter in Econ 101. It isn't really all that complex, but I'm sick of explaining it over and over again. Five minutes with wikipedia and a reasonably intelligent person can see the obvious abuses from Microsoft and why they are detrimental/illegal. And yet, every time I post about MS's monopoly abuse someone has to respond with an analogy and those analogies always (and I do mean always) reference the actions of a company that is not a monopoly. Maybe these people are astroturfers, but I only have so much time.
Even your post, you compare IE to Firefox, but IE is bundled with Windows, which is a monopoly, while the Firefox team has no monopoly on anything. Why people can't understand how this changes things is beyond my understanding.
Google isn't a charity it is a business. How would this help Google make one cent of income?
Companies regularly make strategic moves that make them money in the long term, via an indirect route. Google throwing their support and development behind a desktop Linux distro could do a number of things. It could provide a stable target for other developers. It could promote a commoditization of the OS, and thus remove MS's largest weapon against them. It could save Google money internally by providing a cheaper platform for their employees internally.
I'm not saying it is a good idea, or the best option available to them, but there are lots of reasons it might be.
Is Apple actually getting a larger chunk of the desktop?
From the numbers I've seen, yes, kinda. They are gaining ground in the US and Europe (from 4% to about 6%) in sales at least. They are slightly losing ground worldwide as they can't keep up with the growth rate in computer use around the world.
Even in the free software world, development for the Mac just means porting from Linux to the Mac, and even then, only after the MS Windows port is finished.
This is changing as well, from what I've seen. In the last few years a lot of the UNIX/Linux crowd has moved to OS X laptops and I think the move to intel will bring even more. Hardcore developers are still contributing to Linux/UNIX, but focused more on the server. I've seen a lot of CLI utilities starting to get support for new features first on OS X, and then on Linux. I've seen a fair number of projects start up that are Mac only, since the users are on that platforms and coding multiple GUIs is time consuming. I find this somewhat discouraging since I'd rather have portable applications, but realistically I'm one of those OS X on the desktop people, so it does benefit me.
I anticipate some serious brain drain in the Linux on the desktop community unless there is better support for portable applications or some heavyweights really pour effort into making Linux desktops (probably for enterprise use).
The largest threat to Google's online services business is Microsoft. Microsoft can and does illegally leverage their monopoly on desktop OS's to defeat superior offerings from competitors. Microsoft is putting a lot of resources into defeating Google, not only by making comparable services, but by tying those services to Windows and tying the Web in general to Windows by their use of proprietary technologies and their intentional refusal to fully implement standards in IE. Microsoft's plan is obviously to keep Web technologies weak by keeping capabilities on a default Windows install weak until they have a solution that locks people in.
If MS is using their OS monopoly to leverage an attack on Web services, it only makes sense for Google to make an effort to return fire and do what they can to mitigate that threat. The most widely adopted alternative (by most accounts) is Mac OS X. The small amount of cash needed to support it as well as Windows can potentially provide a great deal of benefit. Additionally, it provides a test as to whether or not they are keeping their services portable, something that promotes good coding in general and fits with their long term goals.
Now is that their motivation? I'd say, that is some justification, but probably not their main motivation. The truth is, a lot of people at Google use macs (or so I've been told, I know two people there and one uses a Mac) and they want services to work because of that. Google has been very practical about this. Mac compatibility is not a requirement, especially for Beta software they have acquired, but everything works on the Mac eventually that makes sense on that platform. Keep up the good work guys.
And if there are infections that are being automated they are the direct result of not patching the box, period.
First, whether or not it is the result of not patching is not the point. Second, your argument does not even address what I said. Third, adding the word "period" just before you use the punctuation point is redundant.
And that "conditioning" you talk about exists in all software, Microsoft is hardly the only ones that default to that sort of behavior. If you're going to complain about something at least first look around to see if everybody else is not doing it as well.
"Everyone else is doing it," is not a valid reason to do something that doesn't work. As for what others are doing, a lot of UIs take these things into account. For example, the OS X UI presents actual actions pertinent to the dialogue box, rather than using the same two button names "OK/Cancel" even when those option make basically no sense. Also, other UIs require at least two options, instead of present ing useless boxes that just say "OK" and give the user no option to do anything but be conditioned one more time. Finally, other UIs don't have nearly as many unneeded dialogues so that people pay attention to the ones they do see.
MS's implementation is a disaster and if you've ever been to a presentation on Human-computer interaction they've probably used it at least once as an example of what not to do, as do dozens of texts on the subject.
Good lord, what part of "breaking everything" did you miss back there?
...the part where you presented an argument or support or anything other than an empty assertion that your belief is true.
So why haven't you? Because Apple has a 2% market share? Or because OS X is so much more secure?
OS X is more secure, partly because it has about 6% of the market and the benefits that brings, and partly because of other design decisions, but all of that is beside the point.
Apropos because the PC is like a TV in that it has a fixed number of inputs and outputs, one way to interact with it and exactly one possible configuration state. Right?
Actually both computers and TVs have multiple inputs and outputs and configuration states. PCs have more, but that changes the principal not at all. You've provided no support for why you think users without the proper information from the OS, granularity of control from the OS, who are basically lied to by the OS, and who want to do a simple series of tasks, mostly ignored by the developers of the OS, should be held entirely accountable for their problems. Sorry, but OS designs, especially Windows, ignore what users want to do and what they need to do that.
Idiot users then are then essentially screwed.
Ahh, idiot users I know who had their Windows machine compromised by malware include three people I now with genius level IQ's (two physicists, and a biologist), an entrepreneur I know who grew up in poverty and has made himself millions, and a very well regarded security researcher who you've seen talk if you've been to any of the major security conferences in the US in the last decade. Gee, if only those people weren't such idiots.
Free software and Apple will "fix" this by taking the decision away from the user, and idiot users will simply become more sophisticated.
Who said anything about taking decisions away? Users of a system with MAC can do anything they can on one without, and more, because they can control security with more granularity. It is giving users a knife and a book on whittling when they want to carve figurines, instead of just a chain saw like they have now.
...where they'll get the "Please enter your root password" dialog...
What a pathetic strawman. I gave you an example of the type of question they would be asked. You've ignored it because you don't want to argue rationally, only try to suppot you random, uneducated beliefs.
Even Windows XP has most of the plumbing needed, the problem is it has not been implemented in a usable way in Vista (from my brief tests). The MAC has been in various OS's for years and Solaris has even has some reasonable UI, but no one that I've seen has built reasonable default ACLs or a usable GUI and integration with the OS. Until they do, this will be a feature for OS developers and a few security geeks.
Could you sue MS since they implemented their own rendering engine into explorer.exe without opportunity for changing it with some other rendering engine?
Just like with the example of electricity and bread this depends upon the market or lack thereof. Is there an existing market where something that does the same thing as explorer.exe? Who makes and profits from that software? If there is a market, I don't see it, but I've also done no research. The theoretical electric company I'm talking about could invent a new product, maybe something you stick under you fingernail, and bundle that with their service because there is no existing, separate market for said new product.
If so, how can any program with any level of complexity be legal to distribute?
Microsoft can make and distribute any program they want. They just can't bundle any software with Windows, only particular software. The antitrust laws are for a purpose and it is pretty easy to tell when you're driving others out of business with your monopoly. Under the assumption that someone does make something that does the same thing as explorer.exe, all MS has to do is not bundle it with Windows and make their version better so Dell and other customers of MS choose MS's solution on its own merits.
Finally, doesn't the fact that Microsoft doesn't lock you out of alternative media players/web browsers make a difference?
Sure. It makes a difference if you kill twelve people and beat up fifteen or if you just beat up fifteen, but abstaining from the murder doesn't make your assault any more legal.
They bundle for convenience (competitive measures)
It cost MS some serious money and endless security headaches to entwine IE so much with Windows. They did so only to stifle competition, not to make their products more convenient. Most people who rip CDs, rip them to DRM-encumbered WMF files. Then, when they want to move those files or play them on a portable player most people find out they have to do it all over again. That is not convenient for anyone. If MS had to compete on even ground with iTunes and Realplayer and Mplayer they would be motivated to fix this problem. Maybe they'd change the default option to MP3. Maybe they'd change it to DRMless WMF. Maybe everyone would just ship iTunes. In all of the above situations the consumer gets something more convenient, not less than what they get now. MS didn't bundle WMP because they want to make life easier on consumers. They did so because they want to take over another market with a product designed to be worse for consumers and better for MS.
It seems you would rather let the law strangle out features of software, which is not the law's intention.
You have it backwards. It is the bundling that is strangling features and innovation. As with the music jukebox example above, consumers end up with a less featureful and innovative product. It took IE what, 5 years to get tabs after everyone else? The problem is one of motivation. Like the electric company selling bread, Microsoft has no good motivation to innovate or make better browsers or media players. You contend that preventing a company from selling everything as a bundle reduces innovation. I contend that removing the financial motivation for innovation, reduces it much more and I further contend that simply looking at the progress of IE for the last several years or historical examples of the same provides convincing evidence to support my contention.
I think maybe you need to really find hard facts on the risks, before you try convincing them of what those risks are. You might be very surprised. The sad truth is if a security measure makes things harder to use, that measure will often become a security liability. Force people to change their passwords every week and they post them on stickies on their monitors. You can't ignore the user as part of a security solution and only you know your users. You can change your users with education, but only a very small amount. Contrary to what many publications teach security and ease of use are not polar opposites. You can take steps to make things easier to use and at the same time more secure.
Depending on the tasks those you support want to accomplish and and the real risks you need to figure out how to make those things easy to do with relative security.
Okay, by simple observation I have worm propagation, and malware signature detection statistics for thousands of infected hosts right now and the vast majority are definitely automated. Of course neither of our observations mean much, which is why there are formal studies presented and peer reviewed at several conferences each year. I haven't seen a lot of disagreement about this topic.
From locking down Outlook and OE to implementing the zone bits for downloaded files, I think Microsoft have done as much as they could without risking some severe compatibility problems.
I disagree. They could do a whole lot more, starting with good, default ACLs for all executables, separating the execution path of executables and scripts from that of data, and elimination of thousands of useless "OK/Cancel" dialogue boxes that condition people to click "OK" to everything.
If you think that Microsoft is not doing X because "they have a monopoly" then I can't really help you.
MS has little in the way of financial incentive to fix this problem. Break them up into two companies, each with the full rights to the code to date, and this problem will be solved by one of them in 3 years.
And if you think it doesn't affect their bottom line, watch those stupid Apple ads sometime.
I said it does not significantly effect their profits. After years of this situation and those ads Apple has taken what, another 2% of the market away from them? It does not justify the cost of fixing the problem properly.
Once Apple has 400 million customers we'll see how fast they patch those holes that even now they've been taking altogether too long to patch in some cases...
In market terms "too long" is anything that adversely affects their customers purchasing decisions. I haven't had any malware problems on my mac. Have you had any on yours? I didn't think so. So how can they have taken too long?
You are perpetuating the "LOLOL M$ dosen't patch" bullshit...
This is a strawman argument. I never mentioned patches. I said Apple responds to their customers. Because Apple knows people have other choices, they do respond to fix any major problems for their users. This includes security issues.
I think not. You cannot engineer away stupidity without making the device useless.
Here's a TV. When you turn to certain channels, it will call the president and threaten him using a cell phone hidden in it. We're not going to tell you which channels though and we're going to change which one occasionally. So long as you always switch to an even channel then a prime number, then an odd channel that isn't a prime number, however, we'll keep the phone deactivated, except on special days which we'll announce in a mix of broken English and Greek on the radio occasionally. Simple, huh?
That is about the state of Windows today for the average user. In order to securely perform common tasks the user must plan ahead, learn obscure knowledge that has nothing to do with the task they want, and constantly monitor channels that speak technobabble, when all they want to do is get their work done or browse porn. The OS can be silently compromised, especially if they don't buy an add on device they don't know about, random data will do things and random games they download will have access to parts of the system they have no business accessing. Worse, the UI doesn't even let them know when it starts sending thousands of e-mail messages so they can pull the damned plug. It is a mess and people like you who want to blame people for not spending several years learning esoteric information simply to use a common tool are part of the problem. You have to make a second user account to run a program with lesser privileges... and this makes sense to someone? And there are still hundreds of unpatched local exploits so even then you can't be sure it will work.. and this is okay?
Of more concern are exploits in the UNIX level of the operating system.
Not speaking to your specific issues, but OS X and most Linux distros are in the same boat when it comes to general security. It's hard to make a worm for them, the average script kiddie won't cause you any problems, but a dedicated hacker or security expert can get in if you leave any openings (like sshd without a firewall). This could be just a dictionary attack on a weak password or it could be an unpublished exploit in some other service.
OS X machines are fairly safe in that the chances someone will hack them are very small because the number of people doing such hacking is very small. Make no mistake, however, neither OS X or most Linux distros are a locked down, super secure system, safe from a skilled expert. If someone is gunning for you or you have really valuable data you might want to consider performing some serious hardening and deploying some countermeasures.
Security is not Apple's top priority, but I'm still happy to see them taking reasonable measures for a consumer grade OS. I look forward to the new security features in 10.5 and I hope as more and more of the security community starts to use OS X as a workstation, we'll see more people banging on it and making it a bit tougher.
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That's fine, but it is free speech. Better to have people discussing this than for it to be a forbidden topic that festers in darkness.
They were mentally and emotionally setting the stage for the same sort of battle for public acceptance that the gay community has fought and mostly won over the last few decades. I don't want them to 'come out', I don't want them to have supportive underground communities, and it was saddening to see the entirely appropriate discourse of public acceptance of homosexuality and queer identity perverted like this.
The important question is why? What is it that is different between pedophiles and homosexuals? Why should society accept one and not the other? Is there a fundamental difference of ethics in your mind that you can explain or are you just reacting emotionally?
This is exactly the slippery slope that the right uses to justify non-acceptance of gays, and we need to bring a big heavy boot down on crap like 'minor attracted adult' to demonstrate that we can make moral choices about who we will accept and who we won't
The "slippery slope" is a logical fallacy. What we need is reason and rational dialogue. We need an understanding of why pedophilia is wrong, not just an angry, emotional attack upon it.
The world's a better place because homosexuality has been mainstreamed. It'll be a better place still when pedophilia is absolutely and explicitly denied the same path and the same acceptance. It starts by calling bullshit on terms like 'minor attracted adult'.
I disagree. The "negativity constant" of a word is how much people react negatively to a given word. It is an emotional response, conditioned by society. Pedophiles are people who are attracted to minors. Rather than reacting to either set of terminology it should be made clear why either people who are attracted to minors or pedophiles should be forbidden from acting on their attraction.
In my mind the ethical principal is quite simply, responsibility. Children are not granted all the rights of an adult, nor are they held entirely responsible for their decisions because they have not yet developed the capacity to make rational, informed choices about their lives. As a result, they are taught to obey their elders as a matter of principal and to cede their will to authority figures, who "know better." They place great trust in their elders and society and that trust in turn engenders a greater responsibility for society to protect them. Sex with children is wrong similar to the way rape is wrong. A child is not socially in a position to make a correct choice and does not have the critical thinking capacity to properly make major life choices.
Sex is a major life choice, both from an emotional and social perspective and from a health risk perspective. Until a child reaches an appropriate level of maturity, every member of society is responsible for making sure to go out of their way to avoid letting children make such choices, whether they think they are ready for it or not.
Now no one with any reason believes that a child magically becomes responsible at the age of 18. Some people develop faster than others. I don't think some 25 year olds are ready to make life choices yet, while some 15 year olds are. Society has chosen an arbitrary age of 18, but ethically, we need to be aware that it is wrong to take advantage of immature 18 year olds. Let the ethical principal, not the law guide one's decision making in this regard.
I pity people who find themselves sexually attracted to children, but I do not forgive them any unethical actions they take. By understanding the issue, however, I think we can more intelligently make decisions and promote understanding within society, both of why one group should be legal and another not, and how we should all act with regard to the issue. Reason, not emotion should guide us.
Kind of hard to judge with absolutely no real information, but that has never stopped anybody on Slashdot before.
If the ISP shut anyone down without a court order, regardless of what content they're hosting, then they've forfeited their common carrier status in my mind. If they found the site and thought it was illegal, they should have contacted the authorities. Otherwise, they should have done nothing. With the facts we have, we can answer the question asked in the summary.
Ati and Nvidia's drivers are already multithreaded on windows but there is only a 10% improvement at best... Rendering frames to the screen is inherently serial so you can't make it much faster with more cores.
We're not talking about the drivers, per se. Many the libraries used by OpenGL programs and some of the OS interactions will be spawned as a second "feeder" process that does nothing but send data to the graphics card/drivers. This means programs who are CPU bound and single threaded, can offload one big task to the second processor without any work from the developers or even recompiling. Theoretically, the perfect storm would be a process where half the work is feeding the GPU and the bottleneck to the GPU is at least half as wide as the CPU bottleneck... resulting in twice the performance. This will never happen, of course, and I don't expect much benefit from this optimization in general, but it is still kinda neat and might be useful in some instances.
To me this article isn't so much about whether global warming is occurring or not but how politics has gotten involved in this field and has affected the science that gets reported in places like the UN where policy decisions are made.
I guess I have a different world view than you do. I assume all studies are motivated by politics or cash and from what I've experienced of the scientific fields, this is not far from the truth. Researchers outright lie all the time to get grant money or more corporate funding or both. The scientific method is designed to deal with this through peer review and repeatability. Unless a number of different researchers have all repeated the results of a particular experiment, it is very shaky, especially in certain fields. But that is part of what we're doing right now, exposing flaws in a given study so that the proper consensus on what is happening can be reached.
FTA: "A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.' "
I actually view this as less damning than other things I've seen. This could be interpreted as the medieval warm period is an anomaly that must be explained or whose statistical significance must be called into question based upon the rest of the results. I've seen instances of "add 10% to all these numbers to make them more dramatic" written on a sticky note in medical lab journals for cancer research. The comment is very suspicious, but the numbers are what is important.
1) So if you can find some phenomenon that correlates directly with temperature for all the time we've been able to record it, and you understand why it correlates, you don't think it is reasonable to assume that that record before we started recording is also a good indication of what the temperature was at that time? What about when you have dozens of such correlations by different mechanisms, but they all agree? 'Cuz that's where the temperature indications most scientists use come from.
2) Is being kicked in the face better than being kicked in the crotch? What about when the kick to the face is coming a hundred times faster than the kick to the crotch? A gradual change in temperature in either direction in a given location will cause problems. A rapid change in temperature will cause severe problems. What's better, a gradual cooling where it drop 1 degree every decade or all the ice caps melting tomorrow and the resulting rise in water level drowning everyone in every costal city?
It's not a simple matter of whether heating or cooling is better, especially given that rapid heating over a short time may lead to long term cooling. Climate is not so simple and it affects our world in profound ways from food production to dangerous species expansion, to hurricanes.
3) I haven't seen said movie. Your comment is empty of all value. I don't know when he photographed them and apparently neither do you so you're implying that it was misleading without presenting any reason for that implication. We do know the ice sheets are retreating, and rapidly. I've not seen any scientific study that did not conclude that.
The article referenced goes through several studies and papers and points out poor methodologies and statistical analysis that is likely fraudulent. From this you can conclude, these studies are possibly flawed. So where does that leave you? Can you logically conclude from this that global warming is not occurring or even not occurring faster than any time in the past? Of course not. Discrediting a study does not prove the opposite of that study is true. It simply provides you a reason to place more weight on other, more credible, studies.
From my reading I have little doubt that global warming is occurring. Just look in peer reviewed journals and other credible sources. It may not be as dramatic as some would like, and the dramatic, but ill-concieved, doomsday scenarios painted by the popular media are entertainment, not fact. The truth is, there are very real indications of climactic problems, which will probably be gradual, but may be practically irreversible by the time they are apparent to skeptics.
Just be careful of your sources and pay attention. Both industrial concerns and people working for government grant dollars have incentive to obtain particular results. Look for peer reviewed results from experiments and observations that have been repeated by numerous scientific studies. Be cautious of interpretations of this data by the popular media, who are more interested in selling ads than presenting the truth.
It is nice when software is rewritten to take advantage of multiple cores, and imagine that most new games will be designed to do this. For older games, however, Apple has announced that programs using the OpenGL APIs will automatically spawn a process that feeds the GPU, using a second thread. This means, theoretically, some programs could see up to 2X the performance when run on OS X 10.5 and a dual core system, without any changes from the developers.
It's a nice little optimization and hopefully Vista will have something similar (although I heard of such a thing yet).
No, it's not and it does not. Go search for OPK/WAIK on MSDN.
What does that have to do with it? Because many things are built upon the presumption that IE will be there, things from lots of places break when you try to install them without it.
So there were errors made in the past. Nobody is denying that. But it's time to move on and do the right thing moving forward.
Lets apply this logic to other criminal acts. So he stole a million dollars and used it to buy a house and a car and get his cousin elected mayor. That is in the past. There is no need to take the house and car away or repeal the laws passed to favor him. We need to move forward.
Doesn't that seem a little counterproductive to you?
No one is stopping the OEMs from pre-installing iTunes/Firefox/etc. on their systems.
That isn't good enough. It needs to be a level playing field.
Dell/HP/etc. spend *hours* tweaking their images, so it really doesn't take much on their part to replace the inbox browser. It's time for *them* to make a decision, Microsoft's not going to go out of their way to convince them.
What makes you think this? Their licensing agreements are "trade secrets" but we do know that in the past they charged much higher prices if companies would not agree to pay for a Windows license for all machines sold, in some cases even macs that could not run Windows. What makes you think they aren't applying that pressure now?
ah, bribing politicians. Are we really going to go there? What proof do you have?
The money MS legally donated to both parties is a matter of public record. Just because it is legal does not make it right. You do know all the Justice dept. officials were replaced right after the election, right? And MS was not punished at all and given no consequences after having been found guilty.
There are a set of compliance guidelines that were produced as a result of the anti-trust verdict and Microsoft does openly admit that it follows those religiously.
Actually, they failed to comply with those guidelines, as in regard to providing documentation, but the punishment for that is the government will observe them not comply longer. It is a fiasco, and if you followed the industry news you probably heard about it. They were given basically no punishment at all and it hasn't stopped them from introducing numerous other antitrust violations, like Windows Media player.
Retailers, be they virtual or brick and mortar, are places of public accommodation, and as such have to make themselves available to everyone. By this logic, Target could exclude , which would be patently illegal.
Legally, I think the ADA applies equally to Web sites and physical locations. Ethically, I think the ADA is on very shaky ground. But then, I support the right of individuals and companies to discriminate based upon sex or ethnicity as well. I think the government should be held to a standard of non-discrimination, but not private companies. Of course I also think such businesses should be ineligible for government granted benefits, such as the rights of incorporation. Unfortunately, life is not so simple. Because big businesses have so much affect upon our government and because of injustices in the past, restriction of freedom like the ADA and affirmative action programs are often a necessary evil.
Now, you probably argue that Microsoft should basically *not* ship IE with Windows at all because that would be leveraging its monopoly. I argue that users should have a way to get online (out of the box), find the best browser out there and have the ability of uninstalling the current one and using the one they lile.
You're making a few false assumptions. Microsoft not bundling IE with Windows does not mean the computer people buy does not have a browser bundled with it. There is no need to make a bowser easily removable, simply for MS to be forbidden from bundling so that OEMs like Dell can and must choose one or more browsers to install.
Even OEMs like Dell/HP/Gateway etc. have the ability of modifying the pre-install image of Windows to *remove* IE, add Firefox and ship their systems like that.
So here's the problem, doing that is hard and breaks things in Windows. Because the abuse has gone on as long as it has, the Web itself has been altered to cater to IE. As a result, OEMs have incentive to choose IE, even if it is not the best product, simply because of the damaged state of the industry.
With your understanding, once a particular OS company reaches a particular market share, they can only ship a barebones OS because everything else would be leveraging their monopoly. That is absurd.
Why is that absurd? Why shouldn't IE have to compete with Firefox when OEMs decide what to bundle? Why shouldn't iTunes compete evenly with WMP when OEMs decide what to ship? Why should MS be given control of a market simply because they have control of a different one?
I agree that IE7 is still not there yet. But the point is that they are making efforts.
No, they're not. Every other browser on the market has managed to implement the standards well enough that a random standards compliant set of pages I make works in them. They managed this years ago. Microsoft has a thousand times the resources of most of these companies/projects but they haven't? Either they are incompetent beyond reason or they are intentionally holding back the standards until they can lock people in.
They have realized that by isolating their users and themselves, they are only going to be making enemies.
Umm, no they're also making billions of dollars and stopping the industry from making their current monopoly less valuable. Monopoly abuse, if not stopped, is profitable. If the courts don't act, MS will not stop, ever.
In the meanwhile, feel free to convince Dell/HP/etc to bundle Firefox with their systems since it doesn't break your tests.
They won't and even if some of them do, that does not fix the market. The problem is not just that Firefox isn't bundled, it is that IE is bundled.
Not everything is Microsoft's fault. Yes, they are the bigger player out there, but there are many others who are making profit out of the business while Microsoft takes all the blame.
No, not everything is Microsoft's fault, but this is. They knowingly broke the law for profit, then bribed politicians to avoid being punished. They are still doing it and consumers, competitors, and the industry as a whole is suffering as a result. They are criminals breaking the law and should be stopped and punished.
If there were a market for a rendering engine alternative for explorer.exe, that would be against antitrust law, right?
Yes, under some conditions.
If there currently isn't a market, I could make it a market by developing my own rendering engine, or by just porting nautilus to windows. Could I then sue MS for millions for stifling me as the competition, and by locking users out of competing window managers?
Not really, since MS would have taken the bundling action before such a market existed. Besides, given the US court system it is a poor investment. It takes most companies half a decade to get their settlement from MS.
Forgetting the more logical applications for the law, doesn't this kind of strike you as illogical?
No, it doesn't. With power comes responsibility. If I build and carry a gun, laws apply to me that don't apply to others. I can't go get drunk in public. I can't go into a courthouse or jail. The same is true for monopolies. Once they acquire that kind of dangerous power, they are responsible to not abuse it.
It would be like suing a office machine company for manufacturing and distributing an all-in-one printer/scanner/photocopier/fax/phone. Why the hell didn't they make it modular?
Every time this topic is discussed people insist on using examples that aren't monopolies. Why don't you try this one with a monopoly. Back in the day, the phone company had a monopoly. You couldn't buy a phone, you had to rent it. That was a monopoly, akin to MS's OS monopoly. This would be akin, not to the phone company making a all-in-one printer/scanner/photocopier, but to the phone company making a printer/scanner/photocopier/phone and it being the only phone you could buy, thus forcing everyone who wanted a phone to also buy a printer/scanner/photocopier/phone.
Those are real problems with the abuse of antitrust, which I respect. However, for the sake of consistency, I think the OS should be considered a single, but modular product.
Your proposal is that a law regarding economics and restricting abuses that damage everyone should have a special case for one technological area. You have not, however, shown any way in which this market is fundamentally different from other markets to warrant such a special case and all you examples have dealt with non-monopolies. I disagree. The law needs to apply to OS's the same as other markets and the definition of markets does not need to be refined. The abuse of bundling IE resulted in real problems and your special case would encourage more of those problems.
If people want tabs or mp3s, they've got to wise up. It isn't that hard to find and download an alternative.
People aren't going to wise up. People are used to free markets and base their decisions on the fact that they are in a free market. If Slashdot has demonstrated anything it is that even smart, knowledgeable people don't understand monopolies and their affects. Assuming the public will, and thus act in anything other than their short term interests is naive. And for that matter, a monopoly allows you to establish artificial barriers, thus making choosing it the best business decision, only because of those barriers. People can be smart and make the right choices, but if they're dealing with an abuse monopoly, the market does not make the correct choices.
Define terms however you want, it does not change the realities of the detrimental effects MS's actions have. It is those effects that need to be stopped, and changing the names, makes no difference.
You don't like it, don't use it, or find another OS.
People act in their own best interests. That is why capitalism works better than socialism. Expecting people to altruistically act to benefit society at their own expense will not work, and MS will expand gaining monopoly after monopoly, killing industry after industry, and ruining
One thing that you might be able to help me with is maybe a utility along the lines of partition magic to configure partions on my mac...
Have you tried Applications: Utilities: Disk Utility.app? I'm not sure what you're trying to do, but the disk utility can manage partitions on your mac and if you have an Intel machine, can nondestructively partition them.
How? Linux is the least stable target by nature.
Well if Google picked or made one distro, that would make for a stable target for them and anyone else who wanted to contribute. We're talking about the benefits to Google of Google sponsoring a distro.
Ubuntu, Open Suse, and even Gentoo are all good enough for for Google to deploy internally.
Sure, but it is a lot easier to standardize on one distro than many.
Frankly I am having less hope for a Desktop Linux by the minute...
You go on to list symptoms. Linux on the desktop will only really take off if a major company or group of companies takes the money they would be spending on Windows and OS X and dumps it into making Linux right for them. I have hope for Linux on the desktop, but it needs real support, and that support is vanishing from some sources. I know a lot of people who have abandoned Linux on the desktop and work from OS X, while contributing to Linux on the server. If Linux on the desktop is to survive, it should be looking at OS X and copying the real underlying innovations. Linux distro developers who want a desktop instead of a server should be going out of their way to be compatible with OS X to allow cross platform improvements. I doubt this will happen because of the biases within the remaining community, however.
It's better than Windows, but that's like saying that being raped in the ass is better than being raped in the ass and the mouth at the same time.
That would make Linux being raped in the ass and the mouth, but it keeps slipping out of the mouth and jabbing you in the eye.
Yeah the OS X GUI sucks, except compared to all the other options.
Do you mind elaborating how exactly Microsoft is leveraging its monopoly to defeat Google?
Bundling IE is the major method, and then what they include and do not include in IE.
The only concrete example I see here is that they do not implement standards in IE - but pray, I ask you, does Firefox fully implement all the standards?
Well, Firefox does implement standards in general. Every time I've followed the W3C spec it has worked in Firefox (and Safari and Opera, etc.) but it has not worked in IE. IE implements about 50% of the standards while other browsers are close to 90% I'd guess. No one is perfect, but IE versus the industry shows a huge difference.
All of this, however, is academic. Firefox is not bundled with a monopoly and what works and what is included and what is broken does not help the Firefox team take over some other market. Unless you have a monopoly, you can't use that monopoly as leverage. If Firefox does not implement some feature, it is just as easy to use Opera. If IE fails to implement something, because it is bundled in Windows, most people will not switch because everything else is harder. It requires education, knowledge, and technical expertise to download, install, and run any browser but IE.
Last time I checked, Firefox 2 did not pass the ACID2 test (if that's any measure of standards).
The ACID2 test is edge cases for the most part, not a test of how comprehensively a given browser adheres to standards. It is like shining a laser on a mirror to see how reflective it is. Firefox and Opera and Safari are all consumer grade mirrors and the ACID2 test is useful for determining which is best. IE is like a piece of aluminum and using the ACID2 test on it is a waste of time.
IE7 is a great improvement over IE6 and an indication that Microsoft is listening, and doing something to change themselves.
I auto-generate some pages. I wrote the code based upon the spec. When I wrote it, I tested it. It worked fine in every single browser I could find, except IE, which completely failed because they did not implement most of CSS2 and any of XHTML that was not coincidentally HTML. When IE7 came out I tested it too. It completely failed to render as well, and added an additional random bug. From reading the IE dev teams comments it seems they're up to implementing about 50% of CSS2 and still haven't implemented any XHTML. They fixed some bugs, but are nowhere near implementing the standards the rest of the industry has had for many, many years.
My point is that with so many eyes watching Microsoft at any given moment and at their every move (DOJ, EU, *every* software company affected by Microsoft), this monopoly thing is getting old.
I agree, MS should stop abusing their monopoly or the courts should actually take meaningful action against them. MS won't stop though, because they're making a fortune breaking the law. The courts won't act though, because MS is one of the largest contributors to both the Republican and Democratic parties and our government is absurdly corrupt.
Perhaps when making this statement, you should provide concrete examples on how exactly that is happening.
I did and I've elaborated upon them, but I find explaining antitrust abuse tedious. I've explained it on Slashdot a hundred times by now, but the vast majority of the people who respond have no understanding of the law or the purpose of the law. Somehow they missed that chapter in Econ 101. It isn't really all that complex, but I'm sick of explaining it over and over again. Five minutes with wikipedia and a reasonably intelligent person can see the obvious abuses from Microsoft and why they are detrimental/illegal. And yet, every time I post about MS's monopoly abuse someone has to respond with an analogy and those analogies always (and I do mean always) reference the actions of a company that is not a monopoly. Maybe these people are astroturfers, but I only have so much time.
Even your post, you compare IE to Firefox, but IE is bundled with Windows, which is a monopoly, while the Firefox team has no monopoly on anything. Why people can't understand how this changes things is beyond my understanding.
Google isn't a charity it is a business. How would this help Google make one cent of income?
Companies regularly make strategic moves that make them money in the long term, via an indirect route. Google throwing their support and development behind a desktop Linux distro could do a number of things. It could provide a stable target for other developers. It could promote a commoditization of the OS, and thus remove MS's largest weapon against them. It could save Google money internally by providing a cheaper platform for their employees internally.
I'm not saying it is a good idea, or the best option available to them, but there are lots of reasons it might be.
Is Apple actually getting a larger chunk of the desktop?
From the numbers I've seen, yes, kinda. They are gaining ground in the US and Europe (from 4% to about 6%) in sales at least. They are slightly losing ground worldwide as they can't keep up with the growth rate in computer use around the world.
Even in the free software world, development for the Mac just means porting from Linux to the Mac, and even then, only after the MS Windows port is finished.
This is changing as well, from what I've seen. In the last few years a lot of the UNIX/Linux crowd has moved to OS X laptops and I think the move to intel will bring even more. Hardcore developers are still contributing to Linux/UNIX, but focused more on the server. I've seen a lot of CLI utilities starting to get support for new features first on OS X, and then on Linux. I've seen a fair number of projects start up that are Mac only, since the users are on that platforms and coding multiple GUIs is time consuming. I find this somewhat discouraging since I'd rather have portable applications, but realistically I'm one of those OS X on the desktop people, so it does benefit me.
I anticipate some serious brain drain in the Linux on the desktop community unless there is better support for portable applications or some heavyweights really pour effort into making Linux desktops (probably for enterprise use).
The largest threat to Google's online services business is Microsoft. Microsoft can and does illegally leverage their monopoly on desktop OS's to defeat superior offerings from competitors. Microsoft is putting a lot of resources into defeating Google, not only by making comparable services, but by tying those services to Windows and tying the Web in general to Windows by their use of proprietary technologies and their intentional refusal to fully implement standards in IE. Microsoft's plan is obviously to keep Web technologies weak by keeping capabilities on a default Windows install weak until they have a solution that locks people in.
If MS is using their OS monopoly to leverage an attack on Web services, it only makes sense for Google to make an effort to return fire and do what they can to mitigate that threat. The most widely adopted alternative (by most accounts) is Mac OS X. The small amount of cash needed to support it as well as Windows can potentially provide a great deal of benefit. Additionally, it provides a test as to whether or not they are keeping their services portable, something that promotes good coding in general and fits with their long term goals.
Now is that their motivation? I'd say, that is some justification, but probably not their main motivation. The truth is, a lot of people at Google use macs (or so I've been told, I know two people there and one uses a Mac) and they want services to work because of that. Google has been very practical about this. Mac compatibility is not a requirement, especially for Beta software they have acquired, but everything works on the Mac eventually that makes sense on that platform. Keep up the good work guys.
And if there are infections that are being automated they are the direct result of not patching the box, period.
First, whether or not it is the result of not patching is not the point. Second, your argument does not even address what I said. Third, adding the word "period" just before you use the punctuation point is redundant.
And that "conditioning" you talk about exists in all software, Microsoft is hardly the only ones that default to that sort of behavior. If you're going to complain about something at least first look around to see if everybody else is not doing it as well.
"Everyone else is doing it," is not a valid reason to do something that doesn't work. As for what others are doing, a lot of UIs take these things into account. For example, the OS X UI presents actual actions pertinent to the dialogue box, rather than using the same two button names "OK/Cancel" even when those option make basically no sense. Also, other UIs require at least two options, instead of present ing useless boxes that just say "OK" and give the user no option to do anything but be conditioned one more time. Finally, other UIs don't have nearly as many unneeded dialogues so that people pay attention to the ones they do see.
MS's implementation is a disaster and if you've ever been to a presentation on Human-computer interaction they've probably used it at least once as an example of what not to do, as do dozens of texts on the subject.
Good lord, what part of "breaking everything" did you miss back there?
...the part where you presented an argument or support or anything other than an empty assertion that your belief is true.
So why haven't you? Because Apple has a 2% market share? Or because OS X is so much more secure?
OS X is more secure, partly because it has about 6% of the market and the benefits that brings, and partly because of other design decisions, but all of that is beside the point.
Apropos because the PC is like a TV in that it has a fixed number of inputs and outputs, one way to interact with it and exactly one possible configuration state. Right?
Actually both computers and TVs have multiple inputs and outputs and configuration states. PCs have more, but that changes the principal not at all. You've provided no support for why you think users without the proper information from the OS, granularity of control from the OS, who are basically lied to by the OS, and who want to do a simple series of tasks, mostly ignored by the developers of the OS, should be held entirely accountable for their problems. Sorry, but OS designs, especially Windows, ignore what users want to do and what they need to do that.
Idiot users then are then essentially screwed.
Ahh, idiot users I know who had their Windows machine compromised by malware include three people I now with genius level IQ's (two physicists, and a biologist), an entrepreneur I know who grew up in poverty and has made himself millions, and a very well regarded security researcher who you've seen talk if you've been to any of the major security conferences in the US in the last decade. Gee, if only those people weren't such idiots.
Free software and Apple will "fix" this by taking the decision away from the user, and idiot users will simply become more sophisticated.
Who said anything about taking decisions away? Users of a system with MAC can do anything they can on one without, and more, because they can control security with more granularity. It is giving users a knife and a book on whittling when they want to carve figurines, instead of just a chain saw like they have now.
What a pathetic strawman. I gave you an example of the type of question they would be asked. You've ignored it because you don't want to argue rationally, only try to suppot you random, uneducated beliefs.
Even Windows XP has most of the plumbing needed, the problem is it has not been implemented in a usable way in Vista (from my brief tests). The MAC has been in various OS's for years and Solaris has even has some reasonable UI, but no one that I've seen has built reasonable default ACLs or a usable GUI and integration with the OS. Until they do, this will be a feature for OS developers and a few security geeks.
Could you sue MS since they implemented their own rendering engine into explorer.exe without opportunity for changing it with some other rendering engine?
Just like with the example of electricity and bread this depends upon the market or lack thereof. Is there an existing market where something that does the same thing as explorer.exe? Who makes and profits from that software? If there is a market, I don't see it, but I've also done no research. The theoretical electric company I'm talking about could invent a new product, maybe something you stick under you fingernail, and bundle that with their service because there is no existing, separate market for said new product.
If so, how can any program with any level of complexity be legal to distribute?
Microsoft can make and distribute any program they want. They just can't bundle any software with Windows, only particular software. The antitrust laws are for a purpose and it is pretty easy to tell when you're driving others out of business with your monopoly. Under the assumption that someone does make something that does the same thing as explorer.exe, all MS has to do is not bundle it with Windows and make their version better so Dell and other customers of MS choose MS's solution on its own merits.
Finally, doesn't the fact that Microsoft doesn't lock you out of alternative media players/web browsers make a difference?
Sure. It makes a difference if you kill twelve people and beat up fifteen or if you just beat up fifteen, but abstaining from the murder doesn't make your assault any more legal.
They bundle for convenience (competitive measures)
It cost MS some serious money and endless security headaches to entwine IE so much with Windows. They did so only to stifle competition, not to make their products more convenient. Most people who rip CDs, rip them to DRM-encumbered WMF files. Then, when they want to move those files or play them on a portable player most people find out they have to do it all over again. That is not convenient for anyone. If MS had to compete on even ground with iTunes and Realplayer and Mplayer they would be motivated to fix this problem. Maybe they'd change the default option to MP3. Maybe they'd change it to DRMless WMF. Maybe everyone would just ship iTunes. In all of the above situations the consumer gets something more convenient, not less than what they get now. MS didn't bundle WMP because they want to make life easier on consumers. They did so because they want to take over another market with a product designed to be worse for consumers and better for MS.
It seems you would rather let the law strangle out features of software, which is not the law's intention.
You have it backwards. It is the bundling that is strangling features and innovation. As with the music jukebox example above, consumers end up with a less featureful and innovative product. It took IE what, 5 years to get tabs after everyone else? The problem is one of motivation. Like the electric company selling bread, Microsoft has no good motivation to innovate or make better browsers or media players. You contend that preventing a company from selling everything as a bundle reduces innovation. I contend that removing the financial motivation for innovation, reduces it much more and I further contend that simply looking at the progress of IE for the last several years or historical examples of the same provides convincing evidence to support my contention.
I think maybe you need to really find hard facts on the risks, before you try convincing them of what those risks are. You might be very surprised. The sad truth is if a security measure makes things harder to use, that measure will often become a security liability. Force people to change their passwords every week and they post them on stickies on their monitors. You can't ignore the user as part of a security solution and only you know your users. You can change your users with education, but only a very small amount. Contrary to what many publications teach security and ease of use are not polar opposites. You can take steps to make things easier to use and at the same time more secure.
Depending on the tasks those you support want to accomplish and and the real risks you need to figure out how to make those things easy to do with relative security.
I disagree, by simple observation.
Okay, by simple observation I have worm propagation, and malware signature detection statistics for thousands of infected hosts right now and the vast majority are definitely automated. Of course neither of our observations mean much, which is why there are formal studies presented and peer reviewed at several conferences each year. I haven't seen a lot of disagreement about this topic.
From locking down Outlook and OE to implementing the zone bits for downloaded files, I think Microsoft have done as much as they could without risking some severe compatibility problems.
I disagree. They could do a whole lot more, starting with good, default ACLs for all executables, separating the execution path of executables and scripts from that of data, and elimination of thousands of useless "OK/Cancel" dialogue boxes that condition people to click "OK" to everything.
If you think that Microsoft is not doing X because "they have a monopoly" then I can't really help you.
MS has little in the way of financial incentive to fix this problem. Break them up into two companies, each with the full rights to the code to date, and this problem will be solved by one of them in 3 years.
And if you think it doesn't affect their bottom line, watch those stupid Apple ads sometime.
I said it does not significantly effect their profits. After years of this situation and those ads Apple has taken what, another 2% of the market away from them? It does not justify the cost of fixing the problem properly.
Once Apple has 400 million customers we'll see how fast they patch those holes that even now they've been taking altogether too long to patch in some cases...
In market terms "too long" is anything that adversely affects their customers purchasing decisions. I haven't had any malware problems on my mac. Have you had any on yours? I didn't think so. So how can they have taken too long?
You are perpetuating the "LOLOL M$ dosen't patch" bullshit...
This is a strawman argument. I never mentioned patches. I said Apple responds to their customers. Because Apple knows people have other choices, they do respond to fix any major problems for their users. This includes security issues.
I think not. You cannot engineer away stupidity without making the device useless.
Here's a TV. When you turn to certain channels, it will call the president and threaten him using a cell phone hidden in it. We're not going to tell you which channels though and we're going to change which one occasionally. So long as you always switch to an even channel then a prime number, then an odd channel that isn't a prime number, however, we'll keep the phone deactivated, except on special days which we'll announce in a mix of broken English and Greek on the radio occasionally. Simple, huh?
That is about the state of Windows today for the average user. In order to securely perform common tasks the user must plan ahead, learn obscure knowledge that has nothing to do with the task they want, and constantly monitor channels that speak technobabble, when all they want to do is get their work done or browse porn. The OS can be silently compromised, especially if they don't buy an add on device they don't know about, random data will do things and random games they download will have access to parts of the system they have no business accessing. Worse, the UI doesn't even let them know when it starts sending thousands of e-mail messages so they can pull the damned plug. It is a mess and people like you who want to blame people for not spending several years learning esoteric information simply to use a common tool are part of the problem. You have to make a second user account to run a program with lesser privileges... and this makes sense to someone? And there are still hundreds of unpatched local exploits so even then you can't be sure it will work.. and this is okay?
Right now, as a pretty
And cat doesn't prepend/append itself to everything in the directory when you run it.
I initially misread this as "A cat doesn't prepend..." and thought I was about the read the best analogy ever. Alas.
A virus should also perform some function the user does not intend or know about.
A malicious virus certainly should, but this was a proof of concept, so I'm not sure that is an issue.
Of more concern are exploits in the UNIX level of the operating system.
Not speaking to your specific issues, but OS X and most Linux distros are in the same boat when it comes to general security. It's hard to make a worm for them, the average script kiddie won't cause you any problems, but a dedicated hacker or security expert can get in if you leave any openings (like sshd without a firewall). This could be just a dictionary attack on a weak password or it could be an unpublished exploit in some other service.
OS X machines are fairly safe in that the chances someone will hack them are very small because the number of people doing such hacking is very small. Make no mistake, however, neither OS X or most Linux distros are a locked down, super secure system, safe from a skilled expert. If someone is gunning for you or you have really valuable data you might want to consider performing some serious hardening and deploying some countermeasures.
Security is not Apple's top priority, but I'm still happy to see them taking reasonable measures for a consumer grade OS. I look forward to the new security features in 10.5 and I hope as more and more of the security community starts to use OS X as a workstation, we'll see more people banging on it and making it a bit tougher.