So to compete with World of Warcraft you'll be supporting multiple platforms at launch right? Or is this just another Windows only game that will get a possibly half-assed port if the Windows version is profitable?
The OSS community, and the proprietary community have had better interoperability with Ms products than Adobe products. While I'm certainly no fan of MS things, I'm sort of glad, in a way.
Really? What other product properly reads.doc all the time? How about.xls? Now would you rather have to deal with HTML output by Dreamweaver or Frontpage? Would you rather try to parse the pseudo XML crap that you can get out of Publisher, or read XML as you define it from Framemaker or InDesign?
The only reason there is more support for some MS formats i because those formats have dominated the market for that product so a lot of people spent a lot of time hacking together reverse engineered products to deal with them. I'd certainly rather deal with compatibility with Adobe products than a new MS product.
Now now. I am a Linux fan and such, but blaming Microsoft here is just stupid! You know why? Because usaully the thing is exploited hasent been patched yet. Every program has bugs, thats just how it is. Get over it. And how is it expensive to maintain windows machines properly? Windows Update is free, no?
There are several items to address here. First, MS's Windows OS is unreasonably vulnerable to exploits for an OS that is so often exploited. It provides far too many services by default, does not employ sandboxing, does not inform the user what is happening on their system, has too many problems where patches break things, has too many large patches, has too many issues with authentication stopping updates, and in general has some design flaws. The truth of the matter is, if MS was not a monopoly and had to actually respond to customers in competition for money with other OS vendors, the worm problem would be mostly solved by now.
While *nix botnets arent nearly as prevalent as Windows botnets, there are still ones out there...Dont think you are exempt.
Hmm, I'm not sure Linux botnets present a credible threat right now. I've heard of one botnet that used Linux machines, once. I've heard of Linux/UNIX machines being the control channel on a fairly regular basis, but I think the odds for a given user are pretty low.
Were you dropped a child?
Is this supposed to be a joke? If so I did not laugh. If not, well, physician heal thyself.
Easier said than done.
You're right with regard to the methods he mentions, but it is not too hard to hop on a control channel, reverse engineer the instructions, and send your own update disabling the network and patching the vulnerability on all the machines. The only reason this is not done by security researchers is the legal liability.
Trying to stop botnets by taking-down servers is like trying to stop rock-throwing by confiscating rocks.
Or, install shutters on your Windows so you can ignore the rock throwing and hire a security guard to go shoot the rock throwers or drive them off.
If these propeller-heads would stop playing with their toys long enough to spend fifteen minutes talking to the nearest cop they would realize this.
The cops often can or will do little in these instances. A lot of the time botnets are rented out by the hour overseas.
Criminal behavior declines only when there is substantial risk of substantial punishment.
Actually, studies have shown that risk of punishment is not the most effective way to reduce criminal behavior. Criminals act out of desperation or believe for some reason they won't be caught, or simply think the risk is justified, even when it is often an irrational belief. The risk/reward for being a crack dealer or devoting yourself to pro basketball are both absurd, but there is no shortage of people who try anyway.
Ethical/moral reasons are actually the best way to motivate a decrease in crime. The vast majority of people will not commit crimes if they don't feel justified in so doing. In fact the number on correlation between rates of robberies and another observed factor is wage disparity. If because of circumstances of birth one person is making billions and another going deeper in debt every year despite the fact that the latter works harder and is smarter than the former, well the latter person feels justified in turning to crime.
The problem here is simply globalization has made "neighbors" of people with vast wealth disparity. Americans happen to have been born into relative wealth despite being not as intelligent or as dedicated of workers as the self-taught computer programmer in Czechoslovakia. So he feels no ethical obligation to not build a botnet that exploits them. Threat of criminal punishment is a factor, but a pretty minor one.
Sadly, this does not present any easy solutions for this problem aside from making computers harder to exploit in the first place, but since we don't have a competitive market for desktop OS's, which is the weak link, I don't expect that to be fixed anytime soon. Break up MS into multiple companies and give at least two of the the rights to all the Windows code to date. forbid them from collaborating and enforce it. The botet problem will be eradicated in 3 years on all new computers.
PDF is not truly a license free product, open yes, license free - sort of... This is how Adobe strongarmed MS in removing it from the shipping version of Office, as Adobe was going to demand licensing fees.
How does this factually incorrect bull crap get modded to +5??? Adobe told MS that if they did not want to go to court over the antitrust laws they were breaking they should take certain steps. I've seen absolutely nothing that indicates Adobe used anything in the license for PDF to influence them at all, nor an logical arguments as to how they could do so.
Adobe truly screwed themselves here, they would have been the all time standard with MS giving them full support in Office, but instead they wanted to keep MS at bay and make money off the Office name. Adobe messed up.
Your assessment is ignorant and wrong. Adobe is doing everything possible to keep MS from illegally driving them out of a market.
From my inside MS sources, the XPS was never meant to become a PDF replacement...
This right here makes me think you're astroturfing. Your secret contact who knows all eh? They built XPS into Windows, which obviously took a lot of time. Then they did not plan on letting applications output to that format easily? Yeah, and I have a lovely historical bridge you might be interested in.
Prior to Adobe trying to squeeze MS for money and try to stop Vista because of the inherent XPS/XAML composer, MS decided they didn't have to play nice in this market, and I honestly don't blame them.
Adobe did not demand any money be given to them you twit! They demanded that MS charge for a product they were providing, rather than bundling the cost into Windows and forcing everyone to pay whether or not they wanted it. How exactly can Adobe be squeezing MS for money when none of the money was going to Adobe? As for not blaming them, they're violating the law.
The sheer amount of factually incorrect and MS marketing spin I read parroted here is absurd. Why is it that is seems half the people on Slashdot suddenly can't understand what a monopoly is or what the laws are, or have any idea what MS is doing? I really hope massive astroturfing is going on because the alternative is a lot worse. I thought better of you Slashdot readers.
MS created tools and a new format that compete with Adobe and PDF and has bundled them into Windows Vista. It is the same thing as if they bundled any other currently available tools into Windows, driving the current makers out of business, regardless of the relative quality of the offerings. This is illegal because it allows inferior products to win in the market and because it results in inferior products in the hands of consumers, with no motivation for them to get better. MS is just about to turn the portable document market into another crapfest dominated by the Internet Explorer of portable document tools and half the people here don't see why that is a problem.
Well, that's exactly what you'll be doing, assuming. In truth, MS needs to present real guarantees and proof of this. Adobe already has and has stood by that licensing for years in good faith.
...then why would I care that it's from Microsoft.
Is there any improvement you want to PDF or XPS over the next decade? Would you like them to support 3-D holographic monitors, should they become available in the next couple of years? Would you like the format to be one that is subject to the innovation and responsiveness to consumer demand that is normal in a competitive free market? I would. Unfortunately, this is not just MS releasing a standard. It is MS releasing a new format that may be standard, but with tools bundled in their monopolized desktop OS. That means, regardless of the quality of the format, it is likely to win in the market. It also means MS will soon have no financial incentive to improve the format or the tools at anything but a glacially slow pace. Even assuming XPS is completely open and standard and MS implements it without any breaking of that standard... you'll still see their XPS tools become the Internet Explorer of portable document tools. They will quickly be substandard and out of date, but ubiquitous and thus hold back the entire industry. IE partially implements six year old standards, has been a security nightmare, and has been completely missing common UI innovations everyone else implemented years ago. Its failure to support CSS and XHTML properly costs developers a fortune every year as they have to use old hacks and work around that failure. But it still dominates the market because of MS's monopoly influence. If the courts do not stop MS, you can look forward to the exact same situation replacing the current, relatively healthy, PDF tool market.
In summary, you should care that it is from Microsoft because their illegal business practices will ruin the industry that uses that format and all of us end users will suffer as a result.
Pardon my ignorance, but what is it that you dont like about MS Office XML?
What I don't like about it is the fact that formatting information is still stored within it as binaries and the licensing for it is a new license MS invented (and has not yet released) that seems to have a lot of hidden gotchas. For example, from my last reading of it suggests that it specifically prevents GPL software from using that license to let them read and write it and if a company were to implement it and MS updated the format, technically, that company loses the license to it and is only licensed to use the latest version. This means only MS could technically make a word processor five years down the road that can read and write all the different versions of the format and all other vendors would have to only implement the current version.
Those are just examples, but we've all seen how MS treats these things. They want to do the minimum possible to seem open to fulfill a bullet point on some clueless manager's purchasing requirement, while still not providing users with the advantages that come from a truly open standard. I've little doubt XPS will be similarly filled with gotchas.
it may be an ISO standard, but realy that means bugger all. yes you can download it and implement it but if adobe thinks you may be too much of a competitor expect to be sued. adobe have patents all over the pdf standard and unlike MS they have shown a willingness to use those to enforce there will.
Bullshit. Show me one instance of Adobe suing over use of PDF that has anything to do with the licensing or patents. You can't burn HTML files to a CD, break it in half, and then stab people to death with it either, but that does not make HTML any less of an open standard.
They can't be considered "open" in my opinion if they get to pick and choose who is allowed to implement it. They gave up any hope of being considered open when they said MS is not allowed to support the standard in office.
Are you being paid to spread this FUD? They complained to the courts when MS violated criminal antitrust laws in their implementation of both PDF and XPS. This has absolutely nothing to do with the licensing or standardization of either format. It has to do with them breaking the law in a way that happens to be using PDF. If they built a photoshop competitor into Windows Adobe would complain to the courts as well, for the same reason. It has nothing to do with whether or not PDF is standard.
First of all, we don't ask users to sign an additional license.
I meant users of the license, but I can see why you were confused.
We ask contributor's to assign MySQL the copyright to their contributed code.
Right, and I asked why. You see having the copyright transferred to you provides you with the opportunity to release that code under a non-GPL license at some point in the future. That means you could take all the work contributed by these people (which admittedly is small compared to the total work) and release it as closed source and proceed with development from there, thereby circumventing the benefits and spirit of the GPL.
And, for your information the GNU/FSF does...
Yes, but they are a nonprofit organization and can be held accountable if they tried to close the source. I understand why they want the copyright transferred, so that they have standing to sue on behalf of the author of a given section. The question is why do you need it transferred? Imagine ten years from now the new CEO does decides to close the source of MySQL, thus depriving all the contributors of the rights to even use a work that is partly made of code they wrote. Why should developers take that risk? Now probably the lawyers are just being overly cautious and have added that in while trying to get patent protection and the like, but surely you can see why it would make some people uncomfortable?
We're talking about a graphics driver here. It pretty much has to execute in kernel mode. you know, where you can do anything you want on the system? Sure, we could have a userspace graphics driver, but it would still need a kernel mode driver stub and it would be substantially slower, which is not really an option for most people.
With the current design of the Linux kernel + userspace, I agree, but I'm unconvinced that that has to be the case. I see inherent stumbling blocks to untrusted video drivers, but nothing that truly prevents them from running in an untrusted mode that does not present the same level of risk. I'm not, however, competent to judge the difficulty of such an enterprise and weigh it against the amount of real benefit to the end user.
This will no doubt fuel the debate about whether binary blob drivers should be allowed in Linux.
Of course they should be allowed. How can that even be prevented? The more important question is what can be done to either provide more secure replacements or make sure binaries can be functional without having to be trusted by the OS.
What would be cool is if Microsoft released software that allowed someone to simultaneously open multiple O/S's at the same time in a non-virtualized environment. Imagine being able to switch back and forth between Linux and Windows simply by hitting a keystroke?
Personally, I'd rather this was done via virtualization. Virtualization allows you to use the most secure OS as the host OS with only it having access to damage the critical parts of your system. The guest OS's can run on top of it and benefit from the increased security and better ability to run incremental backups, restore from a known good state, and suspend without a reboot.
I do switch between OS's I'm using right now, with a simple key press and I sometimes run with one OS displayed on one monitor and one on another. Using a VM allows me to have both of them simultaneously accessing the same files and lets me copy and paste between them. The disadvantages are that it is not quite as fast as running them alone and the hosted OS's can't use the full capabilities of the graphics cards. Given the hardware virtualization built into newer chips and the progress several parties are making towards letting the hosted OS's use the 3-d graphics, I'm pretty pleased with that solution.
If the contributor did not assign us copyright, we would not legally (in the US), be able to include their code in ours.
Technically, if a contributor is modifying the existing MySQL code, they only have the right to do that by agreeing to the GPL, which includes granting everyone the right to add their code to anything they want that is also GPL. If they are contributing completely new code, like a module or something and they have not agreed to license it under the GPL, then they'd need to agree to something, but the GPL would suffice for that. This is the case for a lot of other software out there, where projects are completely GPL and no other license is used or needed. My understanding is that the only reason someone would need another license in addition is if they wanted to relicense that code under a license other than GPL. I don't know of any other company that develops GPL code that asks users to sign an additional license.
Apple and the U.S. government established the anti-boot laws to keep people from booting OS X.
OS X checks the hardware while booting. This, as far as I know, does nothing to remove or bypass that check. Presumably, it may only be used to boot OS X if you are installing multiple OS's on a Mac or have applied other hacks to OS X. I don't see any likely lawsuits over this.
Your arguments basically boil down to the hope that society will be forced to adapt and become more accepting. You may be right, but I'm not willing to bet on it as a general trend. Human nature being what it is, even if those things that are now societal taboos but which are practiced by a significant portion of society become accepted, there will always be those that deviate from the norm in some way that is disliked. How about pedophila? Suppose you're born or raised in such a way that you find yourself sexually attracted to children. You never act on that. You see a shrink to try to work through your issues. You would like to write a book to help others deal with their own problems. Do you think you'll have problems getting jobs despite having always acted properly? Do you think people won't still revile you if you write a book that becomes popular and which makes your name, address, and issue well known? Do you think you might be subjected to illegal searches by the police every time a child goes missing?
And that is only the tip of the iceberg. Society now behaves very poorly with small sets of the population that deviate. Do you think that won't still happen if everyone's secrets are out in the open? How would you like to be the only practicing satanist in a small town in Texas and have everyone in town know that? Do you think that might stifle your freedom of religion? Do you think it might cause problems for you? Do you expect the police to treat you fairly in that case?
I can't claim to know what would happen in a society with no privacy, but I'm less optimistic than you are.
Why would you mention this in this same thread 20 minutes after responding to my post where I pointed out to you that there are no "frivolous lawsuits" or even regular lawsuits, only criminal indictments for breaking the law?
...and companies that compete by conniving to get the government to punish their competitors (instead of merely providing better product).
Yeah, it sure is crazy for them to expect the government to enforce the laws against those who break them and not against those who don't.
An example of the latter is Mozilla/Firefox, which succeeds by making a good browser (no frivolous lawsuits involved).
Gee, yeah. What a great example. They provide an obviously superior product for years, that is so much better no one even bothers to argue it, and they get 10-20% of the market as compared to the inferior product which maintains 80%. Tell me again how that is the market rewarding companies for making a better competitor?
Ok, so could someone explain why it is that privacy is so important? I mean, if everyone, or the bank, or the government knows everything about everyone, they are going to know everybody's little secrets, I see that. But if they know this about everyone, they are probably going to realize that everybody _has_ these little secrets, and it's no big deal. Right?
First, as in most of our society, those with wealth can maintain their own privacy better than the average person. A gated house with walls all around makes it a lot harder for people to spy on you. Your own plane and the ability to go to other countries makes a difference too.
Second, the vast majority of people do something that some part of our society disapproves of. "So what?" you might ask. Well the thing is, if everything about your life is transparent, but everything about the lives of the wealthy is not necessarily transparent, how can someone who is not born wealthy ever successfully run for a major, political office? So where does that get us? In the same situation we have now except with even less chance of ever electing someone not born into the wealthy elite.
Finally, political aspirations aside, there are a lot of dangerous wackos out there either looking to do harm, or in positions of authority. A lot of people partake in activities that are not accepted by a big chunk of society. Would you like to live your entire life denying your sexuality, or limited to the 10% of businesses that are willing to hire you, while constantly looking over your shoulder because hate groups have your name, picture, and address and feel that god wants them to cut off your testicles?
In the macpro you can't use any pci-e video card you must use one form apple that has a efi rom on it.
Apple does not make video cards. You can use any one of a number of offerings from ATI, NVidia, or any other company that makes them and supports both EFI and drivers for OS X. Apple has done nothing to lock them down at all and you can buy them from Apple or some other store. If you look on the Web sites of those vendors you'll see them for sale.
This translates into a "better OS" because there is more software for the OS, and a larger and more diverse user base provides more pressure on the OS makers to refine it.
More software for an OS makes the platform better, again, not the OS itself. A more diverse user base is your guess as to what would happen, when in reality it might mean a smaller user base. As for pressuring Apple to innovate more, they are already under more pressure than simply straight up competition would provide. They survive by constantly staying ahead of what MS can copy into Windows.
I'm using the dictionary definitions, all of which mention the "monopolist" having sole control ("exclusive", "sole control"), not just one option out of many something that happens to be very strong.
The laws consider monopolies in economic terms, since the laws regarding monopolies exist for practical, not ethical reasons. Monopolies break capitalism as a functional model for an economy. They do this by allowing one company that gains significant influence in a market (note that is a market not a product) to use that influence to take over other markets, despite having inferior products in that second market. So in the eyes of the law, you can have a monopoly on cheese, if you are the only company selling cheese, even if another company sells pizza that comes with different cheese on it. Any cheese not sold or bartered in the primary market, does not in any way lesson the monopoly's ability to break the capitalist model.
MS sells desktop OS's mainly to computer companies like Dell and Gateway. Dell and Gateway have no other options for an OS to buy that won't drive them out of business. Mac OS X is not in that market, because Apple will not sell it to them. Linux might make up a tiny portion of that market (pre-intalled by OEMs) but its influence is so small (in terms of money that changes hands) as to have no practical effect. Many legal systems set 70% of a market as a point to begin investigating whether on not a company has monopoly influence.
Note, having monopoly influence is not illegal by itself. It is only abusing monopoly influence by tying multiple markets together that is illegal. Every court that has examined the issue has found MS to both have a monopoly in the market and to be abusing it. You can argue that according to a different way of defining monopolies they don't have one, but it does not matter. They are undeniably having the same adverse affect upon the market as is banned by law.
Now that apple is using x86 hardware there[sic] hardware lock in may hurt them even more and why did apple have to lock you it to only useing[sic] video cards from apple with there[sic] new systems?
Umm, Apple does not lock you into using any video cards in any of their systems that I've seen. Most of their offerings are small form factor, or laptops, which use integrated graphics like every other computer of the same style. You can use any video card that supports Apple systems and firmware in their tower or with their other systems for that matter, if you move them into a case with room for them.
Your company is one of the few that has made open source into a legitimate business model. What has made you succeed where others have failed?
Heh. I've worked at a number of places in my time, including no less than four companies that develop open source software as part of their business plan. You've probably never heard of any of them. I think you might want to rephrase that as, "your company is one of the most well known companies to use open source development in your business model. What has made you so well known while others are less known?"
Multiple platform vendors compete with each other to provide hardware features that satisfy users.
That strengthens the platform for end users, but does not strengthen the OS itself.
In other words, you fight it with another monopoly???
Not at all. Apple does not have a monopoly on any of the elements of the bundle they sell. Other companies, like Dell and Lenovo sell competing computer systems. But because they provide their own OS, in house, they are not subject to the monopoly influence on those computer companies, from MS's dominance in the desktop OS market. Apple has no leverage in the OS market to abuse because they don't sell their OS to other companies. Apple has no leverage in the computer market to abuse, because there are lots of competitors (albeit all of whom suffer because on one of their suppliers abuses). I think maybe you're failing to understand what a monopoly is.
Why rely on frivolous lawsuits and punishing companies for having too many features in their software? Why not just let the options compete, and let the users decide?
With a monopoly, you can win a head to head competition with a superior competitor, even with all buyers acting in their own immediate interest. Companies have tried to compete with MS, with superior offerings and died. It was many years before any of them saw any return from suing MS for its illegal actions at that time. Now who in their right mind would fund another company to compete with MS in that space? How could you sell a proven failure of a business plan to investors? You can't which is why the OS space has been dead so long.
As for you "frivolous lawsuit" dig, you demonstrate an ignorance of antitrust law. We're talking about enforcing criminal law, not a civil lawsuit. It is just like the courts not prosecuting a company who commits fraud, or more accurately who does prosecute them, but in the punishment phase decides to not even take the money back or stop them from continuing their fraudulent operation.
Apple not releasing OS X is the right move for Apple, because of the courts failure to make MS obey the law. The failure of any other company to create and sell a competing desktop OS is the right move based upon the same. That is why the courts should act, to provide a reason for a company to compete. After all, if you have a better product, but know you will still lose, why invest the time and money that can be more profitably used elsewhere? If I can invest in creating a new OS, which is almost doomed to fail and which even if it succeeds will not be as immensely profitable as MS is (since you'd then have to compete against them on price) or I can invest in creating a new line of cookbooks, which will be competing in a non-monopolized space and which will, thus, have a much greater likelihood of succeeding for better return... why would I try the former?
Finally, just to disabuse you, users don't pick their OS. OEMs pick what OS to bundle based upon both what they think users want and what is profitable. If they bundle Windows, they stay slightly profitable like now. If they somehow convince Apple to sell them OS X and bundle it, they are risking their multimillion dollar company on a single gamble and will probably be sued into extinction by their shareholders unless they get very, very lucky.
Awareness of loss of privacy is the problem, or rather lack of it. Many people naively expect people to be trustworthy, especially when it comes to things they are not aware of, or informed about. Sadly, I think it will be a hard fight to make people aware of the precarious position that their private data is in.
I think this entire trend is a problem, partly because of a trend towards less and less personal responsibility and partly out of a feeling of defeat in improving our government. People give out info because they assume the government protects them from abuse of this data (as they do in many other countries). Others, feel their information is already "out there" and while they know the government does not protect them, these are the same somewhat pessimistic people who have no faith in our government or in the ability to change it. I've heard comments like, "do they even count our votes anymore?" spoken in all seriousness. And honestly, I'm not sure that they do.
The lack of concern or privacy does not surprise me because those who trust the government, assume they are protected or don't know about the privacy problems. Those that don't trust the government are the same ones who don't trust companies with their data, and they've given up on the government.
The Mac OS world would be greatly strengthened if you have such an open and responsive situation of multiple hardware vendors making machines to run Mac software.
The OS would be strengthened by needing to support more, less centrally controlled hardware? The OS would be weakened, however, the platform of OS X running on a computer would be better for end users as they would have more granular choices and competition in the hardware part of the market. It is too bad this is not really a viable business plan right now.
Like it or not, MS has a monopoly on desktop OS's. Other OS, obviously superior to the version of Windows with which they were competing were driven out of business in short order because of MS's power over OEMs and artificial lock-ins. One of the few ways to get around a monopoly's power in the market without bowing to it is to maintain a complete, separate, vertical chain including a "competitor" for the monopolized product, but not actually competing. Apple has pulled that off and make a fair bit of money with it.
The problem is, Apple and OEMs know Mac OS X can't take the market for Windows by competing directly with them, regardless of whether or not it is better. The pre-install market and the corporate market are something like 99% of the market. Corporations are locked into Windows via protocols and file formats and have long term contracts. To migrate away is a very large expense and anyone in their right mind would go to Linux in that event. Successful OEMs won't pre-install because the market won't shift all at once and they'd be betting the entire company on that market shift since MS will kill their Windows market in retaliation, using their discriminatory licensing. Apple won't sell to either market, because it would be killing a lot of their hardware business, with little chance of making it up.
This situation exists for one reason. The US courts cannot or will not enforce their antitrust laws against MS. Probably due to interference from politicians to whom MS made very large campaign contributions, the market simply does not believe MS will be punished for said discriminatory pricing nor will the courts act to stop them from leveraging their lock-ins by mandating adherence to open standards. If I was in business, I'd have no confidence in the courts to effectively stop MS's illegal action either, and certainly not in time to save my business and my job. Fix the political system, legal bribes, and replace the justice dept. officials with honest men, then demonstrate that the laws will be enforced and then and only then might it make sense for Apple to compete with MS directly.
One of the most common complaints I've heard about the business model of profiting on support for a product, is that it provides motivation to keep the product from becoming very user friendly. After all, if the product is too easy to use, who will pay for support? In my own experience, I've seen a lot of companies that consider support to be insurance, and don't use it for help with installation, configuration, or to overcome usability issues so much as a way to cover their asses in case something goes very wrong. Do a lot of your customers use support to overcome usability problems and if so, does this de-motivate you to solve other usability issues?
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So to compete with World of Warcraft you'll be supporting multiple platforms at launch right? Or is this just another Windows only game that will get a possibly half-assed port if the Windows version is profitable?
The OSS community, and the proprietary community have had better interoperability with Ms products than Adobe products. While I'm certainly no fan of MS things, I'm sort of glad, in a way.
Really? What other product properly reads .doc all the time? How about .xls? Now would you rather have to deal with HTML output by Dreamweaver or Frontpage? Would you rather try to parse the pseudo XML crap that you can get out of Publisher, or read XML as you define it from Framemaker or InDesign?
The only reason there is more support for some MS formats i because those formats have dominated the market for that product so a lot of people spent a lot of time hacking together reverse engineered products to deal with them. I'd certainly rather deal with compatibility with Adobe products than a new MS product.
Now now. I am a Linux fan and such, but blaming Microsoft here is just stupid! You know why? Because usaully the thing is exploited hasent been patched yet. Every program has bugs, thats just how it is. Get over it. And how is it expensive to maintain windows machines properly? Windows Update is free, no?
There are several items to address here. First, MS's Windows OS is unreasonably vulnerable to exploits for an OS that is so often exploited. It provides far too many services by default, does not employ sandboxing, does not inform the user what is happening on their system, has too many problems where patches break things, has too many large patches, has too many issues with authentication stopping updates, and in general has some design flaws. The truth of the matter is, if MS was not a monopoly and had to actually respond to customers in competition for money with other OS vendors, the worm problem would be mostly solved by now.
While *nix botnets arent nearly as prevalent as Windows botnets, there are still ones out there...Dont think you are exempt.
Hmm, I'm not sure Linux botnets present a credible threat right now. I've heard of one botnet that used Linux machines, once. I've heard of Linux/UNIX machines being the control channel on a fairly regular basis, but I think the odds for a given user are pretty low.
Were you dropped a child?
Is this supposed to be a joke? If so I did not laugh. If not, well, physician heal thyself.
Easier said than done.
You're right with regard to the methods he mentions, but it is not too hard to hop on a control channel, reverse engineer the instructions, and send your own update disabling the network and patching the vulnerability on all the machines. The only reason this is not done by security researchers is the legal liability.
Trying to stop botnets by taking-down servers is like trying to stop rock-throwing by confiscating rocks.
Or, install shutters on your Windows so you can ignore the rock throwing and hire a security guard to go shoot the rock throwers or drive them off.
If these propeller-heads would stop playing with their toys long enough to spend fifteen minutes talking to the nearest cop they would realize this.
The cops often can or will do little in these instances. A lot of the time botnets are rented out by the hour overseas.
Criminal behavior declines only when there is substantial risk of substantial punishment.
Actually, studies have shown that risk of punishment is not the most effective way to reduce criminal behavior. Criminals act out of desperation or believe for some reason they won't be caught, or simply think the risk is justified, even when it is often an irrational belief. The risk/reward for being a crack dealer or devoting yourself to pro basketball are both absurd, but there is no shortage of people who try anyway.
Ethical/moral reasons are actually the best way to motivate a decrease in crime. The vast majority of people will not commit crimes if they don't feel justified in so doing. In fact the number on correlation between rates of robberies and another observed factor is wage disparity. If because of circumstances of birth one person is making billions and another going deeper in debt every year despite the fact that the latter works harder and is smarter than the former, well the latter person feels justified in turning to crime.
The problem here is simply globalization has made "neighbors" of people with vast wealth disparity. Americans happen to have been born into relative wealth despite being not as intelligent or as dedicated of workers as the self-taught computer programmer in Czechoslovakia. So he feels no ethical obligation to not build a botnet that exploits them. Threat of criminal punishment is a factor, but a pretty minor one.
Sadly, this does not present any easy solutions for this problem aside from making computers harder to exploit in the first place, but since we don't have a competitive market for desktop OS's, which is the weak link, I don't expect that to be fixed anytime soon. Break up MS into multiple companies and give at least two of the the rights to all the Windows code to date. forbid them from collaborating and enforce it. The botet problem will be eradicated in 3 years on all new computers.
PDF is not truly a license free product, open yes, license free - sort of... This is how Adobe strongarmed MS in removing it from the shipping version of Office, as Adobe was going to demand licensing fees.
How does this factually incorrect bull crap get modded to +5??? Adobe told MS that if they did not want to go to court over the antitrust laws they were breaking they should take certain steps. I've seen absolutely nothing that indicates Adobe used anything in the license for PDF to influence them at all, nor an logical arguments as to how they could do so.
Adobe truly screwed themselves here, they would have been the all time standard with MS giving them full support in Office, but instead they wanted to keep MS at bay and make money off the Office name. Adobe messed up.
Your assessment is ignorant and wrong. Adobe is doing everything possible to keep MS from illegally driving them out of a market.
From my inside MS sources, the XPS was never meant to become a PDF replacement...
This right here makes me think you're astroturfing. Your secret contact who knows all eh? They built XPS into Windows, which obviously took a lot of time. Then they did not plan on letting applications output to that format easily? Yeah, and I have a lovely historical bridge you might be interested in.
Prior to Adobe trying to squeeze MS for money and try to stop Vista because of the inherent XPS/XAML composer, MS decided they didn't have to play nice in this market, and I honestly don't blame them.
Adobe did not demand any money be given to them you twit! They demanded that MS charge for a product they were providing, rather than bundling the cost into Windows and forcing everyone to pay whether or not they wanted it. How exactly can Adobe be squeezing MS for money when none of the money was going to Adobe? As for not blaming them, they're violating the law.
The sheer amount of factually incorrect and MS marketing spin I read parroted here is absurd. Why is it that is seems half the people on Slashdot suddenly can't understand what a monopoly is or what the laws are, or have any idea what MS is doing? I really hope massive astroturfing is going on because the alternative is a lot worse. I thought better of you Slashdot readers.
MS created tools and a new format that compete with Adobe and PDF and has bundled them into Windows Vista. It is the same thing as if they bundled any other currently available tools into Windows, driving the current makers out of business, regardless of the relative quality of the offerings. This is illegal because it allows inferior products to win in the market and because it results in inferior products in the hands of consumers, with no motivation for them to get better. MS is just about to turn the portable document market into another crapfest dominated by the Internet Explorer of portable document tools and half the people here don't see why that is a problem.
Assuming this standard is truly open...
Well, that's exactly what you'll be doing, assuming. In truth, MS needs to present real guarantees and proof of this. Adobe already has and has stood by that licensing for years in good faith.
Is there any improvement you want to PDF or XPS over the next decade? Would you like them to support 3-D holographic monitors, should they become available in the next couple of years? Would you like the format to be one that is subject to the innovation and responsiveness to consumer demand that is normal in a competitive free market? I would. Unfortunately, this is not just MS releasing a standard. It is MS releasing a new format that may be standard, but with tools bundled in their monopolized desktop OS. That means, regardless of the quality of the format, it is likely to win in the market. It also means MS will soon have no financial incentive to improve the format or the tools at anything but a glacially slow pace. Even assuming XPS is completely open and standard and MS implements it without any breaking of that standard... you'll still see their XPS tools become the Internet Explorer of portable document tools. They will quickly be substandard and out of date, but ubiquitous and thus hold back the entire industry. IE partially implements six year old standards, has been a security nightmare, and has been completely missing common UI innovations everyone else implemented years ago. Its failure to support CSS and XHTML properly costs developers a fortune every year as they have to use old hacks and work around that failure. But it still dominates the market because of MS's monopoly influence. If the courts do not stop MS, you can look forward to the exact same situation replacing the current, relatively healthy, PDF tool market.
In summary, you should care that it is from Microsoft because their illegal business practices will ruin the industry that uses that format and all of us end users will suffer as a result.
Pardon my ignorance, but what is it that you dont like about MS Office XML?
What I don't like about it is the fact that formatting information is still stored within it as binaries and the licensing for it is a new license MS invented (and has not yet released) that seems to have a lot of hidden gotchas. For example, from my last reading of it suggests that it specifically prevents GPL software from using that license to let them read and write it and if a company were to implement it and MS updated the format, technically, that company loses the license to it and is only licensed to use the latest version. This means only MS could technically make a word processor five years down the road that can read and write all the different versions of the format and all other vendors would have to only implement the current version.
Those are just examples, but we've all seen how MS treats these things. They want to do the minimum possible to seem open to fulfill a bullet point on some clueless manager's purchasing requirement, while still not providing users with the advantages that come from a truly open standard. I've little doubt XPS will be similarly filled with gotchas.
it may be an ISO standard, but realy that means bugger all. yes you can download it and implement it but if adobe thinks you may be too much of a competitor expect to be sued. adobe have patents all over the pdf standard and unlike MS they have shown a willingness to use those to enforce there will.
Bullshit. Show me one instance of Adobe suing over use of PDF that has anything to do with the licensing or patents. You can't burn HTML files to a CD, break it in half, and then stab people to death with it either, but that does not make HTML any less of an open standard.
They can't be considered "open" in my opinion if they get to pick and choose who is allowed to implement it. They gave up any hope of being considered open when they said MS is not allowed to support the standard in office.
Are you being paid to spread this FUD? They complained to the courts when MS violated criminal antitrust laws in their implementation of both PDF and XPS. This has absolutely nothing to do with the licensing or standardization of either format. It has to do with them breaking the law in a way that happens to be using PDF. If they built a photoshop competitor into Windows Adobe would complain to the courts as well, for the same reason. It has nothing to do with whether or not PDF is standard.
First of all, we don't ask users to sign an additional license.
I meant users of the license, but I can see why you were confused.
We ask contributor's to assign MySQL the copyright to their contributed code.
Right, and I asked why. You see having the copyright transferred to you provides you with the opportunity to release that code under a non-GPL license at some point in the future. That means you could take all the work contributed by these people (which admittedly is small compared to the total work) and release it as closed source and proceed with development from there, thereby circumventing the benefits and spirit of the GPL.
And, for your information the GNU/FSF does...
Yes, but they are a nonprofit organization and can be held accountable if they tried to close the source. I understand why they want the copyright transferred, so that they have standing to sue on behalf of the author of a given section. The question is why do you need it transferred? Imagine ten years from now the new CEO does decides to close the source of MySQL, thus depriving all the contributors of the rights to even use a work that is partly made of code they wrote. Why should developers take that risk? Now probably the lawyers are just being overly cautious and have added that in while trying to get patent protection and the like, but surely you can see why it would make some people uncomfortable?
We're talking about a graphics driver here. It pretty much has to execute in kernel mode. you know, where you can do anything you want on the system? Sure, we could have a userspace graphics driver, but it would still need a kernel mode driver stub and it would be substantially slower, which is not really an option for most people.
With the current design of the Linux kernel + userspace, I agree, but I'm unconvinced that that has to be the case. I see inherent stumbling blocks to untrusted video drivers, but nothing that truly prevents them from running in an untrusted mode that does not present the same level of risk. I'm not, however, competent to judge the difficulty of such an enterprise and weigh it against the amount of real benefit to the end user.
This will no doubt fuel the debate about whether binary blob drivers should be allowed in Linux.
Of course they should be allowed. How can that even be prevented? The more important question is what can be done to either provide more secure replacements or make sure binaries can be functional without having to be trusted by the OS.
What would be cool is if Microsoft released software that allowed someone to simultaneously open multiple O/S's at the same time in a non-virtualized environment. Imagine being able to switch back and forth between Linux and Windows simply by hitting a keystroke?
Personally, I'd rather this was done via virtualization. Virtualization allows you to use the most secure OS as the host OS with only it having access to damage the critical parts of your system. The guest OS's can run on top of it and benefit from the increased security and better ability to run incremental backups, restore from a known good state, and suspend without a reboot.
I do switch between OS's I'm using right now, with a simple key press and I sometimes run with one OS displayed on one monitor and one on another. Using a VM allows me to have both of them simultaneously accessing the same files and lets me copy and paste between them. The disadvantages are that it is not quite as fast as running them alone and the hosted OS's can't use the full capabilities of the graphics cards. Given the hardware virtualization built into newer chips and the progress several parties are making towards letting the hosted OS's use the 3-d graphics, I'm pretty pleased with that solution.
If the contributor did not assign us copyright, we would not legally (in the US), be able to include their code in ours.
Technically, if a contributor is modifying the existing MySQL code, they only have the right to do that by agreeing to the GPL, which includes granting everyone the right to add their code to anything they want that is also GPL. If they are contributing completely new code, like a module or something and they have not agreed to license it under the GPL, then they'd need to agree to something, but the GPL would suffice for that. This is the case for a lot of other software out there, where projects are completely GPL and no other license is used or needed. My understanding is that the only reason someone would need another license in addition is if they wanted to relicense that code under a license other than GPL. I don't know of any other company that develops GPL code that asks users to sign an additional license.
Apple and the U.S. government established the anti-boot laws to keep people from booting OS X.
OS X checks the hardware while booting. This, as far as I know, does nothing to remove or bypass that check. Presumably, it may only be used to boot OS X if you are installing multiple OS's on a Mac or have applied other hacks to OS X. I don't see any likely lawsuits over this.
Your arguments basically boil down to the hope that society will be forced to adapt and become more accepting. You may be right, but I'm not willing to bet on it as a general trend. Human nature being what it is, even if those things that are now societal taboos but which are practiced by a significant portion of society become accepted, there will always be those that deviate from the norm in some way that is disliked. How about pedophila? Suppose you're born or raised in such a way that you find yourself sexually attracted to children. You never act on that. You see a shrink to try to work through your issues. You would like to write a book to help others deal with their own problems. Do you think you'll have problems getting jobs despite having always acted properly? Do you think people won't still revile you if you write a book that becomes popular and which makes your name, address, and issue well known? Do you think you might be subjected to illegal searches by the police every time a child goes missing?
And that is only the tip of the iceberg. Society now behaves very poorly with small sets of the population that deviate. Do you think that won't still happen if everyone's secrets are out in the open? How would you like to be the only practicing satanist in a small town in Texas and have everyone in town know that? Do you think that might stifle your freedom of religion? Do you think it might cause problems for you? Do you expect the police to treat you fairly in that case?
I can't claim to know what would happen in a society with no privacy, but I'm less optimistic than you are.
I am indeed biased against frivolous lawsuits...
Why would you mention this in this same thread 20 minutes after responding to my post where I pointed out to you that there are no "frivolous lawsuits" or even regular lawsuits, only criminal indictments for breaking the law?
Yeah, it sure is crazy for them to expect the government to enforce the laws against those who break them and not against those who don't.
An example of the latter is Mozilla/Firefox, which succeeds by making a good browser (no frivolous lawsuits involved).
Gee, yeah. What a great example. They provide an obviously superior product for years, that is so much better no one even bothers to argue it, and they get 10-20% of the market as compared to the inferior product which maintains 80%. Tell me again how that is the market rewarding companies for making a better competitor?
Ok, so could someone explain why it is that privacy is so important? I mean, if everyone, or the bank, or the government knows everything about everyone, they are going to know everybody's little secrets, I see that. But if they know this about everyone, they are probably going to realize that everybody _has_ these little secrets, and it's no big deal. Right?
First, as in most of our society, those with wealth can maintain their own privacy better than the average person. A gated house with walls all around makes it a lot harder for people to spy on you. Your own plane and the ability to go to other countries makes a difference too.
Second, the vast majority of people do something that some part of our society disapproves of. "So what?" you might ask. Well the thing is, if everything about your life is transparent, but everything about the lives of the wealthy is not necessarily transparent, how can someone who is not born wealthy ever successfully run for a major, political office? So where does that get us? In the same situation we have now except with even less chance of ever electing someone not born into the wealthy elite.
Finally, political aspirations aside, there are a lot of dangerous wackos out there either looking to do harm, or in positions of authority. A lot of people partake in activities that are not accepted by a big chunk of society. Would you like to live your entire life denying your sexuality, or limited to the 10% of businesses that are willing to hire you, while constantly looking over your shoulder because hate groups have your name, picture, and address and feel that god wants them to cut off your testicles?
In the macpro you can't use any pci-e video card you must use one form apple that has a efi rom on it.
Apple does not make video cards. You can use any one of a number of offerings from ATI, NVidia, or any other company that makes them and supports both EFI and drivers for OS X. Apple has done nothing to lock them down at all and you can buy them from Apple or some other store. If you look on the Web sites of those vendors you'll see them for sale.
This translates into a "better OS" because there is more software for the OS, and a larger and more diverse user base provides more pressure on the OS makers to refine it.
More software for an OS makes the platform better, again, not the OS itself. A more diverse user base is your guess as to what would happen, when in reality it might mean a smaller user base. As for pressuring Apple to innovate more, they are already under more pressure than simply straight up competition would provide. They survive by constantly staying ahead of what MS can copy into Windows.
I'm using the dictionary definitions, all of which mention the "monopolist" having sole control ("exclusive", "sole control"), not just one option out of many something that happens to be very strong.
The laws consider monopolies in economic terms, since the laws regarding monopolies exist for practical, not ethical reasons. Monopolies break capitalism as a functional model for an economy. They do this by allowing one company that gains significant influence in a market (note that is a market not a product) to use that influence to take over other markets, despite having inferior products in that second market. So in the eyes of the law, you can have a monopoly on cheese, if you are the only company selling cheese, even if another company sells pizza that comes with different cheese on it. Any cheese not sold or bartered in the primary market, does not in any way lesson the monopoly's ability to break the capitalist model.
MS sells desktop OS's mainly to computer companies like Dell and Gateway. Dell and Gateway have no other options for an OS to buy that won't drive them out of business. Mac OS X is not in that market, because Apple will not sell it to them. Linux might make up a tiny portion of that market (pre-intalled by OEMs) but its influence is so small (in terms of money that changes hands) as to have no practical effect. Many legal systems set 70% of a market as a point to begin investigating whether on not a company has monopoly influence.
Note, having monopoly influence is not illegal by itself. It is only abusing monopoly influence by tying multiple markets together that is illegal. Every court that has examined the issue has found MS to both have a monopoly in the market and to be abusing it. You can argue that according to a different way of defining monopolies they don't have one, but it does not matter. They are undeniably having the same adverse affect upon the market as is banned by law.
Now that apple is using x86 hardware there[sic] hardware lock in may hurt them even more and why did apple have to lock you it to only useing[sic] video cards from apple with there[sic] new systems?
Umm, Apple does not lock you into using any video cards in any of their systems that I've seen. Most of their offerings are small form factor, or laptops, which use integrated graphics like every other computer of the same style. You can use any video card that supports Apple systems and firmware in their tower or with their other systems for that matter, if you move them into a case with room for them.
Your company is one of the few that has made open source into a legitimate business model. What has made you succeed where others have failed?
Heh. I've worked at a number of places in my time, including no less than four companies that develop open source software as part of their business plan. You've probably never heard of any of them. I think you might want to rephrase that as, "your company is one of the most well known companies to use open source development in your business model. What has made you so well known while others are less known?"
Multiple platform vendors compete with each other to provide hardware features that satisfy users.
That strengthens the platform for end users, but does not strengthen the OS itself.
In other words, you fight it with another monopoly???
Not at all. Apple does not have a monopoly on any of the elements of the bundle they sell. Other companies, like Dell and Lenovo sell competing computer systems. But because they provide their own OS, in house, they are not subject to the monopoly influence on those computer companies, from MS's dominance in the desktop OS market. Apple has no leverage in the OS market to abuse because they don't sell their OS to other companies. Apple has no leverage in the computer market to abuse, because there are lots of competitors (albeit all of whom suffer because on one of their suppliers abuses). I think maybe you're failing to understand what a monopoly is.
Why rely on frivolous lawsuits and punishing companies for having too many features in their software? Why not just let the options compete, and let the users decide?
With a monopoly, you can win a head to head competition with a superior competitor, even with all buyers acting in their own immediate interest. Companies have tried to compete with MS, with superior offerings and died. It was many years before any of them saw any return from suing MS for its illegal actions at that time. Now who in their right mind would fund another company to compete with MS in that space? How could you sell a proven failure of a business plan to investors? You can't which is why the OS space has been dead so long.
As for you "frivolous lawsuit" dig, you demonstrate an ignorance of antitrust law. We're talking about enforcing criminal law, not a civil lawsuit. It is just like the courts not prosecuting a company who commits fraud, or more accurately who does prosecute them, but in the punishment phase decides to not even take the money back or stop them from continuing their fraudulent operation.
Apple not releasing OS X is the right move for Apple, because of the courts failure to make MS obey the law. The failure of any other company to create and sell a competing desktop OS is the right move based upon the same. That is why the courts should act, to provide a reason for a company to compete. After all, if you have a better product, but know you will still lose, why invest the time and money that can be more profitably used elsewhere? If I can invest in creating a new OS, which is almost doomed to fail and which even if it succeeds will not be as immensely profitable as MS is (since you'd then have to compete against them on price) or I can invest in creating a new line of cookbooks, which will be competing in a non-monopolized space and which will, thus, have a much greater likelihood of succeeding for better return... why would I try the former?
Finally, just to disabuse you, users don't pick their OS. OEMs pick what OS to bundle based upon both what they think users want and what is profitable. If they bundle Windows, they stay slightly profitable like now. If they somehow convince Apple to sell them OS X and bundle it, they are risking their multimillion dollar company on a single gamble and will probably be sued into extinction by their shareholders unless they get very, very lucky.
Awareness of loss of privacy is the problem, or rather lack of it. Many people naively expect people to be trustworthy, especially when it comes to things they are not aware of, or informed about. Sadly, I think it will be a hard fight to make people aware of the precarious position that their private data is in.
I think this entire trend is a problem, partly because of a trend towards less and less personal responsibility and partly out of a feeling of defeat in improving our government. People give out info because they assume the government protects them from abuse of this data (as they do in many other countries). Others, feel their information is already "out there" and while they know the government does not protect them, these are the same somewhat pessimistic people who have no faith in our government or in the ability to change it. I've heard comments like, "do they even count our votes anymore?" spoken in all seriousness. And honestly, I'm not sure that they do.
The lack of concern or privacy does not surprise me because those who trust the government, assume they are protected or don't know about the privacy problems. Those that don't trust the government are the same ones who don't trust companies with their data, and they've given up on the government.
The Mac OS world would be greatly strengthened if you have such an open and responsive situation of multiple hardware vendors making machines to run Mac software.
The OS would be strengthened by needing to support more, less centrally controlled hardware? The OS would be weakened, however, the platform of OS X running on a computer would be better for end users as they would have more granular choices and competition in the hardware part of the market. It is too bad this is not really a viable business plan right now.
Like it or not, MS has a monopoly on desktop OS's. Other OS, obviously superior to the version of Windows with which they were competing were driven out of business in short order because of MS's power over OEMs and artificial lock-ins. One of the few ways to get around a monopoly's power in the market without bowing to it is to maintain a complete, separate, vertical chain including a "competitor" for the monopolized product, but not actually competing. Apple has pulled that off and make a fair bit of money with it.
The problem is, Apple and OEMs know Mac OS X can't take the market for Windows by competing directly with them, regardless of whether or not it is better. The pre-install market and the corporate market are something like 99% of the market. Corporations are locked into Windows via protocols and file formats and have long term contracts. To migrate away is a very large expense and anyone in their right mind would go to Linux in that event. Successful OEMs won't pre-install because the market won't shift all at once and they'd be betting the entire company on that market shift since MS will kill their Windows market in retaliation, using their discriminatory licensing. Apple won't sell to either market, because it would be killing a lot of their hardware business, with little chance of making it up.
This situation exists for one reason. The US courts cannot or will not enforce their antitrust laws against MS. Probably due to interference from politicians to whom MS made very large campaign contributions, the market simply does not believe MS will be punished for said discriminatory pricing nor will the courts act to stop them from leveraging their lock-ins by mandating adherence to open standards. If I was in business, I'd have no confidence in the courts to effectively stop MS's illegal action either, and certainly not in time to save my business and my job. Fix the political system, legal bribes, and replace the justice dept. officials with honest men, then demonstrate that the laws will be enforced and then and only then might it make sense for Apple to compete with MS directly.
One of the most common complaints I've heard about the business model of profiting on support for a product, is that it provides motivation to keep the product from becoming very user friendly. After all, if the product is too easy to use, who will pay for support? In my own experience, I've seen a lot of companies that consider support to be insurance, and don't use it for help with installation, configuration, or to overcome usability issues so much as a way to cover their asses in case something goes very wrong. Do a lot of your customers use support to overcome usability problems and if so, does this de-motivate you to solve other usability issues?