Ummmm a LOT of games are Xbox exclusives. It may be stupid, but its nothing new.
Yeah half of those are made by companies MS purchased. The others were paid by MS to keep the games exclusive to the xBox (or greatly discounted license fees). How do you think those companies will feel about no longer getting that kickback, but still not getting to the rest of the market? How will they feel if this results in the xBox taking a huge chunk of the market and the resultant lack of kickbacks plus greatly increased licensing fees to develop for the xBox.
Game developers benefit by having options and multiple markets, even if they get paid not to enter some of those markets. Many of them are companies that look to the future and make strategic moves. A number will not sow the seeds of their own destruction.
One thing I can see coming out of this and hinted at my MS in other ways are games developed for the XBOX360 that will also run on Vista. I can see that as huge market potential.
Yes, but what you're missing is that although those games will run on the xbox and Windows, they won't run on the PS3, Wii, or Macintoshes (sans a lot of work porting them or parallel development anyway). The big players want portable code for strategic and quality reasons. It saves them money in the long run.
Any company that locks themselves into only two markets which are completely controlled by a competitor is taking an enormous gamble. Very few respectable businesses, especially the longer thinking foreign companies are going to go for it.
Actually it is about risk management. The most successful game companies not purchased by MS use OpenGL because it makes them more money (As did several of the companies MS bought until after the acquisition). Development houses that are uncertain of the success of their game, however, often make a smaller up front investment and use DirectX (easier to find cheap talent). Those that are failures lose less money that way. Those that are successful then pay to port it to OpenGL for other markets. The total dev cost is higher, but it is less up front money.
The vast majority of the audience for a PC-based game run Windows.
Why limit the market that way, since many dev houses don't? The market is Windows PCs, Macs, Linux PCs, xBox, Playstation, Nintendo, and a few of other niches.
DirectX is part of that, while OpenGL is an add-on.
Both Windows and almost all graphics cards support both OpenGL and DirectX.
I doubt that the major game publishers are sweating the loss of sales to the *unix crowd.
That depends on if you include Macs, Nintendo, and Playstations in that crowd. I think a lot of developers that currently make games for the Playstation and the PC will be more than a little leery of paying a competitor to Sony an arbitrary sum for making games work on the Playstation. I know many serious developers will be less than pleased with MS becoming a gatekeeper for the gaming market, especially since they are direct competitors, MS having purchased so many of the successful game companies. Sure bob's little game company might blow it off, but ID and Blizzard sure as hell won't. They are big business with long-term plans and are not about to quietly put their heads in the noose.
And all those extensions take up memory and processor time, and often have bugs or security flaws of their own.
And how do you suppose this is different from them being built in? Having an official communication mechanism between components, which everyone knows about is likely to result in more security for interactions, not less. A huge number of vulnerabilitites are the result of a new feature being tacked on in a nonstandard way and without consideration for the security implications.
Another thing I like about IE 7 is its sandbox mode on Vista. That should, I think, provide several security advantages over competing browsers.
sandboxes are a good idea, but I have doubts about the implementation. Maybe they will prove me wrong, but I certainly would not switch until there was some demonstration that it actually helps. MS is notoriously loud about making promises (especially about increased security) and constantly delivering sub par, poorly executed half-solutions that are worked around by the malware development community in short order.
In fact, IE 6 with ActiveX turned off was already reasonably secure.
Compared to what browser? I don't know of any other browser other than IE with active X enabled that is more likely to result in your system being compromised.
Lastly, DirectX 10 is going on a platform that will rule out OpenGL.
This has yet to be seen. Vista may or may not make OpenGL more difficult for the average person.
Not many people use OpenGL in the last few years, so, sadly, this is a minor point.
Sure, not many companies, but they include companies in the gaming market that really matter. ID and Blizzard come to mind. Really, the major players that Microsoft has not bought out (RIP Ensemble and Bungie) mostly use OpenGL because they know their games are going to be successful and it is easier to build using a cross-platform API up front than to try to port it later. I don't think too many gamers are going to switch to Vista if it means World of Warcraft and all the games on the Doom engine will no longer work.
I don't suppose you ever tried tag-level formatting + generated code.
Sure, it works just fine. CSS just separates the content from the markup and makes my life easier. I use it for pretty much everything and there is only one thing really wrong with it, IE. I tag pages by hand and auto-generate a huge pile as well. It all looks great and is a cinch to make style changes to. Firefox, Opera, Safari, and everything else we test with all handle it just fine, except IE which gracefully degrades to show the same info, but without a lot of the useful formatting.
Interesting. An easy to use GUI for accessing Subversion could be very useful. Having helped Windows users with their WinCVS and TortoiseCVS for years though, I wonder if it won't have many of the same usability problems as the former. The number one problem with WinCVS is that users get confused switching between the explorer and CVS viewers for the same files. Tortoise solves that problem by working as a plug-in that lets users perform CVS commands by selecting and right-clicking in the regular explorer and adding color codes to the icons (works with SubVersion too). Have you seen anything like this for OS X and SubVersion? Barring that, it might be easier to just teach them the CLI way of doing things.
Re:So what you're saying is:
on
Beginning GIMP
·
· Score: 1
I don't want GIMP to start catering to the lowest common denominator because then its going to become MORE cumbersome to use.
I disagree with this. The default setup, should be learnable, usable, and universal. The primary method of interaction should be easy to use and intuitive before it is fast for the expert who has been using it forever. That does not mean, however, that that has to be the only interface mechanism. A lot of programs provide contextual menu functionality in addition to that same functionality in more usable locations. This is a good idea.
Provided your interface is flexible, expert users will always know better than the interface designer which controls are fastest and easiest for them and will customize them appropriately. If GIMP is to become popular, however, they must cater to new users and less advanced users as well. Popularity brings developers and money to make GIMP better and provides incentive for other projects to interoperate. It benefits all users, including advanced ones.
So Microsoft already has a leg up on the competition and ANYTHING they can do to keep their customers from 'finding' Linux means they'll keep purchasing Microsoft products above all others.
Most people use and will continue to use Windows because it is the pre-installed OS on nearly every computer. VM technologies allow Linux to gain popularity without overcoming this. It would be easy for an OEM to differentiate their products by running Linux with Windows in a hosted VM. The computer would have better recovery and backup, security, stability, antivirus capability, and could run a wider range of software all at no additional charge. In time, Linux could be a standard part of computers, which makes it a bigger target for developers than Windows itself, thus knocking down both application availability and pre-installation barriers without having to overcome MS's lock-ins in the minds of users all at once.
The stability/BSOD arguments against Windows don't really carry that much weight any more.
I disagree. As a workstation, Windows XP is fairly stable, however it is prone to resource depletion over time and weird problems that can only be solved by a reboot. I agree it is stable enough for most people, but it is certainly not as robust as running Linux. When you consider if the host goes down both so do the clients, but if a client goes down other clients and the host need not, the stability of the host becomes even more vital. More importantly, Windows is more prone to security issues and compromises necessitating a reinstall or restoration from a known good copy. Since it is much easier to accomplish this for a client, rather than host OS and since the security issues themselves are partially mitigated by a more secure host OS, this becomes a real consideration.
Finally, for both servers and workstations, Linux has much better resource management and multitasking. As a result, by running Windows as a client resource blocking can be mitigated in some instances. There have been rare but documented instances of operations running faster in windows under virtualization as a side effect of this. Also, for the server, Window's failure to multitask in a stable way often leads to the need to run multiple servers or virtual servers to maintain stability. Obviously, running Linux as the host OS would mitigate this concern.
Windows has come a long way for stability, but it is not on par yet and in a variety of ways it is still lacking.
I would rather virtualize Windows under Linux, not the other way around.
You and almost everyone else, but this is MS we're dealing with here. Running Windows under Linux undercuts MS's lock-in strategy. Given the choice of either, customers would choose the more secure, stable OS for the host, which means MS would have to make Windows secure and stable to compete and that just isn't the way they do things. Instead they plan to make it easy for you to run Linux under Windows, but not the other way around, thus removing most of the benefits of running Linux at all. Time will tell if they can keep newer hardware's built in virtualization from running Windows under Linux anyway.
Re:I'm not sure what the problem with that is.
on
Beginning GIMP
·
· Score: 1
You have a tool palette. This is how you do stuff on the active layer with your left mouse button or a tablet. If you hold down CTRL, ALT or SHIFT, you expose common tools modes... If you right click on the tool palette, you get additional tool options. If you right click on the image, all of the image operations are shown. This includes "save this image as...", filters, and the like.
The problem is, GIMP relies upon these combinations and alternative menus. Try using it without them and you'll quickly realize how hopeless the situation is. Now imagine you're just learning and you don't think to try right-clicking or holding down buttons and clicking (which is the majority of new users). Or imagine you're using a tablet (like many graphic artists) and right clicking and holding down a key and clicking is moving to a completely new interface device. Most will never even try that option and give up in frustration.
How the hell are people who can't manipulate a pointing device (the disabled) supposed to use photo manipulation software anyway?
A lot of people use simplified interfaces, like the keyboard to direct the mouse. A lot more use some other interface, whether for the disabled or for their super cool new interface device that costs more than I make in a year but is the coolest thing ever for graphic artists. A lot of graphic artists are running a mac, with a one button mouse. The problem is not any given setup, but the combination of all of them and the fact that the application designer does not know what users will be using (unless like GIMP they code it to be impossible to use for anyone not using the same multi-button mouse + keyboard as the developer).
Adobe makes very mediocre interfaces, but they manage to make all functions available to these users, because even though they may not have the best UI people they do follow some of the industries basic guidelines and they actually test it on people that are not the software developers or longtime users already conditioned. There are multiple types of usability. It is partly how fast something is to use once you've become an expert and it is partly how quickly a user can learn to do basic tasks (learnability). VI is a classic example of software good at the former, but horrible at the latter. When you are an underdog trying to gain acceptability in a market dominated by another player, the learnability component is a very important aspect. It is a barrier to entry.
I mean, the could just do everything with a braille input device and Script-Fu, which is very possible, BTW. Try that in Photoshop.
Most graphic artists are on Windows or the Mac. Most (not all) use very different scripting tools than shell scripts. As far as scriptability is concerned, I find GIMP to be easier and I do use it for that, but I'm not the average user. The average user wants to edit things easily by hand first and might be interested in scripting later. They try out GIMP as an alternative and try to perform some basic manipulations and it is just so difficult to get started they give up and go to something else. They don't want to read a manual to do the most common and thus what should be the most easy tasks. Combine this with the fact that half of these users are running Windows or a Mac which adds its own usability problems due to the incompatibility with GIMP and you basically have a non-starter. GIMP has not gained any real acceptance among graphics pros or among casual graphics manipulators. If the GIMP team wants to know why and change that then they should make GIMP conform to some basic human/computer interaction guidelines and do some usability testing. If they aren't interested in that, then they can just continue to fill their niche. The truth is though, they just aren't there for usability in a lot of ways. I pointed out one specific example, but it is just that, one example. User don't avoid GIMP because of the chorded/contextual controls. They avoid it because of the cumulative affect of all the UI that does not obey the rules and does not work well for most potential users.
Wrong, Quark is/was too expensive, had too many problems and too many bad releases.
Not really. People switched to InDesign from both Quark and Framemaker, not because those products were getting any worse, but simply because they were not staying current on OS X.
Except that Apple forces you to update much more when you upgrae[sic] OS for example.
Apple forces who to do what now? I have a six year old tower happily humming away with the latest version of OS X. I have friends who buy every third OS X release, because they don't want/need to update as often as Apple comes out with new OS versions. Both are ideal for some and the option to choose whichever you prefer is a real advantage.
It's not that it breaks design rules - it's that the GIMP team have a different set of design rules they use. I like theirs better.
Different groups and companies all develop their own UI guidelines. Additionally, the human/computer interface design profession creates a series of general guidelines and things to avoid. When you look at all of these collectively, you can see a large amount of overlap. When usability tests from four universities and five major industry players all note that a particular type of interface fails, it can be considered a general rule. That does not mean it will always fail in a UI, just that it is very likely.
As a UI pseudo-expert I think I can safely say the GIMP team did little or no formal UI testing and certainly not with unbiased people. Further, they did not bother to learn from the mistakes and testing of others. For example, functionality should never, ever be available only via a contextual menu. Many users will never find features placed there, thus reducing learnability. Anyone using a slightly different interface, like a stylus, laptop with one mouse button, or device for the disabled will be unable to use that function.
There are exceptions, but they are few and far between. I'd love to see the usability testing the GIMP team did that managed to miss such an obvious snafu and/or prove that it was beneficial because it would either be a great example of how your test can fail or a great example of an exception to a very common error. I suspect, however, that such a usability test never happened.
UI design is science. It is part psychology and part mechanical engineering, but it follows the same, rigorous method as all other science. It is provable. Saying you like the gimp team's results better is just fine, but I strongly suspect, and have plenty of evidence simply from the posts in this topic, to support my opinion that their UI design strategy (if it exists) has failed.
It seems that people who started on GIMP tend to love GIMP and hate Photoshop (or at least have a general dislike for it)
I started out using neither, but tried using both programs in the mid 90s. I still use both for different tasks, but I prefer the UI of photoshop (which is mediocre) to that of GIMP (which is poor). I'd really like to see a completely different interface than either of them, but as a user of both and as a person who has done more than superficial study in the area of user interface design, I've got to say that the GIMP's interface is pretty weak and runs afoul of many UI guidelines. My advice, grab the Apple HIG manual which does a good job of covering the basics and sit down with some users who have never touched either system and do some real usability design.
Actually, it is my opinion that photoshop is more learnable than GIMP. There is always a learning curve moving tools, but GIMP breaks a number of UI design rules (not that photoshop doesn't) and is more than a little kludgy. GIMP could improve their learn-ability and usability for current photoshop users by adopting a more similar interface or they could do so by building a different, but more usable interface. In either case I think the money Adobe spent on usability engineers does show in this case.
Note, I use both programs fairly regularly, but for non-automated tasks I find myself moving towards photoshop more and more. As my workstation of choice is OS X, I really wish there was a better, third choice as neither is ideal. Apple already did a quarter of the work with their core graphics, if only someone would beat Adobe to the native Intel market by doing the rest.
Standardization is why the Microsoft OS is so predominant and to a lesser extent Macs.
I don't buy this assertion. None of the standardized OS's available are prominent for desktop OS's either. MS has locked people in with dozens of mechanisms built upon their monopoly. The reason Apple manages to have some market share is because they maintain a complete vertical supply chain. Linux will grab a significant chunk of the desktop the day a major company starts selling hardware with it pre-installed in the consumer market (which none will do because MS would kill them).
Mostly all software companies develop exclusively for Windows and Mac OS's. Very few develop commercial products for Linux, comparatively speaking.
Software companies aim at the markets for their products. No surprise there. For most software developers, Linux is not a big enough market to be profitable, especially if they have not followed good coding practices and made portable code. Since MS promotes certain, intentionally hard to port APIs I don't see this changing soon.
VMWare on their site has ready-made live Linux distros that you can download and use with their free VMWare Server software. This is most likely the future.
I disagree. Linux has a lot to recommend it as a server and even as a host OS. It is stable, free, fairly secure, well supported, customizable, and efficient. It has much less to recommend it as a client OS. Most people would rather run Windows on top of Linux than Linux on top of Windows. Of course since no major computer manufacturer will ship such a system as a pre-install, it is likely that it will be very slow to take off.
Gee Dell and Apple will be announcing their projected numbers in a few days. Well, I guess we'd all better listen to the "analysts" whose accuracy rate is about the same as flipping a coin. Speculation and stock fluctuations before these announcements is pretty much par for the course as people make guesses in the hopes of a stock market win. The rest of us, however, are a lot more concerned about Q1 and Q2 numbers that actaully, you know are how much they are selling.
When you were growing up were you allowed to talk in class? Of course not. You talked between classes and at lunch. Most of the social skills you received were not tought[sic] by a teacher but interaction with other kids. This can be gained outside of school too.
Here are a few things you might want to consider... I attended public school and the conditions were deplorable. I got in fights. I was beaten up. I beat other people up. There were guns and knives and drugs and booze and lots of crime. I learned a lot that I never would have in the "ideal" learning environment most people would like to create for their own child. I learned by watching my peers the risks of crime and drugs. I learned that almost everyone lies, a lot. I learned that the government shoves propaganda at people and a lot of it is bullshit. (Sure pot is bad for you, but not as bad as tobacco.) A great deal of this turned out to be vital knowledge later in life.
Valuable socialization is not just meeting people. It is meeting diverse kinds of people and specific kinds of people. Knowing teenage drug dealers and a few drug suppliers and some local gang members and some organized crime people really changes the way you think about society. It changes your understanding of the human animal and makes you aware of just how television and books mislead. Meeting people who have become public school teachers is likewise valuable. The drunk in it for a paycheck, the retired scientist who wants to spend his time molding better people, the old marine who speaks Latin and hates technology were all valuable people to socialize with, more so perhaps, than the average person. Maybe the same is true with parents who are home schooling and interaction with many of them will help, but I don't know.
What I do know is if I have a child and decide to home school, that child will accompany me to some less than ideal places and meet some less than ideal people. He or she will not just meet them, but will socialize with them and will eventually do so without any supervision. This sort of socialization should happen before a child is too old and their world views are solidified.
Now I'm not presuming to give you any advice. I'm not a parent. I just though maybe you'd find my view of socialization useful or insightful. Good luck.
Being a teacher I think I have a unique perspective on this. I'm sure that the online classes will work. Why? The students that are involved with the project are going to be the same ones that have parents that care and are active in their education.
If you ever need support for this assertion, see Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt's statistical analysis of the Chicago school systems in the book "Freakonomics." Heck, read it anyway it is short, insightful, and diverse. They found a strong correlation between future success and students who were entered in the lottery for entrance to the best schools, but not any more so for those who attended. It did not matter if kids went to the schools or not, if their parents tried to get them in, they did just as well. You can also read your students the analysis of how little crack dealers make.
Which "important architectural features" do you think are being "ignored" ?
The SRM Access Control Lists could be used to mitigate many of the security issues that plague Windows, but are largely ignored. The userspace and administrative separations have been castrated by other design decisions, which may or may not be fixed in Vista. The hardware abstraction provides a perfect basis for leveraging VM or the like for integrated security, but is not applied to that purpose.
Is this the run-every-app-in-a-VM idea ? Who is doing this in a fashion remotely useful for application to desktop OSes ? Which OSes are you thinking of that fit your description ?
OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Solaris, SELinux, and I'm sure a number of other OS's have implemented features to provide this functionality.
Because I'm not aware of any other contemporary OSes which aren't either a) UNIX, or b) (faithful) reimplementations of UNIX - and UNIX sure as hell wasn't "designed from the ground up with security in mind".
I'd say both Solaris and OpenBSD were implemented from the ground up with security in mind. Just because you reuse existing parts does not mean your design does not take security into consideration for the fundamental architecture.
Well, that depends on whether you think Windows "security problems" - indeed, security problems in general - are primarily a social or technical problem.
No it doesn't.
You seem to be missing the point. One of the inherent features of a rootkit is that it can take over the system without the user knowing.
Which means the OS has failed. It is the job of the OS to let the user know what is going on and control it. If something takes over without telling the user and without letting them control it, the OS has fundamentally failed.
So long as the end user is able to install arbitrary software, the system will be vulnerable to not only rootkits, but all other forms of malicious software as well. Most users are not capable of making appropriate decisions regarding what their computer should and shouldn't run and have little interest in gaining the requisite knowledge. To compound this problem, programmatically divining whether a given application is doing something "good" or "bad" and thus informing the user, is extremely difficult (if not impossible).
You're wrong. It is the OS's job to tell the user what is happening and let them make choices. Blaming the users for failing to make good choices when the OS has both failed to provide them with the information they need and failed to provide them with the choices they want is idiotic. You assert that given the information they need and the choices they want they will still fail, but you have provided not a shred of evidence to support that, nor does it logically follow. Further, you assume all users will fail at the outset, regardless of what is done, thus claiming an unsolvable problem. At that point it does not matter if we implement something since whether we do or not suers will always fail.
Personally, I think you are failing to see how people and machines work. Luckily, a whole lot of security experts agree with me.
Seems to me they've had more important things on the menu and higher priorities - like making sure their system is still useful to users.
HAHAHAHAHA! Have you read the feature set that has not been cut from Vista? Half the "features" are ways to make the system less useful to users and either lock them into a proprietary format or protocol to make later tasks harder or DRM to make it harder for them to do things they want, but content providers would like to stop them from doing. MS's priorities are very clear and they are certainly not to make their machines more useful to end users.
No, they have the vastly more difficult task of finding a balance between security and *usefulness*. The most secure system in the world is useless if no-one will (or can) use it.
So you have real work to do, but they are a bunch of slackers inventing work because they have nothing better to do. You, sir (or madam), are an asshole.
You make some valid points (although I think I disagree that port management is a reasonable solution if there are serious usability tradeoffs) but I think you've gone a bit too far with the above. In large organizations such as the user is describing, it is often the case that the stated mission of a particular department does not actually have anything to do with the real goals of the people working there. I've seen my share of IT department projects that have nothing to do with meeting the goals of the company or serving the end users efficiently, but are designed solely to increase body count, keep the department budget high, or demonstrate importance. I've seen them with even more counterproductive goals as well like "make sure our infrastructure doesn't support macs any longer so we can expand our control into the marketing department that is administering themselves right now.
Further, your name calling is simply counterproductive. Are you sure you're not transferring your anger at someone where you work to the previous poster? He was right to say that the goal of the IT department "should be" to facilitate others getting work done. In truth, in many cases he is right.
the correlations that I have seen are porn - spambots, gambling - trojans/keyloggers, gamecheat/filesharing - trojans/toolbars.
Trojans and keyloggers are mostly the same thing. Spambots by number are almost completely installed by automated worms. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen a spamnet or botnet where anyone bothered to use trojans for anything, except perhaps grabbing a new control channel. Keyloggers and other data mining trojans are rarely spread by worms directly, but then again they still make up an insignificant portion of malware right now.
The first thing I would like to know is where your data is coming from and which time period you are using for your data.
The data I mentioned seeing myself, is coming from a class A network's malware and traffic monitoring system (I can't reveal which one due to my NDA). I'd like to throw in a disclaimer here. I read a lot of network security information, whitepapers, reports, etc. and work in the field, but I am not a professional security expert. I make my living in other ways and don't want you to get the mistaken impression that because I have this info I'm some sort of expert.
As to the time period, this holds true for general trends. Looking at today, this month, or this year shows no real difference, although my DNS data does not go back an entire year.
"Most adware and spyware programs are obtained initially by BROWSING THE WEB or along with some unrelated ad-supported software."
This is probably true, but adware and spyware still do not account for the majority of malware, by infection number. Botnet armies tens of thousands of members strong used for DDoS and spamming are not uncommon. I don't think any type of malware that requires human interaction of any sort is likely to ever catch up to them for sheer numbers.
The programs are rarely installed from a conspicuous website, but rather through social engineering banner ads, drive-by-downloads, and through peer-to-peer networks
with misleading filenames.
Even this subset of malware contains an significant exception. P2P networks are not the Web.
Trojans, which now make up a vast majority of infected pc's do indeed come from risky surfing.
Trojans do not make up the majority of infections. The comment you quote is somewhat misleading in the way it is phrased, but if you read carefully you'll see it does not say that they are. I get a security brief every day that lists the major infections and new threats. Trojans appear in the new threats, but I can only remember one that ever appeared as a major infection. I'm willing to believe that you can increase your risk by going to certain sites, sites that can be classified into distinct categories, but in general no matter where you surf, the majority of your malware infections will have no correlation. Whether or not you use your computer or just leave it sitting idle and connected to the internet will make no significant difference to the number of infections.
Slashdot Mirror
Ummmm a LOT of games are Xbox exclusives. It may be stupid, but its nothing new.
Yeah half of those are made by companies MS purchased. The others were paid by MS to keep the games exclusive to the xBox (or greatly discounted license fees). How do you think those companies will feel about no longer getting that kickback, but still not getting to the rest of the market? How will they feel if this results in the xBox taking a huge chunk of the market and the resultant lack of kickbacks plus greatly increased licensing fees to develop for the xBox.
Game developers benefit by having options and multiple markets, even if they get paid not to enter some of those markets. Many of them are companies that look to the future and make strategic moves. A number will not sow the seeds of their own destruction.
One thing I can see coming out of this and hinted at my MS in other ways are games developed for the XBOX360 that will also run on Vista. I can see that as huge market potential.
Yes, but what you're missing is that although those games will run on the xbox and Windows, they won't run on the PS3, Wii, or Macintoshes (sans a lot of work porting them or parallel development anyway). The big players want portable code for strategic and quality reasons. It saves them money in the long run.
Any company that locks themselves into only two markets which are completely controlled by a competitor is taking an enormous gamble. Very few respectable businesses, especially the longer thinking foreign companies are going to go for it.
Because that's where the market/money is.
Actually it is about risk management. The most successful game companies not purchased by MS use OpenGL because it makes them more money (As did several of the companies MS bought until after the acquisition). Development houses that are uncertain of the success of their game, however, often make a smaller up front investment and use DirectX (easier to find cheap talent). Those that are failures lose less money that way. Those that are successful then pay to port it to OpenGL for other markets. The total dev cost is higher, but it is less up front money.
The vast majority of the audience for a PC-based game run Windows.
Why limit the market that way, since many dev houses don't? The market is Windows PCs, Macs, Linux PCs, xBox, Playstation, Nintendo, and a few of other niches.
DirectX is part of that, while OpenGL is an add-on.
Both Windows and almost all graphics cards support both OpenGL and DirectX.
I doubt that the major game publishers are sweating the loss of sales to the *unix crowd.
That depends on if you include Macs, Nintendo, and Playstations in that crowd. I think a lot of developers that currently make games for the Playstation and the PC will be more than a little leery of paying a competitor to Sony an arbitrary sum for making games work on the Playstation. I know many serious developers will be less than pleased with MS becoming a gatekeeper for the gaming market, especially since they are direct competitors, MS having purchased so many of the successful game companies. Sure bob's little game company might blow it off, but ID and Blizzard sure as hell won't. They are big business with long-term plans and are not about to quietly put their heads in the noose.
And all those extensions take up memory and processor time, and often have bugs or security flaws of their own.
And how do you suppose this is different from them being built in? Having an official communication mechanism between components, which everyone knows about is likely to result in more security for interactions, not less. A huge number of vulnerabilitites are the result of a new feature being tacked on in a nonstandard way and without consideration for the security implications.
Another thing I like about IE 7 is its sandbox mode on Vista. That should, I think, provide several security advantages over competing browsers.
sandboxes are a good idea, but I have doubts about the implementation. Maybe they will prove me wrong, but I certainly would not switch until there was some demonstration that it actually helps. MS is notoriously loud about making promises (especially about increased security) and constantly delivering sub par, poorly executed half-solutions that are worked around by the malware development community in short order.
In fact, IE 6 with ActiveX turned off was already reasonably secure.
Compared to what browser? I don't know of any other browser other than IE with active X enabled that is more likely to result in your system being compromised.
It's unfair to compare Beta versions with a completed version...
Why? This is a comparison of features, not stability, compliance or even speed. Betas are supposed to be feature complete.
Lastly, DirectX 10 is going on a platform that will rule out OpenGL.
This has yet to be seen. Vista may or may not make OpenGL more difficult for the average person.
Not many people use OpenGL in the last few years, so, sadly, this is a minor point.
Sure, not many companies, but they include companies in the gaming market that really matter. ID and Blizzard come to mind. Really, the major players that Microsoft has not bought out (RIP Ensemble and Bungie) mostly use OpenGL because they know their games are going to be successful and it is easier to build using a cross-platform API up front than to try to port it later. I don't think too many gamers are going to switch to Vista if it means World of Warcraft and all the games on the Doom engine will no longer work.
I don't suppose you ever tried tag-level formatting + generated code.
Sure, it works just fine. CSS just separates the content from the markup and makes my life easier. I use it for pretty much everything and there is only one thing really wrong with it, IE. I tag pages by hand and auto-generate a huge pile as well. It all looks great and is a cinch to make style changes to. Firefox, Opera, Safari, and everything else we test with all handle it just fine, except IE which gracefully degrades to show the same info, but without a lot of the useful formatting.
Interesting. An easy to use GUI for accessing Subversion could be very useful. Having helped Windows users with their WinCVS and TortoiseCVS for years though, I wonder if it won't have many of the same usability problems as the former. The number one problem with WinCVS is that users get confused switching between the explorer and CVS viewers for the same files. Tortoise solves that problem by working as a plug-in that lets users perform CVS commands by selecting and right-clicking in the regular explorer and adding color codes to the icons (works with SubVersion too). Have you seen anything like this for OS X and SubVersion? Barring that, it might be easier to just teach them the CLI way of doing things.
I don't want GIMP to start catering to the lowest common denominator because then its going to become MORE cumbersome to use.
I disagree with this. The default setup, should be learnable, usable, and universal. The primary method of interaction should be easy to use and intuitive before it is fast for the expert who has been using it forever. That does not mean, however, that that has to be the only interface mechanism. A lot of programs provide contextual menu functionality in addition to that same functionality in more usable locations. This is a good idea.
Provided your interface is flexible, expert users will always know better than the interface designer which controls are fastest and easiest for them and will customize them appropriately. If GIMP is to become popular, however, they must cater to new users and less advanced users as well. Popularity brings developers and money to make GIMP better and provides incentive for other projects to interoperate. It benefits all users, including advanced ones.
So Microsoft already has a leg up on the competition and ANYTHING they can do to keep their customers from 'finding' Linux means they'll keep purchasing Microsoft products above all others.
Most people use and will continue to use Windows because it is the pre-installed OS on nearly every computer. VM technologies allow Linux to gain popularity without overcoming this. It would be easy for an OEM to differentiate their products by running Linux with Windows in a hosted VM. The computer would have better recovery and backup, security, stability, antivirus capability, and could run a wider range of software all at no additional charge. In time, Linux could be a standard part of computers, which makes it a bigger target for developers than Windows itself, thus knocking down both application availability and pre-installation barriers without having to overcome MS's lock-ins in the minds of users all at once.
The stability/BSOD arguments against Windows don't really carry that much weight any more.
I disagree. As a workstation, Windows XP is fairly stable, however it is prone to resource depletion over time and weird problems that can only be solved by a reboot. I agree it is stable enough for most people, but it is certainly not as robust as running Linux. When you consider if the host goes down both so do the clients, but if a client goes down other clients and the host need not, the stability of the host becomes even more vital. More importantly, Windows is more prone to security issues and compromises necessitating a reinstall or restoration from a known good copy. Since it is much easier to accomplish this for a client, rather than host OS and since the security issues themselves are partially mitigated by a more secure host OS, this becomes a real consideration.
Finally, for both servers and workstations, Linux has much better resource management and multitasking. As a result, by running Windows as a client resource blocking can be mitigated in some instances. There have been rare but documented instances of operations running faster in windows under virtualization as a side effect of this. Also, for the server, Window's failure to multitask in a stable way often leads to the need to run multiple servers or virtual servers to maintain stability. Obviously, running Linux as the host OS would mitigate this concern.
Windows has come a long way for stability, but it is not on par yet and in a variety of ways it is still lacking.
I would rather virtualize Windows under Linux, not the other way around.
You and almost everyone else, but this is MS we're dealing with here. Running Windows under Linux undercuts MS's lock-in strategy. Given the choice of either, customers would choose the more secure, stable OS for the host, which means MS would have to make Windows secure and stable to compete and that just isn't the way they do things. Instead they plan to make it easy for you to run Linux under Windows, but not the other way around, thus removing most of the benefits of running Linux at all. Time will tell if they can keep newer hardware's built in virtualization from running Windows under Linux anyway.
You have a tool palette. This is how you do stuff on the active layer with your left mouse button or a tablet. If you hold down CTRL, ALT or SHIFT, you expose common tools modes... If you right click on the tool palette, you get additional tool options. If you right click on the image, all of the image operations are shown. This includes "save this image as...", filters, and the like.
The problem is, GIMP relies upon these combinations and alternative menus. Try using it without them and you'll quickly realize how hopeless the situation is. Now imagine you're just learning and you don't think to try right-clicking or holding down buttons and clicking (which is the majority of new users). Or imagine you're using a tablet (like many graphic artists) and right clicking and holding down a key and clicking is moving to a completely new interface device. Most will never even try that option and give up in frustration.
How the hell are people who can't manipulate a pointing device (the disabled) supposed to use photo manipulation software anyway?
A lot of people use simplified interfaces, like the keyboard to direct the mouse. A lot more use some other interface, whether for the disabled or for their super cool new interface device that costs more than I make in a year but is the coolest thing ever for graphic artists. A lot of graphic artists are running a mac, with a one button mouse. The problem is not any given setup, but the combination of all of them and the fact that the application designer does not know what users will be using (unless like GIMP they code it to be impossible to use for anyone not using the same multi-button mouse + keyboard as the developer).
Adobe makes very mediocre interfaces, but they manage to make all functions available to these users, because even though they may not have the best UI people they do follow some of the industries basic guidelines and they actually test it on people that are not the software developers or longtime users already conditioned. There are multiple types of usability. It is partly how fast something is to use once you've become an expert and it is partly how quickly a user can learn to do basic tasks (learnability). VI is a classic example of software good at the former, but horrible at the latter. When you are an underdog trying to gain acceptability in a market dominated by another player, the learnability component is a very important aspect. It is a barrier to entry.
I mean, the could just do everything with a braille input device and Script-Fu, which is very possible, BTW. Try that in Photoshop.
Most graphic artists are on Windows or the Mac. Most (not all) use very different scripting tools than shell scripts. As far as scriptability is concerned, I find GIMP to be easier and I do use it for that, but I'm not the average user. The average user wants to edit things easily by hand first and might be interested in scripting later. They try out GIMP as an alternative and try to perform some basic manipulations and it is just so difficult to get started they give up and go to something else. They don't want to read a manual to do the most common and thus what should be the most easy tasks. Combine this with the fact that half of these users are running Windows or a Mac which adds its own usability problems due to the incompatibility with GIMP and you basically have a non-starter. GIMP has not gained any real acceptance among graphics pros or among casual graphics manipulators. If the GIMP team wants to know why and change that then they should make GIMP conform to some basic human/computer interaction guidelines and do some usability testing. If they aren't interested in that, then they can just continue to fill their niche. The truth is though, they just aren't there for usability in a lot of ways. I pointed out one specific example, but it is just that, one example. User don't avoid GIMP because of the chorded/contextual controls. They avoid it because of the cumulative affect of all the UI that does not obey the rules and does not work well for most potential users.
No functionality in the GIMP is available only via context menus.
What version of GIMP are you using?
Wrong, Quark is/was too expensive, had too many problems and too many bad releases.
Not really. People switched to InDesign from both Quark and Framemaker, not because those products were getting any worse, but simply because they were not staying current on OS X.
Except that Apple forces you to update much more when you upgrae[sic] OS for example.
Apple forces who to do what now? I have a six year old tower happily humming away with the latest version of OS X. I have friends who buy every third OS X release, because they don't want/need to update as often as Apple comes out with new OS versions. Both are ideal for some and the option to choose whichever you prefer is a real advantage.
It's not that it breaks design rules - it's that the GIMP team have a different set of design rules they use. I like theirs better.
Different groups and companies all develop their own UI guidelines. Additionally, the human/computer interface design profession creates a series of general guidelines and things to avoid. When you look at all of these collectively, you can see a large amount of overlap. When usability tests from four universities and five major industry players all note that a particular type of interface fails, it can be considered a general rule. That does not mean it will always fail in a UI, just that it is very likely.
As a UI pseudo-expert I think I can safely say the GIMP team did little or no formal UI testing and certainly not with unbiased people. Further, they did not bother to learn from the mistakes and testing of others. For example, functionality should never, ever be available only via a contextual menu. Many users will never find features placed there, thus reducing learnability. Anyone using a slightly different interface, like a stylus, laptop with one mouse button, or device for the disabled will be unable to use that function.
There are exceptions, but they are few and far between. I'd love to see the usability testing the GIMP team did that managed to miss such an obvious snafu and/or prove that it was beneficial because it would either be a great example of how your test can fail or a great example of an exception to a very common error. I suspect, however, that such a usability test never happened.
UI design is science. It is part psychology and part mechanical engineering, but it follows the same, rigorous method as all other science. It is provable. Saying you like the gimp team's results better is just fine, but I strongly suspect, and have plenty of evidence simply from the posts in this topic, to support my opinion that their UI design strategy (if it exists) has failed.
It seems that people who started on GIMP tend to love GIMP and hate Photoshop (or at least have a general dislike for it)
I started out using neither, but tried using both programs in the mid 90s. I still use both for different tasks, but I prefer the UI of photoshop (which is mediocre) to that of GIMP (which is poor). I'd really like to see a completely different interface than either of them, but as a user of both and as a person who has done more than superficial study in the area of user interface design, I've got to say that the GIMP's interface is pretty weak and runs afoul of many UI guidelines. My advice, grab the Apple HIG manual which does a good job of covering the basics and sit down with some users who have never touched either system and do some real usability design.
Familiarity and intuitivity are not the same...
Actually, it is my opinion that photoshop is more learnable than GIMP. There is always a learning curve moving tools, but GIMP breaks a number of UI design rules (not that photoshop doesn't) and is more than a little kludgy. GIMP could improve their learn-ability and usability for current photoshop users by adopting a more similar interface or they could do so by building a different, but more usable interface. In either case I think the money Adobe spent on usability engineers does show in this case.
Note, I use both programs fairly regularly, but for non-automated tasks I find myself moving towards photoshop more and more. As my workstation of choice is OS X, I really wish there was a better, third choice as neither is ideal. Apple already did a quarter of the work with their core graphics, if only someone would beat Adobe to the native Intel market by doing the rest.
Standardization is why the Microsoft OS is so predominant and to a lesser extent Macs.
I don't buy this assertion. None of the standardized OS's available are prominent for desktop OS's either. MS has locked people in with dozens of mechanisms built upon their monopoly. The reason Apple manages to have some market share is because they maintain a complete vertical supply chain. Linux will grab a significant chunk of the desktop the day a major company starts selling hardware with it pre-installed in the consumer market (which none will do because MS would kill them).
Mostly all software companies develop exclusively for Windows and Mac OS's. Very few develop commercial products for Linux, comparatively speaking.
Software companies aim at the markets for their products. No surprise there. For most software developers, Linux is not a big enough market to be profitable, especially if they have not followed good coding practices and made portable code. Since MS promotes certain, intentionally hard to port APIs I don't see this changing soon.
VMWare on their site has ready-made live Linux distros that you can download and use with their free VMWare Server software. This is most likely the future.
I disagree. Linux has a lot to recommend it as a server and even as a host OS. It is stable, free, fairly secure, well supported, customizable, and efficient. It has much less to recommend it as a client OS. Most people would rather run Windows on top of Linux than Linux on top of Windows. Of course since no major computer manufacturer will ship such a system as a pre-install, it is likely that it will be very slow to take off.
Gee Dell and Apple will be announcing their projected numbers in a few days. Well, I guess we'd all better listen to the "analysts" whose accuracy rate is about the same as flipping a coin. Speculation and stock fluctuations before these announcements is pretty much par for the course as people make guesses in the hopes of a stock market win. The rest of us, however, are a lot more concerned about Q1 and Q2 numbers that actaully, you know are how much they are selling.
When you were growing up were you allowed to talk in class? Of course not. You talked between classes and at lunch. Most of the social skills you received were not tought[sic] by a teacher but interaction with other kids. This can be gained outside of school too.
Here are a few things you might want to consider... I attended public school and the conditions were deplorable. I got in fights. I was beaten up. I beat other people up. There were guns and knives and drugs and booze and lots of crime. I learned a lot that I never would have in the "ideal" learning environment most people would like to create for their own child. I learned by watching my peers the risks of crime and drugs. I learned that almost everyone lies, a lot. I learned that the government shoves propaganda at people and a lot of it is bullshit. (Sure pot is bad for you, but not as bad as tobacco.) A great deal of this turned out to be vital knowledge later in life.
Valuable socialization is not just meeting people. It is meeting diverse kinds of people and specific kinds of people. Knowing teenage drug dealers and a few drug suppliers and some local gang members and some organized crime people really changes the way you think about society. It changes your understanding of the human animal and makes you aware of just how television and books mislead. Meeting people who have become public school teachers is likewise valuable. The drunk in it for a paycheck, the retired scientist who wants to spend his time molding better people, the old marine who speaks Latin and hates technology were all valuable people to socialize with, more so perhaps, than the average person. Maybe the same is true with parents who are home schooling and interaction with many of them will help, but I don't know.
What I do know is if I have a child and decide to home school, that child will accompany me to some less than ideal places and meet some less than ideal people. He or she will not just meet them, but will socialize with them and will eventually do so without any supervision. This sort of socialization should happen before a child is too old and their world views are solidified.
Now I'm not presuming to give you any advice. I'm not a parent. I just though maybe you'd find my view of socialization useful or insightful. Good luck.
Being a teacher I think I have a unique perspective on this. I'm sure that the online classes will work. Why? The students that are involved with the project are going to be the same ones that have parents that care and are active in their education.
If you ever need support for this assertion, see Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt's statistical analysis of the Chicago school systems in the book "Freakonomics." Heck, read it anyway it is short, insightful, and diverse. They found a strong correlation between future success and students who were entered in the lottery for entrance to the best schools, but not any more so for those who attended. It did not matter if kids went to the schools or not, if their parents tried to get them in, they did just as well. You can also read your students the analysis of how little crack dealers make.
Which "important architectural features" do you think are being "ignored" ?
The SRM Access Control Lists could be used to mitigate many of the security issues that plague Windows, but are largely ignored. The userspace and administrative separations have been castrated by other design decisions, which may or may not be fixed in Vista. The hardware abstraction provides a perfect basis for leveraging VM or the like for integrated security, but is not applied to that purpose.
Is this the run-every-app-in-a-VM idea ? Who is doing this in a fashion remotely useful for application to desktop OSes ? Which OSes are you thinking of that fit your description ?
OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Solaris, SELinux, and I'm sure a number of other OS's have implemented features to provide this functionality.
Because I'm not aware of any other contemporary OSes which aren't either a) UNIX, or b) (faithful) reimplementations of UNIX - and UNIX sure as hell wasn't "designed from the ground up with security in mind".
I'd say both Solaris and OpenBSD were implemented from the ground up with security in mind. Just because you reuse existing parts does not mean your design does not take security into consideration for the fundamental architecture.
Well, that depends on whether you think Windows "security problems" - indeed, security problems in general - are primarily a social or technical problem.
No it doesn't.
You seem to be missing the point. One of the inherent features of a rootkit is that it can take over the system without the user knowing.
Which means the OS has failed. It is the job of the OS to let the user know what is going on and control it. If something takes over without telling the user and without letting them control it, the OS has fundamentally failed.
So long as the end user is able to install arbitrary software, the system will be vulnerable to not only rootkits, but all other forms of malicious software as well. Most users are not capable of making appropriate decisions regarding what their computer should and shouldn't run and have little interest in gaining the requisite knowledge. To compound this problem, programmatically divining whether a given application is doing something "good" or "bad" and thus informing the user, is extremely difficult (if not impossible).
You're wrong. It is the OS's job to tell the user what is happening and let them make choices. Blaming the users for failing to make good choices when the OS has both failed to provide them with the information they need and failed to provide them with the choices they want is idiotic. You assert that given the information they need and the choices they want they will still fail, but you have provided not a shred of evidence to support that, nor does it logically follow. Further, you assume all users will fail at the outset, regardless of what is done, thus claiming an unsolvable problem. At that point it does not matter if we implement something since whether we do or not suers will always fail.
Personally, I think you are failing to see how people and machines work. Luckily, a whole lot of security experts agree with me.
Seems to me they've had more important things on the menu and higher priorities - like making sure their system is still useful to users.
HAHAHAHAHA! Have you read the feature set that has not been cut from Vista? Half the "features" are ways to make the system less useful to users and either lock them into a proprietary format or protocol to make later tasks harder or DRM to make it harder for them to do things they want, but content providers would like to stop them from doing. MS's priorities are very clear and they are certainly not to make their machines more useful to end users.
No, they have the vastly more difficult task of finding a balance between security and *usefulness*. The most secure system in the world is useless if no-one will (or can) use it.
This is
So you have real work to do, but they are a bunch of slackers inventing work because they have nothing better to do. You, sir (or madam), are an asshole.
You make some valid points (although I think I disagree that port management is a reasonable solution if there are serious usability tradeoffs) but I think you've gone a bit too far with the above. In large organizations such as the user is describing, it is often the case that the stated mission of a particular department does not actually have anything to do with the real goals of the people working there. I've seen my share of IT department projects that have nothing to do with meeting the goals of the company or serving the end users efficiently, but are designed solely to increase body count, keep the department budget high, or demonstrate importance. I've seen them with even more counterproductive goals as well like "make sure our infrastructure doesn't support macs any longer so we can expand our control into the marketing department that is administering themselves right now.
Further, your name calling is simply counterproductive. Are you sure you're not transferring your anger at someone where you work to the previous poster? He was right to say that the goal of the IT department "should be" to facilitate others getting work done. In truth, in many cases he is right.
the correlations that I have seen are porn - spambots, gambling - trojans/keyloggers, gamecheat/filesharing - trojans/toolbars.
Trojans and keyloggers are mostly the same thing. Spambots by number are almost completely installed by automated worms. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen a spamnet or botnet where anyone bothered to use trojans for anything, except perhaps grabbing a new control channel. Keyloggers and other data mining trojans are rarely spread by worms directly, but then again they still make up an insignificant portion of malware right now.
The first thing I would like to know is where your data is coming from and which time period you are using for your data.
The data I mentioned seeing myself, is coming from a class A network's malware and traffic monitoring system (I can't reveal which one due to my NDA). I'd like to throw in a disclaimer here. I read a lot of network security information, whitepapers, reports, etc. and work in the field, but I am not a professional security expert. I make my living in other ways and don't want you to get the mistaken impression that because I have this info I'm some sort of expert.
As to the time period, this holds true for general trends. Looking at today, this month, or this year shows no real difference, although my DNS data does not go back an entire year.
"Most adware and spyware programs are obtained initially by BROWSING THE WEB or along with some unrelated ad-supported software."
This is probably true, but adware and spyware still do not account for the majority of malware, by infection number. Botnet armies tens of thousands of members strong used for DDoS and spamming are not uncommon. I don't think any type of malware that requires human interaction of any sort is likely to ever catch up to them for sheer numbers.
The programs are rarely installed from a conspicuous website, but rather through social engineering banner ads, drive-by-downloads, and through peer-to-peer networks with misleading filenames.
Even this subset of malware contains an significant exception. P2P networks are not the Web.
Trojans, which now make up a vast majority of infected pc's do indeed come from risky surfing.
Trojans do not make up the majority of infections. The comment you quote is somewhat misleading in the way it is phrased, but if you read carefully you'll see it does not say that they are. I get a security brief every day that lists the major infections and new threats. Trojans appear in the new threats, but I can only remember one that ever appeared as a major infection. I'm willing to believe that you can increase your risk by going to certain sites, sites that can be classified into distinct categories, but in general no matter where you surf, the majority of your malware infections will have no correlation. Whether or not you use your computer or just leave it sitting idle and connected to the internet will make no significant difference to the number of infections.