Do you know of any PDF readers for the Mac (I'm a big Apple fan) that can read a PDF as a continuous stream without page boundaries?
Hmm, both Preview and Acrobat have a continuous mode, but they still show where the page breaks are. Latex is not a PDF viewer, per se, but I think it will let you view them continuously if you want and it is free. I'm not sure about others.
It was an IP printer and it connected via ZeroConf to the macs, as shown by the way the printer was listed. It did not show up on the Windows boxes, thus either the printer's ZeroConf implementation is broken or Windows is or Windows discovers it, but screws up after the fact.
It won't pick up on those unless they support UPnP.
If it can't discover them via ZeroConf, and needs UPnP, then it does not support ZeroConf, now does it? Or were you referring to something else, since your statement is a little ambiguous.
Office is not bundled with "their monopoly OS", so what's that got to do with it?
Vista has built a generation for a proprietary format that competes with PDF as well as a PDF generator. Thus, it is bundled with the OS. Even if they rip that out and only put it in Office, Office is illegally tied to the OS via the exchange protocol and the.doc format, both of which have native support in the OS. This compounds that illegal action by attacking yet another market with the same set of ties.
Why not? Since when does having a monopoly mean that you can't give things away free?
MS has a monopoly on their OS. Thus, they are not under normal market pressure for the price of the OS. They can, theoretically, raise the price $10 with little or no effect upon sales, to whatever the maximum amount of income will be, regardless of any competition. Why does this matter? It matters because nothing is truly free. It costs money to purify, bottle and ship water. Thus by "giving it away for free" what they are really doing is including the cost of it in the cost of Windows. When you buy Windows, you are then paying for bottled water, whether you want it or not, just as you are paying for the development of IE, Windows media player, etc., whether you want it or not.
What they can't do is use their monopoly in one area to kill their competition in another area. Since Microsoft is not in the "water selling" business they aren't killing the competition by giving away water for free with their OS.
There is a market for water. By bundling water with their OS and paying for the cost of this operation with it, they are entering into the water market, and no one can compete against them because even if it costs them twice as much to bottle and it tastes a little off, people still buy it because they need an OS, and they have no choice after that.
What Microsoft is doing here is adding some basic functionality to it's[sic] office suite.
Actually, they have created both a PDF generation and a generator for a new competitor to PDF (an MS proprietary format) and built it into the OS.
This is functionality that all or most of its competitors in the office market already have. So by adding it, Microsoft is just keeping up with its own competitors.
This matters not at all. OS X has built in PDF generation, but Apple does not have a monopoly on OS's. You can only bypass the market forces and the advantages of capitalism if you have a monopoly. Apple is getting close to having one on portable mp3 players and could get in trouble for bundling PDF generation software with that, but they don't so they are not at risk.
That is a legal action, even if you are a monopoly.
It is probably legal for them to bundle PDF or a competitor to PDF generation with office, but not with their OS or browser. Even this, however, is somewhat iffy as the office suite is illegally tied to the OS, via bundled support for the proprietary.doc format.
I don't want to be a MS fanboy here but how comes Adobe can sue MS if they want to implement pdf output ? Does that mean that as a linux user I should stop writing so much pdf because some day Adobe can charge LaTeX team in order them to continue producing pdflatex ?
Just as soon as the Latex team gets a monopoly on a product and then bundles the PDF generation part of Latex with it, you need to start worrying.
I don't get it, its been said many time now that Linux bundles software too, BUT it's not the same. Ubuntu is not bundling an Ubuntu web browser or Mandrake bundling a Mandrake email client and so forth...
That is not the relevant difference, or at least not the important one. It is not illegal to bundle products together, normally. I can sell my automobile and cheese bundle all I want... right up until I have a monopoly on either automobiles or cheese. Then, because the free market is no longer affecting the monopolized product, bundling bypasses the free market in selling the other product as well. The end result is no competition, no reason to innovate, and no reason to lower costs. Basically, it makes capitalism fail, so capitalist countries made it illegal.
It's not really open when the vendor producing the operating system that 90+% of the world uses can't use it, is it?
It wouldn't be, were that the case, but it isn't. MS can implement PDF generation support in any product they want, including stand alone tools. What they can't do is bundle it with their monopoly OS, but that is true of any product in any field, standard or not. For example, Water is the standard for drinking and supporting life around the world. MS can sell their own brand of bottled water all they like. What they can't do is give it away for free with any product they have a monopoly on, including their OS.
How is it that Apple is able to get away with allowing easy generation of PDFs via OS X's printing utilities, but Microsoft can't? Did Apple pony up Adobe's danegelt? Or are they too small for Adobe to care?
Anyone can implement the open PDF standard, provided they are not breaking some other law in so doing. What Adobe can potentially take MS to court for is bundling those PDF generation tools with a product them have a monopoly on. That is illegal. Apple is approaching monopoly status with iPods, so Adobe might have a case against them if they bundled their PDF generation tools with iPods. Apple doesn't though, and they don't have a monopoly on desktop operating systems so Adobe can't take them to court for bundling it with that.
I suspect all of this is part of a modified embrace and extend move. MS is also implementing another format that competes with PDF. Their plan is bundle them until Adobe (and everyone else) is gone from the PDF generation market, then deprecate the PDF format in favor of their proprietary one (since there are protections to stop them from directly corrupting the PDF standard). Then, MS will have another monopoly, using a closed format that provides one more barrier to alternate OS adoption and locks in customers even more. Also, they will be able to use this to bolster other potential monopolies, like office tools space. Imagine if OpenOffice could no longer generate the standard portable document format. Would they have any chance at adoption?
And if MS implemented the OpenDoc format in Office and Windows, would that also be MS illegal extending their monopoly? Time and again there has been calls for MS to implement open formats, and on the first one of any significance they run into potential difficulties with competitors, is it any surprise that they hold back on others?
The most popular and ubiquitous open standard MS has ever implemented was HTML, via Internet Explorer. They have been convicted for their actions in so doing, not because they implemented an open standard, but because they bundled the new product with their monopoly on desktop OS's. We all know how that turned out. They killed 80% of all innovation online and have held the internet back by monopolizing the space with a buggy, insecure product that partially implements a seven year old specification with several, intentional flaws added in.
Is this what you want to happen to the portable document and vector graphics space as well?
Maybe Adobe will do nothing, but if they do file suit it will probably be in Europe because the EU seems to be actually doing something. In the US Microsoft was found to be violating even the unbelievably lax terms of their conviction and their punishment was... we'll watch them for several more years. They broke the terms of their criminal sentence and as punishment we did nothing. I'm sure this has nothing to do with the huge piles of money MS dropped on all sorts of politicians desks. Sheer coincidence.
MS needs to compete as well, and if its competitors (openoffice et al) contain the ability that they are including, I dont see how it can be considered an extension of their monopoly by illegal means.
MS has a monopoly on desktop OS's. Adobe sells PDF generation software. MS is now building PDF generation software into their OS (not just their office suite) . As a result, Adobe will lose that market. This is called "bundling" and the courts ruled it is a form of "tying" which is forbidden by antitrust law. Adobe has a pretty good case here if they want to pursue it.
Even more importantly, MS has also implemented another format that competes with PDF, but is not (as far as anyone has been able to determine) open for everyone to use. They have also built this into their OS. This is illegal in exactly the same way, but also includes a further artificial lock-in for customers with the proprietary format. Would you care to bet which of these formats everyone will be using in 5 years if MS gets its way? Their strategy is obvious, take over the PDF generation market then kill it with their new, closed format.
The end result, users go from buying one of several competing products to generate PDFs, to paying whatever price MS bundles into Windows, with no competition, using a closed format, locked-in, and with no incentive for MS to ever improve the tools or format, ever again. It will also serve as one more barrier to moving to a differnt OS, since users won't be able to exchange PDF files with them anymore, unless they buy Windows. Now do you see how this can be considered an extension of their monopoly?
And how often do you print a PDF, versus how often you view it on the screen?
As part of my job I generate PDF files up to about 600 pages long. We do have real data on how often they are printed, versus read on the screen. About 60% print them out and about 50% use them on screen. (With 10% doing both, obviously.)
PDF is ideal for transferring documents that will be printed or that need to look exactly the same everywhere. The main problems with PDF is when it is misapplied to a document that should be markup, and the really, really crappy combination of tools most people use. Windows+IE+Acrobat Reader+the default enabled plug-ins = a slow mess. Using a less bloated reader with a system that properly multitasks and won't hang your entire UI while waiting for a document to download solves most people's issues.
As for Microsoft's apps, I think almost all of them work in non-admin accounts (if not all).
As of Windows XP, this certainly is not the case. I've heard mixed feedback for Vista testers despite the new "shims." I've heard nothing of dev tool changes.
As for the UI "annoying most people", it annoys Mac users too...
Ummm, I've never been annoyed by the Mac OS X dialogue boxes providing options or asking for a password, although I wish they would add more granular controls for applications (as mentioned above). The UI, however, is generally very well done and does provide appropriate actions as the buttons and does not appear often. This is not always true for third party software running on OS X, but that is a different issue.
...the tech media and many slashdotters have held Mac OSX's model up as the epitome of security and the example that Microsoft should follow...
They certainly are not the epitome of either, but as for usable OS's for the average user, they certainly trounce Windows in both those areas and thus a little exuberance can be forgiven. Windows could make a lot of improvements in both areas by copying OS X. They could turn off more network services by default and remove Windows reliance upon RPC for non-networked tasks, for example. They could make visible file extensions or some other, pervasive, indicator of whether a file is data or executable and enforce it. As for UI design, in addition to more sensible dialogue boxes, they could properly make use of screen edges and steal a few dozen other concepts from the Apple HIG.
Apple may be behind MS in some areas and they can certainly use improvement, but for security and UI design, I'm going to have to agree with the general consensus.
Yes, XP has "that thing." It's also on by default. Explorer: Tools menu -> Folder options -> View tab -> "Automatically search for network folders and printers"
Interesting. I don't admin Windows boxes these days, but we plugged in a new printer on our network a few weeks back. Neither of my coworkers using Windows XP Pro could find it without manually adding the IP address for the printer. It showed up automatically as an option when printing on all the Macs. It seems to me, it needs work.
So I'm guessing that apple took care of the licensing issues far in advance.
Licensing issues? PDF is an approved open standard with perpetual free licensing and patent protection from Adobe. Why would Apple have to take care of anything any more than all the free software projects that re-implemented it?
OK, even if I don't have centralized servers I can typically get a small peer-to-peer network setup in a few minutes.
The problem is, the performance is spotty, have problems auto-detecting, and can take hours to reappear after a reboot.
And when did peer-to-peer mean zero configuration? I don't get that.
The original discussion was about file sharing on a LAN, which includes both discovery and file transfer. Zero configuration is, of course, the ideal. It also works just fine in other OS's and has for years.
If you want your machines to be able to see each other, you have to agree on a couple of things, and that involves configuring your system.
That's funny, because I can just walk into the coffee shop and within 30 seconds of opening my computer and selecting a wireless network (I actually only did this once when I first when to that coffee shop) I can see a half dozen other machines and all their shared services, including file sharing, chat, streaming media, printing, etc. Of course that is only the non-Windows machines. Windows hasn't bothered implementing ZeroConf despite it being a ratified standard with a free reference example, and open implementation on several platforms for years. Luckily everyone else, including most printer manufacturers did.
I don't think having the power to supercede civil rights is very important to the United States.
Then why are you arguing in favor of the government doing it without any legal right?
I think what we're dealing with here is certainly just cause to revoke some priviledges we've all enjoyed thus far, like what you can bring on an airplane.
Why? It does no good and spreads fear and causes numerous economic and psychological costs. And people can still bring bombs and guns and knives onto planes, provided they are slightly intelligent and willing to break the law. Guess what, the terrorists won't hesitate to bring weapons onboard because it is breaking the law. All this does is insure the passengers are helpless and annoyed. They fucking confiscated one of our aged WWII hero's congressional medal of honor, because it was pointy, but can't stop bombs. How does this help anyone again?
There is no objection to the legislative branch looking over the shoulder of certain civilians who interact with suspected terrorists. The legislators were made aware of it in a closed council. They are not breaking any laws, which is the legislators duty to enact and the judicial branch's duty to enforce.
Please read a book on the US government. The judicial branch judges what is being done. The legislative branch decides what to do. The executive branch acts.
If it were illegal, the courts would certainly have something to say about it.
It has been in the courts for years now and they have ordered the executive branch to stop doing many things, some of which they have and others of which they have unconstitutionally ignored.
If you could, for a second, take a step back and look at what it is you're argueing[sic] for; the rights of our enemies to communicate and hide within our borders without fear of being uncovered, you may notice how silly you look.
You're an idiot. I'm arguing for the rights of everyone in the US, not some tiny subset. Letting the Executive branch do whatever it wants while if fights a "war"supposedly against a basic human emotion is moronic. You might as well shred the constitution now.
You know the ACLU has nothing to say about firearms, even though the right to bare arms couldn't be more clearly spelled out.
Perhaps you mean the right to bear arms? What does this have to do with anything. We're talking the US government here, not the ACLU. Who even mentioned the ACLU? As for the right to bear arms, we lost that one when states rights were killed in the civil war along with the right to secede.
The ACLU is the champion of leftist ideals.
Left and Right are speaking points for idiots. People don't hold uniform beliefs and trying to pigeonhole everyone into opposing dichotomies is only useful if you're trying to run an election campaign. Get a clue.
You know what, forget everything I've said and go back to the question you've never answered. Tell me one good reason why members of the executive branch need to spy without a warrant. Just tell me one and I'll stop mentally referring to you as "that ignorant twat."
Why the privledge[sic] escalation feature will only help competent people, clueless users will just treat it as another, annoying, hoop to jump through. They'l just blanketly[sic] issue the password when asked, without thinking if this is really an action that should need higher privlidges[sic]. I've already seen the same behaviour[sic] from OS-X users and from Windows users with regards to downloaded files.
From what I've read of the implementation, I agree with your assessment. I would like to stress, however, that this is due to the crappy UI implementation more than anything else. Almost all users (even OS X users) have been conditioned by years of being given (OK)(Cancel) dialogue boxes with poorly phrased technobabble inside. clicking "OK" is what you do to make you computer do stuff. It's like putting gas in a car to make it run.
Sadly this atrocious UI design has been copied elsewhere, including in some OS X applications. To implement this properly users should not be given a "continue" button. They should be given two or more real actions as options. For example, "The program 'Aliens8' would like to change your monitor resolution. (Allow it to change resolution one time)(Always let it change the resolution)(Don't let it change the resolution)(Configure Advanced Settings)."
In the above example, the user is given real choices. They have to read it to pick one. They can't click "OK or "Continue" a million times until it is second nature.
It is also important to note that these dialogues should be kept to a minimum. For example, on most home user systems, there is no reason the default settings should not allow all users to configure the resolutions for their own login within normal ranges and without being asked for permission. Making these dialogue boxes rare will make users pay more attention to them as well.
With Vista hopefully we'll (eventually) be able to have the admins use normal acocunts, and just escalate as needed. However I've got now illusions that this will provide any overall increase in security for home users.
Until MS gets serious about making their own software and apps created with the default settings in their dev tools work in non-privileged accounts and provide a VM or other such accommodation for legacy applications, I don't see a lot of hope for this. And you're right, it won't do much for regular user security except convince people that security is the opposite of usability. This poorly designed interface will just annoy most people.
Strip out NetBIOS and rely on Active Drectory's sane and sensible DNS services (requires an all-Win2k+ environment) and it's like magic.
Strangely enough I don't carry a Windows server to the coffee shop with me. I just open the lid on my laptop and a few seconds later all the machines with ZeroConf advertised services, like chat, filesharing, streaming media, collaborative editors, printers, and the like automagically appear in available to applications. It's a fun way to meet new people too. That whole carrying a server around with me sounds tempting and would probably help me meet new people too, when I tried to get them to configure their machines to use it, but nah I think I'll stick with peer-to-peer.
No, desktop to desktop networking is working flawlessly, and has been since 95... Next time you can't see Bob's computer, just start/run \\bob and his share should appear right away, even if you can't "see" him. If you can't see the shares, it's off the network, for sure.
That would be the discovery portion that is broken then. You see, it is hard to type "start/run \\bob" if you don't know if Bob's share is called "bob" or "grobertson" or "bobs_evil_box." Having to use a CLI work-around to get part of the functionality to do something so simple is like using Linux in 1989. It sounds broken to me.
If you are using DNS, you are no longer in a peer-to-peer network.
If you are using DNS for the networking of the machines, you are no longer (arguably) in a peer-to-peer network. If you are using DNS, separate from the peer-to-peer sharing, such as using a modern auto-discovery protocol, you can get very good performance and reliability.
Appropriate "sandbox" security model depends on what an application is supposed to be doing
Agreed, but a reasonable default should be applied to any software installed and can be modified to become less restrictive as the user tries to use it for more tasks and approves more uses for it.
Arbitrary scripts should not have access to the full range of permissions available to the application running them unless the user has specifically elected to allow that
I very much agree.
P.S. the blockquote tag is not valid with just text in it. You need to nest a paragraph or other tag.
If you think Windows peer networking is balky, you likely aren't setting something up correctly.
Setting up is soooooo, 90's. Does Vista have ZeroConf yet? You plug into the network and within seconds all the printers show up as options when you print, all the local users show up in your chat program, all the shared streaming music channels and files show up in your mp3 player, all the shared directories show up for filesharing, and all the shared documents for collaborative editing appear. It makes conferences a lot more fun. Configuration is a waste of time.
Maybe it is possible that with some more configuration work you can get all the machines to show up, without any centralized servers, but who the hell is going to go mess with the configuration of every machine to get this to work? It sure isn't set up properly by default since it hasn't worked at so many places I've been. Spotty peering that can be fixed with a configuration work-around is still a problem.
So...anything 99% of my users at work won't be doing on a normal basis is protected by the popup boxes you so loathe. In fact, from your quote here, in a normal work day all but one of my users will never see or use any of the items on that list. Yet your claim is that the boxes are so ubiquitous they interfered with the normal operation of the computer.
I think no.
I haven't tried the beta yet, but a lot of people seem to mention this. From what I've read, it does not sound unreasonable, but at the same time the UI does sound like it was written by the usual idiots. "Continue" buttons?!? Gee, what a great way to condition your users to not read yet another series of pop-ups. Did all their UI designers get their degree through the mail or something?
The peer networking at my office is not balky. It works flawlessly and seamlessly. I've established that you're not a Windows user.
I take exception to this. Windows desktop to desktop networking is balky, especially on Win2K or in environments that mix Win2K and Windows XP. In an office of 100 machines, in multiple workplaces I've found it is normal to see a random subset of the machines actually on the network at a given time. I remember having to transfer a file to someone's shared directory and asking the people nearby, "who can see Bob's desktop?" and then getting them to transfer the file to him.
my panties somehow fail to bunch at the thought that a business entrepeneur might take advantage of such largesse, then create a business that is responsible for tens, hundreds, or thousands of jobs (and lots of tax revenue, as it happens).
You're missing the point. Because they only subsidize one or two companies and not all equally and because local governments further restrict competition, the government is doing more than giving handouts. They are giving handouts in such a way so that only certain companies can stay in business. When those companies then deny people their civil rights and citizens can't go with competition (which the government ran out of business), we have a problem.
Giving handouts is one thing. Giving handouts only to people that agree to vote republican is something else entirely.
Huge amounts of damage can be done even to the user's sandbox, including disclosure of private information (which isn't the OS's fault, either, if the app is giving its macros access to sockets).
I fault the OS for not giving sufficient granularity of permissions for applications. The user should decide if the program gets access to sockets, and if they are real sockets or virtual ones. It should also have reasonable defaults that let the user decide if their word processor can access the internet or open another application or run arbitrary scripts. (Note, I know some OS's are starting to do this, but it needs to be built in , with good defaults and a good UI.)
I blame the office suite if it runs macros by default and if those macros are not sufficiently restricted.
Security is everybody's problem, and you have to think about it every time you get input from a user.
Agreed.
Limiting the effect of security failure isn't the same as abnegating responsibility to prevent that failure. The more power you give that user, the more responsibility YOU have to ensure that power isn't misused.
I sort of agree with this. I think in the end the user should have the ability to do anything on their own system, but that as they do more dangerous, unusual, and malware like things, they should be clearly and strongly warned and made to choose an option from a sufficiently granular set of functionality.
Regardless, it's no secret of mystery even if by default macro execution is on in StarOffice, the vulnerability is in the OS infrastructure. If this happened on a Un*x machine (Sun, HP, Linux, BSD), the damage would be confined and limited to what the user had unprotected. It would be highly unusual for a Un*x user hit with a StarOffice macro exploit to have enough exposure to compromise the system.
I partially agree with you. Most office software on a normal *nix workstation, however, would have sufficient access to do damage, including erasing personal files and likely even connecting to the internet and sending spam or a DoS attack. Programs like this will have vulnerabilities. Right now, this is not too serious of a threat. A real piece of malware based on this would probably not even propagate anywhere, however it is a valid issue going forward, especially if market share increases.
The solution in my mind is twofold. First, institute a VM, or Mandatory access control, or jail or whatever you want to call it for all applications. This would limit the exposure from the user directory, to just the files and network access of the application, unless the user specifically allowed the behavior. The second component is a versioned filesystem with redundancy to make sure any files it overwrote could be quickly and painlessly rolled back to the uncorrupted version. This still leaves some room for damage. A subtle malware could add text to a document that might be overlooked, and some clever social engineering could expand the attack. Still, I think both of these are logical directions for security improvements.
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Do you know of any PDF readers for the Mac (I'm a big Apple fan) that can read a PDF as a continuous stream without page boundaries?
Hmm, both Preview and Acrobat have a continuous mode, but they still show where the page breaks are. Latex is not a PDF viewer, per se, but I think it will let you view them continuously if you want and it is free. I'm not sure about others.
Was it an IP printer?
It was an IP printer and it connected via ZeroConf to the macs, as shown by the way the printer was listed. It did not show up on the Windows boxes, thus either the printer's ZeroConf implementation is broken or Windows is or Windows discovers it, but screws up after the fact.
It won't pick up on those unless they support UPnP.
If it can't discover them via ZeroConf, and needs UPnP, then it does not support ZeroConf, now does it? Or were you referring to something else, since your statement is a little ambiguous.
Office is not bundled with "their monopoly OS", so what's that got to do with it?
Vista has built a generation for a proprietary format that competes with PDF as well as a PDF generator. Thus, it is bundled with the OS. Even if they rip that out and only put it in Office, Office is illegally tied to the OS via the exchange protocol and the .doc format, both of which have native support in the OS. This compounds that illegal action by attacking yet another market with the same set of ties.
Why not? Since when does having a monopoly mean that you can't give things away free?
MS has a monopoly on their OS. Thus, they are not under normal market pressure for the price of the OS. They can, theoretically, raise the price $10 with little or no effect upon sales, to whatever the maximum amount of income will be, regardless of any competition. Why does this matter? It matters because nothing is truly free. It costs money to purify, bottle and ship water. Thus by "giving it away for free" what they are really doing is including the cost of it in the cost of Windows. When you buy Windows, you are then paying for bottled water, whether you want it or not, just as you are paying for the development of IE, Windows media player, etc., whether you want it or not.
What they can't do is use their monopoly in one area to kill their competition in another area. Since Microsoft is not in the "water selling" business they aren't killing the competition by giving away water for free with their OS.
There is a market for water. By bundling water with their OS and paying for the cost of this operation with it, they are entering into the water market, and no one can compete against them because even if it costs them twice as much to bottle and it tastes a little off, people still buy it because they need an OS, and they have no choice after that.
What Microsoft is doing here is adding some basic functionality to it's[sic] office suite.
Actually, they have created both a PDF generation and a generator for a new competitor to PDF (an MS proprietary format) and built it into the OS.
This is functionality that all or most of its competitors in the office market already have. So by adding it, Microsoft is just keeping up with its own competitors.
This matters not at all. OS X has built in PDF generation, but Apple does not have a monopoly on OS's. You can only bypass the market forces and the advantages of capitalism if you have a monopoly. Apple is getting close to having one on portable mp3 players and could get in trouble for bundling PDF generation software with that, but they don't so they are not at risk.
That is a legal action, even if you are a monopoly.
It is probably legal for them to bundle PDF or a competitor to PDF generation with office, but not with their OS or browser. Even this, however, is somewhat iffy as the office suite is illegally tied to the OS, via bundled support for the proprietary .doc format.
I don't want to be a MS fanboy here but how comes Adobe can sue MS if they want to implement pdf output ? Does that mean that as a linux user I should stop writing so much pdf because some day Adobe can charge LaTeX team in order them to continue producing pdflatex ?
Just as soon as the Latex team gets a monopoly on a product and then bundles the PDF generation part of Latex with it, you need to start worrying.
I don't get it, its been said many time now that Linux bundles software too, BUT it's not the same. Ubuntu is not bundling an Ubuntu web browser or Mandrake bundling a Mandrake email client and so forth...
That is not the relevant difference, or at least not the important one. It is not illegal to bundle products together, normally. I can sell my automobile and cheese bundle all I want... right up until I have a monopoly on either automobiles or cheese. Then, because the free market is no longer affecting the monopolized product, bundling bypasses the free market in selling the other product as well. The end result is no competition, no reason to innovate, and no reason to lower costs. Basically, it makes capitalism fail, so capitalist countries made it illegal.
It's not really open when the vendor producing the operating system that 90+% of the world uses can't use it, is it?
It wouldn't be, were that the case, but it isn't. MS can implement PDF generation support in any product they want, including stand alone tools. What they can't do is bundle it with their monopoly OS, but that is true of any product in any field, standard or not. For example, Water is the standard for drinking and supporting life around the world. MS can sell their own brand of bottled water all they like. What they can't do is give it away for free with any product they have a monopoly on, including their OS.
How is it that Apple is able to get away with allowing easy generation of PDFs via OS X's printing utilities, but Microsoft can't? Did Apple pony up Adobe's danegelt? Or are they too small for Adobe to care?
Anyone can implement the open PDF standard, provided they are not breaking some other law in so doing. What Adobe can potentially take MS to court for is bundling those PDF generation tools with a product them have a monopoly on. That is illegal. Apple is approaching monopoly status with iPods, so Adobe might have a case against them if they bundled their PDF generation tools with iPods. Apple doesn't though, and they don't have a monopoly on desktop operating systems so Adobe can't take them to court for bundling it with that.
I suspect all of this is part of a modified embrace and extend move. MS is also implementing another format that competes with PDF. Their plan is bundle them until Adobe (and everyone else) is gone from the PDF generation market, then deprecate the PDF format in favor of their proprietary one (since there are protections to stop them from directly corrupting the PDF standard). Then, MS will have another monopoly, using a closed format that provides one more barrier to alternate OS adoption and locks in customers even more. Also, they will be able to use this to bolster other potential monopolies, like office tools space. Imagine if OpenOffice could no longer generate the standard portable document format. Would they have any chance at adoption?
And if MS implemented the OpenDoc format in Office and Windows, would that also be MS illegal extending their monopoly? Time and again there has been calls for MS to implement open formats, and on the first one of any significance they run into potential difficulties with competitors, is it any surprise that they hold back on others?
The most popular and ubiquitous open standard MS has ever implemented was HTML, via Internet Explorer. They have been convicted for their actions in so doing, not because they implemented an open standard, but because they bundled the new product with their monopoly on desktop OS's. We all know how that turned out. They killed 80% of all innovation online and have held the internet back by monopolizing the space with a buggy, insecure product that partially implements a seven year old specification with several, intentional flaws added in.
Is this what you want to happen to the portable document and vector graphics space as well?
Maybe Adobe will do nothing, but if they do file suit it will probably be in Europe because the EU seems to be actually doing something. In the US Microsoft was found to be violating even the unbelievably lax terms of their conviction and their punishment was... we'll watch them for several more years. They broke the terms of their criminal sentence and as punishment we did nothing. I'm sure this has nothing to do with the huge piles of money MS dropped on all sorts of politicians desks. Sheer coincidence.
MS needs to compete as well, and if its competitors (openoffice et al) contain the ability that they are including, I dont see how it can be considered an extension of their monopoly by illegal means.
MS has a monopoly on desktop OS's. Adobe sells PDF generation software. MS is now building PDF generation software into their OS (not just their office suite) . As a result, Adobe will lose that market. This is called "bundling" and the courts ruled it is a form of "tying" which is forbidden by antitrust law. Adobe has a pretty good case here if they want to pursue it.
Even more importantly, MS has also implemented another format that competes with PDF, but is not (as far as anyone has been able to determine) open for everyone to use. They have also built this into their OS. This is illegal in exactly the same way, but also includes a further artificial lock-in for customers with the proprietary format. Would you care to bet which of these formats everyone will be using in 5 years if MS gets its way? Their strategy is obvious, take over the PDF generation market then kill it with their new, closed format.
The end result, users go from buying one of several competing products to generate PDFs, to paying whatever price MS bundles into Windows, with no competition, using a closed format, locked-in, and with no incentive for MS to ever improve the tools or format, ever again. It will also serve as one more barrier to moving to a differnt OS, since users won't be able to exchange PDF files with them anymore, unless they buy Windows. Now do you see how this can be considered an extension of their monopoly?
And how often do you print a PDF, versus how often you view it on the screen?
As part of my job I generate PDF files up to about 600 pages long. We do have real data on how often they are printed, versus read on the screen. About 60% print them out and about 50% use them on screen. (With 10% doing both, obviously.)
PDF is ideal for transferring documents that will be printed or that need to look exactly the same everywhere. The main problems with PDF is when it is misapplied to a document that should be markup, and the really, really crappy combination of tools most people use. Windows+IE+Acrobat Reader+the default enabled plug-ins = a slow mess. Using a less bloated reader with a system that properly multitasks and won't hang your entire UI while waiting for a document to download solves most people's issues.
As for Microsoft's apps, I think almost all of them work in non-admin accounts (if not all).
As of Windows XP, this certainly is not the case. I've heard mixed feedback for Vista testers despite the new "shims." I've heard nothing of dev tool changes.
As for the UI "annoying most people", it annoys Mac users too...
Ummm, I've never been annoyed by the Mac OS X dialogue boxes providing options or asking for a password, although I wish they would add more granular controls for applications (as mentioned above). The UI, however, is generally very well done and does provide appropriate actions as the buttons and does not appear often. This is not always true for third party software running on OS X, but that is a different issue.
They certainly are not the epitome of either, but as for usable OS's for the average user, they certainly trounce Windows in both those areas and thus a little exuberance can be forgiven. Windows could make a lot of improvements in both areas by copying OS X. They could turn off more network services by default and remove Windows reliance upon RPC for non-networked tasks, for example. They could make visible file extensions or some other, pervasive, indicator of whether a file is data or executable and enforce it. As for UI design, in addition to more sensible dialogue boxes, they could properly make use of screen edges and steal a few dozen other concepts from the Apple HIG.
Apple may be behind MS in some areas and they can certainly use improvement, but for security and UI design, I'm going to have to agree with the general consensus.
Yes, XP has "that thing." It's also on by default. Explorer: Tools menu -> Folder options -> View tab -> "Automatically search for network folders and printers"
Interesting. I don't admin Windows boxes these days, but we plugged in a new printer on our network a few weeks back. Neither of my coworkers using Windows XP Pro could find it without manually adding the IP address for the printer. It showed up automatically as an option when printing on all the Macs. It seems to me, it needs work.
So I'm guessing that apple took care of the licensing issues far in advance.
Licensing issues? PDF is an approved open standard with perpetual free licensing and patent protection from Adobe. Why would Apple have to take care of anything any more than all the free software projects that re-implemented it?
OK, even if I don't have centralized servers I can typically get a small peer-to-peer network setup in a few minutes.
The problem is, the performance is spotty, have problems auto-detecting, and can take hours to reappear after a reboot.
And when did peer-to-peer mean zero configuration? I don't get that.
The original discussion was about file sharing on a LAN, which includes both discovery and file transfer. Zero configuration is, of course, the ideal. It also works just fine in other OS's and has for years.
If you want your machines to be able to see each other, you have to agree on a couple of things, and that involves configuring your system.
That's funny, because I can just walk into the coffee shop and within 30 seconds of opening my computer and selecting a wireless network (I actually only did this once when I first when to that coffee shop) I can see a half dozen other machines and all their shared services, including file sharing, chat, streaming media, printing, etc. Of course that is only the non-Windows machines. Windows hasn't bothered implementing ZeroConf despite it being a ratified standard with a free reference example, and open implementation on several platforms for years. Luckily everyone else, including most printer manufacturers did.
I don't think having the power to supercede civil rights is very important to the United States.
Then why are you arguing in favor of the government doing it without any legal right?
I think what we're dealing with here is certainly just cause to revoke some priviledges we've all enjoyed thus far, like what you can bring on an airplane.
Why? It does no good and spreads fear and causes numerous economic and psychological costs. And people can still bring bombs and guns and knives onto planes, provided they are slightly intelligent and willing to break the law. Guess what, the terrorists won't hesitate to bring weapons onboard because it is breaking the law. All this does is insure the passengers are helpless and annoyed. They fucking confiscated one of our aged WWII hero's congressional medal of honor, because it was pointy, but can't stop bombs. How does this help anyone again?
There is no objection to the legislative branch looking over the shoulder of certain civilians who interact with suspected terrorists. The legislators were made aware of it in a closed council. They are not breaking any laws, which is the legislators duty to enact and the judicial branch's duty to enforce.
Please read a book on the US government. The judicial branch judges what is being done. The legislative branch decides what to do. The executive branch acts.
If it were illegal, the courts would certainly have something to say about it.
It has been in the courts for years now and they have ordered the executive branch to stop doing many things, some of which they have and others of which they have unconstitutionally ignored.
If you could, for a second, take a step back and look at what it is you're argueing[sic] for; the rights of our enemies to communicate and hide within our borders without fear of being uncovered, you may notice how silly you look.
You're an idiot. I'm arguing for the rights of everyone in the US, not some tiny subset. Letting the Executive branch do whatever it wants while if fights a "war"supposedly against a basic human emotion is moronic. You might as well shred the constitution now.
You know the ACLU has nothing to say about firearms, even though the right to bare arms couldn't be more clearly spelled out.
Perhaps you mean the right to bear arms? What does this have to do with anything. We're talking the US government here, not the ACLU. Who even mentioned the ACLU? As for the right to bear arms, we lost that one when states rights were killed in the civil war along with the right to secede.
The ACLU is the champion of leftist ideals.
Left and Right are speaking points for idiots. People don't hold uniform beliefs and trying to pigeonhole everyone into opposing dichotomies is only useful if you're trying to run an election campaign. Get a clue.
You know what, forget everything I've said and go back to the question you've never answered. Tell me one good reason why members of the executive branch need to spy without a warrant. Just tell me one and I'll stop mentally referring to you as "that ignorant twat."
Why the privledge[sic] escalation feature will only help competent people, clueless users will just treat it as another, annoying, hoop to jump through. They'l just blanketly[sic] issue the password when asked, without thinking if this is really an action that should need higher privlidges[sic]. I've already seen the same behaviour[sic] from OS-X users and from Windows users with regards to downloaded files.
From what I've read of the implementation, I agree with your assessment. I would like to stress, however, that this is due to the crappy UI implementation more than anything else. Almost all users (even OS X users) have been conditioned by years of being given (OK)(Cancel) dialogue boxes with poorly phrased technobabble inside. clicking "OK" is what you do to make you computer do stuff. It's like putting gas in a car to make it run.
Sadly this atrocious UI design has been copied elsewhere, including in some OS X applications. To implement this properly users should not be given a "continue" button. They should be given two or more real actions as options. For example, "The program 'Aliens8' would like to change your monitor resolution. (Allow it to change resolution one time)(Always let it change the resolution)(Don't let it change the resolution)(Configure Advanced Settings)."
In the above example, the user is given real choices. They have to read it to pick one. They can't click "OK or "Continue" a million times until it is second nature.
It is also important to note that these dialogues should be kept to a minimum. For example, on most home user systems, there is no reason the default settings should not allow all users to configure the resolutions for their own login within normal ranges and without being asked for permission. Making these dialogue boxes rare will make users pay more attention to them as well.
With Vista hopefully we'll (eventually) be able to have the admins use normal acocunts, and just escalate as needed. However I've got now illusions that this will provide any overall increase in security for home users.
Until MS gets serious about making their own software and apps created with the default settings in their dev tools work in non-privileged accounts and provide a VM or other such accommodation for legacy applications, I don't see a lot of hope for this. And you're right, it won't do much for regular user security except convince people that security is the opposite of usability. This poorly designed interface will just annoy most people.
Strip out NetBIOS and rely on Active Drectory's sane and sensible DNS services (requires an all-Win2k+ environment) and it's like magic.
Strangely enough I don't carry a Windows server to the coffee shop with me. I just open the lid on my laptop and a few seconds later all the machines with ZeroConf advertised services, like chat, filesharing, streaming media, collaborative editors, printers, and the like automagically appear in available to applications. It's a fun way to meet new people too. That whole carrying a server around with me sounds tempting and would probably help me meet new people too, when I tried to get them to configure their machines to use it, but nah I think I'll stick with peer-to-peer.
No, desktop to desktop networking is working flawlessly, and has been since 95... Next time you can't see Bob's computer, just start/run \\bob and his share should appear right away, even if you can't "see" him. If you can't see the shares, it's off the network, for sure.
That would be the discovery portion that is broken then. You see, it is hard to type "start/run \\bob" if you don't know if Bob's share is called "bob" or "grobertson" or "bobs_evil_box." Having to use a CLI work-around to get part of the functionality to do something so simple is like using Linux in 1989. It sounds broken to me.
If you are using DNS, you are no longer in a peer-to-peer network.
If you are using DNS for the networking of the machines, you are no longer (arguably) in a peer-to-peer network. If you are using DNS, separate from the peer-to-peer sharing, such as using a modern auto-discovery protocol, you can get very good performance and reliability.
Appropriate "sandbox" security model depends on what an application is supposed to be doing
Agreed, but a reasonable default should be applied to any software installed and can be modified to become less restrictive as the user tries to use it for more tasks and approves more uses for it.
Arbitrary scripts should not have access to the full range of permissions available to the application running them unless the user has specifically elected to allow that
I very much agree.
P.S. the blockquote tag is not valid with just text in it. You need to nest a paragraph or other tag.
If you think Windows peer networking is balky, you likely aren't setting something up correctly.
Setting up is soooooo, 90's. Does Vista have ZeroConf yet? You plug into the network and within seconds all the printers show up as options when you print, all the local users show up in your chat program, all the shared streaming music channels and files show up in your mp3 player, all the shared directories show up for filesharing, and all the shared documents for collaborative editing appear. It makes conferences a lot more fun. Configuration is a waste of time.
Maybe it is possible that with some more configuration work you can get all the machines to show up, without any centralized servers, but who the hell is going to go mess with the configuration of every machine to get this to work? It sure isn't set up properly by default since it hasn't worked at so many places I've been. Spotty peering that can be fixed with a configuration work-around is still a problem.
So...anything 99% of my users at work won't be doing on a normal basis is protected by the popup boxes you so loathe. In fact, from your quote here, in a normal work day all but one of my users will never see or use any of the items on that list. Yet your claim is that the boxes are so ubiquitous they interfered with the normal operation of the computer. I think no.
I haven't tried the beta yet, but a lot of people seem to mention this. From what I've read, it does not sound unreasonable, but at the same time the UI does sound like it was written by the usual idiots. "Continue" buttons?!? Gee, what a great way to condition your users to not read yet another series of pop-ups. Did all their UI designers get their degree through the mail or something?
The peer networking at my office is not balky. It works flawlessly and seamlessly. I've established that you're not a Windows user.
I take exception to this. Windows desktop to desktop networking is balky, especially on Win2K or in environments that mix Win2K and Windows XP. In an office of 100 machines, in multiple workplaces I've found it is normal to see a random subset of the machines actually on the network at a given time. I remember having to transfer a file to someone's shared directory and asking the people nearby, "who can see Bob's desktop?" and then getting them to transfer the file to him.
my panties somehow fail to bunch at the thought that a business entrepeneur might take advantage of such largesse, then create a business that is responsible for tens, hundreds, or thousands of jobs (and lots of tax revenue, as it happens).
You're missing the point. Because they only subsidize one or two companies and not all equally and because local governments further restrict competition, the government is doing more than giving handouts. They are giving handouts in such a way so that only certain companies can stay in business. When those companies then deny people their civil rights and citizens can't go with competition (which the government ran out of business), we have a problem.
Giving handouts is one thing. Giving handouts only to people that agree to vote republican is something else entirely.
Huge amounts of damage can be done even to the user's sandbox, including disclosure of private information (which isn't the OS's fault, either, if the app is giving its macros access to sockets).
I fault the OS for not giving sufficient granularity of permissions for applications. The user should decide if the program gets access to sockets, and if they are real sockets or virtual ones. It should also have reasonable defaults that let the user decide if their word processor can access the internet or open another application or run arbitrary scripts. (Note, I know some OS's are starting to do this, but it needs to be built in , with good defaults and a good UI.)
I blame the office suite if it runs macros by default and if those macros are not sufficiently restricted.
Security is everybody's problem, and you have to think about it every time you get input from a user.
Agreed.
Limiting the effect of security failure isn't the same as abnegating responsibility to prevent that failure. The more power you give that user, the more responsibility YOU have to ensure that power isn't misused.
I sort of agree with this. I think in the end the user should have the ability to do anything on their own system, but that as they do more dangerous, unusual, and malware like things, they should be clearly and strongly warned and made to choose an option from a sufficiently granular set of functionality.
Regardless, it's no secret of mystery even if by default macro execution is on in StarOffice, the vulnerability is in the OS infrastructure. If this happened on a Un*x machine (Sun, HP, Linux, BSD), the damage would be confined and limited to what the user had unprotected. It would be highly unusual for a Un*x user hit with a StarOffice macro exploit to have enough exposure to compromise the system.
I partially agree with you. Most office software on a normal *nix workstation, however, would have sufficient access to do damage, including erasing personal files and likely even connecting to the internet and sending spam or a DoS attack. Programs like this will have vulnerabilities. Right now, this is not too serious of a threat. A real piece of malware based on this would probably not even propagate anywhere, however it is a valid issue going forward, especially if market share increases.
The solution in my mind is twofold. First, institute a VM, or Mandatory access control, or jail or whatever you want to call it for all applications. This would limit the exposure from the user directory, to just the files and network access of the application, unless the user specifically allowed the behavior. The second component is a versioned filesystem with redundancy to make sure any files it overwrote could be quickly and painlessly rolled back to the uncorrupted version. This still leaves some room for damage. A subtle malware could add text to a document that might be overlooked, and some clever social engineering could expand the attack. Still, I think both of these are logical directions for security improvements.