If a person has correct answer but got it only by mistake then what good is it?
Well, it is still the right answer. Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good. I guess the answer to your question gets into some muddy philosophical area. Do you want to be on the plane with the expert pilot or the luckiest man on earth?
Enough with that mumbo jumbo though... I agree that multiple choice is not a very good method for determining how well a given student is doing at math or in CS.
I've always had a strong dislike for multiple choice and true/false testing. Taking those tests is often more of an exercise in test taking than it is in the subject matter. A good test taker can eliminate a good portion of the answers right away and use fairly intuitive psychology to improve the odds of guessing correctly.
What ever happened to demonstrating competence in a field? Forget multiple choice and true/false. Ask your students to actually solve applied math problems or actually write some code (or pseudo code). Maybe you can't do as much testing that way and maybe you can't shorten the time it takes to grade the papers but at least you will be testing something worthwhile.
Sorry for the rant but after having survived more than a decade of "education" that consisted primarily of memorize foo and the regurgitate, I'm fairly traumatized by the horror that is the educational system. I learned orders of magnitude more useful information by simply reading everything and anything and trying to apply what I learned to my pet projects. I took one too many tests where I knew several multiple choice answers where justifiable and "right" depending upon unspecified information not contained in the question and having to guess what the test author thought the correct answer was. Multiple choice, true/false, and automated testing are big indicators of a "fast food" mentality and I'm firmly against that sort of foolishness. Grumble, grumble, etc.
They should not put anything up until the site is 100% cross-browser compatible.
This is called a straw man argument. No one asserted this except you. People are angry because a system that should be working and can easily be made to work was designed improperly and people who really need it to work are suffering as a result.
What should be done about this? Well whomever was responsible for setting up this site in this manner (whether it was the developer or the manager's decision is unknown) should be asked to make a public apology, fired from their job, and blacklisted from ever developing a government funded site. After that and after any ensuing lawsuits are settled maybe other web developers will actually start doing the right thing.
Re:Microsoft Scared of Open Source?
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Microsoft Sues EU
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Yes, absolutely, and for the most part they all interoperate fine, but they're all fundamentally using the same technology - they're all using the same protocols etc. Microsoft approaches it all entirely differently.
You've got that much right, MS approaches it all differently. What usually happens is a new technology emerges from several places. This technology is hampered by the fact that all the different ways of doing it do not work together. The different implementers get together and come to a consensus. They write an official open protocol that is not owned by anyone. Usually at this point MS does not have an implementation although they are often a member of these committees. After everyone signs off on the new protocol they all go back to their respective projects and companies and implement the standard.
...Everyone except MS of course. They go back and write something completely different and closed, or if the market is already entrenched with the new standard something close to the standard but that breaks the standard in important ways. Often they patent those ways. Then they bundle this new protocol or standard with Windows ensuring that no one can sell a competing product unless they have an OS to bundle it with. This makes the MS "broken version" the new de-facto industry standard.
You claim the world is better off with the real standard and the MS standard. I disagree very strongly. There is nothing wrong with competing standards as they drive competition, but when one of them is bundled with a monopoly product, competition is bypassed. How many systems run half-assed, insecure, and buggy protocols because of this illegal behavior on the part of MS? It has slowed down the progress of the industry and killed dozens of new innovations. When the only competitors in a space are companies in that space indirectly (i.e. selling services with an OS, computers with an OS, or giving away an OS for free) instead of directly competing with the monopoly, you know the competitive market is broken. Tabbed browsing windows were introduced more than six years ago and have been standard on every browser but IE for years. 90% of people still do not have the benefit of this improvement because of MS. IE partially implements five year old standards for markup and as a result the whole web is half a decade behind technologically. This applies not only to web standards and protocols, but across the entire software space.
Competing standards are fine. MS does not allow for competing standards or competition in general. They use every dirty trick including breaking the law and bribing politicians to insure that there is no competition and we all suffer for it while they get rich. Making excuses for the company that has single handedly done more damage to the software industry than any other is astounding. Do you still want to be stuck using the same outdated technology in another five years?
but when you have a mindset as strong as say Apache it is hard to make any independent headway.
I disagree. I mean sure it is always hard to oust an incumbent because it takes effort to switch to something new. If, however, someone made a better fork of Apache I'm firmly convinced people would switch. If you don't believe me take a look at XFree86. What Apache has more than anything else is reputation because people respect the quality of the work they have done. It is in no way a monopoly and there is no technological lock-in. Apache runs on multiple OSs, uses open protocols, and is open to be modified. Products chosen based upon quality and upon the reputation of the authors is a very good thing and is certainly not a monopoly.
Re:Microsoft Scared of Open Source?
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Microsoft Sues EU
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It's just business. Microsoft aren't alone in this sort of thing. Do you think IBM open everything of theirs to their competitors?
For the most part actually, yes they do. IBM has been pretty good about working with open standards for quite a while.
What has this got to do with anything?
It seems like a valid point to me. If MS does not want people to be able to see their protocols they must have a reason. Maybe that reason is to stop interoperability or maybe it is because they are full of security holes or even stolen code. It is perfectly reasonable to speculate as to their motives.
I can't see how it would be a good thing. Replacing one monopoly with another is hardly sensible is it, regardless of how that new monopoly behaves?
You can't have a monopoly on Linux. Thats is most of the point. As open source it will never be locked to one vendor. With an MS monopoly customers are subject to the whims of MS. They pay what MS wants or go without and they are restricted to the features MS is willing to allow. With Linux if one vendor charges too much, you can go with a different vendor and prices reflect the fact that there is competition. If you want functionality added/fixed you can do it yourself or hire anyone you want to do it. You seem to have a very skewed idea of what a monopoly is.
2) Disclosure of an exploit for a vulnerability... Type 2 disclosures should be shunned by everyone. These present an immediate hazard to end users and provide no conceivable benefit to anyone
I disagree that this second type of disclosure is never warranted, but I believe there need to be some serious mitigating circumstances. For example, if your own network or networks critical to the "good of the people" (think social security database) are being attacked or compromised using an uncommon and largely ignored exploit and the vendor refuses to acknowledge a problem or fix the problem it may well be warranted. Publishing exploit code that is easy for the average script kiddy to make a worm from is sometimes the only practical way to draw enough attention to a vulnerability to get it fixed. Microsoft may not care if your network is under attack and they may not care if someone is harvesting all the social security records from a government owned computer, but they do care if another worm screws up 5% of their installed user base, gives them another beating by the press, and costs them real money for support. That said, such instances are very rare.
And yes the cost hydrogen will be more expensive than the cost of refining oil. You can only get Hydrogen by cracking Natural Gas or buy using a LOT more energy that you get from hydrogen to split water. And before some idiot says that Moore's law will fix that in the future... The Law of Thermodynamics says that is the way it will always be.
We live on a giant ball of molten metals with a thin crust of solidified rock on top. This ball is orbiting an even larger ball of incredibly hot gasses and plasma. We get most of our energy by burning little bits of burnable material scattered about the surface of our ball.
...and you have the gall to say "The Law of Thermodynamics" (I hope you meant laws) will insure that creating hydrogen will always be more expensive than refining oil. Some people use science to find answers. Some people cite "science" as an authority to support their opinions. The first group are called "scientists." The second group is called "irrational." Guess which group you are in. Just a tip, whenever you hear someone use the phrase "the way it will always be" you can be pretty sure they aren't a competent scientist.
It's not entirely clear what you mean, but I'm assuming you're refering to a company like PayPal "getting a piece of the pie" by facilitating those transactions of a buck or two.
I don't think that is what the previous poster was getting at, at all. Previous to the iTunes music store it was very hard to buy a song online because no one was willing to process that small of credit card payments. Apple made a deal and now you can buy one song for one dollar on your credit card. Several other music services have tried with varying amounts of success to make a similar bargain with the credit card companies.
The only way to get your songs for sale on the iTunes music store is for you to sign with a record label that has an agreement with Apple. There are some great independent record labels that treat artists fairly, but very few them ever gets anything played on the radio, on MTV, etc. The MPAA record companies can get anything they want on MTV or the radio and use that as their own marketing tool. Other than that only songs that are already very popular (the indy hits) ever make it into major advertising channels. The MPAA record companies are notorious for screwing over any artist who signs with them. A great many bands with moderate popularity and record sales actually end up owing money to the record label, rather than profiting from their work and success. Only the very rare top hits really make money with such a deal. The main reason anyone signs with them is because it is one of the few ways to get your music heard and sold to a large audience. If you want to be famous (that's most musicians) you sign your deal with the devil and hope for the best.
What I believe the previous poster was getting at was that with micro-payments becoming a reality in general, bands can now distribute entirely online and make a profit. This opens the road for moderately popular musicians to self-publish and self-promote without paying most or all of their profits to the industry giants and without going into debt or signing away their next several years worth of copyrights. By "big companies" I
d guess he meant "record companies" who don't really add any value, but suck up the majority of the profits in the record industry.
Hmm, I'm not so sure about this. I know the search engine I implemented for the last large web site I was working on searched text, HTML, PDF, and Word files by default. On my workstation, spotlight searches the contents of Word files as well as many other formats. I guess since those are the only two places I perform searches I don't see what the problem is. I'm not convinced there is a problem with searching the contents of Word files.
Why should China get away with pollution because they have an irresponsibly large population?
China is not a person and does not have any human rights. You are arguing that Harry and Sally should be able to make more pollution than Yu, Xang, Fen, Li, and Park because Harry and Sally happen to be born in an area where more people are concentrated closely together. You claim the problem is the Chinese chose to have lots of children, but the people you are punishing did not choose to be born, nor did they choose how many brothers and sisters they would have. It is unethical to punish people for decisions made before they were born. Sorry, you're still wrong. There is no basis for an individual to have more right to screw up the planet than any other, regardless of where they are born or what race they are. People cause pollution, not land. The amount of pollution permissible should be calculated for each person, not for each square mile of land.
...you can't even rely on any *nix system to *HAVE* a gui api...
What you call a bug, I call a feature. I like being able to build a box without having an unnecessary GUI adding overhead and unneeded complexity. If I'm building a box that is destined to sit under the hood of some machinery and has to be 100% reliable and as fast and stable as possible why would I want to add an unnecessary GUI? The inability of Windows to be customized and have parts removed is a huge weakness, not an advantage.
...having a consistant gui api structure, and can reliably have a base of software on *nix (linux or bsd) systems to build from that one can build applications that will run on >90% of linux/bsd desktops, it won't take over the desktop market.
Having the same GUI API as other distributions and UNIX like systems is not a core feature, it is an interoperability feature. Solaris, RedHat Linux, OpenBSD, MacOS X, etc. all have had consistent GUI APIs for years. Sure some of them also support other GUI APIs and they don't have the same GUI API as one another, but then again, Windows doesn't have the same GUI API as any of these others either. Complaining that a given Linux distro and an SGI machine don't have same GUI API is like complaining a given version of Windows and Amigas don't have the same GUI APIs. If you want to argue about who has better support for cross-platform graphics, well I can run most X-11 based graphics on my Mac OS X machine out of the box, without resorting to an emulator. Can any version of Windows?
You're mostly right, but the mess that is copyright law today certainly contributes to people's attitudes about violating those copyrights. People don't feel bad about downloading songs without paying for them because they don't see it having a meaningful effect upon the artists. If, however, musicians were actually paid the money for those songs a lot of people might feel guilty about "ripping off" their favorite bands. As it is now most musicians survive on touring and merchandising.
Are you saying it's the entire partition or nothing? Well... That sucks.
Actually, it is the user's home directory, not the partition. Each user can use their password and an administrator can optionally set a master password for all accounts. Alternately you can create as many encrypted disk images (which look like folders to the end user) as you want and apply encryption. It is actually quite flexible and all this has been beaten on a while by all the security geeks who have been using OS X for the last few years.
I disagree, I can send the specs for a regular key across the internet just as quickly. It is the ease of copying the data to and from a useful form that is "key" here.
Sheesh. It should be based on land mass and NOT population.
Hmm, what an interesting argument. People pollute in order to supply themselves with power and industrial goods. So if one country that owns lots of unusable land, like Canada, wants to pollute a lot, it can go crazy. But people in countries like japan, with dense populations, should all have to make due with 1/10 the electricity that normal people get. I suppose we could move a lot of things to the "by land mass" model. Voting in the united states for example could be one vote per square mile and everyone currently living in that square mile can hash it out among themselves. Or perhaps food supplies, 210 meals a day per square mile, that should destroy the cities pronto. Sorry, I'm not buying it. The planet belongs to everyone and there is no reason why one individual should have less right to screw it up for their own benefit than any other person.
God help these 'professionals' if a suspect's computer happens to run Linux
I remember reading a while back that when the FBI seizes a macintosh computer they ship it to the Canadian Mounties for data recovery because the FBI does not know how to recover data from macintosh computers. I don't know if that is true, but I would not be surprised.
As for security...I have a hardware firewall. I don't have to use Windows firewall to block ports or any of that shit. Anyone with any sense has a hardware firewall anyway. Also, since XP SP2, the vulnerabilities you speak of are gone anyway.
I'm not talking about vulnerabilities, I'm talking about lousy design. Currently, there are no well known and published vulnerabilities due to the fact that RPC etc. are exposed on the network, that does not change the fact that they are still there. Unknown exploits may well exist or crop up at any time. No one with any sense designs a product so that local services have to run on a network port because it gives crackers a great place to look for holes. I guarantee you there are flaws and they will probably be exploited. And yes I'm talking about Windows XP with Service Pack 2.
Great, you have a hardware firewall. What OS does it run? I bet it is either an embedded OS, BSD, or Linux variant. Don't you feel great knowing you have to buy a second specialty computer to keep your primary computer safe because it's security is so flawed?
There's a big difference between going from 98 to XP and going from XP to the Mac. I presume you're intelligent enough that I don't need to explain why?
There are plenty of differences. Conceptually, however, I don't see much difference at all. Both are upgrades from poorly designed and outdated systems to newer ones that work better and have a lot more, useful features.
Please explain to me why I should spend $2k for a few features that are worth, at most, $50 to me.
I won't argue with how much you have to spend because I don't know what your hardware and software requirements are. Just think, however, next time you upgrade that there is an alternative to buying a new Windows machine or OS. You are putting a $50 value on features you've never used. For me, well OS X saves me an hour of work a day and often more than that. I squander that time here on Slashdot. You'll probably remain a Windows user for a long time and you'll probably rave about all the new Vista features OS X users have been enjoying for the last few years. Why should you switch? I don't know that you should. It all depends upon what you do with your computer and what your specific needs and resources are. I can tell you this though, over the last several years more than half of the security experts I know have switched from Linux and Windows to OS X and plenty of people in other fields. Of all the people I know, none of them have ever switched back to Windows. Why do you suppose that is?
Today I can borrow a key for a few hours and go get a copy made, or I can make an impression of that key in just a minute, cast a model, and spend a few hours with my dremel tool making a duplicate that may or may not be good enough. I can duplicate a USB key in just a few minutes while you're in the bathroom. This just makes it even easier for someone with common off-the-shelf technology to make a copy. It has added functionality, but it is also less reliable and may be a vector for computer viruses to infect your car. Personally, I'll stick with an old fashioned key and a hidden kill switch.
and who look at those who have like the bottom of society who only enlisted because we're unable to suceed at real jobs
He only talks about the national guard and I don't see him saying anything about them being unable to succeed. In fact he speaks of it as what used to be a refuge from the draft for the wealthy. How does that imply they are unable to succeed?
standing on your soapbox when it serves your political purpose
I don't think the previous poster mentioned anything political specifically. He spoke only about what is actually happening and what he thinks is wrong with that. Are you claiming responsibility for those things is the fault of the republican party?
This problem will solve itself as the world moves to faster internet connections. You see, what sells video games right now is a few graphics on the cover and the reputation and branding. Blizzard could still sell games if their retail boxes were plain brown because they have a very good reputation. I predict, however, that games will move more and more to the shareware type model of game sales and "try it before you buy it" as a sales technique. As game sales move more and more to online channels, customers will gravitate to games they can try a few levels of first. This means you can actually sell a game based upon how fun the game play is rather than on the graphics on the box or the reputation. This will open the door to games that are fun and innovative, even if they don't have the best graphics. If nothing else there is always the physical limitations of human perception... eventually better graphics won't even be noticeable. To summarize, this problem will solve itself.
Non-admin works just fine in XP. It can sometimes be an annoying experience because some applications haven't caught up...
Many of those applications are very common and some are written by MS themselves. No one I know runs Windows as non-admin. A new employee here prefers Windows and was set-up as a non-admin. It lasted one day before she had to get admin access to accomplish her job. You can't even install most software unless you're an admin on Windows.
...spend 5 minutes on the web and you will find fantastic freeware xp versions of each app-type you mentioned.
I've actually found that Windows has less useful freeware than either the mac or Linux. I'm sure you can find a text editor, but will still be sub-par because Windows does not support text services.
once again here we have freeware to fill in the blanks (cygwin/perl/etc...)... For non-devs, well they wouldn't care about this either way, would they?
Automator is automated tasks without scripting and yes, non-developers use it. I have a friend who could not write a script to save his life, but he figured out how to use Automator to automatically rename a bunch of images rather than doing it by hand. As for perl, don't you think it's odd you have to install an emulator to get halfway decent scripting. Running Perl scripts is about the only reason cygwin is installed on some of the Windows user's desktops here.
Granted neat apps, but nothing that doesn't have a handful of XP counterparts...
I think the author meant good applications, that are free. Not crappy shareware, half-baked freeware, or expensive proprietary applications. Sorry but Windows just does not compare as far as included applications or available, free applications.
"It doesn't have any services turned on by default" - Have you even tried XP SP2?
Yup. RPC and WMI are both still operating on network ports by default. The firewall is turned on as well, but a firewall should be an extra layer of security, not your only defense. OS X can be plugged in with the firewall disabled, in its default configuration and still not have problems with automated attacks. That's because it does not do stupid things like rely upon a network port for services running offline.
Run as non-admin and everything in the OS is protected. Or do you know of any vulnerabilities we're not aware of?
First, you can't run as non-admin because the environment is practically unusable, especially for a novice user. Second, Since you can't rip out IE without killing Windows explorer and since IE runs at elevated security levels you can be pretty sure any non-admin user will still be able to infect the entire system and destroy it. Does Windows even try to stop local privilege escalation attacks? Last I heard there were a few dozen outstanding.
Have you ever heard of cygwin?
cygwin is great, but it is not exactly integrated into the system, or a first class citizen. It runs in it's own space (which can overlap user space) and it does not exactly allow for integration with other apps. Lets see you pipe data to or from firefox or outlook using cygwin. MacOS X can run Windows in VirtualPC, does that mean it has all the advantages of Windows too?
What do I care if the OS has free/open source components if it works?
Because closed source does not work everywhere and cannot be easily made to do so. Because if something doesn't work, you can fix it or hire someone to do so, whereas with closed source you can ask the vendor and if they don't want to do anything about it you're screwed.
OSX is better because it has nominally prettier UI, and has a few apps built in that in XP you'd have to download and install separately.
Bullshit. OS X is better for many tasks because the architecture is a much better design, it is more functional in dozens of ways, it has UI features and search features that are years ahead, it
Some games are ported to the Mac but MANY are not. In some cases, the games take many months before they are ported: Unreal Tournament 2k3 took over a year to be ported.
Actually it was just under 6 months. And UT2004 was released within a month. What does that prove? It took a year for Escape Velocity to be ported to the PC. I guess if games are your primary concern you should have one of each.
all the things you mention, I can either 1) download software the gives me that functionality, or 2) don't need that functionality.
Of course you don't. Of course you don't need Windows XP either, you can get by with Windows 98. The point is that just off the top of my head I can list a dozen things that are simple as pie on the mac and either impossible or expensive on a PC. And those are just things I use every day. The system-wide services capability of OS X makes it easier to make your whole computer have functionality, rather than have to run a separate application for each little thing. If I want to be able to translate things from german, I install a german translation service and I can use it in my e-mail, chat, IRC, terminals, word processor, web browser, etc. The whole architecture is more stable (I host all our Warcraft3 sessions on my laptop since none of the PCs can seem to do so without either dropping random people or bluescreening due to graphic card driver problems) and more cleanly designed. If I want to install an application, I drag it into any folder on my hard drive. That's it. If I want to uninstall it, I drag it to the trash. In general applications don't require administrative privileges and they certainly don't require total access. I can run as a regular user, install applications in my home directory, and not have to worry that anything I do will ever screw up the computer as a whole. There are no exposed system services, except those I enable, so by default I can run without a firewall between me and the world without being instantly compromised by a internet worm. I can launch applications more quickly, search for everything instantaneously, keep my personal files encrypted and unencrypt them on the fly. Basically, it just works better in many, many ways. Every time I use my PC I try to invoke Expose, because it is just the best way I have ever used to select between many windows. It has become a habit and I don't even bother to minimize windows anymore.
Sure it is not needed, but that does not mean it is not better. You don't need a mouse, or multiple monitors but that does not mean I want to go back to a ten year old system and give them up. Considering how small the delta in price is between macs and pcs, it is no wonder so many computing professionals are moving to the mac. Sorry, but Windows has just fallen several years behind the technology curve and all your excuses do not change that.
I was burning a CD, printing out my resume, and reading my gMail. At the same time, Thunderbird was checking mail in the background. My resume was in PDF being printed from Adobe. Nero is my preferred burning software on Windows.
It is interesting to note what applications you mention. Nero uses a lot of RAM, but little CPU and no network. The speed at which it operates is regulated by the speed of your burner and available RAM. All the other applications you mention are restricted by your network speed, not by the applications themselves. While Windows XP does not do a great job of distributing network resources, I think it's major failing is in distributing CPU resources properly and maintaining proper resources for the Windows GUI environment. Having a lot of RAM and using applications that do not tax the CPU will result in reasonable performance, but having less RAM or CPU than is required by your task (like doing any task that actually uses all the CPU it can get for a period of time) will result in a horrible user experience.
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If a person has correct answer but got it only by mistake then what good is it?
Well, it is still the right answer. Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good. I guess the answer to your question gets into some muddy philosophical area. Do you want to be on the plane with the expert pilot or the luckiest man on earth?
Enough with that mumbo jumbo though... I agree that multiple choice is not a very good method for determining how well a given student is doing at math or in CS.
I've always had a strong dislike for multiple choice and true/false testing. Taking those tests is often more of an exercise in test taking than it is in the subject matter. A good test taker can eliminate a good portion of the answers right away and use fairly intuitive psychology to improve the odds of guessing correctly.
What ever happened to demonstrating competence in a field? Forget multiple choice and true/false. Ask your students to actually solve applied math problems or actually write some code (or pseudo code). Maybe you can't do as much testing that way and maybe you can't shorten the time it takes to grade the papers but at least you will be testing something worthwhile.
Sorry for the rant but after having survived more than a decade of "education" that consisted primarily of memorize foo and the regurgitate, I'm fairly traumatized by the horror that is the educational system. I learned orders of magnitude more useful information by simply reading everything and anything and trying to apply what I learned to my pet projects. I took one too many tests where I knew several multiple choice answers where justifiable and "right" depending upon unspecified information not contained in the question and having to guess what the test author thought the correct answer was. Multiple choice, true/false, and automated testing are big indicators of a "fast food" mentality and I'm firmly against that sort of foolishness. Grumble, grumble, etc.
They should not put anything up until the site is 100% cross-browser compatible.
This is called a straw man argument. No one asserted this except you. People are angry because a system that should be working and can easily be made to work was designed improperly and people who really need it to work are suffering as a result.
What should be done about this? Well whomever was responsible for setting up this site in this manner (whether it was the developer or the manager's decision is unknown) should be asked to make a public apology, fired from their job, and blacklisted from ever developing a government funded site. After that and after any ensuing lawsuits are settled maybe other web developers will actually start doing the right thing.
Yes, absolutely, and for the most part they all interoperate fine, but they're all fundamentally using the same technology - they're all using the same protocols etc. Microsoft approaches it all entirely differently.
You've got that much right, MS approaches it all differently. What usually happens is a new technology emerges from several places. This technology is hampered by the fact that all the different ways of doing it do not work together. The different implementers get together and come to a consensus. They write an official open protocol that is not owned by anyone. Usually at this point MS does not have an implementation although they are often a member of these committees. After everyone signs off on the new protocol they all go back to their respective projects and companies and implement the standard.
...Everyone except MS of course. They go back and write something completely different and closed, or if the market is already entrenched with the new standard something close to the standard but that breaks the standard in important ways. Often they patent those ways. Then they bundle this new protocol or standard with Windows ensuring that no one can sell a competing product unless they have an OS to bundle it with. This makes the MS "broken version" the new de-facto industry standard.
You claim the world is better off with the real standard and the MS standard. I disagree very strongly. There is nothing wrong with competing standards as they drive competition, but when one of them is bundled with a monopoly product, competition is bypassed. How many systems run half-assed, insecure, and buggy protocols because of this illegal behavior on the part of MS? It has slowed down the progress of the industry and killed dozens of new innovations. When the only competitors in a space are companies in that space indirectly (i.e. selling services with an OS, computers with an OS, or giving away an OS for free) instead of directly competing with the monopoly, you know the competitive market is broken. Tabbed browsing windows were introduced more than six years ago and have been standard on every browser but IE for years. 90% of people still do not have the benefit of this improvement because of MS. IE partially implements five year old standards for markup and as a result the whole web is half a decade behind technologically. This applies not only to web standards and protocols, but across the entire software space.
Competing standards are fine. MS does not allow for competing standards or competition in general. They use every dirty trick including breaking the law and bribing politicians to insure that there is no competition and we all suffer for it while they get rich. Making excuses for the company that has single handedly done more damage to the software industry than any other is astounding. Do you still want to be stuck using the same outdated technology in another five years?
but when you have a mindset as strong as say Apache it is hard to make any independent headway.
I disagree. I mean sure it is always hard to oust an incumbent because it takes effort to switch to something new. If, however, someone made a better fork of Apache I'm firmly convinced people would switch. If you don't believe me take a look at XFree86. What Apache has more than anything else is reputation because people respect the quality of the work they have done. It is in no way a monopoly and there is no technological lock-in. Apache runs on multiple OSs, uses open protocols, and is open to be modified. Products chosen based upon quality and upon the reputation of the authors is a very good thing and is certainly not a monopoly.
It's just business. Microsoft aren't alone in this sort of thing. Do you think IBM open everything of theirs to their competitors?
For the most part actually, yes they do. IBM has been pretty good about working with open standards for quite a while.
What has this got to do with anything?
It seems like a valid point to me. If MS does not want people to be able to see their protocols they must have a reason. Maybe that reason is to stop interoperability or maybe it is because they are full of security holes or even stolen code. It is perfectly reasonable to speculate as to their motives.
I can't see how it would be a good thing. Replacing one monopoly with another is hardly sensible is it, regardless of how that new monopoly behaves?
You can't have a monopoly on Linux. Thats is most of the point. As open source it will never be locked to one vendor. With an MS monopoly customers are subject to the whims of MS. They pay what MS wants or go without and they are restricted to the features MS is willing to allow. With Linux if one vendor charges too much, you can go with a different vendor and prices reflect the fact that there is competition. If you want functionality added/fixed you can do it yourself or hire anyone you want to do it. You seem to have a very skewed idea of what a monopoly is.
2) Disclosure of an exploit for a vulnerability... Type 2 disclosures should be shunned by everyone. These present an immediate hazard to end users and provide no conceivable benefit to anyone
I disagree that this second type of disclosure is never warranted, but I believe there need to be some serious mitigating circumstances. For example, if your own network or networks critical to the "good of the people" (think social security database) are being attacked or compromised using an uncommon and largely ignored exploit and the vendor refuses to acknowledge a problem or fix the problem it may well be warranted. Publishing exploit code that is easy for the average script kiddy to make a worm from is sometimes the only practical way to draw enough attention to a vulnerability to get it fixed. Microsoft may not care if your network is under attack and they may not care if someone is harvesting all the social security records from a government owned computer, but they do care if another worm screws up 5% of their installed user base, gives them another beating by the press, and costs them real money for support. That said, such instances are very rare.
I remember some old Macintosh games where the space bar would pause and pull up a dummy spreadsheet in the game window. It was great feature.
And yes the cost hydrogen will be more expensive than the cost of refining oil. You can only get Hydrogen by cracking Natural Gas or buy using a LOT more energy that you get from hydrogen to split water. And before some idiot says that Moore's law will fix that in the future... The Law of Thermodynamics says that is the way it will always be.
We live on a giant ball of molten metals with a thin crust of solidified rock on top. This ball is orbiting an even larger ball of incredibly hot gasses and plasma. We get most of our energy by burning little bits of burnable material scattered about the surface of our ball.
...and you have the gall to say "The Law of Thermodynamics" (I hope you meant laws) will insure that creating hydrogen will always be more expensive than refining oil. Some people use science to find answers. Some people cite "science" as an authority to support their opinions. The first group are called "scientists." The second group is called "irrational." Guess which group you are in. Just a tip, whenever you hear someone use the phrase "the way it will always be" you can be pretty sure they aren't a competent scientist.
It's not entirely clear what you mean, but I'm assuming you're refering to a company like PayPal "getting a piece of the pie" by facilitating those transactions of a buck or two.
I don't think that is what the previous poster was getting at, at all. Previous to the iTunes music store it was very hard to buy a song online because no one was willing to process that small of credit card payments. Apple made a deal and now you can buy one song for one dollar on your credit card. Several other music services have tried with varying amounts of success to make a similar bargain with the credit card companies.
The only way to get your songs for sale on the iTunes music store is for you to sign with a record label that has an agreement with Apple. There are some great independent record labels that treat artists fairly, but very few them ever gets anything played on the radio, on MTV, etc. The MPAA record companies can get anything they want on MTV or the radio and use that as their own marketing tool. Other than that only songs that are already very popular (the indy hits) ever make it into major advertising channels. The MPAA record companies are notorious for screwing over any artist who signs with them. A great many bands with moderate popularity and record sales actually end up owing money to the record label, rather than profiting from their work and success. Only the very rare top hits really make money with such a deal. The main reason anyone signs with them is because it is one of the few ways to get your music heard and sold to a large audience. If you want to be famous (that's most musicians) you sign your deal with the devil and hope for the best.
What I believe the previous poster was getting at was that with micro-payments becoming a reality in general, bands can now distribute entirely online and make a profit. This opens the road for moderately popular musicians to self-publish and self-promote without paying most or all of their profits to the industry giants and without going into debt or signing away their next several years worth of copyrights. By "big companies" I d guess he meant "record companies" who don't really add any value, but suck up the majority of the profits in the record industry.
Hmm, I'm not so sure about this. I know the search engine I implemented for the last large web site I was working on searched text, HTML, PDF, and Word files by default. On my workstation, spotlight searches the contents of Word files as well as many other formats. I guess since those are the only two places I perform searches I don't see what the problem is. I'm not convinced there is a problem with searching the contents of Word files.
Why should China get away with pollution because they have an irresponsibly large population?
China is not a person and does not have any human rights. You are arguing that Harry and Sally should be able to make more pollution than Yu, Xang, Fen, Li, and Park because Harry and Sally happen to be born in an area where more people are concentrated closely together. You claim the problem is the Chinese chose to have lots of children, but the people you are punishing did not choose to be born, nor did they choose how many brothers and sisters they would have. It is unethical to punish people for decisions made before they were born. Sorry, you're still wrong. There is no basis for an individual to have more right to screw up the planet than any other, regardless of where they are born or what race they are. People cause pollution, not land. The amount of pollution permissible should be calculated for each person, not for each square mile of land.
What you call a bug, I call a feature. I like being able to build a box without having an unnecessary GUI adding overhead and unneeded complexity. If I'm building a box that is destined to sit under the hood of some machinery and has to be 100% reliable and as fast and stable as possible why would I want to add an unnecessary GUI? The inability of Windows to be customized and have parts removed is a huge weakness, not an advantage.
Having the same GUI API as other distributions and UNIX like systems is not a core feature, it is an interoperability feature. Solaris, RedHat Linux, OpenBSD, MacOS X, etc. all have had consistent GUI APIs for years. Sure some of them also support other GUI APIs and they don't have the same GUI API as one another, but then again, Windows doesn't have the same GUI API as any of these others either. Complaining that a given Linux distro and an SGI machine don't have same GUI API is like complaining a given version of Windows and Amigas don't have the same GUI APIs. If you want to argue about who has better support for cross-platform graphics, well I can run most X-11 based graphics on my Mac OS X machine out of the box, without resorting to an emulator. Can any version of Windows?
You're mostly right, but the mess that is copyright law today certainly contributes to people's attitudes about violating those copyrights. People don't feel bad about downloading songs without paying for them because they don't see it having a meaningful effect upon the artists. If, however, musicians were actually paid the money for those songs a lot of people might feel guilty about "ripping off" their favorite bands. As it is now most musicians survive on touring and merchandising.
Are you saying it's the entire partition or nothing? Well... That sucks.
Actually, it is the user's home directory, not the partition. Each user can use their password and an administrator can optionally set a master password for all accounts. Alternately you can create as many encrypted disk images (which look like folders to the end user) as you want and apply encryption. It is actually quite flexible and all this has been beaten on a while by all the security geeks who have been using OS X for the last few years.
I disagree, I can send the specs for a regular key across the internet just as quickly. It is the ease of copying the data to and from a useful form that is "key" here.
Sheesh. It should be based on land mass and NOT population.
Hmm, what an interesting argument. People pollute in order to supply themselves with power and industrial goods. So if one country that owns lots of unusable land, like Canada, wants to pollute a lot, it can go crazy. But people in countries like japan, with dense populations, should all have to make due with 1/10 the electricity that normal people get. I suppose we could move a lot of things to the "by land mass" model. Voting in the united states for example could be one vote per square mile and everyone currently living in that square mile can hash it out among themselves. Or perhaps food supplies, 210 meals a day per square mile, that should destroy the cities pronto. Sorry, I'm not buying it. The planet belongs to everyone and there is no reason why one individual should have less right to screw it up for their own benefit than any other person.
God help these 'professionals' if a suspect's computer happens to run Linux
I remember reading a while back that when the FBI seizes a macintosh computer they ship it to the Canadian Mounties for data recovery because the FBI does not know how to recover data from macintosh computers. I don't know if that is true, but I would not be surprised.
As for security...I have a hardware firewall. I don't have to use Windows firewall to block ports or any of that shit. Anyone with any sense has a hardware firewall anyway. Also, since XP SP2, the vulnerabilities you speak of are gone anyway.
I'm not talking about vulnerabilities, I'm talking about lousy design. Currently, there are no well known and published vulnerabilities due to the fact that RPC etc. are exposed on the network, that does not change the fact that they are still there. Unknown exploits may well exist or crop up at any time. No one with any sense designs a product so that local services have to run on a network port because it gives crackers a great place to look for holes. I guarantee you there are flaws and they will probably be exploited. And yes I'm talking about Windows XP with Service Pack 2.
Great, you have a hardware firewall. What OS does it run? I bet it is either an embedded OS, BSD, or Linux variant. Don't you feel great knowing you have to buy a second specialty computer to keep your primary computer safe because it's security is so flawed?
There's a big difference between going from 98 to XP and going from XP to the Mac. I presume you're intelligent enough that I don't need to explain why?
There are plenty of differences. Conceptually, however, I don't see much difference at all. Both are upgrades from poorly designed and outdated systems to newer ones that work better and have a lot more, useful features.
Please explain to me why I should spend $2k for a few features that are worth, at most, $50 to me.
I won't argue with how much you have to spend because I don't know what your hardware and software requirements are. Just think, however, next time you upgrade that there is an alternative to buying a new Windows machine or OS. You are putting a $50 value on features you've never used. For me, well OS X saves me an hour of work a day and often more than that. I squander that time here on Slashdot. You'll probably remain a Windows user for a long time and you'll probably rave about all the new Vista features OS X users have been enjoying for the last few years. Why should you switch? I don't know that you should. It all depends upon what you do with your computer and what your specific needs and resources are. I can tell you this though, over the last several years more than half of the security experts I know have switched from Linux and Windows to OS X and plenty of people in other fields. Of all the people I know, none of them have ever switched back to Windows. Why do you suppose that is?
Today I can borrow a key for a few hours and go get a copy made, or I can make an impression of that key in just a minute, cast a model, and spend a few hours with my dremel tool making a duplicate that may or may not be good enough. I can duplicate a USB key in just a few minutes while you're in the bathroom. This just makes it even easier for someone with common off-the-shelf technology to make a copy. It has added functionality, but it is also less reliable and may be a vector for computer viruses to infect your car. Personally, I'll stick with an old fashioned key and a hidden kill switch.
and who look at those who have like the bottom of society who only enlisted because we're unable to suceed at real jobs
He only talks about the national guard and I don't see him saying anything about them being unable to succeed. In fact he speaks of it as what used to be a refuge from the draft for the wealthy. How does that imply they are unable to succeed?
standing on your soapbox when it serves your political purpose
I don't think the previous poster mentioned anything political specifically. He spoke only about what is actually happening and what he thinks is wrong with that. Are you claiming responsibility for those things is the fault of the republican party?
This problem will solve itself as the world moves to faster internet connections. You see, what sells video games right now is a few graphics on the cover and the reputation and branding. Blizzard could still sell games if their retail boxes were plain brown because they have a very good reputation. I predict, however, that games will move more and more to the shareware type model of game sales and "try it before you buy it" as a sales technique. As game sales move more and more to online channels, customers will gravitate to games they can try a few levels of first. This means you can actually sell a game based upon how fun the game play is rather than on the graphics on the box or the reputation. This will open the door to games that are fun and innovative, even if they don't have the best graphics. If nothing else there is always the physical limitations of human perception... eventually better graphics won't even be noticeable. To summarize, this problem will solve itself.
Non-admin works just fine in XP. It can sometimes be an annoying experience because some applications haven't caught up...
Many of those applications are very common and some are written by MS themselves. No one I know runs Windows as non-admin. A new employee here prefers Windows and was set-up as a non-admin. It lasted one day before she had to get admin access to accomplish her job. You can't even install most software unless you're an admin on Windows.
I've actually found that Windows has less useful freeware than either the mac or Linux. I'm sure you can find a text editor, but will still be sub-par because Windows does not support text services.
once again here we have freeware to fill in the blanks (cygwin/perl/etc...)... For non-devs, well they wouldn't care about this either way, would they?
Automator is automated tasks without scripting and yes, non-developers use it. I have a friend who could not write a script to save his life, but he figured out how to use Automator to automatically rename a bunch of images rather than doing it by hand. As for perl, don't you think it's odd you have to install an emulator to get halfway decent scripting. Running Perl scripts is about the only reason cygwin is installed on some of the Windows user's desktops here.
Granted neat apps, but nothing that doesn't have a handful of XP counterparts...
I think the author meant good applications, that are free. Not crappy shareware, half-baked freeware, or expensive proprietary applications. Sorry but Windows just does not compare as far as included applications or available, free applications.
"It doesn't have any services turned on by default" - Have you even tried XP SP2?
Yup. RPC and WMI are both still operating on network ports by default. The firewall is turned on as well, but a firewall should be an extra layer of security, not your only defense. OS X can be plugged in with the firewall disabled, in its default configuration and still not have problems with automated attacks. That's because it does not do stupid things like rely upon a network port for services running offline.
Run as non-admin and everything in the OS is protected. Or do you know of any vulnerabilities we're not aware of?
First, you can't run as non-admin because the environment is practically unusable, especially for a novice user. Second, Since you can't rip out IE without killing Windows explorer and since IE runs at elevated security levels you can be pretty sure any non-admin user will still be able to infect the entire system and destroy it. Does Windows even try to stop local privilege escalation attacks? Last I heard there were a few dozen outstanding.
Have you ever heard of cygwin?
cygwin is great, but it is not exactly integrated into the system, or a first class citizen. It runs in it's own space (which can overlap user space) and it does not exactly allow for integration with other apps. Lets see you pipe data to or from firefox or outlook using cygwin. MacOS X can run Windows in VirtualPC, does that mean it has all the advantages of Windows too?
What do I care if the OS has free/open source components if it works?
Because closed source does not work everywhere and cannot be easily made to do so. Because if something doesn't work, you can fix it or hire someone to do so, whereas with closed source you can ask the vendor and if they don't want to do anything about it you're screwed.
OSX is better because it has nominally prettier UI, and has a few apps built in that in XP you'd have to download and install separately.
Bullshit. OS X is better for many tasks because the architecture is a much better design, it is more functional in dozens of ways, it has UI features and search features that are years ahead, it
Some games are ported to the Mac but MANY are not. In some cases, the games take many months before they are ported: Unreal Tournament 2k3 took over a year to be ported.
Actually it was just under 6 months. And UT2004 was released within a month. What does that prove? It took a year for Escape Velocity to be ported to the PC. I guess if games are your primary concern you should have one of each.
all the things you mention, I can either 1) download software the gives me that functionality, or 2) don't need that functionality.
Of course you don't. Of course you don't need Windows XP either, you can get by with Windows 98. The point is that just off the top of my head I can list a dozen things that are simple as pie on the mac and either impossible or expensive on a PC. And those are just things I use every day. The system-wide services capability of OS X makes it easier to make your whole computer have functionality, rather than have to run a separate application for each little thing. If I want to be able to translate things from german, I install a german translation service and I can use it in my e-mail, chat, IRC, terminals, word processor, web browser, etc. The whole architecture is more stable (I host all our Warcraft3 sessions on my laptop since none of the PCs can seem to do so without either dropping random people or bluescreening due to graphic card driver problems) and more cleanly designed. If I want to install an application, I drag it into any folder on my hard drive. That's it. If I want to uninstall it, I drag it to the trash. In general applications don't require administrative privileges and they certainly don't require total access. I can run as a regular user, install applications in my home directory, and not have to worry that anything I do will ever screw up the computer as a whole. There are no exposed system services, except those I enable, so by default I can run without a firewall between me and the world without being instantly compromised by a internet worm. I can launch applications more quickly, search for everything instantaneously, keep my personal files encrypted and unencrypt them on the fly. Basically, it just works better in many, many ways. Every time I use my PC I try to invoke Expose, because it is just the best way I have ever used to select between many windows. It has become a habit and I don't even bother to minimize windows anymore.
Sure it is not needed, but that does not mean it is not better. You don't need a mouse, or multiple monitors but that does not mean I want to go back to a ten year old system and give them up. Considering how small the delta in price is between macs and pcs, it is no wonder so many computing professionals are moving to the mac. Sorry, but Windows has just fallen several years behind the technology curve and all your excuses do not change that.
I was burning a CD, printing out my resume, and reading my gMail. At the same time, Thunderbird was checking mail in the background. My resume was in PDF being printed from Adobe. Nero is my preferred burning software on Windows.
It is interesting to note what applications you mention. Nero uses a lot of RAM, but little CPU and no network. The speed at which it operates is regulated by the speed of your burner and available RAM. All the other applications you mention are restricted by your network speed, not by the applications themselves. While Windows XP does not do a great job of distributing network resources, I think it's major failing is in distributing CPU resources properly and maintaining proper resources for the Windows GUI environment. Having a lot of RAM and using applications that do not tax the CPU will result in reasonable performance, but having less RAM or CPU than is required by your task (like doing any task that actually uses all the CPU it can get for a period of time) will result in a horrible user experience.