Seems to me that if a store wouldn't let me in unless I told them my name was Frank, I'd only tell THAT store that my name was Frank.
Aaah, but you don't know which stores and other buildings won't let you in. Sure you can tell everyone your real name, then walk over to the other door if they won't let you in, but isn't it easier to just tell them "Frank" all the time? Also, non-expert users are going to have a hard time understanding and switching user strings all the time for sites that don't work. A lot of users still don't know what anything other than the back button does and the only sure way to tell that a site is broken when giving the Opera user string is for the user to look at it and see if it is messed up.
P.S. I'm not an Opera user either, but I can sure see why they made this the default.
A simpler explaination is that Windows XP has already been ported to practically every x86 chipset and common peripheral, so it's no surprise it works.
You've got your cart and horse turned around there partner. Every x86 chipset is designed to work with Windows, even if that means the hardware manufacturer has to write code themselves and pay MS to build it in.
I have firefox but it doesn't work with my bank website. I don't blame the bank or Microsoft, I blame Firefox for being the only dung heap on my system that can't render it.
So let me get this straight. You're blaming Firefox for not properly rendering a page that is written to an unpublished specification (Lets call it MS-HTML), with multiple versions, whose only reference implementations are closed source and patented and owned by one of the most litigious companies on the planet and only run on a closed source operating system that the program has been compiled into. And does you banking site specifically check for a user string and deny access on that basis? I'm sure the firefox developers would have no problem making Firefox work with your banking site if that was their goal. Making it work with your banking site and the thousands of other banking sites and the millions of other sites, all of which follow this invisible MS-HTML spec is a lot harder though.
If you banking site is coded to spec then, yup it's Firefox's fault. If not, then it is the banking site's fault. Why the hell do you think we have a published HTML spec in the first place?
Except that if you code to W3C standards it will work in IE and Firefox and a whole lot more besides, so how does it cost more money?
That is true if you code to five-year-old W3C standards and avoid using certain parts of that standards IE still has not implemented. All browsers, but mostly IE, have bugs and parts of the spec they don't implement properly. Coding to the spec just does not work. You really have to code to the spec and then find workarounds for IE and any bugs in other common browsers.
Better is to make it a menu option, where if the site doesn't render well, you just select the option to mimic IE for that site. Best of both worlds.
You may be right. The problem with that is it does not allow for non-power users. The average user will probably never use an option to switch strings when a page does not load. Thus, Opera gets a bad reputation among less technical users. Note I think the impetus for the switch was MS sending broken CSS data to browsers that identified with the opera string, but not to any others. It is debatable as to whether this was intentional or not, but identifying as IE is the only sure way to avoid that sort of sabotage.
Or one can do what I do. Only go to the stores that are reasonable.
You missed or are ignoring part of my analogy. I said stores and government agencies. Sometimes you just don't have a choice. Your options are use the resource online or try to find a physical location. Also, there is the whole Microsoft monopoly to consider. For good or bad a huge number of people are forced to use Windows, and there has already been an incident where MS sent broken data to Opera when it identified itself properly, which is why, I believe, they stopped identifying themselves correctly by default.
Personally, I think you make a good point. Opera should identify itself properly and MS should pay out millions when they send a different, broken set of data to Opera. Government agencies should be forced to support open standards by law and any agency not complying should pay a fine and multiple offenses should result in the vendor that created the pages being blacklisted.
Alas, there is not much the Opera developers can do to make this happen though. Money talks. So long as MS keeps making "campaign contributions" to both parties they are not going to be prosecuted. Even if they were prosecuted and standards were required by law, that will not be the case in many foreign countries, and the world is increasingly becoming a global market, especially on the internet. Opera was forced into a bad choice and I don't blame them at all for misidentifying, nor for complaining about the inaccurate statistics that result.
It's just good business sense. If you could cripple your competitors' OSes while acquiring things you wanted, wouldn't you do it?
It is also blatantly illegal under the Sherman Act in this case. Don't hold you breath until the DOJ takes action though, we also saw them bought and paid for years ago.
I thought *nix was impervient to such lowly things as 'viruses' and 'spyware' and 'self executing email programs' Why then such dismay at King Bills decision to snip support for this product?
This software was mostly used to safely filter out Windows viruses on a UNIX server before they infected the Windows clients the UNIX box was serving. This is something pretty much every large network does and now MS bought and killed some fairly popular tools to do it. The end result, it is now harder to secure the "horribly insecure by default" windows clients that dominate the business world without buying a moderately insecure Windows server to do it. See the issue?
I dare you to back up your statement. Please reference on/. two posts where users asserted that they did not need antivirus software on their UNIX servers to filter out viruses before they could infect Windows machines on their network.
i don't think it will make much difference because I didn't even know virus software for Linux existed and i've been using it for quite a few years.
The software was for Linux/Unix servers and stopped viruses and worms from infecting Windows clients served by them. For example if you run a Linux based mail server to serve a office full of Windows boxes (as many people do) this software filtered viruses out of the e-mail before they could infect the Windows workstations.
No one used these products to stop Linux/Unix machines from getting compromised. This software was run on Linux/Unix machines to stop Windows clients they served from getting compromised. It filled a real need, if one filled by other products as well. MS killed them because it probably plans to integrate the functionality into its Windows server offerings and does not like offering software that does not lock you in to their OS's.
If I ran around telling everyone my name is Frank, would it be a suprise to find out that nobody knows my name?/p>
If many major department stores and government buildings had someone at the door asking, "is your name Frank," and then refusing entry to anyone who said "no" and then most newspapers reported that Frank is the most popular name in the country after asking department stores and government agencies who would be at fault?
It's perfectly valid to question the accuracy of browser market share statistics given the fact that it is often technologically advantageous or even necessary to misidentify.
...NeoOffice or Pages or another decednt[sic] alternative to Word on the OS X platform, but they all ignore a feature of vital importance to professional writers like myself: A halfway decent word count function.
Actually, while the programmers of Pages may not "get it," because it is a native application and because the programmers of OS X do "get it," you can just install a system service that will perform a word count on a selection. In fact there is a set of services called "Wordservice" that is free and includes that functionality as well as many more (like: Reformat, Remove line attachments/endings/links/multiple spaces/multiple feeds/quotes, Trim line beginnings/line endings/lines, Sort lines ascending/descending, Shift left/right, Initial caps of words/sentences, All caps & lowercase, Mac/Windows/Unix line endings, Rotate 13, Straight/Smart Quotes, Encode/Decode tabs, Insert date/date & time/time/contents of path, Speak native/german text). You can download it from here. System services work on all cocoa applications like Word, Pages, Indesign, TextEdit, Safari, etc. They do not work on NeoOffice/J though, which is for me one of it's biggest failings.
...for now Word is the only real option for anyone who earns his or her living as a writer.
OK, now you've really confused me. You're a professional writer who uses Word? I'm so very sorry. For larger, technical works Latex or Framemaker are both much, much better options. They are actually designed to create and layout books, not memos. For writing non-technical works or if you don't need to do layout there are many text editors that don't have the bugs/limitations of word and provide very useful features.
I've worked at a place that used word for actual writing, but we had to give it up very quickly. Larger files (200+ pages with some embedded images) would regularly become corrupted and either fail to save, or save but fail to open. The layout features were incredibly weak and everyone was reduced to using carriage returns to try to place text and objects. I'll tell you right now, I have written professionally as all or a large part of my job for many years and Word is a non-starter.
Everything else is great, and infinitely superior to the old port of OpenOffice.org to the Mac's X11.
Disclaimer: I haven't downloaded and tried this most recent version.
While NeoOffice/J is a usable program, I think stating that everything else is great is a bit of an overstatement. In all the versions I have used to date the startup times are very slow, and the GUI lacks the responsiveness of a native application. Scrolling for example is noticeably choppy. More importantly for me is that it has no support for native system services. My personalized spell checking library, grammar checking, translation services, thesaurus, online searching, scripts, font books, etc. are all unavailable. That right there is a lot of the added value of OS X. For me that makes it a non-starter as a production application. (I do a lot of writing, professionally.)
On the other hand, it does a very good job of opening Word files, the spotlight plug-in is worth downloading all by itself, and you can't beat the price.
Why would Apple be so focused on only selling uberpowerful models? Not to ruffle any feathers, but isn't the primary audience Apple's trying to grab onto right now the average user?
The powermacs are their professional towers. imacs and mac minis are aimed at non-power users.
Taking away freedom and destroying hope for a better tomorrow is not a flaw for you? I am sure you have never waited in line for 10 hours to get a piece of meat, right?
Hold on there. I agree with your post for the most part but correlation is not causation. Communism is not a form of government, only an economic model. It has been unfortunately paired with corrupt democracies and oligarchies in recent history. In truth neither capitalism nor communism is a workable system. Pretty much every government on earth is implementing some mix of capitalism and socialism. There are plenty of examples of corrupt democracies with horrible, degrading living conditions. The long and short of it is, communism seems to fail more often as economies get larger and capitalism fails more often as economies get smaller. The competitive and innovative advantages of capitalism are useless when applied to very small economies and result in an overabundance of duplicated effort. The collaborative and gestalt advantages of communism become to easily hijacked as economies become large an unwieldy, making profiteering and misinformation too easy.
People are greedy, corrupt, power hungry, stupid, lazy, and downright evil. They are also kind, generous, brilliant, helpful, hard working, determined, and caring. Building a system that capitalizes upon the latter qualities while still buffering against and accounting for the former is not easy. In truth, I think probably a series of communist cells not more than a few hundred thousand people all competing with each other, trading with one another, with free movement between them and with a consistent, democratic government would make for a good utopian experiment.
Eventually the system will probably find a balance, or we will all die in a cataclysmic event. Time will tell.
The only new argument you have presented is that multiple companies will duplicate effort and not be as efficient as a single MS. I think you are wrong. Your argument is the same one used to promote communism. In theory having one company control all the food production or all the car manufacture prevents duplication of effort and makes the system more efficient. In some cases it actually works. In reality, however, in most instances as soon as a company reaches any size and does not have to compete if becomes catastrophically inefficient. More money is spent by MS buying up competitors and killing them off than on building new products. If MS is efficient now why does it take them 7 years to put out a new version of their OS? Why does it take them 5 years to add tabs to their browser or a pop-up blocker? Mind you this is while they spend more money on R&D than any other. The answer is, they are not efficient because they have no incentive to be. Without competition they stagnate and so does the industry they control.
You also mention that you think open source will win in the long term. That may be true and it may be beneficial to society as a whole, but it does not mean we should ignore the abuses going on now from MS. You might as well argue the king is a homicidal maniac who eats babies, but let's not try to stop him since what he is doing inspires the democratic revolutionaries, and making the government democratic will be good in the long term, even if just getting the prince in control would be better than what we have now. My ethics and sense of pragmatism are at odds with "evil for the greater good" arguments.
there are far more exploits out there that require user interaction to install than those that can remotely install themselves.
Who cares? Most machines that are compromised are done automatically with no user intervention. It is a bigger problem for more people and one more easily solved.
getting people to patch their software
You don't think that was included in "make sure that fix reaches all users?"
The "information" necessary to figure out whether something is legitimate or malicious is not difficult to obtain
Nonsense. As you said what is malicious is a matter of each user's perspective. I have yet to see an easy way to find out what every piece of software I buy (let alone that I download) does that I might think is malicious. Does Adobe pagemaker randomly connect to some hardcoded server in Europe? Is that an anti-piracy feature or a backdoor someone built in? What about the little weather applet I download, why does it need access to some of files IE uses? Is it just using them to access the internet or render something or is it grabbing pop-up ads?Any information on the internet may or may not be correct. It could be outright lies or misinformation.
It would also result in a *massive* usability hit. I doubt people are going to want to go back to the days of having to manually save things like jpegs and PDFs off to another directory somewhere just so they can have a quick look at it.
You' mistaking my statement. Their is no reason a trusted application, like your PDF/image viewer cannot have access to your web cache and the files in your download directory. What I said was that attachments would not have access to your other files or the internet until you run them and specifically grant them that privilege.
I'd say it's identical to the situation that exists now where a dialog box pops up - defaulting to the equivalent of "No" - whenever a user tries to open a "risky" attachment.
No it is not identical. For most users the current dialogue asks OK or Cancel (which is nearly meaningless to them) and they have been conditioned to always click OK. Most users don't even realize that the computer is asking a question, they just think clicking OK a lot is what they have to do to make it work. Even for those users that do understand worms and that they are taking a risk the choice presented is to run it and take their chances or just not run it. Since the user obviously wants to run it, this is not sufficient. What I want to do is let the user run anything they want, but then in the rare case a program wants to access their home directory or or the internet tell the user it wants to and let the user choose if it can (framing the question in plain english).
Application Happy Bunny Game wants access to read and overwrite your personal files: (deny access) (Let it read and write your personal files).
The application would run in any case and if it dies when it can't access denied resources the OS should handle informing the user why. With this option I can run the aforementioned Adobe Pagemaker, but still tell the computer not to let it connect to the internet. (As opposed to just not running it which you seem to think is sufficient.)
Where do save games go ? User preferences ? How can the game taked advantage of OS capabilities like DirectX if it can't access anything except its own files ?
A good default is to let an application access any files it creates (which most OSs know anyway). Then it does not matter where your preferences and saved games go. Alternately, you could go with directory based application system, like OS X, where the preferences and saved games can be saved within the game itself as a sub-file. It is much neater anyway. As for direct-X and similar technologies a clean OS design should offer services and audio and graphic rendering to the applications and longhorn will have a built in 2D/3D modeling environment that can already capitaliz
I just downloaded this new spreadsheet program and my powerbook feels much snappier now!
The funny thing is, due to dynamically linked libraries, a new dot version of a library included with a spreadsheet really could make things "snappier" in other applications. It won't... but it technically could.
Re:Automatic DDoS mitigation at backbone level
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Zombie Report By ISP
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email the customer automatically with a message to access a web link with a cleaning program attached.
Would you trust an e-mail with a link supposedly from your ISP that goes to a page and offers software for download?
Either the cleaning program gets run, no problem, or the customer is busy and the zombie is blocked, no problem.
...or the customer uses a different e-mail address than you sent to and you just shut down a paying customer. Or the customer just assumes the internet is down (as it often is for end users with unreliable ISPs). And how do you know which cleaning program a user should run? Based upon network activity there is little difference between many worms, but a lot of difference in how a worm is uninstalled. And what about new worm variants whose activity can be detected but there is no cleaning program for? And what happens when a worm spoofs network activity for a large number of customers who aren't infected?
The problem is not as simple as you claim and ISPs are worried about two things. Firsts thousands of phone calls asking why the network is not working or what they should do about the worm, or can you send someone out to remove it, or can you walk me through fixing it, or what is an internet? Second, paying customers leaving because of the hassle. They don't care if they have a worm or whatever, it is too expensive to have someone fix it and they don't feel confident doing it themselves so they just go to a competing ISP.
Maybe none of these things would turn out to be problems, but most ISPs do have a list and can generate a new one on demand and some of them have or have had pilot projects to test a system like you propose. I don't know of any major ones that are actually implementing it on large scale though and I suspect there are reasons for that.
by that definition OSX is a monopoly in Apple computers and they shouldn't be allowed to bundle...
First, bundling is only illegal when you have a monopoly. Second, Apple sells computers with an OS and some applications; that is their product. Dell sells computers with and OS and some applications. Sun sells computers with an OS and some applications. So do hundreds of other companies. You are mistaken in your assertion.
No, the problem isn't *remote takeovers* - they're quite rare (relatively speaking). The problem is users deliberately (albeit usually in ignorance) installing software locally.
You are mistaken. Worms that take over machines with no user intervention required use up more bandwidth on the internet between propagation and DoS attacks than ones that require user intervention. (At least over the last day and over the last month according to the reports I have in front of me.)
That does not matter though. The way to stop automated worms and exploits is simple, fix the vulnerabilities and make sure that fix reaches all users. The hard part is providing users with the tools and information they need to deal with an event that may be a phishing attack or may be a valid application/message/attachement/file.
How useful do you think a piece of software is going to be if it can neither access data on the local machine nor make network connections ?
That all depends upon the application. For example, if my OS were to sandbox, by default all incoming attachments on mail messages and allow them access to nothing except themselves unless the user explicitly allowed it, the vast majority of e-mail worms would fail. The tiny percentage of people who receive programs via e-mail and want those programs to be able to access either the internet or their files would have to deal with clicking another button. I'd say that is pretty reasonable wouldn't you?
How many games need access to the internet? Some certainly, but most people still don't play online games. So when a user downloads a game and installs it the OS should default to installing it with a given ACL and allow the user to easily change it. Select (game) (internet game) (office application) (other). The first can access only its own files, the second its own files and the internet, the third your documents, its own files but not the internet, and the last you'd have to specify.
Old versions of Word used to throw an error that said something like, "This document has macros enabled and may contain a computer virus. Are you sure you want to open it? (ok) (cancel)" What it needed were the options (open and run macros) and (open but don't let it fuck up anything on my system). I know people who would gladly have paid thousands of dollars for such an option. The problem was, they were not given that level of control. Right now when a user installs an application, unless they are an expert, their options are "don't run it" or "let it do anything it wants to my computer including mailing porn to my grandmother and erasing all my tax information." That is a big, big problem. There needs to be a third, sane option.
Security and usability are inversely proportioned. Increase one and you reduce the other.
While often true, and probably true in this instance, this statement is not a truism. Fixing a vulnerability that is invisible to an end user increases the security of the system without making it any less usable. We really really need some sane, and easily understood generic permissions for applications and objects presented to an end-user that may be applications. By default most games I install should not be allowed to touch my personal files and most office applications should not be able to access the internet. And my mother should be able to tell the computer that without consulting a manual.
Part of the reason MS is so successful is because they are monopoly they can charge much higher prices than a free market can support. I suspect prices for Windows (both versions) would probably drop drastically as they had to compete with each other. The multiple companies would have to change their way of business (which is good since it is illegal) and a lot of the waste buying dozens of companies a year just to kill off their products would no longer be a good market proposition.
Your argument about their share prices going down is pretty obvious. It's like if a bunch of companies owned mostly by the mafia suddenly have all the Dons arrested. Sure the value is going to go down since the illegal activity has been interrupted, but that is not a reasonable argument for not stopping the illegal activity. And if you want to argue overall market effects, what will the effect of half-priced Windows be for the operating costs of every company that runs it in the entire world? We're not eliminating money here, just moving the power back to the market and no longer siphoning quite as many billions from the world economy and spending it to halt all progress in the computing field.
I know politicians are really poor at looking at things from a long term perspective, but doing this is actually a win for the U.S. economy. In the short term less money is sucked to the U.S., but in the long term pretty much every major foreign company and government is pirating Windows now and looking at a way to replace it tomorrow (usually with Linux). Breaking up the Windows monopoly might actually make some of these foreign companies/nations rethink moving away from Windows. Right now an American monopoly with a horrible reputation is a non-starter for a long term supplier, but a number of potential American companies competing with each other is a bit more reasonable.
And I frankly don't see what splitting up Microsoft would accomplish. Instead of one monopoly you'd have four.
I hope that was a joke. Two companies each with rights to the Windows source code, but not the code to Windows media player, MS office etc. When Dell wants to put Windows on it's computers it has two competing bidders. And the products diverge adding different features. Likewise with the applications.
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Seems to me that if a store wouldn't let me in unless I told them my name was Frank, I'd only tell THAT store that my name was Frank.
Aaah, but you don't know which stores and other buildings won't let you in. Sure you can tell everyone your real name, then walk over to the other door if they won't let you in, but isn't it easier to just tell them "Frank" all the time? Also, non-expert users are going to have a hard time understanding and switching user strings all the time for sites that don't work. A lot of users still don't know what anything other than the back button does and the only sure way to tell that a site is broken when giving the Opera user string is for the user to look at it and see if it is messed up.
P.S. I'm not an Opera user either, but I can sure see why they made this the default.
A simpler explaination is that Windows XP has already been ported to practically every x86 chipset and common peripheral, so it's no surprise it works.
You've got your cart and horse turned around there partner. Every x86 chipset is designed to work with Windows, even if that means the hardware manufacturer has to write code themselves and pay MS to build it in.
I have firefox but it doesn't work with my bank website. I don't blame the bank or Microsoft, I blame Firefox for being the only dung heap on my system that can't render it.
So let me get this straight. You're blaming Firefox for not properly rendering a page that is written to an unpublished specification (Lets call it MS-HTML), with multiple versions, whose only reference implementations are closed source and patented and owned by one of the most litigious companies on the planet and only run on a closed source operating system that the program has been compiled into. And does you banking site specifically check for a user string and deny access on that basis? I'm sure the firefox developers would have no problem making Firefox work with your banking site if that was their goal. Making it work with your banking site and the thousands of other banking sites and the millions of other sites, all of which follow this invisible MS-HTML spec is a lot harder though.
If you banking site is coded to spec then, yup it's Firefox's fault. If not, then it is the banking site's fault. Why the hell do you think we have a published HTML spec in the first place?
Except that if you code to W3C standards it will work in IE and Firefox and a whole lot more besides, so how does it cost more money?
That is true if you code to five-year-old W3C standards and avoid using certain parts of that standards IE still has not implemented. All browsers, but mostly IE, have bugs and parts of the spec they don't implement properly. Coding to the spec just does not work. You really have to code to the spec and then find workarounds for IE and any bugs in other common browsers.
Better is to make it a menu option, where if the site doesn't render well, you just select the option to mimic IE for that site. Best of both worlds.
You may be right. The problem with that is it does not allow for non-power users. The average user will probably never use an option to switch strings when a page does not load. Thus, Opera gets a bad reputation among less technical users. Note I think the impetus for the switch was MS sending broken CSS data to browsers that identified with the opera string, but not to any others. It is debatable as to whether this was intentional or not, but identifying as IE is the only sure way to avoid that sort of sabotage.
Or one can do what I do. Only go to the stores that are reasonable.
You missed or are ignoring part of my analogy. I said stores and government agencies. Sometimes you just don't have a choice. Your options are use the resource online or try to find a physical location. Also, there is the whole Microsoft monopoly to consider. For good or bad a huge number of people are forced to use Windows, and there has already been an incident where MS sent broken data to Opera when it identified itself properly, which is why, I believe, they stopped identifying themselves correctly by default.
Personally, I think you make a good point. Opera should identify itself properly and MS should pay out millions when they send a different, broken set of data to Opera. Government agencies should be forced to support open standards by law and any agency not complying should pay a fine and multiple offenses should result in the vendor that created the pages being blacklisted.
Alas, there is not much the Opera developers can do to make this happen though. Money talks. So long as MS keeps making "campaign contributions" to both parties they are not going to be prosecuted. Even if they were prosecuted and standards were required by law, that will not be the case in many foreign countries, and the world is increasingly becoming a global market, especially on the internet. Opera was forced into a bad choice and I don't blame them at all for misidentifying, nor for complaining about the inaccurate statistics that result.
It's just good business sense. If you could cripple your competitors' OSes while acquiring things you wanted, wouldn't you do it?
It is also blatantly illegal under the Sherman Act in this case. Don't hold you breath until the DOJ takes action though, we also saw them bought and paid for years ago.
I thought *nix was impervient to such lowly things as 'viruses' and 'spyware' and 'self executing email programs' Why then such dismay at King Bills decision to snip support for this product?
This software was mostly used to safely filter out Windows viruses on a UNIX server before they infected the Windows clients the UNIX box was serving. This is something pretty much every large network does and now MS bought and killed some fairly popular tools to do it. The end result, it is now harder to secure the "horribly insecure by default" windows clients that dominate the business world without buying a moderately insecure Windows server to do it. See the issue?
I dare you to back up your statement. Please reference on /. two posts where users asserted that they did not need antivirus software on their UNIX servers to filter out viruses before they could infect Windows machines on their network.
i don't think it will make much difference because I didn't even know virus software for Linux existed and i've been using it for quite a few years.
The software was for Linux/Unix servers and stopped viruses and worms from infecting Windows clients served by them. For example if you run a Linux based mail server to serve a office full of Windows boxes (as many people do) this software filtered viruses out of the e-mail before they could infect the Windows workstations.
No one used these products to stop Linux/Unix machines from getting compromised. This software was run on Linux/Unix machines to stop Windows clients they served from getting compromised. It filled a real need, if one filled by other products as well. MS killed them because it probably plans to integrate the functionality into its Windows server offerings and does not like offering software that does not lock you in to their OS's.
If I ran around telling everyone my name is Frank, would it be a suprise to find out that nobody knows my name?/p>
If many major department stores and government buildings had someone at the door asking, "is your name Frank," and then refusing entry to anyone who said "no" and then most newspapers reported that Frank is the most popular name in the country after asking department stores and government agencies who would be at fault?
It's perfectly valid to question the accuracy of browser market share statistics given the fact that it is often technologically advantageous or even necessary to misidentify.
Actually, while the programmers of Pages may not "get it," because it is a native application and because the programmers of OS X do "get it," you can just install a system service that will perform a word count on a selection. In fact there is a set of services called "Wordservice" that is free and includes that functionality as well as many more (like: Reformat, Remove line attachments/endings/links/multiple spaces/multiple feeds/quotes, Trim line beginnings/line endings/lines, Sort lines ascending/descending, Shift left/right, Initial caps of words/sentences, All caps & lowercase, Mac/Windows/Unix line endings, Rotate 13, Straight/Smart Quotes, Encode/Decode tabs, Insert date/date & time/time/contents of path, Speak native/german text). You can download it from here. System services work on all cocoa applications like Word, Pages, Indesign, TextEdit, Safari, etc. They do not work on NeoOffice/J though, which is for me one of it's biggest failings.
OK, now you've really confused me. You're a professional writer who uses Word? I'm so very sorry. For larger, technical works Latex or Framemaker are both much, much better options. They are actually designed to create and layout books, not memos. For writing non-technical works or if you don't need to do layout there are many text editors that don't have the bugs/limitations of word and provide very useful features.
I've worked at a place that used word for actual writing, but we had to give it up very quickly. Larger files (200+ pages with some embedded images) would regularly become corrupted and either fail to save, or save but fail to open. The layout features were incredibly weak and everyone was reduced to using carriage returns to try to place text and objects. I'll tell you right now, I have written professionally as all or a large part of my job for many years and Word is a non-starter.
Everything else is great, and infinitely superior to the old port of OpenOffice.org to the Mac's X11.
Disclaimer: I haven't downloaded and tried this most recent version.
While NeoOffice/J is a usable program, I think stating that everything else is great is a bit of an overstatement. In all the versions I have used to date the startup times are very slow, and the GUI lacks the responsiveness of a native application. Scrolling for example is noticeably choppy. More importantly for me is that it has no support for native system services. My personalized spell checking library, grammar checking, translation services, thesaurus, online searching, scripts, font books, etc. are all unavailable. That right there is a lot of the added value of OS X. For me that makes it a non-starter as a production application. (I do a lot of writing, professionally.)
On the other hand, it does a very good job of opening Word files, the spotlight plug-in is worth downloading all by itself, and you can't beat the price.
Why would Apple be so focused on only selling uberpowerful models? Not to ruffle any feathers, but isn't the primary audience Apple's trying to grab onto right now the average user?
The powermacs are their professional towers. imacs and mac minis are aimed at non-power users.
Taking away freedom and destroying hope for a better tomorrow is not a flaw for you? I am sure you have never waited in line for 10 hours to get a piece of meat, right?
Hold on there. I agree with your post for the most part but correlation is not causation. Communism is not a form of government, only an economic model. It has been unfortunately paired with corrupt democracies and oligarchies in recent history. In truth neither capitalism nor communism is a workable system. Pretty much every government on earth is implementing some mix of capitalism and socialism. There are plenty of examples of corrupt democracies with horrible, degrading living conditions. The long and short of it is, communism seems to fail more often as economies get larger and capitalism fails more often as economies get smaller. The competitive and innovative advantages of capitalism are useless when applied to very small economies and result in an overabundance of duplicated effort. The collaborative and gestalt advantages of communism become to easily hijacked as economies become large an unwieldy, making profiteering and misinformation too easy.
People are greedy, corrupt, power hungry, stupid, lazy, and downright evil. They are also kind, generous, brilliant, helpful, hard working, determined, and caring. Building a system that capitalizes upon the latter qualities while still buffering against and accounting for the former is not easy. In truth, I think probably a series of communist cells not more than a few hundred thousand people all competing with each other, trading with one another, with free movement between them and with a consistent, democratic government would make for a good utopian experiment.
Eventually the system will probably find a balance, or we will all die in a cataclysmic event. Time will tell.
The only new argument you have presented is that multiple companies will duplicate effort and not be as efficient as a single MS. I think you are wrong. Your argument is the same one used to promote communism. In theory having one company control all the food production or all the car manufacture prevents duplication of effort and makes the system more efficient. In some cases it actually works. In reality, however, in most instances as soon as a company reaches any size and does not have to compete if becomes catastrophically inefficient. More money is spent by MS buying up competitors and killing them off than on building new products. If MS is efficient now why does it take them 7 years to put out a new version of their OS? Why does it take them 5 years to add tabs to their browser or a pop-up blocker? Mind you this is while they spend more money on R&D than any other. The answer is, they are not efficient because they have no incentive to be. Without competition they stagnate and so does the industry they control.
You also mention that you think open source will win in the long term. That may be true and it may be beneficial to society as a whole, but it does not mean we should ignore the abuses going on now from MS. You might as well argue the king is a homicidal maniac who eats babies, but let's not try to stop him since what he is doing inspires the democratic revolutionaries, and making the government democratic will be good in the long term, even if just getting the prince in control would be better than what we have now. My ethics and sense of pragmatism are at odds with "evil for the greater good" arguments.
there are far more exploits out there that require user interaction to install than those that can remotely install themselves.
Who cares? Most machines that are compromised are done automatically with no user intervention. It is a bigger problem for more people and one more easily solved.
getting people to patch their software
You don't think that was included in "make sure that fix reaches all users?"
The "information" necessary to figure out whether something is legitimate or malicious is not difficult to obtain
Nonsense. As you said what is malicious is a matter of each user's perspective. I have yet to see an easy way to find out what every piece of software I buy (let alone that I download) does that I might think is malicious. Does Adobe pagemaker randomly connect to some hardcoded server in Europe? Is that an anti-piracy feature or a backdoor someone built in? What about the little weather applet I download, why does it need access to some of files IE uses? Is it just using them to access the internet or render something or is it grabbing pop-up ads?Any information on the internet may or may not be correct. It could be outright lies or misinformation.
It would also result in a *massive* usability hit. I doubt people are going to want to go back to the days of having to manually save things like jpegs and PDFs off to another directory somewhere just so they can have a quick look at it.
You' mistaking my statement. Their is no reason a trusted application, like your PDF/image viewer cannot have access to your web cache and the files in your download directory. What I said was that attachments would not have access to your other files or the internet until you run them and specifically grant them that privilege.
I'd say it's identical to the situation that exists now where a dialog box pops up - defaulting to the equivalent of "No" - whenever a user tries to open a "risky" attachment.
No it is not identical. For most users the current dialogue asks OK or Cancel (which is nearly meaningless to them) and they have been conditioned to always click OK. Most users don't even realize that the computer is asking a question, they just think clicking OK a lot is what they have to do to make it work. Even for those users that do understand worms and that they are taking a risk the choice presented is to run it and take their chances or just not run it. Since the user obviously wants to run it, this is not sufficient. What I want to do is let the user run anything they want, but then in the rare case a program wants to access their home directory or or the internet tell the user it wants to and let the user choose if it can (framing the question in plain english).
Application Happy Bunny Game wants access to read and overwrite your personal files: (deny access) (Let it read and write your personal files).
The application would run in any case and if it dies when it can't access denied resources the OS should handle informing the user why. With this option I can run the aforementioned Adobe Pagemaker, but still tell the computer not to let it connect to the internet. (As opposed to just not running it which you seem to think is sufficient.)
Where do save games go ? User preferences ? How can the game taked advantage of OS capabilities like DirectX if it can't access anything except its own files ?
A good default is to let an application access any files it creates (which most OSs know anyway). Then it does not matter where your preferences and saved games go. Alternately, you could go with directory based application system, like OS X, where the preferences and saved games can be saved within the game itself as a sub-file. It is much neater anyway. As for direct-X and similar technologies a clean OS design should offer services and audio and graphic rendering to the applications and longhorn will have a built in 2D/3D modeling environment that can already capitaliz
You missed a couple:
Theater: Show starts only at specific times and you have to sit thru 10 minutes of commercials.
Theater: With a random selection of people (not always a bad thing).
Theater: Can fit a hundred hooligans.
Theater: usually have to sneak booze in.
I just downloaded this new spreadsheet program and my powerbook feels much snappier now!
The funny thing is, due to dynamically linked libraries, a new dot version of a library included with a spreadsheet really could make things "snappier" in other applications. It won't... but it technically could.
email the customer automatically with a message to access a web link with a cleaning program attached.
Would you trust an e-mail with a link supposedly from your ISP that goes to a page and offers software for download?
Either the cleaning program gets run, no problem, or the customer is busy and the zombie is blocked, no problem.
...or the customer uses a different e-mail address than you sent to and you just shut down a paying customer. Or the customer just assumes the internet is down (as it often is for end users with unreliable ISPs). And how do you know which cleaning program a user should run? Based upon network activity there is little difference between many worms, but a lot of difference in how a worm is uninstalled. And what about new worm variants whose activity can be detected but there is no cleaning program for? And what happens when a worm spoofs network activity for a large number of customers who aren't infected?
The problem is not as simple as you claim and ISPs are worried about two things. Firsts thousands of phone calls asking why the network is not working or what they should do about the worm, or can you send someone out to remove it, or can you walk me through fixing it, or what is an internet? Second, paying customers leaving because of the hassle. They don't care if they have a worm or whatever, it is too expensive to have someone fix it and they don't feel confident doing it themselves so they just go to a competing ISP.
Maybe none of these things would turn out to be problems, but most ISPs do have a list and can generate a new one on demand and some of them have or have had pilot projects to test a system like you propose. I don't know of any major ones that are actually implementing it on large scale though and I suspect there are reasons for that.
by that definition OSX is a monopoly in Apple computers and they shouldn't be allowed to bundle...
First, bundling is only illegal when you have a monopoly. Second, Apple sells computers with an OS and some applications; that is their product. Dell sells computers with and OS and some applications. Sun sells computers with an OS and some applications. So do hundreds of other companies. You are mistaken in your assertion.
No, the problem isn't *remote takeovers* - they're quite rare (relatively speaking). The problem is users deliberately (albeit usually in ignorance) installing software locally.
You are mistaken. Worms that take over machines with no user intervention required use up more bandwidth on the internet between propagation and DoS attacks than ones that require user intervention. (At least over the last day and over the last month according to the reports I have in front of me.)
That does not matter though. The way to stop automated worms and exploits is simple, fix the vulnerabilities and make sure that fix reaches all users. The hard part is providing users with the tools and information they need to deal with an event that may be a phishing attack or may be a valid application/message/attachement/file.
How useful do you think a piece of software is going to be if it can neither access data on the local machine nor make network connections ?
That all depends upon the application. For example, if my OS were to sandbox, by default all incoming attachments on mail messages and allow them access to nothing except themselves unless the user explicitly allowed it, the vast majority of e-mail worms would fail. The tiny percentage of people who receive programs via e-mail and want those programs to be able to access either the internet or their files would have to deal with clicking another button. I'd say that is pretty reasonable wouldn't you?
How many games need access to the internet? Some certainly, but most people still don't play online games. So when a user downloads a game and installs it the OS should default to installing it with a given ACL and allow the user to easily change it. Select (game) (internet game) (office application) (other). The first can access only its own files, the second its own files and the internet, the third your documents, its own files but not the internet, and the last you'd have to specify.
Old versions of Word used to throw an error that said something like, "This document has macros enabled and may contain a computer virus. Are you sure you want to open it? (ok) (cancel)" What it needed were the options (open and run macros) and (open but don't let it fuck up anything on my system). I know people who would gladly have paid thousands of dollars for such an option. The problem was, they were not given that level of control. Right now when a user installs an application, unless they are an expert, their options are "don't run it" or "let it do anything it wants to my computer including mailing porn to my grandmother and erasing all my tax information." That is a big, big problem. There needs to be a third, sane option.
Security and usability are inversely proportioned. Increase one and you reduce the other.
While often true, and probably true in this instance, this statement is not a truism. Fixing a vulnerability that is invisible to an end user increases the security of the system without making it any less usable. We really really need some sane, and easily understood generic permissions for applications and objects presented to an end-user that may be applications. By default most games I install should not be allowed to touch my personal files and most office applications should not be able to access the internet. And my mother should be able to tell the computer that without consulting a manual.
Part of the reason MS is so successful is because they are monopoly they can charge much higher prices than a free market can support. I suspect prices for Windows (both versions) would probably drop drastically as they had to compete with each other. The multiple companies would have to change their way of business (which is good since it is illegal) and a lot of the waste buying dozens of companies a year just to kill off their products would no longer be a good market proposition.
Your argument about their share prices going down is pretty obvious. It's like if a bunch of companies owned mostly by the mafia suddenly have all the Dons arrested. Sure the value is going to go down since the illegal activity has been interrupted, but that is not a reasonable argument for not stopping the illegal activity. And if you want to argue overall market effects, what will the effect of half-priced Windows be for the operating costs of every company that runs it in the entire world? We're not eliminating money here, just moving the power back to the market and no longer siphoning quite as many billions from the world economy and spending it to halt all progress in the computing field.
I know politicians are really poor at looking at things from a long term perspective, but doing this is actually a win for the U.S. economy. In the short term less money is sucked to the U.S., but in the long term pretty much every major foreign company and government is pirating Windows now and looking at a way to replace it tomorrow (usually with Linux). Breaking up the Windows monopoly might actually make some of these foreign companies/nations rethink moving away from Windows. Right now an American monopoly with a horrible reputation is a non-starter for a long term supplier, but a number of potential American companies competing with each other is a bit more reasonable.
And I frankly don't see what splitting up Microsoft would accomplish. Instead of one monopoly you'd have four.
I hope that was a joke. Two companies each with rights to the Windows source code, but not the code to Windows media player, MS office etc. When Dell wants to put Windows on it's computers it has two competing bidders. And the products diverge adding different features. Likewise with the applications.