Your analogy is flawed in three ways. First, MS doesn't make cars. Cars are useful. MS makes on OS which is a system component and pretty much useless by itself. Second MS is a monopoly, whereas GM is not. Third, the flaw in XP is unlikely to result in fatalities or even serious injury. Allow me to fix your analogy:
Today GM announced that the GMC trucks have some fundamental flaw in the lock mechanisms and they are prone to open and start the truck randomly. GM said it can't fix the issue because the component is supplied by EvilCorp and current law makes it illegal for them to change anything inside the locking mechanism device. Further GM can't buy locking mechanisms from anyone else because EvilCorp has a monopoly on selling them and has used criminal acts to drive all real competitors out of business. EvilCorp has already lost court cases to that effect, but after making campaign contributions to your elected officials decided not to punish them. EvilCorp says the design is very old, and fixing it is unfeasible. When asked if they will stop shipping trucks with the flaw, GM spokesman said, "we have not stopped building or shipping them yet. We don't have any real options here. We did try partnering with a company that repackages locking systems made for free by a nonprofit organization, but they aren't compatible with existing trailer hitches, AC systems, or tires and switching all of those is hard to do since all the component suppliers out there build them to work with EvilCorp products. Also EvilCorp gives away free gas tanks with every lock mechanism, but because they are really weird, gas has had to be reformulated so it has problems working in gas tanks from any normal company and nobody really sells standards compliant gas anymore. Car buyers are encouraged to remove the batteries from their trucks whenever they stop and park them in locked garages if they contain anything valuable."
Microsoft's other main competitor, Apple, doesn't provide service updates for anything older than 10.5 (2007).
Apple isn't really competing as they don't license their OS to OEMs. OEMs putting together computer systems have Windows as their only choice in most cases, with Linux distributions being the largest alternative (from a market perspective).
As for support duration, the relevant figure here is how long after a company stops selling an OS do they continue to provide security patches. Apple is still providing patches for 10.4 as they released a patch 5 days ago. That's 4.5 years and counting since they stopped selling it. They have not provided a patch for 10.3 since April 2005, meaning they supported it for about 2 years after they stopped selling it.
Compare this to MS's licensing of XP, which last I heard they were still selling to OEMs for inclusion in new NetBooks. Just because they created it many years ago does not matter one bit if users are still buying new products with that component. That would be like buying a brand new car, having the brakes fail and then having Ford tell you they are not covered by the warranty because they designed those brakes ten years ago, so they're too old to provide decent pads for.
In short, if Windows XP is too old for MS to provide support for, they should have stopped licensing it to OEMs many years ago. Which they of course wanted to, but they failed to provide OEMs and large enterprises with anything as good as XP with which they could replace it.
KDE includes a KDE-wide spellchecker, and has done for at least a few years.
Really, that is interesting and some improvement. I moved away from Kubuntu as my desktop about four years ago because I was having too much trouble configuring certain applications to work with it. I moved to a Gnome based Linux and have stuck with it.
To be clear, the state last time I looked was that KDE only implemented a spellchecking KPart which made it easy for developers to add spellchecking, but did not do so by default for all applications and did not work with any non-KDE applications. The majority of KDE applications, including the Konsole could not actually use the spellchecker. Has that improved? Is there a new mechanism by which spellchecking is accomplished? Any hope for adding system wide grammar checking, language translation, dictionary/thesaurus lookups, and other arbitrary functions?
yeah sure... what exactly did you write about? oh right... YOUR favourite OS. No link whatsoever to the topic.
I use Linux, OS X, and Windows daily. I don't have a favorite. They're all better at different tasks, which you'd know if you bothered to learn before forming your opinions. Furthermore, no one said anything about OS's until you did where you made fun of someone's failure to spell and mentioned Linux. I have no idea what OS the person you were making fun of uses and I don't really care. I just though it might be topical to point out that the state of spellchecking in both Windows and Linux is behind the curve and could use improvement and has been that way for a long time now.
I was referring to Apple introducing it into OS X (in 10.1, I believe). You're quite right, however, to point out that Next had it long before that. I was lucky enough to have access to a lab full of them back in the day and they were ahead of their time.
They were talking about having the OS make Spellcheck available to all apps, instead of getting your spell checker from each app seperately.
nah. actually 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF was going out of his way to prove the fact that "Apple is Ze L33t" or something
Why is it pointing out deficiency of any OS compared to any other OS leads people to shut their brains off and rabidly defend their favorite OS? You mentioned spellchecking in Linux in a snide comment. I mentioned that Linux actually is deficient in that area because it does not offer spellchecking to all applications and allow them to share dictionary training. Further, it lacks the ability to share other, arbitrary text manipulations like grammar checking or dictionary lookups or language translation. In this way Linux could be improved. I have, in fact, submitted feature requests in the hopes it would be improved and had discussions with developers on the topic. I mention it because I think it's important for people to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the various OS's both for choosing the right one for a task and for motivating improvement of weaknesses.
My answer was just a quick rebuttal of his assessment that if the original poster had used a Mac, he would have made less grammatical errors.
I didn't write anything about that. Your response was not a rebuttal. It was an ill informed attempt to defend your favorite OS rather than bother to understand my comment.
The fact that other people don't bother to have their spelling checked is not a manifestation of the fact that they don't have it but they don't want it running and being a nuisance. There are "system spell checkers" for Unix and Linux that are OLDER than the "great innovation" you mentioned from Apple.
I've noticed an interesting trend. Most people who get defensive about $Favorite_OS don't seem to have much of a clue about other OS's. I use Ubuntu Linux daily. Previously I've used Kubuntu daily and a variety of other versions occasionally as servers or terminals over the last few decades. So I tell you, there is not a universal spellchecker built into any version of Linux that I've found, offered as a service to applications. There are CLI spellcheckers you can pipe text through. There are spellcheckers implemented by individual applications. There are even KDE libraries that make it easy for a developer to add spellchecking to an application they are creating without too much work. None of those are the same thing or as functional, however.
What I'm talking about is the fact that OS X offers system services like spelling and grammar checking and if you make an application using the default tools and/or APIs for handling text, your application has the ability to use them and other services with no work on the part of the developer. Moreover, the developer does not have to know such a service even exists beforehand. That doesn't mean you force users to use the services or even leave them on, it just means they're available.
Here's an exercise in what I'm talking about. Write a paper in Linux using OpenOffice. Chances are you're going to use a few words that aren't in the dictionary, whether they are the name of your company or a networking protocol, or some other technical subject. While you go, train the spellchecker and let it know those words aren't misspelled so you don't have them flagged throughout the paper. Now, go into your favorite dedicated HTML editor and write a page or two on the same subject wit spell checking on. Notice that the words you trained in OpenOffice are still showing up as misspellings. Tell your Web editor about them and move on to your Web browser and post a Slashdot comment about the subject. Notice they are showing up as misspelled. Gee, if you actually use a spellchecker you seem to be doing the same task over and over. If only there were a programatic way to do repetitive tasks over and over.
Spellchecking, grammar checking, language translation, and numerous other text manipulations should be implemented at the OS level as plug-ins, not over and over by each and every application with no ability to share that information between them. This is one of the reasons when I have a choice of the same program on my Linux and OS X desktops, all else being equal, I choose OS X which gives me more functionality.
And here we are a decade later and I'm having the same conversations. First Linux on the desktop developers don't understand the feature request, then they decide it isn't really useful, then they admit it is useful but claim the Linux way is better, then they admit the Linux was is inferior, but that it would be too much work to fix.
It is our hope that one day linux apps will be advanced enough to include a spelling checker.
It absolutely amazes me that nearly a decade after Apple introduced system-wide services for things like making spellchecking the default behavior in apps that use the standard text handling APIs, no other OS has bothered to clone it. I mean seriously? Nobody thought being able to use the same spellchecker and grammar checker in all your applications was a good feature for an OS? As a person who makes a lot of my income writing, it seems almost inconceivable to me. Heck, it seems like something appropriate to add in the Windows 95 era.
Updates to Safari only come via the Software Update program, which has its own dock icon and different window borders to Safari, so is impossible to fake realistically from within a browser.
This is true, but sadly you don't need to realistically fake things much of the time. If you pop up a Safari window that looks just like the standard Software Update window, for example, many users won't notice that it did not come with the usual Software Update icon bouncing in the dock. A number of users will likewise click that it is okay to run it, simply because they do that to run new software a lot of the time and don't remember they didn't do so normally with the software update.
My point being, yes Apple is doing a better job with exposing trojans like this and they're probably doing a sufficient job given the current threat level to their average user, but there is a lot more they could do. For example, they could sandbox all new software by default and encourage software providers to sign and provide ACLs for those programs, which Apple verifies. Then, normal users wouldn't be being conditioned to click through and approve running arbitrary software, since most would be verified and not need any such end user verification. Further, any software the user installed which was not verified, but which did not need any potentially dangerous abilities would not need to show such a dialogue box since it would not try to exceed a fairly restrictive sandbox. In such a way false positive warnings could be almost eliminated and users would see warnings asking about running arbitrary software that could be much more potent. Ideally, a user only sees the dialogue a few times, ever, and it can say specific things like, "this is an untrusted application from the internet from an unverified source and it is trying to access the core of the system, would you like to (stop the software)(let the software have complete control of my computer forever)(see more detailed options)". That's actually where I see anti-trojan defenses heading.
Does anyone know if a particular vulnerability was used to gain access to systems?
The theory speculated by the researcher was that incompetent administrators used the root account on the servers to FTP files and the root password was sniffed.
Does anyone know how to detect whether your system is compromised in this manner (is doing "ps -aux nginx" simple enough to detect it)?
You should have been contacted by your domain provider. Mind you, they only detected ten compromised servers so unless something has changed the likelihood is pretty remote. You can always just sniff your server and see if it's hosting a Web service on port 8080.
Spare everyone the OS holy-war and fanboism...
There are two interesting bits to this article. One is that the Linux control servers were load balancing in a way. The other is the way this botnet and it's description has been misrepresented in the tech press leading people into thinking there is some real risk to them if they're running a Linux server as though widescale automated exploits were adding Linux servers to a botnet, as opposed to ten Linux boxes hosting an exploit and controlling a botnet of Windows machines.
'Botnet' has never meant 'auto-infected' and if they assumed that, they were careless.
No, botnet means a network of computers auto controlled, but in general when you describe a botnet, especially referring to the OS, you refer to the OS of the bots, which make up the majority, not the OS of the select few control channel systems.
The summary makes no attempt to fool them into thinking anything other than the facts.
The title was, "First Botnet of Linux Web Servers Discovered". It didn't say first botnet of Windows machines controlled by ten Linux Webservers. It isn't the first botnet that includes Linux Web servers, those are actually quite common. Thus the average person who knows what they're talking about assumes it is the regular bots which must be running Linux, since otherwise the title makes no sense. You don't think that is misleading?
Besides which, at this point, we don't -know- how it spreads. We just know that it exists... Which to me, is news.
Well, no we don't know for sure, but we do know what is likely. Given that only a few servers have been hacked and given the nature of the attempt, it seems to be targeting server operators who attempt to FTP files and steal passwords, it is probably just dumb admins who don't verify credentials and who use root for FTP operations. In past servers have been compromised by a number of web server exploits as well. The only thing that differentiates this botnet from any other is that they networked the control channel to load balance the phishing server. Aside from that, nothing about this botnet is even out of the ordinary. To call it the first botnet of Linux servers is disingenuous by every definition of a botnet that doesn't count multiple Linux Web servers controlling a bunch of Windows boxes but does include multiple Linux Web servers that control a bunch of Windows boxes, but randomly pass traffic to each other to balance the incoming connections.
Companies are indeed defined by what they do - the majority of what Apple does in the marketplace is provide tightly integrated "Just Works" experiences by maintaining a strong control over what they do.
I disagree, slightly. Apple does, indeed, use the business model of providing a polished end user experience, often limited, but easy to use for what it does. They sometimes do this by maintaining a lot of control over all the components, but not in all cases. In other cases they do this by partnering with other companies and organizations or by building a product that integrates well with the existing ecosystem. Controlling all the components is only one of their methods of implementing that business plan.
They also maintain intense secrecy on all their products. Do you dispute anything specific that I said?
Absolutely. Apple completely documents and voluntarily provides the source code for large portions of many of their products. That is certainly not maintaining secrecy about them. Rather, Apple is famed for being secretive about new and upcoming products that have not been released. This is for two reasons. First it allows them to make an effective marketing splash and draws interest from the press. Second, Apple makes a lot of money by innovating and by maintaining secrecy they maximize the time to market advantage they have over those who copy their innovations.
That said, such secrecy as Apple has demonstrated has little to do with whether or not Apple releases source code to products after it comes to market. That's an action they regularly take, so to not expect them to take it, you have to be misconstruing what apple normally does.
At the end of the day *nothing* is really unexpected on some level since there are unseen laws and logic governing basically everything that happens. But if you see a trend in behaviour from somewhere (e.g. tight control and secrecy in most of Apple's most visible things) and then that trend is apparently violated, that qualifies as "surprising" in my opinion.
Ahh, but if you're perceiving Apple as being secretive about how their products work and about the source code it just means your perception is inaccurate. This, in turn, means you should look at your preconceptions and information sources. Apple releases the source code for the 600th or 700th project and that's a surprise? Apple releases the source to a foundational new technology they implemented in OS X? That might have been surprising when it was the original release of Darwin, or even when it was the libc and io stuff they made from scratch and gave away the source to subsequently. But come on already. They've been releasing the source to underlying technologies they add to OS X, with every release for over a decade now. Grand Central is exactly the type of technology that Apple leverages the open source model for, being as it benefits from more eyes and more contributors and the more people that use it the better software developers will get at making applications multiprocess well on OS X. It should be no surprise at all to someone with an accurate perception of how Apple operates as a fairly good, mixed OSS community player, that understands OSS and regularly leverages it for their products.
Frankly, I think your perception of Apple has to be pretty messed up to be surprised by Apple releasing the source to GCD. The reason this is news is because of the idea that other OS's might be able to integrate it and because it is potentially so useful. Most of the time what Apple releases isn't even news. Heck, they released a dozen packages for their underlying security framework in case anyone wants to make use of their version of sandboxing.
I guess the long and short of the matter is, if you're surprised by this, do you just have an anti-Apple bias and why do you have that?
Well, you are assuming that calling a machine a bot is dependent on the fact it was infected.
Not really. Calling a machine a bot or zombie is generally an indication that they are the regular "peon" part of a botnet. I mean technically the control channel and update channel and the terminals machines the operator is using are part of the botnet. They just are not generally referred to as bots because they are part of the system doing the controlling instead of being the end systems used to launch attacks.
My main point was, the summary and title here led readers who use the specific terms one way to think that is what was happening. The comments from researchers led people to think that. That is why this was news. It's not news to discover Linux systems hacked by hand are being used to control Windows bots, because that happens all the time and is, perhaps, the most common kind of botnet.
The only part of this article that is news is the part that is incorrect. Botnets of Windows machines often have compromised Linux servers working as a control channel or update channel. It is not at all unusual. What would be unusual would be for a worm or virus to actually compromise Linux machines in an automated fashion and make them bots. That does not seem to be what has happened here as the Linux systems seem to have been manually hacked in a normal, directed attack.
Basicaly, nothing new or newsworthy happened here, except someone mistakenly referred to the compromised Linux servers as bots.
I think a problem is that good technical writers don't have a tendency to donate work in their 'hobby time'.
Having worked in the field, this does not seem to be true. I used to hook up technical writers with open source projects where they could donate work, but the results were often negative. Many of the writers found the coders would have no real interest in including documentation and did not want to spend the time explaining the more esoteric uses. Further, a good technical writer approaches a documentation project as a user advocate. They try to perform tasks as a user would and then write up an explanation of how the task is accomplished. As a result, they often find bugs, UI bugs, and usability problems. It's not unusual for a writer to go to the other developers and describe how they tried to accomplish a task and failed, only to be yelled at by an engineer that assumes the user/writer is stupid for trying to accomplish the task in a way that isn't the same as they expected. It is, perhaps, only natural for developers to get defensive of their projects and try to defend poor UI design choices rather than commit to working to fix or work around those problems and for OSS projects one cannot always expect to be working with professionals. That said, the rate at which these problems were occurring was strangely high, even when the writers were used to working on commercial OSS products. I more or less stopped giving writers any recommendation unless I really knew all the coders involved fairly well, because I did not want to deal with the backlash anymore.
It's quite surprising from a company like Apple...
Companies are defined by what they do. If a person surprised Apple is releasing technologies as open source projects, that just means that person has an inaccurate image of what kind of company Apple is and should pay more attention to what Apple does and less to espoused, unsupported opinions from astroturfers and zealots.
Everyone who reads slashdot isn't an OSX ween and has no idea what "Grand Central Dispatch" is. Perhaps a sentence or two describing why it is important/useful would save users from following the link which doesn't provide that info either.
Look I'm as annoyed by poor summaries as anyone, but it seems almost reflexive to complain about them these days. The summary clearly said it, "makes it easier for developers to take advantage of multi-core parallelism". I don't care if you've never heard of OS X and no nothing about it. That sentence right there tells you what effect it has and why it's useful. After that it's just details as to where and if it is applicable to some other project. I guess what I'm saying is, I thought this was a pretty decent summary, enough to know if you should read about it.
Why would you think they met daily? The british did meet with the office of the president at least somewhat regulalry. Officer Hayman wrote, "We moved from having congenial conversations to eyeball-to-eyeball confrontations," in reference to their meetings with the american authorities. Mostly they refer to the July 28 meeting with Blair and Bush as the breaking point though, as that seems to be what spurred action by the OVP.
Or are we still trying to blame Bush for everything wrong that happened for the past 8 years?
Umm, you seem to have a chip on your shoulder or something. We're talking about the influence of the american authorities on this case. No one blames Bush for anything in this instance and, in fact, it is Cheney who the british seem to blame for cracking and sending someone to have the contact arrested and more so blame for not informing them at all about that so they could implement a proper plan to arrest the suspects instead of running a major operation with no notice.
Just because facts are revealed that some of the Bush administration officials were jerks, doesn't mean there is some sort of conspiracy. Sometimes it just means some Bush administration officials were jerks. It's called "reality".
Apple's business model is about control end to end, that is the business model of the old mainframe companies, you have admitied[sic] this youreself[sic].
Sigh, I tried to be very clear, but you either are having problems with reading comprehension or you ignore anything that might contradict your already made up mind. Apple's business model is about polished and usable but limited technology being brought to the mass market from a niche. What I said was sometimes end to end control is the best way for Apple to achieve this and other times it is not, which is why "control" is not their core business model, but only appears that way to people who don't look across their product line.
For the iPhone Apple tried to partner with several cell service providers before going with AT&T as the only one willing to make the concessions Apple needed for the level of functionality and ease of overall experience required.
If you're too young to remember then please stop commenting. This may seem new to you but it's old news to us.
What are you a simpleton? I'm describing their business model and giving examples as to how and why they don't always attempt to completely control their products. That absolutely relevant, but you don't want to hear it? Too freaking bad.
You seem to have missed a vital part of the discussion.
As have you, the choice of processor is a vital part of how apple limits geeks.
Are you seriously making this argument? I guess that's how Sony limits geeks too. And how Lockheed limits geeks. Do you know that Lockheed doesn't sell a single desktop computer containing PPC processors? How dare they limit geeks.
Either you're intentionally being obtuse and misunderstanding that the argument was about how companies and Apple artificially limit geeks in their products or you are a complete moron. Either way you've succeeded in convincing me discussion with you is pointless. I'm not even bothering to read, let alone comment upon the rest of your nonsense. Grow up already.
The bottom line is that Apple doesn't support FLAC. Apple is using iTunes and the digital media infrastructure of OS-X, iPod, AppleTv, etc., to LOCK IN users to Apple formats.
Again, that's not what "lock-in" means. By that argument every company that does not support every format is locking thier users into certain formats. OpenOffice does not support exporting documents as jpegs so they're locking us into the formats they do support? Of course not, that's absurd. They do support PDF and postscript so from those formats I can convert if I really need jpeg. Likewise with Apple. For it to be lock-in they have to be actively doing something to prevent you from switching to competitors, and Apple is not, at this point, doing anything of the sort with their audio formats. You can buy a competing player that supports Ogg or WMA or whatever, convert your files with no impediment from Apple and be on your merry way. That is not lock-in and repeatedly saying it is hurts all of us actually working to inform users about real cases where companies are locking people into their products using closed, undocumented, DRM'd or otherwise locked down formats and protocols.
Apple does not support FLAC, indeed, Apple only marginally supports high-resolution audio (iPods cannot play 96/24 audio).
Apple makes products they sell. They cater to their clients. If enough of their clients wanted or needed FLAC, Apple would add support. Seeing as there are not any chipsets that support FLAC, suitable for inclusion in Apple's devices, the battery performance of Apple products would be very, very poor using FLAC and seeing as there is no real demand, Apple doesn't support it.
Maybe you missed why Apple has become so popular with their recent products. They don't provide every niche feature geeks want. They provide a subset of features but make sure those features work really well. This makes them appealing to the mass audience and in turn makes them money. They don't care about FLAC, but since it is not easy to do well and there is no demand for it from consumers, Apple leaves it out. If that's a problem for you, buy something else already. Buy from someone who does cater to geeks. I don't own an ipod or iPhone because they don't cater to me, but I don't go whining that Apple is trying to lock me in because they're ignoring what I want. They aren't trying to lock me in, they're just targeting normal users and I don't fit into that category. Get over it and please stop misusing the term "lock-in" as it belittles all the actual cases of lock-in and confuses an already confusing issue for normal users.
I don't give a crap about appearance and marketing.
The comparison was on usability, which can be affected by appearance, but usually is not significantly so. Marketing is considered when it detracts from usability.
What I want is to find the fix or download I need. If I google (or even live search) an error code from Microsoft 9 times out of 10 I'll get a link to a KB. If I google an Apple error code I'll get nothing, thats after I've gone into the command line to find out what the actual error code is because Apple thinks displaying the actual error is a bad idea.
What you find in Google has no bearing on the usability of the sites being compared. You seem to have completely missed the point. As for errors, what kind of errors are you having trouble finding out about? You're a bit vague on the topic. Can you provide an example?
An MS fix is often found in under an hour...
It's funny, I don't remember having to look up fixes for OS X ever. I have to look up configuration settings when I'm doing something unusual, like installing a specialty kernel module, but not really fixes. What fixes have you had to look up?
Trying to find a fix for OS X or updated firmware is not the easiest task because this is not Apple's modus operandi.
Umm, firmware updates show up automatically in OS X, via the update mechanism. If for some reason that did not work (I've never heard of this problem) you could run the firmware updater and it will pull down the updates from the server. I'm still not clear what fixes you need to look up.
Where most Mac fanboys fail is comparing everything to Apple's goals rather then the organisation in question's goals.
Umm, this was a usability test of Websites, not a comparison of organizations. Are you calling a Microsoft exec you thinks the MS Web page is less usable a "Mac fanboy"?
MS's site is entirely designed entirely for professionals, people who know what they need and can easily figure out how to get it, with this goal in mind MS's site is very well designed.
Not really. I'm a professional. The MS exec is a professional. The usability engineer is a professional. As a usability tester myself, I certainly see where MS has violated some basic design principals that will make their site more difficult to use for anyone, simply because it is ambiguous. You seem to be defending MS's choices, but I'm not sure why and you have not addressed any of the specific mentioned. Frankly, I think you are just emotionally invested in your opinion.
Nonsense like Apple's primary business being marketing does nothing at all to make your argument more persuasive, it just makes you look hopelessly biases to the point where you have no credibility. I have an idea for you. Go read a good book on usability and Web design, then go look at the two sites and try to apply what you learned impartially. Then, get back to all of us with specific points of UI design and why you think MS's site is more usable and in what specific way.
Have you used the unintuitive piece of shit called "iTunes for Windows" that makes zero sense to those unfamiliar with the OS X UI?
What I find really funny about this is that I remember back in the day people installing iTunes even though they did not have iPods, solely for the purpose of ripping CDs. They did it because they could not figure out how to accomplish the task using WMP or any of the other software most people used to play music. The iTunes UI is certainly nonstandard for Windows (not that that is unusual) but I'd say the usability is actually pretty decent. Heck, I'm willing to bet if you sit a Windows user who has never seen either in front of iTunes and WMP and run a regular usability test, iTunes will win. I'm not 100% sure, and usability testing has surprised me in the past, but that would be my bet.
Bullshit the pictures are valid, only if the cops take the photos of the weed in your house is it valid evidence.
Umm, don't read the news much do you? More than one person has been convicted based upon photos of crimes they took themselves, and in recent years posted on social networking sites.
I didn't mean the 'derailing' vs 'conviction' part. I'm referring to the 'Intercepts' part. If what you say is true, the intercepts had nothing to do with this case.
They did have something to do with the case in that they were the first copies of the e-mail the brits were able to read, but they did not hold up in court.
The conviction evidence came from a warrant justified by UK surveillance . I've yet to see a legitimate case that the illegal eavesdropping contributed to exposing.
This is true, but even if the intercepts had been used as evidence, these intercepts were done via FISA warrants issued by a judge, not using the warrantless wiretapping which is what most people argue is illegal. If anything they demonstrate there is no need for the warrantless wiretaps.
I don't understand why Slashdot is promoting this FUD.
Slashdot just runs news articles, it doesn't judge the content per se. I'd say NSA wiretaps and their use is of interest to nerds, even if the article was missing some detail. This is a discussion site, and the discussion is often where the useful insights and info is to be found.
By the trouble it takes to do the conversion of tens of thousands of files to another format.
That's not what lock-in means. It would be lock-in if Apple implemented some mechanism to keep you from converting to another format. As it is you can just set your jukebox player to batch convert and go get coffee. Try not to misuse terms so incorrectly, it verges on flamebait because it is so misinformative. DRM'd AAC, absolutely can be considered lock-in. WMA yup. ALAC, no.
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Your analogy is flawed in three ways. First, MS doesn't make cars. Cars are useful. MS makes on OS which is a system component and pretty much useless by itself. Second MS is a monopoly, whereas GM is not. Third, the flaw in XP is unlikely to result in fatalities or even serious injury. Allow me to fix your analogy:
Today GM announced that the GMC trucks have some fundamental flaw in the lock mechanisms and they are prone to open and start the truck randomly. GM said it can't fix the issue because the component is supplied by EvilCorp and current law makes it illegal for them to change anything inside the locking mechanism device. Further GM can't buy locking mechanisms from anyone else because EvilCorp has a monopoly on selling them and has used criminal acts to drive all real competitors out of business. EvilCorp has already lost court cases to that effect, but after making campaign contributions to your elected officials decided not to punish them. EvilCorp says the design is very old, and fixing it is unfeasible. When asked if they will stop shipping trucks with the flaw, GM spokesman said, "we have not stopped building or shipping them yet. We don't have any real options here. We did try partnering with a company that repackages locking systems made for free by a nonprofit organization, but they aren't compatible with existing trailer hitches, AC systems, or tires and switching all of those is hard to do since all the component suppliers out there build them to work with EvilCorp products. Also EvilCorp gives away free gas tanks with every lock mechanism, but because they are really weird, gas has had to be reformulated so it has problems working in gas tanks from any normal company and nobody really sells standards compliant gas anymore. Car buyers are encouraged to remove the batteries from their trucks whenever they stop and park them in locked garages if they contain anything valuable."
Microsoft's other main competitor, Apple, doesn't provide service updates for anything older than 10.5 (2007).
Apple isn't really competing as they don't license their OS to OEMs. OEMs putting together computer systems have Windows as their only choice in most cases, with Linux distributions being the largest alternative (from a market perspective).
As for support duration, the relevant figure here is how long after a company stops selling an OS do they continue to provide security patches. Apple is still providing patches for 10.4 as they released a patch 5 days ago. That's 4.5 years and counting since they stopped selling it. They have not provided a patch for 10.3 since April 2005, meaning they supported it for about 2 years after they stopped selling it.
Compare this to MS's licensing of XP, which last I heard they were still selling to OEMs for inclusion in new NetBooks. Just because they created it many years ago does not matter one bit if users are still buying new products with that component. That would be like buying a brand new car, having the brakes fail and then having Ford tell you they are not covered by the warranty because they designed those brakes ten years ago, so they're too old to provide decent pads for.
In short, if Windows XP is too old for MS to provide support for, they should have stopped licensing it to OEMs many years ago. Which they of course wanted to, but they failed to provide OEMs and large enterprises with anything as good as XP with which they could replace it.
KDE includes a KDE-wide spellchecker, and has done for at least a few years.
Really, that is interesting and some improvement. I moved away from Kubuntu as my desktop about four years ago because I was having too much trouble configuring certain applications to work with it. I moved to a Gnome based Linux and have stuck with it.
To be clear, the state last time I looked was that KDE only implemented a spellchecking KPart which made it easy for developers to add spellchecking, but did not do so by default for all applications and did not work with any non-KDE applications. The majority of KDE applications, including the Konsole could not actually use the spellchecker. Has that improved? Is there a new mechanism by which spellchecking is accomplished? Any hope for adding system wide grammar checking, language translation, dictionary/thesaurus lookups, and other arbitrary functions?
yeah sure... what exactly did you write about? oh right... YOUR favourite OS. No link whatsoever to the topic.
I use Linux, OS X, and Windows daily. I don't have a favorite. They're all better at different tasks, which you'd know if you bothered to learn before forming your opinions. Furthermore, no one said anything about OS's until you did where you made fun of someone's failure to spell and mentioned Linux. I have no idea what OS the person you were making fun of uses and I don't really care. I just though it might be topical to point out that the state of spellchecking in both Windows and Linux is behind the curve and could use improvement and has been that way for a long time now.
Apple didn't introduce it, they inherited it.
I was referring to Apple introducing it into OS X (in 10.1, I believe). You're quite right, however, to point out that Next had it long before that. I was lucky enough to have access to a lab full of them back in the day and they were ahead of their time.
I'm still wondering what GP was saying.
They were talking about having the OS make Spellcheck available to all apps, instead of getting your spell checker from each app seperately.
nah. actually 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF was going out of his way to prove the fact that "Apple is Ze L33t" or something
Why is it pointing out deficiency of any OS compared to any other OS leads people to shut their brains off and rabidly defend their favorite OS? You mentioned spellchecking in Linux in a snide comment. I mentioned that Linux actually is deficient in that area because it does not offer spellchecking to all applications and allow them to share dictionary training. Further, it lacks the ability to share other, arbitrary text manipulations like grammar checking or dictionary lookups or language translation. In this way Linux could be improved. I have, in fact, submitted feature requests in the hopes it would be improved and had discussions with developers on the topic. I mention it because I think it's important for people to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the various OS's both for choosing the right one for a task and for motivating improvement of weaknesses.
My answer was just a quick rebuttal of his assessment that if the original poster had used a Mac, he would have made less grammatical errors.
I didn't write anything about that. Your response was not a rebuttal. It was an ill informed attempt to defend your favorite OS rather than bother to understand my comment.
The fact that other people don't bother to have their spelling checked is not a manifestation of the fact that they don't have it but they don't want it running and being a nuisance. There are "system spell checkers" for Unix and Linux that are OLDER than the "great innovation" you mentioned from Apple.
I've noticed an interesting trend. Most people who get defensive about $Favorite_OS don't seem to have much of a clue about other OS's. I use Ubuntu Linux daily. Previously I've used Kubuntu daily and a variety of other versions occasionally as servers or terminals over the last few decades. So I tell you, there is not a universal spellchecker built into any version of Linux that I've found, offered as a service to applications. There are CLI spellcheckers you can pipe text through. There are spellcheckers implemented by individual applications. There are even KDE libraries that make it easy for a developer to add spellchecking to an application they are creating without too much work. None of those are the same thing or as functional, however.
What I'm talking about is the fact that OS X offers system services like spelling and grammar checking and if you make an application using the default tools and/or APIs for handling text, your application has the ability to use them and other services with no work on the part of the developer. Moreover, the developer does not have to know such a service even exists beforehand. That doesn't mean you force users to use the services or even leave them on, it just means they're available.
Here's an exercise in what I'm talking about. Write a paper in Linux using OpenOffice. Chances are you're going to use a few words that aren't in the dictionary, whether they are the name of your company or a networking protocol, or some other technical subject. While you go, train the spellchecker and let it know those words aren't misspelled so you don't have them flagged throughout the paper. Now, go into your favorite dedicated HTML editor and write a page or two on the same subject wit spell checking on. Notice that the words you trained in OpenOffice are still showing up as misspellings. Tell your Web editor about them and move on to your Web browser and post a Slashdot comment about the subject. Notice they are showing up as misspelled. Gee, if you actually use a spellchecker you seem to be doing the same task over and over. If only there were a programatic way to do repetitive tasks over and over.
Spellchecking, grammar checking, language translation, and numerous other text manipulations should be implemented at the OS level as plug-ins, not over and over by each and every application with no ability to share that information between them. This is one of the reasons when I have a choice of the same program on my Linux and OS X desktops, all else being equal, I choose OS X which gives me more functionality.
And here we are a decade later and I'm having the same conversations. First Linux on the desktop developers don't understand the feature request, then they decide it isn't really useful, then they admit it is useful but claim the Linux way is better, then they admit the Linux was is inferior, but that it would be too much work to fix.
It is our hope that one day linux apps will be advanced enough to include a spelling checker.
It absolutely amazes me that nearly a decade after Apple introduced system-wide services for things like making spellchecking the default behavior in apps that use the standard text handling APIs, no other OS has bothered to clone it. I mean seriously? Nobody thought being able to use the same spellchecker and grammar checker in all your applications was a good feature for an OS? As a person who makes a lot of my income writing, it seems almost inconceivable to me. Heck, it seems like something appropriate to add in the Windows 95 era.
Updates to Safari only come via the Software Update program, which has its own dock icon and different window borders to Safari, so is impossible to fake realistically from within a browser.
This is true, but sadly you don't need to realistically fake things much of the time. If you pop up a Safari window that looks just like the standard Software Update window, for example, many users won't notice that it did not come with the usual Software Update icon bouncing in the dock. A number of users will likewise click that it is okay to run it, simply because they do that to run new software a lot of the time and don't remember they didn't do so normally with the software update.
My point being, yes Apple is doing a better job with exposing trojans like this and they're probably doing a sufficient job given the current threat level to their average user, but there is a lot more they could do. For example, they could sandbox all new software by default and encourage software providers to sign and provide ACLs for those programs, which Apple verifies. Then, normal users wouldn't be being conditioned to click through and approve running arbitrary software, since most would be verified and not need any such end user verification. Further, any software the user installed which was not verified, but which did not need any potentially dangerous abilities would not need to show such a dialogue box since it would not try to exceed a fairly restrictive sandbox. In such a way false positive warnings could be almost eliminated and users would see warnings asking about running arbitrary software that could be much more potent. Ideally, a user only sees the dialogue a few times, ever, and it can say specific things like, "this is an untrusted application from the internet from an unverified source and it is trying to access the core of the system, would you like to (stop the software)(let the software have complete control of my computer forever)(see more detailed options)". That's actually where I see anti-trojan defenses heading.
Does anyone know if a particular vulnerability was used to gain access to systems?
The theory speculated by the researcher was that incompetent administrators used the root account on the servers to FTP files and the root password was sniffed.
Does anyone know how to detect whether your system is compromised in this manner (is doing "ps -aux nginx" simple enough to detect it)?
You should have been contacted by your domain provider. Mind you, they only detected ten compromised servers so unless something has changed the likelihood is pretty remote. You can always just sniff your server and see if it's hosting a Web service on port 8080.
Spare everyone the OS holy-war and fanboism...
There are two interesting bits to this article. One is that the Linux control servers were load balancing in a way. The other is the way this botnet and it's description has been misrepresented in the tech press leading people into thinking there is some real risk to them if they're running a Linux server as though widescale automated exploits were adding Linux servers to a botnet, as opposed to ten Linux boxes hosting an exploit and controlling a botnet of Windows machines.
'Botnet' has never meant 'auto-infected' and if they assumed that, they were careless.
No, botnet means a network of computers auto controlled, but in general when you describe a botnet, especially referring to the OS, you refer to the OS of the bots, which make up the majority, not the OS of the select few control channel systems.
The summary makes no attempt to fool them into thinking anything other than the facts.
The title was, "First Botnet of Linux Web Servers Discovered". It didn't say first botnet of Windows machines controlled by ten Linux Webservers. It isn't the first botnet that includes Linux Web servers, those are actually quite common. Thus the average person who knows what they're talking about assumes it is the regular bots which must be running Linux, since otherwise the title makes no sense. You don't think that is misleading?
Besides which, at this point, we don't -know- how it spreads. We just know that it exists... Which to me, is news.
Well, no we don't know for sure, but we do know what is likely. Given that only a few servers have been hacked and given the nature of the attempt, it seems to be targeting server operators who attempt to FTP files and steal passwords, it is probably just dumb admins who don't verify credentials and who use root for FTP operations. In past servers have been compromised by a number of web server exploits as well. The only thing that differentiates this botnet from any other is that they networked the control channel to load balance the phishing server. Aside from that, nothing about this botnet is even out of the ordinary. To call it the first botnet of Linux servers is disingenuous by every definition of a botnet that doesn't count multiple Linux Web servers controlling a bunch of Windows boxes but does include multiple Linux Web servers that control a bunch of Windows boxes, but randomly pass traffic to each other to balance the incoming connections.
Companies are indeed defined by what they do - the majority of what Apple does in the marketplace is provide tightly integrated "Just Works" experiences by maintaining a strong control over what they do.
I disagree, slightly. Apple does, indeed, use the business model of providing a polished end user experience, often limited, but easy to use for what it does. They sometimes do this by maintaining a lot of control over all the components, but not in all cases. In other cases they do this by partnering with other companies and organizations or by building a product that integrates well with the existing ecosystem. Controlling all the components is only one of their methods of implementing that business plan.
They also maintain intense secrecy on all their products. Do you dispute anything specific that I said?
Absolutely. Apple completely documents and voluntarily provides the source code for large portions of many of their products. That is certainly not maintaining secrecy about them. Rather, Apple is famed for being secretive about new and upcoming products that have not been released. This is for two reasons. First it allows them to make an effective marketing splash and draws interest from the press. Second, Apple makes a lot of money by innovating and by maintaining secrecy they maximize the time to market advantage they have over those who copy their innovations.
That said, such secrecy as Apple has demonstrated has little to do with whether or not Apple releases source code to products after it comes to market. That's an action they regularly take, so to not expect them to take it, you have to be misconstruing what apple normally does.
At the end of the day *nothing* is really unexpected on some level since there are unseen laws and logic governing basically everything that happens. But if you see a trend in behaviour from somewhere (e.g. tight control and secrecy in most of Apple's most visible things) and then that trend is apparently violated, that qualifies as "surprising" in my opinion.
Ahh, but if you're perceiving Apple as being secretive about how their products work and about the source code it just means your perception is inaccurate. This, in turn, means you should look at your preconceptions and information sources. Apple releases the source code for the 600th or 700th project and that's a surprise? Apple releases the source to a foundational new technology they implemented in OS X? That might have been surprising when it was the original release of Darwin, or even when it was the libc and io stuff they made from scratch and gave away the source to subsequently. But come on already. They've been releasing the source to underlying technologies they add to OS X, with every release for over a decade now. Grand Central is exactly the type of technology that Apple leverages the open source model for, being as it benefits from more eyes and more contributors and the more people that use it the better software developers will get at making applications multiprocess well on OS X. It should be no surprise at all to someone with an accurate perception of how Apple operates as a fairly good, mixed OSS community player, that understands OSS and regularly leverages it for their products.
Frankly, I think your perception of Apple has to be pretty messed up to be surprised by Apple releasing the source to GCD. The reason this is news is because of the idea that other OS's might be able to integrate it and because it is potentially so useful. Most of the time what Apple releases isn't even news. Heck, they released a dozen packages for their underlying security framework in case anyone wants to make use of their version of sandboxing.
I guess the long and short of the matter is, if you're surprised by this, do you just have an anti-Apple bias and why do you have that?
Well, you are assuming that calling a machine a bot is dependent on the fact it was infected.
Not really. Calling a machine a bot or zombie is generally an indication that they are the regular "peon" part of a botnet. I mean technically the control channel and update channel and the terminals machines the operator is using are part of the botnet. They just are not generally referred to as bots because they are part of the system doing the controlling instead of being the end systems used to launch attacks.
My main point was, the summary and title here led readers who use the specific terms one way to think that is what was happening. The comments from researchers led people to think that. That is why this was news. It's not news to discover Linux systems hacked by hand are being used to control Windows bots, because that happens all the time and is, perhaps, the most common kind of botnet.
The only part of this article that is news is the part that is incorrect. Botnets of Windows machines often have compromised Linux servers working as a control channel or update channel. It is not at all unusual. What would be unusual would be for a worm or virus to actually compromise Linux machines in an automated fashion and make them bots. That does not seem to be what has happened here as the Linux systems seem to have been manually hacked in a normal, directed attack.
Basicaly, nothing new or newsworthy happened here, except someone mistakenly referred to the compromised Linux servers as bots.
I think a problem is that good technical writers don't have a tendency to donate work in their 'hobby time'.
Having worked in the field, this does not seem to be true. I used to hook up technical writers with open source projects where they could donate work, but the results were often negative. Many of the writers found the coders would have no real interest in including documentation and did not want to spend the time explaining the more esoteric uses. Further, a good technical writer approaches a documentation project as a user advocate. They try to perform tasks as a user would and then write up an explanation of how the task is accomplished. As a result, they often find bugs, UI bugs, and usability problems. It's not unusual for a writer to go to the other developers and describe how they tried to accomplish a task and failed, only to be yelled at by an engineer that assumes the user/writer is stupid for trying to accomplish the task in a way that isn't the same as they expected. It is, perhaps, only natural for developers to get defensive of their projects and try to defend poor UI design choices rather than commit to working to fix or work around those problems and for OSS projects one cannot always expect to be working with professionals. That said, the rate at which these problems were occurring was strangely high, even when the writers were used to working on commercial OSS products. I more or less stopped giving writers any recommendation unless I really knew all the coders involved fairly well, because I did not want to deal with the backlash anymore.
It's quite surprising from a company like Apple...
Companies are defined by what they do. If a person surprised Apple is releasing technologies as open source projects, that just means that person has an inaccurate image of what kind of company Apple is and should pay more attention to what Apple does and less to espoused, unsupported opinions from astroturfers and zealots.
Everyone who reads slashdot isn't an OSX ween and has no idea what "Grand Central Dispatch" is. Perhaps a sentence or two describing why it is important/useful would save users from following the link which doesn't provide that info either.
Look I'm as annoyed by poor summaries as anyone, but it seems almost reflexive to complain about them these days. The summary clearly said it, "makes it easier for developers to take advantage of multi-core parallelism". I don't care if you've never heard of OS X and no nothing about it. That sentence right there tells you what effect it has and why it's useful. After that it's just details as to where and if it is applicable to some other project. I guess what I'm saying is, I thought this was a pretty decent summary, enough to know if you should read about it.
Wow. Did the brits meet with the president daily?
Why would you think they met daily? The british did meet with the office of the president at least somewhat regulalry. Officer Hayman wrote, "We moved from having congenial conversations to eyeball-to-eyeball confrontations," in reference to their meetings with the american authorities. Mostly they refer to the July 28 meeting with Blair and Bush as the breaking point though, as that seems to be what spurred action by the OVP.
Or are we still trying to blame Bush for everything wrong that happened for the past 8 years?
Umm, you seem to have a chip on your shoulder or something. We're talking about the influence of the american authorities on this case. No one blames Bush for anything in this instance and, in fact, it is Cheney who the british seem to blame for cracking and sending someone to have the contact arrested and more so blame for not informing them at all about that so they could implement a proper plan to arrest the suspects instead of running a major operation with no notice.
Just because facts are revealed that some of the Bush administration officials were jerks, doesn't mean there is some sort of conspiracy. Sometimes it just means some Bush administration officials were jerks. It's called "reality".
Apple's business model is about control end to end, that is the business model of the old mainframe companies, you have admitied[sic] this youreself[sic].
Sigh, I tried to be very clear, but you either are having problems with reading comprehension or you ignore anything that might contradict your already made up mind. Apple's business model is about polished and usable but limited technology being brought to the mass market from a niche. What I said was sometimes end to end control is the best way for Apple to achieve this and other times it is not, which is why "control" is not their core business model, but only appears that way to people who don't look across their product line.
For the iPhone Apple tried to partner with several cell service providers before going with AT&T as the only one willing to make the concessions Apple needed for the level of functionality and ease of overall experience required.
If you're too young to remember then please stop commenting. This may seem new to you but it's old news to us.
What are you a simpleton? I'm describing their business model and giving examples as to how and why they don't always attempt to completely control their products. That absolutely relevant, but you don't want to hear it? Too freaking bad.
You seem to have missed a vital part of the discussion.
As have you, the choice of processor is a vital part of how apple limits geeks.
Are you seriously making this argument? I guess that's how Sony limits geeks too. And how Lockheed limits geeks. Do you know that Lockheed doesn't sell a single desktop computer containing PPC processors? How dare they limit geeks.
Either you're intentionally being obtuse and misunderstanding that the argument was about how companies and Apple artificially limit geeks in their products or you are a complete moron. Either way you've succeeded in convincing me discussion with you is pointless. I'm not even bothering to read, let alone comment upon the rest of your nonsense. Grow up already.
The bottom line is that Apple doesn't support FLAC. Apple is using iTunes and the digital media infrastructure of OS-X, iPod, AppleTv, etc., to LOCK IN users to Apple formats.
Again, that's not what "lock-in" means. By that argument every company that does not support every format is locking thier users into certain formats. OpenOffice does not support exporting documents as jpegs so they're locking us into the formats they do support? Of course not, that's absurd. They do support PDF and postscript so from those formats I can convert if I really need jpeg. Likewise with Apple. For it to be lock-in they have to be actively doing something to prevent you from switching to competitors, and Apple is not, at this point, doing anything of the sort with their audio formats. You can buy a competing player that supports Ogg or WMA or whatever, convert your files with no impediment from Apple and be on your merry way. That is not lock-in and repeatedly saying it is hurts all of us actually working to inform users about real cases where companies are locking people into their products using closed, undocumented, DRM'd or otherwise locked down formats and protocols.
Apple does not support FLAC, indeed, Apple only marginally supports high-resolution audio (iPods cannot play 96/24 audio).
Apple makes products they sell. They cater to their clients. If enough of their clients wanted or needed FLAC, Apple would add support. Seeing as there are not any chipsets that support FLAC, suitable for inclusion in Apple's devices, the battery performance of Apple products would be very, very poor using FLAC and seeing as there is no real demand, Apple doesn't support it.
Maybe you missed why Apple has become so popular with their recent products. They don't provide every niche feature geeks want. They provide a subset of features but make sure those features work really well. This makes them appealing to the mass audience and in turn makes them money. They don't care about FLAC, but since it is not easy to do well and there is no demand for it from consumers, Apple leaves it out. If that's a problem for you, buy something else already. Buy from someone who does cater to geeks. I don't own an ipod or iPhone because they don't cater to me, but I don't go whining that Apple is trying to lock me in because they're ignoring what I want. They aren't trying to lock me in, they're just targeting normal users and I don't fit into that category. Get over it and please stop misusing the term "lock-in" as it belittles all the actual cases of lock-in and confuses an already confusing issue for normal users.
I don't give a crap about appearance and marketing.
The comparison was on usability, which can be affected by appearance, but usually is not significantly so. Marketing is considered when it detracts from usability.
What I want is to find the fix or download I need. If I google (or even live search) an error code from Microsoft 9 times out of 10 I'll get a link to a KB. If I google an Apple error code I'll get nothing, thats after I've gone into the command line to find out what the actual error code is because Apple thinks displaying the actual error is a bad idea.
What you find in Google has no bearing on the usability of the sites being compared. You seem to have completely missed the point. As for errors, what kind of errors are you having trouble finding out about? You're a bit vague on the topic. Can you provide an example?
An MS fix is often found in under an hour...
It's funny, I don't remember having to look up fixes for OS X ever. I have to look up configuration settings when I'm doing something unusual, like installing a specialty kernel module, but not really fixes. What fixes have you had to look up?
Trying to find a fix for OS X or updated firmware is not the easiest task because this is not Apple's modus operandi.
Umm, firmware updates show up automatically in OS X, via the update mechanism. If for some reason that did not work (I've never heard of this problem) you could run the firmware updater and it will pull down the updates from the server. I'm still not clear what fixes you need to look up.
Where most Mac fanboys fail is comparing everything to Apple's goals rather then the organisation in question's goals.
Umm, this was a usability test of Websites, not a comparison of organizations. Are you calling a Microsoft exec you thinks the MS Web page is less usable a "Mac fanboy"?
MS's site is entirely designed entirely for professionals, people who know what they need and can easily figure out how to get it, with this goal in mind MS's site is very well designed.
Not really. I'm a professional. The MS exec is a professional. The usability engineer is a professional. As a usability tester myself, I certainly see where MS has violated some basic design principals that will make their site more difficult to use for anyone, simply because it is ambiguous. You seem to be defending MS's choices, but I'm not sure why and you have not addressed any of the specific mentioned. Frankly, I think you are just emotionally invested in your opinion.
Nonsense like Apple's primary business being marketing does nothing at all to make your argument more persuasive, it just makes you look hopelessly biases to the point where you have no credibility. I have an idea for you. Go read a good book on usability and Web design, then go look at the two sites and try to apply what you learned impartially. Then, get back to all of us with specific points of UI design and why you think MS's site is more usable and in what specific way.
Have you used the unintuitive piece of shit called "iTunes for Windows" that makes zero sense to those unfamiliar with the OS X UI?
What I find really funny about this is that I remember back in the day people installing iTunes even though they did not have iPods, solely for the purpose of ripping CDs. They did it because they could not figure out how to accomplish the task using WMP or any of the other software most people used to play music. The iTunes UI is certainly nonstandard for Windows (not that that is unusual) but I'd say the usability is actually pretty decent. Heck, I'm willing to bet if you sit a Windows user who has never seen either in front of iTunes and WMP and run a regular usability test, iTunes will win. I'm not 100% sure, and usability testing has surprised me in the past, but that would be my bet.
Bullshit the pictures are valid, only if the cops take the photos of the weed in your house is it valid evidence.
Umm, don't read the news much do you? More than one person has been convicted based upon photos of crimes they took themselves, and in recent years posted on social networking sites.
I didn't mean the 'derailing' vs 'conviction' part. I'm referring to the 'Intercepts' part. If what you say is true, the intercepts had nothing to do with this case.
They did have something to do with the case in that they were the first copies of the e-mail the brits were able to read, but they did not hold up in court.
The conviction evidence came from a warrant justified by UK surveillance . I've yet to see a legitimate case that the illegal eavesdropping contributed to exposing.
This is true, but even if the intercepts had been used as evidence, these intercepts were done via FISA warrants issued by a judge, not using the warrantless wiretapping which is what most people argue is illegal. If anything they demonstrate there is no need for the warrantless wiretaps.
I don't understand why Slashdot is promoting this FUD.
Slashdot just runs news articles, it doesn't judge the content per se. I'd say NSA wiretaps and their use is of interest to nerds, even if the article was missing some detail. This is a discussion site, and the discussion is often where the useful insights and info is to be found.
By the trouble it takes to do the conversion of tens of thousands of files to another format.
That's not what lock-in means. It would be lock-in if Apple implemented some mechanism to keep you from converting to another format. As it is you can just set your jukebox player to batch convert and go get coffee. Try not to misuse terms so incorrectly, it verges on flamebait because it is so misinformative. DRM'd AAC, absolutely can be considered lock-in. WMA yup. ALAC, no.