I assume you've answered the wrong post. If this is not the case, then I fail to see the relevance of your missive, or why you're quoting things that I didn't write.
"they aren't actually doing to bad seeing as 2000 was the best year as far as price per stock went and they are up today"
1999 was better than 2000: they hit an all-time high in February at 175.44, and didn't drop below 83.87 that year, while they remained well above $100 for most of 1998. So while the charts do indeed show a diminishing trend in share price since 2000, you have to go all the way back to 1986 (when Microsoft was a _much_ smaller and considerably less powerful company) to see prices comparable to current levels, and 1986 dollars were worth considerably more than 2008 dollars. But if you think that a company whose shares now sell for less than 1/4 of the price they used to command is doing well in that particular regard, then I won't argue.
NB: I'm not saying that share price is any sort of indicator of a company's actual value, but it's an excellent guide to the way potential and current shareholders see things.
"If the alternitave is microsoft loosing most ov their market share to linux and foss then i think they will be willing to put up with it."
You're looking at things from a geek perspective, not that of business types who run the big financial companies who own most of Microsoft's publicly traded shares. The few who've heard of FOSS will come across it through articles written by journalists who haven't researched the topic very well, and get most of their material from the likes of Rob Enderlie and other anti-FOSS people who deliberately misrepresent it, so they'll think it's something that only appeals to cheapskates who and overweight, smelly people with beards and sandals, neither of whom will be seen as a viable market for Microsoft.
What these business types will however be well aware of is that these "costs of doing business" are not only expensive, but also damaging to the company's reputation (and therefore the value of the brand). And unlike FOSS, this is something they know about, which means that they also know how difficult it can be to repair such damage. The fact that shareholders don't like to see companies spending large sums of money on making themselves look like a bunch of crooks and bullies should be fairly obvious.
"The EU fine they paid recently should be seen as part of what they are paying in order to try to keep their monopoly. One way to view it is that these fines are only "cost of business" for Microsoft."
The problem is not whether Microsoft bosses see these things as a cost of doing business, but whether their shareholders, who actually own the company, are willing to put up with large quantities of _their_ money being pissed away on anti-trust fines, winning litigation by patent holders, and various other _avoidable_ legal problems, especially now that they know about those memos which show how Vista's hardware branding campaign was deliberately messed up to help Intel sell some old graphics chip sets, thus proving that much the ill-will from end users and at least one class action suit could also easily have been avoided.
Everything in your list except the last one is only advantageous to corporate users, and even the last fails to benefit consumers much, who don't care who is to blame when things fail to work, only that they fail (e.g. the current debacle with nVidia's Vista drivers).
I know 70% of the world market for PCs is the corporate sector, so MS are more likely to consider them than home and small business users. However, they're also by far the most conservative market segment, hence the fact that so many of them are still installing Windows-2000 on new machines, while a goodly proportion of those who've moved to XP haven't certified SP2 yet for general deployment despite it now being several years old.
This corporate conservatism means that domestic users and small businesses that are only a small fraction of Microsoft's overall market are therefore the most likely ones to be early adopters of any new OS offering, because they use whatever came with a machine instead of immediately installing a heavily customised locked down site licensed OS and software packages on everything that's delivered. If they don't react favourably, then the probability of Vista getting enough critical mass to gain widespread support from the software industry is dramatically lowered, which means that it's less likely the corporate sector will bother to go through the long evaluation and compatibility testing procedures that they perform before accepting software for general deployment.
All these corporate goodies are therefore irrelevant to the only market segment who will initially be using Vista in large enough numbers to matter. The fact that many of them got it on machines that, because of Microsoft's pandering to Intel and others, are quite frankly not up to the task of running it, and in many cases can't use the eye candy that MS advertising was touting to them, has however turned out to be very relevant indeed, because it's resulted in a public relations nightmare that doesn't bode at all well for the chances of Vista ever being widely deployed in the enterprises who probably have the most to gain from it.
If both sides were, as MS claim, stacking national bodies to get their own way in this case, then I'm left wondering how many other standards got pushed through ISO (and indeed other standards bodies) in a similar way. This one got lots of attention from geeks because it involved both MS and various FOSS advocates, but there are probably many other situations that we know nothing about where very large players stood to lose a lot of money if ISO ratified something that didn't enshrine their current way of doing something, and would therefore be inclined to do everything they could to ensure that this didn't happen.
So rather than being an exception to the way standards are normally decided, there exists the very real possibility that this is the way the game has been played many times in the past, but most of us just didn't know until Microsoft attempted to do it, thus ensuring that this time there would be thousands of geeks scrutinising a process that's usually ignored by those who aren't directly involved in it.
"All this means is that those that had been using such tactics in the past are getting worse at it within the US."
An alternative explanation is that they no longer care whether people find out about it because the public now assumes that all politicians are corrupt, so corruption in and of itself isn't a vote loser anymore.
"The difference is simply that other nations are better at it, know when such corruption will gain public focus or not, or don't have the clout to even try on the world stage."
Or perhaps they simply put more effort into hiding it in countries where getting caught out can result in "deciding to spend more time with one's family", jail sentences, or the downfall of a government.
You're missing the fact that the Pony Express could carry packages, which none of the other technologies you mention were or are capable of. The modern equivalents of the Pony Express are therefore the likes of DHL and UPS, who still transport physical things around, and will continue to do so until somebody comes up with a way of replicating matter at a distance.
NB: American Express, who ran the pony express, are still around, and doing very well for themselves, although they aren't in the transport business anymore.
"A lot of keyboards now have USB connectors, but that is basicly building a USB-to-MIDI adapter into the keyboard."
Many modern professional ones also have Firewire, and some older gear had it as an optional add on. Firewire is used for mLan, which allows multiple channels of audio and MIDI data to be sent over a single cable, and up to 64 devices can be daisy-chained. The ability to do signal routing and patching without reconnecting cables also makes it a popular option for mixers and stand-alone DAWs. So this is yet another example of Firewire not being obsolete for high-end pro applications.
"Now, MIDI could do with a bit of freshening up. Perhaps quadruple the bandwidth (while still being backwards compatable), and switch to mini-DIN connectors."
It's already been freshened up. mLan can carry up to 256 MIDI ports simultaneously (1 port = 16 channels, so that's 4096 channels in total) at 200Mbps compared with standard MIDI's single port at 19k2 baud, and it uses a single six-way firewire connector that's comparable in size to a mini-DIN, but with a rectangular cross-section instead of a round one.
"On the flip side though, 33% of the time there's a fatal accident and some of the occupants wore seatbelts and some didn't, those that did were the one's that died."
On the flip side of the flip side, this same statistic also means that in 67% of cases, the ones that didn't wear seat belts were the ones that died, so you're twice as likely to survive a serious accident if you wear a seat belt than if you don't. Note also that they reduce the incidence of certain types of injuries in non-fatal accidents, while increasing the incidence of others.
Whether a seat belt will save or kill depends on the type of accident and where one happens to be sitting. They are beneficial in head-on impacts, for all passengers, but detrimental for side impacts for those sitting on the side where the impact occurs (they're actually beneficial to whoever's on the other side because the unfortunate person on the side that's hit is less likely to be thrown against them with considerable force). Significant benefits are gained in roll-over accidents, but not in those where a vehicle catches fire or plunges into water, where injured or panicked passengers (or people attempting to rescue them) may have difficulty undoing them.
One interesting thing that's been evident in many countries' accident statistics is the fact that fatalities of pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists, etc, go up as seat belt usage becomes more common. This seems to be due to the fact that people feel safer when wearing them, and therefore drive faster, which also of course increases the likelihood of them being subjected to higher impact forces when colliding with other vehicles or immovable solid objects, thus making it more likely that they will be severely injured or killed despite wearing a seat belt.
"Take it even further, and why shouldn't I be able to choose if I buy a car with seatbelts or without?"
Because (a) your passengers can only choose to wear them if they're there, (b) they cost very little to include, and (c) even in the case of there being no passengers, you getting yourself killed or severely injured is a net cost to society in monetary terms, so anything that reduces the likelihood of it happening by even a small amount is worthwhile. I suggest you check some of the many statistics that have been produced all over the world which detail the economic impact of somebody being killed or seriously injured in a road accident -- you might be surprised at how much it actually costs.
"yet another proprietary programming language (objective c)"
I suggest you do some fact checking before writing things like this, because Objective C is not a proprietary language.
"You "could" make an argument for plain C, or an interpreted language but the iphone won't even allow those, so the point is moot."
Objective C is a strict C superset, which means that unlike for example C++, it will compile any standard C program. This means that "plain C" is indeed allowed on the iPhone, which of course you would know if you'd spent the same amount of time that you invested in this rant to learn a little about it.
"The point was that this action is harmful as somebody might already be or could become aware of the same flaw and use it maliciously. "
I believe that this would have been far more likely to have occurred without the competition, because Apple will be given the opportunity to fix the flaw pre-emptively instead of having it brought to their attention by malicious exploits. This is why I think competitions like this one are a good thing, because they're effectively offering a bounty for exploits whose discoverers might otherwise be tempted to use other methods of earning money from them.
NB: if I was running a company with the sort of money that's kicking around at Apple, I'd offer a direct bounty to people who reported any previously unknown exploitable vulnerabilities in OS X: $10,000 and a choice of any machine they make for serious vulnerabilities, and $3,000 plus a choice of computers that cost $1500 or less for those of moderate severity. It'd have the twin advantages of making Apple look like they were taking security very seriously indeed, while significantly reducing the probability of malicious code adversely affecting their customers before they've had a chance to patch it.
"The idea of hacking contests should not to publish new exploits, but to actually find new exploits."
A hacking contest tests the capabilities of hackers, not what they're hacking, and this one was no exception. This is something that the braying fanboys on all sides should bear in mind, because the only true conclusion that can be drawn from this particular contest was that the person who won was a better hacker than those who lost, especially when several of the losers were also trying to hack Macs.
"All bugs should be reported immediately to the developer. Period."
In an ideal world, "should" would equate with "is" and "are", but we don't live in an ideal world.
"I don't have a problem with someone gaining something out of a software bug, as long as it doesn't happen in the expense of the end user."
Then why are you complaining about somebody who gained something out of a bug without affecting end users?
"But delaying bug reports is not much better and I don't see why I should be much happier with this approach."
We should be happier with this approach because no end users were harmed by it, and no end users will be harmed by it if Apple remedy the problem when they're told about it (they may indeed already have been told -- we don't know yet, because the details aren't being published until Apple have been notified, and have been given a chance to fix the problem).
"As someone who works with life critical systems I don't just think of finding and getting a bug fixed, but also the timeframe of the fixing if such bug is found. I don't think this should differ that much from the IT security business."
We have no idea what the bug was so there is no way of knowing how difficult it is to fix. Remember though that this is a bug in Safari, not the OS itself, so anybody who is worried by it can use a different browser until a fix appears from Apple. This is not a version of IE between 3 and 6, which had unremovable exploitable components wedged deep inside the OS itself, but a separate application, so any problems with it can be bypassed by the simple workaround of using something else for a short while.
"But as we have seen now and in the past, there are people who do play the game mostly into their own pockets."
People do indeed frequently expect their skills to be lucrative.
"This should not be endorsed by hacking contests. These contests should be about finding new ways exploiting systems. Having a pre-made exploit kind of kills the whole idea, and to be honest tastes cheating."
Cheating is using trickery to gain advantages that non-cheaters don't have. This was not the case here, because the people attacking Vista and Ubuntu could have done precisely the same things as this guy did, so he was working under exactly the same conditions as all the other entrants.
To sell Mac security software (this is a quote from their own homepage):
"SecureMac's Anti-Spyware program for the Macintosh has been released. MacScan 2.5 adds Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) support as well as the ability to schedule scans. Now you can have MacScan audit your system while you are sleeping or in your idle time. To download your thirty day trial of MacScan or upgrade your existing version please visit the MacScan Homepage."
"And why does it list trojans in the wild as recently as January 2008?"
A Trojan which pretends to be a codec for watching porn that has to be deliberately downloaded and installed by users from porn sites. It changes DNS settings so that browsers are redirected to other sites where users are asked to enter personal information, which will then be used for ID theft. This will undoubtedly be extremely dangerous for people who think that software on porn sites is safe and trustworthy, and routinely type things such as their name, address, social security number, mother's maiden name, and full details of all credit cards and bank accounts into any web page with fields for them, while those with IQs that require more than a single decimal digit to express will not be affected by it.
"In other words this guy most likely found a security bug in Safari, but instead of reporting it directly, made an exploit and waited for a hacking contest to get a monetary benefit out of it."
So what if he did? As somebody who uses a Mac (and Linux, and Windows XP), I'm much happier with him having taken this route to gaining from the exploit than the one so many Windows hackers use of putting it up for auction to the highest bidder, or the Month Of Apple Bugs tactic of making exploits public before giving the people or companies whose code was at fault a chance to fix them. Nobody was directly harmed by his actions, and Apple get to close this particular hole before before its details are published, so this is a net benefit to all Mac users except rabid Apple fans who are being forced to eat crow.
Modern OS distros are a vast web of complex interactions between modules, APIs, drivers, and applications, many of which were written by different people at different times who had widely differing goals. The best programmers in the world can and do make mistakes, so even if a design is flawless (and none of the currently available offerings can claim this), and every programmer is the very best example of his or her craft (the vast majority aren't), there will still be bugs, and some of those bugs will turn out to be exploitable by malicious people. Expecting things to be otherwise is even more naive than expecting those who've found an exploit to report it instead of using it for personal gain.
Yet another "technology journalist" producing a puff piece where some self-styled US experts (two business historians, a "technology forecaster", and a magazine editor) give some entirely US-centric, specialisation-blinkered views that end up being nothing more than column filler. Here are some quotes, with my comments:
"What are the common traits of survivor technologies? First, it seems, there is a core technology requirement: there must be some enduring advantage in the old technology that is not entirely supplanted by the new".
Well blow me down, and there I was thinking that only useless technologies survive, while all the ones that are still useful become obsolete. Thanks for setting me straight.
""The rise and fall of technologies is mainly about business and not technological determinism," said Richard S. Tedlow, a business historian at the Harvard Business School."
Which nicely proves that everything looks like a business decision to business historians. Perhaps somebody could show Mr. Tedlow a few of the technologies that we still use today that which been around for thousands of years such as bricks, cement, concrete, glass, ceramics, axes, hammers, ploughs, knives, spoons, fire, the wheel, nails, screws, pulleys, sails, stitching, weaving, tanning, and a whole host of others. If technology was mainly about business decisions, then how does he explain the fact that so many of these originated from things people made for themselves?
" John Steele Gordon, a business historian and author, observes that there are striking similarities in the evolutionary process of markets and biological ecosystems. Dinosaurs, he notes, may be long gone, victims of a change in climate that better suited mammals. But smaller reptiles evolved and survived"
Yet another business historian has managed to solve a problem that's been perplexing palaeontologists for well over a century: the dinosaurs died out because they were reptiles, big, and didn't like the climate. Of course there are a few wrinkles that still need ironing out, such as the fact that dinosaurs were as closely related to modern reptiles as birds are, or that annoying little niggle of crocodilians and chelonians, both of whom are extremely ancient reptile groups, have and still do include species that are significantly bigger than some dinosaurs, yet managed to survive despite this.
"radio adopted shorter programming formats and became the background music and chat while people ride in cars or do other things at home -- "audio wallpaper," as Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster in Silicon Valley, puts it."
A notably US centric view that's a cultural observation, not a technological one. Radio stations in many other countries were still broadcasting plays, comedy programmes, live concerts, live sporting coverage, and many other "traditional" types of radio programme for several decades after regular television broadcasts were doing the same, and the two formats were often broadcast by the same companies or organisations (e.g. the BBC in the UK, or Spain's RTVE). "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" is a well known example of a series that was originally written for, and broadcast on, radio.
"Technologies want to survive, and they reinvent themselves to go on"
If any single statement demonstrates what a bunch of total arseholes these people are, then this is it.
"The survivors also build on their own technical foundations as well as the human legacy of people skilled in the use of a technology and the business culture and habits that surround it"
So now we all know that ceramic vessels of many types, hand-held mirrors, and tweezers have been around for millennia because there is a legacy of people skilled in using them and business cultures and habits that surround them.
"And a change in the economic environment can sometimes lead to the renaissance of an older technology. Railroads, for example, have enjoyed a revival of investment recently as rising fuel costs and road congestion
"Many people with many years in the software industry still see software patentability as valid"
Because the software industry doesn't just employ programmers. There are also lawyers, many of whom depend on the existence of software patents to run their mansions and pay people to scrape the barnacles off the bottoms of their yachts. Think of all the poor servants who'd lose their jobs if software patents became illegal, and those lawyers were reduced to living in houses without proper servant quarters, garages so tiny that they have to sell off all but a mere dozen of their cars for lack of storage space, make do with illegal immigrants instead of quality, trained American serfs. Oh, the humanity....
Fair use does indeed exist "in Europe", and it also exists in some EU member countries (Europe is not the EU, and the EU isn't Europe). There are no EU rules that either prohibit or permit non-commercial copying, so as with the bits of Europe that aren't in the EU (e.g. Norway, Switzerland), what you can do depends on where you live. The UK for example has no "fair use" provisions at all, while Spain regards all forms of non-commercial copying as legal, including sharing stuff over the Internet (this has been upheld in their courts).
"The Revolutionary War took place due to a foreign "government" trying to rule US citizens."
Because, as we all know, the US was established _before_ that war, and everybody was a citizen of it, hence the fact that the later civil war against something called "The Confederacy" was a fiction invented by pseudo-historians to sell books. New Mexico and Texas were of course always part of that US, and not, as these pseudo-historians claim, Mexican territories at that time.
"To be fair, the $599 Mac Mini doesn't do you much good if you want to actually interact with your computer"
I haven't come across many dongles that one can interact with sans some extra hardware. Note also that the same criticism can be levelled at Apple's high end dongles, because monitors are an extra-cost item with the Mac Pro (although it could be argued that one can interact with them in an obtuse sort of way because they generously include a mouse and keyboard, a $98 value if bought separately from Apple, or $20 from other vendors...)
"As I understand it, a straw man argument is when somebody changes the argument to something they can win"
A straw man argument is a fallacious misrepresentation of somebody's position. The fallacy does not in and of itself have to form the basis of a winnable argument. An excellent example of a straw man that we see all too frequently nowadays is using "sound bites" to take what somebody says out of the context in which they said it to give a false impression of their position on some emotive topic, or pretend that it has changed over time so that they appear to be indecisive or opportunistic. This forces the subject of the straw man to defend him or herself, which provides more sound bites that will then be used to dig an ever deeper hole for them. In these cases, the straw man is intended to present their target in an unfavourable light, not win any debates with them.
"98% of the source of new code does not come from software patents and I can prove it:
Mac OS X"
And MS-DOS, and Windows, and Word, and Excel, and... MS wouldn't exist in its current form if Digital Research had software patents on CP/M, or Apple had them on the original Mac and QuickTime, or Dan Bricklyn had patented the concepts in VisiCalc, or MicroPro had patented various WP concepts, or Borland had patented the IDE, or software patents had been present on any of the legion of other programs and associated software technologies that Microsoft have blatantly ripped off over the years.
To paraphrase Alastair Crowley: "Do as I say and not as I do shall be the whole of the law".
"The Minister slammed software patents. Microsoft is slamming FOSS. While MS's slam, in and of itself, is flawed, it's also somewhat irrelevant."
In other words, it's a straw man, and given the nature of the majority of responses here, it's succeeded admirably in getting lots of geeks beating at it with their FOSS sticks.
Slashdot Mirror
I assume you've answered the wrong post. If this is not the case, then I fail to see the relevance of your missive, or why you're quoting things that I didn't write.
"they aren't actually doing to bad seeing as 2000 was the best year as far as price per stock went and they are up today"
1999 was better than 2000: they hit an all-time high in February at 175.44, and didn't drop below 83.87 that year, while they remained well above $100 for most of 1998. So while the charts do indeed show a diminishing trend in share price since 2000, you have to go all the way back to 1986 (when Microsoft was a _much_ smaller and considerably less powerful company) to see prices comparable to current levels, and 1986 dollars were worth considerably more than 2008 dollars. But if you think that a company whose shares now sell for less than 1/4 of the price they used to command is doing well in that particular regard, then I won't argue.
NB: I'm not saying that share price is any sort of indicator of a company's actual value, but it's an excellent guide to the way potential and current shareholders see things.
"If the alternitave is microsoft loosing most ov their market share to linux and foss then i think they will be willing to put up with it."
You're looking at things from a geek perspective, not that of business types who run the big financial companies who own most of Microsoft's publicly traded shares. The few who've heard of FOSS will come across it through articles written by journalists who haven't researched the topic very well, and get most of their material from the likes of Rob Enderlie and other anti-FOSS people who deliberately misrepresent it, so they'll think it's something that only appeals to cheapskates who and overweight, smelly people with beards and sandals, neither of whom will be seen as a viable market for Microsoft.
What these business types will however be well aware of is that these "costs of doing business" are not only expensive, but also damaging to the company's reputation (and therefore the value of the brand). And unlike FOSS, this is something they know about, which means that they also know how difficult it can be to repair such damage. The fact that shareholders don't like to see companies spending large sums of money on making themselves look like a bunch of crooks and bullies should be fairly obvious.
"The EU fine they paid recently should be seen as part of what they are paying in order to try to keep their monopoly. One way to view it is that these fines are only "cost of business" for Microsoft."
The problem is not whether Microsoft bosses see these things as a cost of doing business, but whether their shareholders, who actually own the company, are willing to put up with large quantities of _their_ money being pissed away on anti-trust fines, winning litigation by patent holders, and various other _avoidable_ legal problems, especially now that they know about those memos which show how Vista's hardware branding campaign was deliberately messed up to help Intel sell some old graphics chip sets, thus proving that much the ill-will from end users and at least one class action suit could also easily have been avoided.
Everything in your list except the last one is only advantageous to corporate users, and even the last fails to benefit consumers much, who don't care who is to blame when things fail to work, only that they fail (e.g. the current debacle with nVidia's Vista drivers).
I know 70% of the world market for PCs is the corporate sector, so MS are more likely to consider them than home and small business users. However, they're also by far the most conservative market segment, hence the fact that so many of them are still installing Windows-2000 on new machines, while a goodly proportion of those who've moved to XP haven't certified SP2 yet for general deployment despite it now being several years old.
This corporate conservatism means that domestic users and small businesses that are only a small fraction of Microsoft's overall market are therefore the most likely ones to be early adopters of any new OS offering, because they use whatever came with a machine instead of immediately installing a heavily customised locked down site licensed OS and software packages on everything that's delivered. If they don't react favourably, then the probability of Vista getting enough critical mass to gain widespread support from the software industry is dramatically lowered, which means that it's less likely the corporate sector will bother to go through the long evaluation and compatibility testing procedures that they perform before accepting software for general deployment.
All these corporate goodies are therefore irrelevant to the only market segment who will initially be using Vista in large enough numbers to matter. The fact that many of them got it on machines that, because of Microsoft's pandering to Intel and others, are quite frankly not up to the task of running it, and in many cases can't use the eye candy that MS advertising was touting to them, has however turned out to be very relevant indeed, because it's resulted in a public relations nightmare that doesn't bode at all well for the chances of Vista ever being widely deployed in the enterprises who probably have the most to gain from it.
"This unsupported media will instead not be playable at all."
Which won't matter in the least to those who buy devices with 8" non-panoramic displays and no room or extra power for things like Blu-Ray drives.
If both sides were, as MS claim, stacking national bodies to get their own way in this case, then I'm left wondering how many other standards got pushed through ISO (and indeed other standards bodies) in a similar way. This one got lots of attention from geeks because it involved both MS and various FOSS advocates, but there are probably many other situations that we know nothing about where very large players stood to lose a lot of money if ISO ratified something that didn't enshrine their current way of doing something, and would therefore be inclined to do everything they could to ensure that this didn't happen.
So rather than being an exception to the way standards are normally decided, there exists the very real possibility that this is the way the game has been played many times in the past, but most of us just didn't know until Microsoft attempted to do it, thus ensuring that this time there would be thousands of geeks scrutinising a process that's usually ignored by those who aren't directly involved in it.
"All this means is that those that had been using such tactics in the past are getting worse at it within the US."
An alternative explanation is that they no longer care whether people find out about it because the public now assumes that all politicians are corrupt, so corruption in and of itself isn't a vote loser anymore.
"The difference is simply that other nations are better at it, know when such corruption will gain public focus or not, or don't have the clout to even try on the world stage."
Or perhaps they simply put more effort into hiding it in countries where getting caught out can result in "deciding to spend more time with one's family", jail sentences, or the downfall of a government.
You're missing the fact that the Pony Express could carry packages, which none of the other technologies you mention were or are capable of. The modern equivalents of the Pony Express are therefore the likes of DHL and UPS, who still transport physical things around, and will continue to do so until somebody comes up with a way of replicating matter at a distance.
NB: American Express, who ran the pony express, are still around, and doing very well for themselves, although they aren't in the transport business anymore.
"A lot of keyboards now have USB connectors, but that is basicly building a USB-to-MIDI adapter into the keyboard."
Many modern professional ones also have Firewire, and some older gear had it as an optional add on. Firewire is used for mLan, which allows multiple channels of audio and MIDI data to be sent over a single cable, and up to 64 devices can be daisy-chained. The ability to do signal routing and patching without reconnecting cables also makes it a popular option for mixers and stand-alone DAWs. So this is yet another example of Firewire not being obsolete for high-end pro applications.
"Now, MIDI could do with a bit of freshening up. Perhaps quadruple the bandwidth (while still being backwards compatable), and switch to mini-DIN connectors."
It's already been freshened up. mLan can carry up to 256 MIDI ports simultaneously (1 port = 16 channels, so that's 4096 channels in total) at 200Mbps compared with standard MIDI's single port at 19k2 baud, and it uses a single six-way firewire connector that's comparable in size to a mini-DIN, but with a rectangular cross-section instead of a round one.
"On the flip side though, 33% of the time there's a fatal accident and some of the occupants wore seatbelts and some didn't, those that did were the one's that died."
On the flip side of the flip side, this same statistic also means that in 67% of cases, the ones that didn't wear seat belts were the ones that died, so you're twice as likely to survive a serious accident if you wear a seat belt than if you don't. Note also that they reduce the incidence of certain types of injuries in non-fatal accidents, while increasing the incidence of others.
Whether a seat belt will save or kill depends on the type of accident and where one happens to be sitting. They are beneficial in head-on impacts, for all passengers, but detrimental for side impacts for those sitting on the side where the impact occurs (they're actually beneficial to whoever's on the other side because the unfortunate person on the side that's hit is less likely to be thrown against them with considerable force). Significant benefits are gained in roll-over accidents, but not in those where a vehicle catches fire or plunges into water, where injured or panicked passengers (or people attempting to rescue them) may have difficulty undoing them.
One interesting thing that's been evident in many countries' accident statistics is the fact that fatalities of pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists, etc, go up as seat belt usage becomes more common. This seems to be due to the fact that people feel safer when wearing them, and therefore drive faster, which also of course increases the likelihood of them being subjected to higher impact forces when colliding with other vehicles or immovable solid objects, thus making it more likely that they will be severely injured or killed despite wearing a seat belt.
"Take it even further, and why shouldn't I be able to choose if I buy a car with seatbelts or without?"
Because (a) your passengers can only choose to wear them if they're there, (b) they cost very little to include, and (c) even in the case of there being no passengers, you getting yourself killed or severely injured is a net cost to society in monetary terms, so anything that reduces the likelihood of it happening by even a small amount is worthwhile. I suggest you check some of the many statistics that have been produced all over the world which detail the economic impact of somebody being killed or seriously injured in a road accident -- you might be surprised at how much it actually costs.
"yet another proprietary programming language (objective c)"
I suggest you do some fact checking before writing things like this, because Objective C is not a proprietary language.
"You "could" make an argument for plain C, or an interpreted language but the iphone won't even allow those, so the point is moot."
Objective C is a strict C superset, which means that unlike for example C++, it will compile any standard C program. This means that "plain C" is indeed allowed on the iPhone, which of course you would know if you'd spent the same amount of time that you invested in this rant to learn a little about it.
"The point was that this action is harmful as somebody might already be or could become aware of the same flaw and use it maliciously. "
I believe that this would have been far more likely to have occurred without the competition, because Apple will be given the opportunity to fix the flaw pre-emptively instead of having it brought to their attention by malicious exploits. This is why I think competitions like this one are a good thing, because they're effectively offering a bounty for exploits whose discoverers might otherwise be tempted to use other methods of earning money from them.
NB: if I was running a company with the sort of money that's kicking around at Apple, I'd offer a direct bounty to people who reported any previously unknown exploitable vulnerabilities in OS X: $10,000 and a choice of any machine they make for serious vulnerabilities, and $3,000 plus a choice of computers that cost $1500 or less for those of moderate severity. It'd have the twin advantages of making Apple look like they were taking security very seriously indeed, while significantly reducing the probability of malicious code adversely affecting their customers before they've had a chance to patch it.
"The idea of hacking contests should not to publish new exploits, but to actually find new exploits."
A hacking contest tests the capabilities of hackers, not what they're hacking, and this one was no exception. This is something that the braying fanboys on all sides should bear in mind, because the only true conclusion that can be drawn from this particular contest was that the person who won was a better hacker than those who lost, especially when several of the losers were also trying to hack Macs.
"All bugs should be reported immediately to the developer. Period."
In an ideal world, "should" would equate with "is" and "are", but we don't live in an ideal world.
"I don't have a problem with someone gaining something out of a software bug, as long as it doesn't happen in the expense of the end user."
Then why are you complaining about somebody who gained something out of a bug without affecting end users?
"But delaying bug reports is not much better and I don't see why I should be much happier with this approach."
We should be happier with this approach because no end users were harmed by it, and no end users will be harmed by it if Apple remedy the problem when they're told about it (they may indeed already have been told -- we don't know yet, because the details aren't being published until Apple have been notified, and have been given a chance to fix the problem).
"As someone who works with life critical systems I don't just think of finding and getting a bug fixed, but also the timeframe of the fixing if such bug is found. I don't think this should differ that much from the IT security business."
We have no idea what the bug was so there is no way of knowing how difficult it is to fix. Remember though that this is a bug in Safari, not the OS itself, so anybody who is worried by it can use a different browser until a fix appears from Apple. This is not a version of IE between 3 and 6, which had unremovable exploitable components wedged deep inside the OS itself, but a separate application, so any problems with it can be bypassed by the simple workaround of using something else for a short while.
"But as we have seen now and in the past, there are people who do play the game mostly into their own pockets."
People do indeed frequently expect their skills to be lucrative.
"This should not be endorsed by hacking contests. These contests should be about finding new ways exploiting systems. Having a pre-made exploit kind of kills the whole idea, and to be honest tastes cheating."
Cheating is using trickery to gain advantages that non-cheaters don't have. This was not the case here, because the people attacking Vista and Ubuntu could have done precisely the same things as this guy did, so he was working under exactly the same conditions as all the other entrants.
"why does this website exist"
To sell Mac security software (this is a quote from their own homepage):
"SecureMac's Anti-Spyware program for the Macintosh has been released. MacScan 2.5 adds Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) support as well as the ability to schedule scans. Now you can have MacScan audit your system while you are sleeping or in your idle time. To download your thirty day trial of MacScan or upgrade your existing version please visit the MacScan Homepage."
"And why does it list trojans in the wild as recently as January 2008?"
A Trojan which pretends to be a codec for watching porn that has to be deliberately downloaded and installed by users from porn sites. It changes DNS settings so that browsers are redirected to other sites where users are asked to enter personal information, which will then be used for ID theft. This will undoubtedly be extremely dangerous for people who think that software on porn sites is safe and trustworthy, and routinely type things such as their name, address, social security number, mother's maiden name, and full details of all credit cards and bank accounts into any web page with fields for them, while those with IQs that require more than a single decimal digit to express will not be affected by it.
"In other words this guy most likely found a security bug in Safari, but instead of reporting it directly, made an exploit and waited for a hacking contest to get a monetary benefit out of it."
So what if he did? As somebody who uses a Mac (and Linux, and Windows XP), I'm much happier with him having taken this route to gaining from the exploit than the one so many Windows hackers use of putting it up for auction to the highest bidder, or the Month Of Apple Bugs tactic of making exploits public before giving the people or companies whose code was at fault a chance to fix them. Nobody was directly harmed by his actions, and Apple get to close this particular hole before before its details are published, so this is a net benefit to all Mac users except rabid Apple fans who are being forced to eat crow.
Modern OS distros are a vast web of complex interactions between modules, APIs, drivers, and applications, many of which were written by different people at different times who had widely differing goals. The best programmers in the world can and do make mistakes, so even if a design is flawless (and none of the currently available offerings can claim this), and every programmer is the very best example of his or her craft (the vast majority aren't), there will still be bugs, and some of those bugs will turn out to be exploitable by malicious people. Expecting things to be otherwise is even more naive than expecting those who've found an exploit to report it instead of using it for personal gain.
Yet another "technology journalist" producing a puff piece where some self-styled US experts (two business historians, a "technology forecaster", and a magazine editor) give some entirely US-centric, specialisation-blinkered views that end up being nothing more than column filler. Here are some quotes, with my comments:
"What are the common traits of survivor technologies? First, it seems, there is a core technology requirement: there must be some enduring advantage in the old technology that is not entirely supplanted by the new".
Well blow me down, and there I was thinking that only useless technologies survive, while all the ones that are still useful become obsolete. Thanks for setting me straight.
""The rise and fall of technologies is mainly about business and not technological determinism," said Richard S. Tedlow, a business historian at the Harvard Business School."
Which nicely proves that everything looks like a business decision to business historians. Perhaps somebody could show Mr. Tedlow a few of the technologies that we still use today that which been around for thousands of years such as bricks, cement, concrete, glass, ceramics, axes, hammers, ploughs, knives, spoons, fire, the wheel, nails, screws, pulleys, sails, stitching, weaving, tanning, and a whole host of others. If technology was mainly about business decisions, then how does he explain the fact that so many of these originated from things people made for themselves?
" John Steele Gordon, a business historian and author, observes that there are striking similarities in the evolutionary process of markets and biological ecosystems. Dinosaurs, he notes, may be long gone, victims of a change in climate that better suited mammals. But smaller reptiles evolved and survived"
Yet another business historian has managed to solve a problem that's been perplexing palaeontologists for well over a century: the dinosaurs died out because they were reptiles, big, and didn't like the climate. Of course there are a few wrinkles that still need ironing out, such as the fact that dinosaurs were as closely related to modern reptiles as birds are, or that annoying little niggle of crocodilians and chelonians, both of whom are extremely ancient reptile groups, have and still do include species that are significantly bigger than some dinosaurs, yet managed to survive despite this.
"radio adopted shorter programming formats and became the background music and chat while people ride in cars or do other things at home -- "audio wallpaper," as Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster in Silicon Valley, puts it."
A notably US centric view that's a cultural observation, not a technological one. Radio stations in many other countries were still broadcasting plays, comedy programmes, live concerts, live sporting coverage, and many other "traditional" types of radio programme for several decades after regular television broadcasts were doing the same, and the two formats were often broadcast by the same companies or organisations (e.g. the BBC in the UK, or Spain's RTVE). "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" is a well known example of a series that was originally written for, and broadcast on, radio.
"Technologies want to survive, and they reinvent themselves to go on"
If any single statement demonstrates what a bunch of total arseholes these people are, then this is it.
"The survivors also build on their own technical foundations as well as the human legacy of people skilled in the use of a technology and the business culture and habits that surround it"
So now we all know that ceramic vessels of many types, hand-held mirrors, and tweezers have been around for millennia because there is a legacy of people skilled in using them and business cultures and habits that surround them.
"And a change in the economic environment can sometimes lead to the renaissance of an older technology. Railroads, for example, have enjoyed a revival of investment recently as rising fuel costs and road congestion
"Many people with many years in the software industry still see software patentability as valid"
Because the software industry doesn't just employ programmers. There are also lawyers, many of whom depend on the existence of software patents to run their mansions and pay people to scrape the barnacles off the bottoms of their yachts. Think of all the poor servants who'd lose their jobs if software patents became illegal, and those lawyers were reduced to living in houses without proper servant quarters, garages so tiny that they have to sell off all but a mere dozen of their cars for lack of storage space, make do with illegal immigrants instead of quality, trained American serfs. Oh, the humanity....
"Note that fair use doesn't exist in Europe."
Fair use does indeed exist "in Europe", and it also exists in some EU member countries (Europe is not the EU, and the EU isn't Europe). There are no EU rules that either prohibit or permit non-commercial copying, so as with the bits of Europe that aren't in the EU (e.g. Norway, Switzerland), what you can do depends on where you live. The UK for example has no "fair use" provisions at all, while Spain regards all forms of non-commercial copying as legal, including sharing stuff over the Internet (this has been upheld in their courts).
"The Revolutionary War took place due to a foreign "government" trying to rule US citizens."
Because, as we all know, the US was established _before_ that war, and everybody was a citizen of it, hence the fact that the later civil war against something called "The Confederacy" was a fiction invented by pseudo-historians to sell books. New Mexico and Texas were of course always part of that US, and not, as these pseudo-historians claim, Mexican territories at that time.
It's a quote from a Derek And Clive Live skit called "the Worst Job He Ever Had".
"To be fair, the $599 Mac Mini doesn't do you much good if you want to actually interact with your computer"
I haven't come across many dongles that one can interact with sans some extra hardware. Note also that the same criticism can be levelled at Apple's high end dongles, because monitors are an extra-cost item with the Mac Pro (although it could be argued that one can interact with them in an obtuse sort of way because they generously include a mouse and keyboard, a $98 value if bought separately from Apple, or $20 from other vendors...)
"As I understand it, a straw man argument is when somebody changes the argument to something they can win"
A straw man argument is a fallacious misrepresentation of somebody's position. The fallacy does not in and of itself have to form the basis of a winnable argument. An excellent example of a straw man that we see all too frequently nowadays is using "sound bites" to take what somebody says out of the context in which they said it to give a false impression of their position on some emotive topic, or pretend that it has changed over time so that they appear to be indecisive or opportunistic. This forces the subject of the straw man to defend him or herself, which provides more sound bites that will then be used to dig an ever deeper hole for them. In these cases, the straw man is intended to present their target in an unfavourable light, not win any debates with them.
"98% of the source of new code does not come from software patents and I can prove it:
Mac OS X"
And MS-DOS, and Windows, and Word, and Excel, and... MS wouldn't exist in its current form if Digital Research had software patents on CP/M, or Apple had them on the original Mac and QuickTime, or Dan Bricklyn had patented the concepts in VisiCalc, or MicroPro had patented various WP concepts, or Borland had patented the IDE, or software patents had been present on any of the legion of other programs and associated software technologies that Microsoft have blatantly ripped off over the years.
To paraphrase Alastair Crowley: "Do as I say and not as I do shall be the whole of the law".
"The Minister slammed software patents. Microsoft is slamming FOSS. While MS's slam, in and of itself, is flawed, it's also somewhat irrelevant."
In other words, it's a straw man, and given the nature of the majority of responses here, it's succeeded admirably in getting lots of geeks beating at it with their FOSS sticks.