Yes, let's give you another analogy, more in line with age of Apple (and possibly you).
You have called one of your class mates (Aron) a "poopoohead". You are called before the headmaster and you are told that your punishment will be to write 100 times on the board that you will never do that again, and you comply by writing: "I will never call the poopoohead Aron a poopoohead, I will call him a shitcollector", I am quite sure that, though you have complied with the letter of the "law" your headmaster will be less than amused.
Apple's response to the court order was less mature than the above, and the judges were not amused. Neither should the rest of us. It takes a particularly deranged mind to be amused by a six year old trying to prank others.
Companies "steal" ideas from each other all the time. Particularly ideas that are blatantly obvious. The only company that goes around suing everybody for making rectangular screens with black bezels is Apple. So, yes, there is a difference, in the behavior of Apple.
Apple is mainly a marketing company. They are good at getting consumers to buy their stuff, and they have a bunch of very good product designers. They are not inventors of much though, and contribute little to that part of business. It is therefore insane that they go around suing everybody.Particularly when it is for blatantly obvious "patents". Many of which have since been invalidated (like the rubber-band stuff).
Thankfully Apple will eventually lose the case against Samsung, and perhaps we can then get back to the business of making cool stuff, not the business of filling the pockets of corporate lawyers.
No, that is actually not the way the law works. But then again, you are not a lawyer, so I would not expect you to know that. Why did you write about something you know nothing about?
Could be microbial life. Could be that a comet crashed into Mars billions of years ago.
Unlikely, since stored Methane would, if it could be sniffed on the surface in high enough quantities, be destroyed by now unless the comet event was rather (cosmically) recent.
a dislike of fart smells would probably reduce your chance of reproducing
I don't think a dislike of certain kinds of smells is going to be this AC's main impediment to reproduction once he reaches sexual maturity. His never getting up the courage to leave his mommy's house will be higher on the list.
What is a pencil and what are they used for? Why would an engineer need one? Come to think of it, what is a pen? Is it just a shorter pencil? A cil-less pencil? What was the question again?
Surface (especially the crippled RT version) cannot do most of that
Do you have a reading or comprehension problem? Seriously, do you? Let's see. You said:
encrypt the flash check, view PDFs check, run LaTeX can't, and plug in a projector check
So, when it can do 75% of what you wanted, you call that "cannot do most"? In what universe is that accurate?
As for LaTeX, It'll be interesting to see. The developer tools are there. They are free. I'd be surprised if LaTeX is not ported. Now, I would not expect it to be ported in 48 hours, but then again, only someone with serious issues would expect that.
Oh, and I forgot, the Surface is also better than my iPad at showing movies. The iPad has better resolution, but that is mostly gone with a movie, and the 16x9 aspect ratio of the surface is more suited for movies. In the same way, the iPad is better for books.
I would add that the Surface is better at connecting to shares on my home network, printing to printers on my home network, accepting my DAS Keyboard and my mouse as peripherals, allowing me to add storage either through SD cards or through a USB connected disk drive of any size you want, editing my Office documents, and quite a few other things as well.
Yeah, anyone who doesn't agree with your religious notions have to be a "Shill". Don't you get tired of being a retard every now and then?
For work, I program in Java on JBoss (and soon on Weblogic and Oracle). My programming environment is installed on Ubuntu, mostly Eclipse and plugins. At home I do a lot of photo and video work using Adobe Creative Suite and Vegas Video, so that is mostly a Windows thing, but I run Ubuntu for Rails development for my personal websites. I have two iPads in the house, one provided by the wife's workplace and one bought for my daughter. My primary phone is a Win Phone 7, my secondary is a Galaxy SIII. I have done some development for Android, but gave up in disgust over the mess. I have two discarded iPhones too, no longer in use.
In other words, I have a little of this and a little of that, but I have no religion about computers whatsoever. I used to, but I was a moron then. Only morons are religious about computers.
Monday afternoon my Surface RT with a TouchType keyboard showed up at my door courtesy of MyUS.com and DHL. Despite a dearth of software, the appeal is almost instant. Why is that? Well, it is a tablet exactly the way a tablet should be. The hardware is impressive to say the least. Nobody disagrees with that I think. A lot of good engineering here. That isn't the most important though. The most important is usability.
So, I sat down and played with it in my lap for a while, as if it was an iPad. It was fast, easy to use, instantly connected to Google and Facebook and downloaded all my contacts. Very useful, though the People app in RT is well behind the same app on Windows Phone 7, which is odd to say the least. After a little while it was clear to me it was about as much an iPad as the iPad is, but with much less software. Then I moved into my office.
Plug the tablet into my big monitor. OK. Hook up a USB switch and add 1T of storage to the tablet from a USB drive I have. OK. Add a proper mouse and my keyboard. OK. Open the main share on my NAS. OK, now I am smiling. I can easily access all shared data on my NAS. This is a little cool compared to the iPad. Open up a few Excel documents I have been working on. No worries. Open. Edit. Save. Works like a charm. Interface is like Windows 7. This replaced my laptop for all work except development (I'll probably get a PRO for that, and then no more travel with iPad and laptop, only one tablet).
I didn't think the Surface RT would be as useful as it is. I figured the Surface PRO would be the thing, and for some things it is. I can not run a dev environment on my RT (yet, probably never), but for other work it works really well. In an iPad sized package with a very good (compared to on-screen) keyboard included.
Religious nuts on/. will never agree, but the Surface is a genuinely useful tablet, even for work. Not many of its competitors are. I know it doesn't have any particular features that various Android tablets have, but honestly, I like my Galaxy SIII phone, but it is not a nice programming environment compared to RT.
So, everything is perfect with Apple products? Only if you are seriously religious. Take the iPad for example, I love mine, but I do actual work too, and the iPad is useless for that. Being a geek, I ordered a Microsoft Surface when it came out and I spent some time last night working on it. Forgetting about the software for a minute, the Surface is what the iPad (at least once it went quad core) should have been all along. A genuinely useful piece of machinery where I can do quite a bit more than just watch movies and read email. The TouchType keyboard is nowhere near perfect, but it is very good once you get used to it. Coming back from work, I had the surface connect to my home network, I plugged in a real keyboard and a real mouse, I connected it to my big monitor. Then I connected the SAN disk and then began to work on some Excel documents I needed to update.
This simply cannot be done with the iPad, which means it is useless as a combination device. It also means that my iPad is about $500 more expensive than my Surface, since I can travel with the Surface only, but if I travel with the iPad I will have to bring a laptop too.
It is a shame that we buy into the Apple story and waste as much on the iPad as we do. I am done buying crippled Apple products.
So his rant on DOS and CP/M was just a meaningless rant? Also, the title of his post, "never designed to be..." was utter rubbish. Much as his entire post.
Win NT was never based on VMS
You are right, I worded that poorly. The design philosophies were influenced by the work of Cutler at DEC, but VMS was not the basis for Win NT. Saying that "some engineers" came from DEC is the understatement of the century. Cutler brought over a good bunch of people, and Cutler was the team lead.
This is an unsubstantiated opinion disguised as "fact".
You are then of course able to substantiate that with something other than the absolutely nothing you offered. Please show the unsubstantiated opinion disguised as fact or you know, prove your self ignorant.
look at the log it produces when you run a.NET app - hundreds of lines of it simply looking for the assemblies to load. Hundreds. Whatever was wrong with search the path for matching filenames?
I am not quite sure what the trace is showing, I haven't run it, but a.NET app will look for assemblies more or less the same way a Linux app will, with one twist. It will search the bin directory of the app, it will search the path, and (and this is the difference) it will search the GAC. Not sure why that turns into hundreds of lines. Perhaps bad developers on the.NET team.
I disagree. First of all, if the OS were truly secure, it wouldn't allow such apps to install
Then I do not know of a single secure OS. Essentially the problem is that a lot of apps (usually because they want to be able to update themselves) require being run as "root". On Unix the equivalent is ownership by root (which most apps have since they are mostly installed as root) and the set-uid bit set. There are very few apps on Linux that require the set-uid bit being set. There is nothing in Linux that prevents you from installing them however.
What you are basically asking of Microsoft here is that they allow the "root" user to do anything, but prevent him from doing dumb stuff, which is an absurd requirement.
the Windows system libraries were originally filled with numerous holes
Mostly exacerbated by the fact that almost anything on Windows was run as root. I know. Even within Microsoft there were, and are, clueless developers. Again, I was answering someones statement about the design of the OS, statements that were all wrong, not about the clues developers for the same OS had. Microsoft had the distinct disadvantage of having developers grow up on Win95/98, and they didn't know jack. Linux developers grew up on a security enabled OS, and knew (mostly) how to do things, even though there have been issues here as well.
I am, as many of us, the sysadmin for my family and some friends. I have a strict policy today when taking on such a task. Nobody as "root" (Administrator on Windows) privileges on their computers. They do not know the Admin password. It can be painful, but that is the requirement. It means that every time there is a new Java version, or similar I have to install it in. So be it. It is a lot less of a hassle than it is cleaning up their computers after an infection.
Perhaps its a Windows shortcoming that so may apps need privilege escalation
It isn't. It is just lazy and/or ignorant developers. For example, if I install an app on Unix for all users, I typically have to run the install as root. Generally the same with Windows. The problem is that on Windows, most applications expect to be able to update them selves when being run. So, a lot of them require escalated privileges to run, the idea that they should be able to update them selves is absurd though, and it is a developer problem, not an OS problem.
things change and Linux had a load of good engineering put into it, and WindowsNT had a load of crappy engineering put into it
I am not sure I agree with the description. Win NT/2K/XP etc had a lot of good engineering going in, but it had some problems on both the marketing side and on the project management side. In essence, there was too many retarded developers developing software for Win2K really which was the first mass adoption of the NT kernel. Instead of telling these developers to go get an education, the marketing/project management fluff decided to cuddle their ignorance and allow Windows to ship with a terrible default configuration. It wasn't difficult to change, but it made the life of the Windows Network manager a little harder, and a lot of them were as clueless as the aforementioned developers. Thus was the bad politics of Windows born. As I said in another post, I managed an NT network, and there wasn't a user on that network that had admin privileges on his own PC. It was made easier by us having relatively limited use of off-the-shelf software.
the faults with Windows lie in the bodged up crap that was added by other teams in Microsoft
I have to disagree with this one as well, but then mostly talking about the server side. Windows Server is, in my not particularly humble opinion, heads and shoulders above any other server OS for small and medium businesses out there. It is far more secure, more flexible and far, far, far more manageable than a Linux solution for say a user base of 100 and up.
These days I would run Linux for app servers, for web servers etc, but for anything enterprise, Windows is significantly better in almost all regards (except licensing cost).
It's relevant because for many years they shipped their OSes configured "out of the box" to bypass or hobble much of that wonderful-on-paper NT security model
Not really. The problem was with app developers with less clues than required. These apps required full privileges to run. Even some Microsoft apps were at fault. This due to the fact that these developers grew up on DOS/Win3/95/98, and wouldn't know either networking or security from a random dog in the garden. The OS team was mostly very good at this.
I ran fully secure versions of Windows NT desktops long ago, but they did require my presence for installing software, a bunch of software didn't run at all etc. We logged bugs with the problematic software and told the developers we were looking for alternatives and that they could call us back once they got a clue. Thankfully, at the time, we didn't use all that much off-the-shelf software. Now, the reason I ran a secure NT network was of course that I was raised on VMS and later Unix.
I don't buy that this cost them their leadership. Crappy decisions did.
I totally agree. Lack of focus, complacency and bad decisions made Microsoft bad. That is still a problem within Microsoft where different team either don't communicate because they don't feel they need to or because they have different outlooks and visions. MS would be better off spinning off some of their stuff into smaller focused entities and open quality dedicated communications teams to keep teams in sync.
Slashdot Mirror
Overreach? Seriously? Are you saying that corporations are above the law?
Yes, let's give you another analogy, more in line with age of Apple (and possibly you).
You have called one of your class mates (Aron) a "poopoohead". You are called before the headmaster and you are told that your punishment will be to write 100 times on the board that you will never do that again, and you comply by writing: "I will never call the poopoohead Aron a poopoohead, I will call him a shitcollector", I am quite sure that, though you have complied with the letter of the "law" your headmaster will be less than amused.
Apple's response to the court order was less mature than the above, and the judges were not amused. Neither should the rest of us. It takes a particularly deranged mind to be amused by a six year old trying to prank others.
Companies "steal" ideas from each other all the time. Particularly ideas that are blatantly obvious. The only company that goes around suing everybody for making rectangular screens with black bezels is Apple. So, yes, there is a difference, in the behavior of Apple.
Apple is mainly a marketing company. They are good at getting consumers to buy their stuff, and they have a bunch of very good product designers. They are not inventors of much though, and contribute little to that part of business. It is therefore insane that they go around suing everybody.Particularly when it is for blatantly obvious "patents". Many of which have since been invalidated (like the rubber-band stuff).
Thankfully Apple will eventually lose the case against Samsung, and perhaps we can then get back to the business of making cool stuff, not the business of filling the pockets of corporate lawyers.
That's how the law works
No, that is actually not the way the law works. But then again, you are not a lawyer, so I would not expect you to know that. Why did you write about something you know nothing about?
Why should the court have to treat Apple like a six year old child?
Apple's behavior would indicate such a course of action would be appropriate.
expected Apple to be adult about it
I'd say that is a completely unreasonable expectation in the Jobs-Apple.
Could be microbial life. Could be that a comet crashed into Mars billions of years ago.
Unlikely, since stored Methane would, if it could be sniffed on the surface in high enough quantities, be destroyed by now unless the comet event was rather (cosmically) recent.
All the Mars mission failures so far have occurred in space
I'd say they have occurred on earth, prior to lift off, but...
a dislike of fart smells would probably reduce your chance of reproducing
I don't think a dislike of certain kinds of smells is going to be this AC's main impediment to reproduction once he reaches sexual maturity. His never getting up the courage to leave his mommy's house will be higher on the list.
What is a pencil and what are they used for? Why would an engineer need one? Come to think of it, what is a pen? Is it just a shorter pencil? A cil-less pencil? What was the question again?
I went into several London electronics stores yesterday ... a good few Surfaces on display
Are you sure? I didn't think Microsoft sold those through third parties.
Surface (especially the crippled RT version) cannot do most of that
Do you have a reading or comprehension problem? Seriously, do you? Let's see. You said:
encrypt the flash check, view PDFs check, run LaTeX can't, and plug in a projector check
So, when it can do 75% of what you wanted, you call that "cannot do most"? In what universe is that accurate?
As for LaTeX, It'll be interesting to see. The developer tools are there. They are free. I'd be surprised if LaTeX is not ported. Now, I would not expect it to be ported in 48 hours, but then again, only someone with serious issues would expect that.
Then you hook up a mouse and a keyboard to the USB port.
The PRO seems to be or any of the other x86 Win 8 tablets. If you mostly do e-mail, web, and Office work, than the RT is as well.
Ignorance is bliss they say, you must be in heaven.
Oh, and I forgot, the Surface is also better than my iPad at showing movies. The iPad has better resolution, but that is mostly gone with a movie, and the 16x9 aspect ratio of the surface is more suited for movies. In the same way, the iPad is better for books.
I would add that the Surface is better at connecting to shares on my home network, printing to printers on my home network, accepting my DAS Keyboard and my mouse as peripherals, allowing me to add storage either through SD cards or through a USB connected disk drive of any size you want, editing my Office documents, and quite a few other things as well.
Yeah, anyone who doesn't agree with your religious notions have to be a "Shill". Don't you get tired of being a retard every now and then?
For work, I program in Java on JBoss (and soon on Weblogic and Oracle). My programming environment is installed on Ubuntu, mostly Eclipse and plugins. At home I do a lot of photo and video work using Adobe Creative Suite and Vegas Video, so that is mostly a Windows thing, but I run Ubuntu for Rails development for my personal websites. I have two iPads in the house, one provided by the wife's workplace and one bought for my daughter. My primary phone is a Win Phone 7, my secondary is a Galaxy SIII. I have done some development for Android, but gave up in disgust over the mess. I have two discarded iPhones too, no longer in use.
In other words, I have a little of this and a little of that, but I have no religion about computers whatsoever. I used to, but I was a moron then. Only morons are religious about computers.
Monday afternoon my Surface RT with a TouchType keyboard showed up at my door courtesy of MyUS.com and DHL. Despite a dearth of software, the appeal is almost instant. Why is that? Well, it is a tablet exactly the way a tablet should be. The hardware is impressive to say the least. Nobody disagrees with that I think. A lot of good engineering here. That isn't the most important though. The most important is usability.
So, I sat down and played with it in my lap for a while, as if it was an iPad. It was fast, easy to use, instantly connected to Google and Facebook and downloaded all my contacts. Very useful, though the People app in RT is well behind the same app on Windows Phone 7, which is odd to say the least. After a little while it was clear to me it was about as much an iPad as the iPad is, but with much less software. Then I moved into my office.
Plug the tablet into my big monitor. OK. Hook up a USB switch and add 1T of storage to the tablet from a USB drive I have. OK. Add a proper mouse and my keyboard. OK. Open the main share on my NAS. OK, now I am smiling. I can easily access all shared data on my NAS. This is a little cool compared to the iPad. Open up a few Excel documents I have been working on. No worries. Open. Edit. Save. Works like a charm. Interface is like Windows 7. This replaced my laptop for all work except development (I'll probably get a PRO for that, and then no more travel with iPad and laptop, only one tablet).
I didn't think the Surface RT would be as useful as it is. I figured the Surface PRO would be the thing, and for some things it is. I can not run a dev environment on my RT (yet, probably never), but for other work it works really well. In an iPad sized package with a very good (compared to on-screen) keyboard included.
Religious nuts on /. will never agree, but the Surface is a genuinely useful tablet, even for work. Not many of its competitors are. I know it doesn't have any particular features that various Android tablets have, but honestly, I like my Galaxy SIII phone, but it is not a nice programming environment compared to RT.
I need shit that works.
So, everything is perfect with Apple products? Only if you are seriously religious. Take the iPad for example, I love mine, but I do actual work too, and the iPad is useless for that. Being a geek, I ordered a Microsoft Surface when it came out and I spent some time last night working on it. Forgetting about the software for a minute, the Surface is what the iPad (at least once it went quad core) should have been all along. A genuinely useful piece of machinery where I can do quite a bit more than just watch movies and read email. The TouchType keyboard is nowhere near perfect, but it is very good once you get used to it. Coming back from work, I had the surface connect to my home network, I plugged in a real keyboard and a real mouse, I connected it to my big monitor. Then I connected the SAN disk and then began to work on some Excel documents I needed to update.
This simply cannot be done with the iPad, which means it is useless as a combination device. It also means that my iPad is about $500 more expensive than my Surface, since I can travel with the Surface only, but if I travel with the iPad I will have to bring a laptop too.
It is a shame that we buy into the Apple story and waste as much on the iPad as we do. I am done buying crippled Apple products.
The OP never claimed there was
So his rant on DOS and CP/M was just a meaningless rant? Also, the title of his post, "never designed to be..." was utter rubbish. Much as his entire post.
Win NT was never based on VMS
You are right, I worded that poorly. The design philosophies were influenced by the work of Cutler at DEC, but VMS was not the basis for Win NT. Saying that "some engineers" came from DEC is the understatement of the century. Cutler brought over a good bunch of people, and Cutler was the team lead.
This is an unsubstantiated opinion disguised as "fact".
You are then of course able to substantiate that with something other than the absolutely nothing you offered. Please show the unsubstantiated opinion disguised as fact or you know, prove your self ignorant.
look at the log it produces when you run a .NET app - hundreds of lines of it simply looking for the assemblies to load. Hundreds. Whatever was wrong with search the path for matching filenames?
I am not quite sure what the trace is showing, I haven't run it, but a .NET app will look for assemblies more or less the same way a Linux app will, with one twist. It will search the bin directory of the app, it will search the path, and (and this is the difference) it will search the GAC. Not sure why that turns into hundreds of lines. Perhaps bad developers on the .NET team.
I disagree. First of all, if the OS were truly secure, it wouldn't allow such apps to install
Then I do not know of a single secure OS. Essentially the problem is that a lot of apps (usually because they want to be able to update themselves) require being run as "root". On Unix the equivalent is ownership by root (which most apps have since they are mostly installed as root) and the set-uid bit set. There are very few apps on Linux that require the set-uid bit being set. There is nothing in Linux that prevents you from installing them however.
What you are basically asking of Microsoft here is that they allow the "root" user to do anything, but prevent him from doing dumb stuff, which is an absurd requirement.
the Windows system libraries were originally filled with numerous holes
Mostly exacerbated by the fact that almost anything on Windows was run as root. I know. Even within Microsoft there were, and are, clueless developers. Again, I was answering someones statement about the design of the OS, statements that were all wrong, not about the clues developers for the same OS had. Microsoft had the distinct disadvantage of having developers grow up on Win95/98, and they didn't know jack. Linux developers grew up on a security enabled OS, and knew (mostly) how to do things, even though there have been issues here as well.
I am, as many of us, the sysadmin for my family and some friends. I have a strict policy today when taking on such a task. Nobody as "root" (Administrator on Windows) privileges on their computers. They do not know the Admin password. It can be painful, but that is the requirement. It means that every time there is a new Java version, or similar I have to install it in. So be it. It is a lot less of a hassle than it is cleaning up their computers after an infection.
Perhaps its a Windows shortcoming that so may apps need privilege escalation
It isn't. It is just lazy and/or ignorant developers. For example, if I install an app on Unix for all users, I typically have to run the install as root. Generally the same with Windows. The problem is that on Windows, most applications expect to be able to update them selves when being run. So, a lot of them require escalated privileges to run, the idea that they should be able to update them selves is absurd though, and it is a developer problem, not an OS problem.
things change and Linux had a load of good engineering put into it, and WindowsNT had a load of crappy engineering put into it
I am not sure I agree with the description. Win NT/2K/XP etc had a lot of good engineering going in, but it had some problems on both the marketing side and on the project management side. In essence, there was too many retarded developers developing software for Win2K really which was the first mass adoption of the NT kernel. Instead of telling these developers to go get an education, the marketing/project management fluff decided to cuddle their ignorance and allow Windows to ship with a terrible default configuration. It wasn't difficult to change, but it made the life of the Windows Network manager a little harder, and a lot of them were as clueless as the aforementioned developers. Thus was the bad politics of Windows born. As I said in another post, I managed an NT network, and there wasn't a user on that network that had admin privileges on his own PC. It was made easier by us having relatively limited use of off-the-shelf software.
the faults with Windows lie in the bodged up crap that was added by other teams in Microsoft
I have to disagree with this one as well, but then mostly talking about the server side. Windows Server is, in my not particularly humble opinion, heads and shoulders above any other server OS for small and medium businesses out there. It is far more secure, more flexible and far, far, far more manageable than a Linux solution for say a user base of 100 and up.
These days I would run Linux for app servers, for web servers etc, but for anything enterprise, Windows is significantly better in almost all regards (except licensing cost).
It's relevant because for many years they shipped their OSes configured "out of the box" to bypass or hobble much of that wonderful-on-paper NT security model
Not really. The problem was with app developers with less clues than required. These apps required full privileges to run. Even some Microsoft apps were at fault. This due to the fact that these developers grew up on DOS/Win3/95/98, and wouldn't know either networking or security from a random dog in the garden. The OS team was mostly very good at this.
I ran fully secure versions of Windows NT desktops long ago, but they did require my presence for installing software, a bunch of software didn't run at all etc. We logged bugs with the problematic software and told the developers we were looking for alternatives and that they could call us back once they got a clue. Thankfully, at the time, we didn't use all that much off-the-shelf software. Now, the reason I ran a secure NT network was of course that I was raised on VMS and later Unix.
I don't buy that this cost them their leadership. Crappy decisions did.
I totally agree. Lack of focus, complacency and bad decisions made Microsoft bad. That is still a problem within Microsoft where different team either don't communicate because they don't feel they need to or because they have different outlooks and visions. MS would be better off spinning off some of their stuff into smaller focused entities and open quality dedicated communications teams to keep teams in sync.