This isn't a great case about privacy, or hacking, or any of that. Just one divorce attorney seeing an opening and going for the kill. He already knows his client will be a less than sympathetic character, so he's doing what he can to balance the playing field.
It appears you read the story, but somehow missed the opening paragraphs.
"A Rochester Hills man faces up to 5 years in prison -- for reading his wife's e-mail.
Oakland County prosecutors, relying on a Michigan statute typically used to prosecute crimes such as identity theft or stealing trade secrets, have charged Leon Walker, 33, with a felony after he logged onto a laptop in the home he shared with his wife, Clara Walker."
He's being charged with a felony; this isn't just another arena for competing divorce attorneys.
I'm more puzzled by the apparently stupid statement of defense attorney Deborah McKelvy who is quoted at the end of the article: "What's the difference between that and parents who get on their kids' Facebook accounts?" attorney Deborah McKelvy said. "You're going to have to start prosecuting a whole bunch of parents."
Apparently she doesn't think there should be different legal consequences for possible violations of privacy when they pertain to married adults versus minor children.
I don't think I'd hire Ms. McKelvy as my attorney unless I was twelve.
Of course, the Vatican users weren't violating the Seventh (by their count) Commandment, "Thou shalt not steal." They're just guilty of copyright infringement.
I found this paragraph from that article on the global reach of these activities quite illuminating:
The investigation took off after a seller of counterfeit Rolex watches in Kansas City told authorities he spent more than $2 million for spammers to help move his products. He directed them to a co-conspirator in Australia, who controlled a digital currency account with a company registered in the British Virgin Islands. Transaction records and e-mails finally pointed investigators to Nikolaenko in Russia.
While I agree with what you've written, I've taken to using OpenVPN to support servers behind NAT routers. I install a server with an OpenVPN client configuration that points to a server I maintain with a public address. Boot up the remote machine, and it becomes visible over the tunnel.
And as the GGGP by Shining Celebi said. This isn't what whistle blowing is for, revealing wrongs. It's about Assange's vendetta against the US's international policies, and his inappropriate attacks on the ability of the US to operate in the international realm.
Indeed. Where are the massive document archives from the Kremlin, Beijing, Tehran, or Tel Aviv? Oh, it's harder to get leaks from those places, you say? Or is it that Assange isn't trying very hard to expose those nations as well?
I thought that as well. Since fair use is an affirmative defense against claims of infringement, why it is Righthaven's responsibility to prepare a response to a hypothetical fair-use claim that wasn't even raised by the defendants?
According to the link in the post above yours, Righthaven now has another client in Arkansas. Why doesn't it make sense for newspapers to contract with another specialized organization to protect their rights? There are obvious economies-of-scale here, especially if Righthaven continues to expand its client base.
You may not like them, but what they are doing makes sense economically.
That's exactly the rationale for the decision in the "Betamax" case. Justice Stevens argued that fair use applied to the off-air recording of commercial programming because there was no obvious "harm," and because time-shifting could expand the size of a program's audience. The additional viewers would generate additional commercial revenues so copyright holders could increase the licensing fees for these programs.
The decision specifically excludes pay-television services like HBO because the economics of that part of the industry is different from over-the-air broadcasting.
Hmm, no mod points today for me. Otherwise +1 Informative.
Even more insidious is the claim made here at Groklaw that Microsoft never actually transferred the copyrights in Xenix to SCO. Now that Novell is pretty clearly the owner of the copyrights to SVR4 UNIX®, how much of *nix does Microsoft own now, or at least litigate over?
It's not hard to imagine a scenario where Google+Android is the target of choice here.
Unhindered in this sense is defined as not prioritising or retarding progress of a packet based upon content, including destination and source.
Indeed. The whole notion of common carriage is that all that matters is the cost of transport; pricing should not depend what's being transported. We decided this was a good idea when it came to railroads over a century ago by passing the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887. We thought it was a good idea when applied to telegraphy and telephony when we passed the the Commmunication Acts of 1927 and 1934. We've managed to run a telephone system for decades that doesn't discriminate between a call to wish Aunt Josephina a happy birthday and one that confirms a $1 million contract. Why should Internet traffic be any different?
If I were the Internet czar, I'd tell ISPs that all they can look at is the packet headers. All this deep-packet inspection stuff gives me the willies. I'd apply the same rules to government agencies unless they get a warrant.
I have no problem with charging end users by demand. You want more bandwidth, pay for it. I'm also okay with charging business users more than residential users for the same bandwidth since they're presumably using their service to earn revenue. But prioritizing traffic by content? That should be forbidden by law or regulation. So, yes, I don't think VOIP should have any more priority than my viewing an online video. If that means my Vonage connection suffers, then let Vonage figure out a solution to that. I certainly don't think they should be subsidized, directly or indirectly, via rules that assign higher priority to some types of Internet traffic. If that means my phone service suffers when I'm watching a streamed movie from Netflix, so be it. Maybe I'll then choose to return to traditional telephone service. Too bad, Vonage, but them's the breaks.
I had a hard time keeping myself from laughing out loud when I came to this paragraph in the article:
However, there exists another key to Apple's success: its products are built around giving people freedom in the user experience. Apple lets you figure out how best to make use of their handhelds. The App Store is a beautiful demonstration of this--it's all about choosing what you want to do with your iPhone or iPad, and not being badgered into using them in a particular way.
Business users are no different from home users in needing this kind of freedom.
Haven't most reasonably-sized IT departments just spent the better part of a decade locking down office workstations so they can administer a common desktop, common applications, and impose security and authentication centrally? Do you think most IT departments want to give their users "freedom in the user experience?" I can't imagine a worse management problem than a device where each individual user goes shopping at the App Store for whatever makes them happy regardless of its fit with the business or whether IT can support it.
My daughter's ASUS 1201N runs Kubuntu 10.10 with the proprietary Nvidia driver for VDPAU video decoding. It recognized the network card as well. Unfortunately her college uses Aruba Networks for its wifi connections, and neither Aruba nor anyone else seems to know or care how to get Linux to talk to it. I've looked at her Win7 setup, and it appears that there are certificates involved that (not surprisingly) aren't in Ubuntu.
Sadly, though, she just sent the whole thing back to ASUS for repair when it stopped charging the batteries. At least they're picking up the tab for shipping both ways, though I understand they only do that if you buy it from certain distributors, in our case Amazon. Luckily for her I still had her old reliable Dell 640m that has been running Linux for nearly five years now.
In earlier discussions of this story we were led to believe that the networks were, in fact, isolated from each other. That's why the USB drive vector was employed. Apparently it's not uncommon to write logs and reports to a USB stick in the "secure" facility then copy the files on a Windows workstation in the unsecured area. At this point the stick is infected so it transfers the payload to the devices in the secure area when next used.
I'd have to go over the number of Stuxnet articles I've read to find the exact source for this; I think it may have been discussed here on Slashdot some time in the past.
I believe starting with XP, if Windows discovers the primary libraries for MS Office on the machine, it loads them at boot. This strategy reflects research on how people react to computer applications. Extending the boot period isn't as annoying as having apps take a while to load. Most people boot their computer in the morning then get a cup of coffee. So MS took advantage of this to make Office apps load faster upon request.
OO used to have an application that would pre-load the libraries for you when you logged into Windows. I don't know if that's still part of it or not, as I don't use Windows any more.
Everyone wants to blame Microsoft for everything, the real blame is on the standards bodies.
I don't think so at all.
Berners-Lee's original draft for HTML appeared under the auspices of the IETF in 1993. By the end of 1995, HTML was already at version 2.0. The first W3C "recommendation," HTML 3.2, was released in January of 1997.
ASP 1.0 was released in December of 1996. PHP 1.0 had existed since June of 1995, and people were already writing web applications in existing languages like Perl before then. PHP 2.0 was released in November of 1997; I remember writing some PostgreSQL-backed applications in that language soon thereafter. This whole "there wasn't any alternative to Microsoft" perspective on early web application development that I've seen here recently on Slashdot has no basis in reality. If anything, the array of free tools and the pace of their development quickly surpassed anything Microsoft had to offer.
I also don't think you can exempt Microsoft from blame for whatever delays you might think took place in the W3C standards meetings either. After all, Microsoft had, and still has, a seat at the W3C table. At the time they wanted nothing to do with a standards-based Internet. This history of HTML at the W3C site makes for interesting reading about that early period. (Microsoft isn't the only guilty party here, of course. The first HTML "Editorial Review Board," set up when the more open IETF working group failed to reach a consensus, included representatives from IBM, Microsoft, Netscape, Novell, and the W3 Consortium. One outcome of these head-to-head negotiations was Microsoft trading away the MARQUEE tag in return for Netscape giving up BLINK!)
Does that painful process include rewriting the apps so they work with Firefox, Opera, and elinks as well? So that they conform to open standards and are browser-neutral? Or are you continuing to lock yourself into a single platform and rewrite them only for IE8? If so, why? Too expensive to go browser-neutral? You see Microsoft in your future for many years still to come? Your developers only know the Microsoft way? Corporate politics? I'm sure there must be others.
I'm sincere in asking this question since I've stuck with open standards and open technologies since the mid-1990's. I had a conversation about this subject here just a few days ago. I rely on server-side intelligence for most applications and use the browser merely as a display device. My limited understanding of this issue is that problematic IE6 applications use now-unsupported functionality on the browser.
Can you leave the infrastructure more or less intact but make the interface browser-neutral?
Realistically in my mind I see this as being more awesome for being able to easily pipe my laptop to the TV, but that's mostly because I've never really gotten into the whole HTPC thing.
I expect we'll see this technology or something like it on smart phones within the decade. You'd just use the Netflix app to stream a movie and wirelessly display it on your TV and audio system. The cell providers all seem interested in streamed on-demand video, too.
I'm running the 64-bit "preview" Linux plugin called "Square". Adobe reports,"You have version 10,2,161,23 installed" when I check by right-clicking on a video and choosing About. Does that mean I'm not vulnerable to this flaw?
Well if it's just plain text they could open the file in an editor, highlight the text, and use copy/paste to drop it in a textarea field in an HTML form.
So let's make the problem harder. How would I have enabled uploading of a binary object in 2001? I'd do the same thing I do today; use "forms-based file uploading."
RFC 1867 defining "forms-based file uploads" appeared in 1995, some months before Berners-Lee and company released RFC 1945 proposing HTTP 1.0. HTML 3.2 (1997) defined the "file" input type that Web applications use for file uploads. That element is usually displayed as a text box into which a file path can be entered, along with a "Browse" button that opens the local file browser.
Of course, there were many other ways to upload a file to a web server by 2001. I wrote a PHP-based application for a legal foundation that enabled subscribed attorneys to share documents in an online archive. Members could register a document online. They'd then receive a mail message to which they would reply after attaching the file. The message included a unique code that so the file could be matched to the registration entry in the database. This worked especially well with people on services like AOL whose interfaces at the time were not friendly to RFC-1867 uploads. (Nowadays I'd probably use either WEBDAV or dspace depending on how much structure I'd need.)
Sometimes I'd use Samba to export directories from a Linux application server to the Windows desktops. Then staff members could simply drop HTML files into pre-determined folders and have them appear within the context of the website. Nowadays, though, I handle pretty much all the content editing on the browser side with forms and TinyMCE. That way I get reasonably clean HTML code as opposed to what you get from someone copying and pasting from Word into a text box.
I wouldn't have thought uploading files was a key obstacle in the way of platform-independent development in 2001. Surely there must have been some bigger roadblocks.
If you're talking about an application that periodically collects files from a Windows workstation, in 2001 I'd have used an automated shell script running smbclient to connect to the workstation using SMB/Netbios and collect the file(s). What happens next depends on the application. I often run PHP scripts from the command line to process text files because I know it well, because of the enormous array of functions it offers, and, frankly, because I've always found Perl's syntax rather intimidating. grep, sed, and awk go a long way, too. Automatically manipulate a graphic image? ImageMagick.
It's easy to criticize in hindsight. But go back in time. What was the alternative?
Putting the intelligence on the server side and using the browser as a platform-independent display device. One reason why Microsoft isn't Google or Facebook is because they thought their advantage lay in leveraging their installed base of Windows machines for Web services and applications. The rest of us realized that the browser was the real platform and platform-independence the future.
AJAX and the like were just frosting on that cake.
When my daughter and I visited colleges last year they generally reported about a 50/50 split between Windows and Macs among incoming students. I have no doubt that the success of the iPod and the iPhone have a lot to do with this adoption of Macs among current college students, along with fears about viruses and possible service needs.
This quote from a VP at UNISYS should reveal the goal of the survey:
Our survey shows that the American public recognizes the danger of a cyber attack and wants the federal government to take an active role in extending the nation's cyber defense. It will be up to officials in all branches of the federal government to respond to this call to action in a way that is measured and well planned.
I'm sure whatever active role the public wants the Federal government to take will naturally include systems from Unisys as well. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they have some products sitting in the pipeline right now. I bet copies of this report have found their way onto desks throughout DC.
I especially like how Unisys is trying to gain credibility by creating its "Unisys Security Index." I breathed a little easier knowing tie Index had fallen from 147 to 136 since February. Hey, it worked for Dow Jones, maybe it will work for Unisys.
The fact that people are actually buying Linux servers and they make up 20% of the sales (as per the IDC numbers) indicates to me that there could be more Linux servers installed than Windows servers, because the ratio of nonpurchased Linux servers to purchased Linux servers is very likely to be higher than 4:1.
Especially since servers, unlike desktops, can easily be bought without an installed operating system at all from many major OEMs.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't a great case about privacy, or hacking, or any of that. Just one divorce attorney seeing an opening and going for the kill. He already knows his client will be a less than sympathetic character, so he's doing what he can to balance the playing field.
It appears you read the story, but somehow missed the opening paragraphs.
"A Rochester Hills man faces up to 5 years in prison -- for reading his wife's e-mail.
Oakland County prosecutors, relying on a Michigan statute typically used to prosecute crimes such as identity theft or stealing trade secrets, have charged Leon Walker, 33, with a felony after he logged onto a laptop in the home he shared with his wife, Clara Walker."
He's being charged with a felony; this isn't just another arena for competing divorce attorneys.
I'm more puzzled by the apparently stupid statement of defense attorney Deborah McKelvy who is quoted at the end of the article: "What's the difference between that and parents who get on their kids' Facebook accounts?" attorney Deborah McKelvy said. "You're going to have to start prosecuting a whole bunch of parents."
Apparently she doesn't think there should be different legal consequences for possible violations of privacy when they pertain to married adults versus minor children.
I don't think I'd hire Ms. McKelvy as my attorney unless I was twelve.
Of course, the Vatican users weren't violating the Seventh (by their count) Commandment, "Thou shalt not steal." They're just guilty of copyright infringement.
I found this paragraph from that article on the global reach of these activities quite illuminating:
While I agree with what you've written, I've taken to using OpenVPN to support servers behind NAT routers. I install a server with an OpenVPN client configuration that points to a server I maintain with a public address. Boot up the remote machine, and it becomes visible over the tunnel.
And as the GGGP by Shining Celebi said. This isn't what whistle blowing is for, revealing wrongs. It's about Assange's vendetta against the US's international policies, and his inappropriate attacks on the ability of the US to operate in the international realm.
Indeed. Where are the massive document archives from the Kremlin, Beijing, Tehran, or Tel Aviv? Oh, it's harder to get leaks from those places, you say? Or is it that Assange isn't trying very hard to expose those nations as well?
I thought that as well. Since fair use is an affirmative defense against claims of infringement, why it is Righthaven's responsibility to prepare a response to a hypothetical fair-use claim that wasn't even raised by the defendants?
According to the link in the post above yours, Righthaven now has another client in Arkansas. Why doesn't it make sense for newspapers to contract with another specialized organization to protect their rights? There are obvious economies-of-scale here, especially if Righthaven continues to expand its client base.
You may not like them, but what they are doing makes sense economically.
That's exactly the rationale for the decision in the "Betamax" case. Justice Stevens argued that fair use applied to the off-air recording of commercial programming because there was no obvious "harm," and because time-shifting could expand the size of a program's audience. The additional viewers would generate additional commercial revenues so copyright holders could increase the licensing fees for these programs.
The decision specifically excludes pay-television services like HBO because the economics of that part of the industry is different from over-the-air broadcasting.
Hmm, no mod points today for me. Otherwise +1 Informative.
Even more insidious is the claim made here at Groklaw that Microsoft never actually transferred the copyrights in Xenix to SCO. Now that Novell is pretty clearly the owner of the copyrights to SVR4 UNIX®, how much of *nix does Microsoft own now, or at least litigate over?
It's not hard to imagine a scenario where Google+Android is the target of choice here.
Unhindered in this sense is defined as not prioritising or retarding progress of a packet based upon content, including destination and source.
Indeed. The whole notion of common carriage is that all that matters is the cost of transport; pricing should not depend what's being transported. We decided this was a good idea when it came to railroads over a century ago by passing the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887. We thought it was a good idea when applied to telegraphy and telephony when we passed the the Commmunication Acts of 1927 and 1934. We've managed to run a telephone system for decades that doesn't discriminate between a call to wish Aunt Josephina a happy birthday and one that confirms a $1 million contract. Why should Internet traffic be any different?
If I were the Internet czar, I'd tell ISPs that all they can look at is the packet headers. All this deep-packet inspection stuff gives me the willies. I'd apply the same rules to government agencies unless they get a warrant.
I have no problem with charging end users by demand. You want more bandwidth, pay for it. I'm also okay with charging business users more than residential users for the same bandwidth since they're presumably using their service to earn revenue. But prioritizing traffic by content? That should be forbidden by law or regulation. So, yes, I don't think VOIP should have any more priority than my viewing an online video. If that means my Vonage connection suffers, then let Vonage figure out a solution to that. I certainly don't think they should be subsidized, directly or indirectly, via rules that assign higher priority to some types of Internet traffic. If that means my phone service suffers when I'm watching a streamed movie from Netflix, so be it. Maybe I'll then choose to return to traditional telephone service. Too bad, Vonage, but them's the breaks.
I had a hard time keeping myself from laughing out loud when I came to this paragraph in the article:
Haven't most reasonably-sized IT departments just spent the better part of a decade locking down office workstations so they can administer a common desktop, common applications, and impose security and authentication centrally? Do you think most IT departments want to give their users "freedom in the user experience?" I can't imagine a worse management problem than a device where each individual user goes shopping at the App Store for whatever makes them happy regardless of its fit with the business or whether IT can support it.
My daughter's ASUS 1201N runs Kubuntu 10.10 with the proprietary Nvidia driver for VDPAU video decoding. It recognized the network card as well. Unfortunately her college uses Aruba Networks for its wifi connections, and neither Aruba nor anyone else seems to know or care how to get Linux to talk to it. I've looked at her Win7 setup, and it appears that there are certificates involved that (not surprisingly) aren't in Ubuntu.
Sadly, though, she just sent the whole thing back to ASUS for repair when it stopped charging the batteries. At least they're picking up the tab for shipping both ways, though I understand they only do that if you buy it from certain distributors, in our case Amazon. Luckily for her I still had her old reliable Dell 640m that has been running Linux for nearly five years now.
In earlier discussions of this story we were led to believe that the networks were, in fact, isolated from each other. That's why the USB drive vector was employed. Apparently it's not uncommon to write logs and reports to a USB stick in the "secure" facility then copy the files on a Windows workstation in the unsecured area. At this point the stick is infected so it transfers the payload to the devices in the secure area when next used.
I'd have to go over the number of Stuxnet articles I've read to find the exact source for this; I think it may have been discussed here on Slashdot some time in the past.
It's the heaviest travel day of the year -- the day before Thanksgiving.
If this really happens (I have my doubts), I hope my daughter's plane home from college arrives before we sit down to dinner on Thursday.
I believe starting with XP, if Windows discovers the primary libraries for MS Office on the machine, it loads them at boot. This strategy reflects research on how people react to computer applications. Extending the boot period isn't as annoying as having apps take a while to load. Most people boot their computer in the morning then get a cup of coffee. So MS took advantage of this to make Office apps load faster upon request.
OO used to have an application that would pre-load the libraries for you when you logged into Windows. I don't know if that's still part of it or not, as I don't use Windows any more.
Everyone wants to blame Microsoft for everything, the real blame is on the standards bodies.
I don't think so at all.
Berners-Lee's original draft for HTML appeared under the auspices of the IETF in 1993. By the end of 1995, HTML was already at version 2.0. The first W3C "recommendation," HTML 3.2, was released in January of 1997.
ASP 1.0 was released in December of 1996. PHP 1.0 had existed since June of 1995, and people were already writing web applications in existing languages like Perl before then. PHP 2.0 was released in November of 1997; I remember writing some PostgreSQL-backed applications in that language soon thereafter. This whole "there wasn't any alternative to Microsoft" perspective on early web application development that I've seen here recently on Slashdot has no basis in reality. If anything, the array of free tools and the pace of their development quickly surpassed anything Microsoft had to offer.
I also don't think you can exempt Microsoft from blame for whatever delays you might think took place in the W3C standards meetings either. After all, Microsoft had, and still has, a seat at the W3C table. At the time they wanted nothing to do with a standards-based Internet. This history of HTML at the W3C site makes for interesting reading about that early period. (Microsoft isn't the only guilty party here, of course. The first HTML "Editorial Review Board," set up when the more open IETF working group failed to reach a consensus, included representatives from IBM, Microsoft, Netscape, Novell, and the W3 Consortium. One outcome of these head-to-head negotiations was Microsoft trading away the MARQUEE tag in return for Netscape giving up BLINK!)
Does that painful process include rewriting the apps so they work with Firefox, Opera, and elinks as well? So that they conform to open standards and are browser-neutral? Or are you continuing to lock yourself into a single platform and rewrite them only for IE8? If so, why? Too expensive to go browser-neutral? You see Microsoft in your future for many years still to come? Your developers only know the Microsoft way? Corporate politics? I'm sure there must be others.
I'm sincere in asking this question since I've stuck with open standards and open technologies since the mid-1990's. I had a conversation about this subject here just a few days ago. I rely on server-side intelligence for most applications and use the browser merely as a display device. My limited understanding of this issue is that problematic IE6 applications use now-unsupported functionality on the browser.
Can you leave the infrastructure more or less intact but make the interface browser-neutral?
Realistically in my mind I see this as being more awesome for being able to easily pipe my laptop to the TV, but that's mostly because I've never really gotten into the whole HTPC thing.
I expect we'll see this technology or something like it on smart phones within the decade. You'd just use the Netflix app to stream a movie and wirelessly display it on your TV and audio system. The cell providers all seem interested in streamed on-demand video, too.
I'm running the 64-bit "preview" Linux plugin called "Square". Adobe reports,"You have version 10,2,161,23 installed" when I check by right-clicking on a video and choosing About. Does that mean I'm not vulnerable to this flaw?
Well if it's just plain text they could open the file in an editor, highlight the text, and use copy/paste to drop it in a textarea field in an HTML form.
So let's make the problem harder. How would I have enabled uploading of a binary object in 2001? I'd do the same thing I do today; use "forms-based file uploading."
RFC 1867 defining "forms-based file uploads" appeared in 1995, some months before Berners-Lee and company released RFC 1945 proposing HTTP 1.0. HTML 3.2 (1997) defined the "file" input type that Web applications use for file uploads. That element is usually displayed as a text box into which a file path can be entered, along with a "Browse" button that opens the local file browser.
Of course, there were many other ways to upload a file to a web server by 2001. I wrote a PHP-based application for a legal foundation that enabled subscribed attorneys to share documents in an online archive. Members could register a document online. They'd then receive a mail message to which they would reply after attaching the file. The message included a unique code that so the file could be matched to the registration entry in the database. This worked especially well with people on services like AOL whose interfaces at the time were not friendly to RFC-1867 uploads. (Nowadays I'd probably use either WEBDAV or dspace depending on how much structure I'd need.)
Sometimes I'd use Samba to export directories from a Linux application server to the Windows desktops. Then staff members could simply drop HTML files into pre-determined folders and have them appear within the context of the website. Nowadays, though, I handle pretty much all the content editing on the browser side with forms and TinyMCE. That way I get reasonably clean HTML code as opposed to what you get from someone copying and pasting from Word into a text box.
I wouldn't have thought uploading files was a key obstacle in the way of platform-independent development in 2001. Surely there must have been some bigger roadblocks.
If you're talking about an application that periodically collects files from a Windows workstation, in 2001 I'd have used an automated shell script running smbclient to connect to the workstation using SMB/Netbios and collect the file(s). What happens next depends on the application. I often run PHP scripts from the command line to process text files because I know it well, because of the enormous array of functions it offers, and, frankly, because I've always found Perl's syntax rather intimidating. grep, sed, and awk go a long way, too. Automatically manipulate a graphic image? ImageMagick.
It's easy to criticize in hindsight. But go back in time. What was the alternative?
Putting the intelligence on the server side and using the browser as a platform-independent display device. One reason why Microsoft isn't Google or Facebook is because they thought their advantage lay in leveraging their installed base of Windows machines for Web services and applications. The rest of us realized that the browser was the real platform and platform-independence the future.
AJAX and the like were just frosting on that cake.
When my daughter and I visited colleges last year they generally reported about a 50/50 split between Windows and Macs among incoming students. I have no doubt that the success of the iPod and the iPhone have a lot to do with this adoption of Macs among current college students, along with fears about viruses and possible service needs.
The branding is confusing, though. Maybe the phone version should've been called "Tiles" instead.
Why wasn't it called the MicroPhone? It's not like Microsoft doesn't know how to fence in an ordinary English noun and call it its own.
This quote from a VP at UNISYS should reveal the goal of the survey:
I'm sure whatever active role the public wants the Federal government to take will naturally include systems from Unisys as well. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they have some products sitting in the pipeline right now. I bet copies of this report have found their way onto desks throughout DC.
I especially like how Unisys is trying to gain credibility by creating its "Unisys Security Index." I breathed a little easier knowing tie Index had fallen from 147 to 136 since February. Hey, it worked for Dow Jones, maybe it will work for Unisys.
The fact that people are actually buying Linux servers and they make up 20% of the sales (as per the IDC numbers) indicates to me that there could be more Linux servers installed than Windows servers, because the ratio of nonpurchased Linux servers to purchased Linux servers is very likely to be higher than 4:1.
Especially since servers, unlike desktops, can easily be bought without an installed operating system at all from many major OEMs.