My main point is that "anti-virus" is not a legitimate, inevitable, recurring expense in owning a computer, and that "viruses" aren't that big and overwhelming a threat - if you know what you're doing. Also, in my opinion it's worth taking the time and effort to get a fundamental clue, vs. paying extra for bloated anti-virus crapware.
I think perpetuating the fatalistic "OMG viruses" angle is unhelpful and only serves the interests of commercial anti-virus makers.
But as I wrote, it's all really tangential to the consoles/PCs debate (in which I don't have a firm opinion). I see your greater point and I generally agree. Consoles are specialized products, for a market that loves specialized products that are crippled outside officially mandated use cases, and that market isn't going away soon.
Something in your comment bothered me slightly and I had to make the following tangential point...
My computer has not had a single malware infection in years, but I don't have any sort of anti-virus software installed. My system is Windows XP SP2, always on, always online via NAT (my gateway computer never had any problems either). How do you figure?
Well, turns out common sense can save you a lot of money, and here's my recipe:
Use Firefox.
Use a firewall (Windows Firewall does the trick).
Avoid suspicious.exe/.wmv/(etc) filespam on file sharing networks (if that's your sort of thing).
For the love of God, use Firefox.
Never click on ads.
Never install bundled adware or browser toolbars.
Nobody offering free screensavers/themes/ringtones/pr0n/minigames in.exe format en masse is legit.
Train yourself to recognize spam in all forms, on all media. Every trendy Internet product, service, feature or meme will have a spam-clone, made either to spread badware or to conduct phishing scams - and you must be ready for both.
???
No viruses and no anti-virus! Enjoy your new computer experience. You're welcome.
Iran is a sovereign country. Irrespective of what anyone's opinion of their current leadership (or the public rhetoric of their leadership), I think that is A Good Thing.
Iran has been a totalitarian theocracy since 1979. What part of this is A Good Thing, exactly, and for whom? Also, totalitarian regimes have a track record of carrying out their stated goals if not interrupted, particularly the goals involving weapons and wars and genocides.
Remember that they had to overthrow the US-supported Shah to get their country back. Hardly surprising they view the US with contempt and distrust.
So? The Nazis "had to" overthrow the US-supported Weimar Republic to "get their country back". (Don't give me any Godwin crap, I know my history well enough to make valid analogies.) This, in itself, is far from an acceptable argument in favor of the current regime in Iran.
Think what you want about Israel, but the folks in Lebanon most certainly view, and justifiably so, Israel as real threat.
WTF? Either you've been smoking some potent stuff, or you're a deranged post-modernist. Here are some facts that don't depend on anyone's "view": On the morning of July 12, Hezbollah launched an unprovoked offensive against Israel, by crossing the internationally recognized border (along which Israel had realigned itself in 2000), killing three soldiers, capturing two others, and killing five more soldiers shortly afterwards. At the first hint of an Israeli military response, Hezbollah began firing rockets (mostly Iranian and Iran-supplied) directly at civilian cities throughout northern Israel. These rockets (3,970 of them before the ceasefire) killed 44 civilians and injured 2,000 others.
And Israel is a threat to Lebanon?
This next one cracks me up...
Once the US learns live with that, maybe the Iranians will get over their hatred of the US and it's involvement in their own country, and its continuing involvement in the countries that surround it.
And if they don't get over it? Israel gets nuked. Bah, bloody Jews deserve it anyway, eh?
Appeasement won't work here unless your goal is, in fact, to get Israel nuked. I point to Hitler again; I'll let you figure out the analogy.
Ah, nothing like that standard OLPC "infrastructure first, laptops last if at all" troll. Catchy, truthy, but completely wrong.
Your opinion is based on a very narrow stereotype of what the "3rd world" is. There are now countries that HAVE the infrastructure and the rest of your "prerequisites" - some of which, like the theft potential, have been specifically addressed in the laptop's design (too distinctive to steal, etc). At this point, powerful educational tools ARE what those countries need, and CM1 is a very promising initiative in that area.
So you're indeed being cynical, but as a knee-jerk response rather than after an educated look at the facts. The sad thing is this kind of comment will most likely keep appearing on future CM1 stories...
I've been closely following this AhmadineBlog since yesterday (trying to conduct some, er, security research on it). The website (hosted with nisn.ir) appears to have been disabled even before the/. post - now it redirects to NISN's home page.
Also: There's a lesson here about how a totalitarian regime can only survive by pretending to be something else ("freedom is slavery" and vice versa).
Both Windows Vista and the next Windows Server are codenamed 'Longhorn', the same way both Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 were codenamed 'Whistler' - it's really the same OS underneath all the branding and focusing. The official name for 'Longhorn Server' hasn't been announced yet (I'm guessing it'll just be Windows Server 2007 or 2010 or whenever).
1) Learn what a computer is, figure out why it's good for what it does. 2) Think of two networked computers and what that could be good for. 3) Scale it up.
Maybe the lack of "PROFIT!!!11" at the end is a deterrent for these people. But MAN that guy's stupid anyhow.
As a society, are we putting too much power in the hands of reckless youngsters? Should we license and track Cell users to make sure they don't become as bad as drunk drivers?
They're doing just that. That's what "open-sourcing Java" means: Making the code available under an open source license. It doesn't necessarily mean switching to a community development model - that's just how the open source community has generally chosen to do things for its own convenience.
(Not to mention your implication that they'd fire their Java dev team or something because "it's open source now". WTF?)
Anyway, Sun's keeping the Java trademark - They will still have exclusive control over what gets released under the "Java" name. They're not giving up one bit of control. Rather, they're throwing away the unnecessary restrictions that have been a pain in the necks of Java developers and users all these years. Hats off to them.
Ha! If only Java were anywhere near standard across browsers. Unless you want to force users to download the latest Java Plugin before running your applet (a long and annoying procedure), you can never rely on users having any version beyond Java 1.1, which predates the "Java 2" branding and lacks huge portions of the modern API (even basic things like the object-oriented event model). That's if you can assume they have a Java implementation at all - I understand Windows XP no longer ships even with M$'s crippled 1.1-compatible JRE.
Now, IE and Firefox share a core specification of JavaScript (standardized a while back as ECMAScript) that, while slightly out of date in terms of the official JS spec published at mozilla.org and used in Firefox, works well and is usable. Beyond the language, both IE and Firefox (I'll focus on these two because I've used both) implement a number of W3C standard APIs, sometimes differing slightly but offering the same functionality.
Oh, and the XMLHTTPRequest object - a M$ invention that was so useful, it immediately got implemented as-is in Firefox and other browsers, for the first time making what we now call "AJAX" truly portable.
More crucially: The interpreted nature of the language allows for a kind of encapsulation that can result in 100% compatibility with any JavaScript-enabled browser, falling back gracefully the less capable the browser.
Now, JavaScript, in itself, isn't messy. You've probably seen a lot of messy JavaScript, but that's because there are a lot of messy JS coders out there. An experienced programmer making good use of what the language has to offer can create any AJAX application she wants - elegantly. It has nothing to do with the language.
And even assuming you're right, and some JavaScript implementations are slow - well, that's just a matter of optimization, right? Implementations are getting better; some of them are really good already - see mozilla.org. In fact, the AJAX trend (I won't pretend it isn't one) will probably drive browser vendors to work harder on optimization.
More generally, Intel's entire mobile R&D branch resides in Haifa, Israel, and all of their mobile chips have Hebrew (or Arabic but Israel-related, like Banias) codenames, at least during development.
Ugh. Freeware != Free Software ( != Open Source, but that's another discussion). The term "Freeware" screams "as in beer", while "Free Software" specifically means "as in speech". The primary advantage of Free Software is not its cost, zero or otherwise, but rather the freedoms that the user and the community gain from it.
Now, Free Software has come a long way, and I don't think you can seriously be arguing that Bugzilla is inferior to commercial bug tracking software in absolutely every aspect (as it is being successfully used for some of the FOSS community's flagship projects - Mozilla and Apache, for example).
All I can say is - The code is readily available, and it's perfectly OK for anyone to fork from it and write a system that better suits their needs, or to contribute new code to Bugzilla itself. You don't get that kind of flexibility with commercial apps, at least not without paying huge sums of money (that cost issue again) to whatever closed-source developer you're stuck with, if they do custom development at all (that freedom issue again).
I've never programmed for a Java phone myself, but I understand that the runtime environment on a phone (specifically the standard class library) would be at best a subset of what you get on the desktop, and at worst a largely proprietary phone-specific API that's incompatible with standard Java.
I expect most phones are in fact standard J2ME platforms (the "best" case) or similar, but it seems like porting desktop software there wouldn't be that simple; Of course, if everything in this particular program is properly encapsulated, some functionality _should_ be reusable from any new code. In any case, you should look for software designed with Java phones in mind - there's bound to be something.
Slashdot Mirror
My main point is that "anti-virus" is not a legitimate, inevitable, recurring expense in owning a computer, and that "viruses" aren't that big and overwhelming a threat - if you know what you're doing. Also, in my opinion it's worth taking the time and effort to get a fundamental clue, vs. paying extra for bloated anti-virus crapware.
I think perpetuating the fatalistic "OMG viruses" angle is unhelpful and only serves the interests of commercial anti-virus makers.
But as I wrote, it's all really tangential to the consoles/PCs debate (in which I don't have a firm opinion). I see your greater point and I generally agree. Consoles are specialized products, for a market that loves specialized products that are crippled outside officially mandated use cases, and that market isn't going away soon.
Something in your comment bothered me slightly and I had to make the following tangential point...
My computer has not had a single malware infection in years, but I don't have any sort of anti-virus software installed. My system is Windows XP SP2, always on, always online via NAT (my gateway computer never had any problems either). How do you figure?
Well, turns out common sense can save you a lot of money, and here's my recipe:
HAH HAH
WHAT
Five years from now: "Virgin Galactic Unveils SpaceShipTwo 2 Duo II Zwei Deux!"
I bet these "MP3s from unsigned bands" won't play in Vista x64 Edition...
It's a matter of security, you see.
Iran has been a totalitarian theocracy since 1979. What part of this is A Good Thing, exactly, and for whom? Also, totalitarian regimes have a track record of carrying out their stated goals if not interrupted, particularly the goals involving weapons and wars and genocides.
So? The Nazis "had to" overthrow the US-supported Weimar Republic to "get their country back". (Don't give me any Godwin crap, I know my history well enough to make valid analogies.) This, in itself, is far from an acceptable argument in favor of the current regime in Iran.
WTF? Either you've been smoking some potent stuff, or you're a deranged post-modernist. Here are some facts that don't depend on anyone's "view": On the morning of July 12, Hezbollah launched an unprovoked offensive against Israel, by crossing the internationally recognized border (along which Israel had realigned itself in 2000), killing three soldiers, capturing two others, and killing five more soldiers shortly afterwards. At the first hint of an Israeli military response, Hezbollah began firing rockets (mostly Iranian and Iran-supplied) directly at civilian cities throughout northern Israel. These rockets (3,970 of them before the ceasefire) killed 44 civilians and injured 2,000 others.
And Israel is a threat to Lebanon?
This next one cracks me up...
And if they don't get over it? Israel gets nuked. Bah, bloody Jews deserve it anyway, eh?
Appeasement won't work here unless your goal is, in fact, to get Israel nuked. I point to Hitler again; I'll let you figure out the analogy.
Ah, nothing like that standard OLPC "infrastructure first, laptops last if at all" troll. Catchy, truthy, but completely wrong.
Your opinion is based on a very narrow stereotype of what the "3rd world" is. There are now countries that HAVE the infrastructure and the rest of your "prerequisites" - some of which, like the theft potential, have been specifically addressed in the laptop's design (too distinctive to steal, etc). At this point, powerful educational tools ARE what those countries need, and CM1 is a very promising initiative in that area.
So you're indeed being cynical, but as a knee-jerk response rather than after an educated look at the facts. The sad thing is this kind of comment will most likely keep appearing on future CM1 stories...
I've been closely following this AhmadineBlog since yesterday (trying to conduct some, er, security research on it). The website (hosted with nisn.ir) appears to have been disabled even before the /. post - now it redirects to NISN's home page.
Also: There's a lesson here about how a totalitarian regime can only survive by pretending to be something else ("freedom is slavery" and vice versa).
Both Windows Vista and the next Windows Server are codenamed 'Longhorn', the same way both Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 were codenamed 'Whistler' - it's really the same OS underneath all the branding and focusing. The official name for 'Longhorn Server' hasn't been announced yet (I'm guessing it'll just be Windows Server 2007 or 2010 or whenever).
It's not so hard to understand:
1) Learn what a computer is, figure out why it's good for what it does.
2) Think of two networked computers and what that could be good for.
3) Scale it up.
Maybe the lack of "PROFIT!!!11" at the end is a deterrent for these people. But MAN that guy's stupid anyhow.
...is some kind of FUD about the PS3, right?
As a society, are we putting too much power in the hands of reckless youngsters? Should we license and track Cell users to make sure they don't become as bad as drunk drivers?
All your DOCs are belong to us!
You mean "DOC".
They're doing just that. That's what "open-sourcing Java" means: Making the code available under an open source license. It doesn't necessarily mean switching to a community development model - that's just how the open source community has generally chosen to do things for its own convenience.
(Not to mention your implication that they'd fire their Java dev team or something because "it's open source now". WTF?)
Anyway, Sun's keeping the Java trademark - They will still have exclusive control over what gets released under the "Java" name. They're not giving up one bit of control. Rather, they're throwing away the unnecessary restrictions that have been a pain in the necks of Java developers and users all these years. Hats off to them.
Ha! If only Java were anywhere near standard across browsers. Unless you want to force users to download the latest Java Plugin before running your applet (a long and annoying procedure), you can never rely on users having any version beyond Java 1.1, which predates the "Java 2" branding and lacks huge portions of the modern API (even basic things like the object-oriented event model). That's if you can assume they have a Java implementation at all - I understand Windows XP no longer ships even with M$'s crippled 1.1-compatible JRE.
Now, IE and Firefox share a core specification of JavaScript (standardized a while back as ECMAScript) that, while slightly out of date in terms of the official JS spec published at mozilla.org and used in Firefox, works well and is usable. Beyond the language, both IE and Firefox (I'll focus on these two because I've used both) implement a number of W3C standard APIs, sometimes differing slightly but offering the same functionality.
Oh, and the XMLHTTPRequest object - a M$ invention that was so useful, it immediately got implemented as-is in Firefox and other browsers, for the first time making what we now call "AJAX" truly portable.
More crucially: The interpreted nature of the language allows for a kind of encapsulation that can result in 100% compatibility with any JavaScript-enabled browser, falling back gracefully the less capable the browser.
Now, JavaScript, in itself, isn't messy. You've probably seen a lot of messy JavaScript, but that's because there are a lot of messy JS coders out there. An experienced programmer making good use of what the language has to offer can create any AJAX application she wants - elegantly. It has nothing to do with the language.
And even assuming you're right, and some JavaScript implementations are slow - well, that's just a matter of optimization, right? Implementations are getting better; some of them are really good already - see mozilla.org. In fact, the AJAX trend (I won't pretend it isn't one) will probably drive browser vendors to work harder on optimization.
Alright then, guess my reply was uninformed and out of place. Thanks for the explanation.
Er, wouldn't that be the fan making the noise? CPUs have no moving parts.
More generally, Intel's entire mobile R&D branch resides in Haifa, Israel, and all of their mobile chips have Hebrew (or Arabic but Israel-related, like Banias) codenames, at least during development.
Ugh. Freeware != Free Software ( != Open Source, but that's another discussion). The term "Freeware" screams "as in beer", while "Free Software" specifically means "as in speech". The primary advantage of Free Software is not its cost, zero or otherwise, but rather the freedoms that the user and the community gain from it.
Now, Free Software has come a long way, and I don't think you can seriously be arguing that Bugzilla is inferior to commercial bug tracking software in absolutely every aspect (as it is being successfully used for some of the FOSS community's flagship projects - Mozilla and Apache, for example).
All I can say is - The code is readily available, and it's perfectly OK for anyone to fork from it and write a system that better suits their needs, or to contribute new code to Bugzilla itself. You don't get that kind of flexibility with commercial apps, at least not without paying huge sums of money (that cost issue again) to whatever closed-source developer you're stuck with, if they do custom development at all (that freedom issue again).
I've never programmed for a Java phone myself, but I understand that the runtime environment on a phone (specifically the standard class library) would be at best a subset of what you get on the desktop, and at worst a largely proprietary phone-specific API that's incompatible with standard Java.
I expect most phones are in fact standard J2ME platforms (the "best" case) or similar, but it seems like porting desktop software there wouldn't be that simple; Of course, if everything in this particular program is properly encapsulated, some functionality _should_ be reusable from any new code. In any case, you should look for software designed with Java phones in mind - there's bound to be something.