Jobs was publicly arguing against DRM in 2003 Actually, his public appeal was in Feb 2007. At this point EMI had already decided to experiment with DRM-free music, and Universal was planning to follow suit (as we saw later in '07). iTunes was being looked at in Europe for anti-competitive practices. A suspiciously well-timed note, don't you think?
FairPlay was the least foul DRM Why so?
and Apple used its retail leverage to keep prices down Doesn't add up. Prior to 2004 apple did not have leverage (iTunes sales we growing, but still not a large enough factor to give Apple leverage). And presently, while they actually have leverage, they are not the cheapest source of DRM-free music (compare the prices on iTunes and Amazon for proof).
There's plenty of pro-Microsoft wags trying to say that Amazon is hurting Apple, but MP3s are good for the iPod. Actually, you're the first person to mention Microsoft on this thread. Anyway, the point is not whether Apple is being hurt, or Microsoft is helped. Competition among online music retailers is good for us; as their margins get squeezed, they'll keep steady pressure on the labels to lower their prices. Everybody wins (consumers) as long as neither Apple, MS, Amazon, anyone else, win outright.
The only thing bad for the iPod is Real/Windows Media/ATRAC DRM that can't play on the iPod. 'Can't play' is not accurate. Apple chooses not to support these formats (and they have their reasons). Should the competitive landscape change to a point where this lack of support hurts them, they will include the support (at least WM-DRM is easily licensed -- I don't know about ATRAC and Real). For now, it's in their interests to avoid interoperability with other DRM schemes. Case in point is the way Real would keep reverse engineering FairPlay support into Rhapsody, and Apple would keep updating iTunes and FairPlay to break Rhapsody's support. Make no mistake about it -- all players in this segment loathe interoperability, and Apple is just as guilty/innocent as anyone else of eroding Fair Use rights.
RealNetworks announced this morning that it has essentially reverse-engineered Apple Computer's FairPlay Digital Rights Management (DRM) scheme. RealNetworks' Harmony Technology will let customers load songs purchased from the RealNetworks RealPlayer Music Store onto Apple's successful but closed iPod portable audio player.
Apple refused to share the technical information RealNetworks needed to make this translation possible; Apple CEO Steve Jobs refused repeated requests from RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser. Apparently, RealNetworks got tired of waiting.
ps: did you enjoy the link? It's right out of your playbook;)
You're not funny or smart or interesting enough to respond to. Nice of you to respond.
But for the record, the only comments I remove besides the spam that gets wiped automatically is right wing rants that go on for paragraphs about bullshit around the IQ of your spiel here.
Claiming to be liberal and indulging in any form of censorship is hypocrisy
Your comments give this claim zero credibility
By censoring, you assume that you are the absolute authority on worthwhile comments vs. bullshit. No such authority exists. Your blog cannot be taken seriously until you realize this.
Symbiotic: What Apple Does for Open Source (link) Focus dude. We were discussing Microsoft. How does this circular reference provide proof for any point you're trying to make about Microsoft? That's what you claimed to use your links for. This is another reason I keep telling you to stop with the links. You're embarrassing yourself. If you can't tell from my comments that I have nothing against Apple, you're even denser than I thought. Why did you need to put that link in there? Why does Windows even get a mention in an article about Apple and Open Source? Ad hominem attack, anyone?
I don't link articles for your benefit, I link to advertise what I've researched and present it as a background proof for comments I make. The articles you write are not proof for the comments you make. You and yourself are the same source. And yet you accuse me of circular logic. And calling what you do research is a stretch at best.
Interestingly you haven't answered one of my questions. Why do you censor comments on roughlydrafted? That scared about people refuting your 'research'?
I also don't define Microsoft's business "narrowly" to upset you, I present what the company itself reports about how it makes money and where. As you apparently have failed to grasp, my comments are based directly on Microsoft's own classification of its business, which falls into Windows, Server, Office (three monopolies that make shit loads of money), all home consumer electronics and embedded and everything else (which loses shit loads of money), some online services and tools businesses (which aren't doing anything spectacular in either direction), and "other," which relates to general advertising, R&D, and the legal machinery that eats up billions every year defending itself from the company's criminal behavior by paying off fines and settlements. We keep coming back to this. You dared anybody to argue with you about slagging sales as a datapoint. I did so with cold hard numbers proving MS's revenues and profits are healthy. You wanna refute that with numbers or you wanna keep spewing the same nonsense as above? Screw your definition of monopolies, loss making units, legal this that and the other mumbo jumbo -- revenues are up, profits are up. Refute that.
If you are not aware of Microsoft's billions of dollars in fraud every year, you need to educate yourself, not complain that I'm pointing out the truth. Billions of dollars of fraud. Please provide one example of this. Link to roughlydrafted (or copy-paste from there) does not count.
The rest of your comments are non-sensical, wrong, or circular fault finding without any point. Go masturbate with your Zune, but don't ask me to watch you get off. What a lovely rational and well-reasoned response. Not in the least bit indicative of a rabid anti-MS bias, facts be damned.
Having to use Microsoft products is plenty enough of a punishment for your asinine behavior, so I don't hold any ill will against you. It will all be over soon enough. Keep circling your thumb clockwise to scroll down. I'll just press down on the zune pad. Touche!
Why Microsoft's Copy-Killing Has Reached a Dead End (link) Thought I told you to stop doing that. This is exactly where you look like a raving lunatic. This quote doesn't even refute any point in my post. You just linked it because you needed something anti-MS, context be damned. Such weird behavior.
Microsoft makes money on Office, Windows, and Servers. Period. Outside of its three monopolies it loses shit loads of money. Read the company's own profit/loss reports.
Keep defining things as narrowly as you want, and you'll be able to show anything as a failure. Its very convenient to bracket all server products together as 'servers' and then put a period after that. It's also convenient to forget that there are other money making things that don't fall under this. VS again, for just one example. You dared someone to argue with you on the data point of sagging sales. I pointed out healthy revenues, profit margins, and many products performing well. You chose to ignore it, and do a bait-and-switch you're so fond of accusing MS of doing. Nice try. As I predicted, your attempt at spinning it negatively amused me.
Apple has outpaced Microsoft's valuation increase by a factor of 100 over the same period.
Apple is a phenomenal company, going through a purple patch right now. What has this got to do with your anti-MS vitriol? You asked people to argue with you on some data points. This is the 'data' you bring to the table? You know, when I read your stuff on non-technology matters (say politics), I get the impression that you understand that the "you're either with us or against us" mindset is essentially a blinding one to have. Why do you have such a hard time seeing that in the technology world as well? I'm almost sorry I asked this because I have a feeling you're going to answer with some ad hominem anti-MS nonsense. I'm sure you understand about bubbles, P/E ratios, cash flow, dividends etc., but you willfully ignore the fact that MSFT has essentially been a great, stable long-term stock to hold, and is undervalued right now.
I have detailed this missing information as an early warning: PC sales are mature and new/emerging markets are looking for cheap laptops. There's no growth market for a $300 OS running a $300 Office suite. Is that an ad hominem attack in your mind?
Read your articles. They sound nothing like the line above. They sound like rants from a raving lunatic.
Microsoft's Outrageous Office Profits (link)
Please do not ever bother linking to an article on roughlydrafted when you reply to me. I have no time for that nonsense. But just to humor you, I'll paste an ad-hominem attack from that link:
Why are Microsoft apologists working so hard
to hold back the progress of technology?
Why do they spew such venom about the iPhone,
Linux, and the Mac? Because Microsoft's obscene
profits from the sales of its outdated, overpriced,
and consumer hostile products help to directly
support the wags' chatterbox industry.
And then there's the paragraph immediately following that. And so much more. My 80% estimate is fairly accurate.
I detailed Microsoft's stock performance over the last few years, but look for yourself at finance.google.com
And you very conveniently ignored the link I showed to finance.yahoo.com showing the 15% gain of their stock since Vista's release.
Soviet Microsoft: How Resistance to Free Markets and Open Ideas Will the Unravel the Software Superpower
Is that an ad hominem attack in your mind?
Did you read the title of that link? Please look up ad hominem in a dictionary. After that, if you still feel the title of your link itself does not constitute such an attack your bias is so deep and irreversible that there is probably no point in any further discussion with you on this topic. I sincerely request that you let me know your evaluation of that title, so I can save myself a lot of time by not replying to you if you really feel tha
All this weak ad hominem criticism just makes me more likely to get sloppy. I really need the competition, just like Microsoft. Funny. Ad-hominem criticism is about 80% of roughlydrafted. And that's reality. The bit about competition -- is that why you censor comments on roughlydrafted? Or is it just a lingering habit from moonlighting as an Apple forum moderator?
Take your pic on the data you'd like to take issue with: slagging sales, stock market indifference, consumer market share in any product that has any competition, consumer perception, forward looking sales projections, historical inability to ship, outrageous inability to make money on any product not supported by a monopoly position. Very well:
slagging sales: For the statement released 30th September, MS had an annual revenue of $54B, and 27% revenue growth for the quarter (year on year). Your attempt to spin this negatively will amuse me.
consumer market share in any product that has any competition: I think you might want to read this statement again. It parses as follows: in any product where there is competition, there is competition. Plus, you fail to realize that in several areas the lack of competition shows what a fantastic job MS has done. Easy examples: Active Directory, Visual Studio. But I'll humor you nonetheless. As an exercise, please look up the past 2 years (or 5 if you prefer) historical sales data for IIS, SQL server, Exchange, and trend it. Let know what you find. Don't come back with "but they took an x-billion dollar loss on the xbox" etc. -- you said any product, so here are your examples
outrageous inability to make money on any product not supported by a monopoly position: (side note: drop the 'outrageous' and see how the ad-hominem-ness of your argument decreases? I mean, you certainly experience glee, rather than outrage, every time MS takes a loss on anything, so why the outrage?). Again, look up SQL server, Exchange, Active Directory.
historical inability to ship: this particular malaise only affects MS's OS line. And the Vista delay was an atypically large one even for Microsoft. They were extremely overambitious with WinFS and managed code in the OS, and ended up having to scrap a lot of work when they backtracked on that. Excuses aside they were woefully slow on Vista. But look at the other areas of the business: Office 2k7 shipped on time. Xbox dashboard updates every 6 months like clockwork. SQL server, exchange ship regularly and on time. The new Zunes and zune software took exactly one year from the release of the original Zune, as promised. Don't bother knocking the Zune -- I'm not interested in your biased opinions (I love my iPod -- but I've used the new Zunes, I love them too, and your ad hominem attacks on the zune will have zero effect on me so save yourself the effort).
I thought "out of reach" and "prohibitive" were the same. But anyway: lol.. I meant to say, it is prohibitive (or out of reach) for your scenario, but that doesn't necessarily make the price unreasonable.
But here's an anecdote: Comodo sells Authenticode certificates for signing applications, but this list of cross-certificates makes it unclear whether Comodo certificates (which are cheaper than VeriSign certificates) work for kernel mode as well. Agreed -- the link you provided is ambiguous on whether Comodo certs will work for signing drivers for x64 vista. Wish I could help you -- I guess contacting MS or Comodo is your best bet. But I guess you are already working on it.
That doesn't make it prhibitively expensive, or unreasonable. Just out of reach for this particular scenario. The example you state is a good cause, but it still doesn't make Verisign's fee unreasonable. In any case, my intention is not to defend Verisign here. My original point was that MS has no say in this fee, and had no hand in Verisign's dominance -- so even if you are upset about it, your anger at MS is misdirected.
I just read after posting this that Thawte was acquired by Verisign in 1999, and they both had about 50% of the market prior to that. Thawte of course, was sold to Verisign by Mark Shuttleworth (of Ubuntu fame). So finally we have the correct object of your ire for the cost of a digital certificate. I of course, see no problem with $500/year, and by extension have no bone to pick with Shuttleworth.
Why should I be upset at VeriSign if Microsoft was responsible for granting this monopoly to VeriSign? Dude!
$500/year is not an unreasonable or prohibitively expensive rate - so you should not be upset at Verisign or MS!
Just about every OS/software vendor (think Apple and Sun) that validates digital signatures also has this same relicance on Verisign -- so you should not single out MS for treatment
You could also get a digital signature from Thawte, for example, so while Verisign has the market dominated, there are alternatives.
Verisign was already the worlds largest Root CA by a ridiculous margin when Windows 2000 was released. Windows 2000 was the first windows version to have the infrastructure to verify digital signatures. So MS was in no way "responsible for granting this monopoly to VeriSign"
HDCP is only required if the ICT (Image Constraint Token) is set (on the media in question). No media in production currently sets this (and will not, until at least 2010). And this is the case for any system that plays HD content (Vista, OS-X, sundry Blu-Ray or HD-DVD players you can pick up at Best Buy).
Having said that, the protected video path spec does not completely prohibit your scenario from working. What is the resolution of your projector? (I assume it's 1024x768 at most, considering resolutions higher than that are so expensive). In the absense of a PVP over HDCP, the spec says the signal should be downgraded to 960x540 (i.e. higher than DVD quality, but less than 720p). Of course, this is not ideal, but I just wanted to point out that it's not Vista-specific.
The digital signature tells the kernel that the driver is from whoever claims to be the provider, and that the package they provided has not been tampered with. The logic behind banning unsigned drivers is sound.
The cost of obtaining a certificate from Verisign should get you pissed off at Verisign, not MS. I'm sure MS would happily create a Certificate Authority of their own that you could root to, but that would give them too much control over what can/cannot be loaded, and hence would (quite rightly) be met with loads of mistrust. So they did the wise thing in sticking with Verisign (aka neutral third party).
Lastly, it's really hard to make the argument that $500/year is a prohibitive expense. Compared to the cost of driver development, $500 is noise.
It doesn't sounds like the DRM problem was a Vista issue. It seems much more likely that this was an Adobe Acrobat DRM feature -- the PDF format has extensive DRM support built into it, since it's quite commonly used for specifications, marketing materials etc. that company's consider their 'IP'.
Seriously. Seriously:)
I even checked the temp directories---nada. Windows was storing it only in RAM. It's not windows -- it's acrobat. Acrobat was only storing it in RAM, and did not write anything to a temp file.
In the end, my housemate had to give me his SSN, date of birth, employee data, and everything needed to log into the website from my computer. I saved a local copy and emailed it to him when I was done printing it.
When he tried downloading it from gmail, of course, Vista forbade him to save it. I cannot believe you get modded +5, Interesting for this piece of fiction. Is MS hatred getting so out of control that we are now willing to belive claims like this without thinking? How did Vista even know that your friend was not authorized to download that PDF? Please explain? How was Vista even able to authenticate (the SSN etc. was required) your friend, to know what rights he had, or did not have to the document? Unfuckingbelievable that you can post fiction like this, and that enough people can be dumb enough to swallow it!
Anybody who has held a soldering iron and done something digital with single transistors please raise your hand ? Vacuum tubes ? Relays ? One hand raised way up here.
Fanciest thing I ever did was a capacitance measuring device. Mostly used op-amps though IIRC there was a single discrete BJT in it as well. It was a really wierd device in the end though. You had to connect the leads of the capacitor and press a start button for the device to start measuring it. The idea was to use a constant current source to charge the capacitor up to a set voltage. So with voltage and charging current being constant, the capacitance value was proportional to time. That's where the transistor came in -- pressing start turned the transistor on, to send a reset pulse to a timer, and also discharged the capacitor. And then getting an accurate reading (relatively speaking) was a question of calibrating the current, voltage, and timer frequency accordingly. A super-fun project, though not very useful in the end:P
2. Apple doesn't ignore security updates and issues. They fix them. Sometimes even before someone posts about them. lol. That's easy to do. Keep deleting posts on the issue until you release a fix.
I think ppl are missing the point. If.Mac has a security flaw, and somebody posts that flaw, at least the information is now available to users so they can now take defensive measures (don't use.Mac, or don't let people use your machine without logging in as guest, or something along those lines). Apple should be responding to the post with guidance on these workarounds until a patch is issued. i.e. they should empower users instead of deceiving them.
I don't understand how corporate structure, support monkeys etc. are relevent. Everyone agrees Apple has a well-documented history of deleting posts of this nature -- this is a deceptive practice and they should not be doing this. If this was any other company court cases would already have been filed. Only Apple users are this forgiving.
Surely it should be left up to the OEM to decide what browser to include. Not necessarily.
It is the OS Vendor (Apple, Ubuntu, whoever) that does the bundling in virtually all cases that exist today. That's because only the OS vendor is in a position to do the testing etc. required to make sure the browser plays well with the OS. To pass those test costs on to the OEMs would result in huge redundancy in testing, and varied results in quality. Such a result would unfairly penalize MS.
Today when you install an OS, you expect to have a browser present. Unbundling IE would unfairly penalize MS.
On the standards compliance side of course, I would say Opera have a point, though historical context (of browsers generally being poor at standards compliance) may blunt it a little. Anything that gets better standards compliance out of IE would be good of course.
The worst are users (about 5%) who always click both buttons at the same time, usually resulting in a left click, but occasionally (and apparently randomly to them) their other finger wins the race and they right click. At last we have an explanation for Apple's 5% of the computer market!:P
We have RMS (rights management services - its an MS solution). I'm far from an expert but I do understand that it's a service by itself (I suppose you could run it on the same physical server as exchange though).
The experience on the client side is pretty smooth if you're using outlook. You basically click on the template you want to protect your email with (company confidential/do-not-forward/do-not-reply-all etc.) and that's it. The rest is like composing any other email. On the receiving side you do nothing different. If you are authorized to read the email, outlook gets a license, decrypts, and displays it just like any other email. If not, you get a 'no rights' message. Screenshots, clipboard etc. are disabled. The screenshots part can get a bit annoying 'cos you have to remember to move on to a different email if you want to take a screenshot even of another application. The clipboard doesn't have this bug though.
So far, aside from protecting company communication, another plus is that you can have a bitching or ranting thread between a group of people, and as long as Do-not-forward is selected, your bacon is somewhat safe.
Encryption is more about making it impossible (or at least computationally expensive) to scan your email for 'flagged' stuff, and making it hard for people to accidentally forward confidential information. For example, if I forward a 'Company Confidential' encrypted email to someone outside of the company, they cannot get a decryption license because my company's AD doesn't recognize them, so it prevents me from shooting myself in the foot and brining my company down with me.
Now having said that, if there is a court case as a result of which a subpoena has been issued on my computer/email, it's quite feasible that my company can also be ordered to hand over the decryption keys. So encryption (at least for corporate/personal email) isn't meant to keep secret stuff irrevocably secret. It's merely intended to be protection against leaks and malicious attackers (but not the law). So if you ever have an email that starts with 'we should probably discuss this over the phone but...', well, do it over the phone.
I'm going to go to hell for saying this but... I actually do have a problem with that message.
Don't get me wrong - I am grateful to our troops. They pay the price for the freedom we enjoy. I have no illusions there, and I'm grateful.
But in the present day, our leaders have sent them to fight a war that is of our making, and was not our business to get involved in. I don't have a problem with thanking the troops. I have a huge problem with the implied endorsement that message has, that we are in a noble war right now, or that we are in any way doing the right thing. We have spent 5 years laying waste to a country that posed no threat to us whatsoever. We have sacrificed ~4000 of our bravest people doing that. And we have killed and displaced well over a million Iraqis in the process. And all of it in the pretext of rescuing a people that did not ask to be rescued, and securing a world that did not ask to be secured. And those people are significantly worse off, and the world is considerably less secure as a result. I have a huge problem with that message.
Still, I hate censorship (I mean, that's loss of freedom right there). So while I say I have a problem with that message, I don't think NBC made the right call.
While the idea of TFA is interesting (that Microsoft is drawing and quartering HD discs to breathe interest into file downloads), the reality is that it's Apple that owns 90% of video downloads and a first place majority share of movie downloads Apple's video download volumes are irrelevant to this discussion. Xbox live downloads are available in 480p and 720p and it's not hard to imagine that they will be available in 1080p once bandwidths permit it. That's basically in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD territory. iTunes store downloads are meant to be played on portable devices with QVGA screens (or thereabouts). It's not the same market. One is meant for the living room, and the other is meant for DAPs (or DVPs in this case).
All very valid reasons. It looks like businesses are getting the message too (however slowly). Amazon and Walmart are definitely helping the cause by selling tracks in MP3 format. Even on the Zune marketplace, tracks that are available in non-DRMed mode are in MP3 format instead of WMA. Hopefully non-DRMed tracks will be mp3 instead of AAC on iTunes soon. Once that happens, and more labels get on board with selling their tracks DRM-free, the mp3 player market will finally be open to competition!
IANAL and IDKS (I don't know shit) about this, but I thought the antitrust case only covered stuff that leveraged the windows market share? i.e. if it can be argued that there is no synergy between Zunes and Windows, then would selling Zunes at a profit/loss matter in the context of the antitrust case?
Slashdot Mirror
FairPlay was the least foul DRM Why so?
and Apple used its retail leverage to keep prices down Doesn't add up. Prior to 2004 apple did not have leverage (iTunes sales we growing, but still not a large enough factor to give Apple leverage). And presently, while they actually have leverage, they are not the cheapest source of DRM-free music (compare the prices on iTunes and Amazon for proof).
There's plenty of pro-Microsoft wags trying to say that Amazon is hurting Apple, but MP3s are good for the iPod. Actually, you're the first person to mention Microsoft on this thread. Anyway, the point is not whether Apple is being hurt, or Microsoft is helped. Competition among online music retailers is good for us; as their margins get squeezed, they'll keep steady pressure on the labels to lower their prices. Everybody wins (consumers) as long as neither Apple, MS, Amazon, anyone else, win outright.
The only thing bad for the iPod is Real/Windows Media/ATRAC DRM that can't play on the iPod. 'Can't play' is not accurate. Apple chooses not to support these formats (and they have their reasons). Should the competitive landscape change to a point where this lack of support hurts them, they will include the support (at least WM-DRM is easily licensed -- I don't know about ATRAC and Real). For now, it's in their interests to avoid interoperability with other DRM schemes. Case in point is the way Real would keep reverse engineering FairPlay support into Rhapsody, and Apple would keep updating iTunes and FairPlay to break Rhapsody's support. Make no mistake about it -- all players in this segment loathe interoperability, and Apple is just as guilty/innocent as anyone else of eroding Fair Use rights.
RealNetworks Reverse-Engineers Apple's FairPlay DRM Scheme
RealNetworks announced this morning that it has essentially reverse-engineered Apple Computer's FairPlay Digital Rights Management (DRM) scheme. RealNetworks' Harmony Technology will let customers load songs purchased from the RealNetworks RealPlayer Music Store onto Apple's successful but closed iPod portable audio player.
Apple refused to share the technical information RealNetworks needed to make this translation possible; Apple CEO Steve Jobs refused repeated requests from RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser. Apparently, RealNetworks got tired of waiting.
ps: did you enjoy the link? It's right out of your playbook ;)
But for the record, the only comments I remove besides the spam that gets wiped automatically is right wing rants that go on for paragraphs about bullshit around the IQ of your spiel here.
Symbiotic: What Apple Does for Open Source (link) Focus dude. We were discussing Microsoft. How does this circular reference provide proof for any point you're trying to make about Microsoft? That's what you claimed to use your links for. This is another reason I keep telling you to stop with the links. You're embarrassing yourself. If you can't tell from my comments that I have nothing against Apple, you're even denser than I thought. Why did you need to put that link in there? Why does Windows even get a mention in an article about Apple and Open Source? Ad hominem attack, anyone?
Interestingly you haven't answered one of my questions. Why do you censor comments on roughlydrafted? That scared about people refuting your 'research'?
I also don't define Microsoft's business "narrowly" to upset you, I present what the company itself reports about how it makes money and where. As you apparently have failed to grasp, my comments are based directly on Microsoft's own classification of its business, which falls into Windows, Server, Office (three monopolies that make shit loads of money), all home consumer electronics and embedded and everything else (which loses shit loads of money), some online services and tools businesses (which aren't doing anything spectacular in either direction), and "other," which relates to general advertising, R&D, and the legal machinery that eats up billions every year defending itself from the company's criminal behavior by paying off fines and settlements. We keep coming back to this. You dared anybody to argue with you about slagging sales as a datapoint. I did so with cold hard numbers proving MS's revenues and profits are healthy. You wanna refute that with numbers or you wanna keep spewing the same nonsense as above? Screw your definition of monopolies, loss making units, legal this that and the other mumbo jumbo -- revenues are up, profits are up. Refute that.If you are not aware of Microsoft's billions of dollars in fraud every year, you need to educate yourself, not complain that I'm pointing out the truth. Billions of dollars of fraud. Please provide one example of this. Link to roughlydrafted (or copy-paste from there) does not count.
The rest of your comments are non-sensical, wrong, or circular fault finding without any point. Go masturbate with your Zune, but don't ask me to watch you get off. What a lovely rational and well-reasoned response. Not in the least bit indicative of a rabid anti-MS bias, facts be damned.
Having to use Microsoft products is plenty enough of a punishment for your asinine behavior, so I don't hold any ill will against you. It will all be over soon enough. Keep circling your thumb clockwise to scroll down. I'll just press down on the zune pad. Touche!
Why Microsoft's Copy-Killing Has Reached a Dead End (link) Thought I told you to stop doing that. This is exactly where you look like a raving lunatic. This quote doesn't even refute any point in my post. You just linked it because you needed something anti-MS, context be damned. Such weird behavior.
Microsoft makes money on Office, Windows, and Servers. Period. Outside of its three monopolies it loses shit loads of money. Read the company's own profit/loss reports.
Keep defining things as narrowly as you want, and you'll be able to show anything as a failure. Its very convenient to bracket all server products together as 'servers' and then put a period after that. It's also convenient to forget that there are other money making things that don't fall under this. VS again, for just one example. You dared someone to argue with you on the data point of sagging sales. I pointed out healthy revenues, profit margins, and many products performing well. You chose to ignore it, and do a bait-and-switch you're so fond of accusing MS of doing. Nice try. As I predicted, your attempt at spinning it negatively amused me.
Apple has outpaced Microsoft's valuation increase by a factor of 100 over the same period.
Apple is a phenomenal company, going through a purple patch right now. What has this got to do with your anti-MS vitriol? You asked people to argue with you on some data points. This is the 'data' you bring to the table? You know, when I read your stuff on non-technology matters (say politics), I get the impression that you understand that the "you're either with us or against us" mindset is essentially a blinding one to have. Why do you have such a hard time seeing that in the technology world as well? I'm almost sorry I asked this because I have a feeling you're going to answer with some ad hominem anti-MS nonsense. I'm sure you understand about bubbles, P/E ratios, cash flow, dividends etc., but you willfully ignore the fact that MSFT has essentially been a great, stable long-term stock to hold, and is undervalued right now.
I have detailed this missing information as an early warning: PC sales are mature and new/emerging markets are looking for cheap laptops. There's no growth market for a $300 OS running a $300 Office suite. Is that an ad hominem attack in your mind?
Read your articles. They sound nothing like the line above. They sound like rants from a raving lunatic.
Microsoft's Outrageous Office Profits (link)
Please do not ever bother linking to an article on roughlydrafted when you reply to me. I have no time for that nonsense. But just to humor you, I'll paste an ad-hominem attack from that link:
And then there's the paragraph immediately following that. And so much more. My 80% estimate is fairly accurate.
I detailed Microsoft's stock performance over the last few years, but look for yourself at finance.google.com
And you very conveniently ignored the link I showed to finance.yahoo.com showing the 15% gain of their stock since Vista's release.
Soviet Microsoft: How Resistance to Free Markets and Open Ideas Will the Unravel the Software Superpower
Is that an ad hominem attack in your mind?
Did you read the title of that link? Please look up ad hominem in a dictionary. After that, if you still feel the title of your link itself does not constitute such an attack your bias is so deep and irreversible that there is probably no point in any further discussion with you on this topic. I sincerely request that you let me know your evaluation of that title, so I can save myself a lot of time by not replying to you if you really feel tha
Or why you didn't just have your friend print the PDF to a .xps, email it to you and then print it from your computer..
But here's an anecdote: Comodo sells Authenticode certificates for signing applications, but this list of cross-certificates makes it unclear whether Comodo certificates (which are cheaper than VeriSign certificates) work for kernel mode as well. Agreed -- the link you provided is ambiguous on whether Comodo certs will work for signing drivers for x64 vista. Wish I could help you -- I guess contacting MS or Comodo is your best bet. But I guess you are already working on it.
That doesn't make it prhibitively expensive, or unreasonable. Just out of reach for this particular scenario. The example you state is a good cause, but it still doesn't make Verisign's fee unreasonable. In any case, my intention is not to defend Verisign here. My original point was that MS has no say in this fee, and had no hand in Verisign's dominance -- so even if you are upset about it, your anger at MS is misdirected.
I just read after posting this that Thawte was acquired by Verisign in 1999, and they both had about 50% of the market prior to that. Thawte of course, was sold to Verisign by Mark Shuttleworth (of Ubuntu fame). So finally we have the correct object of your ire for the cost of a digital certificate. I of course, see no problem with $500/year, and by extension have no bone to pick with Shuttleworth.
C'mon man.. be reasonable!
HDCP is only required if the ICT (Image Constraint Token) is set (on the media in question). No media in production currently sets this (and will not, until at least 2010). And this is the case for any system that plays HD content (Vista, OS-X, sundry Blu-Ray or HD-DVD players you can pick up at Best Buy).
Having said that, the protected video path spec does not completely prohibit your scenario from working. What is the resolution of your projector? (I assume it's 1024x768 at most, considering resolutions higher than that are so expensive). In the absense of a PVP over HDCP, the spec says the signal should be downgraded to 960x540 (i.e. higher than DVD quality, but less than 720p). Of course, this is not ideal, but I just wanted to point out that it's not Vista-specific.
The digital signature tells the kernel that the driver is from whoever claims to be the provider, and that the package they provided has not been tampered with. The logic behind banning unsigned drivers is sound.
The cost of obtaining a certificate from Verisign should get you pissed off at Verisign, not MS. I'm sure MS would happily create a Certificate Authority of their own that you could root to, but that would give them too much control over what can/cannot be loaded, and hence would (quite rightly) be met with loads of mistrust. So they did the wise thing in sticking with Verisign (aka neutral third party).
Lastly, it's really hard to make the argument that $500/year is a prohibitive expense. Compared to the cost of driver development, $500 is noise.
It doesn't sounds like the DRM problem was a Vista issue. It seems much more likely that this was an Adobe Acrobat DRM feature -- the PDF format has extensive DRM support built into it, since it's quite commonly used for specifications, marketing materials etc. that company's consider their 'IP'.
Seriously. SeriouslyFanciest thing I ever did was a capacitance measuring device. Mostly used op-amps though IIRC there was a single discrete BJT in it as well. It was a really wierd device in the end though. You had to connect the leads of the capacitor and press a start button for the device to start measuring it. The idea was to use a constant current source to charge the capacitor up to a set voltage. So with voltage and charging current being constant, the capacitance value was proportional to time. That's where the transistor came in -- pressing start turned the transistor on, to send a reset pulse to a timer, and also discharged the capacitor. And then getting an accurate reading (relatively speaking) was a question of calibrating the current, voltage, and timer frequency accordingly. A super-fun project, though not very useful in the end :P
I think ppl are missing the point. If .Mac has a security flaw, and somebody posts that flaw, at least the information is now available to users so they can now take defensive measures (don't use .Mac, or don't let people use your machine without logging in as guest, or something along those lines). Apple should be responding to the post with guidance on these workarounds until a patch is issued. i.e. they should empower users instead of deceiving them.
I don't understand how corporate structure, support monkeys etc. are relevent. Everyone agrees Apple has a well-documented history of deleting posts of this nature -- this is a deceptive practice and they should not be doing this. If this was any other company court cases would already have been filed. Only Apple users are this forgiving.
It is the OS Vendor (Apple, Ubuntu, whoever) that does the bundling in virtually all cases that exist today. That's because only the OS vendor is in a position to do the testing etc. required to make sure the browser plays well with the OS. To pass those test costs on to the OEMs would result in huge redundancy in testing, and varied results in quality. Such a result would unfairly penalize MS.
That makes sense.
Today when you install an OS, you expect to have a browser present. Unbundling IE would unfairly penalize MS.
On the standards compliance side of course, I would say Opera have a point, though historical context (of browsers generally being poor at standards compliance) may blunt it a little. Anything that gets better standards compliance out of IE would be good of course.
We have RMS (rights management services - its an MS solution). I'm far from an expert but I do understand that it's a service by itself (I suppose you could run it on the same physical server as exchange though).
The experience on the client side is pretty smooth if you're using outlook. You basically click on the template you want to protect your email with (company confidential/do-not-forward/do-not-reply-all etc.) and that's it. The rest is like composing any other email. On the receiving side you do nothing different. If you are authorized to read the email, outlook gets a license, decrypts, and displays it just like any other email. If not, you get a 'no rights' message. Screenshots, clipboard etc. are disabled. The screenshots part can get a bit annoying 'cos you have to remember to move on to a different email if you want to take a screenshot even of another application. The clipboard doesn't have this bug though.
So far, aside from protecting company communication, another plus is that you can have a bitching or ranting thread between a group of people, and as long as Do-not-forward is selected, your bacon is somewhat safe.
Emails you send and receive using your work email account are your company's property by law.
Encryption is more about making it impossible (or at least computationally expensive) to scan your email for 'flagged' stuff, and making it hard for people to accidentally forward confidential information. For example, if I forward a 'Company Confidential' encrypted email to someone outside of the company, they cannot get a decryption license because my company's AD doesn't recognize them, so it prevents me from shooting myself in the foot and brining my company down with me.
Now having said that, if there is a court case as a result of which a subpoena has been issued on my computer/email, it's quite feasible that my company can also be ordered to hand over the decryption keys. So encryption (at least for corporate/personal email) isn't meant to keep secret stuff irrevocably secret. It's merely intended to be protection against leaks and malicious attackers (but not the law). So if you ever have an email that starts with 'we should probably discuss this over the phone but...', well, do it over the phone.
Agreed.
I'm going to go to hell for saying this but... I actually do have a problem with that message.
Don't get me wrong - I am grateful to our troops. They pay the price for the freedom we enjoy. I have no illusions there, and I'm grateful.
But in the present day, our leaders have sent them to fight a war that is of our making, and was not our business to get involved in. I don't have a problem with thanking the troops. I have a huge problem with the implied endorsement that message has, that we are in a noble war right now, or that we are in any way doing the right thing. We have spent 5 years laying waste to a country that posed no threat to us whatsoever. We have sacrificed ~4000 of our bravest people doing that. And we have killed and displaced well over a million Iraqis in the process. And all of it in the pretext of rescuing a people that did not ask to be rescued, and securing a world that did not ask to be secured. And those people are significantly worse off, and the world is considerably less secure as a result. I have a huge problem with that message.
Still, I hate censorship (I mean, that's loss of freedom right there). So while I say I have a problem with that message, I don't think NBC made the right call.
All very valid reasons. It looks like businesses are getting the message too (however slowly). Amazon and Walmart are definitely helping the cause by selling tracks in MP3 format. Even on the Zune marketplace, tracks that are available in non-DRMed mode are in MP3 format instead of WMA. Hopefully non-DRMed tracks will be mp3 instead of AAC on iTunes soon. Once that happens, and more labels get on board with selling their tracks DRM-free, the mp3 player market will finally be open to competition!
IANAL and IDKS (I don't know shit) about this, but I thought the antitrust case only covered stuff that leveraged the windows market share? i.e. if it can be argued that there is no synergy between Zunes and Windows, then would selling Zunes at a profit/loss matter in the context of the antitrust case?