They may know the word "attachment," well enough to use it in casual conversation, but the fact is many computer users don't know what it means. Try to explain it to them. They don't really know what a file is either, or the difference between code or data - the more you try to explain the more you have to explain.
This doesn't explain the sort of story you are telling - but that is an exceptional (although far too common, I know) case. There are still plenty of people who aren't morons on that scale, who still don't understand anything they do on a computer. They have a functional knowledge only - do this then do that and this will happen - but they haven't any sort of realistic understanding of how or why the computer works. (Many of them, I've found, actually have rather ingenious, pre-scientific theories on the subject.) For people like that to work with computers successfully a good GUI design is absolutely essential - and the failure of Outhouse to provide that, combined with the success of microsoft in marketing the damn thing, turn these people into threats unnecessarily.
Look, if these were technical people that actually understood what the hell you are saying it would be one thing.
But it's not. These people don't know what an attachment is. They don't even understand the language you are speaking, so don't be surprised when they don't follow your directions.
The whole point to the GUIfication of computers is to allow people like that to use computers. When you have a company that has worked for years to get people like that on computer, to GUIfy their OS and make sure *everyone* is using it, not just the people that understand it, they have to take some responsibility for doing this in a way that doesn't lead people to do such stupid things.
It wouldn't be hard, at all. There are plenty of examples of how to handle this situation the right way. Instead we get auto-execution of whatever crap is sitting there, at the slightest provocation from the user. A GUI is supposed to shield and guide a non-technical user - not guide them straight into every land-mine it comes across, but around the problems.
Windows 98SE actually. You can do the same thing with ME, but I'm sticking with 98SE on this machine - ME runs slower and offers no particular advantage for me. The VMS based distros require a different approach, but the end result can be achieved there as well.
If you're running 98 or later (or anything with that bullshit "active desktop"), then you do have IE installed (or at least parts of it.)
Let me repeat myself. Nonsense. On 98 and ME removing IE (along with "active desktop" and all that rot) is easy. It's just not the type of stuff they teach MSCEs.
IT has become a haven for morons where having a clue means you are perceived as a threat to everyone elses job.
... or a threat to your own job. The company may like that you can perform miracles on command. They come to depend on your miracles. That dependance makes management types nervous and paranoid. On one hand, they want to get rid of you because of the growing dependance. But on the other hand, they're too worried by the fact that you've got your fingers in everything -- and they're the ones who put your fingers there...
And there you have summed up what every remaining competent person in IT these days must be feeling, if my experience is any indication.
Frankly, I'm surprised that this hasn't become more widespread, and long before this. My present employer's internal network was crippled for days by the nimda worm, all because some idiot salesdroid double-clicked on an attachment in her Hotmail account.
Why is this her fault?
Really. Think about this. She just did the natural, normal thing, to investigate the attachment. It's not her fault, it's the 'software engineers' at Microsoft who had the knowledge, background, and ability to have made an interface that did NOT execute an executive email attachment so easily!
If you're running a modern Windows (anthing from the last 6 years), you have no choice but to run Explorer. IE has been seeded deeper and deeper into the OS until nobody can find the dividing line anymore.
Absolutely untrue. I'm sitting here right now on a Windows box, with no IE, no Outhouse, no Windows Networking. I have Opera, Lynx, and Mozilla available for webbrowsing, and Pegasus Mail for email. Yes, a real professional cracker could probably find *some* way into my system, but it's easily more secure than some default Linux installs I've seen, and it has *NO* vulnerability to any of the exploits that have cost large amounts of money and productivity lately (Nimda, Code Red, etc. - I received all of them and was infected by none.)
I've had to setup the kind of insecure and insane systems most companies are now running, with IE and Outhouse and open shares hanging out like trails of blood attracting the sharks - but it's NOT because it's impossible to set up a reasonably secure systems using Windows boxes - it's because I've been ORDERED to setup the blamed things that way.
Frankly I'm so sick and tired of being ordered to do things in the stupidest possible way on a daily basis I've decided to find a new career. IT has become a haven for morons where having a clue means you are perceived as a threat to everyone elses job.
Just replace the root servers but keep the DNS system? Couple million $ per year, max. You just need a lot of redundant bandwidth, very hefty machines, and a few dozen employees.
To replace the root servers with a new system and update all the software and hardware using DNS? Couple hundred million $, min. There's a whole lot of stuff that just assumes things work one way and you'd have to really work to find it all and fix it. It's a smaller version of the Y2K problem.
Why on earth would you need to do that? Just get folks that run DNS servers to look to the new ones for their updates...
Linux is not a person or a corporation. Linux is a kernel.
Does a kernel ever really learn lessons?
I don't think so.
This is what you have to understand about Free Software. It's not a business. There may be businesses that use it, but it's not a business and it's not dependent on any particular threshold of "business" to survive. Unlike OS/2, or Windows, or Macintosh, Linux is not going to be a "failure" and die if it doesn't attract the unwashed masses.
Anyway, Free GUI systems, which seems to be what you want to see, are getting quite usable. Admittedly, initial setup can be a bit confusing, and they require occasional routine administration that the average home user isn't going to ever understand. The same is true of every version of Windows around too, though, so what's the point?
Whether Microsoft will switch sides on time to stay on top or not remains to be seen, but short of making Free Software illegal they simply cannot kill it.
Really, putting such an obvious typo on the front page is just sloppy... this is supposed to be a geek site, show a little brain power please!
The word you were searching for is "posthumous." From Latin 'posthumus'. No homos involved.
The article isn't all that earthshaking, but it does bring up an interesting thought - this may well be a record that will never be broken. Asteroids is a classic game, and certainly people do still play it and will continue to, but not in the numbers that were playing it at the time. And that was a hell of a high score.
XML+CSS support? XML+XSLT support? Unicode support? (yes, Opera 6 finally has good Unicode support, but Mozilla for Windows has had it since what, M14? And I've been reading Unicode pages on Linux with Mozilla since XFree86 4 came out). Do you have ANY idea what you're talking about, or do you just like Opera's size and feel better, and figure that is what "every front" means?
Why don't you explain why anyone should care about the alphabet soup above?
Perhaps, just perhaps, you are correct. Perhaps I should have said "every front that matters" rather than "every front" but then again, if I went around adding qualifications that are normally assumed to everything I write or speak, I would become needlessly verbose.
If you are really concerned about it you might try reading this thread. I really don't know enough about it to comment myself, other than to note that it was claimed to be a microkernel, but some have claimed that, like NT, it had so many non-microkernel performance hacks done to it that it really wasn't.
And I agree, it did (does, development is closed but you can still run it) run pretty nicely.
Academic CS guys have been saying microkernels are the way of the future for years now. Mac OS10 runs on the Mach microkernel. Windows NT was supposed to be a microkernel, although by the time it actually made it to the light of day so much had been stuffed back into the kernel for performance reasons it really isn't one.
The number one drawbacks to microkernels, as the above might lead you to guess, is performance. On a single processor system expect a microkernel to lag significantly performancewise in comparison to a monolithic kernel with equal optimisations. That's a result of the fact that so many things we think of as system services are user processes instead, and of the communication overhead involved (message passing between components is used extensively, and this is not the fastest way to handle things on a uniprocessor system.)
Why do I say "on a uniprocessor system?" Well, some of that overhead becomes unavoidable anyway when you move to a multiprocessor system, and a microkernel is inherently multithreaded, so it's quite friendly to multiprocessor systems. So as multiprocessor systems become more common the performance gap may drop.
Currently the HURD is a collection of servers that run on top of the GNU Mach microkernel. Does that sentence make more sense for you now? I hope so.
The GNU Mach microkernel is something of a performance dog, but at this point the HURD is still at a development only stage anyway so it doesn't much matter. It will probably be moved to an L4 microkernel instead before it's used in production machines. The L4 family gives much improved performance. Still slower than a highly tuned monolithic kernel like Linux, particularly on uniprocessor systems, but much closer.
So if microkernels are slower, why use them at all? Well, they have the potential to bring an entire new world of flexibility to computing. Imagine having different "personalities" - different collections of "kernel service" daemons, so that your box can run Linux, BSD, Solaris, VMS, or even Windows sessions, on the fly. Imagine being able to switch between them, or run different ones simultaneously, without having "root" privileges and without affecting other users. This is just one of the many interesting things that could be done on a microkernel system but not on a monolithic one. Another one is a system where any user can do all sorts of things that normally require root access, except for mess up other users.
None of the pre-existing systems seem to have ever really taken advantage of microkernel design - rather they just use a microkernel to emulate a single monolithic kernel (usually BSD.) However, there are some pretty incredible microkernel only tricks out there waiting to be done, and the HURD developers plan on finally doing them.
I downloaded the new mozilla earlier today and gave it a try. It's a lot better than it was last time I tried, I'll give credit where credit is due. But it's still far behind Opera on every front. Mozilla could certainly take some interface tips from Opera.
As to the registration, if you are really too cheap to either pay $20 or put up with a tiny little banner, to support a program of this quality, then no one should care what you think anyway.
MSIE for Windows and the Mac are totally seperate products. The Mac version is a reasonably standards compliant browser and isn't tainted by the proprietary crap that goes into the Windows version.
Both the Mac and Windows version are "reasonably standards compliant" in the sense that they will render standard compliant HTML reasonably well. That's not the problem at all. The problem is that they also support lots of non-standard code, which MS encourages people to use instead.
Besides, AOL also produce various set top boxes, PC appliances including one based around Linux & Gecko which no doubt their partners are also required to support.
Umm produced, past tense, and there was only one the best I remember. It was never made in large quantities, and never sold very well, and was discontinued long ago.
Don't get me wrong, it's great to see Linux able to take advantage of AltiVec. You can deride graphics as "fluff",
And Lord knows I have, often enough.:) But seriously, it has its place, PPC is great hardware for it, and up until now Linux/PPC has been hobbled by not being able to take real advantage of that fact.
However: How many PowerPC boxes are running Linux, and how many are running OS X? And which is a more high-profile market?
*shrug* Who cares?
This still has nothing to do with OS 10. It has to do with Linux/PPC.
I take that back, indirectly it does have a little to do with OS10. Because Mac is using that horrid slow Mach kernel, and still performing as well or better than Linux/PPC, because of better optimisation. RedHat is poised to eliminate that gap, and make Linux/PPC a much more attractive system.
Linux, furthermore, is a "market" that GCC already owns. I know, I know, you can retarget from wherever, but making GCC a viable, and in some senses technically superior, choice for OS X development can only be a good thing. Can you compile Carbon apps w/ GCC? I have no idea, but if not, in eight months you will.
Do you think they'd start working on this problem in advance of a Mozilla-based delivery?
According to the article:
The only thing that might delay -- not stop, just delay -- AOL's change from Explorer to a Mozilla-based browser is allowing time for some of AOL's largest and most important "partner sites" to do away with any Explorer-specific features they have been using in place of W3C standards.
The real worth here lies in the fact that MacOS X is, let's not forget, essentially a UN*X platform.
I don't see what that has to do with anything. We're talking about porting the toolchain to the hardware. This has nothing to do with MacOs 10 at all. It's about Linux/PPC.
Linux/PPC has been hampered for quite awhile by the lack of good GCC support for things like AltiVec. Performance suffers from lack of optimisation. It sounds like RH is undertaking to fix that. This could be very cool - if they succeed then Linux/PPC programs will be able to take advantage of the full power of the PPC chips. AltiVec doesn't help with everything, far from it, but code which it does help will see truly impressive performance gains.
If you're not clear on what AltiVec is, try the link out. Basically it's MMX on steroids. It does everything MMX does, better, and some other things besides. It's really very cool tech, and it will be very nice to see Linux/PPC software finally taking advantage of it.
The charts used to navigate by a ship were running on an NT workstation on the bridge of the vessel. It is no longer a requirement for up to date backup charts to be kept on board. A CD is sent to the ship each week updating the charts to the latest version, but the backup paper charts that are kept are not updated at these regular intervals any longer because of the increased reliance on the NT charting software. The GPS onboard the ship updates the ships current position on the charting software running on the NT workstation so the master can see where they are with respect to the course that has been plotted previously.
Well this doesn't sound too horribly dangerous, although it's a little sloppy IMOP. Presumably (correct me if I'm wrong) it's acceptable in this situation if the navigation system is subject to short periods of unavailability? Just how bit a problem is it if that NT box is totally destroyed in mid-voyage, however?
This same ship contains a small network, only consisting of 4-5 computers (its only a coastal tanker). One for charting on the bridge, one controlling & monitoring the amount of oil flowing on/off the ship in dock etc.. but..
The ship also has access to email (and consiquently attachments) at sea via Immersat satellite software + (uhh-ohh) Microsoft Outlook. If a member of the ships crew were to open an email attachment apparently from the office, which was in fact a virus, and the network security was not up to scratch, it may have the capacity to shut down not only the ships main course plotting software (sending them to backup paper charts), but to disturb the monitoring of oil/balast on & off the ship in the dock.
Well obviously that's a huge problem just waiting to happen. I certainly would never sign off on such a system. But the question remains just how much better would be good enough? Just how catastrophic, for instance, would it be to lose that balast monitoring system?
If this system can be taken offline safely for, say, an hour at a time, then I would not say changing OS is necessary - a sensible program of security and reliability enhancement can easily make a windows based network perform at a level that's acceptable in that case. Given how much these vessels cost it would seem horribly short sited to scrimp, so I would recommend:
Strategic network firewalling that blocks any communication not needed for the functioning of the systems as intended, as a prophylactic.
A thorough software scrubbing. Obviously Outhouse has to go. MSIE can and should be completely eradicated (yes, Virginia, you really can do that, despite what MS claims.) This list could get pretty lengthy, but it boils down to removing risky software, and replacing it with less risky equivelants when that is needed.
Each machine should be torn down to exactly what is needed on it, then imaged. There are several ways you could go from there, depending on the exact circumstances, but one good option is simply to have a couple of cloned replacements for each station ready and locked in the ships safe. Alternatively, cloned harddrives only could be kept, along with plenty of spare parts, if the ship will always have a qualified tech no board to make repairs.
Switching Operating Systems might eliminate the need for some of that work, but much of it needs to be done regardless. Hardware failures need to be planned for, in particular.
I recall someone from AOL saying that partner sites are contractually obliged to support all versions of the AOL client - Windows AND Mac which of course means that most sites are likely to be pretty browser-neutral anyway.
Ummm no. That would be nice, but it's just not true. At the moment the Windows and Mac clients both use MSIE.
This is definately an issue with the big guys, it's precisely big corporations which think they can get away with telling their customers what browser to use. Just go down the list of AOL partner sites with Netscape and try to use their login functions and the like if you don't believe me.
The main reason to care is this - if AOL does go to Gecko instead of IE (which would be a very smart decision for a number of technical and business reasons you'd know about if you read the article) then 30% of web users will no longer be using MSIE - and those bastards that write their webpages in MSHTML are going to be scrambling to fix their pages.
This guy has been following that story since it first hit, and if you follow all the links in that article you'll find out a lot more than might be good for your sanity.
It's not one Israeli company, but two, Amdocs Ltd. and Comverse Infosys. Between the two of them they don't just handle all the billing but also play crucial roles in law enforcement wiretaps. The amount of damage some random joe can do with a good exploit is really pretty minor compared to the damage that can result when crucial infrastructure is under control of a foreign government - even if it's a government which is usually an ally.
as soon as i picked up a little c#, object oreintation just started to make sense, i had difficulty with it before in c++ but now the peices fall into place
Never tried ObjC I take it?
The one good thing I've seen in all of this so-called ".NET" is the language-agnosticism technic. Some of that is very handy, and actually almost new (not really, if you follow academic CS this stuff has been coming for awhile, but MS does deserve credit for implementing a few things first for once) and very slick. But the rest of it... are you familiar with the term "trojan horse"?:)
Slashdot Mirror
Download IEradicator and get rid of that POS for good.
They may know the word "attachment," well enough to use it in casual conversation, but the fact is many computer users don't know what it means. Try to explain it to them. They don't really know what a file is either, or the difference between code or data - the more you try to explain the more you have to explain.
This doesn't explain the sort of story you are telling - but that is an exceptional (although far too common, I know) case. There are still plenty of people who aren't morons on that scale, who still don't understand anything they do on a computer. They have a functional knowledge only - do this then do that and this will happen - but they haven't any sort of realistic understanding of how or why the computer works. (Many of them, I've found, actually have rather ingenious, pre-scientific theories on the subject.) For people like that to work with computers successfully a good GUI design is absolutely essential - and the failure of Outhouse to provide that, combined with the success of microsoft in marketing the damn thing, turn these people into threats unnecessarily.
Look, if these were technical people that actually understood what the hell you are saying it would be one thing.
But it's not. These people don't know what an attachment is. They don't even understand the language you are speaking, so don't be surprised when they don't follow your directions.
The whole point to the GUIfication of computers is to allow people like that to use computers. When you have a company that has worked for years to get people like that on computer, to GUIfy their OS and make sure *everyone* is using it, not just the people that understand it, they have to take some responsibility for doing this in a way that doesn't lead people to do such stupid things.
It wouldn't be hard, at all. There are plenty of examples of how to handle this situation the right way. Instead we get auto-execution of whatever crap is sitting there, at the slightest provocation from the user. A GUI is supposed to shield and guide a non-technical user - not guide them straight into every land-mine it comes across, but around the problems.
Windows 98SE actually. You can do the same thing with ME, but I'm sticking with 98SE on this machine - ME runs slower and offers no particular advantage for me. The VMS based distros require a different approach, but the end result can be achieved there as well.
Let me repeat myself. Nonsense. On 98 and ME removing IE (along with "active desktop" and all that rot) is easy. It's just not the type of stuff they teach MSCEs.
And there you have summed up what every remaining competent person in IT these days must be feeling, if my experience is any indication.
Why is this her fault?
Really. Think about this. She just did the natural, normal thing, to investigate the attachment. It's not her fault, it's the 'software engineers' at Microsoft who had the knowledge, background, and ability to have made an interface that did NOT execute an executive email attachment so easily!
Absolutely untrue. I'm sitting here right now on a Windows box, with no IE, no Outhouse, no Windows Networking. I have Opera, Lynx, and Mozilla available for webbrowsing, and Pegasus Mail for email. Yes, a real professional cracker could probably find *some* way into my system, but it's easily more secure than some default Linux installs I've seen, and it has *NO* vulnerability to any of the exploits that have cost large amounts of money and productivity lately (Nimda, Code Red, etc. - I received all of them and was infected by none.)
I've had to setup the kind of insecure and insane systems most companies are now running, with IE and Outhouse and open shares hanging out like trails of blood attracting the sharks - but it's NOT because it's impossible to set up a reasonably secure systems using Windows boxes - it's because I've been ORDERED to setup the blamed things that way.
Frankly I'm so sick and tired of being ordered to do things in the stupidest possible way on a daily basis I've decided to find a new career. IT has become a haven for morons where having a clue means you are perceived as a threat to everyone elses job.
Why on earth would you need to do that? Just get folks that run DNS servers to look to the new ones for their updates...
Really, putting such an obvious typo on the front page is just sloppy... this is supposed to be a geek site, show a little brain power please!
The word you were searching for is "posthumous." From Latin 'posthumus'. No homos involved.
The article isn't all that earthshaking, but it does bring up an interesting thought - this may well be a record that will never be broken. Asteroids is a classic game, and certainly people do still play it and will continue to, but not in the numbers that were playing it at the time. And that was a hell of a high score.
Too bad the guy died...
Why don't you explain why anyone should care about the alphabet soup above?
Perhaps, just perhaps, you are correct. Perhaps I should have said "every front that matters" rather than "every front" but then again, if I went around adding qualifications that are normally assumed to everything I write or speak, I would become needlessly verbose.
If you are really concerned about it you might try reading this thread. I really don't know enough about it to comment myself, other than to note that it was claimed to be a microkernel, but some have claimed that, like NT, it had so many non-microkernel performance hacks done to it that it really wasn't.
And I agree, it did (does, development is closed but you can still run it) run pretty nicely.
The HURD is a Hird of Unix Replacing Daemons. Clearer?
What's a Hird? Hurd of Interfaces Representing Depth. There, all clear now?
Seriously, the HURD is a microkernel system. Instead of having a (relatively) big kernel that provides all the necessary services, a microkernel system has a very minimal kernel and provides most of the services a kernel usually provides by way of userspace daemons (the Hird of Unix Replacing Daemons) instead.
Academic CS guys have been saying microkernels are the way of the future for years now. Mac OS10 runs on the Mach microkernel. Windows NT was supposed to be a microkernel, although by the time it actually made it to the light of day so much had been stuffed back into the kernel for performance reasons it really isn't one.
The number one drawbacks to microkernels, as the above might lead you to guess, is performance. On a single processor system expect a microkernel to lag significantly performancewise in comparison to a monolithic kernel with equal optimisations. That's a result of the fact that so many things we think of as system services are user processes instead, and of the communication overhead involved (message passing between components is used extensively, and this is not the fastest way to handle things on a uniprocessor system.)
Why do I say "on a uniprocessor system?" Well, some of that overhead becomes unavoidable anyway when you move to a multiprocessor system, and a microkernel is inherently multithreaded, so it's quite friendly to multiprocessor systems. So as multiprocessor systems become more common the performance gap may drop.
Currently the HURD is a collection of servers that run on top of the GNU Mach microkernel. Does that sentence make more sense for you now? I hope so.
The GNU Mach microkernel is something of a performance dog, but at this point the HURD is still at a development only stage anyway so it doesn't much matter. It will probably be moved to an L4 microkernel instead before it's used in production machines. The L4 family gives much improved performance. Still slower than a highly tuned monolithic kernel like Linux, particularly on uniprocessor systems, but much closer.
So if microkernels are slower, why use them at all? Well, they have the potential to bring an entire new world of flexibility to computing. Imagine having different "personalities" - different collections of "kernel service" daemons, so that your box can run Linux, BSD, Solaris, VMS, or even Windows sessions, on the fly. Imagine being able to switch between them, or run different ones simultaneously, without having "root" privileges and without affecting other users. This is just one of the many interesting things that could be done on a microkernel system but not on a monolithic one. Another one is a system where any user can do all sorts of things that normally require root access, except for mess up other users.
None of the pre-existing systems seem to have ever really taken advantage of microkernel design - rather they just use a microkernel to emulate a single monolithic kernel (usually BSD.) However, there are some pretty incredible microkernel only tricks out there waiting to be done, and the HURD developers plan on finally doing them.
This is just absurd.
I downloaded the new mozilla earlier today and gave it a try. It's a lot better than it was last time I tried, I'll give credit where credit is due. But it's still far behind Opera on every front. Mozilla could certainly take some interface tips from Opera.
As to the registration, if you are really too cheap to either pay $20 or put up with a tiny little banner, to support a program of this quality, then no one should care what you think anyway.
Both the Mac and Windows version are "reasonably standards compliant" in the sense that they will render standard compliant HTML reasonably well. That's not the problem at all. The problem is that they also support lots of non-standard code, which MS encourages people to use instead.
Umm produced, past tense, and there was only one the best I remember. It was never made in large quantities, and never sold very well, and was discontinued long ago.
And Lord knows I have, often enough. :) But seriously, it has its place, PPC is great hardware for it, and up until now Linux/PPC has been hobbled by not being able to take real advantage of that fact.
*shrug* Who cares?
This still has nothing to do with OS 10. It has to do with Linux/PPC.
I take that back, indirectly it does have a little to do with OS10. Because Mac is using that horrid slow Mach kernel, and still performing as well or better than Linux/PPC, because of better optimisation. RedHat is poised to eliminate that gap, and make Linux/PPC a much more attractive system.
From where on earth are you getting all this?
According to the article:
I don't see what that has to do with anything. We're talking about porting the toolchain to the hardware. This has nothing to do with MacOs 10 at all. It's about Linux/PPC.
Linux/PPC has been hampered for quite awhile by the lack of good GCC support for things like AltiVec. Performance suffers from lack of optimisation. It sounds like RH is undertaking to fix that. This could be very cool - if they succeed then Linux/PPC programs will be able to take advantage of the full power of the PPC chips. AltiVec doesn't help with everything, far from it, but code which it does help will see truly impressive performance gains.
If you're not clear on what AltiVec is, try the link out. Basically it's MMX on steroids. It does everything MMX does, better, and some other things besides. It's really very cool tech, and it will be very nice to see Linux/PPC software finally taking advantage of it.
Well this doesn't sound too horribly dangerous, although it's a little sloppy IMOP. Presumably (correct me if I'm wrong) it's acceptable in this situation if the navigation system is subject to short periods of unavailability? Just how bit a problem is it if that NT box is totally destroyed in mid-voyage, however?
Well obviously that's a huge problem just waiting to happen. I certainly would never sign off on such a system. But the question remains just how much better would be good enough? Just how catastrophic, for instance, would it be to lose that balast monitoring system?
If this system can be taken offline safely for, say, an hour at a time, then I would not say changing OS is necessary - a sensible program of security and reliability enhancement can easily make a windows based network perform at a level that's acceptable in that case. Given how much these vessels cost it would seem horribly short sited to scrimp, so I would recommend:
Switching Operating Systems might eliminate the need for some of that work, but much of it needs to be done regardless. Hardware failures need to be planned for, in particular.
Ummm no. That would be nice, but it's just not true. At the moment the Windows and Mac clients both use MSIE.
This is definately an issue with the big guys, it's precisely big corporations which think they can get away with telling their customers what browser to use. Just go down the list of AOL partner sites with Netscape and try to use their login functions and the like if you don't believe me.
You raise some very good points.
But I must say that I was never so naiive as to have not anticipated them.
CLR is still a platform with a relatively high degree of language agnosticism, in comparison to what else is out there.
I'd certainly rather see it imitated (in that respect) and improved upon than actually used, of course.
But in the end, it's still a neat idea.
The main reason to care is this - if AOL does go to Gecko instead of IE (which would be a very smart decision for a number of technical and business reasons you'd know about if you read the article) then 30% of web users will no longer be using MSIE - and those bastards that write their webpages in MSHTML are going to be scrambling to fix their pages.
Now that would be freakin cool!
This guy has been following that story since it first hit, and if you follow all the links in that article you'll find out a lot more than might be good for your sanity.
It's not one Israeli company, but two, Amdocs Ltd. and Comverse Infosys. Between the two of them they don't just handle all the billing but also play crucial roles in law enforcement wiretaps. The amount of damage some random joe can do with a good exploit is really pretty minor compared to the damage that can result when crucial infrastructure is under control of a foreign government - even if it's a government which is usually an ally.
Never tried ObjC I take it?
The one good thing I've seen in all of this so-called ".NET" is the language-agnosticism technic. Some of that is very handy, and actually almost new (not really, if you follow academic CS this stuff has been coming for awhile, but MS does deserve credit for implementing a few things first for once) and very slick. But the rest of it... are you familiar with the term "trojan horse"? :)
This is a really odd argument. You seem to be implying that software must get more bloated and slow as new hardware gets faster.
Wouldn't it make more sense to use new hardware capabilities for actually doing work, rather than doing what the old software did, only slower?