The point is that theoretically they're not really wrong. Cross platform can mean cross-hardware platform and if Microsoft are talking about something running on x86 PCs, Windows Phone 7 ARM systems, and XBox 360 PPC systems then they're not wrong in saying it's cross platform.
The real problem isn't mis-use of the term by Microsoft, it's a hijacking of the term to mean something arbitrary. When people say something isn't cross platform because it only runs on 5 different versions of Windows across 3 different hardware platforms and doesn't run on Linux then what they really mean is that it's actually not cross-vendor. Microsoft isn't a platform, Microsoft is a vendor so if it works on more than one of Microsoft's platforms, but no other vendors, then it is cross platform.
I realise with this, and my other posts here I probably sound like a Microsoft apologist, and fine, whatever if people want to think that they can, but I prefer to maintain a little be of objectiveness and rationality. I think it's fair to criticise for things that deserve criticism, but abject criticism for the sake of it often makes the critics look like idiots, which is counter-productive to their goal.
Don't waste time criticising Microsoft for things like their use of cross platform when it's technically valid, focus on things Microsoft really do wrong, where they really are evil, like the whole OOXML debacle including bribery and puppets within the ISO standards committees across the globe.
Fuck the vendors, all I care about at the end of the day is protecting computing itself, and bastardising a term like "cross platform" to try and make it mean "cross vendor" only really hurts computer science itself. It's not worth corrupting long established computer science terminology over when there are much better things to beat your opponent over the head with like genuine corruption, lawbreaking, and general morally and ethically poor behaviour.
Well make up random conclusions by reading far too much into a statement all you want, the point was pretty simple though so most people who aren't either plain dumb or just irrational zealots should be able to get it. I'd like to think you're neither, but as you missed the point it's kinda hard to tell. The point is that security in Microsoft's server line products are much better now than they historically have been, and are at a level that makes them an acceptable choice for deploying on the public internet. You can no longer really say "I'm not deploying Windows Server because it's insecure" because it's akint o saying "I'm not deploying Linux because it's insecure", neither is really better than the other now. The only thing I'll agree is a fair point is that if a major exploit in the OS did arise, then in Linux you'll get a faster response, or can of course fix it yourself, whereas with Microsoft you've got a choice of potentially downing your system, or leaving yourself vulnerable until they get their arse into gear and release a patch because of the inherent problem with proprietary software in this respect, but it's really about theory vs. practice, and this sort of thing hasn't been an issue in years. Perhaps sometime soon it will be and issue, and FOSS fans can laugh at anyone who deployed Windows server publicly, but until then it's mere theory, and doesn't necessarily reflect what happens in practice.
10, probably even 5 years ago, I'd have had qualms about deploying Windows server on the public internet tbh, but with 2008 and 2008 R2 I'm not so bothered, it can hold it's own nowadays as well as any Linux server. Ultimately now the problems are more down to 3rd party application services, and web applications running on them.
The reason most attacks nowadays are SQL injection attacks and the like is because remotely rooting a Windows server just isn't as easy as it used to be. Nowadays it's easier to attack the web application or whatever, and hope some idiot has used the same password on the web app as they have on the rest of their network. This kind of attack is really OS neutral, which again highlights the shrinking difference in levels of security between the likes of Linux and Windows server nowadays- attacking either directly can be like banging your head against a wall, so it's better and easier to just attack the apps and application services.
So go carry on reading my post now you understand the point, you may not like what you read, but if you dislike Microsoft it's better to be aware of what your enemy is doing, than live oblivious to reality, telling yourself they suck, they're not threat etc. otherwise you might find yourself 5 years down the line in a world more filled than ever with Windows Servers and be sat thinking to yourself "How did that happen?".
No, just unlike fanboys on Slashdot, I'm actually capable of being objective.
You may think my post is pro-Microsoft, but it's actually what's happening in the real world. So if you don't like Microsoft, then rather than condemn me for pimping Microsoft, you should recognise it's fact, and do something about it.
Putting your hands over your ears and screaming "la la la I can't hear you you're just a marketing droid" is self-defeating if your goal is reduced Microsoft presence. Personally I don't care what happens as long as I can do what I need to do but Microsoft's existence is obviously something that concerns you so maybe you should do something about it, like contribute to the Eclipse project to make it as good as Visual Studio, or work on a language to make it as good as C#. To pretend none of this is the case though is to ignore the reality of the current jobs market, and the strength of Microsoft's.NET technologies in the marketplace - hint: It's absolutely dominating new development ventures by a large margin.
Frankly, if Eclipse wasn't a pile of useless slow, buggy, turd, and Java had at least kept pace with C# and.NET with things like Lambda expressions (which didn't make it into 7), LINQ, and dynamic typing then I'd much rather be using that, but this isn't reality I'm afraid, and this is why I'll keep using C# and.NET, and this is why the vast majority of new projects, and projects started in recent years in business are using it too.
I'm language, platform, vendor, agnostic. I really don't care who made what or when or why, as long as it works and gets the job done, and wont cause problems in a reasonable timeframe then that's good enough. Again though, if a particular vendor bothers you then go do something about it, don't pretend reality isn't real though.
"Still, the whole shebang will eventually become irrelevant next to the coming web-only paradigm (and yes, ChromeOS is a little ahead of the curve on this). Sure, some things will always want to be desktop-native - traditional cross-platform tools will have an advantage there. But the new standard's gonna be the web, and not even Microsoft can stop that."
and erm, what do you think is going to drive this web revolution? Do you think server side logic is done using HTML or something?
There's a plethora of languages for doing server side web development, and.NET is without a doubt one of the more prominent ones. The thing is, Microsoft has actually nailed down the whole security thing quite well on the server now, such that Windows server nowadays is a perfectly reasonable choice for a server OS, and with things like ASP.NET MVC it becomes brilliantly easy to build pretty decent sites, but because.NET covers more than just the web and was designed to from the outset, then it's trivial to make your site interact with more complex back end processing. This is certainly true of Java and so forth as well, but to suggest.NET is a dying paradigm is rather hilarious in this context. If anything it's growing- but the benefit of.NET is that Java is stagnating, whilst.NET is improving at a particularly impressive rate- LINQ and Lambda expressions with 3.0, dynamic types in 4.0 - it's becoming notably more flexible and powerful than it's competitors. In.NET1 it was really behind Java in terms of features, and now it's ahead of it, whilst Oracle continues to rape trust in it that divide is only going to grow as well.
But perhaps the most telltale sign of the prevalence of.NET is the jobs market. You only have to look at it to see how fast growth is in the.NET arena. Here in the UK the ratio of jobs advertised seems to be around 20:5:2 in terms of.NET:PHP:Java jobs respectively. The number of C++ jobs which, if the summary is to be believe, is probably around 50:1 in terms of.NET:C#. Examine the numbers further and you'll see that probably around 80% of those C# jobs are for ASP.NET.
Clearly you're right about one thing, the web is becoming more and more important, but you couldn't be more wrong about another- that.NET is a dying technology in the face of it. Without a doubt it's in a period of rapid growth right now, and the web is certainly the driver behind that.
"In what way can Borderlands possibly be considered an RPG?"
Levels, stats, quests. You know, the key elements of an RPG.
I don't disagree that it was a bit boring though, I still found myself playing it a lot, but I think that was more because it was fun to prat around whilst talking to 3 friends, rather than because the game was inherently fun or had an enjoyable storyline. I think if I played it solo I'd have been bored after about 1 minute.
Well I think it was Cluley at Sophos, who simply said the numbers are an insult to IE users, but as you say the BBC then left it at that and didn't seem to wonder if maybe because they were an insult, they were actually made up and wrong.
I wonder the same but from a different perspective.
Time and time again security firms like Sophos and McAfee make these grand claims - "MASSIVE STATE ATTACK ON US DOD" or whatever, yet do they ever release any evidence?
Of the ones I've bothered to read TFA for so far they seem to be little more than claims, we never see any evidence, just speculation or arbitrary bullshit like they follow a "profile" - the profile probably being nothing more than the attacks were carried out on the internet or something stupid like that.
If anything it seems to be more a case of security firms loving the fact that all they have to do is come up with some sensationalist wankfest and all of a sudden their firm is advertised right across every section of the media across the globe.
I'm getting tired of it. Security firms- either publish all your relevant data to prove your claims, or shut the fuck up. Otherwise I'll just assume the best your firm can do is conjure up marketing stories, because you certainly can't produce trustworthy virus scanners.
Fuck the round UFO, what the hell is the big white thing next to it! However, you've answered my question:
"They've even mentioned "theories" that there could be underwater bases for these USOs/UFOs."
Obviously this is somewhere we should send believers in alien visitors, I think they'd be in their element there, they could find the cure for AIDs, faster than light travel and so forth for us.
Well, that's what we could tell them, and then fuck off with the boat so they're stuck there so that we don't have to listen to them scream UFO! each time some random shape is spotted somewhere, even though it always ends up being something much more boring when we take a closer look.
What is changing is that format shifting, and parody works are being added to the existing list of things like time shifting, and research or review work.
"No Linux? So what's the point about it being open-source then?"
So you can port it perhaps?
You know, open-source doesn't mean "has to run on Linux", it just means the source has to be open, and, er, it is.
The whole philosophy of open source doesn't even revolve around "must run on Linux", it revolves around the ability to view the source for educational purposes, and to be able to take it to modify it, or produce something different.
Why should they make it support Mono? It's open source, you can do that yourself! That's the point!
"The whole description of this.net gageteer thing is
> Let us DIY for you!"
Where?
On Microsoft's site the front page description is:
"Microsoft.NET Gadgeteer is an open-source toolkit for building small electronic devices using the.NET Micro Framework and Visual Studio/Visual C# Express.
Build all manner of electronic gadgets quickly and easily with.NET Gadgeteer."
I couldn't see where you found that quote, but certainly the actual description on their site for it seems quite simple, correct, and sensible.
This is a project born from Microsoft research, somewhere where real geeks work who really just like fucking around with things, in this case, a flexible, easy to use open source hardware development system for.NET developers, which is kinda cool, because.NET is easy to use. This isn't the latest business app with a big budget and major marketing/sales department push behind it. It's a project by geeks, like you and me, who just happen to work at Microsoft, it's pretty cool. I still can't really understand why people have to irrationally hate everything to do with Microsoft just for the sake of hating it.
It's like the light hearted video Microsoft made the other week about Linux's 20th birthday, with a hint of trying to build bridges, but no, FOSS zealots as usual had to read too much into it and saw it as another veiled attack. It's boring now, it's pathetic, it doesn't help anyone, and especially makes the FOSS community look even more retarded.
"This position appears to apply to the entire Internet, not just Facebook (which already requires that its users post real names instead of pseudonyms)"
Yes, and it's long proven how well it works on Facebook too. Just the other day I was searching for Anders Breivik's profile on there to have a nosey and had the pleasure of stumbling across around 50 groups praising the guy as a Saint, and a whole bunch more trolling Norwegians over it. So yes, obviously people behave so much better with their true identities that Facebook "enforce".
No seriously, dickheads act like dickheads when you can't punch them in the face, anonymous or not.
The type of person who is a rabid irrational open source zealot and would cut their nose off to spite their face is the same type who will avoid anything with a Microsoft logo.
FTFY.
There's plenty of people out there who are a bit more rational than that though, and just use what they like, and avoid what they don't. The plethora of open source software available on Windows should make that clear enough- clearly if people are developing FOSS for Windows, then not everyone that cares about open source is avoiding everything with a Microsoft logo, clearly some recognise that FOSS and proprietary can actually work together. Obviously you've never heard of XBMC or the FOSS Kinect projects etc. either.
In fact frankly, most people I come across who have this hate Microsoft for everything, forever attitude, aren't even FOSS developers, they're just FOSS fanboys, groupies, whatever you want to call them. They don't actually help the FOSS community really, they just unfairly make it look like it's full of retards because they're the mouthy gobshites making it look bad, whilst the hard working, talented developers slave away creating a decent product, whatever the underlying platform.
Besides, even if you genuinely believe that a single company can kill FOSS, then there's a lot bigger threats than Microsoft nowadays, MS is pretty much done as a threat to FOSS, I'd be more worried about the growing influence of Apple's extremely more closed and restrictive platform model, or the push by equally many other firms for everything to be run from the cloud, where you can use it, but can't fiddle with it.
"Were you and I living in some sort of alternate reality?"
Do you live in the US? if so then quite possibly - as I pointed out, the US media coverage of the whole situation was grossly warped into an orgy of partisan politics, meanwhile the rest of the world were a bit more objective and unbiased in their reporting.
The other person responding to you said what needed to be said though- the compensation fund was set by BP at $20bn, companies HAVE to account for any potential costs as responsibility to their shareholders, so suggestions it was too low are false- on the contrary, it will have been an high end estimate of potential costs so that BP can account for the worst case scenario in terms of cost. The real cost may well come in much lower and BP may see a windfall back from the fund- more so if they can prove the other partners in the well like Anadarko and TransOcean were responsible. Mitsui another partner as already accepted it's share of blame and has given BP around $1bn for the fund.
But also as the other poster pointed out, the US has a law that oil companies are only responsible for no more than $100million towards any cleanup. BP have given over 20 times their legal obligation, I do not see how they can be said to be acting irresponsibly in this case- they've gone well above and beyond what was required by law, and accepting responsibility etc. Again there's no doubt the things leading to the spill were utterly immoral, but BPs response was wholly moral, and again, well above and beyond it's legal obligations. The only lack of morality was in US politics putting political one-upsmanship above the far more important task of getting the fucking well sealed and cleanup sorted, wasting BP's time telling it it should do things it had already said it would do, and was doing.
But Obama got his popularity boost, and he managed to install a US CEO in BP, so got exactly what he wanted. Has he repealed that law yet on maximum oil company liability? Has he made any real strides to ensure more stringent safety checks on US drilling similar to those the UK and Norway impose on North Sea drilling operations? No? He hasn't? Oh, well, maybe he can play the tough guy for another popularity boost when it happens again then.
Re:Can the developers take over again, please?
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I wasn't referring to the OS UI as such, primarily the applications that run on it. Too many Linux apps say things like "Oh, to do that, just fire up the terminal..." and that's the problem, no normal end user is going to do that.
For those apps that do have a GUI, they're often hacked together forms with a bunch of buttons on and no real thought about usability. It's that that's a fundamental issue for Linux- these are bad programmer built UIs, not friendly user oriented UIs, and Linux just simply has too much of it in it's applications.
Yes but to be fair the bad PR for BP was exceptional, Obama was at a low point in terms of ratings, and he used the situation to his advantage by playing the tough president coming down strong on big bad foreign BP.
BP had already said it would accept full cleanup costs and accepted responsibility (even though it wasn't certain at that point it was at fault, rather than say, TransOcean, and even though it wasn't the only shareholder in the well- Mitsui and Anadarko owned ~25% too). Despite them having said this very early on though, we then got weeks of Obama and other politicians saying shit like "We wont let them weasel out of paying for this", "We wont let them avoid responsibility" - er, politicians, if you hadn't noticed, they've already accepted fault, and already accepted to pay the costs.
Obviously what happened was unacceptable, but frankly BPs response was quite responsible- they accepted fault, and accepted cleanup costs right from the off, there was no haggling, no bickering, they held their hands up and said "Yep, we'll accept fault" - now the investigations have largely concluded they are chasing money from the other parties responsible, but that's surely fair enough no?
So my point is this, I don't think it really matters what oil companies do to try and mask these things, the media coverage, and hence public opinion will be defined entirely by political opinion of the day - it doesn't matter if the oil companies responsibly accept fault, and accept to pay costs, if a politician sees a chance to boost his rep by going on the attack over something there's nothing to actually attack over - i.e. acceptance of responsibility - then that's what they'll do, and the company will have a picture painted of it of one not accepting responsibility.
What was genuinely interesting in the BP case was the difference in reporting of it in US media, vs. foreign media. It was one of the most distinct cases I've seen in the last decade of how internal politics can grossly distort a story within a nation, compared to a more objective global media view of the situation from outside that country.
Or to cut a long story short, yes, I agree with you, this has nothing to do with PR. The PR factor is a completely different animal- let's face it, if BP genuinely had no fault at all and Halliburton's cement job had been found to be entirely the only fault, then BP would've still taken a lot of the rap for it, and that's my fundamental point - politicos will attack the target they see most advantage attacking- it's much easier to attack a foreign company, than it is to attack a home grown company in defence of a foreign one, particularly in a country like the US which has strong patriotic and xenophobic sentiment in sizeable segments of it's population.
Has the inquest in Australia got any momentum behind it though? I really want to see Murdoch's empire fall, but it already looks like the momentum here in the UK which was at the heart of it all has completely gone and it's back to business as usual sadly.
As with everything it looks to be something that suffers compromises, sure they've made things look better, but if it can't be lit well, and if it can't be animated easily it's not much use for games.
Australia doesn't really suprise me anymore, but at least I know why now.
One thing that came out of the British media hacking scandal was an interesting article on News International globally. Well, it turns out, Murdoch owns 70% of Australia's newspaper market and a fair chunk of TV news ownership on top.
It's no wonder their country is politically fucked. Why on earth would you ever let one person control that much of any type of media? What utter lack of irrationality allowed the Aussies to let things get that bad?
It's probably no suprise that the level of "fuckedness" of a country is proportional to News International's ownership of the media in that country.
Re:Can the developers take over again, please?
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Well, that depends on the quality of the developers doesn't it?
I've replaced what I thought myself were pretty awful UIs, and implemented new UIs and have had nothing but praise from users. Don't tar us all with the same brush.
It's possible, that having spent years working in IT support in the past, and having watched users of all skill levels both struggle and fly through applications I've a better appreciation of what does and doesn't work for users, but certainly developers aren't universally bad at UI development.
I do however agree that the GP is slightly wrong in making the argument about developers vs. graphic designers, really, the proper solution is to get real UI experts on board who actually have a track record of doing it right.
I think UI design is one of those things you just have a natural knack for or you don't though, I do agree much of Linux' failure to succeed on the desktop has been down to UIs built by people with no concept of good UI design.
"I would say a lot of your gripes about the iPad are prevalent on Android as well. The excessive use of touch, for instance, is also there on Android. The crappy searching in the Market is definitely there."
No, I agree, but that was my point- often iOS is cited as not having these issues, it's dressed up as something perfect and flawless, but it's not- it has at least as many quirks and flaws as Android, it certainly doesn't have less as many fanboys and Apple marketing themselves make out to be the case.
But I take issue with your latter point, it's simply not true, everything from emulators, to desktop widgets, to customised components such as the vastly improved swype style keyboards. Android is simply more flexible, and yes, jailbreaking opens up these things but for many it's not an option- many people just don't want the risk that their device will be bricked one day by Apple for jailbreaking it and so forth- I do not know how Apple fans can honestly say "It just works" to "Jailbreak it if you want that" - you shouldn't have to, you don't on Android (without even having to root the device), and that's the fundamental point. Even though our iPad was free, I wont jailbreak it because I don't want the hassle of having to fix it if Apple break it with an update, or some dodgy exploit is performed against jailbroken devices that fucks it etc.
Re:when it's not broken, do not fix it.
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Yes, personally I end up disabling these new UIs and putting it back to normal anyway.
The day they don't let me disable it and set it how it always was is the day I stop using it most likely, with each and every new design ever other version I'm concerned one day they'll see classic as too legacy!
What will Apple address? from what I can see they're only just going to be adding what Android already has- a useful task bar at the top, iTunes free activation and such. There's nothing listed that stands out, or makes up for the shortfall.
Your argument would make sense if it had any semblance of a basis in reality, but it's at the point now where Apple is actually playing catch up, not leading and pulling ahead which suggests the counter to what you're claiming will happen- that the gap will in fact widen.
I understand you may like less features (calling things like widgets garbage IS fanboyism - why would you want a full blown app for simple things like on-desktop weather display etc. - it's a distinct optional improvement with no downside), and less control, but ultimately that must become a minority viewpoint, because more and more killer apps become available through these features and this flexibility- again, Swype like keyboards being a prominent example- it's way ahead of plain old touch screen keyboards, and so it's an embarassment that iOS still doesn't offer a competitor to this. A platform can't grow and improve if it keeps itself too limited and basic which is precisely the problem iOS has if Apple wont open things up somewhat - they NEED to allow things like Swype, because many customers are going to expect that type of input as standard on smartphones, simply because it's that much better.
I agree the standards are higher in iOS apps some of the time (but definitely not all of the time), but this isn't a fault of Android itself, merely the likes of the BBC are showing distinct bias in supporting iOS over Android due to an internal preferential bias and because it has more hype. I don't think that can last though, the bigger the gap between Android and iOS penetration grows- particularly with the likes of the BBC who are publicly funded.
Agreed, I actually own an iPad 2, but not an Android tablet. I do however have an Android phone.
There's a lot of rough edges on the iPad, it's merely a myth by Apple fanboys that it's got a somehow perfect UI experience. I don't know how Android tablets compare, because I've never used one, but certainly compared to Android on my phone, Android is the nicer OS imo. It has no more rough edges than the iPhone, and yet has a lot more features.
To cite some examples, I don't like how in the Apple store, if you want to browse games, they're not terribly well categorised into genre. If you scroll through the full list of all 3500 or whatever, and get half way through the list, select a game to view, then go back, it drops you right back to the start of the list, so good luck finding what page you were on again. I've found clearing search filters and then searching on category returns no results, which seems like an illogical action to me, you have to go back to the start and start again. I don't know why there was ever a whine about fragmentation on Android, the half-size game rendering with a little 2x button to double the pixel size to play iPhone apps on the iPad is the most god awful hack I've ever seen, it's just brutal. Sometimes you get a question about wanting permissions for something that doesn't really have any meaning to anyone who doesn't already understand it (i.e. regarding notifications). There's also a lot of use of touch where there really needn't be such that you end up having to guess what gesture you're meant to do where half the time, or even bypass believing the feature isn't there because there's no sensible UI indicator a gesture is possible on some interface elements to manipulate them. The standard Apple device quirks, like having to hand over your name, phone number, address, and so forth just to be able to even use the device in the first place utterly stink, and getting media onto it seems to be an absolute pain, you either have to find some app, or convert it, and then sync your media via iTunes- far easier on Android to just copy it straight across via USB, Wifi, or taking the SD card out tbh.
Of course don't get me wrong, I still like it, it's a nice device, but being objective about it it's not the miracle device Apple fanboys make out, it certainly has at least as many rough edges as Android, but fundamentally the biggest problem is that sometimes I sit down with it and think is that it? You've got a desktop with list of icons, and you've got the apps they lead to which themselves are somewhat restricted as to what they're allowed to do. I don't like the fact you can't have useful gadgets on the desktop, I don't like the fact I have to use the iPhones shitty keyboard and less than stellar autocomplete that acompanies it and completes when you don't want it to, and that you can't instead have something like Swype- you really can feel the restrictions on the device when you've used Android and then use an Apple device for a while, they really are quite painfully limiting.
My partner likes the iPad 2 for what it is, she likes being able to just use iPlayer and such on it, but I think both of us agree, had we not received it free as a gift we certainly wouldn't have bought one, but to be fair it's likely we wouldn't (yet) have bought an Android tablet either, however if we did buy a tablet off our own backs at some point, then it probably would have been Android- there's just no benefit to the Apple experience, the fragmentation issue is apparent on Windows desktops to Android, to iPads - it's a fact of computing progress, the rough edges exist in no more numerous or serious ways on both operating systems, but most damning is that the restrictiveness of the Apple ecosystem really can be felt and that's where the iPad falls down.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is that theoretically they're not really wrong. Cross platform can mean cross-hardware platform and if Microsoft are talking about something running on x86 PCs, Windows Phone 7 ARM systems, and XBox 360 PPC systems then they're not wrong in saying it's cross platform.
The real problem isn't mis-use of the term by Microsoft, it's a hijacking of the term to mean something arbitrary. When people say something isn't cross platform because it only runs on 5 different versions of Windows across 3 different hardware platforms and doesn't run on Linux then what they really mean is that it's actually not cross-vendor. Microsoft isn't a platform, Microsoft is a vendor so if it works on more than one of Microsoft's platforms, but no other vendors, then it is cross platform.
I realise with this, and my other posts here I probably sound like a Microsoft apologist, and fine, whatever if people want to think that they can, but I prefer to maintain a little be of objectiveness and rationality. I think it's fair to criticise for things that deserve criticism, but abject criticism for the sake of it often makes the critics look like idiots, which is counter-productive to their goal.
Don't waste time criticising Microsoft for things like their use of cross platform when it's technically valid, focus on things Microsoft really do wrong, where they really are evil, like the whole OOXML debacle including bribery and puppets within the ISO standards committees across the globe.
Fuck the vendors, all I care about at the end of the day is protecting computing itself, and bastardising a term like "cross platform" to try and make it mean "cross vendor" only really hurts computer science itself. It's not worth corrupting long established computer science terminology over when there are much better things to beat your opponent over the head with like genuine corruption, lawbreaking, and general morally and ethically poor behaviour.
Well make up random conclusions by reading far too much into a statement all you want, the point was pretty simple though so most people who aren't either plain dumb or just irrational zealots should be able to get it. I'd like to think you're neither, but as you missed the point it's kinda hard to tell. The point is that security in Microsoft's server line products are much better now than they historically have been, and are at a level that makes them an acceptable choice for deploying on the public internet. You can no longer really say "I'm not deploying Windows Server because it's insecure" because it's akint o saying "I'm not deploying Linux because it's insecure", neither is really better than the other now. The only thing I'll agree is a fair point is that if a major exploit in the OS did arise, then in Linux you'll get a faster response, or can of course fix it yourself, whereas with Microsoft you've got a choice of potentially downing your system, or leaving yourself vulnerable until they get their arse into gear and release a patch because of the inherent problem with proprietary software in this respect, but it's really about theory vs. practice, and this sort of thing hasn't been an issue in years. Perhaps sometime soon it will be and issue, and FOSS fans can laugh at anyone who deployed Windows server publicly, but until then it's mere theory, and doesn't necessarily reflect what happens in practice.
10, probably even 5 years ago, I'd have had qualms about deploying Windows server on the public internet tbh, but with 2008 and 2008 R2 I'm not so bothered, it can hold it's own nowadays as well as any Linux server. Ultimately now the problems are more down to 3rd party application services, and web applications running on them.
The reason most attacks nowadays are SQL injection attacks and the like is because remotely rooting a Windows server just isn't as easy as it used to be. Nowadays it's easier to attack the web application or whatever, and hope some idiot has used the same password on the web app as they have on the rest of their network. This kind of attack is really OS neutral, which again highlights the shrinking difference in levels of security between the likes of Linux and Windows server nowadays- attacking either directly can be like banging your head against a wall, so it's better and easier to just attack the apps and application services.
So go carry on reading my post now you understand the point, you may not like what you read, but if you dislike Microsoft it's better to be aware of what your enemy is doing, than live oblivious to reality, telling yourself they suck, they're not threat etc. otherwise you might find yourself 5 years down the line in a world more filled than ever with Windows Servers and be sat thinking to yourself "How did that happen?".
No, just unlike fanboys on Slashdot, I'm actually capable of being objective.
You may think my post is pro-Microsoft, but it's actually what's happening in the real world. So if you don't like Microsoft, then rather than condemn me for pimping Microsoft, you should recognise it's fact, and do something about it.
Putting your hands over your ears and screaming "la la la I can't hear you you're just a marketing droid" is self-defeating if your goal is reduced Microsoft presence. Personally I don't care what happens as long as I can do what I need to do but Microsoft's existence is obviously something that concerns you so maybe you should do something about it, like contribute to the Eclipse project to make it as good as Visual Studio, or work on a language to make it as good as C#. To pretend none of this is the case though is to ignore the reality of the current jobs market, and the strength of Microsoft's .NET technologies in the marketplace - hint: It's absolutely dominating new development ventures by a large margin.
Frankly, if Eclipse wasn't a pile of useless slow, buggy, turd, and Java had at least kept pace with C# and .NET with things like Lambda expressions (which didn't make it into 7), LINQ, and dynamic typing then I'd much rather be using that, but this isn't reality I'm afraid, and this is why I'll keep using C# and .NET, and this is why the vast majority of new projects, and projects started in recent years in business are using it too.
I'm language, platform, vendor, agnostic. I really don't care who made what or when or why, as long as it works and gets the job done, and wont cause problems in a reasonable timeframe then that's good enough. Again though, if a particular vendor bothers you then go do something about it, don't pretend reality isn't real though.
"Still, the whole shebang will eventually become irrelevant next to the coming web-only paradigm (and yes, ChromeOS is a little ahead of the curve on this). Sure, some things will always want to be desktop-native - traditional cross-platform tools will have an advantage there. But the new standard's gonna be the web, and not even Microsoft can stop that."
and erm, what do you think is going to drive this web revolution? Do you think server side logic is done using HTML or something?
There's a plethora of languages for doing server side web development, and .NET is without a doubt one of the more prominent ones. The thing is, Microsoft has actually nailed down the whole security thing quite well on the server now, such that Windows server nowadays is a perfectly reasonable choice for a server OS, and with things like ASP.NET MVC it becomes brilliantly easy to build pretty decent sites, but because .NET covers more than just the web and was designed to from the outset, then it's trivial to make your site interact with more complex back end processing. This is certainly true of Java and so forth as well, but to suggest .NET is a dying paradigm is rather hilarious in this context. If anything it's growing- but the benefit of .NET is that Java is stagnating, whilst .NET is improving at a particularly impressive rate- LINQ and Lambda expressions with 3.0, dynamic types in 4.0 - it's becoming notably more flexible and powerful than it's competitors. In .NET1 it was really behind Java in terms of features, and now it's ahead of it, whilst Oracle continues to rape trust in it that divide is only going to grow as well.
But perhaps the most telltale sign of the prevalence of .NET is the jobs market. You only have to look at it to see how fast growth is in the .NET arena. Here in the UK the ratio of jobs advertised seems to be around 20:5:2 in terms of .NET:PHP:Java jobs respectively. The number of C++ jobs which, if the summary is to be believe, is probably around 50:1 in terms of .NET:C#. Examine the numbers further and you'll see that probably around 80% of those C# jobs are for ASP.NET.
Clearly you're right about one thing, the web is becoming more and more important, but you couldn't be more wrong about another- that .NET is a dying technology in the face of it. Without a doubt it's in a period of rapid growth right now, and the web is certainly the driver behind that.
"In what way can Borderlands possibly be considered an RPG?"
Levels, stats, quests. You know, the key elements of an RPG.
I don't disagree that it was a bit boring though, I still found myself playing it a lot, but I think that was more because it was fun to prat around whilst talking to 3 friends, rather than because the game was inherently fun or had an enjoyable storyline. I think if I played it solo I'd have been bored after about 1 minute.
Well I think it was Cluley at Sophos, who simply said the numbers are an insult to IE users, but as you say the BBC then left it at that and didn't seem to wonder if maybe because they were an insult, they were actually made up and wrong.
Modern journalists really do have a sub-100 IQ, because their widespread publishing without question of this story proved it.
I wonder the same but from a different perspective.
Time and time again security firms like Sophos and McAfee make these grand claims - "MASSIVE STATE ATTACK ON US DOD" or whatever, yet do they ever release any evidence?
Of the ones I've bothered to read TFA for so far they seem to be little more than claims, we never see any evidence, just speculation or arbitrary bullshit like they follow a "profile" - the profile probably being nothing more than the attacks were carried out on the internet or something stupid like that.
If anything it seems to be more a case of security firms loving the fact that all they have to do is come up with some sensationalist wankfest and all of a sudden their firm is advertised right across every section of the media across the globe.
I'm getting tired of it. Security firms- either publish all your relevant data to prove your claims, or shut the fuck up. Otherwise I'll just assume the best your firm can do is conjure up marketing stories, because you certainly can't produce trustworthy virus scanners.
Well I was going to say, looking at this picture:
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/08/01/article-2021174-0D41B1E600000578-124_468x286.jpg
Fuck the round UFO, what the hell is the big white thing next to it! However, you've answered my question:
"They've even mentioned "theories" that there could be underwater bases for these USOs/UFOs."
Obviously this is somewhere we should send believers in alien visitors, I think they'd be in their element there, they could find the cure for AIDs, faster than light travel and so forth for us.
Well, that's what we could tell them, and then fuck off with the boat so they're stuck there so that we don't have to listen to them scream UFO! each time some random shape is spotted somewhere, even though it always ends up being something much more boring when we take a closer look.
"No, we just have copyright laws that have no concept of fair use."
This is an often repeated myth, and is simply not true. Numerous exceptions including time shifting exist in UK law already
See here to get it straight from the horse's mouth:
http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/copy/c-other/c-exception.htm
What is changing is that format shifting, and parody works are being added to the existing list of things like time shifting, and research or review work.
"No Linux? So what's the point about it being open-source then?"
So you can port it perhaps?
You know, open-source doesn't mean "has to run on Linux", it just means the source has to be open, and, er, it is.
The whole philosophy of open source doesn't even revolve around "must run on Linux", it revolves around the ability to view the source for educational purposes, and to be able to take it to modify it, or produce something different.
Why should they make it support Mono? It's open source, you can do that yourself! That's the point!
"The whole description of this .net gageteer thing is
> Let us DIY for you!"
Where?
On Microsoft's site the front page description is:
"Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer is an open-source toolkit for building small electronic devices using the .NET Micro Framework and Visual Studio/Visual C# Express.
Build all manner of electronic gadgets quickly and easily with .NET Gadgeteer."
I couldn't see where you found that quote, but certainly the actual description on their site for it seems quite simple, correct, and sensible.
This is a project born from Microsoft research, somewhere where real geeks work who really just like fucking around with things, in this case, a flexible, easy to use open source hardware development system for .NET developers, which is kinda cool, because .NET is easy to use. This isn't the latest business app with a big budget and major marketing/sales department push behind it. It's a project by geeks, like you and me, who just happen to work at Microsoft, it's pretty cool. I still can't really understand why people have to irrationally hate everything to do with Microsoft just for the sake of hating it.
It's like the light hearted video Microsoft made the other week about Linux's 20th birthday, with a hint of trying to build bridges, but no, FOSS zealots as usual had to read too much into it and saw it as another veiled attack. It's boring now, it's pathetic, it doesn't help anyone, and especially makes the FOSS community look even more retarded.
"This position appears to apply to the entire Internet, not just Facebook (which already requires that its users post real names instead of pseudonyms)"
Yes, and it's long proven how well it works on Facebook too. Just the other day I was searching for Anders Breivik's profile on there to have a nosey and had the pleasure of stumbling across around 50 groups praising the guy as a Saint, and a whole bunch more trolling Norwegians over it. So yes, obviously people behave so much better with their true identities that Facebook "enforce".
No seriously, dickheads act like dickheads when you can't punch them in the face, anonymous or not.
The type of person who is a rabid irrational open source zealot and would cut their nose off to spite their face is the same type who will avoid anything with a Microsoft logo.
FTFY.
There's plenty of people out there who are a bit more rational than that though, and just use what they like, and avoid what they don't. The plethora of open source software available on Windows should make that clear enough- clearly if people are developing FOSS for Windows, then not everyone that cares about open source is avoiding everything with a Microsoft logo, clearly some recognise that FOSS and proprietary can actually work together. Obviously you've never heard of XBMC or the FOSS Kinect projects etc. either.
In fact frankly, most people I come across who have this hate Microsoft for everything, forever attitude, aren't even FOSS developers, they're just FOSS fanboys, groupies, whatever you want to call them. They don't actually help the FOSS community really, they just unfairly make it look like it's full of retards because they're the mouthy gobshites making it look bad, whilst the hard working, talented developers slave away creating a decent product, whatever the underlying platform.
Besides, even if you genuinely believe that a single company can kill FOSS, then there's a lot bigger threats than Microsoft nowadays, MS is pretty much done as a threat to FOSS, I'd be more worried about the growing influence of Apple's extremely more closed and restrictive platform model, or the push by equally many other firms for everything to be run from the cloud, where you can use it, but can't fiddle with it.
"Were you and I living in some sort of alternate reality?"
Do you live in the US? if so then quite possibly - as I pointed out, the US media coverage of the whole situation was grossly warped into an orgy of partisan politics, meanwhile the rest of the world were a bit more objective and unbiased in their reporting.
The other person responding to you said what needed to be said though- the compensation fund was set by BP at $20bn, companies HAVE to account for any potential costs as responsibility to their shareholders, so suggestions it was too low are false- on the contrary, it will have been an high end estimate of potential costs so that BP can account for the worst case scenario in terms of cost. The real cost may well come in much lower and BP may see a windfall back from the fund- more so if they can prove the other partners in the well like Anadarko and TransOcean were responsible. Mitsui another partner as already accepted it's share of blame and has given BP around $1bn for the fund.
But also as the other poster pointed out, the US has a law that oil companies are only responsible for no more than $100million towards any cleanup. BP have given over 20 times their legal obligation, I do not see how they can be said to be acting irresponsibly in this case- they've gone well above and beyond what was required by law, and accepting responsibility etc. Again there's no doubt the things leading to the spill were utterly immoral, but BPs response was wholly moral, and again, well above and beyond it's legal obligations. The only lack of morality was in US politics putting political one-upsmanship above the far more important task of getting the fucking well sealed and cleanup sorted, wasting BP's time telling it it should do things it had already said it would do, and was doing.
But Obama got his popularity boost, and he managed to install a US CEO in BP, so got exactly what he wanted. Has he repealed that law yet on maximum oil company liability? Has he made any real strides to ensure more stringent safety checks on US drilling similar to those the UK and Norway impose on North Sea drilling operations? No? He hasn't? Oh, well, maybe he can play the tough guy for another popularity boost when it happens again then.
I wasn't referring to the OS UI as such, primarily the applications that run on it. Too many Linux apps say things like "Oh, to do that, just fire up the terminal..." and that's the problem, no normal end user is going to do that.
For those apps that do have a GUI, they're often hacked together forms with a bunch of buttons on and no real thought about usability. It's that that's a fundamental issue for Linux- these are bad programmer built UIs, not friendly user oriented UIs, and Linux just simply has too much of it in it's applications.
Yes but to be fair the bad PR for BP was exceptional, Obama was at a low point in terms of ratings, and he used the situation to his advantage by playing the tough president coming down strong on big bad foreign BP.
BP had already said it would accept full cleanup costs and accepted responsibility (even though it wasn't certain at that point it was at fault, rather than say, TransOcean, and even though it wasn't the only shareholder in the well- Mitsui and Anadarko owned ~25% too). Despite them having said this very early on though, we then got weeks of Obama and other politicians saying shit like "We wont let them weasel out of paying for this", "We wont let them avoid responsibility" - er, politicians, if you hadn't noticed, they've already accepted fault, and already accepted to pay the costs.
Obviously what happened was unacceptable, but frankly BPs response was quite responsible- they accepted fault, and accepted cleanup costs right from the off, there was no haggling, no bickering, they held their hands up and said "Yep, we'll accept fault" - now the investigations have largely concluded they are chasing money from the other parties responsible, but that's surely fair enough no?
So my point is this, I don't think it really matters what oil companies do to try and mask these things, the media coverage, and hence public opinion will be defined entirely by political opinion of the day - it doesn't matter if the oil companies responsibly accept fault, and accept to pay costs, if a politician sees a chance to boost his rep by going on the attack over something there's nothing to actually attack over - i.e. acceptance of responsibility - then that's what they'll do, and the company will have a picture painted of it of one not accepting responsibility.
What was genuinely interesting in the BP case was the difference in reporting of it in US media, vs. foreign media. It was one of the most distinct cases I've seen in the last decade of how internal politics can grossly distort a story within a nation, compared to a more objective global media view of the situation from outside that country.
Or to cut a long story short, yes, I agree with you, this has nothing to do with PR. The PR factor is a completely different animal- let's face it, if BP genuinely had no fault at all and Halliburton's cement job had been found to be entirely the only fault, then BP would've still taken a lot of the rap for it, and that's my fundamental point - politicos will attack the target they see most advantage attacking- it's much easier to attack a foreign company, than it is to attack a home grown company in defence of a foreign one, particularly in a country like the US which has strong patriotic and xenophobic sentiment in sizeable segments of it's population.
Has the inquest in Australia got any momentum behind it though? I really want to see Murdoch's empire fall, but it already looks like the momentum here in the UK which was at the heart of it all has completely gone and it's back to business as usual sadly.
Is that why the lighting looks terrible too?
As with everything it looks to be something that suffers compromises, sure they've made things look better, but if it can't be lit well, and if it can't be animated easily it's not much use for games.
Australia doesn't really suprise me anymore, but at least I know why now.
One thing that came out of the British media hacking scandal was an interesting article on News International globally. Well, it turns out, Murdoch owns 70% of Australia's newspaper market and a fair chunk of TV news ownership on top.
It's no wonder their country is politically fucked. Why on earth would you ever let one person control that much of any type of media? What utter lack of irrationality allowed the Aussies to let things get that bad?
It's probably no suprise that the level of "fuckedness" of a country is proportional to News International's ownership of the media in that country.
Well, that depends on the quality of the developers doesn't it?
I've replaced what I thought myself were pretty awful UIs, and implemented new UIs and have had nothing but praise from users. Don't tar us all with the same brush.
It's possible, that having spent years working in IT support in the past, and having watched users of all skill levels both struggle and fly through applications I've a better appreciation of what does and doesn't work for users, but certainly developers aren't universally bad at UI development.
I do however agree that the GP is slightly wrong in making the argument about developers vs. graphic designers, really, the proper solution is to get real UI experts on board who actually have a track record of doing it right.
I think UI design is one of those things you just have a natural knack for or you don't though, I do agree much of Linux' failure to succeed on the desktop has been down to UIs built by people with no concept of good UI design.
"I would say a lot of your gripes about the iPad are prevalent on Android as well. The excessive use of touch, for instance, is also there on Android. The crappy searching in the Market is definitely there."
No, I agree, but that was my point- often iOS is cited as not having these issues, it's dressed up as something perfect and flawless, but it's not- it has at least as many quirks and flaws as Android, it certainly doesn't have less as many fanboys and Apple marketing themselves make out to be the case.
But I take issue with your latter point, it's simply not true, everything from emulators, to desktop widgets, to customised components such as the vastly improved swype style keyboards. Android is simply more flexible, and yes, jailbreaking opens up these things but for many it's not an option- many people just don't want the risk that their device will be bricked one day by Apple for jailbreaking it and so forth- I do not know how Apple fans can honestly say "It just works" to "Jailbreak it if you want that" - you shouldn't have to, you don't on Android (without even having to root the device), and that's the fundamental point. Even though our iPad was free, I wont jailbreak it because I don't want the hassle of having to fix it if Apple break it with an update, or some dodgy exploit is performed against jailbroken devices that fucks it etc.
Yes, personally I end up disabling these new UIs and putting it back to normal anyway.
The day they don't let me disable it and set it how it always was is the day I stop using it most likely, with each and every new design ever other version I'm concerned one day they'll see classic as too legacy!
What will Apple address? from what I can see they're only just going to be adding what Android already has- a useful task bar at the top, iTunes free activation and such. There's nothing listed that stands out, or makes up for the shortfall.
Your argument would make sense if it had any semblance of a basis in reality, but it's at the point now where Apple is actually playing catch up, not leading and pulling ahead which suggests the counter to what you're claiming will happen- that the gap will in fact widen.
I understand you may like less features (calling things like widgets garbage IS fanboyism - why would you want a full blown app for simple things like on-desktop weather display etc. - it's a distinct optional improvement with no downside), and less control, but ultimately that must become a minority viewpoint, because more and more killer apps become available through these features and this flexibility- again, Swype like keyboards being a prominent example- it's way ahead of plain old touch screen keyboards, and so it's an embarassment that iOS still doesn't offer a competitor to this. A platform can't grow and improve if it keeps itself too limited and basic which is precisely the problem iOS has if Apple wont open things up somewhat - they NEED to allow things like Swype, because many customers are going to expect that type of input as standard on smartphones, simply because it's that much better.
I agree the standards are higher in iOS apps some of the time (but definitely not all of the time), but this isn't a fault of Android itself, merely the likes of the BBC are showing distinct bias in supporting iOS over Android due to an internal preferential bias and because it has more hype. I don't think that can last though, the bigger the gap between Android and iOS penetration grows- particularly with the likes of the BBC who are publicly funded.
Agreed, I actually own an iPad 2, but not an Android tablet. I do however have an Android phone.
There's a lot of rough edges on the iPad, it's merely a myth by Apple fanboys that it's got a somehow perfect UI experience. I don't know how Android tablets compare, because I've never used one, but certainly compared to Android on my phone, Android is the nicer OS imo. It has no more rough edges than the iPhone, and yet has a lot more features.
To cite some examples, I don't like how in the Apple store, if you want to browse games, they're not terribly well categorised into genre. If you scroll through the full list of all 3500 or whatever, and get half way through the list, select a game to view, then go back, it drops you right back to the start of the list, so good luck finding what page you were on again. I've found clearing search filters and then searching on category returns no results, which seems like an illogical action to me, you have to go back to the start and start again. I don't know why there was ever a whine about fragmentation on Android, the half-size game rendering with a little 2x button to double the pixel size to play iPhone apps on the iPad is the most god awful hack I've ever seen, it's just brutal. Sometimes you get a question about wanting permissions for something that doesn't really have any meaning to anyone who doesn't already understand it (i.e. regarding notifications). There's also a lot of use of touch where there really needn't be such that you end up having to guess what gesture you're meant to do where half the time, or even bypass believing the feature isn't there because there's no sensible UI indicator a gesture is possible on some interface elements to manipulate them. The standard Apple device quirks, like having to hand over your name, phone number, address, and so forth just to be able to even use the device in the first place utterly stink, and getting media onto it seems to be an absolute pain, you either have to find some app, or convert it, and then sync your media via iTunes- far easier on Android to just copy it straight across via USB, Wifi, or taking the SD card out tbh.
Of course don't get me wrong, I still like it, it's a nice device, but being objective about it it's not the miracle device Apple fanboys make out, it certainly has at least as many rough edges as Android, but fundamentally the biggest problem is that sometimes I sit down with it and think is that it? You've got a desktop with list of icons, and you've got the apps they lead to which themselves are somewhat restricted as to what they're allowed to do. I don't like the fact you can't have useful gadgets on the desktop, I don't like the fact I have to use the iPhones shitty keyboard and less than stellar autocomplete that acompanies it and completes when you don't want it to, and that you can't instead have something like Swype- you really can feel the restrictions on the device when you've used Android and then use an Apple device for a while, they really are quite painfully limiting.
My partner likes the iPad 2 for what it is, she likes being able to just use iPlayer and such on it, but I think both of us agree, had we not received it free as a gift we certainly wouldn't have bought one, but to be fair it's likely we wouldn't (yet) have bought an Android tablet either, however if we did buy a tablet off our own backs at some point, then it probably would have been Android- there's just no benefit to the Apple experience, the fragmentation issue is apparent on Windows desktops to Android, to iPads - it's a fact of computing progress, the rough edges exist in no more numerous or serious ways on both operating systems, but most damning is that the restrictiveness of the Apple ecosystem really can be felt and that's where the iPad falls down.