What happens when you mix this with Digital Restrictions Management that goes down to the hardware level?
The answer is: absolutely nothing.
What I'm getting at is, what if it's not malicious code that is being replaced by a "safe equivalent", but perhaps a controversial story on a news website, or an important email between governments?
The technology will not patch plain text content, it'll patch vulnerabilities. Of course this is obvious to most people worth a damn out there, but you get modded up anyways. It's almost as if this is Slashdot.
The research group tested BrowserShield against eight IE patches released in 2005 and found that BrowserShield--when used in tandem with standard anti-virus and HTTP filtering--would have provided the same protection as the software patches in every case, Wang wrote in a research paper.
I'm afraid without more information this sounds too much like magic. "Vulnerability-driven filtering should prevent all exploits (of a flaw) and should not disrupt any exploit free pages."
How is the technology filtering, what is it filtering, and how will it differentiate exploit free from exploit-ridden pages? If it can simply detect them why not just block them?
Microsoft Research has produced amazing technologies in the past and most of their current research is also very promising, in the area of GUI design, security, algorithms and so on. I just hope they are in tune with what Microsoft is already doing in Vista to avoid redundant layers of technology.
Also there's always the danger of Microsoft slapping a technology on IE for pure PR reasons ("haha Firefox has no filter!").
But I believe we have a case of poorly written article here. It's not uncommon that reporters simply have no idea what they are covering and coming up with wrong conclusions on what fundamentaly the shield is.
I'd say wait for the opinion to "mature" a bit on this technology.
Stop calling it "real world" versus "non real"
on
When Is a Con Not a Con?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
MMORPG's are in fact actual economy units governed by their own rules.
Asking whether game crime should be punishable in real world is like asking whether crime comitted in Belgium should be punished in Australia.
The game developers have ultimate power over their world. If they want to confiscate those 700mln ISK (whatever the hell ISK is) they can do it with a mouse click, a lot easier than in "real world".
If game developers want to cooperate with police for creating "interworld" laws that apply in there and give a specialized institution the jurisdiction to enforce those in a game then ok.
It's not up to the government or whoever to mess into the games' internal affairs however. It's not a lot better than invading an actual country.
Yes you can convert virtual assets to real, but I can convert dollars to euros as well, this doesn't mean that US should mess into EU's business.
Google building shuttles, flies to Mars? Google cure cancer? Google invent a time machine? Google change colors in their logo? Google release Google Vista? Google give up search engine business and start building zoos? With pandas? But not regular pandas, but genetically modified pink pandas?
No. They just don't. But we can play "make up a news totally out of the blue" some more if you have more time to waste.
Ok, thank you for being unnecessarily pedantic on matter we all actually know. Things evolve, including language and terms. When I say democracy I probably mean what is commonly applicable today and not in ancient Greece for landowners, slaves, and so on.
Changing old code to new code could rarely be automated, it's not a simple syntax change, it's aq paradigm shift, and computers are not as smart yet as to figure out the semantics of old code and rewrite it into HTML/CSS combo.
HTML Tidy is something free and available which will do the very basic work of cleaning up and fixing the HTML where possible.
It was called "spacer.gif". It was not abused at the time since empty div/span didn't work. In fact Netscape barely supported any div/span.
Also same can be said for table cells with in them which in some browsers would collapse or misbehave.
You create empty space with "spacer div" today which is not better that what people did back then. In fact it's worse since they had no much alternatives while you do: padding/margin/border where applicable.
White space is rarely just a block of empty space floating around.
Finally I will be able to replace my XBOX, which is used solely for home theater purposes, with this HD-DVD capable system. There is no HDMI, but component and DVI should suffice for most.
Nice, finally someone addressed the niche of people who buy XBOX to not play games on it and are fine with a Linux based home theater.
I also hope you're ready to spend good money on those noisy poorly transferred HD movies as well.
Modern companies believe the features of their products are merely an excuse for their marketing campaign statements. Like with HD DVD / Blue Ray.
Speed is apparently no longer something you need to care about: all CPU's are about fast enough for most uses. Cores... I swear a modern OS (Vista including) can simply make no use of more than 2 cores. Power efficiency: they are all more or less the same, unless you have a Pentium4 / Celeron (P4 based) on a laptop/desktop system, in which case you may upgrade.
64-bit -> that's the last selling point. And AMD offers this for a long time now. Intel will sell plenty of Core 2-s since they are late on the train.
But then what? They should either invent totally new way to use a CPU or scale down dramatically (both AMD and Intel).
Lack of leaders is not the same thing as a lack of rules
It's not the same but you'll quickly find out how you emulate "authority" with your set of rules sooner or later, effectively ending up with leaders.
It's the natural way. We all want to be leaders, or be equal, and that's ok, because it means there's a competition and possibility of change for the better. But if there's no concentration or "strategy" in a system, what results is a mess.
Every system needs just about the right amount of "chaos" and "order" for it to thrive. Even democracy has elections once a few years, no every day or every hour.
I use Dreamweaver for PHP/MySQL/CSS/HTML/JS and a bit of WYSIWYG-style development. It's extremely extensible and you can literally make Dreamweaver interpret, autocomplete, color and display your own made-up language but modifying a bunch of XML-files in its config folder (the changes are then exportable and redistributable as an "extension", sort of like on Firefox).
I see the potential of Microsoft's software. They do great stuff, but they, somewhat like Sony, are too locked up on supporting exclusively and pushing their own solutions in their IDE-s.
This works with C#/C++/VisualBasic in VisualStudio where it's only natural that the targeted platform is Win32/.NET. It works less well on web, which is more than.NET offers.
But they are a business, they have their right to try whatever they believe will fly, if it doesn't fly, they'll simply readjust their strategy.
Dreamweaver right now is a perfect solution for years to come (Adobe is not frozen in time too).
Does this matter? I don't need Microsoft being big brother - why can't I get the choice to turn it off? The very people who would actually care about signing are probably smart enough to be sure what they are installing is safe!
You can turn it off on a per-session basis (as in, you can boot with it off). Also Microsoft is not being "big brother", they are simply signing the drivers. Is SSL and Verisign big brother too?
Also the only thing more dangerous than a dump user, is a user who thinks he's really smart.
Signing does not mean code will be stable. It does not mean it won't be malicious, or that it won't have hidden backdoors ie Sony.
There are two major problems being solved: no anonymous or "behind your back" driver installation. If something does cause problems, you have the chance to see who did it and how.
Second, it *does* prevent from malicious activities to a large degree. Even signed drivers can't mess with the kernel anymore on 64bit. It simply not allowed anymore. If a process tries to modify the kernel, it'll be blocked. Even if it manages to modify it the system will be immediately shut down.
Pending? Its more like: pending, pending, hype, pending, shedding features.... pending, more hype, pending, shedding some more features...... but we know it's coming.... right???? pending, pending, even more hype, pending, shedding even more features.... any moment now!!!! pending, pending........
Ok that's a funny post I gotta admit (same as the "list of things that happened since Duke Nukem Forever started development").
But you also gotta admit Vista RC1 is looking amazingly fit as the successor of Windows into the 21-st century. Soon it'll be out publically and whoever couldn't check it out will have the chance.
If you google around, there have been several discussions on Slashdot and elsewhere of so-called meta-materials which can essentially deflect light around an object. No light bouncing off you = no way for a human eyeball to detect you. It's interesting, and apparently theoretically possible and compatible with physics as we know it.
And if they deflect around you, again no photons reach your eye so you're blind again. The only way would be that you have some device that uses other range of frequencies, OR a "invisi suit" to duplicate photos once after the "photo receptors" so they can reach your eyes, and once more "behind" you.
We're talking about things such as the ability to mount ext2 and HFS partitions on Linux.
What has mounting on Linux to do with Vista..? If you mean mounting HFS on Windows, you can write a user-mode driver, and it'll work without signing it.
Also, I would imagine that Vista will not have vendor-supplied drivers for a lot of old hardware out there. OSS guys might just save the day there for those of us who do not want to upgrade simply because the latest-and-greatest-OS requires all-new drivers.
Vista requires recent hardware such as ACPI (no APM supported) and even 64-bit chip for all the benefits. Running Vista on hardware would just fail miserably or perform terribly.
Most Windows machines are sold with new hardware. The problem is largely non-existing. Also I don't see open source folks writing lots of open source drivers right now (for Windows). Save the few generic BT tuner drivers and such.
And it still has the ridiculus mandatory driver signing, forcing freeware/open source developers to shell out $500 for a certificate if they want to make drivers that work on x64. All for their precious trusted computing. Wouldn't want those evil x64 criminals installing drivers to rip hd-dvds would they?
- 99% of open source developers won't need to create "drivers" would they? Unless it goes with their open source hardware.. Oops no such thing. So we're talking a very limited case of emulated devices, like virtual CD ROM or whatever.
- If a development team has no $500 to shell on his own product getting signed, I won't trust him a lot to have money to buy his development/testing Vista licenses too. Should we promote piracy?
- Noone cares for HD-DVD, signing/64-bit Vista keeps rootkits and wanna-be rootkits (read, poorly written software messing with the kernel) away. In fact, it keeps poor copy protections (like seen on games, music CD-s) from messing with your system. It's a Good Thing.
- God damn it stop whining you Microsoft hating POS. I god damn hate Microsoft haters (yea, I feel the irony).
Very interesting article and I've learned a lot. Here's one more:
could an invisible man be a reality? Maybe, who knows, but one thing is certain: to be invisible, photons should pass straight through you, so you are in fact invisible. Your eyes won't be able to register anything and you'll be effectively completely blind.
So I guess that's the other side of the coin, noone can see you, but you can't see anything at all.
On the point whether we should "suspend our disbelief" when going to see movies: depends on the movie. For a fantasy movie with magicians, elfs, and trolls, suspending your disbelief is only natural. But a "sci-fi" is called a "sci-fi" since it's based on a scientific probability. Of course most people do not specialize in biology and chemistry and all this and for them it's all the same.
But you can see for yourself how amazingly irritating it is for a Slashdotter to watch a movie with preposterous ideas about computer technology and Internet (err infinite detail raster photos and magic "password hacking" boxes anyone?).
However we gotta give it to Hollywood. I know it's modern to bash movies nowadays, but just compare the level of sophistication of modern sci-fi movies with what people were fed in the 50-s. It's definitely better, and definitely has more science put into it. It's the only thing we can expect with an increasingly better informed and discriminating public as people are nowadays.
I'd guess that the first of these weaknesses that will be exploited is in the Office market since it is easier to switch to another suite, i.e. OpenOffice, then it is to switch operating systems. Switching over to other non-Microsoft products paves the way towards helping people rid themselves of Windows as well.
It's funny that with so many Office/Windows wannabes this keeps happening *not*.
Most Linux/Apple fans assume Windows users feel desperately trapped into Windows/Office and wanna switch the moment they are given the opportunity.
It's simply not the case. Not even just home users, but many professionals (art, programming, whatever) and businesses feel just right in Windows, where it provides them with easy to support and manage, flexible and capable solution.
And don't understimate Microsoft. They are not vegetables. If Office/Windows was to start losing market share, you can expect Microsoft will not sit with their hands up their bottom parts.
You'll see massive campaign with lowering of prices, new attractive offers, various incentives and a lot of interesting new features in Microsoft's products that will keep them in business. In fact, they are doing some of this all the time which allowed them to produce incredible products like.NET, Tablet/Media Center XP, VS 2005, Office 2007, Vista (pending, but we know it's coming..) and so on.
OSX: built around experience, this OS is made to be simple to use, easy to market, look shiny and tie well with its accompanied Apple hardware. Apple's credo is that they are amazing as hell, and their users will be wowed at whatever they throw at them. As such, OSX provides features such as mandatory startup sounds, mandatory "hardware", mandatory skin and other mandatory "tuned to be kewl" stuff. They have some success, but their market share is still decreasing (currently at meager 2%) because they don't realize that unlike iPod, a PC is (yet) not just another consumer device.
Unix / BSD / Linux: it's made for professionals, for tinkerers and and people who like control over their machines. Those OS have their share of attempts at eye candy, but the main point of the OS is the ability to go down to the bone and tune it just like you like it, without excess fat and trash around. It doesn't have much adoption with casual folks as a desktop OS because the distros are rarely consistent, require low level knowledge of the underlying system to get the maximum out of it and hardware software doesn't target it a lot.
Windows: is sitting in the perfect spot. It's easy to use, has a lot of software written for it, works on commodity hardware, and is practical for business, entertainment and more. It's not perfect, and in fact was quite flaky when the consumer branch was based around the 9x core (for legacy reasons). These guys however get a lot of criticism that they are not enough like Apple and not enough like Unix. Windows has no cult status among its users, while *nix and Apple does.
I have no idea whether it's a complex or lack of confidence in their own strategy, but sometime around XP, Microsoft decided they wanna be more like OSX and Unix, which are dwarfed by Windows on the market of desktop OS. They are just doing it, for no apparent reason, they are not losing market to their competitors on the desktop market, but feel the urge to copy them and be "more like them".
XP and Vista are trying hard to build a branded experience much like OSX, while other projects like Channel 9, the new power shell, and tons of other admin-related utilities and technologies are targeted to the Unix crowd and appearing more opened.
Some of this has positive effects on the users of Windows, but some of it, is just plain stupid (like the glassy look of aero.. it's not easier to use at all, it's one of those gadgets you show off in the PC shops, like OSX's scaling icons on the dock bar). Their desire to preserve their "perfect" branding by locking and hardcoding everything in place is just a symptom of this much deeper problem.
I wish Microsoft would just accept its position in the market, keep the right balance between flexible and preconfigured, and swallow the criticisms, which will come no matter what, versus try and copy whatever fads come along.
"AT&T infects 19'000 of their customers with AIDS, after a 'breach' of their 'security' yesterday. AT&T is offering to pay for free condoms for all affected customers."
Slashdot Mirror
What happens when you mix this with Digital Restrictions Management that goes down to the hardware level?
The answer is: absolutely nothing.
What I'm getting at is, what if it's not malicious code that is being replaced by a "safe equivalent", but perhaps a controversial story on a news website, or an important email between governments?
The technology will not patch plain text content, it'll patch vulnerabilities. Of course this is obvious to most people worth a damn out there, but you get modded up anyways. It's almost as if this is Slashdot.
The research group tested BrowserShield against eight IE patches released in 2005 and found that BrowserShield--when used in tandem with standard anti-virus and HTTP filtering--would have provided the same protection as the software patches in every case, Wang wrote in a research paper.
I'm afraid without more information this sounds too much like magic. "Vulnerability-driven filtering should prevent all exploits (of a flaw) and should not disrupt any exploit free pages."
How is the technology filtering, what is it filtering, and how will it differentiate exploit free from exploit-ridden pages? If it can simply detect them why not just block them?
Microsoft Research has produced amazing technologies in the past and most of their current research is also very promising, in the area of GUI design, security, algorithms and so on. I just hope they are in tune with what Microsoft is already doing in Vista to avoid redundant layers of technology.
Also there's always the danger of Microsoft slapping a technology on IE for pure PR reasons ("haha Firefox has no filter!").
But I believe we have a case of poorly written article here. It's not uncommon that reporters simply have no idea what they are covering and coming up with wrong conclusions on what fundamentaly the shield is.
I'd say wait for the opinion to "mature" a bit on this technology.
MMORPG's are in fact actual economy units governed by their own rules.
Asking whether game crime should be punishable in real world is like asking whether crime comitted in Belgium should be punished in Australia.
The game developers have ultimate power over their world. If they want to confiscate those 700mln ISK (whatever the hell ISK is) they can do it with a mouse click, a lot easier than in "real world".
If game developers want to cooperate with police for creating "interworld" laws that apply in there and give a specialized institution the jurisdiction to enforce those in a game then ok.
It's not up to the government or whoever to mess into the games' internal affairs however. It's not a lot better than invading an actual country.
Yes you can convert virtual assets to real, but I can convert dollars to euros as well, this doesn't mean that US should mess into EU's business.
Google building shuttles, flies to Mars?
Google cure cancer?
Google invent a time machine?
Google change colors in their logo?
Google release Google Vista?
Google give up search engine business and start building zoos? With pandas? But not regular pandas, but genetically modified pink pandas?
No. They just don't. But we can play "make up a news totally out of the blue" some more if you have more time to waste.
Ok, thank you for being unnecessarily pedantic on matter we all actually know. Things evolve, including language and terms. When I say democracy I probably mean what is commonly applicable today and not in ancient Greece for landowners, slaves, and so on.
Changing old code to new code could rarely be automated, it's not a simple syntax change, it's aq paradigm shift, and computers are not as smart yet as to figure out the semantics of old code and rewrite it into HTML/CSS combo.
HTML Tidy is something free and available which will do the very basic work of cleaning up and fixing the HTML where possible.
It was called "spacer.gif". It was not abused at the time since empty div/span didn't work. In fact Netscape barely supported any div/span.
Also same can be said for table cells with in them which in some browsers would collapse or misbehave.
You create empty space with "spacer div" today which is not better that what people did back then. In fact it's worse since they had no much alternatives while you do: padding/margin/border where applicable.
White space is rarely just a block of empty space floating around.
what did he do to cause a stingray to kill him? TFA says it was a freak accident. but was it really? what were the stingray's intentions?
I know it's not appropriate to say but, maybe he was trying to jam 'is thumb up its butt'ole.
"AMD Says Power Efficiency Still Key" .. funny, I thought customers tell to vendors what is key. When did this turn the other way around?
Finally I will be able to replace my XBOX, which is used solely for home theater purposes, with this HD-DVD capable system.
There is no HDMI, but component and DVI should suffice for most.
Nice, finally someone addressed the niche of people who buy XBOX to not play games on it and are fine with a Linux based home theater.
I also hope you're ready to spend good money on those noisy poorly transferred HD movies as well.
Modern companies believe the features of their products are merely an excuse for their marketing campaign statements. Like with HD DVD / Blue Ray.
Speed is apparently no longer something you need to care about: all CPU's are about fast enough for most uses.
Cores... I swear a modern OS (Vista including) can simply make no use of more than 2 cores.
Power efficiency: they are all more or less the same, unless you have a Pentium4 / Celeron (P4 based) on a laptop/desktop system, in which case you may upgrade.
64-bit -> that's the last selling point. And AMD offers this for a long time now. Intel will sell plenty of Core 2-s since they are late on the train.
But then what? They should either invent totally new way to use a CPU or scale down dramatically (both AMD and Intel).
Lack of leaders is not the same thing as a lack of rules
It's not the same but you'll quickly find out how you emulate "authority" with your set of rules sooner or later, effectively ending up with leaders.
It's the natural way. We all want to be leaders, or be equal, and that's ok, because it means there's a competition and possibility of change for the better. But if there's no concentration or "strategy" in a system, what results is a mess.
Every system needs just about the right amount of "chaos" and "order" for it to thrive. Even democracy has elections once a few years, no every day or every hour.
What if we all collectively agree to mark every single image "gay".
Then we all get scores, and Google gets to show up pretty gay image results.
I use Dreamweaver for PHP/MySQL/CSS/HTML/JS and a bit of WYSIWYG-style development. It's extremely extensible and you can literally make Dreamweaver interpret, autocomplete, color and display your own made-up language but modifying a bunch of XML-files in its config folder (the changes are then exportable and redistributable as an "extension", sort of like on Firefox).
.NET offers.
I see the potential of Microsoft's software. They do great stuff, but they, somewhat like Sony, are too locked up on supporting exclusively and pushing their own solutions in their IDE-s.
This works with C#/C++/VisualBasic in VisualStudio where it's only natural that the targeted platform is Win32/.NET.
It works less well on web, which is more than
But they are a business, they have their right to try whatever they believe will fly, if it doesn't fly, they'll simply readjust their strategy.
Dreamweaver right now is a perfect solution for years to come (Adobe is not frozen in time too).
Does this matter? I don't need Microsoft being big brother - why can't I get the choice to turn it off? The very people who would actually care about signing are probably smart enough to be sure what they are installing is safe!
You can turn it off on a per-session basis (as in, you can boot with it off). Also Microsoft is not being "big brother", they are simply signing the drivers. Is SSL and Verisign big brother too?
Also the only thing more dangerous than a dump user, is a user who thinks he's really smart.
Signing does not mean code will be stable. It does not mean it won't be malicious, or that it won't have hidden backdoors ie Sony.
There are two major problems being solved: no anonymous or "behind your back" driver installation. If something does cause problems, you have the chance to see who did it and how.
Second, it *does* prevent from malicious activities to a large degree. Even signed drivers can't mess with the kernel anymore on 64bit. It simply not allowed anymore. If a process tries to modify the kernel, it'll be blocked. Even if it manages to modify it the system will be immediately shut down.
Pending? Its more like: pending, pending, hype, pending, shedding features.... pending, more hype, pending, shedding some more features...... but we know it's coming.... right???? pending, pending, even more hype, pending, shedding even more features.... any moment now!!!! pending, pending........
Ok that's a funny post I gotta admit (same as the "list of things that happened since Duke Nukem Forever started development").
But you also gotta admit Vista RC1 is looking amazingly fit as the successor of Windows into the 21-st century. Soon it'll be out publically and whoever couldn't check it out will have the chance.
If you google around, there have been several discussions on Slashdot and elsewhere of so-called meta-materials which can essentially deflect light around an object. No light bouncing off you = no way for a human eyeball to detect you. It's interesting, and apparently theoretically possible and compatible with physics as we know it.
And if they deflect around you, again no photons reach your eye so you're blind again. The only way would be that you have some device that uses other range of frequencies, OR a "invisi suit" to duplicate photos once after the "photo receptors" so they can reach your eyes, and once more "behind" you.
So this version will actually let me punch internet trolls in the face remotley?
Trust me, *you* do NOT want this feature enabled.
If this is the only rant a troll can put on IE nowadays, let's call it a win for Microsoft, shall we?
We're talking about things such as the ability to mount ext2 and HFS partitions on Linux.
What has mounting on Linux to do with Vista..? If you mean mounting HFS on Windows, you can write a user-mode driver, and it'll work without signing it.
Also, I would imagine that Vista will not have vendor-supplied drivers for a lot of old hardware out there. OSS guys might just save the day there for those of us who do not want to upgrade simply because the latest-and-greatest-OS requires all-new drivers.
Vista requires recent hardware such as ACPI (no APM supported) and even 64-bit chip for all the benefits.
Running Vista on hardware would just fail miserably or perform terribly.
Most Windows machines are sold with new hardware. The problem is largely non-existing. Also I don't see open source folks writing lots of open source drivers right now (for Windows). Save the few generic BT tuner drivers and such.
And it still has the ridiculus mandatory driver signing, forcing freeware/open source developers to shell out $500 for a certificate if they want to make drivers that work on x64. All for their precious trusted computing. Wouldn't want those evil x64 criminals installing drivers to rip hd-dvds would they?
- 99% of open source developers won't need to create "drivers" would they? Unless it goes with their open source hardware.. Oops no such thing. So we're talking a very limited case of emulated devices, like virtual CD ROM or whatever.
- If a development team has no $500 to shell on his own product getting signed, I won't trust him a lot to have money to buy his development/testing Vista licenses too. Should we promote piracy?
- Noone cares for HD-DVD, signing/64-bit Vista keeps rootkits and wanna-be rootkits (read, poorly written software messing with the kernel) away. In fact, it keeps poor copy protections (like seen on games, music CD-s) from messing with your system. It's a Good Thing.
- God damn it stop whining you Microsoft hating POS. I god damn hate Microsoft haters (yea, I feel the irony).
Very interesting article and I've learned a lot. Here's one more:
could an invisible man be a reality? Maybe, who knows, but one thing is certain: to be invisible, photons should pass straight through you, so you are in fact invisible. Your eyes won't be able to register anything and you'll be effectively completely blind.
So I guess that's the other side of the coin, noone can see you, but you can't see anything at all.
On the point whether we should "suspend our disbelief" when going to see movies: depends on the movie. For a fantasy movie with magicians, elfs, and trolls, suspending your disbelief is only natural.
But a "sci-fi" is called a "sci-fi" since it's based on a scientific probability. Of course most people do not specialize in biology and chemistry and all this and for them it's all the same.
But you can see for yourself how amazingly irritating it is for a Slashdotter to watch a movie with preposterous ideas about computer technology and Internet (err infinite detail raster photos and magic "password hacking" boxes anyone?).
However we gotta give it to Hollywood. I know it's modern to bash movies nowadays, but just compare the level of sophistication of modern sci-fi movies with what people were fed in the 50-s. It's definitely better, and definitely has more science put into it.
It's the only thing we can expect with an increasingly better informed and discriminating public as people are nowadays.
I'd guess that the first of these weaknesses that will be exploited is in the Office market since it is easier to switch to another suite, i.e. OpenOffice, then it is to switch operating systems. Switching over to other non-Microsoft products paves the way towards helping people rid themselves of Windows as well.
.NET, Tablet/Media Center XP, VS 2005, Office 2007, Vista (pending, but we know it's coming..) and so on.
It's funny that with so many Office/Windows wannabes this keeps happening *not*.
Most Linux/Apple fans assume Windows users feel desperately trapped into Windows/Office and wanna switch the moment they are given the opportunity.
It's simply not the case. Not even just home users, but many professionals (art, programming, whatever) and businesses feel just right in Windows, where it provides them with easy to support and manage, flexible and capable solution.
And don't understimate Microsoft. They are not vegetables. If Office/Windows was to start losing market share, you can expect Microsoft will not sit with their hands up their bottom parts.
You'll see massive campaign with lowering of prices, new attractive offers, various incentives and a lot of interesting new features in Microsoft's products that will keep them in business. In fact, they are doing some of this all the time which allowed them to produce incredible products like
Here are three major OS on the market:
OSX: built around experience, this OS is made to be simple to use, easy to market, look shiny and tie well with its accompanied Apple hardware. Apple's credo is that they are amazing as hell, and their users will be wowed at whatever they throw at them. As such, OSX provides features such as mandatory startup sounds, mandatory "hardware", mandatory skin and other mandatory "tuned to be kewl" stuff. They have some success, but their market share is still decreasing (currently at meager 2%) because they don't realize that unlike iPod, a PC is (yet) not just another consumer device.
Unix / BSD / Linux: it's made for professionals, for tinkerers and and people who like control over their machines. Those OS have their share of attempts at eye candy, but the main point of the OS is the ability to go down to the bone and tune it just like you like it, without excess fat and trash around. It doesn't have much adoption with casual folks as a desktop OS because the distros are rarely consistent, require low level knowledge of the underlying system to get the maximum out of it and hardware software doesn't target it a lot.
Windows: is sitting in the perfect spot. It's easy to use, has a lot of software written for it, works on commodity hardware, and is practical for business, entertainment and more. It's not perfect, and in fact was quite flaky when the consumer branch was based around the 9x core (for legacy reasons). These guys however get a lot of criticism that they are not enough like Apple and not enough like Unix. Windows has no cult status among its users, while *nix and Apple does.
I have no idea whether it's a complex or lack of confidence in their own strategy, but sometime around XP, Microsoft decided they wanna be more like OSX and Unix, which are dwarfed by Windows on the market of desktop OS. They are just doing it, for no apparent reason, they are not losing market to their competitors on the desktop market, but feel the urge to copy them and be "more like them".
XP and Vista are trying hard to build a branded experience much like OSX, while other projects like Channel 9, the new power shell, and tons of other admin-related utilities and technologies are targeted to the Unix crowd and appearing more opened.
Some of this has positive effects on the users of Windows, but some of it, is just plain stupid (like the glassy look of aero.. it's not easier to use at all, it's one of those gadgets you show off in the PC shops, like OSX's scaling icons on the dock bar). Their desire to preserve their "perfect" branding by locking and hardcoding everything in place is just a symptom of this much deeper problem.
I wish Microsoft would just accept its position in the market, keep the right balance between flexible and preconfigured, and swallow the criticisms, which will come no matter what, versus try and copy whatever fads come along.
In other news:
"AT&T infects 19'000 of their customers with AIDS, after a 'breach' of their 'security' yesterday.
AT&T is offering to pay for free condoms for all affected customers."
I'd rather be killed by a nice boy like you, than an islamo-fascist any day.
That's how we differ. I'd rather not be killed at all.