And this is why Windows will never catch up. And why eventually it will fade away as our generation grows old and leaves the workforce.
How can Microsoft innovate if what "most of us" want is the same old thing? It feels a bit like the educators who were fighting computers in the classroom in the 1980s and insisted that students only learn on manual typewriters.
Its not about what your used to it is about what behavior is sane and what is insane. It is about making determinations based on MERIT.
I suspect you'll find covering the entire workspace just to launch an application or find a document just as nonsensical in the stoneage as it is in the spaceage. I don't much care what that interface *looks* like but it has to be sane and not obleterate all onscreen context in the process.
Simply making the classic change adverse argument is an exercise in making non-falsifiable statements. If the next version of windows is an abacus and I replayed your "change adverse" statement would it be any different? What it convey and more or less information? Without merit without discussing actual tradeoffs what information is being conveyed?
assure you that Microsoft spend millions of dollars on various iterations and on studies for usability testing. But that so many people rejected it even though if it can be scientifically proven to be better (through a repeatable study, that's how science works),
The real issue seems to me to be for years there are a lot of people who own computers only to check email and facebook and now they have more options that are a better fit for what they actually do...good for them...but these people while a huge group are not the entire constellation of those using computers. There are people who still need a sane UI environment to get shit done complete with programs encased in movable frames...goddamn I feel like such a dinosaur saying that.
I also disagree that this is about "science"... it was more about leveraging windows to help windows phone to improve market share in other areas. There is no technical reason they couldn't provide knobs to make everyone happy. They chose not to for political reasons as evidenced by shit they took away during early betas of W8.
Metro is about locking down the computing environment (You can't install a metro app yourself...you can only install a metro app from the MS mothership...oh I'm sorry that is such a dated term...I mean the future of all computing..."the cloud"...
Fads come and go... this isn't an improvement or a reflection of "the future" or a better way... it is a POS forced upon the world for political reasons to make MS more money. A boiling frog on the road to the promised land of vendor locked down computation...our future...where a few control basically everything...like apple does with the iphone and google with everything else...
MS is finally realizing they left way too much value on the table in previous versions of windows and is now hard at work fixing that.
...don't use any Metro apps. You're not forced to, apart from some initial app-pinning perhaps. Apart from that you can happily live in Windows 8, enjoy the extra speed and UI enhancements and never see metro again. Happy days!
Exactly, why is this so hard for MS to figure out? All they need to do is give people an option to turn the metro shit off.
A real start menu, startup to desktop and settings to disable goddamn jestures must be kids play next to writing a kernel driver or something. Why the fuck is it so hard to get thru MS's goddamn head that not all of us use a computer just for email and facebook? Fin idiots.
Damn... a start button that goes to the start screen is like Coca Cola running TV ads about helping people to not be fat. A breathtaking slap in the face.
You have a cellphone in your pocket capable of doing just that, and pinhole surveillance cameras have existed forever anyway.
Making surveillance society worse is not a feature or justification.
Your cellphone doesn't even need an active GPS setting in order to be tracked. As an Android App developer, I can just use a Network Location Provider and triangulate your position to within 100-1000 meters. If you have a cellphone, you're being tracked just as easily as with Glass.
More of the same batshit insane reasoning. We can stalk you anyway so what will a little more and a little easier hurt?
That's from an early video parody of Glass. Ads are against Google's guidelines.
Google isn't evil either...they said so!!
Even if they do that, we've already got the dumped firmware for Glass. Just run a custom ROM on it.
Good luck finding anyone to care enough to try.
Google Glass is scary because some pseudo-libertarian tech journalist told me to be scared!
Oh ok, I guess that explains the inconsistency in your position. Funny how all these former pro-corporate tech gossip douchebags are suddenly worried about your rights. Where were they 10 years ago? And for that matter, where were you?
Strawmen, Douchebags... what I would not give for a slashdot killfile.
Wearing wired or bluetooth headphones allows me to hold a voice conversation with my phone or real people, get directions, listen to music, read and write messages and work voice enabled apps while I'm on the go with the damn thing in my pocket out of my way. Whats the use case for wearing glasses and a stupid little screen all the time? What is the benefit? Why should anyone care?
I've seen a few demos on youtube and listened to a few interviews and have yet to hear a cogent reason why I would want to wear one of these things.
I can think of a few reasons not to partake:
Its google count on them to collect all yer shit. Spy on everything/everyone else. Fill ur brain with ads. Mostly unproductive and pointless. Distracting/dangerous Makes you look stupid WiFi only = useless joke
I have more faith in the power of voters and the desire and the whole "state monoploy on violence" meme to ever see this get anywhere near the light of day. If they want to go down that road with open hostilities...theres more of us than them...just sayin...
The whole undercurrent of protection = retaliation being peddled in TFA is equally nonsensical. Nothing is as it seems on the Internet..most source addresses are either total garbage or unwitting victims. Without human level AI any automated retaliation can and will be leveraged as a weapon by the very people you seek to defend against.
Didn't someone find the shipping container Rossi built his million dollar MW cold fusion plant supposedly delivered to the undisclosed super secret millitary customer actually collecting dust in the back of his brothers tire shop?
And years prior didn't Rossi get in trouble and nearly go to jail for a waste to oil scam that didn't work and ended with his lab burning to the ground?
Now we have lockheed claiming to bring a cheap shipping container sized hot fusion reactor online within the next decade. It is very sad to see such little real money going into commercially viable fusion energy research compared with enormous sums spent on defense dept end-runs around NPT obligations (e.g. NIF)
You sold MySQL to uncle Larry for a lot of cash years ago and now we keep hearing about MariaDB vs MySQL.
After four years of MariaDB and four years of unsubstantiated FUD about Oracles intentions twoard MySQL you choose to make your case using a photo finish performance graph with no error bars.
Apparently google is quickly striving to catch up to AOL having not received the walled garden memo some 20 years ago.
Come on google... don't be stuck in the past.. throw away your crufty ole legacy support for POP3, IMAP and acceptance of SMTP messages from the few third party domains who dare not use gmail. It will be great.
There have been andriod apps in the market place for years converting your phones cmos camera into a real life working decently accurate geiger counter easily able to pick up background. If you go looking take care to avoid the joke apps.
While this is all really cool and interesting mcgivering of technology dirty bombs don't actually exist because they are pointless.
Now that your delaying third party cookies hows about using the extra time to add support for new versions of TLS? Why is IE the only browser supporting TLS v1.1 and 1.2? Even chrome supports 1.1 and it uses NSS too.
We are still dealing with a few lazy nessus wielding compliance jackasses invoking BEAST to get EVERYONE to use broken RC4 ciphers because a few users still have not updated their browsers to fix a known problem solved over a decade ago.
It would be nice to one day be in a position to start to get everyone off TLS 1.0.
Every time uncle Larry speaks he soils himself and his brand. There needs to be PR people within google responsible for training him to keep his mouth shut.
What makes you so sure he's running NTFS? Even if Apple supported that ability (they do on the Mac), they'd have to provide a way to do the same thing on a FAT32 volume... especially likely if he has any external media that are often connected.
I was semi-joking; but it is actually a serious question. (To the best of my understanding) a quantum-encrypted network provides rock-solid assurance that nobody is physically tapping your lines.
All quantum crypto gives you is one time pad material that cannot be derived from previous communications.
For example say you are able to record all classical communication between parties. If at some point in the future you are able to somehow compromise the initial encryption key you would be able to go back and decrypt any communications using this key and rotated keys based on the initial key or descendants of said keys if communicated within intercepted channel after the fact.
With quantum crypto there is no longer a physical linkage possible because pad data is guaranteed to be knowable to exactly two parties.
There is still very much a real classical problem in that you need to establish a trust relationship between yourself and your communication partner to have any assurance as to which party you are actually OTPing in quantum world...This is always done using an initial classical key to protect against Active MITM of the quantum channel.
While I appreciate the value in this scheme in the real world I do wonder what the actual benefit is for things like electric grid control cited in their paper where forward secrecy has very little value to begin with.
While it is true that a compromised key could not in theory be used for long....if you already had the ability to compromise current key you could then also perform an undetectable active MITM against the quantum communication channel and from then on be privy to all new OTP/key refreshes.
Any of us can exchange data over the Internet with the same level of assurances as the best fancy quantum gear...All you need to do is exchange OTP data offline (SD card filled with a few GB of random garbage) and you are set for a very long time of guaranteed intercept free communication. Years worth of voice chatter..lifetimes worth of text messages or short control messages all for small fractiones of pennies on the dollar. Sure it does not scale but no trust relationships ever really meaningfully do.
As with the quantum gear your vulnerability is and always shall be compromise of that which hold trust/keys.
Many of Microsoft's 'failures' are the result of doing something new. And then when the 'improved' version comes out, it can be quite a hit.
Windows 8 is a fundementally different equation. It is not about improving a product or trying something new it is about twisting arms for selfish reasons.
Vista - flop Vista SE (Win 7) - big success
The core problem was people simply did not have enough ram for vista without their machines swaping like crazy. Win 7 made several improvements... bulk of which were realitivly simple changes shifting vista service sprawl from service hosts to a much more capable task scheduler while concurrently dram costs continued to fall like a rock.
Windows 98 SE - pretty good Windows 98 SE 2 (Win Me) - "Hey, people will forget about this once Vista comes out"
I remember feeling sorry for those who did not get the NT memo during Win 9x era. They all sucked 95,98,ME/w only marginally different/abysmal results between them.
Windows 8 - Works pretty good, but people bitch about the UI Windows 8 SE (Blue?) - Hey, Metro apps are cool now. Maybe
No secret a lot of users only own a PC for email/web/facebook a reality that has been building for two decades and now people finally have other options. Good for them if they are happy with windowless UIs and locked down vendor controlled appstores.
For the rest of us metro is basically dos era desqview all over again. Total batshit insanity. Complete waste of time and high resolution monitors. When MS throws US under their Apple chasing bus I hope they understand our server and backend licenses are going with.
Either this is true and so secret even most of law enforcement doesn't have access or it simply isn't true. Having run a large enough telecom operation to deal with CALEA I can say for sure that law enforcement very much needed our help to do anything with our customers' communications. Not only did they need to come to us with proper warrants in the first place, but they barely had enough technology sense to be able to do anything with it. Anything more complicated than taps and CDRs never even came up.
Just cause one TLA has a capability does not mean they would be willing to piss away such capabilities by revealing it to you or LEAs conducting an ordinary investigation.
I am not taking a position on whether Mr. Clementes claims are true or not only this specific line of argument is unsound.
To put it another way who knew we had stealth helos b4 binladen raid? After? See what happens when you use a plausibly deniable capability?
A real "smart grid" would store excess energy when it is not needed and releases it during periods of most need. It would provide a buffer enabling more reliable, effecient and distributed means of generation.
A "smart meter" just browbeats people into accomplishing a similar task with ultimatly much less resiliant outcomes.
If he's successful in preventing HTML5 from being adopted by Netflix, Amazon, etc., that's a big win for non-open technology like Flash and Silverlight.
Stallman is a good example of what happens if you don't pick your battles carefully.
I normally have a kneejerk reaction against RMS ranting but in this instance I agree with his position.
Flash is no longer universally assumed or available to be installed. Silverlight is and always shall be DoA. There is a real cost in electing to use DRM if it requires something all users don't or can't have.
The trends with all of this tablet/phone nonsense is to lock down execution in the browser environment. You simply do not have the option of running any plugins if you wanted to on some "modern" systems these days.
More generally this is fundementally no different than what is asserted by RFC 1984. There is real cost and real pain for those who want to persuit bad behavior making it easy for them when you have increasing amounts of leverage seems unecessary in this instance.
It is not like the netflix's of the world won't just continue to write their own apps to support their services.
Slashdot Mirror
"enables malicious anti-features such as DRM, surveillance, and other monopolistic practices."
Apparently so does ubuntu's integrated search by default.
And this is why Windows will never catch up. And why eventually it will fade away as our generation grows old and leaves the workforce.
How can Microsoft innovate if what "most of us" want is the same old thing? It feels a bit like the educators who were fighting computers in the classroom in the 1980s and insisted that students only learn on manual typewriters.
Its not about what your used to it is about what behavior is sane and what is insane. It is about making determinations based on MERIT.
I suspect you'll find covering the entire workspace just to launch an application or find a document just as nonsensical in the stoneage as it is in the spaceage. I don't much care what that interface *looks* like but it has to be sane and not obleterate all onscreen context in the process.
Simply making the classic change adverse argument is an exercise in making non-falsifiable statements. If the next version of windows is an abacus and I replayed your "change adverse" statement would it be any different? What it convey and more or less information? Without merit without discussing actual tradeoffs what information is being conveyed?
assure you that Microsoft spend millions of dollars on various iterations and on studies for usability testing. But that so many people rejected it even though if it can be scientifically proven to be better (through a repeatable study, that's how science works),
The real issue seems to me to be for years there are a lot of people who own computers only to check email and facebook and now they have more options that are a better fit for what they actually do...good for them...but these people while a huge group are not the entire constellation of those using computers. There are people who still need a sane UI environment to get shit done complete with programs encased in movable frames...goddamn I feel like such a dinosaur saying that.
I also disagree that this is about "science"... it was more about leveraging windows to help windows phone to improve market share in other areas. There is no technical reason they couldn't provide knobs to make everyone happy. They chose not to for political reasons as evidenced by shit they took away during early betas of W8.
Metro is about locking down the computing environment (You can't install a metro app yourself...you can only install a metro app from the MS mothership...oh I'm sorry that is such a dated term...I mean the future of all computing..."the cloud"...
Fads come and go ... this isn't an improvement or a reflection of "the future" or a better way... it is a POS forced upon the world for political reasons to make MS more money. A boiling frog on the road to the promised land of vendor locked down computation...our future...where a few control basically everything...like apple does with the iphone and google with everything else...
MS is finally realizing they left way too much value on the table in previous versions of windows and is now hard at work fixing that.
...don't use any Metro apps. You're not forced to, apart from some initial app-pinning perhaps. Apart from that you can happily live in Windows 8, enjoy the extra speed and UI enhancements and never see metro again. Happy days!
Exactly, why is this so hard for MS to figure out? All they need to do is give people an option to turn the metro shit off.
A real start menu, startup to desktop and settings to disable goddamn jestures must be kids play next to writing a kernel driver or something. Why the fuck is it so hard to get thru MS's goddamn head that not all of us use a computer just for email and facebook? Fin idiots.
Damn... a start button that goes to the start screen is like Coca Cola running TV ads about helping people to not be fat. A breathtaking slap in the face.
You have a cellphone in your pocket capable of doing just that, and pinhole surveillance cameras have existed forever anyway.
Making surveillance society worse is not a feature or justification.
Your cellphone doesn't even need an active GPS setting in order to be tracked. As an Android App developer, I can just use a Network Location Provider and triangulate your position to within 100-1000 meters. If you have a cellphone, you're being tracked just as easily as with Glass.
More of the same batshit insane reasoning. We can stalk you anyway so what will a little more and a little easier hurt?
That's from an early video parody of Glass. Ads are against Google's guidelines.
Google isn't evil either...they said so!!
Even if they do that, we've already got the dumped firmware for Glass. Just run a custom ROM on it.
Good luck finding anyone to care enough to try.
Google Glass is scary because some pseudo-libertarian tech journalist told me to be scared!
Oh ok, I guess that explains the inconsistency in your position. Funny how all these former pro-corporate tech gossip douchebags are suddenly worried about your rights. Where were they 10 years ago? And for that matter, where were you?
Strawmen, Douchebags... what I would not give for a slashdot killfile.
Wearing wired or bluetooth headphones allows me to hold a voice conversation with my phone or real people, get directions, listen to music, read and write messages and work voice enabled apps while I'm on the go with the damn thing in my pocket out of my way. Whats the use case for wearing glasses and a stupid little screen all the time? What is the benefit? Why should anyone care?
I've seen a few demos on youtube and listened to a few interviews and have yet to hear a cogent reason why I would want to wear one of these things.
I can think of a few reasons not to partake:
Its google count on them to collect all yer shit.
Spy on everything/everyone else.
Fill ur brain with ads.
Mostly unproductive and pointless.
Distracting/dangerous
Makes you look stupid
WiFi only = useless joke
I have more faith in the power of voters and the desire and the whole "state monoploy on violence" meme to ever see this get anywhere near the light of day. If they want to go down that road with open hostilities...theres more of us than them...just sayin...
The whole undercurrent of protection = retaliation being peddled in TFA is equally nonsensical. Nothing is as it seems on the Internet..most source addresses are either total garbage or unwitting victims. Without human level AI any automated retaliation can and will be leveraged as a weapon by the very people you seek to defend against.
Didn't someone find the shipping container Rossi built his million dollar MW cold fusion plant supposedly delivered to the undisclosed super secret millitary customer actually collecting dust in the back of his brothers tire shop?
And years prior didn't Rossi get in trouble and nearly go to jail for a waste to oil scam that didn't work and ended with his lab burning to the ground?
Now we have lockheed claiming to bring a cheap shipping container sized hot fusion reactor online within the next decade. It is very sad to see such little real money going into commercially viable fusion energy research compared with enormous sums spent on defense dept end-runs around NPT obligations (e.g. NIF)
You sold MySQL to uncle Larry for a lot of cash years ago and now we keep hearing about MariaDB vs MySQL.
After four years of MariaDB and four years of unsubstantiated FUD about Oracles intentions twoard MySQL you choose to make your case using a photo finish performance graph with no error bars.
Apparently google is quickly striving to catch up to AOL having not received the walled garden memo some 20 years ago.
Come on google... don't be stuck in the past.. throw away your crufty ole legacy support for POP3, IMAP and acceptance of SMTP messages from the few third party domains who dare not use gmail. It will be great.
There have been andriod apps in the market place for years converting your phones cmos camera into a real life working decently accurate geiger counter easily able to pick up background. If you go looking take care to avoid the joke apps.
While this is all really cool and interesting mcgivering of technology dirty bombs don't actually exist because they are pointless.
Now that your delaying third party cookies hows about using the extra time to add support for new versions of TLS? Why is IE the only browser supporting TLS v1.1 and 1.2? Even chrome supports 1.1 and it uses NSS too.
We are still dealing with a few lazy nessus wielding compliance jackasses invoking BEAST to get EVERYONE to use broken RC4 ciphers because a few users still have not updated their browsers to fix a known problem solved over a decade ago.
It would be nice to one day be in a position to start to get everyone off TLS 1.0.
Every time uncle Larry speaks he soils himself and his brand. There needs to be PR people within google responsible for training him to keep his mouth shut.
Irish judge thinking he can censor whole Internet spend too much time in Irish pub.
It always starts with "think of the children". Sad to see Australia returning to its roots as a penal colony.
We need self driving cars and humans not allowed to touch the steering wheel.
"You are experiencing a crash"
What makes you so sure he's running NTFS? Even if Apple supported that ability (they do on the Mac), they'd have to provide a way to do the same thing on a FAT32 volume... especially likely if he has any external media that are often connected.
It makes no difference.
How is this primitive gun ITAR controlled?
Would information about how to make a shotgun from surgical rubber tubing, a nail, gas pipe and caps be ITAR controlled?
Does a faraday cage around a computer (oven) count as "TEMPEST suppression
technology"?
I was semi-joking; but it is actually a serious question. (To the best of my understanding) a quantum-encrypted network provides rock-solid assurance that nobody is physically tapping your lines.
All quantum crypto gives you is one time pad material that cannot be derived from previous communications.
For example say you are able to record all classical communication between parties. If at some point in the future you are able to somehow compromise the initial encryption key you would be able to go back and decrypt any communications using this key and rotated keys based on the initial key or descendants of said keys if communicated within intercepted channel after the fact.
With quantum crypto there is no longer a physical linkage possible because pad data is guaranteed to be knowable to exactly two parties.
There is still very much a real classical problem in that you need to establish a trust relationship between yourself and your communication partner to have any assurance as to which party you are actually OTPing in quantum world...This is always done using an initial classical key to protect against Active MITM of the quantum channel.
While I appreciate the value in this scheme in the real world I do wonder what the actual benefit is for things like electric grid control cited in their paper where forward secrecy has very little value to begin with.
While it is true that a compromised key could not in theory be used for long....if you already had the ability to compromise current key you could then also perform an undetectable active MITM against the quantum communication channel and from then on be privy to all new OTP/key refreshes.
Any of us can exchange data over the Internet with the same level of assurances as the best fancy quantum gear...All you need to do is exchange OTP data offline (SD card filled with a few GB of random garbage) and you are set for a very long time of guaranteed intercept free communication. Years worth of voice chatter..lifetimes worth of text messages or short control messages all for small fractiones of pennies on the dollar. Sure it does not scale but no trust relationships ever really meaningfully do.
As with the quantum gear your vulnerability is and always shall be compromise of that which hold trust/keys.
Perhaps you are the one who doesn't get it. Why should a fully capable PC and a tablet be two different experiences?
Cuz nobody has been able to come up with an interface that does not suck on one or both form factors?
Many of Microsoft's 'failures' are the result of doing something new. And then when the 'improved' version comes out, it can be quite a hit.
Windows 8 is a fundementally different equation. It is not about improving a product or trying something new it is about twisting arms for selfish reasons.
Vista - flop
Vista SE (Win 7) - big success
The core problem was people simply did not have enough ram for vista without their machines swaping like crazy. Win 7 made several improvements... bulk of which were realitivly simple changes shifting vista service sprawl from service hosts to a much more capable task scheduler while concurrently dram costs continued to fall like a rock.
Windows 98 SE - pretty good
Windows 98 SE 2 (Win Me) - "Hey, people will forget about this once Vista comes out"
I remember feeling sorry for those who did not get the NT memo during Win 9x era. They all sucked 95,98,ME /w only marginally different/abysmal results between them.
Windows 8 - Works pretty good, but people bitch about the UI
Windows 8 SE (Blue?) - Hey, Metro apps are cool now. Maybe
No secret a lot of users only own a PC for email/web/facebook a reality that has been building for two decades and now people finally have other options. Good for them if they are happy with windowless UIs and locked down vendor controlled appstores.
For the rest of us metro is basically dos era desqview all over again. Total batshit insanity. Complete waste of time and high resolution monitors. When MS throws US under their Apple chasing bus I hope they understand our server and backend licenses are going with.
Either this is true and so secret even most of law enforcement doesn't have access or it simply isn't true. Having run a large enough telecom operation to deal with CALEA I can say for sure that law enforcement very much needed our help to do anything with our customers' communications. Not only did they need to come to us with proper warrants in the first place, but they barely had enough technology sense to be able to do anything with it. Anything more complicated than taps and CDRs never even came up.
Just cause one TLA has a capability does not mean they would be willing to piss away such capabilities by revealing it to you or LEAs conducting an ordinary investigation.
I am not taking a position on whether Mr. Clementes claims are true or not only this specific line of argument is unsound.
To put it another way who knew we had stealth helos b4 binladen raid? After? See what happens when you use a plausibly deniable capability?
A real "smart grid" would store excess energy when it is not needed and releases it during periods of most need. It would provide a buffer enabling more reliable, effecient and distributed means of generation.
A "smart meter" just browbeats people into accomplishing a similar task with ultimatly much less resiliant outcomes.
If he's successful in preventing HTML5 from being adopted by Netflix, Amazon, etc., that's a big win for non-open technology like Flash and Silverlight.
Stallman is a good example of what happens if you don't pick your battles carefully.
I normally have a kneejerk reaction against RMS ranting but in this instance I agree with his position.
Flash is no longer universally assumed or available to be installed. Silverlight is and always shall be DoA. There is a real cost in electing to use DRM if it requires something all users don't or can't have.
The trends with all of this tablet/phone nonsense is to lock down execution in the browser environment. You simply do not have the option of running any plugins if you wanted to on some "modern" systems these days.
More generally this is fundementally no different than what is asserted by RFC 1984. There is real cost and real pain for those who want to persuit bad behavior making it easy for them when you have increasing amounts of leverage seems unecessary in this instance.
It is not like the netflix's of the world won't just continue to write their own apps to support their services.
Have you ever considered writing your own filesystem? If so what features would it have?