Not only are they not under control of the public, they are also not subject to any form of auditing. If MS wants to play policeman, they will need an Internal Affairs Department that can bust them for pulling stupid shite like this. "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." ~Lord Acton
This is evidenced by the fact that Mozilla never had to change anything in Firefox after that silly "embedding things in a webpage" patent litigation that made IE's Flash support break. The Mozilla Rabbit wasn't enough meat to feed the Patent Troll Hunter's family, so he threw his spear at the Microsoft Mammoth instead.
Allowing everyone to see the code allows the problems to be found quicker and be patched faster. With MS, a hole can go unnoticed (private exploits, anyone?) for long periods of time. All the while, the baddies can have their fun and no one would be the wiser. With OSS, the bug is usually discovered quite quickly, and the patch is usually not far behind. Even if the original programmer doesn't want to make the patch, someone else can do it because they have the source. OSS is simply more conducive to good security. It's not a panacea, but it's a good start.
those involved in open source never get around to programming what most users want. Only what they want. Dont bitch cuz Gates is giving the market what it wants. Fight fire with fire.
Really? Tell that to all the critics raving about Firefox, Amarok, and OpenOffice.org, among others. I don't have to list my satisfaction points with these products here because they'd only be repeats of what others have said. If you're curious, look up the testimonials. The devs of these projects are fighting fire with fire. They're releasing a technologically superior (arguable for OO.o, I know) product for free. What's not fiery about that?
As for gaming, plenty of us don't use Windows because we don't use our computers for gaming. There are plenty of fun games that are native to the Linux platform, but I rarely play them because my computer is for getting things done, not putting off the things that need to get done. I have a PS2 for games. For everything else, including the simpler install (Ubuntu install is 300x easier than Windows to install) and the simpler, more intuitive UI (I didn't much care for GNOME until I actually tried using it - It really rocks) Linux is more than sufficient, and has become the only OS on my desktop and the "98% of the time" OS on my dual-booted lappy.
But above all, use what works for you. If you don't like Linux, don't use it. But I will warn you: *nix is becoming more and more prevalent. Just this year, my school replaced all its public terminals with Sun workstations. You can complain about lack of support for games all you want, but you'll eventually be forced to use something other than Windows.
No, you are dead wrong. Firefox gets patched more often, and since it is open source, that is the main reason that vulnerabilities are being found in it. Sooner or later, all the bugs in Firefox will be ironed out, and it will be considered bulletproof, while IE remains closed source and unavailable for third party code audits, which leaves it wide open to security breaches. Wouldn't you rather have a house that was built by one contractor and then inspected by thousands of others who were able to find and fix some issues with it than a house that was only inspected by the same contractor who built it? There is some correlation between popularity and number of exploits, but you make it sound like it's a 2-dimensional plane. It's not. There are other factors. The very same goes for Linux versus Windows. Until Windows and IE are open source, they will always be miles behind in security. BTW, security through insignificance is the same as security through obscurity, which is just a false sense of security. Just because something is out of the limelight does not mean that no one has the intention of messing with it.
If we can count them, why can't we shut them down?
Because they are hosted in countries over which US law enforcement has no jurisdiction. Eastern Europe is the biggest culprit, but they are found all over the world. It's not like we can just march in there and unplug their Internet connections.
Why do so many people hate the idea of having an easy name for the concept of web pages that interact with the user? I don't see anyone else coming up with a better name. Yeah, let's stop calling it "Web 2.0" and move on to the oh-so-efficient "Interactive web pages built on AJAX, JSON, and other technological advancements." Give me a break, people. Unless you have coined a better term, stop whining.
With that little bit there, it appears that I can't even run Vista in VMWare for the purpose of purchasing (and playing) music from the Zune Marketplace on my Linux machine. I could have been a customer of theirs. They could have been making real money off me in Vista license fee and cash from music sales. But if the only reason I need Vista is for the Zune store, and I am not allowed to use my legally acquired music through the use of that software, I will have use for neither Vista nor Zune. Way to go, geniuses. Lameness filter blocked my clever ascii art of a MS gun shooting a foot. Ya shoulda seen it. It was great.
Simpler than that. Just tell them your computer wiz nephew did it. He's 10 years old - not legally bound by anything. Unable to agree to a contractual agreement.
The electronic ballot machines also print out a copy of what you voted on a roll of paper that is kept inside the machine under a lock. The paper passes through a transparent plastic window so that you can verify the results as they pass. There is no room for error there. It's taken care of, so quit your whining.
I am very much in agreement. If the masses are allowed to dictate whatever meaning they choose for words or phrases they hear, they will slowly erode the vast variety of meanings that can be conveyed through speech and writing. If I said "That begs the question" 75 years ago, most people would realize that I was calling out the speaker for using a circular argument. Saying "That begs the question" today evokes responses like "What question?" The meaning is nearly lost. We have hundreds of thousands of simple words and phrases that we use to convey much more complex concepts. If we let our language become eroded by the uneducated masses, how will we become educated? We will waste all of our time explaining our ideas in excruciating detail rather than using the previously ubiquitous simplified words and phrases that were crafted to symbolize those very concepts. Don't use words and phrases for which you haven't learned the meanings!
Copying the entire partition over on every reboot is unnecessary anyway. You could just diff the files and only copy over the ones that had been changed.
I think you should consider a different distro. Ubuntu will update the repos to reflect the most recent version of software after a pretty short period of time.
Man, what a day! First, Amazon gets bitch-slapped by IBM with a ridiculous patent violation similar to the one that they used to enforce their own ridiculous patents, and now Jack Thompson shows contempt for the court system, and is subsequently held in contempt of court? I can almost taste the sweetness.
I'm not sure that you should be engaging in any discourse of grammatical or linguistic nature if you can't grasp the difference between contractions and plurals.
One problem with your argument: Joe Sixpack will not use Opera; he'll use IE. That's why we harp on MS for being so lax in security. They're targeting the lowest common denominator.
It's not susceptible to buffer overflow if the processor is an Athlon64 or any of the other processors designed to prevent those.
It's only being utilized as a tool to lock users out. Don't blame the crowbar - blame the robber. If you could control your TC hardware, you could lock your box down in an unprecedented fashion. I don't think the majority of companies on board with the initiative have plans to lock the TC hardware to Windows. If you purchase hardware, you can do what you want with it. I'd want TC hardware to handle the communication link between a fingerprint reader and the OS, for example.
Trusted Computing in itself is not a bad thing - it's how it's implemented. TC could help you run a completely bulletproof server by signing all of your in-house code and the OS, but not allowing any other code to run, period. If it's secured on the hardware level, remote exploits become a thing of the past. The fact that Microsoft's vision for TC is a bit Orwellian doesn't mean the rest of us should shun the concept at its core. TC doesn't kill computing. Microsoft kills computing.
Not only was it cheap, it didn't even make sense. How can you be upset at an operating system? (I'll admit that I have been upset with a particular installation of Windows on a particular PC from time to time, and I'm continually pissed at MS for peddling its crappy product to my unsuspecting relatives and friends, but never in my life have I ever been upset with Windows itself.) I'll re-phrase his quote the way it should have been made: "Naturally, we are disappointed in ourselves for missing this. Perhaps this can teach the whole tech industry a lesson - if you are an operating system vendor, make your operating systems secure so that they don't succumb to viruses, and if you manufacture anything with onboard storage, always do thorough QA with emphasis on virus sweeps on your outgoing products."
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Not only are they not under control of the public, they are also not subject to any form of auditing. If MS wants to play policeman, they will need an Internal Affairs Department that can bust them for pulling stupid shite like this. "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."
~Lord Acton
This is evidenced by the fact that Mozilla never had to change anything in Firefox after that silly "embedding things in a webpage" patent litigation that made IE's Flash support break. The Mozilla Rabbit wasn't enough meat to feed the Patent Troll Hunter's family, so he threw his spear at the Microsoft Mammoth instead.
Really? Tell that to all the critics raving about Firefox, Amarok, and OpenOffice.org, among others. I don't have to list my satisfaction points with these products here because they'd only be repeats of what others have said. If you're curious, look up the testimonials. The devs of these projects are fighting fire with fire. They're releasing a technologically superior (arguable for OO.o, I know) product for free. What's not fiery about that?
As for gaming, plenty of us don't use Windows because we don't use our computers for gaming. There are plenty of fun games that are native to the Linux platform, but I rarely play them because my computer is for getting things done, not putting off the things that need to get done. I have a PS2 for games. For everything else, including the simpler install (Ubuntu install is 300x easier than Windows to install) and the simpler, more intuitive UI (I didn't much care for GNOME until I actually tried using it - It really rocks) Linux is more than sufficient, and has become the only OS on my desktop and the "98% of the time" OS on my dual-booted lappy.
But above all, use what works for you. If you don't like Linux, don't use it. But I will warn you: *nix is becoming more and more prevalent. Just this year, my school replaced all its public terminals with Sun workstations. You can complain about lack of support for games all you want, but you'll eventually be forced to use something other than Windows.
No, you are dead wrong. Firefox gets patched more often, and since it is open source, that is the main reason that vulnerabilities are being found in it. Sooner or later, all the bugs in Firefox will be ironed out, and it will be considered bulletproof, while IE remains closed source and unavailable for third party code audits, which leaves it wide open to security breaches. Wouldn't you rather have a house that was built by one contractor and then inspected by thousands of others who were able to find and fix some issues with it than a house that was only inspected by the same contractor who built it? There is some correlation between popularity and number of exploits, but you make it sound like it's a 2-dimensional plane. It's not. There are other factors. The very same goes for Linux versus Windows. Until Windows and IE are open source, they will always be miles behind in security.
BTW, security through insignificance is the same as security through obscurity, which is just a false sense of security. Just because something is out of the limelight does not mean that no one has the intention of messing with it.
Why do so many people hate the idea of having an easy name for the concept of web pages that interact with the user? I don't see anyone else coming up with a better name. Yeah, let's stop calling it "Web 2.0" and move on to the oh-so-efficient "Interactive web pages built on AJAX, JSON, and other technological advancements." Give me a break, people. Unless you have coined a better term, stop whining.
With that little bit there, it appears that I can't even run Vista in VMWare for the purpose of purchasing (and playing) music from the Zune Marketplace on my Linux machine. I could have been a customer of theirs. They could have been making real money off me in Vista license fee and cash from music sales. But if the only reason I need Vista is for the Zune store, and I am not allowed to use my legally acquired music through the use of that software, I will have use for neither Vista nor Zune. Way to go, geniuses.
Lameness filter blocked my clever ascii art of a MS gun shooting a foot. Ya shoulda seen it. It was great.
Simpler than that. Just tell them your computer wiz nephew did it. He's 10 years old - not legally bound by anything. Unable to agree to a contractual agreement.
The electronic ballot machines also print out a copy of what you voted on a roll of paper that is kept inside the machine under a lock. The paper passes through a transparent plastic window so that you can verify the results as they pass. There is no room for error there. It's taken care of, so quit your whining.
Yeah, because they backed down. They didn't stay the course because they had investors to please. I'm looking forward to the Okopipi project's debut.
I am very much in agreement. If the masses are allowed to dictate whatever meaning they choose for words or phrases they hear, they will slowly erode the vast variety of meanings that can be conveyed through speech and writing. If I said "That begs the question" 75 years ago, most people would realize that I was calling out the speaker for using a circular argument. Saying "That begs the question" today evokes responses like "What question?" The meaning is nearly lost. We have hundreds of thousands of simple words and phrases that we use to convey much more complex concepts. If we let our language become eroded by the uneducated masses, how will we become educated? We will waste all of our time explaining our ideas in excruciating detail rather than using the previously ubiquitous simplified words and phrases that were crafted to symbolize those very concepts.
Don't use words and phrases for which you haven't learned the meanings!
Copying the entire partition over on every reboot is unnecessary anyway. You could just diff the files and only copy over the ones that had been changed.
I think you should consider a different distro. Ubuntu will update the repos to reflect the most recent version of software after a pretty short period of time.
Good job there, genius. Way to make all geeks look like homophobes and hyperbolists.
Man, what a day! First, Amazon gets bitch-slapped by IBM with a ridiculous patent violation similar to the one that they used to enforce their own ridiculous patents, and now Jack Thompson shows contempt for the court system, and is subsequently held in contempt of court? I can almost taste the sweetness.
Another good one that came to my mind was "What goes around comes around."
No, you unplug the bastard and pocket it. Those things retail for about $90. Can you say eBay?
I'm not sure that you should be engaging in any discourse of grammatical or linguistic nature if you can't grasp the difference between contractions and plurals.
One word:
Knoppix
One problem with your argument:
Joe Sixpack will not use Opera; he'll use IE. That's why we harp on MS for being so lax in security. They're targeting the lowest common denominator.
It's not susceptible to buffer overflow if the processor is an Athlon64 or any of the other processors designed to prevent those. It's only being utilized as a tool to lock users out. Don't blame the crowbar - blame the robber. If you could control your TC hardware, you could lock your box down in an unprecedented fashion. I don't think the majority of companies on board with the initiative have plans to lock the TC hardware to Windows. If you purchase hardware, you can do what you want with it. I'd want TC hardware to handle the communication link between a fingerprint reader and the OS, for example.
It's called coffee with artificial sweetener and non-dairy creamer. It's pretty revolutionary.
Trusted Computing in itself is not a bad thing - it's how it's implemented. TC could help you run a completely bulletproof server by signing all of your in-house code and the OS, but not allowing any other code to run, period. If it's secured on the hardware level, remote exploits become a thing of the past. The fact that Microsoft's vision for TC is a bit Orwellian doesn't mean the rest of us should shun the concept at its core.
TC doesn't kill computing. Microsoft kills computing.
Not only was it cheap, it didn't even make sense. How can you be upset at an operating system? (I'll admit that I have been upset with a particular installation of Windows on a particular PC from time to time, and I'm continually pissed at MS for peddling its crappy product to my unsuspecting relatives and friends, but never in my life have I ever been upset with Windows itself.)
I'll re-phrase his quote the way it should have been made:
"Naturally, we are disappointed in ourselves for missing this. Perhaps this can teach the whole tech industry a lesson - if you are an operating system vendor, make your operating systems secure so that they don't succumb to viruses, and if you manufacture anything with onboard storage, always do thorough QA with emphasis on virus sweeps on your outgoing products."