Wow, thanks for explaining it. I was wondering why the hell everybody was talking about political parties and agendas. I assumed everybody would read "a decmocratic push" as "an effort from the people," not as "an impetus for the Democratic party."
Back then, malware was a challenge, or was targeted at a specific entity. Now, both of those reason still exist, and malware probpagation based on them does occur, but they've been completley dwarfed by the main purpose of malware today: making money. It's all about business. Take over a Windows box, and it's worth maybe a dollar or two each, on average. Take over an OS X box, and it's worth the same - in general, nothing makes it easier to monetize OS X than Windows.
Now, here's the catch. Developing malware isn't free; even if you don't actually pay for the exploits, it takes time. So which platform do you target? These days, Windows is significantly harder to find new exploits for than OS X. You'll have to spend more time, or pay more (since Windows exploits are in high demand). Here's the catch, though: until the difference in cost is equal to the difference in income between hitting 90% of the market and hitting 10% of the market, it just isn't worthwhile.
Some numbers, based on rough estimates of real-world costs: A typical Windows exploit runs for $10k to $50k, depending on various factors. We'll take the high end of that - I'll give every possible advantage to your point of view. Next lets suppose that finding an equivalent exploit for OS X is effectively free (it's not, of course). There's a little bit of cost on top of that either way, to "weaponize" an exploit into actual malware you can make money off of (keyloggers, botnet nodes, etc.) Now, consider the environment you can release them into. Windows botnets come in various sizes, but 9 million machines is a decent size. For every 9 million Windows boxes, there are 1 million OS X boxes (close enough). However, I'll throw you another bone here: remembering that Windows comes in a number of versions and some people upgrade faster than others, and that security software quality varies significantly, lets say that you're only hitting half the Windows boxes. OS X is more uniform, so let's say for every 9M exploitable Windows boxes you have 2M exploitable Macs. Time to release your malware into the wild... If you chose OS X, you paid very little, exploited 2M boxes, and made maybe a couple dollars each. Congratulations, you've just gained about $2,000,000. Of you chose Windows, you paid $50,000, plus that cost to weaponize. You took over 9 million machines though, for an income of $18M. Total profit: $17,950,000. You spent the same amount of time on each.
You spent far more money on the Windows one. Yet, looking at the final numbers, targeting OS X is almost pointless.
4 to 12 weeks?!? I have a Win2000 box that I use for LAN gaming* (not web browsing, since about 2005) that I haven't flattened the OS on in 9.5 years! The last time I reinstalled the Windows OS on my main box was when Win7 went RTM. I upgrade my Linux install (including formatting / after some annoying dependency hell a few years back, though not typically reformatting/home) more often than that!
*Yes, it plays StarCraft and DotA and Total Annihilation just fine. No, it won't run Crysis without way more hardware upgrades than I want to drop on it. That's not the point, though.
4GB of RAM? WTF? I have a laptop that's 2 years old, cost me just over $1000, and came with 4GB. I mean, I've come to expect Apple devices to be over cost and under spec right before an update, but right after? 4GB is barely better than low-end for a new laptop these days, netbooks excepted (not that any Apple "notebook" would cost anything close to a netbook). Putting that in a "Pro" model machine, which will probably cost about 2x what my 2-year-old laptop did, is simply ridiculous.
Hell, I upgraded another laptop - a 12" tablet - to 4GB of RAM (2x2GB) at the same time as I bought the other machine, for a cost of $90. By Moore's Law, the same amount of money should get me 8GB today, and I'm sure Apple can get better discounts than I can by just going down to Fry's. What's their excuse?
Total cost after tax and all is about $700. The new MBP is *probably* not more than 3x as much... For a bit under $2000 I could get 8GB and a Core i7, in 13.3" form factor.
That sounds pretty plausible, especially because it seems that there was a bug in the Samsung firmware that would lead to possible problems with updates, and this update was supposed to fix that. You'd think they would test against the specific problem they were trying to fix, which suggests some miscommunication
10x faster than IE8, much less IE7, is not an accomplishment worth mentioning. On the other hand, 50% faster than IE9 would be very impressive indeed - the RC is effectively at the top of the speed charts (on Sunspider at least) right now.
WP7 is absolutely nothing like WinMo. The UI is different, the application model is different, the restrictions on carriers are different. Non-removable apps are no longer permitted. Many hardware specs (CPU, GPU, RAM, I/O speed, resolution, points of touch contact, buttons, etc.) are standardized, so software is tested against those specs and must perform well before it will be allowed into the app store.
I would never suggest running out to buy one, but don't dismiss it out of hand because it's from the same company that made a very different OS in the past. Go to a store and try one. Play around with the UI, run some of the included apps (remembering that you can remove them at will). Borrow one from a friend - I know several people who have one - and take a look at how nicely the third-party apps run. Stream some music, watch some YouTube, play some of the Xbox Live games, and tell me where you felt that the OS was ruining the phone experience or wasting the hardware.
For the record: There was a comparison of WP7 and Android, both run on the same hardware. WP7 had a more responsive and smoother UI. WinMo may have had serious performance issues, but Android is hardly the pinnacle of phone OSs. WP7 has it soundly beat in a couple of places.
Unless a plugin automatically adds an exception for itself (which some *cough*Flash*cough* do) it will either prompt you for permission to run outside the sandbox, or will run within it. I remove permissions for Flash to do this and it still usually works just fine.
Strictly speaking, IE7 also includes Protected Mode (MIC sandbox). That's only relevant on Vista though - Win7 comes with IE8 and XP is incapable of MIC.
Does OO.o (or LO) have support for the Track Changes feature yet? I not only use that multiple times per week at my sfotware development job (for reviewing specifications and test plans), I couldn't even have made it through one of my college English classes without it as the professor used this feature to send feedback to students. They didn't require that you have a copy of MS Office - you could use the computer labs, which included it - but they expected that you could access a reasonably complete set of Word's features.
Then there was the way that OO.o liked to mess up my footnotes; the few times I tried to use it for a paper I would always have to open the file on MS Office to fix formatting issues before submitting.
Or you could use a browser that has this feature built in. Strange though it sounds, IE8 has a feature which basically reads "No other site on the web can see you on this site." It works great - I'm almsot always signed in to Facebook, but third party sites have absolutely no way to tell because the browser doesn't allow anything from Facebook to run while I'm not actually on Facebook.com.
That said, the IE8 version has issues. Try the IE9 RC, and its Tracking Protection feature. It also makes a great ad blocker.
Much of what Anonymous does is, in fact, criminal. Therefore your distinction is largely irrelevant. I support what Anon is trying to do, but I completely disagree with their methods and would not be very sorry if some people, for example those making death threats, were caught and faced time for it. I also disagree with what the US government is doing, and I disagree with the motives for HBGary. That doesn't attacks upon them any less criminal, nor investigation into the attackers any less legitimate an activity (the handling of that investigation is another story).
The N900's ability to use swap means that the RAM issue largely goes away, provided you're willing to take the slight performance hit and slight storage loss. I've never owned an N900, but I have used one, and with the libpurple messaging plugin and a handful of browser tabs open, you could chew through 256MB in a hurry. As for the CPU, Skype and Flash did truly awful things to that poor chip.
I'll grant you that resistive touchscreens have the advantage of being able to use precision implements, but it turns out that you learn pretty quickly to hit even very small things with a finger once you know how the phone "sees" your touch profile. Besides, even if it's too small to hit, multi-touch makes zooming ridiculously quick and easy. Browser zooming on the N900 isn't anywhere near as convenient.
As for the UI, it seemed a little clunky but generally finger-friendly and reasonably usable. Mind you, browser and Skype tests aside, I spent much of my time in the terminal playing with CLI apps, where a a good UI is one that, if command line parameters are entered incorrectly, prints out a helpful usage message. I thought it was fantastic that I could use the phone that way. I thought its browser was very nice. I thought Flash was surprisingly good, as long as you didn't mind maxing out the CPU, and as long as you had AdPlock Plus installed to prevent all the Flash ads, it's a useful option (this was over a year before it was available on Android).
My grandfather was an anternna engineer contracting work for various US agencies (Air Force, Navy, NASA, and some others) for decades. They're well aware of using circular polarization for stuff like this. However, it's not practical to do on the kind of scale discussed here, where you're looking for something that can be put in a cell phone without significantly enlarging the case.
It also limits the frequency range you can use, although depending on how good the digital concelation is this might still work for a relatively tight band. Oh, and there will be interference patterns beyond just the third antenna. If the receiver is in the wrong place, it will get the same massive cancelation.
HAM radio (in the "real" sense, where the H shands for HF) uses Over quite heavily, as the signal you're picking up is often coming from thousands of miles away and isn't really any higher than the ambient noise level. Even if there is a mic click, it's entirely possible that the other side can't hear it clearly. The communication is also usually much more conversational, and may include pauses while one party keeps the mic keyed briefly (or releases it but expect to pick it up again imminently).
I thought that was supposed to mean the people who are "defending" Wikileaks, Anonymous et. al.
It's unfortunate that the writing isn't very good, because the point he's trying to make (the random troublemaker is different from the commercially motivated is different from the targeted attacker) is a pretty good one.
"Licensing" for "legal" is a valid argument, although the problem is rooted in historical legal decisions. That was the reason I chose the term I did - not because there's a law against it, but because the MAFIAA have a lot of legal weight to throw around. This is the same reason that WP7 doesn't have customizable ringtones in the GUI, either - the OS fully supports them but the RIAA came unglued at the thought of a device which could stream music licensed for personal listening also being able to *play* music intended for public listening (i.e. a ringtone, and no, I'm not making this shit up).
Given how much effort MS goes through to be able to provide streaming music at all, and given that their catalog is avilable for DRM-free purchase, your final claim / accusation is patently untrue. If you want to take such a ridiculous stance, I submit that the burden is on you to explain why the Zune store want DRM-free instead of staying restricted as it had been. The only other service I can think of that also provides streaming subscription music legally from major labels, on demand, is Rhapsody. They use DRM as well, although they have at least some of their catalog available as MP3 download.
Wow... you planning on starting a garden, or do you really just love tossing manure around?
Zune is one of many parts of WP7, but "zune-based" is completely inaccurate.
WP7 can play streaming music, which for legal reasons MS can only provide DRMed (though you can also download DRM-free MP3s, and play them / copy them between PCs). I suppose you think any system that has any form of DRM at all is "drm-laden" though... I hope you never buy commercial DVDs.
Anything you can point to that justifies calling the man a "deadweight" executive? A good exec can do a lot for a company. If nothing else, he's frank and articulate, and doesn't try to conceal problems.
Of all the accusations you could level at WP7, you chose "slow" for some reason. That pretty much cripples your credibility. Why not complain about how it launched without HTML5 support, or some actually valid complaint? Running on identical hardware, WP7 performs better than Android (http://wmpoweruser.com/windows-phone-7-vs-android-gingerbread-on-the-htc-hd2/).
The N900 had some good things going on its software for a Linux handheld (bear in mind that the vast majority of the world has no interest in Linux, and neither Android nor WebOS make a big deal out of their choice of kernel in advertising). Its hardware was out of date two years ago, though. Slowish processor, low RAM, and for $DEITY's sake a resistive touchscreen... it was obsolete at release (late 2009).
How so? Serious question, what have you found that IE9 can't do but (mobile) WebKit can? The whole idea behind IE9 is that you can use exactly the same HTML(5) and CSS(3) as for other browsers, but IE9 will (sometimes) do it faster.
The current WP7 browser is based on IE7, so yeah, it's shoddy in that sense (it actually works well in the little testing I've given it, including some sites that mobile WebKit can't handle). The point of this announcement is that the next version of the WP7 browser *won't* be "shoddy" any more.
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Wow, thanks for explaining it. I was wondering why the hell everybody was talking about political parties and agendas. I assumed everybody would read "a decmocratic push" as "an effort from the people," not as "an impetus for the Democratic party."
Back then, malware was a challenge, or was targeted at a specific entity. Now, both of those reason still exist, and malware probpagation based on them does occur, but they've been completley dwarfed by the main purpose of malware today: making money. It's all about business. Take over a Windows box, and it's worth maybe a dollar or two each, on average. Take over an OS X box, and it's worth the same - in general, nothing makes it easier to monetize OS X than Windows.
Now, here's the catch. Developing malware isn't free; even if you don't actually pay for the exploits, it takes time. So which platform do you target? These days, Windows is significantly harder to find new exploits for than OS X. You'll have to spend more time, or pay more (since Windows exploits are in high demand). Here's the catch, though: until the difference in cost is equal to the difference in income between hitting 90% of the market and hitting 10% of the market, it just isn't worthwhile.
Some numbers, based on rough estimates of real-world costs:
A typical Windows exploit runs for $10k to $50k, depending on various factors. We'll take the high end of that - I'll give every possible advantage to your point of view. Next lets suppose that finding an equivalent exploit for OS X is effectively free (it's not, of course). There's a little bit of cost on top of that either way, to "weaponize" an exploit into actual malware you can make money off of (keyloggers, botnet nodes, etc.) Now, consider the environment you can release them into. Windows botnets come in various sizes, but 9 million machines is a decent size. For every 9 million Windows boxes, there are 1 million OS X boxes (close enough). However, I'll throw you another bone here: remembering that Windows comes in a number of versions and some people upgrade faster than others, and that security software quality varies significantly, lets say that you're only hitting half the Windows boxes. OS X is more uniform, so let's say for every 9M exploitable Windows boxes you have 2M exploitable Macs. Time to release your malware into the wild...
If you chose OS X, you paid very little, exploited 2M boxes, and made maybe a couple dollars each. Congratulations, you've just gained about $2,000,000.
Of you chose Windows, you paid $50,000, plus that cost to weaponize. You took over 9 million machines though, for an income of $18M. Total profit: $17,950,000.
You spent the same amount of time on each.
You spent far more money on the Windows one. Yet, looking at the final numbers, targeting OS X is almost pointless.
4 to 12 weeks?!? I have a Win2000 box that I use for LAN gaming* (not web browsing, since about 2005) that I haven't flattened the OS on in 9.5 years! The last time I reinstalled the Windows OS on my main box was when Win7 went RTM. I upgrade my Linux install (including formatting / after some annoying dependency hell a few years back, though not typically reformatting /home) more often than that!
*Yes, it plays StarCraft and DotA and Total Annihilation just fine. No, it won't run Crysis without way more hardware upgrades than I want to drop on it. That's not the point, though.
Well, or NTFS. Everything you mentioned except the de-dup is in Win7, and has been for over a year... just sayin'
4GB of RAM? WTF? I have a laptop that's 2 years old, cost me just over $1000, and came with 4GB. I mean, I've come to expect Apple devices to be over cost and under spec right before an update, but right after? 4GB is barely better than low-end for a new laptop these days, netbooks excepted (not that any Apple "notebook" would cost anything close to a netbook). Putting that in a "Pro" model machine, which will probably cost about 2x what my 2-year-old laptop did, is simply ridiculous.
Hell, I upgraded another laptop - a 12" tablet - to 4GB of RAM (2x2GB) at the same time as I bought the other machine, for a cost of $90. By Moore's Law, the same amount of money should get me 8GB today, and I'm sure Apple can get better discounts than I can by just going down to Fry's. What's their excuse?
Random example (neither of my current laptops are Dell, but their business lines are decent):
http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/vostro-3300/pd?oc=bvcs34a&model_id=vostro-3300
2.53GHz Core i5 (better than the MBP)
13.3" display (lower res than the MBP though)
4GB of DDR3 RAM
Total cost after tax and all is about $700. The new MBP is *probably* not more than 3x as much...
For a bit under $2000 I could get 8GB and a Core i7, in 13.3" form factor.
That sounds pretty plausible, especially because it seems that there was a bug in the Samsung firmware that would lead to possible problems with updates, and this update was supposed to fix that. You'd think they would test against the specific problem they were trying to fix, which suggests some miscommunication
10x faster than IE8, much less IE7, is not an accomplishment worth mentioning. On the other hand, 50% faster than IE9 would be very impressive indeed - the RC is effectively at the top of the speed charts (on Sunspider at least) right now.
That's actually a very good point. I wonder of Sony really considered that fact...
WP7 is absolutely nothing like WinMo. The UI is different, the application model is different, the restrictions on carriers are different. Non-removable apps are no longer permitted. Many hardware specs (CPU, GPU, RAM, I/O speed, resolution, points of touch contact, buttons, etc.) are standardized, so software is tested against those specs and must perform well before it will be allowed into the app store.
I would never suggest running out to buy one, but don't dismiss it out of hand because it's from the same company that made a very different OS in the past. Go to a store and try one. Play around with the UI, run some of the included apps (remembering that you can remove them at will). Borrow one from a friend - I know several people who have one - and take a look at how nicely the third-party apps run. Stream some music, watch some YouTube, play some of the Xbox Live games, and tell me where you felt that the OS was ruining the phone experience or wasting the hardware.
For the record: There was a comparison of WP7 and Android, both run on the same hardware. WP7 had a more responsive and smoother UI. WinMo may have had serious performance issues, but Android is hardly the pinnacle of phone OSs. WP7 has it soundly beat in a couple of places.
Unless a plugin automatically adds an exception for itself (which some *cough*Flash*cough* do) it will either prompt you for permission to run outside the sandbox, or will run within it. I remove permissions for Flash to do this and it still usually works just fine.
Strictly speaking, IE7 also includes Protected Mode (MIC sandbox). That's only relevant on Vista though - Win7 comes with IE8 and XP is incapable of MIC.
It actually applies to any copyleft license (GPLvAnything being the most common of these). The reasoning is probably exactly as you say.
Ms-RL is actually a copyleft license. It would appear to fall under this restriction. Ms-PL is probably fine, as are the MIT and BSD licenses.
Does OO.o (or LO) have support for the Track Changes feature yet? I not only use that multiple times per week at my sfotware development job (for reviewing specifications and test plans), I couldn't even have made it through one of my college English classes without it as the professor used this feature to send feedback to students. They didn't require that you have a copy of MS Office - you could use the computer labs, which included it - but they expected that you could access a reasonably complete set of Word's features.
Then there was the way that OO.o liked to mess up my footnotes; the few times I tried to use it for a paper I would always have to open the file on MS Office to fix formatting issues before submitting.
Or you could use a browser that has this feature built in. Strange though it sounds, IE8 has a feature which basically reads "No other site on the web can see you on this site." It works great - I'm almsot always signed in to Facebook, but third party sites have absolutely no way to tell because the browser doesn't allow anything from Facebook to run while I'm not actually on Facebook.com.
That said, the IE8 version has issues. Try the IE9 RC, and its Tracking Protection feature. It also makes a great ad blocker.
Much of what Anonymous does is, in fact, criminal. Therefore your distinction is largely irrelevant. I support what Anon is trying to do, but I completely disagree with their methods and would not be very sorry if some people, for example those making death threats, were caught and faced time for it. I also disagree with what the US government is doing, and I disagree with the motives for HBGary. That doesn't attacks upon them any less criminal, nor investigation into the attackers any less legitimate an activity (the handling of that investigation is another story).
The N900's ability to use swap means that the RAM issue largely goes away, provided you're willing to take the slight performance hit and slight storage loss. I've never owned an N900, but I have used one, and with the libpurple messaging plugin and a handful of browser tabs open, you could chew through 256MB in a hurry. As for the CPU, Skype and Flash did truly awful things to that poor chip.
I'll grant you that resistive touchscreens have the advantage of being able to use precision implements, but it turns out that you learn pretty quickly to hit even very small things with a finger once you know how the phone "sees" your touch profile. Besides, even if it's too small to hit, multi-touch makes zooming ridiculously quick and easy. Browser zooming on the N900 isn't anywhere near as convenient.
As for the UI, it seemed a little clunky but generally finger-friendly and reasonably usable. Mind you, browser and Skype tests aside, I spent much of my time in the terminal playing with CLI apps, where a a good UI is one that, if command line parameters are entered incorrectly, prints out a helpful usage message. I thought it was fantastic that I could use the phone that way. I thought its browser was very nice. I thought Flash was surprisingly good, as long as you didn't mind maxing out the CPU, and as long as you had AdPlock Plus installed to prevent all the Flash ads, it's a useful option (this was over a year before it was available on Android).
My grandfather was an anternna engineer contracting work for various US agencies (Air Force, Navy, NASA, and some others) for decades. They're well aware of using circular polarization for stuff like this. However, it's not practical to do on the kind of scale discussed here, where you're looking for something that can be put in a cell phone without significantly enlarging the case.
It also limits the frequency range you can use, although depending on how good the digital concelation is this might still work for a relatively tight band. Oh, and there will be interference patterns beyond just the third antenna. If the receiver is in the wrong place, it will get the same massive cancelation.
HAM radio (in the "real" sense, where the H shands for HF) uses Over quite heavily, as the signal you're picking up is often coming from thousands of miles away and isn't really any higher than the ambient noise level. Even if there is a mic click, it's entirely possible that the other side can't hear it clearly. The communication is also usually much more conversational, and may include pauses while one party keeps the mic keyed briefly (or releases it but expect to pick it up again imminently).
I thought that was supposed to mean the people who are "defending" Wikileaks, Anonymous et. al.
It's unfortunate that the writing isn't very good, because the point he's trying to make (the random troublemaker is different from the commercially motivated is different from the targeted attacker) is a pretty good one.
"Licensing" for "legal" is a valid argument, although the problem is rooted in historical legal decisions. That was the reason I chose the term I did - not because there's a law against it, but because the MAFIAA have a lot of legal weight to throw around. This is the same reason that WP7 doesn't have customizable ringtones in the GUI, either - the OS fully supports them but the RIAA came unglued at the thought of a device which could stream music licensed for personal listening also being able to *play* music intended for public listening (i.e. a ringtone, and no, I'm not making this shit up).
Given how much effort MS goes through to be able to provide streaming music at all, and given that their catalog is avilable for DRM-free purchase, your final claim / accusation is patently untrue. If you want to take such a ridiculous stance, I submit that the burden is on you to explain why the Zune store want DRM-free instead of staying restricted as it had been. The only other service I can think of that also provides streaming subscription music legally from major labels, on demand, is Rhapsody. They use DRM as well, although they have at least some of their catalog available as MP3 download.
Wow... you planning on starting a garden, or do you really just love tossing manure around?
Zune is one of many parts of WP7, but "zune-based" is completely inaccurate.
WP7 can play streaming music, which for legal reasons MS can only provide DRMed (though you can also download DRM-free MP3s, and play them / copy them between PCs). I suppose you think any system that has any form of DRM at all is "drm-laden" though... I hope you never buy commercial DVDs.
Anything you can point to that justifies calling the man a "deadweight" executive? A good exec can do a lot for a company. If nothing else, he's frank and articulate, and doesn't try to conceal problems.
Of all the accusations you could level at WP7, you chose "slow" for some reason. That pretty much cripples your credibility. Why not complain about how it launched without HTML5 support, or some actually valid complaint? Running on identical hardware, WP7 performs better than Android (http://wmpoweruser.com/windows-phone-7-vs-android-gingerbread-on-the-htc-hd2/).
The N900 had some good things going on its software for a Linux handheld (bear in mind that the vast majority of the world has no interest in Linux, and neither Android nor WebOS make a big deal out of their choice of kernel in advertising). Its hardware was out of date two years ago, though. Slowish processor, low RAM, and for $DEITY's sake a resistive touchscreen... it was obsolete at release (late 2009).
How so? Serious question, what have you found that IE9 can't do but (mobile) WebKit can? The whole idea behind IE9 is that you can use exactly the same HTML(5) and CSS(3) as for other browsers, but IE9 will (sometimes) do it faster.
The current WP7 browser is based on IE7, so yeah, it's shoddy in that sense (it actually works well in the little testing I've given it, including some sites that mobile WebKit can't handle). The point of this announcement is that the next version of the WP7 browser *won't* be "shoddy" any more.
Well, and 4 of the 9 known WP7 models...