Really? Because I use Konqueror's URI handlers for all of this: sftp, zip, tar, http, https, and ftp, and they are all useful. The problem with the Windows URI bug is that it allows an attacker to launch arbitrary programs, even programs without registered URI handlers, by passing arguments to certain registered programs (at least that is how I understand this vulnerability). It would be like using one of my KDE URI handlers to open a terminal; a malicious website could use that to start executing random commands on my system.
The difference is that most Windows users are running as administrator, so an attacker could use this vulnerability to install something bad like a keystroke logger or some sort of worm, whereas they could only corrupt my home directory. This is just another example of why you shouldn't run as a superuser on a system connected to a public network...or any system at all.
Oh no, don't you get it? Through the "power of music," Elton John hopes to bring down the net.
To bad for him that most people can't hear the difference between a phonograph record, a CD, and an MP3 or Vorbis rendered album. Better still, most people don't care -- if there is a musical revolution, the first thing that will happen is that it will become available in some format online.
Sir John --
Please take time to talk to someone who doesn't know anything about music, or about technology, and find out how they actually live their life.
-- Me
First of all, Apple does not make "good hardware," they have been sued for cutting corners on things like display back lights. And anyone who bases their OS on BSD will have something solid (even though OS X still has more unpatched vulnerabilities than *BSD).
That being said, I agree, Apple shouldn't have to develop software for their competitors. But their competitors should have access to the iPod/iPhone interface specs. Why do people only seem to complain when a company in a monopoly position doesn't release technical information? Apple should be held to the same standard: they should release technical information so that third party developers can create software that syncs up with the iPhone (if Apple's software is so good, then the fact that other people produce lower-quality applications shouldn't be a problem...unless...).
Of course, Apple has never been very developer friendly, and they have always tried to hide technical details. Why do they keep trying to roll with the strategy that failed during the 80s?
It is the result of the neoconservative movement. Anyone who speaks out for consumer rights or against ruthless business practices is labeled as some kind of extreme left communist, and here in America, that is considered to be a bad thing. In fact, under the current administration, being labeled a "liberal" is a bad thing. And unfortunately, not only do consumers wind up losing, but engineers and programmers also end up losing because of software patents and large monopolies like Microsoft (God forbid we should ever say that a business is too big).
There are many, many problems here. First of all, this guy seems to think that monetary damage is the only form of damage possible, but there are plenty of worthless trinkets that have meaning to people. Second of all, I have always thought that the idea that file sharing is costing record companies money is a bit dubious, since during the height of Kazaa, they were posting record breaking profits. The problem is that economists like to think that anything that WOULD have been a sale but wasn't is actually a loss -- but that is stupid in a world where you are selling data that can be copied instantly. It is especially stupid when the overwhelming majority of downloaders wouldn't have purchased the album anyway -- usually because they couldn't have possibly afforded to (consider the cost of buying 20GB of music).
[This views and opinions in this post are not necessarily reflective of the views and opinions of my employer]
No, it has an impact on the opinion of those students about software. When I started working at Red Hat, the "non-technical" employees were given a brief, 2 hour tutorial in how to use GNOME and OOo. They must be doing all right, because as far as I know they are still employed. The reason is simple: schools don't teach people the details of how to use office suites. In high school, such things were not considered relevant to the curriculum, and in college, such things were expected to have been learned in high school. Microsoft knows that it is just a question of exposure, and the way people think about their computer. How often do you hear the word "powerpoint" used as a synonym for "presentation" or "slideshow?" I've heard people refer to a presentation created in OOo, in OpenDocument format, refer to it as a "powerpoint."
Very few people even know how to use the features of MS Office that would necessitate some level of retraining in OOo. Very people even need those features -- most people just use a word processor (I know, everyone is queuing up the, "you obviously haven't been in the workplace very" comments, to which I reply: you obviously haven't been outside your line of work much) and a presentation creator. Spreadsheets are about the only thing where the incompatibility becomes noticeable, and even then, a 10 minute tutorial on where each button is would suffice for most people. The fact of the matter is, most people are not power users, and this is no more true today than it was 30 years ago. Most people just don't know about the powerful features their software offers them.
...the same way that a company can demand royalties on a product it contributed NOTHING to. I thank Norway for taking a stand against this kind of stupidity, and hope for a day when the US will.
You think that the idea of creating the need for something that is actually useless is new? Please -- throughout history, there have been snake-oil peddlers, gypsies, and merchants of various kinds working to convince people that they *need* one thing or another. Just look at some of the potions sold during the 19th century. Really, society changes very little -- a slight change in what is appropriate to discuss, or perhaps a greater interest in one particular aspect of life or another, but really, major changes to society occur rarely. Sexual "revolution"? People had premarital and extramarital affairs all the time before the hippies, with only a slight change in societal attitudes towards it (from it happening all the time but officially looked down upon to it happening all the time and approved by a group that was officially looked down upon). Global communications is a slightly bigger change, but only in the sense that the scope of our communications has become larger -- we still discuss the same things people discussed before the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries (leaders, heroes, losers, philosophies...). Postwar life? Just high-tech ways of doing the same things -- cooking, cleaning, working, and entertainment.
Of course, there have been *real* changes -- medicine, for example, and the change in our perception of the value of our lives. But in general, *real* changes are few and far between -- probably because, as a species, we have the same needs and instincts today that we had a thousand years ago. No matter how advanced we become, we still get hungry, we still get tired, and we still follow our instinctual need to form and protect social groups -- just like chimpanzees (surprise? Only if you believe the "theory" of intelligent design). And just like chimps, our social groups change slightly with each generation, only to serve the same functions and do the same things.
People just don't like to think that their intellect is sometimes the servant of their subconscious instincts.
Come on. I can't think of anybody who wasn't able to get a GMail account. If a large number of users necessitated a drop in storage, it would have happened a long time ago.
The fact that Microsoft function do so much is probably the cause of the clutter. The more a function does, the more system calls it will wind up making.
Personally, though, I would question whether or not such drawings are accurate. It is easy to make a graph with 50 nodes look more complex than a graph with 200 nodes by arranging things oddly. and forcing more lines to cross each other at more locations.
I've been using win2k with Qemu for a while now on my FC5 system. It works very well, at almost native speed with the Qemu kernel module. Running most Windows apps, including MS Office and Developer Studio, is not a problem -- only those that require odd hardware will require serious configuration. Just don't try running Vista, which is slow even at native speed.
Only if you install a bootloader also. But if you are doing things that way, you might as well just download a pre-installed disk image and dump it onto a hard drive, the way that enterprises would install it (only they set up the disk image themselves).
Yes, but there is no reason to get Vista if you can't run its new features. Personally, I don't even feel that the new features are worth the money, but that is beside the point. I know plenty of people who upgraded from 2000 to XP..and then chose an XP interface that mirrored the 2000 interface. Why? Why did they pay all that money for the same kernel doing the same thing with the same interface? The same is try for Vista -- why pay all that money for Vista, if you are going to use an XP-esque interface, and run the same programs you ran on XP? Is there something about the word "Vista" that turns people on?
HAha! I always loved being able to run something light like NetBSD on old computers that people think "no longer work."
Of course, it is interesting that people think their computers are no longer good enough, especially these days. Yeah, that P5 I toyed with ran a bit slowly, on 64MB ram, but a computer from 2004 with 512MB+ would be fine running just about anything (except Vista). The best part is that most people who upgrade continue using their computer the same way -- they don't even use the new capabilities the upgrade offered them!
But software patents run backwards to the entire idea. First of all, an algorithm is a mathematical function, which is not supposed to be patentable -- and all software can be reduced to functions in lambda calculus, which is a field of math. Technical details aside, software patents have slowed down the progress of the software world, by scaring away small-time inventors and developers who cannot afford patent litigation against a company like IBM or Microsoft. For example, perhaps it would be a good idea to write a kernel module that created redundant backups of data on every write request (software RAID, which might be useful for network drives). Turns out this is already patented (United States patent # 5,072,368, Duplication of I/O Requests in a Computer Operating System, 1991), but who would ever have known about it? In fact, IBM (the holder of the patent) never actually implemented the idea!
Let's get real for a second here -- software wasn't patented prior to the 1980's, and things were FINE. UNIX was developed without patents, as was Visicalc. Imagine if the concepts behind UNIX and Visicalc were patented. The PC would never have been anything more than a hobbyist's toy, and large corporations would have a mess of royalties to deal with for the simplest operations. Now, in a world of software patents, there are companies who tell their developers NOT to research patents, in an attempt to use a "we didn't know it was patented" defense. There are so many algorithms, and so many ways an algorithm can creep into code without the developer realizing it, that it makes no sense to patent software, because there is nothing to protect!
On the other hand, copyrighting code makes perfect sense. There is no way to make a duplicate of something unknowingly, and it is possible to copyright mathematical works (just look at the front cover of a math textbook). And small-time developers don't have to worry about Microsoft or Apple attacking their work -- as long as the code was written by them. Note that UNIX remained a big money maker, even when the only protection for UNIX vendors was copyright.
Which, if you RTFA, is the exact opposite of what is true -- if their repositories are as poorly constructed as TFA says, then removing products would actually speed up the release! The problem here is that Microsoft has put way to many people on the Vista team, too many layers of management, and extremely poor communication between the sub-teams. The entire situation makes me wonder how Vista ever became stable enough for an actual release...
DRM -- now, you can be sure that you are only renting digital data, regardless of what it actually is.
Aero -- your brand new computer will run slower than my old 386 running 3.1
Office 2007 -- need I say more?
And you came to this conclusion...how? I've seen Fedora set up in under an hour, complete with Open Office and any other software that is needed. It is also simpler to install -- no registration required, no fiddling around with serial numbers that may be invalidated later, no bullshit. The installer is more clearly worded than the Windows installer, and by default creates limited user accounts. Usability studies and personal experience have shown that KDE/GNOME are as easy for an end user to use as Explorer is -- the differences are in the administration, which end users shouldn't be concerned with in a public access setup. Sure, you pay a Linux administrator more (on average), but a single Linux administrator can manage more systems at a time than a Windows administrator.
The real reason for Windows' continued dominance is a combination of friction, marketing, and certain specialty software that isn't available for Linux (yet). Friction and marketing have kept Linux away from home users and nonspecialized offices. Specialized engineering and accounting software is the main reason that Linux hasn't been adopted by engineers and accountants.
And there are legitimate reasons to bash Linux, if you feel you must. Let's start with the disorganized nature of the kernel, which has more explitives per line of code than any other software project. How about the poor bluetooth support, or the difficulty with PDAs (why is it so hard to sync up a pocket pc? Windows Mobile 2003 supports vCard and vCal files, which are easily produced!)? Or the security holes (confused? Compare RHEL with OpenBSD...)? Come on, at least present the Linux fans with some kind of challenge...
Except that the Linux community would be damaged also. A patent war would mean LAWSUITS, and that would mean that kernel.org would start received cease-and-desist letters (and possibly being forced to temporarily follow them while cases are resolved), and the hundreds of other mirrors would probably face the same thing. The onslaught of hundreds of patent cases would be like the legal version of a DOS attack, crippling the ability of Linux developers to develop, potentially wrecking the thousands of small projects out there (just by scaring developers away during the chaos)...it's mutually assured destruction. And the aftermath wouldn't be much better -- software would be gutted left and right, left half-functional because the other half was already patented by somebody else. It would be like GIF on a global scale.
I know, this is where everybody says, "No, GNU is protected, at best there are a dozen patent issues to be resolved..."
When you are told that you need to upgrade a server cluster, and there are time constraints (such as the servers being in use), you really can't sit there hacking away until everything works. That is how Redhat makes its money -- it sells support, so that businesses don't sit there tinkering like Fedora or Debian users, which actually saves money in the long run. Yes, with enough time you can force one distro to run software compiled for another distro, or even create a "universal" system that will run any binary...but time costs businesses money. And yes, other distros could create those wrappers...but they cannot give you the software (GPL terms), nor can they provide support for it. Like I said, it's about servers and enterprises, not home users.
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The difference is that most Windows users are running as administrator, so an attacker could use this vulnerability to install something bad like a keystroke logger or some sort of worm, whereas they could only corrupt my home directory. This is just another example of why you shouldn't run as a superuser on a system connected to a public network...or any system at all.
To bad for him that most people can't hear the difference between a phonograph record, a CD, and an MP3 or Vorbis rendered album. Better still, most people don't care -- if there is a musical revolution, the first thing that will happen is that it will become available in some format online.
Sir John -- Please take time to talk to someone who doesn't know anything about music, or about technology, and find out how they actually live their life. -- Me
Read the Gang of 4 design patterns book...
That being said, I agree, Apple shouldn't have to develop software for their competitors. But their competitors should have access to the iPod/iPhone interface specs. Why do people only seem to complain when a company in a monopoly position doesn't release technical information? Apple should be held to the same standard: they should release technical information so that third party developers can create software that syncs up with the iPhone (if Apple's software is so good, then the fact that other people produce lower-quality applications shouldn't be a problem...unless...).
Of course, Apple has never been very developer friendly, and they have always tried to hide technical details. Why do they keep trying to roll with the strategy that failed during the 80s?
It is the result of the neoconservative movement. Anyone who speaks out for consumer rights or against ruthless business practices is labeled as some kind of extreme left communist, and here in America, that is considered to be a bad thing. In fact, under the current administration, being labeled a "liberal" is a bad thing. And unfortunately, not only do consumers wind up losing, but engineers and programmers also end up losing because of software patents and large monopolies like Microsoft (God forbid we should ever say that a business is too big).
There are many, many problems here. First of all, this guy seems to think that monetary damage is the only form of damage possible, but there are plenty of worthless trinkets that have meaning to people. Second of all, I have always thought that the idea that file sharing is costing record companies money is a bit dubious, since during the height of Kazaa, they were posting record breaking profits. The problem is that economists like to think that anything that WOULD have been a sale but wasn't is actually a loss -- but that is stupid in a world where you are selling data that can be copied instantly. It is especially stupid when the overwhelming majority of downloaders wouldn't have purchased the album anyway -- usually because they couldn't have possibly afforded to (consider the cost of buying 20GB of music).
No, it has an impact on the opinion of those students about software. When I started working at Red Hat, the "non-technical" employees were given a brief, 2 hour tutorial in how to use GNOME and OOo. They must be doing all right, because as far as I know they are still employed. The reason is simple: schools don't teach people the details of how to use office suites. In high school, such things were not considered relevant to the curriculum, and in college, such things were expected to have been learned in high school. Microsoft knows that it is just a question of exposure, and the way people think about their computer. How often do you hear the word "powerpoint" used as a synonym for "presentation" or "slideshow?" I've heard people refer to a presentation created in OOo, in OpenDocument format, refer to it as a "powerpoint."
Very few people even know how to use the features of MS Office that would necessitate some level of retraining in OOo. Very people even need those features -- most people just use a word processor (I know, everyone is queuing up the, "you obviously haven't been in the workplace very" comments, to which I reply: you obviously haven't been outside your line of work much) and a presentation creator. Spreadsheets are about the only thing where the incompatibility becomes noticeable, and even then, a 10 minute tutorial on where each button is would suffice for most people. The fact of the matter is, most people are not power users, and this is no more true today than it was 30 years ago. Most people just don't know about the powerful features their software offers them.
...the same way that a company can demand royalties on a product it contributed NOTHING to. I thank Norway for taking a stand against this kind of stupidity, and hope for a day when the US will.
You think that the idea of creating the need for something that is actually useless is new? Please -- throughout history, there have been snake-oil peddlers, gypsies, and merchants of various kinds working to convince people that they *need* one thing or another. Just look at some of the potions sold during the 19th century. Really, society changes very little -- a slight change in what is appropriate to discuss, or perhaps a greater interest in one particular aspect of life or another, but really, major changes to society occur rarely. Sexual "revolution"? People had premarital and extramarital affairs all the time before the hippies, with only a slight change in societal attitudes towards it (from it happening all the time but officially looked down upon to it happening all the time and approved by a group that was officially looked down upon). Global communications is a slightly bigger change, but only in the sense that the scope of our communications has become larger -- we still discuss the same things people discussed before the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries (leaders, heroes, losers, philosophies...). Postwar life? Just high-tech ways of doing the same things -- cooking, cleaning, working, and entertainment. Of course, there have been *real* changes -- medicine, for example, and the change in our perception of the value of our lives. But in general, *real* changes are few and far between -- probably because, as a species, we have the same needs and instincts today that we had a thousand years ago. No matter how advanced we become, we still get hungry, we still get tired, and we still follow our instinctual need to form and protect social groups -- just like chimpanzees (surprise? Only if you believe the "theory" of intelligent design). And just like chimps, our social groups change slightly with each generation, only to serve the same functions and do the same things. People just don't like to think that their intellect is sometimes the servant of their subconscious instincts.
Come on. I can't think of anybody who wasn't able to get a GMail account. If a large number of users necessitated a drop in storage, it would have happened a long time ago.
I don't want to run Vista on anything! Not even my toaster (go BSD!)
Personally, though, I would question whether or not such drawings are accurate. It is easy to make a graph with 50 nodes look more complex than a graph with 200 nodes by arranging things oddly. and forcing more lines to cross each other at more locations.
I've been using win2k with Qemu for a while now on my FC5 system. It works very well, at almost native speed with the Qemu kernel module. Running most Windows apps, including MS Office and Developer Studio, is not a problem -- only those that require odd hardware will require serious configuration. Just don't try running Vista, which is slow even at native speed.
Only if you install a bootloader also. But if you are doing things that way, you might as well just download a pre-installed disk image and dump it onto a hard drive, the way that enterprises would install it (only they set up the disk image themselves).
" If no one upgrades, then Microsoft will have to continue to support XP, etc."
Huh? Why would they have to do that?
Yes, but there is no reason to get Vista if you can't run its new features. Personally, I don't even feel that the new features are worth the money, but that is beside the point. I know plenty of people who upgraded from 2000 to XP..and then chose an XP interface that mirrored the 2000 interface. Why? Why did they pay all that money for the same kernel doing the same thing with the same interface? The same is try for Vista -- why pay all that money for Vista, if you are going to use an XP-esque interface, and run the same programs you ran on XP? Is there something about the word "Vista" that turns people on?
I always liked the 2-floppy NetBSD install. Or, the "yum update" method of upgrading. Oh yeah, Debian...apt-get moo?
HAha! I always loved being able to run something light like NetBSD on old computers that people think "no longer work." Of course, it is interesting that people think their computers are no longer good enough, especially these days. Yeah, that P5 I toyed with ran a bit slowly, on 64MB ram, but a computer from 2004 with 512MB+ would be fine running just about anything (except Vista). The best part is that most people who upgrade continue using their computer the same way -- they don't even use the new capabilities the upgrade offered them!
...by the time Fiji is available, our bones will have long turned to dust...
But software patents run backwards to the entire idea. First of all, an algorithm is a mathematical function, which is not supposed to be patentable -- and all software can be reduced to functions in lambda calculus, which is a field of math. Technical details aside, software patents have slowed down the progress of the software world, by scaring away small-time inventors and developers who cannot afford patent litigation against a company like IBM or Microsoft. For example, perhaps it would be a good idea to write a kernel module that created redundant backups of data on every write request (software RAID, which might be useful for network drives). Turns out this is already patented (United States patent # 5,072,368, Duplication of I/O Requests in a Computer Operating System, 1991), but who would ever have known about it? In fact, IBM (the holder of the patent) never actually implemented the idea!
Let's get real for a second here -- software wasn't patented prior to the 1980's, and things were FINE. UNIX was developed without patents, as was Visicalc. Imagine if the concepts behind UNIX and Visicalc were patented. The PC would never have been anything more than a hobbyist's toy, and large corporations would have a mess of royalties to deal with for the simplest operations. Now, in a world of software patents, there are companies who tell their developers NOT to research patents, in an attempt to use a "we didn't know it was patented" defense. There are so many algorithms, and so many ways an algorithm can creep into code without the developer realizing it, that it makes no sense to patent software, because there is nothing to protect!
On the other hand, copyrighting code makes perfect sense. There is no way to make a duplicate of something unknowingly, and it is possible to copyright mathematical works (just look at the front cover of a math textbook). And small-time developers don't have to worry about Microsoft or Apple attacking their work -- as long as the code was written by them. Note that UNIX remained a big money maker, even when the only protection for UNIX vendors was copyright.
Which, if you RTFA, is the exact opposite of what is true -- if their repositories are as poorly constructed as TFA says, then removing products would actually speed up the release! The problem here is that Microsoft has put way to many people on the Vista team, too many layers of management, and extremely poor communication between the sub-teams. The entire situation makes me wonder how Vista ever became stable enough for an actual release...
All of these new features of Vista:
DRM -- now, you can be sure that you are only renting digital data, regardless of what it actually is.
Aero -- your brand new computer will run slower than my old 386 running 3.1
Office 2007 -- need I say more?
And you came to this conclusion...how? I've seen Fedora set up in under an hour, complete with Open Office and any other software that is needed. It is also simpler to install -- no registration required, no fiddling around with serial numbers that may be invalidated later, no bullshit. The installer is more clearly worded than the Windows installer, and by default creates limited user accounts. Usability studies and personal experience have shown that KDE/GNOME are as easy for an end user to use as Explorer is -- the differences are in the administration, which end users shouldn't be concerned with in a public access setup. Sure, you pay a Linux administrator more (on average), but a single Linux administrator can manage more systems at a time than a Windows administrator.
The real reason for Windows' continued dominance is a combination of friction, marketing, and certain specialty software that isn't available for Linux (yet). Friction and marketing have kept Linux away from home users and nonspecialized offices. Specialized engineering and accounting software is the main reason that Linux hasn't been adopted by engineers and accountants.
And there are legitimate reasons to bash Linux, if you feel you must. Let's start with the disorganized nature of the kernel, which has more explitives per line of code than any other software project. How about the poor bluetooth support, or the difficulty with PDAs (why is it so hard to sync up a pocket pc? Windows Mobile 2003 supports vCard and vCal files, which are easily produced!)? Or the security holes (confused? Compare RHEL with OpenBSD...)? Come on, at least present the Linux fans with some kind of challenge...
I know, this is where everybody says, "No, GNU is protected, at best there are a dozen patent issues to be resolved..."
When you are told that you need to upgrade a server cluster, and there are time constraints (such as the servers being in use), you really can't sit there hacking away until everything works. That is how Redhat makes its money -- it sells support, so that businesses don't sit there tinkering like Fedora or Debian users, which actually saves money in the long run. Yes, with enough time you can force one distro to run software compiled for another distro, or even create a "universal" system that will run any binary...but time costs businesses money. And yes, other distros could create those wrappers...but they cannot give you the software (GPL terms), nor can they provide support for it. Like I said, it's about servers and enterprises, not home users.