I have a friend with a 2008 MacBook Pro that absolutely could not, for whatever reason, get Windows 7 to run correctly on Bootcamp. He would start it up and be able to get to the login screen, but his MBP would report the keyboard and touchpad as something non-generic and require a driver that doesn't yet exist for Window 7. He could force-install a generic driver but the exact same thing would happen the next time Windows restarted because it detects a less than ideal driver and replaces it.
Last I checked he was running 7 inside VMware instead, but he'd rather run it without a host OS under Bootcamp. As has been said lower here, it's not about the ability to run Windows 7 on Bootcamp, it's Apple's support of it. What's disappointing is they've had a lot longer than the GA of Windows 7 to put together this "update" and still haven't done it.
You're witnessing the difference between patent infringement and copyright infringement. Patents deal with a concept, idea, etc. Copyrights deal with actual products, be they physical (as in a car, processor, or pen) or intellectual (as in a movie, sound recording, etc). You would probably call the latter "imaginary", but regardless, at the current state of law, they are still considered copyrightable property.
Patents don't automatically translate into profits through sale of goods or services. Patents make up products, but there are many patents that don't ever make it to market in a product. Copyrights, on the other hand, deal with an actual product. Copyrights have intrinsic value because the product in question is available for sale or will be available for sale. Copyrights provide an exclusive right to sell, distribute, and produce a product, not an idea. Therefore, infringement of a copyright is much more damaging to the copyright holder than infringement of a patent, at least in theory. Thus the "harsher" penalties.
Keep patent reform separate from copyright reform because they are different things.
I attend Indiana University. While the majority of our Student Technology Centers (STCs) are either Windows Vista Enterprise or Mac OS X, the Computer Science department has rooms full of Red Had Enterprise Linux workstations.
There are some programs that require a specific OS (like Journalism, Fine Arts, etc) most don't care what OS you use. Moreover, Debian and friends, SUSE, and RHEL are supported just as much as Windows and OS X (there's a 24X7 support line). All of the campus resources support Linux and most are online and don't use ActiveX, so they're browser neutral as well. Our course management and application portal are both open source.
With that said, there is much more commercial software available free to Windows or Mac users (Microsoft Office, all Adobe products, etc) through our IUWare Program. To answer your question though, Linux is supported just as well as the other major OSes.
I agree. However, the article says that this happened in 2005. Does anyone have any idea what the MySpace TOS said back then? Doubtful they were much different, but they could be. Just look at Facebook.
Read the fine print in TFA. You can store HD videos on the Zune. It will automatically down-convert them to 480x272. If you have an HD docking station (not described yet and sold separately) you can output at 720p straight to an HDTV from the Zune.
I completely agree with your opinion on this. However, this isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future because of several reasons:
Offering content that is DRM-free is equivalent to condoning piracy in the MPAA's opinion. Forcing the consumer into a corner is so much more lucrative.
The MPAA is 100% opposed to the concept of fair use. They want you to pay for the DVD, the Blu-Ray, and digital copy. They in no way believe you should have the right to purchase content once in one format and watch it in another.
Pay-per-view is incredibly lucrative. Not only do they make money when you purchase a 24-hour viewing cycle, but you have to pay to watch it again.
If the MPAA, and Sony in particular, can't control every aspect of "their" content, they don't want to play the game and don't think anyone else should have the right to play either (a la Real, Napster, etc). Or worse, they want to change the rules to their advantage (DRM, raising prices for DRM-free music on iTunes, etc).
Apparently not. According to Microsoft partners (i.e. consultants), a team of 2 or 3 consultants can teach a team of 3 or 4 internal people to shim applications in a hands-on fashion. The majority of this training centers around teaching what the shims are and what they do, not actually fixing software. That's reserved for the last 2 days of the 5 day session. During that time the consultant claimed they would shim a minimum of 25 apps to provide a broad understanding for the internal people
Something the article doesn't mention is how the shimming actually works, unless you read the linked Microsoft document. Essentially you use ACT to scour your intranet for software. You can't just look in Add/Remove programs since enterprises are notorious for not actually "installing" apps. The program creates a database of all applications that don't work with Vista/7 and why not. Then you go through and apply shims to the database. Now whenever a program starts up it looks at its internal DB or the external DB (depending on if it's been started before) to see if there are any necessary shims. If there are, it uses them and the user shouldn't notice any issues.
To your point that it's a lot of work, 25 apps shimmed in 2 days by 3 people who are learning to do it is pretty quick. You can always hire the consultants to do it all for you anyway. Plus moving to *nix would definitely require a bunch of hacks on your current system (read a complete rewrite)
This is great for Firefox. I really hope this takes off, pardon the unintended pun. I'm just a little leery about the other browser makers picking this up and running with it. It will need to at least be a de facto standard before Google, Apple, Opera or Microsoft even consider using it. If it's controlled by Mozilla, they're not going to want to.
Also, (at least to me) the fact that it's difficult to write an add-on for a browser if you don't have anything but basic web development skills is what add-ons so useful. You know they're probably not going to be half-baked and have someone who (hopefully) knows what they're doing supporting it. Jetpack could lower the skill set bar too low. So to sum up, great for Firefox, but I don't think this is something that will be used across browsers once it's fully implemented, which it's not (yet)
Microsoft has a slew of people who are more than happy to configure any of their software for you, for a price of course. They're called Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS). To your point, the Air Force asked Microsoft to do the configuration prior to sending them the software. Thus you have tons of features that are disabled by default on install. It's not that it's a different version of XP, it's just a reconfigured version.
What I find questionable is the claim in the article that says to the effect "this is the way it should be" with software releases. In other words, all software should come with maximum security enabled (i.e. all or most features disabled by default) and users can pick and choose what they want to turn on. That's fine for corporations where people are paid to configure systems. However, Joe Consumer who doesn't know anything about enabling components or disabling services will find such a system completely unusable. It no longer will "Just Work".
As far as the Air Force is concerned, getting to a consistent image across their systems should have been the goal, regardless of whether they use Microsoft to "secure" XP. It can be done without a Microsoft tech's help, as you point out. Of course, both of those are much easier said than done. Just my 2 cents
I have several machines, all running several versions of Windows (XP & Vista in both 32- and 64-bit varieties) and I have not seen IE8 automagically installed through Windows Update on them. I have Windows Update set to automatically install updates without asking and the result is exactly what happens with IE7 when you get it off of Windows Update: An installer screen pops up asking if you'd like to install IE8 now, would like to wait, or don't want to install it at all, ever. All have updated to Office 2007 SP2, which was released to Windows Update the same day.
However, I can't speak to what happens when you have IE6 installed on your XP machine and this update comes across the wire. I dropped IE6 over a year ago. Still, I doubt such an upgrade would be forced like this. Also, when I did choose to install IE8 on a machine that has Firefox as the default browser, after the restart, Firefox was still the default. This article is simply FUD. Furthermore, what's wrong with replacing a less standards compliant browser with a more standards compliant browser? Provided you don't change the default browser of course.
That will be their argument. However, in order to claim distribution damages, they have to prove distribution and they've already had their "making available" == distribution theory shot down. I'm sure they'll try to come up with another way, but until they do, they can't claim damages for something they can't prove.
Password size does not necessarily equal security. I have no idea what the password requirements for that bank are, but there is a point of diminishing returns for password length. My university recently switched from passwords of 8 to 32 characters (with the requirement for 2 numbers) to passphrases of 16 to 128 characters. The caveat is that everything must be a word now, which makes dictionary attacks much easier.
A complex alpha-numeric password would be just as (if not more) secure as a longer passphrase (albeit harder to remember, but easier to type) because such a password must be brute forced. So simply because your bank has a maximum length requirement does not necessarily equate to insecurity. There are other factors besides length that determine password security.
And obviously Microsoft is not targeting you since you aren't the "typical user" and you don't even use a compatible OS for any of the offline attributes included with Microsoft Equipt. So your opinion doesn't really matter to Microsoft does it? If they're not going to get your money, why should they listen to your voice?
As I said earlier, for the typical user, eg. not someone who trolls/., this is not a bad deal.
You're not paying for JUST Microsoft Office. You also get Windows Live OneCare, not the greatest, but it's still not just Office. Furthermore, you get the complete Windows Live setup, with email and calendars that you can sync with your work computer. The details about which version of Windows Live Mail you get are fuzzy, but if it's the subscription version you get contacts, email, and calendars that you can sync between multiple computers. So with this one setup you can feasibly replace Office, Email, and security software with one $70 package. That's not a bad deal at all. There aren't many other programs that the typical user has, uses on a regular basis, and receive monthly or weekly updates.
Actually, I was reading an article on Yahoo! today and I could swear they referred to someone as the Chief Innovation Officer. However, in my experience, it's always been:
CEO: Chief Executive Officer
CFO: Chief Financial Officer
CTO: Chief Technology Officer
CIO: Chief Information Officer
COO: Chief Operations Officer
What is you can't?
You can do all of the things listed in TFA, but you can't secure any system period. Unless it's buried in a room no one knows about that is completely undetectable and isn't connected to anything else.
I'll take Redundant Questions for $200 Alex!
Agreed. However, I would like to take this opportunity to applaud the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for their work: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/default.htm/. They've recently gotten a pledge to receive a majority, perhaps all, of the Buffet fortune as well. While he might not have made his money in the most forthcoming of ways, (what millionaire has?) he is putting his money to good use, outside of Microsoft. As for his children, they're well taken care of, but they aren't going to walk out the door when they turn 18, or when Bill and Melinda die, with hundreds of millions of dollars. They have trust funds, but all of the billions are going to the charity, as they should.
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I have a friend with a 2008 MacBook Pro that absolutely could not, for whatever reason, get Windows 7 to run correctly on Bootcamp. He would start it up and be able to get to the login screen, but his MBP would report the keyboard and touchpad as something non-generic and require a driver that doesn't yet exist for Window 7. He could force-install a generic driver but the exact same thing would happen the next time Windows restarted because it detects a less than ideal driver and replaces it.
Last I checked he was running 7 inside VMware instead, but he'd rather run it without a host OS under Bootcamp. As has been said lower here, it's not about the ability to run Windows 7 on Bootcamp, it's Apple's support of it. What's disappointing is they've had a lot longer than the GA of Windows 7 to put together this "update" and still haven't done it.
You're witnessing the difference between patent infringement and copyright infringement. Patents deal with a concept, idea, etc. Copyrights deal with actual products, be they physical (as in a car, processor, or pen) or intellectual (as in a movie, sound recording, etc). You would probably call the latter "imaginary", but regardless, at the current state of law, they are still considered copyrightable property.
Patents don't automatically translate into profits through sale of goods or services. Patents make up products, but there are many patents that don't ever make it to market in a product. Copyrights, on the other hand, deal with an actual product. Copyrights have intrinsic value because the product in question is available for sale or will be available for sale. Copyrights provide an exclusive right to sell, distribute, and produce a product, not an idea. Therefore, infringement of a copyright is much more damaging to the copyright holder than infringement of a patent, at least in theory. Thus the "harsher" penalties.
Keep patent reform separate from copyright reform because they are different things.
I attend Indiana University. While the majority of our Student Technology Centers (STCs) are either Windows Vista Enterprise or Mac OS X, the Computer Science department has rooms full of Red Had Enterprise Linux workstations.
There are some programs that require a specific OS (like Journalism, Fine Arts, etc) most don't care what OS you use. Moreover, Debian and friends, SUSE, and RHEL are supported just as much as Windows and OS X (there's a 24X7 support line). All of the campus resources support Linux and most are online and don't use ActiveX, so they're browser neutral as well. Our course management and application portal are both open source.
With that said, there is much more commercial software available free to Windows or Mac users (Microsoft Office, all Adobe products, etc) through our IUWare Program. To answer your question though, Linux is supported just as well as the other major OSes.
What happens when Good [wikipedia.org] and evil [wikipedia.org] combine?
Good+Evil = Google
There, fixed that for you.
The time has come to stop viewing Google as the underdog and realize they're just as good and bad as everyone else.
I agree. However, the article says that this happened in 2005. Does anyone have any idea what the MySpace TOS said back then? Doubtful they were much different, but they could be. Just look at Facebook.
Read the fine print in TFA. You can store HD videos on the Zune. It will automatically down-convert them to 480x272. If you have an HD docking station (not described yet and sold separately) you can output at 720p straight to an HDTV from the Zune.
I completely agree with your opinion on this. However, this isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future because of several reasons:
If the MPAA, and Sony in particular, can't control every aspect of "their" content, they don't want to play the game and don't think anyone else should have the right to play either (a la Real, Napster, etc). Or worse, they want to change the rules to their advantage (DRM, raising prices for DRM-free music on iTunes, etc).
Apparently not. According to Microsoft partners (i.e. consultants), a team of 2 or 3 consultants can teach a team of 3 or 4 internal people to shim applications in a hands-on fashion. The majority of this training centers around teaching what the shims are and what they do, not actually fixing software. That's reserved for the last 2 days of the 5 day session. During that time the consultant claimed they would shim a minimum of 25 apps to provide a broad understanding for the internal people
Something the article doesn't mention is how the shimming actually works, unless you read the linked Microsoft document. Essentially you use ACT to scour your intranet for software. You can't just look in Add/Remove programs since enterprises are notorious for not actually "installing" apps. The program creates a database of all applications that don't work with Vista/7 and why not. Then you go through and apply shims to the database. Now whenever a program starts up it looks at its internal DB or the external DB (depending on if it's been started before) to see if there are any necessary shims. If there are, it uses them and the user shouldn't notice any issues.
To your point that it's a lot of work, 25 apps shimmed in 2 days by 3 people who are learning to do it is pretty quick. You can always hire the consultants to do it all for you anyway. Plus moving to *nix would definitely require a bunch of hacks on your current system (read a complete rewrite)
Oh is that all?
I guess we now know what the ellipses is in:
All kidding aside though, it can't be considerably harder than doing it the "old fashioned way" if black hats are actually going to all that trouble
This is great for Firefox. I really hope this takes off, pardon the unintended pun. I'm just a little leery about the other browser makers picking this up and running with it. It will need to at least be a de facto standard before Google, Apple, Opera or Microsoft even consider using it. If it's controlled by Mozilla, they're not going to want to.
Also, (at least to me) the fact that it's difficult to write an add-on for a browser if you don't have anything but basic web development skills is what add-ons so useful. You know they're probably not going to be half-baked and have someone who (hopefully) knows what they're doing supporting it. Jetpack could lower the skill set bar too low. So to sum up, great for Firefox, but I don't think this is something that will be used across browsers once it's fully implemented, which it's not (yet)
Microsoft has a slew of people who are more than happy to configure any of their software for you, for a price of course. They're called Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS). To your point, the Air Force asked Microsoft to do the configuration prior to sending them the software. Thus you have tons of features that are disabled by default on install. It's not that it's a different version of XP, it's just a reconfigured version.
What I find questionable is the claim in the article that says to the effect "this is the way it should be" with software releases. In other words, all software should come with maximum security enabled (i.e. all or most features disabled by default) and users can pick and choose what they want to turn on. That's fine for corporations where people are paid to configure systems. However, Joe Consumer who doesn't know anything about enabling components or disabling services will find such a system completely unusable. It no longer will "Just Work".
As far as the Air Force is concerned, getting to a consistent image across their systems should have been the goal, regardless of whether they use Microsoft to "secure" XP. It can be done without a Microsoft tech's help, as you point out. Of course, both of those are much easier said than done. Just my 2 cents
I have several machines, all running several versions of Windows (XP & Vista in both 32- and 64-bit varieties) and I have not seen IE8 automagically installed through Windows Update on them. I have Windows Update set to automatically install updates without asking and the result is exactly what happens with IE7 when you get it off of Windows Update: An installer screen pops up asking if you'd like to install IE8 now, would like to wait, or don't want to install it at all, ever. All have updated to Office 2007 SP2, which was released to Windows Update the same day.
However, I can't speak to what happens when you have IE6 installed on your XP machine and this update comes across the wire. I dropped IE6 over a year ago. Still, I doubt such an upgrade would be forced like this. Also, when I did choose to install IE8 on a machine that has Firefox as the default browser, after the restart, Firefox was still the default. This article is simply FUD. Furthermore, what's wrong with replacing a less standards compliant browser with a more standards compliant browser? Provided you don't change the default browser of course.
What about weighing the suspected offender against a duck... Because obviously very small rocks are out of the question.
Probably the same people still holding on to hope that the earth is flat!
A fathom is a measure of depth or line length: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fathom#Use_of_the_fathom/. Clever use of alliteration though. :)
Actually, I would rather they use a consistent measurement for distance at all times. No more use of meters and feet in the same device!
That will be their argument. However, in order to claim distribution damages, they have to prove distribution and they've already had their "making available" == distribution theory shot down. I'm sure they'll try to come up with another way, but until they do, they can't claim damages for something they can't prove.
Password size does not necessarily equal security. I have no idea what the password requirements for that bank are, but there is a point of diminishing returns for password length. My university recently switched from passwords of 8 to 32 characters (with the requirement for 2 numbers) to passphrases of 16 to 128 characters. The caveat is that everything must be a word now, which makes dictionary attacks much easier.
A complex alpha-numeric password would be just as (if not more) secure as a longer passphrase (albeit harder to remember, but easier to type) because such a password must be brute forced. So simply because your bank has a maximum length requirement does not necessarily equate to insecurity. There are other factors besides length that determine password security.
And obviously Microsoft is not targeting you since you aren't the "typical user" and you don't even use a compatible OS for any of the offline attributes included with Microsoft Equipt. So your opinion doesn't really matter to Microsoft does it? If they're not going to get your money, why should they listen to your voice?
/., this is not a bad deal.
As I said earlier, for the typical user, eg. not someone who trolls
You're not paying for JUST Microsoft Office. You also get Windows Live OneCare, not the greatest, but it's still not just Office. Furthermore, you get the complete Windows Live setup, with email and calendars that you can sync with your work computer. The details about which version of Windows Live Mail you get are fuzzy, but if it's the subscription version you get contacts, email, and calendars that you can sync between multiple computers. So with this one setup you can feasibly replace Office, Email, and security software with one $70 package. That's not a bad deal at all. There aren't many other programs that the typical user has, uses on a regular basis, and receive monthly or weekly updates.
Actually, I was reading an article on Yahoo! today and I could swear they referred to someone as the Chief Innovation Officer. However, in my experience, it's always been:
CEO: Chief Executive Officer
CFO: Chief Financial Officer
CTO: Chief Technology Officer
CIO: Chief Information Officer
COO: Chief Operations Officer
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/laptops/0,39029450,49297849-1,00.htm Here's the link to the first page...if you care.
By that time they might be up to WINE 2.0!
What is you can't? You can do all of the things listed in TFA, but you can't secure any system period. Unless it's buried in a room no one knows about that is completely undetectable and isn't connected to anything else. I'll take Redundant Questions for $200 Alex!
Agreed. However, I would like to take this opportunity to applaud the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for their work: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/default.htm/. They've recently gotten a pledge to receive a majority, perhaps all, of the Buffet fortune as well. While he might not have made his money in the most forthcoming of ways, (what millionaire has?) he is putting his money to good use, outside of Microsoft. As for his children, they're well taken care of, but they aren't going to walk out the door when they turn 18, or when Bill and Melinda die, with hundreds of millions of dollars. They have trust funds, but all of the billions are going to the charity, as they should.