I would laugh until I cry if the winners in this turned out to be the Regents of UCSD who probably hold the rights to UCSD Pascal P-System, which is in my opinion the prior art for all this stuff. I assume the average slashdot user recognized at the beginning of.NET that it sounded like P-System all over again. Lets invent a P-Machine (VM), write a compiler for a popular language so it emits P-Code, and voila you have architecture independent source code. Write once compile once, run anywhere (anywhere a p-code interpreter exists. Of course clever programmers with too much time on their hands can convert any one pcode into another. The regents could begin by asserting that ECMA standards/documents were really just reheated P-system, then create derivative lawsuits from there. IANABCL, but as a human with some common sense, I have been wondering since.NET 1.0 why it was any more magical in theory than the p-system, except that it was Microsoft's version and therefore subject to extension and extinguishment.
If you had signed your name, we could avoid hiring you to write any software.. Testing is about creating the highest quality software. If you have any pride in your work, you would want it to be bug free. I have known programmers who thought they were too good to test their own code. They were assholes. If debugging is the art of removing bugs, programming must be the art of putting them in. When people tell me they have found a bug in my software, I get all happy and thank them, because each bug found and corrected puts you that much closer to a perfect product. I don't think there is any magic bullet that makes debugging more fun, or entertaining. But producing quality software is rewarding in many ways.I can hardly believe you asked the question. I can hardly believe they thought the question was worthy of being on today's list.
The company should be placeed in receivership, liquidated, and the proceeds shared among the class of clients with bad boards who were contractually promised certain things.
I found out a while back that if NS thinks your web dns is messed up, they divert your web page to a parking page without telling you. That is bad enough, but worse, the parking page they set up , sends browsers to your competitors. If your business is selling auto-widgets, they do an automatic search, and provide alternative auto-widget vendors on the parking page. This is bad. You pay money to promote your business. and pay to promote your domain, and when potential clients get to your page, they get sent elsewhere to do business. This makes me furious.
I updated my iPhone3G(32) to 4 and that was that. Brick time. Dead as a doornail, no response from any buttons, no acknowledgement when attached by cable to iTunes on Macbook. And it happened the day my AppleCare expired. HA Ha, ulp!#$
The shine is wearing off Apple a little bit, and my fanboi status may not last as long as I do.
I need my iPhone to be a good phone first then some other things later. And I need my MacBook Pro and Mac Pro
to be reliable day after day. If my Mac Pro dies after Apple Care expires, I will be hard pressed to know who to buy
from next.
It doesn't bother me when they make changes as long as I get the new password. Comcast changed mine and refused to give me the new one and I cannot talk to the router any more to ask it if it is healthy. That makes me mad.
I used to make six figures. I worked really hard for it, and I thought I was someone who deserved six figures. Times changed and I don't make six figures any more. I miss the money but not the stress. People who make that kind of money should not assume the will always have it, or that they deserve it. Things can change in the blink of an eye. I would be happy today with five figures. Money is a poor thing to base your self-worth on, but we tend to do it. How much we make does have something to do with our worth to the businesses that employ us, and how they leverage our skills in the market. It is a partnership when things are working right, and programmers don't usually have to pay when a customer cancels an order. Being part of overhead and having less risk gets you less money.
You have a good point.
Please consider my opinion softened substantially
as a result of considering your thoughts.
Thanks for sharing your viewpoint.
Doug
It is not that the information is that private, or that the users think they have privacy, but a fleet of commercial vehicles wardriving on every street in america paid for by the "do no harm" people is a little hard to take. If an individual travels around and collects information, then loses control of it, a few wi-fi access points are disadvantaged. If millions of users network parameters are distributed in machine readable form, that is something else again. I can just see someone selling a CD with all the open access points in america, then there will be a GPS that takes you to the nearest one.
Microsoft has encouraged the pirating of their software in China by publishing their position that it is better
to have Chinese using pirated Windows than other operating systems. I think Windows is a dime on the
street in China, and I think that price is about right considering economy of scale and the amount of time
Windows has been on the market in one form or another.
Just this week I saw an ad on DirecTV for the KIN making it seem like it had a bright new future. I don't know who's add it was, but it seemed compelling enough. They promoted the idea that you could take pictures and maybe movies, then upload them to a site where you could use tools on them and publish them, forever. Certain key phrases made me shudder, like forever. Given that it is being killed now, the people who paid big bucks for national advertising on the satellite can't be too happy about this.
Yes, in the beginning, the DARPA did fund the initial development of the ARPA network, and it's goals did include self-healing in case of link disruption. But at some point, the DARPA powers that be let loose the RFCs. A lot of foreign investment occurred, in infrastructure, and in the development of standards compliant devices used at all levels. Now the global parts of the "Internet" is no longer owned by the US, and although there is quite a lot of knowledge about it resides here, it is a global phenomenon now. The "cat"inet is out of the bag now. We can hope to steer the course through discussion, but I think many governments would take it unkindly should the US try to hurt the global Internet.
If IBM makes a mainframe, do they have to allow Teledyne to make a compatible tape unit? The courts say Yes. Is there any problem with IBM selling theirs at a loss for years to drive Teledyne out of the business of tape systems? Again the courts say yes. These were landmark cases in the early computer industry. As much as IBM hated it, other companies were allowed to sell into their client base. What ever happened to those tape systems? They probably ended up in the control room at the space center at Disneyland. IANABCL, but the parallel seems clear enough to me. I do think it is bait and switch though when they sell you the premium version and later put the ads back in. Vendors that change the deal after they have your money lose market share when the people figure out what is happening. I am mad as hell at Sony about the "other operating system" thing. I will NEVER buy a SONY product again. EVER.
This is a very important issue for me. I run all Mac here, except that I have some electronic test equipment that is USB with Windows based GUI support. I just bought an HP Touch panel computer that comes with WIndows 7 home premium. I do not want to make it sluggish with anti-virus software, and there is no need to have Internet on the machine at all. It is just a Logic Analyzer and Oscilloscope as far as I am concerned. If it turns out that I need to attach Internet to this machine, just so it can stay alive, I will consider that unreasonable. In so many words, my development occurs in a tempest-like environment. If Windows 7 goes into crippled mode a while after I power up the machine, because there is no Internet, I will be calling HP and asking why the machine wasn't clearly marked, "MUST HAVE INTERNET OR OS WILL NOT FUNCTION". I expect this machine to be a turnkey instrument. I don't need security patches because it is not attached to the Internet. I don't need enhancements, because all it needs to run are the legacy instrument apps I am using today. It remains to be seen whether Microsoft can mandate the existence of Internet support for EVERY INSTALLATION of 7. What about people who just cannot get Internet, are they screwed? If XP goes out of support, and 7 must have Internet, certain users will be forced off the platform. I am communicating with my instrument vendors now and begging for Mac OS X versions of the instrument software.
Developing an iPhone app is not a "brain-dead, no-work easy alternative". You have to make a decision to write the app using arcane tools with a non-transportable framework, and very little understanding about the window of opportunity that might bring you rewards for your efforts. Deciding to write an app for the iPhone at this point is like being an author and deciding to write a novel to sell for five dollars on Amazon, but worse, because a novel could at least be re-publlished somewhere else... Although trying to charge real money somewhere else might be hard after racing to the bottom. To make things worse, Apple is carrying forth this new marketing strategy and trying to use if for the iPad platform as well, which may or may not work out that well over time. Just my opinion.
I have COMCAST business service in my home. As slashdot readers know, OpenBSD just released a new version. I downloaded the new version, and was surprised that it took four days and totaled out at 89GB. I thought might be getting the dreaded call from COMCAST. As a side note, just about the time the download completed, my computer hiccuped and the downloaded data got trimmed to 5.6GB. Maybe I was using the wrong download program. Anyway, I don't use torrent at all. I don't download pirate music or movies. I am a software engineer with an insatiable thirst for development files, GNU, sourceforge... I guess what I don't understand is why COMCAST cannot email you an informative note every 25% of the cap, so you can stay aware of your usage. The user could specify the frequency of the notifications. I guess I am lucky to have access to the service I do have, as it seems to be enough for my use today. But I do worry about trends, and I worry that the US providers aren't keeping up with the world, and that we will become a third world country, Internet wise. Another thing that worries me is that my sub-development is too small and Verison didn't feel it would be rational to bring fibre into our loop. So it is louse DSL (old copper) or COMCAST, with no other options. A while back I asked Verison what they could provide, and they offered me a fairly respectable speed for $38/mo. But when install day came, they couldn't stabilize the circuit over 750Kb/128, and they still wanted the entire $38. I had them take their DSL and their CPE and get out. I will have to be satisfied with COMCAST as far into the future as I can see.
That is intriguing. It sounded for a minute like you said that the value of Windows was in the extent to which the developer and user community embraced it, and that the applications are what is important, and not the branded name on the shiny sticker. Back in the day when I sold operating systems, I taught users that the formula for buying a computer was like so... Identify what you need to do. Identify the program that does that. Identify what operating system runs that application, Identify what hardware runs that operating system. If the current users are buying Windows because of the software available on the platform, not because they Like, Trust, or believe in all things Microsoft, but rather because it runs on contemporary hardware, and supports the applications people want to run. Unfortunately, the compatibility that allows the multitude of software to run on their current offerings of Windows, brings with it the vulnerabilities to malware and viruses. I say, GO MICROSOFT. Write a new operating system that looses the backward compatibility but is technically superior (so you say), then hopefully, the causal chain will break, and the software people need will run on something else, and the reasoning that locks in the multitudes will fail, and we will be free. I don't know what can be done for the server market, but I have hopes to see an alternative OS on the desktop in this lifetime. And in the long term, I cannot wait to see if Microsoft has really earned the loyalty of the public or not.
Yes, I admit I am biased. And it is true there is a reason that companies use Windows. And there is a gross injustice here, where several decades of underhanded marketing have made an inefficient, bug-ridden, virus infested, standards perverting, heaping smelly pile of spaghetti code, the "Best Choice" for business and government both. I don't know what to do about it. Smarter and more powerful men than I would like to see something better than Microsoft leading the technical march into the future.
SO I cannot say you are wrong to use MS products, just sorry you don't have better choices, for the sake of your clients, and for the sake of honesty, in those quiet moments when you realize you are tired of the same old problems that come with MS products.
Let me get this straight. You work in a Novell shop, but you hate Novell.
You seem to prefer Windows/Linux, and I won't even get started on what supporting Windows says about you.
I have to agree if the choice was Netware, Windows, or Linux, I would choose linux.
I have written NLMs extensively and don't really like thew environment. I dislike Windows environment even more,
but the Unix environment has seemed like home to me for many years now.
If I had to choose between Netware and Windows, I would take Netware. It is a better operating system than Windows.
All things considered.
First of all, IANABCL.
That having been said, I have been reading these licenses for as long as Microsoft has been around. This license is written carefully to allow no significant rights except to run this version. The license states that if you use the software, you have agreed to the license. That in and of itself is shaky. I don't believe that will stand in court. Now they have a license that doesn't even require you to push a button. There is no protocol by which they assure you have even read the license. Not even a button at the bottom of the license that would require you to at least scroll through it.
The license is specifically written to preclude any development by the users that would be covered with GNU licenses. This is yet another llcense that allows Microsoft to change the terms whenever they like without notification.
It is clear to me that by giving it away for free they would like to contaminate the user base with Microsoft ideas that they will later claim patent rights to, and developers that participated in early use may be precluded from independent development later, much as BIOS authors could not have seen IBM code previously. This software should not be touched with a ten foot pole, unless you think it is good that microsoft should own the robotics space like they do the operating systems space, and we can only hope there are less bugs and viruses in their robotics code, but I wouldn't put money on it.
In the light that our computers are completely out of control, one might ask, "Can we live without these things?".
Well no. Not if you want to do business. UPS requires you to have Windows if you expect to ship............
In 1984,(the book), big brother watched you using a television with a camera. Many people said, "Oh that would never happen".
Well most new computers have webcams, are generally attached to the Internet all the time.
The only thing that stands between this ugly fictional reality and our real-world situation is the security of the software we
run on our computers. Now the company whose operating system seems to be entirely woven out of vulnerabilities has a
program wherein they give the information about these vulnerabilities, not the public, which includes computer scientists
capable of writing defensive code, but rather to the governments of the world, most of which don't like us. Given that the
US government uses Windows, I would think this would be treason. If we didn't have a reason before, I think we have a
reason now to consider getting off WIndows and on to almost anything else, except maybe RedFlag.
A while back trhere was a debacle about the labeling of machines as regards Vista compatibility. I bought three HP Desktops and two Sony VAIOs, all of which could only run the basic versions of Vista because of limitations in the graphics capabilities. Then I watched for years as Microsoft and Balmer dodged the courts about this, even though evidence makes it obvious that collusion occurred between Intel and Microsoft that negatively impacted consumers and businesses alike. Apparently unlimited amounts of cash can keep a company like Microsoft from having to pay even moderate fines for blatant illegal behavior. This is two strikes for Sony with me, the VAIO that wouldn't run Aero, and the PS3s that no longer run Linux. My only difficulty now is making sure before I rent a movie that it didn't come from Sony.
Slashdot Mirror
I would laugh until I cry if the winners in this turned out to be the Regents of UCSD who probably hold the rights to UCSD Pascal P-System, which is in my opinion the prior art for all this stuff. I assume the average slashdot user recognized at the beginning of .NET that it sounded like P-System all over again. Lets invent a P-Machine (VM), write a compiler for a popular language so it emits P-Code, and voila you have architecture independent source code. Write once compile once, run anywhere (anywhere a p-code interpreter exists. Of course clever programmers with too much time on their hands can convert any one pcode into another. The regents could begin by asserting that ECMA standards/documents were really just reheated P-system, then create derivative lawsuits from there. IANABCL, but as a human with some common sense, I have been wondering since .NET 1.0 why it was any more magical in theory than the p-system, except that it was Microsoft's version and therefore subject to extension and extinguishment.
If you had signed your name, we could avoid hiring you to write any software.. Testing is about creating the highest quality software. If you have any pride in your work, you would want it to be bug free. I have known programmers who thought they were too good to test their own code. They were assholes. If debugging is the art of removing bugs, programming must be the art of putting them in. When people tell me they have found a bug in my software, I get all happy and thank them, because each bug found and corrected puts you that much closer to a perfect product. I don't think there is any magic bullet that makes debugging more fun, or entertaining. But producing quality software is rewarding in many ways.I can hardly believe you asked the question. I can hardly believe they thought the question was worthy of being on today's list.
The company should be placeed in receivership, liquidated, and the proceeds shared among the class of clients with bad boards who were contractually promised certain things.
I found out a while back that if NS thinks your web dns is messed up, they divert your web page to a parking page without telling you. That is bad enough, but worse, the parking page they set up , sends browsers to your competitors. If your business is selling auto-widgets, they do an automatic search, and provide alternative auto-widget vendors on the parking page. This is bad. You pay money to promote your business. and pay to promote your domain, and when potential clients get to your page, they get sent elsewhere to do business. This makes me furious.
I updated my iPhone3G(32) to 4 and that was that. Brick time. Dead as a doornail, no response from any buttons, no acknowledgement when attached by cable to iTunes on Macbook. And it happened the day my AppleCare expired. HA Ha, ulp!#$ The shine is wearing off Apple a little bit, and my fanboi status may not last as long as I do. I need my iPhone to be a good phone first then some other things later. And I need my MacBook Pro and Mac Pro to be reliable day after day. If my Mac Pro dies after Apple Care expires, I will be hard pressed to know who to buy from next.
It doesn't bother me when they make changes as long as I get the new password. Comcast changed mine and refused to give me the new one and I cannot talk to the router any more to ask it if it is healthy. That makes me mad.
I used to make six figures. I worked really hard for it, and I thought I was someone who deserved six figures. Times changed and I don't make six figures any more. I miss the money but not the stress. People who make that kind of money should not assume the will always have it, or that they deserve it. Things can change in the blink of an eye. I would be happy today with five figures. Money is a poor thing to base your self-worth on, but we tend to do it. How much we make does have something to do with our worth to the businesses that employ us, and how they leverage our skills in the market. It is a partnership when things are working right, and programmers don't usually have to pay when a customer cancels an order. Being part of overhead and having less risk gets you less money.
You have a good point. Please consider my opinion softened substantially as a result of considering your thoughts. Thanks for sharing your viewpoint. Doug
It is not that the information is that private, or that the users think they have privacy, but a fleet of commercial vehicles wardriving on every street in america paid for by the "do no harm" people is a little hard to take. If an individual travels around and collects information, then loses control of it, a few wi-fi access points are disadvantaged. If millions of users network parameters are distributed in machine readable form, that is something else again. I can just see someone selling a CD with all the open access points in america, then there will be a GPS that takes you to the nearest one.
Microsoft has encouraged the pirating of their software in China by publishing their position that it is better to have Chinese using pirated Windows than other operating systems. I think Windows is a dime on the street in China, and I think that price is about right considering economy of scale and the amount of time Windows has been on the market in one form or another.
Just this week I saw an ad on DirecTV for the KIN making it seem like it had a bright new future. I don't know who's add it was, but it seemed compelling enough. They promoted the idea that you could take pictures and maybe movies, then upload them to a site where you could use tools on them and publish them, forever. Certain key phrases made me shudder, like forever. Given that it is being killed now, the people who paid big bucks for national advertising on the satellite can't be too happy about this.
Yes, in the beginning, the DARPA did fund the initial development of the ARPA network, and it's goals did include self-healing in case of link disruption. But at some point, the DARPA powers that be let loose the RFCs. A lot of foreign investment occurred, in infrastructure, and in the development of standards compliant devices used at all levels. Now the global parts of the "Internet" is no longer owned by the US, and although there is quite a lot of knowledge about it resides here, it is a global phenomenon now. The "cat"inet is out of the bag now. We can hope to steer the course through discussion, but I think many governments would take it unkindly should the US try to hurt the global Internet.
HA HA HA, that's the best posting in this thread so far. I love it. WOW!!
If IBM makes a mainframe, do they have to allow Teledyne to make a compatible tape unit? The courts say Yes. Is there any problem with IBM selling theirs at a loss for years to drive Teledyne out of the business of tape systems? Again the courts say yes. These were landmark cases in the early computer industry. As much as IBM hated it, other companies were allowed to sell into their client base. What ever happened to those tape systems? They probably ended up in the control room at the space center at Disneyland. IANABCL, but the parallel seems clear enough to me. I do think it is bait and switch though when they sell you the premium version and later put the ads back in. Vendors that change the deal after they have your money lose market share when the people figure out what is happening. I am mad as hell at Sony about the "other operating system" thing. I will NEVER buy a SONY product again. EVER.
This is a very important issue for me. I run all Mac here, except that I have some electronic test equipment that is USB with Windows based GUI support. I just bought an HP Touch panel computer that comes with WIndows 7 home premium. I do not want to make it sluggish with anti-virus software, and there is no need to have Internet on the machine at all. It is just a Logic Analyzer and Oscilloscope as far as I am concerned. If it turns out that I need to attach Internet to this machine, just so it can stay alive, I will consider that unreasonable. In so many words, my development occurs in a tempest-like environment. If Windows 7 goes into crippled mode a while after I power up the machine, because there is no Internet, I will be calling HP and asking why the machine wasn't clearly marked, "MUST HAVE INTERNET OR OS WILL NOT FUNCTION". I expect this machine to be a turnkey instrument. I don't need security patches because it is not attached to the Internet. I don't need enhancements, because all it needs to run are the legacy instrument apps I am using today. It remains to be seen whether Microsoft can mandate the existence of Internet support for EVERY INSTALLATION of 7. What about people who just cannot get Internet, are they screwed? If XP goes out of support, and 7 must have Internet, certain users will be forced off the platform. I am communicating with my instrument vendors now and begging for Mac OS X versions of the instrument software.
Developing an iPhone app is not a "brain-dead, no-work easy alternative". You have to make a decision to write the app using arcane tools with a non-transportable framework, and very little understanding about the window of opportunity that might bring you rewards for your efforts. Deciding to write an app for the iPhone at this point is like being an author and deciding to write a novel to sell for five dollars on Amazon, but worse, because a novel could at least be re-publlished somewhere else... Although trying to charge real money somewhere else might be hard after racing to the bottom. To make things worse, Apple is carrying forth this new marketing strategy and trying to use if for the iPad platform as well, which may or may not work out that well over time. Just my opinion.
I have COMCAST business service in my home. As slashdot readers know, OpenBSD just released a new version. I downloaded the new version, and was surprised that it took four days and totaled out at 89GB. I thought might be getting the dreaded call from COMCAST. As a side note, just about the time the download completed, my computer hiccuped and the downloaded data got trimmed to 5.6GB. Maybe I was using the wrong download program. Anyway, I don't use torrent at all. I don't download pirate music or movies. I am a software engineer with an insatiable thirst for development files, GNU, sourceforge... I guess what I don't understand is why COMCAST cannot email you an informative note every 25% of the cap, so you can stay aware of your usage. The user could specify the frequency of the notifications. I guess I am lucky to have access to the service I do have, as it seems to be enough for my use today. But I do worry about trends, and I worry that the US providers aren't keeping up with the world, and that we will become a third world country, Internet wise. Another thing that worries me is that my sub-development is too small and Verison didn't feel it would be rational to bring fibre into our loop. So it is louse DSL (old copper) or COMCAST, with no other options. A while back I asked Verison what they could provide, and they offered me a fairly respectable speed for $38/mo. But when install day came, they couldn't stabilize the circuit over 750Kb/128, and they still wanted the entire $38. I had them take their DSL and their CPE and get out. I will have to be satisfied with COMCAST as far into the future as I can see.
That is intriguing. It sounded for a minute like you said that the value of Windows was in the extent to which the developer and user community embraced it, and that the applications are what is important, and not the branded name on the shiny sticker. Back in the day when I sold operating systems, I taught users that the formula for buying a computer was like so... Identify what you need to do. Identify the program that does that. Identify what operating system runs that application, Identify what hardware runs that operating system. If the current users are buying Windows because of the software available on the platform, not because they Like, Trust, or believe in all things Microsoft, but rather because it runs on contemporary hardware, and supports the applications people want to run. Unfortunately, the compatibility that allows the multitude of software to run on their current offerings of Windows, brings with it the vulnerabilities to malware and viruses. I say, GO MICROSOFT. Write a new operating system that looses the backward compatibility but is technically superior (so you say), then hopefully, the causal chain will break, and the software people need will run on something else, and the reasoning that locks in the multitudes will fail, and we will be free. I don't know what can be done for the server market, but I have hopes to see an alternative OS on the desktop in this lifetime. And in the long term, I cannot wait to see if Microsoft has really earned the loyalty of the public or not.
Are you being sarcastic or not? I am afraid that I cannot tell. It was not clear whether your tongue was in your cheek or not...
Yes, I admit I am biased. And it is true there is a reason that companies use Windows. And there is a gross injustice here, where several decades of underhanded marketing have made an inefficient, bug-ridden, virus infested, standards perverting, heaping smelly pile of spaghetti code, the "Best Choice" for business and government both. I don't know what to do about it. Smarter and more powerful men than I would like to see something better than Microsoft leading the technical march into the future. SO I cannot say you are wrong to use MS products, just sorry you don't have better choices, for the sake of your clients, and for the sake of honesty, in those quiet moments when you realize you are tired of the same old problems that come with MS products.
Let me get this straight. You work in a Novell shop, but you hate Novell. You seem to prefer Windows/Linux, and I won't even get started on what supporting Windows says about you. I have to agree if the choice was Netware, Windows, or Linux, I would choose linux. I have written NLMs extensively and don't really like thew environment. I dislike Windows environment even more, but the Unix environment has seemed like home to me for many years now. If I had to choose between Netware and Windows, I would take Netware. It is a better operating system than Windows. All things considered.
I thought the remaining benefit of running Solaris was ZFS support...
First of all, IANABCL. That having been said, I have been reading these licenses for as long as Microsoft has been around. This license is written carefully to allow no significant rights except to run this version. The license states that if you use the software, you have agreed to the license. That in and of itself is shaky. I don't believe that will stand in court. Now they have a license that doesn't even require you to push a button. There is no protocol by which they assure you have even read the license. Not even a button at the bottom of the license that would require you to at least scroll through it. The license is specifically written to preclude any development by the users that would be covered with GNU licenses. This is yet another llcense that allows Microsoft to change the terms whenever they like without notification. It is clear to me that by giving it away for free they would like to contaminate the user base with Microsoft ideas that they will later claim patent rights to, and developers that participated in early use may be precluded from independent development later, much as BIOS authors could not have seen IBM code previously. This software should not be touched with a ten foot pole, unless you think it is good that microsoft should own the robotics space like they do the operating systems space, and we can only hope there are less bugs and viruses in their robotics code, but I wouldn't put money on it.
In the light that our computers are completely out of control, one might ask, "Can we live without these things?". Well no. Not if you want to do business. UPS requires you to have Windows if you expect to ship............ In 1984,(the book), big brother watched you using a television with a camera. Many people said, "Oh that would never happen". Well most new computers have webcams, are generally attached to the Internet all the time. The only thing that stands between this ugly fictional reality and our real-world situation is the security of the software we run on our computers. Now the company whose operating system seems to be entirely woven out of vulnerabilities has a program wherein they give the information about these vulnerabilities, not the public, which includes computer scientists capable of writing defensive code, but rather to the governments of the world, most of which don't like us. Given that the US government uses Windows, I would think this would be treason. If we didn't have a reason before, I think we have a reason now to consider getting off WIndows and on to almost anything else, except maybe RedFlag.
A while back trhere was a debacle about the labeling of machines as regards Vista compatibility. I bought three HP Desktops and two Sony VAIOs, all of which could only run the basic versions of Vista because of limitations in the graphics capabilities. Then I watched for years as Microsoft and Balmer dodged the courts about this, even though evidence makes it obvious that collusion occurred between Intel and Microsoft that negatively impacted consumers and businesses alike. Apparently unlimited amounts of cash can keep a company like Microsoft from having to pay even moderate fines for blatant illegal behavior. This is two strikes for Sony with me, the VAIO that wouldn't run Aero, and the PS3s that no longer run Linux. My only difficulty now is making sure before I rent a movie that it didn't come from Sony.