A lot has already been said about it, with passionate arguments for and against either side, but I will simply say that I am always for libertarian attitudes. I could never be called a cypherpunk or an anarchist, but I believe that everything that protects the citizen from being controlled by someone (especially the government) can do more good than evil. The potential for misuse of privacy-enforcing technology in the Internet and elsewhere (which almost synonymously means the free access to strong cryptography by common citizens, as opposed to members of so-called "security" or "intelligence" organs) is clearly outweighed by its potential for benefitting people.
Besides, I think that shifting the discussion to the danger of misuse by terrorists and common criminals, as it all too often happens, is only a diverting manoeuvre. The real issue is power shift. George Orwell pointed in 1984 that "power is not a means, it is an end in itself (...) the purpose of power is power." (I am quoting by memory, so I apologize if I am not quoting his words verbatim.) I believe he was right. People who have power don't relinquish it easily. And the world is going through a major power shift, of which the Internet itself is both a symptom and a vehicle. Strong cryptography has the potential to accelerate the power shift even more, by giving "power to the people" to a degree far beyond John Lennon's wildest dreams.
I think they are bad for everyone, and doomed to fall in a not very long time, but from the standpoint of those governments such restrictions are not as stupid as they seem to be at first glance. If powerful people were stupid, they wouldn't be powerful. So of course Washington knew that some way or the other PGP would leak beyond American frontiers (and of course Phil Zimmermann's legal problems were a purely political measure, an affirmation of power). Of course they know that all major strong cryptographic algorithms are thoroughly described in books and academical papers available throughout the world, and that anyone with some basic knowledge can program an implementation of them (not to mention the use of OCR technology to produce compilable sources from printed listings, which, oddly enough, can be legally exported from the U.S. - this is what a European team of volunteers has done to produce the "international" version of PGP). Of course they know that if big crime and terror want strong cryptography, they will have it anyway, because they can pay for it (and being already outlaws, they couldn't care less about ITAR or any other regulation). Of course they know that if American companies can't make money selling cryptography software abroad, others will (there are many commercial vendors of good strong cryptographic software in such countries as Switzerland and Israel, for example). And this is why they of course also know that the restrictions will fall sooner or later. I doubt, for example, that France's paranoiac regulations which forbid French citizens of even sending encrypted messages will resist the European Union and the euro...
But, while I praise and value enormously the efforts of privacy activists, particularly in making information available so that people can form their own judgment, I think it's the big money currently not being earned by large corporations that will ultimately settle the question, dooming ITAR and other such regulations. The powerful ones are simply determined not to give up their power easily, not to give in without a fight. They are trying to gain some extra time to see if they can change things in their favor, through key escrow and other more political than technical measures. But they can't really stop the power shift. Nobody can.
Windows Solitaire! What? No Doom, Quake, Myst, Mortal Kombat, Duke Nukem? Definitely not. I really don't have any patience for shooting aliens, beating up strong guys, piloting spaceships or jet fighters at dizzying speeds, or meandering through confusing fantastic plots. And I really don't like to be pressured to make a move in a second or die. I just don't have such macho fantasies of power and omnipotence, and I really don't like to feel adrenaline flowing through my veins. Solitaire is light, easy and helps me get my mind busy while I think of something else on the background. I also like Taipei (a variation of Mah-Jongg), but in fact I rarely ever play any of them. I'm simply not fond of games, period.
A Brazilian can never give a truly fair answer to this question, because Macs are extremely rare here in Brazil, where most of its few users are, not incidentally, chiefly musicians, multimedia, publishing and design professionals. There must be no more than a few tens of thousands of Macs in Brazil, versus more than 2 million PCs. Most people here have never even seen a Mac - including many experienced and competent computer and information systems professionals - and I have sat to work on a Mac on just one occasion. I have found neither its interface as easy and intuitive, nor its operating system as stable as people say it is (even though it's certainly more stable than the manic-depressive Windows 3.1 used to be). Some interface details actually irritated me, such as having only one menu bar for all applications - this reduces flexibility, in my opinion. (In fact, if you ask me what is the best graphical user interface I have seen, I'd tell you that it's Open Windows, which runs under Sun Microsystems' Solaris avatar of Unix. Now THAT is a really intelligent and user-friendly interface! Those who say that Microsoft copied lots of things from MacOS to put into Windows 95 should take a look at Open Windows to see what their real source of inspiration seems to have been.)
It's out of question that the Mac has many superior features, notably concerning multimedia and the remarkably efficient way the Mac deals with peripherals, and Apple was right in saying that "Windows 95 = Mac 88," but the Mac's closed, inaccessible and proprietary architecture is a policy for which Apple is now paying a heavy price, and the comparatively smaller availability of software (especially such "serious" packages as database management systems, language compilers and systems development tools, in spite of a well-established tradition of superb Mac software in the multimedia, design and publishing market niches) make it lag behind the somewhat clumsy but well-established PCs. Anyway, here in Brazil this is a useless and irrelevant question - Macintosh software, hardware components and peripherals, support and expertise are extremely hard to find here, so much as to prevent it to be used by anyone who doesn't have a very specific need in mind.
Yes. Due to what appeared to be a motherboard failure (boo-hoo!), I was recently forced to upgrade it. The upgrade has left me tight of money, but you can never really regret such things... Now my PC configuration is:
It's a literally homemade configuration mounted into a full tower cabinet with advanced power supply features. The system runs Windows 95. (Of course I'm waiting for Windows 98, like anyone, but when it comes I guess I won't rush to the stores to be the first to buy it.)
In addition to that, I also have:
Hopefully not, and apparently not. Microsoft has done a great service to many people in the world, making computer software more popular, easy to use and accessible, and I would like to see it doing more good things in the future, but I would hate to see it (or any other company) as the sole market standard. Microsoft software tends to be heavy, slow and large - disk space and memory are becoming cheaper, but this is not a reason good enough for me to double my hard disk and RAM every year just for Bill's sake. In non-English-speaking countries, Microsoft's translation policy can be a nightmare: MS products in Portuguese are full of grotesque spelling, grammar and usage mistakes, and are often incompatible with foreign software (for example, McAfee's VirusScan cannot scan Portuguese MS-Word macros, Portuguese MS-Excel does not process English VBA applications without an additional library, and my video board's drivers wouldn't run on my old Portuguese-language Windows 3.11). Fortunately, some innovative companies such as Netscape and Sun are teaching a thing or two to Microsoft, as some time ago Microsoft itself has taught IBM. But you can read more about my opinions on this subject later on.
NT and Unix start from very different premises, and a direct comparison doesn't really make much sense, I think. There is a crucial difference in basic philosophy between both systems, rarely mentioned in the eternal thread of comparing their virtues and flaws. Unix was originally made by computer experts at a research lab, and intended for use by highly trained computer experts in application-oriented environments, while NT was made by a commercial corporation and intended from the start to be used by people with little-to-average specialization, working in a chiefly corporate, data-oriented environment. As it evolves into a more robust system (as it is indeed evolving), and being so much easier (and cheaper) than Unix to install, configure and maintain, corporations (which are the largest buyers in the computer industry, and therefore make all the difference) tend to increasingly shift to NT, because in the long term it promises to evolve into exactly what they want and need, regardless of any possible superiority of Unix from a purely technical standpoint.
Of course, Unix is proven and reliable to a point NT can't yet claim to be, and can't be matched for mission-critical or very heavy applications. The fact that it's still around after more than two decades in such a highly volatile industry is a tribute to the excellence of its concept and design. But Unix is difficult to manage and maintain, requires highly specialized (and expensive) dedicated human resources, and this can be a serious problem in many places and/or situations where NT would be a much more viable and cost-effective alternative. This is why NT is thriving these days, and it looks like it's going to have a long life. But probably not as long a life as Unix has already had.
The latter still have a place in some very data-entry-intensive applications, but GUI-based applications are here to stay - at least until the next quantum leap in user interfaces (natural language processing and speech recognition, which seem to be still many years away). GUIs are easier, they're beautiful, they're fun. And everybody likes that.
All three will continue to have their places, depending on the exact type of application and the user's needs. Applications of all these types will continue to be developed, and the trend is for them to be more and more integrated - to a point where it will be difficult to trace their boundaries. The recent trend toward multi-tiered client-server architecture (particularly with such interesting features as object brokerage) can be seen as a sign of this increasingly blurred environment. I think in a very near future we will be running applications based in many levels at the same time. Perhaps one could talk about "distributed processing," but this expression will probably have a meaning and an architecture which won't look very much like what we now understand for it.
In the past, I used to favor Netscape over MSIE. Until version 2.0 of both browsers, Netscape beat MSIE to a pulp in terms of features, performance, and ease of use. In version 3.0, both browsers became more or less equivalent, but experienced users (like myself) would stick to their good old Navigator interface, and Microsoft understood this, targeting their marketing and product features chiefly at new users, riding the wave of Internet's own growth.
In version 4.0, however, Microsoft has done a great job, and now for the first time I'm using mostly Internet Explorer 4.01, instead of Netscape Navigator 4.05. I was extremely disappointed with Navigator 4.0, which has become too heavy (takes ages to load), has a clumsy new interface (everything now requires more mouse clicks than before), and hasn't really added many new features, at least not those that make a real difference for a user. I still like the Composer very much as a Web page editor (even though it's almost exactly the same Netscape Gold editor of before), and find FrontPage too clumsy and heavy to be practical for most everyday tasks of Web editing, but the other components of the Communicator suite are dismal in comparison with their competition - and I'm not talking only about Microsoft's competition. Try comparing the clumsy Netscape Conference or AOL Instant Messenger (which has been bundled with 4.05) with the agility and power of Mirabilis' ICQ, a program of less than 2 MB...
Internet Explorer 4.0 managed to drop my jaw the first time I used it. The Full Screen feature alone would justify the upgrade. I also like a lot the improved access to Favorites and History. Outlook Express is a much better e-mail client than Netscape Messenger (and, incidentally, it's also much better as an e-mail client than the full-featured Microsoft Outlook 97), but for that sake I still stick to my beloved Pegasus Mail, thanks. I chose to install Active Desktop, the new Web-like interface, and I find it great: once you get used to it, it's much easier and more productive than the traditional Windows 95 interface. However, I don't use the channels ("push" is being very much talked about these days, but I don't think it's really practical and attractive at this stage, especially in dialed-up connections, and as long as it remains a "pull" in disguise...). Navigator is still more stable and reliable than MSIE for downloads (in spite of its unexplainable slowness at that), MSIE still has problems saving Web pages locally, both as HTML and as text, and it doesn't work well with cached files (oops, "Temporary Internet Files"... :-) . Overall, however, MSIE 4.0 is a winner.
Of course, any good Netizen has to have BOTH top browsers, if nothing because there are now incompatible pages, which you can ONLY view with either Navigator or MSIE. This is very bad, of course; I'm always for total compatibility and open standards. But the browser war is not over yet. Microsoft is still losing by 3 x 1... In the long term, it's difficult to say who's going to win the "Web War." Microsoft's power is not to be ignored, but Netscape doesn't do anything other than Internet software, and they are really pros in it. Only time will tell...
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