Another week, another Week in Review, number 9 already. The past week won’t go down in memory as a memorable one, but despite that, we did get lots of new Macs, an LGPL’d Qt 4.5, a sort-of optional Internet Explorer, and some more details on Snow Leopard – among other things, of course. This week’s my take is about a sport most countries aren’t really interested in – long-track speed skating.
Week in Review
The week started off with news around Intel. First, the company faced a countersuit by Psion over the netbook trademark, which Psion claims is theirs. On the same day, Intel and TSMC announced an agreement in which TSMC will produce the Atom processors, which is significant because Intel usually prides itself on doing all manufacturing in-house.
Qt also saw a new release this week with version 4.5 of the Qt cross-platform application and UI framework, accompanied by the Qt Creator integrated development environment. Apart from all sorts of new features and fixes, this is the first Qt release available under the LGPL, which counters the oft-heard Qt license argument.
On that same day, Apple updated all of its desktop machines, including the Mac Mini mini, the iMac, and the Mac Pro. Most OSNews commenters weren’t particularly impressed with the updates, especially in the graphics department. The call for an expandable, headless machine between the Mac mini and the Mac Pro was again strong. Still, the new Macs are now more up-to-speed in terms of performance, and especially the iMac is still pretty good value-for-money as far as all-in-ones are concerned.
Jumping to the end of the week, Apple was again in the news because of the first unofficial application store for the iPhone opening up shop, followed by information regarding new features in Snow Leopard, mostly related to how the operating system handles text.
News also got out that recent Windows 7 builds allowed you to remove Internet Explorer from the operating system. As it turned out, this wasn’t entirely true: in a blog post on the E7 weblog, Microsoft explained that the feature is only disabled – every mention is removed from the OS, but it remains available on-disk in case the user wants to install it again. Microsoft claims their research shows users want that.
Regarding Windows 7, I wrote an editorial about how I believe Windows 7’s User Account Control settings leaves the operating system wide-open to possible security threats. The editorial gave a short history on Windows NT and the need for UAC, what UAC does, and why it shouldn’t be softened down to please the whiner crowd. Let me again repeat that if you are running Windows 7, it is best security practice to move the UAC slider all the way up.
We also had some browser security news, most notably a report by Secunia that didn’t really showed a fair image of browser security: Firefox’ stats were inflated because Mozilla reports all flaws, not just the public ones like closed-source browser makers do. As such, it seemed as if Firefox saw a lot more security flaws. Still, the Secunia report also put Firefox in a positive light, because it showed that Mozilla was a lot quicker at patching zero-day flaws than Microsoft. Regarding Safari, professional cracker Charlie Miller predicted that Safari and Mac OS X will be the first to fall during the upcoming PWN2OWN contest.
To finish off this Week in Review, Jordan Spencer Cunningham is the third person on the OSNews team who bought an Acer Aspire One netbook, and this week he published a review about the successful netbook.
My Take:
Long-track speed skating is somewhat of a Dutch national sport. Most people here love it, and ratings for important international matches are impressive. Throughout history, Dutch speed skaters have played a major role on the international podium, winning countless medals and matches during world, European, and Olympic championships.
Us Dutch are also on the forefront of technological advances in speed skating. Basically all research regarding speed skating is done in The Netherlands, and several key technological advances in the sport are Dutch inventions (with the notable exception of the full-body suit, which is a Swiss invention), such as the clap skate. Thialf in Heerneveen is still the most popular speed skating track because it’s universally sold out during every match held – speed skaters from around the world are amazed at just how popular the sport here is, and are surprised by being greeted by so many cheering fans.
The popularity of speed skating in my country also means that the sport here is highly professionalised, to a degree where it borders on the insane. Large Dutch companies sponsor the various teams, giving them huge budgets, because the companies’ names will be plastered all over the media. The Dutch teams are also home to many non-Dutch skaters, and Dutch coaches find their home in foreign teams as well (for instance, the American national coach is Dutch).
Enough with the chest thumping, I hear you think, and you’re right. This past season has been fairly disastrous for Dutch speed skating, and despite all the money, professionalism, and drama in the media (the drama… Dear lord, the drama), Dutch speed skaters systematically underwhelmed – apart from Sven “god” Kramer, of course.
This is where it gets interesting. Despite having barely any money and basically zero popularity in their own countries, it were skaters like Shani Davis (USA) and the humble Martina SáblÃková (Czech Republic) who gave this season its spark. To me, the success of people from countries without a strong speed skating tradition proves that speed skating isn’t a sport of money, fame, and 4 year training schemes – it’s a sport of the heart, not the brain. And this is something we Dutch have forgotten.
The World Cup finals were held this weekend at the Olympic Oval in Salt Lake City, the fastest speed skating track in the world. Again, we Dutch failed to leave a mark, with only Sven Kramer doing what was expected of him (winning the 5k). Again, it were the Americans that delivered the spark this weekend, with Shani Davis and the very young Trevor Marsicano (19!) skating world records.
My personal idols in speed skating have never really been Dutch – Niemann and Friesinger from Germany, Shimizu from Japan, and SáblÃková are my idols in this sport. Most of all, however, the current generation of American skaters are the ones that have earned my respect and admiration: Davis, Marsicano, and above all, my personal favourite, Chad Hedrick. The Dutch speed skating world needs to take a long hard look at itself, shed the drama and politics, and start focussing on what this sport is all about: heroism, spirit, individuality.
If we don’t get our act together soon, the coming winter Olympics in Vancouver will be a monumental disaster for Dutch speed skating.
IE is tied into a windows desktop so much it won’t be going anywhere soon.
At least turning it off sounds a lot better than just removing the shortcuts that the old add/remove windows components used to do.
Being able to reinstall should always be an option considering a browser is a requirement to download another browser for the average user.
It’s not that i want MS to sell windows without IE (that is way over the top) i just want to be able to remove every trace of it if i choose to.
But the thing is, you aren’t uninstalling it – it’s still on the drive as all internet explorer is; mshtml.dll plus some other files with a shell ontop. The help system still relies on mshtml.dll etc. So it isn’t being removed.
The problem is that OEM’s wanted the ability to at least disable and replace it as the default browser – which is an runs as an extension to their ‘crapware’ programme (previous Windows OEM licenses prohibited this, and when they could customise it, there wasn’t the ability to totally remove it from the customers view). Expect in the next couple of years Windows 7 machines shipped with Internet Explorer ‘removed’ and the vendors being paid by Google to include Chrome browser.
I know it’s not being removed, I didn’t say it was, that’s wishful thinking on anyone’s part.
All i said was it sounds a lot better when you’re trying to sell it to everyone. marketing at best when IE isn’t just the browser in windows.
“it’s been turned off”
sounds better than
“we’ve just hidden (poorly) the IE shortcuts.”
…and actually the subject of my post should have probably pointed that out in the first place.
Edited 2009-03-09 03:43 UTC
I just had an idea; why don’t they have something like ‘browserchoice://’ protocol which you can access via a bundled application which allows you to choose from a list of browsers you wish to install; the only requirement for your browser to be listed would be that it contains no spyware, adware or virus’s.
Also, Microsoft having one library for the whole system raises issues of security; if you have a deliberately crippled one with limited capabilities built into the code; the security is going to be better than a fully capable library which is crippled by the registry (and thus there is the possibility of exploiting holes in the feature that cripple those features) or some external means. ActiveX is a prime example of a fully featured technology which is crippled by ‘policies’ but continuously becoming the bane of Internet Explorer because rather than using a stripped down version they try to cripple a fully featured version.
Edited 2009-03-09 06:35 UTC
No doubt the Dutch will deliver a good performance come the Olympics, they always do. It’s not always fun for the other nations, but you always know who to beat.
It’s an rather exciting sport, so it’s a shame that not more nations take an interest. Besides after watching Shani Davis, I did not get so surprised by Obama. Kind of got the impression that things where changing already.
Don’t have Thom’s diversity in idols tho, I guess growing up watching the four S-es settled that.
Yeah, definitely. Although I must admit that it’s still weird to see a black man competing at the very top of speed skating. The sport has always been whiter than my ass in winter.
It’s good things are changing. It makes no sense to have “white sports” and “black sports”.
Years ago I stumbled over “Michael Holick” – pioneer researcher in Vitamin-D. The Google Query (( Holick Black White )) summons up a page from “Nutrition and Skeletal Health in Blacks” which cites his work.
The Google Query (( HOLICK VITAMIN BLACK CHICAGO )) points out that Black people have problems when living up-North, over the long term. Just as Whites in Australia have a skin-cancer problem.
Someday there will doubtless be a book detailing how this dependence on sunshine got wired into the genome. After all, not being plants offhand it makes no sense that people ( and even Iguanas according to Holick ) have this need for the sunshine vitamin, how did this get kluged in there, hmm.
I cant believe you write about speed skating and forget mentioning us Norwegians 😛 We are likely the country where speed skating is second most popular to the Netherlands..
You guys have been down and out for a while too, I’m glad that you guys finally got someone to cheer about again with HÃ¥vard Bøkko.
He’s close friends with Kramer, and I love it when they race one another – even though HÃ¥vard doesn’t stand a chance against Sven – yet
.
I feel compelled to mention Sweden but I honestly don’t think we’ve had a speed skater of any stature since Tomas Gustafson.
He did kick major ass though.
What’s this? A celebration of speed skating athletes, and no mention of Winnipeg’s own Cindy Klassen and Clara Hughes! Oh, the ignanimity! The outrage! Two women who cleaned up the medals at the last Olympics, and they get completely passed over!
Mark my words, these two Manitoban women will be the ones to beat in Vancouver, especially given the home field advantage…
In other words, you Dutch can Bring. It. On.
I don’t know what it is, but somehow, I never warm up to Canadian speed skaters. It’s not that I don’t like them, it’s just that… I don’t know, I can’t put my finger on it.
But you are right, of course. Canada has a lot of outstanding speed skaters.
Well, it is speed skating. It’s done on ice. If it warms you up, you’re probably doing something wrong.
Alas, you did not rise to my bait. I was hoping you would dismiss my claims to the excellence of our skaters, or trot more of your own heroes. I was prepared to blast you with another battery of our nation’s finest, such as the veteran, if retired, Catriona Le May-Doan, the up-and-coming Shannon Rempel, and the king of World Cup circuit, Jeremy Wotherspoon, with 49 titles to his name, and the World record holder of the 500m track.
But you’re quite right – despite my nation’s claim to excellence at the sport, the names I listed might be recognized by most, but only actually known to few. Even I had to hit up Wikipedia pretty hard to get the facts straight.
It’s those other ice sports that seem to get all the attention over here, hockey and curling, though not without reason, for our excellence at those sports is also well-known, and at least recognized even by our detractors…
Canada, eh? What of the imortal Bonnie Blair? There are some of us in the US of A that care about speed skating.
Thank God for NBC Sports, they now have one of the digital extra channels dedicated to winter sports! Bobsled, skiing, snowboarding, Luge, long and short track speed skating, even curling! I’m part Norwegian as well, so I also claim their victories.