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Windows in 2020
sasha328 writes: "I came across this article on LA Times while I was reading the LinuxToday news site. It is very funny, and points out the in layman's language, the problem with homogeneity in computer OSes. Well worth reading."
Never say never when Micro$oft is concerned. I've been involved in the Home Automation industry and the established vendors got real nervous when Micro$oft started getting the biggest booth they could at HA shows. But all they really seemed to demo was home networking. Home Automation is more about centralized control of the systems in your house. Climate control, A/V, security, etc. For years it has been heavily run by embedded systems using RTOS setups. There are also systems that run on PCs, but they often lack easy to find and use I/O (Digital, Analog, RS-485, etc) Its out there but not for mainstream stuff. Right now, one of the more popular PC based setups is Mr House which is perl based.
So yes, Microsoft really thinks this is an area they can dominate. Yes, some of the high dollar systems (think 10-20% of the cost of your new home) run windows. But for 'everyday' Home Automation, embedded setups are king. Linux is just starting to get buzz for the next generation stuff, but primarily, Home Automation is run on 8-bit systems from PIC microcontrollers up to high end embedded CPUs. The reason? Cost. When you can buy a small system for Considering you can get complete RTOS systems like uC-OS/II (Rabbit C) or Java (Dallas TINI) with a compiler with built in Internet libraries for HTTP, FTP, SMTP, etc, etc including servers for $300, its hard to justify paying royalties for anythign Micro$oft might come out with. Especially when the actual HW cores can be had for $30-$100 including ethernet!
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
Yes, you do get economies of scale if you have huge companies. Coca Cola can ship beverages cheaper and more reliably than 10000 local bottling plants all over the country. You do derive benefits from comparative advantage if you have completely open trade.
The problem is that the megacorp approach sacrifices the diversity that underlies a healthy free market just as much as a healthy ecology. In effect, the cheaper soft drink or the cheaper PC is bought by opportunity costs: society and the market lose the ability to adapt to changing conditions quickly because there are no alternative players that can take over. Instead, the leading players need to laboriously restructure and adapt, with all the speed and efficiency of the Soviet (planned) economy.
What can be done about it? Giving the states more autonomy helps. Allowing states and cities to adopt a wide variety of local regulations helps. Taxing interstate and international commerce helps. A progressive taxation system for corporate profits might help. But all of those are fighting words to conservative economists, as well as corporate backed politicians. And such approaches are not without risk of abuse and inherent problems either.
There is something you can do as a customer, though: be aware of the importance of diversity. Buy local, buy from small companies, and buy the non-mainstream product. Pay a little more for the high-quality specialty item. Don't worry about what the Joneses do. Do without, or do something different. Don't make a habit of eating at big chains, watching a lot of TV, etc. In addition too creating economic diversity, your health and your wallet will thank you, too. But don't obsess about it, either: moderate change in a lot of people is far better than obsessive change in a few.
I notice that the "yaboot" linux bootloader works just fine on the new, "changed" macs, and no one ever managed to write a proper Linux bootloader (well, OK, miBoot, but it was a terrible kludge) for the old macs.
Be were just a bunch of whiners IMO.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
I honestly think this won't be the case, for the following reasons:
Unix systems, having been multi-user systems for a number of years, have well-established guidelines for how much permission to give an application. Even simple things like access permissions and chroots would prevent really devastating worms from hosing your system, and perhaps even from spreading. (Even if Linux supports VBScript Attachments in the future, it's very unlikely that the attachment will be able to do much outside of that user's account...) Many Windows problems stem from giving applications too many permissions. The "tight integration" of Windows applications is done with only lip service to security. (this may be better in Win2K, I haven't done that much with it)...
The Open-Source nature of all the major Unix Services mean that any holes can be found more quickly, and be quickly made available. If someone is suspicious of a certain piece of code, they can LOOK AT IT and find out for themselves. You can't do that with IIS, and have to rely on MS to analyze the code and release patches, making the whole process shower and leaving computers vulernable for longer periods of time. By the time the patch comes out, the hysteria may have dies down, and the Admin may have moved on to other things. (Yes, this means that at least one Admin in an organization should know how to read code. I don't think this is unreasonable.)
Individual Open-Source programs are widely deployed (Apache and BIND, for example) and while they have their share of problems, they don't have nearly as many problems as Windows or IIS. Compare the number of Apache problems over the last five years with the number of IIS problems, relate that to market share, and please tell me if I'm wrong!
In short, if Linux had the same market share as Windows, there would certainly be more Linux nasties than there are now, but not nearly as serious and not nearly in the same proportion as currently affects MS products, for all the reasons I outlined above.
After watching Microsoft profit off of bad software and business decisions that screwed people over again and again, I have come to the following conclusion:
Darwinism does not apply to Capitalism.
The best product, unfortunately, is usually not the one that survives. Rather, it's the one that has the best marketing.
On the topic of using old computers, I don't think it's because they're hard to maintain. I don't know what you mean by that - my Atari ST needs no maintainance. I don't use it for one simple reason - I have absolutely no use for it. Everything I do on my PC would be completely impossible with that little amount of computing power.
Domination by Linux won't happen, because it's too decentralized. That's why a lot of folks hold it up as an ideal. There is no evil corporation with restrictive licenses pushing bug-ridden crap out the door to make a buck and stomp on any competition. If Linux took over, who would run things? Not Bill, but the programmers. Sure, the reporters would all look to Red Hat's CEO for interviews, but he wouldn't run the show any more than he does now.
"If it were our OS that "won" the great battle for the desktop," versions would be released when they were ready. Patches would come out quickly. Software would include things that work, not paperclips. The money that we spend on computers would go towards running them, not into Gates' pocket. Linux isn't going to take over, but it's precisely because of the reasons that it won't that it wouldn't be a bad thing like what we have now.
I spent a year in Iraq looking for WMD and all I found was this lousy sig.
Games are not the reason to upgrade that they once were.
On the other hand, I've never seen a linux box kill itself in this fashion. Sure, I've seen crap happen like ext2 volume corrupting from bad restarts, but with ReiserFS, XFS and JFS becoming stable that's not really a problem anymore.
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
Well, I'm not saying it's really planned, but it seems they never really stop finding bugs in Microsoft's software. At the same time, they do stop issuing patches for software that is no longer officially supported. If Code Red had emerged 5 years from now, and Microsoft simply said the fix was to upgrade to Windows XXL (or whatever it'll be in 2006) then you'd have to choose having your HD repeatedly formatted by script kiddies, or upgrading to the latest version of Windows (or switching to Linux, but I'm betting that if you're still holding onto Windows 2000 six years after it came out, you're not the type to take change lightly.)
Be's story that it was all Apple's fault may have had more to do with getting passed over in favour of NeXT and receiving a large cash injection from Intel...
-dair (yeah, OT)
firstly, microsoft does not have a stranglehold on the market. Have you ever READ the licence for Microsoft products? Nobody would in their RIGHT mind pay a lot of dollars for a product when there are NO GUARANTEES about whether it works or not, and it also specifically says that the producer is NOT LIABLE for any inherent flaws?
How would you like it if GM made a car with brakes that disintegrated after three months, but could not be sued because of several clauses in the buying contract?
Whether we like tort law or not, it HAS provided increased security for John Average. Poor security not only leads to a questionable reputation, it leads to direct expenses in lawsuit settlements and/or court proceedings.
Contradicting yourself in adjoining sentences. nice stuff. and hey - a much better way of killing yourself in traffic is drinking and driving.
Stop the brainwash
This reminds me of the Dilbert cartoon where Dilbert is talking to a salesman about a new computer. The salesman points out that this computer has only one button (implied ideal user interface). When asked what the button does, the salesman pulls back and says "Whoa, I'm in over my head, you'd better call tech support."
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
I'm sure the resulting discussion about how evil-evil-evil OS homogeny is would be totally different if it were our OS that "won" the great battle for the desktop. We'd all be proudly singing the virtues about how Linux did away with the confusion inherent with supporting multiple platforms, and how it was Linux that prevailed in its design and implementation.
But it's not Linux's supremacy that's being talked about here. It's Windows..And that makes you angry.
Now, before you call me a turncoat, i'll underscore the fact that I love Linux -- I use it on the majority of systems I own, and couldn't live without it -- Regardless of that, I cant help but notice that I've grown increasingly disappointed with the Linux community's almost blind willingness to look down upon Windows as a platform et al, regardless of the fact that for most things, Windows is (nowadays) far easier to deal with from a user's standpoint than Linux us. To some degree, I myself am partly to blame -- I used to hate Microsoft simply because it was fun to, and not based on any real concrete observations. Regardless of how much I like Linux, i'd be lying if I said Microsoft hadn't come a long way in the past year or two in improving the stability and usability of their OS offerings.
The Linux community itself is partly to blame for Microsoft's domination. Its our own partisanship and internal bickering that has prevented Linux from showing a unified face to the world when it came to the desktop -- Had KDE and Gnome merged for the common good, and challenged Microsoft's stronghold on the desktop, we would have probably made it...But instead that challenge ended up being more of separate Gnome vs. Microsoft, then KDE vs. Microsoft battle. We got squashed, and sent home with our tail between our legs. That was our fault, not theirs.
OS homogeny is a wonderful thing if it's your OS they're talking about. Its only when that homogeny is achieved with an OS you don't like that homogeny becomes on par with communism. Ask yourself if your opinion on OS homogeny would be the same if Linux were king of the hill versus Windows. How you answer that question will dictate wether or not you need to re-evaluate your view of the competition.
BTW, thanks to all who visited the site earlier today. It was a good stress test!
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
I don't think you understand either Darwinism or Capitalism.
Dawinism states that the organisms that are best adapted for their environment will be the ones that pass on their genes.
Geeks love the BEST solution to a problem, where best == technically elegant or technically advanced.
The real world like the GOOD ENOUGH solution, which wins because there are more parameters than "technical elegance" in the real world. In the real world, MS wins most of the time because they are "best adapted" to the environment they work in.
Sad, but true. The world is not an ideal place.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Um, but don't anyone else do it, OK?
I doubt things will move along from "windows" to "rooms" by 2020, although MSFT might be as far as "walls," or perhaps even "doorframes."
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Impossible? Really? I've never had nor seen an Atari ST but I've heard that they had a color GUI with multimedia that for the mid 80's rocked - sort of the Amiga before there was an Amiga. I don't doubt that it probably doesn't have a big hard drive or RAM but I've heard of people porting web browsers and such to the ST.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
The basic tenet of a capitalist, free-enterprise system is that through competition and the invisible hand of supply-demand, products and productivity will constantly improve and thus society as a whole will prosper.
This, obviously, isn't happening.
Microsoft has no strong commercial competitors. AMD and Intel are the only major processor makers for PCs. Nobody can touch Rambus' stuff. No one sells cola at the same price as Coke or Pepsi that is any better. Wizards of the Coast has the only big CCG. The list goes on and on. The fact of the matter is that the large new corps have managed to warp the capitalist system with their own money. Theorectically no one in one of the modern capitalist countries, especially a hardcore capitalist one like America, should be able to strangle the market for their goods like Microsoft does or Rambus almost did - what needs a patch for our problems is not M$ but modern capitalism, and I don't like the way things are going, because in that path the only major wake-up call may turn out to be...
Hacked by Chinese!
{/rant)
-Better USB support
-P2P2P2P support for faster MP3 downloads
-Greatly improved SMP
-FreeCiv final + Minesweeper deluxe
-BIND security flaw patched
Case
Sounds like someone forgot to download and patch their cornfields. Silly ecological administrators. On a similar note, another buffer overrun was found in tomatoes that permit another a plant to take root.
Code Red bunging up my apache logs has made me think:
Posit: once Linux reaches a certain saturation, it will suffer the same security issues as Microsoft does.
Bear with me on this...
Take Code Red.The problem is not that Microsoft products are insecure. Code Red exploits a flaw for which the patch was available a month ago.
Neither is it that Microsoft sysadmins are incompetent. Most major systems were indeed patched well in advance. Those that weren't at the time, soon did as Code Red struck: even the least-subscribed admin reads the papers and watches TV news.
No. The problem that should be making the Linux community a little less smug is rather more insideous.
After talking to quite a few infected companies, it seems that the majority of uninfected machines were those that were admin-less.
The sort of server you buy, plug in, have someone load up with whatever and leave in a cupboard to happily serve away...and that is **Precisely** the sort of system Linux is going to be used for.
Once Linux systems are consumer devices (like my lovely Cobalt Qube) - and there is every good reason for them to become so - then no amount of open source hacking, patches, multiple eyeballs and bugtraqery will stop these systems from being compromised once a hole is found and made public.
This is not because they will be run by bad sysadmins, but because they will - as with many MS systems running Code Red right now - not be administered by anyone at all.
Perhaps, just perhaps, the very security of Linux is something to do with the average level of savvy among current Linux users.
Would a bigger userbase keep the same level of security and system awareness? Will the guy in 2020 buying the plug-in-and-leave Linux box for his small business's network know when and where to go for the next patch to Sendmail/Apache/Bind?
Probably not.
And that's the problem Microsoft have. and the one we're going to get.
I think I've seen something similar not too long ago. Don't remember where, unfortunately.
Quite a good point about everything running the same OS and getting hit by (worms | virii | crackers) at the same time -- it's even more poignant and ironic with the infections of Code Red 1, 2 (and 3?) still making the rounds.
The corn analogy drives his point home quite well, too!
Now... where are those raging mobs he talks about? We sure could use a few of them -- especially for all the brilliant individuals who still haven't noticed their infected boxes, never mind turn them off! (God forbid they could be bothered to patch 'em!)
Sheesh.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
Yeah, I guess. On the other hand:
My point is only that we all live in glass houses.(from the first page of Debian )
The problem is, because everything runs the same operating system--even my electric shaver--once somebody discovers a security flaw...
wonder how his face looks like when Win goes blue...
As plastik55 says, the basic hardware bootstrapping is done with OF. Information about particular devices is available from Darwin. The idea that it's somehow illegal to use this information is a bit implausible, unless you entered into a contract to say you wouldn't - but I doubt that applies to Be.
-dair (IANAL, but I doubt the person from Be who told you this was either)
20 years of development, and the Linux kernel 2.4.x is not yet considered "stable" by Debian.
One thing I noticed is that the whole "homogeny" thing is based around the fact that Windows is the only operating system.
Isn't that pretty much true right now (and for the past 5 years)?
In short, no. If you take all the computers in the world and worked out what percentage are Intel based you get a figure less than 0.2% - of those, maybe 80% are running Windows.
The problem is what you identify as a computer and as an OS. The article discusses traffic lights, shavers, etc. and these are examples of embedded systems. An electric shaver may have a very simple embedded system in there, bordering on an OS. A traffic light system has something a bit more complicated. Your video recorder or DVD doesn't need anything particularly fancy, but still has something bordering on an OS in there. Same goes with your car's engine management, your burglar alarm, your microwave, etc... Just because almost every desktop you see has Windows running on it, doesn't mean every computer in the world runs it - far from it in fact...
This article is talking about the day when all those things are running some version of Windows. As somebody who studied Software Engineering and therefore embedded systems at Uni (although now I work in ISP as it's more interesting), I suspect that day will take some time to get here, and Linux is already in the lead - how many embedded Linux systems are there out there in comparison to Windows?
One would think that if there was a cult of Mac users that nearly everyone knew about, it would be rather obvious when all the Microsoft-run stuff shut down, that the Mac computers weren't affected. Seems to me that'd be enough to have people switching systems...at least if it was a crisis on this scale...
...isn't that one of the major problems w/ Linux, that most people just don't know it exists? I know I didn't have a clue what it was until one of my friends got me to start reading Slashdot. And if this guy ever thought that MS would be able to over-run the alternate-OS crowd that frequents this place... well, I don't believe that's possible.
I like the bit about the Frosted Flakes though. :)
My Webcomic: Asylum on 5th Street
And to sell these new Windowses (Windii??) they'll have a loud, tough-sounding man with his voice electronically deepened yelling at you about the "once in a lifetime blowout event" with explosions in the background.
Yippie.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Um, wait a sec, the flakes would contain DNA wouldn't they. Um, but, uh..... /me running to car, starting engine and peeling away at speed]
[/me cautiously backs towards the door]
....Y'see, the sugar-frosting DNA would, uh, mix with the corn DNA, and....
SLAM!
[sound of
I wish I could come up with a joke after reading this article, but I simply cannot. It hits too close to the heart of the problem, and it's a huge one. Because aparently this is where the world is going right now, and there is no going back. The problem is that everything, not only computers, is becomming more and more the same.
:P
I was going to write a longer post, but then I realized one thing: There is no way that this can be stopped. Maybe all computers will run M$ software, or maybe not. But then look around you! Even though in the early 1900s there were cars running on gas, steam and electricity, only the gas cars remain. Why? They were the most feasible to build. Now the technology has evolved to a point where we might see some other kind of car using maybe H2, solar or some other energy source, and all the new cars will use that new, better source.
Another example is the cell phone. In the beginning all were analogue (at least in the US). Go to Europe now, and most people don't even know what that is. Why? All cells there are digital, and most of the ones in the US are the same. And how many digital protocols are there? GPM is only one of them, but soon 3G is comming, and that will be the world standard.
The point I'm trying to make is that maybe uniformity is good. Maybe all computers will run M$ software, although I doubt it! (I would never trade Linux for Windoze). So the problem is not that every computer will run the same OS. The problem however is finding the best OS to use on all computers.
But it's 5am where I live, and I think I'll solve it tomorrow.
I'm not going to plant them - I'm going to clone them.
Are you trying to suggest to me that they can't just clone the Frosted Flakes?
Damn. There goes my idea.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Indeed. Until one year ago the computer that handled the core functions of my business, the one that if it went down I was out of business, was 1.7 MHz Compaq trasportable.
The only reason I ditched it was the 5 1/2" full hight floppy drive was getting cranky and I couldn't find a replacment.
I donated it to a church and it's still chugging away doing useful work.
Oh sure, a few years from now I'll want something newer and snazzier than the Athlon 900 I have now. I WON'T want to get rid of the Athlon though. Why should I? It plays music, it records music, both prepackaged and live. It makes CDs. It plays and records movies and TV. It renders images in photo quality. It surfs the web. It can interface with, and control, every electronic device in my house, and with a bit tinkering every NON electronic device in my house. Screen resolutions are higher than anybody can see.
Hell, it even *computes!*
And all of the software to do this is either free or easily writable by myself.
It already does what 90% of the population needs, but more than that, it already does 90% of everything *I* will ever need.
I don't need a faster cpu to get 300 fps in Quake, I need new algorithms to make Quake look like natural motion at 30 fps.
I sure as hell don't need Windows XP. The "industry" is counting on XP to sell computers. What's with that? Do these people have their heads up their fscking butts? It ain't going to happen. If I WANTED XP I'd buy XP, not a computer.
What I need is bigger, faster *storage.*
At least until the Virtual date with petrified Natalie Portman with hot grits down her pants program comes out.
I might buy a new machine to run that. I'll still run my core apps on my current machine though. The new one will be down for cleaning too often.
KFG
All you have to do is keep a "Pentium or better" running and you'll be able to load software on it to do everything that 90% of the population will ever need. Heck, some people are still going fine with C64s, Amigas and for all I know, Atari STs. I had an old 19MHz XT with 1 MB of EMS RAM that did pretty well.
I believe that the glut of existing, functioning, equipment will have more of an influence on the future than homoganisation of the available platforms.
I've heard that WinNT and 2k have good underlying security capabilities. That's why I added the 'default' in there, and was careful to reflect the learning of Linux distros with respect to their default installations.
You're right, BIND, sendmail, Apache, etc have had troubles, and have fixed them. But Microsoft should also not be on their own isolated learning curve. They should have seen the BIND, sendmail, and Apache problems and solutions, and incorporated appropriate fixes for their own products.
So yes, I can criticize their stupidity, because apparently they didn't learn from history.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Actually what I find disturbing is that 'PC' seems be by some weird definition to mean 'runs MS Windows'. I get tired of hearing the watered down phrase, "you have a PC or a MAC". I'm sorry, but we all have PC's...it's called a Personal Computer. Doesn't matter what the operating system running on it is. I say yeah, I have linux machine and windows machine.
Perhaps it's some tie-in with that other PC acronym, political correctness. Ya gotta have a PC to be PC, or something like that. Yech.
- A non-productive mind is with absolutely zero balance.
- AC
Posit: once Linux reaches a certain saturation, it will suffer the same security issues as Microsoft does.
Unplace excriment: Apache runs more web servers than IIS, the victim of Code Red. Saturation reached, failure not suffered. Think about it for a while.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Whether this distrust will result in the company being constrained to operate consistently with its monopoly status is - unfortunately - another matter entirely. It looks as though MS's top management has decided to construct new facts on the ground which will make current court rulings irrelevant; unfortunately the US justice system appears unable to cope with this strategy.
Yeah, the corn analogy is excellent. What's that saying they used to have back in the short-sighted 20th century? "You find something that works - you stick with it!" Yeah, maybe that works in the imaginary world of permanence, but take a cue from the mother of us all: You find something that works, attack it with everything you've got - virus, plague, famine, pestilence - until it goes extinct. It may be just a little red worm now, but someday it'll grow up to be Shai Hulud!
The bit about the subscription system's reverberating side-effects rings awfully true too. Proprietary and convoluted file-formats can only do so much to bring about the American(TM) dream of planned obsolescence. But mark my words: Subscription software is flawed in its genes and doomed to fail. Anything that goes straight to profit-motive without providing added value to the consumer *cough*antitrust*cough* just seems a little dubious.
Personally, I'm getting one of my hotshot Windows geek buddies to whip up a nice short hack to disable the automatic shutoff for my own personal use. Want one? It'll be printed on T-shirts next year in rebus sistena verse.
-- thinkyhead software and media
"Inside Internet Security" by Jeff Crume is a free book being given away by IBM that covers a lot of security topics in a really good way. They get into a lot of white-hat/black-hat discussion, which is sometimes really a distraction from talking about good policies, but it's still good overall. Get a free copy here instead of paying $30 for it, and you can even spamgourmet the address so you make sure you don't hear from them after signing up.
Remember, security is a process, not a package you buy in a store. The best tech won't help if someone is loaning their keychain with security keyfob to their girlfriend or lets their cousin use their corporate PPP account to browse the web from his home.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
SlashDot/XP? Didn't pay your software rent?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
>I don't want to play chess with my microwave, I just want to reheat the damn pizza!
yeah, that is what you think! And mobile phones are only for calling right? Bzzzzt, try again.
nosig today
I wonder if Steve Ballmer will still be doing this in 2020?
The best of all possible worlds is:
* open standards
* with multiple, open implementations
That way, you get interoperability (like the Internet) without the problems that you get with Microsoft-led homogeneity, which is built on
* closed standards
* with single, closed implementations
A world where everyone ran Linux, but no distribution dominated, would be much safer than the current one.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Windows DNI
You open the box labeled "Windows DNI: Direct Neural Interface", carefully extracting the pouch labeled "License Agreement". You examine the contents of the pouch, finding an inflatable cap bearing the Windows logo rather than the familiar 3.5" diskette package. You inflate the cap, insert two "C"-size batteries (not included), and carefully place it on your head. You press the Start button.
Immediately, the image of an hourglass comes to your mind. You find yourself trapped; unable to move anything in your body save your eyes. After an indeterminable delay, you regain control of your senses. You are suddenly compelled to speak your name and business affiliation. You then retrieve your Windows DNI package and chant the Product-ID number.
Suddenly you see the words "Windows is detecting new hardware" flash before your eyes. You crash to the floor, writhing in agony. You feel every muscle in your body contract and retract in turn. Your mind is filled with the image of a blue inchworm, creeping slowly across a grey field. The creature finally reaches the edge of its domain, and your seizure ceases. You take a moment to regain your composure, and you are reminded of your high school anatomy course as a complete listing of every organ in your body appears before your eyes. You browse the list for a moment, and utter the phrase "OK". After a short delay, you hear the sound of a trumpet echo through the recesses of your mind.
You find yourself in a large, barren space. You look around, and discover images labeled "My Brain", "Recycle Bin, and "Set up the Microsoft Network". You feel compelled to utter the word "Start", after which a list of options floods your mind. Weary from the detection phase, you utter the word "Shut down". You close your eyes, and blackness surrounds you. You feel yourself start to drift into sleep. Your peace is interrupted, however, as a bright orange light invades your nothingness. "It's now safe to shut down your mind".
You drift into unconsciousness, and sleep for several hours. When you awaken, you are frozen in place as you see clouds and blue cycling colors. After a short eternity, the familiar "My Brain" icon reappears in your mind. But something is terribly wrong; you can feel it in your gut. Just outside the range of primary vision, you can sense something lurking about you on all four sides.
You slowly look up, and see the word "Safe Mode" glaring back at you. You back away slowly, swivel your head, and there it is, behind you as well. Your heartbeat quickened and you are terrified as you turn to your left and your right and it meets you there as well, its cold, heartless glare filling your soul with despair.
Quickly, you summon Control Panel, System, Device Manager. You feel yourself frantically gasping for air as you run through the list of installed devices. You come upon "Respiratory System" and are horrified to see a black exclamation point on a yellow field next to the entry "Lungs". You close your eyes and utter the word "Properties". On the closed curtains of your eyelids, you see your life flashing before your eyes.
You force yourself to concentrate on your situation, attempting to discover which system devices are in conflict, when suddenly your entire body seizes up in pain. You lose all sense of reality. You are floating through the clouds as you hear a voice echo through your mind: "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be terminated." You start to black out and suddenly you remember your situation. You stare in horror at your blue extremities, knowing that, without oxygen, you will not last much longer. With all the consciousness you can muster, you force yourself... To reboot.
You awaken in a place that is dark, but familiar. A solitary white prompt on a black field greets you. You look behind you and see the wreckage of the operating system that nearly spelled your demise. "Cannot find a file that may be needed to run Windows". You turn around to face the prompt, and a wide grin comes across your face. You take a deep breath and revel in the life-giving atmosphere. You laugh as you utter the words, "DELTREE WINDOWS".
Suddenly you find yourself on the floor of your home. You find the charred remains of the Windows DNI beanie littering the floor. You carefully gather them up, stack them neatly on an altar, and burn them, promising yourself never to risk your life with Microsoft again. You bury the ashes, knowing that your life is again in order.
I have no idea who originally wrote this, it was emailed to me a few years ago...
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
Gates and his minions literally went underground in 2019 after the Supreme Court ruled against the company for the 1,249th time in the antitrust case that began in 1997.
:)
I see that the justice system in the States works just fine
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"I believe in karma. That means I can do bad things to people and assume they deserve it" - Dogbert
that will never happen, forget the linux faithful for a moment and think about how many servers run windows... proof that windows is not prefered is in the messages posted on slashdot about code red. I don't think I read a single message that said "I run a windows box and was affected". I sure someone else could come up with exact figures and berate MS software for exactly why it isn't used.
Windows is good for home users and workstations, xp is actually quite good, but there is enough reactionary backlash against MS that even if they did manage to release a perfect windows os in the next few years *nix and other os's wouldn't just dissapear overnight (or even 20 years I suspect).
Is it possible to totally secure an os ?, you never know one day it might. In this case, as long as windows doesn't crash and does what it is supposed to then I will be more than happy to live in that world.
We need a CLI version of those pretty GUI updaters. Debian is already set, of course. Not a complete answer, of course, but done with a touch of planning will eliminate 99% of failure-to-update errors.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
All of the companies listed (but can't speak about WOTC) work very hard to create a demand for their products and services. You left out phillip morris and a few others. Perhaps I should be daring and mention that you also left out the drug cartels. This is not what people want, it's what they've been told they want.
Can you honestly tell me that Peruvian natives actually wanted black caffienated phosphoric acid before CCC moved in and flogged it to them, hard? People don't actually want ``Word'' or ``Windows'', they want software that does certain things, or even more so, they simply want to do certain things, and Microsoft have - at great expense - sold them on the idea that the Microsoft Way is the best (only) way, and please pay at the till on the way out.
What they are doing now is escalating that to the point of being able to make you pay every time you breathe or blink. Bill's attitude is probably very much along the lines of ``let them eat cake.''
Yah, like Microsoft Bob with the reversed OK and Cancel buttons, those useless disappearing menus, and that fsking PITA paperclip. Oh, and dear old Word, with Format-everything-else in the Format menu, but Format-Page in [drum roll...] the file menu! Of course! No thanks.
``Simplicity,'' yes, but simple not in the sense of easy to use. Simple in the sense of having important bits missing, like security (CodeRed/SirCam/PWL-files/CIFS-hole-de-jour,PPTP,. ..), timesharing (WinModems), user awareness (Windows login), reliability (all, especially Bill's '98 USB scanner driver :-), consistency (NT GUI routing != text) standards (Kerberos/AD/IE-MIME-handling), flexibility (FIND.EXE,EDLIN.COM), honesty (DR-DOS crash code in WFW3, ``IE is necessary for Windows''), and much else. Any modern Linux installer and/or system management toolset (think DrakConf) eats Windows for manageability, and Konqueror (for one example) stands between Explorer and WorkPlaceShell for elegance and consistency.
For...? Stepping on HTML mines? It took them a hell of a long time to get IE smooth, most of the Open browsers are up on it in half the time.
Samsung make even more beautiful chips (Alphas) but Intel may not let them play in that space for long. And tell me that Intel haven't pulled out all the stops to cut AMD, Firewire and everyone else who even smells of competitor off at the knees, I dare you...
Yes, and haven't Microsoft just used that ability to the hilt whenever opportunity arose? Have they stopped? Will they ever? Discuss.
Would it impact your gross stupidity at all to learn that eight times as many car accident victims are maimed for life as are killed outright? And even more are permanently handicapped? What you are advocating would cause a dramatic increase in the societal burden of caring for incapacitated accident victims, which is the direct opposite of where your pious bullshit was evidently directed.
The trick is to prevent M$ from altering ``what people want'' to suit their accunting department.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Take Code Red.The problem is not that Microsoft products are insecure. Code Red exploits a flaw for which the patch was available a month ago.
This is a good point. I really like the Mac OS X solution and which that other unix variants would adopt a similar solution. At scheduled intervals, the machine will contact a central database at Apple looking for software updates. The user may select one or more. These are then downloaded and automatically installed (usually without requiring a reboot). If a security hole is found, a patch is made available on the server and 'average' users should pick it up eventually.
Before readers get too caught up in the details, there are some potential drawbacks to this scheme. One: the centralized server means that Apple gets to control which 3rd party tools can be updatd. Two: it might be possible to spoof the server IP and send out fake updates. There are solutions to each of these. The key thing is that updates are easy and largely automatic.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
"640GB ought to be enough for anybody." --Bill Gates, 2020
:-/
Hopefully ram prices will be decent then
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Check out my blackbox styles
that all available bandwidth will be used up by CodeRed 1007, a sentient replicating virus. Furthermore, since A***e has patented everything, the virus will be put in jail for copying itself.
That's partially how Judge Jackson was able to define Windows as a monopoly -- he first defined the personal computer market as "computers running Windows" (Apples being something else, apparently), and then found that they all ran Windows (imagine my surprise!).
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Having free, open alternatives allow innovations to take place that would not be possible in Windows. There is often far more inventiveness going on at the fringe then at the core. If the innovations are important enough, they may get ported, or even convince users to leave MS. It is not necessary for everyone to know about *nix right now, good, useful new features and programs will stand on their own.
On a last quick note, I would also add that happily, windows does not seem to scale well in any direction except up:) Maybe we'll see toasters with 512MB of ram in a few years but... I doubt it. I don't want to play chess with my microwave, I just want to reheat the damn pizza! -_^
I thought with MS it was more a case of talking out of, or what could be pulled out of, it.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Compare what ships with Debian to what ships with Windows.
:-).
Compare the severity of the exploits (e.g. DSA-067 gets you limited control of the Apache user, CodeRed gets you unlimited control of the whole machine) and the difficulty of using them (DSA-071 or 068 cause an application or service crash in special circumstances, SirCam sends your secrets around the world).
That's like equating FIND.EXE with grep, or EDLIN.COM with vi, and being proud of the DOS app having less known vulnerabilities.
You're comparing strawberries and potatoes, Doug.
Microsoft don't ship TCPdump, so nobody reports vulnerabilities in it. There are dozens of webmail apps available for Linux, and most are reported at places like Debian. There is just one shipped with Windows (Outlook) and little else gets its bugs reported (-: maybe because Outlook fills quota quite handily all by itself?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Windows, Windows Everywhere huh? Nice title for a page with a pop-up AND a pop-under.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
Or just lame, yeah you know, the kind of stupidity that gives geekdom a bad name. It's nice to know some know nothing weenie crackhead from the LA times who probably got his job on all fours has something critical to say about computers.
On the desktop, yes. Something like 95% penetration. Not in server-space (halleluyah!) else CR2 would have pretty much axed the Internet for a fortnight.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The more I used, the more I learned and the easier linux became, and the harder MS looked. Looking back on things, it's amazing to me that anyone would trust configurations to anything but a human readable text file. The amount of trust required of MS to do anything is amazing. Good grief, just look at that sloppy NetBIOS. Look at all the hidden stuff. How does anyone memorize that awful pile of symbols that are the ever shifting MS interface? Work, with NT desktops, it painfully constricted and limiting. No compilers, how can people stand it? Only a single window manager with a single virtual screen? Only one crippled shell? I have no regrets as 98 dies on it's last machines in my house. It sucked, then it died. Win2k? No way!
The sooner you move, the happier you will be. The things you learn from MS are either counter productive or plain useless. Want stability, get Debian potato. Want privacy, get ssh.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Will the metaphor of 'windows' still be around in 2020?
I thought that we would have evolved to something more multi-dimensional - rooms, say?
In other news, Mozilla has achieved the much-vaunted "five-nines" status. Mozilla 0.99999 was released earlier this February, and most coders on the project still claim that 1.0 will be finished "soon."
Apple must not mind too awful much. I attended an Apple shindig at a school whose purpose was convince everybody that OS X is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Don't get me wrong, I think OS X is GREAT technology but its going to take a little more hammering on it to make it insanely great. Anyhoo, this engineer who was leading the talk mentioned to me that he liked Linux on one of his PPC machines. He especially liked that he could run it with a super stripped down desktop and get lots of "speed".
The only reason I can think of that Apple would mind is that Linux allows one to put off retiring the old machine here and there. We are using a 233Mhz Beige G3 Desktop as an inventory and troubleticket database as well as a file/web server for our tech dept. The machine is running Debian and is fast and "just works" at it's appointed duties. I'm sure Apple would love to sell us a G4 running OS X Server to do the same thing. Since the machine is the Desktop model and not a tower, I run it headless underneath my desk. It stays out of the way too.
ps. We did upgrade the memory and disk in the thing but spent less than 100 to make a spiffy server out of it.
you know the future truly sucks when you get up one morning and try to make a pot of coffee only to find the coffee pot display says "Hacked by Chinese".
After Code Red, the WinBox is rooted.
Even when the next Apache exploit is found, it only gains access as the user "apache", and even that will frequently be in a chroot jail.
Security is not a firewall.
Security is not a bug-free program.
Security is not even a set of procedures.
Security is a process, and encompasses all of the above. Security also realizes that accidents happen, and attempts to minimize the aftereffects.
That is one place Windows falls down, there is inadequate system partitioning. IIS and its bevy of extensions run with Admin authority. No dedicated accounts, no chroot jails, etc. At least not by default.
Default security has been pretty bad on Linux, but gets better all the time. Furthermore, there are releases geared toward the server business that are much tighter, by default.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
It's sounds as if these Linux admins handled the whole situation really badly although instituting a better security policy is not, IMHO, ever a bad thing.
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
The natural refute to what I've said, is that Linux will afford a greater degree of variety in each of its implementations, while Windows will likely be the same software, with the same vulnerabilities on every device that runs it.
That too, however is unfair. Witness the X-Box--A very slim kernel (it's smaller than WindowsCE) with extraneous functionality ripped out. Microsoft is capable of de-bloating their kernel.
Further, the idea that security exploits would exist across device implementations is pretty absurd. Beyond the possibility of bugs in, say, the Networking stack or race conditions in the kernel, this simply isn't likely to happen. A toaster would not need to run IIS, and so would not run IIS, hence it has no fear of Code Red.
This is akin to arguing against the ubiquetious (no, I do know how to spell that. My apologies) adoption of Linux because of say, the exploit in piranha from a while back.
I hope most people who develop applications for windows would agree with me that "windows" is not a homogenous thing. For a start there's windows95/98/NT/ME/2000/CE. CE is obviously very different from the rest so I'll ignore it for the rest of the discussion. This leaves 95/98/NT/ME/2000. They are simply NOT homogenous. You cannot treat them as such. Something that works fine on 98 will not work on 95. NT increases the problem by having multiple service packs. Also, the presence/absence of large pieces of software will greatly affect the behaviour of the platform (especially IE). Even the ORDER that things are installed in can have an impact. (I'm sure some of us have gone mad trying to remember did we install x before or after we installed service pack n, and was that before or after we installed y, and if it was was it y professional or y enterprise, and if we did, did we select the foo option?). One commercial application I worked on had a bug in the installer(created by installshield) that on windows NT service pack 4 would completely fsck the user's computer to the point where it was un-bootable and needed to be re-formatted, but worked fine on every other combination of windows we tested. Windows is NOT a homogenous platform.
It would be great if all computers everywhere could talk to each other and work with each other without the amount of fuss we have to go through to do it today. The problem is lack of standards. If MS would use standard protocols, and commercial vendors would bother to write portable code, we wouldn't have a problem with OS dominating the world we'd have a variety of OSen that work together. Virii/worms/hackers would not be able to attack everyone because of that variety... at least not as easily.
The Anti-Blog
Or, rather, I'm going to sell them to someone else (Kelloggs, whoever makes cornflour, Green Giant etc.) for a vast profit and let them bother with the cloning. I'll just pop in occasionally to make unhelpful comments - "Maybe you should try repairing the freezer damage to the chromosones with frog DNA..."
Ooooh, or now I think about it, I could just buy tinned corn and then I wouldn't have to worry about keeping the freezer running.
Awwww, damnit, I really need to stop telling everyone my ideas...
In 2005, Microsoft filed a complaint under the DMCA which accused all Linux users of circumvention for writing anything compatible with Windows XS on the grounds that the source code was seekrit and only illegal disassembly could have given them the ability to write a program that could function on it. Microsoft then managed to successfully prosecute RMS for contributory negligence after he continued screaming that it's not Linux but GNU/Linux and it was his idea to begin with. Stallman received a Gnine-year sentence, with time served if he'd promise no more recursive acronyms.
In 2007, The Supreme Court handed down the "Typesetters' Union v. LameWebDesign IPO" decision (commonly known as the "FontSanity" case) which upheld a lower court's ruling making the use of multiple mixed font sizes, colours and cases on one page illegal (based on community standards, just like the obscenity laws). Steve Gibson got a five-year stint at Leavenworth, where he spent his time pointing out that the bars on the windows were not really secure and that ALL THAT SPACE between them could be USED by ANYONE TO get OUT of JAIL!!!
And while the letter mentioned the Apple religion, it left out the Slackware fundamentalists' revolt of 2011, which targeted all distros containing installers and GUIs. Hundreds wree left helpless at the CLI and millions of files were lost as people helplessly typed in two-letter combinations in the hopes that something would happen.
The future ain't pretty, people.
woof.
lets just look arround this house, which has a lot of x86's by comparrison. x86 computers are
2x laptops (one win3.1 & one linux)
3x desktops (2 linux, 1 win98)
Thats 5 x86's - twice as many as the average hi tech house
The obvious, big computers
1 oven
1 microwave
1 washing machine
1 dryer
1 dishwasher
4 tvs
2 vcrs
1 cable box
3 hifis
4 clock radios
1 doorbell
1 telephone
1 fax machine
1 video mixer
1 camcorder
1 digital camera
4 mobile (cell) phones
a few calculators
a psion
a managed ethernet switch
thats 30+ already, and I gave up going through the house before halfway through. Add 10 seperate comptuers in one car, another one in another car, a few watches, etc. you are up to a 90% range just off the top of my head.
And this is in the home, I dont want to think about work with all the body repair stuff!
In the average house there are at least 50 embedded processors- or "computers", and less then 1 x86 box. Then look at all the equipment out in the street.
The number of x86's in a pc dependent world is 1% given just that breakdown.