Well, I know that it's "technically" possible to install applications as non-root. The problem comes in that there are certain conventions that each distribution wants to follow to allow a unified experience for application developers.
UAC mimics much of the functionality present in a lot of Linux applications. You need root to install the application, but you don't need root to launch the application.
At least, this is exactly how Microsoft has it designed. And anything that requires administrative privileges should have a service that starts as admin/root and then the client side process should be low privileged.
This is exactly how Microsoft has it setup. The problem is that a lot of application developers are lazy. They don't want to write software for how Microsoft wants it to be written. This has, essentially been how Microsoft has intended software to be written for years. C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data has only been around since the Windows 2000 days.
The aforementioned design, however, has never been enforced by Microsoft.
And the worst part about it is that users themselves are asking for software to be written poorly. All you have to do is to take a quick look over at the ZSNES forums where the developers openly asked its users how they should store configurations now that UAC gets in the way, and the users tell them "We want it to be more portable!"
That's fine and all, if you want to install all applications to C:\Users\. But like Linux, there are folder conventions.
It's all there, everything. The environment for writing secure products that don't get exploited that run within the context of a limited user are all built into the OS already.
Microsoft even went out of their way to "virtualize" Program Files for applications that fail to follow the proper format.
You follow through with this idea, you're going to lose your job. Not only are you going to lose your job, but you're going to make it so FOSS software is almost never considered in your school again--for any project. Because the beancounters are going to look back and see just how much money they wasted, how much time and effort they wasted, only to hire a consultant to come fix the mess you made whom is going to reinstall Windows anyway.
The problem that I have with dvorak is that when you type on it you feel like your right hand is doing far more work than the left hand since the positioning of the letters.
This is fine for people who are right-handed, but tends to be problematic for people such as myelf whom are left handed.
Qwerty is more spread across both sides of the keyboard, and a lot of words can be made with just the left hand alone.
You might only feel this sort of "strain" if you're a left-handed typist.
So I guess you want to go back to things like that, right?
The government stepped in as a mediator between the people. And this is what we have. It was required, live with it, and instead of fighting against it try to use it to your benefit. Otherwise, somebody else will (and already has).
Except they can censor your internet and you won't ever know it. But really, censorship doesn't necessarily need the internet these days. In fact, the internet makes it even easier.
At a few clicks of a mouse, you can for example change your CNN homepage to include more "worldly" news or more "local" news. Who's to say that what you see is what is truly happening? I live in Maryland, do I see exactly the same news as someone in California? What about someone in Canada?
Don't think that there's any mitigation at all to censorship simply because people are separated by organizations. After all, people of all socioeconomic statuses can attend similar churches.
I'm not saying the US Government is perfect, but at the very least we have a GUARANTEED right to know what's going on. Our government only hides things because we're too big of pussies to go after them. However, we're not legally bound to submit to their will--they are to ours.
All of these people saying that such things aren't "allowed" by the Constitution. They're not expressly forbidden, either.
The US Constitution is amendable, or have we forgotten that the core of what makes the US Constitution so powerful is that it can be changed with time?
But relatively speaking, the "size" of our government is small. That is, in raw man power and departments most of what they do is outsourced to contractors.
You are vastly overcomplicating the situation, the OP said "There is no outside access to the internet through this connection".
And how, exactly, is it going to go "outside the company" if the torrent is entirely internal anyway? You could have outside access and it's not going to start sending your data to the internet if your tracker and peers consist of entirely internal hosts.
As far as Microsoft is concerned, they made a version of Vista that did not include the 3D fancy interface. While perhaps this was ultimately a poor marketing decision, it's certainly not criminal nor damages-worthy.
Either way, in the end, they have already lost. The constant knee dragging by these morons gives them bad press, and they've earned a lot of bad press over nothing. This entire case is stupid. And the worst part is it's being carried on by people who "think" they are educated.
Vista Basic is still Vista.
Vista Capable meant the PC could run Vista.
They can install and run Basic, Premium, Business, or Ultimate. The PC doesn't care. They simply lose features that their PC doesn't have, for example, Aero.
If they install Ultimate, they still get things such as bitlocker. If they install Business, they still get the ability to join domains.
So nobody got shafted here. They are just your every day normal average Joe stupid computer user.
Except, that the change in requirements came before consumers could actually obtain Vista.
This has nothing to do with "lying, cheating, scamming" this has to do with marketing.
Fact is, you need your products to sell and it needs to be worth buying. The unfortunate part is at the time all of this was going down, you couldn't get a reasonable "Vista" PC. It was OEMs and Intel wanting to push inventory. Their assumption was that once Vista came out, they wouldn't be able to push these PCs.
This is correct.
This sort of thing happens all over the software industry, Microsoft is no different. Do you ever look at a game's minimum system requirements and actually expect it to run decently? You've got to be kidding me. Crysis' minimum requirements include a Geforce 6 series graphics card.
For the end users around here, this doesn't mean much for you.
This does not mean that you'll be able to run whatever version of Android you want on your phone. I would imagine there's very likely situations with code signing involved that ensures that if you're using XYZ's phone, that you'll only be allowed to run the XYZ versions of Android.
This open sourcing does not mean that you simply get to buy an Android phone and then download a version that you want and run that. Not only due to "artificial" reasons such as code signing, but due to hardware features (or lackthereof).
All this really means is that the companies get to have someone else do heavy legwork for them. Beyond that, it means more familiarity with the Android platform which means there's potentially more market for the platform on the bottom line.
More developers means more applications, more applications means more market for Android. Google and the phone carriers are happy. As an end user, you still get a locked down piece of junk--but hey, at least you'll have 50 variants of a card game to buy instead of 40.
M$ can't delete MY software and neither can AT&T =)
Are you sure? A lot of people were shocked (shocked!) to learn that Vista has a backdoor that lets MS disable apps on a customer's machines. Then the discussions here and elsewhere brought out the apparent fact that this has been an undocumented "feature" of Windows since at least XP. This news spread in online forums like/. earlier this year, and I've found it fun to mention it to Windows users. I've yet to find anyone who had ever heard of it.
If your WM phone has such a "kill switch", you probably won't hear about it until they use it.
Actually, it's common in the smart-phone part of the industry. A few years ago, a project I was working on bought me a Blackberry, and one of the first things I did was to install a real browser on it. A year or so later, the browser suddenly stopped working. When I investigated, I finally found someone at the vendor who told me that my license to use it had been disabled. He wouldn't say who did it or why. But I never got it to work again. So such a "kill switch" is implemented on Blackberries. Various discussions I've seen since then have made it clear that if you have a smart-phone, it's highly likely that this can be done to you, too, either by the software vendor or by the cell-phone company.
So far, I haven't heard of it on desktop computers, except for MS Windows. But again, I wouldn't be surprised.
Please e-mail me any details you have on said remote features of Windows that do this. Please post any links to API calls, any examples of this happening with any software, and any examples of Microsoft remoting into anyone's computer and doing this.
Thanks.
I have to agree with you here. I've been trying to get a mailserver running, and part of the problem is everyone has their own "way" of doing it, and there's no concrete method other than figuring it out, which can be a pain in the behind.
The sendmail/postfix guys have their "one way" of doing things. that is, the way it was always setup was send mail to users on the system and to other users on other systems. Pretty simple, but in the newer environments of hosted email (rather than users on the system) there are problems.
The postfix guys aren't going to help you with courier or dovecot. The Ubuntu guys can't help the Redhat users. And even inbetween distributions, different people have entirely different (and often times incompatible) methods.
What you stated above is extremely difficult to do elegantly.
Yes, but you forget the simple thign here EastCoastSurfer.
The states don't want the burden of the roads on them. Otherwise it would have been that way to begin with. Not to mention, you can't argue the fact that a federal highway system has significantly helped travel in this country (I use I-95 myself to travel all up and down the US east coast annually).
Either way, you're in the situation that "someone will take a cut". The difference is how much control you have over that cut.
As it stands right now, what they do with the money is public knowledge. Rather, it's mostly public knowledge. You can use the FOIA to get information on all sorts of stuff the government does. It's your right to do it and you can exercise that right.
If a private company wants to take money and pay their executives, you have no "right" to know what they do with that money. That money has already changed from your hand to theirs. Given the road situation in many areas (where a single main road is generally the only road to drive on to get somewhere), this becomes a problem.
It's not a simple matter of shopping for goods in the grocery store. You don't get to choose the bargain discount box of cereal when it comes to your driving.
But see, the wonderful thing about having a government tax system is that YOU are ultimately in control. Sure, you can say what you want about dirty voting tactics of political parties and the like, but you still, under this system, have a legal say.
You give up any of that right when you say something against a private organization, and saying something against them could even become illegal (slander, libel).
Why are you "anti-taxes". Taxes do a lot of good things. Regardless of the cherry picked issues that people like to pull out on where taxes go, there are still a lot of good things that taxes do for you, your surroundings, and the environment.
For example, National and State parks are funded by taxes. They are protected lands and pay for your ability to get out of the house. Sure, not all of the funding to these areas are tax-related, but taxes help keep the costs of enjoying them down.
Instead of paying $20 to get into the park, you pay $5. In some cases, there are areas you can go to and not even pay.
They are used to pay for police and firefighters. Taxes are used to pay for roads, for city cleanup crews, and everything along those lines.
You take all of these services for granted because they've "been there" since you've known. But take away even a city's trash cans or paying the extra police force to patrol certain areas, and within months you would find a completely different story.
Private development is not always the way to go. For example, if roads were privately owned you would find that you would be charged to drive on them and often times at a higher rate than publicly owned roads. You would also encounter a lot more tolls. On top of that, the pricing would vary and the amount of bills you would pay would have to go up.
Inevitably, you may also end up paying for roads you don't use if the company that owns the road also owns other tolls. For example, a toll company from Australia has purchased roads in the US. They did this on Australian money. Inevitably, a similar thing would happen here with a private company. If there was a road that needed maintaining, but the local toll wasn't enough money to actually clean the road and make it safe, they would funnel money from people in other regions. Rather than lowering your rate, because "you can pay more", they will charge you more.
And finally, at the end of the day--your money would ultimately go into the hands of a greedy shmuck. They would get to charge whatever they wanted until you get to the breaking point, raising costs as a result of average incomes going up, and almost never dropping them unless people started using alternative routes. But here's the catch, in many areas, there aren't any decent alternative routes to use. In most places the highways and the main roads are really the only efficient way to get somewhere. Knowing this, they would be able to pull money from your wallet as bad as the gasoline companies.
Sorry, I'll stick to my tax paid-for roads and a couple of bucks for a toll here and there.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I know that it's "technically" possible to install applications as non-root. The problem comes in that there are certain conventions that each distribution wants to follow to allow a unified experience for application developers.
There's a little give and take there.
maugle:
pretty much.
Viol8:
UAC mimics much of the functionality present in a lot of Linux applications. You need root to install the application, but you don't need root to launch the application.
At least, this is exactly how Microsoft has it designed. And anything that requires administrative privileges should have a service that starts as admin/root and then the client side process should be low privileged.
This is exactly how Microsoft has it setup. The problem is that a lot of application developers are lazy. They don't want to write software for how Microsoft wants it to be written. This has, essentially been how Microsoft has intended software to be written for years. C:\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data has only been around since the Windows 2000 days.
The aforementioned design, however, has never been enforced by Microsoft.
And the worst part about it is that users themselves are asking for software to be written poorly. All you have to do is to take a quick look over at the ZSNES forums where the developers openly asked its users how they should store configurations now that UAC gets in the way, and the users tell them "We want it to be more portable!"
That's fine and all, if you want to install all applications to C:\Users\. But like Linux, there are folder conventions.
It's all there, everything. The environment for writing secure products that don't get exploited that run within the context of a limited user are all built into the OS already.
Microsoft even went out of their way to "virtualize" Program Files for applications that fail to follow the proper format.
Here, start this installer that asks for your root password during install so that it auto elevates itself via your root account.
Just install the update that Microsoft released in October?
Minus Group Policy.
I'm just going to put this lightly.
You follow through with this idea, you're going to lose your job. Not only are you going to lose your job, but you're going to make it so FOSS software is almost never considered in your school again--for any project. Because the beancounters are going to look back and see just how much money they wasted, how much time and effort they wasted, only to hire a consultant to come fix the mess you made whom is going to reinstall Windows anyway.
Just my 2 cents.
The problem that I have with dvorak is that when you type on it you feel like your right hand is doing far more work than the left hand since the positioning of the letters.
This is fine for people who are right-handed, but tends to be problematic for people such as myelf whom are left handed.
Qwerty is more spread across both sides of the keyboard, and a lot of words can be made with just the left hand alone.
You might only feel this sort of "strain" if you're a left-handed typist.
So let me get this straight.....
There should be no OSHA, should be no employer equality, no employer responsibility, no minimum wage, no nothing.
You know why things are the way they are now? Because the things you mentioned didn't work in the past.
http://americanhistory.suite101.com/article.cfm/labor_movement
So I guess you want to go back to things like that, right?
The government stepped in as a mediator between the people. And this is what we have. It was required, live with it, and instead of fighting against it try to use it to your benefit. Otherwise, somebody else will (and already has).
Australia and the US have two very different legal systems. Australia's lets them get away with things that wouldn't be tolerated here in the states.
Except they can censor your internet and you won't ever know it. But really, censorship doesn't necessarily need the internet these days. In fact, the internet makes it even easier.
At a few clicks of a mouse, you can for example change your CNN homepage to include more "worldly" news or more "local" news. Who's to say that what you see is what is truly happening? I live in Maryland, do I see exactly the same news as someone in California? What about someone in Canada?
Don't think that there's any mitigation at all to censorship simply because people are separated by organizations. After all, people of all socioeconomic statuses can attend similar churches.
I'm not saying the US Government is perfect, but at the very least we have a GUARANTEED right to know what's going on. Our government only hides things because we're too big of pussies to go after them. However, we're not legally bound to submit to their will--they are to ours.
Braco wytcld, you hit the nail on the head.
All of these people saying that such things aren't "allowed" by the Constitution. They're not expressly forbidden, either.
The US Constitution is amendable, or have we forgotten that the core of what makes the US Constitution so powerful is that it can be changed with time?
But relatively speaking, the "size" of our government is small. That is, in raw man power and departments most of what they do is outsourced to contractors.
Anyone else find it kind of weird that this is happening right around the time that Bush and Cheney and Co. are heading out of office?
You are vastly overcomplicating the situation, the OP said "There is no outside access to the internet through this connection".
And how, exactly, is it going to go "outside the company" if the torrent is entirely internal anyway? You could have outside access and it's not going to start sending your data to the internet if your tracker and peers consist of entirely internal hosts.
As far as Microsoft is concerned, they made a version of Vista that did not include the 3D fancy interface. While perhaps this was ultimately a poor marketing decision, it's certainly not criminal nor damages-worthy.
Either way, in the end, they have already lost. The constant knee dragging by these morons gives them bad press, and they've earned a lot of bad press over nothing. This entire case is stupid. And the worst part is it's being carried on by people who "think" they are educated.
Vista Basic is still Vista.
Vista Capable meant the PC could run Vista.
They can install and run Basic, Premium, Business, or Ultimate. The PC doesn't care. They simply lose features that their PC doesn't have, for example, Aero.
If they install Ultimate, they still get things such as bitlocker. If they install Business, they still get the ability to join domains.
So nobody got shafted here. They are just your every day normal average Joe stupid computer user.
pseudo:
You're wrong. Aero is a fuction of the OS, it is not the OS. These machines run Vista, they don't run Aero.
Is Windows Server 2003 Standard not Windows Server 2003 since it doesn't include the Datacenter edition functionality?
Except, that the change in requirements came before consumers could actually obtain Vista.
This has nothing to do with "lying, cheating, scamming" this has to do with marketing.
Fact is, you need your products to sell and it needs to be worth buying. The unfortunate part is at the time all of this was going down, you couldn't get a reasonable "Vista" PC. It was OEMs and Intel wanting to push inventory. Their assumption was that once Vista came out, they wouldn't be able to push these PCs.
This is correct.
This sort of thing happens all over the software industry, Microsoft is no different. Do you ever look at a game's minimum system requirements and actually expect it to run decently? You've got to be kidding me. Crysis' minimum requirements include a Geforce 6 series graphics card.
When you need storage and reliability for the long term, there's no substitute.
http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/westasia/literature/cuneiform.jpg
err not going to be difficult*
My apologies.
For the end users around here, this doesn't mean much for you.
This does not mean that you'll be able to run whatever version of Android you want on your phone. I would imagine there's very likely situations with code signing involved that ensures that if you're using XYZ's phone, that you'll only be allowed to run the XYZ versions of Android.
This open sourcing does not mean that you simply get to buy an Android phone and then download a version that you want and run that. Not only due to "artificial" reasons such as code signing, but due to hardware features (or lackthereof).
All this really means is that the companies get to have someone else do heavy legwork for them. Beyond that, it means more familiarity with the Android platform which means there's potentially more market for the platform on the bottom line.
More developers means more applications, more applications means more market for Android. Google and the phone carriers are happy. As an end user, you still get a locked down piece of junk--but hey, at least you'll have 50 variants of a card game to buy instead of 40.
M$ can't delete MY software and neither can AT&T =)
Are you sure? A lot of people were shocked (shocked!) to learn that Vista has a backdoor that lets MS disable apps on a customer's machines. Then the discussions here and elsewhere brought out the apparent fact that this has been an undocumented "feature" of Windows since at least XP. This news spread in online forums like /. earlier this year, and I've found it fun to mention it to Windows users. I've yet to find anyone who had ever heard of it.
If your WM phone has such a "kill switch", you probably won't hear about it until they use it.
Actually, it's common in the smart-phone part of the industry. A few years ago, a project I was working on bought me a Blackberry, and one of the first things I did was to install a real browser on it. A year or so later, the browser suddenly stopped working. When I investigated, I finally found someone at the vendor who told me that my license to use it had been disabled. He wouldn't say who did it or why. But I never got it to work again. So such a "kill switch" is implemented on Blackberries. Various discussions I've seen since then have made it clear that if you have a smart-phone, it's highly likely that this can be done to you, too, either by the software vendor or by the cell-phone company.
So far, I haven't heard of it on desktop computers, except for MS Windows. But again, I wouldn't be surprised.
Please e-mail me any details you have on said remote features of Windows that do this. Please post any links to API calls, any examples of this happening with any software, and any examples of Microsoft remoting into anyone's computer and doing this. Thanks.
I have to agree with you here. I've been trying to get a mailserver running, and part of the problem is everyone has their own "way" of doing it, and there's no concrete method other than figuring it out, which can be a pain in the behind.
The sendmail/postfix guys have their "one way" of doing things. that is, the way it was always setup was send mail to users on the system and to other users on other systems. Pretty simple, but in the newer environments of hosted email (rather than users on the system) there are problems.
The postfix guys aren't going to help you with courier or dovecot. The Ubuntu guys can't help the Redhat users. And even inbetween distributions, different people have entirely different (and often times incompatible) methods.
What you stated above is extremely difficult to do elegantly.
Yes, but you forget the simple thign here EastCoastSurfer.
The states don't want the burden of the roads on them. Otherwise it would have been that way to begin with. Not to mention, you can't argue the fact that a federal highway system has significantly helped travel in this country (I use I-95 myself to travel all up and down the US east coast annually).
Either way, you're in the situation that "someone will take a cut". The difference is how much control you have over that cut.
As it stands right now, what they do with the money is public knowledge. Rather, it's mostly public knowledge. You can use the FOIA to get information on all sorts of stuff the government does. It's your right to do it and you can exercise that right.
If a private company wants to take money and pay their executives, you have no "right" to know what they do with that money. That money has already changed from your hand to theirs. Given the road situation in many areas (where a single main road is generally the only road to drive on to get somewhere), this becomes a problem.
It's not a simple matter of shopping for goods in the grocery store. You don't get to choose the bargain discount box of cereal when it comes to your driving.
But see, the wonderful thing about having a government tax system is that YOU are ultimately in control. Sure, you can say what you want about dirty voting tactics of political parties and the like, but you still, under this system, have a legal say.
You give up any of that right when you say something against a private organization, and saying something against them could even become illegal (slander, libel).
That's a right I'm never going to give up.
Oh I know this will become flame bait...
Why are you "anti-taxes". Taxes do a lot of good things. Regardless of the cherry picked issues that people like to pull out on where taxes go, there are still a lot of good things that taxes do for you, your surroundings, and the environment.
For example, National and State parks are funded by taxes. They are protected lands and pay for your ability to get out of the house. Sure, not all of the funding to these areas are tax-related, but taxes help keep the costs of enjoying them down.
Instead of paying $20 to get into the park, you pay $5. In some cases, there are areas you can go to and not even pay.
They are used to pay for police and firefighters. Taxes are used to pay for roads, for city cleanup crews, and everything along those lines.
You take all of these services for granted because they've "been there" since you've known. But take away even a city's trash cans or paying the extra police force to patrol certain areas, and within months you would find a completely different story.
Private development is not always the way to go. For example, if roads were privately owned you would find that you would be charged to drive on them and often times at a higher rate than publicly owned roads. You would also encounter a lot more tolls. On top of that, the pricing would vary and the amount of bills you would pay would have to go up.
Inevitably, you may also end up paying for roads you don't use if the company that owns the road also owns other tolls. For example, a toll company from Australia has purchased roads in the US. They did this on Australian money. Inevitably, a similar thing would happen here with a private company. If there was a road that needed maintaining, but the local toll wasn't enough money to actually clean the road and make it safe, they would funnel money from people in other regions. Rather than lowering your rate, because "you can pay more", they will charge you more.
And finally, at the end of the day--your money would ultimately go into the hands of a greedy shmuck. They would get to charge whatever they wanted until you get to the breaking point, raising costs as a result of average incomes going up, and almost never dropping them unless people started using alternative routes. But here's the catch, in many areas, there aren't any decent alternative routes to use. In most places the highways and the main roads are really the only efficient way to get somewhere. Knowing this, they would be able to pull money from your wallet as bad as the gasoline companies.
Sorry, I'll stick to my tax paid-for roads and a couple of bucks for a toll here and there.