Consequently the successor to the ext3 filesystem, ext4, includes a filesystem defragmentation utility and support for extents (contiguous file regions).
Looks like defragmenting is coming to Linux as well, so there goes your argument with that.
Garbageware
Just because an OEM would put Linux on a machine does not necessarily mean it won't come pre-loaded with a large amount of crap. It would, and if you think differently you're fooling yourself otherwise. In fact, I'm willing to bet given the "open" nature of Linux, that the garbageware would not only be installed on the system, it would be a core part of the system. There would be no removing it. While this is merely nothing more than conjecture, it's a very real scenario. Microsoft does not allow the OEMs to modify core parts of the OS, but an OEM could modify a core part of any Linux variant and, for example, include advertisements all the way around your applications.
That's a wait-and-see thing but certainly very possible.
Quote: MS could have done this the Right Way. Chroot is your friend. Programs that whine about XYZ not being where it is, then throwing up a UAC prompt is not the right way to do things. Instead, they could have made a default CHROOT environment for each program, with access to the users home directory.
Unfortunately it isn't quite this simple. In order to maintain backwards compatibility, which is a very important thing moving from here on out, software needs a level of interaction with the system. Whether or not this is/was the correct way to do things is up for discussion, but Microsoft has made it available for software to be coded correctly many years ago. They just never enforced it. Why? Who knows. Now they chose to enforce it, but also offer the user a choice.
UAC and Sudo are very, very similar.
The only exception being that sudo can allow you to elevate yourself and do things without getting bugged again until you are finished. Of course, it can be argued that this in and of itself doesn't really solve the problem.
If you want to see a fully secure environment, just take a look at SELinux and get back to me. See for yourself how difficult it is to operate an OS and manage it with multiple tiers of users when you don't have root access.
Quote: Once I get it, I need to go into properties (or commandline) and go set the executable bit. If I dont do this, the OS refuses to run it. Now, is his a bad program? Nope. But it solves the "run_anything_from_email" and related issues in MS based systems.
It can be argued that having to flag a program as executable would be a serious problem for the user. Look only so far at the negative reception of UAC, which you took a jab on earlier. Having to nag the user to take extra steps when they just want to run an application is begging for a serious amount of whining. So your proposed solution really doesn't solve this in any way.
Quote: Now, IE will open up and run whatever.
How long has it been since you've run IE? IE will not just "run whatever". It will actually bug the user multiple times whether or not they want to allow the application. There are security dialogs, warnings, and a final "Accept/Install" before you're allowed to run or install any ActiveX file. Again, providing the user a choice. Sure, most users click OK and this is a serious problem, but would you rather the OS just not allow you to do something?
It's actually kind of funny because as the web seems to evolve we appear to be getting more and more to the point where a browser is an execution environment. It's not a si
Okay, I'm going to make a post here that falls into two parts.
Firstly, this is a pretty useful utility for those that aren't very computer savvy. Everyone knows that most "slowness" can be resolved by simply maintaining the computer every now and again. Clearing temp files, defragmenting, cleaning off viruses, trojans, and other malware. So for the people that are prone to these types of problems, this is a pretty useful utility.
Their alternative is either "the friend" whom has now grown up and gotten a real IT job and doesn't want to be bothered by them, or Best Buy's GeekSquad who will try and tell you your ram is broken and your hard drive died, all the while copying your personal album off of the PC to their internal servers.
Now, the more "OMG anti M$" side of the argument is that Microsoft needs to do something to help improve its image with consumers. Right now, consumers just don't like Windows. In fact, quite the opposite is true. There is a growing movement of disdain for Windows. While every day normal Joe might not care either way, the people he or she asks for computer purchasing advice does care.
Microsoft, after years of keeping hands off on a lot of issues with Windows due to the whole "antitrust" thing, is finally taking charge and trying to improve their image with their software. A "We Care(tm)" approach to a person's computers. That not all Windows is good for is viruses and spyware and Microsoft is actively trying to help its users.
Doing the above, at least Microsoft hopes, may improve confidence and trust in the company.
Either of the above ways you wish to look at it, it's a free utility. It's useful, provides some recommendations about your computer, and provides some help to users who otherwise would just get frustrated.
It also has some sort of built in advertising tool that I'm not sure what exactly is there for since there are no "Offers" available yet.
Not part of a team? You mean, waking up in wee hours of the night because of a corporate server going down isn't enough to prove that you're dedicated to the company?
Or how about the amount of crap you hear being in IT, the only time you hear about computer issues is when someone wants to complain?
"Opening up" and "being a part of the team" is not going to change those issues. "My computer crashed while I was working on a very important project!" isn't going to change whether or not the employees can use IM or facebook.
No I agree with you, in some situations it is warranted sitting down and discussing various applications to be installed and used by various groups. But the scenario you pointed out doesn't necessarily mean that said users need administrative access on their machines.
Nor does it mean that every user needs the ability to use their personal laptop while in the office.
In reality, the only reason this is really an issue and being discussed at all is that most IT shops are so lazy that they don't want to set things properly.
That said, there does exist some retarded software out there that wants users to have Administrative access on their machines.
Actually, for any given Windows XP SP3 machine or Windows Vista box, 42 processes is an extremely low number.
And I find it extremely hard to believe, even in that scenario, that almost half of them (19 processes) are related to software that the IT department had installed on there.
For what it's worth, the machines would probably be faster if the guys with the money listened to IT.
It's not IT's fault that you are using a crappy computer. Let me assure you, if the IT nerds had an unlimited money supply everyone in the building would be using quad processor machines with 24" LCDs just so they could brag to their IT nerd buddies about how awesome their network is.
Actually, for the sake of my argument, you can assume that any software can be seen as potentially a security risk and exploitable.
This is something you learn from using linux and why applications create their own users. You lock down the system based on what the application could likely do, even if there's no known exploit.
As an IT guy, my job isn't to keep you happy or keep you productive. My job is to keep the network safe and secure and make sure that business operations are not interrupted.
Locking down a Windows network to prevent users from installing software, compatible or not, is one of the first things you learn on the way to becoming a Microsoft Certified Solitaire Associate.
I have to disagree with the people here stating that "many of these applications are harmless".
No, they are very harmful, and even if some of them are harmless right now does not mean things may not be harmful in the future.
When the business relies on IT, you cannot allow one person to be able to cause all the headaches for the network.
If a person visits a compromised website with a 0-day exploit that attacks the browser you have installed, and then proceeds to install a worm that traverses the network and attacks all of your machines, soon enough turning your whole network into a giant malware infested spamming machine.
The lockdowns are not because of "known" dangers, it's the unknowns.
You could have the most competent, updated anti-virus in the world, a rigorous patch scheme with Network Access Control implemented (mind you, NAC/NAP is a fairly new thing) that prevents people from connecting to the LAN without certain requirements being met, and a 0-day vulnerability could render all of that useless in an instant.
You have no choice but to lock down your machines and prevent users from doing things that are "harmless".
I would have loved a policy like this in high school. During my first 2 years in high school (at a different school than I completed the last 2 years), most of our grade was weighted on homework and not work done in the classroom. Classroom work ended up being a very small portion of the grade in comparison to homework. We're talking about 40% homework, 40% tests, and 20% classwork. It was a weird weighted system that overburdened students with making sure they were doing their homework.
Terrible idea. In most cases, I didn't do homework. That wasn't any measure of my aptitude as being a student. I aced my tests, aced my classwork, but even 100% acing every test and 100% every classwork assignment, it would mean tops of a 60% grade in the class. And I admit not every single test was aced by me, some of them I didn't do as well on here and there.
I'm in favor of this simply because it means the student has a chance to pass even if they aren't the type of person to do well in certain "method" than the other.
Medical software usually does one thing, and one thing only. The software powering those huge, big tin medical components will only ever need to do that one thing. You're not going to use an X-Ray scanner machine to monitor someone's heart rate and pulse.
On the contrary, the average desktop computer is used for everything from gaming, to video editing, photo editing, film production, office applications, etc. And rather than a focus being on "closed-source, hyper security"--the big focus on the "average pc" is everything being able to connect and talk. We see this with "Standards" such as XML, OOXML, ODF--where the idea is that you could write a document in one application and that document can be used for an entirely different purpose elsewhere, such as being displayed on a webpage in web format, dumped into a SQL database, and being stored and indexed.
Oh, and by the way, you know the desktops that hospitals use to look up your medical records, make changes to your files and data? Yeah, that's MS Windows.
And with regards to "regulation for unsafe products". Who gets to define what is or isn't unsafe? Every single OS vendor, every single software developer--whether it's Cisco IOS, Oracle's DB solutions, Debian, Redhat, or Microsoft--everyone has products that are insecure and vulnerable.
It would stifle innovation as nobody would want to write software for the fear that it could be exploited.
Do you understand why they are doing this? Many malware creations out there, time and time again, the biggest ones have been a result of unpatched systems and vulnerabilities released by the vendor. *EVERYONE* watches these vulnerability reports, including malware writers.
And when I say "malware writers", I don't mean the geeky kid sitting at his computer finding holes in software. I mean the guys that are out there to do it for a profit and are farther down the food chain.
The way this chain works in these cases (and what they're trying to stop):
OS Vendor releases patch/exploit info. Many users don't patch. Spammer/Malware writer exploits flaw that was found. Worm/Trojan is created that uses the exploit to drop a payload. AV Vendor watches the new worms/trojans out there to create signatures to get rid of them.
If you notice the chain here, you realize that the "hackers" and "malware writers" have "products" out before the AV Vendors do. By giving the vendors access to the exploit data, proper tools can be created to watch for attempts at the exploit. Perhaps something that watches for the buffer overflow?
You know, if it's a remote IIS vulnerability and it goes something like http://site.com/request.aspx?request=AAABBBCCCDDDEEEFFFJ2394829384820808payload_here
The AV vendors could look for and validate the input and no trojan, unpatched system or not, can get through.
There is still NOTHING comparable to Active Directory on the Linux front--not even Novell, through the purchase of SUSE, has been pushing something even anywhere near as decent and as manageable.
Ugh I know this is flame bait but I have to say it as it's on topic.
I still don't see the harm that Gates brought to the computing industry with Microsoft. They brought a unification to the desktop and IT that simply didn't exist before, and pushed for standards that made it easier.
And even now there are still problems with all of this. Look at the browser market. Even if IE were not involved, you still have the problem that Firefox, Opera, and Safari render pages differently. Their performance is also very different. So say, a website that you write for one may be great on performance but when launched in another browser be completely and utterly poor.
Even setting "standards" for rendering don't resolve that, as exactly "how" those standards are implemented are left up to the developers. Then you still have the issue that Safari is the most common browser used on Macs, and that's certainly going to heat up as Safari 4 makes its rounds.
Either way, Microsoft tried to reduce this as much as possible. And they succeeded. Despite the fact that millions of people don't know how to use the computers they use every day, they still use them and have access to them. You can still get an education with them.
There are points where IT nerds don't want to learn anything new anymore--it's just at a much higher point than the average person, but still exists...
Wouldn't this kind of remove the point of going after.XXX? I know a large part of the reason that they wanted.XXX to open up is so that porn companies could buy it up and you could block the TLD, making it easier to filter "for the children" and things like that.
With a TLD free-for-all, you now open up a can of worms that would be disgustingly awful.
What would.XXX be worth if you could simply by my.porn.site? or mysite.porn or mysite.adultsonly?
Your "what if" is just as good as my "what if". The reality is, Microsoft was the player who did what it did. You could sit here and go "what if that had not happened" all you want but it's not going to change the fact that it was Microsoft who was at the top of this game.
The reality is, the reason why there were so many smaller players is because, guess what? Everyone wants to be on top or everyone thinks they can do something better than the other guy.
Not everyone cares, obviously, because great ideas and smart people tend to fizzle out all of the time even if it was "years ahead" of its time.
Even now, we have this problem of early computing but in the linux world. Things Microsoft worked hard at changing are STILL prevalent in the Linux software industry.
I can't help but think to agree with some of the others here. He changed a few grades, big deal. How many cases have there been of teachers changing grades for students who provide them "special" favors? How many cases of misrepresented grades have gone through the public school system?
The reality is, the kid probably did it because he was bored in school. This most certainly was the reason why I played around on my school's network back in the day. When you're an IT nerd in high school studying how firewalls work on your own time, and you're shoved into a class full of people who don't know the difference between Windows 95 and Windows 98 and can't type even 1/4th the speed you can--there are glaring flaws to be seen in this system.
While what the kid did may be technically seen as "wrong", 38 years is a bit much. The school should look at programs to challenge students like this one, which may include smaller classrooms, more advanced materials to study, or even individualized instruction.
Then they could have kept him out of their network.
But then you run into the situation of local mirrors require storage space, build-out of infrastructure, a team dedicated to making sure the content stays secure.
Contracts with OEMs to provide support for the local hardware as necessary.
Even then, local mirror goes down for whatever reason, and the users have to end up going out of the ISP anyway.
For that matter, most people who end up using "usenet" actually use a provider that isn't their ISP. This is largely due to access to content as well as retention time.
Not to mention, say content expands beyond expected growth potential. This isn't entirely unheard of in the IT market, you end up having to build out, re-assess, and quickly implement new solutions to keep up.
As popularity grows on peer to peer distribution, it scales to meet that need rather gracefully. In the case of torrent, your tracker may get overloaded with requests but it's far easier to setup another tracker and get it listening than it is to mirror gigabytes of data across the internet to be able to distribute the content to people that request it.
P2P distribution is simply the best way looking forward to lower overall costs while gracefully handling not only content *availability, but distribution *scalability. *Buzzwords
I agree, this is the situation or is part of the overall situation. However, my responses to Tony were such that as a pure file transfer performance and availability standpoint, mesh distribution networks (peer to peer) are significantly better than a "star" distribution network (server -> clientA, clientB, clientC)
At some point bandwidth is shared. Whether it be on the lines or the Central Office. But hey, you keep thinking that you're a crusader against cable companies by trying to prove DSL is "better"!
Slashdot Mirror
Creepy Crawler:
Ext3 file defragmentation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3#Defragmentation
Consequently the successor to the ext3 filesystem, ext4, includes a filesystem defragmentation utility and support for extents (contiguous file regions).
Also: http://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/New_ext4_features
Looks like defragmenting is coming to Linux as well, so there goes your argument with that.
Garbageware
Just because an OEM would put Linux on a machine does not necessarily mean it won't come pre-loaded with a large amount of crap. It would, and if you think differently you're fooling yourself otherwise. In fact, I'm willing to bet given the "open" nature of Linux, that the garbageware would not only be installed on the system, it would be a core part of the system. There would be no removing it. While this is merely nothing more than conjecture, it's a very real scenario. Microsoft does not allow the OEMs to modify core parts of the OS, but an OEM could modify a core part of any Linux variant and, for example, include advertisements all the way around your applications.
That's a wait-and-see thing but certainly very possible.
Quote: MS could have done this the Right Way. Chroot is your friend. Programs that whine about XYZ not being where it is, then throwing up a UAC prompt is not the right way to do things. Instead, they could have made a default CHROOT environment for each program, with access to the users home directory.
Unfortunately it isn't quite this simple. In order to maintain backwards compatibility, which is a very important thing moving from here on out, software needs a level of interaction with the system. Whether or not this is/was the correct way to do things is up for discussion, but Microsoft has made it available for software to be coded correctly many years ago. They just never enforced it. Why? Who knows. Now they chose to enforce it, but also offer the user a choice.
UAC and Sudo are very, very similar.
The only exception being that sudo can allow you to elevate yourself and do things without getting bugged again until you are finished.
Of course, it can be argued that this in and of itself doesn't really solve the problem.
If you want to see a fully secure environment, just take a look at SELinux and get back to me. See for yourself how difficult it is to operate an OS and manage it with multiple tiers of users when you don't have root access.
Quote: Once I get it, I need to go into properties (or commandline) and go set the executable bit. If I dont do this, the OS refuses to run it. Now, is his a bad program? Nope. But it solves the "run_anything_from_email" and related issues in MS based systems.
It can be argued that having to flag a program as executable would be a serious problem for the user. Look only so far at the negative reception of UAC, which you took a jab on earlier. Having to nag the user to take extra steps when they just want to run an application is begging for a serious amount of whining. So your proposed solution really doesn't solve this in any way.
Quote: Now, IE will open up and run whatever.
How long has it been since you've run IE? IE will not just "run whatever". It will actually bug the user multiple times whether or not they want to allow the application. There are security dialogs, warnings, and a final "Accept/Install" before you're allowed to run or install any ActiveX file. Again, providing the user a choice. Sure, most users click OK and this is a serious problem, but would you rather the OS just not allow you to do something?
It's actually kind of funny because as the web seems to evolve we appear to be getting more and more to the point where a browser is an execution environment. It's not a si
Exactly to Anonymous Coward.
Okay, I'm going to make a post here that falls into two parts.
Firstly, this is a pretty useful utility for those that aren't very computer savvy. Everyone knows that most "slowness" can be resolved by simply maintaining the computer every now and again. Clearing temp files, defragmenting, cleaning off viruses, trojans, and other malware. So for the people that are prone to these types of problems, this is a pretty useful utility.
Their alternative is either "the friend" whom has now grown up and gotten a real IT job and doesn't want to be bothered by them, or Best Buy's GeekSquad who will try and tell you your ram is broken and your hard drive died, all the while copying your personal album off of the PC to their internal servers.
Now, the more "OMG anti M$" side of the argument is that Microsoft needs to do something to help improve its image with consumers. Right now, consumers just don't like Windows. In fact, quite the opposite is true. There is a growing movement of disdain for Windows. While every day normal Joe might not care either way, the people he or she asks for computer purchasing advice does care.
Microsoft, after years of keeping hands off on a lot of issues with Windows due to the whole "antitrust" thing, is finally taking charge and trying to improve their image with their software. A "We Care(tm)" approach to a person's computers. That not all Windows is good for is viruses and spyware and Microsoft is actively trying to help its users.
Doing the above, at least Microsoft hopes, may improve confidence and trust in the company.
Either of the above ways you wish to look at it, it's a free utility. It's useful, provides some recommendations about your computer, and provides some help to users who otherwise would just get frustrated.
It also has some sort of built in advertising tool that I'm not sure what exactly is there for since there are no "Offers" available yet.
Not part of a team? You mean, waking up in wee hours of the night because of a corporate server going down isn't enough to prove that you're dedicated to the company?
Or how about the amount of crap you hear being in IT, the only time you hear about computer issues is when someone wants to complain?
"Opening up" and "being a part of the team" is not going to change those issues. "My computer crashed while I was working on a very important project!" isn't going to change whether or not the employees can use IM or facebook.
No I agree with you, in some situations it is warranted sitting down and discussing various applications to be installed and used by various groups. But the scenario you pointed out doesn't necessarily mean that said users need administrative access on their machines.
Nor does it mean that every user needs the ability to use their personal laptop while in the office.
In reality, the only reason this is really an issue and being discussed at all is that most IT shops are so lazy that they don't want to set things properly.
That said, there does exist some retarded software out there that wants users to have Administrative access on their machines.
I think it's because of the known unknown dangers that pose a security risk with unknown and known possible consequences.
Actually, for any given Windows XP SP3 machine or Windows Vista box, 42 processes is an extremely low number.
And I find it extremely hard to believe, even in that scenario, that almost half of them (19 processes) are related to software that the IT department had installed on there.
Either way, sounds like a troll to me.
If management came to IT and expressed an interest in having this, then by all means it's something that should be looked into.
The situation is that it's all "personal" stuff, and the corporate execs don't want to spend money on the proper way to do things.
You run into this situation where it's no longer about IT vs. users but more of business interest vs. personal interest.
For what it's worth, the machines would probably be faster if the guys with the money listened to IT.
It's not IT's fault that you are using a crappy computer. Let me assure you, if the IT nerds had an unlimited money supply everyone in the building would be using quad processor machines with 24" LCDs just so they could brag to their IT nerd buddies about how awesome their network is.
Actually, for the sake of my argument, you can assume that any software can be seen as potentially a security risk and exploitable.
This is something you learn from using linux and why applications create their own users. You lock down the system based on what the application could likely do, even if there's no known exploit.
As an IT guy, my job isn't to keep you happy or keep you productive. My job is to keep the network safe and secure and make sure that business operations are not interrupted.
Locking down a Windows network to prevent users from installing software, compatible or not, is one of the first things you learn on the way to becoming a Microsoft Certified Solitaire Associate.
There's no excuse.
I have to disagree with the people here stating that "many of these applications are harmless".
No, they are very harmful, and even if some of them are harmless right now does not mean things may not be harmful in the future.
When the business relies on IT, you cannot allow one person to be able to cause all the headaches for the network.
If a person visits a compromised website with a 0-day exploit that attacks the browser you have installed, and then proceeds to install a worm that traverses the network and attacks all of your machines, soon enough turning your whole network into a giant malware infested spamming machine.
The lockdowns are not because of "known" dangers, it's the unknowns.
You could have the most competent, updated anti-virus in the world, a rigorous patch scheme with Network Access Control implemented (mind you, NAC/NAP is a fairly new thing) that prevents people from connecting to the LAN without certain requirements being met, and a 0-day vulnerability could render all of that useless in an instant.
You have no choice but to lock down your machines and prevent users from doing things that are "harmless".
I would have loved a policy like this in high school. During my first 2 years in high school (at a different school than I completed the last 2 years), most of our grade was weighted on homework and not work done in the classroom. Classroom work ended up being a very small portion of the grade in comparison to homework. We're talking about 40% homework, 40% tests, and 20% classwork. It was a weird weighted system that overburdened students with making sure they were doing their homework.
Terrible idea. In most cases, I didn't do homework. That wasn't any measure of my aptitude as being a student. I aced my tests, aced my classwork, but even 100% acing every test and 100% every classwork assignment, it would mean tops of a 60% grade in the class. And I admit not every single test was aced by me, some of them I didn't do as well on here and there.
I'm in favor of this simply because it means the student has a chance to pass even if they aren't the type of person to do well in certain "method" than the other.
And a 2nd post on your other points:
Medical software usually does one thing, and one thing only. The software powering those huge, big tin medical components will only ever need to do that one thing. You're not going to use an X-Ray scanner machine to monitor someone's heart rate and pulse.
On the contrary, the average desktop computer is used for everything from gaming, to video editing, photo editing, film production, office applications, etc. And rather than a focus being on "closed-source, hyper security"--the big focus on the "average pc" is everything being able to connect and talk. We see this with "Standards" such as XML, OOXML, ODF--where the idea is that you could write a document in one application and that document can be used for an entirely different purpose elsewhere, such as being displayed on a webpage in web format, dumped into a SQL database, and being stored and indexed.
Oh, and by the way, you know the desktops that hospitals use to look up your medical records, make changes to your files and data? Yeah, that's MS Windows.
And with regards to "regulation for unsafe products". Who gets to define what is or isn't unsafe? Every single OS vendor, every single software developer--whether it's Cisco IOS, Oracle's DB solutions, Debian, Redhat, or Microsoft--everyone has products that are insecure and vulnerable.
It would stifle innovation as nobody would want to write software for the fear that it could be exploited.
jhfry:
Do you understand why they are doing this? Many malware creations out there, time and time again, the biggest ones have been a result of unpatched systems and vulnerabilities released by the vendor. *EVERYONE* watches these vulnerability reports, including malware writers.
And when I say "malware writers", I don't mean the geeky kid sitting at his computer finding holes in software. I mean the guys that are out there to do it for a profit and are farther down the food chain.
The way this chain works in these cases (and what they're trying to stop):
OS Vendor releases patch/exploit info.
Many users don't patch.
Spammer/Malware writer exploits flaw that was found.
Worm/Trojan is created that uses the exploit to drop a payload.
AV Vendor watches the new worms/trojans out there to create signatures to get rid of them.
If you notice the chain here, you realize that the "hackers" and "malware writers" have "products" out before the AV Vendors do. By giving the vendors access to the exploit data, proper tools can be created to watch for attempts at the exploit. Perhaps something that watches for the buffer overflow?
You know, if it's a remote IIS vulnerability and it goes something like http://site.com/request.aspx?request=AAABBBCCCDDDEEEFFFJ2394829384820808payload_here
The AV vendors could look for and validate the input and no trojan, unpatched system or not, can get through.
Like which browsers are "truly insecure"? All of them on this round are turning out to be fairly decent these days.
And Microsoft has been rather committed to security even issuing a security update for IE8 Beta 1, which really they shouldn't have to do.
There is still NOTHING comparable to Active Directory on the Linux front--not even Novell, through the purchase of SUSE, has been pushing something even anywhere near as decent and as manageable.
Ugh I know this is flame bait but I have to say it as it's on topic.
I still don't see the harm that Gates brought to the computing industry with Microsoft. They brought a unification to the desktop and IT that simply didn't exist before, and pushed for standards that made it easier.
And even now there are still problems with all of this. Look at the browser market. Even if IE were not involved, you still have the problem that Firefox, Opera, and Safari render pages differently. Their performance is also very different. So say, a website that you write for one may be great on performance but when launched in another browser be completely and utterly poor.
Even setting "standards" for rendering don't resolve that, as exactly "how" those standards are implemented are left up to the developers. Then you still have the issue that Safari is the most common browser used on Macs, and that's certainly going to heat up as Safari 4 makes its rounds.
Either way, Microsoft tried to reduce this as much as possible. And they succeeded. Despite the fact that millions of people don't know how to use the computers they use every day, they still use them and have access to them. You can still get an education with them.
There are points where IT nerds don't want to learn anything new anymore--it's just at a much higher point than the average person, but still exists...
Wouldn't this kind of remove the point of going after .XXX? I know a large part of the reason that they wanted .XXX to open up is so that porn companies could buy it up and you could block the TLD, making it easier to filter "for the children" and things like that.
.XXX be worth if you could simply by my.porn.site? or mysite.porn or mysite.adultsonly?
With a TLD free-for-all, you now open up a can of worms that would be disgustingly awful.
What would
What about the spammers?
www.paypal.mybanking
www.paypal.ebay
www.paypal.banking
www.pay.pal
www.pay-pal.onlinebanks
Wow..just wow.
Your "what if" is just as good as my "what if". The reality is, Microsoft was the player who did what it did. You could sit here and go "what if that had not happened" all you want but it's not going to change the fact that it was Microsoft who was at the top of this game.
The reality is, the reason why there were so many smaller players is because, guess what? Everyone wants to be on top or everyone thinks they can do something better than the other guy.
Not everyone cares, obviously, because great ideas and smart people tend to fizzle out all of the time even if it was "years ahead" of its time.
Even now, we have this problem of early computing but in the linux world. Things Microsoft worked hard at changing are STILL prevalent in the Linux software industry.
I can't help but think to agree with some of the others here. He changed a few grades, big deal. How many cases have there been of teachers changing grades for students who provide them "special" favors? How many cases of misrepresented grades have gone through the public school system?
The reality is, the kid probably did it because he was bored in school. This most certainly was the reason why I played around on my school's network back in the day. When you're an IT nerd in high school studying how firewalls work on your own time, and you're shoved into a class full of people who don't know the difference between Windows 95 and Windows 98 and can't type even 1/4th the speed you can--there are glaring flaws to be seen in this system.
While what the kid did may be technically seen as "wrong", 38 years is a bit much. The school should look at programs to challenge students like this one, which may include smaller classrooms, more advanced materials to study, or even individualized instruction.
Then they could have kept him out of their network.
But then you run into the situation of local mirrors require storage space, build-out of infrastructure, a team dedicated to making sure the content stays secure.
Contracts with OEMs to provide support for the local hardware as necessary.
Even then, local mirror goes down for whatever reason, and the users have to end up going out of the ISP anyway.
For that matter, most people who end up using "usenet" actually use a provider that isn't their ISP. This is largely due to access to content as well as retention time.
Not to mention, say content expands beyond expected growth potential. This isn't entirely unheard of in the IT market, you end up having to build out, re-assess, and quickly implement new solutions to keep up.
As popularity grows on peer to peer distribution, it scales to meet that need rather gracefully. In the case of torrent, your tracker may get overloaded with requests but it's far easier to setup another tracker and get it listening than it is to mirror gigabytes of data across the internet to be able to distribute the content to people that request it.
P2P distribution is simply the best way looking forward to lower overall costs while gracefully handling not only content *availability, but distribution *scalability. *Buzzwords
kelnos:
I agree, this is the situation or is part of the overall situation. However, my responses to Tony were such that as a pure file transfer performance and availability standpoint, mesh distribution networks (peer to peer) are significantly better than a "star" distribution network (server -> clientA, clientB, clientC)
At some point bandwidth is shared. Whether it be on the lines or the Central Office. But hey, you keep thinking that you're a crusader against cable companies by trying to prove DSL is "better"!