Only if a machine is configured correctly, and only if the user decides not to run as root. Remember, we're talking about stupid people here.
The problems with windows aren't just hitting stupid people who insist on turning off the safeties. We've got a situation where all somebody has to do to get a hostile rootkit on his Windows box (we're talking default configuration here with current service packs installed) is visit an infested website -- possibly one that belongs to a well known company (or even his company) but that has been hijacked. No need to even click on the 'run me' button with the long, incomprehensible warning.
This is more like selling a bottle of bear spray that you're supposed to put on the outside of your backpack -- but without the safety pins, so that it goes off if you hit it on a branch.
. . . .
I guess the other way I could read this is that you're saying that you've got to be stupid to willingly run Windows.
Only if a machine is configured correctly, and only if the user decides not to run as root. Remember, we're talking about stupid people here. "Safety" mechanisms just get in the way and are supposed to be turned off.
One of the design errors of Windows, is that it effectively requires that a user run as root (admin) to get much done. Under those conditions, just about any buffer overflow can be parlayed into a rootkit-capable system.
Now, granted -- you can design a Linux box such that users login as root by default (lineos comes to mind). I would be just as quick to line up those idiots for a lawsuit as Gates.
(kinda like selling customers an asbestos-lined vest soaked in gasoline).
It's not necessary that a Linux user log in as root by default, and it's not suggested.
Like the guy that mentioned a gun with the safety on.... If you insist on flicking off the safety before you stuff the gun in your belt, don't scream at me if your balls get shot off. On the other hand, a well designed safety is better than none at all.
Microsoft's monopoly makes it pretty much the only company that can actually plan on getting away with selling a new product by saying:
Our current product is so slime-infested that, if you don't buy our new product (next year, or so), you'll never be able to get any usefull work done!
Of course, you can also switch over to Linux today, which has enough of a separation between user and admin that rootkits are nontrivial to install, but we won't talk about that...
____
Microsoft and Brazilian bikinis are about the only two products where you can get away with charging people hundreds of dollars for almost nothing -- Of course, I know which one I'd rather see my girlfriend use...
User stupidity helps but if Windows didn't, for example, insist on binding OS and applications so closely, it would be a lot harder for any tom dick and harry virus to install rootkits.
Linux, for example, doesn't prevent user stupidity, but it does prevent user stupidity from being trivially escelated into a rootkit installation.
It's a lot harder for someone to light themselves on fire if you have them step out of those gasoline-soaked clothes they've been wearing.
-- Granted, its stupid of them to walk into a restaurant wearing gasoline-laced clothes, but you could probably still launch a lawsuit against the idiot that sold them the clothes in the first place under the guise of "it's the industry standard -- We've got everybody wearing them!"
Pamela Jones is also gushing about the
Software Freedom Conservancy
at Groklaw.
Having dedicated (para)legal and accounting types to handle the administrivia of maintaining Non Profit (Charitable) status, could be a godsend for the projects that manage to get in on this opportunity.
Ten years ago, people thought 16MB of RAM was excessive. Ten years before that, 512KB was considered a luxury.
Those numbers only apply to a gamer's laptop.
14 years ago I admined a deskside RS-6000 box with 380MB of ram (( although the first response I often got when telling people how much ram it had was "Oooh! That's a lot of disk space isn't it?" ))
Almost 25 years ago, the Computer Science building at the University of Alberta had at least two machines with at least 16MB of ram in them -- one was a mainframe (32-48MB at that time) and the other was a VAX supermini).
It really does take about 10 years to get from the lab to the desktop.
It would do a good job on BOINC-type endeavors where the results are relatively independent of each other. On hybred jobs where communication between nodes isn't huge, and large computational chunks are possible, you could still get very close to the theoretical maximum.
There will, however, continue to be some jobs where this kind of supercomputer sucks relative to it's theretical capability.
Finding and creating the kinds of algorithms where this system works at it's best continues to be half the problem, so training scientists to use it efficiently will go a long ways to extracting maximum flops out of this emplacement.
I don't necessarily believe the 60% tale... I take it as what it is.. I story with no source that may or may not have a basis in fact. At it's worse, it's little better than an urban myth. At it's best, it has more to it than it's lack of sources may indicate.
Note that the Watergate scandal pretty much depended on a single, anonymous source (that claimed [rightly] to have been verified by the paper's editor). What made the story was that it was true, and that it produced a reaction consistent with that.
When looking at a story like this, MS's reaction is going to be more of an indicator to me of what's accurate, or not, in this story -- not what's in the story. The thing about not the 60% delay meaning that Vista won't be out until sometime 2008 is not an acceptance that the story is true... I'm saying that if the story is true, that would be a forseeable consequence. Similarly Vista coming out as per it's Jan 2007 schedule would be a sign that this story is false.
Like you, I can't see into the heart of Microsoft.
N.B: It may be that the truth of this 60% story is that it refers to the rewrite that was ordered in 2004 (i.e. that 60% of vista has been rewritten). It's all conjecture at this pint(sic).
There is much precedent for this.... (Vista was originally scheduled out when?). It's an ancient FUD tactic -- Tell the CEO/CIO types that the newest and greatest version of the OS is gonna be out "real Soon now" (Vaporware) with Gobs of capabilities, the Sun, the Moon, the Stars, etc... Then keep moving the target, keeping it just close enough that these CxOs will hold off going to a (usually superior) competing product because the 'better' (or almost as good) product is 'just around the corner'... but the corner keeps changing and, by the time you get to it, it turns out that many of the originally promised capabilities "had to be pulled at the last minute to get to market".
IBM used the tactic back when they were the computer kings, and now MS is using it against (among others) IBM. (sweet irony for those old enough to remember the IBM monopoly days).
Unforgunately, when you've got monopoly power, Terrible business practices don't hurt you as much as they should (at least, not in the near term). They only hurt you way down the road when customers smell a real alternative. After more than a decade of laboring under IBM's opressive Monopoly, this is why many people jumped on the Microsoft/PC bandwagon. It was politically viable (since it was originally the "IBM PC" and compatibles), and financially cheap like borscht compared to IBM mainframe prices.
(( IBM's pivotal error, in my view, occured when the PC-AT came out. It was more incompatible than most '286 clones and the hard drive had a design fault and failed after about 4-6 months. Since the PC only had a 90 day warranty, IBM was completely within their rights to refuse to fix it (and they did refuse) -- but this blew up the main excuse for paying the IBM premium ("The 800lb gorilla of the computing world will stand behind it with service and support"). Sales of clones went through the roof, and the Computer world was never the same again.
Tech types were relieved to get out from the political yoke of IBM's then iron grip on CEO types, but little did they realize that the cycle would repeat itself with this little company called Microsoft.
))
In all honesty, I doubt that Microsoft would be able to push Vista much farther down the road as VaporWare, but If the 60% story were anywhere near true, they might, ultimately, have to -- and they might even get away with it.
If you're under 50 years old, you probably have no idea how deja-vu Microsoft's monopoly tactics are.
While Microsoft executives themselves may not be a totally reliable source,
No. My point is that The quote is not from a Microsoft Executive. It is from an exec for an outside PR firm who has no reason to be in contact with OS programming types -- especially if he wants to deny knowledge of what is happening.
That 60% of the code needs to be ripped out and completely rewritten does relatively preposterous -- but if this 'couple of weeks delay' ultimately gets stretched out to late 2008, then it might not be so preposterous.
On the other hand, that 60% of the files associated with the changes in Vista need some touching up doesn't sound so out to lunch, and moving coders from X-box to vista isn't too preposterous either, given that X-box is now launched.
I'm not even saying that the fact that a Microsoft 'insider' went to an external PR geek to get this quote disproves anything -- just that it doesn't prove anything.... because, if if Microsoft wanted to cover up that they really were moving people from X-Box to Vista, having someone that has no need to know something like this say that he doesn't know what he wasn't told is a good way to do this.
Diplomacy uses this kind of double-speak all the time ---
Ambasador: "I know of no orders to attack your country." ((... and luckily you're not talking to the Military attaché who is dreadfully busy with something he won't tell me about until after I tell you I don't know anything.))
If you're lucky he means what it looks like he's saying. If you're not, then tomorrow's newspapers will be handed you by your jailers. In either case, what he said was true (but misleading).
Note, also, that I'm reacting to the wording in the slashback quote, and not the original article itself.
(I've spent some time in the political realm, so I get really owly when I see wording like that).
he said it would be moral for someone to break an NDA, get proprietary code, and liberate it to the world, because the mere existence of proprietary code is immoral.
Moral, but illegal, and the fact that it was illegal was enough to stop him.
In the other direction, there are a lot of things in this world that are legal but not moral... a 60 year old man having sex with a 16 year old runaway is legal. Fleecing people of their money is often done in (barely) legal ways. Legal and moral don't always coincide, and RMS is simply acknowledging that. He thinks that proprietary software is immoral, but he's chosen to take on that scourge in an entirely legal manner -- which I fully agree with.
Civil disobedience (willfully breaking the law on moral grounds) should be reserved to the most extreme cases, otherwise we run the risk of anarchy because different people think that different things are (im)moral.
All I complained about was that RMS said that closed-source code ought to be "liberated".
Yeah, and there are a lot of hot women out there that I think should go to bed with me -- but that doesn't mean that I'm about to go on a rape spree.
Neither is RMS forcing anybody to Open Source anything against their will.
He's simply using the GPL and a body of Free and usefull software to encourage people to "move over to the light side". People who want to continue to pay Microsoft big money for the 'right' to have microsoft take over their computer are free to continue to do so. People like Microsoft who want to sell closed source are similarly free to do so. RMS's intention, however, is that people will ultimately see that the Open Source route is far superior and walk away from what MS is trying to do to them.
Nobody is forced to GPL their code. There is no requirement for you to redistribute GPL code that you've modified, and that's the only time that you have to GPL your additions. If you keep the modified GPl code inside of your company (or your home, as the case may be), then there is no need to license anything.
In comparison, Who's the last people you met that had the ability to modify and redistribute Windows -- and if you did:
how much did they pay for this 'priveledge', and
did they have to give their code to Microsoft?
This seems to me a case of "give them a yard and they demand a mile". Here someone is giving you an application for free, and you're bitching that you can't close-source it and force them to pay for your minor fixes.
I believe Vista runs on a heavily.NET server kernel.
There was a recent article about how there was virtually no.net in the current version of vista. I guess that another conspiracy theory was that the marketing people decreed that more than half of vista must be written in.net, so they (semi)randomly trashed gobs of code and have started rewriting it in.net.
I just remembered something.... This tactic is something that IBM was accused of back in the '70s when they were the computer monopoly giant. It works like this:
You go to the CIO and say, "the next great version of product X is due in about a year and a half. It'll do everything that you've ever wanted and way more. 500 new features, and it'll take out your trash when you're tired.
That'll keep them from moving to a competitor... Why go through the horrors of changing supliers and products when you can just wait a year and a half and get something almost as good as what this other competitor can give you today... By the time you finish the migration, New Product X will already be out. -- and besides you've just finished the harrowing experience of migrating to Most Recent Release W.
About 2 years later, New Prouduct X(tm) us only 1 year away -- but they're adding in most of the nice tools that The Competitor delivered last weeks and a couple of even better ones.
By year 3, the product that was promised in 18 months is only 6 months away FIRM.
At 4 years, it's only due out in a month or two, but "we've had to chop out 1/3 of the stuff we promised you 3 years back to get it out the door."
At that point, you're already getting New Product X in beta, and -- even though The Competitor's product is still better than X, it's still too late to go switching from a product who'se warts you've become so intimate when the next and newest is so easy (politically) to switch to in the next couple of months.
I mean really... Are you going to admit that you've held the company back from switching to an excelent product 3 years ago just because you swallowed a bunch of marketing hoodoo from The Big Company? That could cost you your job -- or worse yet, your pride.
Flour? you sure you want to be throwing fine powdered carbohydrates on a fire?
I wouldn't be at all surprised if a knowledgeable instructor said (sarcastically) "You'd be better off throwing flour", knowing that flour could ultimately become a fuel. Then trainee misunderstands the sarcasm as "Flour is a really good idea".
Now, one thing I'd say is that throwing flour from 5 feet away would creat a nice fine mist of fuel that military types call FAE (Fuel/Air Explosive). Bad, bad news.
On the other hand, pouring a couple of kilos of flower from a foot or two away would attack the two primary methods of stopping a fire:
cool the fuel. If you have more flour than grease, the flour will cool the grease -- probably below the burning point. At this point, you have the ability to move the pan from the burner... (further cooling the fire).
When flour hits hot grease, there's a chemical reaction that takes place (first step for making cream sauces). This reaction is probably endothermic, which would further cool the fuel.
Strangely this is actually how placing a lid on the pot helps to put out a fire... It removes the exothermic ("hot") fuel-air interface point from the surface of the grease, thus slowing down the feedback loop of heating the grease from both top and bottom -- now you just need to get the bottom of the grease away from the hot burner....
deprive it of oxygen (or -- to put it another way, deprive the oxygen of flame-temperature fuel. The flour will congeal and cut down on the spattering of the grease which gives a nice fuel-air interface. It can also cover the surface of the grease (before it sinks) -- once again depriving the fuel of it's oxygen (or vice versa).
Water, on the other hand, will just instantly expand into steam, and toss grease into the air -- in a fine mist of flame-temperature fuel. When that hits the air, instead of cooling, it will light on fire which will further heat nearby droplets..... Another FAE situation -- not to mention the large globs of (near) burning grease that will probably cover your body.
So, he's not completely out to lunch -- but I'd say that if you have an ABC or K fire extinguisher on hand, or just a lid (or another, larger pan), that's probably a better solution... Just remember... Never put water on an oil/grease/gasoline fire.
Last point: Firefighters walk into these kinds of fires with equipment that goes well beyond choosing between flour and baking soda. If it gets to the point where a (fully suited) firefighter is choosing between flour and baking soda to put out a fire, (s)he's probably also wondering about whether his/her last will and testament is up to date. I seriously doubt that they get in-depth training about the nuances of using common kitchen ingredients as firefighting tools.
This is not heavy tweaking to remove bugs. A wholesale rewrite of 50%+ of your code means that there are probably major structural problems. It also means that you're likely to be introducing new bugs with the new code. Another year may be a tight schedule for recognizing and squashing the new bugs.
On the upside, Windows has needed a major rewrite since about 1995, so things are looking up.
________ Interesting Timing
The timing of this is interesting. It's coming after the European Commission lambasted their documentation. perhaps that horrid documentation is what they actually use and, when they went whole hog trying to document what they had in a sane manner, they realized in their guts just how horridly crusty their crown jewels really are.
In any case, With this major of a rewrite, I'm expecting Vista to be the kind of fiasco that ME was. I'd strongly suggest that people wait at least until the first service pack before they put this thing in production.
Slashdot Mirror
This time I'm testing the link to the corrected picture.
The problems with windows aren't just hitting stupid people who insist on turning off the safeties. We've got a situation where all somebody has to do to get a hostile rootkit on his Windows box (we're talking default configuration here with current service packs installed) is visit an infested website -- possibly one that belongs to a well known company (or even his company) but that has been hijacked. No need to even click on the 'run me' button with the long, incomprehensible warning.
This is more like selling a bottle of bear spray that you're supposed to put on the outside of your backpack -- but without the safety pins, so that it goes off if you hit it on a branch.
. . . .
I guess the other way I could read this is that you're saying that you've got to be stupid to willingly run Windows.
One of the design errors of Windows, is that it effectively requires that a user run as root (admin) to get much done. Under those conditions, just about any buffer overflow can be parlayed into a rootkit-capable system.
Now, granted -- you can design a Linux box such that users login as root by default (lineos comes to mind). I would be just as quick to line up those idiots for a lawsuit as Gates. (kinda like selling customers an asbestos-lined vest soaked in gasoline). It's not necessary that a Linux user log in as root by default, and it's not suggested.
Like the guy that mentioned a gun with the safety on.... If you insist on flicking off the safety before you stuff the gun in your belt, don't scream at me if your balls get shot off. On the other hand, a well designed safety is better than none at all.
equalized image here. Took a whole 10 seconds with GIMP.
Microsoft's monopoly makes it pretty much the only company that can actually plan on getting away with selling a new product by saying:
Of course, you can also switch over to Linux today, which has enough of a separation between user and admin that rootkits are nontrivial to install, but we won't talk about that...____
Microsoft and Brazilian bikinis are about the only two products where you can get away with charging people hundreds of dollars for almost nothing -- Of course, I know which one I'd rather see my girlfriend use...
Linux, for example, doesn't prevent user stupidity, but it does prevent user stupidity from being trivially escelated into a rootkit installation.
It's a lot harder for someone to light themselves on fire if you have them step out of those gasoline-soaked clothes they've been wearing.
-- Granted, its stupid of them to walk into a restaurant wearing gasoline-laced clothes, but you could probably still launch a lawsuit against the idiot that sold them the clothes in the first place under the guise of "it's the industry standard -- We've got everybody wearing them!"
Windows 98 just crashed on Bill Gates. This demo seems to have crashed and burned (or would that be burned and crashed?).
Having dedicated (para)legal and accounting types to handle the administrivia of maintaining Non Profit (Charitable) status, could be a godsend for the projects that manage to get in on this opportunity.
Those numbers only apply to a gamer's laptop.
14 years ago I admined a deskside RS-6000 box with 380MB of ram (( although the first response I often got when telling people how much ram it had was "Oooh! That's a lot of disk space isn't it?" ))
Almost 25 years ago, the Computer Science building at the University of Alberta had at least two machines with at least 16MB of ram in them -- one was a mainframe (32-48MB at that time) and the other was a VAX supermini).
It really does take about 10 years to get from the lab to the desktop.
Finding and creating the kinds of algorithms where this system works at it's best continues to be half the problem, so training scientists to use it efficiently will go a long ways to extracting maximum flops out of this emplacement.
It's the gay pony tagging that's the April Fools joke, not the story.
Because It's still April Fools day, and some people don't follow the noon limitation???
It depends on your time zone. April Fools is almost over in Australia. (Do you guys celebrate AFD down in Australia?)
We kinda need meta tagging on the tags, so we can filter out things like that.
Note that the Watergate scandal pretty much depended on a single, anonymous source (that claimed [rightly] to have been verified by the paper's editor). What made the story was that it was true, and that it produced a reaction consistent with that.
When looking at a story like this, MS's reaction is going to be more of an indicator to me of what's accurate, or not, in this story -- not what's in the story. The thing about not the 60% delay meaning that Vista won't be out until sometime 2008 is not an acceptance that the story is true... I'm saying that if the story is true, that would be a forseeable consequence. Similarly Vista coming out as per it's Jan 2007 schedule would be a sign that this story is false.
Like you, I can't see into the heart of Microsoft.
N.B: It may be that the truth of this 60% story is that it refers to the rewrite that was ordered in 2004 (i.e. that 60% of vista has been rewritten). It's all conjecture at this pint(sic).
IBM used the tactic back when they were the computer kings, and now MS is using it against (among others) IBM. (sweet irony for those old enough to remember the IBM monopoly days).
Unforgunately, when you've got monopoly power, Terrible business practices don't hurt you as much as they should (at least, not in the near term). They only hurt you way down the road when customers smell a real alternative. After more than a decade of laboring under IBM's opressive Monopoly, this is why many people jumped on the Microsoft/PC bandwagon. It was politically viable (since it was originally the "IBM PC" and compatibles), and financially cheap like borscht compared to IBM mainframe prices.
(( IBM's pivotal error, in my view, occured when the PC-AT came out. It was more incompatible than most '286 clones and the hard drive had a design fault and failed after about 4-6 months. Since the PC only had a 90 day warranty, IBM was completely within their rights to refuse to fix it (and they did refuse) -- but this blew up the main excuse for paying the IBM premium ("The 800lb gorilla of the computing world will stand behind it with service and support"). Sales of clones went through the roof, and the Computer world was never the same again.
Tech types were relieved to get out from the political yoke of IBM's then iron grip on CEO types, but little did they realize that the cycle would repeat itself with this little company called Microsoft. ))
In all honesty, I doubt that Microsoft would be able to push Vista much farther down the road as VaporWare, but If the 60% story were anywhere near true, they might, ultimately, have to -- and they might even get away with it.
If you're under 50 years old, you probably have no idea how deja-vu Microsoft's monopoly tactics are.
No. My point is that The quote is not from a Microsoft Executive. It is from an exec for an outside PR firm who has no reason to be in contact with OS programming types -- especially if he wants to deny knowledge of what is happening.
That 60% of the code needs to be ripped out and completely rewritten does relatively preposterous -- but if this 'couple of weeks delay' ultimately gets stretched out to late 2008, then it might not be so preposterous.
On the other hand, that 60% of the files associated with the changes in Vista need some touching up doesn't sound so out to lunch, and moving coders from X-box to vista isn't too preposterous either, given that X-box is now launched.
I'm not even saying that the fact that a Microsoft 'insider' went to an external PR geek to get this quote disproves anything -- just that it doesn't prove anything.... because, if if Microsoft wanted to cover up that they really were moving people from X-Box to Vista, having someone that has no need to know something like this say that he doesn't know what he wasn't told is a good way to do this.
Diplomacy uses this kind of double-speak all the time ---
Ambasador: "I know of no orders to attack your country." ((... and luckily you're not talking to the Military attaché who is dreadfully busy with something he won't tell me about until after I tell you I don't know anything.))
If you're lucky he means what it looks like he's saying. If you're not, then tomorrow's newspapers will be handed you by your jailers. In either case, what he said was true (but misleading).
Note, also, that I'm reacting to the wording in the slashback quote, and not the original article itself.
(I've spent some time in the political realm, so I get really owly when I see wording like that).
Moral, but illegal, and the fact that it was illegal was enough to stop him.
In the other direction, there are a lot of things in this world that are legal but not moral... a 60 year old man having sex with a 16 year old runaway is legal. Fleecing people of their money is often done in (barely) legal ways. Legal and moral don't always coincide, and RMS is simply acknowledging that. He thinks that proprietary software is immoral, but he's chosen to take on that scourge in an entirely legal manner -- which I fully agree with.
Civil disobedience (willfully breaking the law on moral grounds) should be reserved to the most extreme cases, otherwise we run the risk of anarchy because different people think that different things are (im)moral.
Yeah, and there are a lot of hot women out there that I think should go to bed with me -- but that doesn't mean that I'm about to go on a rape spree. Neither is RMS forcing anybody to Open Source anything against their will.
He's simply using the GPL and a body of Free and usefull software to encourage people to "move over to the light side". People who want to continue to pay Microsoft big money for the 'right' to have microsoft take over their computer are free to continue to do so. People like Microsoft who want to sell closed source are similarly free to do so. RMS's intention, however, is that people will ultimately see that the Open Source route is far superior and walk away from what MS is trying to do to them.
In comparison, Who's the last people you met that had the ability to modify and redistribute Windows -- and if you did:
- how much did they pay for this 'priveledge', and
- did they have to give their code to Microsoft?
This seems to me a case of "give them a yard and they demand a mile". Here someone is giving you an application for free, and you're bitching that you can't close-source it and force them to pay for your minor fixes.There was a recent article about how there was virtually no .net in the current version of vista. I guess that another conspiracy theory was that the marketing people decreed that more than half of vista must be written in .net, so they (semi)randomly trashed gobs of code and have started rewriting it in .net.
Who knows. The Microsoft software roadmap always has seemed a little bit random.
You go to the CIO and say, "the next great version of product X is due in about a year and a half. It'll do everything that you've ever wanted and way more. 500 new features, and it'll take out your trash when you're tired.
That'll keep them from moving to a competitor... Why go through the horrors of changing supliers and products when you can just wait a year and a half and get something almost as good as what this other competitor can give you today... By the time you finish the migration, New Product X will already be out. -- and besides you've just finished the harrowing experience of migrating to Most Recent Release W.
About 2 years later, New Prouduct X(tm) us only 1 year away -- but they're adding in most of the nice tools that The Competitor delivered last weeks and a couple of even better ones.
By year 3, the product that was promised in 18 months is only 6 months away FIRM.
At 4 years, it's only due out in a month or two, but "we've had to chop out 1/3 of the stuff we promised you 3 years back to get it out the door."
At that point, you're already getting New Product X in beta, and -- even though The Competitor's product is still better than X, it's still too late to go switching from a product who'se warts you've become so intimate when the next and newest is so easy (politically) to switch to in the next couple of months.
I mean really ... Are you going to admit that you've held the company back from switching to an excelent product 3 years ago just because you swallowed a bunch of marketing hoodoo from The Big Company? That could cost you your job -- or worse yet, your pride.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if a knowledgeable instructor said (sarcastically) "You'd be better off throwing flour", knowing that flour could ultimately become a fuel. Then trainee misunderstands the sarcasm as "Flour is a really good idea".
Now, one thing I'd say is that throwing flour from 5 feet away would creat a nice fine mist of fuel that military types call FAE (Fuel/Air Explosive). Bad, bad news.
On the other hand, pouring a couple of kilos of flower from a foot or two away would attack the two primary methods of stopping a fire:
- cool the fuel. If you have more flour than grease, the flour will cool the grease -- probably below the burning point. At this point, you have the ability to move the pan from the burner... (further cooling the fire).
- deprive it of oxygen (or -- to put it another way, deprive the oxygen of flame-temperature fuel. The flour will congeal and cut down on the spattering of the grease which gives a nice fuel-air interface. It can also cover the surface of the grease (before it sinks) -- once again depriving the fuel of it's oxygen (or vice versa).
Water, on the other hand, will just instantly expand into steam, and toss grease into the air -- in a fine mist of flame-temperature fuel. When that hits the air, instead of cooling, it will light on fire which will further heat nearby dropletsWhen flour hits hot grease, there's a chemical reaction that takes place (first step for making cream sauces). This reaction is probably endothermic, which would further cool the fuel.
Strangely this is actually how placing a lid on the pot helps to put out a fire... It removes the exothermic ("hot") fuel-air interface point from the surface of the grease, thus slowing down the feedback loop of heating the grease from both top and bottom -- now you just need to get the bottom of the grease away from the hot burner....
So, he's not completely out to lunch -- but I'd say that if you have an ABC or K fire extinguisher on hand, or just a lid (or another, larger pan), that's probably a better solution ... Just remember... Never put water on an oil/grease/gasoline fire.
Last point: Firefighters walk into these kinds of fires with equipment that goes well beyond choosing between flour and baking soda. If it gets to the point where a (fully suited) firefighter is choosing between flour and baking soda to put out a fire, (s)he's probably also wondering about whether his/her last will and testament is up to date. I seriously doubt that they get in-depth training about the nuances of using common kitchen ingredients as firefighting tools.
On the upside, Windows has needed a major rewrite since about 1995, so things are looking up.
________ Interesting Timing
The timing of this is interesting. It's coming after the European Commission lambasted their documentation. perhaps that horrid documentation is what they actually use and, when they went whole hog trying to document what they had in a sane manner, they realized in their guts just how horridly crusty their crown jewels really are.
In any case, With this major of a rewrite, I'm expecting Vista to be the kind of fiasco that ME was. I'd strongly suggest that people wait at least until the first service pack before they put this thing in production.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander. I typoed. you willfully set yourself up.