Doesn't IPSec contain a Public-Key-in-the-DNS system?
I've thought about this a bit, and while everyone hates spam, I don't think the idea of authenticated e-mail would go over very well with Internet culture, as it stands. For example, it would be impossible to send anonymous pro-Linux flames to Bob Metcalfe.
I've even seen resistance to Corporate LAN e-mail systems such as Exchange or Notes precisely because senders are authenticated. (For example, if a secretary sends a message from the Boss, the message will read From:Boss Sent By:Secretary = Boss gets mad because secretary can't impersonate him/her)
Furthermore, it would probably take a long time to push the infrastructure out far enough to be actually useful. If you require authenticated e-mail for customerservice@xyz.com, customers that are still on non-authenticated systems will just go through the roof. This will happen even after Authenticated mail has been "standard" for 10 years.
So, we're really stuck with baseline SMTP for a long time. Everytime ORBS or some one catches or blocks an open relay, clueless admins somewhere in the world set up three more. (Also, noone wants to spring for commercial sendmail that supports ORBS.) What's really needed is for the upstream networks to put a No Open Relay clause in their service agreements. If all the IP traffic from a spam center starts to get blocked at UUNet or MCI, the problem would solve itself in a couple of days. --
IMHO, the only reason apple has survived (before the Imac revival) is due to all the advertising hype.
Actually Apple survived because they realized that as a nitch platform the only way was to charge a big premium (such as $10,000 for a stripped IIfx) and sink those 60% margins into lots of R+D and marketing. Apple survivied the lean years primarily on things they thought up during the fat years (things like UI Research, QuickTime and the 68K emulator).
Commodore/Amiga had a different plan - sell the machine for less money (lower margins) and then find that you have no money left over for R+D and marketing. Thus the platform never really technically advanced or gained market share. After a few years everyone else has caught up on Amiga's technology, and there was no reason left to use it.
Bottom line - Amiga might have survived if they followed Apple's lead and made people pay through the nose when they had the technological advantage. --
if you were implementing UNIX on top of NT (you can do that too, but it's messy).
Actually, if you look at the product architecture drawing for the Interix UNIX-on-NT product, it doesn't look messy at all. It sits right on top of the NT kernel and not on Win32.
I haven't really been following the Amiga, but here's my reconstruction of what's been happening over the last few days:
+ Gateway buys Amiga, because they think tney might be able to use the classic hardware and software in a set-top box or palmtop or something.
+ Gateway figures out that's not really feasible, and that they're going to have to re-write from scratch.
+ However, writing an entire modern OS is a bunch of work, so Amiga decides to create an application environment called "Amiga Operating Environment". Classic Amiga is dropped and it's software will only be run in emulation. I'll assume they're somewhat smart, and they write AOE to run as a POSIX application, so they can port it to different places without too much trouble.
+ Meanwhile, QNX has a robust OS with a jazzy GUI that's been around a while in various vertical markets. They look at the success of Be, and they realize that there might be a market for a consumer version of QNX. They devote "40 engineers" to Consumer QNX.
+ After sniffing around Be (and probably *BSD), Amiga finds QNX, and realizes that there might be some "synergy" between their goals - A new consumer platform running Consumer QNX with AOE on top. They start talking.
+ Amiga realizes that you can buy a $500 Windows 98 computer, and it's going to be difficult to build a consumer computer with razor-thin margins and have both Amiga/Gateway and QNX make any money. QNX can play hardball in the negotiations because they've a working OS and 40 engineers, whereas Amiga has vapor.
+ Amiga looks at all the Linux hype, sees the word FREE, as in Free Beer Software and Free Beer Device Drivers and Free Beer Programmers. They privately tell QNX to screw off. Since they're building a POSIX application, moving it to Linux is possible, it just more delays.
+ QNX gets pissed, and realizes that Amiga won't have jack/shit for another 12 months, where Consumer QNX will be ready sooner. As an appeal to the Amiga fans, they post a bunch of stuff, including sexy screenshots, about being the platform for AOE.
+ Amiga fires back - They're using Linux, it's more popular and free.
+ QNX announces that they're going ahead and shipping ConsumerQNX anyways. They make an appeal to the Amiga fans out there - "We're the *real* Amiga - and we are shipping a product."
+ A big split occurs in what's left of the Amiga community. Some go with QNX as the next best thing to the real Amiga. Others wait for alphas of AOE running on a Linux kernel. Others stick with the classic hardware because both QNX and Linux/AOE are imposters. Some finally give up and go with BeOS or Linux.
I have a feeling that in 2032, I'll be browsing the 3D-Holo-Web, and I'll stumble across a Amiga-versus-Atari flamewar (crossposted to holonet.deathmatch.alt.os.QNX.SuckedRocks.) --
I don't know if I'm raving or not, but the update post seems to indicated that QNX wants to crack the consumer market with-or-without the Amiga brandname. It's not like the blessing of Amiga is really all that important in this day and age.
(I'm not really sure how much the Amiga brandname would really help you nowdays. Even the oldline Amiga fans would know that just because it's called the "Amiga" doesn't mean it's the *Amiga*.) --
Not to mention that standarization is very important in some corporate environments. I imagine it would be much easier to add/replace developers if you had a standard IDE system rather than one or two guys custom emacs macros and shell scripts. This might impair on an individual developer's flexibilty, but allows management to treat developers more like resources and reduces the amount job-security-enhancing voodoo involved. --
The big monolithic recording industry that we know today hasn't even been around 50 years.
Well into the 1950s, most records were made by local distributers or the artists themselves and were sold through local outlets. I heard once that in the 1950s US South, there was something like 100 independantly black owned record companies. (Are there even 100 independant/not-pirate MP3 sites on the whole WWW?)
The big national money wasn't really in the records - it was in the sheet music (so people could here their favorite local bands play the established tunes). --
The apparent irony is that Sony runs ads saying "Copy your CDs onto MiniDiscs!" and Phillips is saying "Copy your CDs with our Audio CD Burner!" and meanwhile they're both fighting MP3.
However, not many people know that all blank recordable media sold in the US (Cassette, MiniDisc, Blank Audio CD) has a Record Company Tax built into the price. Just compare the cost of the Phillips blank Audio CD versus your standard computer blank - $3 versus $1.50, or twice as expensive. An audio cassette tape can be more expensive than a VHS tape.
This "Tax" is a complete scam, because it applies even if you are making recordings of non-copyrighted works (such as your own). MP3 are the tip of the media-less iceburg, and they're scrambling to come up with something to replace the 80s-era media tax comprismise. But, as it's been pointed out here repeately, anything they come up with is already obsolete. --
The legal definition of a monopoly doesn't come out of the American Heritage dictionary. I don't think you need to have 100% of the market to be considered a legal monopoly.
Even so, while MS might not have 100% of the whole computer market, they definately have 99% of various submarkets. Consider mainline corporate desktops (for US organizations > 500 employees) - how many secretaries are *not* running Windows?
Another submarket is consumer desktops less than the cost of a iMac (~= $1000). Even if you want to pretend that Linux is a good consumer OS, you'd have a fair amount of trouble finding a preinstalled, low-end Linux system in CompUSA.
Of course, the marketplace is still wide-open for servers and engineering workstations and the like. But if Microsoft could successfully threaten IBM, the worlds largest computer company and owner of several operating systems, to downplay OS/2 - that tells you that Windows is pretty much the only game in town as far as the general market goes. --
My understanding is that this is a different approach than wine is taking. wine is trying to emulate the entire sprawling Win32 API, whereas this thing only emulates the "Native" WinNT kernel API.
One can imagine a project that translates native WinNT kernel calls to POSIX/Linux API calls. (Another Poster mentioned that there are only 40 or so native API calls, so this is probably several orders of magnitude easier than emulating Win32.) Then you just get all the DLLs, etc from your "licenced" version of WinNT, and bam - Windows programs are running on Linux. The only problem I see is that the graphics wouldn't be over X, but that maybe could be solved with a Win Teminal server client approach. --
Much less troublesome than the Trumpet Winsock was the Microsoft 32-bit winsock built in to Windows for Workgroups. (It's essentially the same 32-bit networking that's built in to W95). --
MS Office 97 doesn't quite need Administrator/root, but it does require write access to a few files in \WINNT\SYSTEM32 and much of it's program directory, as well as in odd places in the Registry.
MS Office and other poorly designed programs (Netscape) are one big reason the default permissions on NT4 are so loose. The problem isn't really the OS, it's how the installer sets everything up. That and most workstation users logon as a local adminstrator.
(As a side note Microsoft has taken alot of blows on this from those familiar with unix, as well as their own user community. I'd expect Windows/Office 2000 to be much better in this respect. Win2000 beta appears to ship much tighter, and then includes some scripts to loosen things for compatiblity with certain apps.) --
No, the AC is correct here. BackOrifice is just a remote control program (think PC Anywhere or any of the others in the Windows world). Do programs exist like this for Unix? How about X Windows?
If I tricked a UNIX user into running a modified telnet or something that would give me remote root access, it wouldn't matter if telnetd was disabled. The only reason UNIX is less vulerable to something like this is that users spend less time logged in as root and are more careful. But that's more of a human issue than a technical one.
The Release 5 user interface is much much better, although it's still Notesey. Unfortunately, most Notes shops upgrade at the speed of molasses, so you might be waiting a while.
Not that this is really an excuse, but back in the dark ages, the Notes GUI first shipped on OS/2 1.x, so many of it's interface conventions are non-standard because they pre-date virtually every standard (an example is that right double-click = close window). Furthermore, many Notes applications just have uglyness designed in. Notes developers (including Lotus) tend to do things like put Purple text on a yellow background and use the least readable font they can find. But, I guess if they had any design sense, they'd be doing web stuff. --
Not total bunk, just mostly bunk. R5 has built-in support for java applets that have the functionality of Notes views or folders. There's also a java rich text editor. (Almost all of the other features can translate pretty much into HTML and JavaScript.)
They've also beefed up the Java-based Administrator program so that you can do more admining from a web browser. --
Re:We don't need a union, we need lobbyists.
on
GEEK Unions?
·
· Score: 2
The Computer Industry lobby that is out there isn't always acting in in the best interest of it's geeks. For example, it's recent struggles to loosen up visa restrictions, with the explicit intention of increasing wage competition.
Especially considering how many in the computer industry are contracting or consulting or working for small shops, a worker-based trade association makes alot of sense.
The specific code everyone's talking about was in the installer. Was this why your setup didn't work, or was it something else (like disk compression)?
The reason I asked is that I worked at a place that had over 100 systems on Novell DOS and Windows 3.1. It worked. --
At some point, Noorda went completely insane. Along with Digital Research and UNIX, Novell bought WordPerfect (only to sell it later at 1/4 the original cost). Novell/WordPerfect screwed the OpenDoc initiative by failing to do their part of the job (get it working on Windows).
Meanwhile Noorda was running around talking about some fantastic billion-node global network. He must have been talking about the Internet, right? Nope. This was a gigantic Novell network running on IPX/SPX! (Novell finally got TCP/IP running last year.)
Other than NDS, the one good idea that Novell had during this period was "SuperNOS" - essentially replacing NetWare with a version of UnixWare that could be integrated in Novell networks. Of course they dropped this plan, and proceeded to see their market share drop from 90% to 30%, mainly due to the fact that NetWare couldn't serve applications very well. Oops. Unix fans should not that this probably set Unix-on-x86 back about 5 years.
It should be noted that Novell self-destructed from being synonymous with networking to being an also-ran without too many specific evil actions on Microsoft's part. If Caldera/Noorda can win this case, it's hardly a vindication.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't IPSec contain a Public-Key-in-the-DNS system?
I've thought about this a bit, and while everyone hates spam, I don't think the idea of authenticated e-mail would go over very well with Internet culture, as it stands. For example, it would be impossible to send anonymous pro-Linux flames to Bob Metcalfe.
I've even seen resistance to Corporate LAN e-mail systems such as Exchange or Notes precisely because senders are authenticated. (For example, if a secretary sends a message from the Boss, the message will read From:Boss Sent By:Secretary = Boss gets mad because secretary can't impersonate him/her)
Furthermore, it would probably take a long time to push the infrastructure out far enough to be actually useful. If you require authenticated e-mail for customerservice@xyz.com, customers that are still on non-authenticated systems will just go through the roof. This will happen even after Authenticated mail has been "standard" for 10 years.
So, we're really stuck with baseline SMTP for a long time. Everytime ORBS or some one catches or blocks an open relay, clueless admins somewhere in the world set up three more. (Also, noone wants to spring for commercial sendmail that supports ORBS.) What's really needed is for the upstream networks to put a No Open Relay clause in their service agreements. If all the IP traffic from a spam center starts to get blocked at UUNet or MCI, the problem would solve itself in a couple of days.
--
IMHO, the only reason apple has survived (before the Imac revival) is due to all the advertising hype.
Actually Apple survived because they realized that as a nitch platform the only way was to charge a big premium (such as $10,000 for a stripped IIfx) and sink those 60% margins into lots of R+D and marketing. Apple survivied the lean years primarily on things they thought up during the fat years (things like UI Research, QuickTime and the 68K emulator).
Commodore/Amiga had a different plan - sell the machine for less money (lower margins) and then find that you have no money left over for R+D and marketing. Thus the platform never really technically advanced or gained market share. After a few years everyone else has caught up on Amiga's technology, and there was no reason left to use it.
Bottom line - Amiga might have survived if they followed Apple's lead and made people pay through the nose when they had the technological advantage.
--
if you were implementing UNIX on top of NT (you can do that too, but it's messy).
Actually, if you look at the product architecture drawing for the Interix UNIX-on-NT product, it doesn't look messy at all. It sits right on top of the NT kernel and not on Win32.
--
I haven't really been following the Amiga, but here's my reconstruction of what's been happening over the last few days:
+ Gateway buys Amiga, because they think tney might be able to use the classic hardware and software in a set-top box or palmtop or something.
+ Gateway figures out that's not really feasible, and that they're going to have to re-write from scratch.
+ However, writing an entire modern OS is a bunch of work, so Amiga decides to create an application environment called "Amiga Operating Environment". Classic Amiga is dropped and it's software will only be run in emulation. I'll assume they're somewhat smart, and they write AOE to run as a POSIX application, so they can port it to different places without too much trouble.
+ Meanwhile, QNX has a robust OS with a jazzy GUI that's been around a while in various vertical markets. They look at the success of Be, and they realize that there might be a market for a consumer version of QNX. They devote "40 engineers" to Consumer QNX.
+ After sniffing around Be (and probably *BSD), Amiga finds QNX, and realizes that there might be some "synergy" between their goals - A new consumer platform running Consumer QNX with AOE on top. They start talking.
+ Amiga realizes that you can buy a $500 Windows 98 computer, and it's going to be difficult to build a consumer computer with razor-thin margins and have both Amiga/Gateway and QNX make any money. QNX can play hardball in the negotiations because they've a working OS and 40 engineers, whereas Amiga has vapor.
+ Amiga looks at all the Linux hype, sees the word FREE, as in Free Beer Software and Free Beer Device Drivers and Free Beer Programmers. They privately tell QNX to screw off. Since they're building a POSIX application, moving it to Linux is possible, it just more delays.
+ QNX gets pissed, and realizes that Amiga won't have jack/shit for another 12 months, where Consumer QNX will be ready sooner. As an appeal to the Amiga fans, they post a bunch of stuff, including sexy screenshots, about being the platform for AOE.
+ Amiga fires back - They're using Linux, it's more popular and free.
+ QNX announces that they're going ahead and shipping ConsumerQNX anyways. They make an appeal to the Amiga fans out there - "We're the *real* Amiga - and we are shipping a product."
+ A big split occurs in what's left of the Amiga community. Some go with QNX as the next best thing to the real Amiga. Others wait for alphas of AOE running on a Linux kernel. Others stick with the classic hardware because both QNX and Linux/AOE are imposters. Some finally give up and go with BeOS or Linux.
--
I have a feeling that in 2032, I'll be browsing the 3D-Holo-Web, and I'll stumble across a Amiga-versus-Atari flamewar (crossposted to holonet.deathmatch.alt.os.QNX.SuckedRocks.)
--
I don't know if I'm raving or not, but the update post seems to indicated that QNX wants to crack the consumer market with-or-without the Amiga brandname. It's not like the blessing of Amiga is really all that important in this day and age.
(I'm not really sure how much the Amiga brandname would really help you nowdays. Even the oldline Amiga fans would know that just because it's called the "Amiga" doesn't mean it's the *Amiga*.)
--
Not to mention that standarization is very important in some corporate environments. I imagine it would be much easier to add/replace developers if you had a standard IDE system rather than one or two guys custom emacs macros and shell scripts. This might impair on an individual developer's flexibilty, but allows management to treat developers more like resources and reduces the amount job-security-enhancing voodoo involved.
--
The big monolithic recording industry that we know today hasn't even been around 50 years.
Well into the 1950s, most records were made by local distributers or the artists themselves and were sold through local outlets. I heard once that in the 1950s US South, there was something like 100 independantly black owned record companies. (Are there even 100 independant/not-pirate MP3 sites on the whole WWW?)
The big national money wasn't really in the records - it was in the sheet music (so people could here their favorite local bands play the established tunes).
--
The apparent irony is that Sony runs ads saying "Copy your CDs onto MiniDiscs!" and Phillips is saying "Copy your CDs with our Audio CD Burner!" and meanwhile they're both fighting MP3.
However, not many people know that all blank recordable media sold in the US (Cassette, MiniDisc, Blank Audio CD) has a Record Company Tax built into the price. Just compare the cost of the Phillips blank Audio CD versus your standard computer blank - $3 versus $1.50, or twice as expensive. An audio cassette tape can be more expensive than a VHS tape.
This "Tax" is a complete scam, because it applies even if you are making recordings of non-copyrighted works (such as your own). MP3 are the tip of the media-less iceburg, and they're scrambling to come up with something to replace the 80s-era media tax comprismise. But, as it's been pointed out here repeately, anything they come up with is already obsolete.
--
Back in the same era, the MacOS originally shipped on 2-3 400K floppies (and some firmware) too. Now it's what? 30 MB?
I'd guess that if AmigaOS was in actual development over the years, it'd be about that size also.
--
Yeah, Apple couldn't afford Be. What did Gasse want for his beta code? $500 Million? How much is Apple worth?
Meanwhile, if I recall correctly, Apple got a robust, mature, multiuser NeXTStep OS and WebObjects (and Steve Jobs) for $400 Million.
--
Actually, there is (WTS).
--
The legal definition of a monopoly doesn't come out of the American Heritage dictionary. I don't think you need to have 100% of the market to be considered a legal monopoly.
Even so, while MS might not have 100% of the whole computer market, they definately have 99% of various submarkets. Consider mainline corporate desktops (for US organizations > 500 employees) - how many secretaries are *not* running Windows?
Another submarket is consumer desktops less than the cost of a iMac (~= $1000). Even if you want to pretend that Linux is a good consumer OS, you'd have a fair amount of trouble finding a preinstalled, low-end Linux system in CompUSA.
Of course, the marketplace is still wide-open for servers and engineering workstations and the like. But if Microsoft could successfully threaten IBM, the worlds largest computer company and owner of several operating systems, to downplay OS/2 - that tells you that Windows is pretty much the only game in town as far as the general market goes.
--
Q: Why did Be develop an OS for the PowerPC?
A: They thought they could sell BeOS to Apple.
Q: Why didn't Apple buy BeOS?
A: They bought NextStep instead.
Q: Why does Be now have better x86 than PPC support?
A: Intel bought part of Be Inc.
Q: Why does this keep coming up on Slashdot?
A: Good question!
--
My understanding is that this is a different approach than wine is taking. wine is trying to emulate the entire sprawling Win32 API, whereas this thing only emulates the "Native" WinNT kernel API.
One can imagine a project that translates native WinNT kernel calls to POSIX/Linux API calls. (Another Poster mentioned that there are only 40 or so native API calls, so this is probably several orders of magnitude easier than emulating Win32.) Then you just get all the DLLs, etc from your "licenced" version of WinNT, and bam - Windows programs are running on Linux. The only problem I see is that the graphics wouldn't be over X, but that maybe could be solved with a Win Teminal server client approach.
--
Much less troublesome than the Trumpet Winsock was the Microsoft 32-bit winsock built in to Windows for Workgroups. (It's essentially the same 32-bit networking that's built in to W95).
--
I haven't seen it yet, but apparently NT5 has a "single user mode" that's command line only.
--
MS Office 97 doesn't quite need Administrator/root, but it does require write access to a few files in \WINNT\SYSTEM32 and much of it's program directory, as well as in odd places in the Registry.
MS Office and other poorly designed programs (Netscape) are one big reason the default permissions on NT4 are so loose. The problem isn't really the OS, it's how the installer sets everything up. That and most workstation users logon as a local adminstrator.
(As a side note Microsoft has taken alot of blows on this from those familiar with unix, as well as their own user community. I'd expect Windows/Office 2000 to be much better in this respect. Win2000 beta appears to ship much tighter, and then includes some scripts to loosen things for compatiblity with certain apps.)
--
No, the AC is correct here. BackOrifice is just a remote control program (think PC Anywhere or any of the others in the Windows world). Do programs exist like this for Unix? How about X Windows?
If I tricked a UNIX user into running a modified telnet or something that would give me remote root access, it wouldn't matter if telnetd was disabled. The only reason UNIX is less vulerable to something like this is that users spend less time logged in as root and are more careful. But that's more of a human issue than a technical one.
--
The Release 5 user interface is much much better, although it's still Notesey. Unfortunately, most Notes shops upgrade at the speed of molasses, so you might be waiting a while.
Not that this is really an excuse, but back in the dark ages, the Notes GUI first shipped on OS/2 1.x, so many of it's interface conventions are non-standard because they pre-date virtually every standard (an example is that right double-click = close window). Furthermore, many Notes applications just have uglyness designed in. Notes developers (including Lotus) tend to do things like put Purple text on a yellow background and use the least readable font they can find. But, I guess if they had any design sense, they'd be doing web stuff.
--
Not total bunk, just mostly bunk. R5 has built-in support for java applets that have the functionality of Notes views or folders. There's also a java rich text editor. (Almost all of the other features can translate pretty much into HTML and JavaScript.)
They've also beefed up the Java-based Administrator program so that you can do more admining from a web browser.
--
The Computer Industry lobby that is out there isn't always acting in in the best interest of it's geeks. For example, it's recent struggles to loosen up visa restrictions, with the explicit intention of increasing wage competition.
Especially considering how many in the computer industry are contracting or consulting or working for small shops, a worker-based trade association makes alot of sense.
--
The specific code everyone's talking about was in the installer. Was this why your setup didn't work, or was it something else (like disk compression)?
The reason I asked is that I worked at a place that had over 100 systems on Novell DOS and Windows 3.1. It worked.
--
Ironically, Caldera's DOS web browser ran much better for me under MS-DOS 7 than Open/DR-DOS.
--
At some point, Noorda went completely insane. Along with Digital Research and UNIX, Novell bought WordPerfect (only to sell it later at 1/4 the original cost). Novell/WordPerfect screwed the OpenDoc initiative by failing to do their part of the job (get it working on Windows).
Meanwhile Noorda was running around talking about some fantastic billion-node global network. He must have been talking about the Internet, right? Nope. This was a gigantic Novell network running on IPX/SPX! (Novell finally got TCP/IP running last year.)
Other than NDS, the one good idea that Novell had during this period was "SuperNOS" - essentially replacing NetWare with a version of UnixWare that could be integrated in Novell networks. Of course they dropped this plan, and proceeded to see their market share drop from 90% to 30%, mainly due to the fact that NetWare couldn't serve applications very well. Oops. Unix fans should not that this probably set Unix-on-x86 back about 5 years.
It should be noted that Novell self-destructed from being synonymous with networking to being an also-ran without too many specific evil actions on Microsoft's part. If Caldera/Noorda can win this case, it's hardly a vindication.
--