I disagree. In most cases it won't be worth the complexity and overhead to introduce a metering facility into the OS.
The overall trend of the industry is towards cheap clusters, so I can see the argument for renting per-node, but certainly not mainframe-style load management.
Sounds like the exception which proves the rule. One particular ueber-expensive IBM package which has better pricing on mainframes. It's almost nearly always the opposite case. Plus, I would not be suprised if this particular package was only of interest to IBM shops, and they've tweaked the pricing to keep you from moving away from the more profitable mainframes.
Per CPU licensing was a simple metric that allowed software companies to scale their pricing so that it was fair to both the entry level and high end customers.
Which works as long as the hardware companies scale their prices with # of CPUs. Historically, going from 2 CPUs to 4 often quadrupled the price of a server, and going to 8 quadrupled it again.
The issue is that Intel and AMD are currently breaking this model. There isn't a substantial price difference between today's dual core system and yesterday's single core. But yet some software costs have doubled.
It's only a year or so until even laptops have dual-core chips, and $3000 Xeon/Opteron servers have chips with 4 or more cores. The whole assumption that 4 CPUs = Big Expensive System is going to have to change.
Yeah, Mainframes "solved" this problem by charging people X or more the licensing price of Unix or Windows platforms. All of this "MUS" and "LC" nonsense is just basically a license for IBM to remove money from your bank account.
Which is not to say that mainframes are not appropriate for certain applications, only that it is ridiculous to pretend that you can cost-justify the things on licensing grounds.
WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker for z/OS and for Windows. The z/OS version at 3 MSUs -- all we needed -- was 60% less expensive than a single Windows CPU.
Excluding all of the other ongoing maintenance fees for the mainframe, of course. I wouldn't be suprised if a $20K server with W2003 license was cheaper than one month of keeping the 'frame running.
At least in my experience working for an IBM "partner", they agressively discount the hardware/software to get the services business. While I'm sure some 3rd parties continue to maintain IBM software/hardware, when IBM went in the services direction, it became very difficult to do so.
But did they have the brains? I got the impression that the graphics people were pretty much gone by 2000 -- off to work at companies like nVidia. Maybe if they had done it in 1996, or taken that route instead of Intel workstations.
Plus, I strongly suspect that a significant chunk of IBM's "services" revenue derives directly from servicing IBM's proprietary hardware/software, and is lumped into the "services" bucket because it looks better on Wall Street.
can be directly attributed to their little tangle with the Beast of Redmond.
Slashdot old wives tale. SGI's traditional graphics workstation business had already nearly collapsed -- they got into Windows NT as a last-ditch attempt to save it. Too little too late. You can point fingers at Redmond all you like, the facts are that the market chose PC workstations over proprietary UNIX models.
If you want to blame a SGI partner for their downfall -- how about the sale of the E10K design to Sun? That basically kept Sun fat and happy in the "mainframe-class" business market while SGI struggled selling scientific systems.
As for OpenGL/"Fahrenheit" -- without workstations, SGI saw selling their OpenGL stuff as a quick way to make some needed cash.
I'm sure if you printed out the computer section of eBay, it would be far thicker than 2 inches.
I don't think there's any question that Internet destroyed the market for these enthusist magazines (PC Magazine, PC Shopper, Byte, etc) and they only reoriented themselves to the idiot market after their sales and advertising markets moved on.
The Apple Image Writer was no champion of high resolution output. It used the some 15 pin technology of those other printers, but the Mac used bitmap mode instead of text mode. The result was pretty equivilent.
It might be hard to understand now, but the bitmapped output on the Imagewriter looked like a million bucks compared to traditional dot-matrix printouts -- especially if you used the double-print mode which had effectively 144 dpi. (Since this was before outline fonts, it used a trick where "double-size" fonts were used for printing -- a 24pt hand-drawn bitmap for 12pt text.)
The downside was that the Mac/Imagewriter combo printed very slowly. The print head would actually pause at the end of the line while the computer puzzled over the next chunk of text, and it could take several minutes to print a single page of double-print mode text.
GUI snoops [oops! Windows has absolutely no protection on that front]
Does X11? I always assumed that any processes running under the same UID could snoop on each other all they want, and a root process could of course do whatever it wants.
Hmm, it turns out that the excellent Old New thing has an entry on it
That blog entry is a poor excuse. There's no real reason that FUS has to be tied into the "Welcome" logon screen. Any use of the classic login box (domain or no) prevents FUS from being used.
Saying it doesn't make it so. You have to demonstrate how it doesn't.
There's no point in having a conversation with someone who insists on putting words into my mouth. For the record, Windows has LU but has not done nearly as well as the compeititon with building a system that encourages it's use. I don't believe that's even debatable among anyone with a Mac on their hands.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. The issue is that you are primarily talking about cultural systems and not operating system security systems. Which is why I brought OS X into the picture, because even though it has a Unix security model, the ISV relationship is essentially the same as on Windows.
But your mention of RealPlayer brings up a couple counter-points:
(A) The central repository approach will never provide 100% coverage. I'm sure you've read the complaints about Debian release process, but I just point out that even they have 3rd Party "backports". Also, I read that Fedora 4 conflicts with the Sun Java RPM, apparently for ideological rather than customer-driven reasons.
Especially in the desktop market, either Linux distros allow the 3rd party ecosystem to grow, or adoption will remain stagnant. And that opens the door for malware infection.
(B) Most malware doesn't require elevated privileges to perform it's evil deeds anyway. Administrator is protection on Windows largely because the malware is written/packaged by the same bunch of dunderheads that require Admin for other user-level software.
As for your essay, I think lacks the thoughtfulness of your comment, and mainly regurgitates old bits of slashbot FUD without any insight or support whatsoever. For example, modern versions of Outlook are more resistant to social engineering viruses than Mozilla Thunderbird.
It's there. It's just that application developers don't take advantage of it.
Microsoft themselves doesn't take advantage of it for their system management tools, which is my point. There is some hack surrounding files called "install.exe", but that's not really the same as what OS X does.
Create a short cut.
This shortcut method is a way to automate RunAs -- it's not a OS feature like setuid. (Which I agree can be bad, but it beats running your desktop as Admin because some stupid game's CD check.)
So far you haven't explained how Windows doesn't support LU.
No, I said it has minimal LU support (that most users will never see). See my other posts -- Longhorn appears to be going in the direction of doing LUA right with none of this RunAs/sudo/setuid stuff.
This is only because Linux incompatibilities have forced their users into a single source for nearly all their software. If it were easy to produce an RPM that worked everywhere, there would be a lot more opportunity for users to type their password.
Remember that most malware gets installed through social engineering. A MacOS X user sees "Install this cool screensaver", and he will happly provide whatever privs necessary because he wants the screensaver -- Unix or no.
Only minimally. The feature is not nicely integrated into the GUI as with OS X's sudo functionality.
Furthermore, WinNT has no real concept of "setuid-root". This could be argued either way, but the upshot is there's no means to run with elevated privs on an application-by-application basis. This is another trick that some OS X apps use to avoid requiring that the user have full root privs 100% of the time.
Unfortunately, the headline of that article is totally misleading. Windows already has "Unix-like" user permissions, they just usually ignored.
The big problem is that existing Windows/Unix security systems were designed for multi-user timesharing machines, and the root|user divide just doen't really work that well on a single-user personal computer. On a personal desktop, rights should be assigned based on What the program does, rather than Who is running it. And it sounds like that's direction Longhorn is going in.
For example, Kazaa should have no rights to install a browser plug-in, but the Java installer should have that right. Having a root/admin account doesn't solve this problem -- the whole system has to be rethought. The question is how you can do it without having a million popups and settings dialogs that the user would just defeat (see Windows ACLs).
Re:Why should windows media player be removed?
on
Windows XP N a Bust
·
· Score: 1
It wasn't always bundled. "Windows Sound System" (including media player) was sold as an add-on in the early years. </oldman>
The other issue is that until about 1998, WMP was just a little functional applet and wasn't competing with Real or QuickTime in terms of codec quality, streaming, media management, visualizations, etc.
OEMs would never purchase an IE-less Windows either, primarily because it would be incompatibile with nearly every modern Windows application (both MS and 3rd party).
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree. In most cases it won't be worth the complexity and overhead to introduce a metering facility into the OS.
The overall trend of the industry is towards cheap clusters, so I can see the argument for renting per-node, but certainly not mainframe-style load management.
Sounds like the exception which proves the rule. One particular ueber-expensive IBM package which has better pricing on mainframes. It's almost nearly always the opposite case. Plus, I would not be suprised if this particular package was only of interest to IBM shops, and they've tweaked the pricing to keep you from moving away from the more profitable mainframes.
Per CPU licensing was a simple metric that allowed software companies to scale their pricing so that it was fair to both the entry level and high end customers.
Which works as long as the hardware companies scale their prices with # of CPUs. Historically, going from 2 CPUs to 4 often quadrupled the price of a server, and going to 8 quadrupled it again.
The issue is that Intel and AMD are currently breaking this model. There isn't a substantial price difference between today's dual core system and yesterday's single core. But yet some software costs have doubled.
It's only a year or so until even laptops have dual-core chips, and $3000 Xeon/Opteron servers have chips with 4 or more cores. The whole assumption that 4 CPUs = Big Expensive System is going to have to change.
Looks like I hosed my post somehow. That's supposed to be "10x", not "X", and "VWLC" instead of "LC".
Yeah, Mainframes "solved" this problem by charging people X or more the licensing price of Unix or Windows platforms. All of this "MUS" and "LC" nonsense is just basically a license for IBM to remove money from your bank account.
Which is not to say that mainframes are not appropriate for certain applications, only that it is ridiculous to pretend that you can cost-justify the things on licensing grounds.
WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker for z/OS and for Windows. The z/OS version at 3 MSUs -- all we needed -- was 60% less expensive than a single Windows CPU.
Excluding all of the other ongoing maintenance fees for the mainframe, of course. I wouldn't be suprised if a $20K server with W2003 license was cheaper than one month of keeping the 'frame running.
I imagine this thing is probably more of a solution for call centers and the like rather than corporate computing.
It's home hobbyists that will have 400 sparcs, mips and alphas from various ages
Yes, Sparc/MIPS/Alpha/PARISC is hobbiest-dabbler territory.
However, businesses do rely on x86, x86-64, PowerPC (IBM servers), Itanium (HP, etc), and S/390, so multi-arch support is very important to some.
If Unix workstations hadn't collapsed then, they did so within a year or two. Same result.
I also suspect that the MS deal was a drop in the bucket compared to the deals with Cray, etc.
At least in my experience working for an IBM "partner", they agressively discount the hardware/software to get the services business. While I'm sure some 3rd parties continue to maintain IBM software/hardware, when IBM went in the services direction, it became very difficult to do so.
But did they have the brains? I got the impression that the graphics people were pretty much gone by 2000 -- off to work at companies like nVidia. Maybe if they had done it in 1996, or taken that route instead of Intel workstations.
Plus, I strongly suspect that a significant chunk of IBM's "services" revenue derives directly from servicing IBM's proprietary hardware/software, and is lumped into the "services" bucket because it looks better on Wall Street.
can be directly attributed to their little tangle with the Beast of Redmond.
Slashdot old wives tale. SGI's traditional graphics workstation business had already nearly collapsed -- they got into Windows NT as a last-ditch attempt to save it. Too little too late. You can point fingers at Redmond all you like, the facts are that the market chose PC workstations over proprietary UNIX models.
If you want to blame a SGI partner for their downfall -- how about the sale of the E10K design to Sun? That basically kept Sun fat and happy in the "mainframe-class" business market while SGI struggled selling scientific systems.
As for OpenGL/"Fahrenheit" -- without workstations, SGI saw selling their OpenGL stuff as a quick way to make some needed cash.
I'm sure if you printed out the computer section of eBay, it would be far thicker than 2 inches.
I don't think there's any question that Internet destroyed the market for these enthusist magazines (PC Magazine, PC Shopper, Byte, etc) and they only reoriented themselves to the idiot market after their sales and advertising markets moved on.
The Apple Image Writer was no champion of high resolution output. It used the some 15 pin technology of those other printers, but the Mac used bitmap mode instead of text mode. The result was pretty equivilent.
It might be hard to understand now, but the bitmapped output on the Imagewriter looked like a million bucks compared to traditional dot-matrix printouts -- especially if you used the double-print mode which had effectively 144 dpi. (Since this was before outline fonts, it used a trick where "double-size" fonts were used for printing -- a 24pt hand-drawn bitmap for 12pt text.)
The downside was that the Mac/Imagewriter combo printed very slowly. The print head would actually pause at the end of the line while the computer puzzled over the next chunk of text, and it could take several minutes to print a single page of double-print mode text.
GUI snoops [oops! Windows has absolutely no protection on that front]
Does X11? I always assumed that any processes running under the same UID could snoop on each other all they want, and a root process could of course do whatever it wants.
Hmm, it turns out that the excellent Old New thing has an entry on it
That blog entry is a poor excuse. There's no real reason that FUS has to be tied into the "Welcome" logon screen. Any use of the classic login box (domain or no) prevents FUS from being used.
Saying it doesn't make it so. You have to demonstrate how it doesn't.
There's no point in having a conversation with someone who insists on putting words into my mouth. For the record, Windows has LU but has not done nearly as well as the compeititon with building a system that encourages it's use. I don't believe that's even debatable among anyone with a Mac on their hands.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. The issue is that you are primarily talking about cultural systems and not operating system security systems. Which is why I brought OS X into the picture, because even though it has a Unix security model, the ISV relationship is essentially the same as on Windows.
But your mention of RealPlayer brings up a couple counter-points:
(A) The central repository approach will never provide 100% coverage. I'm sure you've read the complaints about Debian release process, but I just point out that even they have 3rd Party "backports". Also, I read that Fedora 4 conflicts with the Sun Java RPM, apparently for ideological rather than customer-driven reasons.
Especially in the desktop market, either Linux distros allow the 3rd party ecosystem to grow, or adoption will remain stagnant. And that opens the door for malware infection.
(B) Most malware doesn't require elevated privileges to perform it's evil deeds anyway. Administrator is protection on Windows largely because the malware is written/packaged by the same bunch of dunderheads that require Admin for other user-level software.
As for your essay, I think lacks the thoughtfulness of your comment, and mainly regurgitates old bits of slashbot FUD without any insight or support whatsoever. For example, modern versions of Outlook are more resistant to social engineering viruses than Mozilla Thunderbird.
It's there. It's just that application developers don't take advantage of it.
Microsoft themselves doesn't take advantage of it for their system management tools, which is my point. There is some hack surrounding files called "install.exe", but that's not really the same as what OS X does.
Create a short cut.
This shortcut method is a way to automate RunAs -- it's not a OS feature like setuid. (Which I agree can be bad, but it beats running your desktop as Admin because some stupid game's CD check.)
So far you haven't explained how Windows doesn't support LU.
No, I said it has minimal LU support (that most users will never see). See my other posts -- Longhorn appears to be going in the direction of doing LUA right with none of this RunAs/sudo/setuid stuff.
This is only because Linux incompatibilities have forced their users into a single source for nearly all their software. If it were easy to produce an RPM that worked everywhere, there would be a lot more opportunity for users to type their password.
Remember that most malware gets installed through social engineering. A MacOS X user sees "Install this cool screensaver", and he will happly provide whatever privs necessary because he wants the screensaver -- Unix or no.
There are, but Visual Studio is not one of them.h tml/vxoriInstallationSetup.asp
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/vsintro7/
The issue used to be poorly-written Win9x programs. The issue now is mainly copy-protection or anti-cheat systems.
The OS provides the mechanisms for LUP
Only minimally. The feature is not nicely integrated into the GUI as with OS X's sudo functionality.
Furthermore, WinNT has no real concept of "setuid-root". This could be argued either way, but the upshot is there's no means to run with elevated privs on an application-by-application basis. This is another trick that some OS X apps use to avoid requiring that the user have full root privs 100% of the time.
Unfortunately, the headline of that article is totally misleading. Windows already has "Unix-like" user permissions, they just usually ignored.
The big problem is that existing Windows/Unix security systems were designed for multi-user timesharing machines, and the root|user divide just doen't really work that well on a single-user personal computer. On a personal desktop, rights should be assigned based on What the program does, rather than Who is running it. And it sounds like that's direction Longhorn is going in.
For example, Kazaa should have no rights to install a browser plug-in, but the Java installer should have that right. Having a root/admin account doesn't solve this problem -- the whole system has to be rethought. The question is how you can do it without having a million popups and settings dialogs that the user would just defeat (see Windows ACLs).
It wasn't always bundled. "Windows Sound System" (including media player) was sold as an add-on in the early years.
</oldman>
The other issue is that until about 1998, WMP was just a little functional applet and wasn't competing with Real or QuickTime in terms of codec quality, streaming, media management, visualizations, etc.
OEMs would never purchase an IE-less Windows either, primarily because it would be incompatibile with nearly every modern Windows application (both MS and 3rd party).