Mozilla Multiple Vulnerabilities Highly critical Cross Site Scripting Manipulation of data Exposure of sensitive information System access From remote
That got me to upgrade ASAP!
I don't know if Mozilla should be bragging that up to a million users had to run out and get a critical security fix. It would be nice if there was a patch install, and they could separate out the new downloads from the upgraders.
Not just DOS! Removing BIOS would break Windows 98, Novell Netware, OS/2. It would also break bootcode in older versions of Linux/NT/BSD/etc. (And even if it was just DOS, may corps still use it to "Ghost" every new machine that comes in the door.)
Believe or not, millions of customers still use this stuff. Killing back-compat would be a sales disaster. It's not like Apple where they can force customers to run OS x.y.z (released yesterday).
On another level, there's the psychological factor. All the hardware vendors made their mark by being "100% IBM PC AT Compatible", and it's somewhat admirable they haven't given it up yet.
The technical reasons are (A) backward-compatibility for older OSes and (B) easier migration path for newer OSes. And of course some NIH factor.
OpenFirmware apparently has some fans because Apple and Sun use it. But OF is just a means to an end, and EFI accomplishes the same objectives. The best thing for Apple/Sun customers would be if they adopted EFI and became truely compatible with Intel hardware standards, fulfilling the promise made when they adopted PCI/AGP.
The more Highly-Available you get, the more forced-reboot paths you get.
I recall a slashdot discussion where someone was arguing that Linux was "better" because, when a NIC driver took a dump, (sometimes) you could just unload the module and continue on with life minus a panic.
This always seemed like a suspect design decision -- NT usually halts because it knows something is wrong. I'm not sure if Linux thinks things are AOK or just gives you the "freedom" to have memory corrupted by a bad driver.
(Although, I've noticed that XP will sometimes dynamically load a SVGA driver when my ATI stuff goes to hell.)
And they were right, weren't they? -- XFS didn't get in a bunch of code was changed and a few years went by.
And I think the issue with XFS was more of a coding style/organization issue. The Reiser thing seems more political and deeply technical. Anyway my only point is that all this talk of Reiser4 vs WinFS seems grossly premature (for both).
My impression is that Reiser4 will never be accepted into Linux as it currently stands ("Breaks POSIX", "Incompatible with Linux VFS", etc.) Which means it is probably a little premature to start planning World Domination for it.
Not really, Pink was supposed to be a "OO" NeXT-ish API.
IBM had this idea called "WorkplaceOS", which was basically a Mach kernel that would run different "personalities" for OS/2, AIX, Pink, and maybe MacOS. They basically copied the plan from Windows NT.
There was a preview release of OS/2-PPC that used it, it was apparenlty horribly slow, and that was about it.
Right now, Reiser hasn't even conviced Linus and Viro to include Reiser4 into the stock kernel. Much less convince KDE/Gnome/Mozila/OpenOffice/etc/etc/etc to adapt their stuff to his interfaces. So, no, I don't think he's in the same position as Microsoft (who can coordinate this across the OS, the shell, and in many applicaitons at once) at all.
Well, there's also the other organizational issue that *I* can maintain a perfectly good directory layout, but *you* may not have the slightest clue how it organized.
You can see this problem on any corporate network where the users have 10 shared drives, each with hundreds of subdirectories, and most of them don't have a clue whats out there.
In otherwords, some of the best metadata for searching would be folder structure. Problem is that most search tools don't understand "Q:\Reports\Joe\" in the same way humans do. I don't know how this helps your mother.
I used to work a lot with Lotus Notes, which is sorta a half-solution to the problem, and one that's been around for decades. (Notes, like the WWW, was based quite a bit on Ted Nelson's Xanadu idea.)
Notes basically gives you network-enabled document stores with indexed metadata and fulltext searching. The problem (other than the asstastic and totally broken UI) is that Notes doesn't integrate well with other software, either in exposing interfaces to users or pulling in random documents from the Internet or MS Office or whatever. Basically they pushed the hard problems back on the enduser, and Notes ended up as another island of data rather than a solution.
Anyway the idea was out there, and I think some people in MS understood it.
Microsoft, OTOH, is in the unique position to implement such an idea on the 'system' level and provide a transition plan for existing software. But it sounds like WinFS got beached because they still don't have real answers to the hard problems of pulling random data & metadata into such a system.
The other big issue for Microsoft is that they'd probably have to rewrite Outlook and Access for the thing to be effective. (I find it slightly funny that Outlook lacks even basic fulltext searching while MS was running their mouth off about WinFS.)
Hi Pudge -- I've read your journals, and while I don't necessary agree with your politics, your points are substantiated and well-argued.
But, with all due respect, you often seem a little too "close to the action" to be an effective moderator of these kinds of discussions. Regardless of your positions, your online persona seems to be more of the Battlehardened Partisan Flamewarrior type, rather than someone who is trying to constructively frame a debate for others.
So, I'm mainly curious about the tone which is planned for politics.slashdot.org.... Is it just to put the "Super Important Bush|Kerry Blog Talking Point of the Week" in a more prominent place than the journals? Or will the focus be on broader, more constructive issues? (It seems to me that/. discussion tends to be of higher quality the more 'high-level' the issue is.)
The G5 iMac is positioned exactly where the G4 iMac was
Which is a problem because sales of the G4 iMac weren't exactly spectactular (to put it mildly - 60K last quarter).
If you look at the entire history of Apple "AIO" models going back to 1990 or so, there was really only that one year that the G3 iMac was a big hit. The rest of the time, it's been a niche formfactor. Which would be OK if Apple offered a "regular computer" along side it (as they did in years past).
Apple do indeed recognise that they aren't going to get huge market share growth, no matter what they do
Then we agree. However, I think that Apple management is wrong on this point and that there is greater demand for Macs than is being met (even if it is only churn in the existing userbase).
Sounds like the exact same machine to me. The lowend guy gets a decent entry $1K box with a 3rd party CRT, and the high-end guy gets a PVR with a $$$$ Apple display. All new markets for Apple. Thus the incredible magic of a simple PCIe slot and letting the user pick their video card and display.
(I still have faith that Apple will introduce such a machine as soon as G5 production gets ramped up.)
Most people buy computers with monitors... and 3-4 AGP/PCI slots.
The new iMac is a fine machine, it's just positioned nearly identically to the old iMac, so I don't see it broadening Apple's customer base very much. Status quo.
And perhaps Apple believes there's not a lot of sales growth potential, which is why there is such a stark distinction between consumer and pro machines (both in formfactor and price).
If Joe Yuppie goes and buys a shiny new Mac, he has the reasonable expectation that the kids will be able to fire up Doom3 or Halo and get decent play out of it. That's what people do with home computers -- play games.
If that's not the case, he might think "Damn I spent a lot of money on that Apple, and the kids hated it. Next time I'm getting something else." He is probably not going to think "Next time I'm dropping $2500 to get a G5 with the PDQ9000 video card."
The video card in these things seems to violate the Apple principle of "It just works".
Just to make myself clear -- the iMac pricing is fine in my book -- just due to the formfactor its not the machine for everyone.
The "gouging" is the fact that Apple's cheapest headless machine is $2000. That's a huge premium to pay if you just want something better than a bottom-scraper video card or an insurance slot.
I just don't buy the idea that a good-looking $1K desktop would "dilute the brand" any more than the eMac or iBook has. It would still be more premium (in price and looks) than a Dell. And I think it would sell a lot better than the iMac has.
In otherwords, Apple can't give people what they want (midrange desktop box), because they are too busy gouging someone else (low-end pros).
A headless G5 with a couple slots and a 17" LCD would probably sell for more $$ than the iMac -- it would be plenty profitable for Apple. The problem is that a lot of Photoshop types would be attracted to the machine along with the home/edu users.
I'd like to think that the PowerMac, with dual procs, PCI-X, huge memory bus, etc, could stand on its own in the marketplace. Apple apparently doesn't agree, and they've hollowed out the middle in order to drive users towards the most expensive machines.
You're right they don't "need" to do anything, if they're happy with their current sales/marketshare numbers. But they've got themselves into a strange situation where they don't sell a computer with "normal" specs (see average Dell or HP), and that has to hurt sales to some degree.
Why does a remote login have the capability to kick a console login?
Your Domain probably has the common setup of Local Administrators including the "Domain Users" group. So anyone logged on to your machine has Administrator access. So you could phrase it as "Why shouldN'T one administrator be able to kick off another?"
(Although the more I think about it, you could boot out your cow-orkers from their machines with RPC and no Terminal Services required. Hmm...)
FWIW, NT3.x didn't have this problem -- Domain users had to be specifically granted local rights. But people found it too much of a pain in the ass.
Slashdot Mirror
This is probably an unpopular opinion around here, but I'd like to see an installer that includes the Flash plugin.
Mozilla Multiple Vulnerabilities
Highly critical
Cross Site Scripting
Manipulation of data
Exposure of sensitive information
System access
From remote
That got me to upgrade ASAP!
I don't know if Mozilla should be bragging that up to a million users had to run out and get a critical security fix. It would be nice if there was a patch install, and they could separate out the new downloads from the upgraders.
Cool project. What's your assessment of the difficulty of providing traditional PC BIOS support on top of OpenFirmware?
You mean like Itanium? One of features of EFI is CPU-independant bytecode, like OF.
Apologies ... I meant Linux Distros -- you couldn't just drop in an old RedHat CD and expect it to work.
True, but vendors would release new install CDs for current OSes. You probably won't see an EFI version of Windows 2000 or RedHat Enterprise 2.1.
Not just DOS! Removing BIOS would break Windows 98, Novell Netware, OS/2. It would also break bootcode in older versions of Linux/NT/BSD/etc. (And even if it was just DOS, may corps still use it to "Ghost" every new machine that comes in the door.)
Believe or not, millions of customers still use this stuff. Killing back-compat would be a sales disaster. It's not like Apple where they can force customers to run OS x.y.z (released yesterday).
On another level, there's the psychological factor. All the hardware vendors made their mark by being "100% IBM PC AT Compatible", and it's somewhat admirable they haven't given it up yet.
Don't let DRM cloud the issue -- the PC BIOS sucks phenomenally and should have been replaced decades ago. DRM is coming whether or not that happens.
The technical reasons are (A) backward-compatibility for older OSes and (B) easier migration path for newer OSes. And of course some NIH factor.
OpenFirmware apparently has some fans because Apple and Sun use it. But OF is just a means to an end, and EFI accomplishes the same objectives. The best thing for Apple/Sun customers would be if they adopted EFI and became truely compatible with Intel hardware standards, fulfilling the promise made when they adopted PCI/AGP.
The more Highly-Available you get, the more forced-reboot paths you get.
I recall a slashdot discussion where someone was arguing that Linux was "better" because, when a NIC driver took a dump, (sometimes) you could just unload the module and continue on with life minus a panic.
This always seemed like a suspect design decision -- NT usually halts because it knows something is wrong. I'm not sure if Linux thinks things are AOK or just gives you the "freedom" to have memory corrupted by a bad driver.
(Although, I've noticed that XP will sometimes dynamically load a SVGA driver when my ATI stuff goes to hell.)
People said the same thing about XFS.
And they were right, weren't they? -- XFS didn't get in a bunch of code was changed and a few years went by.
And I think the issue with XFS was more of a coding style/organization issue. The Reiser thing seems more political and deeply technical. Anyway my only point is that all this talk of Reiser4 vs WinFS seems grossly premature (for both).
My impression is that Reiser4 will never be accepted into Linux as it currently stands ("Breaks POSIX", "Incompatible with Linux VFS", etc.) Which means it is probably a little premature to start planning World Domination for it.
However, I don't think NT OFS was based on SQL Server -- it was supposed to be based on JET. (This is also why Exchange runs on JET.)
> BUt was not Pink part of os/2?
Not really, Pink was supposed to be a "OO" NeXT-ish API.
IBM had this idea called "WorkplaceOS", which was basically a Mach kernel that would run different "personalities" for OS/2, AIX, Pink, and maybe MacOS. They basically copied the plan from Windows NT.
There was a preview release of OS/2-PPC that used it, it was apparenlty horribly slow, and that was about it.
Right now, Reiser hasn't even conviced Linus and Viro to include Reiser4 into the stock kernel. Much less convince KDE/Gnome/Mozila/OpenOffice/etc/etc/etc to adapt their stuff to his interfaces. So, no, I don't think he's in the same position as Microsoft (who can coordinate this across the OS, the shell, and in many applicaitons at once) at all.
Well, there's also the other organizational issue that *I* can maintain a perfectly good directory layout, but *you* may not have the slightest clue how it organized.
You can see this problem on any corporate network where the users have 10 shared drives, each with hundreds of subdirectories, and most of them don't have a clue whats out there.
In otherwords, some of the best metadata for searching would be folder structure. Problem is that most search tools don't understand "Q:\Reports\Joe\" in the same way humans do. I don't know how this helps your mother.
I used to work a lot with Lotus Notes, which is sorta a half-solution to the problem, and one that's been around for decades. (Notes, like the WWW, was based quite a bit on Ted Nelson's Xanadu idea.)
Notes basically gives you network-enabled document stores with indexed metadata and fulltext searching. The problem (other than the asstastic and totally broken UI) is that Notes doesn't integrate well with other software, either in exposing interfaces to users or pulling in random documents from the Internet or MS Office or whatever. Basically they pushed the hard problems back on the enduser, and Notes ended up as another island of data rather than a solution.
Anyway the idea was out there, and I think some people in MS understood it.
Microsoft, OTOH, is in the unique position to implement such an idea on the 'system' level and provide a transition plan for existing software. But it sounds like WinFS got beached because they still don't have real answers to the hard problems of pulling random data & metadata into such a system.
The other big issue for Microsoft is that they'd probably have to rewrite Outlook and Access for the thing to be effective. (I find it slightly funny that Outlook lacks even basic fulltext searching while MS was running their mouth off about WinFS.)
I am a Goldwater Conservative...
/. discussion tends to be of higher quality the more 'high-level' the issue is.)
Hi Pudge -- I've read your journals, and while I don't necessary agree with your politics, your points are substantiated and well-argued.
But, with all due respect, you often seem a little too "close to the action" to be an effective moderator of these kinds of discussions. Regardless of your positions, your online persona seems to be more of the Battlehardened Partisan Flamewarrior type, rather than someone who is trying to constructively frame a debate for others.
So, I'm mainly curious about the tone which is planned for politics.slashdot.org.... Is it just to put the "Super Important Bush|Kerry Blog Talking Point of the Week" in a more prominent place than the journals? Or will the focus be on broader, more constructive issues? (It seems to me that
The G5 iMac is positioned exactly where the G4 iMac was
Which is a problem because sales of the G4 iMac weren't exactly spectactular (to put it mildly - 60K last quarter).
If you look at the entire history of Apple "AIO" models going back to 1990 or so, there was really only that one year that the G3 iMac was a big hit. The rest of the time, it's been a niche formfactor. Which would be OK if Apple offered a "regular computer" along side it (as they did in years past).
Apple do indeed recognise that they aren't going to get huge market share growth, no matter what they do
Then we agree. However, I think that Apple management is wrong on this point and that there is greater demand for Macs than is being met (even if it is only churn in the existing userbase).
Sounds like the exact same machine to me. The lowend guy gets a decent entry $1K box with a 3rd party CRT, and the high-end guy gets a PVR with a $$$$ Apple display. All new markets for Apple. Thus the incredible magic of a simple PCIe slot and letting the user pick their video card and display.
(I still have faith that Apple will introduce such a machine as soon as G5 production gets ramped up.)
Most people buy computers with monitors ... and 3-4 AGP/PCI slots.
The new iMac is a fine machine, it's just positioned nearly identically to the old iMac, so I don't see it broadening Apple's customer base very much. Status quo.
And perhaps Apple believes there's not a lot of sales growth potential, which is why there is such a stark distinction between consumer and pro machines (both in formfactor and price).
> The iMac has never been a gaming machine,
If Joe Yuppie goes and buys a shiny new Mac, he has the reasonable expectation that the kids will be able to fire up Doom3 or Halo and get decent play out of it. That's what people do with home computers -- play games.
If that's not the case, he might think "Damn I spent a lot of money on that Apple, and the kids hated it. Next time I'm getting something else." He is probably not going to think "Next time I'm dropping $2500 to get a G5 with the PDQ9000 video card."
The video card in these things seems to violate the Apple principle of "It just works".
Just to make myself clear -- the iMac pricing is fine in my book -- just due to the formfactor its not the machine for everyone.
The "gouging" is the fact that Apple's cheapest headless machine is $2000. That's a huge premium to pay if you just want something better than a bottom-scraper video card or an insurance slot.
I just don't buy the idea that a good-looking $1K desktop would "dilute the brand" any more than the eMac or iBook has. It would still be more premium (in price and looks) than a Dell. And I think it would sell a lot better than the iMac has.
In otherwords, Apple can't give people what they want (midrange desktop box), because they are too busy gouging someone else (low-end pros).
A headless G5 with a couple slots and a 17" LCD would probably sell for more $$ than the iMac -- it would be plenty profitable for Apple. The problem is that a lot of Photoshop types would be attracted to the machine along with the home/edu users.
I'd like to think that the PowerMac, with dual procs, PCI-X, huge memory bus, etc, could stand on its own in the marketplace. Apple apparently doesn't agree, and they've hollowed out the middle in order to drive users towards the most expensive machines.
You're right they don't "need" to do anything, if they're happy with their current sales/marketshare numbers. But they've got themselves into a strange situation where they don't sell a computer with "normal" specs (see average Dell or HP), and that has to hurt sales to some degree.
Why does a remote login have the capability to kick a console login?
Your Domain probably has the common setup of Local Administrators including the "Domain Users" group. So anyone logged on to your machine has Administrator access. So you could phrase it as "Why shouldN'T one administrator be able to kick off another?"
(Although the more I think about it, you could boot out your cow-orkers from their machines with RPC and no Terminal Services required. Hmm...)
FWIW, NT3.x didn't have this problem -- Domain users had to be specifically granted local rights. But people found it too much of a pain in the ass.