Not true. Software design is very important. Compare the design of sendmail vs qmail. qmail is better designed from a security stand point than sendmail and sendmail has payed dearly for it's design choices. Software really needs to grow up and it won't until vendors bear some of the liability beyond PR implications on sales.
Microsoft is using a PR campaign to combat the bad press it has received lately. Their campaign is designed to change public perception, not address the actual problems.
Windows 2003 server certainly has more secure default behavior than it's predecessors, so atleast it isn't all window dressing. But they have a long road ahead on the security front.
Last quarter they had $800 million in unearned revenue, this PR campaign is focused on changing public perception in order to get that unearned revenue problem under control.
There a difference between encouraging something someone else initiated and being the mastermind behind the scheme. The May 19th evidence obviously suggests the former, the latter is a bit more of a stretch. SCO's statements from the Computer Business Review remove any reasonable doubt of the latter.
A letter like that is really all everyone has been asking for from SCO. JBoss is doing this to protect their code. It makes you wonder why SCO hasn't done the same already. Unless of course their actions are not at all about protecting their source code and patents. Reminds of that bible story where King Solomon must decide a dispute over a newborn child. JBoss reacted in the interests of protecting their code, SCO has not. From this simple story, we see whose intentions are what they claim to be, and whose are not.
On a side note, SCO's recent behavior has made it clear as to who the puppetmaster of this debacle really is:
Here are two quotes from the Computer Business Review:
"SCO would probably provide customers with financial incentives and discounts to migrate to SCO Unix, other vendors' Unix, and what he referred to as 'other proprietary operating systems' but probably Windows."
"'We are offering a migration path to other operating systems that have a stronger IP basis than Linux,' the spokesperson said. Incentives will be offered 'in the coming months.'"
If that move doesn't reveal the puppetmaster, nothing will.
I sincerely doubted Microsoft's involvement for a while, this time though, the paranoid/.ers were on the money.
viruses and worms are designed to hit a wide range of machines, the intention being to get publicity or attention. When a system is exploited for profit/gain, you almost never hear about it. Even if the individual is caught, you almost never hear about it. Companies don't want their customers to know about those kind of breakins, those breakins affect their stock both directly and indirectly. Directly in that they may loose customers. Indirectly in that share holders may think that the company may loose customers and start selling. I would say that the public nature of what we know as viruses/worms helps us long term, despite the short term annoyance. I would rather have a vulnerability in a web server/application server comprised by a wide spread public virus/trojan than to have the same server silently compromised and have my credit card information and personal information stolen without me or the company I am trusting knowing about it. Stagnation and a lack of commoditization in the software market has led to open source software. By a similiar stroke, lack of security considerations in both software development methodologies, practices, and tools has led to public viruses/worms. They have created public awareness of the problem. I don't know if any legislation exists on the matter, but if I am a customer and I trust you with my information, I WANT TO KNOW whenever their is any chance my information was compromised. If this isn't a law, it should be! Enough for now. Any thoughts?
You still have the problem of whether your dsl/cable provider has their equipment on a backup power source. Even if they do, will it last as long as the power used to backup POTS.
In the age of cell phones, this may not be an issue for some, but if you plan on replacing your land line with voip over your broadband, what happens when you need to call someone during a power outage? You could setup a UPS, but you probably need to power more than your voip phone. You will need to power your cable modem/dsl modem and possibly some sort of firewall/nat device. A UPS will only buy you 15 minutes to an hour unless you get an expensive unit. I have yet to year a real great solution to this problem. Also, if your power is out, will your dsl/cable even work? Just because your equipment has backup power doesn't mean your cable provider/dsl provider does. Any thoughts?
I agree, linux on the desktop isn't real significant right now, but that could easily change with a little help. Linux on the desktop is at the point where it could use some help from one of the graphics card companies. Open source drivers and/or open specifications are needed if linux is going to get big on the desktop. A manufacturer releasing open source drivers and/or specs would help linux on the desktop grow and they would certainly be in a position to take advantage of that growth. This would certainly help the KGI/GGI projects. Linux is about choice. Card manufacturers currently support linux in a very limited fashion with binary drivers. Buggy drivers? Well, your stuck with them if/until the manufacturer decides it's worth there time. But it won't be because no one will want to use linux for games because the drivers aren't any good. See the circle? In the windows world, there is one OS with 90%+ desktop market share. The linux world is a whole new ball game. Linux is about choice, choice in every part of the OS. Linux is about open source and open specifications. In order for linux to thrive and the hardware vendors that support it, they must play by the rules that have made linux a success on the server. The first vendor who does will fuel the growth of linux on the desktop and in turn will benefit greatly from that growth. A symbiotic relationship, if you will. Such a strategy would benefit XGI greatly since linux on the desktop is starting to get some pretty big buyers, and they could drive and ride that growth in terms of market share. The wireless card manufacturers could learn something here as well. How does it harm you to open up your specs or even the source to your drivers? Does it really give you a big advantage over the other market players? If the answer is no, then why not put a little effort into opening your specs and/or source and see what happens? You will be pleasantly surprised.
Most of the people I know who are Windows users have no idea that alternatives even exist. They hate that their computer crashes all the time (WinXP too!) and their applications act flaky, but they don't know of any alternatives. The lack of alternatives keeps the average expectations of computer users low. People sometimes interpret computer problems as some sort of mystical property of a computer, which makes them believe all the more that they just don't know how to use it. The funny things is, if someone's vcr was eating their tapes all the time or their dvd player kept turning off randomly while they were using it, they would haul those devices back to Best Buy and demand replacement/money back. A computer is capable of being just as reliable as a vcr/dvd player. They are just not designed that way. Atleast not consumer windows pcs. Microsoft's message has always been "the next version will be better". My parents kept their vcr for 10+ years. Microsoft wants people to upgrade their computers every 3 years. Given the cost of PCs, you can't maintain a schedule like that by producing a reliable product. Don't misunderstand, microsoft also introduces new features in each os, but at a snail's pace. They spend most of their time changing the way the product looks, not the actual functionality of the product. Look at Internet Explorer, not a whole lot of changes since version 5. What about office? I recently tried out Office 2003, little has changed functionality-wise since Office 97. The new help system that happened in Office XP was perhaps the most significant change. Look at what features were added versus the benefit to most office users. Most offices could stick with Office 97 if file format compatibility wasn't such a problem. Every product category where Microsoft dominates has experienced very little change for the last 5 years. Monopoly = Stagnation = Lack of Innovation. Look at Microsoft's recent behavior. In a tough economy, companies generally focus a lot on their core products because that is where they will be getting a lot of pressure from competition. What is Microsoft doing? Microsoft is branching into other businesses and leveraging their other products/businesses to help that meet that goal. Why aren't they worried about their Windows product? Very little competition. Linux is their yet on the desktop. Apple is tied to their own proprietary hardware. What about their Office product? Very little competition. OpenOffice/StarOffice is pretty good. What about Internet Explorer? They have a lot of competition, but IE has a huge advantage, it ships with Windows, so it is the default browser on most pcs. As long as they don't have to worry about Windows, they don't have to worry about IE. I don't see a whole lot happening on the OS front. The office and browser fronts though I could see heating up within the next two years. IE doesn't make microsoft any direct revenue, so I don't believe they would feel as threatened if a browser started rapidly gaining market share from IE. If OpenOffice/StarOffice or some other suite started growing rapidly, the warchest would be opened up. The office suite market is the more interesting possibility. An office suite is much easier to build than an operating system, it doesn't require any cooperation from hardware manufacturers (e.g. drivers). I see open office and other suites catching up quickly and being the most troublesome to microsoft. It really will come down to compatability with Microsoft's file formats (import/export). In terms of price, the suites are already there. I find hardware vendors frustrating. Video cards especially. Video subsystems have become so essential to a PC, opening up low-level hardware programming details seems like a no-brainer. Video hardware is much more generalized than it once was. Intel/AMD provide programming documentation for their hardware and have for a long time. It is time for video card manufacturers to do the same. This would really help linux on the desktop. I still wonder what
Microsoft denies the similarities between VMS and Windows. Microsoft wants to make you think that windows is *new* technology and that UNIX is *old* technology. The truth is, they are both based on 20+ year old ideas.
We used VMS at work for our core information system until recently. It is a solidly engineered operating system. The win32 api and the backward compatibility baggage of windows limit the solid VMS foundation that it copies.
hotmail was a great service and I had an account when I was in college. I remember the day that I found out that microsoft was taking over hotmail. I signed up for a yahoo account. I held on to my hotmail to see if the quality of the service would drop. It was ok for a while, then I saw rumors of microsoft trying to convert hotmail over to its technology. The service started becoming very unreliable, it sometimes took 3 months to get an email through. To this day, the service still has problems, it took many years for them to get the service to the point that you could rely on it again. Microsoft has never release any information on the hardware required to run hotmail. I would speculate that the cost of the software/hardware to run hotmail most likely would make the service infeasible by anyone but microsoft since hotmail probably either gets the software for free or at a discount. The hotmail switch was made in order to prove microsoft's technology to other people. The amount of $$$ spent getting it to where it is today must have been staggering.
Now look at google. They use about 8000-10000 linux 1u servers to run their software. Imagine how long it will take microsoft to switch google's software over to their technology. And the cost? Will it even be possible with 1u servers? Or will they need huge 32 processor unisys servers running windows datacenter? google will go down the tubes if microsoft takes them over because they will try to port google's software from the linux platform to the windows platform, and money will be no object.
Hopefully, google won't sell out.
On a side note, it makes microsoft look pretty desperate since they were bragging about working on technology to defeat google just the other day. Apparently it must be a much more monumental task than they originally envisioned...
Both Windows and Unix are based on 20 year old ideas. The similarities between VMS and Windows are quite astonishing. There was an article on/. a while back about it.
I agree that many security problems in both unix and windows come from poor application design.
Compare designs between qmail and sendmail. qmail is a properly constructed unix application that takes advantage of all the facilities unix provides. sendmail is a blob. bind also suffers from being a blob. sendmail and bind alone account for a good portion of unix related vulnerabilities.
Bind and sendmail are applications in the unix world.
Unix and Windows may bother be at heart very solid designs. Remember though that microsoft isn't just responsible for the operating system, but for many of the most popular windows applications as well. IIS, Office, file/print services, exchange, etc.
Microsoft goal has always been integration. Integration and Security are opposing goals.
Single sign-on is a good example. To prevent someone from entering their password each time they want to utilitize a secure resource, you ask them for their username and password once and then cache the username/password. By doing this, you have sacrificed security for integration. The cache acts as an integrated security service that transparently lets any program that runs act with your full authority on all security resources that you are permitted to utilize for as long as your credentials remain in effect.
Without a an approved legal remedy, in 100 days the internet is still infected. In 300 days, in 600 days,... and so on. Old exploit attempts show up in my web logs every 15 minutes. Sometimes the people you contact either won't listen or the contact information you have for them isn't correct or they are just hard to get a hold of via it. If it takes two weeks of your effort just to contact each individual, the internet will be affected forever. But if they receive a court notice from their ISP indicating that they have 10 days to comply or the ISP will be forced to shut them down, someone will pay attention, especially when the site quits working. The idea was for a legal course of action that requires minimal involvement for the party seeking corrective action from the offending party.
Welchia proved that good intentions can be disasterous. Even well-intentioned actions could damage someone's livelihood or equipment and open up the vigilante to criminal/civil penalties. A better approach would be a quick legal remedy that would permit one party to obtain a court order ordering the ISP of another party to cut off their internet access until they complied with the remedy (fixing the issue). The ISP is given 10 business days to notify the customer of the court order. An ISP could then try and verify the claim and file a response themselves if they find the claim unsubstantiated, or they could pass on the claim to the customer who would then would be responsible for replying. If the customer or ISP replied without properly addressing the claim or fixing the issue, they would be liable for criminal penalties and fines under the law. Wow, this whole idea ended up sounding kind of draconian which is not at all what I was going for. Any thoughts?
Integration has been known to lower costs. Microsoft uses integration in a rather clever manner than takes advantage of that assumption. When you buy a single microsoft product, it is becoming increasingly difficult not to have to buy a whole slew of products just to use it. As someone pointed out in another slashdot comment, Exchange 2003 server requires AD which requires Windows 200x. Microsoft has been slowly increasing dependencies between products since windows 95. This is a good business practice in that it provides a way of generating revenue while looking cheaper short term. But initial cost is only 10% of TCO. I challenge that assumption because if you just want to upgrade to Exchange Server 2007, you will probably need a complete infrastructure upgrade. Or even better, you upgrade to Office 2007 and need an infrastructure upgrade. That is the path microsoft is following. In terms of employee training (admins, even with excellent training will still have to figure out the quarks/implications of the new software. Most available training for Microsoft products is far from excellent.), business disruption, etc. that certainly raises the cost. It is more difficult to measure since their is no way to compare without using a different setup. I am constantly amazed that Microsoft is pushing businesses toward a disruptive 3 year upgrade cycle despite the increased cost to customers and I am even more amazed how many customers are still sticking with Microsoft. Well, it's their money.
We have MX records for email, why not have different record types for each kind of service? This would permit verisign to run there service affecting websites w/o affecting any other service. I don't know much about root dns setups, is this a useful idea? (Maybe it exists already, I will have to read the rfc).
The objection to the pledge of allegiance is similar in atleast one respect to the objections christians have concerning the teaching of darwinian micro-evolution in public schools. The pledge is objected too because of the religious connotation contained in part of it's text. Micro-evolution was objected to for the same reasons, but those reasons were ignored because science is not a religion. So no church & state conflict. Christianity, Budhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, and "science" all provide an individual with a world view and something to believe in (aka: faith). They all answer or provide insight into the same kinds of questions. Yet "science" is not considered a religion because "science" says that it is not a religion. It is the newest of the world views listed above. I put "science" in quotes because their is no actual "ism" word that defines the embodiment of world view components and ideals that make up this very new religion. When "science" is considered to be a religion like all the others, the separation of church and state idea seems to fall apart in terms of practicality. What subjects in school could be considered "world-view" free. Mathematics, Spelling/Grammar, Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Music, those are the only two that come to mind. Written historical records could be examined. But when you study the history of any civilization, you are going to bump into multiple world-views. Most of what are traditionaly considered the sciences such as chemistry, biology, physics, etc. are based on experimental results and some theoretical work as well. Biology and History typically fall victim to having world-view issues dragged into the situation. If "science" is a world-view, then teaching it and excluding others doesn't make any sense. To favor one world-view over all the others is to force an idea on those who don't hold that point of view. Essentially instilling intolerance through the public educational system. That is unconstitutional. As with any world view, it doesn't do any good for one world-view to know nothing or very little about the others. How can you support your world-view if you don't know any thing about the other world views? The best approach would seem to be to teach all the world-views in school. I believe at this point the parent's/community the school resides in come into play. A community/parents may decide that they want only a subset of the world views mentioned above taught. As long as no ones opinion is excluded, that seems somewhat reasonable and already happens anyway.
In highschool, the textbooks we had were about 15 years old. The books had a lot of ideas from science that are now considered to be incorrect. This is evident in comparing the new books they purchased two years after I left (my sibling's books) with my old book. The "evidence" found and interpreted by science changes in many ways as time goes on. Sometimes the interpretation of the results is replaced. Sometimes the evidence itself is invalidated. What I don't understand is, if this stuff changes so much, why is it held in so high a regard? Micro-evolution has been all but abandoned in favor of Gould's explanation of the evolutionary process. Yet the material I was taught in highschool contained facts and theories whose conclusions were later invalidated and replaced. All the more reason to teach all the points of view. Science has been taught in schools as if it is *gospel* but it has all kinds of evidence and interpretation validations and major theory shift s every twenty years or so. It is great that mankind makes that kind of progress, but why are we teaching it as fact given the body of evidence surrounding it's evidently limited life span? "Science" is not being taught the way science would teach it. Current results are used to produce a world-view, but the very embodiment of the ideals in science argue against such an approach. I believe that "science" is actually a world-view/religion that arose out of the conflict between other world-views and science. Someday hopefully is will have it's own "ism" so that it is easier to separate science from "science" and clear up this whole mess once and for all.
The pledge of allegiance, the star-spangled banner, and other pieces of American history are part of our heritage and tradition. One's standpoint on christianity is irrelevant. The heritage and history of our country should be preserved as it was, not how we want it to be.
The key issue is:
Should children in the public school system be forced to recite it?
No, an individual should not be penalized for their particular beliefs. The laws making it mandatory should be declared unconstitutional.
Let's say it was left as optional. The teacher says to her students, "Class, let's stand and recite the pledge of allegiance". Their is a good chance that the students who's parents object will have to stand against the majority by not participating. Children are very impressionable, and such a situation can be hard for them to deal with, especially when most of the class will be standing.
This is where the removing of the "under god" solution comes into play. If you take the pledge out of schools completely, you break a school tradition of instilling patriotic ideals into school children on a daily basis. If you leave the pledge in schools but make it voluntary, kids who's parents don't want them saying the pledge will probably end up saying it anyway. Their solution is to change the pledge. It makes it "easy" on everyone but chips away at American history and our national heritage. While the recording of history is often times hardly objective, changing it for the reasons above, is in my opinion, one of the greatest crimes a society can commit against itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true. Software design is very important. Compare the design of sendmail vs qmail. qmail is better designed from a security stand point than sendmail and sendmail has payed dearly for it's design choices. Software really needs to grow up and it won't until vendors bear some of the liability beyond PR implications on sales.
No wonder Microsoft is so concerned about the EU antitrust case. It revolves around its media player.
Is SCO doing this to delay the 2.6 kernel?
Microsoft is using a PR campaign to combat the bad press it has received lately. Their campaign is designed to change public perception, not address the actual problems.
Windows 2003 server certainly has more secure default behavior than it's predecessors, so atleast it isn't all window dressing. But they have a long road ahead on the security front.
Last quarter they had $800 million in unearned revenue, this PR campaign is focused on changing public perception in order to get that unearned revenue problem under control.
There a difference between encouraging something someone else initiated and being the mastermind behind the scheme. The May 19th evidence obviously suggests the former, the latter is a bit more of a stretch. SCO's statements from the Computer Business Review remove any reasonable doubt of the latter.
Anonymous suggestions are not the same as anonymous donations. :(
A letter like that is really all everyone has been asking for from SCO. JBoss is doing this to protect their code. It makes you wonder why SCO hasn't done the same already. Unless of course their actions are not at all about protecting their source code and patents. Reminds of that bible story where King Solomon must decide a dispute over a newborn child. JBoss reacted in the interests of protecting their code, SCO has not. From this simple story, we see whose intentions are what they claim to be, and whose are not.
/.ers were on the money.
On a side note, SCO's recent behavior has made it clear as to who the puppetmaster of this debacle really is:
Here are two quotes from the Computer Business Review:
"SCO would probably provide customers with financial incentives and discounts to migrate to SCO Unix, other vendors' Unix, and what he referred to as 'other proprietary operating systems' but probably Windows."
"'We are offering a migration path to other operating systems that have a stronger IP basis than Linux,' the spokesperson said. Incentives will be offered 'in the coming months.'"
If that move doesn't reveal the puppetmaster, nothing will.
I sincerely doubted Microsoft's involvement for a while, this time though, the paranoid
viruses and worms are designed to hit a wide range of machines, the intention being to get publicity or attention. When a system is exploited for profit/gain, you almost never hear about it. Even if the individual is caught, you almost never hear about it. Companies don't want their customers to know about those kind of breakins, those breakins affect their stock both directly and indirectly. Directly in that they may loose customers. Indirectly in that share holders may think that the company may loose customers and start selling. I would say that the public nature of what we know as viruses/worms helps us long term, despite the short term annoyance. I would rather have a vulnerability in a web server/application server comprised by a wide spread public virus/trojan than to have the same server silently compromised and have my credit card information and personal information stolen without me or the company I am trusting knowing about it. Stagnation and a lack of commoditization in the software market has led to open source software. By a similiar stroke, lack of security considerations in both software development methodologies, practices, and tools has led to public viruses/worms. They have created public awareness of the problem. I don't know if any legislation exists on the matter, but if I am a customer and I trust you with my information, I WANT TO KNOW whenever their is any chance my information was compromised. If this isn't a law, it should be! Enough for now. Any thoughts?
You still have the problem of whether your dsl/cable provider has their equipment on a backup power source. Even if they do, will it last as long as the power used to backup POTS.
Plus, an intermediate source of power is usually required to avoid interruption.
In the age of cell phones, this may not be an issue for some, but if you plan on replacing your land line with voip over your broadband, what happens when you need to call someone during a power outage? You could setup a UPS, but you probably need to power more than your voip phone. You will need to power your cable modem/dsl modem and possibly some sort of firewall/nat device. A UPS will only buy you 15 minutes to an hour unless you get an expensive unit. I have yet to year a real great solution to this problem. Also, if your power is out, will your dsl/cable even work? Just because your equipment has backup power doesn't mean your cable provider/dsl provider does. Any thoughts?
I agree, linux on the desktop isn't real significant right now, but that could easily change with a little help. Linux on the desktop is at the point where it could use some help from one of the graphics card companies. Open source drivers and/or open specifications are needed if linux is going to get big on the desktop. A manufacturer releasing open source drivers and/or specs would help linux on the desktop grow and they would certainly be in a position to take advantage of that growth. This would certainly help the KGI/GGI projects. Linux is about choice. Card manufacturers currently support linux in a very limited fashion with binary drivers. Buggy drivers? Well, your stuck with them if/until the manufacturer decides it's worth there time. But it won't be because no one will want to use linux for games because the drivers aren't any good. See the circle? In the windows world, there is one OS with 90%+ desktop market share. The linux world is a whole new ball game. Linux is about choice, choice in every part of the OS. Linux is about open source and open specifications. In order for linux to thrive and the hardware vendors that support it, they must play by the rules that have made linux a success on the server. The first vendor who does will fuel the growth of linux on the desktop and in turn will benefit greatly from that growth. A symbiotic relationship, if you will. Such a strategy would benefit XGI greatly since linux on the desktop is starting to get some pretty big buyers, and they could drive and ride that growth in terms of market share. The wireless card manufacturers could learn something here as well. How does it harm you to open up your specs or even the source to your drivers? Does it really give you a big advantage over the other market players? If the answer is no, then why not put a little effort into opening your specs and/or source and see what happens? You will be pleasantly surprised.
Most of the people I know who are Windows users have no idea that alternatives even exist. They hate that their computer crashes all the time (WinXP too!) and their applications act flaky, but they don't know of any alternatives. The lack of alternatives keeps the average expectations of computer users low. People sometimes interpret computer problems as some sort of mystical property of a computer, which makes them believe all the more that they just don't know how to use it. The funny things is, if someone's vcr was eating their tapes all the time or their dvd player kept turning off randomly while they were using it, they would haul those devices back to Best Buy and demand replacement/money back. A computer is capable of being just as reliable as a vcr/dvd player. They are just not designed that way. Atleast not consumer windows pcs. Microsoft's message has always been "the next version will be better". My parents kept their vcr for 10+ years. Microsoft wants people to upgrade their computers every 3 years. Given the cost of PCs, you can't maintain a schedule like that by producing a reliable product. Don't misunderstand, microsoft also introduces new features in each os, but at a snail's pace. They spend most of their time changing the way the product looks, not the actual functionality of the product. Look at Internet Explorer, not a whole lot of changes since version 5. What about office? I recently tried out Office 2003, little has changed functionality-wise since Office 97. The new help system that happened in Office XP was perhaps the most significant change. Look at what features were added versus the benefit to most office users. Most offices could stick with Office 97 if file format compatibility wasn't such a problem. Every product category where Microsoft dominates has experienced very little change for the last 5 years. Monopoly = Stagnation = Lack of Innovation. Look at Microsoft's recent behavior. In a tough economy, companies generally focus a lot on their core products because that is where they will be getting a lot of pressure from competition. What is Microsoft doing? Microsoft is branching into other businesses and leveraging their other products/businesses to help that meet that goal. Why aren't they worried about their Windows product? Very little competition. Linux is their yet on the desktop. Apple is tied to their own proprietary hardware. What about their Office product? Very little competition. OpenOffice/StarOffice is pretty good. What about Internet Explorer? They have a lot of competition, but IE has a huge advantage, it ships with Windows, so it is the default browser on most pcs. As long as they don't have to worry about Windows, they don't have to worry about IE. I don't see a whole lot happening on the OS front. The office and browser fronts though I could see heating up within the next two years. IE doesn't make microsoft any direct revenue, so I don't believe they would feel as threatened if a browser started rapidly gaining market share from IE. If OpenOffice/StarOffice or some other suite started growing rapidly, the warchest would be opened up. The office suite market is the more interesting possibility. An office suite is much easier to build than an operating system, it doesn't require any cooperation from hardware manufacturers (e.g. drivers). I see open office and other suites catching up quickly and being the most troublesome to microsoft. It really will come down to compatability with Microsoft's file formats (import/export). In terms of price, the suites are already there. I find hardware vendors frustrating. Video cards especially. Video subsystems have become so essential to a PC, opening up low-level hardware programming details seems like a no-brainer. Video hardware is much more generalized than it once was. Intel/AMD provide programming documentation for their hardware and have for a long time. It is time for video card manufacturers to do the same. This would really help linux on the desktop. I still wonder what
Microsoft denies the similarities between VMS and Windows. Microsoft wants to make you think that windows is *new* technology and that UNIX is *old* technology. The truth is, they are both based on 20+ year old ideas.
We used VMS at work for our core information system until recently. It is a solidly engineered operating system. The win32 api and the backward compatibility baggage of windows limit the solid VMS foundation that it copies.
hotmail was a great service and I had an account when I was in college. I remember the day that I found out that microsoft was taking over hotmail. I signed up for a yahoo account. I held on to my hotmail to see if the quality of the service would drop. It was ok for a while, then I saw rumors of microsoft trying to convert hotmail over to its technology. The service started becoming very unreliable, it sometimes took 3 months to get an email through. To this day, the service still has problems, it took many years for them to get the service to the point that you could rely on it again. Microsoft has never release any information on the hardware required to run hotmail. I would speculate that the cost of the software/hardware to run hotmail most likely would make the service infeasible by anyone but microsoft since hotmail probably either gets the software for free or at a discount. The hotmail switch was made in order to prove microsoft's technology to other people. The amount of $$$ spent getting it to where it is today must have been staggering.
Now look at google. They use about 8000-10000 linux 1u servers to run their software. Imagine how long it will take microsoft to switch google's software over to their technology. And the cost? Will it even be possible with 1u servers? Or will they need huge 32 processor unisys servers running windows datacenter? google will go down the tubes if microsoft takes them over because they will try to port google's software from the linux platform to the windows platform, and money will be no object.
Hopefully, google won't sell out.
On a side note, it makes microsoft look pretty desperate since they were bragging about working on technology to defeat google just the other day. Apparently it must be a much more monumental task than they originally envisioned...
Both Windows and Unix are based on 20 year old ideas. The similarities between VMS and Windows are quite astonishing. There was an article on /. a while back about it.
I agree that many security problems in both unix and windows come from poor application design.
Compare designs between qmail and sendmail. qmail is a properly constructed unix application that takes advantage of all the facilities unix provides. sendmail is a blob. bind also suffers from being a blob. sendmail and bind alone account for a good portion of unix related vulnerabilities.
Bind and sendmail are applications in the unix world.
Unix and Windows may bother be at heart very solid designs. Remember though that microsoft isn't just responsible for the operating system, but for many of the most popular windows applications as well. IIS, Office, file/print services, exchange, etc.
Microsoft goal has always been integration. Integration and Security are opposing goals.
Single sign-on is a good example. To prevent someone from entering their password each time they want to utilitize a secure resource, you ask them for their username and password once and then cache the username/password. By doing this, you have sacrificed security for integration. The cache acts as an integrated security service that transparently lets any program that runs act with your full authority on all security resources that you are permitted to utilize for as long as your credentials remain in effect.
Without a an approved legal remedy, in 100 days the internet is still infected. In 300 days, in 600 days, ... and so on. Old exploit attempts show up in my web logs every 15 minutes. Sometimes the people you contact either won't listen or the contact information you have for them isn't correct or they are just hard to get a hold of via it. If it takes two weeks of your effort just to contact each individual, the internet will be affected forever. But if they receive a court notice from their ISP indicating that they have 10 days to comply or the ISP will be forced to shut them down, someone will pay attention, especially when the site quits working. The idea was for a legal course of action that requires minimal involvement for the party seeking corrective action from the offending party.
Welchia proved that good intentions can be disasterous. Even well-intentioned actions could damage someone's livelihood or equipment and open up the vigilante to criminal/civil penalties. A better approach would be a quick legal remedy that would permit one party to obtain a court order ordering the ISP of another party to cut off their internet access until they complied with the remedy (fixing the issue). The ISP is given 10 business days to notify the customer of the court order. An ISP could then try and verify the claim and file a response themselves if they find the claim unsubstantiated, or they could pass on the claim to the customer who would then would be responsible for replying. If the customer or ISP replied without properly addressing the claim or fixing the issue, they would be liable for criminal penalties and fines under the law. Wow, this whole idea ended up sounding kind of draconian which is not at all what I was going for. Any thoughts?
Integration has been known to lower costs. Microsoft uses integration in a rather clever manner than takes advantage of that assumption. When you buy a single microsoft product, it is becoming increasingly difficult not to have to buy a whole slew of products just to use it. As someone pointed out in another slashdot comment, Exchange 2003 server requires AD which requires Windows 200x. Microsoft has been slowly increasing dependencies between products since windows 95. This is a good business practice in that it provides a way of generating revenue while looking cheaper short term. But initial cost is only 10% of TCO. I challenge that assumption because if you just want to upgrade to Exchange Server 2007, you will probably need a complete infrastructure upgrade. Or even better, you upgrade to Office 2007 and need an infrastructure upgrade. That is the path microsoft is following. In terms of employee training (admins, even with excellent training will still have to figure out the quarks/implications of the new software. Most available training for Microsoft products is far from excellent.), business disruption, etc. that certainly raises the cost. It is more difficult to measure since their is no way to compare without using a different setup. I am constantly amazed that Microsoft is pushing businesses toward a disruptive 3 year upgrade cycle despite the increased cost to customers and I am even more amazed how many customers are still sticking with Microsoft. Well, it's their money.
We have MX records for email, why not have different record types for each kind of service? This would permit verisign to run there service affecting websites w/o affecting any other service. I don't know much about root dns setups, is this a useful idea? (Maybe it exists already, I will have to read the rfc).
The objection to the pledge of allegiance is similar in atleast one respect to the objections christians have concerning the teaching of darwinian micro-evolution in public schools. The pledge is objected too because of the religious connotation contained in part of it's text. Micro-evolution was objected to for the same reasons, but those reasons were ignored because science is not a religion. So no church & state conflict. Christianity, Budhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, and "science" all provide an individual with a world view and something to believe in (aka: faith). They all answer or provide insight into the same kinds of questions. Yet "science" is not considered a religion because "science" says that it is not a religion. It is the newest of the world views listed above. I put "science" in quotes because their is no actual "ism" word that defines the embodiment of world view components and ideals that make up this very new religion. When "science" is considered to be a religion like all the others, the separation of church and state idea seems to fall apart in terms of practicality. What subjects in school could be considered "world-view" free. Mathematics, Spelling/Grammar, Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Music, those are the only two that come to mind. Written historical records could be examined. But when you study the history of any civilization, you are going to bump into multiple world-views. Most of what are traditionaly considered the sciences such as chemistry, biology, physics, etc. are based on experimental results and some theoretical work as well. Biology and History typically fall victim to having world-view issues dragged into the situation. If "science" is a world-view, then teaching it and excluding others doesn't make any sense. To favor one world-view over all the others is to force an idea on those who don't hold that point of view. Essentially instilling intolerance through the public educational system. That is unconstitutional. As with any world view, it doesn't do any good for one world-view to know nothing or very little about the others. How can you support your world-view if you don't know any thing about the other world views? The best approach would seem to be to teach all the world-views in school. I believe at this point the parent's/community the school resides in come into play. A community/parents may decide that they want only a subset of the world views mentioned above taught. As long as no ones opinion is excluded, that seems somewhat reasonable and already happens anyway.
In highschool, the textbooks we had were about 15 years old. The books had a lot of ideas from science that are now considered to be incorrect. This is evident in comparing the new books they purchased two years after I left (my sibling's books) with my old book. The "evidence" found and interpreted by science changes in many ways as time goes on. Sometimes the interpretation of the results is replaced. Sometimes the evidence itself is invalidated. What I don't understand is, if this stuff changes so much, why is it held in so high a regard? Micro-evolution has been all but abandoned in favor of Gould's explanation of the evolutionary process. Yet the material I was taught in highschool contained facts and theories whose conclusions were later invalidated and replaced. All the more reason to teach all the points of view. Science has been taught in schools as if it is *gospel* but it has all kinds of evidence and interpretation validations and major theory shift s every twenty years or so. It is great that mankind makes that kind of progress, but why are we teaching it as fact given the body of evidence surrounding it's evidently limited life span? "Science" is not being taught the way science would teach it. Current results are used to produce a world-view, but the very embodiment of the ideals in science argue against such an approach. I believe that "science" is actually a world-view/religion that arose out of the conflict between other world-views and science. Someday hopefully is will have it's own "ism" so that it is easier to separate science from "science" and clear up this whole mess once and for all.
The pledge of allegiance, the star-spangled banner, and other pieces of American history are part of our heritage and tradition. One's standpoint on christianity is irrelevant. The heritage and history of our country should be preserved as it was, not how we want it to be.
The key issue is:
Should children in the public school system be forced to recite it?
No, an individual should not be penalized for their particular beliefs. The laws making it mandatory should be declared unconstitutional.
Let's say it was left as optional. The teacher says to her students, "Class, let's stand and recite the pledge of allegiance". Their is a good chance that the students who's parents object will have to stand against the majority by not participating. Children are very impressionable, and such a situation can be hard for them to deal with, especially when most of the class will be standing.
This is where the removing of the "under god" solution comes into play. If you take the pledge out of schools completely, you break a school tradition of instilling patriotic ideals into school children on a daily basis. If you leave the pledge in schools but make it voluntary, kids who's parents don't want them saying the pledge will probably end up saying it anyway. Their solution is to change the pledge. It makes it "easy" on everyone but chips away at American history and our national heritage. While the recording of history is often times hardly objective, changing it for the reasons above, is in my opinion, one of the greatest crimes a society can commit against itself.
How about a gecko activex plugin for IE? Gecko is Mozilla's rendering engine.
SRP provides strong authentication capabilities. Here are the client programs that implement it.
http://srp.stanford.edu/