As much juvenile and downright silly Stallman gets, I wish he'd get a bit of support from "the community". He's one of the founding fathers after all.
If you donate to the FSF, you're supporting Stallman. It's not cynical, it's what the FSF is for. You don't have to address your checks to RMS directly for him to benefit from it.
Delphi 8 and the VCL are nothing more than wrappers around.NET. If I were to perform any NEW windows centric development I would use C#.
I wouldn't necessarily call that bad news. Win32 is dead, wrapping.NET is the only way for Delphi to continue to grow. I assume Delphi 8 can use Windows Forms directly without the VCL layer, if one wanted to continue to use that language in the future; but overall I'll agree -- there's really no point to use anything other than C# or maybe VB.NET.
Tiger" data, by the US Census, has tons of free and open data for anyone to use. The accuracy isn't great a lot of the time, but then again, a lot of companies use this data....
TIGER data is often years out of date, and can be horribly skewed. It also doesn't include information about one-ways, nor does it specifically delimit where roads intersect (though if you're plucky enough, you can divine that information with reasonable accuracy and the expected false positives by simply joining road endpoints that are close enough to each other). TIGER data really starts to fall apart once you begin using it for anything more than very rudimentary GIS work.
I've heard whispers that the Census Bureau is really working on putting together some improvements for the TIGER data set in the coming years, so keep your fingers crossed.
All things considered I think the killing off of the Registry is a far bigger story than a competitor of flash. This has been arguably overdue for many years, and long one of Microsofts OS weak points. Have you got a link for the registry story by chance?
While I don't have a link, references to it are all over all the press about Longhorn that came out of PDC. The Registry's been on the way out as an information store for applications ever since.NET, which prefers XML configuration files in the application's directory or the user's home directory as appropriate. So, even only by that token, the Registry in Longhorn will have a much lesser importance.
The remainder of the registry looks like its going to be rolled into WinFS. Several of the reports from PDC describe mounting the registry like a hard drive and using a command prompt to change through directories/keys to read files/values.
It's all very interesting stuff, if you can get past the fact that Microsoft's name is on the label.
all this does is add the flag to the stream. and it says that receivers must SEE the flag. it does not say what the box does with the flag..if the box lets you record it to DVD, allows you to make a DRMed file for your PC, if it lets you TIVO it, etc. companies will come up with tools that use the flag, and all they have to do is make sure the content is protected from being transmitted over the internet on a massive scale.
Step 1: Implement "Broadcast Flag"
Step 2: ???
Step 3: More freedom for consumers!
Sorry if I'm cynical, but I don't really see this as a possible business plan for media companies. These companies have already proven they'll try anything it takes to try to deprive the public of Fair Use rights; and this seemingly innocuous move, while your scenario paints it as a positive change, could just as easily be turned into a shackle to try to restrict any sort of copying whatsoever. (Of course, how successful they'd be in such a move isn't guaranteed by any means.)
"And the horsemen spoke "Behold 9 solar prominences" And the Earth was smited by an X15.
Naw it's not nearly as bad as that. What's really going on is that with X10's popunders patented and too expensive for them to use now, they're looking into alternative means of blanketing their name across the Earth. Solar flares turned out to be a perfect idea -- trigger a few of the right intensity and their company name is all over, science journals, websites, the nightly news.
Just give them a few weeks to perfect the technology and we won't hear the end of X10 again.
"The Librarian of Congress"? She must be busy as hell!
Oh come on, when's the last time you think a Congressman actually read something? They don't need to anymore, now that they've got the nice people at Disney telling them how to vote!
Windows is simply missing hundreds of obvious features. Tabbed browsing in IE. The ability to put stuff in the system tray. Virtual Desktops. Etc. These are basic functionalities that should be part of the os.
One man's features is another man's bloatware. I don't want any of the stuff you listed and I don't want a 3-DVD Windows installation just because they try to include every little feature that someone, somewhere might want. They already do that with Office and they take constant flack for Office being bloatware as a result.
I'm not saying that your facts aren't true, but considering a completely different company (vmware) can allow you run DOS on top of Linux who didn't even have any of the inside resources that Microsoft had, I certainly think Microsoft could have achieved compatibility with DOS without allowing these "restrictions" even if only to emulate DOS. And even now, they can't emulate their own old operating system on systems like XP as well as vmware can do via virtual machine.
Emulation and virtualization are a different beast entirely. The techniques VMware uses are great for running a machine-inside-a-machine, but that wouldn't have been sufficient for the level of compatibility the Win9x line needed to gain acceptance at the time.
Those legacy DOS apps that would have been running under a VMware-like emulation would have needed to interact with all the other apps on the system, and the services provided by the DOS legacy device drivers running under emulation would have needed to be available to other apps on the system. By stuffing them away in a emulated machine, it presents problems for those requirements since the very core idea of VMware is that stuff running in it is contained away from everything else.
Would it have been possible? Maybe. At the very least it would have taken an incredible performance hit (remember that Microsoft really pushed that Win95 was fast enough to run Quake at the time -- and that VMware is usably fast enough because our physical machines are incredibly fast today), not to mention incredible memory usage. Then again, maybe not. The biggest problem with DOS compatibility was that DOS wasn't so much an operating system (in the sense that we think of an OS today) as it was just a very loosely defined API with no restrictions on expansion.
The other alternative would have been to just virtualize everything, which would have offered no real benefits -- if the system crashed, you might not have had to reboot the physical machine, but you'd still have to restart the virtual machine, which all your apps would have been running in, so you're only really exchanging hitting the physical reset switch with a virtual one. In fact, you could see this approach being used by Microsoft with the Win16 subsystem in NT - you had the option of starting legacy apps in different memory spaces. Performance issues and resource usage issues rear their heads here again, too.
Today -- certainly there'd be no problem with Microsoft using a VMWare-like system to provide better DOS support, but the main question is "Why?". DOS has been dead as a platform for almost 10 years now. The niche of people who need DOS support at a level where they'd need an emulated solution is small enough that Microsoft doesn't bother -- but large enough to support a smaller company catering to that niche.
As far as using emulation and virtualization to provide enhanced security for non-legacy applications -- that's solving the problem of a nail needing to be hammered in by using a jackhammer. It's the OS's job to keep one process from unwanted interference with another; this is not a problem that should need to be shunted off to an emulation layer. And yes, in fact, with Windows and Linux both, you don't need to; since as modern protected operating systems, they both provide all the protection you'll need.
This wasn't just because of the need to preserve backward compatitibility with DOS.
Yes, it was. The Win9x line not only needed to ensure application compatibility with DOS, but also device driver compatibility with DOS -- and anyone who ever wrote DOS drivers could tell you, there was almost no such thing as standards.
The end result was a GUI system that couldn't be stable because in order to be stable it had to enforce restrictions, and that was unacceptable because the software and the drivers needed to run without restrictions. Over the course of the Win9x line, Microsoft built APIs and pushed developers to use them, and then once there was sufficient legacy behind Win32 and WDM, they pulled the rug out from under us and we're all running on NT and enjoying the stability benefits that a protected architecture can provide.
To say that Win9x was unstable because Microsoft was just lazy is a completely asinine thing to say and anyone who maintains as such shows how little they actually know about the situation. To say that Windows is stable today because of Linux is also misguided: Linux didn't really start appearing on Microsoft's radar until after 1999, which was when Win2k shipped, so Microsoft was already firmly in the stable OS bandwagon before Linux was a concern.
.NET, on the other hand, is as much of a response to Linux (well, Open Source in general) as it is to Java -- Microsoft doesn't push the cross-platform capabilities of.NET in their marketing or technical evangelism, which is what you'd assume they'd really be pushing if they were intent on solely battling Java. No, Microsoft pushes the security, interoperability and standards aspects of.NET -- the very grounds that Linux and other Open Source software have been eating its lunch on lately.
It's already crashed once for me in the three hours I've been using it (I picked "Hide Browser" from the menu while an MP3 was playing and it bombed), and the navigation (scrolling and such) while in the Music Store seems incredibly slow -- but aside from those problems, it's pure heaven.
As much as I hate the idea of buying a DRM'd audio format, I think Apple's suckered me in as a customer.
Can't think of one thing you can't do on Windows (95/98/NT/2000/XP)? Let me give you a hand: Fire up Mplayer to watch any video you want.
Windows Media Player (and in fact, pretty much every Windows video player) use a common multimedia API. WMP, or any other player you download, like Winamp3, for example, can play each other's formats just fine.
Interpolate with a large number of different machines.
Nicely vague... how about pointing out something that Linux can do in this regard that Windows can't? It can certainly be argued that Windows has a better infrastructure for networking control with Active Directory. And as far as interoperating with non-Windows machines, as a Windows user I can telnet, I can SSH, I can FTP, I can scp, I can rsync, I can do pretty much anything a Linux machine can do.
Secure your network.
A patched and properly configured Windows machine is just as secure as a patched and properly configured Linux box. None of the various worms and viruses that have spread via Windows machines have done so via a method that a patched system would have been vulnerable to.
Remote X Session over ssh.
PuTTY's SSH tunneling support coupled with the Win32 build of XFree86.
This security enhancement took a half billion dollar patent lawsuit to be brought about.
This is not a "security enhancement". IE already come shipped to prompt before installing any ActiveX controls (the famous "Always trust content by Microsoft Corporation" window is the one I'm talking about here).
What this is doing is forcing the browser to prompt in every instance that an ActiveX control is used, which, by the way, you can currently set IE to do as well, but it doesn't come defaulted to do so -- the "trust" there was placed when you permitted the control to be downloaded in the first place, which is a perfectly reasonable security model; so this isn't a security enhancement. There's also no way for a user to turn off this annoying "prompt all the time" behavior.
Fortunately, there is a way for webmasters and people hosting the IE browser control (such as MyIE2) to turn off this behavior, as Microsoft has posted workarounds (along with a wink-wink-nudge-nudge disclaimer that you shouldn't use them to circumvent the patent).
Unfortunately, this is having the opposite effect that Eolas intended. We've decided not to roll out a Mozilla solution because Gecko is in violation of this very same patent, which has now been validated by a federal judge.
Some people may say that it's due to cheat prevention... but c'mon. Security through obscurity is no security at all, if that's what they were relying on.
You have to rely on security through obscurity to some extent in an FPS, because the network latency is too high to constantly be relying on the server for every piece of data that the client might need at any given moment. More data than is absolutely needed must be sent so that if the player turns around suddenly, they don't have a quarter-second delay (or more) before they see who's standing behind them.
Hosts like Rackshack are adding 'no-IRC' rules to their AUPs at the risk of having one's server unplugged.
The submitter misread Rackshack's AUP (as I did when I was signing up for service through them, on this specific topic incidentally -- so I emailed them for clarification). Many of the items in their AUP apply to their virtual servers only -- where many customers share one physical machine. IRC servers aren't permitted on those machines because of the load they put on the machine.
If you've got your own Rackshack server, you can run IRC on it all you want.
Has anyone else noticed that the "spam" sort of sites that are nothing but link farms and Gator popups are getting much better at finding their way into Google's rankings? I switched to Google back in the day after search engines like altavista became overrun with such sites. Now I've noticed that they occasionally creep into their rankings...I guess entropy is the way of the universe after all.
I've been noticing it a lot lately, on all sorts of searches. It's almost enough to make me want to start using a better search engine instead.
This is a BAD idea. What happens when I have 3 different email accounts that I use for different things, and I want to send mail from each of them from my home ISP? Sure, each email provider can provide a secure SMTP for me to log into, but this sounds like a lot of work
A better idea would be to use public key cryptography to validate a sender's address. Add a domain's public key to its DNS record so receiving servers can verify it actually came from the domain in question, and extend SMTP so a server can be queried for a specific user's public key, to be able to verify it came from the user in question once the domain's signature has been validated.
Slashdot Mirror
As much juvenile and downright silly Stallman gets, I wish he'd get a bit of support from "the community". He's one of the founding fathers after all.
If you donate to the FSF, you're supporting Stallman. It's not cynical, it's what the FSF is for. You don't have to address your checks to RMS directly for him to benefit from it.
Glad to hear Linus is covered. Who is covering Stallman's legal expenses?
I'd imagine the FSF is. Stallman's only involved because SCO's attacking the GPL, and defending the GPL is the FSF's raison d'etre.
IFS (Installable File System) Kit costs about $900; see also http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/ddk/ifskit
There is a GPL'd clone of the header file you need to develop IFS drivers for windows, available here.
Delphi 8 and the VCL are nothing more than wrappers around .NET. If I were to perform any NEW windows centric development I would use C#.
.NET is the only way for Delphi to continue to grow. I assume Delphi 8 can use Windows Forms directly without the VCL layer, if one wanted to continue to use that language in the future; but overall I'll agree -- there's really no point to use anything other than C# or maybe VB.NET.
I wouldn't necessarily call that bad news. Win32 is dead, wrapping
NightWulf and Cliff, you may think I'm crazy, but sell your dot-com stock now !!!
Tiger" data, by the US Census, has tons of free and open data for anyone to use. The accuracy isn't great a lot of the time, but then again, a lot of companies use this data....
TIGER data is often years out of date, and can be horribly skewed. It also doesn't include information about one-ways, nor does it specifically delimit where roads intersect (though if you're plucky enough, you can divine that information with reasonable accuracy and the expected false positives by simply joining road endpoints that are close enough to each other). TIGER data really starts to fall apart once you begin using it for anything more than very rudimentary GIS work.
I've heard whispers that the Census Bureau is really working on putting together some improvements for the TIGER data set in the coming years, so keep your fingers crossed.
All things considered I think the killing off of the Registry is a far bigger story than a competitor of flash. This has been arguably overdue for many years, and long one of Microsofts OS weak points. Have you got a link for the registry story by chance?
.NET, which prefers XML configuration files in the application's directory or the user's home directory as appropriate. So, even only by that token, the Registry in Longhorn will have a much lesser importance.
While I don't have a link, references to it are all over all the press about Longhorn that came out of PDC. The Registry's been on the way out as an information store for applications ever since
The remainder of the registry looks like its going to be rolled into WinFS. Several of the reports from PDC describe mounting the registry like a hard drive and using a command prompt to change through directories/keys to read files/values.
It's all very interesting stuff, if you can get past the fact that Microsoft's name is on the label.
all this does is add the flag to the stream. and it says that receivers must SEE the flag. it does not say what the box does with the flag..if the box lets you record it to DVD, allows you to make a DRMed file for your PC, if it lets you TIVO it, etc. companies will come up with tools that use the flag, and all they have to do is make sure the content is protected from being transmitted over the internet on a massive scale.
Step 1: Implement "Broadcast Flag"
Step 2: ???
Step 3: More freedom for consumers!
Sorry if I'm cynical, but I don't really see this as a possible business plan for media companies. These companies have already proven they'll try anything it takes to try to deprive the public of Fair Use rights; and this seemingly innocuous move, while your scenario paints it as a positive change, could just as easily be turned into a shackle to try to restrict any sort of copying whatsoever. (Of course, how successful they'd be in such a move isn't guaranteed by any means.)
"And the horsemen spoke "Behold 9 solar prominences" And the Earth was smited by an X15.
Naw it's not nearly as bad as that. What's really going on is that with X10's popunders patented and too expensive for them to use now, they're looking into alternative means of blanketing their name across the Earth. Solar flares turned out to be a perfect idea -- trigger a few of the right intensity and their company name is all over, science journals, websites, the nightly news.
Just give them a few weeks to perfect the technology and we won't hear the end of X10 again.
about it, can YOU name any war that happened 1000 years ago? How about all the leaders of a country somewhere?
No, but around a 1000 years ago there was one of the most dramatic periods of solar activity they'd seen in those times!
"The Librarian of Congress"? She must be busy as hell!
Oh come on, when's the last time you think a Congressman actually read something? They don't need to anymore, now that they've got the nice people at Disney telling them how to vote!
Now we can expect a lot more of those lame "no carrier" posts on Wed.
:(
Hey, you know if you didn't like my sig, you could have just told me.
Windows is simply missing hundreds of obvious features. Tabbed browsing in IE. The ability to put stuff in the system tray. Virtual Desktops. Etc. These are basic functionalities that should be part of the os.
One man's features is another man's bloatware. I don't want any of the stuff you listed and I don't want a 3-DVD Windows installation just because they try to include every little feature that someone, somewhere might want. They already do that with Office and they take constant flack for Office being bloatware as a result.
I beg to differ. Many Outlook viri are embedded into HTML messages that require no user action to run.
1999 called, it wants its FUD back.
I'm not saying that your facts aren't true, but considering a completely different company (vmware) can allow you run DOS on top of Linux who didn't even have any of the inside resources that Microsoft had, I certainly think Microsoft could have achieved compatibility with DOS without allowing these "restrictions" even if only to emulate DOS. And even now, they can't emulate their own old operating system on systems like XP as well as vmware can do via virtual machine.
Emulation and virtualization are a different beast entirely. The techniques VMware uses are great for running a machine-inside-a-machine, but that wouldn't have been sufficient for the level of compatibility the Win9x line needed to gain acceptance at the time.
Those legacy DOS apps that would have been running under a VMware-like emulation would have needed to interact with all the other apps on the system, and the services provided by the DOS legacy device drivers running under emulation would have needed to be available to other apps on the system. By stuffing them away in a emulated machine, it presents problems for those requirements since the very core idea of VMware is that stuff running in it is contained away from everything else.
Would it have been possible? Maybe. At the very least it would have taken an incredible performance hit (remember that Microsoft really pushed that Win95 was fast enough to run Quake at the time -- and that VMware is usably fast enough because our physical machines are incredibly fast today), not to mention incredible memory usage. Then again, maybe not. The biggest problem with DOS compatibility was that DOS wasn't so much an operating system (in the sense that we think of an OS today) as it was just a very loosely defined API with no restrictions on expansion.
The other alternative would have been to just virtualize everything, which would have offered no real benefits -- if the system crashed, you might not have had to reboot the physical machine, but you'd still have to restart the virtual machine, which all your apps would have been running in, so you're only really exchanging hitting the physical reset switch with a virtual one. In fact, you could see this approach being used by Microsoft with the Win16 subsystem in NT - you had the option of starting legacy apps in different memory spaces. Performance issues and resource usage issues rear their heads here again, too.
Today -- certainly there'd be no problem with Microsoft using a VMWare-like system to provide better DOS support, but the main question is "Why?". DOS has been dead as a platform for almost 10 years now. The niche of people who need DOS support at a level where they'd need an emulated solution is small enough that Microsoft doesn't bother -- but large enough to support a smaller company catering to that niche.
As far as using emulation and virtualization to provide enhanced security for non-legacy applications -- that's solving the problem of a nail needing to be hammered in by using a jackhammer. It's the OS's job to keep one process from unwanted interference with another; this is not a problem that should need to be shunted off to an emulation layer. And yes, in fact, with Windows and Linux both, you don't need to; since as modern protected operating systems, they both provide all the protection you'll need.
This wasn't just because of the need to preserve backward compatitibility with DOS.
.NET, on the other hand, is as much of a response to Linux (well, Open Source in general) as it is to Java -- Microsoft doesn't push the cross-platform capabilities of .NET in their marketing or technical evangelism, which is what you'd assume they'd really be pushing if they were intent on solely battling Java. No, Microsoft pushes the security, interoperability and standards aspects of .NET -- the very grounds that Linux and other Open Source software have been eating its lunch on lately.
Yes, it was. The Win9x line not only needed to ensure application compatibility with DOS, but also device driver compatibility with DOS -- and anyone who ever wrote DOS drivers could tell you, there was almost no such thing as standards.
The end result was a GUI system that couldn't be stable because in order to be stable it had to enforce restrictions, and that was unacceptable because the software and the drivers needed to run without restrictions. Over the course of the Win9x line, Microsoft built APIs and pushed developers to use them, and then once there was sufficient legacy behind Win32 and WDM, they pulled the rug out from under us and we're all running on NT and enjoying the stability benefits that a protected architecture can provide.
To say that Win9x was unstable because Microsoft was just lazy is a completely asinine thing to say and anyone who maintains as such shows how little they actually know about the situation. To say that Windows is stable today because of Linux is also misguided: Linux didn't really start appearing on Microsoft's radar until after 1999, which was when Win2k shipped, so Microsoft was already firmly in the stable OS bandwagon before Linux was a concern.
So far I'm very impressed with the quality of it
It's already crashed once for me in the three hours I've been using it (I picked "Hide Browser" from the menu while an MP3 was playing and it bombed), and the navigation (scrolling and such) while in the Music Store seems incredibly slow -- but aside from those problems, it's pure heaven.
As much as I hate the idea of buying a DRM'd audio format, I think Apple's suckered me in as a customer.
Here's one of my favorites: Crash
Can't think of one thing you can't do on Windows (95/98/NT/2000/XP)? Let me give you a hand: Fire up Mplayer to watch any video you want.
... how about pointing out something that Linux can do in this regard that Windows can't? It can certainly be argued that Windows has a better infrastructure for networking control with Active Directory. And as far as interoperating with non-Windows machines, as a Windows user I can telnet, I can SSH, I can FTP, I can scp, I can rsync, I can do pretty much anything a Linux machine can do.
Windows Media Player (and in fact, pretty much every Windows video player) use a common multimedia API. WMP, or any other player you download, like Winamp3, for example, can play each other's formats just fine.
Interpolate with a large number of different machines.
Nicely vague
Secure your network.
A patched and properly configured Windows machine is just as secure as a patched and properly configured Linux box. None of the various worms and viruses that have spread via Windows machines have done so via a method that a patched system would have been vulnerable to.
Remote X Session over ssh.
PuTTY's SSH tunneling support coupled with the Win32 build of XFree86.
MS plays the patent game all the time its kind of nice to see it reversed.
Really now? When's the last time Microsoft used a software patent offensively?
This security enhancement took a half billion dollar patent lawsuit to be brought about.
This is not a "security enhancement". IE already come shipped to prompt before installing any ActiveX controls (the famous "Always trust content by Microsoft Corporation" window is the one I'm talking about here).
What this is doing is forcing the browser to prompt in every instance that an ActiveX control is used, which, by the way, you can currently set IE to do as well, but it doesn't come defaulted to do so -- the "trust" there was placed when you permitted the control to be downloaded in the first place, which is a perfectly reasonable security model; so this isn't a security enhancement. There's also no way for a user to turn off this annoying "prompt all the time" behavior.
Fortunately, there is a way for webmasters and people hosting the IE browser control (such as MyIE2) to turn off this behavior, as Microsoft has posted workarounds (along with a wink-wink-nudge-nudge disclaimer that you shouldn't use them to circumvent the patent).
Unfortunately, this is having the opposite effect that Eolas intended. We've decided not to roll out a Mozilla solution because Gecko is in violation of this very same patent, which has now been validated by a federal judge.
Some people may say that it's due to cheat prevention... but c'mon. Security through obscurity is no security at all, if that's what they were relying on.
You have to rely on security through obscurity to some extent in an FPS, because the network latency is too high to constantly be relying on the server for every piece of data that the client might need at any given moment. More data than is absolutely needed must be sent so that if the player turns around suddenly, they don't have a quarter-second delay (or more) before they see who's standing behind them.
Hosts like Rackshack are adding 'no-IRC' rules to their AUPs at the risk of having one's server unplugged.
The submitter misread Rackshack's AUP (as I did when I was signing up for service through them, on this specific topic incidentally -- so I emailed them for clarification). Many of the items in their AUP apply to their virtual servers only -- where many customers share one physical machine. IRC servers aren't permitted on those machines because of the load they put on the machine.
If you've got your own Rackshack server, you can run IRC on it all you want.
Has anyone else noticed that the "spam" sort of sites that are nothing but link farms and Gator popups are getting much better at finding their way into Google's rankings? I switched to Google back in the day after search engines like altavista became overrun with such sites. Now I've noticed that they occasionally creep into their rankings...I guess entropy is the way of the universe after all.
I've been noticing it a lot lately, on all sorts of searches. It's almost enough to make me want to start using a better search engine instead.
This is a BAD idea. What happens when I have 3 different email accounts that I use for different things, and I want to send mail from each of them from my home ISP? Sure, each email provider can provide a secure SMTP for me to log into, but this sounds like a lot of work
A better idea would be to use public key cryptography to validate a sender's address. Add a domain's public key to its DNS record so receiving servers can verify it actually came from the domain in question, and extend SMTP so a server can be queried for a specific user's public key, to be able to verify it came from the user in question once the domain's signature has been validated.