I have RC2 installed, and it upgraded me automatically (without asking). For what it's worth, downloading the English(British) version from the linked page fired off a download of RC3 for me...
Holy shit, you're right - this was driving me nuts just last night when I was helping setup Firefox on a friend's new laptop. She had a whole load of bookmarks, many in folders, and wanted a few on the bookmarks toolbar. I was going nuts trying to drag them from the bookmarks sidebar, eventually having to do it from the bookmark manager with the "move" tool.
Why the hell did they decide on making you hold down shift to move folders, but not to move bookmarks?!
No, Linux is more secure because you don't get those smiley packs for it.
Yet.
That and Linux users aren't generally using it for the smileys and assorted mass-consumer crap that is targetted at Windows users.
Yet.
The security risk here is the human aspect, if the attackers find the right buttons to push for linux users, they'll own you just as easily.
Absolutely, with one caveat - at the moment Linux is still very much a niche OS, and most Linux users are (relatively speaking) very tech savvy, and wary of binaries from untrusted sources, etc.
However, as you say the biggest problem is the users. If Linux ever became a mainstream OS used by significant numbers of "ordinary" people, you'd see just as many trojans written for it, and the end users would just get used to entering their root password everytime they installed the latest must-have piece of trojaned frippery. No (general purpose) OS is proof against a rogue user with admin access.
If/when the "average user" migrates to Linux, they'll still want their stock tickers, comet cursors, weather applets and smileys, and people will provide them. They're not available for Linux at the moment because the vast majority of users are like me - distrusting paranoiacs that aren't interested in any of that rubbish in the first place.
BTW: did you know that about 90% of email is spam? That a lot of it is being used to distribute malware, including automated attacks? By your logic, email providers should be sued, too.
No, by his logic the ISPs that knowingly tolerate spam botnets on their networks because they can't be bothered to do anything about them should be sued; I'd be inclined to agree with that personally.
Well, some of us actually take the time to shut down and (where possible) disable as much of that crap as possible. Besides, whether or not other apps are wasteful is no excuse for iTunes to be.
All I'm asking for is a way of configuring it so it doesn't keep that stuff running all the time - I don't have an iPod, I have no plans to buy an iPod, so I really don't need it. Setting it to start them up and keep/leave them running by default is fine, I'd just like the option to have it kill them off.
I know a lot of Slashdotters hate iTunes for "DRM", "not HD(TV) quality", "too expensive", or whatever other B.S. excuse they can come up with
Well, it's a bit off topic, but personally I dislike (but still use) iTunes because it's a resource hog. I don't own an iPod, and so it really shouldn't need to have an iPod helper service running continuously. It definitely shouldn't have an iTunesHelper process running continuously either.
Yes, you can kill the processes, but iTunes will just start them back up again when you start it. Hell, it doesn't even take setting the iPodService to "disabled" as a hint - if you run it as admin, it'll just set it back to "manual" and start it up.
So while I don't hate iTunes, and use it myself from time to time, I certainly do dislike some aspects of it, just enough to keep me using WMP as my main media player.
I'd agree with you if we weren't talking about fanboys - I generally find that their perceptions are based purely on an almost fanatical personal preference, rather than anything based in reality. Fanboyism, in other words...
Not to mention that it's a completely irrelevant comment anyway - what bearing does the number of fanboys have on the worth of AMD's current or upcoming line of chips?
Spam is not a Microsoft problem, spam is a clueless user problem. It's just as easy to write a trojan spam bot that works under Linux or OS X as it is to write one that runs under Windows. All you need to do is trick someone into installing it as root/admin. Right now that's unlikely, as there are (relatively) so few Linux boxes and the maintainers and users are (relatively) so much more clued-up about this sort of thing. If the masses ever migrate away from Windows, they'll be just as clueless and likely to root themselves on their new platform.
I'm not defending MS (who have worked quite hard to make PCs easier to use, with the side effect that the more clueless user can use them) or denigrating Linux. I'm just pointing out that actually spam is a social problem; the average user doesn't know enough to keep their machines clean. A lot of users don't even care, as long as their machine works for them, they don't care who it might be working against.
Education is our only hope. Personally, I think we're doomed.
It would be interesting if all email server admins suddenly opened the flood gates for a day or two. Maybe then the general population will gain a better appreciate of the scale of the matter.
And what exactly can we do about the problem? I'm part of the general population in this case, how can I help? I secure my machines (so no spam zombies for me), I don't buy from spammers or companies advertised by spam, and I'm not within the court's jurisdiction so I can't petition it (even assuming they'd listen, which they probably wouldn't and arguably shouldn't).
(I also appreciate the scale of the problem; I own a domain and thanks to some scum sucking low life using it in their forged From: headers, I get in excess of 1000 junk mails, bounces, etc per day.)
So what would you have me and the rest of the "general population" do?
Except for, you know, the idea that we should be free to do whatever the hell we want, so long as we're not harming others. I know freedom (and liberalism) in general is out of favour these days, but still...
You're still free, as an Irish citizen, to register donkey-fuckers.com, donkey-fuckers.co.uk, etc. You just can't register donkey-fuckers.ie. So what? What about the freedom of the registrar to decide what data they will and will not allow to reside on their servers?
I really don't see how any rights are being infringed here; if nothing else, owning a domain is hardly a right.
Because I'm lazy, and my memory is poor, and some sites don't allow you to choose a username instead giving you a number, but mostly because I was once told that computers were really good at storing information and retrieving it on demand.
They kowtowed to a government body that has control of an entire continent.
But said government body only kicked up a fuss because Symantec and McAfee complained; MS are indeed kowtowing to them, the EU commission is just acting as a proxy.
the OS is so crippled at the 'normal user' level that most applications fail to install correctly.
Unlike with Linux, where all applications fail to install as normal users? Oh sure, you can (usually) compile from source and install to ~/bin, but then you can get Windows apps (such as Eclipse) that you just unzip and drop into whatever folder you choose.
I am not aware of any system-wide installation service (eg rpm, deb, msi, etc) that doesn't require admin privs.
Are application developers largely concerned their application could weaken an end users' system? I think it's less so then a unix/unix like application developer...
Developers in general are clueless about security. Just a few days ago there was an article here about how many web apps are vulnerable to SQL injection attacks. To me, that is utterly unforgivable, and yet they are. There are far more developers writing software for Windows, so you are bound to have far more unsecure apps.
All executables are always executable in windows. Unix requires a permission to be applied to it before its allowed to execute.
Technically under Windows you have to have execute permission for the file in question. However, this is automatically granted to the creator/owner of the file, so it's something of a moot issue. Also, given that executable permission for a file on Linux is just a 'chmod +x $filename' away, I don't really see your point. It's a speed bump, nothing more; I've received email viruses that are in password protected zip files - you have to open the zip file, enter the password, then run the enclosed app, and yet they still spread. Do you really think having to perform the extra step of chmoding a file is going to stop the sort of person that will do that?
People run as admin under Windows because there's a lot of poorly-written software that requires it, and because it's easier. If and when the masses move to Linux, they will either run as root, or they will become used to providing their username and password everytime they install the cute little screensaver or buddy icon package they've found/their friend mailed them/etc.
Requiring admin privs is nothing but a speed bump until and unless the average end user is trained to not provide them willy-nilly. No OS can save itself from a rogue admin user, and I have no confidence that the typical end user will be any safer under Linux from trojans and other social engineering tricks. Drive-by installers and other such exploits yes, but people will simply stop using them and move to trojans.
Besides which, as the OP points out and you ignore, you don't need admin privs to create a spam botnet or similar, you just need to be able to create network connections and have a mechanism to start up at logon time.
Thus, this limitation amounts to "no painlessly trying out Linux allowed".
The restriction applies to running Vista in a VM, not to running (eg) VMWare under Vista; in no way does it preclude you from trying out Linux.
As for license transfers... With OEM versions, you already can't transfer them.
Tell that to my current PC; since purchasing and installing an OEM copy of XP, I've upgraded the graphics card, CPU, motherboard, hard drives and RAM. XP installed and activated without incident. Perhaps I'm not supposed to have done that, but even MS didn't try to prevent me from doing it.
Much like XP's much-protested activation, this will vanish with the first service pack
XP's activation hasn't vanished. It may have been toned down (I don't know), but it most certainly hasn't gone entirely.
"Photoshop is better, it's not Photoshop!" I'm tired of hearing that.
You did read the part where he said he used Gimp before Photoshop, right? This wasn't a case of his being used to teh Photoshop interface and unable to switch...
In the circles I work in, "storage device" means something rather different to "hard drive". A "storage device" would be something like a NAS or a SAN - a very different thing indeed to the hdd in your PC.
Suddenly, the implied meaning changes from "you can't store ISOs on your PC!" to "you can't store the Vista ISO for the Home editions on a network storage device", which is totally, totally different.
I hadn't heard about that (or if I had, I'd forgotten it in the general deluge of shit legislation his government has been churning out lately). Just one more reason to long for his resignation; it can't come soon enough. Not that it'll change anything, when the choice is between the real Tories and the other Tories - sorry, I mean New Labour...
Slashdot Mirror
I have RC2 installed, and it upgraded me automatically (without asking). For what it's worth, downloading the English(British) version from the linked page fired off a download of RC3 for me...
Holy shit, you're right - this was driving me nuts just last night when I was helping setup Firefox on a friend's new laptop. She had a whole load of bookmarks, many in folders, and wanted a few on the bookmarks toolbar. I was going nuts trying to drag them from the bookmarks sidebar, eventually having to do it from the bookmark manager with the "move" tool.
Why the hell did they decide on making you hold down shift to move folders, but not to move bookmarks?!
No, Linux is more secure because you don't get those smiley packs for it.
Yet.
That and Linux users aren't generally using it for the smileys and assorted mass-consumer crap that is targetted at Windows users.
Yet.
The security risk here is the human aspect, if the attackers find the right buttons to push for linux users, they'll own you just as easily.
Absolutely, with one caveat - at the moment Linux is still very much a niche OS, and most Linux users are (relatively speaking) very tech savvy, and wary of binaries from untrusted sources, etc.
However, as you say the biggest problem is the users. If Linux ever became a mainstream OS used by significant numbers of "ordinary" people, you'd see just as many trojans written for it, and the end users would just get used to entering their root password everytime they installed the latest must-have piece of trojaned frippery. No (general purpose) OS is proof against a rogue user with admin access.
If/when the "average user" migrates to Linux, they'll still want their stock tickers, comet cursors, weather applets and smileys, and people will provide them. They're not available for Linux at the moment because the vast majority of users are like me - distrusting paranoiacs that aren't interested in any of that rubbish in the first place.
BTW: did you know that about 90% of email is spam? That a lot of it is being used to distribute malware, including automated attacks? By your logic, email providers should be sued, too.
No, by his logic the ISPs that knowingly tolerate spam botnets on their networks because they can't be bothered to do anything about them should be sued; I'd be inclined to agree with that personally.
Well, some of us actually take the time to shut down and (where possible) disable as much of that crap as possible. Besides, whether or not other apps are wasteful is no excuse for iTunes to be.
All I'm asking for is a way of configuring it so it doesn't keep that stuff running all the time - I don't have an iPod, I have no plans to buy an iPod, so I really don't need it. Setting it to start them up and keep/leave them running by default is fine, I'd just like the option to have it kill them off.
I know a lot of Slashdotters hate iTunes for "DRM", "not HD(TV) quality", "too expensive", or whatever other B.S. excuse they can come up with
Well, it's a bit off topic, but personally I dislike (but still use) iTunes because it's a resource hog. I don't own an iPod, and so it really shouldn't need to have an iPod helper service running continuously. It definitely shouldn't have an iTunesHelper process running continuously either.
Yes, you can kill the processes, but iTunes will just start them back up again when you start it. Hell, it doesn't even take setting the iPodService to "disabled" as a hint - if you run it as admin, it'll just set it back to "manual" and start it up.
So while I don't hate iTunes, and use it myself from time to time, I certainly do dislike some aspects of it, just enough to keep me using WMP as my main media player.
I'd agree with you if we weren't talking about fanboys - I generally find that their perceptions are based purely on an almost fanatical personal preference, rather than anything based in reality. Fanboyism, in other words...
Not to mention that it's a completely irrelevant comment anyway - what bearing does the number of fanboys have on the worth of AMD's current or upcoming line of chips?
Spam is not a Microsoft problem, spam is a clueless user problem. It's just as easy to write a trojan spam bot that works under Linux or OS X as it is to write one that runs under Windows. All you need to do is trick someone into installing it as root/admin. Right now that's unlikely, as there are (relatively) so few Linux boxes and the maintainers and users are (relatively) so much more clued-up about this sort of thing. If the masses ever migrate away from Windows, they'll be just as clueless and likely to root themselves on their new platform.
I'm not defending MS (who have worked quite hard to make PCs easier to use, with the side effect that the more clueless user can use them) or denigrating Linux. I'm just pointing out that actually spam is a social problem; the average user doesn't know enough to keep their machines clean. A lot of users don't even care, as long as their machine works for them, they don't care who it might be working against.
Education is our only hope. Personally, I think we're doomed.
It would be interesting if all email server admins suddenly opened the flood gates for a day or two. Maybe then the general population will gain a better appreciate of the scale of the matter.
And what exactly can we do about the problem? I'm part of the general population in this case, how can I help? I secure my machines (so no spam zombies for me), I don't buy from spammers or companies advertised by spam, and I'm not within the court's jurisdiction so I can't petition it (even assuming they'd listen, which they probably wouldn't and arguably shouldn't).
(I also appreciate the scale of the problem; I own a domain and thanks to some scum sucking low life using it in their forged From: headers, I get in excess of 1000 junk mails, bounces, etc per day.)
So what would you have me and the rest of the "general population" do?
Due to the presence of uranium in the coal, coal-fired plants release more radioactive materials during normal operations than a nuclear plant does.
Coal is in no way safer; the worst case scenario is arguably preferable is all.
Since porn.murder.ie would be a subdomain of murder.ie, I'm not sure that the registry would have any say in the matter.
Except for, you know, the idea that we should be free to do whatever the hell we want, so long as we're not harming others. I know freedom (and liberalism) in general is out of favour these days, but still...
You're still free, as an Irish citizen, to register donkey-fuckers.com, donkey-fuckers.co.uk, etc. You just can't register donkey-fuckers.ie. So what? What about the freedom of the registrar to decide what data they will and will not allow to reside on their servers?
I really don't see how any rights are being infringed here; if nothing else, owning a domain is hardly a right.
Not all participants in the movies are entirely willing though.
So, because you believe that some of the participants are unwilling, you would gladly see the entire industry go down in flames?
By the same token, I believe that some programmers create malware - clearly the entire application development industry should be shut down.
Because I'm lazy, and my memory is poor, and some sites don't allow you to choose a username instead giving you a number, but mostly because I was once told that computers were really good at storing information and retrieving it on demand.
They kowtowed to a government body that has control of an entire continent.
But said government body only kicked up a fuss because Symantec and McAfee complained; MS are indeed kowtowing to them, the EU commission is just acting as a proxy.
At least it would have been that little bit harder for rogue apps to pwn the box.
the OS is so crippled at the 'normal user' level that most applications fail to install correctly.
Unlike with Linux, where all applications fail to install as normal users? Oh sure, you can (usually) compile from source and install to ~/bin, but then you can get Windows apps (such as Eclipse) that you just unzip and drop into whatever folder you choose.
I am not aware of any system-wide installation service (eg rpm, deb, msi, etc) that doesn't require admin privs.
Are application developers largely concerned their application could weaken an end users' system? I think it's less so then a unix/unix like application developer...
Developers in general are clueless about security. Just a few days ago there was an article here about how many web apps are vulnerable to SQL injection attacks. To me, that is utterly unforgivable, and yet they are. There are far more developers writing software for Windows, so you are bound to have far more unsecure apps.
All executables are always executable in windows. Unix requires a permission to be applied to it before its allowed to execute.
Technically under Windows you have to have execute permission for the file in question. However, this is automatically granted to the creator/owner of the file, so it's something of a moot issue. Also, given that executable permission for a file on Linux is just a 'chmod +x $filename' away, I don't really see your point. It's a speed bump, nothing more; I've received email viruses that are in password protected zip files - you have to open the zip file, enter the password, then run the enclosed app, and yet they still spread. Do you really think having to perform the extra step of chmoding a file is going to stop the sort of person that will do that?
People run as admin under Windows because there's a lot of poorly-written software that requires it, and because it's easier. If and when the masses move to Linux, they will either run as root, or they will become used to providing their username and password everytime they install the cute little screensaver or buddy icon package they've found/their friend mailed them/etc.
Requiring admin privs is nothing but a speed bump until and unless the average end user is trained to not provide them willy-nilly. No OS can save itself from a rogue admin user, and I have no confidence that the typical end user will be any safer under Linux from trojans and other social engineering tricks. Drive-by installers and other such exploits yes, but people will simply stop using them and move to trojans.
Besides which, as the OP points out and you ignore, you don't need admin privs to create a spam botnet or similar, you just need to be able to create network connections and have a mechanism to start up at logon time.
I am an intelligent man
But apparently not intelligent enough to not needlessly antagonise the people you have to work with...
What about gamers? People who change hardware more than underwear and mostly run Windows?
I'm a gamer - I spend most of my free time playing games on my Windows PC. I swap hardware around roughly once every 18 months or so.
We're not all dropping hundreds every year on the latest and greatest hardware in a never-ending chase for the highest possible FPS.
Thus, this limitation amounts to "no painlessly trying out Linux allowed".
The restriction applies to running Vista in a VM, not to running (eg) VMWare under Vista; in no way does it preclude you from trying out Linux.
As for license transfers... With OEM versions, you already can't transfer them.
Tell that to my current PC; since purchasing and installing an OEM copy of XP, I've upgraded the graphics card, CPU, motherboard, hard drives and RAM. XP installed and activated without incident. Perhaps I'm not supposed to have done that, but even MS didn't try to prevent me from doing it.
Much like XP's much-protested activation, this will vanish with the first service pack
XP's activation hasn't vanished. It may have been toned down (I don't know), but it most certainly hasn't gone entirely.
"Photoshop is better, it's not Photoshop!" I'm tired of hearing that.
You did read the part where he said he used Gimp before Photoshop, right? This wasn't a case of his being used to teh Photoshop interface and unable to switch...
In the circles I work in, "storage device" means something rather different to "hard drive". A "storage device" would be something like a NAS or a SAN - a very different thing indeed to the hdd in your PC.
Suddenly, the implied meaning changes from "you can't store ISOs on your PC!" to "you can't store the Vista ISO for the Home editions on a network storage device", which is totally, totally different.
I hadn't heard about that (or if I had, I'd forgotten it in the general deluge of shit legislation his government has been churning out lately). Just one more reason to long for his resignation; it can't come soon enough. Not that it'll change anything, when the choice is between the real Tories and the other Tories - sorry, I mean New Labour...