It's interesting that this subject was brought up in an article that wasn't worth the bits it was printed on.
In that vein, though, I think that the number of times you have to say RTFA here demonstrates just how much people filter when they're immersed in this much information. I know it definitely applies to me.
While I agree that security should be easy, you can only dumb it down so much. If the entire knowledge that the user has is that a window is "secure", they are only getting a warm fuzzy feeling, not real security.
For real security, you need to know WHAT has been secured. Examples include:
Data was encrypted in transit. Data is authenticated to come from XXX source, according to YYY certificate authority. This window is protected from being viewed by PCAnywhere. This data has DRM, and is protected from being copied to another computer.
Unless you tell the user WHAT the security is, they will make poor decisions about what to do with the data. Putting the name of their dog on the window doesn't provide that information.
The trouble is that since it's not a ubiquitous standard, it's not really all that useful. Compare to old optical media standards - there were plenty of optical medias that you could record to (and even re-record) long before CDR came out. But CDR took off like all crazy because it was standard media you could play back anywhere.
Having actually RTFA, it sounds like they're not advotacting mandating open source - they're trying to *prevent* mandating *commercial software*. It sounds like MS has been lobbying that allowing open souce software would unfairly impact them, and this is people trying to fight it down.
Foundry, Juniper, and Nortel don't sell firewalls. Cisco Pix and Nokia ARE PCs. Would you say that a "serious" company shouldn't use Pix or Nokia because they're PCs? Do you think the Nokia hardware is more reliable than Dell's?
Having a support plan is important. Purchasing support from Cisco or Nokia is one option. For many situations, we are finding that an organized, thought out self-support plan for an open source solution is providing better quality support than the commercial vendors can provide. It's not for everything (no, we're not about to rip out our Cisco 7200VXRs or our Extreme switches), and we still have a commercial firewall solution that we use in many places, but Linux is definitely making its mark on our network.
#1. "On Demand" services are always touted as the next big thing that's going to replace being able to buy media. Unfortunately, content companies are still too hung up on trying to control what you can do with the content. Fortunately, people are smarter than I usually give them credit for, and are proving themselves to be smart enough to fight down these stupid DRM content non-ownership schemes. Once content companies give up trying to rape us, they'll fall back on giving us what we've wanted (and have been able to get with VHS, DVD, books, etc all along) - a copy that we can buy and keep. We just have to wait until they give up on the "Keep you over a barrel" model.
#2. The internet *is* ready for this sort of content distribution. For everyone in the world? No. For enough people to get an online movie store off the ground? Yes. And as people buy into it, the bandwidth will be able to scale to meet the need. Unfortunately, phone companies have a huge vested interest in you *not* having the bandwidth you want. They too are holding onto a "Keep you over a barrel" model of business: they hold the monopoly on the copper. Selling an inferior product (1.5Mbps down/ 256kbps up DSL) is better for them than giving you a real internet connection. If they did THAT, then your upstream wouldn't have lag spikes. And if THAT happened, you could get truly reliable phone service over the net. And that would mean competiton for the phone companies. So they're not going to sell it to you. That said, they will have to give up clinging to their monopoly sometime. Wireless / powerline / infrared / satellite / whatever will mature sooner or later, and they'll be forced to compete instead of continuing to rape us.
Neither #1 nor #2 is a technical problem. Current media formats are already good enough, as well, though newer codecs will make this easier of course. All that remains is for the companies involved to give up with trying to control us (and they will; independent competition will kill them if they don't). How long will that take? They can drag this out for another ten years if they really want, but in my uneducated opinion, I'd say that they'll give up in five, and start cashing in on the smaller profit of giving us what we want, instead of operating for a loss for another five years trying to sell us something that we don't want.
I'm a network guy for a fairly large company. We use Linux all over the place, including firewalls. Frankly, I'm quite impressed; we've found it to be far more supportable than even the best commercial products.
But why would I want to run it on a Nokia box? Typically, firewall vendors sell the box's hardware and software support together. So, if you're not paying the software support, you have no hardware support. If you're using Linux to save costs, and it fries its power supply, you're SOL.
For the amount of CPU power that you get in the Nokia, you're better off if you buy a good, high-quality PC (We use Dell PowerEdge), throw a few NICs in it, and run Linux on it. The PC will be cheaper, include hardware support, and be easily field-servicable by any PC tech.
Re:This is actually major news to some people
on
First HDTV Camcorder
·
· Score: 1
I work for arguebly the most successful photography and digital imaging company in history... such specs on a camcorder, at that price, will be most highly prized by the adult film industry. Don't ask me why I know that, because frankly, I'm not allowed to tell.
Nothing gets the adrenaline pumping like the flood of trolls this sort of comparison should inspire.
"Legacy" doesn't have to mean "Bad".
on
Legacy-Free PCs
·
· Score: 1
The article presents "Legacy" as being some sort of evil that needs to be dumped at any cost. And they seem to define "Legacy" as anything that was invented more than 10 years ago.
It just isn't true. Legacy support - backward compatibility - is a *good* thing, unless it meets BOTH of these criteria: A) it sucks, and B) it conflicts with a better standard.
They present PS/2 keyboard connectors as an example, as if there's something wrong with them, but PS/2 doesn't meet EITHER of these criteria: PS/2 keyboards work just fine (A), and they don't get in the way of me using another standard such as USB (B). So why not have a PS/2 connector? It lets me use my old-skool clicky IBM keybard, and people with USB keyboards can just leave the port unused. BFD.
This glosses over the *real* problem with legacy support: Antique architectures that keep getting dragged along even though they *are* inhibiting progress. And, I'll go out on a limb here - computers are hardly encumbered by legacy the way a number of other common devices are. The worst of the computer world comes down to: x86 is kind of archaic, but has been pretty successfully extended to keep up with the best of any competing architecture; BIOSes have a lot of old features that aren't really necessary any more, but newer designs of system boot firmware are just over the horizon.
Really, the software is far more legacy prone than the hardware: Windows (Still supporting 16 bit DOS and all its cruft); Linux (doing a fine job of working just like computers did 30 years ago, because it still works just fine.)
Compare this aganst other industries that have some *real* cruft: Telephones - ISDN could have brought us crystal-clear, crosstalk-free phone lines everywhere, through use of digital telephony, and included some much better data capabilities than legacy telephone systems allow. Cars - We are *still* using rubber-on-asphalt, gasoline-powered, manual-drive crap, because we don't want to force everyone to throw out their old cars and invest in a better form of transportation.
And then you get into the truly *insane* forms of legacy support: Music distribution. The United States government with it's truly out of date laws. Governments in parts of the world that have laws that are *far* older than the entire country of the US. 110 volt 60hz AC.
And they're bitching about having extra unused PS/2 ports?
OK, I admit I'm kind of an audio snob. I have full size, full range speakers at my desk, because I like to really listen to music while I work / play / whatever.
But I don't think that *anyone* thinks that "the sound quality is quite good" coming from "average multimedia computer speakers".
I don't mean to knock this technology - if it's like multimedia speakers, it's probably great for people who just want to hear the Happy Sound when their computer boots up, and to watch some video clips from the news online. But, c'mon, Slash, you guys are supposed to be smart enough to filter this BS, and just tell us that it lets people hear their login "zing" without having extra speakers on their desk.
The coolest thing I anticipate from this technology is really cool crack patterns in LCDs from people trying to crank the bass way up (since most compact flat panel speakers have trouble with deep bass).
The bandwidth stays the same. Said conditions lower the range of the systems.
When you're installing the system, you get one that has more power than you need during a clear day, so that it will have enough power to pierce the thickest fog you anticipate having in your area.
The unit I was specifically looking at was advertised as having a 2 km range in adverse conditions, and significantly more if only used in clear conditions. This was also for business-level connectivity, where we couldn't go down. In a home-consumer market, you could probably skimp on the margain for error a little more, and push the things out to (say) 4km, which gives you a pretty good radius to find an ISP. Also, the 2 km in rain+fog unit wasn't the most powerful one they had. Some of the 10Mb units (which I think would be perfect for home use) had range far in excess of that.
Free air optical networking isn't really a new idea. Infrared units are pretty common. I'm not sure what supposed advantage using visible light has over infrared... IR isn't regulated (at least in the US, I can't imagine that it would be anywhere).
I investigated this for networking a couple of buildings my company had near together. Pretty cool stuff. You could get a gigabit connection over a few km of thin air. Cheaper units did 155Mb and for dirt cheap you could get 10Mb. Short range units used LEDs. Longer range ones used lasers.
I've been wondering why consumer ISP's haven't taken to this yet. It's a great last mile solution.
Right. The inspectors are just one day going to say "Oh, we're just going to do a little sightseeing today. Don't worry, we left all the equipment back at the hotel. Yup, just a bunch of tourists today." And I'm sure Iraq won't bother hiding anything when the tour bus drives right into the $excuse manufacturing plant, because, I mean, who brings a hidden geiger counter along on a sightseeing trip?
Yup, that's a brilliant plan. Someone go submit it to TIPS.
Sure enough, the old formula persists. Creating a new "optical sensor" just wouldn't get enough media attention. But if you call it a "optical antenna" you can make it SO much more buzzword compliant.
Meanwhile, I've created a totally new form of network media that's MUCH faster and more secure than ANY WiFi to date. I call it the "Electron Antenna". It only transmits through copper. Here are some choice quotes from my upcoming press release:
The new antenna may have a favorable impact on the use of networks in corporate settings or for business transactions. Compared with radio frequencies, which pass right through walls, electron beams can be more tightly controlled.
"You make the network more secure because electrical energy is contained within plastic and doesn't leak out through the edges of the wires. You can equip the wires to contain electrical energy," said Subreality. "Also, you can create a tight beam between one point and another which doesn't diverge much in comparison to a radio frequency beam."
I suspect that MicroSoft isn't behind this for the benefit of the movie industry. Rather, they're doing this for their own sake. Set aside the security (or lack thereof) in an uncontrolled environment, and think about some of the other implications:
If they have this built into the OS, then it's going to give people producing commercial content a big incentive to only produce content for Windows Media Player. Think in corporate management terms: "Hey, 90% of people use Windows, so that's where our big market is. And if we try to reach that other 10%, we're not going to be able to protect our content!"
I believe the term for this is "Leveraging a Monopoly to Acheive Another Monopoly".
Slashdot Mirror
Always remember these two words:
"Plausible Deniability"
It's interesting that this subject was brought up in an article that wasn't worth the bits it was printed on.
In that vein, though, I think that the number of times you have to say RTFA here demonstrates just how much people filter when they're immersed in this much information. I know it definitely applies to me.
I am *so* moving to France, and won't be answering any questions about where my money comes from.
While I agree that security should be easy, you can only dumb it down so much. If the entire knowledge that the user has is that a window is "secure", they are only getting a warm fuzzy feeling, not real security.
For real security, you need to know WHAT has been secured. Examples include:
Data was encrypted in transit.
Data is authenticated to come from XXX source, according to YYY certificate authority.
This window is protected from being viewed by PCAnywhere.
This data has DRM, and is protected from being copied to another computer.
Unless you tell the user WHAT the security is, they will make poor decisions about what to do with the data. Putting the name of their dog on the window doesn't provide that information.
I can definitely relate to this. It was a dark day when I saw the Snorks again about a year ago.
Perhaps the world's desire for bad movies is programmed at an early age.
The trouble is that since it's not a ubiquitous standard, it's not really all that useful. Compare to old optical media standards - there were plenty of optical medias that you could record to (and even re-record) long before CDR came out. But CDR took off like all crazy because it was standard media you could play back anywhere.
The title to the /. article looks like it's wrong.
Having actually RTFA, it sounds like they're not advotacting mandating open source - they're trying to *prevent* mandating *commercial software*. It sounds like MS has been lobbying that allowing open souce software would unfairly impact them, and this is people trying to fight it down.
Foundry, Juniper, and Nortel don't sell firewalls. Cisco Pix and Nokia ARE PCs. Would you say that a "serious" company shouldn't use Pix or Nokia because they're PCs? Do you think the Nokia hardware is more reliable than Dell's?
Having a support plan is important. Purchasing support from Cisco or Nokia is one option. For many situations, we are finding that an organized, thought out self-support plan for an open source solution is providing better quality support than the commercial vendors can provide. It's not for everything (no, we're not about to rip out our Cisco 7200VXRs or our Extreme switches), and we still have a commercial firewall solution that we use in many places, but Linux is definitely making its mark on our network.
Scare tactics like this are meant to reform the P2P crowd just as much as the P2P guys are pirating movies to reform the movie industry.
#1. "On Demand" services are always touted as the next big thing that's going to replace being able to buy media. Unfortunately, content companies are still too hung up on trying to control what you can do with the content. Fortunately, people are smarter than I usually give them credit for, and are proving themselves to be smart enough to fight down these stupid DRM content non-ownership schemes. Once content companies give up trying to rape us, they'll fall back on giving us what we've wanted (and have been able to get with VHS, DVD, books, etc all along) - a copy that we can buy and keep. We just have to wait until they give up on the "Keep you over a barrel" model.
#2. The internet *is* ready for this sort of content distribution. For everyone in the world? No. For enough people to get an online movie store off the ground? Yes. And as people buy into it, the bandwidth will be able to scale to meet the need. Unfortunately, phone companies have a huge vested interest in you *not* having the bandwidth you want. They too are holding onto a "Keep you over a barrel" model of business: they hold the monopoly on the copper. Selling an inferior product (1.5Mbps down/ 256kbps up DSL) is better for them than giving you a real internet connection. If they did THAT, then your upstream wouldn't have lag spikes. And if THAT happened, you could get truly reliable phone service over the net. And that would mean competiton for the phone companies. So they're not going to sell it to you. That said, they will have to give up clinging to their monopoly sometime. Wireless / powerline / infrared / satellite / whatever will mature sooner or later, and they'll be forced to compete instead of continuing to rape us.
Neither #1 nor #2 is a technical problem. Current media formats are already good enough, as well, though newer codecs will make this easier of course. All that remains is for the companies involved to give up with trying to control us (and they will; independent competition will kill them if they don't). How long will that take? They can drag this out for another ten years if they really want, but in my uneducated opinion, I'd say that they'll give up in five, and start cashing in on the smaller profit of giving us what we want, instead of operating for a loss for another five years trying to sell us something that we don't want.
Uh, OK, so what do YOU think a large company should use for critical infrastructre? iMacs? Wal-Mart PCs?
C'mon, if you're gonna troll, at least try.
I'm a network guy for a fairly large company. We use Linux all over the place, including firewalls. Frankly, I'm quite impressed; we've found it to be far more supportable than even the best commercial products.
But why would I want to run it on a Nokia box? Typically, firewall vendors sell the box's hardware and software support together. So, if you're not paying the software support, you have no hardware support. If you're using Linux to save costs, and it fries its power supply, you're SOL.
For the amount of CPU power that you get in the Nokia, you're better off if you buy a good, high-quality PC (We use Dell PowerEdge), throw a few NICs in it, and run Linux on it. The PC will be cheaper, include hardware support, and be easily field-servicable by any PC tech.
You work for goatse.cx?
Nothing gets the adrenaline pumping like the flood of trolls this sort of comparison should inspire.
The article presents "Legacy" as being some sort of evil that needs to be dumped at any cost. And they seem to define "Legacy" as anything that was invented more than 10 years ago.
It just isn't true. Legacy support - backward compatibility - is a *good* thing, unless it meets BOTH of these criteria: A) it sucks, and B) it conflicts with a better standard.
They present PS/2 keyboard connectors as an example, as if there's something wrong with them, but PS/2 doesn't meet EITHER of these criteria: PS/2 keyboards work just fine (A), and they don't get in the way of me using another standard such as USB (B). So why not have a PS/2 connector? It lets me use my old-skool clicky IBM keybard, and people with USB keyboards can just leave the port unused. BFD.
This glosses over the *real* problem with legacy support: Antique architectures that keep getting dragged along even though they *are* inhibiting progress. And, I'll go out on a limb here - computers are hardly encumbered by legacy the way a number of other common devices are. The worst of the computer world comes down to: x86 is kind of archaic, but has been pretty successfully extended to keep up with the best of any competing architecture; BIOSes have a lot of old features that aren't really necessary any more, but newer designs of system boot firmware are just over the horizon.
Really, the software is far more legacy prone than the hardware: Windows (Still supporting 16 bit DOS and all its cruft); Linux (doing a fine job of working just like computers did 30 years ago, because it still works just fine.)
Compare this aganst other industries that have some *real* cruft: Telephones - ISDN could have brought us crystal-clear, crosstalk-free phone lines everywhere, through use of digital telephony, and included some much better data capabilities than legacy telephone systems allow. Cars - We are *still* using rubber-on-asphalt, gasoline-powered, manual-drive crap, because we don't want to force everyone to throw out their old cars and invest in a better form of transportation.
And then you get into the truly *insane* forms of legacy support: Music distribution. The United States government with it's truly out of date laws. Governments in parts of the world that have laws that are *far* older than the entire country of the US. 110 volt 60hz AC.
And they're bitching about having extra unused PS/2 ports?
--Keepiru
--slashsuckATvegaDOTfurDOTcom
It looks like we're also bringing down the server. Ping? ping? ping?
Oh, there's the survey.
So do I, of course. That's why I said I didn't want to put down the tech. It's still cool stuff.
I was just wishing Slash would be less like the mass media, and resist the urge to exaggerate things, like sound quality.
OK, I admit I'm kind of an audio snob. I have full size, full range speakers at my desk, because I like to really listen to music while I work / play / whatever.
But I don't think that *anyone* thinks that "the sound quality is quite good" coming from "average multimedia computer speakers".
I don't mean to knock this technology - if it's like multimedia speakers, it's probably great for people who just want to hear the Happy Sound when their computer boots up, and to watch some video clips from the news online. But, c'mon, Slash, you guys are supposed to be smart enough to filter this BS, and just tell us that it lets people hear their login "zing" without having extra speakers on their desk.
The coolest thing I anticipate from this technology is really cool crack patterns in LCDs from people trying to crank the bass way up (since most compact flat panel speakers have trouble with deep bass).
--Keepiru
--slashsuckATvegaDOTfurDOTcom
N/T
The bandwidth stays the same. Said conditions lower the range of the systems.
When you're installing the system, you get one that has more power than you need during a clear day, so that it will have enough power to pierce the thickest fog you anticipate having in your area.
The unit I was specifically looking at was advertised as having a 2 km range in adverse conditions, and significantly more if only used in clear conditions. This was also for business-level connectivity, where we couldn't go down. In a home-consumer market, you could probably skimp on the margain for error a little more, and push the things out to (say) 4km, which gives you a pretty good radius to find an ISP. Also, the 2 km in rain+fog unit wasn't the most powerful one they had. Some of the 10Mb units (which I think would be perfect for home use) had range far in excess of that.
Free air optical networking isn't really a new idea. Infrared units are pretty common. I'm not sure what supposed advantage using visible light has over infrared... IR isn't regulated (at least in the US, I can't imagine that it would be anywhere).
I investigated this for networking a couple of buildings my company had near together. Pretty cool stuff. You could get a gigabit connection over a few km of thin air. Cheaper units did 155Mb and for dirt cheap you could get 10Mb. Short range units used LEDs. Longer range ones used lasers.
I've been wondering why consumer ISP's haven't taken to this yet. It's a great last mile solution.
--Keepiru
--slashsuckATvegaDOTfurDOTcom
Why not the brute force ESD method? I own a tesla coil. Don't you?
--Keepiru
Right. The inspectors are just one day going to say "Oh, we're just going to do a little sightseeing today. Don't worry, we left all the equipment back at the hotel. Yup, just a bunch of tourists today." And I'm sure Iraq won't bother hiding anything when the tour bus drives right into the $excuse manufacturing plant, because, I mean, who brings a hidden geiger counter along on a sightseeing trip?
Yup, that's a brilliant plan. Someone go submit it to TIPS.
Meanwhile, I've created a totally new form of network media that's MUCH faster and more secure than ANY WiFi to date. I call it the "Electron Antenna". It only transmits through copper. Here are some choice quotes from my upcoming press release:
The new antenna may have a favorable impact on the use of networks in corporate settings or for business transactions. Compared with radio frequencies, which pass right through walls, electron beams can be more tightly controlled.
"You make the network more secure because electrical energy is contained within plastic and doesn't leak out through the edges of the wires. You can equip the wires to contain electrical energy," said Subreality. "Also, you can create a tight beam between one point and another which doesn't diverge much in comparison to a radio frequency beam."
I'm a genius.
--Keepiru
--slashsuckATvegaDOTfurDOTcom
If they have this built into the OS, then it's going to give people producing commercial content a big incentive to only produce content for Windows Media Player. Think in corporate management terms: "Hey, 90% of people use Windows, so that's where our big market is. And if we try to reach that other 10%, we're not going to be able to protect our content!"
I believe the term for this is "Leveraging a Monopoly to Acheive Another Monopoly".
IANAL. Use your own judgement.
--Kai
--slashsuckATvegaDOTfurDOTcom