My concern is that the policy wouldn't be followed. The original policy suggested using a safe-deposit box. That's making a trip to the bank every 90 days (or however frequently you change the passwords) to store the updated list.
Even using an on-site safe would be prone to human problems.
I agree that you shouldn't be using technology for the sake of using technology, but in this case, I do think that it would make things easier. Frankly, I wouldn't expect the CEO to have the keys. I'd expect it to be largely in the hands of senior IT staff.
Someone will still need the password to decrypt the store.
Public-key cryptography to the rescue!
You can encrypt the file in such a way that any of a set of private keys can decrypt it. You can also encrypt it in such a way as that a combination of keys are needed (i.e. 5 keys used in encryption, and you must have 2 in order to decrypt.)
You can also send that machine's logs to all 5 owners, so that an intrusion by any one will be more likely to be noticed (and it will be harder to tamper with the logs.)
You could probably even automate the entire encryption process. Any time a password changes, automatically re-encrypt with the public keys and store on the server. That way, you remove the human element, which could screw up encryption or signing, or forget to update the file.
Exactly. And that's exactly how MS got their desktop monopoly.
Piracy was rampant in the 80s and 90s. DOS and Windows disks were passed around like the town bicycle, along with CD keys. If a really big shop was caught selling pirated copies of their software, there might be a fuss, but casual copying and even smaller businesses buying one copy and pre-installing it on all of their machines was pretty much overlooked.
A lot of people have theorized that Microsoft allowed this to go on to gain marketshare. It's better to have your OS pirated and installed on a machine than for your competitors to make a sale, in the long run. There's always time to lock everything down once you've gotten the monopoly.
A license is implied in the distribution of the work. See various bands who have distributed albums via BitTorrent. See every webpage you visit where a license hasn't been displayed or agreed to.
Part of the GP's point is that absent an explicit license, the only reasonable thing to do is to assume that you have one until told otherwise.
Now redistribution...that's a different matter entirely.
I found that I get more work done by simplifying things. First of all, having a "work" window and a "play" window is an immense help. I can keep my focus, and instantly switch from one context to another without having to worry about which tabs are which (even with good tab management.)
Second, I found that closing tabs I'm not actively working on is helpful, too. It's pretty trivial to reopen them with a bookmark or a shortcut key, and it means that there's less up there to keep track of.
Now I'm working on other areas where I pathologically hoard, such as data on my drive. I think this will be a much harder thing to fix....
And the reason for that is that the XP installation is frozen in time, to 2001.
This was Vista. The Vista that came with my machine, incidentally. So yeah, I did have driver disks, but that's irrelevant to the point at hand.
For all of it's longevity, I think XP is awesome.
I haven't tried out any of the Server versions, or Windows 7, but I do think that XP is the pinnacle Microsoft OS that I've used. I'd award that to Windows 2000, but it crashed on me pretty regularly, whereas XP was rock solid.
Vista is pretty solid, but bloated. Yeah, yeah, XP was bloated when it came out, yadda yadda.... Vista's been out for a few years now and it still doesn't seem to run well on brand new hardware. Maybe it's just me, or a perception thing....
A) No. Installing Ubuntu is easy. A proper dual-boot setup takes some experience - especially if you use Firefox/Thunderbird profiles etc from both OSs.
I generally agree. I think that the setup program could be more streamlined, though.
B) There is a problem with USB WiFi adapters but everything else worked out of the box. If you want to use the latest and greatest HW, stick to Windows.
There are still older wireless chipsets that don't work. Some esoteric hardware doesn't work, either. The former will be found on a lot of user machines--the latter will be a special case, but when people need it, it will be a stopping point.
D) Yes, mainstream games suck on Linux. Get a console - PC gaming is dying anyway.
Ug, I hate to hear that:( I prefer PC gaming to using a crappy controller to aim.
I'm a Linux user who recently had to install Vista to debug hardware. Have you installed Vista? Vista's a breeze to install. XP and earlier versions are a serious pain, though. Why oh why can't they get all of the information they need from you up front and then let the install finish?! Having to babysit the install (or customize it, which was a pain prior to nLite) is unreasonable.
However, I do have a hard time understanding why many Linux Lovers have such a hatred of Windows, and why they continually claim that Linux is better and can do EVERYTHING that Windows can do and more.
Well, I hate Microsoft and prefer not to give them money if I don't have to. The reason is because they're slimy. They use sleazy business practices, flaunt the law (antitrust), and generally make my skin crawl. Note: they're not the only business that does this, but the point is that when given a choice, I'll choose the less sleazy business.
Now, I'm not an advocate. I don't go around saying that everyone should use Linux. I do think that if both meet your needs, you should choose Linux, however.
A) Installation IS a pain in the ass for anyone who isn't a geek with a decent amount of experience. Hell its a pain in the ass for those who DO have a decent amount of experience, especially when trying a new distro for the first time that has a wholly different install experience.
I realize that I'm one of those geeks, but Ubuntu's installation process is pretty simple. The biggest pain is understanding partitioning--I wish that they'd just say, "Do you want to keep Windows on your computer while you try Linux?" and use that to determine how to partition (with an Advanced mode for the geeks.)
Most of the non-geeks are going to be given a distro by a geek friend, and that means that they probably won't be trying out several different distros. The argument about consistency, then, is somewhat irrelevant to installations.
B) Driver support sucks. Oh, sure, a lot of the big hw companies have usable drivers for Linux. But does that driver work well with your distro? Do all the features work with your distro? And what about the non-juggernaut hw companies. A vast majority of them don't have native Linux drivers, making it a super-headache to get the item to work in Linux.
Hardware support is my number one beef with Linux. It means that Linux will not be an option for a large number of people. I tend to plan to run Linux on my machines, so I buy hardware which is known to work, but most people don't do this. For me, though, this is why Linux provides a good (sometimes better than Windows) user experience.
C) Software selection leaves a lot to be desired. As pointed out in TFA, Open Office vs MS Office is just one of many instances where FOSS really takes a back seat. And most of the industry-standard software either doesn't run on Linux at all or works partially and only in a VM (which kind of defeats the purpose of using Linux).
I've had few problems with the software selection, but then, my needs are few. Gaming (I lump this in with software, since it's software) and the occasional poorly-designed website are the only places where I have problems, and I find that I play games less and less often as I get older.
Ok. Now I know that some of what I touched upon can be band-aided by using Wine and such, but come on. That's cheating. If the OS can't natively run the software, and has to do so in a virtual-Windows environment, why not just use Windows?
This statement seems a tad misinformed, though I can see where a lay person unfamiliar with software development might misunderstand this.
Wine has two parts. One is a translation layer that allows Windows code to run on Linux. On this point, you're completely correct. It's important to note, though, that the goal of the Wine project is to reimplement the Windows API. A reimplementation would mean that it's native code, not a shim that allows Windows code to run. The shim would allow the Windows program executable format to run on Linux (much like the difference between a.out, ELF, etc.), but from that point on, all of the code would essentially be native.
Well, guess what. Windows SHIPS insecure, but once installed by any compet
Right. Again, you missed the point. So forget the restaurant analogy, and use something else.
I buy a chair. If I get it home, and for whatever reason, I decide that I don't like it, I can take it back and get a refund. It doesn't matter if I sat in it. It doesn't matter if I sat it in all damn night, or even took a nap on it. If the chair is in saleable condition, I'll get a refund if I bring it back within a certain period of time.
Same for a TV, DVD player, even video game consoles. But try to do this with most media, and they'll refuse. Why? I guess because they can't prove that you didn't copy it. That doesn't really help the consumer, though.
Like I said, I'm not justifying copyright infringement. Rather, I'm trying to help explain why this feeling exists in a minority of infringers.
Frankly, there's enough junk out there that I don't buy much media sight-unseen. Occasionally, I'll trust a reviewer; most of the time, however, I'll play a friend's copy of the game, movie, or CD, or I'll read a friend's copy of a book. I may decide to purchase a copy for myself after I've returned theirs, assuming that I enjoyed it enough to own. But prior to returning their copy, I haven't purchased it in any of these scenarios--do you think that I'm morally bankrupt because I do this? I've still consumed it without paying. What's the difference if I instead made a copy of it to try out? It's a really thin line, in my opinion.
I'm glad that this thread/posting is about books, because the line there is probably the thinnest. With games or music, you probably want to play or listen at the same time as your friend. But few people read books cover to cover over and over, back to back. Once I've read a book, I'm usually done with it for a year or two, minimum. Loaning it to a friend doesn't impact me in the least unless they damage or lose it. So the question stands--do you think that I'm doing something wrong (not legally wrong, as The Right To Read hasn't come to pass, yet; I'm talking about morals here.)
He may not have consumed the steak, but the restaurant has lost steak. They've lost something tangible because it didn't meet the standards of the customer.
If you don't sell a book because the guy read through any or all of it and it was utter crap, you've lost only a potential sale because it didn't meet the standards of the customer. You never had that money. You never had a physical good which is now unfit for consumption.
So yeah, the analogy is imperfect. The point is, though, that almost every good that is sold can be returned if the customer decides that they don't like it (even in cases where it has been used or partially used)--except for goods which are copyrighted. You can't return software, you can't return movies or CDs, and you can rarely return books.
I'm not making a judgment on whether or not the behavior is just or right; rather I'm clarifying that despite the fact that the analogy is imperfect, it's sound.
Microsoft won't stop shipping a browser with Windows. More likely (as the summary to that article suggests) they'll change the rendering engine to something that's not under their control (albeit almost certainly with their own tweaks.)
It really makes sense, at this point. There's really no good reason to reinvent the wheel every few years as they've been doing since IE6. It just serves to cause headache to web developers, it costs a lot of money, and it isn't really gaining them anything. If they switched to Webkit, they could cut most of the IE team, begin building a positive relationship with web developers, and *gasp* contribute back to the community by sending patches upstream. I'm sure they could figure out a way to write that off of their taxes.
A decent solution for smaller amounts of data. It sounds like the asker is creating lots of large files (all of his movies and TV shows on DVD.) If we assume a terabyte of storage, S3 is going to run him $150/mo, plus $170 just to transfer it all. For those prices, you could buy several terabyte hard drives, a lot of gasoline (over the course of a year) and a safety deposit box in your bank.
That said, for smaller amounts of data, S3 seems reasonable. I've just started trying out tarsnap ( https://beta.tarsnap.com/ ). The feature list is good, and the person coding it has been working on the FreeBSD project for a while (he contributed portsnap and freebsd-update, two projects which make maintaining FreeBSD much easier.)
Specifically, tarsnap uses a snapshot model similar to filesystem snapshots. This means that after the initial backup, you only have to save the changes, and you can delete snapshots without having to make a full backup or otherwise recreate the full set of data. It also compresses and encrypts the blocks, and it uses S3 for the back-end. Unfortunately, this means that you have to pay fees which are higher than Amazon's, which is why it isn't suitable for high volumes of data. The tarsnap client is open-source, though the server has not been released (and likely will not be.)
Right now, the author is using a prepaid pricing model, and he charges $0.30/GB transferred and $0.30/GB/mo storage--roughly twice Amazon's rates.
Like I said, I just started testing it to see if it will be viable for my users' home directories. The initial backup seemed to go well, though I haven't tried a full restore yet.
I didn't want to go with a Drobo for the sole reason that you have to buy a new one (at, what, $400?) if it fails. I can buy a whole new computer for that much, and I'm unlikely to need to (any given component in the computer will cost much less, and will likely be the part that failed.)
I was going to say the same thing, albeit in a less inflammatory way.
He's talking about backing up DVDs, and he's concerned about wasting time re-ripping them. I don't think that going to the bank periodically is going to be an acceptable solution. If his house burns down, he's probably not going to be worried about the time he lost ripping his discs.
Now it is true that C# was taken lock, stock and barrel from Java when the Microsoft embrace and extend strategy was slapped down there (read the memos), but no-one ever complained about other languages being added in just as no-one accuses Java of "stealing" all the languages that VM supports now.
Doesn't "embrace and extend" usually mean that Microsoft keeps the technology name? That's the big complaint that a lot of people have with them--they use a protocol with their own proprietary extensions which makes interoperability (the point of having protocols) difficult.
But at least U7pt2 came with a little card that told you exactly what to load to get things to work. God help you if your sound driver took up too much RAM, though.
Except for Steam-only games, this is truly something of a trade-off. The user takes the risk that their games will one day be unavailable in exchange for some short-term convenience. Their alternative (aside from not buying at all) is to buy the CD version of the game and lose some of that convenience.
I've purchased from Steam, but only games which were very, very cheap. I'll blow $10 on a game that I may only play a couple of times, and may eventually lose the ability to play.
Not trying to be an ass, but there's a lot of misinformation out there on these "DoD wipe standards." Lots of people are throwing around these things, but I've only seen one person trying to back it up with something from the DoD.
Slashdot Mirror
My concern is that the policy wouldn't be followed. The original policy suggested using a safe-deposit box. That's making a trip to the bank every 90 days (or however frequently you change the passwords) to store the updated list.
Even using an on-site safe would be prone to human problems.
I agree that you shouldn't be using technology for the sake of using technology, but in this case, I do think that it would make things easier. Frankly, I wouldn't expect the CEO to have the keys. I'd expect it to be largely in the hands of senior IT staff.
Someone will still need the password to decrypt the store.
Public-key cryptography to the rescue!
You can encrypt the file in such a way that any of a set of private keys can decrypt it. You can also encrypt it in such a way as that a combination of keys are needed (i.e. 5 keys used in encryption, and you must have 2 in order to decrypt.)
You can also send that machine's logs to all 5 owners, so that an intrusion by any one will be more likely to be noticed (and it will be harder to tamper with the logs.)
You could probably even automate the entire encryption process. Any time a password changes, automatically re-encrypt with the public keys and store on the server. That way, you remove the human element, which could screw up encryption or signing, or forget to update the file.
That's insane. What exactly are they doing that the type of filesystem mount matters?
Exactly. And that's exactly how MS got their desktop monopoly.
Piracy was rampant in the 80s and 90s. DOS and Windows disks were passed around like the town bicycle, along with CD keys. If a really big shop was caught selling pirated copies of their software, there might be a fuss, but casual copying and even smaller businesses buying one copy and pre-installing it on all of their machines was pretty much overlooked.
A lot of people have theorized that Microsoft allowed this to go on to gain marketshare. It's better to have your OS pirated and installed on a machine than for your competitors to make a sale, in the long run. There's always time to lock everything down once you've gotten the monopoly.
A license is implied in the distribution of the work. See various bands who have distributed albums via BitTorrent. See every webpage you visit where a license hasn't been displayed or agreed to.
Part of the GP's point is that absent an explicit license, the only reasonable thing to do is to assume that you have one until told otherwise.
Now redistribution...that's a different matter entirely.
I used to do this sort of thing.
I found that I get more work done by simplifying things. First of all, having a "work" window and a "play" window is an immense help. I can keep my focus, and instantly switch from one context to another without having to worry about which tabs are which (even with good tab management.)
Second, I found that closing tabs I'm not actively working on is helpful, too. It's pretty trivial to reopen them with a bookmark or a shortcut key, and it means that there's less up there to keep track of.
Now I'm working on other areas where I pathologically hoard, such as data on my drive. I think this will be a much harder thing to fix....
And the reason for that is that the XP installation is frozen in time, to 2001.
This was Vista. The Vista that came with my machine, incidentally. So yeah, I did have driver disks, but that's irrelevant to the point at hand.
For all of it's longevity, I think XP is awesome.
I haven't tried out any of the Server versions, or Windows 7, but I do think that XP is the pinnacle Microsoft OS that I've used. I'd award that to Windows 2000, but it crashed on me pretty regularly, whereas XP was rock solid.
Vista is pretty solid, but bloated. Yeah, yeah, XP was bloated when it came out, yadda yadda.... Vista's been out for a few years now and it still doesn't seem to run well on brand new hardware. Maybe it's just me, or a perception thing....
A) No. Installing Ubuntu is easy. A proper dual-boot setup takes some experience - especially if you use Firefox/Thunderbird profiles etc from both OSs.
I generally agree. I think that the setup program could be more streamlined, though.
B) There is a problem with USB WiFi adapters but everything else worked out of the box. If you want to use the latest and greatest HW, stick to Windows.
There are still older wireless chipsets that don't work. Some esoteric hardware doesn't work, either. The former will be found on a lot of user machines--the latter will be a special case, but when people need it, it will be a stopping point.
D) Yes, mainstream games suck on Linux. Get a console - PC gaming is dying anyway.
Ug, I hate to hear that :( I prefer PC gaming to using a crappy controller to aim.
I'm a Linux user who recently had to install Vista to debug hardware. Have you installed Vista? Vista's a breeze to install. XP and earlier versions are a serious pain, though. Why oh why can't they get all of the information they need from you up front and then let the install finish?! Having to babysit the install (or customize it, which was a pain prior to nLite) is unreasonable.
However, I do have a hard time understanding why many Linux Lovers have such a hatred of Windows, and why they continually claim that Linux is better and can do EVERYTHING that Windows can do and more.
Well, I hate Microsoft and prefer not to give them money if I don't have to. The reason is because they're slimy. They use sleazy business practices, flaunt the law (antitrust), and generally make my skin crawl. Note: they're not the only business that does this, but the point is that when given a choice, I'll choose the less sleazy business.
Now, I'm not an advocate. I don't go around saying that everyone should use Linux. I do think that if both meet your needs, you should choose Linux, however.
A) Installation IS a pain in the ass for anyone who isn't a geek with a decent amount of experience. Hell its a pain in the ass for those who DO have a decent amount of experience, especially when trying a new distro for the first time that has a wholly different install experience.
I realize that I'm one of those geeks, but Ubuntu's installation process is pretty simple. The biggest pain is understanding partitioning--I wish that they'd just say, "Do you want to keep Windows on your computer while you try Linux?" and use that to determine how to partition (with an Advanced mode for the geeks.)
Most of the non-geeks are going to be given a distro by a geek friend, and that means that they probably won't be trying out several different distros. The argument about consistency, then, is somewhat irrelevant to installations.
B) Driver support sucks. Oh, sure, a lot of the big hw companies have usable drivers for Linux. But does that driver work well with your distro? Do all the features work with your distro? And what about the non-juggernaut hw companies. A vast majority of them don't have native Linux drivers, making it a super-headache to get the item to work in Linux.
Hardware support is my number one beef with Linux. It means that Linux will not be an option for a large number of people. I tend to plan to run Linux on my machines, so I buy hardware which is known to work, but most people don't do this. For me, though, this is why Linux provides a good (sometimes better than Windows) user experience.
C) Software selection leaves a lot to be desired. As pointed out in TFA, Open Office vs MS Office is just one of many instances where FOSS really takes a back seat. And most of the industry-standard software either doesn't run on Linux at all or works partially and only in a VM (which kind of defeats the purpose of using Linux).
I've had few problems with the software selection, but then, my needs are few. Gaming (I lump this in with software, since it's software) and the occasional poorly-designed website are the only places where I have problems, and I find that I play games less and less often as I get older.
Ok. Now I know that some of what I touched upon can be band-aided by using Wine and such, but come on. That's cheating. If the OS can't natively run the software, and has to do so in a virtual-Windows environment, why not just use Windows?
This statement seems a tad misinformed, though I can see where a lay person unfamiliar with software development might misunderstand this.
Wine has two parts. One is a translation layer that allows Windows code to run on Linux. On this point, you're completely correct. It's important to note, though, that the goal of the Wine project is to reimplement the Windows API. A reimplementation would mean that it's native code, not a shim that allows Windows code to run. The shim would allow the Windows program executable format to run on Linux (much like the difference between a.out, ELF, etc.), but from that point on, all of the code would essentially be native.
Well, guess what. Windows SHIPS insecure, but once installed by any compet
Interesting. Last time I reinstalled, Windows didn't know how to talk to my NIC.
Right. Again, you missed the point. So forget the restaurant analogy, and use something else.
I buy a chair. If I get it home, and for whatever reason, I decide that I don't like it, I can take it back and get a refund. It doesn't matter if I sat in it. It doesn't matter if I sat it in all damn night, or even took a nap on it. If the chair is in saleable condition, I'll get a refund if I bring it back within a certain period of time.
Same for a TV, DVD player, even video game consoles. But try to do this with most media, and they'll refuse. Why? I guess because they can't prove that you didn't copy it. That doesn't really help the consumer, though.
Like I said, I'm not justifying copyright infringement. Rather, I'm trying to help explain why this feeling exists in a minority of infringers.
Frankly, there's enough junk out there that I don't buy much media sight-unseen. Occasionally, I'll trust a reviewer; most of the time, however, I'll play a friend's copy of the game, movie, or CD, or I'll read a friend's copy of a book. I may decide to purchase a copy for myself after I've returned theirs, assuming that I enjoyed it enough to own. But prior to returning their copy, I haven't purchased it in any of these scenarios--do you think that I'm morally bankrupt because I do this? I've still consumed it without paying. What's the difference if I instead made a copy of it to try out? It's a really thin line, in my opinion.
I'm glad that this thread/posting is about books, because the line there is probably the thinnest. With games or music, you probably want to play or listen at the same time as your friend. But few people read books cover to cover over and over, back to back. Once I've read a book, I'm usually done with it for a year or two, minimum. Loaning it to a friend doesn't impact me in the least unless they damage or lose it. So the question stands--do you think that I'm doing something wrong (not legally wrong, as The Right To Read hasn't come to pass, yet; I'm talking about morals here.)
If they deny you that right, I wonder if you can get the case thrown out on a destruction of evidence claim.
It's worse than that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect
Bad steak analogy. You didn't consume the steak.
Just for the sake of argument....
He may not have consumed the steak, but the restaurant has lost steak. They've lost something tangible because it didn't meet the standards of the customer.
If you don't sell a book because the guy read through any or all of it and it was utter crap, you've lost only a potential sale because it didn't meet the standards of the customer. You never had that money. You never had a physical good which is now unfit for consumption.
So yeah, the analogy is imperfect. The point is, though, that almost every good that is sold can be returned if the customer decides that they don't like it (even in cases where it has been used or partially used)--except for goods which are copyrighted. You can't return software, you can't return movies or CDs, and you can rarely return books.
I'm not making a judgment on whether or not the behavior is just or right; rather I'm clarifying that despite the fact that the analogy is imperfect, it's sound.
Microsoft won't stop shipping a browser with Windows. More likely (as the summary to that article suggests) they'll change the rendering engine to something that's not under their control (albeit almost certainly with their own tweaks.)
It really makes sense, at this point. There's really no good reason to reinvent the wheel every few years as they've been doing since IE6. It just serves to cause headache to web developers, it costs a lot of money, and it isn't really gaining them anything. If they switched to Webkit, they could cut most of the IE team, begin building a positive relationship with web developers, and *gasp* contribute back to the community by sending patches upstream. I'm sure they could figure out a way to write that off of their taxes.
A decent solution for smaller amounts of data. It sounds like the asker is creating lots of large files (all of his movies and TV shows on DVD.) If we assume a terabyte of storage, S3 is going to run him $150/mo, plus $170 just to transfer it all. For those prices, you could buy several terabyte hard drives, a lot of gasoline (over the course of a year) and a safety deposit box in your bank.
That said, for smaller amounts of data, S3 seems reasonable. I've just started trying out tarsnap ( https://beta.tarsnap.com/ ). The feature list is good, and the person coding it has been working on the FreeBSD project for a while (he contributed portsnap and freebsd-update, two projects which make maintaining FreeBSD much easier.)
Specifically, tarsnap uses a snapshot model similar to filesystem snapshots. This means that after the initial backup, you only have to save the changes, and you can delete snapshots without having to make a full backup or otherwise recreate the full set of data. It also compresses and encrypts the blocks, and it uses S3 for the back-end. Unfortunately, this means that you have to pay fees which are higher than Amazon's, which is why it isn't suitable for high volumes of data. The tarsnap client is open-source, though the server has not been released (and likely will not be.)
Right now, the author is using a prepaid pricing model, and he charges $0.30/GB transferred and $0.30/GB/mo storage--roughly twice Amazon's rates.
Like I said, I just started testing it to see if it will be viable for my users' home directories. The initial backup seemed to go well, though I haven't tried a full restore yet.
I didn't want to go with a Drobo for the sole reason that you have to buy a new one (at, what, $400?) if it fails. I can buy a whole new computer for that much, and I'm unlikely to need to (any given component in the computer will cost much less, and will likely be the part that failed.)
I was going to say the same thing, albeit in a less inflammatory way.
He's talking about backing up DVDs, and he's concerned about wasting time re-ripping them. I don't think that going to the bank periodically is going to be an acceptable solution. If his house burns down, he's probably not going to be worried about the time he lost ripping his discs.
Now it is true that C# was taken lock, stock and barrel from Java when the Microsoft embrace and extend strategy was slapped down there (read the memos), but no-one ever complained about other languages being added in just as no-one accuses Java of "stealing" all the languages that VM supports now.
Doesn't "embrace and extend" usually mean that Microsoft keeps the technology name? That's the big complaint that a lot of people have with them--they use a protocol with their own proprietary extensions which makes interoperability (the point of having protocols) difficult.
Cue people saying, "It's cue, not queue."
Then cue people defending it saying that you're putting the ad into a queue.
Oh the horrors....
But at least U7pt2 came with a little card that told you exactly what to load to get things to work. God help you if your sound driver took up too much RAM, though.
These days, I'm glad we have http://exult.sourceforge.net/ though it's not exactly the same.
Except for Steam-only games, this is truly something of a trade-off. The user takes the risk that their games will one day be unavailable in exchange for some short-term convenience. Their alternative (aside from not buying at all) is to buy the CD version of the game and lose some of that convenience.
I've purchased from Steam, but only games which were very, very cheap. I'll blow $10 on a game that I may only play a couple of times, and may eventually lose the ability to play.
[citation needed]
Not trying to be an ass, but there's a lot of misinformation out there on these "DoD wipe standards." Lots of people are throwing around these things, but I've only seen one person trying to back it up with something from the DoD.
Note that document only covers unclassified data.