Your analogy is more accurate than the parent, but still faulty. The problem is with this part:
Our car is as car bomb proof as we were able to make it
I'm fairly certain that Microsoft engineers were fully capable of making Windows more secure. They have smart people working there. Reality is that they made it as secure as they were willing to make it. It's like cars in the '60s. Safety didn't sell if it was an inconvienience. Adding more security to Windows would have meant less ease of use and less backwards compatability. Both are important to maintain the customer base and prevent people from considering alternatives. Were they right or wrong? That depends on how you look at it, but you certainly can't say they implemented security to the limits of their ability.
it is evident that along the journey to enlightenment this nugget has been gleaned: At least one firm exists solely for the advancement and purpose of IP litigation.
You're just learning this now? Do you have a phone book handy? There are many in your metropolitan area of choice, wherever that may be, and there have been for over a century.
Im sure the patent holder would allow Microsoft to continue using the patented software for a price.
Why are you so sure? There are plenty of companies that buy or file patents speciffically to keep a technology off the market and prevent it from competing with their existing product.
Humans have great capacity to manage lots of simplistic tasks, and yet capable enough to break complex tasks into much smaller ones. Why can we not deal with this abstraction with our software?
I think we can, but I think it is an unresonable expectation to acomplish that with no understanding on the part of the user. The same goes for any complex system. You will never be able to use a complex system to its fullest if you learn to use it by rote, because you will be unable to memorize the infinite possibilities.
I have great faith in humans ability to learn, and I think just about anybody is capable of understanding a system well enough to take full advantage. As long as we dumb things down for users, and give them the impression that they can't understand (the 'appliance' attitude), they won't bother to, and they will get themselves in trouble.
That depends on the particular ruling and the particular level of violation.
If somebody had a thousand copies unpatched, sure, call the FBI. For lesser violations, you would sue to get a judge to assign specific monitary damages, which again aren't enforced by the courts, but you would be able to procede with having a lein placed on assets of the entity in violation. Depending on where you lived, that may well be the Sherif, but it could just be the registrar of deeds in the town they do business in.
FPSs aren't anywhere near photorealistic. We've just finally gotten to the point where there is only a little pixalization and we have some decent lighting effects in our fake looking graphics.
Static scenes, sure, we're near photorealism, but for interactive games... Especially for first person shooters, we're not even close, mostly because the current use of texture mapping, bump mapping, etc... only looks good from a narrow range of angles. When we can push enough polygons to actually model the texture of a surface, or when we start using different textures for different angles (we do it for distance, so why not?) then maybe things will improve.
This is going to get modded as Flamebait by some Microsoft fanboys even though it's not intended as such, but I'll say it anyway:
You don't think Sony learned anything from running Everquest?
Microsoft had a big hurdle too. They had to get their system working on Windows. Look how long it took them to get Hotmail working correctly on Windows compared to how easy it was for everybody else to get massive webmail systems online, and you'll have a good idea of how much harder Microsoft makes things for themselves.
and now M$ is the incumbent to a firmly entrenched online gaming network
It's just that firmly entrenched means something totally different to Microsoft than Sony. The number of Live subscribers almost reached 0.4% of the number of PS2 owners in the last generation. No wonder Sony didn't try too hard to go after those customers...
Dispite all the hype, online gaming just isn't that big yet compared to the overall gaming market.
Chances are, even without an online service, if the PS3 doesn't win big this generation it won't be because of Microsoft. It'll be because of the PSP. The system that wins is the one with the big name games, and no developer is going to bet against Sony right now.
The news is that so far Sony did not have a unified online service in the manner of Xbox Live.
The real news here is that the gaming journalists and analysts that have been speculating as to Sony's motives and plans have all been called out. Yet people will continue to believe the crap that these 'expert analysts' and paid industry shills that call themselves gaming journalists pump out.
The only people who believed that crap in the first place are the same people who believe the PS3 is going to cost $500 because of Blu Ray.
Wouldn't it have been 'morally right' for Microsoft to offer a refund as an option to customers using this feature that they paid for?
Is it morally right for this third party to require microsoft to remove this feature when they don't offer a product with similar functionality? Is it moral to use patent law to deny technology to society?
I find it difficult to consider applying this patch to be the moral thing to do when taken in the context of the situation.
Actually, I think you might be under just such an obligation.
Technically, you're right, but practically nobody is ever going to come and get you. Besides, the courts issue decisions, but they don't enforce them. It will be up to the patent holder to hunt you down and get the authorities to punish you.
The article should say that Microsoft had to release said patch. Users of Microsoft products are under no obligation to actually apply the patch and remove functionality.
Yes and no; developers can still be clueless about trojans, etc, although they do tend to be rather more savvy than average, I'll agree.
Developers aren't really even close to the bulk of the population though. There would be no such thing as a 'huge outbreak' if only developers got infected, and it would certainly be more economical to on have to protect that small subset of machines.
That's not how it works on any OS I've ever used, as it implies that all exes are protected, regardless of permissions.
True, I over simplified because I only had about 30 seconds to write that comment before I had to run off to somewhere else. And you're also right that it also can work that way on Windows already. This same discussion exists elsewhere in this thread, so I'll spare you the repost.
Seriously, how can we defend Journalist's use of anonymous, unverified sources in the reporting we use to make important decisions in our daily lives, and on the other hand we can't take the author of some random, inconsequential 'memoir' on his word?
So in your scheme, every developer has to run as an administrative user?
I suppose if you take it to the extreme... There's nothing wrong with developers running as root on a development workstation.
More realistically though, there would be a development sandbox, or a provision that you could write executable data to the disk as a user, with the understanding that said code isn't protected because it isn't 'installed' to the system.
You know, like it works on just about every operating system out there? So you *could* develop as root, but you wouldn't *have* to develop as root.
I had a big long decussion about this in an Ask Slashdot a few weeks back that is mildly applicable.
Re:Damned if they do, Damned if they don't
on
No Anti-Virus in Vista
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Overrated I can live with. I think 90% of everything I say is overrated.
Flamebait though?
I hope you get metamoderated to hell for that you Microsoft fanboy prick. It wasn't even inflamatory, much less designed to be inflamatory.
it's because just about every other consumer appliance is designed to be "plug and play"
Most other consumer appliances are designed to do only one thing.
Making the interface to a general purpose computer a simple task oriented thing is a fundamental design flaw. It's a square peg for a round hole. If you're going to do that, you need to go all the way. Either make it an appliance that does one of the things that is a button on the desktop, and that's it, or make it a general purpose machine that becomes easy to use only through understanding. Don't do both. Both only leads to problems where your simple task based buttons stop working, and your general purpose interactions are severely limited.
I think you phrased it wrong. Virus Scanners hardly have to modify executable code, except when they're infected. I think you meant the Virus themselves, not the scanners.
What I meant was that if what 90% of viruses do was stopped, 90% of what virus scanners do (scan the same executable for viruses over and over) could be stopped too.
Windows already have a good security model, it just isn't "enabled" by default. In a "sane" security model, the first created user, or the default user, should never be privileged.
This depends on what you mean by "Windows". If you just mean the OS, I agree, the permissions semantics are well defined. If by "Windows" you mean the OS and development platform, it's just not there. Developers need to be encourages, and failing that just plain forced, to deal with the security model of the OS in a sane fashion. If Windows was made in such a way that running with Administrative privlidges on a day-to-day basis was stigmatized, and users didn't want to do that, applications that don't work properly unless you are 'Administrator' would fail in the marketplace and the problem would be solved by good-old capitalism.
I think making Windows machines that are logged in as Administrator unable to participate in a Windows network in any meaningful way would be a great start to solving the problem.
Re:Damned if they do, Damned if they don't
on
No Anti-Virus in Vista
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
You're going to have to explain to me what you mean by 'properly configured'.
You certainly can't mean anything that is close to the default settings.
The problem is that most forum-posters are not game designers, they don't really know what makes a game fun to play, they know what makes a game easy.
This is completely true. Plus...
The people who leave feedback for a game, especially in forums it seems, are the people who are dis-satisfied. The people who enjoy the game don't complain, suggest modifications, or even turn up just to say they're happy. What happens is the company who is 'listening to the fans' ends up listening to everybody *but* the fans, and the new game ends up alienating all the people who liked the original.
Re:Damned if they do, Damned if they don't
on
No Anti-Virus in Vista
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
There's an option three.
They could implement a sane security model where file permissions disallow non administrative users from modifying executable code on disk, thus making 90% of what virus scanning programs do obsolete.
Believe it or not, that's not hard to do. Do 500 calories on an exercise machine, and lose the other half by walking.
I guess if you're fairly heavy it wouldn't be that bad now that I think about it the way you described it... Just seemed a little overboard to me at first, but that's probably because I'd essentally be not eating at all, ever, and running for an hour if I wanted to drop off 2000 calories per day.
I finally decided back in November to get off my fat ass and do something about it, and have since lost 52lbs just from doing Weight Watchers and hitting an elliptical machine a few times a week.
Holy crap! You lost 52lbs in three months? That can't possibly be healthy. Aren't you supposed to limit your weight loss to a few pounds per week?
Slashdot Mirror
Your analogy is more accurate than the parent, but still faulty. The problem is with this part:
Our car is as car bomb proof as we were able to make it
I'm fairly certain that Microsoft engineers were fully capable of making Windows more secure. They have smart people working there. Reality is that they made it as secure as they were willing to make it. It's like cars in the '60s. Safety didn't sell if it was an inconvienience. Adding more security to Windows would have meant less ease of use and less backwards compatability. Both are important to maintain the customer base and prevent people from considering alternatives. Were they right or wrong? That depends on how you look at it, but you certainly can't say they implemented security to the limits of their ability.
it is evident that along the journey to enlightenment this nugget has been gleaned: At least one firm exists solely for the advancement and purpose of IP litigation.
You're just learning this now? Do you have a phone book handy? There are many in your metropolitan area of choice, wherever that may be, and there have been for over a century.
If they're spending tax dollars on a computer to do one guy's taxes, I want some of the $30+K I sent to the government last year back. Seriously.
If their automated system can't handle one return, then why the hell don't they just do that one by hand? Lazy bastards.
As an aside, if this story were about Steve Jobs, all the replies would be bitching about how much press he gets.
Im sure the patent holder would allow Microsoft to continue using the patented software for a price.
Why are you so sure? There are plenty of companies that buy or file patents speciffically to keep a technology off the market and prevent it from competing with their existing product.
Humans have great capacity to manage lots of simplistic tasks, and yet capable enough to break complex tasks into much smaller ones. Why can we not deal with this abstraction with our software?
I think we can, but I think it is an unresonable expectation to acomplish that with no understanding on the part of the user. The same goes for any complex system. You will never be able to use a complex system to its fullest if you learn to use it by rote, because you will be unable to memorize the infinite possibilities.
I have great faith in humans ability to learn, and I think just about anybody is capable of understanding a system well enough to take full advantage. As long as we dumb things down for users, and give them the impression that they can't understand (the 'appliance' attitude), they won't bother to, and they will get themselves in trouble.
who are the 'authorities' here?
That depends on the particular ruling and the particular level of violation.
If somebody had a thousand copies unpatched, sure, call the FBI. For lesser violations, you would sue to get a judge to assign specific monitary damages, which again aren't enforced by the courts, but you would be able to procede with having a lein placed on assets of the entity in violation. Depending on where you lived, that may well be the Sherif, but it could just be the registrar of deeds in the town they do business in.
as we near the realm of photorealism
FPSs aren't anywhere near photorealistic. We've just finally gotten to the point where there is only a little pixalization and we have some decent lighting effects in our fake looking graphics.
Static scenes, sure, we're near photorealism, but for interactive games... Especially for first person shooters, we're not even close, mostly because the current use of texture mapping, bump mapping, etc... only looks good from a narrow range of angles. When we can push enough polygons to actually model the texture of a surface, or when we start using different textures for different angles (we do it for distance, so why not?) then maybe things will improve.
This is going to get modded as Flamebait by some Microsoft fanboys even though it's not intended as such, but I'll say it anyway:
You don't think Sony learned anything from running Everquest?
Microsoft had a big hurdle too. They had to get their system working on Windows. Look how long it took them to get Hotmail working correctly on Windows compared to how easy it was for everybody else to get massive webmail systems online, and you'll have a good idea of how much harder Microsoft makes things for themselves.
and now M$ is the incumbent to a firmly entrenched online gaming network
It's just that firmly entrenched means something totally different to Microsoft than Sony. The number of Live subscribers almost reached 0.4% of the number of PS2 owners in the last generation. No wonder Sony didn't try too hard to go after those customers...
Dispite all the hype, online gaming just isn't that big yet compared to the overall gaming market.
Chances are, even without an online service, if the PS3 doesn't win big this generation it won't be because of Microsoft. It'll be because of the PSP. The system that wins is the one with the big name games, and no developer is going to bet against Sony right now.
The news is that so far Sony did not have a unified online service in the manner of Xbox Live.
The real news here is that the gaming journalists and analysts that have been speculating as to Sony's motives and plans have all been called out. Yet people will continue to believe the crap that these 'expert analysts' and paid industry shills that call themselves gaming journalists pump out.
The only people who believed that crap in the first place are the same people who believe the PS3 is going to cost $500 because of Blu Ray.
Wouldn't it have been 'morally right' for Microsoft to offer a refund as an option to customers using this feature that they paid for?
Is it morally right for this third party to require microsoft to remove this feature when they don't offer a product with similar functionality? Is it moral to use patent law to deny technology to society?
I find it difficult to consider applying this patch to be the moral thing to do when taken in the context of the situation.
Actually, I think you might be under just such an obligation.
Technically, you're right, but practically nobody is ever going to come and get you. Besides, the courts issue decisions, but they don't enforce them. It will be up to the patent holder to hunt you down and get the authorities to punish you.
Um, no thanks.
The article should say that Microsoft had to release said patch. Users of Microsoft products are under no obligation to actually apply the patch and remove functionality.
Yes and no; developers can still be clueless about trojans, etc, although they do tend to be rather more savvy than average, I'll agree.
Developers aren't really even close to the bulk of the population though. There would be no such thing as a 'huge outbreak' if only developers got infected, and it would certainly be more economical to on have to protect that small subset of machines.
That's not how it works on any OS I've ever used, as it implies that all exes are protected, regardless of permissions.
True, I over simplified because I only had about 30 seconds to write that comment before I had to run off to somewhere else. And you're also right that it also can work that way on Windows already. This same discussion exists elsewhere in this thread, so I'll spare you the repost.
Seriously, how can we defend Journalist's use of anonymous, unverified sources in the reporting we use to make important decisions in our daily lives, and on the other hand we can't take the author of some random, inconsequential 'memoir' on his word?
So in your scheme, every developer has to run as an administrative user?
I suppose if you take it to the extreme... There's nothing wrong with developers running as root on a development workstation.
More realistically though, there would be a development sandbox, or a provision that you could write executable data to the disk as a user, with the understanding that said code isn't protected because it isn't 'installed' to the system.
You know, like it works on just about every operating system out there? So you *could* develop as root, but you wouldn't *have* to develop as root.
I had a big long decussion about this in an Ask Slashdot a few weeks back that is mildly applicable.
Overrated I can live with. I think 90% of everything I say is overrated.
Flamebait though?
I hope you get metamoderated to hell for that you Microsoft fanboy prick. It wasn't even inflamatory, much less designed to be inflamatory.
(Now that is flamebait!)
it's because just about every other consumer appliance is designed to be "plug and play"
Most other consumer appliances are designed to do only one thing.
Making the interface to a general purpose computer a simple task oriented thing is a fundamental design flaw. It's a square peg for a round hole. If you're going to do that, you need to go all the way. Either make it an appliance that does one of the things that is a button on the desktop, and that's it, or make it a general purpose machine that becomes easy to use only through understanding. Don't do both. Both only leads to problems where your simple task based buttons stop working, and your general purpose interactions are severely limited.
I think you phrased it wrong. Virus Scanners hardly have to modify executable code, except when they're infected. I think you meant the Virus themselves, not the scanners.
What I meant was that if what 90% of viruses do was stopped, 90% of what virus scanners do (scan the same executable for viruses over and over) could be stopped too.
Windows already have a good security model, it just isn't "enabled" by default. In a "sane" security model, the first created user, or the default user, should never be privileged.
This depends on what you mean by "Windows". If you just mean the OS, I agree, the permissions semantics are well defined. If by "Windows" you mean the OS and development platform, it's just not there. Developers need to be encourages, and failing that just plain forced, to deal with the security model of the OS in a sane fashion. If Windows was made in such a way that running with Administrative privlidges on a day-to-day basis was stigmatized, and users didn't want to do that, applications that don't work properly unless you are 'Administrator' would fail in the marketplace and the problem would be solved by good-old capitalism.
I think making Windows machines that are logged in as Administrator unable to participate in a Windows network in any meaningful way would be a great start to solving the problem.
You're going to have to explain to me what you mean by 'properly configured'.
You certainly can't mean anything that is close to the default settings.
The problem is that most forum-posters are not game designers, they don't really know what makes a game fun to play, they know what makes a game easy.
This is completely true. Plus...
The people who leave feedback for a game, especially in forums it seems, are the people who are dis-satisfied. The people who enjoy the game don't complain, suggest modifications, or even turn up just to say they're happy. What happens is the company who is 'listening to the fans' ends up listening to everybody *but* the fans, and the new game ends up alienating all the people who liked the original.
There's an option three.
They could implement a sane security model where file permissions disallow non administrative users from modifying executable code on disk, thus making 90% of what virus scanning programs do obsolete.
Believe it or not, that's not hard to do. Do 500 calories on an exercise machine, and lose the other half by walking.
I guess if you're fairly heavy it wouldn't be that bad now that I think about it the way you described it... Just seemed a little overboard to me at first, but that's probably because I'd essentally be not eating at all, ever, and running for an hour if I wanted to drop off 2000 calories per day.
I finally decided back in November to get off my fat ass and do something about it, and have since lost 52lbs just from doing Weight Watchers and hitting an elliptical machine a few times a week.
Holy crap! You lost 52lbs in three months? That can't possibly be healthy. Aren't you supposed to limit your weight loss to a few pounds per week?
Standard WOL, however, uses very little power in comparison to IPMI, which is why I made the distinction.
it however has nothing to do with the post I replied to which asked about using WOL with Linux.
Your post was at the top level, and not a reply to anything. Perhaps that is the source of the confusion.