It has all what you need from a SaaS app - and it sits on your desktop so you can have access anytime, even offline. It works on standard http/80 - just like a browser would - but being a native app, it can tightly integrate with your desktop.
So you say. Native app, just like a browser, standards... it must be a portable open-source application.
That was not software as a service, that was a lock in to proprietary platforms with lip service given to your needs.
The open systems movement, that grew into the open source movement, was built on online services, timesharing systems, that were not locked in to proprietary platforms. They were still centralized. You were still dependent on some computer outside your control to be up, on phone lines and networks outside your control to be working.
I've worked on VAX/VMS and the HP3000 servers running MPE.
I've worked on Version 6 UNIX and RSX-11/M and Version 7 UNIX and VAX/VMS and Xenix and MPE-IV and Ultrix and OS/1100 and TNIX and MS-DOS and Cromix and MP/M and Solaris and AmigaDOS and System V and Windows and BSD and BeOS and Linux and Mac OS and OS X and Regulus and GCOS and RT/11 and DR/DOS and RTE. There's two completely separate coordinate systems here.
Proprietary systems and application lock-in happen on timeshared systems and on personal computers. They are a problem whether your data is locked up in a hard disk you don't have access to or in a format for an application that isn't made any more. I've been in both places.
Centralized control can come out of open systems and proprietary ones. It's a problem whether your data locked up in the glass house is an a UNIX text file or an RMS variant record file.
But better to be dependent on access to the entire universe than to be limited by whatever is on my small desktop village.
Better not to be dependent on either. My small desktop village has access to the entire universe, but isn't dependent on it.
The fact that George Jetson still had to commute was a failure of the work culture, not the technology.
For a certain class of applications, it makes sense.
This is the bottom line.
For some applications, it makes sense.
For some applications, it's a disaster waiting to happen.
Would it matter whether WGA was what it was, or Microsoft's idea of a "cloud" operating system, or a "thin client" server for some super-web-tv product or for Sun's Javastation, or Google Apps (or Microsoft's inevitable response to them)?
The thing is, some applications are inherently collaborative and online, if the server's down you're dead in the water anyway. Some applications don't need to be online to be useful. Google, Wikipedia, online stores, webmail, these are well suited to the service model. Editors, operating systems, things that you use by yourself, you're creating an unnecessary risk when you take them online.
Was my backup cd in the house too? Oh no, there goes my Great American Novel.
Yeh, I know people who this happened to. Me, for one. But you can do something about that, and some of the data I've lost has been offline. I've lost the Apple II font editor that was stolen with my backpack, sure, but nobody has a copy of the Star Trek game that I wrote that was included with one of the early Berkeley Software Distributions (yes, I've even asked McKusick... it's gone). Nowadays, I have backups online and in multiple places offline, and the only data I've lost in the past 20 years has been stuff that I hadn't brought offline yet.
Online services are out of my control. I can't do anything about them.
Local data, you can lose, if you're careless. But you can choose not to be careless.
Massively redundant widely distributed strong-encrypted data storage.
Build it. See if they come. But that's not what's on the table today. You want to change people's perceptions of the old online services world, bring it back, turn back the personal computer revolution, you gotta prove it. You can't keep them down on the server farm now they've seen the big city.
... and so am I, and even we're not online 24/7/365. Let's answer your question...
And short of having a cable cut (which can happen) how often does your internet connection (not the router) go down?
Every time I leave my house, until I get to the office. Every time I leave the office until I return. Every time I go shopping. Every time I go on vacation, even though for the past 15 years I've made sure I had service lined up at my destination.
A few years ago, we had a bad amplifier in the neighborhood. Internet service went down every afternoon, during the summer, until that was found and fixed.
All I am saying is that central is a better overall solution for critical systems.
Whether central or local is a better model depends on what the system is. If the system requires online access to be meaningful, like that straw man credit card authentication for onine sales, of course there's no problem making it as centralized as the product you're buying. But unless it *has* to be centralized, why create an unnecessary dependency on a network?
Because that's what WGA is, and what Google Apps are, and what Microsoft's theoretical "cloud" is... an unnecessary dependency on an online service that doesn't benefit anyone but the central authority itself.
If every apps was PC based, most people would not be safe...
Applications are PC based. Services are network based. That's the difference that's developed between applications and services. This story and this discussion are not about turning services into applications, it's about turning applications into services.
Even as we speak, Apple is making billions on iTunes and music stores selling CD's are going out of business.
You're right, Apple is selling billions of songs through iTunes. You're wrong about what this means, though: Apple is *selling* billions of songs, and they're totally clobbering the music stores that are using the subscription model.
The MP3 you buy from iTunes isn't anything like "software as a service". The music you listen to online on Rhapsody is where your "software as a service" model is working. Or, really, not working.
I guess you're too young to remember when "software as a service" was king of the hill.
Back in the '70s and early '80s microcomputers were still basically toys, computers most people could afford were a fraction of the power of mainframes and minicomputers. It took years before basic word processing, let alone more complex applications, were really practical. Server based online applications were cheap, and one of the critical applications for any personal computer was a terminal program so you could get online and use them. People with real terminals sneered at the 40 column 16 line display of the Apples and Ataris.
The personal computer revolution clobbered "software as a service".
The Jetsons are the vision of the future from that era. George doesn't telecommute, he commutes. George isn't doing anything at Spacely Sprockets he couldn't be doing at home. George is the pre-cyberpunk future of flying cars and skyway traffic jams. We're past that now, and all the wishing for the safe old days of the IBM 360 in its dinosaur pen won't bring it back.
No, "software as a service" isn't the future. It's a 20 year dead corpse that Microsoft is trying to reanimate.
In this instance, you'd start with server-based online applications, and then suddenly a new technology--the desktop computer with a quad-core processor and huge hard drive--appears. Now, you do not need to do all your computing online. The timeline is reversed.
But that's what happened! That's the timeline we're on! You started with server based online applications. When I met my wife (online, mind you) I didn't have a computer... I had a good (for the time) terminal and a fast (for the time) modem, and I could dial in to my office and work from home. She had an Atari, with low quality graphics and worse quality text and so slow that even when I got a compiler for it it wasn't even worth using... and my online experience was way better than hers.
But when the phone went out after a hurricane, she still had her software. I was dead in the water.
It was really only a couple of decades ago that we went from online computing with dumb terminals to personal computers that could pick up the load from minis and mainframes and supermicros. He's wrong about the timeline... Microsoft's "cloud" is *reversing* the timeline, it's maybe the most recent attempt to pull computing back into the 'dinosaur pen'.
He's right about why this is a bad idea, though. Those of us who still have long term memory that goes back to before the microcomputer revolution have to agree with him on that. Most of us, anyway... there's always been a solid core of dinosaur herders who don't like the freedom we have now...
Why buy a CD when you can just tap the grid for an MP3?
From the point of software-as-a-service these are the same thing. They both end up with the software, the music, in your hands or your computer, independent of the grid. I had all my music on hand a week ago when I didn't have access to my database servers I needed to use to test the code I was working on.... because the latter really WAS like SaaS. I'd have been happier were it the other way around.:)
My daughter is kind of a space cadet and is rarely bothered by small details like backing up her files containing her thesis.
So set it up so it's always backed up to Google or.MAC or whatever. Backups are well suited to SaaS because even days of latency aren't important unless you have *simultaneous* local and network failures.
But when your net goes down the weekend before her thesis is due, having the applications and files locally will make her a lot happier than the assurance that you know where a good Internet cafe is.:)
There is NO need to have an outage of a system that large for that long. We have CONOPS plans for a reason. And if these backup plans don't work - someone should be fired for not doing their job. There is WAY too much technology out there to prevent these kinds of things from happening.
Maybe, but right now nobody's got reliable enough internet access to justify having anything critical ONLY available online, as a service, even if you're right. A week ago I lost internet access for three days because of a cut cable. That was a major problem for me because I had some files I was working on on a server... and redundantly on another server... and periodically downloaded... but the download was out of date and I couldn't get to either server.
I think everyone is on DSL, cable modem or wireless access.
Nope. Even in a city like Houston there are gaps in the coverage, and only a fraction of the population are connected where coverage exists. Cable probably has the biggest coverage in this town and in my neighborhood cable Internet is not getting to even 10% of the households.
So... if you think we're ready to go back to the future of Shockwave Rider where local applications are rare and everything is "in the cloud", and roll back the personal computer revolution, you have to prove it's safe. How are these stumbling blocks going to be fixed?
Now, WGA on the other hand isn't worth trusting. As a service, it doesn't enable any valuable functionality; all it can do is disable existing functionality.
That's not the real issue.
Let's say you had a Google Maps database on your computer, but it had to get to Google Maps online to work. If it didn't work, you'd be stuck. You'd have to use something else to plan your trip, you'd have to call directory assistance or ask someone. It might take you an extra 10 minutes to find out something you needed to know. Just like you would be if you didn't have internet access to Google Maps. It's not a big deal, because Google Maps isn't critical.
On the other hand, if your word processor or operating systems was in an online service, the way Microsoft wants it to be, you'd be just as stuck as you are with WGA down. And it's a big deal, because you've lost access to your data. Why does it matter whether you're stuck because WGA is down, or because the server with your data is on is down?
It doesn't.
The issue isn't "WGA is there to disable the OS", it's "the OS is too important to depend on online services".
Does anyone think these apps are going back to the desktop?
They're going back to my laptop as soon as I can manage it. A week ago last Friday I lost my internet link for the weekend, and was cut off from the software I was working on, from Google, from Wikipedia... and as soon as I got back online I started working on using the Wikipedia download (only 2.9 gigabytes compressed) to make that last less important.
Local storage is growing so fast that keeping local caches of even huge online databases is reasonable.
But the flipside of this is more important.
Wikipedia can be easily cached locally. Google Maps can't. And there's two inferences to be drawn from this.
First... if the software itself requires online access, everything changes. It's not that WGA is designed to stop you from doing something or not that made it a problem, it's that it makes certain functionality useless without that online access.
Second... Google Reader and Google Maps are occasionally-important nice-to-have capabilities. They're not critical. If they were offline for a couple of days people would gripe, but you wouldn't be locked out of your job and data. WGA is something that perhaps shouldn't be necessary, but it is necessary, and that makes an outage important.
Putting this together should teach us that having critical functions "in the cloud" (as Microsoft puts it) is dangerous. What if your word processor or operating system itself was "in the cloud"? At the very least you'd need far greater reliability from the servers and the infrastructure of the internet itself no matter why it was there.
THAT is the lesson that has to be learned. Not that online services are a failed model, but that they're a bad model for anything that really matters.
I was working with a monkey...I'm sorry a chimpanzee - he doesn't like to be called a monkey.
A relative of the Unseen University's librarian, perhaps?
You can't solve this on a single system.
on
Another Sony Rootkit?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The issue here is the biometric stuff.
This is an inherent problem in biometrics: you have to trust every scanner that takes a reading not to be trapdoored.
The entire authentication process has to be performed verifiably in the scanner hardware and firmware, and the scanner itself had to be trusted - either it's your scanner or it belongs to someone you have to trust anyway.
But no reversible form of the biometric information can be transferred to potentially untrusted storage.
1. The point is that popularity is not the only or even the primary reason why a product can be attacked. 1a. Back in the old "classic" Mac era the Mac went through a period where it was the prime target for attacks, despite it having a fraction of the market, simply because it had such a huge surface area to attack. 1b. Apple responded to many exploits (for example, in autorun CDs and floppies) by removing dangerous capabilities. 1c. Similarly, UNIX systems usually don't come with the "r" suite enabled or often even installed any more. 2. The problems I listed have not been fixed or even addressed by Microsoft. 2a. Windows is still vulnerable to autorun attacks in CDs and USB keys. 2b. Windows still comes with dangerous components like SMS. 3. http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclos ure/2005-04/0400.html
The decoding process is the only computationally intensive part of playback and that can go on in the background at low priority... so long as there's decoded audio queued up it doesn't matter if the mp3 decoding is deferred even *seconds* at a time on occasion. The latency sensitive part, the audio playback, can be performed using traditional device drivers and queues even on computers a thousand times slower than anything that runs Vista.
The only computationally intensive processes introduced by Vista that's latency-sensitive are the encryption and decryption operations in the trusted audio path. As you say, this is most likely content protection showing its igly face.
It's still impressive, but when you pause and examine the frames in the hi-res movie you see a lot of distortion. The people on the beach look like famine victims by the end of the sequence. Boosting the importance of the other figures would help.
Adobe put out a lot f advertisements targeting artists pushing PDF as a superior format to HTML because with PDF the reader can't mess with your layout.
When I looked at those ads my thought was "man, the PDF version is unreadable at this resolution, but the HTML might look ugly but I can read all of it".
As PDF came into use my fears were realized. PDF documents are all too often unreadable on anything but the largest screens, and I sometimes have to blow them up even on my 23" cinema display.
When it comes to preserving your artistic intent, the alternative to "losing layout" may well be losing all the content.
The easiest way to insert additional content would seem to be to paste an image of the additional runner in with a similar background, then mark the seam as "unimportant". Similarly, to improve gluing together panoramas you could mark the seams between individual photos as unimportant.
the reason Windows gets hacked is because there are so many more MS machines than any other type of machine.
If that was the case, then why are Microsoft applications (like IIS) more often compromised than non-Microsoft applications even in areas where Microsoft is NOT dominant?
Windows is inherently less secure than most of the competition in a number of ways.
1. The Microsoft HTML control's use of ActiveX is inherently insecure and can not be fixed without breaking every application that uses the HTML control. 1a. This insecure design was deliberate and Microsoft fought the Justice Department to a standstill rather than change or replace it. 2. Windows requires a number of insecure services to run to perform routine operations. 2a. There is no way to force these services to be run local-only without using a firewall. 2b. This means that Windows Firewall has to be used to secure Windows to the same degree as a UNIX based system WITHOUT a firewall. 3. Windows document formats are still based on serialized COM objects. It's even possible for them to include serialized COM objects in XML files. 3a. Serialized COM objects can refer to or even contain insecure code that can be used for an attack.
The idea that any one of these three issues and theor consequent corollaries are accepted boggles my mind. The idea that they're defended by the claim that the only reason Windows is more often compromised is that it is more common...I can not conceive of the confusion in the mind that would lead to such a conclusion.
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Dvorak might be a stopped clock, maybe he's only right by accident, but this time he really IS right.
So you say. Native app, just like a browser, standards... it must be a portable open-source application.
Oh well. Just a different kind of lock-in.
(go ahead, talk to me about MONO. I need a laugh)
That was not software as a service, that was a lock in to proprietary platforms with lip service given to your needs.
The open systems movement, that grew into the open source movement, was built on online services, timesharing systems, that were not locked in to proprietary platforms. They were still centralized. You were still dependent on some computer outside your control to be up, on phone lines and networks outside your control to be working.
I've worked on VAX/VMS and the HP3000 servers running MPE.
I've worked on Version 6 UNIX and RSX-11/M and Version 7 UNIX and VAX/VMS and Xenix and MPE-IV and Ultrix and OS/1100 and TNIX and MS-DOS and Cromix and MP/M and Solaris and AmigaDOS and System V and Windows and BSD and BeOS and Linux and Mac OS and OS X and Regulus and GCOS and RT/11 and DR/DOS and RTE. There's two completely separate coordinate systems here.
Proprietary systems and application lock-in happen on timeshared systems and on personal computers. They are a problem whether your data is locked up in a hard disk you don't have access to or in a format for an application that isn't made any more. I've been in both places.
Centralized control can come out of open systems and proprietary ones. It's a problem whether your data locked up in the glass house is an a UNIX text file or an RMS variant record file.
But better to be dependent on access to the entire universe than to be limited by whatever is on my small desktop village.
Better not to be dependent on either. My small desktop village has access to the entire universe, but isn't dependent on it.
The fact that George Jetson still had to commute was a failure of the work culture, not the technology.
Software as a service is culture, not technology.
"Why oh why didn't I take the blue pill?"
I took both pills.
For a certain class of applications, it makes sense.
This is the bottom line.
For some applications, it makes sense.
For some applications, it's a disaster waiting to happen.
Would it matter whether WGA was what it was, or Microsoft's idea of a "cloud" operating system, or a "thin client" server for some super-web-tv product or for Sun's Javastation, or Google Apps (or Microsoft's inevitable response to them)?
The thing is, some applications are inherently collaborative and online, if the server's down you're dead in the water anyway. Some applications don't need to be online to be useful. Google, Wikipedia, online stores, webmail, these are well suited to the service model. Editors, operating systems, things that you use by yourself, you're creating an unnecessary risk when you take them online.
What Dvorak's talking about are the latter.
The IT industry has already been through an era when apps were centralized, and moved away from it.
You remember that. I remember that. To judge from the messages here, a lot of people can't even *imagine* what it was like.
Hey, why won't the hard drive spin? Damn.
That's what backups are for.
Come back here thief, help!
And nobody can hijack your online data?
Was my backup cd in the house too? Oh no, there goes my Great American Novel.
Yeh, I know people who this happened to. Me, for one. But you can do something about that, and some of the data I've lost has been offline. I've lost the Apple II font editor that was stolen with my backpack, sure, but nobody has a copy of the Star Trek game that I wrote that was included with one of the early Berkeley Software Distributions (yes, I've even asked McKusick... it's gone). Nowadays, I have backups online and in multiple places offline, and the only data I've lost in the past 20 years has been stuff that I hadn't brought offline yet.
Online services are out of my control. I can't do anything about them.
Local data, you can lose, if you're careless. But you can choose not to be careless.
Massively redundant widely distributed strong-encrypted data storage.
Build it. See if they come. But that's not what's on the table today. You want to change people's perceptions of the old online services world, bring it back, turn back the personal computer revolution, you gotta prove it. You can't keep them down on the server farm now they've seen the big city.
... and so am I, and even we're not online 24/7/365. Let's answer your question...
And short of having a cable cut (which can happen) how often does your internet connection (not the router) go down?
Every time I leave my house, until I get to the office. Every time I leave the office until I return. Every time I go shopping. Every time I go on vacation, even though for the past 15 years I've made sure I had service lined up at my destination.
A few years ago, we had a bad amplifier in the neighborhood. Internet service went down every afternoon, during the summer, until that was found and fixed.
All I am saying is that central is a better overall solution for critical systems.
Whether central or local is a better model depends on what the system is. If the system requires online access to be meaningful, like that straw man credit card authentication for onine sales, of course there's no problem making it as centralized as the product you're buying. But unless it *has* to be centralized, why create an unnecessary dependency on a network?
Because that's what WGA is, and what Google Apps are, and what Microsoft's theoretical "cloud" is... an unnecessary dependency on an online service that doesn't benefit anyone but the central authority itself.
If every apps was PC based, most people would not be safe...
Applications are PC based. Services are network based. That's the difference that's developed between applications and services. This story and this discussion are not about turning services into applications, it's about turning applications into services.
Even as we speak, Apple is making billions on iTunes and music stores selling CD's are going out of business.
You're right, Apple is selling billions of songs through iTunes. You're wrong about what this means, though: Apple is *selling* billions of songs, and they're totally clobbering the music stores that are using the subscription model.
The MP3 you buy from iTunes isn't anything like "software as a service". The music you listen to online on Rhapsody is where your "software as a service" model is working. Or, really, not working.
I guess you're too young to remember when "software as a service" was king of the hill.
Back in the '70s and early '80s microcomputers were still basically toys, computers most people could afford were a fraction of the power of mainframes and minicomputers. It took years before basic word processing, let alone more complex applications, were really practical. Server based online applications were cheap, and one of
the critical applications for any personal computer was a terminal program so you could get online and use them. People with real terminals sneered at the 40 column 16 line display of the Apples and Ataris.
The personal computer revolution clobbered "software as a service".
The Jetsons are the vision of the future from that era. George doesn't telecommute, he commutes. George isn't doing anything at Spacely Sprockets he couldn't be doing at home. George is the pre-cyberpunk future of flying cars and skyway traffic jams. We're past that now, and all the wishing for the safe old days of the IBM 360 in its dinosaur pen won't bring it back.
No, "software as a service" isn't the future. It's a 20 year dead corpse that Microsoft is trying to reanimate.
In this instance, you'd start with server-based online applications, and then suddenly a new technology--the desktop computer with a quad-core processor and huge hard drive--appears. Now, you do not need to do all your computing online. The timeline is reversed.
But that's what happened! That's the timeline we're on! You started with server based online applications. When I met my wife (online, mind you) I didn't have a computer... I had a good (for the time) terminal and a fast (for the time) modem, and I could dial in to my office and work from home. She had an Atari, with low quality graphics and worse quality text and so slow that even when I got a compiler for it it wasn't even worth using... and my online experience was way better than hers.
But when the phone went out after a hurricane, she still had her software. I was dead in the water.
It was really only a couple of decades ago that we went from online computing with dumb terminals to personal computers that could pick up the load from minis and mainframes and supermicros. He's wrong about the timeline... Microsoft's "cloud" is *reversing* the timeline, it's maybe the most recent attempt to pull computing back into the 'dinosaur pen'.
He's right about why this is a bad idea, though. Those of us who still have long term memory that goes back to before the microcomputer revolution have to agree with him on that. Most of us, anyway... there's always been a solid core of dinosaur herders who don't like the freedom we have now...
Why buy a CD when you can just tap the grid for an MP3?
:)
.MAC or whatever. Backups are well suited to SaaS because even days of latency aren't important unless you have *simultaneous* local and network failures.
:)
From the point of software-as-a-service these are the same thing. They both end up with the software, the music, in your hands or your computer, independent of the grid. I had all my music on hand a week ago when I didn't have access to my database servers I needed to use to test the code I was working on.... because the latter really WAS like SaaS. I'd have been happier were it the other way around.
My daughter is kind of a space cadet and is rarely bothered by small details like backing up her files containing her thesis.
So set it up so it's always backed up to Google or
But when your net goes down the weekend before her thesis is due, having the applications and files locally will make her a lot happier than the assurance that you know where a good Internet cafe is.
There is NO need to have an outage of a system that large for that long. We have CONOPS plans for a reason. And if these backup plans don't work - someone should be fired for not doing their job. There is WAY too much technology out there to prevent these kinds of things from happening.
Maybe, but right now nobody's got reliable enough internet access to justify having anything critical ONLY available online, as a service, even if you're right. A week ago I lost internet access for three days because of a cut cable. That was a major problem for me because I had some files I was working on on a server... and redundantly on another server... and periodically downloaded... but the download was out of date and I couldn't get to either server.
I think everyone is on DSL, cable modem or wireless access.
Nope. Even in a city like Houston there are gaps in the coverage, and only a fraction of the population are connected where coverage exists. Cable probably has the biggest coverage in this town and in my neighborhood cable Internet is not getting to even 10% of the households.
So... if you think we're ready to go back to the future of Shockwave Rider where local applications are rare and everything is "in the cloud", and roll back the personal computer revolution, you have to prove it's safe. How are these stumbling blocks going to be fixed?
Now, WGA on the other hand isn't worth trusting. As a service, it doesn't enable any valuable functionality; all it can do is disable existing functionality.
That's not the real issue.
Let's say you had a Google Maps database on your computer, but it had to get to Google Maps online to work. If it didn't work, you'd be stuck. You'd have to use something else to plan your trip, you'd have to call directory assistance or ask someone. It might take you an extra 10 minutes to find out something you needed to know. Just like you would be if you didn't have internet access to Google Maps. It's not a big deal, because Google Maps isn't critical.
On the other hand, if your word processor or operating systems was in an online service, the way Microsoft wants it to be, you'd be just as stuck as you are with WGA down. And it's a big deal, because you've lost access to your data. Why does it matter whether you're stuck because WGA is down, or because the server with your data is on is down?
It doesn't.
The issue isn't "WGA is there to disable the OS", it's "the OS is too important to depend on online services".
THAT is what Dvorak is saying.
And today, that's true.
But more on that in another message.
Does anyone think these apps are going back to the desktop?
They're going back to my laptop as soon as I can manage it. A week ago last Friday I lost my internet link for the weekend, and was cut off from the software I was working on, from Google, from Wikipedia... and as soon as I got back online I started working on using the Wikipedia download (only 2.9 gigabytes compressed) to make that last less important.
Local storage is growing so fast that keeping local caches of even huge online databases is reasonable.
But the flipside of this is more important.
Wikipedia can be easily cached locally. Google Maps can't. And there's two inferences to be drawn from this.
First... if the software itself requires online access, everything changes. It's not that WGA is designed to stop you from doing something or not that made it a problem, it's that it makes certain functionality useless without that online access.
Second... Google Reader and Google Maps are occasionally-important nice-to-have capabilities. They're not critical. If they were offline for a couple of days people would gripe, but you wouldn't be locked out of your job and data. WGA is something that perhaps shouldn't be necessary, but it is necessary, and that makes an outage important.
Putting this together should teach us that having critical functions "in the cloud" (as Microsoft puts it) is dangerous. What if your word processor or operating system itself was "in the cloud"? At the very least you'd need far greater reliability from the servers and the infrastructure of the internet itself no matter why it was there.
THAT is the lesson that has to be learned. Not that online services are a failed model, but that they're a bad model for anything that really matters.
If so, then how do they know which customer is doing all the downloading?
If nothing else they can get it by SNMP request from your cable modem or the head-end.
It's not reducing your bandwidth per se, it's reducing the CPU time available to non-music applications. Ping requires little to no CPU time.
As for online gamers... there *have* been complaints about Vista performance in games.
The odd thing is that playing music shouldn't require any significant CPU time on any modern computer. Why would they bother throttling THAT?
I was working with a monkey...I'm sorry a chimpanzee - he doesn't like to be called a monkey.
A relative of the Unseen University's librarian, perhaps?
The issue here is the biometric stuff.
This is an inherent problem in biometrics: you have to trust every scanner that takes a reading not to be trapdoored.
The entire authentication process has to be performed verifiably in the scanner hardware and firmware, and the scanner itself had to be trusted - either it's your scanner or it belongs to someone you have to trust anyway.
But no reversible form of the biometric information can be transferred to potentially untrusted storage.
MP3 decoding doesn't even register as a blip on modern CPUs.
It's still the most computationally intensive LEGITIMATE part of playing back music.
Seriously.
If Vista is doing anything that requires more resources than MP3 decoding, and apparently it is, it's doing something that doesn't belong there.
1. The point is that popularity is not the only or even the primary reason why a product can be attacked.s ure/2005-04/0400.html
1a. Back in the old "classic" Mac era the Mac went through a period where it was the prime target for attacks, despite it having a fraction of the market, simply because it had such a huge surface area to attack.
1b. Apple responded to many exploits (for example, in autorun CDs and floppies) by removing dangerous capabilities.
1c. Similarly, UNIX systems usually don't come with the "r" suite enabled or often even installed any more.
2. The problems I listed have not been fixed or even addressed by Microsoft.
2a. Windows is still vulnerable to autorun attacks in CDs and USB keys.
2b. Windows still comes with dangerous components like SMS.
3. http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclo
The decoding process is the only computationally intensive part of playback and that can go on in the background at low priority... so long as there's decoded audio queued up it doesn't matter if the mp3 decoding is deferred even *seconds* at a time on occasion. The latency sensitive part, the audio playback, can be performed using traditional device drivers and queues even on computers a thousand times slower than anything that runs Vista.
The only computationally intensive processes introduced by Vista that's latency-sensitive are the encryption and decryption operations in the trusted audio path. As you say, this is most likely content protection showing its igly face.
It's still impressive, but when you pause and examine the frames in the hi-res movie you see a lot of distortion. The people on the beach look like famine victims by the end of the sequence. Boosting the importance of the other figures would help.
Adobe put out a lot f advertisements targeting artists pushing PDF as a superior format to HTML because with PDF the reader can't mess with your layout.
When I looked at those ads my thought was "man, the PDF version is unreadable at this resolution, but the HTML might look ugly but I can read all of it".
As PDF came into use my fears were realized. PDF documents are all too often unreadable on anything but the largest screens, and I sometimes have to blow them up even on my 23" cinema display.
When it comes to preserving your artistic intent, the alternative to "losing layout" may well be losing all the content.
The easiest way to insert additional content would seem to be to paste an image of the additional runner in with a similar background, then mark the seam as "unimportant". Similarly, to improve gluing together panoramas you could mark the seams between individual photos as unimportant.
the reason Windows gets hacked is because there are so many more MS machines than any other type of machine.
If that was the case, then why are Microsoft applications (like IIS) more often compromised than non-Microsoft applications even in areas where Microsoft is NOT dominant?
Windows is inherently less secure than most of the competition in a number of ways.
1. The Microsoft HTML control's use of ActiveX is inherently insecure and can not be fixed without breaking every application that uses the HTML control.
1a. This insecure design was deliberate and Microsoft fought the Justice Department to a standstill rather than change or replace it.
2. Windows requires a number of insecure services to run to perform routine operations.
2a. There is no way to force these services to be run local-only without using a firewall.
2b. This means that Windows Firewall has to be used to secure Windows to the same degree as a UNIX based system WITHOUT a firewall.
3. Windows document formats are still based on serialized COM objects. It's even possible for them to include serialized COM objects in XML files.
3a. Serialized COM objects can refer to or even contain insecure code that can be used for an attack.
The idea that any one of these three issues and theor consequent corollaries are accepted boggles my mind. The idea that they're defended by the claim that the only reason Windows is more often compromised is that it is more common...I can not conceive of the confusion in the mind that would lead to such a conclusion.
I think you're mixing up Google and X-10, because they sure sound like pop-up ads to me.