IE integration with the desktop has done almost nothing to compromise security. The whole problem boils down to two things:
1. IE has the ability to run executable code from untrusted sources.
And this is the direct result of Internet Explorer's integration with Windows Explorer. The direct result of using the same control to manage both trusted and untrusted objects. That's what "integration with the desktop" means, that's what it is, that's the whole point of it.
Well, I understand that you don't know how to read man pages (you seem to see a "deprecated" on the man page of fsck that isn't there), but some people actually need them.
If Spotlight's picking and choosing what to index, and I as a user can't control that, maybe I *should* stick with Harvest.
They still seem to be on sale, too -- in the UK, at least.
The difference between the cellular phone industry in the US and the cellular phone industry anywhere else in the world is... stunning. It's like the difference between the set of "Apollo 13" and the real Cape. Three incompatible digital phone systems, none compatible with anything anywhere else in the world, and only one supports SIMs and phone portability... and they do their damndest to keep you from taking advantage of it.
OS/2 puts things requiring realtime priority in a seperate priority class, they are not 'higher' in priority but they are treated differently to ensure they get their timeslices when needed still.
Dude, I know about realtime priority. I've been in the realtime business for most of my working life.
I've used UNIX systems with realtime priority. It doesn't make a difference to interactive response time. It's a great way to lock up the system when a realtime process goes into an infinite loop and becomes a compute-bound process, though.
I can EASILY believe that OS/2 is doing a better job of handling I/O. That's been a problem with the traditional UNIX monolithic kernel as long as I've used it, but that's got nothing to do with how many CPU-bound processes are sitting there competing with the interactive one.
DEVELOPER RANT: don't use if (win_version == nt5.1) use if (win_version >= nt51).
DEVELOP RANT: don't use OS version tests if you can use feature tests instead.
Not a comment specifically directed at you, I don't know if you do this, but I keep running into software on all platforms that doesn't run on older versions even when patches, service packs, hotfixes, software updates, backported libraries, or compatibility fixes have removed the dependency on the specific OS version they hardcoded into the application.
One of the nice things about the Amiga is that all the developer documentation showed code checking library versions instead. Not perfect, but much better than OS version checks. Palm provided hooks to do functional checks down to the entry point level, but then spoiled it by shipping example code doing OS version checking.
I'd love to see more ONLINE security: integrated firewall, antivirus, spyware, etc. That would more satisfy me.
I'd like to see them turn the user interface clock back to 1995, before they started integrating the Internet with the Desktop.
That would do more to improve Windows security than anything else they could do. Look, if Steve Jobs can back down on "No Ugly Monitors on Nice Macs" and come back with "BYOKDM", then surely Bill Gates can back down on Internet Explorer Integration.
A lot of people don't have an iPod becausae they don't think they'll carry it around.
It's a pity about the lanyard onthe iPod Shuffle. If it came with a clip by default a lot of people who just want a tiny music player would be more likely to buy it.
The reason people like the iPod is because of the interface.
I hate the iPod interface. That's why I gave my iPod to my daughter and got an iPod Shuffle... which is what I really wanted all along. I used to have an earlier generation of the same kind of ultra-minimalist MP3 player, though it was less annoying to load songs onto from iTunes because it didn't keep mounting and unmounting the damn thing all the time.
Someone is going to make a cheap nice-looking display-less MP3 flash drive like the old "Magic Star player" with updated storage levels and without its "Gray Whale" looks. I'm really amazed Apple got so damn close to it for a reasonable price, but it's a pity they felt they had to bow to the RIAA to keep their nudge-nudge-wink-wink DRM viable, so you can't just shove files into it and have them play.
Cell phone makers don't seem to understand a major problem with throwing every possible gadget in the world into one's cell phone: battery life.
If cell phone makers cared about battery life I'd be able to get a big fat dumb Nokia bar with a MONOCHROME screen I could actually read outdoors, instead of fragile folding toys that fail me if I forget to charge them every bloody night.
Why do I not care for any games or apps or cameras or music being stored on my phone?
I don't for the same reason I don't want any of that stuff on my PDA. Because telephones have enough battery problems as it is, and it's aggravating and embarassing and even dangerous to have your phone not work because you were listening to NiN and John Denver.
My ideal phone is a 4" long fat old-fashioned Nokia with a monochrome display and hours of talk time. Too bad you can't GET one any more because everyone's making phones with cameras and hard disks and laser pointers and sex toys, or at the very least color screens you can't read in sunlight.
It's a phone. It makes phone calls. It doesn't need to do any of these other things, badly and expensively, especially when they make it less effective at being a phone.
Has anyone bought a mobile phone and decided *NOT* to use the telephone function? Why should one pay for an ongoing telephone service, when all one wants is a camera, hard disk and music player?
Well, if you buy it "subsidized" from Verizon or whoever, you have to sign a contract for phone service. If you break the contract it costs more than you saved on the phone.
If you don't buy it subsidized, it's a pretty high price for a camera or music player.
all the ones I've seen are not compatible with the songs from the iTunes Music Store. So what's the deal?
The deal is that "AAC" is a public standard (MP4 audio, pretty much) but "Protected AAC" uses Fairplay, which is Apple's proprietary DRM. I'll leave the explanation of why there's no open DRM as an exercise for the reader.
I use the decades old quoting convention from usenet, email etc
At one point around 1990 I was 2 of the top 3 posters on Usenet. My first posts date back to the early '80s. I'm real familiar with ">"-quoting, and if we were using trn with an 80x24 screen with all the lines wrapped on input, that would work nicely. But ">"-quoting doesn't work worth a damn in an environment where you're NOT using a TTY type display.
Example, bash accepting user input, becomming slgightly sluggish...
You do know of course that bash forks and execs for each external command (like ls) and internal commands frequently involve disk I/O as well. In addition, CD burning... particularly on older burners... is a real-time process and good burning software is going to run at an elevated priority... it's more important than the user interface. So you're mixing up CPU, disk, and a high priority background task. Separating the impact of the scheduler out of that is going to be a big problem.
OS/2 had no problem with keeping a serial link at 57600bps running reliably...
What sort of serial port, what was the UART? 8250, 16540, 16550? Was the Solaris driver smart enough to use the 16-byte queue in the latter case, or was it taking an intterupt for every character? Again, you're combining all kinds of things that have nothing to do with scheduling.
They're standing up for the school and the student body as a whole.
but couldn't you use the same argument (privacy) these schools are using to defend withholding the names of people running a kiddie porn ring or some other illegal activity?
Well, you'd have to convince a judge that. In that case it wouldn't be the RIAA going to a judge, it'd be law enforcement, because that'd be a criminal case instead of a civil one. Plus, you'd have to be able to argue that the right of privacy was more important than the rights of the children.
Could you, like, indent or italicise the stuff you're quoting?
Hrm, I saw this fail on Sun 68k, sparc and hypersparc hardware, and on x86 hardware, Irix on R3000, R4000, R5000, FreeBSD, NetBSD and Linux on a huge variety of x86 hardware (from 386dx to p4 xeon), AIX on a whole variety of RS/6000 machines, HPUX on HPPA and some more.
I'd really like to get you to elaborate on that, because our experience seems to be radically different. Are you talking about a situation where the system was compute-bound, not swapping or paging, and the interactive task was not subject to blocking on a contested resource? I've seen interactive character mode applications become unresponsive in those circumstances, but I can't see how that could possibly have anything to do with the scheduler.
For a general purpose GUI you cannot control the latency of whatever application the user decides to run, so there it really does not work too well.
So in OS/2 if your foreground program opened a file and that blocked for half a second because it was on a network file share and competing with the porn traffic, then the GUI as a whole was also blocked until that application responded to a message? What if the app was blocked for a minute? Did the whole thing lock up for a minute?
What it boils down to is that there may be certain technologies in the Longhorn Developer Preview build for which Microsoft has not filed patent applications, and the confidentiality provisions protect or mitigate the company's filing rights.
I guess "Developers! Developers! Developers!" was too "Open" or something.
Here's a question for Slashdot readers: Why do you care what web browser/email client/etc people use?
Because around 1997, maybe a bit earlier, I realised that what MS was doing to Windows was really dangerous, and managed to convince management to ban IE and Outlook and other apps that used the HTML control to display potentially untrusted objects. I didn't know exactly what the failure mode would be, but I was absolutely sure that there would be one.
Shortly thereafter the first of the big email viruses hit. We were the only division of the company that didn't get slammed by them. For the next several years the vast majority of the times I had to go in and clean up an infected computer the user had been using Outlook or IE. I had one person argue with me that the should be allowed to be an exception to the "no Outlook" rule while I was sitting there tracking down an infection that they'd got through Outlook. And of course IE is quite happy to let down its hair for any malware with a good jawline.
At this point I don't care if the browser you use is Open Source or not, so long as it, or its email software, doesn't go anywhere near the HTML control. In practice, that means the options are buy Opera or install a Mozilla browser.
This isn't exactly an answer to "why Open Source", but it's sure an answer to "Why do I care what browser or mail software you use".
What bug in the firewall, av software or automatic updates is being fixed?
The fact that you need a firewall, A/V software, and automatic updates to work with the same level of security that you did before Microsoft came up with the whole idea of integrating the Internet into the OS (with ActiveX in IE, Active Desktop, Security Zones, and so on), so you need to have a program that monitors them and warns you if you need to do someting about them.
Let's suppose there was a tool company that made a power tool with a plastic guard, and had been making it with a plastic guard for years, and when as the result of a lawsuit and bad publicity they came up with a gadget you could attach to the guard to let you know when the plastic was degrading and you had to replace or readjust it.
Would you call the "security gard monitor" a new feature or a bugfix?
Slashdot Mirror
Damn, if it wasn't for the "Slow Down Cowboy" code that'd have been the first post. :-P
Plus he posted the patches to KHTML on his blog, so Konqueror should be passing it too pretty soon.
They were (and are) wildly popular in the business community here in Australia.
See my other comment about the cellular phone "system" in the United States.
IE integration with the desktop has done almost nothing to compromise security. The whole problem boils down to two things:
1. IE has the ability to run executable code from untrusted sources.
And this is the direct result of Internet Explorer's integration with Windows Explorer. The direct result of using the same control to manage both trusted and untrusted objects. That's what "integration with the desktop" means, that's what it is, that's the whole point of it.
Well, I understand that you don't know how to read man pages (you seem to see a "deprecated" on the man page of fsck that isn't there), but some people actually need them.
If Spotlight's picking and choosing what to index, and I as a user can't control that, maybe I *should* stick with Harvest.
They still seem to be on sale, too -- in the UK, at least.
The difference between the cellular phone industry in the US and the cellular phone industry anywhere else in the world is... stunning. It's like the difference between the set of "Apollo 13" and the real Cape. Three incompatible digital phone systems, none compatible with anything anywhere else in the world, and only one supports SIMs and phone portability... and they do their damndest to keep you from taking advantage of it.
OS/2 puts things requiring realtime priority in a seperate priority class, they are not 'higher' in priority but they are treated differently to ensure they get their timeslices when needed still.
Dude, I know about realtime priority. I've been in the realtime business for most of my working life.
I've used UNIX systems with realtime priority. It doesn't make a difference to interactive response time. It's a great way to lock up the system when a realtime process goes into an infinite loop and becomes a compute-bound process, though.
I can EASILY believe that OS/2 is doing a better job of handling I/O. That's been a problem with the traditional UNIX monolithic kernel as long as I've used it, but that's got nothing to do with how many CPU-bound processes are sitting there competing with the interactive one.
DEVELOPER RANT: don't use if (win_version == nt5.1) use if (win_version >= nt51).
DEVELOP RANT: don't use OS version tests if you can use feature tests instead.
Not a comment specifically directed at you, I don't know if you do this, but I keep running into software on all platforms that doesn't run on older versions even when patches, service packs, hotfixes, software updates, backported libraries, or compatibility fixes have removed the dependency on the specific OS version they hardcoded into the application.
One of the nice things about the Amiga is that all the developer documentation showed code checking library versions instead. Not perfect, but much better than OS version checks. Palm provided hooks to do functional checks down to the entry point level, but then spoiled it by shipping example code doing OS version checking.
6310i - Review by Michael Oryl (editor) on Monday June 17, 2002.
Three years ago I suspect I would have found it a lot easier to find a monochrome phone supported by my carrier, but this is 2005, not 2002.
Nice try though, thanks.
If Microsoft was going to start naming operating systems consistently, then... let's see...
Windows 2000 -> Windows NT 5.0
Windows XP -> Windows NT 5.1
Longhorn -> Windows NT 6.0 or Windows NT 5.2?
Or maybe even Windows NT 5.11?
I'd love to see more ONLINE security: integrated firewall, antivirus, spyware, etc. That would more satisfy me.
I'd like to see them turn the user interface clock back to 1995, before they started integrating the Internet with the Desktop.
That would do more to improve Windows security than anything else they could do. Look, if Steve Jobs can back down on "No Ugly Monitors on Nice Macs" and come back with "BYOKDM", then surely Bill Gates can back down on Internet Explorer Integration.
Aha! This is how he plans to get Longhorn out before the end of the decade!
A lot of people don't have an iPod becausae they don't think they'll carry it around.
It's a pity about the lanyard onthe iPod Shuffle. If it came with a clip by default a lot of people who just want a tiny music player would be more likely to buy it.
The reason people like the iPod is because of the interface.
I hate the iPod interface. That's why I gave my iPod to my daughter and got an iPod Shuffle... which is what I really wanted all along. I used to have an earlier generation of the same kind of ultra-minimalist MP3 player, though it was less annoying to load songs onto from iTunes because it didn't keep mounting and unmounting the damn thing all the time.
Someone is going to make a cheap nice-looking display-less MP3 flash drive like the old "Magic Star player" with updated storage levels and without its "Gray Whale" looks. I'm really amazed Apple got so damn close to it for a reasonable price, but it's a pity they felt they had to bow to the RIAA to keep their nudge-nudge-wink-wink DRM viable, so you can't just shove files into it and have them play.
Cell phone makers don't seem to understand a major problem with throwing every possible gadget in the world into one's cell phone: battery life.
If cell phone makers cared about battery life I'd be able to get a big fat dumb Nokia bar with a MONOCHROME screen I could actually read outdoors, instead of fragile folding toys that fail me if I forget to charge them every bloody night.
Why do I not care for any games or apps or cameras or music being stored on my phone?
I don't for the same reason I don't want any of that stuff on my PDA. Because telephones have enough battery problems as it is, and it's aggravating and embarassing and even dangerous to have your phone not work because you were listening to NiN and John Denver.
My ideal phone is a 4" long fat old-fashioned Nokia with a monochrome display and hours of talk time. Too bad you can't GET one any more because everyone's making phones with cameras and hard disks and laser pointers and sex toys, or at the very least color screens you can't read in sunlight.
It's a phone. It makes phone calls. It doesn't need to do any of these other things, badly and expensively, especially when they make it less effective at being a phone.
Has anyone bought a mobile phone and decided *NOT* to use the telephone function? Why should one pay for an ongoing telephone service, when all one wants is a camera, hard disk and music player?
Well, if you buy it "subsidized" from Verizon or whoever, you have to sign a contract for phone service. If you break the contract it costs more than you saved on the phone.
If you don't buy it subsidized, it's a pretty high price for a camera or music player.
all the ones I've seen are not compatible with the songs from the iTunes Music Store. So what's the deal?
The deal is that "AAC" is a public standard (MP4 audio, pretty much) but "Protected AAC" uses Fairplay, which is Apple's proprietary DRM. I'll leave the explanation of why there's no open DRM as an exercise for the reader.
I use the decades old quoting convention from usenet, email etc
...
At one point around 1990 I was 2 of the top 3 posters on Usenet. My first posts date back to the early '80s. I'm real familiar with ">"-quoting, and if we were using trn with an 80x24 screen with all the lines wrapped on input, that would work nicely. But ">"-quoting doesn't work worth a damn in an environment where you're NOT using a TTY type display.
Example, bash accepting user input, becomming slgightly sluggish
You do know of course that bash forks and execs for each external command (like ls) and internal commands frequently involve disk I/O as well. In addition, CD burning... particularly on older burners... is a real-time process and good burning software is going to run at an elevated priority... it's more important than the user interface. So you're mixing up CPU, disk, and a high priority background task. Separating the impact of the scheduler out of that is going to be a big problem.
OS/2 had no problem with keeping a serial link at 57600bps running reliably...
What sort of serial port, what was the UART? 8250, 16540, 16550? Was the Solaris driver smart enough to use the 16-byte queue in the latter case, or was it taking an intterupt for every character? Again, you're combining all kinds of things that have nothing to do with scheduling.
I'm glad someone's standing up for pirates
They're standing up for the school and the student body as a whole.
but couldn't you use the same argument (privacy) these schools are using to defend withholding the names of people running a kiddie porn ring or some other illegal activity?
Well, you'd have to convince a judge that. In that case it wouldn't be the RIAA going to a judge, it'd be law enforcement, because that'd be a criminal case instead of a civil one. Plus, you'd have to be able to argue that the right of privacy was more important than the rights of the children.
Also mouse, keyboard, speakers etc.
If you can't get a mouse, keyboard, and speakers for under $20 you're not trying hard enough.
Anything half decent will up the price to way over $500.
The only upgrade you really need for the Mini is the 512M RAM. That's a $75 checkbox on the Apple store. $575 isn't "way over $500".
Could you, like, indent or italicise the stuff you're quoting?
Hrm, I saw this fail on Sun 68k, sparc and hypersparc hardware, and on x86 hardware, Irix on R3000, R4000, R5000, FreeBSD, NetBSD and Linux on a huge variety of x86 hardware (from 386dx to p4 xeon), AIX on a whole variety of RS/6000 machines, HPUX on HPPA and some more.
I'd really like to get you to elaborate on that, because our experience seems to be radically different. Are you talking about a situation where the system was compute-bound, not swapping or paging, and the interactive task was not subject to blocking on a contested resource? I've seen interactive character mode applications become unresponsive in those circumstances, but I can't see how that could possibly have anything to do with the scheduler.
For a general purpose GUI you cannot control the latency of whatever application the user decides to run, so there it really does not work too well.
So in OS/2 if your foreground program opened a file and that blocked for half a second because it was on a network file share and competing with the porn traffic, then the GUI as a whole was also blocked until that application responded to a message? What if the app was blocked for a minute? Did the whole thing lock up for a minute?
What it boils down to is that there may be certain technologies in the Longhorn Developer Preview build for which Microsoft has not filed patent applications, and the confidentiality provisions protect or mitigate the company's filing rights.
I guess "Developers! Developers! Developers!" was too "Open" or something.
Here's a question for Slashdot readers: Why do you care what web browser/email client/etc people use?
Because around 1997, maybe a bit earlier, I realised that what MS was doing to Windows was really dangerous, and managed to convince management to ban IE and Outlook and other apps that used the HTML control to display potentially untrusted objects. I didn't know exactly what the failure mode would be, but I was absolutely sure that there would be one.
Shortly thereafter the first of the big email viruses hit. We were the only division of the company that didn't get slammed by them. For the next several years the vast majority of the times I had to go in and clean up an infected computer the user had been using Outlook or IE. I had one person argue with me that the should be allowed to be an exception to the "no Outlook" rule while I was sitting there tracking down an infection that they'd got through Outlook. And of course IE is quite happy to let down its hair for any malware with a good jawline.
At this point I don't care if the browser you use is Open Source or not, so long as it, or its email software, doesn't go anywhere near the HTML control. In practice, that means the options are buy Opera or install a Mozilla browser.
This isn't exactly an answer to "why Open Source", but it's sure an answer to "Why do I care what browser or mail software you use".
What bug in the firewall, av software or automatic updates is being fixed?
The fact that you need a firewall, A/V software, and automatic updates to work with the same level of security that you did before Microsoft came up with the whole idea of integrating the Internet into the OS (with ActiveX in IE, Active Desktop, Security Zones, and so on), so you need to have a program that monitors them and warns you if you need to do someting about them.
Let's suppose there was a tool company that made a power tool with a plastic guard, and had been making it with a plastic guard for years, and when as the result of a lawsuit and bad publicity they came up with a gadget you could attach to the guard to let you know when the plastic was degrading and you had to replace or readjust it.
Would you call the "security gard monitor" a new feature or a bugfix?