Automatic archiving and retention is a real advantage of Exchange (or Notes) servers. In corporatations with good implementation of Exchange email is automatically stored and can be easily retrieved with appropriate security.
So you say. I've recently been commiserating with a fellow who's in the process of trying to take the mess of non-standard crap that Notes calls email and convert it back to the original format it was received from the Internet in response to a legal request. Neither Notes nor Exchange retain the original documents including full headers. For the future he's sticking a regular UNIX SMTP transport in front and archiving what goes through THAT.
And, well, I've had to actually work with the corporate managed IT. Often the real work goes on behind the IT department's back, on user-run wikis and jabber servers, because the Microsoft and Lotus "solutions" are too cumbersome to get any real work done.
They always manage to get some police officer to say "if NewSpeedTrapThingy makes people slow down, we're all for it". Doesn't matter what the thingy is, from radar detectors and people talking on CB Radio onwards... is there actually any research indicating that people with radar detectors or whatever drive slower, on average, after they start using these tools? Or is this just official bravado?
Yah, but if a company's named "Bland" you're still going to be able to find it in the Yellow Pages. It's when you want to find who's having problems with "Bland" in Google that you're in trouble. Doesn't matter whether Bland's a brand of muffler or mp3 encoder.
I think the worst example of this is probably ".NET". How do you search for that? "dotnet"? "microsoft.net" works pretty well for their own site, but most references to ".NET" are standalone, and you have to try mixing in other keywords like "windows".
At least with "There" you can search for their domain "there.com", because people seem to refer to it that way in self-defense.
Silverlight is basically a.NET-based version of Flash or Java. Being based on.NET instead of a sandboxed interpreter it should be faster, and they get to work with Novell to try and get some open source street cred.
Apple has more power in the media marketplace than Microsoft by way of iTunes and they have consistently weilded that power in favor of DRM.
Oh, right, the first online vendor to convince a major label to go DRM-free is "in favor of DRM". There STILL wouldn't be any DRM-free music supported by the major labels if Apple hadn't done that. That's what opened the floodgates.
iTunes DRM is "honor system" at best.
* The implementation is comical: it downloads the file DRM-free and applies the DRM in the application. Yes, there's ways to take advantage of this. * It makes no use of hardware or kernel support for DRM, except where absolutely required by the label, even on Windows where there is extensive kernel support for strong DRM. * THEY TELL YOU HOW TO REMOVE THE DRM FROM MUSIC TRACKS, by burning a CD.
OK, I get it, you're pissed off at Apple. I understand. You would much rather they commit suicide in the marketplace by playing chicken with the labels. It's not going to happen... they've played hardball hard enough, and it's worked, but they're not going to hand the labels over to Amazon and Microsoft just because you've got a bug up your ass about Steve bloody Jobs.
All this HDMI shit? It's already in Windows, and Windows hardware, and if Apple had a hard-on for DRM like Microsoft does they wouldn't even let you play videos on Macs without HDMI at all. Not just on the latest Macbooks with the wrong kind of monitor attached. Because that's what it's like for Windows users with Windows Media Player.
So, yes, you're talking out of your ass. When Apple does something stupid, or evil, I'm the first to call them on it. I've gotten modded down here by real Mac fanbois often enough to prove that. But this? This isn't "in favor of DRM", this is foot dragging compared with Microsoft.
Apple has, and continues to be, the largest supporter of DRM out there.
Regardless of whether I believe Steve Jobs or not, you're talking out of your ass.
Microsoft has far stronger DRM support in Windows, including using encryption within the kernel to keep device drivers from spying on each other and including "tilt switches" to disable parts or all of the OS if necessary to enforce this, and Windows video cards have supported HDCP for at least a couple of years. Apple is late to the table, here.
And Apple is small potatoes. If every Mac in the world was magically mutated to support HDCP, it would still be a small fraction of the HDCP-compliant devices out there. Probably even a small fraction of the HDCP-compliant computer systems.
Apples not important enough to be the biggest supporter of ANYTHING, let alone DRM.
I once thought Microsoft might do that, but.NET isn't really a new API, it's a new API *framework*. The same issues apply, and as Mono demonstrates duplicating the framework is not a killer barrier to entry.
To really switch to.NET and keep their barrier to entry they would need to provide a rich API that couldn't be duplicated easily on UNIX, and so far that seems to be mostly duplication of - and bridges to - the existing Win32 APIs.
Also, implementing too much in.NET itself would hurt... you're looking at a performance hit as high as 10:1 and rarely less than 50% overhead. Even absorbing the performance hit of Vista in the past 2 years of CPU improvements has hurt, and that was only 20-40% at worst.
There's certainly a lot of interest in that. There was so much talk out there about the possibility that Windows 7 was going to be this kind of "New Windows" with legacy software running in a thin emulation environment that it became conventional wisdom at one point. They could do this... a lot more easily than Apple did... because the Windows application model is not tightly coupled to the API exposed through it... for example, the Pocket PC test environment in the Pocket PC SDK is just a Windows application with a different set of DLLs available to it. Whether they will or not is a different matter, but it's something they certainly could do.
Part of the reason I don't see them going that way is that currently the complexity of the Windows API is where their application barrier to entry lives. Given a simpler and cleaner API it would be SO much easier for projects like Wine to emulate it on top of UNIX-based systems.
Things are not that simple however, especially when you look closely at the kernels. [...]
I'm not arguing that Linux, OpenBSD, or OSX are as good for the purpose you're using AIX for, I'm just saying that the fact that the most popular UNIX desktop products aren't licensed from whoever owns the formerly-AT&T copyrights this week doesn't mean that "UNIX on the Desktop is dead". It just means that the UNIX desktop market has changed.
Neal Stephenson doesn't really get everything he talks about. He's really good at attaching powerful language to what he thinks he gets, and what he gets is sometimes very close to the original.
I don't think that describing UNIX in terms of the hacker subculture is really appropriate or relevant.
The difference is that UNIX was designed by programmers for programmers to use. The end users were either programmers or plugged in to the programming grapevine. But the people who developed it weren't hackers... they had a mental model of "what UNIX was", and they documented it, and they drove the design in terms of that model. They tried all kinds of approaches and threw away the ones that didn't fit well with that model.
When it became assimilated into the hacker subculture, it pretty much stopped growing within that model. Berkeley sockets, System V IPC, X11, virtually every API layered on top of UNIX outside Bell Labs has been a deviation from that model.
What UNIX is, the core of everything that can be called UNIX, is the dependence on a small set of APIs and tools based on what left Bell Labs in the 6th and 7th edition Unix Programming Manuals. You can strip out everything since then, sockets, streams, kernel modules, X11, and what is left is recognizably UNIX. But if you start somewhere else, and layer that on top of something that's got a fundamentally different model... even if it's a really nice hacker-friendly model like (say) AmigaDOS, what you get isn't UNIX... it's clearly and obviously a UNIX emulation. You start using it, and you can tell pretty quickly that pipes and files aren't the essential primitives of that system.
There are edge cases. There's no hard and fast definition. You have to taste it and say whether Interix or OpenVMS or QNX or BeOS is really "UNIX". There are other operating systems that have had similar origins... The Amiga Exec is clearly a programmer-oriented environment with a tight model of how things should work (pity about that TRIPOS-flavored bag on the side) without being UNIX. PalmOS is another environment that gives the the same kinds of vibes that... here is something designed by someone who really know where is towel is. It's clumsy and inconvenient outside its domain... networking on PalmOS is a nightmare... but within it, it's beautiful.
UNIX is a kind of Gilgamesh epic, but it's not an epic about the hacker subculture, it's an epic about a group of people who came up with an amazing model of interacting with computers, one that was as revolutionary in its day was Xerox's windows and mice and menus were less than a decade later. It ties in to the hacker subculture because it's something that the hacker subculture could build on and use from the very beginning, thanks to Software Tools, but it's no more THE epic of the hacker subculture than the history of Lisp, Emacs, Forth, or Perl are.
For all I know they're writing applications in a native API as well, and only using these hosted operating systems for non-critical or untrusted services, I don't know, I'm just noting that there are situations where virtualization does improve security over the non-virtualized alternative.
VMWare makes systems more secure than if you ran multiple applications in the same OS image.
VMWare makes systems cheaper than if you bought separate hardware to run each application.
This presumably provides the same kind of division, plus it's been piddled on by the DoD to smell more secure. Remember, in avionics, weight requirements can make "more expensive" into "impossible", so it improves security by allowing you to use multiple instances of the OS where that wouldn't otherwise be possible,
UNIX is as UNIX does. If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, you might as well call it a duck... and OS X and Linux and BSD are all UNIX for any practical purposes.
Macros are supposed to help editing and creating the document. For that they usually have access to everything your wordprocessor, spreadsheet or editor can access, including your filesystem
Macros that are provided from OUTSIDE the document, yes.
Macros EMBEDDED IN a document must NOT be granted any rights to modify any state outside the currently in-memory copy of that document... and a saved copy IF you choose to save it.
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Automatic archiving and retention is a real advantage of Exchange (or Notes) servers. In corporatations with good implementation of Exchange email is automatically stored and can be easily retrieved with appropriate security.
So you say. I've recently been commiserating with a fellow who's in the process of trying to take the mess of non-standard crap that Notes calls email and convert it back to the original format it was received from the Internet in response to a legal request. Neither Notes nor Exchange retain the original documents including full headers. For the future he's sticking a regular UNIX SMTP transport in front and archiving what goes through THAT.
And, well, I've had to actually work with the corporate managed IT. Often the real work goes on behind the IT department's back, on user-run wikis and jabber servers, because the Microsoft and Lotus "solutions" are too cumbersome to get any real work done.
They always manage to get some police officer to say "if NewSpeedTrapThingy makes people slow down, we're all for it". Doesn't matter what the thingy is, from radar detectors and people talking on CB Radio onwards... is there actually any research indicating that people with radar detectors or whatever drive slower, on average, after they start using these tools? Or is this just official bravado?
Yah, but if a company's named "Bland" you're still going to be able to find it in the Yellow Pages. It's when you want to find who's having problems with "Bland" in Google that you're in trouble. Doesn't matter whether Bland's a brand of muffler or mp3 encoder.
The Internet turns all the knobs to 11.
I think the worst example of this is probably ".NET". How do you search for that? "dotnet"? "microsoft.net" works pretty well for their own site, but most references to ".NET" are standalone, and you have to try mixing in other keywords like "windows".
At least with "There" you can search for their domain "there.com", because people seem to refer to it that way in self-defense.
I prefer the term "The camel's nose under the tent".
Silverlight is basically a .NET-based version of Flash or Java. Being based on .NET instead of a sandboxed interpreter it should be faster, and they get to work with Novell to try and get some open source street cred.
Disclaimer: You may want to leave airport arrival and customs clearance out of the demo experience.
But there are these really great cavity search poseballs you could use...
Mod parent up "informative" and "bloody fascinating".
Google has finally had their "Bob". No big deal.
Now if they had let you put avatars into Google Street View and the rest of the Google Earth line-up, that would have been cool.
Seriously, a knock off of Second-Life?
No. Not even vaguely.
Not even a knock-off of IMVU.
It was more like a slightly fancier version of Puzzle Pirates, but without the games.
Apple has more power in the media marketplace than Microsoft by way of iTunes and they have consistently weilded that power in favor of DRM.
Oh, right, the first online vendor to convince a major label to go DRM-free is "in favor of DRM". There STILL wouldn't be any DRM-free music supported by the major labels if Apple hadn't done that. That's what opened the floodgates.
iTunes DRM is "honor system" at best.
* The implementation is comical: it downloads the file DRM-free and applies the DRM in the application. Yes, there's ways to take advantage of this.
* It makes no use of hardware or kernel support for DRM, except where absolutely required by the label, even on Windows where there is extensive kernel support for strong DRM.
* THEY TELL YOU HOW TO REMOVE THE DRM FROM MUSIC TRACKS, by burning a CD.
OK, I get it, you're pissed off at Apple. I understand. You would much rather they commit suicide in the marketplace by playing chicken with the labels. It's not going to happen... they've played hardball hard enough, and it's worked, but they're not going to hand the labels over to Amazon and Microsoft just because you've got a bug up your ass about Steve bloody Jobs.
All this HDMI shit? It's already in Windows, and Windows hardware, and if Apple had a hard-on for DRM like Microsoft does they wouldn't even let you play videos on Macs without HDMI at all. Not just on the latest Macbooks with the wrong kind of monitor attached. Because that's what it's like for Windows users with Windows Media Player.
So, yes, you're talking out of your ass. When Apple does something stupid, or evil, I'm the first to call them on it. I've gotten modded down here by real Mac fanbois often enough to prove that. But this? This isn't "in favor of DRM", this is foot dragging compared with Microsoft.
Apple has, and continues to be, the largest supporter of DRM out there.
Regardless of whether I believe Steve Jobs or not, you're talking out of your ass.
Microsoft has far stronger DRM support in Windows, including using encryption within the kernel to keep device drivers from spying on each other and including "tilt switches" to disable parts or all of the OS if necessary to enforce this, and Windows video cards have supported HDCP for at least a couple of years. Apple is late to the table, here.
And Apple is small potatoes. If every Mac in the world was magically mutated to support HDCP, it would still be a small fraction of the HDCP-compliant devices out there. Probably even a small fraction of the HDCP-compliant computer systems.
Apples not important enough to be the biggest supporter of ANYTHING, let alone DRM.
It's no coincidence that the first operating system under GPL is the first to receive enough contributed work to remain relevant.
Hurd is relevant?
I once thought Microsoft might do that, but .NET isn't really a new API, it's a new API *framework*. The same issues apply, and as Mono demonstrates duplicating the framework is not a killer barrier to entry.
To really switch to .NET and keep their barrier to entry they would need to provide a rich API that couldn't be duplicated easily on UNIX, and so far that seems to be mostly duplication of - and bridges to - the existing Win32 APIs.
Also, implementing too much in .NET itself would hurt... you're looking at a performance hit as high as 10:1 and rarely less than 50% overhead. Even absorbing the performance hit of Vista in the past 2 years of CPU improvements has hurt, and that was only 20-40% at worst.
If you buy a Ford Mustang engine it is illegal for Ford to say you are ONLY allowed to install this in Ford Mustangs.
First, physical objects are not treated, legally, the same way as software.
Second, are you absolutely sure of that? Can you cite actual law, or are you just repeating "conventional wisdom"?
There's certainly a lot of interest in that. There was so much talk out there about the possibility that Windows 7 was going to be this kind of "New Windows" with legacy software running in a thin emulation environment that it became conventional wisdom at one point. They could do this... a lot more easily than Apple did... because the Windows application model is not tightly coupled to the API exposed through it... for example, the Pocket PC test environment in the Pocket PC SDK is just a Windows application with a different set of DLLs available to it. Whether they will or not is a different matter, but it's something they certainly could do.
Part of the reason I don't see them going that way is that currently the complexity of the Windows API is where their application barrier to entry lives. Given a simpler and cleaner API it would be SO much easier for projects like Wine to emulate it on top of UNIX-based systems.
Things are not that simple however, especially when you look closely at the kernels. [...]
I'm not arguing that Linux, OpenBSD, or OSX are as good for the purpose you're using AIX for, I'm just saying that the fact that the most popular UNIX desktop products aren't licensed from whoever owns the formerly-AT&T copyrights this week doesn't mean that "UNIX on the Desktop is dead". It just means that the UNIX desktop market has changed.
Why is it illegal? It may be undesirable, from the point of view of the consumer, but how exactly is it illegal?
Neal Stephenson doesn't really get everything he talks about. He's really good at attaching powerful language to what he thinks he gets, and what he gets is sometimes very close to the original.
I don't think that describing UNIX in terms of the hacker subculture is really appropriate or relevant.
The difference is that UNIX was designed by programmers for programmers to use. The end users were either programmers or plugged in to the programming grapevine. But the people who developed it weren't hackers... they had a mental model of "what UNIX was", and they documented it, and they drove the design in terms of that model. They tried all kinds of approaches and threw away the ones that didn't fit well with that model.
When it became assimilated into the hacker subculture, it pretty much stopped growing within that model. Berkeley sockets, System V IPC, X11, virtually every API layered on top of UNIX outside Bell Labs has been a deviation from that model.
What UNIX is, the core of everything that can be called UNIX, is the dependence on a small set of APIs and tools based on what left Bell Labs in the 6th and 7th edition Unix Programming Manuals. You can strip out everything since then, sockets, streams, kernel modules, X11, and what is left is recognizably UNIX. But if you start somewhere else, and layer that on top of something that's got a fundamentally different model... even if it's a really nice hacker-friendly model like (say) AmigaDOS, what you get isn't UNIX... it's clearly and obviously a UNIX emulation. You start using it, and you can tell pretty quickly that pipes and files aren't the essential primitives of that system.
There are edge cases. There's no hard and fast definition. You have to taste it and say whether Interix or OpenVMS or QNX or BeOS is really "UNIX". There are other operating systems that have had similar origins... The Amiga Exec is clearly a programmer-oriented environment with a tight model of how things should work (pity about that TRIPOS-flavored bag on the side) without being UNIX. PalmOS is another environment that gives the the same kinds of vibes that... here is something designed by someone who really know where is towel is. It's clumsy and inconvenient outside its domain... networking on PalmOS is a nightmare... but within it, it's beautiful.
UNIX is a kind of Gilgamesh epic, but it's not an epic about the hacker subculture, it's an epic about a group of people who came up with an amazing model of interacting with computers, one that was as revolutionary in its day was Xerox's windows and mice and menus were less than a decade later. It ties in to the hacker subculture because it's something that the hacker subculture could build on and use from the very beginning, thanks to Software Tools, but it's no more THE epic of the hacker subculture than the history of Lisp, Emacs, Forth, or Perl are.
For all I know they're writing applications in a native API as well, and only using these hosted operating systems for non-critical or untrusted services, I don't know, I'm just noting that there are situations where virtualization does improve security over the non-virtualized alternative.
VMWare makes systems more secure than if you ran multiple applications in the same OS image.
VMWare makes systems cheaper than if you bought separate hardware to run each application.
This presumably provides the same kind of division, plus it's been piddled on by the DoD to smell more secure. Remember, in avionics, weight requirements can make "more expensive" into "impossible", so it improves security by allowing you to use multiple instances of the OS where that wouldn't otherwise be possible,
The 950 is junk too. What was intel going to do, license a chipset from ATI or nVidia?
UNIX is as UNIX does. If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, you might as well call it a duck... and OS X and Linux and BSD are all UNIX for any practical purposes.
Macros are supposed to help editing and creating the document. For that they usually have access to everything your wordprocessor, spreadsheet or editor can access, including your filesystem
Macros that are provided from OUTSIDE the document, yes.
Macros EMBEDDED IN a document must NOT be granted any rights to modify any state outside the currently in-memory copy of that document... and a saved copy IF you choose to save it.
He would have been only 12 years old at the time they show him racing his bike and seeing the enterprise being built.
Precocious little SOB, isn't he?