Firstly, a version of Windows as you describe would be fantastic. MS would focus on making a fast, reliable & genuinely brilliant operating system. (As opposed to what they've got now.) On top of that I could install all the programs you mention above, which in turn would be more reliable because of the increased stability on layers closer to the hardware.
Secondly, you're right; it is pretty useless to Joe Average. That's where the OEMs come in, selling pre-configured and pre-packaged computers. OEMs would then compete on variety or specialty, offering any range of configurations, from bare-bones windows+free/software, to Windows+MS Office+Quickbooks for accountants/self-employed people etc. Why don't you get that? Microsoft.
No kidding, Ballmer has become a complete liability to MS. He had exactly the same effect in Munich, which is switching to OSS care of IBM. Mentioning the developer developer clips is a low blow, but they're a memorable sight that makes it harder for people to take him seriously.
Now, I do think that you want an outgoing, charismatic person at the top of an innovative, profitable software company, but he should be charismatic to people outside the company too. An important reason this news is bad for MS is that the decision to go ahead by the EU will be seen as a defeat for Ballmer, and that will damage his reputation with the big shareholders. They want a piece of that piggy bank too.
MS has two problems: firstly, they've been naughty, and they're having their knuckles rapped in front of the class. Secondly, they're a very rich and very prominent company that competes with a lot of people and doesn't have many friends left. That makes them a natural target. Whether they deserve it or not is... controversial:-)
Also, never go to a meeting that has no agenda. If the meeting has a subject, treat it as a one-point agenda. Any offtopic points should be put on the agenda for the next meeting. This applies to all types of meetings.
Actually, I think I heard Carmack say somewhere that the PC version was basically finished, and that they were being paid to sit on it by MS so they could release it simultaneously for the X-Box...
Heh, same with me and HL2. Except Valve actually set a date.
I'm not that annoyed, (it's a sweet machine), I just hope that it won't be entry-level by the time either of those two come out. HL2 and D3 are the only games I'll ever upgrade for... until HL3 or D4:-)
Well, can you show me a successful communist regime that is not a highly-centralised government with a strongman at the top? Laos and Vietnam don't count, since they both have private sectors.
I forget who it was who said that a common misperception on communism is that it's a good idea that's just implemented poorly - every single time it's ever been tried. Communism is a fundamentally bad idea.
Cold war or not, this is just callous disregard for human life.
I think you're showing your age, you obviously have no idea of the threat Communism posed to the Western world and it's way of life. Yes, hundreds of people could have been killed, but that's war, and war is Hell, cold or not. Beat on America all you like, but no American administration in living memory has deliberately and systematically exterminated tens of millions of it's own civilians.
That's funny, but UnknowingFool is actually correct, in that any MS dev worth their salt will tell you that of the 9x series, 98SE is the best, and ME is the worst.
Google updates every month, and every month webmasters throw hissy fits over PR and SERPs.
I get SEO spam simply for being the technical contact for a couple of domains at work, and I will bet my bottom dollar that anyone who does business with those people will be wiped of the map come the next update.
By contrast, all the sites I manage still show up as usual. I've been no.1 on key terms for a while, simply 'cos the sites provide relevant, useful info in a well-structured manner, and doesn't mess around with Google.
One thing I am curious about is whether or not Stuart Langridge's accessible image replacement technique counts as an attempt at spamming Google: after all, it hides header text behind images...
Of course it's self-inflicted. We know a correct typing posture is absolutely essential to avoid RSI, however, hardly any office workers do. But ''Slouching is bad'' is not half as self-evident as ''knives are sharp''.
I'm not trying to plead ignorance on behalf of the uninformed, but the fact remains that people do suffer, and many of them had no idea of what they were doing to themselves.
Displays embedded in contact lenses would be orders of magnitude less clumsy than even lightweight VR helmets. At that scale they could probably be powered by eye motion (as some watches are powered by wrist motion), or you could embed miniature solar panels where the contact lense covers the iris, with the LCD just covering the pupil.
I'm not saying that there isn't astroturf, of course there is. What I am trying to put across is that I don't think Scoble/C4L etc. are astroturfing, they're MS employees who blog. And if they like what they do, there's no big deal with them blogging about it - as long as they don't get themselves fired:-)
That's one of the reasons I think there seem to be so many MS staff who have blogs - they want to be seen encoraging an MS community.
Or maybe there are actually some cool people in MS who aren't afraid to publish their own opinions? While MS ain't exactly a nice company, it can be a nice company to work for, and it's a bit silly to expect a monoculture of Dr. Evils.
AFAIK, C-A-D is a "Secure Access Key", to use the nomenclature. IIRC it's/supposed/ to be impossible to intercept in software, although of course running NT* on a VM should work.
A SAK is actually one thing that most distros lack.
Even assuming you're not joking, but assuming that you entered it correctly, what's <; w:versionOfBuiltInStylenames w:val="4"/> doing in there, or <; w:style w:type="list" w:default="on" w:styleId="NoList">? Is that Slashcode munging your text, or is that in the source? ";" isn't a valid name for an element.
Also, I'm curious, but what happens when you toggle the value in <w:saveInvalidXML w:val="off"/>?
Re:Design flaw or Feature?
on
Cracking GSM
·
· Score: 1
That the last ten bits of the key is zero is not a weakness in A5/1 but a deliberate weakness in the system. - Yeah, I was trying to say that but I guess I wasn't too clear.
I haven't seen anything much on A5/1, the only mention in the Biryukov-Shamir-Wagner paper was ''At the rump session of Crypto 99, Ian Goldberg and David Wagner announced an attack on A5/2 which requires very few pseudo random bits and just O(216) steps. This demonstrated that the \export version" A5/2 is totally insecure.''.
I haven't seen any actual reports of A5/3 rollout, just snippets of marketing BS promising Q3 02.
Re:"The GSM association is not happy."
on
Cracking GSM
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Did they have their design checked out by someone who understands cryptography?
The hash function (A3/A8) used in the default implementation of the GSM protocol for the challenge-response authentication had a vulnerability of a type known about in the cryptographic community for years.
This wasn't a deliberate weakening, because this flaw had no real impact on the ability of law enforcement to intercept, and allowed cloning of GSM handsets: something that was definitely not supposed to be possible.
They've learnt from their mistakes though: the 3G protocol has undergone extensive public review , as has the ciphers they chose.
Re:Design flaw or Feature?
on
Cracking GSM
·
· Score: 1
Law enforcement taps take place within the telco infrastructure: i.e. after the conversation has been received & decrypted by the base station.
According to Ross Anderson, most inter-base station communications is done via microwaves, (because the landline infrastructure is generally owned by a competitor), and IIRC most of the microwave transmissions are in the clear.
Transport-level privacy between handset and base station was provided by two ciphers of different strengths: A5/1 for Europe & the USA, A5/2 for export (and Australia:-)
A5/1 turned out to be trivial (3 LFSRs?), and could be cracked in realtime on a 2000 PC. Also, the last ten bits of the key were always zero. So A5/1 was deliberately weakened. Who can say how bad A5/2 was. A5/1 has been replaced by A5/3 for most GSM networks.
Slashdot Mirror
Two issues:
Firstly, a version of Windows as you describe would be fantastic. MS would focus on making a fast, reliable & genuinely brilliant operating system. (As opposed to what they've got now.) On top of that I could install all the programs you mention above, which in turn would be more reliable because of the increased stability on layers closer to the hardware.
Secondly, you're right; it is pretty useless to Joe Average. That's where the OEMs come in, selling pre-configured and pre-packaged computers. OEMs would then compete on variety or specialty, offering any range of configurations, from bare-bones windows+free/software, to Windows+MS Office+Quickbooks for accountants/self-employed people etc. Why don't you get that? Microsoft.
No kidding, Ballmer has become a complete liability to MS. He had exactly the same effect in Munich, which is switching to OSS care of IBM. Mentioning the developer developer clips is a low blow, but they're a memorable sight that makes it harder for people to take him seriously.
Now, I do think that you want an outgoing, charismatic person at the top of an innovative, profitable software company, but he should be charismatic to people outside the company too. An important reason this news is bad for MS is that the decision to go ahead by the EU will be seen as a defeat for Ballmer, and that will damage his reputation with the big shareholders. They want a piece of that piggy bank too.
MS has two problems: firstly, they've been naughty, and they're having their knuckles rapped in front of the class. Secondly, they're a very rich and very prominent company that competes with a lot of people and doesn't have many friends left. That makes them a natural target. Whether they deserve it or not is... controversial :-)
Also, never go to a meeting that has no agenda. If the meeting has a subject, treat it as a one-point agenda. Any offtopic points should be put on the agenda for the next meeting. This applies to all types of meetings.
Actually, I think I heard Carmack say somewhere that the PC version was basically finished, and that they were being paid to sit on it by MS so they could release it simultaneously for the X-Box...
Heh, same with me and HL2. Except Valve actually set a date.
I'm not that annoyed, (it's a sweet machine), I just hope that it won't be entry-level by the time either of those two come out. HL2 and D3 are the only games I'll ever upgrade for... until HL3 or D4 :-)
Well, can you show me a successful communist regime that is not a highly-centralised government with a strongman at the top? Laos and Vietnam don't count, since they both have private sectors.
I forget who it was who said that a common misperception on communism is that it's a good idea that's just implemented poorly - every single time it's ever been tried. Communism is a fundamentally bad idea.
Hmm, you got a point there. Maybe that was a bit too confrontational :-)
That's hardly living memory, is it?
I think you're showing your age, you obviously have no idea of the threat Communism posed to the Western world and it's way of life. Yes, hundreds of people could have been killed, but that's war, and war is Hell, cold or not. Beat on America all you like, but no American administration in living memory has deliberately and systematically exterminated tens of millions of it's own civilians.
That's funny, but UnknowingFool is actually correct, in that any MS dev worth their salt will tell you that of the 9x series, 98SE is the best, and ME is the worst.
And when all you have is an axe, then every problem begins to look like hours of fun...
Ask any sysadmin.
Google updates every month, and every month webmasters throw hissy fits over PR and SERPs.
I get SEO spam simply for being the technical contact for a couple of domains at work, and I will bet my bottom dollar that anyone who does business with those people will be wiped of the map come the next update.
By contrast, all the sites I manage still show up as usual. I've been no.1 on key terms for a while, simply 'cos the sites provide relevant, useful info in a well-structured manner, and doesn't mess around with Google.
One thing I am curious about is whether or not Stuart Langridge's accessible image replacement technique counts as an attempt at spamming Google: after all, it hides header text behind images...
Of course it's self-inflicted. We know a correct typing posture is absolutely essential to avoid RSI, however, hardly any office workers do. But ''Slouching is bad'' is not half as self-evident as ''knives are sharp''.
I'm not trying to plead ignorance on behalf of the uninformed, but the fact remains that people do suffer, and many of them had no idea of what they were doing to themselves.
Displays embedded in contact lenses would be orders of magnitude less clumsy than even lightweight VR helmets. At that scale they could probably be powered by eye motion (as some watches are powered by wrist motion), or you could embed miniature solar panels where the contact lense covers the iris, with the LCD just covering the pupil.
Except they don't sing praises. To give you an example, I remember C4L unapologetically slagging off MSN Instant Messenger several times.
I'm not saying that there isn't astroturf, of course there is. What I am trying to put across is that I don't think Scoble/C4L etc. are astroturfing, they're MS employees who blog. And if they like what they do, there's no big deal with them blogging about it - as long as they don't get themselves fired :-)
Or maybe there are actually some cool people in MS who aren't afraid to publish their own opinions? While MS ain't exactly a nice company, it can be a nice company to work for, and it's a bit silly to expect a monoculture of Dr. Evils.
Let me guess: is it a 3-series version? TC 4.1 and up don't have too many problems with resources, from what I've seen.
"Trusted Computing" was around for a long time before MS hijacked the term. The TCB as a concept was first described in 1972. See this e2 node.
AFAIK, C-A-D is a "Secure Access Key", to use the nomenclature. IIRC it's /supposed/ to be impossible to intercept in software, although of course running NT* on a VM should work.
A SAK is actually one thing that most distros lack.
Even assuming you're not joking, but assuming that you entered it correctly, what's <; w:versionOfBuiltInStylenames w:val="4"/> doing in there, or <; w:style w:type="list" w:default="on" w:styleId="NoList">? Is that Slashcode munging your text, or is that in the source? ";" isn't a valid name for an element.
Also, I'm curious, but what happens when you toggle the value in <w:saveInvalidXML w:val="off"/>?
That the last ten bits of the key is zero is not a weakness in A5/1 but a deliberate weakness in the system. - Yeah, I was trying to say that but I guess I wasn't too clear.
I haven't seen anything much on A5/1, the only mention in the Biryukov-Shamir-Wagner paper was ''At the rump session of Crypto 99, Ian Goldberg and David Wagner announced an attack on A5/2 which requires very few pseudo random bits and just O(216) steps. This demonstrated that the \export version" A5/2 is totally insecure.''.
I haven't seen any actual reports of A5/3 rollout, just snippets of marketing BS promising Q3 02.
A: No.
The hash function (A3/A8) used in the default implementation of the GSM protocol for the challenge-response authentication had a vulnerability of a type known about in the cryptographic community for years.
This wasn't a deliberate weakening, because this flaw had no real impact on the ability of law enforcement to intercept, and allowed cloning of GSM handsets: something that was definitely not supposed to be possible.
They've learnt from their mistakes though: the 3G protocol has undergone extensive public review , as has the ciphers they chose.
Law enforcement taps take place within the telco infrastructure: i.e. after the conversation has been received & decrypted by the base station.
According to Ross Anderson, most inter-base station communications is done via microwaves, (because the landline infrastructure is generally owned by a competitor), and IIRC most of the microwave transmissions are in the clear.
Transport-level privacy between handset and base station was provided by two ciphers of different strengths: A5/1 for Europe & the USA, A5/2 for export (and Australia :-)
A5/1 turned out to be trivial (3 LFSRs?), and could be cracked in realtime on a 2000 PC. Also, the last ten bits of the key were always zero. So A5/1 was deliberately weakened. Who can say how bad A5/2 was. A5/1 has been replaced by A5/3 for most GSM networks.
IIRC Nintento makes a profit on every GC sold? They're not that hi-spec. Feel free to correct me if that's not the case.