You know, I wasn't going to reply to this because the parent's reply to my comment is obviously a flame.
However, I would just like to take a few seconds to point out the classic flaming elements of the post for the audience's edification:
Repetitive mockery of the original post for rhetorical effect:
Because some people here apparently cannot read English, I will quote, verbatim, the relevant section of the IDG article...
The insinuation that the parent poster does not understand something taught in elementary school:
so it is puzzling why some have such difficulty with the type of basic reading comprehension that is taught in elementary schools.
The suggestion of confusion or even stupidity as an explanation for the parent's comment:
This confusion would surely be resolved if the confused parties would simply read the articles. I would hope that this was an honest mistake, that the commentator is not intentionally being utterly obtuse.
The use of pejoratives like "self-aggrandizing" and "pseudo-intellectual" when referring to the poster:
assuming the commentator wants to be regarded as something other than Slashdot's self-appointed, self-aggrandizing, pseudo-intellectual grammar police.
Well, that concludes our lesson dissecting a flame today. Class dismissed!
Because some people here apparently cannot read English, I will quote, verbatim, the relevant section of the IDG article you have just cited:
Microsoft is changing its tactics because its earlier attacks on open source have backfired, Raymond said. "A lot of people they talked to were interpreting 'Linux as cancer' as self-serving FUD (an attempt to create fear, uncertainty and doubt), and the only thing it was doing was making Linux look good," he said.
As you can quite plainly see, the article itself clearly quotes OSI President Eric Raymond as qualifying Microsoft's previous strategy as a FUD campaign (he even uses the "Linux as cancer" metaphor). At NO time in the article does Martin Taylor, the new MS strategist, say these things about previous MS strategy.
Now, contrast the above straight quote from the IDG article with the Slashdot-summary:
Taylor says his goal is to change Microsoft's competitive strategy by pursuing a fact-based approach instead of continuing the previous discredit-and-undermine strategy that was characterized by calling open source and Linux software 'a cancer, un-American and bankrupt' among other things.
As you can clearly see, the submitter begins the statement with the independent clause "Taylor says" followed by the dependent clause "[that] his goal is to...". Everything that follows in the dependent clause has clearly been attributed to something that Taylor actually says in the article. The problem is, he does not say anything about Linux being a cancer, or even acknowledging that this was Microsoft's previous strategy.
It seems that you're the only one here putting words in someone's mouth.
I would hope that it is quite clear to English speakers everywhere that I have not misquoted anyone, unlike the submitter of this otherwise interesting article.
I would hope that this was an honest mistake, that the submitter meant to say something like this:
Taylor says his goal is to change Microsoft's competitive strategy by pursuing a fact-based approach instead of what he calls the previous "emotional approach." The president of the Open Source Initiative notes that this is a significant change from the previous discredit-and-undermine strategy that has been characterized by calling open source and Linux software 'a cancer, un-American and bankrupt' among other things.
THAT is how the article's summary should have been phrased, assuming the submitter wanted to be accurate.
If you read the article, Open Source Initiative President Eric Raymond was the one who said that Microsoft's previous strategy was claiming Linux was a "cancer." Taylor never used those words and never suggested that was Microsoft's previous strategy, as the headline suggests.
All Taylor admits is that previously Microsoft had defaulted to an "emotional" argument, and that now they are switching to a "fact-based" one, whatever that means.
The only reason I'm correcting the submitter here is that it makes no sense to put words in people's mouth, even if you hate them. It is counter-productive to legitimate debate and argument.
The Windows API was pretty innovative for something created in 1984, years before X was publicly released (Athena was started in 1984 but X wasn't publicly released until 1988). I think you're failing to understand how truly old the Windows API really is.
I don't think you'll find any other pre-1985 GUIs that perform event handling the way Windows does it (whether you like their solution or not). I'd say that alone makes it an original implementation, and would make a reasonable patent.
Considering Microsoft has made moves against Wine before (copyrighted header files springs to mind)
You call that a move? That's just something they forgot to do, and Wine may have reminded them. When a move against Wine happens, you will know about it.
The chances of them having a patent that is required to implement an API is practically nil and has never been encountered in 10 years of reverse engineering Windows.
Well, I guarantee you that if someone created a Macintosh API emulator, they'd get their ass sued off (reverse engineered or not). Microsoft isn't exactly on unheard-of legal ground here, and all it takes is sufficient legal resources to quash a project like this under a mountain of legal paperwork.
Personally, I think it is quite remarkable that MS hasn't really taken any action against Wine. It apparently just isn't worth their time, yet.
Yes, there are solutions, but they're either rare, expensive, hacks, or a combination of the above.
UPnP's Internet Gateway Device control protocol is neither a hack nor is it expensive.
The idea is simple; your NAT firewall is UPnP enabled, and UPnP aware applications simply use the standard UPnP IGDP API to configure the firewall for it use. No work involved on the user's part at all!
And if you think this is far-fetched or won't be available, realize that many current home broadband routers already support this protocol, and applications such as Windows Messenger already make use of UPnP router features.
Or better yet, they can write open-source drivers with great features, and then leverage this contribution to gain goodwill from the community. Companies that help with open-source development have historically been viewed much more favorably that those which haven't bothered.
Let's investigate this idea of "goodwill" for a minute. Realtek makes open source drivers and specs available, but they're considered a low-end company that makes bargain-basement NIC chipsets that can handle 65% of the throughput of the market leaders for 20% of the price. Where is the goodwill? Has the open source industry done anything for Realtek? Their chipsets are already integrated into countless motherboards, and used on some of the most prevalent NICs in the industry; they donated their driver code. But I don't see anyone out there saying, "Thank you, Realtek! You are our favorite NIC chipset maker! We recommend that everyone who runs Linux go out and buy a card with your chipsets!"
And what about wireless? The last time I checked, the only drivers that worked were the reverse-engineered Prism II chipset drivers for the ancient Lucent WaveLAN and compatible cards. Good luck getting your high speed D-link, SMC, Netgear, or Intel card working. Apparently the "goodwill" of the community isn't enough of an incentive for them to release the details of how their MAC layer operates.
What about video? Well, you basically have ATI and NVidia, neither of whom release open source drivers. I guess they're not going to get any goodwill from the Linux community either! Should I sell my stock as a result?
Look, I know I'm being overly sarcastic here, but "goodwill" is no incentive for a real company to release drivers that give out intimate details about the inner architecture of their HW designs. Graphics cards makers will NEVER do this because their drivers are now boiling down to software routines written for GPUs in the equivalent of graphics assembly language. Giving away the code to these routines would give away any optimization strategies that they had spent time and millions of $$ researching and developing to beat their rivals.
I don't care what you think about open source, but wrong or right, most companies that own some sort of IP are generally not willing to give that away to everybody. If you want your platform to be seen as desirable to hardware developers, you need to keep that in mind.
Exactly. And to a large extent, I think open-source operating systems will be relegated to supplying such class drivers for well into the future for this reason. Class drivers are great for basic functionality, but for anything advanced they obviously suck. VESA video drivers, for instance, are a joke. The XFree86 team has done a pretty good job (using a combination of accepting donated code and outright reverse engineering) of getting functional accelerated video drivers for several chipsets. But they STILL won't live up to the level of features that IHVs can provide, writing code to their own chipset and specs.
What we as a community can do, however, is make writing good quality device drivers as EASY as possible for the hardware vendors. Then they will have no excuse not to write a driver for at least the top 3 platform OSes other than laziness.
It is a shame that vendor-supplied driver support is in such a questionable state for Linux, and I hope this improves with time. I like to see OSes compete on some semblance of a level playing field, but without adequate device drivers for the latest multimedia gadgets, OSes are nothing more than curiosities to most users.
For instance, if you download the newest kernel, there's a driver in there for the RTL3019 NIC chipset.
This is true only if you elect to compile the kernel module corresponding to this driver into your kernel. The source for the driver is distributed with the kernel, but it is up to you to elect its inclusion. This mechanism is no better than Windows, because some drivers just aren't included with the kernel sources, just as some drivers aren't shipped in-box with Windows. So you're still stuck with fetching your own driver direct from the vendor of your hardware.
Stock distro kernels typically include tons of drivers in their kernels just in case you happen to have a device needing that driver; in most cases, the driver tries to load and fails to initialize, and unloads itself from memory. In my opinion, this is a somewhat clumsy mechanism, but it works. At install, Windows determines what PnP devices are on your system and installs only the drivers for which a PnP ID has been discovered.
So all cards based on this chipset (which is a lot; it's a common low-cost chipset for NICs) use the same driver, unlike the Windows world where all those cards are about the same from a hardware POV, but the drivers are all different, and some may be better than others.
This is just completely wrong. Windows ships with in-box "class drivers" based on generic chipset specifications just as any other operating system does. In fact, Windows ships with a class driver for the Realtek 8139x chipset that works with just about any such card on the market (D-link 530TX comes to mind). The reason you might want a IHV-specific driver for your particular card is that some IHV's enable extra functionality that the class drivers do not support (wake-on-lan, encryption coprocessors, etc). Class drivers are a good way to get support out for devices quickly, but they are much worse at supporting specific features in individual cards.
Also, in Linux, the drivers are open-source just like the rest of the kernel, so people are able to file bug reports against them, debug them themselves, etc...
Again, only the ones included with the kernel are guaranteed to be open source. NVidia's display drivers are most certainly not open source. And you can't assume that all Windows drivers are closed-source, either: Realtek (makers of the RTLxxxx chipsets you alluded to earlier) typically releases source code so that IHVs that implement NICs using their chipset can easily adapt some working code to their drivers.
Admittedly, MS has finally, after all these years, started to recognize this problem, and is now trying this "signed" driver scheme to improve their situation.
Driver signing has nothing to do with making drivers open source, or eliminating problems with vendors going out of business, so I fail to see the connection there. WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) testing and signing is a method by which Microsoft can provide some basic level of quality assurance on device drivers that they do not directly produce. Poorly written kernel-mode device drivers are still the #1 cause of Windows crashes (according to some press release that I can't find at the moment), and Microsoft is attempting to address this by helping improve driver quality through WHQL and eliminating the need for future kernel-mode drivers (replacing them with user-mode drivers whenever possible, I'm sure).
Regardless, you will find no such centralized basic quality control mechanism for Linux drivers. If you sincerely believe that Linux device drivers are of higher overall quality than their Windows equivalents, I have some land to sell you right next to an oasis in Baja. (And before you flame me, I completely understand that Linux drivers often must be reverse-engineered, and that is a difficult process. But while I sympathize with Linux driver writers, this difficulty still doesn't support the claim that the resulting Linux driver model is superior to its Windows counterpart.)
To their debit, most WinDesktops that I'm aware of end up as glorified single-user machines, and that user is also.... Admin.
Most corporate Windows networks that I'm aware of use domain controllers for authentication, which means that even if you COULD gain local admin access to a workstation on the network, using this Swiss method isn't going to get you passwords other than the local passwords stored on the compromised box.
If their method worked on domains, this would be much more significant. As it stands, it is only a concern to physically insecure, standalone boxes.
This isn't popular to say I'm sure, but when it comes to pushing new technologies out the door into motherboard design, Intel is the clear frontrunner. Let's go through some of the items we now take for granted that Intel brought to us:
ACPI
ATX form factor (a godsend, IMHO)
integrated USB
AGP
the first PC IO-APIC
CPU ZIF-socket design (I remember soldered chips as late as 1991)
Microsoft should make it a habit of getting sued by states so that it can spread its software into the schools more effectively.
Continuing sarcasm...
Gosh, we certainly don't want our kids to learn to use software that is actually out there in the real world! That would be disastrous! Then kids might actually be able to DO something with computers coming out of U.S. high schools, and the curricula of community colleges everywhere would have to be completely restructured... What is the world coming to?
Let's stop this now, teach them to use the Bash shell, and show them that they don't really need MS Word when they can have the power of vi and LaTeX...
You can open a resturant in NYC with less paperwork than it takes to provision a single copper pair from an ILEC, and it shows in the pricing.
Haha, your point is well taken. Is there any wonder why Americans are so obese?:-P
As for Sweden, there were some posts a while back (I forget the thread) discussing the relative advantages/disadvantages of the Swedish governmental system that were quite interesting. Perhaps I can uncover them and post a link...
I actually admire Scandinavians greatly. I wish their populations weren't so stagnant. (To save you some searching for the population growth rates: Denmark 0.29%, Finland 0.14%, Sweden 0.02%, Norway 0.47%, USA 0.89%, Qatar 3.02%)
At least they're non-negative, unlike Bulgaria at -1.11%, Ukraine at -0.72%, and Russia at -0.33%...
Norway gets a significant portion of its GNP from oil, as do several other small nations throughout the world. Qatar, for example, has no taxes and free college for all citizens.
Comparing standards of living in these countries to those countries that profit mainly by trade, manufacturing, and services (like Western Europe, Hong Kong, and the US) is not a legitimate comparison. Not everyone is free to live in those places where natural resources supplement income.
And before you complain too much about your small, overpriced NY apartment, realize that you're living in one of the two most expensive and overcrowded places in the United States (the other being SF). If you want to compare the standard of living and other statistics from where you live to other cities in the US, check out this MSN House & Home page. Pretty cool, eh?
The troubling response to which I was referring is not how Apple will handle the vulnerability now that it is publicly known, but rather their response to the initial warning email.
If a company can fix a vulnerability before it becomes publicly known, all computer users can obviously benefit. But in this case, the guy apparently tried to let Apple know, but didn't even receive a response. It is that response (or rather, lack of response) that concerns me.
here is the mail that i've sent to apple security people, they didn't
replied:(
I'm not trying to blast Apple in particular here or anything, but it seems that all companies have had a poor record lately responding to security holes pointed out by email users. Recall the Microsoft Passport security vulnerability.
Granted, I would guess that the email volume these receive claiming discovery of new exploits is daunting, but doesn't this deserve top priority for response?
For some projects with validation requirements a three year life span for a stable OS product is insanly low.
Why do you say NT4's life span is only 3 years? Just because MS will stop supporting all versions of NT4 in 18 months does not mean that the product has reached the end of its life span! Many people continue to run MS-DOS systems which haven't been supported for at least 7 years; they obviously haven't reached the end of their life span.
7 years of active support for an operating system is quite reasonable. Red Hat, for instance, no longer supports Red Hat Linux 6.2 even though it was only released 4 years ago.
Your argument that some people only purchased NT4 3 years ago and therefore deserve more support is also flawed. If I walked into a store and purchased a shrink-wrapped copy of Lotus 1-2-3, I would be a fool to think that IBM would give me any sort of support for it...
Patches are just the most visible aspect of "support." Under the surface, if you choose to look that far, you will see that there are many other ways that a company "supports" a product.
I would guess that 18 months from now (when NT4 Server support lapses) the following things will happen:
no more quickfix (QFE) patches for security holes in any NT4 service, including IIS (this is probably the biggest incentive for MS to drop support, given the sheer amount of test resources required to make sure a 7-year-old OS isn't broken by a fix for a new exploit)
MS application support for NT4 will be dropped (the "common denominator" of basic OS-level support for new MS applications like IE, MS Money, MS Office, etc will now be Win98 or above)
Driver development for NT4 will cease at Microsoft (Win98 and above support WDM drivers, whereas NT4 did not)
Pay-by-incident phone tech support for NT4 will cease
Granted, Microsoft has certainly already scaled down support for these items in NT4 over the past few years, but the WinSE (sustained engineering) team does more work than you might expect to keep backwards compatibility for NT4 running.
First of all, the server "support" doesn't expire for another 18 months, so you haven't just been thrown out into the cold. You still have time to figure out a strategy, if you need to do anything at all.
Second of all, why will you be "forced" to buy a Win2k server license? Why can't you just continue to use your server? If it works, let it run! "Yanking support" in 18 months doesn't mean that your server will cease functioning...
Also, what exactly is wrong with NT4's networking that is fixed by more recent Windows systems?
In a word, lots. The TCP/IP stack in the NT4 kernel has some serious flaws which were addressed in Win2k. The most serious of them is probably the well-known TCP Sequence Number prediction problem (NT4 used a fairly simple linear algorithm for picking its new TCP sequence numbers for new TCP sessions; non-random sequence numbers exposes the stack to TCP session hijacking). Other improvements to the TCP/IP stack involve things like standards compliance, TCP Vegas, etc. It was a fairly major overhaul.
BTW, that's XP 2003 with the 64bit support, which is most likely NT5.2, and another payed for dot revision upgrade.
I don't think that's a fair assessment.
Windows 2003 64-bit edition is hardly a "dot revision upgrade." Prior to this, the only 64-bit Windows workstation platform available was Windows XP 64-bit "Gold" Edition. It was extremely limited distribution (in addition to having limited features), primarily owing to the fact that you need an Itanium machine to use it, and they are quite scarce.
Windows 2003 64-bit edition, on the other hand, runs on both Itanium and Itanium2 processors right now, and an AMD64 launch will be made later this year simultaneously with Windows 2003 Sp1 for IA64, IIRC.
AMD considers this new version of Windows to be the Windows debut for their AMD64 processor line. It will enable the AMD64 processor to run in so-called "compatibility mode" where your apps can run under the 32-bit "WOW64" environment, while the OS runs in 64-bit native mode at the same time; this allows each 32-bit app to utilize all 4 Gigabytes of virtual address space (no 3/1 split). Native 64-bit apps will enjoy the full 64-bit address space, as well as the extra 8 AMD64 general purpose registers.
Vendors are also working furiously to develop full 64-bit 3-d accelerated drivers for this new workstation version of Windows; the sever market doesn't drive 3-d acceleration much.
Suffice it to say that Windows XP 2003 64-bit Edition will probably be the first version of Windows you're likely to actually use on a desktop 64-bit system. That's not just a "dot-version upgrade..."
While this may be true for smaller organizations, MS has set up completely indpenent licensing schemes for the US Government.
When I volunteered in the IT department of a VA Hospital, for instance, we had subscription licenses to all sorts of software specially marked "US Government Use Only: Do Not Copy or Distribute." Some of these media didn't even require activation keys on install.
At the time I volunteered (early 2000), the VA Hospital Network was the 3rd largest installation of NT workstations in the entire world, behind the Department of Defense and Department of Justice (IIRC). Microsoft has custom agreements with its largest customers, agreements that don't fit under the umbrella of standard "Enterprise Subscription Licensing" or the other licensing schemes you find here.
What I'm getting at is that you can't make ANY assumptions about the terms of the Army's license agreement (which the poster admitted we don't have details about), because they are custom tailored to each purchaser. The terms are often completely different from the standard "Enterprise" licenses that we are all familiar with in the business arena.
If someone knows specifics about this particular license agreement with the Army, please speak up.
Honestly, though... I know *many* more Linux users than Mac users... Come to think of it, I only know a single Mac user.
When Richard Nixon won easy re-election in 1972, New Yorker columnist Pauline Kael illustrated precisely the same lack of perspective when she exclaimed, "I can't believe it! I don't know a single person who voted for him!"
The moral of the story is that we all need to get out more and interact with other communities in order to follow the trends in rest of the computer world. It is far too easy to be lulled into a false sense of world homogeneity when those who surround us all share the same viewpoints and choice of operating system...:-P
This would be similar to Microsoft putting the axe in X-Windows for trademark violation.
It would be similar if X-Windows were a rip-off or hack of MS's product, but it is not. Blizzard is simply trying to prevent a bunch of anonymous hackers from mucking with their program, trying to get it to run on a platform for which it was not intended.
Allowing these people to do whatever they want to the program (by replacing the engine) could easily cause headaches with Blizzard's Battle.Net servers. If you had to maintain the Battle.Net servers and this group were messing with your client, would YOU want them to be doing it? I don't think so.
Album price must be less than or equal to the sum of their tracks. So if you have a 5-song album, it can't be more than $4.95 to buy the full-length album.
Something about this doesn't seem right... So I can buy a 2:30 radio-ready pop song for the same price as a 15-minute Pink Floyd song? Take "Wish you were Here" with its 5 tracks. That costs $4.95. But "Hangin' Tough" by New Kids on the Block will run me $9.95?
There is ALREADY a huge incentive for bands to produce short "radio-ready" songs that play well on the air. Now, this rule seems to supply even MORE incentive to shorten tracks. Why produce a 7 minute song when a song half that long (with its reduced production costs) brings in the same amount of money?
Hmm... seems to me this licensing scheme hasn't been perfected yet...
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I wasn't going to reply to this because the parent's reply to my comment is obviously a flame.
However, I would just like to take a few seconds to point out the classic flaming elements of the post for the audience's edification:
Well, that concludes our lesson dissecting a flame today. Class dismissed!
Because some people here apparently cannot read English, I will quote, verbatim, the relevant section of the IDG article you have just cited:
As you can quite plainly see, the article itself clearly quotes OSI President Eric Raymond as qualifying Microsoft's previous strategy as a FUD campaign (he even uses the "Linux as cancer" metaphor). At NO time in the article does Martin Taylor, the new MS strategist, say these things about previous MS strategy.
Now, contrast the above straight quote from the IDG article with the Slashdot-summary:
As you can clearly see, the submitter begins the statement with the independent clause "Taylor says" followed by the dependent clause "[that] his goal is to...". Everything that follows in the dependent clause has clearly been attributed to something that Taylor actually says in the article. The problem is, he does not say anything about Linux being a cancer, or even acknowledging that this was Microsoft's previous strategy.
I would hope that it is quite clear to English speakers everywhere that I have not misquoted anyone, unlike the submitter of this otherwise interesting article.
I would hope that this was an honest mistake, that the submitter meant to say something like this:
THAT is how the article's summary should have been phrased, assuming the submitter wanted to be accurate.
If you read the article, Open Source Initiative President Eric Raymond was the one who said that Microsoft's previous strategy was claiming Linux was a "cancer." Taylor never used those words and never suggested that was Microsoft's previous strategy, as the headline suggests.
All Taylor admits is that previously Microsoft had defaulted to an "emotional" argument, and that now they are switching to a "fact-based" one, whatever that means.
The only reason I'm correcting the submitter here is that it makes no sense to put words in people's mouth, even if you hate them. It is counter-productive to legitimate debate and argument.
The Windows API was pretty innovative for something created in 1984, years before X was publicly released (Athena was started in 1984 but X wasn't publicly released until 1988). I think you're failing to understand how truly old the Windows API really is.
I don't think you'll find any other pre-1985 GUIs that perform event handling the way Windows does it (whether you like their solution or not). I'd say that alone makes it an original implementation, and would make a reasonable patent.
You call that a move? That's just something they forgot to do, and Wine may have reminded them. When a move against Wine happens, you will know about it.
Well, I guarantee you that if someone created a Macintosh API emulator, they'd get their ass sued off (reverse engineered or not). Microsoft isn't exactly on unheard-of legal ground here, and all it takes is sufficient legal resources to quash a project like this under a mountain of legal paperwork.
Personally, I think it is quite remarkable that MS hasn't really taken any action against Wine. It apparently just isn't worth their time, yet.
UPnP's Internet Gateway Device control protocol is neither a hack nor is it expensive.
The idea is simple; your NAT firewall is UPnP enabled, and UPnP aware applications simply use the standard UPnP IGDP API to configure the firewall for it use. No work involved on the user's part at all!
And if you think this is far-fetched or won't be available, realize that many current home broadband routers already support this protocol, and applications such as Windows Messenger already make use of UPnP router features.
If you want to read all about it, go here.
Let's investigate this idea of "goodwill" for a minute. Realtek makes open source drivers and specs available, but they're considered a low-end company that makes bargain-basement NIC chipsets that can handle 65% of the throughput of the market leaders for 20% of the price. Where is the goodwill? Has the open source industry done anything for Realtek? Their chipsets are already integrated into countless motherboards, and used on some of the most prevalent NICs in the industry; they donated their driver code. But I don't see anyone out there saying, "Thank you, Realtek! You are our favorite NIC chipset maker! We recommend that everyone who runs Linux go out and buy a card with your chipsets!"
And what about wireless? The last time I checked, the only drivers that worked were the reverse-engineered Prism II chipset drivers for the ancient Lucent WaveLAN and compatible cards. Good luck getting your high speed D-link, SMC, Netgear, or Intel card working. Apparently the "goodwill" of the community isn't enough of an incentive for them to release the details of how their MAC layer operates.
What about video? Well, you basically have ATI and NVidia, neither of whom release open source drivers. I guess they're not going to get any goodwill from the Linux community either! Should I sell my stock as a result?
Look, I know I'm being overly sarcastic here, but "goodwill" is no incentive for a real company to release drivers that give out intimate details about the inner architecture of their HW designs. Graphics cards makers will NEVER do this because their drivers are now boiling down to software routines written for GPUs in the equivalent of graphics assembly language. Giving away the code to these routines would give away any optimization strategies that they had spent time and millions of $$ researching and developing to beat their rivals.
Exactly. And to a large extent, I think open-source operating systems will be relegated to supplying such class drivers for well into the future for this reason. Class drivers are great for basic functionality, but for anything advanced they obviously suck. VESA video drivers, for instance, are a joke. The XFree86 team has done a pretty good job (using a combination of accepting donated code and outright reverse engineering) of getting functional accelerated video drivers for several chipsets. But they STILL won't live up to the level of features that IHVs can provide, writing code to their own chipset and specs.
What we as a community can do, however, is make writing good quality device drivers as EASY as possible for the hardware vendors. Then they will have no excuse not to write a driver for at least the top 3 platform OSes other than laziness.
It is a shame that vendor-supplied driver support is in such a questionable state for Linux, and I hope this improves with time. I like to see OSes compete on some semblance of a level playing field, but without adequate device drivers for the latest multimedia gadgets, OSes are nothing more than curiosities to most users.
This is true only if you elect to compile the kernel module corresponding to this driver into your kernel. The source for the driver is distributed with the kernel, but it is up to you to elect its inclusion. This mechanism is no better than Windows, because some drivers just aren't included with the kernel sources, just as some drivers aren't shipped in-box with Windows. So you're still stuck with fetching your own driver direct from the vendor of your hardware.
Stock distro kernels typically include tons of drivers in their kernels just in case you happen to have a device needing that driver; in most cases, the driver tries to load and fails to initialize, and unloads itself from memory. In my opinion, this is a somewhat clumsy mechanism, but it works. At install, Windows determines what PnP devices are on your system and installs only the drivers for which a PnP ID has been discovered.
This is just completely wrong. Windows ships with in-box "class drivers" based on generic chipset specifications just as any other operating system does. In fact, Windows ships with a class driver for the Realtek 8139x chipset that works with just about any such card on the market (D-link 530TX comes to mind). The reason you might want a IHV-specific driver for your particular card is that some IHV's enable extra functionality that the class drivers do not support (wake-on-lan, encryption coprocessors, etc). Class drivers are a good way to get support out for devices quickly, but they are much worse at supporting specific features in individual cards.
Again, only the ones included with the kernel are guaranteed to be open source. NVidia's display drivers are most certainly not open source. And you can't assume that all Windows drivers are closed-source, either: Realtek (makers of the RTLxxxx chipsets you alluded to earlier) typically releases source code so that IHVs that implement NICs using their chipset can easily adapt some working code to their drivers. Driver signing has nothing to do with making drivers open source, or eliminating problems with vendors going out of business, so I fail to see the connection there. WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) testing and signing is a method by which Microsoft can provide some basic level of quality assurance on device drivers that they do not directly produce. Poorly written kernel-mode device drivers are still the #1 cause of Windows crashes (according to some press release that I can't find at the moment), and Microsoft is attempting to address this by helping improve driver quality through WHQL and eliminating the need for future kernel-mode drivers (replacing them with user-mode drivers whenever possible, I'm sure).Regardless, you will find no such centralized basic quality control mechanism for Linux drivers. If you sincerely believe that Linux device drivers are of higher overall quality than their Windows equivalents, I have some land to sell you right next to an oasis in Baja. (And before you flame me, I completely understand that Linux drivers often must be reverse-engineered, and that is a difficult process. But while I sympathize with Linux driver writers, this difficulty still doesn't support the claim that the resulting Linux driver model is superior to its Windows counterpart.)
Most corporate Windows networks that I'm aware of use domain controllers for authentication, which means that even if you COULD gain local admin access to a workstation on the network, using this Swiss method isn't going to get you passwords other than the local passwords stored on the compromised box.
If their method worked on domains, this would be much more significant. As it stands, it is only a concern to physically insecure, standalone boxes.
Exactly!
This isn't popular to say I'm sure, but when it comes to pushing new technologies out the door into motherboard design, Intel is the clear frontrunner. Let's go through some of the items we now take for granted that Intel brought to us:
And I'm sure I've left out quite a few...
Continuing sarcasm...
Gosh, we certainly don't want our kids to learn to use software that is actually out there in the real world! That would be disastrous! Then kids might actually be able to DO something with computers coming out of U.S. high schools, and the curricula of community colleges everywhere would have to be completely restructured... What is the world coming to?
Let's stop this now, teach them to use the Bash shell, and show them that they don't really need MS Word when they can have the power of vi and LaTeX...
End sarcasm...
Haha, your point is well taken. Is there any wonder why Americans are so obese? :-P
As for Sweden, there were some posts a while back (I forget the thread) discussing the relative advantages/disadvantages of the Swedish governmental system that were quite interesting. Perhaps I can uncover them and post a link...
I actually admire Scandinavians greatly. I wish their populations weren't so stagnant. (To save you some searching for the population growth rates: Denmark 0.29%, Finland 0.14%, Sweden 0.02%, Norway 0.47%, USA 0.89%, Qatar 3.02%)
At least they're non-negative, unlike Bulgaria at -1.11%, Ukraine at -0.72%, and Russia at -0.33%...
Norway gets a significant portion of its GNP from oil, as do several other small nations throughout the world. Qatar, for example, has no taxes and free college for all citizens.
Comparing standards of living in these countries to those countries that profit mainly by trade, manufacturing, and services (like Western Europe, Hong Kong, and the US) is not a legitimate comparison. Not everyone is free to live in those places where natural resources supplement income.
And before you complain too much about your small, overpriced NY apartment, realize that you're living in one of the two most expensive and overcrowded places in the United States (the other being SF). If you want to compare the standard of living and other statistics from where you live to other cities in the US, check out this MSN House & Home page. Pretty cool, eh?
Let's hope that Linux doesn't have the same problem of vertical stabilizers falling off in-flight after only 12 years of use...
...certainly not me.
The troubling response to which I was referring is not how Apple will handle the vulnerability now that it is publicly known, but rather their response to the initial warning email.
If a company can fix a vulnerability before it becomes publicly known, all computer users can obviously benefit. But in this case, the guy apparently tried to let Apple know, but didn't even receive a response. It is that response (or rather, lack of response) that concerns me.
I'm not trying to blast Apple in particular here or anything, but it seems that all companies have had a poor record lately responding to security holes pointed out by email users. Recall the Microsoft Passport security vulnerability.
Granted, I would guess that the email volume these receive claiming discovery of new exploits is daunting, but doesn't this deserve top priority for response?
Why do you say NT4's life span is only 3 years? Just because MS will stop supporting all versions of NT4 in 18 months does not mean that the product has reached the end of its life span! Many people continue to run MS-DOS systems which haven't been supported for at least 7 years; they obviously haven't reached the end of their life span.
7 years of active support for an operating system is quite reasonable. Red Hat, for instance, no longer supports Red Hat Linux 6.2 even though it was only released 4 years ago.
Your argument that some people only purchased NT4 3 years ago and therefore deserve more support is also flawed. If I walked into a store and purchased a shrink-wrapped copy of Lotus 1-2-3, I would be a fool to think that IBM would give me any sort of support for it...
Patches are just the most visible aspect of "support." Under the surface, if you choose to look that far, you will see that there are many other ways that a company "supports" a product.
I would guess that 18 months from now (when NT4 Server support lapses) the following things will happen:
Granted, Microsoft has certainly already scaled down support for these items in NT4 over the past few years, but the WinSE (sustained engineering) team does more work than you might expect to keep backwards compatibility for NT4 running.
First of all, the server "support" doesn't expire for another 18 months, so you haven't just been thrown out into the cold. You still have time to figure out a strategy, if you need to do anything at all.
Second of all, why will you be "forced" to buy a Win2k server license? Why can't you just continue to use your server? If it works, let it run! "Yanking support" in 18 months doesn't mean that your server will cease functioning...
In a word, lots. The TCP/IP stack in the NT4 kernel has some serious flaws which were addressed in Win2k. The most serious of them is probably the well-known TCP Sequence Number prediction problem (NT4 used a fairly simple linear algorithm for picking its new TCP sequence numbers for new TCP sessions; non-random sequence numbers exposes the stack to TCP session hijacking). Other improvements to the TCP/IP stack involve things like standards compliance, TCP Vegas, etc. It was a fairly major overhaul.
I don't think that's a fair assessment.
Windows 2003 64-bit edition is hardly a "dot revision upgrade." Prior to this, the only 64-bit Windows workstation platform available was Windows XP 64-bit "Gold" Edition. It was extremely limited distribution (in addition to having limited features), primarily owing to the fact that you need an Itanium machine to use it, and they are quite scarce.
Windows 2003 64-bit edition, on the other hand, runs on both Itanium and Itanium2 processors right now, and an AMD64 launch will be made later this year simultaneously with Windows 2003 Sp1 for IA64, IIRC.
AMD considers this new version of Windows to be the Windows debut for their AMD64 processor line. It will enable the AMD64 processor to run in so-called "compatibility mode" where your apps can run under the 32-bit "WOW64" environment, while the OS runs in 64-bit native mode at the same time; this allows each 32-bit app to utilize all 4 Gigabytes of virtual address space (no 3/1 split). Native 64-bit apps will enjoy the full 64-bit address space, as well as the extra 8 AMD64 general purpose registers.
Vendors are also working furiously to develop full 64-bit 3-d accelerated drivers for this new workstation version of Windows; the sever market doesn't drive 3-d acceleration much.
Suffice it to say that Windows XP 2003 64-bit Edition will probably be the first version of Windows you're likely to actually use on a desktop 64-bit system. That's not just a "dot-version upgrade..."
While this may be true for smaller organizations, MS has set up completely indpenent licensing schemes for the US Government.
When I volunteered in the IT department of a VA Hospital, for instance, we had subscription licenses to all sorts of software specially marked "US Government Use Only: Do Not Copy or Distribute." Some of these media didn't even require activation keys on install.
At the time I volunteered (early 2000), the VA Hospital Network was the 3rd largest installation of NT workstations in the entire world, behind the Department of Defense and Department of Justice (IIRC). Microsoft has custom agreements with its largest customers, agreements that don't fit under the umbrella of standard "Enterprise Subscription Licensing" or the other licensing schemes you find here.
What I'm getting at is that you can't make ANY assumptions about the terms of the Army's license agreement (which the poster admitted we don't have details about), because they are custom tailored to each purchaser. The terms are often completely different from the standard "Enterprise" licenses that we are all familiar with in the business arena.
If someone knows specifics about this particular license agreement with the Army, please speak up.
When Richard Nixon won easy re-election in 1972, New Yorker columnist Pauline Kael illustrated precisely the same lack of perspective when she exclaimed, "I can't believe it! I don't know a single person who voted for him!"
The moral of the story is that we all need to get out more and interact with other communities in order to follow the trends in rest of the computer world. It is far too easy to be lulled into a false sense of world homogeneity when those who surround us all share the same viewpoints and choice of operating system... :-P
It would be similar if X-Windows were a rip-off or hack of MS's product, but it is not. Blizzard is simply trying to prevent a bunch of anonymous hackers from mucking with their program, trying to get it to run on a platform for which it was not intended.
Allowing these people to do whatever they want to the program (by replacing the engine) could easily cause headaches with Blizzard's Battle.Net servers. If you had to maintain the Battle.Net servers and this group were messing with your client, would YOU want them to be doing it? I don't think so.
Something about this doesn't seem right... So I can buy a 2:30 radio-ready pop song for the same price as a 15-minute Pink Floyd song? Take "Wish you were Here" with its 5 tracks. That costs $4.95. But "Hangin' Tough" by New Kids on the Block will run me $9.95?
There is ALREADY a huge incentive for bands to produce short "radio-ready" songs that play well on the air. Now, this rule seems to supply even MORE incentive to shorten tracks. Why produce a 7 minute song when a song half that long (with its reduced production costs) brings in the same amount of money?
Hmm... seems to me this licensing scheme hasn't been perfected yet...