The reason Teh Lunix fails when sold at retail is primarily due to returns. If you sell out all your computers, and 80% of them get returned because people don't want Teh Lunix... how are you supposed to make a profit? The profit margin on computers is very low, and if a company has to sell at a steep discount for "open box"... they've just lost money.
I don't know why this guy got modded down except for the typical mindless pro-Linux bias here. The above is realistic. I don't know if it's 80%, but Linux desktops see FAR more returns than Windows desktops. MacOS desktops see more returns too, that's part of the reason for the high costs. Compatibility is a major factor. In practice, this completely negates any cost advantage Linux might have. You add in support costs and selling Linux is basically a loser for most PC vendors. It makes a LOT more sense for PC vendors to sell machines completely bare and have people install Linux on them. This pretty much locks out all casual users.
The reality is that desktop Linux will never take off unless one of the Linux vendors bites the bullet and agrees to provide free, unlimited, 27/4 technical support to PC makers like Dell. Yes, this is better than Windows (that's the whole point) and yes, this would cost billions (I'm thinking about $3 billion per year). Penetrating entrenched markets is HARD. MS has spent $8 billion trying to penetrate the console market. The 360 is wildly successful and they're still nowhere near profitable. The PS3 has been a disaster and Sony is STILL beating MS on sales.
I also wouldn't even consider this in the hostile US market. I'd do it in Europe, and I'd use some of those billions to bribe officials to get my Linux into the governments and to get tarrifs or lawsuits and other anti-compete measures passed against Microsoft. MS (and every company with the resources to do so) does the same thing, so don't feel bad for them.
Except that Linux doesn't work WELL with anything but x86. Sure you can shoehorn it into a NSLU and other NAS devices (I've worked on several Linux NAS devices), but it's painful. I did MIPS and PowerPC (and a bit of ARM) and I ended up having to hand-tune or re-write virtually every single app I wanted to compile. I ALWAYS had to re-write make files and more than once I had to tweak a bit of code. And this was using Gentoo, a distribution designed for this purpose. I quickly gave up on Debian. Getting the kernel itself (and bash) working wasn't too tough, everything else was a major hassle.
To give you an idea of how annoying this is: You would think that PowerPC would be well-covered with YellowDog, MKLinux, etc. You'd be wrong about that. There are a SEA of bugs in different PowerPC processors that break various parts of YellowDog and MKLinux. And as it turns out the PowerPC CPU I was using (the 601) didn't work with YellowDog or MKLinux at all.
Basically, TFA is flat-out wrong. Shifting Windows to ARM is impossible (literally, most apps would have to be re-written from SCRATCH) and shifting a Linux desktop to ARM is NEAR-impossible unless you enjoy pain. Running a handful of specially-compiled non-updatable apps is relatively easy, that's what Dell is doing. To a greater extent, that's what Pandora is doing. Porting a full Linux operating system (something like Ubuntu) is a multi-year effort involving dozens (or more likely, hundreds) of developers.
So, for example, you hire a consultant and give him a copy of the software. Then you decide not to use the consultant any longer. He's annoyed, and he asserts his GPL rights on your entire product, and distributes it. You go to sue, and the copyright holder of the GPL piece gets involved and makes a case that you don't have the rights you think you did. Your NDA does not apply to GPL software because GPL prohibits you from adding incompatible terms.
What are the realistic odds of this actually happening?
Let's get real here for a minute. Virtually every legal case is decided by who has the most money to hire the most lawyers. So most legal "battles" are only between evenly-matched opponents, which is not the case you describe above. In reality, the company would threaten the consultant and because they have more resources the consultant would quickly back down.
No, the only credible legal case we're likely to see (and have seen, I've followed this) is a company that uses combined proprietary/GPL code and then a rival copies their product whole cloth (maybe changing a few logos here and there) and then starts selling it claiming that "GPL infection" means the original company can't assert copyright. THIS is the scenario most companies are concerned about.
VIA obtained it's licenses through the acquisition of Cyrix. I don't know if this clause applied, but if it did they're maintaining Cyrix as a "paper company" that exists solely for legal purposes. I see no reason why NDIVIA couldn't do the same thing.
In my opinion they're getting worse as more developers try to shoehorn their apps into AJAX and similar models.
Web apps are slow as molasses. They will ALWAYS be slow relative to desktop apps because increasing the performance of web apps means turning them into desktop apps by using a thicker client (Air, Silverlight, etc.) and moving less data between the client and server less often. Eventually, apps like Gmail are going to evolve into thick clients that are simply downloaded to the browser so all the browser REALLY does is UI, badly, and adds a lot of pointless overhead.
Mobile devices are a perfect example of this. My Blackberry doesn't use GMail in the browser because the browser sucks too bad and there's too much overhead. So GMail has a CUSTOM CLIENT for my Blackberry. This is true model of web apps going forward, client-server with the thick client resting within the browser.
And everyone has pointed out the "big, complex, app" issue but not the "very simple, very fast app" issues. Do you REALLY want to use a web browser as your text editor?
why would a USB external hard drive be any less reliable than an internal SATA drive?
Because you're probably moving it around more. External USB 3.5" hard drives rarely have anything close to decent shock protection, so it's fundamentally less secure that the drive buried in the guts of the PC. Even if it's just sitting on your desk 100% of the time if it accidentally gets knocked off your desk its MUCH more likely to fail than the one buried in the guts of the desktop. And because its a lot smaller it's more likely to get knocked off.
So it's nothing "inherent", it's tied to the usage pattern.
It's also worth noting that I live in earthquake country so I'm more sensitive to this issue than most. For example, I don't care much about lightning strikes but they might be a major issue where you're located.
we're a small indie label, so i'm not sure the cost of an external RAID enclosure is justified. we do have a lot of hi-res graphics to back up, such as album artwork, print layouts, poster/sticker/clothing designs, etc., as well as e-mails, invoices, and our retail & radio mailing/contact lists. but i think weekly backups onto one or two 750GB~1TB drives should be sufficient.
As a proprietary product, I am unable to prove or disprove what is or is not in Windows.
Sure you can. You can sniff for leaks. That's how people found out about the "personal information" in WGA.
You're not seriously going to do a line-by-line code review of Windows, even if you had the source. It would take you months or years. It would take you even longer in Linux, Nobody's going to do a line-by-line review of that either. AND NOBODY EVER HAS. Show me the line-by-line code review of Fedora 10.
We do, however, have plenty of evidence that "NSA Key" does not have an adequate explanation,
No, we don't. NSA uses it's own special sauce separate from FIPS for encryption/signing/etc. That special sauce is in Windows so NSA can use it. You need to turn it on with registry keys and it doesn't implement anything remotely similar to a backdoor. It affects logins, EFS, and network filesharing.
WGA does send personal information despite microsoft's claims to the contrary,
By whom? Not by me. Not under circumstances that I trust. By the same people who've requested its inclusion in the first place, perhaps?
The University of Washington has done a code review of Windows 2000 and I think XP. And more importantly, the European Union has the source and their special masters have been doing a code review as part of the antitrust and other lawsuits against Microsoft. Like you, they're paranoid of the supposed "NSA backdoor". I think the British government has done the same thing independently. So have the Australians. Links: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2003/jan03/01-14GSPrelease.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/default.mspx
There's also the fact that the Windows 2000 source has leaked and independents reviewed that and found no backdoors.
It is a server intended for very broad access to the system, however it is proprietary and impossible to audit. So you can't check the access execution path to verify that it is secure.
You can't attach a debugger? You can find out everything it's doing pretty easily.
More over, it uses AES encryption which, while fairly secure in theory, does not prevent MITM and does not prevent eavesdropping.
AES is the most widely-used algorithm in encryption today. If you've got a problem with AES you've got a big problem with encryption in general.
All you need to do is get the password and that's easier than you think.
Please tell me how it's "easier" to crack passwords on RDP than SSH. Assume password ONLY on SSH. I'm not aware of any known vulnerabilties on the password engine so you have to brute force it. Limit login attempts to 3. What's the problem?
Even WITH the passphrase, you can't eavesdrop and if properly configured, can't do an MITM with ssh.
Not true, but I don't want to get into it. What you're talking about is probably pre-sharing private keys rather than passwords. As I said before, Remote Desktop has just about every feature of SSH, including this one.
use a few pairs of external hard drives for back-ups.
Get an external enclosure that does RAID and use that. Preferably a NAS device so you can leverage it a little. Not very expensive and that way your backup will actually be more reliable than the source. "Backing up" data to unreliable external storage like USB hard drives and flash drives is a bad idea.
ever since we switched to wireless, working over the network (with 20~100MB hi-res images) has become a pain in the ass
Wait for n or switch back. I recommend the latter. The practical limitations on wireless are serious an they're not changing anytime soon.
Then there is the nefarious code purposefully put into Microsoft's proprietary code.
Prove it.
There is a difference between a "regular" service and a backdoor system like WGA, the NSA key, et. al. *You* have no control over how those services are configured nor whom they contact.
WGA isn't a hidden backdoor. It uses a well-known port and connects to well-known servers. It's easily blocked or disabled.
The NSA backdoor does not exist unless you can prove it exists. There have been extensive code reviews of Windows source code that have not revealed these imaginary backdoors.
The "ssh" vs "Windows Remote Desktop" comparison is rediculous, do you have any idea how BAD the security in WRD? Any?
What makes you think Remote Desktop is "bad"? Do you have any idea how it works? If so, please explain it. Just about every feature in SSH is in RDP.
And the paranoid can tunnel their RDP connections over SSH or IPSec.
Then there is the nefarious code purposefully put into Microsoft's proprietary code.
Be it the NSA key, WGA, or other methodologies of accessing machines remotely. If these systems are in Windows, they WILL be exploited by external entities.
So you're saying "remote access of any kind = external exploit". There is certainly some truth to this, but virtually all operating systems contain some form of remoter access. In Unix you have telnet and ssh. In Windows you have Remote Desktop (and telnet and ssh). I'm sure there are exploits for these, but this is hardly a Microsoft problem.
This is a keen insight that needs more attention. He forgot to mention Yahoo. A lot of internet projects started out great and then died when the copyright czars or PHBs mucked with them too much. And a lot of this has to do with fear of lawsuits and legislation.
Americans should be concerned. If we keep letting incumbents (I'm looking at you Disney) fuck up the new media market it will eventually be taken over by someone else. Think I'm kidding? When Google implodes I guarantee you it's replacement will be Chinese.
The decentralized systems you talk about DO exist and they ARE widely used. It's called P2P, in particular bittorrent. It's just that it's very difficult for the copyright czars and decency police to control such systems so they fight to shut them down. This is the essence of the new media conflict.
This in itself would have provided a superset of the functionality iTunes provided.
What do you mean "would have"? PlaysForSure still exists and it provides all the features you mentioned. Personally, I don't like the "paid subscription" model of Janus, but others do and it works.
Your whole rant is wrong-headed. For obvious reasons, you can't use Mass Storage Mode for the PlaysForSure subscriptions because in the name of DRM they can't let you have access for the actual files. MTP is well-documented, it's just fundamentally more complicated than Mass Storage Mode which uses very well-known MS interfaces. And as you pointed out, the stupid DB and encryption requirements of PlaysForSure priced it out of cheap devices. All of this is true to a MUCH GREATER EXTENT with Apple's DRM.
As I've said many times in the past, I strongly prefer MS' DRM solution for the SOLE reason that it's somewhat easier to remove. I happen to know this was deliberate.
After an electronics-generation of fucking up the non-Apple MP3 market, then screwing up their own solution, and now after (very likely) ditching Zune, they've basically done almost exactly the right set of steps to put Apple into a lead that will be hard to make a dent into.
The market is transitioning to cheap Asian players from SanDisk and other players and DRM-free MP3s. The Zune is doomed as an audio player for this reason. I would very much like to give credit to MS for this by saying that their crappy DRM led to this. But MS, quite obviously, never wanted this DRM crap. It was the label's insistence on unreasonable limitations and the inability of ANYONE to make those limitations user-friendly that led to the transition to DRM-free music.
Don't worry, they're bringing it back for video. Apple isn't stupid. They know that the end of DRM on music will free their customers from the iTunes straitjacket and free from that they will prove very reluctant to pay Apple prices for mere audio players. Expect the Shuffle and Nano (and anything audio-oriented) to be discontinued in 2 years. Apple sells video and internet devices now, audio is an afterthought.
The same applies to MS. MS is pushing their downloadable video in a big way. The Zune 3, if it's released, is likely to be a video player.
Then for which platform should an indie game developer develop party games?
The XBOX 360. In an earlier post I mentioned the new Community Games part of XBOX Live that is specifically for indie developers. I'm told Sony has a similar initiative but I'm less familiar with it and I don't know if it's off the ground yet.
But, I'm 50 years old, and so I now have to "prove" myself to arrogant whelps such as yourself.
How old do you think I am? I've notice that everyone here is assuming I'm a kid. I'm not.
It's been my experience that younger programmers TEND to be more open to learning new things than older programmers. They're also willing to work longer hours and put up with more bullshit. And not all programming tasks involve lots of new learning. You might be great at learning, but that means you're exceptional. In fact, I happen to know how exceptional you really are.
Example: At one of the last jobs I had we required someone with 10 years of C and C++ programming experience, 5 years of Java, a couple years of XML, networking experience, the ability to invent a new language from scratch, and the ability to do this all from day one with no training or help whatsoever. In Silicon Valley it was very difficult to find this guy. We interviewed at least 20 people before we found someone who we thought could do the job, He didn't work out. We went through 3 rounds (about 60 interviews) before finding the right guy. We didn't rule out ANYONE due to age, it wasn't a factor. But how many people over 50 do you think even applied?
All of this is anecdotal. I haven't seen any studies on this issue, unless you can cite one this is really just my experience vs. your experience and I've seen this A LOT. Especially in large companies.
If you want to be constructive, tell me how to distinguish between someone like you who is a good learner at 50 and a someone who is a bad learner at 50 by looking at their resume.
Not really. Merely operating a "circumvention device", like DeCSS, is a felony under the DMCA. In order to rip your DVDs you had to use DeCSS or something similar and therefore you are subject to prosecution. MPAA, RIAA, etc. need not make any case.
And even though nobody has been prosecuted for operating a "circumvention device", people certainly HAVE been prosecuted for creating such devices/software. And I'd argue that amounts to the same thing. If you can't legally create the tools to backup the media you can't legally backup the media. There are people serving time in Federal prison right now for making cracking tools.
There are a number of products that already do this. ACTNet, which is part of ActiveScout, does something very similar to this. And it's patented.
Attack information is uploaded to a central server from individual appliances. Appliances then check the central server for a list of "known attackers" and automatically blocks them if they attempt to access the protected network. The concept is similar to Realtime Blackhole lists for spammers.
I picked that statement for a reason. To some extent I want to specifically exclude old farts like you (if they didn't have PCs when you were 12 you'd have to be around 50).
Really old programmers tend to be set in their ways and are reluctant to learn new things, which is one of my key criteria in hiring. "I have to assuming this guy knows nothing. How long will it take him to teach HIMSELF something?" That 50-year-old would have to demonstrate to me that he was exceptionally good at teaching himself. In his case a CS degree would hurt him. What I would like to see is someone with 30 years of high-level experience and NO degree. It was a lot harder to get a programming job without a degree back in the day, and it says a lot about his TALENT.
By the age of 16 or so I had written my own assembler, and sold my first programs - written in directly in hexadecimal machine code
I think too many people are reading into the fact the I specifically mentioned C. By C I meant "real programming language" as opposed to BASIC and Pascal. I like BASIC too and I use it a LOT nowadays, but I'm not a real programmer (by my own definition).
Some posters argue that C wasn't readily available on computers in the 80s. This isn't true, but even if it was I'd expect those people to be writing in assembler like the poster above did.
And getting share time on public access unix systems back then was pretty easy.
Musical instrument teachers know this well.
Musical instruments (I'm talking about rock music here) are one of the areas where most amateurs are professionally trained and most professionals are self-taught. The opposite is true of orchestral musicians, but that's for a very good reason. In an orchestra you "follow the line", in a rock bend you have to make your own line. You HAVE to innovate. I've briefly worked as an audio engineer and most of the musicians I've worked with can't even read music. Most do it by ear. All the greatest composers were self-taught obsessives.
You picked one of the areas that perfectly illustrates what I'm talking about. The key is creativity, to be able to think of your own solutions to problems. This is best taught by not having answers handed to you.
But all "memory upgrades" for the North American and European NES (that is, everything but the Japan-only Famicom Disk System) have been limited to memory chips inside the Game Pak,
I was thinking of the memory upgrades in the carts. It still a hardware upgrade and added to the cost of the carts so I think this counts.
And what kinds of user-installable OS updates are you talking about for Dreamcast
I'm may be mistaken here, I was thinking of the memory carts for the Saturn and Genesis.
PlayStation 2
Extremely poorly documented, but they were/are there for upgrading backwards-compatibility to the PS1 and other features. The updates were distributed through new games would silently update the OS when the game was played in the drive.
not the gamepads that would be useful for two or three people sitting in front of a TV playing an arcade-style game
This is not the style of gameplay that has become fashionable on the PC. Nobody plays "party games" on the PC. Nowadays, it's about online multiplayer which is specifically someone sitting ALONE in from of a PC.
And PC gamers don't WANT gamepads. Half of the reason they're playing on the PC is so they can use the more precise and complex keyboard+mouse controls. And it's not like there aren't PC gaming pads widely available. Perhaps one of the best is the $20 dongle you can buy for using the wireless XBOX 360 controllers on your PC.
Actually, I tend to have a dim view of those that took a few classes in computer programing and think they're a programmer.
If I was being real, I mean really real, my interview would consist of one question:
"When did you code your first C application?"
If it was any older than 12 (twelve), I'd reject them. *I* did this, and I don't even consider myself to be a programmer.
Experience has taught me that high-school dropouts with a passion for programming are generally LIGHT YEARS beyond people who aren't passionate that scraped through a BA in Computer Science. The dropout is far more likely to have real experience using software to solve real problems.
Self-taught programmers are almost always superior to those that have learned in a class. They're "doing it the hard way" and the extra effort shows.
Hmm, most of the homebrew stuff for the Wii can be distributed without having to worry about license agreements since most do not seem to be using official Nintendo license stuff. (As in the libraries are homebrew)
You have to violate the DMCA to run the hacks to allow you to run homebrew software, so this strikes me as a very fine distinction. MS isn't very aggressive with the XBOX developers BTW. I worked at Microsoft at the same time I was doing XBOX development and nobody said anything. I actually was offered help from XBOX developers because THEY were using XBMC.
Clearly the vendor most amenable to homebrew development is Microsoft, they now have a downloadable "Community Games" section on XBOX Live. Sony has also made strides in this area with the user-developed content in LittleBigPlanet. Nintendo doesn't even let you chat in online play (and has lousy online services in general) because they don't want people swearing at little kids in online play. I suspect this same concern will also kill "official" homebrew development.
I'm not a real big fan of the "Community Games" on the 360, but I'm not a fan of Arcade either.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason Teh Lunix fails when sold at retail is primarily due to returns. If you sell out all your computers, and 80% of them get returned because people don't want Teh Lunix... how are you supposed to make a profit? The profit margin on computers is very low, and if a company has to sell at a steep discount for "open box"... they've just lost money.
I don't know why this guy got modded down except for the typical mindless pro-Linux bias here. The above is realistic. I don't know if it's 80%, but Linux desktops see FAR more returns than Windows desktops. MacOS desktops see more returns too, that's part of the reason for the high costs. Compatibility is a major factor. In practice, this completely negates any cost advantage Linux might have. You add in support costs and selling Linux is basically a loser for most PC vendors. It makes a LOT more sense for PC vendors to sell machines completely bare and have people install Linux on them. This pretty much locks out all casual users.
The reality is that desktop Linux will never take off unless one of the Linux vendors bites the bullet and agrees to provide free, unlimited, 27/4 technical support to PC makers like Dell. Yes, this is better than Windows (that's the whole point) and yes, this would cost billions (I'm thinking about $3 billion per year). Penetrating entrenched markets is HARD. MS has spent $8 billion trying to penetrate the console market. The 360 is wildly successful and they're still nowhere near profitable. The PS3 has been a disaster and Sony is STILL beating MS on sales.
I also wouldn't even consider this in the hostile US market. I'd do it in Europe, and I'd use some of those billions to bribe officials to get my Linux into the governments and to get tarrifs or lawsuits and other anti-compete measures passed against Microsoft. MS (and every company with the resources to do so) does the same thing, so don't feel bad for them.
Except that Linux doesn't work WELL with anything but x86. Sure you can shoehorn it into a NSLU and other NAS devices (I've worked on several Linux NAS devices), but it's painful. I did MIPS and PowerPC (and a bit of ARM) and I ended up having to hand-tune or re-write virtually every single app I wanted to compile. I ALWAYS had to re-write make files and more than once I had to tweak a bit of code. And this was using Gentoo, a distribution designed for this purpose. I quickly gave up on Debian. Getting the kernel itself (and bash) working wasn't too tough, everything else was a major hassle.
To give you an idea of how annoying this is: You would think that PowerPC would be well-covered with YellowDog, MKLinux, etc. You'd be wrong about that. There are a SEA of bugs in different PowerPC processors that break various parts of YellowDog and MKLinux. And as it turns out the PowerPC CPU I was using (the 601) didn't work with YellowDog or MKLinux at all.
Basically, TFA is flat-out wrong. Shifting Windows to ARM is impossible (literally, most apps would have to be re-written from SCRATCH) and shifting a Linux desktop to ARM is NEAR-impossible unless you enjoy pain. Running a handful of specially-compiled non-updatable apps is relatively easy, that's what Dell is doing. To a greater extent, that's what Pandora is doing. Porting a full Linux operating system (something like Ubuntu) is a multi-year effort involving dozens (or more likely, hundreds) of developers.
I haven't even started on driver issues yet.
So, for example, you hire a consultant and give him a copy of the software. Then you decide not to use the consultant any longer. He's annoyed, and he asserts his GPL rights on your entire product, and distributes it. You go to sue, and the copyright holder of the GPL piece gets involved and makes a case that you don't have the rights you think you did. Your NDA does not apply to GPL software because GPL prohibits you from adding incompatible terms.
What are the realistic odds of this actually happening?
Let's get real here for a minute. Virtually every legal case is decided by who has the most money to hire the most lawyers. So most legal "battles" are only between evenly-matched opponents, which is not the case you describe above. In reality, the company would threaten the consultant and because they have more resources the consultant would quickly back down.
No, the only credible legal case we're likely to see (and have seen, I've followed this) is a company that uses combined proprietary/GPL code and then a rival copies their product whole cloth (maybe changing a few logos here and there) and then starts selling it claiming that "GPL infection" means the original company can't assert copyright. THIS is the scenario most companies are concerned about.
I doubt this is a serious problem.
VIA obtained it's licenses through the acquisition of Cyrix. I don't know if this clause applied, but if it did they're maintaining Cyrix as a "paper company" that exists solely for legal purposes. I see no reason why NDIVIA couldn't do the same thing.
And these issues shrink all the time.
In my opinion they're getting worse as more developers try to shoehorn their apps into AJAX and similar models.
Web apps are slow as molasses. They will ALWAYS be slow relative to desktop apps because increasing the performance of web apps means turning them into desktop apps by using a thicker client (Air, Silverlight, etc.) and moving less data between the client and server less often. Eventually, apps like Gmail are going to evolve into thick clients that are simply downloaded to the browser so all the browser REALLY does is UI, badly, and adds a lot of pointless overhead.
Mobile devices are a perfect example of this. My Blackberry doesn't use GMail in the browser because the browser sucks too bad and there's too much overhead. So GMail has a CUSTOM CLIENT for my Blackberry. This is true model of web apps going forward, client-server with the thick client resting within the browser.
And everyone has pointed out the "big, complex, app" issue but not the "very simple, very fast app" issues. Do you REALLY want to use a web browser as your text editor?
why would a USB external hard drive be any less reliable than an internal SATA drive?
Because you're probably moving it around more. External USB 3.5" hard drives rarely have anything close to decent shock protection, so it's fundamentally less secure that the drive buried in the guts of the PC. Even if it's just sitting on your desk 100% of the time if it accidentally gets knocked off your desk its MUCH more likely to fail than the one buried in the guts of the desktop. And because its a lot smaller it's more likely to get knocked off.
So it's nothing "inherent", it's tied to the usage pattern.
It's also worth noting that I live in earthquake country so I'm more sensitive to this issue than most. For example, I don't care much about lightning strikes but they might be a major issue where you're located.
we're a small indie label, so i'm not sure the cost of an external RAID enclosure is justified. we do have a lot of hi-res graphics to back up, such as album artwork, print layouts, poster/sticker/clothing designs, etc., as well as e-mails, invoices, and our retail & radio mailing/contact lists. but i think weekly backups onto one or two 750GB~1TB drives should be sufficient.
Is $250 too much? http://www.amazon.com/Buffalo-Technology-LS-W1-0TGL-R1-LinkStation/dp/B000ZPIMN2/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
The Linkstation is pretty heavy, but it's still too small and delicate for my tastes. I'd secure it somehow.
Full disclosure: I worked on the predecessor to this product.
i'd prefer if they were FireWire, but it's still a heck of a lot better than trying to do backups over the network.
My Gigabit network is actually faster than USB for file transfers. I have very fast gear though, so YMMV. Speed is definitely an issue.
As a proprietary product, I am unable to prove or disprove what is or is not in Windows.
Sure you can. You can sniff for leaks. That's how people found out about the "personal information" in WGA.
You're not seriously going to do a line-by-line code review of Windows, even if you had the source. It would take you months or years. It would take you even longer in Linux, Nobody's going to do a line-by-line review of that either. AND NOBODY EVER HAS. Show me the line-by-line code review of Fedora 10.
We do, however, have plenty of evidence that "NSA Key" does not have an adequate explanation,
No, we don't. NSA uses it's own special sauce separate from FIPS for encryption/signing/etc. That special sauce is in Windows so NSA can use it. You need to turn it on with registry keys and it doesn't implement anything remotely similar to a backdoor. It affects logins, EFS, and network filesharing.
WGA does send personal information despite microsoft's claims to the contrary,
What personal information is that? It sends system details. It DOESN'T send the Owner or Company strings which is the ONLY "personal information" stored in a standard Windows install. Unless you consider what motherboard you have installed to be "personal information". Link:
http://blogs.msdn.com/wga/archive/2007/03/07/wga-notifications-and-download-and-install-telemetry.aspx
By whom? Not by me. Not under circumstances that I trust. By the same people who've requested its inclusion in the first place, perhaps?
The University of Washington has done a code review of Windows 2000 and I think XP. And more importantly, the European Union has the source and their special masters have been doing a code review as part of the antitrust and other lawsuits against Microsoft. Like you, they're paranoid of the supposed "NSA backdoor". I think the British government has done the same thing independently. So have the Australians. Links:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2003/jan03/01-14GSPrelease.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/default.mspx
There's also the fact that the Windows 2000 source has leaked and independents reviewed that and found no backdoors.
It is a server intended for very broad access to the system, however it is proprietary and impossible to audit. So you can't check the access execution path to verify that it is secure.
You can't attach a debugger? You can find out everything it's doing pretty easily.
More over, it uses AES encryption which, while fairly secure in theory, does not prevent MITM and does not prevent eavesdropping.
AES is the most widely-used algorithm in encryption today. If you've got a problem with AES you've got a big problem with encryption in general.
All you need to do is get the password and that's easier than you think.
Please tell me how it's "easier" to crack passwords on RDP than SSH. Assume password ONLY on SSH. I'm not aware of any known vulnerabilties on the password engine so you have to brute force it. Limit login attempts to 3. What's the problem?
Even WITH the passphrase, you can't eavesdrop and if properly configured, can't do an MITM with ssh.
Not true, but I don't want to get into it. What you're talking about is probably pre-sharing private keys rather than passwords. As I said before, Remote Desktop has just about every feature of SSH, including this one.
use a few pairs of external hard drives for back-ups.
Get an external enclosure that does RAID and use that. Preferably a NAS device so you can leverage it a little. Not very expensive and that way your backup will actually be more reliable than the source. "Backing up" data to unreliable external storage like USB hard drives and flash drives is a bad idea.
ever since we switched to wireless, working over the network (with 20~100MB hi-res images) has become a pain in the ass
Wait for n or switch back. I recommend the latter. The practical limitations on wireless are serious an they're not changing anytime soon.
Because developers and engineers are far more familiar with x86 and there are vastly more tools and resources for x86.
I've done embedded Linux development on platforms other than x86 (PowerPC and MIPS). It sucks.
Somehow my post got mangled.
Then there is the nefarious code purposefully put into Microsoft's proprietary code.
Prove it.
There is a difference between a "regular" service and a backdoor system like WGA, the NSA key, et. al. *You* have no control over how those services are configured nor whom they contact.
WGA isn't a hidden backdoor. It uses a well-known port and connects to well-known servers. It's easily blocked or disabled.
The NSA backdoor does not exist unless you can prove it exists. There have been extensive code reviews of Windows source code that have not revealed these imaginary backdoors.
The "ssh" vs "Windows Remote Desktop" comparison is rediculous, do you have any idea how BAD the security in WRD? Any?
What makes you think Remote Desktop is "bad"? Do you have any idea how it works? If so, please explain it. Just about every feature in SSH is in RDP.
And the paranoid can tunnel their RDP connections over SSH or IPSec.
Then there is the nefarious code purposefully put into Microsoft's proprietary code.
Be it the NSA key, WGA, or other methodologies of accessing machines remotely. If these systems are in Windows, they WILL be exploited by external entities.
So you're saying "remote access of any kind = external exploit". There is certainly some truth to this, but virtually all operating systems contain some form of remoter access. In Unix you have telnet and ssh. In Windows you have Remote Desktop (and telnet and ssh). I'm sure there are exploits for these, but this is hardly a Microsoft problem.
Please mod OP up.
This is a keen insight that needs more attention. He forgot to mention Yahoo. A lot of internet projects started out great and then died when the copyright czars or PHBs mucked with them too much. And a lot of this has to do with fear of lawsuits and legislation.
Americans should be concerned. If we keep letting incumbents (I'm looking at you Disney) fuck up the new media market it will eventually be taken over by someone else. Think I'm kidding? When Google implodes I guarantee you it's replacement will be Chinese.
The decentralized systems you talk about DO exist and they ARE widely used. It's called P2P, in particular bittorrent. It's just that it's very difficult for the copyright czars and decency police to control such systems so they fight to shut them down. This is the essence of the new media conflict.
This in itself would have provided a superset of the functionality iTunes provided.
What do you mean "would have"? PlaysForSure still exists and it provides all the features you mentioned. Personally, I don't like the "paid subscription" model of Janus, but others do and it works.
Your whole rant is wrong-headed. For obvious reasons, you can't use Mass Storage Mode for the PlaysForSure subscriptions because in the name of DRM they can't let you have access for the actual files. MTP is well-documented, it's just fundamentally more complicated than Mass Storage Mode which uses very well-known MS interfaces. And as you pointed out, the stupid DB and encryption requirements of PlaysForSure priced it out of cheap devices. All of this is true to a MUCH GREATER EXTENT with Apple's DRM.
As I've said many times in the past, I strongly prefer MS' DRM solution for the SOLE reason that it's somewhat easier to remove. I happen to know this was deliberate.
After an electronics-generation of fucking up the non-Apple MP3 market, then screwing up their own solution, and now after (very likely) ditching Zune, they've basically done almost exactly the right set of steps to put Apple into a lead that will be hard to make a dent into.
The market is transitioning to cheap Asian players from SanDisk and other players and DRM-free MP3s. The Zune is doomed as an audio player for this reason. I would very much like to give credit to MS for this by saying that their crappy DRM led to this. But MS, quite obviously, never wanted this DRM crap. It was the label's insistence on unreasonable limitations and the inability of ANYONE to make those limitations user-friendly that led to the transition to DRM-free music.
Don't worry, they're bringing it back for video. Apple isn't stupid. They know that the end of DRM on music will free their customers from the iTunes straitjacket and free from that they will prove very reluctant to pay Apple prices for mere audio players. Expect the Shuffle and Nano (and anything audio-oriented) to be discontinued in 2 years. Apple sells video and internet devices now, audio is an afterthought.
The same applies to MS. MS is pushing their downloadable video in a big way. The Zune 3, if it's released, is likely to be a video player.
Actually, if you're not to wonky with the site design you can access SharePoint sites from other browsers just fine. I use Firefox all the time.
Then for which platform should an indie game developer develop party games?
The XBOX 360. In an earlier post I mentioned the new Community Games part of XBOX Live that is specifically for indie developers. I'm told Sony has a similar initiative but I'm less familiar with it and I don't know if it's off the ground yet.
But, I'm 50 years old, and so I now have to "prove" myself to arrogant whelps such as yourself.
How old do you think I am? I've notice that everyone here is assuming I'm a kid. I'm not.
It's been my experience that younger programmers TEND to be more open to learning new things than older programmers. They're also willing to work longer hours and put up with more bullshit. And not all programming tasks involve lots of new learning. You might be great at learning, but that means you're exceptional. In fact, I happen to know how exceptional you really are.
Example: At one of the last jobs I had we required someone with 10 years of C and C++ programming experience, 5 years of Java, a couple years of XML, networking experience, the ability to invent a new language from scratch, and the ability to do this all from day one with no training or help whatsoever. In Silicon Valley it was very difficult to find this guy. We interviewed at least 20 people before we found someone who we thought could do the job, He didn't work out. We went through 3 rounds (about 60 interviews) before finding the right guy. We didn't rule out ANYONE due to age, it wasn't a factor. But how many people over 50 do you think even applied?
All of this is anecdotal. I haven't seen any studies on this issue, unless you can cite one this is really just my experience vs. your experience and I've seen this A LOT. Especially in large companies.
If you want to be constructive, tell me how to distinguish between someone like you who is a good learner at 50 and a someone who is a bad learner at 50 by looking at their resume.
You're grossly overstating things.
Not really. Merely operating a "circumvention device", like DeCSS, is a felony under the DMCA. In order to rip your DVDs you had to use DeCSS or something similar and therefore you are subject to prosecution. MPAA, RIAA, etc. need not make any case.
And even though nobody has been prosecuted for operating a "circumvention device", people certainly HAVE been prosecuted for creating such devices/software. And I'd argue that amounts to the same thing. If you can't legally create the tools to backup the media you can't legally backup the media. There are people serving time in Federal prison right now for making cracking tools.
There are a number of products that already do this. ACTNet, which is part of ActiveScout, does something very similar to this. And it's patented.
Attack information is uploaded to a central server from individual appliances. Appliances then check the central server for a list of "known attackers" and automatically blocks them if they attempt to access the protected network. The concept is similar to Realtime Blackhole lists for spammers.
Of course, this is also illegal.
The DMCA has removed the ability to legally backup protected content, for any reason.
I picked that statement for a reason. To some extent I want to specifically exclude old farts like you (if they didn't have PCs when you were 12 you'd have to be around 50).
Really old programmers tend to be set in their ways and are reluctant to learn new things, which is one of my key criteria in hiring. "I have to assuming this guy knows nothing. How long will it take him to teach HIMSELF something?" That 50-year-old would have to demonstrate to me that he was exceptionally good at teaching himself. In his case a CS degree would hurt him. What I would like to see is someone with 30 years of high-level experience and NO degree. It was a lot harder to get a programming job without a degree back in the day, and it says a lot about his TALENT.
By the age of 16 or so I had written my own assembler, and sold my first programs - written in directly in hexadecimal machine code
I think too many people are reading into the fact the I specifically mentioned C. By C I meant "real programming language" as opposed to BASIC and Pascal. I like BASIC too and I use it a LOT nowadays, but I'm not a real programmer (by my own definition).
Some posters argue that C wasn't readily available on computers in the 80s. This isn't true, but even if it was I'd expect those people to be writing in assembler like the poster above did.
And getting share time on public access unix systems back then was pretty easy.
Musical instrument teachers know this well.
Musical instruments (I'm talking about rock music here) are one of the areas where most amateurs are professionally trained and most professionals are self-taught. The opposite is true of orchestral musicians, but that's for a very good reason. In an orchestra you "follow the line", in a rock bend you have to make your own line. You HAVE to innovate. I've briefly worked as an audio engineer and most of the musicians I've worked with can't even read music. Most do it by ear. All the greatest composers were self-taught obsessives.
You picked one of the areas that perfectly illustrates what I'm talking about. The key is creativity, to be able to think of your own solutions to problems. This is best taught by not having answers handed to you.
But all "memory upgrades" for the North American and European NES (that is, everything but the Japan-only Famicom Disk System) have been limited to memory chips inside the Game Pak,
I was thinking of the memory upgrades in the carts. It still a hardware upgrade and added to the cost of the carts so I think this counts.
And what kinds of user-installable OS updates are you talking about for Dreamcast
I'm may be mistaken here, I was thinking of the memory carts for the Saturn and Genesis.
PlayStation 2
Extremely poorly documented, but they were/are there for upgrading backwards-compatibility to the PS1 and other features. The updates were distributed through new games would silently update the OS when the game was played in the drive.
not the gamepads that would be useful for two or three people sitting in front of a TV playing an arcade-style game
This is not the style of gameplay that has become fashionable on the PC. Nobody plays "party games" on the PC. Nowadays, it's about online multiplayer which is specifically someone sitting ALONE in from of a PC.
And PC gamers don't WANT gamepads. Half of the reason they're playing on the PC is so they can use the more precise and complex keyboard+mouse controls. And it's not like there aren't PC gaming pads widely available. Perhaps one of the best is the $20 dongle you can buy for using the wireless XBOX 360 controllers on your PC.
maybe at their school
Actually, I tend to have a dim view of those that took a few classes in computer programing and think they're a programmer.
If I was being real, I mean really real, my interview would consist of one question:
"When did you code your first C application?"
If it was any older than 12 (twelve), I'd reject them. *I* did this, and I don't even consider myself to be a programmer.
Experience has taught me that high-school dropouts with a passion for programming are generally LIGHT YEARS beyond people who aren't passionate that scraped through a BA in Computer Science. The dropout is far more likely to have real experience using software to solve real problems.
Self-taught programmers are almost always superior to those that have learned in a class. They're "doing it the hard way" and the extra effort shows.
Thanks. Whatever you think about Microsoft it doesn't detract from the utility of the original XBOX as a media center and game emulation box.
Especially XBMC was a REVOLUTION when it came out. To this day, it stomps all over everything in erms of codec support.
Hmm, most of the homebrew stuff for the Wii can be distributed without having to worry about license agreements since most do not seem to be using official Nintendo license stuff. (As in the libraries are homebrew)
You have to violate the DMCA to run the hacks to allow you to run homebrew software, so this strikes me as a very fine distinction. MS isn't very aggressive with the XBOX developers BTW. I worked at Microsoft at the same time I was doing XBOX development and nobody said anything. I actually was offered help from XBOX developers because THEY were using XBMC.
Clearly the vendor most amenable to homebrew development is Microsoft, they now have a downloadable "Community Games" section on XBOX Live. Sony has also made strides in this area with the user-developed content in LittleBigPlanet. Nintendo doesn't even let you chat in online play (and has lousy online services in general) because they don't want people swearing at little kids in online play. I suspect this same concern will also kill "official" homebrew development.
I'm not a real big fan of the "Community Games" on the 360, but I'm not a fan of Arcade either.