Thanks for the summary. I quickly browsed the article looking at some graphs, and I'm suprised by the bad performance of the Athlon 64s compared to the Athlon XPs in many of the tests.... Is any of those programs running in 64 bit mode, or it's just a test of 32-bit applications running on 64-bit CPUS?
You can easily build yourself a bootable DVD from the CDs. Here is what I did:
- Grab all the CDs and mount them with the loopback device to access the files inside - copy all the files from all CDs in some directory - with "less", open the first CD iso image, kill the line-counting with Ctrl-C and scroll down, you'll find a nice mkisofs command line containing all the parameters to correctly generate a bootable image. - run mkisofs and build yourself a 3Gb iso, burn it to DVD. - boot it, go for upgrade, wait (on my machine) 1 hour and it's done....
I'm paying for linux Mandrake. I don't buy any boxed set, but I donated some money before the club existed, then I subscribed at the "entry" level, now I'm a silver member. I don't really use any of the advantages of being a club member, except the club repository for commercial apps, which allows me to install (and uninstall) non-free stuff quickly.
I see my subscription as hiring a group of talented programmers to build a product which I like and I want to keep using. I'm also anti-MS, or, more precisely, anti-MS-users, for the very simple reason that they assume the non-sequitur that since I know linux I must be good and be able to solve all their windows problems......
Linux I use for: (1) the compatibility with workstations (even if today they are being replaced by PCs). Basically I can code at home and my software will run anywhere I have a c compiler and X11 (I don't do any low-level system programming, so cross-unix compatibility is not a problem). (2) I get for free a lot of developement tools which on MS would cost a lot of money. I'm not a professional programmer, and I'm not ready to spend that amount of money just to code for fun. (3) I don't like the "closed" approach of windows and the systematic incompatibility that goes with it. I like to be able to mess with the files generated by system/software.
I still have a win partition to play games, and this is also one reason I won't switch to OS-X: too few games for the Apple hardware. (I'm also familiar with linux and unless I get some big advantage I won't to switch).
A more serious example: my bank, the Dutch Rabobank, features internet banking. It specifically displays a warning before logging in: Make sure that the address in the address bar starts with https://www.rabobank.nl/, then you are sure you're communicating with us.
Frankly, what would be REALLY nice in a browser would be a toolbar widget giving you the information of the SSL certificate of the website. I usually check it when connecting to my bank, but being able to just view it on the screen would allow me to immediately see if I'm where I want to be or not. Alternatively, use a pop-up (tips, balloon help or whatever they are called) when I station my mouse pointer on the "lock" symbol to bring up both the certificate and its signature.... Galeon almost does this, telling you the signature.
Another solution not involving a second PC. Install a stupid program simulating user activity, let it run 30 hours/month when you're not home. For the rest of the time just do what you want (i.e. kill the advertising program or run linux).
CD-R's, contarary to popular belief (or at least manufacturers claims) only last about a year or two.
BAD CD-Rs. I have 5-year old backups which are still perfectly readable (not that this will prevent me from moving everything to DVD-R soon), but I use TDK and not unbranded CDRs.
Look at all the posts...excuses and rationalizations. "Well, this serves as an example of weak passwords" or "non-root privileges," etc.
Actually, what I see is people warning of a possible security hole in the wild.
You never see that level of rational explanation when it comes to a user-transmitted e-mail Outlook worm. In fact, in those cases it magically becomes a "Microsoft hole," even though it's users running the executable!
This is because one of the "strong" points which is claimed by windows is that it's designed to be used by non-tech experts, while at the same time it offers NO protection from mistakes. If outlook were modified so that it cannot execute anything and you must manually save to disk and execute whatever you would see (beside a drop in virus infections) fingers pointed at the users instead of Microsoft.
Ever notice how the things you like are never harmful, and they are always misunderstood by society?
Could this be because 99.99% of the people doing $FAVORITE_ACTIVITY are not bloodthirsty killers/terrorists/whatever, even if the media puts big letters on the front page every time someone performing $FAVORITE_ACTIVITY kills/terrorizes/whatever for reasons completely unrelated to $FAVORITE_ACTIVITY?
Whereas the things you don't like are unprecedented levels of chaos, evil and destruction never before witnessed in the history of man?
"History repeats itself". The fear is due to the unprecedented levels of chaos evil and destruction witnessed in the past....
It doesn't matter what the issue is, or what side you're on: play this to your advantage and you'll win ever time:-)
People are not scared of what they are familiar with, whatever it is, while tend to have irrational fears about the unknown, so this trick only works when dealing with people who already agree with you.....
If any country had to be in possession of these things, it should be the US. You don't want it to be the US?
Considering the recent record of the US of bombing and invading countries on purely imaginary perceived threats and very real economic reasons, I'd rather NOT have the US be the only one with such a weapon. I'd like a lot of different people to have it. Balance of terror is bad, but I've come to appreciate the advantages of unstable equilibrium compared to a (albeit very stable) death.
He was fired for a fairly innocous describing of part of the physical layout of their campus. While I'm not exactly fond of beast of Redmond, they do have some pretty valid security concerns.
"VALID SECURITY CONCERNS" from a message which says 'I took this shot on the way into work on the loading dock (MSCopy, the print shop I work in, is in the same building as MS's shipping and receiving).'??? If your security is compromised by this kind of absolutely insignificant amount of information then I'd say that you need to seriously review your security procedures..... It seems to me that he was very careful both in the text and in the picture not to give out any information about Microsoft Campus, and I don't understand the amount of postings on the tone of "they were right to fire him because he posted confident data in a weblog". The only explanation I can guess is rampant paranoia from the readers.... it's scary to see how the 9/11 mentality creeps anywhere. For Microsoft it wasn't paranoia: the confidentiality thing is just an excuse to fire him as he posted a joke putting Microsoft in bad light (= they have to copy from Apple).
You're probably one of those people who became livid when Tom Bombadil was stripped from "Fellowship of the Ring", too. Do you really intend to hold it against them if they don't develop every last character in exactly the same way as the 13-hour series during a 2-hour movie?
I don't know about him, but I personally found the idea of eliminating TB good, as it does not add much to the story and can be safely removed without messing up with the plot. I turned livid at "Faramir's massacre" or the Elves helping the humans at Helm's Deep, or Merry/Pippin "tricking" the Ents, as these are completely useless from the point of view of book->film conversion, but also fuck up what Tolkien wrote (and the elf one indicates a serious misundestanding).
Evangelion has a lot of strong/important points. If they want to keep "the message" they cannot change much. All the elements cited above ARE important, remove them and be ready to become target practice (verbal only:) for Eva fans.
As I always say: there's nothing wrong in filming a grandma on a toliet for two hours, just don't title it "The Lord of the Rings".
When basing movies on "huge" books, people should basically not mess up with any element. The book was "huge" because of what it is: stick to it or do something different. Changing stuff looks like wanting to get easy cash from the big name.
Am I the only person that *only* cares about my personal files and not about the system? That thinks the computer is here to do stuff for me, not for me to protect the stupid computer?
No. While the distribution do not provide this "out of the box", it is trivial to set up applications so that they run as another userid. For example I run some programs which I don't fully trust thorough a setuid wrapper which launches them as a different user. Those applications write in a directory which is owned by that user and which is part of a group for which my main userid has RW access. This way I can access any downloaded/generated data without changing user, but at the same time, if the application fucks up (or say a web broweser manages to run rm -rf) it ONLY affects files related to that application. It would not be difficult to do this with a mail reader, in which case the worst which can happen is that your mail folders will be damaged (the mail program needs write access to that). In any case, if executable mail is required for some reason, it's perfectly possible to write a mail client which runs as nobody and operates on folders though a socket to another app. This way the mail program can execute stuff which won't even be able to delete your mail folders.
Well, I'm Italian and I can offer you my view on the "compulsory" ID card thing. In Italy you are supposed to have an ID card on you at all time, but in fact nothing too bad happens if you don't (you may have to talk a bit, but you most definitely won't be arrested:). I admit that I don't understand the concern of people about the ID card, but I think that this comes from the fact that what's more important is not the fact that you MUST have an ID card, but rather the fact that you must show it when doing this or that. I mean: if you must have it, but you're never asked to show it, you don't really feel Big-Brother'ed. Honestly, in Italy I cannot remember any situation where my card was asked which was not very well justified... In general it happens when you request official documents (and not always), maybe it happened once or twice at an university exam with a more paranoid professor fearing "friends" coming to do the exam for you. I suppose that if they catch you with a smoking gun in front of a dead man they'll ask you, also. When driving they ask for driving license, often they don't care about the ID card. If I were asked to list 10 times when my card was asked I'm not sure I'd be able to reach those 10 times.... What is true is that it will be asked when crossing the border (you don't need a passport to move inside the EU, the ID card is enough), and even there, not always. When travelling by train or plane between France and Italy there have been times when I could travel without showing my ID to anyone (after 9/11 they are more paranoid, on planes they always ask you for the ID card....even if they tend to look at it for 1-2 seconds...). In France, some shops want to see your ID card when you pay by cheque or foreign credit card. I don't feel much threatened by this: my name is already on both of them, so the ID card does not add any information. If I don't want questions I just pay cash. Overall, I think you can understand while, even carrying an ID card at all times, I really don't feel "watched". I feel much more watched through the credit card, for example, because that is associated to buying habits, while the ID is not.
The coats are different colors. How is this possible?
The color of a cat's coat is a much more complex matter than what it seems. While, of course, genetics applies, there are a lot of "minor" details which are not completely understood. Even in "purebreed" cats you can have a lot of fluctuations in the fur color (there are lots of variations in the "blue" you can see in the Chartreux). While some of them are genetically transferred (and thus selective breeding can enhance/cancel them), for some of them the situation is not so clear, an example being the tortie-shell females (black/red or blue/cream), where the distribution of the color doesn't seem much controllable. From what they show with Cc it also seems that the tabby stripes can show up more or less depending on the individual.
Some more info on the main cat color genes can be found here and even more here.
Well, the whole IE vs Netscape thing didn't really get them any profit did it.
It "only" provided a 90+% installed base of browsers which support their standard instead of the normal one. A standard which, surprise surprise, is fully accessible when using their http server (otherwise, forget about the neat extensions).
This is the main difference with "free-as-in-speech": a 100% marketshare in free software does not give you leverage to extend monopoly in another market. On the contrary, proprietary protocols give you this power (proprietary = either that the protocol is unknown or that it's supported only by a specific proprietary app). Netscape was dangerous because, even if is now portrayed at the poor victim of the gorilla, was trying to play the very same game with their "agressively embracing open standards" (= adding new extensions) which, surprise again, were better supported by their http server. Microsoft had no control on the platform where that server would be running: in particular it would not have been NT Windows-only.
All they need to do is create a free (as in beer) X-semi-compatible, but faster GUI. Then release Word for it.
Ok, and the situation will end up being identical to today, with people locked in MS X# or whatever instead of windows. In what way would this take control of linux? X11 and all the apps would still exists and you would still be able to use them. The only consequence would be to get some extra kernel debugging and lots of linux kernels running in the background of desktop PCs.
They can't change X# to make it only compatible with the special closed-source Microsoft-approved linux kernel, because the kernel is GPL. Actually, Microsoft would give a lot of power in the hands of Linus: a few touches here and there and it would be update nightmare for Microsoft to make sure that their interface runs on every new release of the kernel.....
I think you are assuming that the only things MS wants is "control", while the aim is profit: control is only a mean to it. And this new scenario does not bring in any additional profit.
A traditional online game has a goals of sorts - to adventure, to kill monsters, to work as a team, to compete against other teams, to acquire wealth and status etc.
I should answer RTFA.... They addressed this problem quite clearly, by dividing the players in different categories which like the game for a specific aspect (building, getting rich, socializing...) and trying to include elements which guarantee long playability for all of them.
Personally, I'll never play it (I may try if they give out a couple of months and the program for free), and some of the comments on the sims newsgroup are very negative (they say it's boring), but there will be certainly tons of people ready to pay for the game just because it's "The Sims" and probably a fair amount of them will appreciate the "glorified chat room" idea and stick around even at $10/month (which seems to be quite a lot of money to me).
Beside the nice graphics with the "create your own objects" possibility (which will be added later - and will pose lots of troubles, I think), I don't see any advantage over a good old text MUD.
While obviously true, it doesn't really help to talk about unknown issues when assessing the security of a system. It's a safe bet that there are unknown issues with any piece of software, especially a complex one. The argument that closed-source software isn't open to as much peer review as is open-source software doesn't really hold ground. It's perfectly possible for closed-source software to be more extensively audited than an open-source alternative.
The minor difference that you fail to mention is that for open source the possible ways to assess the security are two: 1) rely on the quality of the auditing and testing from the creator or other third party 2) test and audit the code yourself or by a contracted (by you) party. For closed source you only have 1 and so you have to trust the creator & his friends. Now, a lot of people is very good at producing secure software and as you say it's perfectly possible for closed-source to be more extensively tested and audited, but what Microsoft has shown up to now is a complete disregard of the problem. So, the "unknown issues" cannot be dismissed that easily. If we talk about Swiss cheese, you'll agree with me that there are lots of holes, even without looking at the piece I have in my mouth:)
(for the single-user thing: Apple has done a better job in much less time with OSX)
PGP signing is a good way to prevent trojaned software like this case. But I think the process to verify the software is too complicated and not easy for all users to use. Let me ask you this, when is the last time you checked the hash or PGP signature after you download a software?
Always. It goes like: - download (mirror) the updates for my distro (Mandrake) - rpm --checksig *.rpm
The Mandrake key is added to root's keyring off the CDROM at install time, so unless someone hacks your box to change it, it will be the right one.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the summary. I quickly browsed the article looking at some graphs, and I'm suprised by the bad performance of the Athlon 64s compared to the Athlon XPs in many of the tests.... Is any of those programs running in 64 bit mode, or it's just a test of 32-bit applications running on 64-bit CPUS?
You can easily build yourself a bootable DVD from the CDs. Here is what I did:
- Grab all the CDs and mount them with the loopback device to access the files inside
- copy all the files from all CDs in some directory
- with "less", open the first CD iso image, kill the line-counting with Ctrl-C and scroll down, you'll find a nice mkisofs command line containing all the parameters to correctly generate a bootable image.
- run mkisofs and build yourself a 3Gb iso, burn it to DVD.
- boot it, go for upgrade, wait (on my machine) 1 hour and it's done....
Hoe this helps
Check galeon. It was user-selectable in the past, now the "save session on exit" option seems to be always on, which is nice....
I'm paying for linux Mandrake. I don't buy any boxed set, but I donated some money before the club existed, then I subscribed at the "entry" level, now I'm a silver member. I don't really use any of the advantages of being a club member, except the club repository for commercial apps, which allows me to install (and uninstall) non-free stuff quickly.
I see my subscription as hiring a group of talented programmers to build a product which I like and I want to keep using. I'm also anti-MS, or, more precisely, anti-MS-users, for the very simple reason that they assume the non-sequitur that since I know linux I must be good and be able to solve all their windows problems......
Linux I use for: (1) the compatibility with workstations (even if today they are being replaced by PCs). Basically I can code at home and my software will run anywhere I have a c compiler and X11 (I don't do any low-level system programming, so cross-unix compatibility is not a problem). (2) I get for free a lot of developement tools which on MS would cost a lot of money. I'm not a professional programmer, and I'm not ready to spend that amount of money just to code for fun. (3) I don't like the "closed" approach of windows and the systematic incompatibility that goes with it. I like to be able to mess with the files generated by system/software.
I still have a win partition to play games, and this is also one reason I won't switch to OS-X: too few games for the Apple hardware. (I'm also familiar with linux and unless I get some big advantage I won't to switch).
A more serious example: my bank, the Dutch Rabobank, features internet banking. It specifically displays a warning before logging in: Make sure that the address in the address bar starts with https://www.rabobank.nl/, then you are sure you're communicating with us.
Frankly, what would be REALLY nice in a browser would be a toolbar widget giving you the information of the SSL certificate of the website. I usually check it when connecting to my bank, but being able to just view it on the screen would allow me to immediately see if I'm where I want to be or not. Alternatively, use a pop-up (tips, balloon help or whatever they are called) when I station my mouse pointer on the "lock" symbol to bring up both the certificate and its signature.... Galeon almost does this, telling you the signature.
Another solution not involving a second PC. Install a stupid program simulating user activity, let it run 30 hours/month when you're not home. For the rest of the time just do what you want (i.e. kill the advertising program or run linux).
CD-R's, contarary to popular belief (or at least manufacturers claims) only last about a year or two.
BAD CD-Rs. I have 5-year old backups which are still perfectly readable (not that this will prevent me from moving everything to DVD-R soon), but I use TDK and not unbranded CDRs.
Look at all the posts...excuses and rationalizations. "Well, this serves as an example of weak passwords" or "non-root privileges," etc.
Actually, what I see is people warning of a possible security hole in the wild.
You never see that level of rational explanation when it comes to a user-transmitted e-mail Outlook worm. In fact, in those cases it magically becomes a "Microsoft hole," even though it's users running the executable!
This is because one of the "strong" points which is claimed by windows is that it's designed to be used by non-tech experts, while at the same time it offers NO protection from mistakes. If outlook were modified so that it cannot execute anything and you must manually save to disk and execute whatever you would see (beside a drop in virus infections) fingers pointed at the users instead of Microsoft.
Ever notice how the things you like are never harmful, and they are always misunderstood by society?
:-)
Could this be because 99.99% of the people doing $FAVORITE_ACTIVITY are not bloodthirsty killers/terrorists/whatever, even if the media puts big letters on the front page every time someone performing $FAVORITE_ACTIVITY kills/terrorizes/whatever for reasons completely unrelated to $FAVORITE_ACTIVITY?
Whereas the things you don't like are unprecedented levels of chaos, evil and destruction never before witnessed in the history of man?
"History repeats itself". The fear is due to the unprecedented levels of chaos evil and destruction witnessed in the past....
It doesn't matter what the issue is, or what side you're on: play this to your advantage and you'll win ever time
People are not scared of what they are familiar with, whatever it is, while tend to have irrational fears about the unknown, so this trick only works when dealing with people who already agree with you.....
If any country had to be in possession of these things, it should be the US. You don't want it to be the US?
Considering the recent record of the US of bombing and invading countries on purely imaginary perceived threats and very real economic reasons, I'd rather NOT have the US be the only one with such a weapon. I'd like a lot of different people to have it. Balance of terror is bad, but I've come to appreciate the advantages of unstable equilibrium compared to a (albeit very stable) death.
He was fired for a fairly innocous describing of part of the physical layout of their campus. While I'm not exactly fond of beast of Redmond, they do have some pretty valid security concerns.
"VALID SECURITY CONCERNS" from a message which says 'I took this shot on the way into work on the loading dock (MSCopy, the print shop I work in, is in the same building as MS's shipping and receiving).'???
If your security is compromised by this kind of absolutely insignificant amount of information then I'd say that you need to seriously review your security procedures.....
It seems to me that he was very careful both in the text and in the picture not to give out any information about Microsoft Campus, and I don't understand the amount of postings on the tone of "they were right to fire him because he posted confident data in a weblog". The only explanation I can guess is rampant paranoia from the readers.... it's scary to see how the 9/11 mentality creeps anywhere. For Microsoft it wasn't paranoia: the confidentiality thing is just an excuse to fire him as he posted a joke putting Microsoft in bad light (= they have to copy from Apple).
I honestly can't understand how this bullshit can get modded to +5. It's a blatant uninformed troll, shame on you moderators.
The answer is easy :)
http://atari800.sourceforge.net/
It works pretty well, I used it to play M.U.L.E. and Koronis Rift some time ago....
You're probably one of those people who became livid when Tom Bombadil was stripped from "Fellowship of the Ring", too. Do you really intend to hold it against them if they don't develop every last character in exactly the same way as the 13-hour series during a 2-hour movie?
:) for Eva fans.
I don't know about him, but I personally found the idea of eliminating TB good, as it does not add much to the story and can be safely removed without messing up with the plot. I turned livid at "Faramir's massacre" or the Elves helping the humans at Helm's Deep, or Merry/Pippin "tricking" the Ents, as these are completely useless from the point of view of book->film conversion, but also fuck up what Tolkien wrote (and the elf one indicates a serious misundestanding).
Evangelion has a lot of strong/important points. If they want to keep "the message" they cannot change much. All the elements cited above ARE important, remove them and be ready to become target practice (verbal only
As I always say: there's nothing wrong in filming a grandma on a toliet for two hours, just don't title it "The Lord of the Rings".
When basing movies on "huge" books, people should basically not mess up with any element. The book was "huge" because of what it is: stick to it or do something different. Changing stuff looks like wanting to get easy cash from the big name.
Am I the only person that *only* cares about my personal files and not about the system? That thinks the computer is here to do stuff for me, not for me to protect the stupid computer?
No. While the distribution do not provide this "out of the box", it is trivial to set up applications so that they run as another userid.
For example I run some programs which I don't fully trust thorough a setuid wrapper which launches them as a different user. Those applications write in a directory which is owned by that user and which is part of a group for which my main userid has RW access.
This way I can access any downloaded/generated data without changing user, but at the same time, if the application fucks up (or say a web broweser manages to run rm -rf) it ONLY affects files related to that application.
It would not be difficult to do this with a mail reader, in which case the worst which can happen is that your mail folders will be damaged (the mail program needs write access to that). In any case, if executable mail is required for some reason, it's perfectly possible to write a mail client which runs as nobody and operates on folders though a socket to another app. This way the mail program can execute stuff which won't even be able to delete your mail folders.
After all, it runs Windows! What do you expect?
From a computer running windows, I'd expect YOU THE USER to develop a neurosis...
Same here. Also, a real download instead of streaming would be nice, as my network-enabled machine is way too weak to actually play such a thing....
Well, I'm Italian and I can offer you my view on the "compulsory" ID card thing. In Italy you are supposed to have an ID card on you at all time, but in fact nothing too bad happens if you don't (you may have to talk a bit, but you most definitely won't be arrested :). I admit that I don't understand the concern of people about the ID card, but I think that this comes from the fact that what's more important is not the fact that you MUST have an ID card, but rather the fact that you must show it when doing this or that. I mean: if you must have it, but you're never asked to show it, you don't really feel Big-Brother'ed.
Honestly, in Italy I cannot remember any situation where my card was asked which was not very well justified... In general it happens when you request official documents (and not always), maybe it happened once or twice at an university exam with a more paranoid professor fearing "friends" coming to do the exam for you. I suppose that if they catch you with a smoking gun in front of a dead man they'll ask you, also. When driving they ask for driving license, often they don't care about the ID card.
If I were asked to list 10 times when my card was asked I'm not sure I'd be able to reach those 10 times....
What is true is that it will be asked when crossing the border (you don't need a passport to move inside the EU, the ID card is enough), and even there, not always. When travelling by train or plane between France and Italy there have been times when I could travel without showing my ID to anyone (after 9/11 they are more paranoid, on planes they always ask you for the ID card....even if they tend to look at it for 1-2 seconds...). In France, some shops want to see your ID card when you pay by cheque or foreign credit card. I don't feel much threatened by this: my name is already on both of them, so the ID card does not add any information. If I don't want questions I just pay cash.
Overall, I think you can understand while, even carrying an ID card at all times, I really don't feel "watched". I feel much more watched through the credit card, for example, because that is associated to buying habits, while the ID is not.
The coats are different colors. How is this possible?
The color of a cat's coat is a much more complex matter than what it seems. While, of course, genetics applies, there are a lot of "minor" details which are not completely understood.
Even in "purebreed" cats you can have a lot of fluctuations in the fur color (there are lots of variations in the "blue" you can see in the Chartreux). While some of them are genetically transferred (and thus selective breeding can enhance/cancel them), for some of them the situation is not so clear, an example being the tortie-shell females (black/red or blue/cream), where the distribution of the color doesn't seem much controllable. From what they show with Cc it also seems that the tabby stripes can show up more or less depending on the individual.
Some more info on the main cat color genes can be found here
and even more here.
Well, the whole IE vs Netscape thing didn't really get them any profit did it.
It "only" provided a 90+% installed base of browsers which support their standard instead of the normal one. A standard which, surprise surprise, is fully accessible when using their http server (otherwise, forget about the neat extensions).
This is the main difference with "free-as-in-speech": a 100% marketshare in free software does not give you leverage to extend monopoly in another market. On the contrary, proprietary protocols give you this power (proprietary = either that the protocol is unknown or that it's supported only by a specific proprietary app). Netscape was dangerous because, even if is now portrayed at the poor victim of the gorilla, was trying to play the very same game with their "agressively embracing open standards" (= adding new extensions) which, surprise again, were better supported by their http server. Microsoft had no control on the platform where that server would be running: in particular it would not have been NT Windows-only.
All they need to do is create a free (as in beer) X-semi-compatible, but faster GUI. Then release Word for it.
Ok, and the situation will end up being identical to today, with people locked in MS X# or whatever instead of windows. In what way would this take control of linux? X11 and all the apps would still exists and you would still be able to use them.
The only consequence would be to get some extra kernel debugging and lots of linux kernels running in the background of desktop PCs.
They can't change X# to make it only compatible with the special closed-source Microsoft-approved linux kernel, because the kernel is GPL. Actually, Microsoft would give a lot of power in the hands of Linus: a few touches here and there and it would be update nightmare for Microsoft to make sure that their interface runs on every new release of the kernel.....
I think you are assuming that the only things MS wants is "control", while the aim is profit: control is only a mean to it. And this new scenario does not bring in any additional profit.
A traditional online game has a goals of sorts - to adventure, to kill monsters, to work as a team, to compete against other teams, to acquire wealth and status etc.
I should answer RTFA.... They addressed this problem quite clearly, by dividing the players in different categories which like the game for a specific aspect (building, getting rich, socializing...) and trying to include elements which guarantee long playability for all of them.
Personally, I'll never play it (I may try if they give out a couple of months and the program for free), and some of the comments on the sims newsgroup are very negative (they say it's boring), but there will be certainly tons of people ready to pay for the game just because it's "The Sims" and probably a fair amount of them will appreciate the "glorified chat room" idea and stick around even at $10/month (which seems to be quite a lot of money to me).
Beside the nice graphics with the "create your own objects" possibility (which will be added later - and will pose lots of troubles, I think), I don't see any advantage over a good old text MUD.
While obviously true, it doesn't really help to talk about unknown issues when assessing the security of a system. It's a safe bet that there are unknown issues with any piece of software, especially a complex one. The argument that closed-source software isn't open to as much peer review as is open-source software doesn't really hold ground. It's perfectly possible for closed-source software to be more extensively audited than an open-source alternative.
:)
The minor difference that you fail to mention is that for open source the possible ways to assess the security are two: 1) rely on the quality of the auditing and testing from the creator or other third party 2) test and audit the code yourself or by a contracted (by you) party. For closed source you only have 1 and so you have to trust the creator & his friends. Now, a lot of people is very good at producing secure software and as you say it's perfectly possible for closed-source to be more extensively tested and audited, but what Microsoft has shown up to now is a complete disregard of the problem. So, the "unknown issues" cannot be dismissed that easily. If we talk about Swiss cheese, you'll agree with me that there are lots of holes, even without looking at the piece I have in my mouth
(for the single-user thing: Apple has done a better job in much less time with OSX)
Working as a web developer I know that getting users to update their browsers is hard, let alone switch browser alltogether...
:)
Well, use the wonderful features of IE and have your web page update their browsers automatically
PGP signing is a good way to prevent trojaned software like this case. But I think the process to verify the software is too complicated and not easy for all users to use. Let me ask you this, when is the last time you checked the hash or PGP signature after you download a software?
Always. It goes like:
- download (mirror) the updates for my distro (Mandrake)
- rpm --checksig *.rpm
The Mandrake key is added to root's keyring off the CDROM at install time, so unless someone hacks your box to change it, it will be the right one.