Thanks for replying. I do disagree with some of the things you mention, such as one app trying to fix another. Part of my suggestion was that, if app A and B are in the same directory, then they can both write to config files within the same directory.
So, if one app needs to correct a setting in outlook, for example, it would need to be physically located within outlooks' install directory. (Of course, you could still have a warning pop up when the app installs telling the admin "This application wants to patch "MS Outlook". Do you allow it").
As for communications, you have ports, web services, and I am also suggesting that apps be allowed to write to non-system folders, such as your "My Documents" folder.
But, I understand that this is irrelevant, because it cannot possibly be done without rewriting a substantial portion of Microsoft's security controls.
But then this doesn't really solve the problem that this whole thread is about--that is malware being run that is allowed to screw with the system.
I disagree. I feel that part of the problem with security is that Microsoft cannot get the permissions correct. Their security plan seems to be to cry wolf until the user either disables it, or learns to ignore warnings. The user is to blame, but I can't blame them for ignoring the good warnings, when they are bombarded with so many pointless or uninformative warnings.
As for your point about people/sysadmins not always enforcing the best security, I can agree with that.
Uh, and just what the hell do you think the government is comprised of? Deities who are always neutral and never do anything wrong?
We are not arguing over who should be allowed to throttle internet traffic. We are arguing over whether anybody should be allowed to.
I want sysadmins regulating their company's services...not bribed politicians who are above the law and will cater to every big financial donor's wishes.
Not an option. The policies will be set by the people who run the company. They also happen to be the same people who are attempting to bribe politicians. Who do you trust more. The politician who may be getting bribed, or the guy who is definitely doing the bribery?
The internet isn't a right or a life necessity. It's a convenient service you pay for, like having a car or a television,
The car analogy is close to correct, because if you cannot find transportation of any kind, then you cannot go to work. The internet is much more than a luxury. It is something that many of us, myself included, must have as terms of our employment. It is also something that society as a whole needs to assure that the next generation of children will be competitive in the information-based economy that the first world is moving toward. (BTW, one person can get buy without internet access, just as one person can get by without electricity or running water. That does not diminish its' importance to society).
and the free market keeps abuses in check because a company's livelihood depends on your dollar.
There is no free market when it comes to internet access, in many, if not most, areas. Your choices are "broadband through one ISP. Take it or leave it".
A government, on the other hand, already forces you to pay it through taxes, and it makes its own special rules for itself so that it's not beholden to the law like the free market is. There's no incentive to please you as a customer.
Politicians can be voted out of office.
You're a citizen who will do what it says.
Could some of you stop giving the government so much power, please? We get it, you hate free markets and think government power solves absolutely everything by magic.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the free market. Not a damn thing. Until the cable companies stop respecting each others fiefdoms, and start competing for my business, this is not about capitalism, the free market, or any other pseudo-patriotic catch-phrase you can come up with.
Yep, history sure has shown how pure, fair, reliable, trustworthy, and incorruptible the government is. Uh-huh.
And history has shown that unregulated markets can be even more unfair, untrustworthy, and corrupt.
I am wondering how long before I see the headline "Man arrested for using linux", just to read on and find out that he beat his wife to death using a Ubuntu Laptop.
Probably. We would have avoided the areas that were unlivable, and built our infrastructure around the world as it was at the time. And it would be perfectly rational not to welcome the prospect of farms either being flooded or turning to desert, while sea ports are buried under water, and the gradual changes in variables that could make life more difficult for the plants and animals we depend upon.
It's not that the world in its current state is perfect. It's just that it works for us, right now. So I would rather not risk everything, in return for cheap transportation.
What do you want them to replace it with? hundreds of.conf files scattered randomly about the filesystem, with no standard format? That will be much easier for the user than a centralized, standardized configuration system.
Well, if they stick the files in random places, then it may be harder. But, why couldn't the config file be located in the directory structure allocated for the app itself? This way, everything you need to run random_app_x is in the directory labeled "C:\program files\random_app_x".
As for separate formats, are you really arguing that learning to read both ini and xml files is more complicated than learning the windows registry?
I was going to argue one registry or config directory for system settings and then let each app put their config files back in their home directory. What's the point of letting firefox keep it's settings in the same file as Windows Media Player?
And why is it so scary to have random_app_x.conf in the same directory as random_app_x.exe?
As far as security goes, why couldn't Windows work out the permissions so that each directory within the "program files" directory is "owned" by the applications within, and they are the only ones with write permissions (other than the superuser). (Of course somebody may have to modify the permissions system to make that suggestion possible, but my point is that the registry is not needed for individual apps.)
I think GP agrees with you. He seems to be arguing that an honest human being should admit to his mistakes, without being denigrated for showing weakness.
These features and options have to be implemented. In an industry that is already extremely cutthroat with tight schedules and a revenue model that normally involves taking a loss on 9 product in the hope that the 10 will be a multi billion dollar hit ready for chrismas, that means that every single feature that gets implemented that was not absolutely necessary, is one less bug fixed, one less normal stage added, one less part voice acted.
And this is why disabled gamers shouldn't have a website telling which games are best for them?
Can you name one single instance in which anything has been mucked up, to accommodate the handicapped? Sure, some people had to put wheelchair ramps on their businesses, and the best parking spaces are handicapped, but, really, has anything in your life ever been inconvenienced in the slightest way, for the sake of accommodation?
It isn't religion that is the problem, it is organization and trust. Take any group of trusted people and you will find that a minority want to use their trust for personal gain. In America, corporations, schools, etc. are all looked at pretty thoroughly for abuses, religion usually isn't.
I agree with every word of that. Throw in the concept of faith, and you have a system in which critical examination or "looking for abuse" is a sin that will send you to hell for all eternity.
I believe the change was implemented in order to prevent phosphor burn-in on older CRT monitors.
Actually, blue was chosen deliberately because zinc sulfide silver (blue phosphor in CRTs) is more resistant to burnout than the other phosphors, thus ensuring more even color rendition over time. It was a feature, not a bug:-). With no burnout problems in LCD panels, they went with black.
Do you think there was somebody sitting in a Microsoft headquarters saying "You know, when this thing crashes, we should make it blue. That way, the monitors will not experience burn-in after years of constant crashing"?
Too bad terrorist organizations aren't modelled after businesses:
Suicide Bomber (Entry Level) Are you a people-oriented go-getter with a strong desire to work the competitive field of non-recurring thermal politics? Do you look at fireworks and think "That'll change people's minds"? If so, Al-Qaeda may be the place for you.
Benefits include:
72 virgins
401k
Competitive pay
Qualifications:
Master's Degree in hyperballistics
three years experience working in suicide bombing or related field.
Five years experience in use of public transportation.
Ten years experience in cartography, GPS, or similar field.
Fifteen years, oh screw it. If you don't know somebody, don't bother applying.
Or to make a similar (but dumbed down) argument...Computers exist to server a purpose. If that purpose is served, quit bitching that it didn't require enough work.
Wikipedia is what it is. Even if all the contributors dropped dead right now, it'd be the best encyclopedia around for quite some time yet.
I have never heard anyone use the phrase "it is what it is", without it being a euphemistic way to say "it sucks, and I hate it, but there isn't a thing either of us can do about it"
Of course a lot of crap is coming in. It always has. The problem is that many start to assume anything added by a newbie is crap until proven otherwise.
As a thought example, let's say 80% of new articles are crap. Then let's say 90% is deletions are accurate. 90% is pretty good, but that still means about 44% of good new articles are deleted.
I'm having trouble understanding your math on this one.
1,000 articles total
800 are crap
200 are good
90% of deletions are accurate. Let's say 100 articles are deleted.
90% of them, or 90 total are bad articles. 10%, or 10 of them, are good articles.
The end result is that, of 200 articles, 10 were deleted. That's 5%.
Now, if you meant to say that 90% of all articles are handled correctly, then you could say:
720 of the bad articles are removed, leaving 80 still in the system. 20 of the good articles are removed, leaving 180 in the system.
The end result is that, 97 percent of the articles removed were crap, and 30% of the articles remaining are bad.
Have you ever seen backup systems in Star Trek, for example? you haven't. The future requires no backups.
Have you ever seen a holodeck episode? The future has crappy IT. The Vulcans must have stolen their ships from go'uld*, since nobody knows how to do anything nerdier than paint or play jazz music.
(And yes, I am cross-referencing different series.)
I had my own questions about what "stealing information" comprises. For example, is it stealing information, if you take generic libraries, that you wrote, with you? I'm not talking about entire applications, but, if you wrote some useful testing functions, and maybe a shell script that could come in handy, is it "stealing information", to keep a copy for future reference?
No, we just live in the quantum reality in which they failed. Sucks to be (this version of) us.
Why couldn't they have just written a note? I'm glad the real world doesn't work like myths, urban legends, and chain mails. Every time someone, in these tales, has a critically important message to deliver, they do it in a way that combines the subtlety of a whisper with a Rube Goldberg design. If the future wants us to turn off the LHC, have the future send us a bad-ass cyborg with a note taped to it's shirt.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for replying. I do disagree with some of the things you mention, such as one app trying to fix another. Part of my suggestion was that, if app A and B are in the same directory, then they can both write to config files within the same directory.
So, if one app needs to correct a setting in outlook, for example, it would need to be physically located within outlooks' install directory. (Of course, you could still have a warning pop up when the app installs telling the admin "This application wants to patch "MS Outlook". Do you allow it").
As for communications, you have ports, web services, and I am also suggesting that apps be allowed to write to non-system folders, such as your "My Documents" folder.
But, I understand that this is irrelevant, because it cannot possibly be done without rewriting a substantial portion of Microsoft's security controls.
But then this doesn't really solve the problem that this whole thread is about--that is malware being run that is allowed to screw with the system.
I disagree. I feel that part of the problem with security is that Microsoft cannot get the permissions correct. Their security plan seems to be to cry wolf until the user either disables it, or learns to ignore warnings. The user is to blame, but I can't blame them for ignoring the good warnings, when they are bombarded with so many pointless or uninformative warnings.
As for your point about people/sysadmins not always enforcing the best security, I can agree with that.
Also, thank you for being respectful.
Uh, and just what the hell do you think the government is comprised of? Deities who are always neutral and never do anything wrong?
We are not arguing over who should be allowed to throttle internet traffic. We are arguing over whether anybody should be allowed to.
I want sysadmins regulating their company's services...not bribed politicians who are above the law and will cater to every big financial donor's wishes.
Not an option. The policies will be set by the people who run the company. They also happen to be the same people who are attempting to bribe politicians. Who do you trust more. The politician who may be getting bribed, or the guy who is definitely doing the bribery?
The internet isn't a right or a life necessity. It's a convenient service you pay for, like having a car or a television,
The car analogy is close to correct, because if you cannot find transportation of any kind, then you cannot go to work. The internet is much more than a luxury. It is something that many of us, myself included, must have as terms of our employment. It is also something that society as a whole needs to assure that the next generation of children will be competitive in the information-based economy that the first world is moving toward. (BTW, one person can get buy without internet access, just as one person can get by without electricity or running water. That does not diminish its' importance to society).
and the free market keeps abuses in check because a company's livelihood depends on your dollar.
There is no free market when it comes to internet access, in many, if not most, areas. Your choices are "broadband through one ISP. Take it or leave it".
A government, on the other hand, already forces you to pay it through taxes, and it makes its own special rules for itself so that it's not beholden to the law like the free market is. There's no incentive to please you as a customer.
Politicians can be voted out of office.
You're a citizen who will do what it says.
Could some of you stop giving the government so much power, please? We get it, you hate free markets and think government power solves absolutely everything by magic.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the free market. Not a damn thing. Until the cable companies stop respecting each others fiefdoms, and start competing for my business, this is not about capitalism, the free market, or any other pseudo-patriotic catch-phrase you can come up with.
Yep, history sure has shown how pure, fair, reliable, trustworthy, and incorruptible the government is. Uh-huh.
And history has shown that unregulated markets can be even more unfair, untrustworthy, and corrupt.
Wow, just freaking wow...
I am wondering how long before I see the headline "Man arrested for using linux", just to read on and find out that he beat his wife to death using a Ubuntu Laptop.
Probably. We would have avoided the areas that were unlivable, and built our infrastructure around the world as it was at the time. And it would be perfectly rational not to welcome the prospect of farms either being flooded or turning to desert, while sea ports are buried under water, and the gradual changes in variables that could make life more difficult for the plants and animals we depend upon.
It's not that the world in its current state is perfect. It's just that it works for us, right now. So I would rather not risk everything, in return for cheap transportation.
What do you want them to replace it with? hundreds of .conf files scattered randomly about the filesystem, with no standard format? That will be much easier for the user than a centralized, standardized configuration system.
Well, if they stick the files in random places, then it may be harder. But, why couldn't the config file be located in the directory structure allocated for the app itself? This way, everything you need to run random_app_x is in the directory labeled "C:\program files\random_app_x".
As for separate formats, are you really arguing that learning to read both ini and xml files is more complicated than learning the windows registry?
I was going to argue one registry or config directory for system settings and then let each app put their config files back in their home directory. What's the point of letting firefox keep it's settings in the same file as Windows Media Player?
And why is it so scary to have random_app_x.conf in the same directory as random_app_x.exe?
As far as security goes, why couldn't Windows work out the permissions so that each directory within the "program files" directory is "owned" by the applications within, and they are the only ones with write permissions (other than the superuser). (Of course somebody may have to modify the permissions system to make that suggestion possible, but my point is that the registry is not needed for individual apps.)
I think GP agrees with you. He seems to be arguing that an honest human being should admit to his mistakes, without being denigrated for showing weakness.
These features and options have to be implemented. In an industry that is already extremely cutthroat with tight schedules and a revenue model that normally involves taking a loss on 9 product in the hope that the 10 will be a multi billion dollar hit ready for chrismas, that means that every single feature that gets implemented that was not absolutely necessary, is one less bug fixed, one less normal stage added, one less part voice acted.
And this is why disabled gamers shouldn't have a website telling which games are best for them?
Can you name one single instance in which anything has been mucked up, to accommodate the handicapped? Sure, some people had to put wheelchair ramps on their businesses, and the best parking spaces are handicapped, but, really, has anything in your life ever been inconvenienced in the slightest way, for the sake of accommodation?
Type O Negative: Not Okay?
Umm...
Hitler wasn't a scientologist?
Oh, my, a Reverse Godwin! Ladies and Gentlemen, I think we have our winner.
The Religion of Anthropogenic Global Warming...! :)
Right, because you never hear criticism of that!
It isn't religion that is the problem, it is organization and trust. Take any group of trusted people and you will find that a minority want to use their trust for personal gain. In America, corporations, schools, etc. are all looked at pretty thoroughly for abuses, religion usually isn't.
I agree with every word of that. Throw in the concept of faith, and you have a system in which critical examination or "looking for abuse" is a sin that will send you to hell for all eternity.
I believe the change was implemented in order to prevent phosphor burn-in on older CRT monitors.
Actually, blue was chosen deliberately because zinc sulfide silver (blue phosphor in CRTs) is more resistant to burnout than the other phosphors, thus ensuring more even color rendition over time. It was a feature, not a bug :-). With no burnout problems in LCD panels, they went with black.
Do you think there was somebody sitting in a Microsoft headquarters saying "You know, when this thing crashes, we should make it blue. That way, the monitors will not experience burn-in after years of constant crashing"?
Somebody stab me with a stick...
I would add one thing to that. Learn about the situation, before you assert your superior understanding of it.
Too bad terrorist organizations aren't modelled after businesses:
Suicide Bomber (Entry Level)
Are you a people-oriented go-getter with a strong desire to work the competitive field of non-recurring thermal politics? Do you look at fireworks and think "That'll change people's minds"? If so, Al-Qaeda may be the place for you.
Benefits include:
72 virgins
401k
Competitive pay
Qualifications:
Master's Degree in hyperballistics
three years experience working in suicide bombing or related field.
Five years experience in use of public transportation.
Ten years experience in cartography, GPS, or similar field.
Fifteen years, oh screw it. If you don't know somebody, don't bother applying.
Or to make a similar (but dumbed down) argument...Computers exist to server a purpose. If that purpose is served, quit bitching that it didn't require enough work.
I love it when I look up NFS commands and all the ads are for the newest "Need For Speed" game.
Wikipedia is what it is. Even if all the contributors dropped dead right now, it'd be the best encyclopedia around for quite some time yet.
I have never heard anyone use the phrase "it is what it is", without it being a euphemistic way to say "it sucks, and I hate it, but there isn't a thing either of us can do about it"
This happens to any system of sufficient size and age.
Europe has been there for a while.
The US is getting there now.
People are never content to leave well enough alone.
If we were, we'd have never invented agriculture, let alone the internet, or wikipedia.
Of course a lot of crap is coming in. It always has. The problem is that many start to assume anything added by a newbie is crap until proven otherwise.
As a thought example, let's say 80% of new articles are crap. Then let's say 90% is deletions are accurate. 90% is pretty good, but that still means about 44% of good new articles are deleted.
I'm having trouble understanding your math on this one.
1,000 articles total
800 are crap
200 are good
90% of deletions are accurate.
Let's say 100 articles are deleted.
90% of them, or 90 total are bad articles.
10%, or 10 of them, are good articles.
The end result is that, of 200 articles, 10 were deleted. That's 5%.
Now, if you meant to say that 90% of all articles are handled correctly, then you could say:
720 of the bad articles are removed, leaving 80 still in the system.
20 of the good articles are removed, leaving 180 in the system.
The end result is that, 97 percent of the articles removed were crap, and 30% of the articles remaining are bad.
If I'm missing something, could you let me know?
But we do have daemons!
Have you ever seen backup systems in Star Trek, for example? you haven't. The future requires no backups.
Have you ever seen a holodeck episode? The future has crappy IT. The Vulcans must have stolen their ships from go'uld*, since nobody knows how to do anything nerdier than paint or play jazz music.
(And yes, I am cross-referencing different series.)
I had my own questions about what "stealing information" comprises. For example, is it stealing information, if you take generic libraries, that you wrote, with you? I'm not talking about entire applications, but, if you wrote some useful testing functions, and maybe a shell script that could come in handy, is it "stealing information", to keep a copy for future reference?
The question in the survey is broad.
No, we just live in the quantum reality in which they failed. Sucks to be (this version of) us.
Why couldn't they have just written a note? I'm glad the real world doesn't work like myths, urban legends, and chain mails. Every time someone, in these tales, has a critically important message to deliver, they do it in a way that combines the subtlety of a whisper with a Rube Goldberg design. If the future wants us to turn off the LHC, have the future send us a bad-ass cyborg with a note taped to it's shirt.