If I were an investor, I would be asking why Robert didn't take a week and educate himself before bowing to SCO.
Why? It's obvious to world+dog that SCO has no case. But you'd have still have to prove it in a court of law, and that would have cost many times the settlement offered by SCO.
He says made a pragmatic decision - which was not necessarily based on the merits of the case - to protect his clients from SCO and its barratrous lawyers.
It's true he didn't make the same decision many of us would have made, but it's wrong to call him irresponsible just because of that.
I found out how to block referrer information in Mozilla too; it's just a bit more trouble than in Opera. Put this line:
user_pref("network.http.sendRefererHeader", 0);
in the user.js file (create the file if necessary).
Too much work. Just type "about:config" in the url bar, type "refer" in the search bar, and change the ReferrerHeader preference to 0. You can change hundreds of moz settings the same way.
Microsoft is scared shitless of linux. They know as well as anyone that linux is faster, cheaper, more reliable, less prone to vendor lock-in, etc., and they know their customers know it too.
Since everyone knows they're lying anyway, Microsoft's black PR campaign will end up giving linux the exposure it can't afford to give itself. Maybe it will hold back the tide for a bit. Who knows? But software commoditization is inevitable if Microsoft fails in its bid to Xbox the PC platform.
There's an extremely good chance that Microsoft will be forced to be more competitive in pricing, stability, openness of interfaces, etc. Great for us, bad for them.
It's scary how many NT 4 boxes I come across in the work world. they just don't want to update, and the diff between using that and the newer offerings is huge, although so is the price.
I bet the installed base of nt4 is bigger than all later windows server installations combined. In my own case, I work at a small business with an nt4 pdc and about a half dozen 98/me clients. Microsoft did announce another year of security updates for nt4 server, but when they finally do kill support for it I'm going to say it's going to cost thousands to upgrade to Palladium or whatever it'll be called, but we can run linux for nothing. No need for licenses, no need to upgrade the p233 w/224 mb ram.
Don't laugh, it works. Despite all the whizbang marketing from Redmond, most busineses are extremely pragmatic. If all you need is a {print,file,login} server, linux will happily work on hardware later Microsoft OSes have no hope of running on.
Prediction: there'll be huge uptake of linux when Microsoft kills off support of nt4 server, because no one is going to want to take the double hit of replacing all the hardware and buying all new OS licenses. Not to mention new and different security headaches due to exponential increases in complexity, increased lock-in, restrictive EULAs, etc.
A) pay a little more for media and hardware and have essentially decriminalized filesharing, or
B) have all your hardware corrupted with crypto-DRM, with tethered downloads, criminalization of file sharing, draconian laws passed favoring big media at the expense of everyone else, etc?
Anyway, to make a long story short, it's outdated support like this that'll never get Debian to be accepted by my coworkers, and I can't say I blame them. I love the stability and easy of maintenance once it's installed, but putting it on a newer machine is sure a pain in the ass. I'll be stuck with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux) from now on I guess for our servers since Debian provided such a poor showing on a workstation setup.
There's a lot of new interest in debian because there's no corporation that will try to monitize its relationship with its users if it becomes more popular. The installer is a problem, but there's a lot of work being done - there's progeny's anaconda port, there's the new installer in sarge, etc. If this happens in a reasonable timeframe I would not be surprised if it made huge inroads in the enterprise space. Easy easy updates and no money to pay, ever, is a powerful combination.
But if you can't wait for debian to ship a modern installer and don't want to fork over $$$ for Redhat Enterprise Linux 3 you can always try White Box Linux (http://www.beau.org/~jmorris/linux/whitebox/), a free version of rhel3. It's at rc2 now and production release is probably only a month or two away. I notice the Dag apt repository (http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/apt/) has rhel3 rpms, so it should be possible to stay up to date with apt.
You can get a good nforce2-400 board without onboard video for about $80. You can get a retail AthlonXP Barton 333mhz fsb 2500+ cpu (with fan) for $90. You can get a Radeon 9100 video card for about $60. Throw in some good quality 2x256 ddr 3200 ram for dual-channel goodness for less than $100 and you have the guts of a machine that'll run all but the very latest and most cpu-intensive games with total ease.
I figure the whole thing with 120gb hard drive, burner, dvd, case, monitor, etc. will run about $800. Imho it's the best deal on the market right now, price/performance wise.
If the open-source community wants to sit and watch DRM and Trusted Computing take the industry by storm, at least they should try and develop an alternate solution to the problem. A keystroke logger is easily embedded in a midget bowling application that will be run by 99.999 percent of the recipients. And most of those people are at work when they do it...
There's no duplicate in the free software world for the actual motives behind Trusted Computing(tm), and therefore no need to duplicate the technology.
Or buy a motherboard with a BIOS that doesn't come from Phoenix.
Hardware-based restrictions management is never going to fly if people have any kind of choice. That's why Microsoft is pushing hard to make their "secure" DRM based hardware platform the new standard PC. The hope is that when we go to buy our next computers (or even the parts to build computers) they'll all be infected with this garbage^W^W^W^W "Longhorn Compatible" to the extent that we'll be unable to avoid it.
I don't understand why more people aren't jumping on this. If they can't lock up all the hardware vendors linux and friends will most likely commoditize the software industry. If they don't, well, good for MS and big media and bad for everyone else.
Plutocracy: a government by and for the wealthy, i.e. spammers have the money to buy lobbyists, who in turn buy politicians, who then pass convenient laws for the spammers. It's all so tidy and efficient.
I'm as cynical and jaded as the next genX geek, but it still pisses me off that no one gives a shite about the common good. You get the sense that those in power would laugh out loud if you even mentioned it. Bastards.
Oh by the way, even good legislation would be useless against spam. How is these people are too stupid to figure that out?
Accepting for the sake of argument that a SolariX/Opteron system will be more secure, featureful, stable, and pretty than a DIY Linux/Opteron box, will it really be so much better that people will actually pay significant extra money for it?
Compared to, say, a 2.6 based linux box with an SMP Opteron board.
The entry level server market is a low margin minefield, and I'm not sure folks are going to want to pay for stuff (extra securty, huge filesystem support, a Sun badge on the case, etc.) they don't think they're going to need.
Re:US Gov't on Linux
on
Linux in 2004?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Actually, there already is a Tinfoil Hat linux. It's a bootable single-floppy distro for gpg-signing and/or wiping files.
The NSA's version is called SE-Linux, for Security Enhanced Linux. It has a "strong, flexible mandatory access control architecture incorporated into the major subsystems of the kernel. The system provides a mechanism to enforce the separation of information based on confidentiality and integrity requirements. This allows threats of tampering and bypassing of application security mechanisms to be addressed and enables the confinement of damage that can be caused by malicious or flawed applications." Or some such.
If you really need security and don't think running Bastille-linux is going to be enough, then ACLs a la SE-Linux might be the way to go. I suppose no OS is truly secure, but it's hard to imagine even talented crackers getting very far against it.
Ok, so Apache kills IIS and Linux kills Windows in the server space. How is it that MySQL, postgreSQL, et al don't kill Oracle? Why is Oracle spared when the rest of the proprietary software industry falls victim to commoditization?
As a longtime linux user I note that it has improved at the same feverish pace for years. Keeping in mind that the vast majority of computer users only want to write letters, do email, surf the web, etc, the more polished distributions (SuSE, Mandrake, Fedora) are ready now for them now. Microsoft will be in very serious trouble if enough of them realize that they don't need to spend hundreds of dollars on software licenses just to perform these simple, routine tasks.
Microsoft's only chance is to embrace and extend the PC hardware platform in order to illegally stifle competition. One of the main reasons Longhorn is taking so long is that Microsoft has to twist the arms of all the hardware vendors to build Palladium compatibility into their products.
It's a close call. If enough people wake up, openness will win. If they don't, the open pc platform, open protocols, etc. will die.
BayStar does not need Microsoft directing its investments. Believe it or not, there are some companies out there that can make stupid decisions without Microsoft.
Obviously, it's a stupid investment for everyone but Microsoft, who can a) get a lot of FUD out of it, and b) easily afford the 50 mil.
But they know direct funding is out of the question because they'd take a huge PR hit and probably get in regulatory trouble, so they sneak it in through the back door. Just like they did by buying millions of dollars in SCO licenses they didn't need. Surely a coincidence that it's been funding the lawsuit all these months...
Nothing out of the ordinary here, just sharp business, i.e. cheating and not getting caught, which is the order of the day from our good friends at Microsoft.
I've read dozens of OS reviews like this, were all you get is a review of the install and a quick tour of the new features - only here there's Eugenia's inevitable comparisons to BEOS. Deeply exciting I'm sure, but somehow I suspect better reviews will appear within the next couple of days.
When you send snail mail there is some actual, legitimate cost involved in transporting the letter for A to B. But email can be zapped to any net.connected machine pretty much instantly and for a vanishingly small cost. Layering on some expensive infrastructure will never work, for exactly the same reason that charging big bucks for easily reproducible media won't: everyone will use a cheaper way, and the expensive way will be ignored.
In the article Tim Bray says the problem with the current email system is no cost coupled with relative anonymity. Ok then, lets pull back on the anonymity a bit. Let's find a way to identify and block hosts that are sending millions of mail per day. Anything is better than enabling some massive new bureaucracy, which will inevitably put the screws to us the same way Verisign has.
I mean Jesus, haven't we learned anything?
embracing and extending the PC hardware platform
on
Longhorn in 2006
·
· Score: 1
Microsoft is trying to grab control of the PC hardare platform as a way to prevent total software commoditization by the likes of linux and friends. When Longhorn hits Microsoft will have most of the cpu, bios, motherboard, and other hardware vendors onboard and will be pushing the new standard as hard as it can. For the first time, there will be secure, hardware-based digital restrictions management (DRM) that will allow remote control of much of the data on our computers.
Microsoft and the media companies are practically drooling over the possibilites, so it won't matter that some geeks will figure out obcure ways to crack the DRM, or that nearly every computer user on the planet will hate it. The media monopolies will not support anything else, and Microsoft will drop support for and break backwards compatibility with older versions of its office and OS software, using its monopolies in these areas to force everyone to adopt the new Palladium-enabled standard.
But people won't go along with the new regime if they feel they have a choice, and Microsoft will have a serious problem on its hands if linux improves as much in the next three years as it has in the last three. That in addition to Microsoft's dismal security record, onerous licenses and high costs, pervasive DRM may encourage a mass exodus away from Microsoft.
I honestly can't decide who is going to win. Some days I think people are good and responsible and will come to their senses in time, and then I see again how utterly wrapped up your average person is in the lives of celebrities and other shiny things. It's a tough call.
For the record, I will do everything in my power to not buy Palladium-corrupted hardware and will encourage my non-geek friends to do the same.
I suppose if a company were to have a monoculture of free software, they would have standardized on a particular desktop, os, editor, interpreted language (if such were needed), etc., etc., etc. You lower enterprise computing costs by making all the computers the same. That way you only have to test one configuration before releasing patches or software upgrades, etc.
That was why Enderle argued that monocultures are cheaper in principle than the diversified infrastructures Gartner and the CCIA are suggesting we should have. All I said was, you can do the same thing with OSes other than Windows, a point that seems to have escaped him.
Just build your own computers. You can get better quality, exactly the parts you want, at a good price. My personal machine has lots of ram, a big hard drive w/8 mb cache and 3 year warranty, a good burner also w/8 mb chache and burnproof, etc. All the stuff I want, nothing I don't, and the price is right.
I don't see the point in paying for Windows or Office if I'm just going to wipe them anyway.
The author does not define the term "anti-Microsoft". So my question is, what connotation do people try and draw up with the term "anti-Microsoft"? In my opinion, fabricated terms that begin with "anti-" tend to be used to describe an irrational hatred of something, and that's what I'm seeing here.
Perceptive. Dismiss an entire movement with a swipe of the pen, regardless of how well-reasoned the objections may be.
What really opened my eyes to the possibilities of free software was emailing a bug report to the developer of a free software program, getting a reply that day and a fix the next. Proprietary vendors simply cannot touch this level of support, at least not for mere individuals like myself. It's not so much that Microsoft is bad, although it is in many ways, but that free software is so much better.
There will always be apologists for the rich and powerful, be they journalists, politicians, or supposedly impartial "analysts" like Enderle. Such people are responsible for the endless flood of Microsoft-sponsored "studies" purporting to show that Windows is more secure, more stable, has a lower total cost of ownership, wipes your ass for you, etc. So when Enderle says
I'm not a big fan of diversity because so much the research I've done over the last decade or so indicates that by eliminating diversity you can dramatically reduce costs. Companies can minimize support costs by rolling out identical hardware and software to every desktop through big bang deployments. Going the other way in a knee jerk reaction to just one class of security threat seems poorly founded.
he seems not to have considered the cheapest possibility - a monoculture of free software, which has lower cost, better security, and higher performance. Now how is that?
Microsoft software has never been designed with network security in mind. Usually the main focus was breaking interoperability with competing software, or adding features, or "ease of use," whatever that means.
So their code is a horrible, unfixable mess. I don't believe it's possible to add decent security without causing huge breakage to the many different versions of Windows and Office that are still supported and in wide use. Microsoft knows this, so it does what it thinks is the next best thing - trot out the VPs and CEOs and all the partners and they all join hands and say how happy they all are with all the great improvments, with all the (wait for it...) innovations that are just around the corner. Happy happy, joy joy.
Which is why I *really* want some stupid corporation to plough ahead with one of these bullshit legal threats. The DMCA is a disaster, a blunt instrument whose real purpose is to intimidate into silence the great majority of people who do not have access to unlimited legal help. What kind of justice is that?
Like most people, I believe we should have final say over what software runs on our computers, and over what information enters and leaves them. But on Windows machines, especially those running IE/OE, it's already hard to keep from getting infected by the steady stream of spyware, trojans and viruses that are constantly being released. And when we do get infected, it can be hard to tell because we just don't have good enough access to the inner workings of the operating system. And so we're left having to run supplementary firewalls, virus scanners, adware removers, etc., etc., in a neverending attempt to keep up. Even for relatively accomplished users of Microsoft software, it's a horrible mess and it's not going to get better any time soon. And beginners are basically screwed as soon as they go online.
Unfortunately, Microsoft's solution for the problems created by its poor design decisions may be even worse. As part of its Trusted Computing Initiative(tm), Microsoft is attempting to control the PC hardware platform to enable, among other things, remote control of our computers. It's not hard to imagine all manner of abuses, by the entertainment industry, by the government, and of course by Microsoft itself.
So big deal if TrueActive kills "silent deploy." They're just small fry anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
He says made a pragmatic decision - which was not necessarily based on the merits of the case - to protect his clients from SCO and its barratrous lawyers.
It's true he didn't make the same decision many of us would have made, but it's wrong to call him irresponsible just because of that.
Microsoft is scared shitless of linux. They know as well as anyone that linux is faster, cheaper, more reliable, less prone to vendor lock-in, etc., and they know their customers know it too.
Since everyone knows they're lying anyway, Microsoft's black PR campaign will end up giving linux the exposure it can't afford to give itself. Maybe it will hold back the tide for a bit. Who knows? But software commoditization is inevitable if Microsoft fails in its bid to Xbox the PC platform.
There's an extremely good chance that Microsoft will be forced to be more competitive in pricing, stability, openness of interfaces, etc. Great for us, bad for them.
Don't laugh, it works. Despite all the whizbang marketing from Redmond, most busineses are extremely pragmatic. If all you need is a {print,file,login} server, linux will happily work on hardware later Microsoft OSes have no hope of running on.
Prediction: there'll be huge uptake of linux when Microsoft kills off support of nt4 server, because no one is going to want to take the double hit of replacing all the hardware and buying all new OS licenses. Not to mention new and different security headaches due to exponential increases in complexity, increased lock-in, restrictive EULAs, etc.
Would you rather:
A) pay a little more for media and hardware and have essentially decriminalized filesharing, or
B) have all your hardware corrupted with crypto-DRM, with tethered downloads, criminalization of file sharing, draconian laws passed favoring big media at the expense of everyone else, etc?
But if you can't wait for debian to ship a modern installer and don't want to fork over $$$ for Redhat Enterprise Linux 3 you can always try White Box Linux (http://www.beau.org/~jmorris/linux/whitebox/), a free version of rhel3. It's at rc2 now and production release is probably only a month or two away. I notice the Dag apt repository (http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/apt/) has rhel3 rpms, so it should be possible to stay up to date with apt.
You can get a good nforce2-400 board without onboard video for about $80. You can get a retail AthlonXP Barton 333mhz fsb 2500+ cpu (with fan) for $90. You can get a Radeon 9100 video card for about $60. Throw in some good quality 2x256 ddr 3200 ram for dual-channel goodness for less than $100 and you have the guts of a machine that'll run all but the very latest and most cpu-intensive games with total ease.
I figure the whole thing with 120gb hard drive, burner, dvd, case, monitor, etc. will run about $800. Imho it's the best deal on the market right now, price/performance wise.
I don't understand why more people aren't jumping on this. If they can't lock up all the hardware vendors linux and friends will most likely commoditize the software industry. If they don't, well, good for MS and big media and bad for everyone else.
Plutocracy: a government by and for the wealthy, i.e. spammers have the money to buy lobbyists, who in turn buy politicians, who then pass convenient laws for the spammers. It's all so tidy and efficient.
I'm as cynical and jaded as the next genX geek, but it still pisses me off that no one gives a shite about the common good. You get the sense that those in power would laugh out loud if you even mentioned it. Bastards.
Oh by the way, even good legislation would be useless against spam. How is these people are too stupid to figure that out?
Accepting for the sake of argument that a SolariX/Opteron system will be more secure, featureful, stable, and pretty than a DIY Linux/Opteron box, will it really be so much better that people will actually pay significant extra money for it?
Compared to, say, a 2.6 based linux box with an SMP Opteron board.
The entry level server market is a low margin minefield, and I'm not sure folks are going to want to pay for stuff (extra securty, huge filesystem support, a Sun badge on the case, etc.) they don't think they're going to need.
Actually, there already is a Tinfoil Hat linux. It's a bootable single-floppy distro for gpg-signing and/or wiping files.
The NSA's version is called SE-Linux, for Security Enhanced Linux. It has a "strong, flexible mandatory access control architecture incorporated into the major subsystems of the kernel. The system provides a mechanism to enforce the separation of information based on confidentiality and integrity requirements. This allows threats of tampering and bypassing of application security mechanisms to be addressed and enables the confinement of damage that can be caused by malicious or flawed applications." Or some such.
If you really need security and don't think running Bastille-linux is going to be enough, then ACLs a la SE-Linux might be the way to go. I suppose no OS is truly secure, but it's hard to imagine even talented crackers getting very far against it.
Ok, so Apache kills IIS and Linux kills Windows in the server space. How is it that MySQL, postgreSQL, et al don't kill Oracle? Why is Oracle spared when the rest of the proprietary software industry falls victim to commoditization?
Just wondering.
Microsoft's only chance is to embrace and extend the PC hardware platform in order to illegally stifle competition. One of the main reasons Longhorn is taking so long is that Microsoft has to twist the arms of all the hardware vendors to build Palladium compatibility into their products.
It's a close call. If enough people wake up, openness will win. If they don't, the open pc platform, open protocols, etc. will die.
But they know direct funding is out of the question because they'd take a huge PR hit and probably get in regulatory trouble, so they sneak it in through the back door. Just like they did by buying millions of dollars in SCO licenses they didn't need. Surely a coincidence that it's been funding the lawsuit all these months...
Nothing out of the ordinary here, just sharp business, i.e. cheating and not getting caught, which is the order of the day from our good friends at Microsoft.
I've read dozens of OS reviews like this, were all you get is a review of the install and a quick tour of the new features - only here there's Eugenia's inevitable comparisons to BEOS. Deeply exciting I'm sure, but somehow I suspect better reviews will appear within the next couple of days.
When you send snail mail there is some actual, legitimate cost involved in transporting the letter for A to B. But email can be zapped to any net.connected machine pretty much instantly and for a vanishingly small cost. Layering on some expensive infrastructure will never work, for exactly the same reason that charging big bucks for easily reproducible media won't: everyone will use a cheaper way, and the expensive way will be ignored.
In the article Tim Bray says the problem with the current email system is no cost coupled with relative anonymity. Ok then, lets pull back on the anonymity a bit. Let's find a way to identify and block hosts that are sending millions of mail per day. Anything is better than enabling some massive new bureaucracy, which will inevitably put the screws to us the same way Verisign has.
I mean Jesus, haven't we learned anything?
Microsoft is trying to grab control of the PC hardare platform as a way to prevent total software commoditization by the likes of linux and friends. When Longhorn hits Microsoft will have most of the cpu, bios, motherboard, and other hardware vendors onboard and will be pushing the new standard as hard as it can. For the first time, there will be secure, hardware-based digital restrictions management (DRM) that will allow remote control of much of the data on our computers.
Microsoft and the media companies are practically drooling over the possibilites, so it won't matter that some geeks will figure out obcure ways to crack the DRM, or that nearly every computer user on the planet will hate it. The media monopolies will not support anything else, and Microsoft will drop support for and break backwards compatibility with older versions of its office and OS software, using its monopolies in these areas to force everyone to adopt the new Palladium-enabled standard.
But people won't go along with the new regime if they feel they have a choice, and Microsoft will have a serious problem on its hands if linux improves as much in the next three years as it has in the last three. That in addition to Microsoft's dismal security record, onerous licenses and high costs, pervasive DRM may encourage a mass exodus away from Microsoft.
I honestly can't decide who is going to win. Some days I think people are good and responsible and will come to their senses in time, and then I see again how utterly wrapped up your average person is in the lives of celebrities and other shiny things. It's a tough call.
For the record, I will do everything in my power to not buy Palladium-corrupted hardware and will encourage my non-geek friends to do the same.
I suppose if a company were to have a monoculture of free software, they would have standardized on a particular desktop, os, editor, interpreted language (if such were needed), etc., etc., etc. You lower enterprise computing costs by making all the computers the same. That way you only have to test one configuration before releasing patches or software upgrades, etc.
That was why Enderle argued that monocultures are cheaper in principle than the diversified infrastructures Gartner and the CCIA are suggesting we should have. All I said was, you can do the same thing with OSes other than Windows, a point that seems to have escaped him.
Just build your own computers. You can get better quality, exactly the parts you want, at a good price. My personal machine has lots of ram, a big hard drive w/8 mb cache and 3 year warranty, a good burner also w/8 mb chache and burnproof, etc. All the stuff I want, nothing I don't, and the price is right.
I don't see the point in paying for Windows or Office if I'm just going to wipe them anyway.
What really opened my eyes to the possibilities of free software was emailing a bug report to the developer of a free software program, getting a reply that day and a fix the next. Proprietary vendors simply cannot touch this level of support, at least not for mere individuals like myself. It's not so much that Microsoft is bad, although it is in many ways, but that free software is so much better.
Microsoft software has never been designed with network security in mind. Usually the main focus was breaking interoperability with competing software, or adding features, or "ease of use," whatever that means.
So their code is a horrible, unfixable mess. I don't believe it's possible to add decent security without causing huge breakage to the many different versions of Windows and Office that are still supported and in wide use. Microsoft knows this, so it does what it thinks is the next best thing - trot out the VPs and CEOs and all the partners and they all join hands and say how happy they all are with all the great improvments, with all the (wait for it...) innovations that are just around the corner. Happy happy, joy joy.
Bleh.
Which is why I *really* want some stupid corporation to plough ahead with one of these bullshit legal threats. The DMCA is a disaster, a blunt instrument whose real purpose is to intimidate into silence the great majority of people who do not have access to unlimited legal help. What kind of justice is that?
Like most people, I believe we should have final say over what software runs on our computers, and over what information enters and leaves them. But on Windows machines, especially those running IE/OE, it's already hard to keep from getting infected by the steady stream of spyware, trojans and viruses that are constantly being released. And when we do get infected, it can be hard to tell because we just don't have good enough access to the inner workings of the operating system. And so we're left having to run supplementary firewalls, virus scanners, adware removers, etc., etc., in a neverending attempt to keep up. Even for relatively accomplished users of Microsoft software, it's a horrible mess and it's not going to get better any time soon. And beginners are basically screwed as soon as they go online.
Unfortunately, Microsoft's solution for the problems created by its poor design decisions may be even worse. As part of its Trusted Computing Initiative(tm), Microsoft is attempting to control the PC hardware platform to enable, among other things, remote control of our computers. It's not hard to imagine all manner of abuses, by the entertainment industry, by the government, and of course by Microsoft itself.
So big deal if TrueActive kills "silent deploy." They're just small fry anyway.