You have to separate DRM, which is a type of protection designed for short-term media protection, from content-based information security. The former fails by security through obscurity, the latter is a very interesting, but very difficult research area, and if you (or anyone) were to come up with any cross-vendor implementation of a working solution, you would advance the security of information exchange between partners manyfold.
Abcolutely... when I ran it on my tablet, battery life went down *significantly*, I/O was way slower (especially disk I/O) and the promised improvements in wireless tools were simply not there. Agreed, you get a somewhat better pen interface. And the irony is that battery life and I/O performance do not improve with SP1, nor does the wireless toolset.
Years and years of sending emergency (food) aid has proved that sending emergency food aid is not the way to provide lasting improvements. The only way to provide lasting improvement is through education and government reform.
I think that media companies are going to fight until the bitter end to supress Linux users because so much of their DRM technology just doesn't work. Microsoft will play ball with DRM Media companies, Linux users are much more likely to fight. DRM should follow the rules of good crypto. No secrecy in the algorithm, but all secrecy contained in keys. That way all DRM technology can be open sourced and implemented on Linux with no isseus. However, most DRM schemes are so broken that they rely on secrecy.
If their physical security is this bad, one wonders how much value should be placed in the statement that the data on the server is "adequately protected".
Moreover, this should spark the debate whether it is okay that private companies work on this sort of data, and whether the government should or should not have its own data specialists.
If the Chinese and Indians are allowed to run this unlicensed on a large scale (I do not like the word pirated, since essentially all you are doing is violating a license agreement) then this is the end for either Vista or the end of the Vista activation. I for one would welcome the end of the Vista activation! (Or Vista... I really couldn't care less about that OS).
You are absolutely right, and I was about to make a comment along your lines. Microsoft is not an innovative organisation, and in truth they have never really been. Very, very few of their products have been developed in-house, and the ones that have been have a horrible development history. (7 years to develop word for windows 1.0)!
Let's just take Vista... 6 billion in research and development money... and it shows. All exciting features dropped and what they release is essentially a warmed-over Windows XP.
I guess we can predict Microsoft's next moves: - Copy whatever Google is doing - Copy whatever Apple is doing
"Software as a Service" died back in 2000... why does MSFT keep insisting on bringing it back up?
Revenue, baby. Same reason they like software assurance so much. You pay first, and then you use it. Software as a Service is the logical extension of this. A perpetual amount of money flowing into the company, regardless whether people upgrade or not. Or worse (for users) upgrading at Microsoft's demands. Microsoft has been wanting this for a log, long time. (Project Megaserver). They might as well get it too.
So you are interested in using other people's work, you are interested in getting other people's opinions, all for free, yet you contribute nothing to the community that gave you so much...
Some people would call that selfish.
Here is my advice: talk to a lawyer who is knowledgeable on licensing and IP matters.
2.5 to 5 Gb is still "only" 250 to 500 MB (roughly). My SGI Octanes could do that 7 years ago! (And still do that regularly, for the record). So what's the fuss?
Can anyone imagine what would happen if one of these would be lt loose in a busy place like a christmas shopping mall, a crowded airport or atoher place where loads of people are available and unprepared for such a device? Sounds like the perfect massacre tool to me...
Sounds like what happened with Windows 2000. Service pack 5 never materialised, but a security roll-up package was released to somewhat satisfy major customers. My guess is that the same thing will happen with Windows XP. A security roll-up package will be released at some point because the number of post-SP2 patches is approaching insane amounts. But other than that, Microsoft will be far, far too busy pushing Longhorn Server out of the door.
... I can read it. If it is encrypted and my player can read it, I can still read it. No matter what they try to do, unless they can come up with some sort of scheme where the complete key management is happening over a closed network that your player is mandatorily hooked up to 24/7, there is no way that this will prevent piracy.
What they will do is make the incentive bigger for criminals to copy these disks, and they make the incentive bigger for curious people to try and hack the protection of these disks. They will also piss the general disk-buying public off by creating disks that will more often not play rather than play.
No winners here... is that my problem? Last time I have seen a Hollywood movie is so long ago I can't even remember.
There aren't that many big shared-memory systems in the world that scale as well as an Altix does. For the type of calculations the Dutch weather institute does, shared-momery is the way to go... a climate model just doesn't run well on a beowulf-type cluster.
Other options would have included vector machines, which is something entirely different, and also a very niche market.
It should be all about choice, about what tool is the best for the job. Not about mandatory use of certain operating systems for perhaps totally unsuitable tasks.
This is so cool... this reminds me of people getting rid of their records years ago, and then realising the treasures they threw away... the same thing will happen with analog photo gear. Hasselblad, Leica, Nikon, stuff is practically given away. Now is the time to buy:-)
Microsoft does not compete in the supercomputer market. Their offering is currently in beta, limited to 128 nodes, and none of the important "traditional" applications used in HPC run on it.
To give an idea, 128 nodes will give you at most 512 processors (more becomes EXTREMELY inefficient). 512 processors will net you a place between 300 and 500 on the current top 500 list. This will be very different on the list to be released six months for now... such small clusters might not even show up.
Then there is the user group of HPC systems. It is a VERYsmall market, with a userbase, a group of anministrators and a group of manufacturers traditionally used to UNIX, and now migrating to Linux in droves. Windows is not even duscussed. The announcement of the Windows Compute Cluster edition was cause for great hilarity at the workplace, where jokes like parallel word/excel and high-performance visual basic started floating around. No one will take Microsoft serious in that market.
Perhaps Microsoft will sell some systems to some manufacturers, like in the automotive or pharmaceutical industry. But these guys already know the ways to traditional vendors selling them Linux clusters, vendors like SGI for instance. CHeck the SGI Manufacturing page.
So... will Microsoft compete? So far, they announced an operating system for clusters. Important questions remain:
Will the OS run headless?
What low latency networks will be supported?
Are MPI and OpenMP implementations available?
what about remote management, remote login and remote copy? (On a side note: why is it that Windows 2003 can't have simple stuff like ssh and scp built in?)
what applications will be available?
I have to wait and see... i don't expect anything substantial to happen... and if Microsoft does this for prestige, they are wasting their money.
-
Once again, we see a total lack of understanding on the side of content creators. Instead of providing us with added value, the provide us with hard to remove malware that will cost us, honest customers who bought an actual cd, cpu and memory resources, not to mention possible back doors into our home computers.
In a world where a computer more and more becomes a tool for content creation and is used more and more as a media hub, unfortunately most of the time based on an operating system known for its insecure architecture, this is a very worrying trend.
We see the same thing happening with content creation software. Dongles, challenge-response systems, it is made harder and harder for legitimate users to use the software, while the odd cracker is very capable of evading whatever copy protection or DRM scheme might exist in the software.
Now I am a firm believer that it is quite okay to pay for quality. I am also a firm believer that I should (and I do) pay for the software I use for my content creation (photoshop for my digital darkroom needs, pro tools for my music making needs). But why the hell should I, as a legitimate customer, pay for insane copy protection mechanisms? They do not add value for me, instead they take value away, in terms of storage, CPU cycles and memory.
Same here, actually. Anyone who dares to compare Photoshop to Gimp has either no clue what they are talking about or are so blantantly biassed that they should keep their mouth shut. Gimp is nowhere NEAR photoshop, in terms of functionality, feature-set and workflow. Everything I want to do in Photoshop is either very hard or impossible to do in Gimp. And no, the lack of a CMYK color space is not one of them...
Photoshop is modelled after the old analogue darkroom and film technologies. Dodging and burning comes easy to people who worked in the dark room. And once you understand channels and how they map to the analogue medium, you can do so much powerful things in photoshop. Pixel-accurate selections for instance. Unsharp masks may seem to work like magic (how can you sharpen something by using the unsharp mask?), but it all maps to analogue processes.
For analogue photograpers like me, this is wonderful, as I can apply everything I know from the dark room directly to photoshop, and obtain similar results. I still use slide film, and scan the slides. Works wonders. Photograpers who have a digital workflow still understand very well what is going on.
Poeple who just wish to do simple image ajustments, red eye reduction, cropping and so on, Photoshop is not the tool for them. They never were able to make those corrections, now they can, but Photoshop expects too much of a analogue background. You will leave 90% of the power of Photoshop untouched. (the digital dark room bit, that is). In that respect, Photoshop is just the wrong tool for them. Please note that this doesn't say anything about the inteligence of these people or the capabilities of the tool.
... when the Microsoft Research Center in Cambridge is known as the "Black Hole of Research". Good scientists go in, and no one ever hears from them again.
It's not a community problem... it's a business ethics problem. As long as companies can get away with using open source software in closed source products, they will continue to do so.
Only when the first cases are brought before court, we might see an improvement. Until that moment, this will continue.
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You have to separate DRM, which is a type of protection designed for short-term media protection, from content-based information security. The former fails by security through obscurity, the latter is a very interesting, but very difficult research area, and if you (or anyone) were to come up with any cross-vendor implementation of a working solution, you would advance the security of information exchange between partners manyfold.
"We have a McAfee product for Linux in the labs, but the company lawyers are worried that someone else runs away with our IP."
Abcolutely... when I ran it on my tablet, battery life went down *significantly*, I/O was way slower (especially disk I/O) and the promised improvements in wireless tools were simply not there. Agreed, you get a somewhat better pen interface. And the irony is that battery life and I/O performance do not improve with SP1, nor does the wireless toolset.
Years and years of sending emergency (food) aid has proved that sending emergency food aid is not the way to provide lasting improvements. The only way to provide lasting improvement is through education and government reform.
If their physical security is this bad, one wonders how much value should be placed in the statement that the data on the server is "adequately protected".
Moreover, this should spark the debate whether it is okay that private companies work on this sort of data, and whether the government should or should not have its own data specialists.
If the Chinese and Indians are allowed to run this unlicensed on a large scale (I do not like the word pirated, since essentially all you are doing is violating a license agreement) then this is the end for either Vista or the end of the Vista activation. I for one would welcome the end of the Vista activation! (Or Vista... I really couldn't care less about that OS).
You are absolutely right, and I was about to make a comment along your lines. Microsoft is not an innovative organisation, and in truth they have never really been. Very, very few of their products have been developed in-house, and the ones that have been have a horrible development history. (7 years to develop word for windows 1.0)!
Let's just take Vista... 6 billion in research and development money... and it shows. All exciting features dropped and what they release is essentially a warmed-over Windows XP.
I guess we can predict Microsoft's next moves:
- Copy whatever Google is doing
- Copy whatever Apple is doing
Revenue, baby. Same reason they like software assurance so much. You pay first, and then you use it. Software as a Service is the logical extension of this. A perpetual amount of money flowing into the company, regardless whether people upgrade or not. Or worse (for users) upgrading at Microsoft's demands. Microsoft has been wanting this for a log, long time. (Project Megaserver). They might as well get it too.
So you are interested in using other people's work, you are interested in getting other people's opinions, all for free, yet you contribute nothing to the community that gave you so much...
Some people would call that selfish.
Here is my advice: talk to a lawyer who is knowledgeable on licensing and IP matters.
2.5 to 5 Gb is still "only" 250 to 500 MB (roughly). My SGI Octanes could do that 7 years ago! (And still do that regularly, for the record). So what's the fuss?
Can anyone imagine what would happen if one of these would be lt loose in a busy place like a christmas shopping mall, a crowded airport or atoher place where loads of people are available and unprepared for such a device? Sounds like the perfect massacre tool to me...
Sounds like what happened with Windows 2000. Service pack 5 never materialised, but a security roll-up package was released to somewhat satisfy major customers. My guess is that the same thing will happen with Windows XP. A security roll-up package will be released at some point because the number of post-SP2 patches is approaching insane amounts. But other than that, Microsoft will be far, far too busy pushing Longhorn Server out of the door.
... I can read it. If it is encrypted and my player can read it, I can still read it. No matter what they try to do, unless they can come up with some sort of scheme where the complete key management is happening over a closed network that your player is mandatorily hooked up to 24/7, there is no way that this will prevent piracy.
What they will do is make the incentive bigger for criminals to copy these disks, and they make the incentive bigger for curious people to try and hack the protection of these disks. They will also piss the general disk-buying public off by creating disks that will more often not play rather than play.
No winners here... is that my problem? Last time I have seen a Hollywood movie is so long ago I can't even remember.
Other options would have included vector machines, which is something entirely different, and also a very niche market.
"we are too stupid to make a distinction between Free software and commercial software. We can't read nor do we understand licence agreements."
In other words, they can't do their job in a proper way.
It should be all about choice, about what tool is the best for the job. Not about mandatory use of certain operating systems for perhaps totally unsuitable tasks.
...can lack of common sense be basis for a law suit.
This is so cool... this reminds me of people getting rid of their records years ago, and then realising the treasures they threw away... the same thing will happen with analog photo gear. Hasselblad, Leica, Nikon, stuff is practically given away. Now is the time to buy :-)
To give an idea, 128 nodes will give you at most 512 processors (more becomes EXTREMELY inefficient). 512 processors will net you a place between 300 and 500 on the current top 500 list. This will be very different on the list to be released six months for now... such small clusters might not even show up.
Then there is the user group of HPC systems. It is a VERYsmall market, with a userbase, a group of anministrators and a group of manufacturers traditionally used to UNIX, and now migrating to Linux in droves. Windows is not even duscussed. The announcement of the Windows Compute Cluster edition was cause for great hilarity at the workplace, where jokes like parallel word/excel and high-performance visual basic started floating around. No one will take Microsoft serious in that market.
Perhaps Microsoft will sell some systems to some manufacturers, like in the automotive or pharmaceutical industry. But these guys already know the ways to traditional vendors selling them Linux clusters, vendors like SGI for instance. CHeck the SGI Manufacturing page.
So... will Microsoft compete? So far, they announced an operating system for clusters. Important questions remain:
- Will the OS run headless?
- What low latency networks will be supported?
- Are MPI and OpenMP implementations available?
- what about remote management, remote login and remote copy? (On a side note: why is it that Windows 2003 can't have simple stuff like ssh and scp built in?)
- what applications will be available?
I have to wait and see... i don't expect anything substantial to happen... and if Microsoft does this for prestige, they are wasting their money. -Once again, we see a total lack of understanding on the side of content creators. Instead of providing us with added value, the provide us with hard to remove malware that will cost us, honest customers who bought an actual cd, cpu and memory resources, not to mention possible back doors into our home computers.
In a world where a computer more and more becomes a tool for content creation and is used more and more as a media hub, unfortunately most of the time based on an operating system known for its insecure architecture, this is a very worrying trend.
We see the same thing happening with content creation software. Dongles, challenge-response systems, it is made harder and harder for legitimate users to use the software, while the odd cracker is very capable of evading whatever copy protection or DRM scheme might exist in the software.
Now I am a firm believer that it is quite okay to pay for quality. I am also a firm believer that I should (and I do) pay for the software I use for my content creation (photoshop for my digital darkroom needs, pro tools for my music making needs). But why the hell should I, as a legitimate customer, pay for insane copy protection mechanisms? They do not add value for me, instead they take value away, in terms of storage, CPU cycles and memory.
Same here, actually. Anyone who dares to compare Photoshop to Gimp has either no clue what they are talking about or are so blantantly biassed that they should keep their mouth shut. Gimp is nowhere NEAR photoshop, in terms of functionality, feature-set and workflow. Everything I want to do in Photoshop is either very hard or impossible to do in Gimp. And no, the lack of a CMYK color space is not one of them...
For analogue photograpers like me, this is wonderful, as I can apply everything I know from the dark room directly to photoshop, and obtain similar results. I still use slide film, and scan the slides. Works wonders. Photograpers who have a digital workflow still understand very well what is going on.
Poeple who just wish to do simple image ajustments, red eye reduction, cropping and so on, Photoshop is not the tool for them. They never were able to make those corrections, now they can, but Photoshop expects too much of a analogue background. You will leave 90% of the power of Photoshop untouched. (the digital dark room bit, that is). In that respect, Photoshop is just the wrong tool for them. Please note that this doesn't say anything about the inteligence of these people or the capabilities of the tool.
... when the Microsoft Research Center in Cambridge is known as the "Black Hole of Research". Good scientists go in, and no one ever hears from them again.
It's not a community problem... it's a business ethics problem. As long as companies can get away with using open source software in closed source products, they will continue to do so.
Only when the first cases are brought before court, we might see an improvement. Until that moment, this will continue.