Unfortunately there's more missing in that article than info its actually providing. For example, it glosses over all the other services that Azure and Amazon's cloud services offer. It also mentions Google is a PaaS provider, without mentioning that Azure is both IaaS and PaaS.
When it comes to cloud platforms, the capabilities surrounding them are more important than the "dumb" VM hosting and whatever management "polish" they may provide. Google, for example, does't play particularly well with a lot of infrastructure that isn't Google. It'd be a bizarre choice for 90% of cloud applications, but its dramatically better than any others if you happen to hit the sweet spot of services Google provides.
Mesh is/was a great product, MS just sucked at bringing it to people's attention.
Or, they realized it gave you too much control over your own data...
Don't fall into the trap of attributing strange things Microsoft does to nefarious intents, athough that's the knee-jerk at Slashdot. The reality is that corporate politics and turf battles are the real cause of most of these things. When you have two products coming out of two business groups or parts of the organization under two different senior leaders, the losers are the consumers. Much of what people tend to attribute to some sort of centralized scheming on the part of Microsoft is really just a result of a compensation system that (at senior levels) heavily rewards looking out for yourself above all else. Silverlight's fall from grace, for example, is simply because of Sinofsky ending up with the ear of Ballmer and the associated power that brings.
Windows Live Mesh did this and was much more advanced than both DropBox AND SkyDrive.
Hopefully some of that functionality will eventually come back. A bigger loss without having Mesh (and you lose Mesh if you move to the new versions of the Live apps), in my opinion, is the remote access functionality. I doubt many people even knew it was there, but it was one of the best freebee things Microsoft had associated with their Live properties.
This isn't specific to Skydrive, it's a defect of other 'cloud storage' things as well; but why the hell would I want an "app" on my desktop for something that is supposed to be a filesystem?
Why would I use an application-specific re-implementation of things like 'search' and 'metadata display'? That's just perverse. I can understand that, if you need a UI that works in just about any browser, with download links and a little xmlhttprequest upload box, for basic just-need-to-grab-that-file-to-print-it-out type needs; but a desktop "app"?
Is it too hard for Microsoft to expose their own service as a filesystem?
It is, but the OS won't do local caching so you have the files offline.
The app gives you file synchronization with offline copies. You don't need it, you can access it via WEBDAV just fine.
If you got it, no matter if got activated or not because your machine is not the full target system, then you should be able to demand it (specially if got delivered to you in the way that the maker intended to, is not like you stole it)
Laws, contracts and licenses aren't made of "shoulds"
Load the code in a hardware virtualization monitoring environement with an emulated CPU clock and let it run. Analyse the code execution and discover the branches not taken and then force it to take each branch the next time around, and watch/trace what it does. If you find ant-debugging protections along that path then you are probably on the right track to recover the key. There is no singular trick in their little-black-bag-of-tricks that can't be worked around. Be persistant and the key will be recovered, and a lot sooner than trying to brute-force decrypt the payload without the key.
Its guys like you being involved insecurity that makes people like the NSA get all warm and fuzzy.
Do you really think you're smarter than people at Kapersky? Or whatever shadowy group created the payload? I'm sure on the offence or defence side of things, no one has ever thought about debuggers.
If they probably are using a GPL library for decoding/uncompressing, they could be sued to release the code to be compliant with the license.
That seems to be a common misconception. That's not how the GPL works. They need to make the code available to their customers on demand. You aren't their customer, you can't demand anything.
Enough with the "one click is all it takes" argument! It's one click TOO MANY! Also, enough with the "Have you used it?" defense! This must be some kind of standard Microsoft shill response, because I ALWAYS see this in response to any criticism of Windows 8! YES, WE HAVE USED IT! YES, IT SUCKS! NO, WE DONT LIKE IT! And NO WE WONT BE USING IT!
You have to click to start a program, anyway. That click will close it.
The Start page is just a full screen start menu with active tiles, nothing more.
If anyone had actually spent time using it, or if CowboyNeal was attempting anything other than a flamefest to drive ad impressions, perhaps that'd be more clear to people.
Imagine Windows 7 where the start menu opened at login and took up the whole screen. That's it. If you don't use any modern apps, you won't ever see the WinRT part of the system. Start an application, you're on the desktop. Click the start button, or push the windows key, you'll see the start screen until you launch another app. Hell, you can hit escape to close it *exactly like the start menu*.
IMO, its worth it just for all the new hotkeys that are available. Win8 is a lot more efficient if you're a keyboard user than Win7 was.
Because the entire business method of patent trolls typically include only suing others. They don't generate anything of value and will only fatten the bank accounts for themselves and their lawyer.
These aren't guys who invented something, got a patent on it and sued those trying to copy, they buy patents from others (who may not even have bothered going after the alleged infringers) and use those patents as grounds to sue. They are leeches.
And that has been a business model for at least 150 years in the US. The patent system was quite literally designed for that. Patent thickets, licensing companies and the ilk were extremely common during the rise of the industrial age from things like loom technology, to sewing machines, to industrial controllers.
You may feel they're leeches (and, by the way, I agree), but the system was explicitly set up to allow for (and, frankly, encourage) things like that. It gave inventors incentive to do their inventing and get compensated for it, without having to build out a business themselves. Its a win-win for the investment community that wants to consume them and the inventors who are producing them. It absolutely has encouraged huge amounts of innovation in the last 200 years.
The bigger problem is not the fact that its legal to do that, its that there are so many lousy patents, and the litigation costs are high enough that its cheaper to settle most of the time without a jugement on the quality of the patent. If you want to fix the problem, you need to get the US government to hire ten times the number of qualified reviewers, spend the money to make it easier to trace though existing patents and solve the litation problem (mandatory licensing, mandatory arbitration, guaranteed legal fees if the patent holder loses the case, things like that...)
The ability for a particular person to be able to be compensated for their innovation without needing to start a company and begin manufacturing something is an important thing for progress in general. There's certainly a lot of evidence to suggest the spike in technological advance 200 years ago started precisely because of the rise of a patent system that encouraged inventors to do inventing as a full-time job. For that to work, you have to be able to buy and sell patents, and if you do that, you're going to get situations exactly like we have. Fix the process of issuing patents, and you'll get back to the controlled insanity of the 19th century instead of the uncontrolled insanity of the 21st.
Cloud storage is less of an issue than the cloud hosted services. High availability, even in the cloud, has to be architected into the software.
Vanishingly few people know how to build robust systems like that. From direct experience with a good number of the, say, "top 100" cloud services -- very few of them are designed well. Amazon, Google, Microsoft... *their* software running in their clouds continue working (at least in aggregate) when there are data center failures. You may have transient regional outages, but the systems in general are robust to the failures. A huge number of the 3rd party cloud systems running in the respective infrastructure won't be robust to those failures.
Hospitals are complex places. Lots of staff, lots of data being transferred between systems some of which are insecure and there's nothing you can do about that, because they're required, and no competitors exist.
Most lost data is not from network vectors, but from lost portable devices.
Given that the majority of corporate systems out there are Windows, with most organizations heading towards from XP to 7, how hard is it to mandate that all removable devices be encrypted with BitLocker?
Win7 is still pretty rare to find in provider settings like hospitals. There's no money for updated hardware, too many one-off systems to revalidate on the new OS. Its coming, for sure, but its coming VERY slowly.
Stop dancing around the issue, trying to shift the goalposts, and answer the fucking question.
This is about scripps trying to claim copyright over a NASA BROADCASTED FEED, NASA BEING A GOVERNMENT agency that doesn't have ccopyright over [most?] of its videos, etc.
I'm sorry rational thought is such a struggle for you.
If you don't want to read the article, I can try to summarize it. "Scripps didn't claim a copyright over NASA's video". But Slashdot likes to get whipped up over DMCA articles, factual or otherwise.
How the fuck would Scripps Media have a valid copyright claim in the least over something from NASA's livestream?
And no, your example would NOT be justified.
Your opinion of the law, as you may or may not realize, has absolutely no bearing on the law, unless you happen to be a Supreme Court judge.
Slashdot is famous for its knee-jerk reactions. This one happens to be one -- as the article said, the takedown was a result of Google's automated scanning, not some nefarious bad guy lurking at Scripps *and* it'd already been fixed before the article was even posted! And in just as many cases, people get all hot and bothered over something like this and it turns out it was a valid DMCA takedown. In those cases, the fact is that the law is the law. Sticking your head in the sand and pretending its not is just being ignorant. If you don't like the law, change the law. Don't be a moron about it.
There is a provision that for fraudulent DMCA take-down that there is a penalty of $500. We should increase this to $50,000 immediately to prevent future abuses.
Why do you assume its a fraudulent take-down? Perhaps it is, but perhaps it actually did contain licensed content.
I'm not sure I saw the video in question, but a similar 12-13 minute video I watched this morning amounted to a screen capture of browsers with NASA's streaming *and* other sites at the same time. (And would be justified in being taken down because of it.)
According to the article: "Like iTunes Match, Amazonâ(TM)s Cloud Player keeps copies of songs at 256 kilobytes per second, even if the original version was lower-fidelity."
Who would want 256 kilobyte per second, which turns a normal CD into more than a Gigabyte?
Who profits from BOTS pumping the FACEBOOK advertising system?
In practice it will be effectively impossible to identify the person-or-company who is *originally* responsible for this clickvertising pumping scheme.
But I know who I'd be betting on.
Someone shorting their stock would be the top of my list...
I'm a guy, and I've never found it difficult not to bring sex into workplace conversations and situations. Here's a short list of other things I find it easy not to do in a professional context:
1. Masturbate. 2. Shit myself. 3. Spend all day reading Facebook updates. 4. Nap. 5. Talk about my cats.
I was going to reply and said I'd managed to avoid one of those today, but when I woke up my post had timed out.
Dissipated in 630 seconds, this is an average rate of 51 Watts. Warm, but not out of line with being wrapped in an electric blanket.
Why in the world would you think the average rate is even remotely relavent? Peak rate, while not exclusively so, is the primary factor for survivability.
If I have a stick of dynamite with a timer on it, and set it for 23:59 hours, the average energy of the next 24 hours is not going to be my primary concern tomorrow morning.
I thought the same thing, and was going to post that, until I did a bit of math on it.
From the altitude of space, in a vacuum at 1G you'll be going almost 3000mph when you hit the ground. If you assume the bulk of the atmosphere capable of slowing you down significantly starts, say, around 20 miles up, you'll still be going 2500mph as you hit that meatier part of the air.
I can't say if that's something survivable or not, but 2500mph is fast enough at 20 miles up that an SR71 needed to be made of titanium to handle the heat.
The problem is if you swallow more then one, they bond through an intestine loop and you can't egest them normally.
That's just step 1 of the problem. Step 2 is the pressure between them wearing/tearing a hole through the intestine, which can be quickly fatal if not caught in time.
Slashdot Mirror
All That Cloud: Amazon, Google App Engine, Windows Azure, Heroku, Jelastic
Unfortunately there's more missing in that article than info its actually providing. For example, it glosses over all the other services that Azure and Amazon's cloud services offer. It also mentions Google is a PaaS provider, without mentioning that Azure is both IaaS and PaaS.
When it comes to cloud platforms, the capabilities surrounding them are more important than the "dumb" VM hosting and whatever management "polish" they may provide. Google, for example, does't play particularly well with a lot of infrastructure that isn't Google. It'd be a bizarre choice for 90% of cloud applications, but its dramatically better than any others if you happen to hit the sweet spot of services Google provides.
Mesh is/was a great product, MS just sucked at bringing it to people's attention.
Or, they realized it gave you too much control over your own data...
Don't fall into the trap of attributing strange things Microsoft does to nefarious intents, athough that's the knee-jerk at Slashdot. The reality is that corporate politics and turf battles are the real cause of most of these things. When you have two products coming out of two business groups or parts of the organization under two different senior leaders, the losers are the consumers. Much of what people tend to attribute to some sort of centralized scheming on the part of Microsoft is really just a result of a compensation system that (at senior levels) heavily rewards looking out for yourself above all else. Silverlight's fall from grace, for example, is simply because of Sinofsky ending up with the ear of Ballmer and the associated power that brings.
Windows Live Mesh did this and was much more advanced than both DropBox AND SkyDrive.
Hopefully some of that functionality will eventually come back. A bigger loss without having Mesh (and you lose Mesh if you move to the new versions of the Live apps), in my opinion, is the remote access functionality. I doubt many people even knew it was there, but it was one of the best freebee things Microsoft had associated with their Live properties.
This isn't specific to Skydrive, it's a defect of other 'cloud storage' things as well; but why the hell would I want an "app" on my desktop for something that is supposed to be a filesystem?
Why would I use an application-specific re-implementation of things like 'search' and 'metadata display'? That's just perverse. I can understand that, if you need a UI that works in just about any browser, with download links and a little xmlhttprequest upload box, for basic just-need-to-grab-that-file-to-print-it-out type needs; but a desktop "app"?
Is it too hard for Microsoft to expose their own service as a filesystem?
It is, but the OS won't do local caching so you have the files offline.
The app gives you file synchronization with offline copies. You don't need it, you can access it via WEBDAV just fine.
If you got it, no matter if got activated or not because your machine is not the full target system, then you should be able to demand it (specially if got delivered to you in the way that the maker intended to, is not like you stole it)
Laws, contracts and licenses aren't made of "shoulds"
Load the code in a hardware virtualization monitoring environement with an emulated CPU clock and let it run. Analyse the code execution and discover the branches not taken and then force it to take each branch the next time around, and watch/trace what it does. If you find ant-debugging protections along that path then you are probably on the right track to recover the key. There is no singular trick in their little-black-bag-of-tricks that can't be worked around. Be persistant and the key will be recovered, and a lot sooner than trying to brute-force decrypt the payload without the key.
Its guys like you being involved insecurity that makes people like the NSA get all warm and fuzzy.
Do you really think you're smarter than people at Kapersky? Or whatever shadowy group created the payload? I'm sure on the offence or defence side of things, no one has ever thought about debuggers.
Really?
If they probably are using a GPL library for decoding/uncompressing, they could be sued to release the code to be compliant with the license.
That seems to be a common misconception. That's not how the GPL works. They need to make the code available to their customers on demand. You aren't their customer, you can't demand anything.
Enough with the "one click is all it takes" argument! It's one click TOO MANY! Also, enough with the "Have you used it?" defense! This must be some kind of standard Microsoft shill response, because I ALWAYS see this in response to any criticism of Windows 8! YES, WE HAVE USED IT! YES, IT SUCKS! NO, WE DONT LIKE IT! And NO WE WONT BE USING IT!
You have to click to start a program, anyway. That click will close it.
The Start page is just a full screen start menu with active tiles, nothing more.
If anyone had actually spent time using it, or if CowboyNeal was attempting anything other than a flamefest to drive ad impressions, perhaps that'd be more clear to people.
Imagine Windows 7 where the start menu opened at login and took up the whole screen. That's it. If you don't use any modern apps, you won't ever see the WinRT part of the system. Start an application, you're on the desktop. Click the start button, or push the windows key, you'll see the start screen until you launch another app. Hell, you can hit escape to close it *exactly like the start menu*.
IMO, its worth it just for all the new hotkeys that are available. Win8 is a lot more efficient if you're a keyboard user than Win7 was.
Because the entire business method of patent trolls typically include only suing others. They don't generate anything of value and will only fatten the bank accounts for themselves and their lawyer.
These aren't guys who invented something, got a patent on it and sued those trying to copy, they buy patents from others (who may not even have bothered going after the alleged infringers) and use those patents as grounds to sue. They are leeches.
And that has been a business model for at least 150 years in the US. The patent system was quite literally designed for that. Patent thickets, licensing companies and the ilk were extremely common during the rise of the industrial age from things like loom technology, to sewing machines, to industrial controllers.
You may feel they're leeches (and, by the way, I agree), but the system was explicitly set up to allow for (and, frankly, encourage) things like that. It gave inventors incentive to do their inventing and get compensated for it, without having to build out a business themselves. Its a win-win for the investment community that wants to consume them and the inventors who are producing them. It absolutely has encouraged huge amounts of innovation in the last 200 years.
The bigger problem is not the fact that its legal to do that, its that there are so many lousy patents, and the litigation costs are high enough that its cheaper to settle most of the time without a jugement on the quality of the patent. If you want to fix the problem, you need to get the US government to hire ten times the number of qualified reviewers, spend the money to make it easier to trace though existing patents and solve the litation problem (mandatory licensing, mandatory arbitration, guaranteed legal fees if the patent holder loses the case, things like that...)
The ability for a particular person to be able to be compensated for their innovation without needing to start a company and begin manufacturing something is an important thing for progress in general. There's certainly a lot of evidence to suggest the spike in technological advance 200 years ago started precisely because of the rise of a patent system that encouraged inventors to do inventing as a full-time job. For that to work, you have to be able to buy and sell patents, and if you do that, you're going to get situations exactly like we have. Fix the process of issuing patents, and you'll get back to the controlled insanity of the 19th century instead of the uncontrolled insanity of the 21st.
Cloud storage is less of an issue than the cloud hosted services. High availability, even in the cloud, has to be architected into the software.
Vanishingly few people know how to build robust systems like that. From direct experience with a good number of the, say, "top 100" cloud services -- very few of them are designed well. Amazon, Google, Microsoft... *their* software running in their clouds continue working (at least in aggregate) when there are data center failures. You may have transient regional outages, but the systems in general are robust to the failures. A huge number of the 3rd party cloud systems running in the respective infrastructure won't be robust to those failures.
There's a "default desktop" in Debian? I thought everyone just installed the netinst and used apt-get to install whatever desktop they wanted.
And this is why there will never be a "Year of the Linux Desktop".
Hospitals are complex places. Lots of staff, lots of data being transferred between systems some of which are insecure and there's nothing you can do about that, because they're required, and no competitors exist.
Most lost data is not from network vectors, but from lost portable devices.
Given that the majority of corporate systems out there are Windows, with most organizations heading towards from XP to 7, how hard is it to mandate that all removable devices be encrypted with BitLocker?
Win7 is still pretty rare to find in provider settings like hospitals. There's no money for updated hardware, too many one-off systems to revalidate on the new OS. Its coming, for sure, but its coming VERY slowly.
Stop dancing around the issue, trying to shift the goalposts, and answer the fucking question.
This is about scripps trying to claim copyright over a NASA BROADCASTED FEED, NASA BEING A GOVERNMENT agency that doesn't have ccopyright over [most?] of its videos, etc.
I'm sorry rational thought is such a struggle for you.
If you don't want to read the article, I can try to summarize it. "Scripps didn't claim a copyright over NASA's video". But Slashdot likes to get whipped up over DMCA articles, factual or otherwise.
Why do you assume its a fraudulent take-down?
How the fuck would Scripps Media have a valid copyright claim in the least over something from NASA's livestream?
And no, your example would NOT be justified.
Your opinion of the law, as you may or may not realize, has absolutely no bearing on the law, unless you happen to be a Supreme Court judge.
Slashdot is famous for its knee-jerk reactions. This one happens to be one -- as the article said, the takedown was a result of Google's automated scanning, not some nefarious bad guy lurking at Scripps *and* it'd already been fixed before the article was even posted! And in just as many cases, people get all hot and bothered over something like this and it turns out it was a valid DMCA takedown. In those cases, the fact is that the law is the law. Sticking your head in the sand and pretending its not is just being ignorant. If you don't like the law, change the law. Don't be a moron about it.
There is a provision that for fraudulent DMCA take-down that there is a penalty of $500. We should increase this to $50,000 immediately to prevent future abuses.
Why do you assume its a fraudulent take-down? Perhaps it is, but perhaps it actually did contain licensed content.
I'm not sure I saw the video in question, but a similar 12-13 minute video I watched this morning amounted to a screen capture of browsers with NASA's streaming *and* other sites at the same time. (And would be justified in being taken down because of it.)
Slashdot sells ad impressions.
Flaimbait drives ad impressions.
You must be new here if you expect anything less.
According to the article: "Like iTunes Match, Amazonâ(TM)s Cloud Player keeps copies of songs at 256 kilobytes per second, even if the original version was lower-fidelity."
Who would want 256 kilobyte per second, which turns a normal CD into more than a Gigabyte?
Those are metric seconds.
Who profits from BOTS pumping the FACEBOOK advertising system?
In practice it will be effectively impossible to identify the person-or-company who is *originally* responsible for this clickvertising pumping scheme.
But I know who I'd be betting on.
Someone shorting their stock would be the top of my list ...
Just goes to show, when you have a virus you can't get rid of, reboot and re-install.
I'm a guy, and I've never found it difficult not to bring sex into workplace conversations and situations. Here's a short list of other things I find it easy not to do in a professional context:
1. Masturbate.
2. Shit myself.
3. Spend all day reading Facebook updates.
4. Nap.
5. Talk about my cats.
I was going to reply and said I'd managed to avoid one of those today, but when I woke up my post had timed out.
repetitive much?
No, its not. The product is "OS X". The version is 10.5.
What else would you say? "OS X 5"? That's neither the product, nor the version.
Dissipated in 630 seconds, this is an average rate of 51 Watts. Warm, but not out of line with being wrapped in an electric blanket.
Why in the world would you think the average rate is even remotely relavent? Peak rate, while not exclusively so, is the primary factor for survivability.
If I have a stick of dynamite with a timer on it, and set it for 23:59 hours, the average energy of the next 24 hours is not going to be my primary concern tomorrow morning.
I thought the same thing, and was going to post that, until I did a bit of math on it.
From the altitude of space, in a vacuum at 1G you'll be going almost 3000mph when you hit the ground. If you assume the bulk of the atmosphere capable of slowing you down significantly starts, say, around 20 miles up, you'll still be going 2500mph as you hit that meatier part of the air.
I can't say if that's something survivable or not, but 2500mph is fast enough at 20 miles up that an SR71 needed to be made of titanium to handle the heat.
The problem is if you swallow more then one, they bond through an intestine loop and you can't egest them normally.
That's just step 1 of the problem. Step 2 is the pressure between them wearing/tearing a hole through the intestine, which can be quickly fatal if not caught in time.