1. True. I find it more academically interesting that other groups are using/considering using the kernel with a different user environment than the concept of cloning Win NT. But I can't help but wonder if the effort would be better spent working on Wine or allowing Linux or FreeBSD to use Windows drivers. But as you said, why not? It's their time and their choice.
2. Open source may not need money to survive, but it does require "the itch" that causes the programmers to scratch. Remember, writing the software is the easy part. Testing the code and making it bulletproof is the hard part. I've seen many open source projects get 90% done and fall apart because they find that there just isn't that much consumer interest in it, and there wasn't the motivation to get over the hump of sitting there are 2 in the morning trying to track down that memory leak that seems to only happen every 27th time a function is called.
As far as DR-DOS, what makes you think that if ReactOS were to actually threaten MS, what makes you think they wouldn't squash them through use of FUD, patents, or other such measures? Given that MS Office is still 'the killer app' for offices, I doubt it would take much code to make it develop mysterious errors when running under ReactOS.
Other than the fun-for-the-programmers aspect, I'm still just not seeing the target market for this. With home users, either they need the absolute basic stuff (word processor, e-mail, spreadsheet, browser). I suspect that by the time that ReactOS is finished and stable, there'll be cheap Walmart or AOL branded Linux boxes that fill that role nicely. Home users looking to play games won't be interested, because modern games will be so far above what NT can handle. (I suspect that MS has more people working on DirectX alone than the entire ReactOS team.) And most business users will shy away from anything that's not heavily tested. My employer provides me with a copy of VMWare and WinXP, because it's far cheaper to purchase those than to have me burn hours futzing around with a first generation cloned OS.
So we're back to "why not," which I think is a better answer than, "why clone Unix?"
Unix was cloned for a number of reasons. First, it's (or very similar clones) been used extensively in the teaching of college level OS courses (Lyons, Tanenbaum, et al), so when students decided to write their own, it was natural to model their OSes after what they'd learned. As has been beaten to death in the past few weeks, Minix was specifically designed to be small and compact so that students could understand it in a semester. How many versions of Windows is that true for? *BSD obviously came out of the education system, and Linux was written in response to Minix.
Second, Unix systems have been established a track record of power and reliability (yes, there have been very bad Unixes, and they tend to have been removed from the marketplace). Windows... hasn't. It's gotten remarkably better, and a good deal of its problems are due to 3rd party drivers, but my well maintained W2K desktop and XP laptop still need to be rebooted every two or three weeks. And there's the never ending string of serious vulnerabilities. At an OS level, Windows has a lot of nice ideas. The problem is, most discussions about them seem to run, "They had a nice idea, but..."
Windows is changing rapidly, in ways that are likely to make programs incompatable with older versions (the better to force upgrades with, I'm sure). I'm sorry, but if after 7 years of work the project is almost within grasp of being able to use a DHCP client, I don't see any way they can keep up with Microsoft. If they want to work on it as a hobby and have fun doing so, more power to them. I just don't see it as being something overly useful. Screenshots of minesweeper (with poor graphics) aren't what I want to see. I want to see a version of Group Policies, Active Directory capability, and so on.
*BSD and Linux suceeded, not simply because of price, but because they were *better* in various ways than the competition. Microsoft has a tremendous software and driver collection, and has begun to do some really cool stuff. OS X has a simple UI that many people adore. What does ReactOS bring to the table, if it's three generations behind Microsoft? DR-DOS was cheaper and better (IMO) than MS-DOS, but Microsoft still ground it underneath their boots.
Open standards haven't won out so far. IE still has over 90% of the market and barely support CSS2. Outlook rules corporate e-mail. Most mail software doesn't try to be something better than Outlook, it just tries to be compatable on a different platform or with less cost. CIFS/SMB rules basic networking, while the Samba team tries to figure out the protocol that even MS doesn't know. Where have the open standards won out?
None of the above is a good thing, but it's how it is right now.
The problem with widespread biometrics is that you have to have a secure biometric reader at every location that users would possibly be at. This is why you see fingerprint scanners used at a lot of locations for door security, but relatively few for individual computer security. And secure biometric readers are expensive. (yes, you could use a simple scanner device, but then who's to say what's providing the data - an actual scanner or some software that's playing back the data that was captured from a previous session?)
There are PDAs that have biometric attachments that you can use to store multiple passwords, but in most cases I'm not sure that gains you that better security over just using a strong personal password, ala Apple's keychain.
As an aside, my experience with biometric door access at work has been that it rejects my finger scnas repeatedly about half the time until I give up and go around to where there's still card swipe access. YMWV.
Brute forcing is often applied in a situation where someone's compromised a system and has access to the password file (debian.org, as a notable example). From there, the attacker can brute force passwords of various users in the hope that they've used the same password on more than one system (which will be true in VERY many situations). If they're smart, they'll do the cracking on a different location so no one noticing the sudden spike in CPU use.
In practice, most of the software used for this purpose starts with a dictionary attack, which will find quite a few weak passwords in many cases. But many offer the option of attempting to brute force as well, though it may take some time.
Brute forcing can also be used to break weak encryption schemes - say I have see someone transmitting passwords to a webapp that's an MD5 hash. With a fast enough computer, I can brute force short or dictionary passwords. This is why salt is a good thing.
You did get paid for your work (that didn't leave a mark), did you not? If you laboured 40 hours a week for a year and wrote a piece of software, would you choose for it to have been included on a free software compilation if it meant that you got paid nothing for your work? Or would you pocket the money and let the software sit in profitable obscurity and enjoyed the fact you could pay your rent/mortgage?
If not for copies of their work, how do you propose artists get paid? Until you've done it, don't tell me that concerts will serve that function or provide a quality lifestyle.
Have you ever looked at the costs of making a good album? (No, not the Albini tract on major label artists, but the cost of an unknown artist trying to fund their own ~1000 pressed run.)
OBI WAN
Sagnarian 34th, Nine PM
Empire Standard Time
From here on in,
I shoot without a plot.
See if anything comes out of it
Instead of my old shit.
First shot -- Luke
Mending the lightsaber
He hasn't swung in a year. LUKE
This won't work...
LUKE AND OBI'S OUTGOING MESSAGE
May the Force be with you. ("Beeeep!") DARTH VADER
That was a very loud beep
I don't even know if this is working
Luke -- Luke -- are you there?
Are you screening your calls?
Luke, I AM YOUR FATHER.
--- Why do you blame the user? She explicitly said that she lost all of the programs that she likes...it is the fault of the person installing and configuring the computer. ---
You haven't dealt much with teenage girls, have you? The programs that they seem to like are all malware infested pieces of junk that do some little cute thing. And then $FLAVOUR of file pirating^wsharing software, each with a load of crud attached to it.
As the owner of an Inspiron 8500 and the user of a 12" Powerbook (and sometimes using a 15"), I have this to say:
1. Well yeah, the Inspiron isn't small. That's why I bought a unit with a wide 15" screen. On the other hand, I have little details like pageup and pagedown keys (and others that are missing on the Apple), full size arrow keys, dedicated audio controls, four mouse bottons, a touch pad, and an eraser mouse (AKA a 2 dimensional scroll wheel). I can understand why some of these things are missing on the 12" because of size issues, but there's no excuse for the larger Mac notebooks not having a usable keybaord. Fn-tiny-arrow-key-up is NOT the same as hitting pageup.
2. My 8500 isn't much heavier than the Powerbook, despite having a much larger screen.
3. Both get about three hours battery life with 802.11 on.
4. Cool? Have you touched a 12" after it's run for an hour? The entire case gets hot. Uncomfortably hot. Give me a fan that runs every now and then any time over that.
5. Neither's failed yet. They both cost about the same, have simular specs other than the screen difference, but my Dell has a three year, no fault warantee at that price.
P.S. To anyone considering getting a Powerbook to run Linux on, make sure you check that it's video card and wireless nyetworking are supported under Linux.
Yeah, the world is filled with nice rich people from the US, Canada, Europe, and so on. Nevermind the people outside of that area who might need the information. If they can't afford a 1GHz machine, screw them. Of course, those people are less likely to be consumers, and thus, the fancy javascript and flash ads won't be needed for them anyway, right?
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1. True. I find it more academically interesting that other groups are using/considering using the kernel with a different user environment than the concept of cloning Win NT. But I can't help but wonder if the effort would be better spent working on Wine or allowing Linux or FreeBSD to use Windows drivers. But as you said, why not? It's their time and their choice.
2. Open source may not need money to survive, but it does require "the itch" that causes the programmers to scratch. Remember, writing the software is the easy part. Testing the code and making it bulletproof is the hard part. I've seen many open source projects get 90% done and fall apart because they find that there just isn't that much consumer interest in it, and there wasn't the motivation to get over the hump of sitting there are 2 in the morning trying to track down that memory leak that seems to only happen every 27th time a function is called.
As far as DR-DOS, what makes you think that if ReactOS were to actually threaten MS, what makes you think they wouldn't squash them through use of FUD, patents, or other such measures? Given that MS Office is still 'the killer app' for offices, I doubt it would take much code to make it develop mysterious errors when running under ReactOS.
Other than the fun-for-the-programmers aspect, I'm still just not seeing the target market for this. With home users, either they need the absolute basic stuff (word processor, e-mail, spreadsheet, browser). I suspect that by the time that ReactOS is finished and stable, there'll be cheap Walmart or AOL branded Linux boxes that fill that role nicely. Home users looking to play games won't be interested, because modern games will be so far above what NT can handle. (I suspect that MS has more people working on DirectX alone than the entire ReactOS team.) And most business users will shy away from anything that's not heavily tested. My employer provides me with a copy of VMWare and WinXP, because it's far cheaper to purchase those than to have me burn hours futzing around with a first generation cloned OS.
So we're back to "why not," which I think is a better answer than, "why clone Unix?"
Unix was cloned for a number of reasons. First, it's (or very similar clones) been used extensively in the teaching of college level OS courses (Lyons, Tanenbaum, et al), so when students decided to write their own, it was natural to model their OSes after what they'd learned. As has been beaten to death in the past few weeks, Minix was specifically designed to be small and compact so that students could understand it in a semester. How many versions of Windows is that true for? *BSD obviously came out of the education system, and Linux was written in response to Minix.
... hasn't. It's gotten remarkably better, and a good deal of its problems are due to 3rd party drivers, but my well maintained W2K desktop and XP laptop still need to be rebooted every two or three weeks. And there's the never ending string of serious vulnerabilities. At an OS level, Windows has a lot of nice ideas. The problem is, most discussions about them seem to run, "They had a nice idea, but..."
Second, Unix systems have been established a track record of power and reliability (yes, there have been very bad Unixes, and they tend to have been removed from the marketplace). Windows
Windows is changing rapidly, in ways that are likely to make programs incompatable with older versions (the better to force upgrades with, I'm sure). I'm sorry, but if after 7 years of work the project is almost within grasp of being able to use a DHCP client, I don't see any way they can keep up with Microsoft. If they want to work on it as a hobby and have fun doing so, more power to them. I just don't see it as being something overly useful. Screenshots of minesweeper (with poor graphics) aren't what I want to see. I want to see a version of Group Policies, Active Directory capability, and so on.
*BSD and Linux suceeded, not simply because of price, but because they were *better* in various ways than the competition. Microsoft has a tremendous software and driver collection, and has begun to do some really cool stuff. OS X has a simple UI that many people adore. What does ReactOS bring to the table, if it's three generations behind Microsoft? DR-DOS was cheaper and better (IMO) than MS-DOS, but Microsoft still ground it underneath their boots.
Open standards haven't won out so far. IE still has over 90% of the market and barely support CSS2. Outlook rules corporate e-mail. Most mail software doesn't try to be something better than Outlook, it just tries to be compatable on a different platform or with less cost. CIFS/SMB rules basic networking, while the Samba team tries to figure out the protocol that even MS doesn't know. Where have the open standards won out?
None of the above is a good thing, but it's how it is right now.
The problem with widespread biometrics is that you have to have a secure biometric reader at every location that users would possibly be at. This is why you see fingerprint scanners used at a lot of locations for door security, but relatively few for individual computer security. And secure biometric readers are expensive. (yes, you could use a simple scanner device, but then who's to say what's providing the data - an actual scanner or some software that's playing back the data that was captured from a previous session?)
There are PDAs that have biometric attachments that you can use to store multiple passwords, but in most cases I'm not sure that gains you that better security over just using a strong personal password, ala Apple's keychain.
As an aside, my experience with biometric door access at work has been that it rejects my finger scnas repeatedly about half the time until I give up and go around to where there's still card swipe access. YMWV.
Brute forcing is often applied in a situation where someone's compromised a system and has access to the password file (debian.org, as a notable example). From there, the attacker can brute force passwords of various users in the hope that they've used the same password on more than one system (which will be true in VERY many situations). If they're smart, they'll do the cracking on a different location so no one noticing the sudden spike in CPU use.
In practice, most of the software used for this purpose starts with a dictionary attack, which will find quite a few weak passwords in many cases. But many offer the option of attempting to brute force as well, though it may take some time.
Brute forcing can also be used to break weak encryption schemes - say I have see someone transmitting passwords to a webapp that's an MD5 hash. With a fast enough computer, I can brute force short or dictionary passwords. This is why salt is a good thing.
Excuse me?
You did get paid for your work (that didn't leave a mark), did you not? If you laboured 40 hours a week for a year and wrote a piece of software, would you choose for it to have been included on a free software compilation if it meant that you got paid nothing for your work? Or would you pocket the money and let the software sit in profitable obscurity and enjoyed the fact you could pay your rent/mortgage?
If not for copies of their work, how do you propose artists get paid? Until you've done it, don't tell me that concerts will serve that function or provide a quality lifestyle.
Have you ever looked at the costs of making a good album? (No, not the Albini tract on major label artists, but the cost of an unknown artist trying to fund their own ~1000 pressed run.)
OBI WAN ...
Sagnarian 34th, Nine PM
Empire Standard Time
From here on in,
I shoot without a plot.
See if anything comes out of it
Instead of my old shit.
First shot -- Luke
Mending the lightsaber
He hasn't swung in a year.
LUKE
This won't work
LUKE AND OBI'S OUTGOING MESSAGE
May the Force be with you. ("Beeeep!")
DARTH VADER
That was a very loud beep
I don't even know if this is working
Luke -- Luke -- are you there?
Are you screening your calls?
Luke, I AM YOUR FATHER.
---
Why do you blame the user? She explicitly said that she lost all of the programs that she likes...it is the fault of the person installing and configuring the computer.
---
You haven't dealt much with teenage girls, have you? The programs that they seem to like are all malware infested pieces of junk that do some little cute thing. And then $FLAVOUR of file pirating^wsharing software, each with a load of crud attached to it.
I just tested it under 1.7 rc1 and it did not have any problems with it.
As the owner of an Inspiron 8500 and the user of a 12" Powerbook (and sometimes using a 15"), I have this to say:
1. Well yeah, the Inspiron isn't small. That's why I bought a unit with a wide 15" screen. On the other hand, I have little details like pageup and pagedown keys (and others that are missing on the Apple), full size arrow keys, dedicated audio controls, four mouse bottons, a touch pad, and an eraser mouse (AKA a 2 dimensional scroll wheel). I can understand why some of these things are missing on the 12" because of size issues, but there's no excuse for the larger Mac notebooks not having a usable keybaord. Fn-tiny-arrow-key-up is NOT the same as hitting pageup.
2. My 8500 isn't much heavier than the Powerbook, despite having a much larger screen.
3. Both get about three hours battery life with 802.11 on.
4. Cool? Have you touched a 12" after it's run for an hour? The entire case gets hot. Uncomfortably hot. Give me a fan that runs every now and then any time over that.
5. Neither's failed yet. They both cost about the same, have simular specs other than the screen difference, but my Dell has a three year, no fault warantee at that price.
P.S. To anyone considering getting a Powerbook to run Linux on, make sure you check that it's video card and wireless nyetworking are supported under Linux.
Joe Schottman
The DC area traffic authorities started playing with this some time ago.
One reference
Yeah, the world is filled with nice rich people from the US, Canada, Europe, and so on. Nevermind the people outside of that area who might need the information. If they can't afford a 1GHz machine, screw them. Of course, those people are less likely to be consumers, and thus, the fancy javascript and flash ads won't be needed for them anyway, right? Posted using links..