Thankfully, my English teacher taught me that, when writing an informal comment (email didn't really exist in schools back then, certainly wasn't taught in class, and web-based HTTP submissions were only used to show off Netscape), spelling, punctuation and grammar only matter if the actual messages being conveyed cannot be understood. I don't think they ever accounted for posting a comment on Slashdot at 130WPM while in a classroom full of kids, but the message would have been the same: "Who cares, so long as you can understand it? You aren't writing a book, you're making an informal comment / Post-it / Memo / Scribble."
Fortunately, my teachers also taught me that pointing out the mistakes of other people in the class does nothing to further my own education. Some people not only have trouble understanding informal versus formal writing, but also believe they are doing the world a service by pointing out typographical errors on Slashdot comments, when in fact they come across as pompous twits. And it's people such as this that actually *hinder* children from learning because by your rules they can almost *never* get the question right on their own.
God forbid that my child should ever be taught in a school that recognises their intelligence and then comdemns them for an out-of-place apostrophe in a forum post somewhere.
"I lost any sort of hope for schools adopting opensource software back then."
Working in schools for seven years will *really* open your eyes to the reality of that situation.
I've had schools who will pay £1000 to Microsoft for software that they don't even install, let alone use. Discs arrive in the post from random educational software companies addressed to random teachers and the next thing you know, there's a line on the ICT budget where they've bought the site licence (£300, £3000, it doesn't matter). When you chase it up, they've never even installed the thing, but it said it was a 30-day trial that you had to pay for after that, so they paid it. Then you find out it was a Mac program and you don't have Macs.
Teacher's have *no* idea how to run computer networks, or even just standalone computers. Their laptops are a mess of demos, trials, spyware, viruses, broken registries and confidential data (both personal and school). And that's the *better* ones, the ones who can install Flash on their own if they have permission. Now translate that to what they actually teach and try to be in the room when they are teaching without bursting into laughter.
For five years, I watched twenty seperate members of staff at half a dozen schools refer to the base unit as a "hard drive" and teach their kids that. And pressing save "Saves on the hard drive", don't you know... even when that's Z:\ (\\server\studentshare). You have *absolutely* no idea how bad it gets.
Have you checked my post at all? This is one of those "distro that targets education" LiveCD's that doesn't actually do anything educational at all (no more than Slackware with a handful of free apps from the web, which is in the range of any competent technician, let's say) but claims to be educational because it has TuxPaint and an adding program. It's also not suitable for deployment in a multi-user environment and is extremely admin-unfriendly (i.e. gives kids ways to break things / bypass things that you don't want them to ever have) without a second thought.
OpenOffice.org, Dia, Scribus, GanttProject, FreeMind, PDF Creator, Sumatra PDF (Bog-standard office-app fare available to anyone already. Nobody uses it in education any more than they use it anywhere else. And to be honest, there are staff/student mixtures of software here - kids generally aren't going to use FreeMind willingly, for example - which suggest that these people don't even seperate the two distinct and vital categories of user.)
Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin, RSSOwl (Seriously? You're going to put these into a networked environment and just let kids run them? IM and external email is banned in every school I've worked in - Firefox, etc. don't have any sort of functionality that lets you disable certain features for certain groups easily. You get kids who write Word macros that compromise the network to let them into Myspace past the filters - an open, difficult-to-restrict Browser/IM suite is just asking for trouble).
GIMP, GIMP animation, Inkscape, Blender, Tuxpaint (Wow - one extreme to the other - GIMP to TuxPaint. I've use Tuxpaint in some primary schools. They complain that it doesn't fulfill certain categories of their curriculum and last time I updated it, it wiped out the only interesting special effects that the younger kids would use in it. And I wouldn't want to teach GIMP *AT ALL* to children/young adults of any age. Hell, I used it once to try and do a GIF animation and gave up because a freeware bit of Linux command-line software did it better and more simply).
VLC ("for playing DVD's"... Just broken MPEG licensing restrictions unless you pay the MPEG LA seperately? This sort of thing doesn't go down well in schools).
Audacity (already use it... the kids can't get the hang of it at all and have little need to ever use it anyway)
Avidemux (last time I used this, it blew *my* mind, just doing a simple edit/conversion. Kids will never use this, anyway, staff will make the IT guys do anything along these lines and the IT guys have better tools at their disposal anyway).
Nasa Worldwind, GraphCalc, Guido Van Robot, CarMetal, Celestia, Stellarium (Standard freeware fare, no matter what OS, and not that useful / well used.).
Maxima (I quote *University* standard computer algebra system - Tuxpaint and university software... what the hell is this distro supposed to be targetting?)
***Games*** (Seriously? Schools + games don't mix, even if they have a "educational" [inverted commas deliberate] stance... FreeCiv isn't going to teach the kids history, any more than Wii Sports makes them an athlete).
It's the same as a million others of its kind. Useless. Ubuntu or similar distros actually have more and better software with a million times the control and admin-ability built-in. This is "OSS for Schools", it's "OSS with education in the name". It's *worthless* to kids, *worthless* to teaching staff, *worthless* to the IT guys who work in schools and *worthless* to the school as a whole. Anyone who wants this stuff has already got it, whether on Windows or Linux. It doesn't bring anything new or special to the table and actually makes several rather dubious additions. I've missed some of the lines from the website's contents out but where's the actual *software* for kids, for instance? Where are the admin tools? Where's the seperation between staff and student? Where's the capabilities that any school actually wants? Nowhere.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't OSS's fault - It's hard to make educational software, rather than just "kids software". Enormously hard. Which is why OSS has almost none.
Speaking as a UK school ICT Technician / ICT Manager for 7 years...
1) Some/Most teacher's are stupid, even in their specialist subject
It's a gross generalisation, but even most IT teachers cannot understand licensing, copyright, installation, administration of network machines, IT best practices, simple programming etc. I have seen heads of IT in secondary schools that have less knowledge of computers than my own mother, who can just about turn on a Wii unsupervised. If you think I am exaggerating, I'm really not. Couple this with the fact that *real* IT teachers (those who have taken computing degrees, and not some "business *with* computing" degree) are fewer than you think, that those who are still current on their IT are even less, and then those who can actually teach *AND* still understand anything vaguely technical are rare, if not non-existent.
This applies from kindergarten up to a lot of universities - their theory is sound but their IT is actually run by a real Network Manager (who will be denigrated and earn half their money because they don't have a PGCE or other 1-year-extra course that enables them to teach officially). If it isn't run by a real techie, disaster ensues - I know - I used to charge by the hour to clear it up. If you want to pass ICT GCSE, ask an ICT teacher. If you want to know about anything other than Word or Powerpoint or, indeed, anything that might ever require you to click the Help button, don't ask an ICT teacher. Guess who they'll ask.
2) 99.9% of people have never heard of Linux, even if they use it everyday (Google).
In my time working in IT support/network management for schools, I have met precisely six other people at work who have *heard* of Linux, and precisely *one* who actually used it more than "Yeah, installed it once, it didn't play games". That one was a fellow IT Technician. (Additionally, I have met three people who used any browser other than IE at home). Bear in mind that the average school has at least 30 staff (part/full-time), that I've worked in LOTS of schools (freelance support for five years), that this includes IT departments at large secondary schools / Academies, that it includes the Borough ICT support teams, sales people who called me etc. and I think you start to get the scale of the problem.
Now consider that most of those schools had Cachepilots or similar Linux-based hardware, ran on external shared services that were mostly hosted on Linux, Squid, Apache etc., used Asus EEEPC's, and even in one case the entire school network operated off the back of proxy caching servers and firewalls which ran Linux and even the IT people didn't know it until it was pointed out to them.
3) Free stuff has two connotations to the uninitiated:
a) Argh! It's rubbish. Because everything free is rubbish. b) There's a catch. (i.e. it's illegal, it forces you to do things, it reads your emails, etc.)
A previous (and very IT knowledgeable) IT Manager of mine, who used to manage mainframes in the financial sector for about 20 years, actively resisted me using Linux inside a school for months before I was allowed to bring in a couple of experimental projects I had built previously using it. Purely because it was "free" and therefore, no good. The "Free stuff isn't Microsoft" isn't a new phenomenon and it scares even the most technical of people who haven't tried it themselves.
4) In schools, nobody cares.
Educational software for Linux sucks. Completely. I've just started a job at a school where the head and bursar actually do *get* Linux and OSS and we were in instant, unanimous agreement on this while still in the interview. So, as far as most schools are concerned, it's not even worth touching. Yes, office apps are there, you can print, save, email, and all the usual. It's great for remote terminals, for getting basics done and for re-using old, cheap machines. But you're still having to buy new machines to run the fancy Windows content that you want because there isn't any Linux
And if you're an Australian ISP, this is a God-send.
Dec 24th: Implement blacklist as ordered. Dec 25th: Nobody in, skeleton crew while people jam the phones line to complain that their sites don't work. Dec 26th: Still on skeleton crew, who field the calls with "not our fault, we were ordered to" while people can't get their Christmas presents online properly. As all ISP's have the same problem, changing to ANY competing ISP won't do nowt. Dec 27-Jan 1st: Field all calls with "Blame the government's stupid filtering policy, all the ISP's are in teh same boat, we can't get through to anyone but we were required to implement it and there's nobody around to say we have to stop". Jan 2nd: Uproar ensues, public pressure demands the whole scheme is scrapped and people sacked, and it never comes up in any reasonable country ever again because people just point to "That Australia Fiasco".
To all the people who are saying "just take the botnet down with that control system", this isn't always possible.
Think, for instance, of a virus that not only has this sort of "find my controller" system but that, when it finds instructions, checks an attached PGP public key to ensure their integrity and that they came from the original author. If this particular virus doesn't have it, the next breed will. That makes it completely immune to "false" updates, in the same way that Linux repositories and Windows Update are... unless you have the private key associated with that virus' creation, you can't issue an update that it will take notice off.
You can't stop things like this by just intercepting the botnets... you can slow them, hinder them, give you time, but there are ways around everything. The way to stop it is to SHUT OFF USERS who have those botnets, who have allowed their computers to be compromised. Permanantly. Give them the incentive to actually keep their systems clean. They can move to another ISP etc. but the only way to stop them is to show them that leaving their PC open to infection is the problem here, along with an OS that allows that sort of compromise to be so easy, and not that some kid in Russia is somehow smarter or more resourceful than the entire world's IT experts.
I don't know if this worm actually does have a signed update system, but it's a very easy thing to do, with tons of well-audited, open-source, freely available code to do it for you. I would be very surprised if some malware somewhere wasn't already doing it.
The whole crux of your argument boils down to coding = time = money = who's going to pay?
The fatal flaw here is that, YEARS before IBM et al. jumped onboard, the OS machine was already churning out good software, without funding, without help, without any commercial interests. There's no doubt that funding of kernel developers, OS organisations, etc. is extremely helpful and a massive contribution but you appear to be stuck in the mindset that people don't do things unless they are paid.
In the commercial world, this is true. If you want a program to run that $10m company's tax accounts, you're going to have to pay for it. Outside the commercial world, there are a ton of experts (including paid professional coders who do it in their spare time and explicitly state that their OS-work is nothing to do with their employer) who are constantly do things, for free. Education is one good example. Teachers *GIVE AWAY* their lesson plans, resources, worksheets, overheads, even educational programs. Their schools/universities are *PAYING* for those but they are still allowed to give them away. And, even if they don't explicitly license and put these things online, there are many of them who are more than happy to share their resources.
And the beauty of Open Source is that it prevents such mono-culture as you describe because, at the end of the day, I am *legally allowed* to do pretty much what I like with OS software, even if company X has bundled their own version with tons of crap with their new PC's. I can take *their* OS code (which they are legally obliged to provide) and rip all the rubbish out and put my own version online for ANYONE to do what they want with it and there's nothing the company can do. The little guys, who are able to make the one-line changes to the OS code, keep the big-guys in check. "I'll just remove that line that say 'enable_drm_and_check_hardware'".
More importantly, in my point of view, is the fact that critical mass has been hit. We can run OS software of a myraid variations on so much hardware, supporting so many architectures and devices, "emulating" so many common pieces of software that the changes now are small-fry in comparison to the work that's already been done. We can make a PC today that is OS from top to bottom, including the BIOS. Hell, some guys are still churning out OS-from-top-to-bottom gaming devices (GP2X, Pandora) by just taking an off-the-shelf chip, bundling it with some OS software and then selling it. The opposite of what you predict may happen is much more likely to happen - MS will die or at least be crippled, and OS will be in every device whether you know it or not. Before you know it, people will be crying out for OS support for every tiny little device because they can't distribute their 99% OS-based product without it.
It takes *one* man/woman to write a driver that a million people will use and can adapt and change to an infinite variety of hardware and uses. However, in the corporate market, it takes teams of coders, lawyers, testers, etc. to write that same driver which can only be used in Company X machines and will never been seen outside the company. Thus it will take MANY, MANY teams in MANY corporations to get the same "prevelance" of a bit of software that one man can make.
I would actually welcome this return to "one-man, one code" coding... it's the way programming was started in earnest back in the 70's/80's - kids reading books, programming games, getting them published, all on their own. It's how most of the big names back then started, until commercialism jumped in. It's the way software works best. It doesn't make money (that's just a temporary side-benefit) but equally it doesn't COST anything to make more of it. It takes a teenage kid with a few hours spare who wants to do something with the programming language they just learned and all that free code/compilers that they have been given. Sound familiar? It should.
We get enough money from the ad's to host the site (which has some pretty hefty bandwidth needs at the moment but we have a very charitable host who does us lots of favours) and run a couple of camps for the Scouts every year. The clickthrough ratio is the same as my own sites, about 0.30%, but the number of visitors means it's actually profitable. Of course, we get that amount of visitors but being useful, prevelant, having lots of information, and being around for nearly 10 years helps - however we have never paid to advertise it, on-line or off. As far as I know, we've never had an article in any big Scouting magazines or anything. Just local stuff and general Googling. We don't sell anything, we don't take bribes, we don't like to anything that we review/use (advertisers/sponsors are *clearly* marked as such). So I guess it's just the number of eyes that determine click-through's, than anything else. I haven't seen the statistics in a while but I'm pretty sure we get a thousand visitors an hour or something stupid like that, for as far as you can trust web-based metrics.
Ad's get clicked on. In fact, the last few times we've been approached by camping specialists to sponsor the site, it's been for much less than the Google ad's bring in on their own.
I just gave this whole thing ten minutes thought because of this thread - damn you and your ridiculous suggestions.
My suggestion would have been to have a non-flat solar panel in the first place - one made up of 3D "pyramids" of mini triangular solar panels joined together, a bit like the shape of that reflector that they put on the moon, so that you catch light coming in from virtually any angle but have a non-flat sheet-like panel. I don't know if you'd get "more" power because of the greater surface area, at the expense of a greater "height" but it seems likely.
Then in the bottom, where each "pyramid" of panels meets another, a small hole for loose dust to drain through. That probably wouldn't do much on it's own, because the dust isn't all loose, but I'd have a "shaker" mechanism, probably just an extension of the motor systems or even just using the bumpy surface of Mars itself.
Then, whenever the rover moved, the dust would have somewhere to "fall" off the panels, there are no horizontal surfaces for it to cling too (the sloped sides of all the pyramids would help the dust slide off, I assume, a bit like flat roofs vs peaked roofs). Moving parts are kept to a minimum above what's *already* moving (which also means no extra power is required), you might end up with a greater power capacity because of surface area, the panels would be modular and thus less prone to total failure, angle of light coming into the panel wouldn't be as much as factor, so it might be able to collect more light at sunrise/sunset, and (hopefully) dust would be less of a problem.
If you did it right, you could still have quite a thin sheet of "bumpy pyramid" panels doing the job, although I imagine the wiring between them may be more complex. There's probably a million and one problems with this idea, too, because it took me ten minutes to think up and wasn't going to cost me millions of dollars if it had problems.
So you're adding a motor, including cabling and control, plus rolls of film which would have to be designed properly to not block out too much light to the solar panel in the first place (UV-translucent etc.), you would have gears, etc. possibly in an exposed martian dusty atmosphere but they only get used, say, once a month. And you expect this motor/gearing to start up and work first time every time when it's caked in dust, or provide some sort of shielding that is "dust-proof" but also allows the film to move smoothly through it and, presumbly, "out" of something like a spindle the other end, when it's caked in dust that you've just shoved towards the spindle.
You've added so many moving parts and complications it would actually have been easier to just fit a mechanism to spray some Windowlene on it...
They're mainly European and if my previous history with them is anything to go by, they're a fly-by-night, domains-and-hosting-for-£1 outfit that has little or no technical acumen and is mainly for small business or mass-domain sales direct to personal customers.
I once had a dedicated "root" Linux server with them which I never got working for its intended purpose because their initial setup was dire (outdated Plesk, kernel, Apache, etc. all with serious remotely-exploitable security flaws), their support was atrocious (wouldn't even know what Apache was half the time and their answer to everything was "you have a dedicated server, you do it" unless you were asking them to reboot and even then you had to fight). Which wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't been for the fact that the supplied server came with insecure software by default (and I'm talking about several-year-old flaws) and the only available updates (specially hosted on their privately-accesible servers only to dedicated customers, including updates to the pay-for software and part of the support contract) for their customised-kernel/userspace/Plesk etc. specifically said not to install them AT ALL without actual physical access (one specifically mentioned "DO NOT DO THIS VIA SSH", which was the only access I had).
Their dedicated server support line couldn't understand the problem, wanted me to just run it anyway (they charged for rebuilds), refused to do anything more than reboot if it went wrong (and the nature of the update specified that if it went wrong, a simple reboot would do NOTHING because it updated so much stuff), refused to supply a server with a newer image or to upgrade it, and sometimes couldn't even understand simple technical terms. So I had a choice - run a high-power, high-bandwidth, Internet-facing server with well-known, long-established serious security flaws in all the important software (and suffer their charges if the server was compromised and started spewing spam), or attempt a massive upgrade party with hundreds of updates remotely via SSH where several of them specifically state not to do it remotely (and get charged if it needs to be restored from their backup, even if just to a bootable state so that I could restore *my* backups).
Needless to say, I chose the third option: tell them to stick it where the sun don't shine. Letters of complaint to head office went unanswered or (if sent recorded delivery) received the vaguest of replies which basically said "We don't care, we can do no wrong, you still owe us money even though you couldn't use the server, because you're a 'dedicated server' customer we won't do anything to help you, ever.", etc. I even have a soundbite on a phone call to the support line where the chief technical bod on the special "dedicated server support line" actually refuses to state what it is that they COULD do for me. "Can you reboot my server if I ask?" "Can you restore from backup?" "Can you shut the machine down?" "Can you filter a DDoS attack if I get hit?" "What questions do you ACTUALLY answer?"... every single answer was the same... "I can't tell you that, sir". I mean, seriously, what the hell kind of answer is that?
Needless to say, I never used them ever again and like to pull out the story whenever I hear their name.
"Yes good, efficient design is from the ground up but once you've got the underlying structure sorted, you then move onto features."
Except, little to no "underlying structure" has changed. If it did, we'd need new driver models (like Vista, which claimed the same thing but actually followed through with it and didn't actually show that much improvement at all), new API's, new ways of doing things entirely. The *design* of Vista/Windows 7 and even the server OS's is now virtually identical. The only difference is in the eye candy that sits above it. And you don't "move on" to features - the features *define* the changes that you need to make. But, and I repeat this with your items below, there are no *significant* *new* features in Windows 7 yet. They may appear, they may not. I very much doubt anything more than eye candy will surface now because there is not even a hint that anything is actually in progress... 50% of your development time is not spent "gettings things ready" for a new feature without making *substantial* changes to the underlying OS or at least providing some hint that that feature is requiring changes to be made. There's *no* sign of that.
"Once all the features are in place, then you move onto optimisation. Optimisation and bug fixing are the final stages of development, after all, you can't optimise things which haven't been implemented yet can you?"
How true that is. You can't optimise thing that don't exist. However, nothing "new" exists. So there's nothing to optimise, which is why this pre-beta OS behaves in the exact same manner as the post-SP1 Vista. Because it's the same bloody code. I would *expect* a dramatic performance hit in a pre-beta OS. Nothing less. There should be debug info, assertions, all sorts of tests and edge cases being caught that make it slow to a crawl. But somehow it performs *identically* to it's predecessor. That tells me that there's been no changes *to* optimise or debug.
"However Microsoft have never promised magical performance boosts. They've just said less bloat, more streamlining."
Neither of which is evident.
"No new features? There's the **improved** wireless, the GUI which will **now** load and be smooth BEFORE graphics drivers are installed (I don't believe any desktop versions of windows have done that since **before win95**),..., They **improved** the UAC so you can make it as invasive or as invisible as you wish... They've **updated** all the **basic** applications (notepad etc.)."
My highlighting speaks for itself. Additionally, the last point is heavily cancelled out by removal of quite a few of those applications *entirely*.
Now, I've stripped some of your suggestions out to talk about them one by one.
"The interface is hugely optimised, resulting in a much smoother experience from practically everyone who has done the beta."
Apart from the guy who did the benchmarks. "Hugely optimised" is an enormous statement to back up. I doubt you can prove it with numbers but as this very article shows, looks don't always mean that it *is* working faster. It may "feel" faster. Even then, we're talking about "optimisation" again, which doesn't seem to have any effect on the actual measurable numbers, so I claim that it's not optimised AT ALL. Also, it's not "new". Every OS since Windows 2.0 has claimed to have a "improved" interface with "optimised" code. Rarely has it ever materialised.
"They've shown a version that will run comfortably on netbooks whilst still looking and feeling great (and the OS is SSD optimised)."
SSD optimisation is *new*. I'll grant you that one. It's a not-easy task, too, because it's not as simple as just assuming that every seek is latency-free - that's deep-level, hard kernel work. However, most SSD's actually pretend to be IDE, SATA, etc. interfaces and so all that work will result in minimal optimisation because of the sheer layers between the two, along with the fact that most SSD's aren't optimal or fit to their cl
Personally, I use Ghost for imaging and if I want to find out what a program is doing, I run sysinternals File Monitor and Registry Monitor. They're real-time and don't record in a nice format but nothing really beats them on Windows. They've helped me diagnose hundreds of horrible modern and ancient installation programs used in an educational environment to allow network installation (why, exactly, do you need write access to C:\WINDOWS to run a Shockwave-based game for toddlers, etc.?).
Linux/Unix has this much easier because it allows you to monitor EVERYTHING without massive binary blobs having settings stored in them, having settings locked to particular machines, etc. or things generally getting in your way. Windows, it's a pain in the proverbial.
Even a lot of the professional MSI-Builders with their "discovery" modes are absolutely useless at working out what was actually a vital change and what was just the installer playing about, or the user changing their screensaver / explorer view preferences while they installed etc. I spend half my life cleaning MSI's of unnecessary cruft and inserting the entries that they miss. About 50% of automated install captures like this are useless for deployment to a different machine.
Basically, despite the "secrecy" around your particular purpose (why did you have to mention that at all... it makes no difference to what you want and adds nothing to our knowledge), it's probably not worth the hassle. Before and after snapshots, or package the programs and MSI's and you'll find out everything you need along the way, with an actual, practical result at the end. Trying to diff a filesystem/registry image in any way is madness and is only useful if you can get a *perfectly* clean machine, a VERY good automated program to do it brilliantly, where you'll end up with a lot of cruft that isn't related to the program installation at all (e.g. event log entries, temporary files, taskbar icons saving their settings etc.).
"Come on guys, its a pre-beta!... did you really expect them to actually do any thing significant so far?"
Yes. I pulled some facts off the Wiki but I think they are pretty accurate.
Windows Vista RTM: November 8, 2006. Microsoft stated in 2007 that it is "scoping Windows 7 development to a three-year timeframe" Release dates are supposed to be in the region of 2009 or 2010.
So, to me, that says that it's *at least* eighteen-months, two-years into development (or thereabouts). It's got another year to eighteen months to go. So, halfway through it's development process, we have *zip* that is actually useful to the average user (which is who it is supposedly aimed at) and nothing to entice business users. There are *no* performance improvements. None. Programmers don't magically add 50% performance after-the-fact, it's *design* that gives you performance.
Halfway through and we don't have a single groundbreaking feature. Nothing. Not even something to show off temporarily. Seriously, read through the Wiki page on "new features in Windows 7" and have a look at the features that are actually *HERE*, not the ones "promised"... remember, Windows Vista was going to have WinFS etc. It's completely embarassing. Instead of a "new operating system", we just have:
Vista, with no better performance, some unnecessary UI changes (purely to make gullible people pay to "retrain" on the new OS in my opinion), removal of lots of built-in applications, a "Health Centre", some claims about fantastic new features that this article proves aren't even in there yet (better performance, threading, etc.) or that only a handful of people in the world could get excited about.
What that tells me is that all these marvellous new features DO NOT EXIST in a reliable form. But I'd be showing them everywhere if they did just work, even only on one machine - I'd be booting it up in conferences, showing it in trade shows, making people WANT that feature that I haven't finished yet and which only works on 25% of machines while the programmers hack on it. But there's *nothing*.
Fortunately, I saw the Vista thing coming.
I had a job interview the other day where the main technically-literate person on the panel asked my opinion on Vista. Needless to say, I was wary of giving my reply in case it was interpreted as belligerent or dismissive, but the interviewer and I laughed and joked and told Vista anecdotes for about ten minutes *in the interview* once he realised that I shared his very-low opinion of the OS. (I got the job, by the way.) I'm pretty sure, at this point, that Windows 7 will be more of the same or worse. Promises, promises, promises and then sting the customer before they realise that they've bought a turkey and that actually it was only useful for the little sticker with the Product Key on it that lets you use its predecessor instead.
WPA isn't broken. TKIP (and *ONLY* TKIP) has a flaw which means it is susceptible for small packets, assuming that people are able to send unlimited amounts of data at the router and have it respond to that data - this might even be fixable in firmware by implementing the same time limits as WPA2 uses for such things.
TKIP is an *option* in the standard, the alternative being the still-secure AES. So one (little-used) protocol out of two (or more) possible protocols in an ageing standard that has been superceded in all practically available hardware by WPA2, has a flaw in that an attacker who can send unlimited data and recieved unlimited responses to that data may, after lots of analysis be able to craft a *small* packet (which is admittedly no worse or better than being able to generate any packet). It's a crack, yes, but you can:
Use AES instead of TKIP Wait for the manufacturers to put out an updated firmware Use WPA2 (which is probably the default already)
It isn't the end of the world, but the horsemen of the Apocalypse might well be getting their horses some nice new shoes ready...
Yes, it's only a crack, not a collapse. But a crack into which can be inserted the crowbar of, in this case, ARP or DNS spoofing. Enough to force quite a large hole into a wireless network which relies on TKIP. AES is safe, yes, but if your router allows TKIP, this could be quite a large hole... enough to poke a user on the other side to start sending their private traffic across the Internet, other wireless networks, etc. to a third-party IP.
And it won't be long before that crack becomes a hole big enough to slap the user through. It's not "the sky is falling" but it's a wake up call to people who thought TKIP/WPA was "safe enough" to instead make sure they are using AES with strong keys. Personally, even the school wireless routers that I manage have WPA2, AES with PSK's in the range of 512bytes each. Doing that from the first has bought me a lot of time in which to be secure. However, if I had started slightly earlier with WEP equipment, moved onto WPA as a compatability measure, etc. I might now be in the position where I would need to move again.
It's right to make a fuss of this. It's wrong to suggest the WPA (or, by unsaid extension) WPA2 are "broken". Even if they were, we have no viable alternative just yet, anyway, so you're stuffed.:-)
I'm not saying that your points don't have merit. I just don't believe any of them to be true. In the face of almost zero evidence, people choose different beliefs.
"1) "People 'with half a brain' arleady use encryption"."
This isn't one of my points. My point is, it's an insecure medium. So either secure it, or don't be surprised that you can't trust it.
"People who deliberatly use encryption are so few that the governements do not really care."
Just about everyone who uses a bank account. Most people who use BitTorrent. Most people who use file-sharing networks in any way. SSL-secured email. Encryption is everywhere. It's just that, for most of the "interesting" people, talking to "interesting" friends, they *will* use encryption heavily (except for a few dumb ones but you get stupid criminals as well as stupid terrorists so they do exist) - the prime suspects are the ones who *are* using encryption.
"If you look at the history of wiretap abuses, you'll see that it's mostly about political activists (who think they have nothing to hide, since what they do is legal)"
And if they use unsecured communications channels willingly and the information on there is harvested (whether in an ISP blackbox or by someone scraping their MySpace account), that's part of the problem. That was my very first point. If you know you're on a database "somewhere" that contains detail X and another database that contains detail "Y", you *have* to know that a sufficiently evil government can easily correlate them. Whether they are joined together or not, whether there's a blackbox in your ISP or not, you have to accept that. If you tell your boss that you're having a day off sick, but you post on MySpace that you were at the football match that day - it's the same scenario. Blackboxes do not help or hinder this discovery.
"2) "They have so much data, they can't do anything with it":"
A point I stand by, but I'd add the disclaimer "useful". All the "useful" information can be extracted without ISP blackboxes. Again, it's not that "it can be done" but "is it worth the effort if we alienate the entire voting population, get our budgets slashed and don't manage to catch anyone with it"? When you consider the sheer costs involved, it's really not. Nobody analyses that data. It's all targetted. You find your suspect (Z) and you trace it back through anything you have on Z in your history, the same way you would without a blackbox. You don't splat Terabytes of data on a populous through an algorithm and get "X is a terrorist".
I can extrapolate what's feasible with a datacentre the size of Google's collective servers (anything larger would be hard to hide effectively and certainly wouldn't be wasted on such a fishing expedition) and, let's say, knock it up by a couple of orders of magnitude. Run that on TB's of data (probably a lot more but I can't remember my prefix's and their order... exabytes, zottabytes, whatever) which is being collected *each second*. What do you find out? That X spoke to Y who spoke to Z (a known terrorist) over an encrypted channel. You can do that by targetting Z specifically (e.g. plant a bug, surveillance, etc), much more effectively and at much less cost and hassle with a vastly better signal-to-noise ratio...
The point is that the data you get out is practically worthless compared to that available by much simpler methods. Even if you *designed* a way to get this *exact* information, this would be the method of last resort. And it's *so* prone to false information, deliberate obfuscation, and, e.g. only communicating over anonymous connections that it's just not worth the effort.
"3) "I've seen the government's lack of money/competence on other things, so they will b ineffective at that, too":"
A point well made, although this wouldn't form my entire argument here for that reason. The point is though that a simple, non-intrusive, useful, money-saving application can't be done effectively with good will behind it. So w
First, do you mean that everybody with half a brain doesn't already work under the assumption that, if they wanted to, the UK government (or indeed any government) can *already* do this, or *are* already doing this? If in doubt assume the worst. The Internet is an insecure channel, which is why things like SSH and SSL exist. You *know* that your ISP can / will monitor the basic contents of your connection (just ask the record companies, or Phorm). At any point, a court could order surveillance of your Internet connection remotely without your knowledge. Therefore the *only* sensible thing to do is to treat your Internet connection as the insecure channel that it is.
Secondly, I don't believe for a second that there's enough processing power anywhere to do anything useful with this amount of data or intercept anything more than a specific customer or two. The infrastructure required to pipe entire ISP's worth of data to "some secret datacentre" is something that would not go unnoticed, would raise an awful lot of eyebrows and technical problems, not to mention a technical nightmare for ISP's and governments alike. They can't get every doctor's surgery online, for God's sake, after decades of work and that's making them an international embarassment and costing *billions*.
If the plans go through and the equipment is installed, there's no practical way it can "monitor" everything simultaneously for those magic words, and doing it via protocol/plaintext analysis on a CPU inside an ISP is a damn sight easier than that mythical American data centre that recognises multilingual speech in every phone conversation taking place across the country (Yeah, right, I can't even get ViaVoice or the automated bank systems to recognise a number correctly three times out of ten in English from a limited vocabulary on a perfectly clear, high-quality microphone, with oodles of processing power behind it).
What this is, is a filter. It would allow the government to implement a wiretap quickly once they had a suspect, so that they can issue a command that would send a BGP request or similar, which the ISP would be required to honour, which would allow them to intercept the traffic to a particular IP that they already suspect. It might even have a decent amount of processing power on the ISP side so that the full IP contents don't have to be re-transmitted over the "super-secret-network" to a mainframe for analysis.
The problem is, for anything practical, you have to then bring that evidence to court and show that you were entitled to that information in the first place (i.e. you had a *prior* court warrant to allow you to do so) or it just gets thrown straight back out, if not in the UK, then in the appeal to the EU court (who are no friends of the UK when it comes to legal decisions), etc.
I can tap your Internet illicitly, or put an tap on your keyboard, or steal your machine and find evidence that you committed a murder, or a terrorist act, or a copyright infringement - it *isn't* necessarily true that such evidence is admissable in court. In fact, it's more likely to *jeopardise* a case against you, even if I'm a policeman, because it was collected by illegal means which means it is possible that an order is given that it *must* be disregarded and cannot be brought up ever again in any court. So my hard work to prove you are a terrorist may actually end up making you a free man *forever* from anything in that confession. The only way to make sure it's admissable is to ask permission from the court *first* (i.e. get a warrant, based on your suspicions), in which case you could get all the information you wanted anyway. You can think about "super-secret" organisations not limited by such things all you want - the fact is that if they exist, they already have all the capabilities they ever need without such assistance.
If the plans go through, it's just how it works now, only speeded up a bit. The legal ramifications alone of any other method would have lawyers begging to take cases on.
No matter how much you want to think so. How this relates to a story about **UK** ISP's, I don't know. However, if you wish to turn Slashdot into Slashdot World Series (i.e. only America actually contributes - my apologies... Wiki says that there is one Canadian team too...), then feel free to keep whinging. Or just read the story at the top of the front page about the election that, with its sister postings over the last few days, has made me remove "News" from my topic lists. Do British people shove comments on random pages when a new Prime Minister is elected? No. Why not? Because it would annoy the Americans and others who have precisely zero interest in such things.
That's got to be the *oddest* troll I've ever had.
But, hey, it's my time. I'll "waste" it if I want to. Or I might just be coding free / Open Source software at the same time as playing. God, wouldn't *that* be ironic? Or maybe I spend my day helping out poor schools with their IT and teaching kids that free software exists and how to use it? Or *maybe*, just *maybe*, between myself and my brother alone we've run dozens of various youth clubs, both work/teach in schools, have taken pretty much all the IT jobs that crop up as part of those things and are, for instance, throwing kids in front of Linux machines in order to let them complete their IT badges for Scout groups (the hard way, to the kids, because we're both such harsh judges that we set the kids tasks and only at the last minute show them that they need to be completed on a KDE GUI, or an Apple Mac, or something even more "obscure" to them so that they can't just memorise menu names), sending kids home with copies of TuxPaint so that their parents don't go buying expensive rubbish to do the same job, moving school networks away from expensive proprietry company software to free and Open Source stuff wherever possible (and for a living) so that the school can do stuff like... buy books and pens with the money instead.
So sue me if I enjoy the odd game of OpenTTD or even RedAlert at the end of the day and don't want to pay a few hundred quid to get a game running. Unfortunately, if I were to spend *all* my time (notice the "all", suggesting that actually I already do "some" or even a "lot") programming Open Source software, I might become a TCL/TK troll from Manchester University. Although, I have to admit, it's one language of the few languages I've never touched in my life, and one of the Universities that I gave absolutely no consideration to when applying *thirteen* years ago. Be careful who you try to mock online, or at least make it clear that you're attempting humour.
BTW: there's quite a few broken links, missing images, non-working pages on your website including the Yow CGI "experiment".
Stop buying games, then. Not just *buying* them, but playing them too. Or make your purchases much more carefully. I did this years ago and haven't bought a PC game in that time, unless it was a non-DRM thing off a budget label. The only game I play online is Counterstrike, because I have at least four legitimate copies of the original CD version at home, all of which entitle me to a Steam account with that game. I last loaded Steam about a year ago. Someone bought me FarCry for Christmas - I haven't even opened it.
Instead, I download freeware, use open-source games, buy games (if I buy any at all) that are from smaller developers, budget labels and/or have no DRM in them at all. Even my wife now recognises the Sold Out, etc. budget labels in shops and points them out to me if she sees them. Gaming for me has gone from a hardcore-fanatic industry to where it should have always stayed: casual gamers. A few levels of some platformer, a couple of Flash games, and I'm happy.
If you think I don't game much, you're wrong. Gaming is a family trait - over the years we've wasted countless hours playing every Mario game ever made (my mum loves them and has completed them all), Tetris, Counterstrike, you name it. We have PC's, consoles and handhelds all over the place. Dad loves his Palm, word games and racing games. Mum loves her various consoles and Mario. My brother is PC-oriented and plays strategy games and FPS. My wife comes from a family that had Sega instead of Nintendo and so much prefers replaying all her old Megadrive games. About once a week, we all get together and have a massive gaming bash and it's not unusual for my Mum to still be up at 3am trying to complete a Mario level. There are computers I've built for them loaded up with emulators for all their old consoles, freeware, and flash games. We even had a CD-i which we kept just for PacMania (which Mum loves). My earliest computing memory is my brother, Dad and I all working together to complete and then map Nonterraqueous for the Spectrum. It took weeks and the largest bit of graph paper you've ever seen in your life. (We did it in the end, and the day after, a magazine published a map in it's cheats section. Grr...)
What I'm doing now is actually spending a lot more time on emulators of older games that I know I'll enjoy. I carry a GP2X just to replay all my old SNES games. I just replayed Red Alert on PC, because it was released as freeware without DRM, and it was really quite good fun. Syndicate in DOSBox gave me more hours of fun (except that impossibly stupid last mission) than I've ever got from a modern £50 PC game. I have a stack of games that I bought years ago that I just keep replaying (or, in some cases, actually getting around to play for the first time). Carmageddon, Project IGI, Master of Magic, even stupid old Apogee stuff like Commander Keen and Halloween Harry. The first Unreal Tournament, Quake and every one of it's official expansions (which I can even play on the GP2X). They are *all* great games. They are all replayable. None of them demands 10% of my hard disk or some ridiculously overspecced graphics card. I get more use out of XQuest 2 and The Incredible Machine than I do out of anything made for a console in the last few years.
Eventually all the games that people are raving about now will come out on budget labels and if they *were* actually any good, I'll know by the time they do, snap them up for a bargain, have no troubles with DRM, stupid system requirements, activation, or having to have the latest, greatest hardware to play smoothly, etc.
I like to play my parent's Wii - it's great fun. We buy about two or three games for it a year between the five of us. But even the (unskippable) cutscenes in Mario Galaxy which I played for the first time this week were so annoying because when I play, I just want to play. I haven't even looked at any other console past the N64 or original Playstation. Every now and again, I'll buy a complete console with controllers, acc
"Daley Thomson's Decathlon - for single-handedly killing more Z and X keys than anything else on the market. Ever."
I never killed the keyboard with DTD but I did destroy at least one Interface II (the ones that could take console-style "ROM cartridges" and boot games instantly... wow!), several IF2 joysticks and the edge-connector on the back of the Speccy twice. I think I also killed the power supply numerous times by pulling out the connector, though. For as long as I can remember it was held together by dad's soldering and a lot of black electrical tape. Nothing more fun than accidentally wiggling the wire when you wanted to load the next level...
Slashdot Mirror
Thankfully, my English teacher taught me that, when writing an informal comment (email didn't really exist in schools back then, certainly wasn't taught in class, and web-based HTTP submissions were only used to show off Netscape), spelling, punctuation and grammar only matter if the actual messages being conveyed cannot be understood. I don't think they ever accounted for posting a comment on Slashdot at 130WPM while in a classroom full of kids, but the message would have been the same: "Who cares, so long as you can understand it? You aren't writing a book, you're making an informal comment / Post-it / Memo / Scribble."
Fortunately, my teachers also taught me that pointing out the mistakes of other people in the class does nothing to further my own education. Some people not only have trouble understanding informal versus formal writing, but also believe they are doing the world a service by pointing out typographical errors on Slashdot comments, when in fact they come across as pompous twits. And it's people such as this that actually *hinder* children from learning because by your rules they can almost *never* get the question right on their own.
God forbid that my child should ever be taught in a school that recognises their intelligence and then comdemns them for an out-of-place apostrophe in a forum post somewhere.
"I lost any sort of hope for schools adopting opensource software back then."
Working in schools for seven years will *really* open your eyes to the reality of that situation.
I've had schools who will pay £1000 to Microsoft for software that they don't even install, let alone use. Discs arrive in the post from random educational software companies addressed to random teachers and the next thing you know, there's a line on the ICT budget where they've bought the site licence (£300, £3000, it doesn't matter). When you chase it up, they've never even installed the thing, but it said it was a 30-day trial that you had to pay for after that, so they paid it. Then you find out it was a Mac program and you don't have Macs.
Teacher's have *no* idea how to run computer networks, or even just standalone computers. Their laptops are a mess of demos, trials, spyware, viruses, broken registries and confidential data (both personal and school). And that's the *better* ones, the ones who can install Flash on their own if they have permission. Now translate that to what they actually teach and try to be in the room when they are teaching without bursting into laughter.
For five years, I watched twenty seperate members of staff at half a dozen schools refer to the base unit as a "hard drive" and teach their kids that. And pressing save "Saves on the hard drive", don't you know... even when that's Z:\ (\\server\studentshare). You have *absolutely* no idea how bad it gets.
Have you checked my post at all? This is one of those "distro that targets education" LiveCD's that doesn't actually do anything educational at all (no more than Slackware with a handful of free apps from the web, which is in the range of any competent technician, let's say) but claims to be educational because it has TuxPaint and an adding program. It's also not suitable for deployment in a multi-user environment and is extremely admin-unfriendly (i.e. gives kids ways to break things / bypass things that you don't want them to ever have) without a second thought.
OpenOffice.org, Dia, Scribus, GanttProject, FreeMind, PDF Creator, Sumatra PDF
(Bog-standard office-app fare available to anyone already. Nobody uses it in education any more than they use it anywhere else. And to be honest, there are staff/student mixtures of software here - kids generally aren't going to use FreeMind willingly, for example - which suggest that these people don't even seperate the two distinct and vital categories of user.)
Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin, RSSOwl
(Seriously? You're going to put these into a networked environment and just let kids run them? IM and external email is banned in every school I've worked in - Firefox, etc. don't have any sort of functionality that lets you disable certain features for certain groups easily. You get kids who write Word macros that compromise the network to let them into Myspace past the filters - an open, difficult-to-restrict Browser/IM suite is just asking for trouble).
GIMP, GIMP animation, Inkscape, Blender, Tuxpaint
(Wow - one extreme to the other - GIMP to TuxPaint. I've use Tuxpaint in some primary schools. They complain that it doesn't fulfill certain categories of their curriculum and last time I updated it, it wiped out the only interesting special effects that the younger kids would use in it. And I wouldn't want to teach GIMP *AT ALL* to children/young adults of any age. Hell, I used it once to try and do a GIF animation and gave up because a freeware bit of Linux command-line software did it better and more simply).
VLC ("for playing DVD's"... Just broken MPEG licensing restrictions unless you pay the MPEG LA seperately? This sort of thing doesn't go down well in schools).
Audacity (already use it... the kids can't get the hang of it at all and have little need to ever use it anyway)
Avidemux (last time I used this, it blew *my* mind, just doing a simple edit/conversion. Kids will never use this, anyway, staff will make the IT guys do anything along these lines and the IT guys have better tools at their disposal anyway).
Nasa Worldwind, GraphCalc, Guido Van Robot, CarMetal, Celestia, Stellarium
(Standard freeware fare, no matter what OS, and not that useful / well used.).
Maxima (I quote *University* standard computer algebra system - Tuxpaint and university software... what the hell is this distro supposed to be targetting?)
***Games***
(Seriously? Schools + games don't mix, even if they have a "educational" [inverted commas deliberate] stance... FreeCiv isn't going to teach the kids history, any more than Wii Sports makes them an athlete).
It's the same as a million others of its kind. Useless. Ubuntu or similar distros actually have more and better software with a million times the control and admin-ability built-in. This is "OSS for Schools", it's "OSS with education in the name". It's *worthless* to kids, *worthless* to teaching staff, *worthless* to the IT guys who work in schools and *worthless* to the school as a whole. Anyone who wants this stuff has already got it, whether on Windows or Linux. It doesn't bring anything new or special to the table and actually makes several rather dubious additions. I've missed some of the lines from the website's contents out but where's the actual *software* for kids, for instance? Where are the admin tools? Where's the seperation between staff and student? Where's the capabilities that any school actually wants? Nowhere.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't OSS's fault - It's hard to make educational software, rather than just "kids software". Enormously hard. Which is why OSS has almost none.
Speaking as a UK school ICT Technician / ICT Manager for 7 years...
1) Some/Most teacher's are stupid, even in their specialist subject
It's a gross generalisation, but even most IT teachers cannot understand licensing, copyright, installation, administration of network machines, IT best practices, simple programming etc. I have seen heads of IT in secondary schools that have less knowledge of computers than my own mother, who can just about turn on a Wii unsupervised. If you think I am exaggerating, I'm really not. Couple this with the fact that *real* IT teachers (those who have taken computing degrees, and not some "business *with* computing" degree) are fewer than you think, that those who are still current on their IT are even less, and then those who can actually teach *AND* still understand anything vaguely technical are rare, if not non-existent.
This applies from kindergarten up to a lot of universities - their theory is sound but their IT is actually run by a real Network Manager (who will be denigrated and earn half their money because they don't have a PGCE or other 1-year-extra course that enables them to teach officially). If it isn't run by a real techie, disaster ensues - I know - I used to charge by the hour to clear it up. If you want to pass ICT GCSE, ask an ICT teacher. If you want to know about anything other than Word or Powerpoint or, indeed, anything that might ever require you to click the Help button, don't ask an ICT teacher. Guess who they'll ask.
2) 99.9% of people have never heard of Linux, even if they use it everyday (Google).
In my time working in IT support/network management for schools, I have met precisely six other people at work who have *heard* of Linux, and precisely *one* who actually used it more than "Yeah, installed it once, it didn't play games". That one was a fellow IT Technician. (Additionally, I have met three people who used any browser other than IE at home). Bear in mind that the average school has at least 30 staff (part/full-time), that I've worked in LOTS of schools (freelance support for five years), that this includes IT departments at large secondary schools / Academies, that it includes the Borough ICT support teams, sales people who called me etc. and I think you start to get the scale of the problem.
Now consider that most of those schools had Cachepilots or similar Linux-based hardware, ran on external shared services that were mostly hosted on Linux, Squid, Apache etc., used Asus EEEPC's, and even in one case the entire school network operated off the back of proxy caching servers and firewalls which ran Linux and even the IT people didn't know it until it was pointed out to them.
3) Free stuff has two connotations to the uninitiated:
a) Argh! It's rubbish. Because everything free is rubbish.
b) There's a catch. (i.e. it's illegal, it forces you to do things, it reads your emails, etc.)
A previous (and very IT knowledgeable) IT Manager of mine, who used to manage mainframes in the financial sector for about 20 years, actively resisted me using Linux inside a school for months before I was allowed to bring in a couple of experimental projects I had built previously using it. Purely because it was "free" and therefore, no good. The "Free stuff isn't Microsoft" isn't a new phenomenon and it scares even the most technical of people who haven't tried it themselves.
4) In schools, nobody cares.
Educational software for Linux sucks. Completely. I've just started a job at a school where the head and bursar actually do *get* Linux and OSS and we were in instant, unanimous agreement on this while still in the interview. So, as far as most schools are concerned, it's not even worth touching. Yes, office apps are there, you can print, save, email, and all the usual. It's great for remote terminals, for getting basics done and for re-using old, cheap machines. But you're still having to buy new machines to run the fancy Windows content that you want because there isn't any Linux
And if you're an Australian ISP, this is a God-send.
Dec 24th: Implement blacklist as ordered.
Dec 25th: Nobody in, skeleton crew while people jam the phones line to complain that their sites don't work.
Dec 26th: Still on skeleton crew, who field the calls with "not our fault, we were ordered to" while people can't get their Christmas presents online properly. As all ISP's have the same problem, changing to ANY competing ISP won't do nowt.
Dec 27-Jan 1st: Field all calls with "Blame the government's stupid filtering policy, all the ISP's are in teh same boat, we can't get through to anyone but we were required to implement it and there's nobody around to say we have to stop".
Jan 2nd: Uproar ensues, public pressure demands the whole scheme is scrapped and people sacked, and it never comes up in any reasonable country ever again because people just point to "That Australia Fiasco".
"In hand-coded ASM."
And the author managed to survive the resulting mental breakdown?
"an attached PGP public key" should read "an attached PGP public key signed digest".
Oh, and "off" should have been "of".
I type too fast for my brain.
To all the people who are saying "just take the botnet down with that control system", this isn't always possible.
Think, for instance, of a virus that not only has this sort of "find my controller" system but that, when it finds instructions, checks an attached PGP public key to ensure their integrity and that they came from the original author. If this particular virus doesn't have it, the next breed will. That makes it completely immune to "false" updates, in the same way that Linux repositories and Windows Update are... unless you have the private key associated with that virus' creation, you can't issue an update that it will take notice off.
You can't stop things like this by just intercepting the botnets... you can slow them, hinder them, give you time, but there are ways around everything. The way to stop it is to SHUT OFF USERS who have those botnets, who have allowed their computers to be compromised. Permanantly. Give them the incentive to actually keep their systems clean. They can move to another ISP etc. but the only way to stop them is to show them that leaving their PC open to infection is the problem here, along with an OS that allows that sort of compromise to be so easy, and not that some kid in Russia is somehow smarter or more resourceful than the entire world's IT experts.
I don't know if this worm actually does have a signed update system, but it's a very easy thing to do, with tons of well-audited, open-source, freely available code to do it for you. I would be very surprised if some malware somewhere wasn't already doing it.
The whole crux of your argument boils down to coding = time = money = who's going to pay?
The fatal flaw here is that, YEARS before IBM et al. jumped onboard, the OS machine was already churning out good software, without funding, without help, without any commercial interests. There's no doubt that funding of kernel developers, OS organisations, etc. is extremely helpful and a massive contribution but you appear to be stuck in the mindset that people don't do things unless they are paid.
In the commercial world, this is true. If you want a program to run that $10m company's tax accounts, you're going to have to pay for it. Outside the commercial world, there are a ton of experts (including paid professional coders who do it in their spare time and explicitly state that their OS-work is nothing to do with their employer) who are constantly do things, for free. Education is one good example. Teachers *GIVE AWAY* their lesson plans, resources, worksheets, overheads, even educational programs. Their schools/universities are *PAYING* for those but they are still allowed to give them away. And, even if they don't explicitly license and put these things online, there are many of them who are more than happy to share their resources.
And the beauty of Open Source is that it prevents such mono-culture as you describe because, at the end of the day, I am *legally allowed* to do pretty much what I like with OS software, even if company X has bundled their own version with tons of crap with their new PC's. I can take *their* OS code (which they are legally obliged to provide) and rip all the rubbish out and put my own version online for ANYONE to do what they want with it and there's nothing the company can do. The little guys, who are able to make the one-line changes to the OS code, keep the big-guys in check. "I'll just remove that line that say 'enable_drm_and_check_hardware'".
More importantly, in my point of view, is the fact that critical mass has been hit. We can run OS software of a myraid variations on so much hardware, supporting so many architectures and devices, "emulating" so many common pieces of software that the changes now are small-fry in comparison to the work that's already been done. We can make a PC today that is OS from top to bottom, including the BIOS. Hell, some guys are still churning out OS-from-top-to-bottom gaming devices (GP2X, Pandora) by just taking an off-the-shelf chip, bundling it with some OS software and then selling it. The opposite of what you predict may happen is much more likely to happen - MS will die or at least be crippled, and OS will be in every device whether you know it or not. Before you know it, people will be crying out for OS support for every tiny little device because they can't distribute their 99% OS-based product without it.
It takes *one* man/woman to write a driver that a million people will use and can adapt and change to an infinite variety of hardware and uses. However, in the corporate market, it takes teams of coders, lawyers, testers, etc. to write that same driver which can only be used in Company X machines and will never been seen outside the company. Thus it will take MANY, MANY teams in MANY corporations to get the same "prevelance" of a bit of software that one man can make.
I would actually welcome this return to "one-man, one code" coding... it's the way programming was started in earnest back in the 70's/80's - kids reading books, programming games, getting them published, all on their own. It's how most of the big names back then started, until commercialism jumped in. It's the way software works best. It doesn't make money (that's just a temporary side-benefit) but equally it doesn't COST anything to make more of it. It takes a teenage kid with a few hours spare who wants to do something with the programming language they just learned and all that free code/compilers that they have been given. Sound familiar? It should.
I helped put Google Ad's on a site my brother runs... http://www.scoutingresources.org.uk/
We get enough money from the ad's to host the site (which has some pretty hefty bandwidth needs at the moment but we have a very charitable host who does us lots of favours) and run a couple of camps for the Scouts every year. The clickthrough ratio is the same as my own sites, about 0.30%, but the number of visitors means it's actually profitable. Of course, we get that amount of visitors but being useful, prevelant, having lots of information, and being around for nearly 10 years helps - however we have never paid to advertise it, on-line or off. As far as I know, we've never had an article in any big Scouting magazines or anything. Just local stuff and general Googling. We don't sell anything, we don't take bribes, we don't like to anything that we review/use (advertisers/sponsors are *clearly* marked as such). So I guess it's just the number of eyes that determine click-through's, than anything else. I haven't seen the statistics in a while but I'm pretty sure we get a thousand visitors an hour or something stupid like that, for as far as you can trust web-based metrics.
Ad's get clicked on. In fact, the last few times we've been approached by camping specialists to sponsor the site, it's been for much less than the Google ad's bring in on their own.
Just to give some sense of the scale of the problem:
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA03272 http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA10128 - dirty solar panels.
I just gave this whole thing ten minutes thought because of this thread - damn you and your ridiculous suggestions.
My suggestion would have been to have a non-flat solar panel in the first place - one made up of 3D "pyramids" of mini triangular solar panels joined together, a bit like the shape of that reflector that they put on the moon, so that you catch light coming in from virtually any angle but have a non-flat sheet-like panel. I don't know if you'd get "more" power because of the greater surface area, at the expense of a greater "height" but it seems likely.
Then in the bottom, where each "pyramid" of panels meets another, a small hole for loose dust to drain through. That probably wouldn't do much on it's own, because the dust isn't all loose, but I'd have a "shaker" mechanism, probably just an extension of the motor systems or even just using the bumpy surface of Mars itself.
Then, whenever the rover moved, the dust would have somewhere to "fall" off the panels, there are no horizontal surfaces for it to cling too (the sloped sides of all the pyramids would help the dust slide off, I assume, a bit like flat roofs vs peaked roofs). Moving parts are kept to a minimum above what's *already* moving (which also means no extra power is required), you might end up with a greater power capacity because of surface area, the panels would be modular and thus less prone to total failure, angle of light coming into the panel wouldn't be as much as factor, so it might be able to collect more light at sunrise/sunset, and (hopefully) dust would be less of a problem.
If you did it right, you could still have quite a thin sheet of "bumpy pyramid" panels doing the job, although I imagine the wiring between them may be more complex. There's probably a million and one problems with this idea, too, because it took me ten minutes to think up and wasn't going to cost me millions of dollars if it had problems.
So you're adding a motor, including cabling and control, plus rolls of film which would have to be designed properly to not block out too much light to the solar panel in the first place (UV-translucent etc.), you would have gears, etc. possibly in an exposed martian dusty atmosphere but they only get used, say, once a month. And you expect this motor/gearing to start up and work first time every time when it's caked in dust, or provide some sort of shielding that is "dust-proof" but also allows the film to move smoothly through it and, presumbly, "out" of something like a spindle the other end, when it's caked in dust that you've just shoved towards the spindle.
You've added so many moving parts and complications it would actually have been easier to just fit a mechanism to spray some Windowlene on it...
They're mainly European and if my previous history with them is anything to go by, they're a fly-by-night, domains-and-hosting-for-£1 outfit that has little or no technical acumen and is mainly for small business or mass-domain sales direct to personal customers.
I once had a dedicated "root" Linux server with them which I never got working for its intended purpose because their initial setup was dire (outdated Plesk, kernel, Apache, etc. all with serious remotely-exploitable security flaws), their support was atrocious (wouldn't even know what Apache was half the time and their answer to everything was "you have a dedicated server, you do it" unless you were asking them to reboot and even then you had to fight). Which wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't been for the fact that the supplied server came with insecure software by default (and I'm talking about several-year-old flaws) and the only available updates (specially hosted on their privately-accesible servers only to dedicated customers, including updates to the pay-for software and part of the support contract) for their customised-kernel/userspace/Plesk etc. specifically said not to install them AT ALL without actual physical access (one specifically mentioned "DO NOT DO THIS VIA SSH", which was the only access I had).
Their dedicated server support line couldn't understand the problem, wanted me to just run it anyway (they charged for rebuilds), refused to do anything more than reboot if it went wrong (and the nature of the update specified that if it went wrong, a simple reboot would do NOTHING because it updated so much stuff), refused to supply a server with a newer image or to upgrade it, and sometimes couldn't even understand simple technical terms. So I had a choice - run a high-power, high-bandwidth, Internet-facing server with well-known, long-established serious security flaws in all the important software (and suffer their charges if the server was compromised and started spewing spam), or attempt a massive upgrade party with hundreds of updates remotely via SSH where several of them specifically state not to do it remotely (and get charged if it needs to be restored from their backup, even if just to a bootable state so that I could restore *my* backups).
Needless to say, I chose the third option: tell them to stick it where the sun don't shine. Letters of complaint to head office went unanswered or (if sent recorded delivery) received the vaguest of replies which basically said "We don't care, we can do no wrong, you still owe us money even though you couldn't use the server, because you're a 'dedicated server' customer we won't do anything to help you, ever.", etc. I even have a soundbite on a phone call to the support line where the chief technical bod on the special "dedicated server support line" actually refuses to state what it is that they COULD do for me. "Can you reboot my server if I ask?" "Can you restore from backup?" "Can you shut the machine down?" "Can you filter a DDoS attack if I get hit?" "What questions do you ACTUALLY answer?"... every single answer was the same... "I can't tell you that, sir". I mean, seriously, what the hell kind of answer is that?
Needless to say, I never used them ever again and like to pull out the story whenever I hear their name.
"Yes good, efficient design is from the ground up but once you've got the underlying structure sorted, you then move onto features."
Except, little to no "underlying structure" has changed. If it did, we'd need new driver models (like Vista, which claimed the same thing but actually followed through with it and didn't actually show that much improvement at all), new API's, new ways of doing things entirely. The *design* of Vista/Windows 7 and even the server OS's is now virtually identical. The only difference is in the eye candy that sits above it. And you don't "move on" to features - the features *define* the changes that you need to make. But, and I repeat this with your items below, there are no *significant* *new* features in Windows 7 yet. They may appear, they may not. I very much doubt anything more than eye candy will surface now because there is not even a hint that anything is actually in progress... 50% of your development time is not spent "gettings things ready" for a new feature without making *substantial* changes to the underlying OS or at least providing some hint that that feature is requiring changes to be made. There's *no* sign of that.
"Once all the features are in place, then you move onto optimisation. Optimisation and bug fixing are the final stages of development, after all, you can't optimise things which haven't been implemented yet can you?"
How true that is. You can't optimise thing that don't exist. However, nothing "new" exists. So there's nothing to optimise, which is why this pre-beta OS behaves in the exact same manner as the post-SP1 Vista. Because it's the same bloody code. I would *expect* a dramatic performance hit in a pre-beta OS. Nothing less. There should be debug info, assertions, all sorts of tests and edge cases being caught that make it slow to a crawl. But somehow it performs *identically* to it's predecessor. That tells me that there's been no changes *to* optimise or debug.
"However Microsoft have never promised magical performance boosts. They've just said less bloat, more streamlining."
Neither of which is evident.
"No new features? There's the **improved** wireless, the GUI which will **now** load and be smooth BEFORE graphics drivers are installed (I don't believe any desktop versions of windows have done that since **before win95**), ..., They **improved** the UAC so you can make it as invasive or as invisible as you wish... They've **updated** all the **basic** applications (notepad etc.)."
My highlighting speaks for itself. Additionally, the last point is heavily cancelled out by removal of quite a few of those applications *entirely*.
Now, I've stripped some of your suggestions out to talk about them one by one.
"The interface is hugely optimised, resulting in a much smoother experience from practically everyone who has done the beta."
Apart from the guy who did the benchmarks. "Hugely optimised" is an enormous statement to back up. I doubt you can prove it with numbers but as this very article shows, looks don't always mean that it *is* working faster. It may "feel" faster. Even then, we're talking about "optimisation" again, which doesn't seem to have any effect on the actual measurable numbers, so I claim that it's not optimised AT ALL. Also, it's not "new". Every OS since Windows 2.0 has claimed to have a "improved" interface with "optimised" code. Rarely has it ever materialised.
"They've shown a version that will run comfortably on netbooks whilst still looking and feeling great (and the OS is SSD optimised)."
SSD optimisation is *new*. I'll grant you that one. It's a not-easy task, too, because it's not as simple as just assuming that every seek is latency-free - that's deep-level, hard kernel work. However, most SSD's actually pretend to be IDE, SATA, etc. interfaces and so all that work will result in minimal optimisation because of the sheer layers between the two, along with the fact that most SSD's aren't optimal or fit to their cl
Personally, I use Ghost for imaging and if I want to find out what a program is doing, I run sysinternals File Monitor and Registry Monitor. They're real-time and don't record in a nice format but nothing really beats them on Windows. They've helped me diagnose hundreds of horrible modern and ancient installation programs used in an educational environment to allow network installation (why, exactly, do you need write access to C:\WINDOWS to run a Shockwave-based game for toddlers, etc.?).
Linux/Unix has this much easier because it allows you to monitor EVERYTHING without massive binary blobs having settings stored in them, having settings locked to particular machines, etc. or things generally getting in your way. Windows, it's a pain in the proverbial.
Even a lot of the professional MSI-Builders with their "discovery" modes are absolutely useless at working out what was actually a vital change and what was just the installer playing about, or the user changing their screensaver / explorer view preferences while they installed etc. I spend half my life cleaning MSI's of unnecessary cruft and inserting the entries that they miss. About 50% of automated install captures like this are useless for deployment to a different machine.
Basically, despite the "secrecy" around your particular purpose (why did you have to mention that at all... it makes no difference to what you want and adds nothing to our knowledge), it's probably not worth the hassle. Before and after snapshots, or package the programs and MSI's and you'll find out everything you need along the way, with an actual, practical result at the end. Trying to diff a filesystem/registry image in any way is madness and is only useful if you can get a *perfectly* clean machine, a VERY good automated program to do it brilliantly, where you'll end up with a lot of cruft that isn't related to the program installation at all (e.g. event log entries, temporary files, taskbar icons saving their settings etc.).
"Come on guys, its a pre-beta! ... did you really expect them to actually do any thing significant so far?"
Yes. I pulled some facts off the Wiki but I think they are pretty accurate.
Windows Vista RTM: November 8, 2006.
Microsoft stated in 2007 that it is "scoping Windows 7 development to a three-year timeframe"
Release dates are supposed to be in the region of 2009 or 2010.
So, to me, that says that it's *at least* eighteen-months, two-years into development (or thereabouts). It's got another year to eighteen months to go. So, halfway through it's development process, we have *zip* that is actually useful to the average user (which is who it is supposedly aimed at) and nothing to entice business users. There are *no* performance improvements. None. Programmers don't magically add 50% performance after-the-fact, it's *design* that gives you performance.
Halfway through and we don't have a single groundbreaking feature. Nothing. Not even something to show off temporarily. Seriously, read through the Wiki page on "new features in Windows 7" and have a look at the features that are actually *HERE*, not the ones "promised"... remember, Windows Vista was going to have WinFS etc. It's completely embarassing. Instead of a "new operating system", we just have:
Vista, with no better performance, some unnecessary UI changes (purely to make gullible people pay to "retrain" on the new OS in my opinion), removal of lots of built-in applications, a "Health Centre", some claims about fantastic new features that this article proves aren't even in there yet (better performance, threading, etc.) or that only a handful of people in the world could get excited about.
What that tells me is that all these marvellous new features DO NOT EXIST in a reliable form. But I'd be showing them everywhere if they did just work, even only on one machine - I'd be booting it up in conferences, showing it in trade shows, making people WANT that feature that I haven't finished yet and which only works on 25% of machines while the programmers hack on it. But there's *nothing*.
Fortunately, I saw the Vista thing coming.
I had a job interview the other day where the main technically-literate person on the panel asked my opinion on Vista. Needless to say, I was wary of giving my reply in case it was interpreted as belligerent or dismissive, but the interviewer and I laughed and joked and told Vista anecdotes for about ten minutes *in the interview* once he realised that I shared his very-low opinion of the OS. (I got the job, by the way.) I'm pretty sure, at this point, that Windows 7 will be more of the same or worse. Promises, promises, promises and then sting the customer before they realise that they've bought a turkey and that actually it was only useful for the little sticker with the Product Key on it that lets you use its predecessor instead.
Someone didn't RTFA.
WPA isn't broken. TKIP (and *ONLY* TKIP) has a flaw which means it is susceptible for small packets, assuming that people are able to send unlimited amounts of data at the router and have it respond to that data - this might even be fixable in firmware by implementing the same time limits as WPA2 uses for such things.
TKIP is an *option* in the standard, the alternative being the still-secure AES. So one (little-used) protocol out of two (or more) possible protocols in an ageing standard that has been superceded in all practically available hardware by WPA2, has a flaw in that an attacker who can send unlimited data and recieved unlimited responses to that data may, after lots of analysis be able to craft a *small* packet (which is admittedly no worse or better than being able to generate any packet). It's a crack, yes, but you can:
Use AES instead of TKIP
Wait for the manufacturers to put out an updated firmware
Use WPA2 (which is probably the default already)
It isn't the end of the world, but the horsemen of the Apocalypse might well be getting their horses some nice new shoes ready...
Yes, it's only a crack, not a collapse. But a crack into which can be inserted the crowbar of, in this case, ARP or DNS spoofing. Enough to force quite a large hole into a wireless network which relies on TKIP. AES is safe, yes, but if your router allows TKIP, this could be quite a large hole... enough to poke a user on the other side to start sending their private traffic across the Internet, other wireless networks, etc. to a third-party IP.
And it won't be long before that crack becomes a hole big enough to slap the user through. It's not "the sky is falling" but it's a wake up call to people who thought TKIP/WPA was "safe enough" to instead make sure they are using AES with strong keys. Personally, even the school wireless routers that I manage have WPA2, AES with PSK's in the range of 512bytes each. Doing that from the first has bought me a lot of time in which to be secure. However, if I had started slightly earlier with WEP equipment, moved onto WPA as a compatability measure, etc. I might now be in the position where I would need to move again.
It's right to make a fuss of this. It's wrong to suggest the WPA (or, by unsaid extension) WPA2 are "broken". Even if they were, we have no viable alternative just yet, anyway, so you're stuffed. :-)
I'm not saying that your points don't have merit. I just don't believe any of them to be true. In the face of almost zero evidence, people choose different beliefs.
"1) "People 'with half a brain' arleady use encryption"."
This isn't one of my points. My point is, it's an insecure medium. So either secure it, or don't be surprised that you can't trust it.
"People who deliberatly use encryption are so few that the governements do not really care."
Just about everyone who uses a bank account. Most people who use BitTorrent. Most people who use file-sharing networks in any way. SSL-secured email. Encryption is everywhere. It's just that, for most of the "interesting" people, talking to "interesting" friends, they *will* use encryption heavily (except for a few dumb ones but you get stupid criminals as well as stupid terrorists so they do exist) - the prime suspects are the ones who *are* using encryption.
"If you look at the history of wiretap abuses, you'll see that it's mostly about political activists (who think they have nothing to hide, since what they do is legal)"
And if they use unsecured communications channels willingly and the information on there is harvested (whether in an ISP blackbox or by someone scraping their MySpace account), that's part of the problem. That was my very first point. If you know you're on a database "somewhere" that contains detail X and another database that contains detail "Y", you *have* to know that a sufficiently evil government can easily correlate them. Whether they are joined together or not, whether there's a blackbox in your ISP or not, you have to accept that. If you tell your boss that you're having a day off sick, but you post on MySpace that you were at the football match that day - it's the same scenario. Blackboxes do not help or hinder this discovery.
"2) "They have so much data, they can't do anything with it":"
A point I stand by, but I'd add the disclaimer "useful". All the "useful" information can be extracted without ISP blackboxes. Again, it's not that "it can be done" but "is it worth the effort if we alienate the entire voting population, get our budgets slashed and don't manage to catch anyone with it"? When you consider the sheer costs involved, it's really not. Nobody analyses that data. It's all targetted. You find your suspect (Z) and you trace it back through anything you have on Z in your history, the same way you would without a blackbox. You don't splat Terabytes of data on a populous through an algorithm and get "X is a terrorist".
I can extrapolate what's feasible with a datacentre the size of Google's collective servers (anything larger would be hard to hide effectively and certainly wouldn't be wasted on such a fishing expedition) and, let's say, knock it up by a couple of orders of magnitude. Run that on TB's of data (probably a lot more but I can't remember my prefix's and their order... exabytes, zottabytes, whatever) which is being collected *each second*. What do you find out? That X spoke to Y who spoke to Z (a known terrorist) over an encrypted channel. You can do that by targetting Z specifically (e.g. plant a bug, surveillance, etc), much more effectively and at much less cost and hassle with a vastly better signal-to-noise ratio...
The point is that the data you get out is practically worthless compared to that available by much simpler methods. Even if you *designed* a way to get this *exact* information, this would be the method of last resort. And it's *so* prone to false information, deliberate obfuscation, and, e.g. only communicating over anonymous connections that it's just not worth the effort.
"3) "I've seen the government's lack of money/competence on other things, so they will b ineffective at that, too":"
A point well made, although this wouldn't form my entire argument here for that reason. The point is though that a simple, non-intrusive, useful, money-saving application can't be done effectively with good will behind it. So w
First, do you mean that everybody with half a brain doesn't already work under the assumption that, if they wanted to, the UK government (or indeed any government) can *already* do this, or *are* already doing this? If in doubt assume the worst. The Internet is an insecure channel, which is why things like SSH and SSL exist. You *know* that your ISP can / will monitor the basic contents of your connection (just ask the record companies, or Phorm). At any point, a court could order surveillance of your Internet connection remotely without your knowledge. Therefore the *only* sensible thing to do is to treat your Internet connection as the insecure channel that it is.
Secondly, I don't believe for a second that there's enough processing power anywhere to do anything useful with this amount of data or intercept anything more than a specific customer or two. The infrastructure required to pipe entire ISP's worth of data to "some secret datacentre" is something that would not go unnoticed, would raise an awful lot of eyebrows and technical problems, not to mention a technical nightmare for ISP's and governments alike. They can't get every doctor's surgery online, for God's sake, after decades of work and that's making them an international embarassment and costing *billions*.
If the plans go through and the equipment is installed, there's no practical way it can "monitor" everything simultaneously for those magic words, and doing it via protocol/plaintext analysis on a CPU inside an ISP is a damn sight easier than that mythical American data centre that recognises multilingual speech in every phone conversation taking place across the country (Yeah, right, I can't even get ViaVoice or the automated bank systems to recognise a number correctly three times out of ten in English from a limited vocabulary on a perfectly clear, high-quality microphone, with oodles of processing power behind it).
What this is, is a filter. It would allow the government to implement a wiretap quickly once they had a suspect, so that they can issue a command that would send a BGP request or similar, which the ISP would be required to honour, which would allow them to intercept the traffic to a particular IP that they already suspect. It might even have a decent amount of processing power on the ISP side so that the full IP contents don't have to be re-transmitted over the "super-secret-network" to a mainframe for analysis.
The problem is, for anything practical, you have to then bring that evidence to court and show that you were entitled to that information in the first place (i.e. you had a *prior* court warrant to allow you to do so) or it just gets thrown straight back out, if not in the UK, then in the appeal to the EU court (who are no friends of the UK when it comes to legal decisions), etc.
I can tap your Internet illicitly, or put an tap on your keyboard, or steal your machine and find evidence that you committed a murder, or a terrorist act, or a copyright infringement - it *isn't* necessarily true that such evidence is admissable in court. In fact, it's more likely to *jeopardise* a case against you, even if I'm a policeman, because it was collected by illegal means which means it is possible that an order is given that it *must* be disregarded and cannot be brought up ever again in any court. So my hard work to prove you are a terrorist may actually end up making you a free man *forever* from anything in that confession. The only way to make sure it's admissable is to ask permission from the court *first* (i.e. get a warrant, based on your suspicions), in which case you could get all the information you wanted anyway. You can think about "super-secret" organisations not limited by such things all you want - the fact is that if they exist, they already have all the capabilities they ever need without such assistance.
If the plans go through, it's just how it works now, only speeded up a bit. The legal ramifications alone of any other method would have lawyers begging to take cases on.
Shall we state it again for prosperity?
America != World.
No matter how much you want to think so. How this relates to a story about **UK** ISP's, I don't know. However, if you wish to turn Slashdot into Slashdot World Series (i.e. only America actually contributes - my apologies... Wiki says that there is one Canadian team too...), then feel free to keep whinging. Or just read the story at the top of the front page about the election that, with its sister postings over the last few days, has made me remove "News" from my topic lists. Do British people shove comments on random pages when a new Prime Minister is elected? No. Why not? Because it would annoy the Americans and others who have precisely zero interest in such things.
That's got to be the *oddest* troll I've ever had.
But, hey, it's my time. I'll "waste" it if I want to. Or I might just be coding free / Open Source software at the same time as playing. God, wouldn't *that* be ironic? Or maybe I spend my day helping out poor schools with their IT and teaching kids that free software exists and how to use it? Or *maybe*, just *maybe*, between myself and my brother alone we've run dozens of various youth clubs, both work/teach in schools, have taken pretty much all the IT jobs that crop up as part of those things and are, for instance, throwing kids in front of Linux machines in order to let them complete their IT badges for Scout groups (the hard way, to the kids, because we're both such harsh judges that we set the kids tasks and only at the last minute show them that they need to be completed on a KDE GUI, or an Apple Mac, or something even more "obscure" to them so that they can't just memorise menu names), sending kids home with copies of TuxPaint so that their parents don't go buying expensive rubbish to do the same job, moving school networks away from expensive proprietry company software to free and Open Source stuff wherever possible (and for a living) so that the school can do stuff like... buy books and pens with the money instead.
So sue me if I enjoy the odd game of OpenTTD or even RedAlert at the end of the day and don't want to pay a few hundred quid to get a game running. Unfortunately, if I were to spend *all* my time (notice the "all", suggesting that actually I already do "some" or even a "lot") programming Open Source software, I might become a TCL/TK troll from Manchester University. Although, I have to admit, it's one language of the few languages I've never touched in my life, and one of the Universities that I gave absolutely no consideration to when applying *thirteen* years ago. Be careful who you try to mock online, or at least make it clear that you're attempting humour.
BTW: there's quite a few broken links, missing images, non-working pages on your website including the Yow CGI "experiment".
Stop buying games, then. Not just *buying* them, but playing them too. Or make your purchases much more carefully. I did this years ago and haven't bought a PC game in that time, unless it was a non-DRM thing off a budget label. The only game I play online is Counterstrike, because I have at least four legitimate copies of the original CD version at home, all of which entitle me to a Steam account with that game. I last loaded Steam about a year ago. Someone bought me FarCry for Christmas - I haven't even opened it.
Instead, I download freeware, use open-source games, buy games (if I buy any at all) that are from smaller developers, budget labels and/or have no DRM in them at all. Even my wife now recognises the Sold Out, etc. budget labels in shops and points them out to me if she sees them. Gaming for me has gone from a hardcore-fanatic industry to where it should have always stayed: casual gamers. A few levels of some platformer, a couple of Flash games, and I'm happy.
If you think I don't game much, you're wrong. Gaming is a family trait - over the years we've wasted countless hours playing every Mario game ever made (my mum loves them and has completed them all), Tetris, Counterstrike, you name it. We have PC's, consoles and handhelds all over the place. Dad loves his Palm, word games and racing games. Mum loves her various consoles and Mario. My brother is PC-oriented and plays strategy games and FPS. My wife comes from a family that had Sega instead of Nintendo and so much prefers replaying all her old Megadrive games. About once a week, we all get together and have a massive gaming bash and it's not unusual for my Mum to still be up at 3am trying to complete a Mario level. There are computers I've built for them loaded up with emulators for all their old consoles, freeware, and flash games. We even had a CD-i which we kept just for PacMania (which Mum loves). My earliest computing memory is my brother, Dad and I all working together to complete and then map Nonterraqueous for the Spectrum. It took weeks and the largest bit of graph paper you've ever seen in your life. (We did it in the end, and the day after, a magazine published a map in it's cheats section. Grr...)
What I'm doing now is actually spending a lot more time on emulators of older games that I know I'll enjoy. I carry a GP2X just to replay all my old SNES games. I just replayed Red Alert on PC, because it was released as freeware without DRM, and it was really quite good fun. Syndicate in DOSBox gave me more hours of fun (except that impossibly stupid last mission) than I've ever got from a modern £50 PC game. I have a stack of games that I bought years ago that I just keep replaying (or, in some cases, actually getting around to play for the first time). Carmageddon, Project IGI, Master of Magic, even stupid old Apogee stuff like Commander Keen and Halloween Harry. The first Unreal Tournament, Quake and every one of it's official expansions (which I can even play on the GP2X). They are *all* great games. They are all replayable. None of them demands 10% of my hard disk or some ridiculously overspecced graphics card. I get more use out of XQuest 2 and The Incredible Machine than I do out of anything made for a console in the last few years.
Eventually all the games that people are raving about now will come out on budget labels and if they *were* actually any good, I'll know by the time they do, snap them up for a bargain, have no troubles with DRM, stupid system requirements, activation, or having to have the latest, greatest hardware to play smoothly, etc.
I like to play my parent's Wii - it's great fun. We buy about two or three games for it a year between the five of us. But even the (unskippable) cutscenes in Mario Galaxy which I played for the first time this week were so annoying because when I play, I just want to play. I haven't even looked at any other console past the N64 or original Playstation. Every now and again, I'll buy a complete console with controllers, acc
"Daley Thomson's Decathlon - for single-handedly killing more Z and X keys than anything else on the market. Ever."
I never killed the keyboard with DTD but I did destroy at least one Interface II (the ones that could take console-style "ROM cartridges" and boot games instantly... wow!), several IF2 joysticks and the edge-connector on the back of the Speccy twice. I think I also killed the power supply numerous times by pulling out the connector, though. For as long as I can remember it was held together by dad's soldering and a lot of black electrical tape. Nothing more fun than accidentally wiggling the wire when you wanted to load the next level...