it will only keep your computer's state between power downs
So its almost similar to the ACPI "S3" (save to
RAM) or "S4" (save to disk) states.
But what is really "power down"? Actually even in ACPI "S5" (power down) an ATX PC consumes around 4-5 watts of power. In the S3/S4 states it may
consume a bit more, especially when the RAM is powered.
But all this won't allow you to disconnect power. For example if your PC is part of a company network and you get your IP via DHCP, then the PC will "wake up" magically even when in S3/S4 on the moment when the DHCP lease has to be renewed. What is very senseful otherwise you risk double IPs on the net when a sleeping PC comes back to life.
So if I really want to safe electricity I have to switch off the main power anyway and that means that any sort of preserved PC status can be totally invalid after I turn the PC on again for the next time. So I probably have to reboot, unless the software is able to reinitialize all dynamic assigned data after a "power on" event.
We tried out with a similar copy protected CD on a Linux box. It doesn't play. If you try to make a CD image using cdread the task hangs and you have to kill it.
The problem is that the computer CD drive obviously tries to find out what sort of CD you have inserted and since this CD is not fulfilling any standard it fails.
There are also reports that some audio CD players have the same problems.
For me that simply means: In the future I'm avoiding Sony and they won't get any of my bucks again. Too bad that I have bought a Minidisc player already and now I can't copy CDs to my MD walkman...
Well, I can live easily without buying things from Sony but can they live without getting money from the customers?
Maybe enough for it to take off, at least in Germany
Debian is very well known in Germany (were I live). Of course many people use SUSE as well, just because SUSE is available in every bookshop while you have to ask for Debian.
I'm using SUSE for several years now and soon I'm going to switch to Debian for a simple reason: I'm sick of SUSE's "we are the first to have XYZ" policy. I don't appreciate to have software that is just in beta status in a distribution.
So I retrieved my set of Potato CDs and now I'm playing around with Debian in my laboratory environment (lots of PCs to try things out). So far I'm fine with Debian as well, even when there is something different from SUSE:
SUSE installs and per default you have many things running. That means you have to disable services that you don't want (and maybe you don't even know)
Debian installs with a minimum of running services. That means that I have to configure additional services and there is nothing running that I didn't want to run
A small difference, but from my point of view an important one.
Coming to the installation process. I don't think that Debian is more difficult to install than SUSE. Ok, the text based installer requires you to read instead of clicking around, but after all I succeeded in installing Debian without any problem that I couldn't solve.
And one final point: Debian installs also on systems with small memory while SUSE for example requires at least 64 MB for installation. And in some cases that's even too much...
In a control panel, every available option is visible.
Are you sure? Usually there are a lot of options that are hiding behind "tabbed dialogs". So I have to go through the dialog tree even if I exactly know what I'm looking for. In a text based configuration I do a text based search for an option and there I am.
When I enter a parameter, my input is checked for validity.
Yep. But that doesn't prevent you from entering rubbish that is still valid but also wrong in the context. Ok, a text configuration doesn't validate too but the program that uses that config file can do and tell you what's wrong. And especially funny are those "helpful" dialogs for entering an IP where you just have to be careful when you move to the next byte.
The only way to make sure your input is correct is by manually checking everything, consulting with the manpage on every step.
Not at all. As I mentioned above usually the application that uses the config file finds your mistakes and tells you what's wrong.
Now let's look at the consulting of manpages.
A good config file has also a lot of comments in it and I can add my own comments like "Don't fuck around with this option" to write down my experiences. That means that I just can read about the options I'm working on in the same file and I usually don't need an extra manpage.
In a dialogs you can find a sort of "item help" if the programmer was nice, if not you have to consult helpfile and online documentation.
One other major drawback of Control panels is that it keeps me away from the config files. What if I want to try out some options but I want to keep a "known as good" config file as a fallback if I mess up too much? How do I manage to do this with Windows control panel? In/etc I just make a
cp xyz.conf xyz.conf.knowngood
and I can restore that every time I want within second. Did you ever do that with Windows control panel? Without moving your mouse for miles?
I could have sworn that people were playing the xbox at CeBIT
[...]
How is this any different?
The difference is that Sony let the customers play on their on CeBIT stand while Microsoft was handing out the XBoxes to partner firms and the people were playing at the stands of those partners.
I guess the number of public accessible XBoxes was more or less the same as the number of public accessible playstations. But of course Sony did the mistake to keep them in their stand.
And of course nobody complained about the XBoxes running for public fun at the partner stands...
What bothers me more than this kindergarten stuff was that this thing made it also to the 8 o'clock news on TV here in Germany. Does that mean that there are no other breaking news than Microsoft and Sony kidding around?
From my point of view the only group that would profit from a liability for bugs are the lawyers.
I'm working in 3rd level support at a PC vendor for a while and my experience tells me that the thing runs like that:
Customer is reporting a problem and complains a lot and of course wants money for the trouble he got. We even got customers that wanted to get paid for the work of flashing a BIOS.
Companies are not happy to give customers money. So they need to be forced. But the problem is that you need a very strong evidence that it is really the fault of the company that you're in trouble. Unfortunately your product is not made by only one company, its more like that:
The hardware is from Compaq, Dell or whoever
The operating system is lets say Windows 2000 from Microosoft
The network is based on Novell
And your office suite is from Lotus/IBM
Now you run into trouble. What's the cause?
Could be a hardware problem. I know that there are bugs in every hardware and sometimes the BIOS does a workaround for those bugs. But if your hardware vendor gives you a workaround in the BIOS its not because he's the guilty one, sometimes 3rd party PCI cards can cause trouble and that can be fixed by the BIOS. So the hardware vendor will state "that is a software problem".
Could be a bug in the operating system. Can you prove it? Whatever you tell Microsoft can show you a lot of systems where it works fine in the same situation. So they will tell you that its not the fault of Microsoft and you should go to the hardware vendor or to Novell or IBM to get a fixed version of the "3rd party software".
Novell and IBM will do the same. Nobody will take the blame, especially not if there is the risk that you have to pay for the damage.
The usual home user won't be able to pay for a lawsuit to get his damage paid. Practical example: Here in Germany (where I live) you can get easily a new dial up network connection installed when you surf on some sites. The bad thing is that those numbers are charging you up to 900 Euro per connection. If such a shit happens, you could try and sue Microsoft because their product is not preventing such a hostile attack. But they will tell you that you acknowledged the installation and its your fault. Are you in the condition to fight a lawsuit with Microsoft after your phonebill has eaten up your income?
If you are a company user you have better cards. Especially big companies get their support because no vendor wants to lose a customer that buys 10000+ of his product every year. But you won't get paid for your damage and so the support crew will try to find a solution that proves that they are not guilty and its just a combination of "bad factors". So if you want to be paid for the damage you will have to fight a lawsuit and at the end probably nobody wins because you are not able to prove that one of the vendors is guilty.
And really don't forget that most of the problems reported are only existing between keyboard and chair. And that many of those users are not even able to tell you what their problem is.
So I think that software liability would be great if you have the chance to prove whose fault it is when there is a problem. But especially with closed source, NDAs and secrets about bugs in every company you won't be able to do that.
Why in teh world would Microsoft require teh removal of a BIOS setting?
The answer is easy: To make it more difficult for the people to switch to operating systems that are not made by Microsoft.
Is this Microsofts way of forcing people off APM to ACPI?
Looks like. But Microsoft has another big way to force hardware vendors to do what they want: The give you a special discount on the prize of an OEM license if you fulfill some requirements. In the company where I work this means that we can "save" some dollars with every OEM license and with producing >1,000,000 PC every year that easily sums up to a lot of million dollars "saved".
The price we have to pay is that the requirements are not exactly defined so we never know if not one day MS comes and says "You don't fulfill that exactly" because there is no "exactly".
The other prices pays the customer. Since one of the requirements is that the customer should have his "Windows Experience" as quickly as possible the PCs are required to boot in a very short time and to pass the BIOS POST even much quicker. The result is that BIOS is optimized for speed which in the long run means that the POST doesn't do much of a self test anymore.
Since they give the hardware vendor the illusion to get better prices they vendors usually trade quality for lower license costs.
Yes, now imagine if Linux Torvalds or the FreeBSD Foundation were liable for that same $2 Billion
Why should Torvalds or FSF be made responsible for the damages caused by the Nimada attacks?
Did we have a similar incident that caused such a damage on Linux or FreeBSD platforms? I know that also Open Source software is listed on the security announcements, but I don't remember that any of this issues caused so much trouble.
Yes, now you can argue that Microsoft products are more widespread than Open Source but then you should also consider that usually Open Source comes more or less secure out of the box while Microsoft products are insecure if you take them out of the box. And of course Microsoft is trying to put the responsibility for security issues on the shoulders of the user, but if a system is insecure by default then its not the fault of the user.
Compare it with cars. If I buy a car without brakes and the salespeople told me "thats the most safe car in the world" and I have an accident... who is responsible? If I use a known as safe car and I don't fasten my seat belts, go with more speed than allowed and I get hurt in an accident then its my own fault.
The only problem is that usually a car has to pass a lot of security tests before firms are allowed to sell it and you are allowed to use it in the daily traffic. With software nobody checks if you are able to use it and if its fulfilling minimum security requirements. So we all meet on the "information highway" and some of us suffer because others have insecure "cars".
Just because other countries had systems of apartheid doesn't invalidate what the first poster said.
Yes, it does. You should be aware, that the
government of South Africa changed, that means
that now the government is made of people that
never were supporting apartheid. So its wrong to make a sort of link between the
badness of apartheid and using open source.
I'm from Germany for example and I would be
really angry if you would call me "Nazi" just because long time ago the german government was made of Nazis, but that was long before I was born. So its just wrong to link the actual decision with history.
Speaking of history: I don't know if you ever
visited South Africa. I did, several times and
also in times where they had apartheid. But I didn't see suffering black people even then, because there were none. TV reports made us think
that the black and the withe people of South Africa were sort of "hating" each other and that there was practically one side of the road for blacks and one for whites. The reality showed different to me, they just lived on the same place, but with little interaction. The "worst" thing I noticed on my trip was a sign on a beach that said "for whites only".
No, I don't want to defend apartheit, but people
should be aware, that the really bad thing that the South African government did was that they put apartheid to their laws. Apartheid in a form of keeping distance to members of another culture always existed because it exists in the head of the people. Looking around to "multicultural states" like Afghanistan or Israel/Palaestina shows me that it still exists everywhere.
And yes I'm happy that South Africa is going for open source. It will help them to save money and it will teach them to use their brains and that's much more worthy than saving money.
The following happened to me: I updated the hardware of my old PC and got a new mainboard, a new graphic and a new DVD drive (instead of a normal CD-ROM drive). The system was running SuSE 7.0 and it worked fine.
The trouble began when I tried to upgrade to SuSE 7.2 (Kernel 2.4.6 IIRC). The installation always hanged because of SCSI lockups (I don't use IDE, I have all SCSI in that machine). I could get around of it by disabling ACPI in the BIOS and so the lockups were very rarely then. Another
Update to Kernel 2.4.10 (SuSE 7.3) solved this issue completely.
But I'm not angry about that. It gave me a wonderful opportunity to learn new things and I also found answers on the Kernel mailing lists. So it was just a bug, that could be fixed, I didn't lose any data from it and it didn't take
me ages to solve the problem.
And BTW: The parallel installation of Windows 95 didn't work on the updated PC at all. And upgrading to a real running Windows 98 installation took me much more time (with all the reboots) than solving my little SCSI lockups under Linux.
Goodbye ZoneLabs (makers of ZoneAlarm). What other big Windows security players will have their security software crushed within 3 years? McAfee? Symantec?
I'm sorry, but if things like ZoneAlarm are gone its not a great loss. Those sort of "personal firewalls" do not really add security to a system. The reason for this is simple:
You have on piece of closed source software (Windows) of which you don't know exactly what it is doing. And now you want to feel better by adding another piece of closed source software (personal firewall) of which you also don't know what it is doing.
As a Unix user I really laugh about MS and their security problems. And of course if they will have better security in a few years I won't laugh, but that's not a problem. The goal is not to make some people laugh, the goal is to have secure computersystems.
And Microsoft has actually realized that they don't have them, but their competitors from the Unix world do. And they have realized that the customer is going to be concerned about security now. So if they want to sell their products in the future they have to improve security a lot.
But I'm more afraid that this is more a sort of vapoware announcement. To prove their security they have to make Windows open source and I doubt that they will do it.
... that it's not neccessary to put every memo sent by email from higher management levels into an attached Winword file, plain ASCII text
works as well and - believe me - there is no loss of information at all.
Windows 3.1/95/98/ME were all horribly unstable - there just isn't any denying that. But the *nix crowd is starting to look incredibly silly sitting over in the corner snickering about the reliability of Windows today.
Windows today? That sound's like "ok, we don't deny that we're telling you lies in the past 10 years, but now everything will be better". I guess that nobody wants to spend his money to find out if Microsoft is lying again or not this time.
On the other hand this "more reliable" sounds a bit like an advertising for washing powder. We all know that every new washing powder is washing more white, more bright and so on. And I really wonder how damn dirty my parents must have been when they were young.
I hate to break it to you guys, but as far as stability is concerned - Windows 2000/XP are VERY stable operating systems. NT was pretty good, but 2000 and XP will seriously give any desktop OS out there a run for its money.
Well, after playing around with XP for a while in my job I think its a bit too early to talk about stability. XP is simply spoken younger than the uptime of my Linux boxes. So I won't call it stable unless I have more experience with it. So far I experienced some crashes and some funny
features like for example that XP refuses to shutdown and asks you if you want to quit Explorer immediately.
But the other side of the medal is that even if
Windows would really manage to be stable, its still a question if its also secure. And
Windows Security sounds like an oxymoron to me.
From my point of view its not sufficient to replace a MS-Office with a StarOffice, K-Office, Open-Office or whatever.
I think that the main advantage in productivity I
can get is by going away from the "office thinking" that is nothing else than generating a lot of documents that serve only the purpose of being printed. We are still lightyears away from
the paperless office and all office tools give us just a metapher that enables us to handle the paper in electronic form.
My employer (a big PC manufacturer) is suffering a lot from thousands of technical docs that are in *.Doc and can only be re-used by copy & paste. In fact the technical documentation is a mess since there are no tools available in the MS-Office suite that would enable the user to write content instead of layout.
I can imagine that we could solve the problem of outdated documents, wrong information buried on NTFS servers and so on easily by migrating our way to think from "preparing paper" to "preparing content" by using XML for example. And here Linux comes in with a wonderful set of tools to get the job done.
Unfortuantely changing also the way of thinking requires more ability to learn and that's why its so difficult to convince people of the advantages. Well, I've given it a try and I didn't regret it so far.
Note: I'm a 40 year old German citizen and so I can maybe give some other points of view
First of all note that according to this article now the sites are
blocked again. So it looks like that there seems
to be a need for blocking nazi sites?
Did you ever stumble over such a site by accident? I'm online now for many many years, but
even hitting some hard core porn sites by misleading search engines I never hit one of the
Nazi sites because I was misled (and since I'm not interested in the rubbish they have there I never visited them on purpose). So if somebody
want's to get that "illegal" material he's going
for it on purpose and he will surely find another
way to get it. So blocking nazi sites is a sort of ostrich policy, don't look at the real problem and pretend that the problem will go away by itself.
From my very own point of view Germany has to deal with the real problem and that is the answer to the question why people should want to access such site. Why are the new nazis attracting some
people.
One thing can be that even 56 years after World War II Germany is not able to deal with that dark chapter in its history at school. I remember my own school lessons about history, we were forced to learn everything about Julius Caeser for example, but the whole period between 1900 and now was more or less done in 2 hours. Just like "that was bad" and stop. The kids just don't
know what really happened in that time and since nobody is telling them the truth instead of "that's some sort of taboo" they might think that it wasn't that bad. I would really strongly recommend that every kid at school has to see a KZ memorial once in his school life. There are plenty of them existing in Germany and they really give you in impression how bad it was. I recently visited Dachau and I was really feeling sorry that I had to get adult and go there by myself instead of my school taking me there.
On the other hand Germany has to deal with 4 million unemployed people (total population 82 millions) so there is a great chance that you finish school and you get no job. Education at
school is focussed on a program that creates workers in a minumim time and there is not much about social competence and human rights and so on. So you have frustrated people that get the message "no future" from the actual job market, they get little supply from the social system and they are poorly educated. Do you really think that those people can resist a "strong leader" that is promising them a sort of future and that is at least dealing with them?
I think that every society or every state can be seen like a sort of organism. At the moment the human organism is attacked by flu viruses and a healthy organism can stand that attack without medication. A weak organism needs medication to survive. And blocking out things instead of "healing" the system looks like a big dosis of medication to me.
Panem et circenses the old romans said (that means something like "bread & games"). So
why don't we replace the usual desktop metaphor by a game metaphor?
Just imagine: To delete a file you don't have to drag it to the trashbin but you can shoot at it. And depending on the type of weapon you are using there is a chance to recover the file if you (of course accidentially) hit the wrong file...
From my point of view a computer was designed to take work away from the user and not to put extra work on him by applying some stupid metaphors. Every metaphor that requires interaction like mouse movement and klicking is wasting the users time because its hard to make it automatically. But that's what the computer should do, doing the jobs automatically. I don't enjoy a copy job that requires me to push and pull a mouse and gives me as a sort of reward a stupid animation of flying papers.
I can understand the author of the proposal, but
I'm afraid that his proposal won't help the usual
web searcher.
So I would suggest that he could think about
checking the refferer as this site is showing
and maybe directs all users that come from a
search engine to a page where he offers a
search engine that is limited to his site. Since
the referrer also includes the whole search string
he could maybe even use it to fill out his search
form.
I would even prefer this method because it often
happens to me that I enter a site via link from
a search engine and then I find out that the
result page is just a part of a frameset and
its missing properties like Javascript variables.
If I would redirect search engine users to a
defined starting point on my site they would have
less troubles (Don't start a disscussion about
the sense and use of frames here:-) )
The interesting thing was that two fields were listed in the record definition, but were zero'ed out on the tape -- the latitude and longitude of each bridge. It turned out that the agency responsible for the data would not release that one datum; the concern was that the data could be militarily significant in time of war.
Damn, then I should be careful on my next holidays to follow my passion to "log" all the
coordinates of interesting things with my GPS. I wouldn't like to go to jail for "spying".:-)
So the next thing will be that we destroy all
civil GPS receivers, maybe bring also down the
internet and find ourselves back in the deepest
middleage.
And how long until we burn books again like in
the "Reichskristallnacht" in Germany long ago?
And yes, for the geography coordinates it works.
I got an authentic screenshot from a CNN broadcast
that has a map behind the speaker and the map shows "Switzerland" at the position where (according to my map) the former CSSR (Slovakia) is located. I really hope that the guys that are
dropping bombs on Afghanistan now have some more
accurate maps...
So not at all cost effective with only about 7 times the capacity if you're just using it for backup purposes.
Depends. I would prefer to have a backup solution
that save 7 times more data on the media than one
that forces me to change the media 7 times.
If the media is big enough the backup
can (and will be) run unattended (e.g. over night). If you are forced to change media its
more probable that your laziness wins over your
need for backup and you won't do it often.
And the big advantage of a backup on a disk is the fast access to the data (instead of serial
access on a tape).
From my point of view its nice that I can support Windows clients by offering SMB services on a Linux box.
If this will come to an end its not a great loss, its more an accelerator for the people to head towards a Unix-like desktop instead of a Microsoft desktop.
And if its not Samba then it will be NFS or whatever. After migrating away from a Windows platform nobody will miss the SMB services.
Well, maybe I miss it a bit since Samba is
the only reliable server I know. Windows
Servers tend to be suddenly "unavailable" if
the ammount of data transfered grows...:-)
Long time ago I was using Windows and then I
switched over to Linux. Since computers are my
job I spend part of my salary to keep myself up
to date.
That budget didn't change when I stopped buying
Windows products and put my expenses in Linux.
Buying distibutions is cheap, but since I want
to know how the things work I spend lots of money
on books (I guess Tim O'Reilly will be happy if
he sees my bookshelf).
So the investments are the same (because of the
same budget) but the return of investment in
none monetary terms is a big difference:
Working with Linux improves the knowledge a lot.
And its knowledge that is useful for a long
period of time. I remember that during my Windows
times the knowledge was out of date with the next
version of Windows. No I just add to my Linux
knowledge every day and my job is more secure
because I have all that knowledge.
Slashdot Mirror
So its almost similar to the ACPI "S3" (save to RAM) or "S4" (save to disk) states.
But what is really "power down"? Actually even in ACPI "S5" (power down) an ATX PC consumes around 4-5 watts of power. In the S3/S4 states it may consume a bit more, especially when the RAM is powered.
But all this won't allow you to disconnect power. For example if your PC is part of a company network and you get your IP via DHCP, then the PC will "wake up" magically even when in S3/S4 on the moment when the DHCP lease has to be renewed. What is very senseful otherwise you risk double IPs on the net when a sleeping PC comes back to life.
So if I really want to safe electricity I have to switch off the main power anyway and that means that any sort of preserved PC status can be totally invalid after I turn the PC on again for the next time. So I probably have to reboot, unless the software is able to reinitialize all dynamic assigned data after a "power on" event.
We tried out with a similar copy protected CD on a Linux box. It doesn't play. If you try to make a CD image using cdread the task hangs and you have to kill it.
The problem is that the computer CD drive obviously tries to find out what sort of CD you have inserted and since this CD is not fulfilling any standard it fails.
There are also reports that some audio CD players have the same problems.
For me that simply means: In the future I'm avoiding Sony and they won't get any of my bucks again. Too bad that I have bought a Minidisc player already and now I can't copy CDs to my MD walkman...
Well, I can live easily without buying things from Sony but can they live without getting money from the customers?
Debian is very well known in Germany (were I live). Of course many people use SUSE as well, just because SUSE is available in every bookshop while you have to ask for Debian.
I'm using SUSE for several years now and soon I'm going to switch to Debian for a simple reason: I'm sick of SUSE's "we are the first to have XYZ" policy. I don't appreciate to have software that is just in beta status in a distribution.
So I retrieved my set of Potato CDs and now I'm playing around with Debian in my laboratory environment (lots of PCs to try things out). So far I'm fine with Debian as well, even when there is something different from SUSE:
A small difference, but from my point of view an important one.
Coming to the installation process. I don't think that Debian is more difficult to install than SUSE. Ok, the text based installer requires you to read instead of clicking around, but after all I succeeded in installing Debian without any problem that I couldn't solve.
And one final point: Debian installs also on systems with small memory while SUSE for example requires at least 64 MB for installation. And in some cases that's even too much...
Are you sure? Usually there are a lot of options that are hiding behind "tabbed dialogs". So I have to go through the dialog tree even if I exactly know what I'm looking for. In a text based configuration I do a text based search for an option and there I am.
When I enter a parameter, my input is checked for validity.
Yep. But that doesn't prevent you from entering rubbish that is still valid but also wrong in the context. Ok, a text configuration doesn't validate too but the program that uses that config file can do and tell you what's wrong. And especially funny are those "helpful" dialogs for entering an IP where you just have to be careful when you move to the next byte.
The only way to make sure your input is correct is by manually checking everything, consulting with the manpage on every step.
Not at all. As I mentioned above usually the application that uses the config file finds your mistakes and tells you what's wrong.
Now let's look at the consulting of manpages. A good config file has also a lot of comments in it and I can add my own comments like "Don't fuck around with this option" to write down my experiences. That means that I just can read about the options I'm working on in the same file and I usually don't need an extra manpage. In a dialogs you can find a sort of "item help" if the programmer was nice, if not you have to consult helpfile and online documentation.
One other major drawback of Control panels is that it keeps me away from the config files. What if I want to try out some options but I want to keep a "known as good" config file as a fallback if I mess up too much? How do I manage to do this with Windows control panel? In /etc I just make a
cp xyz.conf xyz.conf.knowngood
and I can restore that every time I want within second. Did you ever do that with Windows control panel? Without moving your mouse for miles?
[...]
How is this any different?
The difference is that Sony let the customers play on their on CeBIT stand while Microsoft was handing out the XBoxes to partner firms and the people were playing at the stands of those partners.
I guess the number of public accessible XBoxes was more or less the same as the number of public accessible playstations. But of course Sony did the mistake to keep them in their stand.
And of course nobody complained about the XBoxes running for public fun at the partner stands...
What bothers me more than this kindergarten stuff was that this thing made it also to the 8 o'clock news on TV here in Germany. Does that mean that there are no other breaking news than Microsoft and Sony kidding around?
Welcome to the brave new world...
The only thing that is better for cleaning your ass is a bidet.
Or does anybody think adults shouldn't be clean as babies are?
I'm working in 3rd level support at a PC vendor for a while and my experience tells me that the thing runs like that:
Customer is reporting a problem and complains a lot and of course wants money for the trouble he got. We even got customers that wanted to get paid for the work of flashing a BIOS.
Companies are not happy to give customers money. So they need to be forced. But the problem is that you need a very strong evidence that it is really the fault of the company that you're in trouble. Unfortunately your product is not made by only one company, its more like that:
- The hardware is from Compaq, Dell or whoever
- The operating system is lets say Windows 2000 from Microosoft
- The network is based on Novell
- And your office suite is from Lotus/IBM
Now you run into trouble. What's the cause?- Could be a hardware problem. I know that there are bugs in every hardware and sometimes the BIOS does a workaround for those bugs. But if your hardware vendor gives you a workaround in the BIOS its not because he's the guilty one, sometimes 3rd party PCI cards can cause trouble and that can be fixed by the BIOS. So the hardware vendor will state "that is a software problem".
- Could be a bug in the operating system. Can you prove it? Whatever you tell Microsoft can show you a lot of systems where it works fine in the same situation. So they will tell you that its not the fault of Microsoft and you should go to the hardware vendor or to Novell or IBM to get a fixed version of the "3rd party software".
- Novell and IBM will do the same. Nobody will take the blame, especially not if there is the risk that you have to pay for the damage.
The usual home user won't be able to pay for a lawsuit to get his damage paid. Practical example: Here in Germany (where I live) you can get easily a new dial up network connection installed when you surf on some sites. The bad thing is that those numbers are charging you up to 900 Euro per connection. If such a shit happens, you could try and sue Microsoft because their product is not preventing such a hostile attack. But they will tell you that you acknowledged the installation and its your fault. Are you in the condition to fight a lawsuit with Microsoft after your phonebill has eaten up your income?If you are a company user you have better cards. Especially big companies get their support because no vendor wants to lose a customer that buys 10000+ of his product every year. But you won't get paid for your damage and so the support crew will try to find a solution that proves that they are not guilty and its just a combination of "bad factors". So if you want to be paid for the damage you will have to fight a lawsuit and at the end probably nobody wins because you are not able to prove that one of the vendors is guilty.
And really don't forget that most of the problems reported are only existing between keyboard and chair. And that many of those users are not even able to tell you what their problem is.
So I think that software liability would be great if you have the chance to prove whose fault it is when there is a problem. But especially with closed source, NDAs and secrets about bugs in every company you won't be able to do that.
The answer is easy: To make it more difficult for the people to switch to operating systems that are not made by Microsoft.
Is this Microsofts way of forcing people off APM to ACPI?
Looks like. But Microsoft has another big way to force hardware vendors to do what they want: The give you a special discount on the prize of an OEM license if you fulfill some requirements. In the company where I work this means that we can "save" some dollars with every OEM license and with producing >1,000,000 PC every year that easily sums up to a lot of million dollars "saved".
The price we have to pay is that the requirements are not exactly defined so we never know if not one day MS comes and says "You don't fulfill that exactly" because there is no "exactly".
The other prices pays the customer. Since one of the requirements is that the customer should have his "Windows Experience" as quickly as possible the PCs are required to boot in a very short time and to pass the BIOS POST even much quicker. The result is that BIOS is optimized for speed which in the long run means that the POST doesn't do much of a self test anymore.
Since they give the hardware vendor the illusion to get better prices they vendors usually trade quality for lower license costs.
Brave new world...
Did we have a similar incident that caused such a damage on Linux or FreeBSD platforms? I know that also Open Source software is listed on the security announcements, but I don't remember that any of this issues caused so much trouble.
Yes, now you can argue that Microsoft products are more widespread than Open Source but then you should also consider that usually Open Source comes more or less secure out of the box while Microsoft products are insecure if you take them out of the box. And of course Microsoft is trying to put the responsibility for security issues on the shoulders of the user, but if a system is insecure by default then its not the fault of the user.
Compare it with cars. If I buy a car without brakes and the salespeople told me "thats the most safe car in the world" and I have an accident... who is responsible? If I use a known as safe car and I don't fasten my seat belts, go with more speed than allowed and I get hurt in an accident then its my own fault.
The only problem is that usually a car has to pass a lot of security tests before firms are allowed to sell it and you are allowed to use it in the daily traffic. With software nobody checks if you are able to use it and if its fulfilling minimum security requirements. So we all meet on the "information highway" and some of us suffer because others have insecure "cars".
For the next generation of stealth fighter planes:
- You don't see them on the radar
- You don't see them with your eyes
Only the pilot has to be made transparent as well...
Yes, it does. You should be aware, that the government of South Africa changed, that means that now the government is made of people that never were supporting apartheid. So its wrong to make a sort of link between the badness of apartheid and using open source.
I'm from Germany for example and I would be really angry if you would call me "Nazi" just because long time ago the german government was made of Nazis, but that was long before I was born. So its just wrong to link the actual decision with history.
Speaking of history: I don't know if you ever visited South Africa. I did, several times and also in times where they had apartheid. But I didn't see suffering black people even then, because there were none. TV reports made us think that the black and the withe people of South Africa were sort of "hating" each other and that there was practically one side of the road for blacks and one for whites. The reality showed different to me, they just lived on the same place, but with little interaction. The "worst" thing I noticed on my trip was a sign on a beach that said "for whites only".
No, I don't want to defend apartheit, but people should be aware, that the really bad thing that the South African government did was that they put apartheid to their laws. Apartheid in a form of keeping distance to members of another culture always existed because it exists in the head of the people. Looking around to "multicultural states" like Afghanistan or Israel/Palaestina shows me that it still exists everywhere.
And yes I'm happy that South Africa is going for open source. It will help them to save money and it will teach them to use their brains and that's much more worthy than saving money.
...why Windows XP is frequently calling "home" :-)
The trouble began when I tried to upgrade to SuSE 7.2 (Kernel 2.4.6 IIRC). The installation always hanged because of SCSI lockups (I don't use IDE, I have all SCSI in that machine). I could get around of it by disabling ACPI in the BIOS and so the lockups were very rarely then. Another Update to Kernel 2.4.10 (SuSE 7.3) solved this issue completely.
But I'm not angry about that. It gave me a wonderful opportunity to learn new things and I also found answers on the Kernel mailing lists. So it was just a bug, that could be fixed, I didn't lose any data from it and it didn't take me ages to solve the problem.
And BTW: The parallel installation of Windows 95 didn't work on the updated PC at all. And upgrading to a real running Windows 98 installation took me much more time (with all the reboots) than solving my little SCSI lockups under Linux.
I'm sorry, but if things like ZoneAlarm are gone its not a great loss. Those sort of "personal firewalls" do not really add security to a system. The reason for this is simple:
You have on piece of closed source software (Windows) of which you don't know exactly what it is doing. And now you want to feel better by adding another piece of closed source software (personal firewall) of which you also don't know what it is doing.
As a Unix user I really laugh about MS and their security problems. And of course if they will have better security in a few years I won't laugh, but that's not a problem. The goal is not to make some people laugh, the goal is to have secure computersystems.
And Microsoft has actually realized that they don't have them, but their competitors from the Unix world do. And they have realized that the customer is going to be concerned about security now. So if they want to sell their products in the future they have to improve security a lot.
But I'm more afraid that this is more a sort of vapoware announcement. To prove their security they have to make Windows open source and I doubt that they will do it.
... that it's not neccessary to put every memo sent by email from higher management levels into an attached Winword file, plain ASCII text
works as well and - believe me - there is no loss of information at all.
On the other hand this "more reliable" sounds a bit like an advertising for washing powder. We all know that every new washing powder is washing more white, more bright and so on. And I really wonder how damn dirty my parents must have been when they were young.
Well, after playing around with XP for a while in my job I think its a bit too early to talk about stability. XP is simply spoken younger than the uptime of my Linux boxes. So I won't call it stable unless I have more experience with it. So far I experienced some crashes and some funny features like for example that XP refuses to shutdown and asks you if you want to quit Explorer immediately.But the other side of the medal is that even if Windows would really manage to be stable, its still a question if its also secure. And Windows Security sounds like an oxymoron to me.
I think that the main advantage in productivity I can get is by going away from the "office thinking" that is nothing else than generating a lot of documents that serve only the purpose of being printed. We are still lightyears away from the paperless office and all office tools give us just a metapher that enables us to handle the paper in electronic form.
My employer (a big PC manufacturer) is suffering a lot from thousands of technical docs that are in *.Doc and can only be re-used by copy & paste. In fact the technical documentation is a mess since there are no tools available in the MS-Office suite that would enable the user to write content instead of layout.
I can imagine that we could solve the problem of outdated documents, wrong information buried on NTFS servers and so on easily by migrating our way to think from "preparing paper" to "preparing content" by using XML for example. And here Linux comes in with a wonderful set of tools to get the job done.
Unfortuantely changing also the way of thinking requires more ability to learn and that's why its so difficult to convince people of the advantages. Well, I've given it a try and I didn't regret it so far.
that is called "brakes". Or did I just oversee
them somehow?
First of all note that according to this article now the sites are blocked again. So it looks like that there seems to be a need for blocking nazi sites?
Did you ever stumble over such a site by accident? I'm online now for many many years, but even hitting some hard core porn sites by misleading search engines I never hit one of the Nazi sites because I was misled (and since I'm not interested in the rubbish they have there I never visited them on purpose). So if somebody want's to get that "illegal" material he's going for it on purpose and he will surely find another way to get it. So blocking nazi sites is a sort of ostrich policy, don't look at the real problem and pretend that the problem will go away by itself.
From my very own point of view Germany has to deal with the real problem and that is the answer to the question why people should want to access such site. Why are the new nazis attracting some people.
One thing can be that even 56 years after World War II Germany is not able to deal with that dark chapter in its history at school. I remember my own school lessons about history, we were forced to learn everything about Julius Caeser for example, but the whole period between 1900 and now was more or less done in 2 hours. Just like "that was bad" and stop. The kids just don't know what really happened in that time and since nobody is telling them the truth instead of "that's some sort of taboo" they might think that it wasn't that bad. I would really strongly recommend that every kid at school has to see a KZ memorial once in his school life. There are plenty of them existing in Germany and they really give you in impression how bad it was. I recently visited Dachau and I was really feeling sorry that I had to get adult and go there by myself instead of my school taking me there.
On the other hand Germany has to deal with 4 million unemployed people (total population 82 millions) so there is a great chance that you finish school and you get no job. Education at school is focussed on a program that creates workers in a minumim time and there is not much about social competence and human rights and so on. So you have frustrated people that get the message "no future" from the actual job market, they get little supply from the social system and they are poorly educated. Do you really think that those people can resist a "strong leader" that is promising them a sort of future and that is at least dealing with them?
I think that every society or every state can be seen like a sort of organism. At the moment the human organism is attacked by flu viruses and a healthy organism can stand that attack without medication. A weak organism needs medication to survive. And blocking out things instead of "healing" the system looks like a big dosis of medication to me.
why don't we replace the usual desktop metaphor by a game metaphor?
Just imagine: To delete a file you don't have to drag it to the trashbin but you can shoot at it. And depending on the type of weapon you are using there is a chance to recover the file if you (of course accidentially) hit the wrong file...
From my point of view a computer was designed to take work away from the user and not to put extra work on him by applying some stupid metaphors. Every metaphor that requires interaction like mouse movement and klicking is wasting the users time because its hard to make it automatically. But that's what the computer should do, doing the jobs automatically. I don't enjoy a copy job that requires me to push and pull a mouse and gives me as a sort of reward a stupid animation of flying papers.
So I would suggest that he could think about checking the refferer as this site is showing and maybe directs all users that come from a search engine to a page where he offers a search engine that is limited to his site. Since the referrer also includes the whole search string he could maybe even use it to fill out his search form.
I would even prefer this method because it often happens to me that I enter a site via link from a search engine and then I find out that the result page is just a part of a frameset and its missing properties like Javascript variables. If I would redirect search engine users to a defined starting point on my site they would have less troubles (Don't start a disscussion about the sense and use of frames here :-) )
Depends. I would prefer to have a backup solution that save 7 times more data on the media than one that forces me to change the media 7 times.
If the media is big enough the backup can (and will be) run unattended (e.g. over night). If you are forced to change media its more probable that your laziness wins over your need for backup and you won't do it often.
And the big advantage of a backup on a disk is the fast access to the data (instead of serial access on a tape).
If this will come to an end its not a great loss, its more an accelerator for the people to head towards a Unix-like desktop instead of a Microsoft desktop.
And if its not Samba then it will be NFS or whatever. After migrating away from a Windows platform nobody will miss the SMB services.
Well, maybe I miss it a bit since Samba is the only reliable server I know. Windows Servers tend to be suddenly "unavailable" if the ammount of data transfered grows... :-)
That budget didn't change when I stopped buying Windows products and put my expenses in Linux.
Buying distibutions is cheap, but since I want to know how the things work I spend lots of money on books (I guess Tim O'Reilly will be happy if he sees my bookshelf).
So the investments are the same (because of the same budget) but the return of investment in none monetary terms is a big difference:
Working with Linux improves the knowledge a lot. And its knowledge that is useful for a long period of time. I remember that during my Windows times the knowledge was out of date with the next version of Windows. No I just add to my Linux knowledge every day and my job is more secure because I have all that knowledge.