You mean the government has seized the rights to the airwaves. We public own nothing. Don't believe me? Try setting up a transmitter with any serious wattage -- even on an open frequency -- without a license and watch what happens to you.
It wrinkles my feathers big time whenever the government claims something is "public", and yet the public has little control or voice over it. "Public" schools. "Public" airwaves. "Public" roads, etc.
I heard an interesting argument the other day. The proposal was to limit the Executives' salaries to X percentage above the lowest paid employee's salary. That way, For the CEO to get a raise, the lowest paid employees get a bump in pay too. This could make better business sense, but I don't think you can actually legislate CEO salary caps.
Note that this proposal does not set a cap on a CEO's salary.
Errr, no? sudo is absolutely not the same as UAC. I've yet to see sudo jump up and down, telling me that some other program wants to do something on my system, asking me for permission.
So you've never used Ubuntu then ? Or OS X ? You know, the platforms Microsoft keep getting accused of copying ?
UAC and sudo do the same thing, and have remarkably similar implementations, given the fundamentally different underlying security models.
This is off-topic, but apparently you never dug Mac OS X keyboard preferences. Mac OS X is much much more keyboard friendly then any Windows ever was (probably with exception of Win 3.x which still tried to follow the aforementioned UI guidelines).
No, it's not. OS X's "keyboardability" relies in kludgy TABing and arrow-keying around (and there are still some elements you can't interact with), while Windows has proper accelerator keys allowing fast and direct access to all important UI elements.
Added to which, it needs to be specifically enabled to be active - Windows's is just there, because it's a fundamental part of the UI.
HP has taken a solid product improved it and is using it to improve the value of it's own product.
How much will HP be benefitting if every other Netbook manufacturer takes their work and uses it, without having to wear any of the costs involved in making it ?
For malicious code to change the UAC setting, it needs to a) get on the machine and b) be run by the user. Microsoft's point is that if both those conditions are met, then there's a non-trivial chance the system is already exploited, or would be even if UAC was still enabled.
Like I said, I can see the reasoning there, but IMHO this is an issue of defense in depth, and such a critical system setting should be individually protected.
My understanding of the various UAC warnings is that they are to try to stop malicious behaviour once a program is already running, otherwise why not simply have a single "Do you trust this application to run" prompt?
That is basically what a UAC prompt is [for applications that need elevated privileges]. UAC is only triggered if an application specifically requests it, or if it tries to access system areas.
The reason it's tagged astroturfing is because of the recent onslaught of Windows 7 articles about every little thing, from multiple articles about how many versions it will have to individual articles about every little feature improvement. Not a day has gone by without a new Windows 7 article recently, and we're still months away from release, they're still a few months off from RC.
The typically negative spin on said postings kind of makes any claims of 'astroturfing' rather laughable, however.
If any other operating system release got this kind of publicity, that's all slashdot would be filled with, news about tiny improvements in that operating system and speculation as to how many different versions that other operating system will be released in.
At a _minimum_, every point release of the Linux kernel, or of FreeBSD, or of OS X, gets an article on Slashdot.
And it should be pointed out more often, that Unix, Linux, Mac OS X, these have all had better models for decades. MS really has no excuse for not having this fixed by now.
In actual fact all those OSes (and more) have an even more flawed feature to provide equivalent functionality.
I suppose I'd like to spend a day watching a windows7 user and see WHY they are getting all these UAC popups. I can't believe that if the OS is engineered properly if there would be any reason for it with ANY frequency unless you're doing things that *I* might find common, which is not Joe User.
The problem isn't with the OS - never has been - it's with the applications.
I do understand it's the windows way, but it's not one myself or my (highly skilled, highly intelligent but admittedly mostly *nix focused) department knew about. Took aaaaages to figure out why the admin making changes to the server config didn't seem to have any effect on the service, which was running under a different system account.
Microsoft are optimising for the common case of 99.999% of ignorant users for whom their engineering decision is correct, not the 0.001% of ignorant users for whom it is not.
Sounds like Group Policy Objects in Windows (running in a Domain).
No. It's not even vaguely the same.
SELinux is an implementation of Mandatory Access Controls.
Group Policy is a form of centralised configuration management (a decent implementation of which is something sorely lacking in the OSS world, but that's another discussion).
Unless small means large and large means small, then for that version, they're claiming transferring a larger, more complex file is 15x quicker than transferring a smaller, less complex file.
Operations on smaller numbers of large files are nearly always faster than operations on larger numbers of smaller files. Vastly less filesystem and other OS overheads. This is true regardless of the OS.
I think it's a mistake to buy a netbook to use to do anything that requires more speed than surfing the net. If you need something faster but portable then get a laptop.
If your idea of "surfing the net" includes anything remotely flash-intensive, a netbook isn't going to cut it, regardless of what OS it's running.
The length of time an amber light is on should be fixed in legislation (or design standards, or whatever your preferred method is) and tied solely to the speed limit of the approaching roads. Similarly, the delay between a red in one direction and a green in another, should be based on the speed limits, intersection size and traffic density. Both of these should be fixed in *National*-level road design standards.
There is zero justification for allowing variances in these things and it is trivial to demonstrate how doing so results in a basic and fundamental reduction in road safety.
While I wouldn't be at all surprised by this sort of thing in the US, I must admit I'm somewhat amazed that a regulation-heavy nanny-state like the EU doesn't already have these sorts of standards well-defined.
But, yes, in practice, lots of drivers will probably slam their accelerator even harder, and this increase in speed will probably bring more accidents.
It's got nothing to do with the speed (although those indoctrinated by the "speed kills" propaganda may not be able to comprehend this).
The average home user of Ubuntu (or any other Linux or Free-BSD for that matter) will never have to defrag their hard disk because of a better system of deciding where on the disk to put files as they're created.
The average home user of Windows will never have to defrag their hard disk either, since it won't make any noticable difference.
Pretty much anyone whose analysis of the situation advanced past "ZOMG teh micro$suck is trying to force us to use Vista !!11!ONE!1ONEONE!!1!".
Do you mind giving facts to backup your wild claim?
Gotta love Slashdot. I'm the one making a "wild claim" because I say a substantial and fundamental part of one of - if not the - biggest architectural overhauls Windows NT has ever had, might take more than a recompile to work with earlier OS revisions, and because the only people disagreeing with me are conspiracy theorists.
Do you think Apple could just "port" Aqua and Quartz Extreme/2D/etc back to NeXTSTEP 4.0 with a quick weekend's hackathon ? Because that's the equivalent of going from XP to Vista. Do you think someone could recompile Compiz on RH5 and it would "just work" ?
I realise it's popular on Slashdot to revel in ignorance of Windows, but make no mistake - Vista was a major update to the internals of Windows NT, a significant proportion of which was in the display system of which DX10 is a part (while not forgetting the audio and network stacks were also completely reworked, both of which are also used by DirectX).
I you make the mistake and let the installer execute the Firefox, the FF will be launched as a separate process but under the administrator account. Why? Why the hell Vista allows this?
It is not impossible, in fact it is very possible. Microsoft would have to create a flag so that programmers can set it to tell the system that it is a security related program and thus should be allowed to execute under the admin account.
Your solution fails because it relies on developers to do the right thing.
If developers could be trusted to do the right thing, we wouldn't have this problem in the first place - no developer has had anything close to a good excuse for creating a program that unnecessarily requires admin privileges for over a decade now, yet they continue to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean the government has seized the rights to the airwaves. We public own nothing. Don't believe me? Try setting up a transmitter with any serious wattage -- even on an open frequency -- without a license and watch what happens to you.
It wrinkles my feathers big time whenever the government claims something is "public", and yet the public has little control or voice over it. "Public" schools. "Public" airwaves. "Public" roads, etc.
"Public" doesn't mean "you", it means "everyone".
I heard an interesting argument the other day. The proposal was to limit the Executives' salaries to X percentage above the lowest paid employee's salary. That way, For the CEO to get a raise, the lowest paid employees get a bump in pay too. This could make better business sense, but I don't think you can actually legislate CEO salary caps.
Note that this proposal does not set a cap on a CEO's salary.
Errr, no? sudo is absolutely not the same as UAC. I've yet to see sudo jump up and down, telling me that some other program wants to do something on my system, asking me for permission.
So you've never used Ubuntu then ? Or OS X ? You know, the platforms Microsoft keep getting accused of copying ?
UAC and sudo do the same thing, and have remarkably similar implementations, given the fundamentally different underlying security models.
This is off-topic, but apparently you never dug Mac OS X keyboard preferences. Mac OS X is much much more keyboard friendly then any Windows ever was (probably with exception of Win 3.x which still tried to follow the aforementioned UI guidelines).
No, it's not. OS X's "keyboardability" relies in kludgy TABing and arrow-keying around (and there are still some elements you can't interact with), while Windows has proper accelerator keys allowing fast and direct access to all important UI elements.
Added to which, it needs to be specifically enabled to be active - Windows's is just there, because it's a fundamental part of the UI.
HP has taken a solid product improved it and is using it to improve the value of it's own product.
How much will HP be benefitting if every other Netbook manufacturer takes their work and uses it, without having to wear any of the costs involved in making it ?
Americans workers would like to work in America for American wages. However, are they also willing to pay the prices of American made products?
If certain employees' salaries weren't so outrageously high, would American-made products really be that much more expensive ?
Not sure that I am.
For malicious code to change the UAC setting, it needs to a) get on the machine and b) be run by the user. Microsoft's point is that if both those conditions are met, then there's a non-trivial chance the system is already exploited, or would be even if UAC was still enabled.
Like I said, I can see the reasoning there, but IMHO this is an issue of defense in depth, and such a critical system setting should be individually protected.
My understanding of the various UAC warnings is that they are to try to stop malicious behaviour once a program is already running, otherwise why not simply have a single "Do you trust this application to run" prompt?
That is basically what a UAC prompt is [for applications that need elevated privileges]. UAC is only triggered if an application specifically requests it, or if it tries to access system areas.
The problem is that 70 applications are on the whitelist and are allowed to silently elevate without the user's knowledge.
$ cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.2 (Tikanga)
$ sudo find / -type f -perm -4000 | wc -l
Password:
58
The reason it's tagged astroturfing is because of the recent onslaught of Windows 7 articles about every little thing, from multiple articles about how many versions it will have to individual articles about every little feature improvement. Not a day has gone by without a new Windows 7 article recently, and we're still months away from release, they're still a few months off from RC.
The typically negative spin on said postings kind of makes any claims of 'astroturfing' rather laughable, however.
If any other operating system release got this kind of publicity, that's all slashdot would be filled with, news about tiny improvements in that operating system and speculation as to how many different versions that other operating system will be released in.
At a _minimum_, every point release of the Linux kernel, or of FreeBSD, or of OS X, gets an article on Slashdot.
And it should be pointed out more often, that Unix, Linux, Mac OS X, these have all had better models for decades. MS really has no excuse for not having this fixed by now.
In actual fact all those OSes (and more) have an even more flawed feature to provide equivalent functionality.
Yes, but this is Windows, which has been so poorly engineered for so long that roughly 97% of applications expect to be run as Admin;
It has nothing to do with how Windows was engineered (which is fine), it's completely due to broken applications.
root is not a concept, it's a system user.
Actually root is a concept, it is the concept of a superuser. root is just the most common username given to UID 0.
So what exactly do you want to compare? Any Unix GUI that copies UAC is just as broken.
You may have heard of sudo. The concept is the same. There are numerous GUI implementations of same.
I suppose I'd like to spend a day watching a windows7 user and see WHY they are getting all these UAC popups. I can't believe that if the OS is engineered properly if there would be any reason for it with ANY frequency unless you're doing things that *I* might find common, which is not Joe User.
The problem isn't with the OS - never has been - it's with the applications.
I do understand it's the windows way, but it's not one myself or my (highly skilled, highly intelligent but admittedly mostly *nix focused) department knew about. Took aaaaages to figure out why the admin making changes to the server config didn't seem to have any effect on the service, which was running under a different system account.
Microsoft are optimising for the common case of 99.999% of ignorant users for whom their engineering decision is correct, not the 0.001% of ignorant users for whom it is not.
Find a better complaint.
Sounds like Group Policy Objects in Windows (running in a Domain).
No. It's not even vaguely the same.
SELinux is an implementation of Mandatory Access Controls.
Group Policy is a form of centralised configuration management (a decent implementation of which is something sorely lacking in the OSS world, but that's another discussion).
When I read the headline...that they were going to implement proper user account permissions (a la UNIX) so UAC wouldn't be needed.
You mean like sudo isn't needed in UNIX ?
indicating that more fine grained controls via ACLs etc is better than the ugo model that standard unix uses.
They are. Provably and demonstrably so. ACLs are a superset of the UNIX security model.
Unless small means large and large means small, then for that version, they're claiming transferring a larger, more complex file is 15x quicker than transferring a smaller, less complex file.
Operations on smaller numbers of large files are nearly always faster than operations on larger numbers of smaller files. Vastly less filesystem and other OS overheads. This is true regardless of the OS.
I think it's a mistake to buy a netbook to use to do anything that requires more speed than surfing the net. If you need something faster but portable then get a laptop.
If your idea of "surfing the net" includes anything remotely flash-intensive, a netbook isn't going to cut it, regardless of what OS it's running.
The length of time an amber light is on should be fixed in legislation (or design standards, or whatever your preferred method is) and tied solely to the speed limit of the approaching roads. Similarly, the delay between a red in one direction and a green in another, should be based on the speed limits, intersection size and traffic density. Both of these should be fixed in *National*-level road design standards.
There is zero justification for allowing variances in these things and it is trivial to demonstrate how doing so results in a basic and fundamental reduction in road safety.
While I wouldn't be at all surprised by this sort of thing in the US, I must admit I'm somewhat amazed that a regulation-heavy nanny-state like the EU doesn't already have these sorts of standards well-defined.
But, yes, in practice, lots of drivers will probably slam their accelerator even harder, and this increase in speed will probably bring more accidents.
It's got nothing to do with the speed (although those indoctrinated by the "speed kills" propaganda may not be able to comprehend this).
The average home user of Ubuntu (or any other Linux or Free-BSD for that matter) will never have to defrag their hard disk because of a better system of deciding where on the disk to put files as they're created.
The average home user of Windows will never have to defrag their hard disk either, since it won't make any noticable difference.
Do you mind citing sources?
Pretty much anyone whose analysis of the situation advanced past "ZOMG teh micro$suck is trying to force us to use Vista !!11!ONE!1ONEONE!!1!".
Do you mind giving facts to backup your wild claim?
Gotta love Slashdot. I'm the one making a "wild claim" because I say a substantial and fundamental part of one of - if not the - biggest architectural overhauls Windows NT has ever had, might take more than a recompile to work with earlier OS revisions, and because the only people disagreeing with me are conspiracy theorists.
Do you think Apple could just "port" Aqua and Quartz Extreme/2D/etc back to NeXTSTEP 4.0 with a quick weekend's hackathon ? Because that's the equivalent of going from XP to Vista. Do you think someone could recompile Compiz on RH5 and it would "just work" ?
I realise it's popular on Slashdot to revel in ignorance of Windows, but make no mistake - Vista was a major update to the internals of Windows NT, a significant proportion of which was in the display system of which DX10 is a part (while not forgetting the audio and network stacks were also completely reworked, both of which are also used by DirectX).
I you make the mistake and let the installer execute the Firefox, the FF will be launched as a separate process but under the administrator account. Why? Why the hell Vista allows this?
How do you propose that it prevent it ?
It is not impossible, in fact it is very possible. Microsoft would have to create a flag so that programmers can set it to tell the system that it is a security related program and thus should be allowed to execute under the admin account.
Your solution fails because it relies on developers to do the right thing.
If developers could be trusted to do the right thing, we wouldn't have this problem in the first place - no developer has had anything close to a good excuse for creating a program that unnecessarily requires admin privileges for over a decade now, yet they continue to do so.