Now tapes get mixed up and over written all the time, someone doesn't realize what's on them and thinks it's just something that can be rotated in or someone thinks the information is in another place and the tapes are redundant or something. Next thing you know, they are gone and no one know why.
No. Tapes go offsite to a secure facility once they have been used and are physically modified so that they cannot be overwritten. This is something even wet-behind-the-ears junior sysadmins understand. For records of such high importance, I would expect no less than 3 off-site copies are kept, in well-separate geographical locations (and probably more like two or three times that number, stored both within the US and internationally).
The problem comes from backup media being expensive plus it degrades over time. Almost all magnetic media starts losing it's luster after about 5 years and needs refreshed from time to time so it isn't like throwing them into a box and forgetting it forever actually works.
Rubbish. Decent tape media lasts for decades, especially if properly stored.
There are only two possible reasons such a large amount of such important data could have gone "missing" - deliberate action to destroy (or avoid keeping) it, or incompetence of nearly unimaginable proportions. "Accidentally" doesn't even pass the laugh test.
It's ridiculously expensive, impossible to enforce and hugely unpopular, so whats in it for them??
Hugely unpopular ? ID cards only seem to be 'hugely unpopular' amongst a vocal minority, everyone else tends to fall into either the 'they will help us catch bad people' or, at most, the 'I've done nothing wrong, so I've got nothing to hide' camps.
When you write *privative* software, you meant. Privative software suffers from the "broken glass" problem: for the most part is redo what already was done, both among competing products and between versions of the same product (well, version shifting is more to add featuritis and in cases of dominant products both for vendor lock-in and to maintain third party/competing products at a distance). This is not usually the way with open source software.
You have *GOT* to be kidding. "Open Source" and "reinventing the wheel" are practically synonyms.
This is even before getting into how certain OSS licenses like the GPL make code reuse relatively unattractive.
If Microsoft Word were (as a predominant example) an open source application, doesn't it stand to reason that more of the bugs would have been found and squashed?
No. It might be true, it might not - most likely it could be either - but it is *certainly* not a given.
It also stands to reason that a piece of software with such a massive following would invariably become a much better product with hundreds or thousands (more) of talented programmers working to add features and such.
No, it doesn't. Consult, for example, books like "The Mythical Man Month".
So what's with the flame wars? I don't understand why so many people seem to think closed source software is so awesome. I've talked to a few people who were very much attached to Microsoft products; when I mentioned anything about Linux or the software that runs on it, they got incredibly uptight for no good reason. They seemed to quickly grasp that "open source" mean NOT Microsoft, and quickly became terribly defensive about anything that went against them.
So what's with the flame wars? I don't understand why so many people seem to think open source software is so awesome. I've talked to a few people who were very much attached to Open Source products; when I mentioned anything about Windows or the software that runs on it, they got incredibly uptight for no good reason. They seemed to quickly grasp that "Windows" mean NOT Open Source, and quickly became terribly defensive about anything that went against it.
On Linux, I never have to reboot. Basically my desktop stays on unless I am taking a long weekend. I understand that efficiency is good, however, a fast boot-up does not seem like news to me.
Note that for most people, "having to reboot" is irrelevant, since they turn their computers off every night anyway.
Further note that for most of those who are left, the practical difference between "reboot" and "restart all your applications and services", is zero.
And yes MS reworked their OS, yes the NT codebase is miles better than the 9x codebase obviously but it was nowhere as clean and clearly separated as what Apple did.
Then: NTVDM(+Win16) was "Classic", Win32s was "Carbon" and Win32 was "Cocoa".
Now: Win32 is "Carbon" and.NET is "Cocoa" (and NTVDM is still hanging around on 32 bit systems as "Classic").
I'd say the biggest flaw of all is the presence of ActiveX in IE, which allows you to visit a website and automatically execute arbitrary code on your machine.
It's not (and never has been) automatic by design. Bugs and deliberate configuration changes are a different matter.
Only an idiot would ever put such a "feature" in a web browser, and it should have been removed when the potential for abuse was recognized. AFAIK, ActiveX is still present in even the latest versions of IE, and that's inexcusable.
In its current, and default, setup, ActiveX is no more dangerous than Java.
MS didn't take the the two crucial steps Apple did when they redesigned: they didn't have a clean forward compatible API common to old and new and they didn't sandbox the old cruft in a virtualizer.
The 'forward compatible API' was win32 (and to a degree Win32s) and the 'virtualiser' was VDMs. Given the constraints at the time (~1990 or so), that's hardly an unreasonable solution. Note that any "Win 1.x" (up to Win 3.x) era code will be 'virtualised' (ie: isolated) in VDMs. In fact, it was (given the constraints of the day) a nearly identical process.
It's also worth noting that Microsoft is in the process of going through it again with.NET and the changes in Vista/2008. They're actually in the process of their *second* major OS overhaul.
Remember those Win2000 sources that leaked a few years ago. A lot of it was hacky workarounds targeted at popular apps that wouldn't run otherwise. For instance, Win2000 would detect that it was SimCity 2000 running and change some things accordingly.I don't remember that anecdote about Windows 2000, nor do I remember anyone highlighting any glaring problems with the Windows 2000 source. I *do* remember a similar anecdote about Windows _95_ and SimCity for DOS, from Raymond Chen's blog. The Windows 2000 codebase is also quite old today, and will have been changed substantially into today's Windows Vista and 2008.
Trying disabling Symantec Anti-virus on an XP system without a reboot, for example, and then doing a reinstall of it remotely. In the field, I saw failure rates of about 6% for SAV10. On a hundred thousand systems, let's just say I was not happy on that deployment! Killing malware is even more risky.
This is particularly poor example, however, since AV software is notorious for messing in parts of the system that it shouldn't be, as a hangover from the way it had been developed in earlier (DOS-based) versions of Windows. The blame there lies solely with the AV developers, who refused to improve their techniques and code to take advantage of the "proper" ways of doing things in NT-based Windows.
Heck, even when Microsoft (finally) closed the door a bit on their shennanigans with Vista, they screamed and bellowed and threatened lawsuits just so they wouldn't have to go back and fix up their decade-old broken design and code to do things properly.
If you ask me, Microsoft is complicit in allowing malware to exist because they are unwilling to modernize Windows.
Please define "modernise" in this context. By any objective measure, Windows is one of the most 'modern' OSes available.
They need to start over from scratch on their codebase and have a good hard think about what those APIs and interfaces are going to look like and then stick to it.
There is almost never any reason good enough to 'start over from scratch', and there definitely isn't in this instance.
Or at the very least, they could start by documenting these interfaces and releasing some code so we can be more confident that our hooks into their black-boxed APIs won't tear the operating system's heart out...
In Windows when you doubleclick on readme.txt, you're not telling your computer to open the readme.txt file with the text processor. You're executing the text file.
False. You're telling the shell to perform the default operation for that file type. Ie: "telling your computer to open the readme.txt file with the text processor". This is trivially simple to demonstrate by renaming a.exe file to.txt and noting that double-clicking it does not execute the binary, but opens it in Notepad.
This is exactly the same thing as happens when you double click an icon in pretty much every remotely modern GUI known. Even UNIX CLI shells do (conceptually) the same thing (#!/bin/sh, #!/usr/bin/perl, etc), and have done so for longer than Windows has even existed.
Like the rest of your comments, there is nothing Windows-specific about this.
If you buy a door that has a lock with a flaw, and the lock maker knows about this flaw and does nothing about it and continues to sell this same flawed model for many years [...]
A couple or so years ago, I asked a university lecturer why they used so much MS software, when the obviously had knowledge of Linux and Unix -- the reply was something like "we get it free" (or perhaps "almost free").
So they were using it because it was better ? Because they certainly wouldn't have been paying more for Linux or UNIX...
Formatting instructions should only go so far as to specify point size and font type (i.e., serif, sans-serif).
Which is likely what the teacher actually meant, only they either a) didn't think the children would understand what serif vs sans-serif meant, or b) didn't know themselves (and probably uses terms like "Arial" and "Times New Roman" instead).
Instead I had my son use Google Documents (which is what he's used since he started typing papers of any sort) with a Verdana font. He ended up receiving a D on the paper for not following instructions.
If you'd picked a font that at least looked somewhat like Times New Roman, the teacher _probably_ wouldn't have cared (or even noticed).
Part of it is that the documentation sucks, or doesn't even exist. The last time I bought a copy of Office, I received a box containing a CD and a license code. When did it become acceptable to deliver software with no documentation?
The "documentation" is on the CD.
If you mean "printed manual", then those haven't been included with most software in any meaningful form (ie: more than a "quick start guide" or similar) for going on a decade, if not longer. The last decent printed manual I can remember getting were the 2" thick books that came with Windows 3.1 and DOS 5.0.
So what exactly IS "relevant" to this discussion? Only consumer desktop machines that might play HD video across HDMI from a Blu-ray source?
I shall refer you to my original comments:
This argument is meaningless. It could be made about every single aspect of Vista that delivers some form of functionality you personally have no interest in.
What performance benefits do you think you're going to see by removing a feature that isn't being used ?
Say I've got a Blu-ray movie and a Blu-ray drive in my Linux box. Please explain how DRM is allowing me to watch the video I payed for.
Linux doesn't support BD DRM (and is unlikely to any time soon). IF Linux supported the BD DRM, then that support would allow you to watch the movie you'd paid for.
Movies (etc) are going to be released in DRM-encumbered formats for some time to come, regardless of whether or not $OS supports that DRM. The purveyors of content are the ones who have the product in demand, not the sellers of commoditised playback tools. "No-one" cares what they're using to watch the latest film on their nice big plasma screen, only that they're watching it.
Your boss send you a DRM'd email in which he demands you do something illigal. When the activity has passed you are not given the key to use your email as evidence in court.
Destruction of evidence and/or obstruction of justice are hardly something that is only possible because of DRM.
I have a feeling I'm a "DRM = digital restrictions" type person while you are a "DRM = digital rights" one. That makes this akin to discussing religion. Nothing but a dead end.
I have a fairly dim view on the whole concept of copyright itself. I can assure you I don't view DRM as anything more than a futile last-ditch effort by media companies to keep the easy money rolling in.
Just because people aren't asking for it doesn't mean it's not a good idea. It's probably never even occured to most Windows users that such a thing is possible. Yet many of them have secondary monitors, so clearly, there's a significant number of them that would like extra screen real estate.
Virtual Desktops don't give you more 'screen real estate' (and especially not the benefits thereof), they're basically just an organisational tool you can use to create logical groups of windows.
Microsoft's random UI changes or updates show they're perfectly willing to do this stuff without anyone asking for it. Their reluctance to set up virtual desktops has to stem from something else other than customer demand.
Not really. All those things you talk about will have been extensively researched and tested before they ever saw the light of day in released software (or were just refinements of old ideas - eg: Expose). Which is certainly what has happened with Virtual Desktops - they've been put into focus groups and usability testing, received a negative response, and been canned.
Which I can understand. While there is a minority of vocal proponents of virtual desktops, from a UI perspective, they have some notable drawbacks in typical usage scenarios. Which is why I was draw-joppingly astounded when Apple put them into OSX (OTOH, Apple's UI standards are not what they once were - one need look no further than the Dock to realise that).
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Now tapes get mixed up and over written all the time, someone doesn't realize what's on them and thinks it's just something that can be rotated in or someone thinks the information is in another place and the tapes are redundant or something. Next thing you know, they are gone and no one know why.
No. Tapes go offsite to a secure facility once they have been used and are physically modified so that they cannot be overwritten. This is something even wet-behind-the-ears junior sysadmins understand. For records of such high importance, I would expect no less than 3 off-site copies are kept, in well-separate geographical locations (and probably more like two or three times that number, stored both within the US and internationally).
The problem comes from backup media being expensive plus it degrades over time. Almost all magnetic media starts losing it's luster after about 5 years and needs refreshed from time to time so it isn't like throwing them into a box and forgetting it forever actually works.
Rubbish. Decent tape media lasts for decades, especially if properly stored.
There are only two possible reasons such a large amount of such important data could have gone "missing" - deliberate action to destroy (or avoid keeping) it, or incompetence of nearly unimaginable proportions. "Accidentally" doesn't even pass the laugh test.
It's ridiculously expensive, impossible to enforce and hugely unpopular, so whats in it for them??
Hugely unpopular ? ID cards only seem to be 'hugely unpopular' amongst a vocal minority, everyone else tends to fall into either the 'they will help us catch bad people' or, at most, the 'I've done nothing wrong, so I've got nothing to hide' camps.
When you write *privative* software, you meant. Privative software suffers from the "broken glass" problem: for the most part is redo what already was done, both among competing products and between versions of the same product (well, version shifting is more to add featuritis and in cases of dominant products both for vendor lock-in and to maintain third party/competing products at a distance). This is not usually the way with open source software.
You have *GOT* to be kidding. "Open Source" and "reinventing the wheel" are practically synonyms.
This is even before getting into how certain OSS licenses like the GPL make code reuse relatively unattractive.
If Microsoft Word were (as a predominant example) an open source application, doesn't it stand to reason that more of the bugs would have been found and squashed?
No. It might be true, it might not - most likely it could be either - but it is *certainly* not a given.
It also stands to reason that a piece of software with such a massive following would invariably become a much better product with hundreds or thousands (more) of talented programmers working to add features and such.
No, it doesn't. Consult, for example, books like "The Mythical Man Month".
So what's with the flame wars? I don't understand why so many people seem to think closed source software is so awesome. I've talked to a few people who were very much attached to Microsoft products; when I mentioned anything about Linux or the software that runs on it, they got incredibly uptight for no good reason. They seemed to quickly grasp that "open source" mean NOT Microsoft, and quickly became terribly defensive about anything that went against them.
So what's with the flame wars? I don't understand why so many people seem to think open source software is so awesome. I've talked to a few people who were very much attached to Open Source products; when I mentioned anything about Windows or the software that runs on it, they got incredibly uptight for no good reason. They seemed to quickly grasp that "Windows" mean NOT Open Source, and quickly became terribly defensive about anything that went against it.
On Linux, I never have to reboot. Basically my desktop stays on unless I am taking a long weekend. I understand that efficiency is good, however, a fast boot-up does not seem like news to me.
Note that for most people, "having to reboot" is irrelevant, since they turn their computers off every night anyway.
Further note that for most of those who are left, the practical difference between "reboot" and "restart all your applications and services", is zero.
And yes MS reworked their OS, yes the NT codebase is miles better than the 9x codebase obviously but it was nowhere as clean and clearly separated as what Apple did.
Then: NTVDM(+Win16) was "Classic", Win32s was "Carbon" and Win32 was "Cocoa". .NET is "Cocoa" (and NTVDM is still hanging around on 32 bit systems as "Classic").
Now: Win32 is "Carbon" and
What's the difference ?
I'd say the biggest flaw of all is the presence of ActiveX in IE, which allows you to visit a website and automatically execute arbitrary code on your machine.
It's not (and never has been) automatic by design. Bugs and deliberate configuration changes are a different matter.
Only an idiot would ever put such a "feature" in a web browser, and it should have been removed when the potential for abuse was recognized. AFAIK, ActiveX is still present in even the latest versions of IE, and that's inexcusable.
In its current, and default, setup, ActiveX is no more dangerous than Java.
MS didn't take the the two crucial steps Apple did when they redesigned: they didn't have a clean forward compatible API common to old and new and they didn't sandbox the old cruft in a virtualizer.
The 'forward compatible API' was win32 (and to a degree Win32s) and the 'virtualiser' was VDMs. Given the constraints at the time (~1990 or so), that's hardly an unreasonable solution. Note that any "Win 1.x" (up to Win 3.x) era code will be 'virtualised' (ie: isolated) in VDMs. In fact, it was (given the constraints of the day) a nearly identical process.
It's also worth noting that Microsoft is in the process of going through it again with .NET and the changes in Vista/2008. They're actually in the process of their *second* major OS overhaul.
Remember those Win2000 sources that leaked a few years ago. A lot of it was hacky workarounds targeted at popular apps that wouldn't run otherwise. For instance, Win2000 would detect that it was SimCity 2000 running and change some things accordingly.I don't remember that anecdote about Windows 2000, nor do I remember anyone highlighting any glaring problems with the Windows 2000 source. I *do* remember a similar anecdote about Windows _95_ and SimCity for DOS, from Raymond Chen's blog. The Windows 2000 codebase is also quite old today, and will have been changed substantially into today's Windows Vista and 2008.
Trying disabling Symantec Anti-virus on an XP system without a reboot, for example, and then doing a reinstall of it remotely. In the field, I saw failure rates of about 6% for SAV10. On a hundred thousand systems, let's just say I was not happy on that deployment! Killing malware is even more risky.
This is particularly poor example, however, since AV software is notorious for messing in parts of the system that it shouldn't be, as a hangover from the way it had been developed in earlier (DOS-based) versions of Windows. The blame there lies solely with the AV developers, who refused to improve their techniques and code to take advantage of the "proper" ways of doing things in NT-based Windows.
Heck, even when Microsoft (finally) closed the door a bit on their shennanigans with Vista, they screamed and bellowed and threatened lawsuits just so they wouldn't have to go back and fix up their decade-old broken design and code to do things properly.
If you ask me, Microsoft is complicit in allowing malware to exist because they are unwilling to modernize Windows.
Please define "modernise" in this context. By any objective measure, Windows is one of the most 'modern' OSes available.
They need to start over from scratch on their codebase and have a good hard think about what those APIs and interfaces are going to look like and then stick to it.
There is almost never any reason good enough to 'start over from scratch', and there definitely isn't in this instance.
Or at the very least, they could start by documenting these interfaces and releasing some code so we can be more confident that our hooks into their black-boxed APIs won't tear the operating system's heart out...
Errr, MSDN ring any bells ?
Actually what Apple did is a good model for the sort of change MS needs to make.
What Apple did is what Microsoft did half a decade earlier with Windows NT.
In Windows when you doubleclick on readme.txt, you're not telling your computer to open the readme.txt file with the text processor. You're executing the text file.
False. You're telling the shell to perform the default operation for that file type. Ie: "telling your computer to open the readme.txt file with the text processor". This is trivially simple to demonstrate by renaming a .exe file to .txt and noting that double-clicking it does not execute the binary, but opens it in Notepad.
This is exactly the same thing as happens when you double click an icon in pretty much every remotely modern GUI known. Even UNIX CLI shells do (conceptually) the same thing (#!/bin/sh, #!/usr/bin/perl, etc), and have done so for longer than Windows has even existed.
Like the rest of your comments, there is nothing Windows-specific about this.
If you buy a door that has a lock with a flaw, and the lock maker knows about this flaw and does nothing about it and continues to sell this same flawed model for many years [...]
What are these 'known flaws' you allude to ?
It has 128 megs of ram and a 8 gig hard drive.
I'm mightily impressed you managed to find a 486 that could even take 128M of RAM, let alone get 128M into it !
Anyway, it doesn't support mounting an ISO under any software that I tried and I'm guessing it was DRM related.
Based on what ? An irrational desire to blame _something_ on DRM ?
But long car trips without TV? I don't know how our ancient ancestors did it!
Books ? Games ? Talking ?
And kudos to ScuttleMonkey, who had to remove all the creative spelling and grammar errors from the submission.
Whoa, back up there. Are you saying a Slashdot Editor actually edited something ? That's crazy talk.
A couple or so years ago, I asked a university lecturer why they used so much MS software, when the obviously had knowledge of Linux and Unix -- the reply was something like "we get it free" (or perhaps "almost free").
So they were using it because it was better ? Because they certainly wouldn't have been paying more for Linux or UNIX...
Formatting instructions should only go so far as to specify point size and font type (i.e., serif, sans-serif).
Which is likely what the teacher actually meant, only they either a) didn't think the children would understand what serif vs sans-serif meant, or b) didn't know themselves (and probably uses terms like "Arial" and "Times New Roman" instead).
Instead I had my son use Google Documents (which is what he's used since he started typing papers of any sort) with a Verdana font. He ended up receiving a D on the paper for not following instructions.
If you'd picked a font that at least looked somewhat like Times New Roman, the teacher _probably_ wouldn't have cared (or even noticed).
Verdana, however, looks a lot different to Times.
Part of it is that the documentation sucks, or doesn't even exist. The last time I bought a copy of Office, I received a box containing a CD and a license code. When did it become acceptable to deliver software with no documentation?
The "documentation" is on the CD.
If you mean "printed manual", then those haven't been included with most software in any meaningful form (ie: more than a "quick start guide" or similar) for going on a decade, if not longer. The last decent printed manual I can remember getting were the 2" thick books that came with Windows 3.1 and DOS 5.0.
So what exactly IS "relevant" to this discussion? Only consumer desktop machines that might play HD video across HDMI from a Blu-ray source?
I shall refer you to my original comments:
This argument is meaningless. It could be made about every single aspect of Vista that delivers some form of functionality you personally have no interest in.
What performance benefits do you think you're going to see by removing a feature that isn't being used ?
Say I've got a Blu-ray movie and a Blu-ray drive in my Linux box. Please explain how DRM is allowing me to watch the video I payed for.
Linux doesn't support BD DRM (and is unlikely to any time soon). IF Linux supported the BD DRM, then that support would allow you to watch the movie you'd paid for.
Movies (etc) are going to be released in DRM-encumbered formats for some time to come, regardless of whether or not $OS supports that DRM. The purveyors of content are the ones who have the product in demand, not the sellers of commoditised playback tools. "No-one" cares what they're using to watch the latest film on their nice big plasma screen, only that they're watching it.
Your boss send you a DRM'd email in which he demands you do something illigal. When the activity has passed you are not given the key to use your email as evidence in court.
Destruction of evidence and/or obstruction of justice are hardly something that is only possible because of DRM.
I have a feeling I'm a "DRM = digital restrictions" type person while you are a "DRM = digital rights" one. That makes this akin to discussing religion. Nothing but a dead end.
I have a fairly dim view on the whole concept of copyright itself. I can assure you I don't view DRM as anything more than a futile last-ditch effort by media companies to keep the easy money rolling in.
Just because people aren't asking for it doesn't mean it's not a good idea. It's probably never even occured to most Windows users that such a thing is possible. Yet many of them have secondary monitors, so clearly, there's a significant number of them that would like extra screen real estate.
Virtual Desktops don't give you more 'screen real estate' (and especially not the benefits thereof), they're basically just an organisational tool you can use to create logical groups of windows.
Microsoft's random UI changes or updates show they're perfectly willing to do this stuff without anyone asking for it. Their reluctance to set up virtual desktops has to stem from something else other than customer demand.
Not really. All those things you talk about will have been extensively researched and tested before they ever saw the light of day in released software (or were just refinements of old ideas - eg: Expose). Which is certainly what has happened with Virtual Desktops - they've been put into focus groups and usability testing, received a negative response, and been canned.
Which I can understand. While there is a minority of vocal proponents of virtual desktops, from a UI perspective, they have some notable drawbacks in typical usage scenarios. Which is why I was draw-joppingly astounded when Apple put them into OSX (OTOH, Apple's UI standards are not what they once were - one need look no further than the Dock to realise that).