It sucked at it compared to OS/2 and probably Solaris 10+ years ago and because of how poorly it did threads, most Windows apps did what Microsoft did and pretty much stayed away from threading. And to be relevant to the current discussion, Windows threading did not cross CPU/core boundries while OS/2's threading did 10+ years ago.
What do you mean by "cross CPU/core boundaries" ? Windows NT has been able to schedule artbitrary threads onto arbitrary processors since *at least* NT 4.0 (and probably 3.1).
It's about the really bad OS design IMO.
There's nothing wrong with NT's design. It's leagues ahead of OS/2 (as it was designed to be).
That's asking the theater to assume the risk that the movie will make money.
No more so than they do now.
It would encourage theaters to only purchase bland, inoffensive movies that are guaranteed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, or at least edit the movies they receive until they are.
Again, no different to the situation now.
And if another theater chain doesn't want to pay the studio the full amount for a print, they can go to another theater chain who will be only happy to sell one of their copies for, say, half the price the studio is demanding.
Ie: the studios have to price reasonably. I'm not seeing a downside here.
Haha, I never thought I'd see someone on Slashdot actually advocate DRM.
I would _vastly_ prefer DRM to copyright law. DRM sucks, to be sure, but if it were the only protection, at least when it is broken you wouldn't have to worry about the government coming after you.
No, DRM doesn't work.
"DRM" works fine in certain circumstances (you trust your SSH and SSL connections don't you ?).
All it would do is create a market for DRM-bypassing projectors, which there would be a huge financial incentive to manufacture.
A DRM-bypassing projector is worthless without anything to project.
The main reasons DRM has failed so far is because a) the hardware you sell today needs to be able to work with the content you're releasing in a decade (and vice versa) and b) there's no easy way of updating the protection when it is cracked. DRM for protecting prints for cinemas would suffer none of these weaknesses. All they need is a projector that phones home for every print, a hardware dongle that is required for a print to work, a self-destruct mechanism for the print once its "lifetime" has expired and a legal contract with the cinema not to distribute any copies.
DRM for mass-market consumer level devices and DRM for specialised hardware are two _completely_ different ballgames. Don't kid yourself otherwise.
Do you just not think, before posting, or are you genuinely delusional ?
Eee Pc opened the floodgates - the future looks to be low power, SSD, minimal RAM long battery "laptop" style devices that will never run Vista in a million years.
The Eee PC is one iteration of "Moore's Law" away from being a decent Vista machine. So, less than 12 months from now, given how long it's already been out.
I keep hearing that 70% of PCs in a year or so will be laptops, if 50% of them are low power devices then that 1/4 to 1/3 of PC in a few years that will not run Vista - you can kinda see why they are doing it.
Even the cheapest "normal" laptops today are quite capable of running Vista.
And I certainly couldn't justify spending $1000 more on a document handling laptop just so I can run Vista vs XP.
$1000 _extra_ ? WTF ? For US$1000 you could buy *two* laptops capable of running Vista for "document handling".
Linux resource requirements seem to be relatively stable compared to MS operating systems.
The oldest PC you can usefully run Vista on (with minor upgrades), dates from around 2000. With a functionally equivalent Linux distro, you might be able to get away with slightly less upgrades, although the cost saving would be insignificant. Of course, since most people replace their PC every 3-5 years, it's a moot point.
Seriously. The only argument against Vista that's less relevant that hardware requirements, is DRM.
On the contrary, that is the marketing fluff. To the extent that is true (it's largely true, but not completely so -- yet), it's because powerful interests have distorted the original intent. At a fundamental level, that is still the justification that everyone uses -- "without copyright, there would be no [music|movies|books|etc]" is hyperbole, but there is truth to it.
No, there's not. Music/movies/books/etc were around long, long, long before Copyright ever existed.
As any economist will be happy to tell you, wealth is diminished by scarcity, not created by it.
We're not talking about wealth, we're talking about value. Copyright imposes artificial scarcity to lend value to something whose infinite supply would otherwise render it valueless - copies of information.
The entire reason movie studios make money off of box office revenue is because they have a licensing deal with the theaters. That licensing deal requires a notion of copyright and intellectual property to be valid. Otherwise the studio would only be able to charge the theater for a physical movie print, which a theater chain could duplicate amongst all their theaters rather than having to buy more than one print from the studio.
The solution there is pretty simple. The first print is sold for an appropriate cost under the assumption it will be duplicated to all the chain's cinemas.
The only way a studio could take a cut of box office revenue without copyright would be to own the entire vertical distribution chain. Every movie studio would have to build and maintain an entire theater chain, and consumers would have to go to separate theaters to see a 20th Century Fox movie as opposed to a Disney movie. Even then DVD distribution would be nearly impossible to make profitable if people could just press their own copies of the DVDs.
No, they just need a way of making sure their prints can only be shown in approved cinemas who have paid. Ie: DRM. Given the relatively miniscule number and variability of customers, setting up an effective system would be child's play.
Yet when I want to do EXACTLY THE SAME THING with my music,
But you don't want to do "exactly the same thing". You want to get paid over and over and over and over and over again FOR THE SAME BIT OF WORK. The employee going to work does not have this luxury. He has to show up every day, not just the once.
Would Lord of the Rings, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, have been made if there had been no way to recoup the costs of production?
What makes you think Lord of the Rings wouldn't have turned a profit without copyright ? Are you seriously suggesting the millions of people who saw it in the cinema would have just watched a dodgy handycam recording of it at home on their TV ?
Some people might have an interest in re-mixing various pieces of content for their own personal use.
Then they should avoid content where the copyright holder stops them from doing this via DRM.
Burying streams underneath DRM locks, or hiding them by default when playing non-DRM content for the convenience and security of DRM material may inhibit reasonable use of information. I don't really know the extent of such operation within Vista, if any. But I don't want to pay that kind of price for the DRM war.
My understanding was that the pervasive DRM in Vista has unacceptable impact on non-DRM aspects of the operating system. Such as throttling network traffic whilst playing unencumbered MP3s.
Not at all. "DRM" is quite possibly the biggest non-argument about Vista there is (with the possible exception of "hardware requirements").
It boils down to two possible scenarios:
1. You don't have DRM-encumbered media. Therefore the DRM is irrelevant.
2. You do have DRM-encumbered media. Vista lets you watch it. Vista doesn't impose any more restrictions than any other player. Therefore, the DRM support is good, because the alternative is either a degraded output or none at all.
Many tweaks to the UI cause you to jump through new hoops, slowing down productivity and causing me to get irate. An OS should enable me to use my computer, but slow me down.
Like what ?
Last week I was in a store purchasing a new computer for my step-dad, and all he needed was a web browser. I was damn tempted to give him a Linux box, and I'm not sure he'd notice. But we buy a new PC with Vista. He's used XP for years, but now he is totally lost.
Someone who is "lost" in Vista after using XP for years, is going to be vastly more "lost" using Linux (or OS X for that matter).
Seriously. The fundamental UI in Vista is still the same as Windows 95.
And the salesman was insisting 2 gigs of ram isn't enough for Vista, and that we needed a box with 4.
Of course he'd say that. He's on commission. 2 gigs is plenty.
Here is the crux of it. Vista offers no new features that will blow anyone away, yet the requirements are considerably higher.
One could make that same argument about just about every version of Windows since Windows 95 (and every version of every other OS from some time back in the '90s, with the exception of OS X since it was so late to the party).
We -- and I think I speak for the majority of Linux users here -- don't want binary drivers in Linux.
I sincerely doubt you're speaking for even a sizable minority of Linux users, let alone a majority. Most people are far, far more interested in their hardware working than they are about idealism.
You can't fix a binary driver, nor can you make sure it's not doing something evil.
Nor can you, I'm willing to bet, with an open source driver. You have to trust someone else to do it for you.
You can't migrate the code to future versions as the kernel is modified.
Nor do you need to with a stable interface.
You can't optimize it. We don't want an endless stream of support for old pieces of hardware, or a fixed-in-time ABI that keeps things from maturing. An ABI freezes progress.
Tripe. Pretty much the only OS today that doesn't have a stable ABI is Linux. Solaris, Windows, OS X, FreeBSD, etc. All somehow manage to do it without "freezing progress".
The only reason we don't have drivers for some pieces of hardware is the unwillingness of certain manufacturers to cooperate -- they hide behind binaries and refuse to work with the community.
Or they're legally unable to due to licensing conditions.
Make no mistake. The biggest reason hardware vendors are reluctant to work on Linux drivers are because of problems in Linux and the zealotry of certainly parts of the Linux community.
Interestingly enough, Microsoft doesn't offer a stable ABI either.
Yes, they do.
It just releases new versions of its operating system kernel so slowly that it *seems* that there is a stable ABI.
Pretty much every Service Pack updates the kernel. Drivers don't break. Added to that, it's not unusual for drivers to continue working across major OS updates (and when they don't, it's usually with very good reason).
The fact that Vista has problems with hardware compatibility is proof of that. What's more, Microsoft's "black box" model is clearly at least partly to blame for Windows' stability problems. As part of the discovery in its Windows Vista class action lawsuit Microsoft was forced to reveal that 30% of Windows crashes in 2007 were the fault of nVidia's drivers.
I'm not sure how you get "Microsoft is to blame" out of a report clearly indicating the problems were with nVidia's driver, but this is Slashdot, so I suppose that's to be expected.
Incidentally, the "black box model" is hardly "Microsoft's", or unnique to them. Indeed, about the only mainstream OS that *doesn't* have a stable kernel ABI for developers to target drivers at is Linux.
Hardware compatibility is a real problem for Windows Vista. Tons of perfectly good hardware doesn't work (or work very well) with the operating system. That's a real concern for people with investments in existing hardware.
Hardly. Firstly, the proportion of people who upgrade existing systems to Vista, much like those who upgraded existing versions previously, is tiny. Most people using Vista get it with a new PC, just like they got XP. Secondly, anyone upgrading is going to have relatively recent hardware.
Microsoft pundits often use similar hardware compatibility problems as a reason to stay away from Linux. However, when Windows Vista has some of the exact same problems it apparently gets a pass.
Except they're not exactly the same problems, which was my point (to say nothing of the gross exaggeration of Vista's "hardware compatibility problems").
Driver issues are one of the primary reasons why people stay away from Linux. Why, precisely, should Vista be any different?
Because one of the major reasons Linux has driver problems is the refusal of the kernel developer to settle on a stable ABI so companies have something to develop for.
I'm not aware of any other system that does this. Everything I've used has administrators, and non-administrators. But not administrators who are only administrators after a secured process has displayed a particular dialog box. In Vista, if I have UAC on and open a command prompt and run WHOAMI it reports that I am "mobydisk." If I then run the command prompt "as administrator and do a whois -- I'm still "mobydisk". Compare that to Linux: suppose I do something in the control panel and it prompts me for the admin password. Before that I am "mobydisk" and after the prompt I am "root." Vista is the only thing I know of where before and after the user is still "mobydisk"
It's because of the different security models. In UNIX, you "become" a user that has higher privileges. In Windows NT/Vista, your actual user account is temporarily granted the necessary privileges (or you can also "become" them with RunAs, but that is an inferior technique).
In short, the low-level details are (very) different, but the high-level theory, objective and results are the same.
As for that miniscule list, try Quicken, Quickbooks, and every video game ever made.
Quicken and Quickbooks I can't speak for, but lots of games run as a regular user. Even for the ones that don't, it's for simple reasons that are trivially addressed on a per-case basis (eg: Doom 3 writes to a config file in Program Files - if you make that one file writable, it works fine as a regular user - what's particularly stupid is the Linux port *doesn't* do this).
I've tried to get my family members to use non-admin users for years, and even my attempts in 2007 were thwarted by foolish apps.
I've been running NT as a regular user since ~1997. Now, while I don't for a second think the average home user could have done this, I know that most IT departments _could_. The vast, vast majority of problems are related to applications writing to (or sometimes just opening RW) a small number of filesystem and Registry locations. Modify the permissions on those and the app works, with no need for the "always run as Administrator" sledgehammer.
It is my understanding that Vista has specific workarounds for these apps. Kinda like a list of "Oh, if QB.EXE is running, let it write files with.qdb extensions to C:\Program Files" and stuff like that.
It's a bit more involved than that. Vista intercepts writes to "illegal" places and redirects them to a "virtual" Registry and filesystem. It's a great way to implement "proper" security without breaking all the existing apps.
Yes, you don't run Quicken or video games in a corporation, but from my home-use experience, it is really the majority of applications that don't work as limited users.
I don't run into many problems running as a non-Admin these days. Maybe 5 years ago a "majority" of applications were badly broken, but not any more. Even for those that are, ten minutes with filemon and regmon should allow even semi-competent IT staff to fix 90% of problems.
My blog posts are not wrong. There is a difference between graphical SUDO / the Mac OS X authorization prompt, and Vista's UAC.
Sorry, I was (and thought you were) speaking mostly in terms of the concept, rather than nitty gritty details about the implementations.
Vista certainly does more smoke and mirrors, but in concept, they are the same - the user tries to do something they don't have privilege levels for and the system automatically prompts them for authorisation (and potentially authentication).
Why would Microsoft do this if there weren't a huge body of legacy software that would simply break if it was not running as admin?
Same reason OS X and Linux do it. Because you don't want[0] to run as a high-privilege user all the time but you do (especially on single-user, home desktops) want the ability the easily and temporarily raise your privilege levels when necessary.
It is a *fact* that UAC is a compatibility mechanism... Microsoft has repeated stated this. Not only that, but a huge part of UAC is heuristic based... so it can detect the potential for requiring admin access ahead of time. This is particularly useful with installers, control panel apps (.cpl), etc.
The point is that it's not _only_ a compatibility mechanism. Of equal (and far longer term than the remaining lifetime of broken applications) importance is that is allows users to easily run with reduced privileges. In that context, whether the UAC prompts are being triggered by dedicated API calls or heuristic jiggery-pokery behind the scenes is a relatively insignificant issue of semantics.
Sure the APIs have been there to play nice with NT-style permissions / user isolation... but Microsoft was horrible at enforcing that, even with XP.
How do you propose they "enforce" it (and especially without bringing down the usual accusations of "monopoly, antitrust !") ?
Lazy ISVs continued to do it the old way because it worked. The fact it was possible to do it the right way, or that you could "Run As Admin" has absolutely no bearing on this discussion.
It does, because your blog is suggesting that running as a non-Administrator is something that's only recently been possible and (IMO) implying that because of this developers have had some sort of excuse for writing broken apps up until only a few years ago, when XP gained popularity. This is not true, and developers are 100% to blame for any program released in basically the last decade that unnecessarily needs Administrator privileges because it assumes it will always have them.
Heh, at any rate, having just looked at the Slashdot posting your blog referenced, it seems we've had some of this discussion before:).
[0] Although in practice the ignorance level of the typical end-user nullifies this principle.
Not true. Even today, there is a plethora of Windows applications that require you to run as administrator.
Proportionally, the list is tiny.
That's why Vista has "adminsitrator" and "administrator, but constantly prompt for for stuff."
No, it has that for the same reason all the other contemporary multiuser platforms have the same concept - security.
However, most managed corporate systems would not have the user running as a Domain Administrator. But they still have enough access to screw-up their own PC, and all th network shares that they probably have write-access to.
Having worked in several places where the IT infrastructure was an utter shambles but the average user still didn't have local Administrator privileges on their PC, I'm going to have to call bollocks. One of the primary things IT departments like to do is lock down local machines to stop people installing their own crap, which essentially requires not allowing Administrator access. Even the most mediocre IT department will attempt Run-As-Administrator shortcuts or modifications to Registry and filesystem permissions to get specific programs running long before they grant across-the-board Administrator privileges to normal end users.
I'm also struggling to see how this is any different to other platforms, particularly the "you can modify anything you have write privileges for" problem.
In short, I wouldn't hesistate for a second in claiming the majority of managed PCs do not allow unsupervised Administrator privileges to local users. Nor would I hesitate in claiming this accounted for >10% of Windows PCs out there.
That is, not a whole lot, as long as all you are trying to do is own the system or otherwise do malicious things to it. If you were a virus/trojan writer, would you ever hit yourself on the forehead saying, "Damn, this Administrator access isn't good enough. I need SYSTEM access to totally own this system"?*
How unsurprising that everyone is focusing solely on the insignificant issue of the differences between SYSTEM and Administrator and completely ignoring the _important_ point that IE runs *as the user* not as SYSTEM.
The truth is, at least before Vista (I wouldn't know about Vista since I never used it), Windows' security model was broken.
No, it wasn't. Vista and Windows (NT) <Vista have the same security model. They have different interfaces to it, and Vista has more extensive hackery to fool poorly-written applications into working with it, but the security _model_ is the same.
No security model where the default user (as pointed out by my sibling poster) runs as superuser ever is.
Firstly, Windows doesn't have the concept of a 'superuser'. All user accounts are subject to ACLs (unlike "classic" UNIX).
Secondly, have a default user as admin is a (minor) configuration semantic (and one that isn't even present when the machine is part of a Domain). It says nothing about the security model. Logging into a Linux system as root vs a regular user (or, for perhaps a better example, a user in the 'wheel' group vs a user who isn't) does _nothing_ to change the security model. All it does is change what you are allowed to do.
The difference between Vista and earlier versions is basically the same as the difference between older Linux distros that didn't automatically pop up graphical sudo prompts and newer distros that do. While there's a bit more sleight of hand going on behind the scenes in Vista to pander to broken applications, the fundamental security architecture is the same in Vista as it was in Windows NT 3.1, 15-odd years ago (and it is far superior to "classic" UNIX).
Also, your conclusions about UAC are completely wrong. I refer you to several blog posts I've written on the subject. UAC is a solution to a problem that only exists on Windows.
No, UAC is addressing a problem present on all multiuser OSes - which is why all multiuser OSes make some attempt at addressing it. UAC is doing the same thing OS X and some Linux distros like Ubuntu do with their automated, graphical sudo prompts, and it is doing it for the same reason - to abstract away the concept of a multiuser OS.
Incidentally, your blog posts aren't really correct. Lots of applications - even those dating from the late 90s - were properly written and work fine when not running as Administrator. Microsoft had all the API infrastructure in place - even in DOS-based Windows - so developers have had no excuse for not writing "multiuser friendly" apps since about 1997. Not having an Admin user by default in XP wouldn't have broken "all" applications, although it would have likely broken a non-trivial subset.
Additionally, you have always been able to "Run As" in Windows NT (as Windows NT has always been multiuser), although it did require a "Power Toy" or the user of a commandline until Windows 2000.
The very real, but subtle difference is that when prompted for credentials, the resulting action is carried out with those credentials. When only authorization is performed, the resulting action is performed under predetermined credentials.
In the vast, vast, vast bulk of OS X installations, when the user is prompted for "authentication", they are prompted for, and type in, their user password. Mainly because the idea of putting in another user's credentials would never occur to them, but also because those machines only have one user account defined.
If you're going to use the tiny minority of OS X systems where the user isn't the default "admin" class user then it's only fair to include the similarly tiny subset of Vista machines that are also configured to prompt for "authentication".
I see where you were going though, in a single user desktop environment it is somewhat sensible to have all privileged actions performed under a single God-like privileges (like sudo & root on UNIX platforms) after obtaining authorization.
That's not where I was going at all. I was merely pointing out that in reality, there's only a single person on the box, so trying to artificially pretend there isn't only adds confusion and work. I was most certainly NOT making any attempt to argue in favour of a superuser.
I believe OS X has a better model because the user isn't required to have knowledge of every single privilege the OS might ask you to authorize.
Nor are they in Vista...
On the other hand, Vista's model might be more "secure" because the user is aware of which operation he is allowing an application to perform. Whether that actually provides more real world security is umm... doubtful, in my mind anyway, as you're really just leaving it up to the user to decide what's good for the system, and most users are dumbsh*ts.
In an unmanaged system, you're _always_ leaving it up to the user to decide. That's why unmanaged systems will never be secure.
Neither method is more secure, in my opinion. Indeed, the point I've been trying to make is that the differences are so small and so insignificant (basically, click a button vs type in your password), that they're equivalent by any reasonable measure.
Slashdot Mirror
It sucked at it compared to OS/2 and probably Solaris 10+ years ago and because of how poorly it did threads, most Windows apps did what Microsoft did and pretty much stayed away from threading. And to be relevant to the current discussion, Windows threading did not cross CPU/core boundries while OS/2's threading did 10+ years ago.
What do you mean by "cross CPU/core boundaries" ? Windows NT has been able to schedule artbitrary threads onto arbitrary processors since *at least* NT 4.0 (and probably 3.1).
It's about the really bad OS design IMO.
There's nothing wrong with NT's design. It's leagues ahead of OS/2 (as it was designed to be).
That's asking the theater to assume the risk that the movie will make money.
No more so than they do now.
It would encourage theaters to only purchase bland, inoffensive movies that are guaranteed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, or at least edit the movies they receive until they are.
Again, no different to the situation now.
And if another theater chain doesn't want to pay the studio the full amount for a print, they can go to another theater chain who will be only happy to sell one of their copies for, say, half the price the studio is demanding.
Ie: the studios have to price reasonably. I'm not seeing a downside here.
Haha, I never thought I'd see someone on Slashdot actually advocate DRM.
I would _vastly_ prefer DRM to copyright law. DRM sucks, to be sure, but if it were the only protection, at least when it is broken you wouldn't have to worry about the government coming after you.
No, DRM doesn't work.
"DRM" works fine in certain circumstances (you trust your SSH and SSL connections don't you ?).
All it would do is create a market for DRM-bypassing projectors, which there would be a huge financial incentive to manufacture.
A DRM-bypassing projector is worthless without anything to project.
The main reasons DRM has failed so far is because a) the hardware you sell today needs to be able to work with the content you're releasing in a decade (and vice versa) and b) there's no easy way of updating the protection when it is cracked. DRM for protecting prints for cinemas would suffer none of these weaknesses. All they need is a projector that phones home for every print, a hardware dongle that is required for a print to work, a self-destruct mechanism for the print once its "lifetime" has expired and a legal contract with the cinema not to distribute any copies.
DRM for mass-market consumer level devices and DRM for specialised hardware are two _completely_ different ballgames. Don't kid yourself otherwise.
Do you just not think, before posting, or are you genuinely delusional ?
Eee Pc opened the floodgates - the future looks to be low power, SSD, minimal RAM long battery "laptop" style devices that will never run Vista in a million years.
The Eee PC is one iteration of "Moore's Law" away from being a decent Vista machine. So, less than 12 months from now, given how long it's already been out.
I keep hearing that 70% of PCs in a year or so will be laptops, if 50% of them are low power devices then that 1/4 to 1/3 of PC in a few years that will not run Vista - you can kinda see why they are doing it.
Even the cheapest "normal" laptops today are quite capable of running Vista.
You mean other than the insane hardware requirements,
A Ghz-class CPU, 1GB RAM and a $30 video card is "insane" ?
the general slowness,
Doesn't seem any slower than OS X. Or Ubunut, for that matter.
requiring special hardware to be able to do HD (even though there's no technical reason why it should be required),
It doesn't require special hardware to do HD. You're lying.
and no benefits over XP unless you count the machine running slower?
UAC, search, better utilisation of hardware resources. That's just off the top of my head.
And I certainly couldn't justify spending $1000 more on a document handling laptop just so I can run Vista vs XP.
$1000 _extra_ ? WTF ? For US$1000 you could buy *two* laptops capable of running Vista for "document handling".
Linux resource requirements seem to be relatively stable compared to MS operating systems.
The oldest PC you can usefully run Vista on (with minor upgrades), dates from around 2000. With a functionally equivalent Linux distro, you might be able to get away with slightly less upgrades, although the cost saving would be insignificant. Of course, since most people replace their PC every 3-5 years, it's a moot point.
Seriously. The only argument against Vista that's less relevant that hardware requirements, is DRM.
On the contrary, that is the marketing fluff. To the extent that is true (it's largely true, but not completely so -- yet), it's because powerful interests have distorted the original intent. At a fundamental level, that is still the justification that everyone uses -- "without copyright, there would be no [music|movies|books|etc]" is hyperbole, but there is truth to it.
No, there's not. Music/movies/books/etc were around long, long, long before Copyright ever existed.
As any economist will be happy to tell you, wealth is diminished by scarcity, not created by it.
We're not talking about wealth, we're talking about value. Copyright imposes artificial scarcity to lend value to something whose infinite supply would otherwise render it valueless - copies of information.
The entire reason movie studios make money off of box office revenue is because they have a licensing deal with the theaters. That licensing deal requires a notion of copyright and intellectual property to be valid. Otherwise the studio would only be able to charge the theater for a physical movie print, which a theater chain could duplicate amongst all their theaters rather than having to buy more than one print from the studio.
The solution there is pretty simple. The first print is sold for an appropriate cost under the assumption it will be duplicated to all the chain's cinemas.
The only way a studio could take a cut of box office revenue without copyright would be to own the entire vertical distribution chain. Every movie studio would have to build and maintain an entire theater chain, and consumers would have to go to separate theaters to see a 20th Century Fox movie as opposed to a Disney movie. Even then DVD distribution would be nearly impossible to make profitable if people could just press their own copies of the DVDs.
No, they just need a way of making sure their prints can only be shown in approved cinemas who have paid. Ie: DRM. Given the relatively miniscule number and variability of customers, setting up an effective system would be child's play.
Yet when I want to do EXACTLY THE SAME THING with my music,
But you don't want to do "exactly the same thing". You want to get paid over and over and over and over and over again FOR THE SAME BIT OF WORK. The employee going to work does not have this luxury. He has to show up every day, not just the once.
Would Lord of the Rings, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, have been made if there had been no way to recoup the costs of production?
What makes you think Lord of the Rings wouldn't have turned a profit without copyright ? Are you seriously suggesting the millions of people who saw it in the cinema would have just watched a dodgy handycam recording of it at home on their TV ?
The purpose of copyright is to promote creation and enrich society.
The purpose of Copyright is to create artificial scarcity and, hence, "value".
Everything else said about it is just marketing fluff.
I disagree. The DRM problem with vista is so bad it that it even affects all linux distributions.
Your "problems" have nothing to do with Vista, and everything to do with media companies DRM-encumbering their content.
Some people might have an interest in re-mixing various pieces of content for their own personal use.
Then they should avoid content where the copyright holder stops them from doing this via DRM.
Burying streams underneath DRM locks, or hiding them by default when playing non-DRM content for the convenience and security of DRM material may inhibit reasonable use of information. I don't really know the extent of such operation within Vista, if any. But I don't want to pay that kind of price for the DRM war.
Since you don't know, why are you commenting ?
My understanding was that the pervasive DRM in Vista has unacceptable impact on non-DRM aspects of the operating system. Such as throttling network traffic whilst playing unencumbered MP3s.
Your understanding is wrong.
Super invasive DRM.
Not at all. "DRM" is quite possibly the biggest non-argument about Vista there is (with the possible exception of "hardware requirements").
It boils down to two possible scenarios:
1. You don't have DRM-encumbered media. Therefore the DRM is irrelevant.
2. You do have DRM-encumbered media. Vista lets you watch it. Vista doesn't impose any more restrictions than any other player. Therefore, the DRM support is good, because the alternative is either a degraded output or none at all.
Many tweaks to the UI cause you to jump through new hoops, slowing down productivity and causing me to get irate. An OS should enable me to use my computer, but slow me down.
Like what ?
Last week I was in a store purchasing a new computer for my step-dad, and all he needed was a web browser. I was damn tempted to give him a Linux box, and I'm not sure he'd notice. But we buy a new PC with Vista. He's used XP for years, but now he is totally lost.
Someone who is "lost" in Vista after using XP for years, is going to be vastly more "lost" using Linux (or OS X for that matter).
Seriously. The fundamental UI in Vista is still the same as Windows 95.
And the salesman was insisting 2 gigs of ram isn't enough for Vista, and that we needed a box with 4.
Of course he'd say that. He's on commission. 2 gigs is plenty.
Here is the crux of it. Vista offers no new features that will blow anyone away, yet the requirements are considerably higher.
One could make that same argument about just about every version of Windows since Windows 95 (and every version of every other OS from some time back in the '90s, with the exception of OS X since it was so late to the party).
We -- and I think I speak for the majority of Linux users here -- don't want binary drivers in Linux.
I sincerely doubt you're speaking for even a sizable minority of Linux users, let alone a majority. Most people are far, far more interested in their hardware working than they are about idealism.
You can't fix a binary driver, nor can you make sure it's not doing something evil.
Nor can you, I'm willing to bet, with an open source driver. You have to trust someone else to do it for you.
You can't migrate the code to future versions as the kernel is modified.
Nor do you need to with a stable interface.
You can't optimize it. We don't want an endless stream of support for old pieces of hardware, or a fixed-in-time ABI that keeps things from maturing. An ABI freezes progress.
Tripe. Pretty much the only OS today that doesn't have a stable ABI is Linux. Solaris, Windows, OS X, FreeBSD, etc. All somehow manage to do it without "freezing progress".
The only reason we don't have drivers for some pieces of hardware is the unwillingness of certain manufacturers to cooperate -- they hide behind binaries and refuse to work with the community.
Or they're legally unable to due to licensing conditions.
Make no mistake. The biggest reason hardware vendors are reluctant to work on Linux drivers are because of problems in Linux and the zealotry of certainly parts of the Linux community.
Interestingly enough, Microsoft doesn't offer a stable ABI either.
Yes, they do.
It just releases new versions of its operating system kernel so slowly that it *seems* that there is a stable ABI.
Pretty much every Service Pack updates the kernel. Drivers don't break. Added to that, it's not unusual for drivers to continue working across major OS updates (and when they don't, it's usually with very good reason).
The fact that Vista has problems with hardware compatibility is proof of that. What's more, Microsoft's "black box" model is clearly at least partly to blame for Windows' stability problems. As part of the discovery in its Windows Vista class action lawsuit Microsoft was forced to reveal that 30% of Windows crashes in 2007 were the fault of nVidia's drivers.
I'm not sure how you get "Microsoft is to blame" out of a report clearly indicating the problems were with nVidia's driver, but this is Slashdot, so I suppose that's to be expected.
Incidentally, the "black box model" is hardly "Microsoft's", or unnique to them. Indeed, about the only mainstream OS that *doesn't* have a stable kernel ABI for developers to target drivers at is Linux.
Hardware compatibility is a real problem for Windows Vista. Tons of perfectly good hardware doesn't work (or work very well) with the operating system. That's a real concern for people with investments in existing hardware.
Hardly. Firstly, the proportion of people who upgrade existing systems to Vista, much like those who upgraded existing versions previously, is tiny. Most people using Vista get it with a new PC, just like they got XP. Secondly, anyone upgrading is going to have relatively recent hardware.
Microsoft pundits often use similar hardware compatibility problems as a reason to stay away from Linux. However, when Windows Vista has some of the exact same problems it apparently gets a pass.
Except they're not exactly the same problems, which was my point (to say nothing of the gross exaggeration of Vista's "hardware compatibility problems").
Driver issues are one of the primary reasons why people stay away from Linux. Why, precisely, should Vista be any different?
Because one of the major reasons Linux has driver problems is the refusal of the kernel developer to settle on a stable ABI so companies have something to develop for.
I'm not aware of any other system that does this. Everything I've used has administrators, and non-administrators. But not administrators who are only administrators after a secured process has displayed a particular dialog box. In Vista, if I have UAC on and open a command prompt and run WHOAMI it reports that I am "mobydisk." If I then run the command prompt "as administrator and do a whois -- I'm still "mobydisk". Compare that to Linux: suppose I do something in the control panel and it prompts me for the admin password. Before that I am "mobydisk" and after the prompt I am "root." Vista is the only thing I know of where before and after the user is still "mobydisk"
It's because of the different security models. In UNIX, you "become" a user that has higher privileges. In Windows NT/Vista, your actual user account is temporarily granted the necessary privileges (or you can also "become" them with RunAs, but that is an inferior technique).
In short, the low-level details are (very) different, but the high-level theory, objective and results are the same.
As for that miniscule list, try Quicken, Quickbooks, and every video game ever made.
Quicken and Quickbooks I can't speak for, but lots of games run as a regular user. Even for the ones that don't, it's for simple reasons that are trivially addressed on a per-case basis (eg: Doom 3 writes to a config file in Program Files - if you make that one file writable, it works fine as a regular user - what's particularly stupid is the Linux port *doesn't* do this).
I've tried to get my family members to use non-admin users for years, and even my attempts in 2007 were thwarted by foolish apps.
I've been running NT as a regular user since ~1997. Now, while I don't for a second think the average home user could have done this, I know that most IT departments _could_. The vast, vast majority of problems are related to applications writing to (or sometimes just opening RW) a small number of filesystem and Registry locations. Modify the permissions on those and the app works, with no need for the "always run as Administrator" sledgehammer.
It is my understanding that Vista has specific workarounds for these apps. Kinda like a list of "Oh, if QB.EXE is running, let it write files with .qdb extensions to C:\Program Files" and stuff like that.
It's a bit more involved than that. Vista intercepts writes to "illegal" places and redirects them to a "virtual" Registry and filesystem. It's a great way to implement "proper" security without breaking all the existing apps.
Yes, you don't run Quicken or video games in a corporation, but from my home-use experience, it is really the majority of applications that don't work as limited users.
I don't run into many problems running as a non-Admin these days. Maybe 5 years ago a "majority" of applications were badly broken, but not any more. Even for those that are, ten minutes with filemon and regmon should allow even semi-competent IT staff to fix 90% of problems.
My blog posts are not wrong. There is a difference between graphical SUDO / the Mac OS X authorization prompt, and Vista's UAC.
Sorry, I was (and thought you were) speaking mostly in terms of the concept, rather than nitty gritty details about the implementations.
Vista certainly does more smoke and mirrors, but in concept, they are the same - the user tries to do something they don't have privilege levels for and the system automatically prompts them for authorisation (and potentially authentication).
Why would Microsoft do this if there weren't a huge body of legacy software that would simply break if it was not running as admin?
Same reason OS X and Linux do it. Because you don't want[0] to run as a high-privilege user all the time but you do (especially on single-user, home desktops) want the ability the easily and temporarily raise your privilege levels when necessary.
It is a *fact* that UAC is a compatibility mechanism... Microsoft has repeated stated this. Not only that, but a huge part of UAC is heuristic based... so it can detect the potential for requiring admin access ahead of time. This is particularly useful with installers, control panel apps (.cpl), etc.
The point is that it's not _only_ a compatibility mechanism. Of equal (and far longer term than the remaining lifetime of broken applications) importance is that is allows users to easily run with reduced privileges. In that context, whether the UAC prompts are being triggered by dedicated API calls or heuristic jiggery-pokery behind the scenes is a relatively insignificant issue of semantics.
Sure the APIs have been there to play nice with NT-style permissions / user isolation... but Microsoft was horrible at enforcing that, even with XP.
How do you propose they "enforce" it (and especially without bringing down the usual accusations of "monopoly, antitrust !") ?
Lazy ISVs continued to do it the old way because it worked. The fact it was possible to do it the right way, or that you could "Run As Admin" has absolutely no bearing on this discussion.
It does, because your blog is suggesting that running as a non-Administrator is something that's only recently been possible and (IMO) implying that because of this developers have had some sort of excuse for writing broken apps up until only a few years ago, when XP gained popularity. This is not true, and developers are 100% to blame for any program released in basically the last decade that unnecessarily needs Administrator privileges because it assumes it will always have them.
Heh, at any rate, having just looked at the Slashdot posting your blog referenced, it seems we've had some of this discussion before :).
[0] Although in practice the ignorance level of the typical end-user nullifies this principle.
Not true. Even today, there is a plethora of Windows applications that require you to run as administrator.
Proportionally, the list is tiny.
That's why Vista has "adminsitrator" and "administrator, but constantly prompt for for stuff."
No, it has that for the same reason all the other contemporary multiuser platforms have the same concept - security.
However, most managed corporate systems would not have the user running as a Domain Administrator. But they still have enough access to screw-up their own PC, and all th network shares that they probably have write-access to.
Having worked in several places where the IT infrastructure was an utter shambles but the average user still didn't have local Administrator privileges on their PC, I'm going to have to call bollocks. One of the primary things IT departments like to do is lock down local machines to stop people installing their own crap, which essentially requires not allowing Administrator access. Even the most mediocre IT department will attempt Run-As-Administrator shortcuts or modifications to Registry and filesystem permissions to get specific programs running long before they grant across-the-board Administrator privileges to normal end users.
I'm also struggling to see how this is any different to other platforms, particularly the "you can modify anything you have write privileges for" problem.
In short, I wouldn't hesistate for a second in claiming the majority of managed PCs do not allow unsupervised Administrator privileges to local users. Nor would I hesitate in claiming this accounted for >10% of Windows PCs out there.
That is, not a whole lot, as long as all you are trying to do is own the system or otherwise do malicious things to it. If you were a virus/trojan writer, would you ever hit yourself on the forehead saying, "Damn, this Administrator access isn't good enough. I need SYSTEM access to totally own this system"?*
How unsurprising that everyone is focusing solely on the insignificant issue of the differences between SYSTEM and Administrator and completely ignoring the _important_ point that IE runs *as the user* not as SYSTEM.
The truth is, at least before Vista (I wouldn't know about Vista since I never used it), Windows' security model was broken.
No, it wasn't. Vista and Windows (NT) <Vista have the same security model. They have different interfaces to it, and Vista has more extensive hackery to fool poorly-written applications into working with it, but the security _model_ is the same.
No security model where the default user (as pointed out by my sibling poster) runs as superuser ever is.
Firstly, Windows doesn't have the concept of a 'superuser'. All user accounts are subject to ACLs (unlike "classic" UNIX).
Secondly, have a default user as admin is a (minor) configuration semantic (and one that isn't even present when the machine is part of a Domain). It says nothing about the security model. Logging into a Linux system as root vs a regular user (or, for perhaps a better example, a user in the 'wheel' group vs a user who isn't) does _nothing_ to change the security model. All it does is change what you are allowed to do.
The difference between Vista and earlier versions is basically the same as the difference between older Linux distros that didn't automatically pop up graphical sudo prompts and newer distros that do. While there's a bit more sleight of hand going on behind the scenes in Vista to pander to broken applications, the fundamental security architecture is the same in Vista as it was in Windows NT 3.1, 15-odd years ago (and it is far superior to "classic" UNIX).
Also, your conclusions about UAC are completely wrong. I refer you to several blog posts I've written on the subject. UAC is a solution to a problem that only exists on Windows.
No, UAC is addressing a problem present on all multiuser OSes - which is why all multiuser OSes make some attempt at addressing it. UAC is doing the same thing OS X and some Linux distros like Ubuntu do with their automated, graphical sudo prompts, and it is doing it for the same reason - to abstract away the concept of a multiuser OS.
Incidentally, your blog posts aren't really correct. Lots of applications - even those dating from the late 90s - were properly written and work fine when not running as Administrator. Microsoft had all the API infrastructure in place - even in DOS-based Windows - so developers have had no excuse for not writing "multiuser friendly" apps since about 1997. Not having an Admin user by default in XP wouldn't have broken "all" applications, although it would have likely broken a non-trivial subset.
Additionally, you have always been able to "Run As" in Windows NT (as Windows NT has always been multiuser), although it did require a "Power Toy" or the user of a commandline until Windows 2000.
The very real, but subtle difference is that when prompted for credentials, the resulting action is carried out with those credentials. When only authorization is performed, the resulting action is performed under predetermined credentials.
In the vast, vast, vast bulk of OS X installations, when the user is prompted for "authentication", they are prompted for, and type in, their user password. Mainly because the idea of putting in another user's credentials would never occur to them, but also because those machines only have one user account defined.
If you're going to use the tiny minority of OS X systems where the user isn't the default "admin" class user then it's only fair to include the similarly tiny subset of Vista machines that are also configured to prompt for "authentication".
I see where you were going though, in a single user desktop environment it is somewhat sensible to have all privileged actions performed under a single God-like privileges (like sudo & root on UNIX platforms) after obtaining authorization.
That's not where I was going at all. I was merely pointing out that in reality, there's only a single person on the box, so trying to artificially pretend there isn't only adds confusion and work. I was most certainly NOT making any attempt to argue in favour of a superuser.
I believe OS X has a better model because the user isn't required to have knowledge of every single privilege the OS might ask you to authorize.
Nor are they in Vista...
On the other hand, Vista's model might be more "secure" because the user is aware of which operation he is allowing an application to perform. Whether that actually provides more real world security is umm... doubtful, in my mind anyway, as you're really just leaving it up to the user to decide what's good for the system, and most users are dumbsh*ts.
In an unmanaged system, you're _always_ leaving it up to the user to decide. That's why unmanaged systems will never be secure.
Neither method is more secure, in my opinion. Indeed, the point I've been trying to make is that the differences are so small and so insignificant (basically, click a button vs type in your password), that they're equivalent by any reasonable measure.
SCSI drives have generally had 10x higher MTBF ratings, which means a lot when you're installing a drive in a server that needs to run for five nines.
"Five nines" servers shouldn't be affected by individual drive failures. Arguably, they shouldn't be affected by _two_ simultaneous drive failures.