I work in the security industry, and I can tell you now that there are no other products that can do what the US govt want to do at the scale that they want to do in production today.
Sure there are alternatives, including the Sun Liberty thingy (substitute your evil vendor for someone else's), but no one else has a federated existing customer base of the size of Passport's.
I've reviewed various products like Netegrity's SiteMinder, iPlanet, and a few others including online banking authenticators, and trust me, it's really hard to get this right. And from the two Passport integrations I've seen, passport is done right. It's a breeze compared to Siteminder and doesn't install an SDK and samples on the box that you don't find unless you really look hard.
A government wants to just get something off the shelf and make it work. The scalability issue is the major one, and Passport is one of a very small number of products out there with a large user base today (30 million+).
The trick with any SSO scheme (and Passport is one of them) is the security administration associated with it. Plus you have to validate each and every site to ensure no leaks, no confidentiality breaches, good cookie practices, etc. This is MUCH harder than getting the SSO stuff to work.
And realistically, wouldn't you prefer the govt to just make services available online? I hate calling my govt's call centres - such a waste of everyone's time.
dselect sucks. It's the hardest thing about getting a working debian install, akin to a purity or intelligence test. This is exclusionary, and the only way to fix it is to streamline the way a base debian gets installed. And to me, that means dselect must go. It's too hard and takes too long to get right. I've always found it much easier and faster to completely ignore dselect and add the packages I need later using apt, which is far more friendly (and actually works).
In HCI terms, you *must* understand your users. If your user base is educated professionals who have done hundreds of debian installs and can compile their own kernel without assistance, then the current installer is probably okay, but it's not where Debian needs to go. It has the developer Linux user sown up; Debian needs to add to the collection other types of users.
So we pick another user set - the Linux newbie and/or Windows refugee. These people don't want to know about installers, and you must make the interface hard for them to screw up. Remember in HCI terms, allowing the user to screw up might be powerful, but it's wrong. I'm not talking about GUIs here (even though I like 'em), I'm talking HCI and interface. You can have a very decent text installer.
Moving along... You describe to the potential newbie users why you need an installer in very basic non-prejudiced terms, so they understand the problem space but without suggesting to them potential solutions. Grab their suggestions and recommendations and experiences and write them all down. This is your specification to a certain extent. Users have a keen insight on what they like and they don't like. Ignore their advice at your own peril.
You create a first cut at an installer, constantly second guessing the users: "will my mum be able to do this?" "Do I have to do this now?" "Is this a reasonable set of defaults that don't need to be adjusted?" You want the user to make as few decisions as possible, whilst postponing as many decisions as possible to allow experienced users to customize it if they wish.
Once the first cut of the installer is done, you must get a bunch of new users, and watch them use it without assistance. Learn from the mistakes or missteps they make, and learn if there's steps you can eliminate. And of course, eliminate any bugs the users find.
Repeat ad nauseam until it's hard to get a bodged unrecoverable install.
Developers are truly the worst people to ask to do this. They *know* the right answers, and will not even think that there might be other possibilities.
A good OS installer is like the old A/UX 3.0 installer - it literally was a one button install if you had a disk ready for it.
Other OS's with decent installers are NetBSD (with the possible exception of the very confusing disk partitioner) or WinXP (very few questions indeed).
I am buying a new iMac roughly September, my first Mac in nearly six years. I've owned several PCs, one Digital Alpha OEM motherboard, and several Palm handhelds in the meantime.
I last used MacOS when 7.61 was out. I have personally owned four Macs - a Mac Plus, Mac II with the optional FPU and MMU - I owned and ran A/UX 3.0 , Duo 210 (still an excellent form factor), and my Quadra 630. I retired the Q630 in 1996 when I got my first PC. My first Mac was bought after a succession of excellent English or US games machines (Amstrad, Spectrum, Amiga), so not owning or using a PC until I was nearly 26 was fine by me. Until NT came out, PC's sucked because the OS sucked.
By 1994, my work had converted from being a helpdesk person looking after Mac users to a system administrator looking after Novell boxes. The lack of Macintosh Novell admin tools was a killer (even though we were about 80% Mac desktops), and the Apple PC coprocessor card that my last work PowerMac 6100 had was too slow to run the tools on a day to day basis. In 1995, I became an NT admin, and there's simply no way to manage NT from a Mac (nowadays you'd use VNC or Terminal Services, but then there was nothing). So I had to have a PC desktop. I couldn't stand (and still can't) Windows 3.1. Win95 had just come out which was better than Win31, but it still sucked. I've never used Win95 or Win98 for anything but a glorified games loader, and I've still yet to use Windows ME or XP Home, and am very unlikely to.
Once I was basically an NT-only guy at work, I decided to buy a "designed for NT" PC for home in September 1996. Through work, I was getting great prices on HP gear, which has the same sort of bullet proof reliability of all my previous Macs - I hate crap hardware. I moved from an eighteen month old 33 MHz Quadra 630 with a 13" RGB 640x480 monitor to a dual Pentium Pro 200 MHz, 17" monitor, bleeding edge 2D accelerator running at 1152x864 in millions of colors on NT Workstation 3.51. This rocked. It was more than an order of magnitude jump in processing power, and a jump from several crashes a day (MacOS 7.61 with dev tools) to none. Pre-emptive multitasking, protected memory, the works.
Imagine if you will - going from my 18 month old Mac to my new PC, it was more than the difference in productivity between a 4.77 MHz IBM PC running DOS to my first Mac. There was simply no comparison to what was before - I was hooked. Then I added Linux to my home box, but that sucked (and still does) but it was fun in a masochistic way. I had fun whilst debasing myself. I helped write the first Matrox Millennium graphic drivers for Linux*, for example. During this time, Apple went from being open and allowing BeOS and clones to exist to being a closed shop, killing off the clones. A/UX was well dead. The Mac business market was in retreat.
Why am I coming back? You certainly did me no favors when you killed Rhapsody on x86. I was developing Mozilla for Rhapsody/x86 DR2* at the time, and you killed my ability to still use an Apple operating system. Killing the x86 port was needlessly bloody-minded, and a monumentally stupid idea, especially now that both PPC CPU makers want to do embedded stuff, not 64 bit desktop stuff. I'm agnostic about hardware and almost all of my friends who I put onto Macs in my early days simply have no idea of what processor they are using. This is Apple's true strength! Remember when you did the PowerPC conversion? That was flawless - you couldn't tell, it just went faster. I'm sure Apple could do an iMac using the AMD Sledgehammer if you had the mind to. It's the OS that makes a computer. The hardware I own and recommend is fast, bullet-proof and supported. Things Apple does in its sleep. If Apple produced an x86 iMac, I would be in heaven. I don't know if you make $AUD500 on a loaded iMac, but that's the sort of money I don't mind paying for a good OS even if you didn't make an x86 Mac. I run XP Professional because it is fast, extremely stable and runs all my apps.
The iMac is beautiful. It's slow**, but almost fast enough to do what I will be using it for (browsing, e-mail, development), but I might be frustrated with it in less than a year from now unless it's seriously speed bumped. If you can stick a 2 GHz processor or say 2x or 4x 1 GHz processors in there I'll be happier. I buy machines to last three years (my 1996 Dual PPro was only retired two weeks ago when it finally died), so processing capabilities over the life of the product is a prime factor in my purchasing decision. But to make me really happy, it would be nice if you could do an order of magnitude thing for me. Like my Quadra 630 to Dual Pentium Pro 200, my 18 month old Dell is an 800 MHz PIII, so if you could somehow make the equivalent of an 8 GHz G4 by September in your consumer line, I would seriously have babies for any passing iMac.
Keep up the industrial design - you have that right. The iMac is inherently desirable. Just make it a LOT faster. And get waaaay more games on to the platform. I don't care if you have to prostitute yourself to get DirectX or the Playstation 2 API's - game developers' shouldn't need to (and don't have time or the desire to) re-target the 3D front end of their software, you have to come half-way for them. OpenGL is good for workstation stuff, but the reality is that most games are written for DirectX or PS2 games. And I don't play Quake.
Feel free to write back.
Andrew
* http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/132/1998/8/0/ for an example of Rhapsody development * http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/alpha/9609. 0/0005.html for both Alpha and Matrox development in 1996.
** the 800 MHz G4 - I don't keep with Intel's faster clock is better thing. AMD is proof positive of this, and your Photoshop tests are interesting. I know that the G4 is per clock cycle more efficient, but it is not 2.75 times more efficient on integer stuff, which is the vast majority of what I do (development). I don't do Photoshop and have never owned a copy. I owned CodeWarrior and I liked the Project Builder on Rhapsody. You must be FAST when I compile stuff. This means good I/O, good memory bandwidth and fast integer CPUs.
Getting past what are the wrong tools first: Beowulf is an architecture to do massively parallel computation, so we can eliminate two of the best known HA tools. Microsoft Cluster Service is two or four node high availability, similar to HA Linux's efforts. NLBS is a software form of a hardware load balancer, similar to Cisco Local Directors and only really good for web farms. So what does MS provide to do similar stuff as Beowulf?
COM+ and Queueing Components. AppCenter.
The way it works is this. You write a COM+ component that is transactionally queuing aware. Each component takes a work unit in, processes it, and then sends the result of the transaction to the queueing components for reassembly or re-issue (if a node fails to submit a result, for example, good for checkpointing).
You can use normal Windows 2000 Professional boxes for the worker bees, and use a few Windows 2000 Server boxes to co-ordinate the issuing of jobs and control, and munging the result sets coming back in.
If you need to submit a wide variety of jobs, obviously the COM+ components will be changing regularly, it'd be a good idea to go to AppCenter so that you can treat a bunch of machines as single whole. This allows you to upgrade or deploy an app in a few mouse clicks to literally thousands of machines in a few seconds. AppCenter also has pretty good resource management, something that might be necessary if multiple jobs are running at the same time.
The cool thing is the development environment is really friendly and you can make COM+ components pretty easily and test them locally (for the n=1 case) before deploying to the farm.
There are also specialist MP libraries for the Win32 platform, such as PVM or MPI (WMPI). These have the benefits of re-using the knowledge and API's that users might already be familiar with - one of the biggest thing when a place converts from one supercomputer to another is rejigging and reoptimizing the code for the new architecture.
Sorry, but there you go. I know I'm going to lose karma for this post, but please a) check your facts b) don't spout off if you don't know what you're talking about.
Look for my post in the main thread for a clue.
Software development tools on Windows is lightyears ahead of most other platforms. Have you actually used Visual Studio 6 or 7? They kick ass. VS7 allows you to just do *stuff*, in C, C++, C# and VB, and any of the hosted.Net languages, like Eiffel and so on. I haven't seen Fortran for a few years as most people are moving to C.
Debugging tools - you are soo wrong I can't believe you wrote that. You can target the local machine, a remote machine (even for full on kernel debugs if you're using a checked build), a CE device, and debug an emulated CE device. You can debug COM+ assemblies which are running locally or remotely. The tools are there, you're knowledge isn't.
You can work with 10 Windows boxes simultaneously, it's just obvious you don't know how.
Get down and dirty with a kernel project. I chose Reiserfs on alpha.
This taught me a lot about lkml politics, which is probably the first skill (and some larrikins would say, the only skill you need) you must master to be a successful long term kernel hacker. First lkml hint: don't slag off anyone. Don't piss off a few people in the know until you get to know them, and then...
Then, don't talk - do. Respect is directly based upon your skills with patches, and their acceptance rate.
Patch submission. Follow the standard guidelines (found elsewhere), but know now that Linus sucks at code control. The mainline kernel development process is slow, prone to serious lossage, allows regression, and is irreparably harmed by Linus' refusal to adopt modern code control practices. So when you submit a patch, don't worry if it's not accepted. Every time the kernel is revved, re-do your patch and re-submit. It'll eventually be accepted, particularly if it helps the kernel boot. For example, it took nearly a month of my submitting a two line patch to allow the alpha to boot before it was accepted into mainline 2.4.0pre development. That's why I ditched Linux for a while - dickheads in charge. All the *BSDs have better kernel development practices, and their bleeding edge kernels are far more stable than any stable Linux kernel. However, for various reasons, I get attracted back to Linux on a regular basis, like a fly to a pus-filled boil.
Anyway, the things that need desperate attention are:
the kernel janitor project (clean out the cruft!)
the linux kernel testing project
These are far more important than any single feature you might want to add, and in particular the kernel janitor project will help you get familiarized with the kernel the quickest.
I was incredibly frustrated by the lack of software release management and code control skills exhibited by the kernel team when I was trying to make 2.4.0pre -7 to -11 work on my Alpha. These kernels didn't compile on any Alpha - at all. The fix was trivial, and yet Linus didn't accept my patch because he's (charitably) human or (uncharitably) a code control moron.
2.4 freezes were a joke. It was warm and slushy. Features and drivers crept in all the time, and few were doing stablization work. Necessary patches, like mine, to make entire architectures compile let alone boot went missing in action when unnecessary new features were glibly accepted. I was shocked to discover they were calling 2.4.0 "done".
The sooner Linus retires, the sooner Linux has a long term future.
It wont happen, but not because of technical difficulties. The NT kernel is easy to adapt to and has booted in the past from machines sporting various non-BIOS arrangements, like Digital's axp AlphaBIOS, SGI's Visual Workstation (which used ARC prom's on a not-at-all-like-ia32 architecture), x86-based ccNUMA machines like Unisys/HP/IBM 8, 16 and 32 way boxes which use a freaky custom BIOS that runs 2, 4 or 8 times on each 4 processor node until the OS can take over, IBM's PowerPC NT workstations (PowerSeries 440 and 8x0's and certain RS/6000's which used ARC firmware based upon Motorola's portable firmware). So for Apple to make a piece of hardware that suits the Mac first and NT second is no biggie. It would be up to Microsoft to port XP and.Net Server to the platform in the long term as long as Apple provided the technical details (hah!).
As long as OpenFirmware (or whatever they might choose) can run something like another program like an EFI thingy, or get all the initial files needed into RAM and then let the NT kernel take over as per normal, will mean users have multiple operating system support out of the box. But as Apple of the last five years has consistently refused to co-operate with hardware partners and those trying to make a go of the platform (Be for example), I doubt this course of action.
If I was Apple, I wouldn't be targeting ia32 except to keep Bill Gates awake; I would be keeping an eye out for ia64. The associated ia64 platform has a number of interesting technical features, including not least the lack of a traditional BIOS, and EFI / GPT based disk management, which allow far more Mac-like behavior than old style MBR disks.
And realistically, an ia64 port would give them the ability to make IBM/Motorola their bitch when it came to 64 bit processor supply. At the moment, only IBM make POWER architecture 64 bit processors (like the RS64 III, mainly in low volume, are multi-chip, and they are HUGE and relatively power hungry compared to the G4), and Motorola would probably dearly love to ditch a smallish player (in units consumed, particularly when you divide deliveries over an entire year) like Apple and concentrate on making money on embedded PPCs instead.
Here's the address you can send your displeasure to:
askthecivteam@firaxis.com
Please be civil.
Remember, if you _own_ a product, you are not _copying_ it or infringing Firaxis's rights in any way. As long as the patch (which I believe will involve a translation of the "Text" subdirectory) will not work unless you have the real thing, I can't see how Firaxis can lose... unless they heavy handedly stomp and piss on all their fans. Of which I am one.
It's not about the connection method, it's the content that traverses the corporate boundary that is the issue.
If the content shouldn't be going over the boundary, then it doesn't matter how you achieved it - you're still in the wrong. You could do it in CORBA, you could do it in simple HTTP GET and POSTs, it doesn't matter.
As a developer, I can make SOAP invisible to all firewall administrators using HTTPS or abusing their firewall's limitations (most firewalls are incredibly stupid - they don't and can't parse even basic protocols like HTTP, thus let anything that goes out on port X out if port X is allowed outbound.
As a person responsible for security, your use of any services not explicitly allowed is probably against security policy. But security policy is there to enable business, not inhibit it. This is the single biggest failing of most security people: they lose sight of why they are there!.
If it takes too long to get a content-flow approved, then that is a failing of the content-flow negotiation process, and it's not about technology at all.
No corporation is going to use ONE box for 5000 users. It's stupid. Single points of failure for so many users are unbelievably expensive.
Simple equation:
Avg Cost per employee per hour (college/industry): $25/40
Downtime, cost per hour: $125,000 / $200,000
In a previous job, we had a server with 1100 people on it (a NT 4.0 box running File and Print and Exchange!), with 99.96% uptime. It was pretty busy, but how did I justify getting it a friend? Easy. The downtime cost PER HOUR was 3x the purchase price of the bloody expensive server we had. I managed to get another two servers fairly quickly, and divided the load.
Companies do not care about capex cost for the most part. They care about getting the job done in a reasonable amount of time, ease of getting staff at reasonable rates, and finally about stability of the environment.
Windows unreliability was a thing of Win3.1 days. Windows 2000 is rock solid. WinXP (which I have been using for more than a year now) is even more stable. You cannot criticize Windows for reliaiblity or manageability now. Check out application center 2000 - that baby has no competitors in the market today. Microsoft MOM is coming, and I dare you to find a competitive product in the Unix market place. Backup Exec already is the best backup solution - it's far superior to Legato. I've never used the IBM HSM jobbie, so I won't comment on it, but I doubt it's as good as BE.
There are areas where MS can improve:
* security
* privacy
* trust of end users (activation, et al)
* marketing practices
But scalability (both vertically and horizontally), reliability, servicability, and manageability are no longer Window's bug bears. This article might have been true in 1995, but not today.
Truth: auDA is not a private body. It is a government institued body, funded by (well, this bit needs to be worked out, as per Southpark's "1. Underpants 2. ? 3. Profit!")
kre, despite the incredibly long times it takes him to register.org.au, is actually a good bloke if you've met him. He's active in NetBSD development, and has a fair enough reason to dislike the media, as blatent unresearched and unprofessional misrepresentations like this prove.
However, it is time to move on. munnari served Australia well, but now its time to have technical standards, high availability, consumer and privacy protection. auDA, through the names and competition panel have made these changes. kre had the opportunity to do so through his agreements with the various registries, but didn't. auDA will be forcing the issue.
auDA has gone through two (and a bit) very open, accountable and public processes to determine what's right for the future. I think if you read our reports, the membership of each of the panels, how auDA's board is constructed, and contrast them to the kre way, there's a lot of change, but not a lot of philosophical change. But where there is change, it is for the better.
For example, we recommended:
stringent privacy and consumer protection at all levels of competition
high availability by the registries
strong protection against domain squatters (particularly those in bad faith) as well as stamping out bad practices that NSI have been known to get up to (ie keeping expired domains from the available pool)
... the list continues...
Read our reports to find out what we've changed. The executive summary is fairly accurate in each, so it shouldn't tax you terribly.
Unlike most of you, I've had the chance to have lunch with kre, and he is no ogre. I publically thank kre for his stewardship of.au and the fostering of the Internet in Australia. But I also think it's time for.au to move into modern times.
c:\WINDOWS\system32>find/i "Regent" *.*
---------- FINGER.EXE
@(#) Copyright (c) 1980 The Regents of the University of California.
---------- FTP.EXE
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
---------- NSLOOKUP.EXE
@(#) Copyright (c) 1985,1989 Regents of the University of California.
---------- RCP.EXE
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
---------- RSH.EXE
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
FWIW, VMware use ISC's dhcp code in VMnetbridge:
---------- VMNETDHCP.EXE
$Id: inet_addr.c,v 1.1.1.1 1999/11/22 00:57:05 edward Exp $ Copyright (c) 1983, 1990, 1993 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
(rant)But they're okay, aren't they? They're not Microsoft.(rant off)
History lesson
The original DOS tcp stack has an interesting history. It's not related to the BSD 4.x stack in any way, and it shows.
It was originally developed by the LanMan group in combination with IBM during the original OS/2 collaboration. It was included in LanMan, OS/2 1.x, probably later versions of OS/2, and definitely Windows for Workgroups. It was forced upon the NT 3.1 development team (they weren't happy, apparently), forked at NT 3.1 and Win95. High quality descendants ended up NT 3.51 and its derivatives until NT 5.0 ~ beta 1. WinME still has the derivative of the LanMan/WfwG stack.
NT 5.0 (Win2K) adopted the FreeBSD stack prior to beta 2, and in fact, roughly around build 1477 Win2K smelled like FreeBSD to nmap. This adopted stack has been seriously tuned to provide even higher throughput of an already well acknowledged industry leader stack for throughput and solidity. Things like full SMP robustness, CPU affinity, etc were added (FreeBSD are adding them now in the -current branch; speak to Greg Lehey and co for more detail).
I don't know Robert personally, but I have met him at a couple of lunches for netbsd types. He's just a nice guy with a grey beard. Chris Disspain must have annoyed him somehow.
I am on the auDA DNS Competition panel, and realistically, it is time for Robert to give it over. It's just that he doesn't recognise auDA's authority. auDA has been inclusive. Each of the panels have 30 people on them from all walks of life, including those who represent - in my opinion - fringe interests. It's been a very interesting experience.
The Competition and Name panels have taken public comments, and the Competition panel has a meeting tomorrow to revise our final report based upon the submissions received. That's a public process done right.
As for privacy and anti-squatting, we are more strongly in favor of privacy and stricter on anti-squatting than the current rules, so the fears of delivering this stuff to the hands of big business are unfounded. WHOIS data will be severerly truncated to remove the ability to farm it for e-mail addresses, and includes strict agreements to prevent harvesting by registries or registrars. The consumer protection is going to be even stronger, based upon public input (and our own feelings on the matter as DNS consumers). We are also imposing minimum technical standards on the proposed single registry to make it extremely available, unlike munnari, which is just a Sun workstation running dns, ftp and whatever other jobs kre feels like running up.
auDA's inclusiveness and openness is a valid a reason as any for their legitimacy to obtain.au. In my opinion, it's time for the Internet to grow up in Australia.
Sorry to rain on your parade, dude, but our government is about as left wing as Hitler was. The Liberals (=Tories, Conservatives) privatise everything, they are pro-business, they are anti-environment (due to those scumbags, we're allowed to pollute 8% more than 1990 under Kyoto), and they are paternalistic, monarchistic and non-secular. A fairly unpleasant bunch of right wing loonies causing pain and angst to all fair minded Aussies (such as myself) as they wind the clock back to a mythical 1950's that never was.
I will be glad when the paternalistic bastards are gone.
I feel for the parents and their immense loss. There's no way that anyone can know their loss without going through it as well.
I have a friend, one who rings late at night, is regularly depressed, and more than just occasionally talks about ending it all. I make time for her, because otherwise, she'll just be another statistic before the year's out.
There's no reason to do take your own life. If you're in the same boat, get some help now. There are many anonymous forms of help, so no one needs to know. But it's so much better if you can ask your friends and family for help. If they had an ounce of humanity in them, like me, they'll take the calls at 3 am.
It's never too late to ask for help. The numbers for places like LifeLine (it's a secular suicide prevention line) are found in your phone books.
It is currently illegal to sell region-locked players in New Zealand. So they are not locked - so I am told, but I'm having trouble confirming this.
In Australia, all it takes is one court case to decide on prima-facie evidence that region locking reduces consumer choice and restricts competition, and any CE manufacturer importing region locked devices will be up for large fines. The vitamin industry was fined $AUD25.5m because of very similar behaviour, and the fines are relative the ability of the companies to pay. I'd love to see Sony, et al fined lots of $$$ because of their illegal players.
Re:Just one example of the stupidity of this speec
on
MS VP Speech Online
·
· Score: 2
Microsoft's approach to security can be found at the links below, not at the Register. The Register is a fine publication I read avidly, but like/., it's not exactly an unbiased view of the matter.
In addition, please take to me to the Sun pages for Security advice, or Checkpoint's (I couldn't find any, and I have partner access), or Redhat (there's no dedicated security pages - it's under "errata") and say that Microsoft doesn't take security as seriously or more seriously than these other respected companies.
Windows Xp is targeted first and foremost as a consumer OS. It will be replacing Win Me, which in my personal opinion is excellent. No more DOS! No more instability.
Anyway, Win2K has not been, and is not a flop. Most of the places I'm working at now are getting ready to deploy it as SP1 is out, SP2 is on the way, and more large sites have done the guinea pig bit for them, so they, too, can be lemmings.
However, I do agree with you, there are certain business practices that Microsoft needs to stop and consider before doing or else this will be point historians will point at, and say "Microsoft's decline started in 2001, when customers balked at..." Microsoft is completely customer driven, and if the customers do not come across, then they are stuffed.
/.... Microsoft... FUD... where to begin? Let's start with some facts from a beta tester.
In beta 2, the supplied MP3 encoder gets its Low Rate setting from the registry. This is set at the factory to 56k. You can go into the registry and change 56k to 128k or whatever. And it works, but 64k.wma files sound better than 128k mp3 files, and use less than half the space. And, so far, you can continue to turn off licensing your.wma files.
There are no NTFS or other deliberate data corruption ploys. I have existing MP3 files that play just fine in WMP and in WinAmp (which also continues to work).
CuteRip, my favorite ripper before WMP, continues to work, and continues to encode at whatever setting I set it to. WMP 8 plays these files just fine. But compared to WMP8, CuteRip is feature poor and slow. WMP8 not only goes and grabs the titles without paying for it, it retrieves album art work and orders it properly for you in your media library. As soon as you start ripping in WMP8, it starts playing the encoded files, and it encodes both.wma or.mp3 on my PIII/700 laptop about 3x real time. It's flawless. There seems to be no penalty for playing whilst ripping. It has digital and analog error correction if your CDs have a few scratches like mine do.
Microsoft may or may not ship a MP3 encoder with WMP 8, but it is in beta 2. Microsoft may or may not ship WMP 8 with the ability to turn off licensing.wma files, but it is in beta 2.
Sorry for the barrage of facts. I'm now returing you to your regularly scheduled fact-free Microsoft bash.
I say never let facts get in the way of a good Microsoft bashing article on/. For the very, very few of you using beta 2, the following registry key is of interest.
Just change it. The above will change it 128k (from 56k). The UI shows this and reflects it.
Also Media Player 8 will allow you to encode.wma files without setting the license keys. I'm not sure that this will make it to the final release, or even WMP9, but...
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I'd be getting Adult Check not passport.
Pr0n sites are hit much harder than the many federated Passport sites by desperate geeks wanting to see pics of Natalie Portman with grits.
I'm serious.
I work in the security industry, and I can tell you now that there are no other products that can do what the US govt want to do at the scale that they want to do in production today.
Sure there are alternatives, including the Sun Liberty thingy (substitute your evil vendor for someone else's), but no one else has a federated existing customer base of the size of Passport's.
I've reviewed various products like Netegrity's SiteMinder, iPlanet, and a few others including online banking authenticators, and trust me, it's really hard to get this right. And from the two Passport integrations I've seen, passport is done right. It's a breeze compared to Siteminder and doesn't install an SDK and samples on the box that you don't find unless you really look hard.
A government wants to just get something off the shelf and make it work. The scalability issue is the major one, and Passport is one of a very small number of products out there with a large user base today (30 million+).
The trick with any SSO scheme (and Passport is one of them) is the security administration associated with it. Plus you have to validate each and every site to ensure no leaks, no confidentiality breaches, good cookie practices, etc. This is MUCH harder than getting the SSO stuff to work.
And realistically, wouldn't you prefer the govt to just make services available online? I hate calling my govt's call centres - such a waste of everyone's time.
dselect sucks. It's the hardest thing about getting a working debian install, akin to a purity or intelligence test. This is exclusionary, and the only way to fix it is to streamline the way a base debian gets installed. And to me, that means dselect must go. It's too hard and takes too long to get right. I've always found it much easier and faster to completely ignore dselect and add the packages I need later using apt, which is far more friendly (and actually works).
In HCI terms, you *must* understand your users. If your user base is educated professionals who have done hundreds of debian installs and can compile their own kernel without assistance, then the current installer is probably okay, but it's not where Debian needs to go. It has the developer Linux user sown up; Debian needs to add to the collection other types of users.
So we pick another user set - the Linux newbie and/or Windows refugee. These people don't want to know about installers, and you must make the interface hard for them to screw up. Remember in HCI terms, allowing the user to screw up might be powerful, but it's wrong. I'm not talking about GUIs here (even though I like 'em), I'm talking HCI and interface. You can have a very decent text installer.
Moving along... You describe to the potential newbie users why you need an installer in very basic non-prejudiced terms, so they understand the problem space but without suggesting to them potential solutions. Grab their suggestions and recommendations and experiences and write them all down. This is your specification to a certain extent. Users have a keen insight on what they like and they don't like. Ignore their advice at your own peril.
You create a first cut at an installer, constantly second guessing the users: "will my mum be able to do this?" "Do I have to do this now?" "Is this a reasonable set of defaults that don't need to be adjusted?" You want the user to make as few decisions as possible, whilst postponing as many decisions as possible to allow experienced users to customize it if they wish.
Once the first cut of the installer is done, you must get a bunch of new users, and watch them use it without assistance. Learn from the mistakes or missteps they make, and learn if there's steps you can eliminate. And of course, eliminate any bugs the users find.
Repeat ad nauseam until it's hard to get a bodged unrecoverable install.
Developers are truly the worst people to ask to do this. They *know* the right answers, and will not even think that there might be other possibilities.
A good OS installer is like the old A/UX 3.0 installer - it literally was a one button install if you had a disk ready for it.
Other OS's with decent installers are NetBSD (with the possible exception of the very confusing disk partitioner) or WinXP (very few questions indeed).
Here's my post: (careful - long!)
/ for an example of Rhapsody development. 0/0005.html for both Alpha and Matrox development in 1996.
I am buying a new iMac roughly September, my first Mac in nearly six years. I've owned several PCs, one Digital Alpha OEM motherboard, and several Palm handhelds in the meantime.
I last used MacOS when 7.61 was out. I have personally owned four Macs - a Mac Plus, Mac II with the optional FPU and MMU - I owned and ran A/UX 3.0 , Duo 210 (still an excellent form factor), and my Quadra 630. I retired the Q630 in 1996 when I got my first PC. My first Mac was bought after a succession of excellent English or US games machines (Amstrad, Spectrum, Amiga), so not owning or using a PC until I was nearly 26 was fine by me. Until NT came out, PC's sucked because the OS sucked.
By 1994, my work had converted from being a helpdesk person looking after Mac users to a system administrator looking after Novell boxes. The lack of Macintosh Novell admin tools was a killer (even though we were about 80% Mac desktops), and the Apple PC coprocessor card that my last work PowerMac 6100 had was too slow to run the tools on a day to day basis. In 1995, I became an NT admin, and there's simply no way to manage NT from a Mac (nowadays you'd use VNC or Terminal Services, but then there was nothing). So I had to have a PC desktop. I couldn't stand (and still can't) Windows 3.1. Win95 had just come out which was better than Win31, but it still sucked. I've never used Win95 or Win98 for anything but a glorified games loader, and I've still yet to use Windows ME or XP Home, and am very unlikely to.
Once I was basically an NT-only guy at work, I decided to buy a "designed for NT" PC for home in September 1996. Through work, I was getting great prices on HP gear, which has the same sort of bullet proof reliability of all my previous Macs - I hate crap hardware. I moved from an eighteen month old 33 MHz Quadra 630 with a 13" RGB 640x480 monitor to a dual Pentium Pro 200 MHz, 17" monitor, bleeding edge 2D accelerator running at 1152x864 in millions of colors on NT Workstation 3.51. This rocked. It was more than an order of magnitude jump in processing power, and a jump from several crashes a day (MacOS 7.61 with dev tools) to none. Pre-emptive multitasking, protected memory, the works.
Imagine if you will - going from my 18 month old Mac to my new PC, it was more than the difference in productivity between a 4.77 MHz IBM PC running DOS to my first Mac. There was simply no comparison to what was before - I was hooked. Then I added Linux to my home box, but that sucked (and still does) but it was fun in a masochistic way. I had fun whilst debasing myself. I helped write the first Matrox Millennium graphic drivers for Linux*, for example. During this time, Apple went from being open and allowing BeOS and clones to exist to being a closed shop, killing off the clones. A/UX was well dead. The Mac business market was in retreat.
Why am I coming back? You certainly did me no favors when you killed Rhapsody on x86. I was developing Mozilla for Rhapsody/x86 DR2* at the time, and you killed my ability to still use an Apple operating system. Killing the x86 port was needlessly bloody-minded, and a monumentally stupid idea, especially now that both PPC CPU makers want to do embedded stuff, not 64 bit desktop stuff. I'm agnostic about hardware and almost all of my friends who I put onto Macs in my early days simply have no idea of what processor they are using. This is Apple's true strength! Remember when you did the PowerPC conversion? That was flawless - you couldn't tell, it just went faster. I'm sure Apple could do an iMac using the AMD Sledgehammer if you had the mind to. It's the OS that makes a computer. The hardware I own and recommend is fast, bullet-proof and supported. Things Apple does in its sleep. If Apple produced an x86 iMac, I would be in heaven. I don't know if you make $AUD500 on a loaded iMac, but that's the sort of money I don't mind paying for a good OS even if you didn't make an x86 Mac. I run XP Professional because it is fast, extremely stable and runs all my apps.
The iMac is beautiful. It's slow**, but almost fast enough to do what I will be using it for (browsing, e-mail, development), but I might be frustrated with it in less than a year from now unless it's seriously speed bumped. If you can stick a 2 GHz processor or say 2x or 4x 1 GHz processors in there I'll be happier. I buy machines to last three years (my 1996 Dual PPro was only retired two weeks ago when it finally died), so processing capabilities over the life of the product is a prime factor in my purchasing decision. But to make me really happy, it would be nice if you could do an order of magnitude thing for me. Like my Quadra 630 to Dual Pentium Pro 200, my 18 month old Dell is an 800 MHz PIII, so if you could somehow make the equivalent of an 8 GHz G4 by September in your consumer line, I would seriously have babies for any passing iMac.
Keep up the industrial design - you have that right. The iMac is inherently desirable. Just make it a LOT faster. And get waaaay more games on to the platform. I don't care if you have to prostitute yourself to get DirectX or the Playstation 2 API's - game developers' shouldn't need to (and don't have time or the desire to) re-target the 3D front end of their software, you have to come half-way for them. OpenGL is good for workstation stuff, but the reality is that most games are written for DirectX or PS2 games. And I don't play Quake.
Feel free to write back.
Andrew
* http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/132/1998/8/0
* http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/alpha/9609
** the 800 MHz G4 - I don't keep with Intel's faster clock is better thing. AMD is proof positive of this, and your Photoshop tests are interesting. I know that the G4 is per clock cycle more efficient, but it is not 2.75 times more efficient on integer stuff, which is the vast majority of what I do (development). I don't do Photoshop and have never owned a copy. I owned CodeWarrior and I liked the Project Builder on Rhapsody. You must be FAST when I compile stuff. This means good I/O, good memory bandwidth and fast integer CPUs.
Getting past what are the wrong tools first: Beowulf is an architecture to do massively parallel computation, so we can eliminate two of the best known HA tools. Microsoft Cluster Service is two or four node high availability, similar to HA Linux's efforts. NLBS is a software form of a hardware load balancer, similar to Cisco Local Directors and only really good for web farms. So what does MS provide to do similar stuff as Beowulf?
COM+ and Queueing Components. AppCenter.
The way it works is this. You write a COM+ component that is transactionally queuing aware. Each component takes a work unit in, processes it, and then sends the result of the transaction to the queueing components for reassembly or re-issue (if a node fails to submit a result, for example, good for checkpointing).
You can use normal Windows 2000 Professional boxes for the worker bees, and use a few Windows 2000 Server boxes to co-ordinate the issuing of jobs and control, and munging the result sets coming back in.
If you need to submit a wide variety of jobs, obviously the COM+ components will be changing regularly, it'd be a good idea to go to AppCenter so that you can treat a bunch of machines as single whole. This allows you to upgrade or deploy an app in a few mouse clicks to literally thousands of machines in a few seconds. AppCenter also has pretty good resource management, something that might be necessary if multiple jobs are running at the same time.
The cool thing is the development environment is really friendly and you can make COM+ components pretty easily and test them locally (for the n=1 case) before deploying to the farm.
There are also specialist MP libraries for the Win32 platform, such as PVM or MPI (WMPI). These have the benefits of re-using the knowledge and API's that users might already be familiar with - one of the biggest thing when a place converts from one supercomputer to another is rejigging and reoptimizing the code for the new architecture.
This is utter bullshit.
.Net languages, like Eiffel and so on. I haven't seen Fortran for a few years as most people are moving to C.
Sorry, but there you go. I know I'm going to lose karma for this post, but please a) check your facts b) don't spout off if you don't know what you're talking about.
Look for my post in the main thread for a clue.
Software development tools on Windows is lightyears ahead of most other platforms. Have you actually used Visual Studio 6 or 7? They kick ass. VS7 allows you to just do *stuff*, in C, C++, C# and VB, and any of the hosted
Debugging tools - you are soo wrong I can't believe you wrote that. You can target the local machine, a remote machine (even for full on kernel debugs if you're using a checked build), a CE device, and debug an emulated CE device. You can debug COM+ assemblies which are running locally or remotely. The tools are there, you're knowledge isn't.
You can work with 10 Windows boxes simultaneously, it's just obvious you don't know how.
Get down and dirty with a kernel project. I chose Reiserfs on alpha.
This taught me a lot about lkml politics, which is probably the first skill (and some larrikins would say, the only skill you need) you must master to be a successful long term kernel hacker. First lkml hint: don't slag off anyone. Don't piss off a few people in the know until you get to know them, and then...
Then, don't talk - do. Respect is directly based upon your skills with patches, and their acceptance rate.
Patch submission. Follow the standard guidelines (found elsewhere), but know now that Linus sucks at code control. The mainline kernel development process is slow, prone to serious lossage, allows regression, and is irreparably harmed by Linus' refusal to adopt modern code control practices. So when you submit a patch, don't worry if it's not accepted. Every time the kernel is revved, re-do your patch and re-submit. It'll eventually be accepted, particularly if it helps the kernel boot. For example, it took nearly a month of my submitting a two line patch to allow the alpha to boot before it was accepted into mainline 2.4.0pre development. That's why I ditched Linux for a while - dickheads in charge. All the *BSDs have better kernel development practices, and their bleeding edge kernels are far more stable than any stable Linux kernel. However, for various reasons, I get attracted back to Linux on a regular basis, like a fly to a pus-filled boil.
Anyway, the things that need desperate attention are:
the kernel janitor project (clean out the cruft!)
the linux kernel testing project
These are far more important than any single feature you might want to add, and in particular the kernel janitor project will help you get familiarized with the kernel the quickest.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ltp/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/kernel-janitor/
I was incredibly frustrated by the lack of software release management and code control skills exhibited by the kernel team when I was trying to make 2.4.0pre -7 to -11 work on my Alpha. These kernels didn't compile on any Alpha - at all. The fix was trivial, and yet Linus didn't accept my patch because he's (charitably) human or (uncharitably) a code control moron.
2.4 freezes were a joke. It was warm and slushy. Features and drivers crept in all the time, and few were doing stablization work. Necessary patches, like mine, to make entire architectures compile let alone boot went missing in action when unnecessary new features were glibly accepted. I was shocked to discover they were calling 2.4.0 "done".
The sooner Linus retires, the sooner Linux has a long term future.
It wont happen, but not because of technical difficulties. The NT kernel is easy to adapt to and has booted in the past from machines sporting various non-BIOS arrangements, like Digital's axp AlphaBIOS, SGI's Visual Workstation (which used ARC prom's on a not-at-all-like-ia32 architecture), x86-based ccNUMA machines like Unisys/HP/IBM 8, 16 and 32 way boxes which use a freaky custom BIOS that runs 2, 4 or 8 times on each 4 processor node until the OS can take over, IBM's PowerPC NT workstations (PowerSeries 440 and 8x0's and certain RS/6000's which used ARC firmware based upon Motorola's portable firmware). So for Apple to make a piece of hardware that suits the Mac first and NT second is no biggie. It would be up to Microsoft to port XP and .Net Server to the platform in the long term as long as Apple provided the technical details (hah!).
As long as OpenFirmware (or whatever they might choose) can run something like another program like an EFI thingy, or get all the initial files needed into RAM and then let the NT kernel take over as per normal, will mean users have multiple operating system support out of the box. But as Apple of the last five years has consistently refused to co-operate with hardware partners and those trying to make a go of the platform (Be for example), I doubt this course of action.
If I was Apple, I wouldn't be targeting ia32 except to keep Bill Gates awake; I would be keeping an eye out for ia64. The associated ia64 platform has a number of interesting technical features, including not least the lack of a traditional BIOS, and EFI / GPT based disk management, which allow far more Mac-like behavior than old style MBR disks.
And realistically, an ia64 port would give them the ability to make IBM/Motorola their bitch when it came to 64 bit processor supply. At the moment, only IBM make POWER architecture 64 bit processors (like the RS64 III, mainly in low volume, are multi-chip, and they are HUGE and relatively power hungry compared to the G4), and Motorola would probably dearly love to ditch a smallish player (in units consumed, particularly when you divide deliveries over an entire year) like Apple and concentrate on making money on embedded PPCs instead.
Here's the address you can send your displeasure to:
askthecivteam@firaxis.com
Please be civil.
Remember, if you _own_ a product, you are not _copying_ it or infringing Firaxis's rights in any way. As long as the patch (which I believe will involve a translation of the "Text" subdirectory) will not work unless you have the real thing, I can't see how Firaxis can lose... unless they heavy handedly stomp and piss on all their fans. Of which I am one.
For shame, Firaxis!
It's not about the connection method, it's the content that traverses the corporate boundary that is the issue.
If the content shouldn't be going over the boundary, then it doesn't matter how you achieved it - you're still in the wrong. You could do it in CORBA, you could do it in simple HTTP GET and POSTs, it doesn't matter.
As a developer, I can make SOAP invisible to all firewall administrators using HTTPS or abusing their firewall's limitations (most firewalls are incredibly stupid - they don't and can't parse even basic protocols like HTTP, thus let anything that goes out on port X out if port X is allowed outbound.
As a person responsible for security, your use of any services not explicitly allowed is probably against security policy. But security policy is there to enable business, not inhibit it. This is the single biggest failing of most security people: they lose sight of why they are there!.
If it takes too long to get a content-flow approved, then that is a failing of the content-flow negotiation process, and it's not about technology at all.
Hi John,
I've gone to cryptome on a regular basis - it's always an interesting read.
However, do you have any internal guidelines or a gut reaction for stuff you wont host?
Andrew
This article is full of FUD of the worst sort.
No corporation is going to use ONE box for 5000 users. It's stupid. Single points of failure for so many users are unbelievably expensive.
Simple equation:
Avg Cost per employee per hour (college/industry): $25/40
Downtime, cost per hour: $125,000 / $200,000
In a previous job, we had a server with 1100 people on it (a NT 4.0 box running File and Print and Exchange!), with 99.96% uptime. It was pretty busy, but how did I justify getting it a friend? Easy. The downtime cost PER HOUR was 3x the purchase price of the bloody expensive server we had. I managed to get another two servers fairly quickly, and divided the load.
Companies do not care about capex cost for the most part. They care about getting the job done in a reasonable amount of time, ease of getting staff at reasonable rates, and finally about stability of the environment.
Windows unreliability was a thing of Win3.1 days. Windows 2000 is rock solid. WinXP (which I have been using for more than a year now) is even more stable. You cannot criticize Windows for reliaiblity or manageability now. Check out application center 2000 - that baby has no competitors in the market today. Microsoft MOM is coming, and I dare you to find a competitive product in the Unix market place. Backup Exec already is the best backup solution - it's far superior to Legato. I've never used the IBM HSM jobbie, so I won't comment on it, but I doubt it's as good as BE.
There are areas where MS can improve:
* security
* privacy
* trust of end users (activation, et al)
* marketing practices
But scalability (both vertically and horizontally), reliability, servicability, and manageability are no longer Window's bug bears. This article might have been true in 1995, but not today.
Just ignore it.
Truth: auDA is not a private body. It is a government institued body, funded by (well, this bit needs to be worked out, as per Southpark's "1. Underpants 2. ? 3. Profit!")
kre, despite the incredibly long times it takes him to register .org.au, is actually a good bloke if you've met him. He's active in NetBSD development, and has a fair enough reason to dislike the media, as blatent unresearched and unprofessional misrepresentations like this prove.
However, it is time to move on. munnari served Australia well, but now its time to have technical standards, high availability, consumer and privacy protection. auDA, through the names and competition panel have made these changes. kre had the opportunity to do so through his agreements with the various registries, but didn't. auDA will be forcing the issue.
auDA has gone through two (and a bit) very open, accountable and public processes to determine what's right for the future. I think if you read our reports, the membership of each of the panels, how auDA's board is constructed, and contrast them to the kre way, there's a lot of change, but not a lot of philosophical change. But where there is change, it is for the better.
For example, we recommended:
Read our reports to find out what we've changed. The executive summary is fairly accurate in each, so it shouldn't tax you terribly.
Unlike most of you, I've had the chance to have lunch with kre, and he is no ogre. I publically thank kre for his stewardship of .au and the fostering of the Internet in Australia. But I also think it's time for .au to move into modern times.
(rant)But they're okay, aren't they? They're not Microsoft.(rant off) History lesson The original DOS tcp stack has an interesting history. It's not related to the BSD 4.x stack in any way, and it shows. It was originally developed by the LanMan group in combination with IBM during the original OS/2 collaboration. It was included in LanMan, OS/2 1.x, probably later versions of OS/2, and definitely Windows for Workgroups. It was forced upon the NT 3.1 development team (they weren't happy, apparently), forked at NT 3.1 and Win95. High quality descendants ended up NT 3.51 and its derivatives until NT 5.0 ~ beta 1. WinME still has the derivative of the LanMan/WfwG stack.
NT 5.0 (Win2K) adopted the FreeBSD stack prior to beta 2, and in fact, roughly around build 1477 Win2K smelled like FreeBSD to nmap. This adopted stack has been seriously tuned to provide even higher throughput of an already well acknowledged industry leader stack for throughput and solidity. Things like full SMP robustness, CPU affinity, etc were added (FreeBSD are adding them now in the -current branch; speak to Greg Lehey and co for more detail).
I don't know Robert personally, but I have met him at a couple of lunches for netbsd types. He's just a nice guy with a grey beard. Chris Disspain must have annoyed him somehow.
I am on the auDA DNS Competition panel, and realistically, it is time for Robert to give it over. It's just that he doesn't recognise auDA's authority. auDA has been inclusive. Each of the panels have 30 people on them from all walks of life, including those who represent - in my opinion - fringe interests. It's been a very interesting experience.
The Competition and Name panels have taken public comments, and the Competition panel has a meeting tomorrow to revise our final report based upon the submissions received. That's a public process done right.
As for privacy and anti-squatting, we are more strongly in favor of privacy and stricter on anti-squatting than the current rules, so the fears of delivering this stuff to the hands of big business are unfounded. WHOIS data will be severerly truncated to remove the ability to farm it for e-mail addresses, and includes strict agreements to prevent harvesting by registries or registrars. The consumer protection is going to be even stronger, based upon public input (and our own feelings on the matter as DNS consumers). We are also imposing minimum technical standards on the proposed single registry to make it extremely available, unlike munnari, which is just a Sun workstation running dns, ftp and whatever other jobs kre feels like running up.
auDA's inclusiveness and openness is a valid a reason as any for their legitimacy to obtain .au. In my opinion, it's time for the Internet to grow up in Australia.
I will be glad when the paternalistic bastards are gone.
I feel for the parents and their immense loss. There's no way that anyone can know their loss without going through it as well.
I have a friend, one who rings late at night, is regularly depressed, and more than just occasionally talks about ending it all. I make time for her, because otherwise, she'll just be another statistic before the year's out.
There's no reason to do take your own life. If you're in the same boat, get some help now. There are many anonymous forms of help, so no one needs to know. But it's so much better if you can ask your friends and family for help. If they had an ounce of humanity in them, like me, they'll take the calls at 3 am.
It's never too late to ask for help. The numbers for places like LifeLine (it's a secular suicide prevention line) are found in your phone books.
Yellow Ribbon Suicide Prevention Program
It is currently illegal to sell region-locked players in New Zealand. So they are not locked - so I am told, but I'm having trouble confirming this.
In Australia, all it takes is one court case to decide on prima-facie evidence that region locking reduces consumer choice and restricts competition, and any CE manufacturer importing region locked devices will be up for large fines. The vitamin industry was fined $AUD25.5m because of very similar behaviour, and the fines are relative the ability of the companies to pay. I'd love to see Sony, et al fined lots of $$$ because of their illegal players.
In addition, please take to me to the Sun pages for Security advice, or Checkpoint's (I couldn't find any, and I have partner access), or Redhat (there's no dedicated security pages - it's under "errata") and say that Microsoft doesn't take security as seriously or more seriously than these other respected companies.
Windows Xp is targeted first and foremost as a consumer OS. It will be replacing Win Me, which in my personal opinion is excellent. No more DOS! No more instability.
Anyway, Win2K has not been, and is not a flop. Most of the places I'm working at now are getting ready to deploy it as SP1 is out, SP2 is on the way, and more large sites have done the guinea pig bit for them, so they, too, can be lemmings.
However, I do agree with you, there are certain business practices that Microsoft needs to stop and consider before doing or else this will be point historians will point at, and say "Microsoft's decline started in 2001, when customers balked at..." Microsoft is completely customer driven, and if the customers do not come across, then they are stuffed.
/. ... Microsoft ... FUD... where to begin? Let's start with some facts from a beta tester.
In beta 2, the supplied MP3 encoder gets its Low Rate setting from the registry. This is set at the factory to 56k. You can go into the registry and change 56k to 128k or whatever. And it works, but 64k .wma files sound better than 128k mp3 files, and use less than half the space. And, so far, you can continue to turn off licensing your .wma files.
There are no NTFS or other deliberate data corruption ploys. I have existing MP3 files that play just fine in WMP and in WinAmp (which also continues to work).
CuteRip, my favorite ripper before WMP, continues to work, and continues to encode at whatever setting I set it to. WMP 8 plays these files just fine. But compared to WMP8, CuteRip is feature poor and slow. WMP8 not only goes and grabs the titles without paying for it, it retrieves album art work and orders it properly for you in your media library. As soon as you start ripping in WMP8, it starts playing the encoded files, and it encodes both .wma or .mp3 on my PIII/700 laptop about 3x real time. It's flawless. There seems to be no penalty for playing whilst ripping. It has digital and analog error correction if your CDs have a few scratches like mine do.
Microsoft may or may not ship a MP3 encoder with WMP 8, but it is in beta 2. Microsoft may or may not ship WMP 8 with the ability to turn off licensing .wma files, but it is in beta 2.
Sorry for the barrage of facts. I'm now returing you to your regularly scheduled fact-free Microsoft bash.
CuteRip works just fine.
I say never let facts get in the way of a good Microsoft bashing article on /. For the very, very few of you using beta 2, the following registry key is of interest.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlaye r\ Settings\MP3Encoding]
"LowRate"=dword:0001f400
Just change it. The above will change it 128k (from 56k). The UI shows this and reflects it.
Also Media Player 8 will allow you to encode .wma files without setting the license keys. I'm not sure that this will make it to the final release, or even WMP9, but ...
Good call.