Iran will democatise in the next 5-10 years, due entirely to a large young population
Young population? You must be kidding.
High schoolers and students are the first people used as foot soldiers for any anti-government actions, by all forces, internal and external for the country. They are great material for that use, too, as they easily accept the most idiotic "teachings" as long as they are not what the rest of the society supports.
This is why any self-respecting government is prepared to face those "protests" and "revolutions", and defeat them. One that don't, are already conquered by such "revolutions" directed from abroad or by local lunatics.
By the time "WP8" will be in any way usable, the platform everyone but Apple will be running, will be called Ubuntu Phone Remix or Qt-Android. The latter will be double ironic if Nokia itself didn't support it. Triple if Qt will be BSD-licensed because Nokia abandoned it in favor of.NET.
Plagiarism is independent from copyright infringement -- it is a form of both libel and fraud. The fact that existing (massively fucked up) law conflates the two and makes copyright the only protection against plagiarism, does not make it dependent on the justification for current copyright laws. GPL openly uses copyright to achieve goals that are the opposite to the goals of people who created current copyright-related laws, and even shitheads like yourself stopped screaming about it being some kind of hypocrisy, so I recommend shutting up and writing something about Gimp not supporting CMYK.
I spend at least half of my time at work writing GPL software. I work for a hardware manufacturer, and all my employer wants from GPL software is to have its hardware supported.
The models with software being sold to consumers, or written before having any idea of its application, then expecting a commercial success by selling expensive boxes, work very poorly with software. When unwashed consumer masses are involved, nothing ever gets accomplished without a massive marketing battle with everyone else in the same market. When any large and expensive piece of software is produced, the first user will turn it into a service-like model just by the virtue of being different from developer's stupid idea of what users want to use. In the end. While people like you, love to fantasize about running a highly profitable game studio or starting "the next Microsoft/Adobe/Oracle", both models had exhausted themselves already.
An overwhelming majority of people who used Maya or 3DMax used pirated versions, and have no idea what other 3D software exists. Among the remaining minority, a majority are "graphics artists" who only know what was spoonfed to them in their courses. They would not recognize Blender as a 3D modeling software if it was in front of them, being used.
I never understoof, WTF it was about. Was it to make hardware manufacturers in some way change its design or pricing (ex: abandon OpenGL, sell more low-end devices subsidized by Microsoft)? Was it to make Microsoft somehow assist them in making their hardware more compatible with Windows games? Was it to somehow hurt competitors (who are right there in the same "alliance")?
BBC was subjected to the same criticism. The difference is, UK no longer has imperial ambitions, and BBC ended up being superior to commercial services due to the massive whoredom of the latter far outweighing bureaucracy and bias of the former.
UAC can be debated. In reality, UAC is a good thing, although how MS got a patent on a "graphical sudo" is beyond me.
It may be a "good thing" for Microsoft, considering what a disaster it was before and what a slightly lesser disaster it is with that. In reality, when security is concerned, "if you have to ask, the answer is no". Please note that Linux desktops mostly moved from sudo to PolicyKit, and use password prompts not to verify if potentially security-breaking operation is started by an authorized user but to check if the user really wants to perform an administrative operation, so he won't just press OK. I expect that cached permissions in sudo will be completely disabled after that transition will be complete.
1: Filesystem encryption,
This is only justified for non-removable media when user has to deal with attacker having access to hardware AND attacker is interested in reading or altering data instead of destroying it, AND computer is always off when attacker can access it. Never in my life I was in a situation when I could benefit from this, or seen someone who can. With removable media it is somewhat justified because it's shipped and carried in all kinds of potentially hostile environments.
[1]: IronKeys in my experience are the only game in town when it comes to on-board hardware encryption for USB flash drives. They are expensive, but worth it, assuming the machine its used on is not compromised.
There is no way in Hell I will trust unknown implementation of unknown encryption algorithm on a media type known to move data around its physical addresses.
2: ASLR, DEP, and other memory protection.
Useful, but only marginally because almost everything that was exploitable is still exploitable with a more convoluted exploit.
3: Limited application context.
This is a part of design. Windows has such a hard time using it (cutting IE away from the rest of the system that you mentioned being the only feasible, and extremely inconvenient for the user who has to download files, example).
4: Ability to deny access after "x" amount of bad password guesses. This is important to prevent brute forcing of either local access (via a hardware device that guesses passwords), or from remote.
Absolutely worthless for any purposes other than being an easy DoS target. "Locking out" of this kind needs an override to restore access after it happens, and access to such override is protected by... another password!
5: Ability to check for unauthorized modifications to the operating system.
This can not be possibly a part of the system because it has to be performed in a known-unmodified environment outside of the system. Otherwise it's no better than antivirus.
The only real way to detect modifications even with rootkits present is to boot the OS from other media, check the hashes of the programs on the system against a known good list, and discard false positives.
The only real way to detect modifications is to boot from a read-only media. There is no requirement for OS being the same as OS being booted -- in fact, it's better to keep checker the Hell away from the image that is normally booted, lest the user will be tempted to run it from there.
6: The ability to have audit logs sent to another machine. Having this ability may mean the difference between an investigation of a breach being unable to commence versus being able to backtrack to the next link in the chain.
The existence of such logging is a part of design -- to be in any way effective it has to be used by everything worth being monitored, OR it has to log every system call.
That foreign office has to interchange with the tax office and others for example. All of them use Windows, and rely on bureaucratic process; likely invoking custom forms and standardized (Win-only) hardware.
If government uses scripting in Microsoft Word and Excel to handle its forms, the problem is not with software.
Also they've been dual-booting
No one sane dual-boots an office computer. If anyone did, the whole thing would be nothing but sabotage.
still due to requiring Win-only legacy software (tax office again), so that's were the user inertia still was.
Tax law most likely changed multiple times over the years, requiring full rewrite of tax-related software pieces. If someone kept rewriting them in Visual Basic in the midst of migration to Linux, he was either a complete idiot or intentionally sabotaging the system. Much more likely no such thing existed because tax handling is server-side in custom-made accounting systems.
Microsoft fanboys/marketing people are at it again. The link you shown counts SALES of operating systems. I am sure, in some other comment you foam at the mouth about "not being able to sell software" if it is free.
The rest of your comment is a mix of trolling and recommending things that would be between stupid and suicidal.
They never wrote any drivers. This part is certain. I don't think, they ever encountered any problems with printers, either, but the part about writing driver is easier to prove.
1) They have a special use printer (someone mentioned Zebras above)
They claim they had to write drivers. I do not believe this ever happened.
that they had to create drivers for (I had this same issues with Linux based thin clients connecting to my citrix servers)
Citrix does its best to make their products impossible to use with Linux. It uses Linux in many of those products, but they still are only usable with Windows clients, so no sane person will use them in any Linux-based setup.
The only printers that I have seen unsupported by CUPS, are hopelessly obsolete or extra-cheap models specifically made for sporadic home use. Anyone who keeps those in a government or company office should be fired because those things have truly astronomical cost in in toner/ink, service and wasted time after they jam.
Security "features" of a typical desktop OS is not what makes it secure -- it's what annoys the user while pretending to make the computer less vulnerable. UAC and antivirus are "security features", and so are Window Firewall, ACLs, etc.
What makes OS secure is secure design and lack of vulnerabilities, Windows has none of that and never will.
While it's very likely that Microsoft-addicted users complained, I am absolutely certain that no resources were spent on "writing printer and scanner drivers", thus making the whole claim untrustworthy.
Someone has to be investigated for corruption -- IIRC, in Germany it actually something that matters.
Trade secrets, as opposed to NDAs. You and many others don't seem to understand the difference.
There are no "objective" secrets -- secrets are applicable only to organizations and groups of people who agree on something being their secret. This is what is covered by NDA. Without NDA there are no trade secrets. Without trade secrets there would be no purpose for NDA. You can't declare anything a trade secret if there never was NDA for it, and you can't apply it to anyone not under NDA -- if they know it, it's not a secret anymore.
Take a look at both the UTSA and California's Civil Code sections 3426.1-3426.11. If you knowingly receive trade secrets from a trusted party and use them to profit, even if you've never signed an NDA in your life, you are still guilty of a crime. So I'll say it to you as well, please stop misinforming people and do your research before handing out amateur legal advice.
That only makes sense because a person would be actively assisting someone in performing a criminal action, thus being a participant in it. It is also useless in any imaginable scenario short of blatant corporate espionage because it requires that outside party knows about NDA before receiving information. On top of everything, even if someone is punished for such disclosure, if it was a public disclosure, the secret is gone nevertheless.
Neither of this is in any way applicable to anything with PS3 and iPhone "secrets" because there was no disclosure by anyone under NDA in the first place.
CPU production is only a small part of the whole device. Sony has higher volume for all components that are re-used through their all products, so it's cheaper for them. There is also a matter of reusing R&D across generations of PS and across product lines -- Microsoft has none of that, and likely had to outsource all of its hardware R&D except some pieces.
Sony has its own hardware production, Microsoft outsources everything. Sony did R&D on consumer electronics since it was founded, Microsoft has a bunch of recent graduates with "cool ideas" (such as Kinect) and megalomania. Sony competed with Nintendo and Sega for the whole lifetime of Playstation line, Microsoft dumps billions on random R&D without any hope to recoup anything in half a century, just because it has money flowing from Windows and Office.
Sony may be evil, but they are not dumping hardware onto the market to support games sales.
That depends on how long that email is.
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Iran will democatise in the next 5-10 years, due entirely to a large young population
Young population? You must be kidding.
High schoolers and students are the first people used as foot soldiers for any anti-government actions, by all forces, internal and external for the country. They are great material for that use, too, as they easily accept the most idiotic "teachings" as long as they are not what the rest of the society supports.
This is why any self-respecting government is prepared to face those "protests" and "revolutions", and defeat them. One that don't, are already conquered by such "revolutions" directed from abroad or by local lunatics.
By the time "WP8" will be in any way usable, the platform everyone but Apple will be running, will be called Ubuntu Phone Remix or Qt-Android. The latter will be double ironic if Nokia itself didn't support it. Triple if Qt will be BSD-licensed because Nokia abandoned it in favor of .NET.
Plagiarism is independent from copyright infringement -- it is a form of both libel and fraud. The fact that existing (massively fucked up) law conflates the two and makes copyright the only protection against plagiarism, does not make it dependent on the justification for current copyright laws. GPL openly uses copyright to achieve goals that are the opposite to the goals of people who created current copyright-related laws, and even shitheads like yourself stopped screaming about it being some kind of hypocrisy, so I recommend shutting up and writing something about Gimp not supporting CMYK.
I spend at least half of my time at work writing GPL software. I work for a hardware manufacturer, and all my employer wants from GPL software is to have its hardware supported.
The models with software being sold to consumers, or written before having any idea of its application, then expecting a commercial success by selling expensive boxes, work very poorly with software. When unwashed consumer masses are involved, nothing ever gets accomplished without a massive marketing battle with everyone else in the same market. When any large and expensive piece of software is produced, the first user will turn it into a service-like model just by the virtue of being different from developer's stupid idea of what users want to use. In the end. While people like you, love to fantasize about running a highly profitable game studio or starting "the next Microsoft/Adobe/Oracle", both models had exhausted themselves already.
You can distinguish between genuine trolls and Microsoft marketing people?
An overwhelming majority of people who used Maya or 3DMax used pirated versions, and have no idea what other 3D software exists.
Among the remaining minority, a majority are "graphics artists" who only know what was spoonfed to them in their courses. They would not recognize Blender as a 3D modeling software if it was in front of them, being used.
I never understoof, WTF it was about. Was it to make hardware manufacturers in some way change its design or pricing (ex: abandon OpenGL, sell more low-end devices subsidized by Microsoft)? Was it to make Microsoft somehow assist them in making their hardware more compatible with Windows games? Was it to somehow hurt competitors (who are right there in the same "alliance")?
I am sure that in "some other comment" you advocate drowning puppies.
Actually in my system of values drowning puppies is more ethical than using Windows -- it does not increase Microsoft's mindshare.
Perhaps when you discuss solutions to the problem of video on open source operating systems, you will write something worth reading.
That would be like asking me to recommend a new KKK uniform (my answer would be "a coffin").
BBC was subjected to the same criticism. The difference is, UK no longer has imperial ambitions, and BBC ended up being superior to commercial services due to the massive whoredom of the latter far outweighing bureaucracy and bias of the former.
UAC can be debated. In reality, UAC is a good thing, although how MS got a patent on a "graphical sudo" is beyond me.
It may be a "good thing" for Microsoft, considering what a disaster it was before and what a slightly lesser disaster it is with that. In reality, when security is concerned, "if you have to ask, the answer is no". Please note that Linux desktops mostly moved from sudo to PolicyKit, and use password prompts not to verify if potentially security-breaking operation is started by an authorized user but to check if the user really wants to perform an administrative operation, so he won't just press OK. I expect that cached permissions in sudo will be completely disabled after that transition will be complete.
1: Filesystem encryption,
This is only justified for non-removable media when user has to deal with attacker having access to hardware AND attacker is interested in reading or altering data instead of destroying it, AND computer is always off when attacker can access it. Never in my life I was in a situation when I could benefit from this, or seen someone who can. With removable media it is somewhat justified because it's shipped and carried in all kinds of potentially hostile environments.
[1]: IronKeys in my experience are the only game in town when it comes to on-board hardware encryption for USB flash drives. They are expensive, but worth it, assuming the machine its used on is not compromised.
There is no way in Hell I will trust unknown implementation of unknown encryption algorithm on a media type known to move data around its physical addresses.
2: ASLR, DEP, and other memory protection.
Useful, but only marginally because almost everything that was exploitable is still exploitable with a more convoluted exploit.
3: Limited application context.
This is a part of design. Windows has such a hard time using it (cutting IE away from the rest of the system that you mentioned being the only feasible, and extremely inconvenient for the user who has to download files, example).
4: Ability to deny access after "x" amount of bad password guesses. This is important to prevent brute forcing of either local access (via a hardware device that guesses passwords), or from remote.
Absolutely worthless for any purposes other than being an easy DoS target. "Locking out" of this kind needs an override to restore access after it happens, and access to such override is protected by... another password!
5: Ability to check for unauthorized modifications to the operating system.
This can not be possibly a part of the system because it has to be performed in a known-unmodified environment outside of the system. Otherwise it's no better than antivirus.
The only real way to detect modifications even with rootkits present is to boot the OS from other media, check the hashes of the programs on the system against a known good list, and discard false positives.
The only real way to detect modifications is to boot from a read-only media. There is no requirement for OS being the same as OS being booted -- in fact, it's better to keep checker the Hell away from the image that is normally booted, lest the user will be tempted to run it from there.
6: The ability to have audit logs sent to another machine. Having this ability may mean the difference between an investigation of a breach being unable to commence versus being able to backtrack to the next link in the chain.
The existence of such logging is a part of design -- to be in any way effective it has to be used by everything worth being monitored, OR it has to log every system call.
That foreign office has to interchange with the tax office and others for example. All of them use Windows, and rely on bureaucratic process; likely invoking custom forms and standardized (Win-only) hardware.
If government uses scripting in Microsoft Word and Excel to handle its forms, the problem is not with software.
Also they've been dual-booting
No one sane dual-boots an office computer. If anyone did, the whole thing would be nothing but sabotage.
still due to requiring Win-only legacy software (tax office again), so that's were the user inertia still was.
Tax law most likely changed multiple times over the years, requiring full rewrite of tax-related software pieces. If someone kept rewriting them in Visual Basic in the midst of migration to Linux, he was either a complete idiot or intentionally sabotaging the system. Much more likely no such thing existed because tax handling is server-side in custom-made accounting systems.
US propaganda abroad -- subverting legitimate political movements to produce US puppets since WWII.
The original trolling is in the article. Trolling in comments is done by article author's colleagues from marketing companies.
The author of the article is most likely a Microsoft contractor.
Congratulations, you are a tool.
Microsoft fanboys/marketing people are at it again. The link you shown counts SALES of operating systems. I am sure, in some other comment you foam at the mouth about "not being able to sell software" if it is free.
The rest of your comment is a mix of trolling and recommending things that would be between stupid and suicidal.
They never wrote any drivers. This part is certain. I don't think, they ever encountered any problems with printers, either, but the part about writing driver is easier to prove.
1) They have a special use printer (someone mentioned Zebras above)
They claim they had to write drivers. I do not believe this ever happened.
that they had to create drivers for (I had this same issues with Linux based thin clients connecting to my citrix servers)
Citrix does its best to make their products impossible to use with Linux. It uses Linux in many of those products, but they still are only usable with Windows clients, so no sane person will use them in any Linux-based setup.
The only printers that I have seen unsupported by CUPS, are hopelessly obsolete or extra-cheap models specifically made for sporadic home use. Anyone who keeps those in a government or company office should be fired because those things have truly astronomical cost in in toner/ink, service and wasted time after they jam.
Security "features" of a typical desktop OS is not what makes it secure -- it's what annoys the user while pretending to make the computer less vulnerable. UAC and antivirus are "security features", and so are Window Firewall, ACLs, etc.
What makes OS secure is secure design and lack of vulnerabilities, Windows has none of that and never will.
While it's very likely that Microsoft-addicted users complained, I am absolutely certain that no resources were spent on "writing printer and scanner drivers", thus making the whole claim untrustworthy.
Someone has to be investigated for corruption -- IIRC, in Germany it actually something that matters.
Trade secrets, as opposed to NDAs. You and many others don't seem to understand the difference.
There are no "objective" secrets -- secrets are applicable only to organizations and groups of people who agree on something being their secret. This is what is covered by NDA. Without NDA there are no trade secrets. Without trade secrets there would be no purpose for NDA.
You can't declare anything a trade secret if there never was NDA for it, and you can't apply it to anyone not under NDA -- if they know it, it's not a secret anymore.
Take a look at both the UTSA and California's Civil Code sections 3426.1-3426.11. If you knowingly receive trade secrets from a trusted party and use them to profit, even if you've never signed an NDA in your life, you are still guilty of a crime. So I'll say it to you as well, please stop misinforming people and do your research before handing out amateur legal advice.
That only makes sense because a person would be actively assisting someone in performing a criminal action, thus being a participant in it. It is also useless in any imaginable scenario short of blatant corporate espionage because it requires that outside party knows about NDA before receiving information. On top of everything, even if someone is punished for such disclosure, if it was a public disclosure, the secret is gone nevertheless.
Neither of this is in any way applicable to anything with PS3 and iPhone "secrets" because there was no disclosure by anyone under NDA in the first place.
CPU production is only a small part of the whole device. Sony has higher volume for all components that are re-used through their all products, so it's cheaper for them. There is also a matter of reusing R&D across generations of PS and across product lines -- Microsoft has none of that, and likely had to outsource all of its hardware R&D except some pieces.
Sony has its own hardware production, Microsoft outsources everything.
Sony did R&D on consumer electronics since it was founded, Microsoft has a bunch of recent graduates with "cool ideas" (such as Kinect) and megalomania.
Sony competed with Nintendo and Sega for the whole lifetime of Playstation line, Microsoft dumps billions on random R&D without any hope to recoup anything in half a century, just because it has money flowing from Windows and Office.
Sony may be evil, but they are not dumping hardware onto the market to support games sales.
n/t