Actually, mandatory insurance has caused the price of auto insurance to skyrocket. In states, like Massachusetts, the State even sets the prices the insurance companies can charge. What this causes is a yearly lobby war to increase the price of insurance, which then all insurance providers are forced to do.
If you look at a state without legislated profit (ie: doesn't require auto insurance), you see an interesting picture. NH doesn't require auto insurance, and the insurance prices there are much lower.
Nowadays people are more worried about speeding tickets than they are about accidents. This is largely because of the nanny-state insistance on forcing you to have insurance coverage.
In Windows, you run Windows client, such as 2000 or XP, for a workstation. If you want to run a server, you now buy another version of Windows, Windows Server, and install that instead; you don't use that as a workstation. The strengths and weaknesses differ.
Why is it different because FC isn't as good for desktop use as Ubunutu? How about we call FC "Linux Server" and Ubuntu "Linux XP"? Now is it different?
I personally wouldn't even go that far. I don't like the cruft and annoyance that comes with FC. I use something even more basic: Slackware. I still use Ubuntu on my desktop, as I want it to *just work*, and it does.
And you could use similar tools to manage things like fstab on Linux. Windows is not an easy GUI, and most unices are not easy, either. MacOS has all things UNIX too, hidden under a well designed GUI.
On Windows, you routinely have to do things to keep it running, after the fact. With UNIX, you set up the system, and it doesn't require modification until it's job changes. On UNIX, you can easily connect remotely, you don't have to log of a user, or mess with a bad user account model; you just log in, and fix it. With Windows, you have to get the remote functions to work, then log in, then close everything the user has open, then log out, log in, fix it, log out, log in, and close the remote desktop program.
Why should the casual user have to do anything to use the machine? There should be things that admins do, that they can do remotely, that the user never notices. The only times an admin should have to deal with a user machine are for upgrades, break/fix on hardware, and to change the operation of the machine.
Would be nice, except nearly everyone in the US is sending data over ATT, Level3, or similar, lines. Those telecomms that were lobbying for this are the backbone providers, and that's where they could do QoS.
For example, I have a cable modem through Charter. For me to get to Slashdot, I have to go through *at least* three ATT nodes. To get to Google, I'm going through Level3. Hell, I have to go through ATT nodes to get the MCI, Sprint, Cingular, and even Speakeasy.
Blacklisting in that way would mean that it's very likely that *nobody* could get to the site, and switching ISP wouldn't fix it.
Re:This happens all the time...
on
Faking a Company
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· Score: 1
Why should they have all those good confinscated? There should be an injunction placed on the sale of the merchandise, and they should be required to be relabelled to not violate NEC's trademark. *THERE IS NO PIRACY IN ANY FORM.* Nothing was taking from NEC, NEC lost no property or money. A company was masquerading as NEC, and taking advantage of the name. That is trademark infringment.
If they change their name from NEC to NAC or something, they should be able to keep on going doing business. Then you deal with the infringment of the NEC mark in court, and figure out what restitution is appropriate.
Also, "Kudos" is a snack bar when you use it as a proper noun. They do deserve some praise for getting their sneaky plan to dispatch with sales channel agreements and advertising from their costs, but they can buy their own food, thank you very much.
Re:This happens all the time...
on
Faking a Company
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· Score: 3, Insightful
So... these people set up a company, did legitimate business, developed products, shipped and sold products. They did everything any other company does, except come up with their own name and logo.
Perhaps these "official-looking documents", passes, ID cards, etcetera, *were* official. Perhaps they were just issued by the bizzaro-NEC that was stepping on the real NEC's name. That's could still be nothing more than trademark infringment.
There is nothing here that even resembles piracy, or copyright infringment, or theft. These people used the NEC mark, and the real NEC is pissed. These guys were able to exploit the ease with which NEC could close business deals for manufacturing, or marketing a product. They have been riding in on the coattails of a large company with an established brand *by infringing their trademark*.
There is shared bandwidth among associated stations, enourmous overhead in the sessions, and the possibility for easy interference. I've seen wireless keyboards that will screw up 802.11b/g links, in addition to microwaves, phones, handheld radios, other 802.11b/g networks, etc. Alos, performance degrades with link load.
As an example, at my house I can't reliably watch an xvid movie across 802.11g. I get excellent signal, a 54Mbps link, and low latency. That is, I get those until I try to watch a movie, and then the latency get quite unbearable.
So basically, 802.11g is fine for browsing, copying data, and similar, but it is nowhere near reliable enough for gaming, and it doesn't provide reliablity or bandwidth sufficient for new LAN games.
Anybody that has to deal with a marketing department has heard of that. They seem to love to embed dozens of 1024x768 32bpp unscaled TIFFs in their Word docs.
That's all only too true. It's amazing that people seem to forget that there was a time that the Internet was around, but there was no WWW. Even back in the earliest days of Linux, there was a good amount of data sitting on USENET about everything.
Up until fairly recently, MS used the fragility of typical UNIX filesystems as a reason that NT was better! The other vendors that used journalling filesystems were pitching it as a selling point, too. It might not have been common knowledge, but it wasn't exactly rare knowledge, either.
Linux won't install onto NTFS (complete lack of documentation from MS does not help), but it will install into a vFAT partition. The compression is possible, though not likely, and I doubt the file encryption will ever be supported. If you install Windows into a FAT partition, then you can use UMSDOS to install Linux onto the same, and you need no other partitions.
If you wanted to use Captive in the way you're talking about, then you would need a partition to load the Linux kernel and support binaries, and you could then have all of your other files on the Captive NTFS partition. Nobody has done this because it's both not really worth it and not very efficient.
Linux can use swapfiles. Swap partitions are just a generally better way.
You're completely correct about the filesystem. You're also right that Linux was not ready for what a lot of people were pushing it to do. All I'm saying is that by bring up a server, you really need to understand the system. This is the same problem that so many Windows Server locations have - the admin in charge didn't learn what was needed, and either it is poorly implemented, it's not robust, or it just plain isn't working right.
As I said, it isn't your fault that ext2 is fragile. It's only your fault that you didn't know what you needed to know before it was put into production. You might be right, and there was no documentation about it at the time. In that case, you probably shouldn't have used an undocumented system.;-) At least it wasn't a huge and critical system, and at least your were able to easily recover from it. However, you just as easily could have lost everything on both servers.
Ultimately, the blame game doesn't matter. You dealt with the problem when it came up, and now you know. It's always the danger of going with something that isn't well documented: you can't go in with your eyes completely open.
I agree with you completely. The people the GP was talking to were rude and childish. Instead of helping to fix the damage, they belittled instead. The documentation on these tools is still nothing grand.
Ext2 wasn't, and isn't, fine. It's a known issue in that style of fs, and one that anyone building a critical server that uses something like it should be aware of. You need to have considered the possibility of the filesystem being trashed, and have a contingency to deal with that. I always treated ext2 very similarly to how I treated FAT. In either case, you *knew* the filesystem would get corrupted, so you did everything you could to prevent it, while keeping backups for when you lost the battle.
Woah, calm down there. I'm not doing the same thing as what was described. I'm saying that you can't disclaim all responsibility. If you chose a platform, and that platform failed, then it *is* your fault for choosing a platform and not covering the weakness. It *is not* your fault that the platform had the weakness; you didn't create the platform. I also said that it was inappropriate that you were flamed for pointing out that ext2 had the problem. It isn't as if you were making it up.
I knew then that ext2 had problems with FS corruption, and I knew that before 1997. It was the same problem that most UNIX flavors had, and anything that isn't journalled has always had. DOS and Windows 9x have this problem, SunOS has it, DEC OSF has it, etc. If you're using a non-journalled filesystem, you will have corruption if you lose power without writing out your cache. That's why a *lot* of systems out there did not run with write caching enabled. It's also why most UNIX systems, even workstations, were attached to a UPS.
Perhaps you couldn't find anything specific to ext2, and fine, then you didn't explicitly know that ext2 had the same weaknesses as similar filesystems. The documentation for the platform should have included at least a note about the issue. I knew ext2 had this problem before I ever had an encounter with it on my own data.
Good practices have always included backing up the data, documenting the system build process, and putting a UPS on the system. Even without the UPS, you should not have lost your data, but you would still have potential downtime after the power failure.
When you put up a system, you're taking responsibilty for it. If it failed, then it's your problem. Maybe you didn't do your job well enough, and choose poorly. Maybe there was an undocumented bug that you couldn't have known about. Either way, *it is your problem*, and your responsibility for it includes dealing with a catastrophic failure.
While it wasn't your fault that ext2 was terrible, if you were going to use Linux w/ ext2 as a server, you should have done the research on what the pitfalls were. Information that ext2 would not survive a power failure was rather common. It's been standard for a UNIX server to require a UPS for a long time, and that is one of the biggest reasons.
Likewise, you shouldn't have gotten crap for saying that ext2 was fragile. If you set up those systems, you should've gotten crap for not protecting them against their known weaknesses. In other words, don't blame the user because the OS has a fault, but do blame the admin for not equipping the environment properly.
I do something very similar to that, unless time is critical. Most people just learn better from doing the work themselves. If you are handed the answer, you haven't really learned why it is the answer. I prefer to point people in the right direction, whether it is telling them what manpage to look at, or which howto or FAQ, etc. That teaches how to find the answer, the answer itself, how to find other answers, and hopefully why these things are the answers. You end up with a person that has learned to solve problems on their own, which is much better than one that can only parrot your answer back to the computer.
Honestly, if you're just going to tell someone the answer, why not just do it for them. At least that way you know it'll be right the first time, and it will probably take less time.
In your case, perhaps you just aren't interested in learned for the sake of learning. Maybe you don't care to understand the computer and its software; you just want it to work. In that case, you're better off on either a distro more like Ubuntu or Linspire, or on a more hand-holding platform, like Windows or MacOS. I didn't have to do much of anything to get SUSE to just work, but I did go out of my way to get hardware that's well supported by Linux.
That certificate costs several thousand dollars. There will likely be additional fees from Microsoft.
What this means is that low-volume hardware becomes instantly more expensive, and amateur driver developers are locked out. You won't even be loading a test driver into your system without getting it signed. That should make driver dev a whole lot of fun.
What do you get out of this? Why, DRM, and nothing else, of course.
This is yet another reason that I *must* avoid Vista in my organization. Some of the software that is critical here uses unsigned drivers. Some hardware is out of production, and the latest driver is years old. I'm not throwing out my infrastructure just because Microsoft decided to sleep with Hollywood; I'll be throwing out Microsoft, because it's far less expensive to do.
DRM has absolutely nothing to do with security. The Vista DRM is all about Microsoft telling you what you're allowed to do with your OS, and RIAA/MPAA telling you what you're allowed to do with your content.
Personally, I don't want TPM. It allows my computer to be uniquely identified down to the hardware. It's the same reason that people were so upset over the privacy implications of the Pentium III CPU serial number. The whole DRM nonsense that is destroying technology today is ridiculous. It's like your TV telling you that you're not allowed to watch something because it isn't carrying a government approved rating.
To take your woefully incorrect idea just a little further, that policy which you suggest would mean that you couldn't back up the data. It would be locked to the TPM chip and the user credentials. It would be unrecoverable. BTW - Vista won't run on mobile devices, so that part of your argument is just meaningless.
Between the DRM, the hardware requirements, that so much of the system has been rewritten, new incompatabilities, and who knows what else, Vista adoption *will* be slow in the enterprise. Hell, in my department, the earliest I'll even have the option to run Vista is the next hardware cycle in *2009*. You see people killing off their Windows Server installs all over the place, because the product is heavy, expensive, and the licensing is almost the worst in the industry. Vista and it's brethren are making it all worse, with fifty different versions of the desktop and the server OS.
Linux doesn't need DRM in 2-3 years, either. No OS in common use in business will have DRM in that time frame. Windows 2000 and XP don't have lock-in DRM, 2003 server doesn't have it, Linux doesn't have it. Vista isn't going to be in wide use 2-3 years from now, as I mentioned.
You can't have a secure system by using DRM. You have to prevent the access in the first place. You can't have removeable media or outside network access. You can't let things leave site. You have to protect printers and the documents they create. You need *policy* right along with it. All your DRM will do is lose data and make peoples' lives hell, while providing no real benefit.
I just tried it on another IE 6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_gdr.050301-1519 machine with Update version SP2, all running on WinXP SP2. I ran tests through a Squid proxy, direct to the Internet, and through a Dans Guardian proxy. They exploit worked on all those configs.
I'm pretty curious what the differences are, so that I can duplicate them!
OpenSSH development is tied with OpenBSD because the project is *part* of OpenBSD. People just took the time to code it to be portable, and some effort is made to make sure that it works on other Unix platforms. It is more useful that way.
What you want is much like saying that you want to donate to Thunderbird, but not have the money go to the Firefox crew, as you only use Thunderbird. The same foundation is working on both, so the money goes to the group as a whole.
And yes, de Raadt really should set up a non-profit for OpenBSD, under the OpenBSD name.
As much as I dislike it, I do have to generally agree when it comes to broad environmental concerns. I prefer that it could happen at the State level, but as you point out, that is unlikely to really work. What makes it worse is that by allowing the Federal to pass legislation on environmental concerns, it opens the door for it passing legislation on other matters that are similar.
When you carry the pollution control idea futher, you get to where we are now. The US has many regulations regarding pollution, so the factories just go to other countries. It's a very troublesome and difficult topic to deal with.
For something like my suggestion of having the regulations happen at the State level to work, it would require the Federal to be able to intervene in disputes that arose between States. They would have to mediate and have the ability to force States to work together. In your example, the river is a shared resource, and the pollution level allows in one violates the regulations of the other. The Federal would need to be able to deal with this. The air is another shared resource, as is radio spectrum. This way the Federal isn't passing direct regulation, but more enforcing a cooperative framework between States.
Overall, I'd have less of a problem with this sort of thing if Congress were closer to the pre-17th amendment style. It was a good check to have Senators be direct representatives of the States, since it would be in their best interest to maintain States' Rights.
Not all Federal regulations have a definite time frame. With something like CAA, you got controls on new construction, but old structures continued and simply paid fines. As you said, if you allow status quo, business will go with such. For many companies, it was cheaper to pay millions a year in fines than it was to shut down operations. What you're saying is that the CAA mandates worked so well, that it took 30 years and 4 amendments to make it do something.
If a company is large enough, it doesn't have to worry about paying fines. You need the State where the company resides to be willing to revoke the corporate charter. This type of regulation simply needs to be at the State level, like nearly all other regulation. You see, I'm not opposed to any and all regulation, just regulation that comes from the Federal.
I also know how manufacturer fleet averaging works for the EPA and related policy. It means that a manufacturer can produce total crap as long as they produce some cheap as dirt economy cars. I also know that auto manufacturers get away with a lot, because so many of their SUV fleets are considered trucks. The regulation on this market failed. It isn't resulting in more efficient cars, just more ingenious loopholes. The increase in efficiency has resulted from a combination of State law and new technology.
Please, go back and read what I wrote. I'm talking about the harm during production, not the energy cost. I'm talking about the toxic substances released from the manufacturing processes. Making a solar cell is *not* a clean process.
Yes, that's the idea of a supplemental energy source. You can't depend on a fixed output, and you have to be able to make up for a shortfall. You scale your fixed production capabilities to account for swings in both directions. You still need to have those primary production methods for times when you have stagnant weather or something like a tropical storm.
With regional power generation you still have a distribution grid, and you still have many of the same losses in delivery. There are methods of reducing the loss on the distribution grid, such as superconducting lines or new materials. There are even several places today that are running on superconducting lines, the biggest being a deployment in China.
You also neglected to mention the other costs with running generation stations. You have to build them, staff them, and maintain them. If you had hundreds of small stations, you will spend more money to keep them running than if you had a dozen large stations.
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Actually, mandatory insurance has caused the price of auto insurance to skyrocket. In states, like Massachusetts, the State even sets the prices the insurance companies can charge. What this causes is a yearly lobby war to increase the price of insurance, which then all insurance providers are forced to do.
If you look at a state without legislated profit (ie: doesn't require auto insurance), you see an interesting picture. NH doesn't require auto insurance, and the insurance prices there are much lower.
Nowadays people are more worried about speeding tickets than they are about accidents. This is largely because of the nanny-state insistance on forcing you to have insurance coverage.
In Windows, you run Windows client, such as 2000 or XP, for a workstation. If you want to run a server, you now buy another version of Windows, Windows Server, and install that instead; you don't use that as a workstation. The strengths and weaknesses differ.
Why is it different because FC isn't as good for desktop use as Ubunutu? How about we call FC "Linux Server" and Ubuntu "Linux XP"? Now is it different?
I personally wouldn't even go that far. I don't like the cruft and annoyance that comes with FC. I use something even more basic: Slackware. I still use Ubuntu on my desktop, as I want it to *just work*, and it does.
And you could use similar tools to manage things like fstab on Linux. Windows is not an easy GUI, and most unices are not easy, either. MacOS has all things UNIX too, hidden under a well designed GUI.
On Windows, you routinely have to do things to keep it running, after the fact. With UNIX, you set up the system, and it doesn't require modification until it's job changes. On UNIX, you can easily connect remotely, you don't have to log of a user, or mess with a bad user account model; you just log in, and fix it. With Windows, you have to get the remote functions to work, then log in, then close everything the user has open, then log out, log in, fix it, log out, log in, and close the remote desktop program.
Why should the casual user have to do anything to use the machine? There should be things that admins do, that they can do remotely, that the user never notices. The only times an admin should have to deal with a user machine are for upgrades, break/fix on hardware, and to change the operation of the machine.
Would be nice, except nearly everyone in the US is sending data over ATT, Level3, or similar, lines. Those telecomms that were lobbying for this are the backbone providers, and that's where they could do QoS.
For example, I have a cable modem through Charter. For me to get to Slashdot, I have to go through *at least* three ATT nodes. To get to Google, I'm going through Level3. Hell, I have to go through ATT nodes to get the MCI, Sprint, Cingular, and even Speakeasy.
Blacklisting in that way would mean that it's very likely that *nobody* could get to the site, and switching ISP wouldn't fix it.
Why should they have all those good confinscated? There should be an injunction placed on the sale of the merchandise, and they should be required to be relabelled to not violate NEC's trademark. *THERE IS NO PIRACY IN ANY FORM.* Nothing was taking from NEC, NEC lost no property or money. A company was masquerading as NEC, and taking advantage of the name. That is trademark infringment.
If they change their name from NEC to NAC or something, they should be able to keep on going doing business. Then you deal with the infringment of the NEC mark in court, and figure out what restitution is appropriate.
Also, "Kudos" is a snack bar when you use it as a proper noun. They do deserve some praise for getting their sneaky plan to dispatch with sales channel agreements and advertising from their costs, but they can buy their own food, thank you very much.
So... these people set up a company, did legitimate business, developed products, shipped and sold products. They did everything any other company does, except come up with their own name and logo.
Perhaps these "official-looking documents", passes, ID cards, etcetera, *were* official. Perhaps they were just issued by the bizzaro-NEC that was stepping on the real NEC's name. That's could still be nothing more than trademark infringment.
There is nothing here that even resembles piracy, or copyright infringment, or theft. These people used the NEC mark, and the real NEC is pissed. These guys were able to exploit the ease with which NEC could close business deals for manufacturing, or marketing a product. They have been riding in on the coattails of a large company with an established brand *by infringing their trademark*.
There is shared bandwidth among associated stations, enourmous overhead in the sessions, and the possibility for easy interference. I've seen wireless keyboards that will screw up 802.11b/g links, in addition to microwaves, phones, handheld radios, other 802.11b/g networks, etc. Alos, performance degrades with link load.
As an example, at my house I can't reliably watch an xvid movie across 802.11g. I get excellent signal, a 54Mbps link, and low latency. That is, I get those until I try to watch a movie, and then the latency get quite unbearable.
So basically, 802.11g is fine for browsing, copying data, and similar, but it is nowhere near reliable enough for gaming, and it doesn't provide reliablity or bandwidth sufficient for new LAN games.
Anybody that has to deal with a marketing department has heard of that. They seem to love to embed dozens of 1024x768 32bpp unscaled TIFFs in their Word docs.
Sorry, still perfecting my water to wine skills. It's a shame, because it would really save me a fortune.
That's all only too true. It's amazing that people seem to forget that there was a time that the Internet was around, but there was no WWW. Even back in the earliest days of Linux, there was a good amount of data sitting on USENET about everything.
Up until fairly recently, MS used the fragility of typical UNIX filesystems as a reason that NT was better! The other vendors that used journalling filesystems were pitching it as a selling point, too. It might not have been common knowledge, but it wasn't exactly rare knowledge, either.
Linux won't install onto NTFS (complete lack of documentation from MS does not help), but it will install into a vFAT partition. The compression is possible, though not likely, and I doubt the file encryption will ever be supported. If you install Windows into a FAT partition, then you can use UMSDOS to install Linux onto the same, and you need no other partitions.
If you wanted to use Captive in the way you're talking about, then you would need a partition to load the Linux kernel and support binaries, and you could then have all of your other files on the Captive NTFS partition. Nobody has done this because it's both not really worth it and not very efficient.
Linux can use swapfiles. Swap partitions are just a generally better way.
You're completely correct about the filesystem. You're also right that Linux was not ready for what a lot of people were pushing it to do. All I'm saying is that by bring up a server, you really need to understand the system. This is the same problem that so many Windows Server locations have - the admin in charge didn't learn what was needed, and either it is poorly implemented, it's not robust, or it just plain isn't working right.
;-) At least it wasn't a huge and critical system, and at least your were able to easily recover from it. However, you just as easily could have lost everything on both servers.
As I said, it isn't your fault that ext2 is fragile. It's only your fault that you didn't know what you needed to know before it was put into production. You might be right, and there was no documentation about it at the time. In that case, you probably shouldn't have used an undocumented system.
Ultimately, the blame game doesn't matter. You dealt with the problem when it came up, and now you know. It's always the danger of going with something that isn't well documented: you can't go in with your eyes completely open.
I agree with you completely. The people the GP was talking to were rude and childish. Instead of helping to fix the damage, they belittled instead. The documentation on these tools is still nothing grand.
Ext2 wasn't, and isn't, fine. It's a known issue in that style of fs, and one that anyone building a critical server that uses something like it should be aware of. You need to have considered the possibility of the filesystem being trashed, and have a contingency to deal with that. I always treated ext2 very similarly to how I treated FAT. In either case, you *knew* the filesystem would get corrupted, so you did everything you could to prevent it, while keeping backups for when you lost the battle.
Woah, calm down there. I'm not doing the same thing as what was described. I'm saying that you can't disclaim all responsibility. If you chose a platform, and that platform failed, then it *is* your fault for choosing a platform and not covering the weakness. It *is not* your fault that the platform had the weakness; you didn't create the platform. I also said that it was inappropriate that you were flamed for pointing out that ext2 had the problem. It isn't as if you were making it up.
I knew then that ext2 had problems with FS corruption, and I knew that before 1997. It was the same problem that most UNIX flavors had, and anything that isn't journalled has always had. DOS and Windows 9x have this problem, SunOS has it, DEC OSF has it, etc. If you're using a non-journalled filesystem, you will have corruption if you lose power without writing out your cache. That's why a *lot* of systems out there did not run with write caching enabled. It's also why most UNIX systems, even workstations, were attached to a UPS.
Perhaps you couldn't find anything specific to ext2, and fine, then you didn't explicitly know that ext2 had the same weaknesses as similar filesystems. The documentation for the platform should have included at least a note about the issue. I knew ext2 had this problem before I ever had an encounter with it on my own data.
Good practices have always included backing up the data, documenting the system build process, and putting a UPS on the system. Even without the UPS, you should not have lost your data, but you would still have potential downtime after the power failure.
When you put up a system, you're taking responsibilty for it. If it failed, then it's your problem. Maybe you didn't do your job well enough, and choose poorly. Maybe there was an undocumented bug that you couldn't have known about. Either way, *it is your problem*, and your responsibility for it includes dealing with a catastrophic failure.
While it wasn't your fault that ext2 was terrible, if you were going to use Linux w/ ext2 as a server, you should have done the research on what the pitfalls were. Information that ext2 would not survive a power failure was rather common. It's been standard for a UNIX server to require a UPS for a long time, and that is one of the biggest reasons.
Likewise, you shouldn't have gotten crap for saying that ext2 was fragile. If you set up those systems, you should've gotten crap for not protecting them against their known weaknesses. In other words, don't blame the user because the OS has a fault, but do blame the admin for not equipping the environment properly.
I do something very similar to that, unless time is critical. Most people just learn better from doing the work themselves. If you are handed the answer, you haven't really learned why it is the answer. I prefer to point people in the right direction, whether it is telling them what manpage to look at, or which howto or FAQ, etc. That teaches how to find the answer, the answer itself, how to find other answers, and hopefully why these things are the answers. You end up with a person that has learned to solve problems on their own, which is much better than one that can only parrot your answer back to the computer.
Honestly, if you're just going to tell someone the answer, why not just do it for them. At least that way you know it'll be right the first time, and it will probably take less time.
In your case, perhaps you just aren't interested in learned for the sake of learning. Maybe you don't care to understand the computer and its software; you just want it to work. In that case, you're better off on either a distro more like Ubuntu or Linspire, or on a more hand-holding platform, like Windows or MacOS. I didn't have to do much of anything to get SUSE to just work, but I did go out of my way to get hardware that's well supported by Linux.
That certificate costs several thousand dollars. There will likely be additional fees from Microsoft.
What this means is that low-volume hardware becomes instantly more expensive, and amateur driver developers are locked out. You won't even be loading a test driver into your system without getting it signed. That should make driver dev a whole lot of fun.
What do you get out of this? Why, DRM, and nothing else, of course.
This is yet another reason that I *must* avoid Vista in my organization. Some of the software that is critical here uses unsigned drivers. Some hardware is out of production, and the latest driver is years old. I'm not throwing out my infrastructure just because Microsoft decided to sleep with Hollywood; I'll be throwing out Microsoft, because it's far less expensive to do.
DRM has absolutely nothing to do with security. The Vista DRM is all about Microsoft telling you what you're allowed to do with your OS, and RIAA/MPAA telling you what you're allowed to do with your content.
Personally, I don't want TPM. It allows my computer to be uniquely identified down to the hardware. It's the same reason that people were so upset over the privacy implications of the Pentium III CPU serial number. The whole DRM nonsense that is destroying technology today is ridiculous. It's like your TV telling you that you're not allowed to watch something because it isn't carrying a government approved rating.
To take your woefully incorrect idea just a little further, that policy which you suggest would mean that you couldn't back up the data. It would be locked to the TPM chip and the user credentials. It would be unrecoverable. BTW - Vista won't run on mobile devices, so that part of your argument is just meaningless.
Between the DRM, the hardware requirements, that so much of the system has been rewritten, new incompatabilities, and who knows what else, Vista adoption *will* be slow in the enterprise. Hell, in my department, the earliest I'll even have the option to run Vista is the next hardware cycle in *2009*. You see people killing off their Windows Server installs all over the place, because the product is heavy, expensive, and the licensing is almost the worst in the industry. Vista and it's brethren are making it all worse, with fifty different versions of the desktop and the server OS.
Linux doesn't need DRM in 2-3 years, either. No OS in common use in business will have DRM in that time frame. Windows 2000 and XP don't have lock-in DRM, 2003 server doesn't have it, Linux doesn't have it. Vista isn't going to be in wide use 2-3 years from now, as I mentioned.
You can't have a secure system by using DRM. You have to prevent the access in the first place. You can't have removeable media or outside network access. You can't let things leave site. You have to protect printers and the documents they create. You need *policy* right along with it. All your DRM will do is lose data and make peoples' lives hell, while providing no real benefit.
I just tried it on another IE 6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_gdr.050301-1519 machine with Update version SP2, all running on WinXP SP2. I ran tests through a Squid proxy, direct to the Internet, and through a Dans Guardian proxy. They exploit worked on all those configs.
I'm pretty curious what the differences are, so that I can duplicate them!
Interesting. *I* just tried it on XP using IE 6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_gdr.050301-1519, and it showed the incorrect URL, as predicted by Secunia.
My XP machine is also fully patched.
OpenSSH development is tied with OpenBSD because the project is *part* of OpenBSD. People just took the time to code it to be portable, and some effort is made to make sure that it works on other Unix platforms. It is more useful that way.
What you want is much like saying that you want to donate to Thunderbird, but not have the money go to the Firefox crew, as you only use Thunderbird. The same foundation is working on both, so the money goes to the group as a whole.
And yes, de Raadt really should set up a non-profit for OpenBSD, under the OpenBSD name.
As much as I dislike it, I do have to generally agree when it comes to broad environmental concerns. I prefer that it could happen at the State level, but as you point out, that is unlikely to really work. What makes it worse is that by allowing the Federal to pass legislation on environmental concerns, it opens the door for it passing legislation on other matters that are similar.
When you carry the pollution control idea futher, you get to where we are now. The US has many regulations regarding pollution, so the factories just go to other countries. It's a very troublesome and difficult topic to deal with.
For something like my suggestion of having the regulations happen at the State level to work, it would require the Federal to be able to intervene in disputes that arose between States. They would have to mediate and have the ability to force States to work together. In your example, the river is a shared resource, and the pollution level allows in one violates the regulations of the other. The Federal would need to be able to deal with this. The air is another shared resource, as is radio spectrum. This way the Federal isn't passing direct regulation, but more enforcing a cooperative framework between States.
Overall, I'd have less of a problem with this sort of thing if Congress were closer to the pre-17th amendment style. It was a good check to have Senators be direct representatives of the States, since it would be in their best interest to maintain States' Rights.
Not all Federal regulations have a definite time frame. With something like CAA, you got controls on new construction, but old structures continued and simply paid fines. As you said, if you allow status quo, business will go with such. For many companies, it was cheaper to pay millions a year in fines than it was to shut down operations. What you're saying is that the CAA mandates worked so well, that it took 30 years and 4 amendments to make it do something.
If a company is large enough, it doesn't have to worry about paying fines. You need the State where the company resides to be willing to revoke the corporate charter. This type of regulation simply needs to be at the State level, like nearly all other regulation. You see, I'm not opposed to any and all regulation, just regulation that comes from the Federal.
I also know how manufacturer fleet averaging works for the EPA and related policy. It means that a manufacturer can produce total crap as long as they produce some cheap as dirt economy cars. I also know that auto manufacturers get away with a lot, because so many of their SUV fleets are considered trucks. The regulation on this market failed. It isn't resulting in more efficient cars, just more ingenious loopholes. The increase in efficiency has resulted from a combination of State law and new technology.
Please, go back and read what I wrote. I'm talking about the harm during production, not the energy cost. I'm talking about the toxic substances released from the manufacturing processes. Making a solar cell is *not* a clean process.
Yes, that's the idea of a supplemental energy source. You can't depend on a fixed output, and you have to be able to make up for a shortfall. You scale your fixed production capabilities to account for swings in both directions. You still need to have those primary production methods for times when you have stagnant weather or something like a tropical storm.
With regional power generation you still have a distribution grid, and you still have many of the same losses in delivery. There are methods of reducing the loss on the distribution grid, such as superconducting lines or new materials. There are even several places today that are running on superconducting lines, the biggest being a deployment in China.
You also neglected to mention the other costs with running generation stations. You have to build them, staff them, and maintain them. If you had hundreds of small stations, you will spend more money to keep them running than if you had a dozen large stations.