Well, that's the Keystone Kops aspect to the whole thing. First Microsoft decides to make corporations double-pay for Windows licences.
Then after a few years, they come to realize that this has created crates of millions of unused Win9x CDs sitting around in the IT basement free for the taking, for home installation purposes or gray market sales.
Well, that backfired. So instead of developing a reasonable corporate licence policy (as they ahd about 5 years ago), they force the OEMs to use some mystery BIOS-locked CD install kit. America's Landfill Industry says "Thank You Microsoft!"
BTW, FU to the Microsoft and/or Netscape collaborationist who marked me as Troll.
And why shouldn't they? Microsoft is essentially demanding that corporate customers purchase their product twice (a useless OEM licence + a Select licence)
Not all that long ago, you could order bare PCs from big name Compaq and IBM resellers. The large corp I worked for did that to avoid double-paying Microsoft (well, IBM still insisted on throwing in OS/2). Since then, I've worked at places that bought Win98 machines to lessen the shaft by $100 for our NT site licence. The current place has decided to screw double-paying Select and just play count-the-certificate. They're not making it easy to be a MS customer...
I also think the last kilometre (or "mile") are now belongs to the customer (can anyone confirm?), the imcubents are supposed to allow free access to the lines for servicing.
There's an easy solution to this problem: have your local government socialize the distribution network. Putting the electrical grid under public control will be on the San Francisco, CA ballot shortly, for example.
Well, from the telco perspective, they invented a technology (DSL) that allows them to make additional profit from copper networks that *they* built at great expense over the last 80 years. The fact that 3rd parties can get a cut off this network is more of a regulatory miricle than anything else.
If it was easy to build-out the last mile, more people would be doing it. As it is, the cable industry almost bankrupted itself doing so (saved by Internet hype and deep-pockets such as AT&T and AOL/TW). Even as duopoly providers, the phone/cable companies usally with a tacit agreement not to eat each others lunch (despite what they told congress before the 1996 telcom act).
Now, if you had massive amounts of capital, would you spend it laying last-mile connections, or would you buy a slice of wireless spectrum and try to accomplish the same thing at much lower build-out costs?
Well, the old "PUC-regulated monopoly" model of utilities was essentially just a government subcontracting system (utilities build out and provide 'universal service' in return for guaranteed profits at 8% or whatever).
"Deregulation" is primarily just widening the contractor pool in some limited ways. Problem is, the 'universal service' part got left out somewhere along the way. Which is good in some ways because built-out areas are no longer subsidizing new suburban construction, but also not so good because big industrial users (say in California) can jigger the system to get priority access to resources (say electricity).
The main reason that ACLs are complex on NT is not because they're ACLs, it's because the OS has a set of marketing requirements that Unix doesn't have.
First of all, there's the partially priviledged "Power User" group. Probably a braindead idea because there's numerous priv escalation bugs to be found there (and it wasn't unitil NT5 did MS start considering Power User to Local Admin a bug!)
Second, there's the real problem of running legacy Win95-style applications. Personally, I'd love it if Microsoft just broke these for Power Users in the same way they broke them for Users (in W2K). But those of you who are running broken apps in legacy mode (such as Nutscrape 4.x or Office 97) probably wouldn't, and neither would Microsoft because their app base is the source of their strength.
Any old NetWare admin can tell you that ACLs are damn useful on file shares. Trying to discredit them via the abortion of NT's system files doesn't count because it doesn't apply to Unix (where there's root and there's everyone else).
There is an open source version in the Mozilla sidebar.
If you want something with more of a my.netscape feel, you can build your own version using a XML parser fairly easily. Or look around, I'm sure someone has done it already. There's nothing "closed source" about a documented data format, btw.
First of all, I'm not defending bad HTML. I am demanding standards-compliant browser behavior. From the HTML 3.2 specification (if you can even call that Netscape-accommodationalist document a specification):
Text level elements
These don't cause paragraph breaks. Text level elements that define character styles can generally be nested. They can contain other text level elements but not block level elements.
Netscape clearly interpreted the rest of the table as being contained in the <I> element, in violation of the specification. Incorrect HTML, sure, but theoretically no worse than not closing your <P> tags.
Mozilla and IE both correctly assume that the italic element ends where the table cell does.
ACLs are the only real solution for the situation where you have one group with Read Only access and another group with Read/Write access, and yet another administrative group.
There's also the kudgyness of creating groups just to solve a particular access control problem. Have many thousand users in a directory environment, and it just doesn't scale up.
Not to say that ACLs don't have their own problems, especially wrt to complexity. NT, for example, allows permissions on file/print shares, and those are often used instead of ACLs.
Not to mention that network types have gotten used to ACLs since Novell 3.x back in the early 90s. It has become a checkbox feature.
Slashdot Mirror
After Copeland was canned, Microsoft apparently made a serious bid to Apple to use NT as the foundation of their next-gen OS.
Well, that's the Keystone Kops aspect to the whole thing. First Microsoft decides to make corporations double-pay for Windows licences.
Then after a few years, they come to realize that this has created crates of millions of unused Win9x CDs sitting around in the IT basement free for the taking, for home installation purposes or gray market sales.
Well, that backfired. So instead of developing a reasonable corporate licence policy (as they ahd about 5 years ago), they force the OEMs to use some mystery BIOS-locked CD install kit. America's Landfill Industry says "Thank You Microsoft!"
BTW, FU to the Microsoft and/or Netscape collaborationist who marked me as Troll.
And why shouldn't they? Microsoft is essentially demanding that corporate customers purchase their product twice (a useless OEM licence + a Select licence)
Not all that long ago, you could order bare PCs from big name Compaq and IBM resellers. The large corp I worked for did that to avoid double-paying Microsoft (well, IBM still insisted on throwing in OS/2). Since then, I've worked at places that bought Win98 machines to lessen the shaft by $100 for our NT site licence. The current place has decided to screw double-paying Select and just play count-the-certificate. They're not making it easy to be a MS customer...
When they start making $20 network servers, we'll start throwing them away when they break/crash, just like we do with toasters.
I also think the last kilometre (or "mile") are now belongs to the customer (can anyone confirm?), the imcubents are supposed to allow free access to the lines for servicing.
There's an easy solution to this problem: have your local government socialize the distribution network. Putting the electrical grid under public control will be on the San Francisco, CA ballot shortly, for example.
Who's the "us" in the quote? Because I don't think that applied to the USA (as a matter of public opinion).
Well, from the telco perspective, they invented a technology (DSL) that allows them to make additional profit from copper networks that *they* built at great expense over the last 80 years. The fact that 3rd parties can get a cut off this network is more of a regulatory miricle than anything else.
If it was easy to build-out the last mile, more people would be doing it. As it is, the cable industry almost bankrupted itself doing so (saved by Internet hype and deep-pockets such as AT&T and AOL/TW). Even as duopoly providers, the phone/cable companies usally with a tacit agreement not to eat each others lunch (despite what they told congress before the 1996 telcom act).
Now, if you had massive amounts of capital, would you spend it laying last-mile connections, or would you buy a slice of wireless spectrum and try to accomplish the same thing at much lower build-out costs?
Canadian government is subsidizing high speed Internet, eh?
Well, the old "PUC-regulated monopoly" model of utilities was essentially just a government subcontracting system (utilities build out and provide 'universal service' in return for guaranteed profits at 8% or whatever).
"Deregulation" is primarily just widening the contractor pool in some limited ways. Problem is, the 'universal service' part got left out somewhere along the way. Which is good in some ways because built-out areas are no longer subsidizing new suburban construction, but also not so good because big industrial users (say in California) can jigger the system to get priority access to resources (say electricity).
The main reason that ACLs are complex on NT is not because they're ACLs, it's because the OS has a set of marketing requirements that Unix doesn't have.
First of all, there's the partially priviledged "Power User" group. Probably a braindead idea because there's numerous priv escalation bugs to be found there (and it wasn't unitil NT5 did MS start considering Power User to Local Admin a bug!)
Second, there's the real problem of running legacy Win95-style applications. Personally, I'd love it if Microsoft just broke these for Power Users in the same way they broke them for Users (in W2K). But those of you who are running broken apps in legacy mode (such as Nutscrape 4.x or Office 97) probably wouldn't, and neither would Microsoft because their app base is the source of their strength.
Any old NetWare admin can tell you that ACLs are damn useful on file shares. Trying to discredit them via the abortion of NT's system files doesn't count because it doesn't apply to Unix (where there's root and there's everyone else).
Anyone using a validating XML parser on the source side and the default DTD netscape.com URL would be down.
There is an open source version in the Mozilla sidebar.
If you want something with more of a my.netscape feel, you can build your own version using a XML parser fairly easily. Or look around, I'm sure someone has done it already. There's nothing "closed source" about a documented data format, btw.
Not RSS 0.9.1: http://slashdot.org/slashdot.rdf
This made building a homerolled parser a little annoying.
(BTW, RSS doesn't suck. Or it wouldn't if more big name news sites were using it.)
First of all, I'm not defending bad HTML. I am demanding standards-compliant browser behavior. From the HTML 3.2 specification (if you can even call that Netscape-accommodationalist document a specification):
Text level elements
These don't cause paragraph breaks. Text level elements that define character styles can generally be nested. They can contain other text level elements but not block level elements.
Netscape clearly interpreted the rest of the table as being contained in the <I> element, in violation of the specification. Incorrect HTML, sure, but theoretically no worse than not closing your <P> tags.
Mozilla and IE both correctly assume that the italic element ends where the table cell does.
ACLs are the only real solution for the situation where you have one group with Read Only access and another group with Read/Write access, and yet another administrative group.
There's also the kudgyness of creating groups just to solve a particular access control problem. Have many thousand users in a directory environment, and it just doesn't scale up.
Not to say that ACLs don't have their own problems, especially wrt to complexity. NT, for example, allows permissions on file/print shares, and those are often used instead of ACLs.
Not to mention that network types have gotten used to ACLs since Novell 3.x back in the early 90s. It has become a checkbox feature.
The solution to your problems is to avoid using Netscape 4.x. Better browsers end text formatting at the end of a block element such as a table.