Only the metrics have changed. This was an easy call when they first started bundling multiple issues into a single advisory. Notice also how the change to once a month reporting (spin) is also claimed as a security breakthrough. The issues still pile upt, it's just that they're only mentioned once a month. Also, for the last few years, issues are now counted from the time MS announces they will have a patch not the time that the problem is actually reported. It still takes months and, in some cases, years before a patch is issued. Even then, the patches have a high failure rate -- failing to fix the problem or introducing further problems -- and thats not even counting problems caused for 3rd party apps.
Also, last fall a few more former security companies knuckled under and now no longer engage in disclosure. Without some semblance of public disclosure, there is now way for sysadmins to verify that their systems are/aren't vulnerable or to verify if the patch worked or not. Talk about putting one's head in the sand.
The problems from that company are as severe as before, perhaps worse. For those still stuck with that company's products, 2004 will be a hard year, especially if its customers run afoul of privacy and other regulations as a result of the product.
Dust on the panels: over time, dust builds op on the panels, making them less efficient. And there aren't any wiper to take to dust off.
Weather: dust and wind will gradually damage the rover.
Could the rover use or change a charge on its case to throw off some of the dust?
The new Napster has ony the name in common with the old service. The files are WMA which require you to 1) be locked into an MS-platform and 2) install pieces of DRM / Palladium / NGSCB where it can interact with all your other data and applications. Being cynical, I'd say its main goal is the latter.
"DRM on my business documents?! F-ing A, no way. Wait.... Oooh... music..."
All these articles have the same whine and miss all the issues beyond scalability. Yes, IPv6 looks to solve some scalability problems. No, not everyone is in full agreement about the urgency, but regardless of views about scalability, other issues are far more important and beneficial.
However, given the sad, vulnerable state of security and privacy, I'd expect more authors to expound on the benefits of IPv6's privacy and authentication mechanisms.
Likewise, as more bandwidth is eaten by spam and music downloading, IPv6 addresses quality of service, and better routing and addressing capabilities.
The only two reasons not to go IPv6, at least for intranets, is either espionage agencies oppose increased security and/or a particular large vendor fails to support it well. Maybe there are others. Wireless networks and VPNs are being thrown in all over the place. These are the perfect places to start with IPv6. The other option is NAT, but that will eventually have to be redone when the move is finally made. Kill 2 birds with one stone and install the new VPN or Wireless net with IPv6.
Actually, the numbers I kept hearing, well before the dot-com lunacy, was that 90% of new businesses go bankrupt within two years. A surprising number of friends and acquaintances started up in the 80's and 90's and repeated this number as well (BTW they're all in business except one, who cashed in and got out.)
However, that said, it would interesting to see some reliable figures. Funny how it's run full circle - 'dot-com' started out as a pejorative, was the latest rage, and is now a pejorative again.
Each version of MS-Word has a slightly different, slightly incompatible file format. Various formating and metadata does not always translate. So, despite the same 3-letter extension, it is not a single format. You already knew that because you probably know someone that bought the "latest version" just to be able read the new file format.
Lesson? It's part of the hamster wheel of useless upgrades. And it currently leads to lost business or government records due to changes in undocumented, proprietary formats. How many minutes / hours are you willing waste to attack a file in order to find out how to read it in order to find out if it is worth reading?
Templates and styles are the way to go regardless of which program you use and regardless of which format it chooses to write. OpenOffice.org is one of many which do that well.
Seriously, what functions do you use now in 2004 that where not available in 1994?
What examples of them being damaged by the "anticompetitive whims" of the "big guts" can you cite?
Well the ODBC error which hinders using FileMaker and MS-Word for Macintosh for mail merge is one. The issue is a bug on Microsoft's side and cannot be fixed by anyone else. The official status is "no plans to fix"
Another is marketing practice -- too many non-technical people (e.g. CTOs and CIOs) don't know that it is possible to have a hetergeneous computing environment.
Also, each Apple ][ came with complete schematics and diagrams showing the design. Talk about open source!
Ah the nostalgia. That really was a great feature. Adding peripherals like stepping motors was possible. I made game paddles for myself and my friends and even hacked some joysticks originally designed for some other system. Some of them even added rapid fire to the buttons.
With the help of some eeproms (and an inverter) it was possible to rewrite the parts of the monitor. There was even a hack to add lowercase and the missing ] or [ character.
These days I'm happy with the open source nature of OS X which is the software equivalent of providing schematics.
There is no mention that this will be tailored to Windows in the article, but MS's hearty endorsement is a suspicious indicator of such. If so, would this simply become a matter of the BIOS not allowing anything but "acceptable" OSes to boot? That's where my nickel gets bet.
Actually there is indication this is a move to
integrate Windows with the BIOS and lock out non-MS operating systems and, eventually, packages.
Manufacturers can instead provide a disk image then users on any platform could upgrade the BIOS.
For example, I have an old Dell which needed a BIOS upgrade the other year and had to go to the trouble of finding a Windows user to download and uncompress the disk image for me. If it have been available as purely a disk image, it would have been a non-issue instead of a black spot against Dell on my next x86 purchase.
If more users were to suggest using disk images instead of the MS-DOS/MS-Windows only executables, perhaps they would upgrade their process.
That sounds similar to Iceland's situation. Microsoft had refused to provide an Icelandic version, even if the work was paid for.
Again, this not only a warning about the dangers of monopoly lock-in but also a visible example of where OSS methods excel. It's not only cheaper to develop OSS, but fewer hoops to hop through. If I can gather the resources, I or anyone can make a translation of OpenOffice.org or AbiWord or Mozilla or so on in the language of my choice be it Navajo, Ojibwe, Kildin Sami, or what ever.
Yes, support, disrtibution, manuals, and so on will still be there, but based on F/OSS. The overhead will be lower and there will be less duplication of effort - i.e. faster advancement.
The doomsday scenario about anyone suffering when Microsoft goes under strikes me as bullshit. I'm sure even the current U.S. government could find a replacement export. Actually, they'd have to. Very little production goes on in the U.S. anymore, not even jeans, and the trade deficit + the budget deficit + deflation are about to pop a bubble.
As mentioned before, each day we read about more countries, agencies, institutions and businesses increasing productivity and cutting TCO by going F/OSS. Someone is going to be selling to these customers. If the U.S. keeps wasting it resources propping up the MS dinosaur, it will let everyone else get too far a lead.
I have people at work use PDF, ISO-8859-1, or XHTML and justified it on purely technical grounds, however, I'd like to add a paragraph or two from the law book.
In the near future, there will be the
Oasis file format, which will make archival work much easier.
Well, there's no date or source attibuted to the supposed ad. It could be fake. But regardless here are the points,
- no GUI for linux server on old hardware
Just how old? 8088? xfree86 will run on even an i486 with 16 MB RAM.
- authentification with uncrypthed text as default
SSH, PAM
- no Kerberos support
Standard Kerberos, both MIT and Heimdal, not MS's broken, proprietary variant is supported in both client and server. It's on all distros I've seen in the last few years.
- no smartcart authentification support
PAM
- no public key infrastructure with directory service
LDAP/OpenLDAP/NDS
- no default cryptho file system
No, but doing an encrypted loopback filesystem is an install option on many distros.
Yes, but if you buy a car, you expect the locks, doors and windows to work and not to pop open for anyone with a thumb or if-and-only-if the wind blows.
Everyone in the IT community already knows what a poor reputation that company has actively worked hard to earn. Articles like the above serve only to provide free marketing and distract from
active development rather than pump-n-dump.
Rather than doing free security and sysadmin work for Chairman Bill this holiday season, and rather than providing free publicity for his portfolio, could we please give it a rest and have a MS free week, weekend or at least just a MS free friday? i.e. no articles or press releases about the lastest vaporware, thneed, fud or spin, inlcuding news relays via MS-owned sources like slate, msn, msnbc, msnpr, newseek, etc. It seems every day there is a shameless, uneccesary plug or two. Now that international investors have divested and even their own emloyees have offloaded it is as irrelevant to the stock market as it is for the IT sector. The pyramid scheme has maxed out, if you weren't already bailing, then it's too late.
As far as security goes, businesses and home users alike are finding Gnome and KDE easy to use and the plaforms (Darwin, OpenBSD, Linux, QNX, etc.) more secure, more stable, and easier to maintain. So looking back at MS-Window
[lack of] security in 2003, we can say good bye to the terminally insecure and hello to modern technology.
The comparison is closer than you'd prefer to admit. There are moderated newsgroups and even closed ones, thus providing the option for invitation-only private discussions.
Personally, I think most mailing lists ought to have a news gateway and most newsgroups ought to have a mailing list gate way. That lets participants use the client of choice - news or mail or both.
Yes, but that won't nuke stories that point to articles repackaged by MS-owned sources like slate, msn, msnbc, msnpr, newsweek, etc. If it's a Reuters story, point to Reuters. If it's an AP story, point to AP. If it's CNN, point to CNN, Heise, Mundo and so on.
The further you get from the original source, the greater probability for omissions, errors or further bias. Yes, the original story had those problems, but following a lossy compression with a second lossy compression, you get less info and more garbage. That applies to any news source, or even academic research.
Cool. I hit a nerve among astroturfers. There is far more to Slashdot than Linux, BSD, Apple, etc., but I'll say again the signal-to-noise ratio is worsened by continuous churn of irrelevant plugs and press releases for the lastest MS-vaporware, thneed, fud or spin, inlcuding news relays via MS-owned sources like slate, msn, msnbc, msnpr, newseek, etc. A lot of companies do this, however I single one out because it's currently the most problematic.
/. != Linux
Yes, there is more to computing than just Linux. But it's a testament to the skill and effort of its marketing that MS even gets mentioned --
It's an investment and marketing company and has very little to do with technology outside of the acquisition of other companies and/or their technologies, e.g. Sendo, to pick one example of many.
The small part that it had played in technology is diminishing as even Joe Six pack is figuring that Windows isn't ready for the Internet and that pretending it is is costing businesses billions, year after year, after year. Both directly and indirectly.
And now that international investors have divested and that even its own emloyees have offloaded it is as irrelevant to the stock market as it is for the IT sector.
No reason to keep plugging it, if you're not on the pay roll. Doing so is not only working for free but also causing further harm and excluding other stories and even original sources.
Even just the added bureacracy of license managment takes badly needed, valuable man-hours / years away from re-building. Then there are the maintenance and interoperability issues on top of that which further sap resources.
So, it does not necessarily forfeit their chance at a stable government, but it does risk forfeiting the open access and open communication needed to maintain a democracy or constitutional federal republic. Lastly, any DRM would create problems of sovereignity if internal government documents were freely available via backdoors and other tricks
or where even the very file formats lived and died the marketing whim of a single supplier.
Let's steer back to news for nerds / stuff that matters.
For the holidays, could we please have a MS free week, weekend or at least just a MS free friday? i.e. no articles or press releases about the lastest vaporware, thneed, fud or spin, inlcuding news relays via MS-owned sources like slate, msn, msnbc, msnpr, newseek, etc. It seems every day there is a shameless, uneccesary plug or two. Now that international investors have divested and even their own emloyees have offloaded it is as irrelevant to the stock market as it is for the IT sector.
Look, none of these WMA-only sites are going to survive. Not only are there formats with better sound quality, but ones with less cumbersome overhead and available on more platforms. iTunes can play on both Macintosh and Windows so far.
No matter the relative market shares of the two platforms, Mac + Windows > Windows Only.
Yes, despite the "strong dollar" policy the bad shape of the economy meant using tricks like cutting the interest rate. However, the interest rate is already as low as it can go so that can't be cut further. There have already been several recessions recently, but just now deflation is the problem. The recent "growth" seems to result from the change in the value of the dollar, jobs are still getting cut, rather than an increase in trade.
Maybe economic depression can be avoided maybe not. Hiding deflation by devaluing the dollar relative to other currencies is only cosmetic and irresponsible.
It's a shame that in the last three years the U.S. looks now in a position where two or three large countries could make it cry "Uncle"
Anyway, strong or weak US vs Australian dollar, the service is misleading. 99 cents my ass. It's just another gimmick to get kids to install pieces of Palladium/DRM on their parents machines.
and content by the corporations
on
Smart Billboards
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Seriously, what if the majority of riders are listening to truly non-commercial stations like student stations e.g. ones with voice id's like "WCBN 88.3 FM - at the far left of your radio dial" or "Radio Free Ann Arbor". Would the billboard show an ad for a state or city park or a free concert? Or just tell people to bike to work?
A couple different Boston media outlets have run tests, and even with the extra cab rides out to Logan and in from Laguardia, the plane guy always beats the train guy. (I think they always do this without checking baggage.)...
... advantage to the train is not shutting off all electronics for take-off and landing and no post-9/11 anal prob security to get to the gate.
In addition to skipping the inneffective and inconvenient airport theatrics, there are other reasons to not waste time flying.
Most of the travel time using a train is time you can use to read, work, sleep, and so on. Take a route like Copenhagen - Stockholm. It's about 4 hours door to door by jet and about 5 by train, but on the train that about a 4.5 hour block of work, some even have internet connections. On the plane, you're never in one spot for more than 30 or 40 minutes unless there's a delay.
Auto update screwing up third party apps ought to be part of a renewed anti-trust activity. Also, think about the standard help-desk answer, "reformat, reinstall". That effectively wipes any competing software off the harddrive completely.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, last fall a few more former security companies knuckled under and now no longer engage in disclosure. Without some semblance of public disclosure, there is now way for sysadmins to verify that their systems are/aren't vulnerable or to verify if the patch worked or not. Talk about putting one's head in the sand.
The problems from that company are as severe as before, perhaps worse. For those still stuck with that company's products, 2004 will be a hard year, especially if its customers run afoul of privacy and other regulations as a result of the product.
"DRM on my business documents?! F-ing A, no way. Wait. ... Oooh ... music..."
However, given the sad, vulnerable state of security and privacy, I'd expect more authors to expound on the benefits of IPv6's privacy and authentication mechanisms.
Likewise, as more bandwidth is eaten by spam and music downloading, IPv6 addresses quality of service, and better routing and addressing capabilities.
The only two reasons not to go IPv6, at least for intranets, is either espionage agencies oppose increased security and/or a particular large vendor fails to support it well. Maybe there are others. Wireless networks and VPNs are being thrown in all over the place. These are the perfect places to start with IPv6. The other option is NAT, but that will eventually have to be redone when the move is finally made. Kill 2 birds with one stone and install the new VPN or Wireless net with IPv6.
However, that said, it would interesting to see some reliable figures. Funny how it's run full circle - 'dot-com' started out as a pejorative, was the latest rage, and is now a pejorative again.
Lesson? It's part of the hamster wheel of useless upgrades. And it currently leads to lost business or government records due to changes in undocumented, proprietary formats. How many minutes / hours are you willing waste to attack a file in order to find out how to read it in order to find out if it is worth reading?
Templates and styles are the way to go regardless of which program you use and regardless of which format it chooses to write. OpenOffice.org is one of many which do that well.
Seriously, what functions do you use now in 2004 that where not available in 1994?
Well the ODBC error which hinders using FileMaker and MS-Word for Macintosh for mail merge is one. The issue is a bug on Microsoft's side and cannot be fixed by anyone else. The official status is "no plans to fix"
Another is marketing practice -- too many non-technical people (e.g. CTOs and CIOs) don't know that it is possible to have a hetergeneous computing environment.
I'm sure others can point out other examples.
With the help of some eeproms (and an inverter) it was possible to rewrite the parts of the monitor. There was even a hack to add lowercase and the missing ] or [ character.
These days I'm happy with the open source nature of OS X which is the software equivalent of providing schematics.
For example, I have an old Dell which needed a BIOS upgrade the other year and had to go to the trouble of finding a Windows user to download and uncompress the disk image for me. If it have been available as purely a disk image, it would have been a non-issue instead of a black spot against Dell on my next x86 purchase.
If more users were to suggest using disk images instead of the MS-DOS/MS-Windows only executables, perhaps they would upgrade their process.
Again, this not only a warning about the dangers of monopoly lock-in but also a visible example of where OSS methods excel. It's not only cheaper to develop OSS, but fewer hoops to hop through. If I can gather the resources, I or anyone can make a translation of OpenOffice.org or AbiWord or Mozilla or so on in the language of my choice be it Navajo, Ojibwe, Kildin Sami, or what ever.
The doomsday scenario about anyone suffering when Microsoft goes under strikes me as bullshit. I'm sure even the current U.S. government could find a replacement export. Actually, they'd have to. Very little production goes on in the U.S. anymore, not even jeans, and the trade deficit + the budget deficit + deflation are about to pop a bubble.
As mentioned before, each day we read about more countries, agencies, institutions and businesses increasing productivity and cutting TCO by going F/OSS. Someone is going to be selling to these customers. If the U.S. keeps wasting it resources propping up the MS dinosaur, it will let everyone else get too far a lead.
I have people at work use PDF, ISO-8859-1, or XHTML and justified it on purely technical grounds, however, I'd like to add a paragraph or two from the law book.
In the near future, there will be the Oasis file format, which will make archival work much easier.
Everyone in the IT community already knows what a poor reputation that company has actively worked hard to earn. Articles like the above serve only to provide free marketing and distract from active development rather than pump-n-dump.
Rather than doing free security and sysadmin work for Chairman Bill this holiday season, and rather than providing free publicity for his portfolio, could we please give it a rest and have a MS free week, weekend or at least just a MS free friday? i.e. no articles or press releases about the lastest vaporware, thneed, fud or spin, inlcuding news relays via MS-owned sources like slate, msn, msnbc, msnpr, newseek, etc. It seems every day there is a shameless, uneccesary plug or two. Now that international investors have divested and even their own emloyees have offloaded it is as irrelevant to the stock market as it is for the IT sector. The pyramid scheme has maxed out, if you weren't already bailing, then it's too late.
As far as security goes, businesses and home users alike are finding Gnome and KDE easy to use and the plaforms (Darwin, OpenBSD, Linux, QNX, etc.) more secure, more stable, and easier to maintain. So looking back at MS-Window [lack of] security in 2003, we can say good bye to the terminally insecure and hello to modern technology.
Personally, I think most mailing lists ought to have a news gateway and most newsgroups ought to have a mailing list gate way. That lets participants use the client of choice - news or mail or both.
The further you get from the original source, the greater probability for omissions, errors or further bias. Yes, the original story had those problems, but following a lossy compression with a second lossy compression, you get less info and more garbage. That applies to any news source, or even academic research.
The small part that it had played in technology is diminishing as even Joe Six pack is figuring that Windows isn't ready for the Internet and that pretending it is is costing businesses billions, year after year, after year. Both directly and indirectly. And now that international investors have divested and that even its own emloyees have offloaded it is as irrelevant to the stock market as it is for the IT sector.
No reason to keep plugging it, if you're not on the pay roll. Doing so is not only working for free but also causing further harm and excluding other stories and even original sources.
So, it does not necessarily forfeit their chance at a stable government, but it does risk forfeiting the open access and open communication needed to maintain a democracy or constitutional federal republic. Lastly, any DRM would create problems of sovereignity if internal government documents were freely available via backdoors and other tricks or where even the very file formats lived and died the marketing whim of a single supplier.
However, it would very much forfeit their chance at an independent IT sector.
For the holidays, could we please have a MS free week, weekend or at least just a MS free friday? i.e. no articles or press releases about the lastest vaporware, thneed, fud or spin, inlcuding news relays via MS-owned sources like slate, msn, msnbc, msnpr, newseek, etc. It seems every day there is a shameless, uneccesary plug or two. Now that international investors have divested and even their own emloyees have offloaded it is as irrelevant to the stock market as it is for the IT sector.
No matter the relative market shares of the two platforms, Mac + Windows > Windows Only.
See also Metcalfe's Law in other contexts.
It's a shame that in the last three years the U.S. looks now in a position where two or three large countries could make it cry "Uncle"
Anyway, strong or weak US vs Australian dollar, the service is misleading. 99 cents my ass. It's just another gimmick to get kids to install pieces of Palladium/DRM on their parents machines.
Seriously, what if the majority of riders are listening to truly non-commercial stations like student stations e.g. ones with voice id's like "WCBN 88.3 FM - at the far left of your radio dial" or "Radio Free Ann Arbor". Would the billboard show an ad for a state or city park or a free concert? Or just tell people to bike to work?
Most of the travel time using a train is time you can use to read, work, sleep, and so on. Take a route like Copenhagen - Stockholm. It's about 4 hours door to door by jet and about 5 by train, but on the train that about a 4.5 hour block of work, some even have internet connections. On the plane, you're never in one spot for more than 30 or 40 minutes unless there's a delay.