Maybe I'm about to show my ignorance here, but couldn't the guest (virtualized) system get shown the drive via the host OS?
So you put the disk into the drive / attach the USB device... it comes up to the host system, which actually has access to the bare metal. When the guest OS requests the device, it's actually talking not to the hardware but to Parallels (or VMWare, whatever), which then accesses that device through the host system's normal methods.
There wouldn't be any way for both host and guest to 'fight' over the device, because the host OS is the only one directly touching the hardware. The guest OS only gets to access it through an intermediary -- the normal system calls of the host OS, after being passed through Parallels (which is running in system or userspace on the host).
This is probably a lot slower than just offering up the hardware to the guest OS, so maybe it falls more towards the 'emulation' side than true 'virtualization,' but it would solve the conflict-of-access problems.
But isn't this sort of tunneling-through-the-host-OS what most virtualization software does anyway? For example, when you want to treat a file on the host computer as the hard drive of the guest computer, you have to do something like this. When the guest system tries to access its "hard drive," the virtualization software turns it into a regular system call on the host, which accesses the file, and then the data gets passed back to the virtual machine.
If you can make a file resident on the host's filesystem look like a drive to the guest, I don't see why you couldn't abstract a USB device out in the same manner -- at least commonly-understood ones like Mass Storage, where there's really not any reason to access it on a low level.
This is interesting. Is this a commonality of all virtualization systems (i.e., VMWare, Xen, etc.?) or just a Parallels thing?
If each VM can only use a maximum of 100% of one processor, then it seems like people are going to have to choose their machine configurations very carefully. A dual-proc quad-core sounds neat, but if you're going to be doing a most of your work in a small number of running VMs, then it might be better to get a machine that only has two or four processors, but where the individual cores are faster.
If this is a limitation of all VM systems, can anyone explain why it isn't practical for the hypervisor to take the various application threads that are being run on the virtual machine and dole them out to different physical processors / logical cores? Why keep the VM bottled up on a single hardware or logical processor? Seems like this ought to be one of the major functions of the host system's OS: managing the physical resources of the system as efficiently as possible so as to keep them saturated with the virtualized workload.
It would be a heck of a waste to be waiting for something to happen on a virtual machine because it was only using one core of your eight-core system, while all the other cores just sat idle. That seems like such a fundamentally wasteful proposition that I can't believe people haven't figured out some way to avoid it.
If you have to go out and specifically purchase hardware in order to run OS X... why wouldn't you just get, you know, the hardware that's specifically designed to run OS X? Or that OS X is designed to run on? You know -- Apple hardware? I can't imagine it's that much more expensive than buying the Intel mobo and processor aftermarket along with all the associated support HW, particularly if you put any value on your time. I guess if combing through NewEgg is your idea of a good time, this might not matter, but I enjoy using my computer.
I understand there's a certain amount of geek cachet in doing something that's not really supposed to be done -- IP by carrier pigeon, whatever -- but eventually you have to admit to yourself that you're going out of your way to make life difficult.
Microsoft has a monopoly. Therefore, it's a pretty good assumption that they've done their market research and have already set the price of their products for maximum revenue generation: the point at which the sales you'd lose from increasing the price overwhelm the additional income. (There's probably an economics term for this point, but it's been a while...)
Any involuntary price increase at this point can't be a good thing for them, because (assuming rational behavior) they've already set their prices for optimum profit. Increasing them further might not make people immediately switch from Windows, but it could change purchasing patterns in other ways: slowing the upgrade cycle, making piracy or theft more attractive, etc.
True, most people would just bend over and take it, but Microsoft is already giving it to them as hard as they can -- forcing them to be harder isn't good for them. The damage to MS might be insignificant, though.
Unfortunately, the documentation and source code at issue in this case, combined with the licensing that the EU is letting Microsoft get away with, won't result in any real competition to Windows.
At best, it might result in some competition to other Microsoft products that are highly-integrated: maybe next year's Lotus Notes will be better in comparison to Exchange, for instance. Or RealPlayer in comparison to WMP.
The only thing the documentaiton is going to do is let other big software vendors write more tightly-integrated software for the Windows platform. It won't help create a Windows alternative, an in the long run, might actually hurt, since writing programs that are tied to particular quirks of Windows might make them less platform-agnostic and harder to port.
The licensing that all the docs and source is going to be released under is going to be very restrictive, and if anything is a danger to efforts like ReactOS and Wine, since it makes it more likely that they'll get accused of stealing code, and increases the number of people who can't touch projects like that because of the possibility that they've seen Microsoft's trade secrets under NDA/restrictive-license in the past.
The only "good" to come of all this, in my opinion, is the huge PR disaster for Microsoft. The fact that it might lead to "better," by which I mean more tightly-integrated, Windows applications is less of a benefit than it is a hazard. Frankly, anything that makes Windows suck less is bad, if you dislike Windows.
It's because they have a monopoly -- all the restaurant/automobile/whatever analogies in the world don't matter, if you don't factor in the anti-competitive aspect of the monopoly. If Microsoft were smaller, they wouldn't be having a problem; it's only because of their extremely dominant position that they have to follow special rules, because otherwise it would be impossible to compete with them.
If you were a niche OS vendor and didn't want to share information on the inner workings of your system, so that you could make more money selling a highly-integrated application stack, that would probably be OK. It becomes anti-competitive when you have such an absurd proportion of the market that it's basically impossible for any company to compete with you, unless they make products that run on your OS. In that case, by keeping the details to yourself, you can suppress realistic competition indefinitely.
Since this suppression of competition hurts the market in general and is bad for the consumer, I think the EU and other regulatory bodies are more than justified in doing whatever they think is necessary in order to remedy the situation. In this case, they're not going after the monopoly itself (as some of the proposed solutions to the US anti-trust case did) but after the behavior that suppresses competition itself: basically acknowledging that Windows is the de-facto standard and will be for some time, and requiring that Microsoft stop tilting the playing field in their own favor.
This was a good analogy to the point I was trying to make.
I guess the corollary here would be if you could install automatically-locking doorknobs on everyone's houses, so that even people too dumb to lock their own doors when they left the house had a minimum level of security, wouldn't that make it more likely that you -- a conscientious person who does remember to lock their door -- would get broken into? Before, the criminals are going to go for the easy targets; if you make them harder, then the criminals are just going to pick someone at random once they get a little smarter, and that person they pick could be you.
I'm not suggesting that anyone actually downgrade their security (so in the analogy, I'm not suggesting that you stop locking your door), just wondering whether if there were a hypothetical way to eliminate human stupidity as a source of vulnerabilities, if this wouldn't make the playing field more level, and thus put non-stupid people at greater risk.
I know you're joking, but large companies really do have a "credit rating" -- it's called their bond rating or bond score. They don't just go to a bank and borrow money, they basically write their own fiat currency (bonds) and sell them to raise capital. Depending on the perceived health of the company, the bonds are perceived as more or less risky.
I don't know Microsoft's offhand, but I'm betting it's pretty good...not that they need to raise capital, with the amount of money they have sitting around.
Hypothetical question: "lusers" as decoys
on
A Closed Off System?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Speaking as a user who understands their computer reasonably well and doesn't click on stuff just because animated characters tell me to, would this be a good thing?
If we (hypothetically) closed off the "stupid user" vulnerabilities that are the major attack vectors right now, wouldn't the malware authors instead just concentrate on other, more technical, avenues of attack?
Here's my thought: maybe having systems vulnerable to idiot users is actually a good thing for the informational ecosystem as a whole. They're more than just the canaries in the coal mine (although they serve that function, too), they provide a steady stream of marks for the virus/trojan/malware writers and phishing-scheme authors of the world.
If these people weren't able to basically throw themselves on the swords of their own stupidity on a regular basis, couldn't this just lead to smarter malware, which affected more of us (not just the stupid/ignorant)?
Malware authors are inherently lazy and opportunistic. While there are still lots of "the monkey told me to click it so I did" people around, and ways to exploit this idiocy, that's what they're going to do. They're not going to mess around with esoteric buffer overflows to steal your information, when they can just send out some fake PayPal emails and watch the data roll in.
Given the choice, I'd rather have the primary attack vectors be ones that rely on user stupidity, rather than technical flaws, because 0-day technical flaws are too 'egalitarian,' attacking both the clueless user and the experienced person without warning. Personally, anything that keeps the collective attention of the Russian Mafia focused on people too dumb to check the URL line in IE before typing in their bank account information is a good thing in my book.
I know this isn't a very nice sentiment to hold, but if there was some hypothetical way to remove user stupidity as a vulnerability (not possible, so this is all just a mind game), maybe we'd be better off not implementing it?
I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't attempt to educate people on good computing practices, but if people are too lazy or disinterested to become educated, maybe in their laziness they can do the rest of us a favor by acting as the collective decoys?
Not to argue with you, since I suppose it depends heavily on the population you're talking about, but I've found that the majority of even not-particularly-technical businesspeople that I work with are aware of Linux -- as in, they've heard of it, and know it has something to do with computers. The slightly more astute realize that it's an operating system, but it's still basically an abstract concept.
I use my Linux machine as a media PC from time to time, hooked up to a projector, and I've had quite a few people who know next-to-nothing about computers (or I thought they did, anyway) ask "what's up with the funny icons?" When I tell them it's Linux (actually, KDE, horrible of me, I know), it's surprising the number of people that say "Ohh, that's Linux." As in, they've heard of it someplace before, but didn't really know what it was.
YMMV, of course -- there are doubtless lots of people out there who don't know what an 'operating system' is and don't care, but I think they're basically irrelevant as a market, since they are followers -- they buy what's popular because they're told to, either through advertising or by salespeople or by friends/relatives.
Among the people who really matter, Linux has achieved good name recognition (it's at least buzzword-ish), but little actual understanding.
There's an easier way to do this. Just sneeze on some unsuspecting passenger headed to LAX, send their description to your recipient, and then have them steal the passenger's handkerchief upon arrival in Los Angeles. Then just wipe the handkerchief on an empty Agar-DVD, and presto!
Sneezing? I know of a much more fun way to transfer micro-organisms. However, I doubt it's practical for most potential users of the technology.
Huh? I think that's a little limited in perspective on your part. There are lots of applications where you need lots of capacity but perhaps not very much shelf life (or maybe where shelf life is actually a bad thing).
True, it wouldn't make a very good backup media, but when you're choosing something for archivial purposes, you don't do it based on capacity, you do it based on stability, longevity of the format and equipment, and many other factors. That's the only reason tape is even still in use: otherwise everyone would use fixed disks, since they're so much cheaper per MB. (Last time I checked, you could get hard disks for less than the cost of good LTO media alone, not even factoring in the cost of the tape drives.)
Particularly if they can make the process easily rewritable (or even recyclable), at 50TB there would be a lot of applications for short-term storage media just as a way of moving massive quantities of data around. A spindle of 50TB DVD-sized disks shipped via FedEx from coast to coast, or even carried from one building to another, would have a pretty impressive bandwidth equivalency. (That whole "bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes" adage again.)
True, but do you really want to have to get a UPS for your fridge, in order to keep your data cool in the case of a power outage?
Every time there was a big blackout, you'd have geeks lining up to beg for slivers of dry ice from the power company in order to keep their porn collections from warming up and expiring.
I don't think it will. It may fail for a lot of other reasons, but "a lot of information can get stolen" won't be one of them.
That whole line in TFA reeks of a journalist trying to find some 'flip side' to write about, just so he doesn't come off like he's plugging a vaporware product. Rather than actually do any research, he asks the inventor a dumb question about the downsides and prints the guy's underwhelming response.
This sort of cheesy manufactured controversy is pretty popular, and it's a sign of poor journalism.
Space exploration -- even just putting stuff into orbit -- is a risky proposition at the best of times. Any agency pushing the envelope of what they've done before is bound to have some failures, but this is sometimes the price you pay for eventual success.
What are your experiences with the hardware requirements for successfully running Windows in a VM?
I'm thinking of trying the free version of VMWare on my Linux machine (running Kubuntu) so I can use some CAD programs that are unfortunately Windows-only; I think it'll be easier than spending a lot of time tweaking Wine, which I've had some mixed results with in the past. (Interestingly, I had better results with TG's Cedega for games, though.)
I don't mean what the bare-minimum requirements are for it, I'm thinking more of "comfortable" use. People allude to it being RAM-hungry, but I'm trying to get an idea of how much more RAM, if any, I'll need to buy. (Right now I have a P4 workstation with a paltry 512MB in it -- although surprisingly it rarely needs to swap during normal usage, even with KDE. =P )
This is true, but in a system like this, the casino has a strong interest in checking everyone's identity against the no-gamble list, and in aggressively pursuing people who are on the list to keep them from sneaking in, in the same way that they pursue people who cheat: it's bad for business. Their business.
Probably they check your ID when you buy chips or something, and if you're on the no-gamble list then you just get turned away, but if you show a false ID then you've committed fraud. Thus the onus is on them to check everyone's IDs, but if you show them a bad one then the fault is on you. (I can't imagine a system where showing a false ID and passing it off as your own isn't a crime.)
That said, the chances of you walking into a casino and making money are slim indeed. More likely if you're on the no-gamble list it's likely you'd walk into the casino, lose your shirt, and then the casino wouldn't be able to go after you for the money you "spent." But they're not really losing any actual money, since it's not like you stole a product from them: their 'loss' is all on paper anyway. (I.e., the marginal cost of production of a game of poker is basically nil, so if you gamble and then don't pay up, they don't make money, but they don't really lose anything, either.)
The real intent of the law, as I understand it, is just to keep the casinos from trying to wring blood from stones, as it were: people who are compulsive gamblers (and by that I really mean 'compulsive gambling losers' since they're almost by definition losing money, if they have a problem) aren't going to make money in a casino.
There's a huge difference between being able to buy a machine with an OS and installing it aftermarket.
To a lot of people, the latter route seems very hacker-esque. If the machine doesn't come with a particular OS pre-installed, then clearly it's not "designed for" that OS. After all, that sticker on the front of the box says "Designed for Windows XP," doesn't it? And you wouldn't want to run an OS on that machine that it wasn't designed for -- that's like putting diesel into a gasoline car. Or something.
Computers are complex devices, and to many people who don't spend their days working on them, complicated devices. There is a perception that anything you're installing aftermarket must necessarily be an additional level of complexity (even if the resulting system is simpler and/or easier to use, people oftentimes don't consider that).
The day that you can go onto Dell's Home-user site and order a "PC with Linux" as easily as you can choose one with a 60GB drive versus a 40GB drive will be an important day, if only because it'll serve to break down a little more of the perception that "PC's are supposed to run Windows, even if they can run Linux."
This question came up the last time the idea of legitimate, DRM-ed P2P software was discussed, and I didn't see any answer.
The whole advantage of BT versus a direct transfer protocol is the client-to-client aspect, which can only work as long as each client wants the same file. This means that you can't encrypt every file with a per-user/per-file key, and have to rely on the client software to apply the DRM to the final file. (As I believe iTunes does -- or used to do, anyway; wasn't the whole point of pyMusique that it could save files without applying the DRM?)
I have no idea how the system actually works, but if I were going to design something like it, I'd say that you'd have to have files that were encrypted with a per-file global key (this theoretically limits their use to users of the service, rather than just everyone, at least until the files+key escape onto the net) and then encrypt the files as they're written to disk (including the temp files) with a per-download key which would be used to enforce the expiration and single-user nature of the files. The keys would have to be kept inside the application, or inside the Windows Media framework, and the system would depend fundamentally on the security of the client software and the its prevention of user access of the keystore.
Oh, and the peer-to-peer connections between various clients would have to be encrypted with randomly generated keys, so that a user couldn't just capture packets flowing into the machine and reconstruct the un-DRMed file that way. This handshaking could also be used to (attempt to) verify the integrity of the clients to each other, so that a user couldn't inject an untrustworthy client and get un-DRMed content -- although I think it's impossible to block this avenue completely in the long run. (This is the pyMusique approach, at least as I understand it: simulate a client and get the file as normal, but just don't apply the DRM as the 'real' client does. However a P2P based system is more vulnerable to this attack than a centralized, iTMS-like service, since you can't arbitrarily change the handshaking procedure whenever you want: older versions of the client will still be out there, talking to each other, unless you have some sort of remote killswitch or enforced auto-updates.)
That I know of, there are at least parts of the Windows Media DRM system which remain unhacked, including it's key-management functions for DRMed files; although I suspect this is not due to any fundamental features of the system but more because of its limited use right now (and easier ways to bypass it that don't involve breaking the DRM itself, i.e. Audio Hijack). In the long run, a system like this can only work with any kind of security with Treacherous Computing technology that restricts the user from ever accessing the keystore, and even then I'm not sure you can guarantee security that way.
Because what you're trying to do is give the user access to something and keep them from it at the same time, all DRM systems are a bit schizophrenic, and this is no exception.
The first time I read your comment, I thought you said: So hopefully they mean what they say and they'll actually support more than just windows and die soon.
Which I feel would be the best possible outcome, incidentally.
People have lived for centuries in climates hotter than Arizona without air conditioning. Lots of people do right now, in fact. Provided you dress appropriately, keep hydrated, and don't do a lot of heavy physical exertion, a person can survive in regions where daytime temperatures exceed 100-plus degrees F pretty much indefinitely.
So while I would never want to live in Arizona -- or in Washington, DC or even New York City, for that matter -- without air conditioning (I consider anything warmer than 70F uncomfortable), it's a bit of an exaggeration to say that it's necessary for life. It's a necessity for comfort, not survival, and that's just the type of distinction that I'm talking about.
We define 'necessities' as those things which are required to live 'comfortably,' which is an artificially-defined state close to the mean in a given society, not what is required to actually maintain homeostasis and continue sucking air for a while longer. Because 'comfortably' is a continuously moving target, so are 'necessities,' and thus we can never provide them for everyone.
The article does a really bad job of emphasizing the difference between Bittorrent the download protocol/technology, and BitTorrent, the CA-based company.
It's kind of like what would happen if Yahoo! had named itself "HTTP" back in the early 90s.
What's basically happening here is that a company (BitTorrent) is marketing a service which (I think) uses the bittorrent protocol to share DRMed movies, as part of a subscription service.
From a technical standpoint, this has as much to do with the Pirate Bay's use of BT as Apple's iTunes does with AllOfMP3.com, since they both use HTTP. Which is to say, basically none.
However, from an economic/political standpoint, this could be a good thing depending on how you look at it. Because BitTorrent, Inc. is the 'public face' of the BT protocol, whatever it does reflects on the perception of bittorrrent generally. If it's perceived as being legitimate, then it dampens the kneejerk "bittorrent == piracy" reaction, even though the majority of the traffic using that protocol on the network at any given time may be illegitimate or pirated. This perception is important, since it may be what drives ISPs and others to filter, block, or ratelimit packets on their network. As in many aspects of life, what people perceive to be the truth is far more important than what's actually the case.
I would wager that at some point, as BitTorrent, Inc. tries to clean up its image, that it will probably try to keep other file-sharing systems from using it's name and trademark -- Azureus will have to be a "distributed peer-to-peer simultaneous transfer client" instead of a "Bittorrent client."
I think you've hit the nail on the head. Pity you don't work in a corner office for some studio somewhere.
It's not that 'people are unwilling to pay for content' -- the sales of TV shows on DVD show that's obviously false. People are very willing to pay for content, when it's presented to them in the right way.
The rise of Netflix and DVD sales should have been a wake-up call to the studios, that given the choice between paying a few bucks a month (in the case of a rental service) and watching ads, people will pay for no-ads, and for the perception of a higher-quality product.
When people are using P2P, then that should be a sign that the price point is too high for a lot of consumers. Obviously you're never going to get it low enough for everyone (there are always going to be people with a lot of free time and not a lot of free cash -- e.g. college students -- who will spend the time to download stuff rather than buy it; that's an un-winnable battle), but it shows there's probably a market for lower-quality services below DVD sales and rentals. I think that iTunes is beginning to get into this market, but it's still not aggressive enough.
At any rate, I'm not particularly worried. If the studios can't provide content that the market wants to buy, somebody else will. As nature abhors a vacuum, capitalism abhors it even more: where there's money to be made, somebody will step in to make it. The thing I find most worrying is not the sources of content (basically limitless) but the damage that the studios will do to the markets as their old business models collapse and they try vainly to preserve them.
Once the mass of humanity is freed from the need to scramble for scarce necessities...
I think this is a beautiful, but utterly naive sentiment. As society progresses, we constantly change what we define "necessities" to be, so that everyone can never have them.
Consider what was considered the 'basic necessities' for life 100 years ago, and compare it to today. Things that were utterly frivolous luxuries (like air conditioning) not too many generations ago are considered so critical to life today, that if you can't afford it you can sometimes get a government handout. Easy example: electricity.
This is because society defines "necessities" not as 'things a person needs in order to stay alive' (which is surprisingly minimal), but 'things a person needs in order to lead a reasonably average life.' At the same time, people who do have an income constantly strive to exceed that average -- to do better than the people surrounding them. Thus, the "average" bar gets constantly higher.
The net result is that there will never be enough "necessities" for everyone. If the total amount of resources in the world is n, then the amount you'd need to provide for everyone is permanently defined as n+1.
Slashdot Mirror
*scratches head*
... it comes up to the host system, which actually has access to the bare metal. When the guest OS requests the device, it's actually talking not to the hardware but to Parallels (or VMWare, whatever), which then accesses that device through the host system's normal methods.
Maybe I'm about to show my ignorance here, but couldn't the guest (virtualized) system get shown the drive via the host OS?
So you put the disk into the drive / attach the USB device
There wouldn't be any way for both host and guest to 'fight' over the device, because the host OS is the only one directly touching the hardware. The guest OS only gets to access it through an intermediary -- the normal system calls of the host OS, after being passed through Parallels (which is running in system or userspace on the host).
This is probably a lot slower than just offering up the hardware to the guest OS, so maybe it falls more towards the 'emulation' side than true 'virtualization,' but it would solve the conflict-of-access problems.
But isn't this sort of tunneling-through-the-host-OS what most virtualization software does anyway? For example, when you want to treat a file on the host computer as the hard drive of the guest computer, you have to do something like this. When the guest system tries to access its "hard drive," the virtualization software turns it into a regular system call on the host, which accesses the file, and then the data gets passed back to the virtual machine.
If you can make a file resident on the host's filesystem look like a drive to the guest, I don't see why you couldn't abstract a USB device out in the same manner -- at least commonly-understood ones like Mass Storage, where there's really not any reason to access it on a low level.
This is interesting. Is this a commonality of all virtualization systems (i.e., VMWare, Xen, etc.?) or just a Parallels thing?
If each VM can only use a maximum of 100% of one processor, then it seems like people are going to have to choose their machine configurations very carefully. A dual-proc quad-core sounds neat, but if you're going to be doing a most of your work in a small number of running VMs, then it might be better to get a machine that only has two or four processors, but where the individual cores are faster.
If this is a limitation of all VM systems, can anyone explain why it isn't practical for the hypervisor to take the various application threads that are being run on the virtual machine and dole them out to different physical processors / logical cores? Why keep the VM bottled up on a single hardware or logical processor? Seems like this ought to be one of the major functions of the host system's OS: managing the physical resources of the system as efficiently as possible so as to keep them saturated with the virtualized workload.
It would be a heck of a waste to be waiting for something to happen on a virtual machine because it was only using one core of your eight-core system, while all the other cores just sat idle. That seems like such a fundamentally wasteful proposition that I can't believe people haven't figured out some way to avoid it.
If you have to go out and specifically purchase hardware in order to run OS X ... why wouldn't you just get, you know, the hardware that's specifically designed to run OS X? Or that OS X is designed to run on? You know -- Apple hardware? I can't imagine it's that much more expensive than buying the Intel mobo and processor aftermarket along with all the associated support HW, particularly if you put any value on your time. I guess if combing through NewEgg is your idea of a good time, this might not matter, but I enjoy using my computer.
I understand there's a certain amount of geek cachet in doing something that's not really supposed to be done -- IP by carrier pigeon, whatever -- but eventually you have to admit to yourself that you're going out of your way to make life difficult.
Microsoft has a monopoly. Therefore, it's a pretty good assumption that they've done their market research and have already set the price of their products for maximum revenue generation: the point at which the sales you'd lose from increasing the price overwhelm the additional income. (There's probably an economics term for this point, but it's been a while...)
Any involuntary price increase at this point can't be a good thing for them, because (assuming rational behavior) they've already set their prices for optimum profit. Increasing them further might not make people immediately switch from Windows, but it could change purchasing patterns in other ways: slowing the upgrade cycle, making piracy or theft more attractive, etc.
True, most people would just bend over and take it, but Microsoft is already giving it to them as hard as they can -- forcing them to be harder isn't good for them. The damage to MS might be insignificant, though.
Unfortunately, the documentation and source code at issue in this case, combined with the licensing that the EU is letting Microsoft get away with, won't result in any real competition to Windows.
At best, it might result in some competition to other Microsoft products that are highly-integrated: maybe next year's Lotus Notes will be better in comparison to Exchange, for instance. Or RealPlayer in comparison to WMP.
The only thing the documentaiton is going to do is let other big software vendors write more tightly-integrated software for the Windows platform. It won't help create a Windows alternative, an in the long run, might actually hurt, since writing programs that are tied to particular quirks of Windows might make them less platform-agnostic and harder to port.
The licensing that all the docs and source is going to be released under is going to be very restrictive, and if anything is a danger to efforts like ReactOS and Wine, since it makes it more likely that they'll get accused of stealing code, and increases the number of people who can't touch projects like that because of the possibility that they've seen Microsoft's trade secrets under NDA/restrictive-license in the past.
The only "good" to come of all this, in my opinion, is the huge PR disaster for Microsoft. The fact that it might lead to "better," by which I mean more tightly-integrated, Windows applications is less of a benefit than it is a hazard. Frankly, anything that makes Windows suck less is bad, if you dislike Windows.
It's because they have a monopoly -- all the restaurant/automobile/whatever analogies in the world don't matter, if you don't factor in the anti-competitive aspect of the monopoly. If Microsoft were smaller, they wouldn't be having a problem; it's only because of their extremely dominant position that they have to follow special rules, because otherwise it would be impossible to compete with them.
If you were a niche OS vendor and didn't want to share information on the inner workings of your system, so that you could make more money selling a highly-integrated application stack, that would probably be OK. It becomes anti-competitive when you have such an absurd proportion of the market that it's basically impossible for any company to compete with you, unless they make products that run on your OS. In that case, by keeping the details to yourself, you can suppress realistic competition indefinitely.
Since this suppression of competition hurts the market in general and is bad for the consumer, I think the EU and other regulatory bodies are more than justified in doing whatever they think is necessary in order to remedy the situation. In this case, they're not going after the monopoly itself (as some of the proposed solutions to the US anti-trust case did) but after the behavior that suppresses competition itself: basically acknowledging that Windows is the de-facto standard and will be for some time, and requiring that Microsoft stop tilting the playing field in their own favor.
SO are you equating microsoft with a large lumbering overpriced and slow vehicle that is horribly inefficient?
Duh.
This was a good analogy to the point I was trying to make.
I guess the corollary here would be if you could install automatically-locking doorknobs on everyone's houses, so that even people too dumb to lock their own doors when they left the house had a minimum level of security, wouldn't that make it more likely that you -- a conscientious person who does remember to lock their door -- would get broken into? Before, the criminals are going to go for the easy targets; if you make them harder, then the criminals are just going to pick someone at random once they get a little smarter, and that person they pick could be you.
I'm not suggesting that anyone actually downgrade their security (so in the analogy, I'm not suggesting that you stop locking your door), just wondering whether if there were a hypothetical way to eliminate human stupidity as a source of vulnerabilities, if this wouldn't make the playing field more level, and thus put non-stupid people at greater risk.
I know you're joking, but large companies really do have a "credit rating" -- it's called their bond rating or bond score. They don't just go to a bank and borrow money, they basically write their own fiat currency (bonds) and sell them to raise capital. Depending on the perceived health of the company, the bonds are perceived as more or less risky.
I don't know Microsoft's offhand, but I'm betting it's pretty good...not that they need to raise capital, with the amount of money they have sitting around.
Speaking as a user who understands their computer reasonably well and doesn't click on stuff just because animated characters tell me to, would this be a good thing?
If we (hypothetically) closed off the "stupid user" vulnerabilities that are the major attack vectors right now, wouldn't the malware authors instead just concentrate on other, more technical, avenues of attack?
Here's my thought: maybe having systems vulnerable to idiot users is actually a good thing for the informational ecosystem as a whole. They're more than just the canaries in the coal mine (although they serve that function, too), they provide a steady stream of marks for the virus/trojan/malware writers and phishing-scheme authors of the world.
If these people weren't able to basically throw themselves on the swords of their own stupidity on a regular basis, couldn't this just lead to smarter malware, which affected more of us (not just the stupid/ignorant)?
Malware authors are inherently lazy and opportunistic. While there are still lots of "the monkey told me to click it so I did" people around, and ways to exploit this idiocy, that's what they're going to do. They're not going to mess around with esoteric buffer overflows to steal your information, when they can just send out some fake PayPal emails and watch the data roll in.
Given the choice, I'd rather have the primary attack vectors be ones that rely on user stupidity, rather than technical flaws, because 0-day technical flaws are too 'egalitarian,' attacking both the clueless user and the experienced person without warning. Personally, anything that keeps the collective attention of the Russian Mafia focused on people too dumb to check the URL line in IE before typing in their bank account information is a good thing in my book.
I know this isn't a very nice sentiment to hold, but if there was some hypothetical way to remove user stupidity as a vulnerability (not possible, so this is all just a mind game), maybe we'd be better off not implementing it?
I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't attempt to educate people on good computing practices, but if people are too lazy or disinterested to become educated, maybe in their laziness they can do the rest of us a favor by acting as the collective decoys?
Not to argue with you, since I suppose it depends heavily on the population you're talking about, but I've found that the majority of even not-particularly-technical businesspeople that I work with are aware of Linux -- as in, they've heard of it, and know it has something to do with computers. The slightly more astute realize that it's an operating system, but it's still basically an abstract concept.
I use my Linux machine as a media PC from time to time, hooked up to a projector, and I've had quite a few people who know next-to-nothing about computers (or I thought they did, anyway) ask "what's up with the funny icons?" When I tell them it's Linux (actually, KDE, horrible of me, I know), it's surprising the number of people that say "Ohh, that's Linux." As in, they've heard of it someplace before, but didn't really know what it was.
YMMV, of course -- there are doubtless lots of people out there who don't know what an 'operating system' is and don't care, but I think they're basically irrelevant as a market, since they are followers -- they buy what's popular because they're told to, either through advertising or by salespeople or by friends/relatives.
Among the people who really matter, Linux has achieved good name recognition (it's at least buzzword-ish), but little actual understanding.
There's an easier way to do this. Just sneeze on some unsuspecting passenger headed to LAX, send their description to your recipient, and then have them steal the passenger's handkerchief upon arrival in Los Angeles. Then just wipe the handkerchief on an empty Agar-DVD, and presto!
Sneezing? I know of a much more fun way to transfer micro-organisms. However, I doubt it's practical for most potential users of the technology.
Huh? I think that's a little limited in perspective on your part. There are lots of applications where you need lots of capacity but perhaps not very much shelf life (or maybe where shelf life is actually a bad thing).
True, it wouldn't make a very good backup media, but when you're choosing something for archivial purposes, you don't do it based on capacity, you do it based on stability, longevity of the format and equipment, and many other factors. That's the only reason tape is even still in use: otherwise everyone would use fixed disks, since they're so much cheaper per MB. (Last time I checked, you could get hard disks for less than the cost of good LTO media alone, not even factoring in the cost of the tape drives.)
Particularly if they can make the process easily rewritable (or even recyclable), at 50TB there would be a lot of applications for short-term storage media just as a way of moving massive quantities of data around. A spindle of 50TB DVD-sized disks shipped via FedEx from coast to coast, or even carried from one building to another, would have a pretty impressive bandwidth equivalency. (That whole "bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes" adage again.)
True, but do you really want to have to get a UPS for your fridge, in order to keep your data cool in the case of a power outage?
Every time there was a big blackout, you'd have geeks lining up to beg for slivers of dry ice from the power company in order to keep their porn collections from warming up and expiring.
I don't think it will. It may fail for a lot of other reasons, but "a lot of information can get stolen" won't be one of them.
That whole line in TFA reeks of a journalist trying to find some 'flip side' to write about, just so he doesn't come off like he's plugging a vaporware product. Rather than actually do any research, he asks the inventor a dumb question about the downsides and prints the guy's underwhelming response.
This sort of cheesy manufactured controversy is pretty popular, and it's a sign of poor journalism.
While I'm always up for an opportunity to bolster my sense of baseless, nationalistic superiority, NASA's had some strings of bad luck, too.
The Loss of Mars Observer. Oops.
Whatever Happened to the Mars Polar Lander? Double Oops.
NASA's metric confusion caused Mars orbiter loss. Durh...
Space exploration -- even just putting stuff into orbit -- is a risky proposition at the best of times. Any agency pushing the envelope of what they've done before is bound to have some failures, but this is sometimes the price you pay for eventual success.
Hopefully this isn't too off-topic:
What are your experiences with the hardware requirements for successfully running Windows in a VM?
I'm thinking of trying the free version of VMWare on my Linux machine (running Kubuntu) so I can use some CAD programs that are unfortunately Windows-only; I think it'll be easier than spending a lot of time tweaking Wine, which I've had some mixed results with in the past. (Interestingly, I had better results with TG's Cedega for games, though.)
I don't mean what the bare-minimum requirements are for it, I'm thinking more of "comfortable" use. People allude to it being RAM-hungry, but I'm trying to get an idea of how much more RAM, if any, I'll need to buy. (Right now I have a P4 workstation with a paltry 512MB in it -- although surprisingly it rarely needs to swap during normal usage, even with KDE. =P )
This is true, but in a system like this, the casino has a strong interest in checking everyone's identity against the no-gamble list, and in aggressively pursuing people who are on the list to keep them from sneaking in, in the same way that they pursue people who cheat: it's bad for business. Their business.
Probably they check your ID when you buy chips or something, and if you're on the no-gamble list then you just get turned away, but if you show a false ID then you've committed fraud. Thus the onus is on them to check everyone's IDs, but if you show them a bad one then the fault is on you. (I can't imagine a system where showing a false ID and passing it off as your own isn't a crime.)
That said, the chances of you walking into a casino and making money are slim indeed. More likely if you're on the no-gamble list it's likely you'd walk into the casino, lose your shirt, and then the casino wouldn't be able to go after you for the money you "spent." But they're not really losing any actual money, since it's not like you stole a product from them: their 'loss' is all on paper anyway. (I.e., the marginal cost of production of a game of poker is basically nil, so if you gamble and then don't pay up, they don't make money, but they don't really lose anything, either.)
The real intent of the law, as I understand it, is just to keep the casinos from trying to wring blood from stones, as it were: people who are compulsive gamblers (and by that I really mean 'compulsive gambling losers' since they're almost by definition losing money, if they have a problem) aren't going to make money in a casino.
There's a huge difference between being able to buy a machine with an OS and installing it aftermarket.
To a lot of people, the latter route seems very hacker-esque. If the machine doesn't come with a particular OS pre-installed, then clearly it's not "designed for" that OS. After all, that sticker on the front of the box says "Designed for Windows XP," doesn't it? And you wouldn't want to run an OS on that machine that it wasn't designed for -- that's like putting diesel into a gasoline car. Or something.
Computers are complex devices, and to many people who don't spend their days working on them, complicated devices. There is a perception that anything you're installing aftermarket must necessarily be an additional level of complexity (even if the resulting system is simpler and/or easier to use, people oftentimes don't consider that).
The day that you can go onto Dell's Home-user site and order a "PC with Linux" as easily as you can choose one with a 60GB drive versus a 40GB drive will be an important day, if only because it'll serve to break down a little more of the perception that "PC's are supposed to run Windows, even if they can run Linux."
I'm interested in their answer to this as well.
This question came up the last time the idea of legitimate, DRM-ed P2P software was discussed, and I didn't see any answer.
The whole advantage of BT versus a direct transfer protocol is the client-to-client aspect, which can only work as long as each client wants the same file. This means that you can't encrypt every file with a per-user/per-file key, and have to rely on the client software to apply the DRM to the final file. (As I believe iTunes does -- or used to do, anyway; wasn't the whole point of pyMusique that it could save files without applying the DRM?)
I have no idea how the system actually works, but if I were going to design something like it, I'd say that you'd have to have files that were encrypted with a per-file global key (this theoretically limits their use to users of the service, rather than just everyone, at least until the files+key escape onto the net) and then encrypt the files as they're written to disk (including the temp files) with a per-download key which would be used to enforce the expiration and single-user nature of the files. The keys would have to be kept inside the application, or inside the Windows Media framework, and the system would depend fundamentally on the security of the client software and the its prevention of user access of the keystore.
Oh, and the peer-to-peer connections between various clients would have to be encrypted with randomly generated keys, so that a user couldn't just capture packets flowing into the machine and reconstruct the un-DRMed file that way. This handshaking could also be used to (attempt to) verify the integrity of the clients to each other, so that a user couldn't inject an untrustworthy client and get un-DRMed content -- although I think it's impossible to block this avenue completely in the long run. (This is the pyMusique approach, at least as I understand it: simulate a client and get the file as normal, but just don't apply the DRM as the 'real' client does. However a P2P based system is more vulnerable to this attack than a centralized, iTMS-like service, since you can't arbitrarily change the handshaking procedure whenever you want: older versions of the client will still be out there, talking to each other, unless you have some sort of remote killswitch or enforced auto-updates.)
That I know of, there are at least parts of the Windows Media DRM system which remain unhacked, including it's key-management functions for DRMed files; although I suspect this is not due to any fundamental features of the system but more because of its limited use right now (and easier ways to bypass it that don't involve breaking the DRM itself, i.e. Audio Hijack). In the long run, a system like this can only work with any kind of security with Treacherous Computing technology that restricts the user from ever accessing the keystore, and even then I'm not sure you can guarantee security that way.
Because what you're trying to do is give the user access to something and keep them from it at the same time, all DRM systems are a bit schizophrenic, and this is no exception.
The first time I read your comment, I thought you said:
So hopefully they mean what they say and they'll actually support more than just windows and die soon.
Which I feel would be the best possible outcome, incidentally.
People have lived for centuries in climates hotter than Arizona without air conditioning. Lots of people do right now, in fact. Provided you dress appropriately, keep hydrated, and don't do a lot of heavy physical exertion, a person can survive in regions where daytime temperatures exceed 100-plus degrees F pretty much indefinitely.
So while I would never want to live in Arizona -- or in Washington, DC or even New York City, for that matter -- without air conditioning (I consider anything warmer than 70F uncomfortable), it's a bit of an exaggeration to say that it's necessary for life. It's a necessity for comfort, not survival, and that's just the type of distinction that I'm talking about.
We define 'necessities' as those things which are required to live 'comfortably,' which is an artificially-defined state close to the mean in a given society, not what is required to actually maintain homeostasis and continue sucking air for a while longer. Because 'comfortably' is a continuously moving target, so are 'necessities,' and thus we can never provide them for everyone.
The article does a really bad job of emphasizing the difference between Bittorrent the download protocol/technology, and BitTorrent, the CA-based company.
It's kind of like what would happen if Yahoo! had named itself "HTTP" back in the early 90s.
What's basically happening here is that a company (BitTorrent) is marketing a service which (I think) uses the bittorrent protocol to share DRMed movies, as part of a subscription service.
From a technical standpoint, this has as much to do with the Pirate Bay's use of BT as Apple's iTunes does with AllOfMP3.com, since they both use HTTP. Which is to say, basically none.
However, from an economic/political standpoint, this could be a good thing depending on how you look at it. Because BitTorrent, Inc. is the 'public face' of the BT protocol, whatever it does reflects on the perception of bittorrrent generally. If it's perceived as being legitimate, then it dampens the kneejerk "bittorrent == piracy" reaction, even though the majority of the traffic using that protocol on the network at any given time may be illegitimate or pirated. This perception is important, since it may be what drives ISPs and others to filter, block, or ratelimit packets on their network. As in many aspects of life, what people perceive to be the truth is far more important than what's actually the case.
I would wager that at some point, as BitTorrent, Inc. tries to clean up its image, that it will probably try to keep other file-sharing systems from using it's name and trademark -- Azureus will have to be a "distributed peer-to-peer simultaneous transfer client" instead of a "Bittorrent client."
I think you've hit the nail on the head. Pity you don't work in a corner office for some studio somewhere.
It's not that 'people are unwilling to pay for content' -- the sales of TV shows on DVD show that's obviously false. People are very willing to pay for content, when it's presented to them in the right way.
The rise of Netflix and DVD sales should have been a wake-up call to the studios, that given the choice between paying a few bucks a month (in the case of a rental service) and watching ads, people will pay for no-ads, and for the perception of a higher-quality product.
When people are using P2P, then that should be a sign that the price point is too high for a lot of consumers. Obviously you're never going to get it low enough for everyone (there are always going to be people with a lot of free time and not a lot of free cash -- e.g. college students -- who will spend the time to download stuff rather than buy it; that's an un-winnable battle), but it shows there's probably a market for lower-quality services below DVD sales and rentals. I think that iTunes is beginning to get into this market, but it's still not aggressive enough.
At any rate, I'm not particularly worried. If the studios can't provide content that the market wants to buy, somebody else will. As nature abhors a vacuum, capitalism abhors it even more: where there's money to be made, somebody will step in to make it. The thing I find most worrying is not the sources of content (basically limitless) but the damage that the studios will do to the markets as their old business models collapse and they try vainly to preserve them.
Consider what was considered the 'basic necessities' for life 100 years ago, and compare it to today. Things that were utterly frivolous luxuries (like air conditioning) not too many generations ago are considered so critical to life today, that if you can't afford it you can sometimes get a government handout. Easy example: electricity.
This is because society defines "necessities" not as 'things a person needs in order to stay alive' (which is surprisingly minimal), but 'things a person needs in order to lead a reasonably average life.' At the same time, people who do have an income constantly strive to exceed that average -- to do better than the people surrounding them. Thus, the "average" bar gets constantly higher.
The net result is that there will never be enough "necessities" for everyone. If the total amount of resources in the world is n, then the amount you'd need to provide for everyone is permanently defined as n+1.