Windows was already quite firmly established on x86 by 1993, starting with 3.0 which came out in around 1990... AmigaOS, VMS, IRIX, MacOS all only ran on their own hardware. I don't think BeOS was around at the time, and the earliest versions only ran on PPC hardware too.
DOS was the incumbent yes, it came bundled with almost every x86 compatible machine, and windows soon came bundled with dos (it was actually cheaper for hardware vendors to ship both, ms charged a lot more for dos on its own)...
Windows succeeded in a very different market to what Linux now competes in...
Dos came bundled, and windows was pushed as the natural progression from dos. It had very few competitors, most of which were considerably more expensive both for the software and the hardware required to run it on.
Linux on the other hand came much later, and is faced with a market already dominated by an incumbent player who has no interest in promoting linux as the natural progression away from their existing product.
If both windows and linux were introduced new to the market today, i think the story would be very different... Alternative OSs to the incumbents have a very rough time of it, commercial ones outright fail due to not being able to build marketshare fast enough to fund development (look at beos etc), desktop linux would have been considered a commercial failure and dropped years ago if it was a commercial product, only due to being open source and thus not dependent on revenue has it been able to build a user base slowly and steadily.
It's also possible (although very rare) to use most control characters in your password, at least on unix boxes. Very few brute force tools would be configured to try these.
Amusing that people rag on about MD5Crypt being weak, when...
It's still much stronger than the unsalted simple hash being used by sites like linkedin. Both of which are still massively stronger than the unsalted MD4 based algorithm used by windows (which is not only fast to crack, but can also be used as-is without needing to crack anyway), on which virtually all companies in the world are currently reliant. Solaris still defaults to DES, although it does support MD5/Blowfish if you explicitly enable them.
Incidentally, until a breach like this occurs you have no idea what algorithm a website uses to store your passwords... There are still many sites out there which store them in plain text.
If games are linked to your steam account, will that mean someone who bought a title for windows will automatically be able to run that same title on linux or mac if its available? I would certainly hope so, i hate the idea of having to pay again for a game i already bought...
This would greatly benefit those who dual boot for the purposes of gaming, depending on the games they play this could eliminate or greatly reduce the amount of time they spend booted into windows... On the other hand, if they have to buy the games again most people won't... Also this would create fragmentation with some of their game library on linux and some on windows, and discourage use of linux for gaming as it will undoubtedly have a smaller library.
Incidentally, dual booting can actually be beneficial... Plenty of people use windows for gaming (and only gaming), and use linux for everything else... It means that their windows install doesn't get bloated up with random applications that might interfere with their games.
IF drugs were legal, then people wouldn't be breaking the law by taking... That was the whole argument, there would be no reason to seek alternatives if they could legally take the original substance.
I tend to be wary of having service exclusively from a top tier provider... Such providers have been known to have peering disagreements with other such providers, and thus cut you off from chunks of the internet... Sometimes you also end up with very poor routes because the provider your using doesn't peer locally, so your traffic goes on a thousand mile round trip.
The smaller companies may be leasing lines from the big providers, but they will usually be using several of those providers at once so you end up with better local peering and much lower risk of peering disagreements.
The problem with cisco certified people and partners, is that they will push cisco products regardless of wether they are best value for the job... Same for any other vendor cert, all designed to sell products rather than provide a quality service.
For example, I built several networks recently using hp switches because they came in considerably cheaper than cisco, while still providing the required functionality.
I would much rather use a vendor-neutral organisation.
On the other hand, a pooling of resources and building-wide network makes sense for many reasons...
Having lots of different individual wireless networks in a small space causes congestion, a single centrally controlled one is far more efficient, and if there are any public areas in the development this could cover those too.
Depending how small the units are, having a central area where users can install noisy devices like a NAS (and not have to listen to it while you sleep) could be useful.
A building wide network has other uses, for instance door access systems, CCTV, access to shared resources such as a satellite dish etc.
There's no reason to have only a single internet connection, several could be used and load balanced while also providing some redundancy - depending on whats available in the area.
Do you think people would resort to taking bath salts if marijuana and other such drugs were available legally? As the article points out, as more substances are made illegal they are creating ever more dangerous substances in order to achieve similar highs. This wouldn't have happened if drugs were legal, if anything research would have been performed to create safer versions.
Also if drugs are sold legally, you can better keep track of who is taking them...
And people kill innocents all the time, wether on illegal drugs, legal drugs like alcohol or prescribed medicine from a doctor, or on no drugs whatsoever... Just because someone had taken bath salts at the time he tried to kill and eat someone, doesn't mean the bath salts had any influence over his decision to commit such an act.
Not necessarily... The black market drugs would need to be significantly cheaper than the over the counter stuff, or it simply wouldn't be worth the risk (of police, of poor quality product, of being ripped off by an unregulated seller etc) for the purchaser... And if the profit margins are slim enough it wouldn't be worth it for the seller.
With legal production, you have efficiencies through economies of scale as well as savings through being able to ship via official channels and not needing to smuggle etc, so you could easily undercut the black market on price and still turn a tidy profit.
Legalizing drugs would destroy the business of those in the illegal drug trade over night, save the police millions and allow the government keep track of who is buying what drugs.
You can buy spray on mud in a can. Although its illegal for your license plate to be covered in mud, it's very hard to prove that it was done intentionally (unless your stupid and only spray mud on the plate leaving the rest of the car clean) so all they can generally do is tell you to wash it off.
They are deploying thousands of these all around the country, putting them underground would be considerably more expensive...
It's not just maintenance for which they need to access the cabinet, connecting new customers up requires that too.
Also, these cabinets contain quite a lot of kit that generates heat, that would need to be vented somehow and you can't just put vents in the top because water would get in. If you sealed them such that they were waterproof and insulated by dirt and paving slabs on all sides, they would overheat very quickly... With the above ground cabinets, you can have vents which are angled downwards to prevent rain ingress and the metal case will also conduct heat fairly well and is cooled by fresh air on the outside.
Feeding solar in like that just causes inefficiency, you still need the same level of power generation from other (coal/gas etc) sources on the grid to cope with nights and cloudy days.
No it wouldn't, they would just write that gamble off as a loss and move on to the next... Smaller companies go belly up all the time, and you soon see the same people back running another company.
Something else needs to be done to ensure long term sustainable business, but i have no idea what would work.
Even as more apps are becoming web based, in the short to medium term users will still be accessing them using the same desktops they always have and will still need support for them.
Perhaps long term, users can move to simpler dumb terminals that have less to go wrong and thus require less support. But that's less, not none... Things can still go wrong, one of the primary functions of desktop support is unjamming printers and replacing toner which despite promises of the paperless office won't be going away any time soon.
There will also be a need to debug network level issues, as a dumb terminal is useless without its network...
So sure, desktop support will be reduced but not "wiped out"...
No, the hardware i have is the tomtom go, the first revision of tomtom hardware, it runs linux and is not an hp pda...
I also still have archived, an email response from tomtom support:
The TomTom licence agreement clearly states that this “Licence is non-exclusive and non-transferable.” In order to use your product you will always need your TomTom licence, this is the product code and can be found on the registration card or in the CD envelope/case (sometimes under the CDs) please check the link below:
This product code is unique and personal, only you have access to it, which is also why it is recommended in the same registration card, to keep in a safe place for activation (including TomTom PLUS), support and future map upgrades. This product code can be also stored into ‘My TomTom’ area where you will see “product code”
TomTom Navigator is sold as personal software with a unique and personal licence, if for some reason you have lost this product code and you did not add this information into your ‘My TomTom’ account , TomTom will not be able track your product code. This unfortunately means that you have lost your product code and with this the licence for use of TomTom software.
We understand and appreciate your situation, however; we are unable to issue you a new product code. For more information, may we to refer you to the TomTom Shop or your local retailer where you will be able to purchase an extra card with the software pre-installed and the licence Included within.
basically saying my device is a brick without this tiny slip of paper containing a code, and basically holding it to ransom demanding more money to continue using hardware i paid for.
Needless to say, i have not given any further money to tomtom and turned to the warez community in order to continue using the device i had already bought.
There was no pc software back then, you installed updates on the device by unzipping them onto the sdcard, a much preferable setup as i run linux and could not run this pc software anyway. Being able to install updates in a standard platform neutral way was one of the reasons i bought this device in the first place.
The problem is, HTML is *supposed* to degrade gracefully when faced with browsers that don't support given features, and properly coded html will indeed degrade gracefully in browsers like lynx and older mozilla versions... IE (and netscape 4 for that matter) on the other hand, doesn't simply lack support for stuff, it has broken implementations of various specs which means that instead of ignoring it and degrading gracefully, you end up with a really garbled page.
Most companies idea of "securing" windows, is to try and disable or break most of the features, resulting in a system which is extremely painful to use, and frequently displays errors because the system simply isn't designed to work in such a hacked up fashion.
What this says to me, is that most of the features are fundamentally insecure and thus have to be disabled rather than configured in a sensible way.
In every scenario i've seen, there were ways to bypass these restrictions and pretty much do what you want anyway.
On the other hand, on the linux setups i've seen you could do normal things, for instance you could browse the filesystem normally without resorting to hacks (on a typical windows setup explorer wont let you browse the boot drive, but you can still access it anyway through the cli or such), and yet the system still manages to be considerably more secure... Simple things also make a lot more sense, like having removable media just not configured to auto mount, or mounted noexec on linux, vs having crufty software running on windows to prevent access to removable media (and which allows everything when that crufty software crashes) while still allowing usb mice etc.
Any form of DRM has to be proprietary, the entire premise is based on security through obscurity... If the platform is not obscure, then it becomes even more trivial to circumvent.
It is DRM that should be abandoned, it serves only to screw legitimate customers through lack of player choice and bugs etc... It does absolutely nothing to stop piracy, if anything it encourages it because it enables the pirates to offer a superior product...
DRM is inherently broken because you have to give users everything they need in order to play the stream, you just need to reverse engineer it and work out how to extract the data or keys. For any DRM scheme which has content worth pirating, this always happens, and it only takes one person to work it out and distribute his tools to the warez scene.
If a chinese company wants you to work as part of a larger group of developers, they will expect you to be able to speak their language in order to participate...
On the other hand, your best bet is probably to work for a company in an english speaking country that will let you work remotely... I know a few people who do development for london/uk based companies but who live in thailand, a uk wage goes a LONG way in a place like thailand.
The fact that Tomtom feels the need to bring up OSM says to me that OSM is now a credible competitive threat to them. The business model of selling maps for use on gps units is rapidly becoming obsolete, they can either try to fight it and become increasingly irrelevant, or adapt...
Incidentally, what i dislike about tomtom is that having bought the device, i needed a code to register my map, and this code was on a tiny sticker attached to the sleeve of a cd that came in the box... When my sdcard died, i replaced it, reloaded the software and map, only for it to refuse to work unless i entered the code. I still have the physical device, but have no idea where the code is (most likely lost) so am left with a relatively expensive device that i now cannot use via official channels. Ofcourse, i simply found a crack online which allowed me to use the device i paid for without the tiny strip of paper containing an arbitrary code.
Sometimes it is useful to have a local copy of a map with you, incase you are in an area with no cell coverage or a foreign country where roaming charges would make using online maps uneconomical.
Well, you could argue that OS choice is actually a very important factor when applying for jobs in IT... I wouldn't hire someone to run a Solaris network who has never used Solaris before.
Also i tend to find that more competent candidates will have usually tried several different systems. OS of choice, experience of different systems and computing background are very important.
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Windows was already quite firmly established on x86 by 1993, starting with 3.0 which came out in around 1990...
AmigaOS, VMS, IRIX, MacOS all only ran on their own hardware.
I don't think BeOS was around at the time, and the earliest versions only ran on PPC hardware too.
DOS was the incumbent yes, it came bundled with almost every x86 compatible machine, and windows soon came bundled with dos (it was actually cheaper for hardware vendors to ship both, ms charged a lot more for dos on its own)...
Windows succeeded in a very different market to what Linux now competes in...
Dos came bundled, and windows was pushed as the natural progression from dos. It had very few competitors, most of which were considerably more expensive both for the software and the hardware required to run it on.
Linux on the other hand came much later, and is faced with a market already dominated by an incumbent player who has no interest in promoting linux as the natural progression away from their existing product.
If both windows and linux were introduced new to the market today, i think the story would be very different... Alternative OSs to the incumbents have a very rough time of it, commercial ones outright fail due to not being able to build marketshare fast enough to fund development (look at beos etc), desktop linux would have been considered a commercial failure and dropped years ago if it was a commercial product, only due to being open source and thus not dependent on revenue has it been able to build a user base slowly and steadily.
It's also possible (although very rare) to use most control characters in your password, at least on unix boxes. Very few brute force tools would be configured to try these.
Amusing that people rag on about MD5Crypt being weak, when...
It's still much stronger than the unsalted simple hash being used by sites like linkedin.
Both of which are still massively stronger than the unsalted MD4 based algorithm used by windows (which is not only fast to crack, but can also be used as-is without needing to crack anyway), on which virtually all companies in the world are currently reliant.
Solaris still defaults to DES, although it does support MD5/Blowfish if you explicitly enable them.
Incidentally, until a breach like this occurs you have no idea what algorithm a website uses to store your passwords... There are still many sites out there which store them in plain text.
If games are linked to your steam account, will that mean someone who bought a title for windows will automatically be able to run that same title on linux or mac if its available?
I would certainly hope so, i hate the idea of having to pay again for a game i already bought...
This would greatly benefit those who dual boot for the purposes of gaming, depending on the games they play this could eliminate or greatly reduce the amount of time they spend booted into windows... On the other hand, if they have to buy the games again most people won't... Also this would create fragmentation with some of their game library on linux and some on windows, and discourage use of linux for gaming as it will undoubtedly have a smaller library.
Incidentally, dual booting can actually be beneficial... Plenty of people use windows for gaming (and only gaming), and use linux for everything else... It means that their windows install doesn't get bloated up with random applications that might interfere with their games.
IF drugs were legal, then people wouldn't be breaking the law by taking... That was the whole argument, there would be no reason to seek alternatives if they could legally take the original substance.
I tend to be wary of having service exclusively from a top tier provider... Such providers have been known to have peering disagreements with other such providers, and thus cut you off from chunks of the internet... Sometimes you also end up with very poor routes because the provider your using doesn't peer locally, so your traffic goes on a thousand mile round trip.
The smaller companies may be leasing lines from the big providers, but they will usually be using several of those providers at once so you end up with better local peering and much lower risk of peering disagreements.
The problem with cisco certified people and partners, is that they will push cisco products regardless of wether they are best value for the job... Same for any other vendor cert, all designed to sell products rather than provide a quality service.
For example, I built several networks recently using hp switches because they came in considerably cheaper than cisco, while still providing the required functionality.
I would much rather use a vendor-neutral organisation.
On the other hand, a pooling of resources and building-wide network makes sense for many reasons...
Having lots of different individual wireless networks in a small space causes congestion, a single centrally controlled one is far more efficient, and if there are any public areas in the development this could cover those too.
Depending how small the units are, having a central area where users can install noisy devices like a NAS (and not have to listen to it while you sleep) could be useful.
A building wide network has other uses, for instance door access systems, CCTV, access to shared resources such as a satellite dish etc.
There's no reason to have only a single internet connection, several could be used and load balanced while also providing some redundancy - depending on whats available in the area.
Bath salts are a legal substance being abused...
Do you think people would resort to taking bath salts if marijuana and other such drugs were available legally? As the article points out, as more substances are made illegal they are creating ever more dangerous substances in order to achieve similar highs. This wouldn't have happened if drugs were legal, if anything research would have been performed to create safer versions.
Also if drugs are sold legally, you can better keep track of who is taking them...
And people kill innocents all the time, wether on illegal drugs, legal drugs like alcohol or prescribed medicine from a doctor, or on no drugs whatsoever... Just because someone had taken bath salts at the time he tried to kill and eat someone, doesn't mean the bath salts had any influence over his decision to commit such an act.
Not necessarily...
The black market drugs would need to be significantly cheaper than the over the counter stuff, or it simply wouldn't be worth the risk (of police, of poor quality product, of being ripped off by an unregulated seller etc) for the purchaser... And if the profit margins are slim enough it wouldn't be worth it for the seller.
With legal production, you have efficiencies through economies of scale as well as savings through being able to ship via official channels and not needing to smuggle etc, so you could easily undercut the black market on price and still turn a tidy profit.
Legalizing drugs would destroy the business of those in the illegal drug trade over night, save the police millions and allow the government keep track of who is buying what drugs.
You can buy spray on mud in a can. Although its illegal for your license plate to be covered in mud, it's very hard to prove that it was done intentionally (unless your stupid and only spray mud on the plate leaving the rest of the car clean) so all they can generally do is tell you to wash it off.
They are deploying thousands of these all around the country, putting them underground would be considerably more expensive...
It's not just maintenance for which they need to access the cabinet, connecting new customers up requires that too.
Also, these cabinets contain quite a lot of kit that generates heat, that would need to be vented somehow and you can't just put vents in the top because water would get in. If you sealed them such that they were waterproof and insulated by dirt and paving slabs on all sides, they would overheat very quickly... With the above ground cabinets, you can have vents which are angled downwards to prevent rain ingress and the metal case will also conduct heat fairly well and is cooled by fresh air on the outside.
Feeding solar in like that just causes inefficiency, you still need the same level of power generation from other (coal/gas etc) sources on the grid to cope with nights and cloudy days.
No it wouldn't, they would just write that gamble off as a loss and move on to the next... Smaller companies go belly up all the time, and you soon see the same people back running another company.
Something else needs to be done to ensure long term sustainable business, but i have no idea what would work.
Even as more apps are becoming web based, in the short to medium term users will still be accessing them using the same desktops they always have and will still need support for them.
Perhaps long term, users can move to simpler dumb terminals that have less to go wrong and thus require less support. But that's less, not none... Things can still go wrong, one of the primary functions of desktop support is unjamming printers and replacing toner which despite promises of the paperless office won't be going away any time soon.
There will also be a need to debug network level issues, as a dumb terminal is useless without its network...
So sure, desktop support will be reduced but not "wiped out"...
No, the hardware i have is the tomtom go, the first revision of tomtom hardware, it runs linux and is not an hp pda...
I also still have archived, an email response from tomtom support:
The TomTom licence agreement clearly states that this “Licence is non-exclusive and non-transferable.”
In order to use your product you will always need your TomTom licence, this is the product code and can be found on the registration card or in the CD envelope/case (sometimes under the CDs) please check the link below:
http://www.ttcode.com/images/boxshot.jpg
This product code is unique and personal, only you have access to it, which is also why it is recommended in the same registration card, to keep in a safe place for activation (including TomTom PLUS), support and future map upgrades. This product code can be also stored into ‘My TomTom’ area where you will see “product code”
TomTom Navigator is sold as personal software with a unique and personal licence, if for some reason you have lost this product code and you did not add this information into your ‘My TomTom’ account , TomTom will not be able track your product code. This unfortunately means that you have lost your product code and with this the licence for use of TomTom software.
We understand and appreciate your situation, however; we are unable to issue you a new product code.
For more information, may we to refer you to the TomTom Shop or your local retailer where you will be able to purchase an extra card with the software pre-installed and the licence
Included within.
basically saying my device is a brick without this tiny slip of paper containing a code, and basically holding it to ransom demanding more money to continue using hardware i paid for.
Needless to say, i have not given any further money to tomtom and turned to the warez community in order to continue using the device i had already bought.
There was no pc software back then, you installed updates on the device by unzipping them onto the sdcard, a much preferable setup as i run linux and could not run this pc software anyway. Being able to install updates in a standard platform neutral way was one of the reasons i bought this device in the first place.
The problem is, HTML is *supposed* to degrade gracefully when faced with browsers that don't support given features, and properly coded html will indeed degrade gracefully in browsers like lynx and older mozilla versions...
IE (and netscape 4 for that matter) on the other hand, doesn't simply lack support for stuff, it has broken implementations of various specs which means that instead of ignoring it and degrading gracefully, you end up with a really garbled page.
How is it a metro clone? Unity has been around a lot longer than metro.
Most companies idea of "securing" windows, is to try and disable or break most of the features, resulting in a system which is extremely painful to use, and frequently displays errors because the system simply isn't designed to work in such a hacked up fashion.
What this says to me, is that most of the features are fundamentally insecure and thus have to be disabled rather than configured in a sensible way.
In every scenario i've seen, there were ways to bypass these restrictions and pretty much do what you want anyway.
On the other hand, on the linux setups i've seen you could do normal things, for instance you could browse the filesystem normally without resorting to hacks (on a typical windows setup explorer wont let you browse the boot drive, but you can still access it anyway through the cli or such), and yet the system still manages to be considerably more secure...
Simple things also make a lot more sense, like having removable media just not configured to auto mount, or mounted noexec on linux, vs having crufty software running on windows to prevent access to removable media (and which allows everything when that crufty software crashes) while still allowing usb mice etc.
Any form of DRM has to be proprietary, the entire premise is based on security through obscurity... If the platform is not obscure, then it becomes even more trivial to circumvent.
It is DRM that should be abandoned, it serves only to screw legitimate customers through lack of player choice and bugs etc... It does absolutely nothing to stop piracy, if anything it encourages it because it enables the pirates to offer a superior product...
DRM is inherently broken because you have to give users everything they need in order to play the stream, you just need to reverse engineer it and work out how to extract the data or keys. For any DRM scheme which has content worth pirating, this always happens, and it only takes one person to work it out and distribute his tools to the warez scene.
If a chinese company wants you to work as part of a larger group of developers, they will expect you to be able to speak their language in order to participate...
On the other hand, your best bet is probably to work for a company in an english speaking country that will let you work remotely... I know a few people who do development for london/uk based companies but who live in thailand, a uk wage goes a LONG way in a place like thailand.
The fact that Tomtom feels the need to bring up OSM says to me that OSM is now a credible competitive threat to them. The business model of selling maps for use on gps units is rapidly becoming obsolete, they can either try to fight it and become increasingly irrelevant, or adapt...
Incidentally, what i dislike about tomtom is that having bought the device, i needed a code to register my map, and this code was on a tiny sticker attached to the sleeve of a cd that came in the box... When my sdcard died, i replaced it, reloaded the software and map, only for it to refuse to work unless i entered the code. I still have the physical device, but have no idea where the code is (most likely lost) so am left with a relatively expensive device that i now cannot use via official channels.
Ofcourse, i simply found a crack online which allowed me to use the device i paid for without the tiny strip of paper containing an arbitrary code.
Sometimes it is useful to have a local copy of a map with you, incase you are in an area with no cell coverage or a foreign country where roaming charges would make using online maps uneconomical.
Well, you could argue that OS choice is actually a very important factor when applying for jobs in IT... I wouldn't hire someone to run a Solaris network who has never used Solaris before.
Also i tend to find that more competent candidates will have usually tried several different systems. OS of choice, experience of different systems and computing background are very important.