Why would they need to do that? Just ensure that the description of any GPL app includes a link to download the sourcecode, or make complying with the gpl and providing sourcecode a requirement in order to get your gpl licensed app listed on the marketplace.
While i agree about interchanging information via open formats, that would be EXTREMELY bad for microsoft... Open standards would ensure that competition exists in the software market, which would drive prices down and quality up. Vendors of proprietary software will never be able to compete with open source on price, and can only compete on quality in the short term - long term the quality will gradually improve due to the "standing on the shoulders of giants" principle until such time as it becomes good enough (at which point it is chosen based on price), and eventually better than the proprietary alternatives. Look how quickly proprietary unix has died out in the face of compatible open source alternatives.
Keeping people locked in to proprietary formats is pretty much the best way any mass market software vendor has of staying relevant.
You license your patents on a "you have free use of these unless you sue us" basis, there are already a large number of patents available this way from the likes of sun and ibm.
MS on the other hand have openly claimed that linux infringes on their patents as a form of FUD. They also intentionally develop proprietary protocols and file formats, instead of working with the community to use and/or develop standard ones.
How about malicious link farms, that is someone sets up a link farm specifically to screw over one of their competitors?
Also, how about aggregation sites... Sites that have "content copied from other sites" but provide data from multiple locations in a single place making the data that much easier to use? I wouldn't consider such sites to be of low quality.
One thing that does irritate me, if i have a technical question google can usually find 50 instances of other people asking the same question, but not all of them will have been answered and you have to go through each one until you find one which has an answer.
Regular updates to fix known vulnerabilities would be considered routine maintenance similar to whats performed on cars...
Preventative measures, analogous to rust proofing for instance, include hardening the system, changing settings to more secure defaults and removing unnecessary exploit vectors.
Regular maintenance to a car, like regular updates to a computer will not stop a user from doing something stupid... If someone drives a car into a brick wall, or fills it with the wrong kind of fuel etc then chances are it will stop functioning correctly.
Similarly, while some vehicle faults develop gradually and are easily picked up before they get worse, some faults occur rapidly and with no prior warning.
Also, there is always accidental damage which is not the fault of the driver or of the maintenance schedule, for instance a stone being flicked up by the car infront impacting your windscreen and cracking it.
Car drivers are more analogous to users on a controlled computer system... Someone who (supposedly) understands the system better manages the technical details, and the users are only required to interact with a select few aspects of the system.
If you don't maintain your car, or drive it in a stupid fashion it will break sooner or later. If you don't know how to maintain it, you typically pay someone who does.
Some people do indeed buy cars and never service them at all, such cars gradually deteriorate until they stop functioning all together, some may even develop dangerous faults resulting fire or in extreme cases might actually blow up.
Well said... Tools aimed at end users should be greatly simplified, they don't need a full blown computer with a complex OS, they need a simple system that satisfies whatever their individual needs may be (see ipad, games consoles etc). Leave complex general purpose computing to those who know how to deal with it.
Security standards as a whole are like that, based on checklists, and the checklists have flaws in them which vendors will often exploit...
For instance, one of the requirements may be "must encrypt all user data using a recognised encryption algorithm", however they will miss something like where the key should be stored, so you end up with the key being stored on the device where its easily retrieved thus rendering the encryption pretty worthless.
On the other hand, the threat is often overhyped... The majority of people who would steal something like an ipad are petty criminals who care about how much cash they can get by selling the device, they couldn't care less what data it contains.
The problem with phones as a whole, not just the iphone, is that the device is generally capable of booting without the user having to enter any form of key material... Therefore, even if the device is encrypted, the key must also be stored on the device, where someone with sufficient skill will be able to extract it.
Years ago, pirated content (ie analog copies) were clearly inferior to their legitimate purchased counterparts, you knew you were getting a cheap knockoff...
Digital media like CDs enabled perfect copies, although it was still possible to get cheap knockoffs (ie heavily compressed music such as mp3s)...
DRM inconveniences users, and actually makes it possible for pirates to offer a SUPERIOR product. With a pirate copy, i can skip at will, format shift at will, play on any device i choose, extract screenshots of clips for other uses etc... Various forms of DRM try to restrict all or some of these uses.
If legitimate producers offered a superior or even equivalent product to the pirates at the same time in my location then i would surely consider it, and probably go for this version on principle... I can certainly justify paying a reasonable sum for a decent quality product or sitting through a set of commercials.
On the other hand, i simply cannot justify paying for an experience which is both inferior and 6 months late.
I have a few songs in DTS (5.1 surround sound) format, the experience is pretty good with decent speakers... How come more music isn't released in this format?
I would take the higher quality sound especially if it didn't cost more... There's no real downside, disk space and bandwidth is plentiful, if you play it on lowend hardware it wont be any worse than the low bitrate mp3s but will sound better on decent enough hardware.
Contract rules requiring the cheapest hardware still require that the hardware be fit for purpose... Otherwise the cheapest "printer" is actually a disposable pen. Hardware that does not work with your existing systems is not fit for purpose. If you are (or planning to) run linux, then linux compatibility should be a requirement, and any manufacturer unable to fulfil your requirements should be excluded from bidding.
Also if the hardware does not have drivers for the platform you are using, then the cost of writing those drivers is part of the cost of hardware, is it still cheaper?
Some of us are in countries where these shows are either not aired at all, or are shown months or years later than they are in the US. Airing a show months later may not have been a big deal 20 years ago, but now we live in an interconnected world where it is common to see US centric media online such as advertising and interact with other people who have seen these shows already. Am i expected to wait 6-8 months and then see a show that's been totally ruined by all the spoilers i've seen online? My only alternative to this, is to torrent the shows.
If the producers of the show provided the same convenience as a torrent (drm-free download within 2 hours of the original airing) then i would use their service instead of the torrents.
Run something like Nessus against those systems in authenticated mode... What it does, is log in and verify the versions of the individual files installed by various updates, rather than relying on the windows update apis to tell it if updates are correctly installed. You can get a list of the correct versions from most microsoft knowledgebase articles... Give it a try and let me know what it finds, in my experience on any large network running the windows update services, a handful will think they have patches installed when in reality the updated files are not present (ie your still vulnerable).
Large companies that buy $2 million software generally wouldn't use a free version even if one were available, they will want a support contract and someone to blame if it breaks (even if the license explicitly disclaims any warrantee as most do)...
There are many companies out there making good money selling various networking appliances that are based on linux (or in some cases bsd), and the most any of these companies will have done is to put their own branded frontend on top of whatever underlying open source is running the show.
In fact, a lot of consultants hate the idea of "free software" and will often try to associate it with malware, however they are completely ignorant of the fact that the expensive products they sell are based on open source code.
They have been using this system for several years already... So lets assume that when they started, they may have had to write drivers for some hardware they already had. But surely this has now been done and won't be a recurring cost. Unless ofcourse they are actively procuring new hardware which doesn't have linux drivers, but why would they do that? That's just unbelievably stupid, there is plenty of hardware out there which already has very good linux drivers available.
Why are they writing printer and scanner drivers? If they've been running this since 2001 (ie 10 years ago) then chances are any printers or scanners they bought prior to that have already been retired, so why the hell are they buying new printers and scanners which are not already compatible with what they use?
This would not "give us 2 more hours in the day", it would merely shift what the "time" of these hours is... Why not just get up 2 hours earlier? It would achieve the same result... The idea that you have to get up based on something as arbitrary as a clock is ridiculous. In fact, people should stagger when they do things so as to decrease traffic at "peak" times...
Slashdot Mirror
Why would they need to do that?
Just ensure that the description of any GPL app includes a link to download the sourcecode, or make complying with the gpl and providing sourcecode a requirement in order to get your gpl licensed app listed on the marketplace.
While i agree about interchanging information via open formats, that would be EXTREMELY bad for microsoft... Open standards would ensure that competition exists in the software market, which would drive prices down and quality up. Vendors of proprietary software will never be able to compete with open source on price, and can only compete on quality in the short term - long term the quality will gradually improve due to the "standing on the shoulders of giants" principle until such time as it becomes good enough (at which point it is chosen based on price), and eventually better than the proprietary alternatives.
Look how quickly proprietary unix has died out in the face of compatible open source alternatives.
Keeping people locked in to proprietary formats is pretty much the best way any mass market software vendor has of staying relevant.
You license your patents on a "you have free use of these unless you sue us" basis, there are already a large number of patents available this way from the likes of sun and ibm.
MS on the other hand have openly claimed that linux infringes on their patents as a form of FUD.
They also intentionally develop proprietary protocols and file formats, instead of working with the community to use and/or develop standard ones.
Email is great because its decentralised, facebook is a monopoly controlled by a single entity...
How good are they? Most very cheap VPS are extremely over subscribed...
How about malicious link farms, that is someone sets up a link farm specifically to screw over one of their competitors?
Also, how about aggregation sites... Sites that have "content copied from other sites" but provide data from multiple locations in a single place making the data that much easier to use? I wouldn't consider such sites to be of low quality.
One thing that does irritate me, if i have a technical question google can usually find 50 instances of other people asking the same question, but not all of them will have been answered and you have to go through each one until you find one which has an answer.
Do the Apple monitors even support these fancy displayport features, or are there any plans for them to?
It is worth considering however, that Apple were the first to really support USB in a big way... Who's to say thunderbolt won't go the same way?
Regular updates to fix known vulnerabilities would be considered routine maintenance similar to whats performed on cars...
Preventative measures, analogous to rust proofing for instance, include hardening the system, changing settings to more secure defaults and removing unnecessary exploit vectors.
Regular maintenance to a car, like regular updates to a computer will not stop a user from doing something stupid... If someone drives a car into a brick wall, or fills it with the wrong kind of fuel etc then chances are it will stop functioning correctly.
Similarly, while some vehicle faults develop gradually and are easily picked up before they get worse, some faults occur rapidly and with no prior warning.
Also, there is always accidental damage which is not the fault of the driver or of the maintenance schedule, for instance a stone being flicked up by the car infront impacting your windscreen and cracking it.
Car drivers are more analogous to users on a controlled computer system...
Someone who (supposedly) understands the system better manages the technical details, and the users are only required to interact with a select few aspects of the system.
If you don't maintain your car, or drive it in a stupid fashion it will break sooner or later. If you don't know how to maintain it, you typically pay someone who does.
Some people do indeed buy cars and never service them at all, such cars gradually deteriorate until they stop functioning all together, some may even develop dangerous faults resulting fire or in extreme cases might actually blow up.
Well said...
Tools aimed at end users should be greatly simplified, they don't need a full blown computer with a complex OS, they need a simple system that satisfies whatever their individual needs may be (see ipad, games consoles etc). Leave complex general purpose computing to those who know how to deal with it.
Security standards as a whole are like that, based on checklists, and the checklists have flaws in them which vendors will often exploit...
For instance, one of the requirements may be "must encrypt all user data using a recognised encryption algorithm", however they will miss something like where the key should be stored, so you end up with the key being stored on the device where its easily retrieved thus rendering the encryption pretty worthless.
On the other hand, the threat is often overhyped... The majority of people who would steal something like an ipad are petty criminals who care about how much cash they can get by selling the device, they couldn't care less what data it contains.
The problem with phones as a whole, not just the iphone, is that the device is generally capable of booting without the user having to enter any form of key material...
Therefore, even if the device is encrypted, the key must also be stored on the device, where someone with sufficient skill will be able to extract it.
Then why would anyone pay for DRM content either?
Years ago, pirated content (ie analog copies) were clearly inferior to their legitimate purchased counterparts, you knew you were getting a cheap knockoff...
Digital media like CDs enabled perfect copies, although it was still possible to get cheap knockoffs (ie heavily compressed music such as mp3s)...
DRM inconveniences users, and actually makes it possible for pirates to offer a SUPERIOR product. With a pirate copy, i can skip at will, format shift at will, play on any device i choose, extract screenshots of clips for other uses etc... Various forms of DRM try to restrict all or some of these uses.
If legitimate producers offered a superior or even equivalent product to the pirates at the same time in my location then i would surely consider it, and probably go for this version on principle... I can certainly justify paying a reasonable sum for a decent quality product or sitting through a set of commercials.
On the other hand, i simply cannot justify paying for an experience which is both inferior and 6 months late.
I have a few songs in DTS (5.1 surround sound) format, the experience is pretty good with decent speakers... How come more music isn't released in this format?
I would take the higher quality sound especially if it didn't cost more...
There's no real downside, disk space and bandwidth is plentiful, if you play it on lowend hardware it wont be any worse than the low bitrate mp3s but will sound better on decent enough hardware.
Contract rules requiring the cheapest hardware still require that the hardware be fit for purpose... Otherwise the cheapest "printer" is actually a disposable pen. Hardware that does not work with your existing systems is not fit for purpose.
If you are (or planning to) run linux, then linux compatibility should be a requirement, and any manufacturer unable to fulfil your requirements should be excluded from bidding.
Also if the hardware does not have drivers for the platform you are using, then the cost of writing those drivers is part of the cost of hardware, is it still cheaper?
Some of us are in countries where these shows are either not aired at all, or are shown months or years later than they are in the US.
Airing a show months later may not have been a big deal 20 years ago, but now we live in an interconnected world where it is common to see US centric media online such as advertising and interact with other people who have seen these shows already.
Am i expected to wait 6-8 months and then see a show that's been totally ruined by all the spoilers i've seen online?
My only alternative to this, is to torrent the shows.
If the producers of the show provided the same convenience as a torrent (drm-free download within 2 hours of the original airing) then i would use their service instead of the torrents.
Run something like Nessus against those systems in authenticated mode...
What it does, is log in and verify the versions of the individual files installed by various updates, rather than relying on the windows update apis to tell it if updates are correctly installed. You can get a list of the correct versions from most microsoft knowledgebase articles...
Give it a try and let me know what it finds, in my experience on any large network running the windows update services, a handful will think they have patches installed when in reality the updated files are not present (ie your still vulnerable).
The same reason they did that with version 6?
Large companies that buy $2 million software generally wouldn't use a free version even if one were available, they will want a support contract and someone to blame if it breaks (even if the license explicitly disclaims any warrantee as most do)...
There are many companies out there making good money selling various networking appliances that are based on linux (or in some cases bsd), and the most any of these companies will have done is to put their own branded frontend on top of whatever underlying open source is running the show.
In fact, a lot of consultants hate the idea of "free software" and will often try to associate it with malware, however they are completely ignorant of the fact that the expensive products they sell are based on open source code.
Because its not advertised widely, i hadn't even heard of this device until i read about it here.
They have been using this system for several years already...
So lets assume that when they started, they may have had to write drivers for some hardware they already had. But surely this has now been done and won't be a recurring cost.
Unless ofcourse they are actively procuring new hardware which doesn't have linux drivers, but why would they do that? That's just unbelievably stupid, there is plenty of hardware out there which already has very good linux drivers available.
Thanks to the Internet, there is no reason that malware written in one place cannot easily spread across the world...
Why are they writing printer and scanner drivers? If they've been running this since 2001 (ie 10 years ago) then chances are any printers or scanners they bought prior to that have already been retired, so why the hell are they buying new printers and scanners which are not already compatible with what they use?
This would not "give us 2 more hours in the day", it would merely shift what the "time" of these hours is...
Why not just get up 2 hours earlier? It would achieve the same result... The idea that you have to get up based on something as arbitrary as a clock is ridiculous.
In fact, people should stagger when they do things so as to decrease traffic at "peak" times...