The idea of multiuser is to protect one user from another... You wouldn't be able to keylog other users at least, and sending spam is something that identd on unix was supposed to deal with, tho the prevalence of single user systems has rendered ident pretty much totally worthless.
Also, nonroot malware is much easier to remove, especially on unix, because there are only a very limited number of places it can hide on the filesystem, it can't do neat tricks like mark areas of the disk corrupt and hide there, it can't hide in system directories amongst the thousands of other files already there, it cant modify the kernel to hide itself... It will show up in the process list when running, whereas with admin privileges it can easily hide itself to the point that you need to boot from clean media.
The beauty of wine, is that you can configure multiple wine instances which are segregated from each other, so a virus infecting one won't affect another... Also, since wine is a userland program which is only invoked at the user's request, any malware shouldn't be able to make itself load at boot.
Incidentally, small desktop marketshare is not the only reason, windows has traditionally been more susceptible to viruses due to various design decisions which don't apply to linux, various factors like hiding of file extensions, users being admin by default, files being executable purely based on their filename (linux users have to chmod something first), and the basic fact that windows has its origins in a single user gui addon for dos which had no concept of security whatsoever (yes i know nt does, but they grafted the old 9x interface and apis on top, which fundamentally weakened the security model inherent in nt).
I resent paying money for something that can be gotten for free... I also resent paying money for something that can't be gotten for free, but i will shop around for the lowest price. Everything else is coming down in price, hardware becomes cheaper and faster all the time, services keep getting cheaper because they are outsourced to asia... Yet there will be a floor to these things at which they can't get any cheaper... The floor for software is 0.
Also consider, software is basically a set of instructions for doing something with a piece of hardware... Such knowledge is often shared freely, people show their friends how to do things, software is just a more complicated set of instructions.
How do you determine if a review is independently written or not?
Magazines and websites that specialize in reviews generally also depend on advertising revenue from the same people that make the items they review... Publishing negative reviews can kill a magazine, as you stop receiving free review copies (so you have to pay for them, and your reviews come out weeks or months behind your competitors), not to mention your advertising revenue drying up.
Blog sites could easily be shill sites, setup by game companies or those on their payrole...
And reviewers don't necessarily share your taste in games...
The only real option, is to play the game yourself for a while... And personally i'm not a big gamer, and i find the vast majority of games lose my interest after a couple of hours.
What about some more detail? Of those users, those who bought it and those who pirated it, how long did they continue playing for? Perhaps the pirates try it (because theres nothing to lose from doing so) and decide it's not worth it... Do any of those pirates come back for more later? You did point out that they seem to have a shorter attention span and quickly move from one game option to the next, perhaps they quickly get bored of the game and don't consider it worth spending money on.
Incidentally, i would not randomly buy a game i hadn't played before, i might consider buying it if i'd played it on a friends device (who may or may not have pirated it). I don't trust online reviews or demo versions (a lot of demos offer the first great level of a game, when you buy the full game you find the remaining levels are crap).
I might pirate it to try it out, but i probably wouldn't drop $4 on the off chance (i hate things which are priced x.99, its more hassle than its worth and is anyone really stupid enough to think 3.99 is really much different from 4.00?), the idea of a beat em up game with the iphone control method seems very strange.
Very few games hold my interest, i might play a couple of hours tops... I have maybe a small handful of games which i can keep coming back to, most of them involve networked play.
Some things should be illegal... Making a modification the sole purpose of which is detrimental to the consumer and damages a product they have already purchased by breaking functionality that previously worked. In effect, that is vandalism.
In future, games will come with the new software version and force you to update before you can play them... You're not using a service, you're just trying to play a game which is why you bought the console in the first place.
If a program is specifically designed for such a purpose, then it should be designed to not let users change such settings... Alternatively, you can always make the config owned by root. That said, audit logs should be done at a different level - not in the program itself, since the user has control of that program... If the program talks to a backend server, the logging should be done there for instance, or at the kernel level.
On linux, you could simply remove those applications you don't want people to use (through the package manager), and make sure any areas they can write (eg/home and/tmp) are mounted noexec so they can't put arbitrary binaries there and execute them.
Alternatively, you could use file permissions on the binaries themselves if you want *some* users to have access and some not.
On windows, most of the methods to restrict what people can and cant run are quite easy to bypass, the restrictions - at least the default windows ones, are implemented in userspace (eg the application itself checks wether its allowed to be used when you run it), for instance cmd.exe runs and checks a registry key to see if your allowed to use it, then exits if your not... If you run other programs (eg command.com) they don't perform these checks and run anyway. Also, many windows apps were designed for a single user environment, applications like word for instance which lets you embed arbitrary binary objects (which you can then execute) or execute arbitrary commands from macros, provide for some easy ways to bypass the restrictions.
On linux, if you want to restrict the *desktop environment* there are plenty of ways to do so but you are approaching it from a windows perspective, if you really want to restrict them don't give them a desktop environment at all, give them a window manager and a menu. If they log in and all they see is a list of applications in the middle of the screen there really isn't much else that they can do, there is no filesystem browser to let them wander around the system.
On windows you have a fixed set of tools, and the goal is to restrict access to parts of those tools, and the goal of the user is to gain access to the functionality which is still there but they're not allowed. On linux you have a variable set of tools, and the goal is to pick the one which suits your needs... There won't be any additional functionality for users to try and gain access to.
The kernel takes up quite a lot of space, but most of that is drivers for hardware you don't have... Modern distros include everything on the drive incase you install extra hardware, windows 95 only installed what you needed (and would ask for the original cd if you tried to add features)... There is nothing to stop you stripping linux down, and distros targeting 486 type systems will do that.
Modern gui based apps take up a lot of space, a lot of code these days is written in high level languages which consumes far more memory and often requires a large runtime environment... Firefox for example, has it's own language for the interface (XUL) which is rendered in much the same way a webpage is. They also typically have a lot more functionality than equivalent apps from the windows 95 era... Security also plays a part, windows 95 basically had none, a modern os has code to manage multiple users, a permissions system for the filesystem etc (tho unix systems predating windows 95 also had this).
Modern graphical items (hypertext help, icons etc) are much bigger, it is extremely rare to not have a 24bit videocard these days, in the windows 95 days a lot of people had 8-bit video and 16 color icons were common.
A modern linux distro comes with a lot more applications out of the box than windows does, but they are all easily removed.
You also get lots of online documentation (manpages, info pages, html help etc) which can be removed.
Windows comes in different versions for different languages, Linux comes in one version with multiple sets of language files which sit dormant on the disk, nothing stopping you from deleting the ones you don't use.
But if you want an example of small, try AmigaOS... Back when windows 95 came out, we amiga users were laughing at it for the ridiculously high system requirements it had... All the microsoft marketing talking about how it could now multitask, and how multitasking was impossible with less than 8mb... AmigaOS was doing it in 0.5mb, and doing a much better job.
What software developers need to start doing, is targeting wine as their development platform... That way you don't really need to relearn anything or change the way you work, but you get linux/mac compatibility (of a sort) basically for free.
Yes, proprietary lock-in is bad wether it's on hardware or software... However if the software is open (as opposed to no-cost, like ibm mainframe software was) then there's nothing to stop you running the exact same software on other hardware.
IBM's plan is much better for those of us who value freedom from lockin.
Yes, i've heard the talk about hardware being given away free with software... It's ridiculous tho...
Software *can* be given away free quite easily, you don't even have to pay all the bandwidth costs because third parties will mirror your files... It's within easy reach of almost anyone to acquire the tools necessary to write and distribute software.
Hardware on the other hand, while competition has driven the price way down, can never be free because each piece of hardware can only be cheapened to a point... It still requires raw materials for each and every unit produced, still needs to be physically moved, and also requires specialised equipment to build.
What is absolutely disgusting, is that software has not seen the same competition that has driven hardware development so much... If software had evolved in the same way as hardware, it would virtually all be free these days and would probably just come bundled with hardware.
Modern consoles ALL have USB ports, the fact you can't play more games using keyboard/mouse is just ridiculous... This control method should be an option in games where it's appropriate.
PCs are more open, but not as open as they should be... The majority of games still require windows, which is also owned by a single supplier... MS used the relative openness of the PC compatible to lock people into their own non-open software, and there's no telling what restrictions they may implement in the future.
Only this is in the UK... Many people in the UK don't have cars, especially in larger cities... Think of someone who works in central London and wants to catch a movie after work, he has his work bag with him (containing a laptop) and has nowhere to put it... He comes to work on the train and has no car nearby. Infact, in the middle of London it's extremely expensive to park, and hard to find a space.
It also ensures that noone will want to record movies in UK cinemas... Cam rips will already be available from the US showings, producing a UK one several weeks later is pointless.
A lot of people in the UK work in the middle of large cities, and live outside... I know plenty of people who will watch a movie (in a cinema) after work, and go there with their laptop bags. If they're not allowed in, they don't have a car parked outside to put their laptop in, so they simply won't be able to go.
Depends on the individual tokens... Some of them let the purchaser load the key material, in which case the keys will only be in one place... Others are pre-keyed by the supplier, meaning that the keys for all their customers are in one place. If you can acquire access to this (hacking, physical breakin, rogue employee etc) then you now have all the customers and you just need to determine the serial number associated with a particular user. Also, if a breakin like this occured, do you think a security company selling authentication tokens would admit to the theft? They would do everything they could to cover it up.
Because they're expensive, and people will lose or break them, and many of the tokens come pre-keyed before you buy them - meaning that the vendor of the device always knows the key... Most suppliers of these type of devices charge annual or monthly subscriptions for the keys, spread out over a large customer base the costs would be ridiculous.
Windows does have LVM and software raid, software raid has been there since NT4 and LVM since 2000 i believe.
That said, that are plenty of other things that make windows a poor choice for a server os, like a mandatory gui stack (even the command prompt only mode in 2008 loads the gui layer), and all kinds of other user oriented applications and libraries which come by default with a "server" install and which are difficult or impossible to remove. Not to mention general lack of modularity in the base system, and lack of coherent package management for third party apps.. The extremely weak choice of filesystems (one size does not fit all), the excessively complex proprietary services (rpc, netbios etc - how can you quantify risk when you don't know exactly what functions are offered by a particular network service?),
Me too, i specifically go for pirate copies of various things because they are typically free of phone home programs, onerous install requirements (eg license codes) and onerous runtime requirements (like putting the cd in the drive - who wants to carry around a stack of low capacity media like cds?)... The pirate copies are better, the fact that they're cheaper is secondary.
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The idea of multiuser is to protect one user from another... You wouldn't be able to keylog other users at least, and sending spam is something that identd on unix was supposed to deal with, tho the prevalence of single user systems has rendered ident pretty much totally worthless.
Also, nonroot malware is much easier to remove, especially on unix, because there are only a very limited number of places it can hide on the filesystem, it can't do neat tricks like mark areas of the disk corrupt and hide there, it can't hide in system directories amongst the thousands of other files already there, it cant modify the kernel to hide itself... It will show up in the process list when running, whereas with admin privileges it can easily hide itself to the point that you need to boot from clean media.
The beauty of wine, is that you can configure multiple wine instances which are segregated from each other, so a virus infecting one won't affect another... Also, since wine is a userland program which is only invoked at the user's request, any malware shouldn't be able to make itself load at boot.
Incidentally, small desktop marketshare is not the only reason, windows has traditionally been more susceptible to viruses due to various design decisions which don't apply to linux, various factors like hiding of file extensions, users being admin by default, files being executable purely based on their filename (linux users have to chmod something first), and the basic fact that windows has its origins in a single user gui addon for dos which had no concept of security whatsoever (yes i know nt does, but they grafted the old 9x interface and apis on top, which fundamentally weakened the security model inherent in nt).
I resent paying money for something that can be gotten for free...
I also resent paying money for something that can't be gotten for free, but i will shop around for the lowest price.
Everything else is coming down in price, hardware becomes cheaper and faster all the time, services keep getting cheaper because they are outsourced to asia... Yet there will be a floor to these things at which they can't get any cheaper... The floor for software is 0.
Also consider, software is basically a set of instructions for doing something with a piece of hardware... Such knowledge is often shared freely, people show their friends how to do things, software is just a more complicated set of instructions.
How do you determine if a review is independently written or not?
Magazines and websites that specialize in reviews generally also depend on advertising revenue from the same people that make the items they review... Publishing negative reviews can kill a magazine, as you stop receiving free review copies (so you have to pay for them, and your reviews come out weeks or months behind your competitors), not to mention your advertising revenue drying up.
Blog sites could easily be shill sites, setup by game companies or those on their payrole...
And reviewers don't necessarily share your taste in games...
The only real option, is to play the game yourself for a while... And personally i'm not a big gamer, and i find the vast majority of games lose my interest after a couple of hours.
What about some more detail?
Of those users, those who bought it and those who pirated it, how long did they continue playing for? Perhaps the pirates try it (because theres nothing to lose from doing so) and decide it's not worth it... Do any of those pirates come back for more later? You did point out that they seem to have a shorter attention span and quickly move from one game option to the next, perhaps they quickly get bored of the game and don't consider it worth spending money on.
Incidentally, i would not randomly buy a game i hadn't played before, i might consider buying it if i'd played it on a friends device (who may or may not have pirated it). I don't trust online reviews or demo versions (a lot of demos offer the first great level of a game, when you buy the full game you find the remaining levels are crap).
I might pirate it to try it out, but i probably wouldn't drop $4 on the off chance (i hate things which are priced x.99, its more hassle than its worth and is anyone really stupid enough to think 3.99 is really much different from 4.00?), the idea of a beat em up game with the iphone control method seems very strange.
Very few games hold my interest, i might play a couple of hours tops... I have maybe a small handful of games which i can keep coming back to, most of them involve networked play.
Some things should be illegal...
Making a modification the sole purpose of which is detrimental to the consumer and damages a product they have already purchased by breaking functionality that previously worked. In effect, that is vandalism.
In future, games will come with the new software version and force you to update before you can play them... You're not using a service, you're just trying to play a game which is why you bought the console in the first place.
If a program is specifically designed for such a purpose, then it should be designed to not let users change such settings...
Alternatively, you can always make the config owned by root.
That said, audit logs should be done at a different level - not in the program itself, since the user has control of that program... If the program talks to a backend server, the logging should be done there for instance, or at the kernel level.
On linux, you could simply remove those applications you don't want people to use (through the package manager), and make sure any areas they can write (eg /home and /tmp) are mounted noexec so they can't put arbitrary binaries there and execute them.
Alternatively, you could use file permissions on the binaries themselves if you want *some* users to have access and some not.
On windows, most of the methods to restrict what people can and cant run are quite easy to bypass, the restrictions - at least the default windows ones, are implemented in userspace (eg the application itself checks wether its allowed to be used when you run it), for instance cmd.exe runs and checks a registry key to see if your allowed to use it, then exits if your not... If you run other programs (eg command.com) they don't perform these checks and run anyway.
Also, many windows apps were designed for a single user environment, applications like word for instance which lets you embed arbitrary binary objects (which you can then execute) or execute arbitrary commands from macros, provide for some easy ways to bypass the restrictions.
On linux, if you want to restrict the *desktop environment* there are plenty of ways to do so but you are approaching it from a windows perspective, if you really want to restrict them don't give them a desktop environment at all, give them a window manager and a menu. If they log in and all they see is a list of applications in the middle of the screen there really isn't much else that they can do, there is no filesystem browser to let them wander around the system.
On windows you have a fixed set of tools, and the goal is to restrict access to parts of those tools, and the goal of the user is to gain access to the functionality which is still there but they're not allowed.
On linux you have a variable set of tools, and the goal is to pick the one which suits your needs... There won't be any additional functionality for users to try and gain access to.
The kernel takes up quite a lot of space, but most of that is drivers for hardware you don't have... Modern distros include everything on the drive incase you install extra hardware, windows 95 only installed what you needed (and would ask for the original cd if you tried to add features)... There is nothing to stop you stripping linux down, and distros targeting 486 type systems will do that.
Modern gui based apps take up a lot of space, a lot of code these days is written in high level languages which consumes far more memory and often requires a large runtime environment... Firefox for example, has it's own language for the interface (XUL) which is rendered in much the same way a webpage is.
They also typically have a lot more functionality than equivalent apps from the windows 95 era...
Security also plays a part, windows 95 basically had none, a modern os has code to manage multiple users, a permissions system for the filesystem etc (tho unix systems predating windows 95 also had this).
Modern graphical items (hypertext help, icons etc) are much bigger, it is extremely rare to not have a 24bit videocard these days, in the windows 95 days a lot of people had 8-bit video and 16 color icons were common.
A modern linux distro comes with a lot more applications out of the box than windows does, but they are all easily removed.
You also get lots of online documentation (manpages, info pages, html help etc) which can be removed.
Windows comes in different versions for different languages, Linux comes in one version with multiple sets of language files which sit dormant on the disk, nothing stopping you from deleting the ones you don't use.
But if you want an example of small, try AmigaOS... Back when windows 95 came out, we amiga users were laughing at it for the ridiculously high system requirements it had... All the microsoft marketing talking about how it could now multitask, and how multitasking was impossible with less than 8mb... AmigaOS was doing it in 0.5mb, and doing a much better job.
Look on the bright side, at least you had the option to switch, and plenty of choices that you could switch to...
What software developers need to start doing, is targeting wine as their development platform...
That way you don't really need to relearn anything or change the way you work, but you get linux/mac compatibility (of a sort) basically for free.
Yes, proprietary lock-in is bad wether it's on hardware or software...
However if the software is open (as opposed to no-cost, like ibm mainframe software was) then there's nothing to stop you running the exact same software on other hardware.
IBM's plan is much better for those of us who value freedom from lockin.
Yes, i've heard the talk about hardware being given away free with software... It's ridiculous tho...
Software *can* be given away free quite easily, you don't even have to pay all the bandwidth costs because third parties will mirror your files... It's within easy reach of almost anyone to acquire the tools necessary to write and distribute software.
Hardware on the other hand, while competition has driven the price way down, can never be free because each piece of hardware can only be cheapened to a point... It still requires raw materials for each and every unit produced, still needs to be physically moved, and also requires specialised equipment to build.
What is absolutely disgusting, is that software has not seen the same competition that has driven hardware development so much... If software had evolved in the same way as hardware, it would virtually all be free these days and would probably just come bundled with hardware.
Modern consoles ALL have USB ports, the fact you can't play more games using keyboard/mouse is just ridiculous... This control method should be an option in games where it's appropriate.
PCs are more open, but not as open as they should be...
The majority of games still require windows, which is also owned by a single supplier... MS used the relative openness of the PC compatible to lock people into their own non-open software, and there's no telling what restrictions they may implement in the future.
Only this is in the UK...
Many people in the UK don't have cars, especially in larger cities... Think of someone who works in central London and wants to catch a movie after work, he has his work bag with him (containing a laptop) and has nowhere to put it... He comes to work on the train and has no car nearby.
Infact, in the middle of London it's extremely expensive to park, and hard to find a space.
It also ensures that noone will want to record movies in UK cinemas... Cam rips will already be available from the US showings, producing a UK one several weeks later is pointless.
A lot of people in the UK work in the middle of large cities, and live outside... I know plenty of people who will watch a movie (in a cinema) after work, and go there with their laptop bags. If they're not allowed in, they don't have a car parked outside to put their laptop in, so they simply won't be able to go.
Depends on the individual tokens...
Some of them let the purchaser load the key material, in which case the keys will only be in one place...
Others are pre-keyed by the supplier, meaning that the keys for all their customers are in one place. If you can acquire access to this (hacking, physical breakin, rogue employee etc) then you now have all the customers and you just need to determine the serial number associated with a particular user.
Also, if a breakin like this occured, do you think a security company selling authentication tokens would admit to the theft? They would do everything they could to cover it up.
Sending passwords by SMS is not exactly a very secure way of doing things....
Because they're expensive, and people will lose or break them, and many of the tokens come pre-keyed before you buy them - meaning that the vendor of the device always knows the key...
Most suppliers of these type of devices charge annual or monthly subscriptions for the keys, spread out over a large customer base the costs would be ridiculous.
Windows does have LVM and software raid, software raid has been there since NT4 and LVM since 2000 i believe.
That said, that are plenty of other things that make windows a poor choice for a server os, like a mandatory gui stack (even the command prompt only mode in 2008 loads the gui layer), and all kinds of other user oriented applications and libraries which come by default with a "server" install and which are difficult or impossible to remove. Not to mention general lack of modularity in the base system, and lack of coherent package management for third party apps.. The extremely weak choice of filesystems (one size does not fit all), the excessively complex proprietary services (rpc, netbios etc - how can you quantify risk when you don't know exactly what functions are offered by a particular network service?),
Me too, i specifically go for pirate copies of various things because they are typically free of phone home programs, onerous install requirements (eg license codes) and onerous runtime requirements (like putting the cd in the drive - who wants to carry around a stack of low capacity media like cds?)... The pirate copies are better, the fact that they're cheaper is secondary.
Branding people as insane is far more effective and easier to cover up than killing them or locking them up...