The point is that GNU/Linux has chroot, and other unices have similar things. Microsoft doesn't seem to be going to spend money on developing anything like it on windows. If virusses become a problem on any unix system, chroot will most certainly be used by any email program that executes attachments. Actually it will probably be used if there is not yet a virus problem, too.
A Linux virus could do significant damage without root access
A virus in GNU/Linux could indeed do a lot of damage, but you are forgetting one point. Many popular viruses have an incubation time of 0: they start doing malicious things the moment they infest a computer. In the old days, when spreading was a hard thing to do for a virus, they sometimes had an incubation time of a year or something. That way, your whole system (and that of others) was infested before you realized that something was wrong.
It is very likely that this behaviour will return if a virus cannot just send itself out to the whole addressbook the moment it arrives. If this happens while executing as the root user, you need a reinstall of the whole system. If it happens as a normal user, that user's home should probably be recovered from backup. If it happens as a dummy user in a chrooted environment (which is how any e-mailer should execute an attachment if it chooses to do so at all), then nothing at all needs to be done.
I think this kind of extra security alone is worth the inconvinience of typing the root password when installing something. But there is more. If a non-malicious program has a bug, when running it as root it can break the system, while running it as a normal user will most probably not do any harm (non-malicious code will not do rm -rf/, it will more probably try something like cp/dev/urandom/dev/hda.) This is probably a greater threat on GNU/Linux systems in the current world than viruses, and also by itself reason enough not to use the root account for programs that don't need it.
Look at the "GNU/Linux" vs. "Linux" debate - Linus claimed that in his opinion "Linux" refers only to the kernel, and anything else is none of his business. Yet RMS seems to blame Linus for the lack of credit GNU gets.
And he is right in that. RedHat calls their distribution "Linux", while there's ten times more GNU than Linux in it. RMS asked them to stop doing that, but they don't. If Linux would ask them, they probably would. But he doesn't. He says: I call my kernel "Linux" and I don't care at all about this thing. It's not that he's doing the wrong thing. It's that he isn't doing the right thing.
X is supposedly never used and the root of all slowness in X.
I use remote X all the time and it works fine. Only applications that need lots of traffic to the video card, like mplayer, don't work at normal speed. I sometimes use remote X applications over my cablemodem, which is capped at 8kB/s upload. That is a bit slow, but not unworkable. And it is very convenient to be able to see the application the way you always see it.
Anyways, just because this isn't a tablet PC doesn't make it not cool. I'd often like to have the power of my desktop machine anywhere in the house.
In the case of programming together, you probably trust the person on the other side of the connection. And if you don't, then you do the programming as guest and you make sure guest doesn't have any sensitive files on the system. Personally I wouldn't want to code with someone I can't trust, anyway.
less than a year ago, Jim Allchin swore under oath that disclosing the Windows operating system source code could damage national security.
Of course it only damages security if by opening up it would come in the hands of dangerous and evil people. Our comrades from China are very trustworthy, they would never want to harm an honest US company.
If this is indeed "shared source", then they cannot violate it. Microsoft will just not give all the code to them, but only parts of it. There is no way you can compile Windows only with the parts they usually show.
Perhaps they show all the code this time, but I seriously doubt that.
While no comet with such a small nucleus has ever survived that kind of close solar approach (one-fourth of Mercury's orbit) without fragmenting, this one did
In astronomy, there is something called the "Roche limit". It is the closest a object can come to another object without being torn apart (by difference in gravitational force between the part closest to the star/planet/whatever, and the part furthest away from it.) The larger the satellite, the larger the difference in force and therefore the larger this limit.
So the answer why such a small nucleus did not get torn apart is easy: because it is so small.
It looks like this will be an important step in getting Linux to be more widely adopted in governments around the world.
I guess this certification is a good thing, especially in the home country of Microsoft, where the government seems to protect its own businesses quite a lot. But why would this national certification matter anything to governments around the world? If it did, how come Germany already has Gnu/Linux on their government computers?
This is a fairly major revelation from Microsoft, and if it happens, it may be one of the biggest wins yet for open-source software: what do you know -- competition works!
The original idea of free software was to let the end-user have freedom to do what he or she wants with it. For Gnu, this still is the main goal. OSS (like Linux) focusses more on technical benefits, in other words: having software that works well.
Both OSS and FS don't care at all about the prices of Microsoft's products, except as far as the number of people using their products is concerned.
As an other reader noted, the main reason for people switching to systems like Gnu/Linux is money. Part of the switching people may hear about the ethics of it and join the free software movement. Some may be enthousiastic about the results and join the open source movement. But hardly anyone starts using it because of such reasons.
This is something that I think we should try to change. If we can let people know why FS and/or OSS is so good, then it doesn't matter if Microsoft lowers their prices, since people will decide on other grounds what software they use. So please tell all people you know (and people you don't know:-) ) about all the non-financial benefits of it.
This all makes me think back of the times when I hadn't decided yet that I would no longer help people having problems with MS platforms. How can you possibly get any work done (let alone faster, as they claim), if you have to worry all the time about what you should and should not do, because otherwise all kind of strange things happen?
It does it in a per-browser way. Its intention is understand and exploit advanced features of your browser.
They do quite a bad job at exploiting advanced features of Mozilla if they generate javascript statements that aren't according to the standard and are known not to be supported by it.
I think a country which has passes laws that make it legal in certain situations to invade a European country (to be more specific: the Haque in Holland) isn't really popular anyway.
The USA obviously has a long way to go before they can join the club of really important countries;-)
On Sendo's leaving Microsoft and using Symbian, where they get the source and are allowed to tweak with it:
Was it a technology problem -- did Microsoft's software work? "It was a not a technology issue," she said. "I cannot go into all the details about it, but our business model is to offer very customized phones so they have something to distinguish themselves in the marketplace, which we cannot offer if we don't have the source code."
Microsoft dismissed this explanation. In an e-mail, Suwanjindar said that Microsoft's "shared source" model "provides partners with the APIs [application programming interfaces] they need in order to customize and develop applications for our platform."
Sendo: We don't like your deal, it isn't flexible enough.
Microsoft: We'll give you our API's.
Sendo: API's aren't as flexible as the full source code.
Microsoft (handwaving): API's will do.
Sendo: No, they won't.
Microsoft (handwaving again): APIs will do.
Sendo: No, they won't! You think you're some kind of jedi, waving your hand like that?
Noone pretended to post a fact, and I don't think anyone (beside you, maybe) had the feeling they did. The statement is, that Microsoft is probably locking in their customers again, and a non-readable format sounds like a good way to do this. You say it's readable? Well, then they probably found some other way to lock people in. I just read that XML isn't actually the default. Sounds like a nice way to ensure it will not be used very much...
First of all, the headline sounds like there will be a nuclear fission power plant in your mobile phone very soon. This is not at all what is meant, according to the article.
What they do mean, is that they will use the energy from the radiation that comes from nuclear isotopes as a power source. This sounds like a very nice idea.
I have an extra idea for this: How about creating power plants around nuclear waste from fission power plants. That way, the nuclear waste problem would be solved: when those new power plants generate enough energy to substitute the original plant (which produces the waste), then the original one is shut down. Then no more waste is generated anymore.
I think this would probably take too much space, because a fission power plant generates much more energy then an isotope plant can. It is worth thinking about though, since we have to do something with the waste anyway.
This may sound like we will get the nuclear waste from the fission power plants into our mobile phones. This will not happen (so this power source will not help us fix that problem), because the products of nuclear fission are much too dangerous to store with so little shielding (less than 1m of concrete)
But, hey, if they make nuclear powered cell phones, the radiation would treat the supposed cancer risk. Right?
Atomic radiation is like a gun: It destroys things. If you start shooting randomly at a crowd of people where you know there is a criminal, you may hit the criminal. But you can be sure to hit many innocant bystanders. And what's more, radiating healthy tissue may cause cancer again (with high amounts of radiation, this is very likely).
However, the radiation used would be beta-particles. If there is a cover on the batteries which is 3mm thick, then beta's will not leave the machine (unless they are very energetic, but it is unlikely that they do that, because it would not be allowed by any government (I hope)).
Therefore, it is very unlikely to bring any safety risk at all, except for people opening the device
I guess you all remember the settlement that was just approved. I remember "windows" being defined in there as "Windows NT, Winodws XP and systems based on that" (or something similar). Would this move be made to make sure they can avoid the consequences of the settlement even more than they already can? After this move they can claim it is a totally independant and "new" system (as they say every few years, usually after something visual has changed).
No, we're not all going to die. But you don't need much imagination to see that maybe most of us are going to. That's how it works in evolution. You breed a lot, some disaster happens, almost everyone dies, but there are some that survive and they breed on and the story repeats (unless noone survives, which happens to all species at some point)
The fact that the cavemen survived as a species doesn't mean they were having a nice time when it happened.
Re:BioMetric User Identification
on
Secure PDAs
·
· Score: 1
The difference is Microsoft would probably implement it as: "store your fingerprint on our server, use the network to let us check if it is correct".
I don't particularly like Microsoft and I think I have good reason for it. But if they would implement some security feature that would actually give the security to the user, without having them intervening, then you will not hear me complain.
This device seems nice, keeping its data to itself (and of course to its owner). Some comments say it doesn't work. They're probably right. But there's nothing 1984 about it.
I don't think it will have a positive effect. The idea is that the receiver can get the light you're sending. And I expect the manufacturers to have chosen their materials such that they get an optimal reception of the light they transmit. So if you put in a different colour LED, you are in a different (and since it was optimized worse) part of the reception spectrum.
So it may actually increase the the accuracy in the case case it does receive the signal (which seems unimportant because of the little effect, as other readers say), but it might as well increase the time the mouse is "not reacting", because of bad reflection (or in this case, bad transmission).
What we need is linux open-sourceness with Microsoft marketing
I totally agree that this would be good for the market share. However, I don't want to lie to people about my software, so I don't. Microsoft marketing is very successful in that it makes people buy the software, but it's ethically very wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is that GNU/Linux has chroot, and other unices have similar things. Microsoft doesn't seem to be going to spend money on developing anything like it on windows. If virusses become a problem on any unix system, chroot will most certainly be used by any email program that executes attachments. Actually it will probably be used if there is not yet a virus problem, too.
A Linux virus could do significant damage without root access
A virus in GNU/Linux could indeed do a lot of damage, but you are forgetting one point. Many popular viruses have an incubation time of 0: they start doing malicious things the moment they infest a computer. In the old days, when spreading was a hard thing to do for a virus, they sometimes had an incubation time of a year or something. That way, your whole system (and that of others) was infested before you realized that something was wrong.
It is very likely that this behaviour will return if a virus cannot just send itself out to the whole addressbook the moment it arrives. If this happens while executing as the root user, you need a reinstall of the whole system. If it happens as a normal user, that user's home should probably be recovered from backup. If it happens as a dummy user in a chrooted environment (which is how any e-mailer should execute an attachment if it chooses to do so at all), then nothing at all needs to be done.
I think this kind of extra security alone is worth the inconvinience of typing the root password when installing something. But there is more. If a non-malicious program has a bug, when running it as root it can break the system, while running it as a normal user will most probably not do any harm (non-malicious code will not do rm -rf /, it will more probably try something like cp /dev/urandom /dev/hda.) This is probably a greater threat on GNU/Linux systems in the current world than viruses, and also by itself reason enough not to use the root account for programs that don't need it.
Look at the "GNU/Linux" vs. "Linux" debate - Linus claimed that in his opinion "Linux" refers only to the kernel, and anything else is none of his business. Yet RMS seems to blame Linus for the lack of credit GNU gets.
And he is right in that. RedHat calls their distribution "Linux", while there's ten times more GNU than Linux in it. RMS asked them to stop doing that, but they don't. If Linux would ask them, they probably would. But he doesn't. He says: I call my kernel "Linux" and I don't care at all about this thing. It's not that he's doing the wrong thing. It's that he isn't doing the right thing.
X is supposedly never used and the root of all slowness in X.
I use remote X all the time and it works fine. Only applications that need lots of traffic to the video card, like mplayer, don't work at normal speed. I sometimes use remote X applications over my cablemodem, which is capped at 8kB/s upload. That is a bit slow, but not unworkable. And it is very convenient to be able to see the application the way you always see it.
Anyways, just because this isn't a tablet PC doesn't make it not cool. I'd often like to have the power of my desktop machine anywhere in the house.
This power is cool indeed. Welcome to X.
it looks like Microsoft has been busy developing a new video compression method
Anyone with a fast PC will be able to watch
Somehow I get the feeling you mean "anyone with a fast PC and a Microsoft operating system". Or am I too cynical?
In the case of programming together, you probably trust the person on the other side of the connection. And if you don't, then you do the programming as guest and you make sure guest doesn't have any sensitive files on the system. Personally I wouldn't want to code with someone I can't trust, anyway.
free game for anyone that's paid the Microsoft tax!
Not quite. The problem of the microsoft tax is that you pay it, even if you do not buy their software.
less than a year ago, Jim Allchin swore under oath that disclosing the Windows operating system source code could damage national security.
Of course it only damages security if by opening up it would come in the hands of dangerous and evil people. Our comrades from China are very trustworthy, they would never want to harm an honest US company.
If this is indeed "shared source", then they cannot violate it. Microsoft will just not give all the code to them, but only parts of it. There is no way you can compile Windows only with the parts they usually show.
Perhaps they show all the code this time, but I seriously doubt that.
While no comet with such a small nucleus has ever survived that kind of close solar approach (one-fourth of Mercury's orbit) without fragmenting, this one did
In astronomy, there is something called the "Roche limit". It is the closest a object can come to another object without being torn apart (by difference in gravitational force between the part closest to the star/planet/whatever, and the part furthest away from it.) The larger the satellite, the larger the difference in force and therefore the larger this limit.
So the answer why such a small nucleus did not get torn apart is easy: because it is so small.
It looks like this will be an important step in getting Linux to be more widely adopted in governments around the world.
I guess this certification is a good thing, especially in the home country of Microsoft, where the government seems to protect its own businesses quite a lot. But why would this national certification matter anything to governments around the world? If it did, how come Germany already has Gnu/Linux on their government computers?
This is a fairly major revelation from Microsoft, and if it happens, it may be one of the biggest wins yet for open-source software: what do you know -- competition works!
The original idea of free software was to let the end-user have freedom to do what he or she wants with it. For Gnu, this still is the main goal. OSS (like Linux) focusses more on technical benefits, in other words: having software that works well.
Both OSS and FS don't care at all about the prices of Microsoft's products, except as far as the number of people using their products is concerned.
As an other reader noted, the main reason for people switching to systems like Gnu/Linux is money. Part of the switching people may hear about the ethics of it and join the free software movement. Some may be enthousiastic about the results and join the open source movement. But hardly anyone starts using it because of such reasons.
This is something that I think we should try to change. If we can let people know why FS and/or OSS is so good, then it doesn't matter if Microsoft lowers their prices, since people will decide on other grounds what software they use. So please tell all people you know (and people you don't know :-) ) about all the non-financial benefits of it.
Does anyone like to finance a TV commercial?
This all makes me think back of the times when I hadn't decided yet that I would no longer help people having problems with MS platforms. How can you possibly get any work done (let alone faster, as they claim), if you have to worry all the time about what you should and should not do, because otherwise all kind of strange things happen?
It does it in a per-browser way. Its intention is understand and exploit advanced features of your browser.
They do quite a bad job at exploiting advanced features of Mozilla if they generate javascript statements that aren't according to the standard and are known not to be supported by it.
I think a country which has passes laws that make it legal in certain situations to invade a European country (to be more specific: the Haque in Holland) isn't really popular anyway.
The USA obviously has a long way to go before they can join the club of really important countries ;-)
And don't bother telling me MS is evil - in this case that would be a real strong signal of a dull, well-rutted mind.
Except for that line, your comment makes sense. They're still evil, though. But not because of what they're doing here ;-)
On Sendo's leaving Microsoft and using Symbian, where they get the source and are allowed to tweak with it:
Was it a technology problem -- did Microsoft's software work? "It was a not a technology issue," she said. "I cannot go into all the details about it, but our business model is to offer very customized phones so they have something to distinguish themselves in the marketplace, which we cannot offer if we don't have the source code."
Microsoft dismissed this explanation. In an e-mail, Suwanjindar said that Microsoft's "shared source" model "provides partners with the APIs [application programming interfaces] they need in order to customize and develop applications for our platform."
Sendo: We don't like your deal, it isn't flexible enough.
Microsoft: We'll give you our API's.
Sendo: API's aren't as flexible as the full source code.
Microsoft (handwaving): API's will do.
Sendo: No, they won't.
Microsoft (handwaving again): APIs will do.
Sendo: No, they won't! You think you're some kind of jedi, waving your hand like that?
Please get your facts straight before flaming!
Noone pretended to post a fact, and I don't think anyone (beside you, maybe) had the feeling they did. The statement is, that Microsoft is probably locking in their customers again, and a non-readable format sounds like a good way to do this. You say it's readable? Well, then they probably found some other way to lock people in. I just read that XML isn't actually the default. Sounds like a nice way to ensure it will not be used very much...
First of all, the headline sounds like there will be a nuclear fission power plant in your mobile phone very soon. This is not at all what is meant, according to the article.
What they do mean, is that they will use the energy from the radiation that comes from nuclear isotopes as a power source. This sounds like a very nice idea.
I have an extra idea for this: How about creating power plants around nuclear waste from fission power plants. That way, the nuclear waste problem would be solved: when those new power plants generate enough energy to substitute the original plant (which produces the waste), then the original one is shut down. Then no more waste is generated anymore.
I think this would probably take too much space, because a fission power plant generates much more energy then an isotope plant can. It is worth thinking about though, since we have to do something with the waste anyway.
This may sound like we will get the nuclear waste from the fission power plants into our mobile phones. This will not happen (so this power source will not help us fix that problem), because the products of nuclear fission are much too dangerous to store with so little shielding (less than 1m of concrete)
But, hey, if they make nuclear powered cell phones, the radiation would treat the supposed cancer risk. Right?
Atomic radiation is like a gun: It destroys things. If you start shooting randomly at a crowd of people where you know there is a criminal, you may hit the criminal. But you can be sure to hit many innocant bystanders. And what's more, radiating healthy tissue may cause cancer again (with high amounts of radiation, this is very likely).
However, the radiation used would be beta-particles. If there is a cover on the batteries which is 3mm thick, then beta's will not leave the machine (unless they are very energetic, but it is unlikely that they do that, because it would not be allowed by any government (I hope)).
Therefore, it is very unlikely to bring any safety risk at all, except for people opening the device
I guess you all remember the settlement that was just approved. I remember "windows" being defined in there as "Windows NT, Winodws XP and systems based on that" (or something similar). Would this move be made to make sure they can avoid the consequences of the settlement even more than they already can? After this move they can claim it is a totally independant and "new" system (as they say every few years, usually after something visual has changed).
Just a thought....
First off: we are not all gonna die.
No, we're not all going to die. But you don't need much imagination to see that maybe most of us are going to. That's how it works in evolution. You breed a lot, some disaster happens, almost everyone dies, but there are some that survive and they breed on and the story repeats (unless noone survives, which happens to all species at some point)
The fact that the cavemen survived as a species doesn't mean they were having a nice time when it happened.
The difference is Microsoft would probably implement it as: "store your fingerprint on our server, use the network to let us check if it is correct".
I don't particularly like Microsoft and I think I have good reason for it. But if they would implement some security feature that would actually give the security to the user, without having them intervening, then you will not hear me complain.
This device seems nice, keeping its data to itself (and of course to its owner). Some comments say it doesn't work. They're probably right. But there's nothing 1984 about it.
I don't think it will have a positive effect. The idea is that the receiver can get the light you're sending. And I expect the manufacturers to have chosen their materials such that they get an optimal reception of the light they transmit. So if you put in a different colour LED, you are in a different (and since it was optimized worse) part of the reception spectrum.
So it may actually increase the the accuracy in the case case it does receive the signal (which seems unimportant because of the little effect, as other readers say), but it might as well increase the time the mouse is "not reacting", because of bad reflection (or in this case, bad transmission).
What we need is linux open-sourceness with Microsoft marketing
I totally agree that this would be good for the market share. However, I don't want to lie to people about my software, so I don't. Microsoft marketing is very successful in that it makes people buy the software, but it's ethically very wrong.