>Dude! You haven't tried beos on your system >right? I am running Beos on my Amd k6-2 450 on >my system. did you try out the beos demo yet?
*Your* mobo and glue chipset are supported, obviously; but my motherboard and chipset are *not*. Nor is my video card--it has a different chipset than any of the cards Be supports, so as they themselves say in the video card compatibility section: "if it isn't on the list, basically identical to a card on the list, or it doesn't use the same chipset as a card on the list--don't ask if it'll work; it won't."
Re:Wow. Now if only they could kick the Mac's a**.
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Be Inc. IPO-bound
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· Score: 1
Microsoft is as vulnerable as it's going to get right now--and has been ever since the trial got into full swing. But what happened? Microsoft mentioned BeOS as a "competitor" to Windows during the trial...and Gassee denied it! Mistake. He should have *embraced* it, and come out shouting to the rooftops that "Be is better than Windows, easier to use than a Mac, and as stable as Linux!" But Be didn't do that. They pussied out and now they're never going to get much of the desktop market--unless maybe they smarten up and adopt a vocal, anti-Windows stance. But they're not going to do it--they're too "nice" and it will be/has been their undoing...
>I admit this is getting better as we speak, but >it's blatantly incorrect to state that BeOS is >ready for prime time. It only runs usably on >less than one out of three machines, and even >then, there are some things missing here and >there.
Someone isn't listening. As I said, the lack of hardware support is a function of low profile which is a function of poor marketing (the "complement to Windows" crap). If they had challenged Windows vocally, like Linux has, they would have gotten media attention-->high profile-->lots of developers. Aside from which--one out of three machines wouldn't be bad, if they had actually marketed themselves onto all those machines. They failed by not being vocal, and they boxed themselves into a niche. But I'll address a few of your points anyway...
>Look at the list of things Be doesn't support: >* DVD Playback - the number-one reason I don't sit in BeOS all the time.
So, you usually sit around watching DVD movies all the time? Most of us have better uses for our computers. I mean, DVD support is *fun*, but won't be a necessity for another few years--by which time Be, as long as they pull their marketing act together and start shouting, will surely support all major DVD-ROMs and DVD-RAMs. Being the "Media OS", I bet they're working on it hard right now and will support a few major brands in the next release.
>* SCSI Support - very poor, the variety of devices is very narrow.
They're right not to have SCSI support, because SCSI is as good as dead. There are FAR TOO MANY different SCSI devices which lack any real compatibility standards--this isn't Be's fault, it's the fault of SCSI manufacturers everywhere. Aside from which, SCSI is a dying market--USB is kicking it around now. Many USB implementations actually outperform SCSI implementations in real-world performance tests--just look at all those peripherals tests in PC magazines. And how many of us have SCSI racks at home? I didn't think so. USB is the future, SCSI is the past.
>* Consumer 3D Hardware - No TNT? No go.
They're working on it. You can't expect them to have all this support for hardware when, as I said earlier, they shot themselves in the foot with marketing and lost out on the chance to recruit a lot of the chaps who are now developing in the Linux community.
>* Consumer 2D Hardware - Be needs video drivers, badly.
As I said above...
>* Multiuser - Or even multiple user profiles! >* Remote administration
These last two--how many of us need them? Only corporate administrator a**holes or people who can't be trusted to run a machine (i.e., the stupid or malicious) need remote administration. Lack of remote administration is NOT what's preventing them from being a challenger for the desktop market--as I said, *low profile* is. Low profile is *also* the source of their lack of drivers and hardware support. As for user profiles--the same is true: not an obstacle to the desktop market. They suck anyway by just taking up useless space; standard configurations should work for each user of a multiuser machine, and if you're talking about security then nothing beats using encrypted volumes for each user anyway, with the passwords held by administrators as well as employees. My understanding is that Be will support encrypted volumes soon.
Re:Some thoughts on Be's viability
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Be Inc. IPO-bound
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Umm, "It was designed from the ground up to run well on any hardware"--*not*. I wish it were, but it isn't. Be just doesn't have the coders right now to support very much hardware. You mention that it looks good for people with new hardware--false. It only looks good for people with new, standard hardware from the top few major vendors. My kick-ass K6-2 450, just a month old, has a great motherboard--whose chipset isn't supported. Forget about it if you have an older but decent computer with an older but good graphics board--which is a HUGE segment of the market which Be *should* go after. How many people have brand-new boxes, compared to those who use PCs which are a couple of years old--in my post above, I mentioned that Be *should* have gone after the whole market, not just a niche market, after it got its foot in the door by being a "Media OS". Let's face it: Be could have been a serious challenger to Windows (it's certainly *better* than Windows), but they adopted this "complement to Windows" strategy which is going to be their undoing. Non-media-based companies aren't going to buy it, colleges aren't going to buy it, and most regular people who want to change or experiment are going to get Linux instead because of its high profile compared to Be. BTW, I found it annoying and insulting that the Be hardware support page mentioned that they're only concentrating on supporting Intel processors and glue chipsets designed for the Intel--again, they're alienating a big segment of their potential market: the kind of person likely to buy an alternative OS as an "impulse purchase," as you put it, is the same kind of person who's likely to buy an AMD chip or some unusual, unsupported hardware.
I really don't think Be will make much headway unless it starts to make the same noise Linux makes--a lot of people try Linux for the same reason Apple sales skyrocketed after that Superbowl commersial where the hot chick throws a sledgehammer through the screen of Big Brother (representing IBM): they want to be part of the defiance of Microsoft, they want to rebel, and ride the wave of coolness and chic which accompanies rebellion. But Be doesn't rebel against Microsoft, they pussy out and say what a great complement to Windows they are. That's not the way to make a product attractive--they should say "We're better than Windows, and as easy to use as a Mac. We're the best of both worlds, and as stable as Linux." *That's* the way to make their OS attractive. *That* would have gotten them sales on par with those of boxed Linux distros--maybe even greater. But choosing the "safe" path, the "quiet" marketing, has carved out a small niche where they'll stay until they learn to hawk their wares as loudly as Linux.
Wow. Now if only they could kick the Mac's a**...
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Be Inc. IPO-bound
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I'm glad to see that Be is doing well. Quite frankly, it's an OS that's ready for prime time--it fulfills the promise which the Mac used to have.
But I think what's really hurt them in the long run is their very "niceness" and lack of aggression. Yes, they're the "Media OS" extraordinaire, and marketing themselves as that got their feet in a lot of doors. But they should have expanded on that once they did get a foothold--they should have started a long time ago to market themselves as a mainstream OS, and the perfect choice for "grown-up Mac users" so to speak. As someone who started out on Macs, at a college full of Macs, I have a special liking for BeOS which is everything MacOS *should* have become. But, thanks to the stereotype of Be as a "niche" OS, few people outside the technobubble ever even hear of Be. If they'd been aggressive, said and done a few of the things the Linux community has done and said about Microsoft and their kind of software, then they would have gotten the press necessary to raise their visibility a long time ago.
Think about it: Linux has the visibility, and is waiting on the GUI-liciousness to move into the seat occupied by Windows. BeOS, on the other hand, has the smoothness of silk and is easy enough for WebTV'er to use, while incredibly robust and capable--but it lacks the visibility of Linux. Of course it also lacks the hardware support which Linux offers, but *that* is also a function of visibility--Be would have lots of developers, if it were more visible, and so higher profile would have given it enough hardware support to seriously push on Windows right now.
There's the Catch-22, which can be reduced to what I said in the beginning--Be got its foot in the door by being "the Media OS", but once they did they should have become as vocal as the Linux community, as persistent about the superiority of their OS, and they should have actively dragged potential developers to their camp through the media attention they could have gotten. But they missed out, and now Linux has come up from behind and become *the* challenger which Be could have been. Just my 2 cents...
* * * * "Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficient..."--Justice Brandeis
If you are REALLY interested in making a crypto file system, try asking the good folks at http://www.jetico.sci.fi to let you try to port BestCrypt to Linux. They already release most of the source code for people to add their own routines & algorithms not "stock" to the system. It's the most beautiful & fully-featured encrypted drive system I've seen. It has all the features you mentioned, and more. Someone in the Linux community ought to ask about porting it, because I almost guarantee they'd let it be ported and give full source in exchange for rights to sell it on the new platform. Software like BestCrypt really is worth buying...
The FBI/CIA/NSA stance on encryption, and lots of other things, is about knowledge and keeping it out of the hands of the people. It's not about law enforcement, excepting the fact that their laws are meant to keep us ignorant--as Chomsky would point out, it's the goal of government (whether consciously or not) to try to keep knowledge from the people. Scientia potentia est--knowledge is power. Give Louis Freeh, or nearly any lawmaker or law enforcer, a position of power, and they will want to maintain and strengthen that power--it's human nature--and since knowledge is power they must restrict knowledge. Think about it: the officer who shoved something up Abner Louima's bum, he probably wasn't a *terrible* guy (they do do screenings before you become NYPD), he let the power get to him. In his mind, he was punishing a perpetrator, punishing a criminal--people like Louis Freeh, they do *the same* thing, only they bugger us with raids on our homes and seizures of our property (the harassment of "suspected hackers" comes to mind lately--btw, when do you think the "suspects" will get their computers back?). Freeh and his ilk view themselves as protectors of society, as is clear from their reports on crypto--but they also view themselves as "above" the average citizen. Sure, IBM and Microsoft need strong crypto to protect corporate interests--but plain old Mr. Bud Sixpack can't send encrypted private messages, because we have to scan them for keywords and read them. He can't have an encrypted hard drive because if we knock on his door we have the right to rifle through his files--so, gee, let's talk Congress into making it illegal to encrypt stuff without us having the key, and together with the NSA we'll drop hints to U.S. crypto vendors that we'll let them have lucrative export permits it they'll slip backdoors in the code. BTW, industry people *have* posted to newsgroups before about being approached by a certain NSA fellow, who offered export permits for "chinks in the armour"--moral of the story, use open source or good Finnish crypto.
They must keep silly reports like the one given in the article secret for a few years. They must make things illegal which deal with "forbidden" knowledge--knowledge of the truth, and what they are doing. Why do you think the FBI cyber crimes investigators almost always refer to "crackers" as "hackers"--they *do* know better, but it's a way to undermine the legitimacy of "hackers" as merely people with special in-depth knowledge about computers and code. It's the *knowledge* they fear and would like to eliminate when that knowledge is in the hands of a commoner. In the end, it's the difference in ideologies between people who want knowledge to be freely available for the good of all and those who want knowledge to be secret so that its power is only in the hands of the handlers. Quis custodiet custodes, indeed!
You know, it's significant that the only comprehensive pages I've found about the security holes and privacy-killers in Windows is a cracker page--you don't see the FBI giving us useful info on protecting our privacy because they don't want us to have privacy. Knowledge like this *should* be freely available--look at http://www.faizal.com/singapura-mirrors/fravia/ent ran.htm --preferably through an anonymous proxy, unless you want to get on a list somewhere...
>Er... in that case, remember to thoroughly nuke >your swapfile afterward. When I rooted thru my >own Windows swapfile with a simple hex viewer, I >found data more than 6 months old!!
Yeah, the swap file...the bittersweet voodoo that made it possible for me to run Paint Shop Pro on my old i486 with palty 8Megs RAM!! Thank God for my new 64Meg K6-2 400... Actually, the swap file is where Kremlin 2.21 comes in handy: it can be configured to overwrite not only the swap, but the system RAM as well, *and* those annoying mm*.dats which track your Net visits. Of course, I have it configured to only clear the Windows and browser, etc., histories because I'm not hiding much Big Brother would be interested in, except maybe that manifesto...;-) I'm more concerned with Little Sister finding the pics of me boning an old friend of hers, hehe. I do the crypto/security thing as a hobby & political statement, but I do have Kremlin delete the mm*.dats once a week because they can get to be a few hundred KB.:-( If only I could figure out how to pare down the user.dats--which are 500-600KB each.
> Also, >compressed volume files (such as created by >Stacker/Doublespace) can contain all sorts of >supposedly-deleted data from months previous.
You know, I never thought when I got my new box w/ 8.4 Gig HD, that I'd ever be wanting for space again, since my old 8Meg i486 laptop had only 650Meg HD--well, I went nuts with the expansion room, installed every game I've been wanting to disk and even put the whole Encarta on my HD, plus a 650Meg encrypted archive (sized for when I get a CD-R) and a backup, so I'm at 5.9Gigs and it's only been a month. A-hem...
Seriously, I can hardly wait for a stable, well-GUI'd Linux and good easy Linux volume encryption--I'd dump half the crap on my disk for that, surely. Windows is like an information sieve--anyone using it is not entirely safe, even with encryption. If anyone wants to know bad enough what files you access on that encrypted disk, or what sites you visit on the Net, they *will* know.
Huh, looks like I haven't been paying attention to Scramdisk enough. Is it possible that in an earlier incarnation, ScramDisk was DOS-based, or have I been completely out to lunch about this?
Of course, most of what I heard about ScramDisk came from third-party peaople with privacy pages and FAQs, so it's likely I picked up that error there. I'll check on which source said it. Then of course I came to alt.privacy and saw some first-person experiences with ScramDisk. Since I've been using BestCrypt since a few generations back, I never had much impetus to try ScramDisk--esp. since I'd heard it was DOS-based. BestCrypt is awesome, very clean and intuitive GUI, and the fact that its authors created a hardware "cryptoprocessor" for GOST several years back kind of inspires confidence in their crypto expertise. That they let you download a development kit with some source code also inspires some confidence, although it doesn't include source for the main engine it does include the keygen and encryption "modules". I've e-mailed them several times, and they are the nicest people you could imagine--cute imperfect English too, since they're Finnish.
I'M SURPRISED (hint hint, nudge nudge, wink wink) that no one in the Linux crypto community has contacted them with an offer to port it over, since it's the most awesome Windows crypto app and they could probably be persuaded, after all: their market would improve greatly, though they'd have to lower their price for the Linux version (which should be easy to talk them into doing, if others are willing to do the work).
Like I said, Windows *bites* about security--user.dat -.da0 -.bak is bordering on a conspiracy, it's so bad, and mm256.dats and mm2048.dats are almost as bad about logging Net usage. You can overwrite the mm*.dats from DOS, and sometimes Kremlin can even do it, but the user.dat files I don't know what to do about. Anyone hiding something with a telling name, like "F:\Freemen\TerrorismRules\Bombplans\LA.doc" is screwed.;-) So, Linux with a BestCrypt or Scramdisk would be as airtight as it gets... Any hackers up for a porting job?:-)
P.S.--anyone who might be interested, free full-function 30-day demos, and development kits, are at http://www.jetico.sci.fi
Several products have done what you mentioned PGP6.0i doing, and better, for Win/DOS for a long time. Problem is, Windows is so insecure, it hardly matters--look at my post below about user.dat files. If you use virgin DOS with it, that's secure, but Windows f*cks it up by strewing sensitive data all over the place...
I've been interested in encryption & security ever since I went to a college where the college president was former deputy director of the CIA. I use Windows, which is so insecure I'd never trust it if I were doing anything "naughty." I mean, have you actually *read* the Windows user.dat file?? I almost think the FBI/NSA/CIA talked Microsoft into doing it, because it contains an in-depth list of the names and complete paths of just about every file you access. Even if you put that folder "AE-35 Warhead" and its companions in an encrypted drive, the user.dat and its user.da0 and user.bak backups, would still give away "E:\Chinese\Docs\AE-35\blueprint002.gif" or whatever. Kinda sucks if you're into espionage, tax evasion, Traci Lords pics, or terrorism.:-)
On the bright side, there are a few Windows products which will successfully hide the contents of files, though not their names & paths (unless you're brave enough to f*ck with the user.dats), from even the boys in Langley & Ft. Meade. I test drove many encryption & security progs for a webpage I did on Windows security utilities. BestCrypt, from Finland via http://www.jetico.sci.fi , is probably the best & most trustworthy commercial encryption product for Windows, not for e-mail but for anything you want to keep on your own HD or floppies--they even have released source code, for security verification and third-party development. You create a file of any size you want, and the program mounts the file as a "virtual drive" when the decryption passphrase is input: the data remains in encrypted form even when mounted, and is decrypted only to memory/swapfile. When mounted, it appears like any other drive, with whatever drive letter and file structure you give it; when unmounted, it looks like a big file in the root of C:\ and is encrypted with either 256-bit Blowfish, 256-bit Twofish, DES, GOST, or 128-bit IDEA. IDEA was added by a third-party developer. The only annoying thing about them is that they don't mention on their site that DES has been broken. They include a file overwriting utility which is slow and crappy, so I suggest Kremlin 2.21 from http://www.mach5.com because it is configurable, fast, and they even have a "sentry" which can wipe specified files on shutdown or whenever, with as many passes as you want. Kremlin also encrypts file-by-file, so any paranoids could double-encrypt their files if they were that...careful?... nuts?... who knows.
ScramDisk is supposed to be similar, but designed to encrypt a real partition, and is wholly DOS-based, and best of all is FREE and coded mostly by a regular at alt.privacy . I have never tried it though so can't personally recommend it.
The only thing I really use encryption for personally is keeping the nosy friends'n'family out of my private e-mail archives, pictures of the girlfriend, etc., and for the crypto hobby and my belief that we all should use crypto to foster it so that the gov't can't take away our privacy or single out individuals who do use it. We should all use crypto on principle, even those of us who don't really need it.
This idea of placing keywords in lots of ho-hum com chatter is similar to an idea that Zimmerman espoused ever since he coded the first release of PGP: if a whole bunch of everyday folks, not anarchists or terrorists or _____ists, use PGP, then PGP messages won't be at all conspicuous or assumed to contain something worth hiding--and the SIGnals INTelligence community would be out of business. Freedom, peace-love-dope, etc. etc. would be fostered. I agree, that's why I started using a PGP signature recently--put the sig on all your posts and e-mail, and anyone who uses PGP can see you use it and look up your public key on the MIT server and crypt you a message. See:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP for Personal Privacy 5.0 Charset: noconv
I am a minority here: a Windows user. Not that I like it, mind you; I just lack the ability to use the current generation of Linux distros, having met computers in the GUI age and utterly lacking in the ability to learn more than the most basic command line uses. It's not a cop-out; I've always been a liberal artist lacking in math and similar skills: in college, A's in English, D+ in math, and I'm smart enough to have avoided computer science due to my own shortcomings and specialties.
So, I'm stuck with Windows. I can't use Be because my hardware's not supported and, anyway, my computer's in an open place and I need transparent disk encryption which I can't find for Be--wouldn't want anyone who knows me to stumble across those scans of me and the girlfriend, my 10-meg e-mail archive, or (yikes) my collection of Barbra Streisand lyrics.
Meaning, of course, that I'm stuck with Windows software, too. Expensive Windows software. Whereas you can just use the free Gimp to retouch those pics and create graphics, I have to either violate my 30-day evaluation license for Paint Shop Pro or pony up money I don't have (poor student syndrome), or just go without. $99.95 may not be that much, but to some people it is (I was stuck with an ancient 486 with 8megs RAM until a month ago, a miracle but I *did* run PSP well enough), and add that to $449.00 for the only video capture program I can get to work with my off-the-wall hand-me-down capture card, $40.00 for an AVI-to-Mpeg converter, $39.95 for a good Windows newsreader, $35.00 for a decent mass jpeg/gif viewer, etc., not to mention the "minor" stuff I hardly ever use, like $35.00 for an unRARing app. Hmmm, my computer cost less than what I just listed. Not many people write good free software for Windows, it's all $$$. PGP and ScramDisk are two of the few exceptions I can think of. So, should I go without, or bend those demo licenses in the knowledge that I really *can't* afford to buy the software? Yeah, most of it isn't *necessary* software--I don't really need to use that free video capture card, but I do like to use it to share things with certain newsgroups and sites. Same goes for the pics I make with Paint Shop and the home page some of those graphics land on. No, I don't *need* to have what's in those RARs, and I could always open pictures ponderously with Netscape. But, I'm not talking about purely recreational "gamez" either--I'm talking about useful software the lack of which would effectively curtail my ability to make my homepage livable and otherwise indulge my audiovisual Internet and Usenet expression.
But, since the software is available, and it costs no one anything for someone who can't afford it to not register it, why not? It can't really be called stealing, because it costs no one anything for me to download it--CNET wants those site hits anyway--and there is an unlimited supply, and again I honestly don't have the money to register it. I posit this: if I had the money to register and didn't, *then* it would be equivalent to theft.
Yes, I understand that programming is a tough job--well beyond my abilities--and that the companies who release these products need to make enough to pay employees' well-deserved salaries. But, without a lot of quality free programming going on for Windows, and without the technical abilities to switch over to this generation of Linux (though much of my old hardware, like the capture board, would probably be useless under it anyway), I am stuck with the choice between being a "benign" pirate or going without. Well, all I can say is: "there is honor even among [some] pirates." Meanwhile, I anxiously await the day when a GUI-loving, technically-inept fellow like myself can use Linux... Maybe Corel will help...
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>Dude! You haven't tried beos on your system
>right? I am running Beos on my Amd k6-2 450 on
>my system. did you try out the beos demo yet?
*Your* mobo and glue chipset are supported, obviously; but my motherboard and chipset are *not*. Nor is my video card--it has a different chipset than any of the cards Be supports, so as they themselves say in the video card compatibility section: "if it isn't on the list, basically identical to a card on the list, or it doesn't use the same chipset as a card on the list--don't ask if it'll work; it won't."
Microsoft is as vulnerable as it's going to get right now--and has been ever since the trial got into full swing. But what happened? Microsoft mentioned BeOS as a "competitor" to Windows during the trial...and Gassee denied it! Mistake. He should have *embraced* it, and come out shouting to the rooftops that "Be is better than Windows, easier to use than a Mac, and as stable as Linux!" But Be didn't do that. They pussied out and now they're never going to get much of the desktop market--unless maybe they smarten up and adopt a vocal, anti-Windows stance. But they're not going to do it--they're too "nice" and it will be/has been their undoing...
>I admit this is getting better as we speak, but
>it's blatantly incorrect to state that BeOS is
>ready for prime time. It only runs usably on
>less than one out of three machines, and even
>then, there are some things missing here and
>there.
Someone isn't listening. As I said, the lack of hardware support is a function of low profile which is a function of poor marketing (the "complement to Windows" crap). If they had challenged Windows vocally, like Linux has, they would have gotten media attention-->high profile-->lots of developers. Aside from which--one out of three machines wouldn't be bad, if they had actually marketed themselves onto all those machines. They failed by not being vocal, and they boxed themselves into a niche. But I'll address a few of your points anyway...
>Look at the list of things Be doesn't support:
>* DVD Playback - the number-one reason I don't sit in BeOS all the time.
So, you usually sit around watching DVD movies all the time? Most of us have better uses for our computers. I mean, DVD support is *fun*, but won't be a necessity for another few years--by which time Be, as long as they pull their marketing act together and start shouting, will surely support all major DVD-ROMs and DVD-RAMs. Being the "Media OS", I bet they're working on it hard right now and will support a few major brands in the next release.
>* SCSI Support - very poor, the variety of devices is very narrow.
They're right not to have SCSI support, because SCSI is as good as dead. There are FAR TOO MANY different SCSI devices which lack any real compatibility standards--this isn't Be's fault, it's the fault of SCSI manufacturers everywhere. Aside from which, SCSI is a dying market--USB is kicking it around now. Many USB implementations actually outperform SCSI implementations in real-world performance tests--just look at all those peripherals tests in PC magazines. And how many of us have SCSI racks at home? I didn't think so. USB is the future, SCSI is the past.
>* Consumer 3D Hardware - No TNT? No go.
They're working on it. You can't expect them to have all this support for hardware when, as I said earlier, they shot themselves in the foot with marketing and lost out on the chance to recruit a lot of the chaps who are now developing in the Linux community.
>* Consumer 2D Hardware - Be needs video drivers, badly.
As I said above...
>* Multiuser - Or even multiple user profiles!
>* Remote administration
These last two--how many of us need them? Only corporate administrator a**holes or people who can't be trusted to run a machine (i.e., the stupid or malicious) need remote administration. Lack of remote administration is NOT what's preventing them from being a challenger for the desktop market--as I said, *low profile* is. Low profile is *also* the source of their lack of drivers and hardware support. As for user profiles--the same is true: not an obstacle to the desktop market. They suck anyway by just taking up useless space; standard configurations should work for each user of a multiuser machine, and if you're talking about security then nothing beats using encrypted volumes for each user anyway, with the passwords held by administrators as well as employees. My understanding is that Be will support encrypted volumes soon.
Umm, "It was designed from the ground up to run well on any hardware"--*not*. I wish it were, but it isn't. Be just doesn't have the coders right now to support very much hardware. You mention that it looks good for people with new hardware--false. It only looks good for people with new, standard hardware from the top few major vendors. My kick-ass K6-2 450, just a month old, has a great motherboard--whose chipset isn't supported. Forget about it if you have an older but decent computer with an older but good graphics board--which is a HUGE segment of the market which Be *should* go after. How many people have brand-new boxes, compared to those who use PCs which are a couple of years old--in my post above, I mentioned that Be *should* have gone after the whole market, not just a niche market, after it got its foot in the door by being a "Media OS". Let's face it: Be could have been a serious challenger to Windows (it's certainly *better* than Windows), but they adopted this "complement to Windows" strategy which is going to be their undoing. Non-media-based companies aren't going to buy it, colleges aren't going to buy it, and most regular people who want to change or experiment are going to get Linux instead because of its high profile compared to Be. BTW, I found it annoying and insulting that the Be hardware support page mentioned that they're only concentrating on supporting Intel processors and glue chipsets designed for the Intel--again, they're alienating a big segment of their potential market: the kind of person likely to buy an alternative OS as an "impulse purchase," as you put it, is the same kind of person who's likely to buy an AMD chip or some unusual, unsupported hardware.
I really don't think Be will make much headway unless it starts to make the same noise Linux makes--a lot of people try Linux for the same reason Apple sales skyrocketed after that Superbowl commersial where the hot chick throws a sledgehammer through the screen of Big Brother (representing IBM): they want to be part of the defiance of Microsoft, they want to rebel, and ride the wave of coolness and chic which accompanies rebellion. But Be doesn't rebel against Microsoft, they pussy out and say what a great complement to Windows they are. That's not the way to make a product attractive--they should say "We're better than Windows, and as easy to use as a Mac. We're the best of both worlds, and as stable as Linux." *That's* the way to make their OS attractive. *That* would have gotten them sales on par with those of boxed Linux distros--maybe even greater. But choosing the "safe" path, the "quiet" marketing, has carved out a small niche where they'll stay until they learn to hawk their wares as loudly as Linux.
I'm glad to see that Be is doing well. Quite frankly, it's an OS that's ready for prime time--it fulfills the promise which the Mac used to have.
i les/page1.html
But I think what's really hurt them in the long run is their very "niceness" and lack of aggression. Yes, they're the "Media OS" extraordinaire, and marketing themselves as that got their feet in a lot of doors. But they should have expanded on that once they did get a foothold--they should have started a long time ago to market themselves as a mainstream OS, and the perfect choice for "grown-up Mac users" so to speak. As someone who started out on Macs, at a college full of Macs, I have a special liking for BeOS which is everything MacOS *should* have become. But, thanks to the stereotype of Be as a "niche" OS, few people outside the technobubble ever even hear of Be. If they'd been aggressive, said and done a few of the things the Linux community has done and said about Microsoft and their kind of software, then they would have gotten the press necessary to raise their visibility a long time ago.
Think about it: Linux has the visibility, and is waiting on the GUI-liciousness to move into the seat occupied by Windows. BeOS, on the other hand, has the smoothness of silk and is easy enough for WebTV'er to use, while incredibly robust and capable--but it lacks the visibility of Linux. Of course it also lacks the hardware support which Linux offers, but *that* is also a function of visibility--Be would have lots of developers, if it were more visible, and so higher profile would have given it enough hardware support to seriously push on Windows right now.
There's the Catch-22, which can be reduced to what I said in the beginning--Be got its foot in the door by being "the Media OS", but once they did they should have become as vocal as the Linux community, as persistent about the superiority of their OS, and they should have actively dragged potential developers to their camp through the media attention they could have gotten. But they missed out, and now Linux has come up from behind and become *the* challenger which Be could have been. Just my 2 cents...
* * * *
"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficient..."--Justice Brandeis
http://homestead.dejanews.com/user.sirwinston/f
If you are REALLY interested in making a crypto file system, try asking the good folks at http://www.jetico.sci.fi to let you try to port BestCrypt to Linux. They already release most of the source code for people to add their own routines & algorithms not "stock" to the system. It's the most beautiful & fully-featured encrypted drive system I've seen. It has all the features you mentioned, and more. Someone in the Linux community ought to ask about porting it, because I almost guarantee they'd let it be ported and give full source in exchange for rights to sell it on the new platform. Software like BestCrypt really is worth buying...
IT'S ABOUT KNOWLEDGE, & WHO HAS IT...
t ran.htm --preferably through an anonymous proxy, unless you want to get on a list somewhere...
The FBI/CIA/NSA stance on encryption, and lots of other things, is about knowledge and keeping it out of the hands of the people. It's not about law enforcement, excepting the fact that their laws are meant to keep us ignorant--as Chomsky would point out, it's the goal of government (whether consciously or not) to try to keep knowledge from the people. Scientia potentia est--knowledge is power. Give Louis Freeh, or nearly any lawmaker or law enforcer, a position of power, and they will want to maintain and strengthen that power--it's human nature--and since knowledge is power they must restrict knowledge. Think about it: the officer who shoved something up Abner Louima's bum, he probably wasn't a *terrible* guy (they do do screenings before you become NYPD), he let the power get to him. In his mind, he was punishing a perpetrator, punishing a criminal--people like Louis Freeh, they do *the same* thing, only they bugger us with raids on our homes and seizures of our property (the harassment of "suspected hackers" comes to mind lately--btw, when do you think the "suspects" will get their computers back?). Freeh and his ilk view themselves as protectors of society, as is clear from their reports on crypto--but they also view themselves as "above" the average citizen. Sure, IBM and Microsoft need strong crypto to protect corporate interests--but plain old Mr. Bud Sixpack can't send encrypted private messages, because we have to scan them for keywords and read them. He can't have an encrypted hard drive because if we knock on his door we have the right to rifle through his files--so, gee, let's talk Congress into making it illegal to encrypt stuff without us having the key, and together with the NSA we'll drop hints to U.S. crypto vendors that we'll let them have lucrative export permits it they'll slip backdoors in the code. BTW, industry people *have* posted to newsgroups before about being approached by a certain NSA fellow, who offered export permits for "chinks in the armour"--moral of the story, use open source or good Finnish crypto.
They must keep silly reports like the one given in the article secret for a few years. They must make things illegal which deal with "forbidden" knowledge--knowledge of the truth, and what they are doing. Why do you think the FBI cyber crimes investigators almost always refer to "crackers" as "hackers"--they *do* know better, but it's a way to undermine the legitimacy of "hackers" as merely people with special in-depth knowledge about computers and code. It's the *knowledge* they fear and would like to eliminate when that knowledge is in the hands of a commoner. In the end, it's the difference in ideologies between people who want knowledge to be freely available for the good of all and those who want knowledge to be secret so that its power is only in the hands of the handlers. Quis custodiet custodes, indeed!
You know, it's significant that the only comprehensive pages I've found about the security holes and privacy-killers in Windows is a cracker page--you don't see the FBI giving us useful info on protecting our privacy because they don't want us to have privacy. Knowledge like this *should* be freely available--look at http://www.faizal.com/singapura-mirrors/fravia/en
>Er... in that case, remember to thoroughly nuke
;-) I'm more concerned with Little Sister finding the pics of me boning an old friend of hers, hehe. I do the crypto/security thing as a hobby & political statement, but I do have Kremlin delete the mm*.dats once a week because they can get to be a few hundred KB. :-( If only I could figure out how to pare down the user.dats--which are 500-600KB each.
>your swapfile afterward. When I rooted thru my
>own Windows swapfile with a simple hex viewer, I
>found data more than 6 months old!!
Yeah, the swap file...the bittersweet voodoo that made it possible for me to run Paint Shop Pro on my old i486 with palty 8Megs RAM!! Thank God for my new 64Meg K6-2 400... Actually, the swap file is where Kremlin 2.21 comes in handy: it can be configured to overwrite not only the swap, but the system RAM as well, *and* those annoying mm*.dats which track your Net visits. Of course, I have it configured to only clear the Windows and browser, etc., histories because I'm not hiding much Big Brother would be interested in, except maybe that manifesto...
> Also,
>compressed volume files (such as created by
>Stacker/Doublespace) can contain all sorts of
>supposedly-deleted data from months previous.
You know, I never thought when I got my new box w/ 8.4 Gig HD, that I'd ever be wanting for space again, since my old 8Meg i486 laptop had only 650Meg HD--well, I went nuts with the expansion room, installed every game I've been wanting to disk and even put the whole Encarta on my HD, plus a 650Meg encrypted archive (sized for when I get a CD-R) and a backup, so I'm at 5.9Gigs and it's only been a month. A-hem...
Seriously, I can hardly wait for a stable, well-GUI'd Linux and good easy Linux volume encryption--I'd dump half the crap on my disk for that, surely. Windows is like an information sieve--anyone using it is not entirely safe, even with encryption. If anyone wants to know bad enough what files you access on that encrypted disk, or what sites you visit on the Net, they *will* know.
Huh, looks like I haven't been paying attention to Scramdisk enough. Is it possible that in an earlier incarnation, ScramDisk was DOS-based, or have I been completely out to lunch about this?
;-) So, Linux with a BestCrypt or Scramdisk would be as airtight as it gets... Any hackers up for a porting job? :-)
Of course, most of what I heard about ScramDisk came from third-party peaople with privacy pages and FAQs, so it's likely I picked up that error there. I'll check on which source said it. Then of course I came to alt.privacy and saw some first-person experiences with ScramDisk. Since I've been using BestCrypt since a few generations back, I never had much impetus to try ScramDisk--esp. since I'd heard it was DOS-based. BestCrypt is awesome, very clean and intuitive GUI, and the fact that its authors created a hardware "cryptoprocessor" for GOST several years back kind of inspires confidence in their crypto expertise. That they let you download a development kit with some source code also inspires some confidence, although it doesn't include source for the main engine it does include the keygen and encryption "modules". I've e-mailed them several times, and they are the nicest people you could imagine--cute imperfect English too, since they're Finnish.
I'M SURPRISED (hint hint, nudge nudge, wink wink) that no one in the Linux crypto community has contacted them with an offer to port it over, since it's the most awesome Windows crypto app and they could probably be persuaded, after all: their market would improve greatly, though they'd have to lower their price for the Linux version (which should be easy to talk them into doing, if others are willing to do the work).
Like I said, Windows *bites* about security--user.dat -.da0 -.bak is bordering on a conspiracy, it's so bad, and mm256.dats and mm2048.dats are almost as bad about logging Net usage. You can overwrite the mm*.dats from DOS, and sometimes Kremlin can even do it, but the user.dat files I don't know what to do about. Anyone hiding something with a telling name, like "F:\Freemen\TerrorismRules\Bombplans\LA.doc" is screwed.
P.S.--anyone who might be interested, free full-function 30-day demos, and development kits, are at http://www.jetico.sci.fi
Several products have done what you mentioned PGP6.0i doing, and better, for Win/DOS for a long time. Problem is, Windows is so insecure, it hardly matters--look at my post below about user.dat files. If you use virgin DOS with it, that's secure, but Windows f*cks it up by strewing sensitive data all over the place...
I've been interested in encryption & security ever since I went to a college where the college president was former deputy director of the CIA. I use Windows, which is so insecure I'd never trust it if I were doing anything "naughty." I mean, have you actually *read* the Windows user.dat file?? I almost think the FBI/NSA/CIA talked Microsoft into doing it, because it contains an in-depth list of the names and complete paths of just about every file you access. Even if you put that folder "AE-35 Warhead" and its companions in an encrypted drive, the user.dat and its user.da0 and user.bak backups, would still give away "E:\Chinese\Docs\AE-35\blueprint002.gif" or whatever. Kinda sucks if you're into espionage, tax evasion, Traci Lords pics, or terrorism. :-)
On the bright side, there are a few Windows products which will successfully hide the contents of files, though not their names & paths (unless you're brave enough to f*ck with the user.dats), from even the boys in Langley & Ft. Meade. I test drove many encryption & security progs for a webpage I did on Windows security utilities. BestCrypt, from Finland via http://www.jetico.sci.fi , is probably the best & most trustworthy commercial encryption product for Windows, not for e-mail but for anything you want to keep on your own HD or floppies--they even have released source code, for security verification and third-party development. You create a file of any size you want, and the program mounts the file as a "virtual drive" when the decryption passphrase is input: the data remains in encrypted form even when mounted, and is decrypted only to memory/swapfile. When mounted, it appears like any other drive, with whatever drive letter and file structure you give it; when unmounted, it looks like a big file in the root of C:\ and is encrypted with either 256-bit Blowfish, 256-bit Twofish, DES, GOST, or 128-bit IDEA. IDEA was added by a third-party developer. The only annoying thing about them is that they don't mention on their site that DES has been broken. They include a file overwriting utility which is slow and crappy, so I suggest Kremlin 2.21 from http://www.mach5.com because it is configurable, fast, and they even have a "sentry" which can wipe specified files on shutdown or whenever, with as many passes as you want. Kremlin also encrypts file-by-file, so any paranoids could double-encrypt their files if they were that...careful?... nuts?... who knows.
ScramDisk is supposed to be similar, but designed to encrypt a real partition, and is wholly DOS-based, and best of all is FREE and coded mostly by a regular at alt.privacy . I have never tried it though so can't personally recommend it.
The only thing I really use encryption for personally is keeping the nosy friends'n'family out of my private e-mail archives, pictures of the girlfriend, etc., and for the crypto hobby and my belief that we all should use crypto to foster it so that the gov't can't take away our privacy or single out individuals who do use it. We should all use crypto on principle, even those of us who don't really need it.
This idea of placing keywords in lots of ho-hum com chatter is similar to an idea that Zimmerman espoused ever since he coded the first release of PGP: if a whole bunch of everyday folks, not anarchists or terrorists or _____ists, use PGP, then PGP messages won't be at all conspicuous or assumed to contain something worth hiding--and the SIGnals INTelligence community would be out of business. Freedom, peace-love-dope, etc. etc. would be fostered. I agree, that's why I started using a PGP signature recently--put the sig on all your posts and e-mail, and anyone who uses PGP can see you use it and look up your public key on the MIT server and crypt you a message. See:
A qH9Fh2tcYQQAn3GZ
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP for Personal Privacy 5.0
Charset: noconv
iQA/AwUBN2CVVbJesMZKJNtrEQKtIQCgyQoREfAwDeHEOq2
QE++G7XaNv8Gu68WkzZu5taZ
=TS5U
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
I am a minority here: a Windows user. Not that I like it, mind you; I just lack the ability to use the current generation of Linux distros, having met computers in the GUI age and utterly lacking in the ability to learn more than the most basic command line uses. It's not a cop-out; I've always been a liberal artist lacking in math and similar skills: in college, A's in English, D+ in math, and I'm smart enough to have avoided computer science due to my own shortcomings and specialties.
So, I'm stuck with Windows. I can't use Be because my hardware's not supported and, anyway, my computer's in an open place and I need transparent disk encryption which I can't find for Be--wouldn't want anyone who knows me to stumble across those scans of me and the girlfriend, my 10-meg e-mail archive, or (yikes) my collection of Barbra Streisand lyrics.
Meaning, of course, that I'm stuck with Windows software, too. Expensive Windows software. Whereas you can just use the free Gimp to retouch those pics and create graphics, I have to either violate my 30-day evaluation license for Paint Shop Pro or pony up money I don't have (poor student syndrome), or just go without. $99.95 may not be that much, but to some people it is (I was stuck with an ancient 486 with 8megs RAM until a month ago, a miracle but I *did* run PSP well enough), and add that to $449.00 for the only video capture program I can get to work with my off-the-wall hand-me-down capture card, $40.00 for an AVI-to-Mpeg converter, $39.95 for a good Windows newsreader, $35.00 for a decent mass jpeg/gif viewer, etc., not to mention the "minor" stuff I hardly ever use, like $35.00 for an unRARing app. Hmmm, my computer cost less than what I just listed. Not many people write good free software for Windows, it's all $$$. PGP and ScramDisk are two of the few exceptions I can think of. So, should I go without, or bend those demo licenses in the knowledge that I really *can't* afford to buy the software? Yeah, most of it isn't *necessary* software--I don't really need to use that free video capture card, but I do like to use it to share things with certain newsgroups and sites. Same goes for the pics I make with Paint Shop and the home page some of those graphics land on. No, I don't *need* to have what's in those RARs, and I could always open pictures ponderously with Netscape. But, I'm not talking about purely recreational "gamez" either--I'm talking about useful software the lack of which would effectively curtail my ability to make my homepage livable and otherwise indulge my audiovisual Internet and Usenet expression.
But, since the software is available, and it costs no one anything for someone who can't afford it to not register it, why not? It can't really be called stealing, because it costs no one anything for me to download it--CNET wants those site hits anyway--and there is an unlimited supply, and again I honestly don't have the money to register it. I posit this: if I had the money to register and didn't, *then* it would be equivalent to theft.
Yes, I understand that programming is a tough job--well beyond my abilities--and that the companies who release these products need to make enough to pay employees' well-deserved salaries. But, without a lot of quality free programming going on for Windows, and without the technical abilities to switch over to this generation of Linux (though much of my old hardware, like the capture board, would probably be useless under it anyway), I am stuck with the choice between being a "benign" pirate or going without. Well, all I can say is: "there is honor even among [some] pirates." Meanwhile, I anxiously await the day when a GUI-loving, technically-inept fellow like myself can use Linux... Maybe Corel will help...