" Oddly enough, this situation seems to be acceptable [to Brown's IT manager, who] 'praised Google for its prompt response."
In my NSHO three days is pretty fast for a free service. You want faster response times, 100% avail and dedicated engineers? For free? Sorry, no can do.
Everytime i see an article like this all i can think is "what Microsoft backed puppet wrote this crap?". Microsoft is working very hard to make out Google as craptastic, greedy and customerhating as them. For me it has the opposite effect, Google becomes the underdog with Microsoft kicking them in the groin. I find myself feel for Google in the search market despite their 90% marketshare.
Way to go Microsoft, no PR in the world coming from Google could accomplish that feat, feeling sorry for a market leader.;D
Will this result in a new market where you can D/L different sounds for your car? Gives rice car a new meaning. Drive downtown late friday night with a honda that sounds like a Murcielago 660 and see people look for the Ghost Car.
I think i like this idea. I think the most popular sound will be "fart".
"Ballmer should say screw it and just go back to the 90's and steamroll all over the competition."
Hi there, where have you been since the 90's ? Rest assured you have missed much much steamrolling while you were gone. The whole OOXML debacle is something you really should catch up on, with all the bribes, stacking of panels and other fun stuff. Also take a look at how Microsofts totally dumped the price on Windows for netbooks to kill off any continued linux adoption. Why not look into how an ASUS representive excused himself for having the balls to show an own product with *gasp* Linux on it? The gall! And just recently when they tried to sell off OpenGL patents from SGI to patent trolls under the premise that they would be excellent for going after Linux companies (Hey Novell, looking at you and your patent indemnification, not that useful ey?).
"At least the M$ moniker would have meaning again."
When didnt it have a meaning? They are getting better att hiding their activities but they never stopped.
I think it needs less Microsoft or better, none at all. It blatantly obvious this is a mere publicity stunt. The bylaws arent accidentally about giving all control to Microsoft.
The only good thing at all is that it puts Miguel de Icaza on Microsofts side so that people easier understand where his loyalty really lies. The discussions about Mono and abolishing it from distributions should get easier now.
I love BackupPC more today than ever. I had a run with some of the more often used commercial offerings and the grass is NOT greener on the other side. Despite fancy wizards and support BackupPC beats any one of them anytime.
I backup about 230 GB of user data each night and still the pool is only 241 GB after many months of use.
"There are 6 hosts that have been backed up, for a total of:
* 51 full backups of total size 1895.95GB (prior to pooling and compression),
* 36 incr backups of total size 62.33GB (prior to pooling and compression). "
The pooling works really well and saves oodles of space. Best thing is that its very easy to setup/restore files through a web GUI and demands no tinkering at all once its installed. I dont think the learning curve is worse than for anything else. Even if you can install a commercial system easily to its default it takes very much learning, tinkering and work before you can let it go.
The only way the ARM manufacturers stand any chance is to either go for a completely new OS or jump onto the Linux bandwagon. Microsoft wont endanger their cooperation with Intel and AMD until ARM has secured a sufficient enough marketshare. This makes ARM and Microsoft a catch 22 happening. Any support will be superficial with lots and lots of fot dragging.
On the other hand Asus has shown just how successfull cheap small devices can be with Linux on them. If the ARM companies goes ahead full steam pushing devices with Linux Microsoft will be forced to jump aboard no matter what they really want to do. By then Microsoft wont be calling the shots and ARM will have a much better bargaining position.
I also think the ARM manufacturers should take a long hard look at the Wintel OEMs and think about their situation. Do they really want ot find themselves in a position where all their revenue is taken by a third party like Microsoft who doesnt contribute anything at all to the platform? Are they comfortable to be totally in the hands of a company that cant manage to turn out a new version of their OS in almost ten years?
I fail to see the problem that multitouch solves. Everything we have seen so far has been anything but intuitive. The interface and its setup is what makes a computer easy, not the HID interface. If you want you can make an OS very easy to use with nothing but a keyboard, or like Windows hopelessly random with gui elements and settings being sprinkled all over in no apparant pattern.
Changing to multitouch wont help Windows 7 a bit, what it needs is to be simplified and take away stupid settings and repetitive tasks from the user. More automagic and a lot less "Do you really want this or that?" popups.
I think while pretty hard on the innocent users this proposition could be good for the internet. If users of unsafe OS are punished there will be atleast some incentive to push better security. Right now security is all about lipservice and PR. It will also force people who dont upgrade off the net and make them aware that their computers has been breached.
The marginal effects are pretty big but hopefully people will go after the OS/applications vendors for better security.
I strongly suspect they will prefer licenses for pillage and burning and not GPL or any such license.
This is a move to keep Windows developers on Windows instead of falling of the straight and narrow and make stupid things like Linux/Mac/whatever compatible software. Some developers are slipping through their fingers and we cant have people with their own free will can we?
Moves like theese shows a forward thinking that the west has tossed out the window long ago. When we moved our factories abroad we sold our butts for a fast buck and a nice swimming pool for some executives. My country happily ships all resources out instead of processing them and we loose billions in the long run on this, not to mention jobs lost and trade balance.
Keeping important natural resources inside the country and selling them highly processed (in cars, computers etc) gives much better yield than to just sell it abroad and then buy the refined products back. Im must give it to the Chinese, they are shrewd economics but the really dangerous part is that they think ten years longer ahead than most westerners do that only worry about the next quarter at most.
"And by allowing the patents to go to AST in the first place, Microsoft may (the article implies) be signaling at least their lack of active intent to disrupt the Linux marketplace."
Im much more inclined to believe that the intent was some patent troll getting their hands on the patents. They want a new SCO, no doubt.
In Microsofts case i read the bulletin as it allows remote code execution in w2k8 and Vista. Thats very unpleasant considering it happens in the TCP/IP level and not higher up. Im no hacker but from what i can understand this exploit allows a hacker to own ANY affected system directly over the internet as long as any port on that target is accessible. I really hope im reading this wrong.
A firewall wont help at all in that case and critical is a very moderate rating indeed. Im very glad we havent upgraded to w2k8 yet.
1. Most Linux users are also heavy Windows users and know both sides equally well. Youre not stupid if you use Windows and i dont think i have seen anyone being accused of that anywhere except when someone trolls. 2. Linux has had some bad holes but i havent seen many Linux companies strutting around badmouthing Windows for all they can. The fact is that every single salesperson for Linux ive met has either declined to say anything about Microsoft or just said theyre ok. Its the audacity of Microsoft to proclaim they are the safest and best in the universe and then fall on the goal line with holes like theese. Microsoft has enormous amounts of cash and still doesnt seem to do any unit testing or fuzzy tests on their protocols and software. Microsoft should be tenfold better for the buck, not equal or even worse. 3. Most of my personal Microsoft criticism comes from my work as a network admin. Its all those marketing decisions that trumps good engineering all the time that makes me see red. I battle Microsofts marketing department every single day and i feel truly sorry for the poor sods down in engineering. Im also furius about the fact that Microsoft spends so much time trying to kill my personal favourite OS. I dont want Windows to disappear, i want Microsoft to leave Linux the freck alone. The hostility comes from one side only and my aversion for Microsoft is an answer directly to it. 4. The meme-spouting is just for fun and xkcd is not the posterchild for linux, its just plain fun for a geek.
As for treating linux like a community, thats where you, Microsoft and most other fail. There is no community, at all. We have as much in common as you have with a random Windows user. Do you feel a common bond with anyone using Windows? There can be small communitys around some projects but consensus is very rarely achieved. Take two linux users and put them in the same room and they have absolutely nothing in common except for that they happens to use Linux. Thats what makes Linux hopelessly hard to kill for Microsoft.
There isnt a community for you to join, it doesnt exist. Find a project you like and where the people seems to correlate with your values and have fun.
Instead of whining about Apple being a bunch of morons with world domination urges, get a better more free phone. At best the whining will bring a temporary change but the company culture itself is more or less set in stone. Control.
"Win7 RTM was already released to MS partners and MSDN and TechNet subscribers."
Everyone who has been in the game for a while knows that Windows 7 SP3 is the RTM version. The current version is actually one of the betas, as this exploit clearly shows. Parent poster is sadly right in his assumtion.
Id love to see you handle a large network where a disgruntled employee runs this as a script against your servers, or any school network. Imagine a good hacker in Iran/Afganistan combining this script with a couple of viruses and getting it into a large network like a governmental institution.
This is a very serious DoS since it kills the entire box, not just the faulty service. I dont think the other people on the network thinks its ok when every service serviced by Windows 2008 on the network disappears.
Me and my coworker tried this on an updated Windows 2008 today and none of us could believe what happened. The server just dies mid-air and throws a proud BSOD.
Am i the only one surprised something like this could slip through all the supposed testing done by Microsoft? Have they even ran a fuzzer against their code at all? If blatantly obvious holes like this goes unseen in the new TCP/IP SMB2 code rest assured a whole slew of new holes will be found later.
Funniest thing is that this dont affects XP while Microsoft touts Windows 7/2008 as the safest os ever. I guess its all marketing and just blatantly nothing done about security other than to blame everything on the user by passing every security decission onto the user with UAC.
"Stop being a hater miffo.swe. You are free to believe or not as you wish. But don't go lumping the major religions in with cults like Scientology"
I dare to lump all the major religions in with scientology. Christianity beat Scientology any day if you look at it historically. A more brutal conversion than the one from hedonism to christianity is hard to find. Cult is a bit too nice of a wording for how most of our religions have come to be. You carry on closing your eyes and dont whatever you do read any history.
Anyone reading Scientology material becomes pretty much immune against their brainwash. Its more like a very badly written sci-fi novel than anything else. Letting people read it in a safe enviroment makes recruting more cultists so much harder.
The only way to get rid of stupid cults like Scientology, Christianity and the like is to expose them freely and put them against real knowledge and science. Religion has no place in a modern society.
If intel has made an SSD that dont wear out ffs sell them to me now. If not, then stuff that cache somewhere the sun dont shine and come up with a better solution.
Only in america there can be an uproar about sexual content when most games in existence is about killing people. Wtf is wrong with you people? Its ok to kill and mame people without any reason but its not ok when two consenting adults have sex?
Something is fundamentally and utterly broken in the US. The same people who shouts for unborn childrens rights to life cry in pain when someone wants to supply them with medicare once they are born.
The problem is that software patents are just to simple to get and to many simple patents have been given already. Like, take old tech A. and do B. wich is A., but on the internet! There seems to be zero demand for orginality in granting patents. Most arent really a way of solving a specific task but rather doing that specifik task. Instead of getting a patent on one way of doing some stuff you get a patent on doing some stuff regardless of how you do it.
The possibility to patent API and protocols are also insane since it isnt a tool against someone stealing knowledge but rather a tool against any competition.
All in all if its one thing software patents has done its halting software development to a complete halt. While hardware gets better each iteration software seems to be in stasis and improve in glacier speed.
Slashdot Mirror
Google Apps for Edu is free.
24/7 support, ,complete monitoring, 1hr response time and 100% avail is not free.
" Oddly enough, this situation seems to be acceptable [to Brown's IT manager, who] 'praised Google for its prompt response."
In my NSHO three days is pretty fast for a free service. You want faster response times, 100% avail and dedicated engineers? For free? Sorry, no can do.
Everytime i see an article like this all i can think is "what Microsoft backed puppet wrote this crap?". Microsoft is working very hard to make out Google as craptastic, greedy and customerhating as them. For me it has the opposite effect, Google becomes the underdog with Microsoft kicking them in the groin. I find myself feel for Google in the search market despite their 90% marketshare.
Way to go Microsoft, no PR in the world coming from Google could accomplish that feat, feeling sorry for a market leader. ;D
Microsoft lowered the standards. Google is just placing themselves a tad above those.
Will this result in a new market where you can D/L different sounds for your car? Gives rice car a new meaning. Drive downtown late friday night with a honda that sounds like a Murcielago 660 and see people look for the Ghost Car.
I think i like this idea. I think the most popular sound will be "fart".
"Ballmer should say screw it and just go back to the 90's and steamroll all over the competition."
Hi there, where have you been since the 90's ? Rest assured you have missed much much steamrolling while you were gone. The whole OOXML debacle is something you really should catch up on, with all the bribes, stacking of panels and other fun stuff. Also take a look at how Microsofts totally dumped the price on Windows for netbooks to kill off any continued linux adoption. Why not look into how an ASUS representive excused himself for having the balls to show an own product with *gasp* Linux on it? The gall! And just recently when they tried to sell off OpenGL patents from SGI to patent trolls under the premise that they would be excellent for going after Linux companies (Hey Novell, looking at you and your patent indemnification, not that useful ey?).
"At least the M$ moniker would have meaning again."
When didnt it have a meaning? They are getting better att hiding their activities but they never stopped.
I think it needs less Microsoft or better, none at all. It blatantly obvious this is a mere publicity stunt. The bylaws arent accidentally about giving all control to Microsoft.
The only good thing at all is that it puts Miguel de Icaza on Microsofts side so that people easier understand where his loyalty really lies. The discussions about Mono and abolishing it from distributions should get easier now.
It sucks and there are much better alternatives. Just dont buy it.
I love BackupPC more today than ever. I had a run with some of the more often used commercial offerings and the grass is NOT greener on the other side. Despite fancy wizards and support BackupPC beats any one of them anytime.
I backup about 230 GB of user data each night and still the pool is only 241 GB after many months of use.
"There are 6 hosts that have been backed up, for a total of:
* 51 full backups of total size 1895.95GB (prior to pooling and compression),
* 36 incr backups of total size 62.33GB (prior to pooling and compression). "
The pooling works really well and saves oodles of space. Best thing is that its very easy to setup/restore files through a web GUI and demands no tinkering at all once its installed. I dont think the learning curve is worse than for anything else. Even if you can install a commercial system easily to its default it takes very much learning, tinkering and work before you can let it go.
The only way the ARM manufacturers stand any chance is to either go for a completely new OS or jump onto the Linux bandwagon. Microsoft wont endanger their cooperation with Intel and AMD until ARM has secured a sufficient enough marketshare. This makes ARM and Microsoft a catch 22 happening. Any support will be superficial with lots and lots of fot dragging.
On the other hand Asus has shown just how successfull cheap small devices can be with Linux on them. If the ARM companies goes ahead full steam pushing devices with Linux Microsoft will be forced to jump aboard no matter what they really want to do. By then Microsoft wont be calling the shots and ARM will have a much better bargaining position.
I also think the ARM manufacturers should take a long hard look at the Wintel OEMs and think about their situation. Do they really want ot find themselves in a position where all their revenue is taken by a third party like Microsoft who doesnt contribute anything at all to the platform? Are they comfortable to be totally in the hands of a company that cant manage to turn out a new version of their OS in almost ten years?
I fail to see the problem that multitouch solves. Everything we have seen so far has been anything but intuitive. The interface and its setup is what makes a computer easy, not the HID interface. If you want you can make an OS very easy to use with nothing but a keyboard, or like Windows hopelessly random with gui elements and settings being sprinkled all over in no apparant pattern.
Changing to multitouch wont help Windows 7 a bit, what it needs is to be simplified and take away stupid settings and repetitive tasks from the user. More automagic and a lot less "Do you really want this or that?" popups.
I think while pretty hard on the innocent users this proposition could be good for the internet. If users of unsafe OS are punished there will be atleast some incentive to push better security. Right now security is all about lipservice and PR. It will also force people who dont upgrade off the net and make them aware that their computers has been breached.
The marginal effects are pretty big but hopefully people will go after the OS/applications vendors for better security.
I strongly suspect they will prefer licenses for pillage and burning and not GPL or any such license.
This is a move to keep Windows developers on Windows instead of falling of the straight and narrow and make stupid things like Linux/Mac/whatever compatible software. Some developers are slipping through their fingers and we cant have people with their own free will can we?
Moves like theese shows a forward thinking that the west has tossed out the window long ago. When we moved our factories abroad we sold our butts for a fast buck and a nice swimming pool for some executives. My country happily ships all resources out instead of processing them and we loose billions in the long run on this, not to mention jobs lost and trade balance.
Keeping important natural resources inside the country and selling them highly processed (in cars, computers etc) gives much better yield than to just sell it abroad and then buy the refined products back. Im must give it to the Chinese, they are shrewd economics but the really dangerous part is that they think ten years longer ahead than most westerners do that only worry about the next quarter at most.
"And by allowing the patents to go to AST in the first place, Microsoft may (the article implies) be signaling at least their lack of active intent to disrupt the Linux marketplace."
Im much more inclined to believe that the intent was some patent troll getting their hands on the patents. They want a new SCO, no doubt.
In Microsofts case i read the bulletin as it allows remote code execution in w2k8 and Vista. Thats very unpleasant considering it happens in the TCP/IP level and not higher up. Im no hacker but from what i can understand this exploit allows a hacker to own ANY affected system directly over the internet as long as any port on that target is accessible. I really hope im reading this wrong.
A firewall wont help at all in that case and critical is a very moderate rating indeed. Im very glad we havent upgraded to w2k8 yet.
1. Most Linux users are also heavy Windows users and know both sides equally well. Youre not stupid if you use Windows and i dont think i have seen anyone being accused of that anywhere except when someone trolls.
2. Linux has had some bad holes but i havent seen many Linux companies strutting around badmouthing Windows for all they can. The fact is that every single salesperson for Linux ive met has either declined to say anything about Microsoft or just said theyre ok. Its the audacity of Microsoft to proclaim they are the safest and best in the universe and then fall on the goal line with holes like theese. Microsoft has enormous amounts of cash and still doesnt seem to do any unit testing or fuzzy tests on their protocols and software. Microsoft should be tenfold better for the buck, not equal or even worse.
3. Most of my personal Microsoft criticism comes from my work as a network admin. Its all those marketing decisions that trumps good engineering all the time that makes me see red. I battle Microsofts marketing department every single day and i feel truly sorry for the poor sods down in engineering. Im also furius about the fact that Microsoft spends so much time trying to kill my personal favourite OS. I dont want Windows to disappear, i want Microsoft to leave Linux the freck alone. The hostility comes from one side only and my aversion for Microsoft is an answer directly to it.
4. The meme-spouting is just for fun and xkcd is not the posterchild for linux, its just plain fun for a geek.
As for treating linux like a community, thats where you, Microsoft and most other fail. There is no community, at all. We have as much in common as you have with a random Windows user. Do you feel a common bond with anyone using Windows? There can be small communitys around some projects but consensus is very rarely achieved. Take two linux users and put them in the same room and they have absolutely nothing in common except for that they happens to use Linux. Thats what makes Linux hopelessly hard to kill for Microsoft.
There isnt a community for you to join, it doesnt exist. Find a project you like and where the people seems to correlate with your values and have fun.
Instead of whining about Apple being a bunch of morons with world domination urges, get a better more free phone. At best the whining will bring a temporary change but the company culture itself is more or less set in stone. Control.
"Win7 RTM was already released to MS partners and MSDN and TechNet subscribers."
Everyone who has been in the game for a while knows that Windows 7 SP3 is the RTM version. The current version is actually one of the betas, as this exploit clearly shows. Parent poster is sadly right in his assumtion.
Id love to see you handle a large network where a disgruntled employee runs this as a script against your servers, or any school network. Imagine a good hacker in Iran/Afganistan combining this script with a couple of viruses and getting it into a large network like a governmental institution.
This is a very serious DoS since it kills the entire box, not just the faulty service. I dont think the other people on the network thinks its ok when every service serviced by Windows 2008 on the network disappears.
Me and my coworker tried this on an updated Windows 2008 today and none of us could believe what happened. The server just dies mid-air and throws a proud BSOD.
Am i the only one surprised something like this could slip through all the supposed testing done by Microsoft? Have they even ran a fuzzer against their code at all? If blatantly obvious holes like this goes unseen in the new TCP/IP SMB2 code rest assured a whole slew of new holes will be found later.
Funniest thing is that this dont affects XP while Microsoft touts Windows 7/2008 as the safest os ever. I guess its all marketing and just blatantly nothing done about security other than to blame everything on the user by passing every security decission onto the user with UAC.
"Stop being a hater miffo.swe. You are free to believe or not as you wish. But don't go lumping the major religions in with cults like Scientology"
I dare to lump all the major religions in with scientology. Christianity beat Scientology any day if you look at it historically. A more brutal conversion than the one from hedonism to christianity is hard to find. Cult is a bit too nice of a wording for how most of our religions have come to be. You carry on closing your eyes and dont whatever you do read any history.
Anyone reading Scientology material becomes pretty much immune against their brainwash. Its more like a very badly written sci-fi novel than anything else. Letting people read it in a safe enviroment makes recruting more cultists so much harder.
The only way to get rid of stupid cults like Scientology, Christianity and the like is to expose them freely and put them against real knowledge and science. Religion has no place in a modern society.
If intel has made an SSD that dont wear out ffs sell them to me now. If not, then stuff that cache somewhere the sun dont shine and come up with a better solution.
Only in america there can be an uproar about sexual content when most games in existence is about killing people. Wtf is wrong with you people? Its ok to kill and mame people without any reason but its not ok when two consenting adults have sex?
Something is fundamentally and utterly broken in the US. The same people who shouts for unborn childrens rights to life cry in pain when someone wants to supply them with medicare once they are born.
Stupid fucks.
The problem is that software patents are just to simple to get and to many simple patents have been given already. Like, take old tech A. and do B. wich is A., but on the internet! There seems to be zero demand for orginality in granting patents. Most arent really a way of solving a specific task but rather doing that specifik task. Instead of getting a patent on one way of doing some stuff you get a patent on doing some stuff regardless of how you do it.
The possibility to patent API and protocols are also insane since it isnt a tool against someone stealing knowledge but rather a tool against any competition.
All in all if its one thing software patents has done its halting software development to a complete halt. While hardware gets better each iteration software seems to be in stasis and improve in glacier speed.