I'm not really sure what "bigness" of the lie has to do with anything. I will say this though, it's being something you're not. Why should anyone pretend to be religious when they're not? That seems a disgrace to both the religion in question, and the individual faking it. Have you never been at a family gathering or some other function, like a baseball game or something, where they said a prayer and everyone was supposed to bow their heads and pray?
Of course. That happens frequently at weddings or funerals or whatever. What did you do?
Sat silently without my head bowed while people did what they pleased. I'm not the only one who didn't bow and pray. I guess I'm not sure why you think the only alternative is acting like an ass. There's no reason to be disrespectful, but there's also no reason to be a sheep. That's all you have to do in Scouts, too.
I have a problem with encouraging people to fake it. It's not a little thing, though I guess some people seem to think it is.
There is no correlation between a weak dollar and the strength or status of the U.S. in the world economy. A weak dollar is not inherently bad either as it makes our exports more attractive and competitive.
The big problem right now with a weak dollar any commodity traded on the world market will be expensive to buy for anyone buying in dollars. Like say, oil for instance. Other commodities are the same way (wheat has gone through the roof). This only leads to inflation, especially with something like oil which is such a basis for the United States economy.
High oil and wheat prices aren't completely because of a weak dollar, of course. Increased usage, decreased exploration, and speculation all drive up the price.
Honestly, how long do you think the open nature of personal computers is going to last?
Forever. How long do you think the open nature of lumber is going to continue?
The only reason personal computers have become as popular as the are is because of the open nature of them. Take that away, and the gravy train is over. Honestly, any market moves towards being MORE open and less proprietary as time goes on. 30 years ago you couldn't buy a non-AT&T approved phone and attach it to your phone line. People got tired of that, and AT&T eventually lost that battle. Do you think we'd ever go back to that kind of policy?
People have already tried those lock-in models with computers and internet. They didn't work. They're even less likely to work as computers become less and less expensive. 20 years ago lots of network providers tried to close off computer networks into proprietary ones (Compuserve, Q-Link, Prodigy, AOL). Those all failed to an open model. Trying to create a proprietary solution when an open one already exists is going to be near impossible.
The comparison to cell phones is rather poor. A cell phone is almost totally worthless without the service attached to it (and vice versa). The implication is the two are linked together, where the provider benefits by reducing a high barrier to entry (initial high cost).
A portable computer is tied to no such service. It's useful without any internet service in particular, and there's thousands of FREE places around the world to get free Wi-Fi internet. So tell me again why this bundled business model is going to take over?
If you want to make a comparison, compare it to banks giving away free junk, like a toaster. Hardly anyone that wants a toaster goes to open up the bank account just to get the toaster. I don't see why the ultra-mobile laptop is any different.
If you have lost DNS, game is over, you lose. A recipe if your system hits a compromised root server.
Unless you happen to have SSL enabled pop or imap.
A (revised) recipe for an SSL enabled mail host:
* You open up email to read todays email. You PC looks up pop3.yourisp.com.
* DNS returns the IP of evil PC to your PC which will connect to it.
* Evil PC returns a forged SSL certfificate claiming to be pop3.yourisp.com
* Your email client brings up an error message saying there's something wrong with this certificate (self signed, etc)
* You hopefully get suspicious, (this never having happened before), and don't click through.
* Attack fails.
If you don't get suspicious, and just click OK, you're right. But the situation isn't quite as dire as you make it out to be. I'd never connect to a non-secure host for something like email.
I'd say that if you realize it was a joke, but then still try to make this into a serious, factual statement, that makes you look either stupid, humorless, or at best just a troll.
I eat at gas stations, because here in the UK they provide a decent selection of food and it's convenient to be able to do both at once.
My point isn't to say some people won't choose convenience over quality, only that providing two vastly different products means that the quality of one of them is going to suffer greatly.
The idea that I'm going to be content putting "headhoncho_acme6@gmail.com" on my business card instead is laughable.
Who said anything about gmail.com? Google also provides DOMAIN based hosting of your email. i.e. headhoncho@acme.com can go to Google's servers. If Dreamhost doesn't want to include email with their web hosting accounts (and it looks like this is the first step towards phasing it out), then they need to get out of the web hosting business
I very much disagree. Web hosting and email hosting have very little to do with each other. They both involve the internet, but beyond that, there's little crossover. Why not let each provider provide what they can do best? I don't eat at gas stations, even though driving across country often involves feeding myself as well as my car. Why should my website host try to also provide poor email?
I'm not a kernel developer, but I'd say it's because there's widespread belief that the preemtable BKL is "the wrong way forward". Statements like these lead me to believe this:
"all this has built up to a kind of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about the BKL: nobody really knows it, nobody really dares to touch it and code can break silently and subtly if BKL locking is wrong."
In any large software project there's always a path to get from where you are, to where you want to be. It sounds like any version of BKL is considered ugly and causes problems, and patching it just won't work. In other words, fixing this part of the kernel isn't really possible, so they need to start over and change any code that relies on it to rely on something different entirely.
The problem is that a lot of times, the buck stops with you and your reputation is on the line when someone else borks something.
I agree. But my point is that Sysadmins often will just want to say NO ACCESS NO ACCESS!! without considering any alternatives. This case is a good example of that.
In the "client wants SQL access" case, the sysadmin immediately has the "NO WAY!" reaction, and doesn't consider any alternative, and the larger business picture. Obviously you don't want to compromise the systems (and thus the business), but you also want to address the customers desires. It's good to take responsibility for the systems. Just don't think the ONLY way to protect a system is to lock it down.
There's too much of an instinct in IT to think of the systems as "yours", and protect your little kingdom. It's a computer, not your children.
The only thing I'd like to add is, if the customer wants this kind of access (and I'd agree about the replication system), then it's going to cost something. This kind of thing isn't cheap, and it should be free. Estimate some reasonable setup costs, as well as maintenance costs, add some kind of profit margin to each, and present it to the customer. Let THEM decide if it's worth the price.
This is a business decision. There's really no reason the technology can't provide you a level of protection from the customer access to the system. The difference is they have to be willing to pay for that access. We successfully avoided letting the customer see how awful the design was until the contract ended (it was a fixed term job that could not be extended) by making the IP argument.
Heh. I'm sure you can fool a non-developer with a line like that, but anyone that knows anything about software development knows that schema is about worth nothing, and you're just trying to hide something.
If the Church cannot enforce this copyright, or chooses not to, then it is in danger of setting a precedent about its other copyrights
You're thinking about patent and trademark laws. Copyright has no such provision. Having other entities pose as the LDS Church would certainly be damaging.
It would be. Nobody is doing that here, so I'm not sure why you're implying this is happening.
Please list here, for all to see, your full name, address, phone number, social security number, and bank account information.
You seem to have confused keeping something secret, with someone going and invading your privacy. If I _did_ post that information, I would have no right to try to silence others who repeated it. That's the difference. I think they're simply enforcing a copyright they own - a perfectly legitimate pursuit.
Nobody tries to enforce copyright law just to enforce copyright law. That's not an end. People enforce copyright law to protect something, most of the time revenue. The question here is, what is the LDS trying to protect?
As a lawyer, I'm disappointed you fail to see the larger issues of copyright and ownership, which is the real issue here.
As a human being, I'm disappointed you fail to see the larger issues of "who gives a rats ass?", which is the real issue here. Lawsuits aren't just about "winning the case", the real issue is what's at stake, not "winning the case". The GP seems to have a better grasp of what's at stake here. The obvious copyright issues are beside the point.
The Masons protect the privacy of their rituals. Businesses keep private how a product is made.
What you're talking about are secrets. Secrets != privacy. Privacy is about a right to keep someone else from intruding on something that's private (like your naked body, your diary, your home). Privacy is more about something that's very personal.
A secret is a fact you try to keep from other people, like the things you just mentioned. Nobody has a right to secrets.
In this specific case, it isn't even a secret (someone pointed out that copies of this are freely available to LDS members, of which there are millions). This is neither secrecy, or privacy. The LDS just has some crazy notion that they can somehow keep this information from "getting out". Which is nuts. My guess is the centralized, small leadership of the LDS contributes to this.
What I'm pointing out is that some of the give-aways that label a stream as p2p traffic are not simple to fix. They impact download performance.
Does that really matter? Reduced performance is better than no performance. the pool of people skilled enough to do it that think it is fun is shrinking rapidly.
Why? btw I've never heard someone with so much religosity on the subject, outside of this bizarre context that is slashdot you would be quite scary
Thanks for the douche bag comment. I really don't see any reason to get personal here. You are changing one of a million attributes of a dataflow. Somebody else is reading and estimating that attribute.
I nice theoretical assessment, but how well will it stand up to the real world? How much processing can you reasonably do to each data flow to find out if you like it or not? How many false positives are you going to identify as p2p? How much maintenance cost do you have to do the system to keep it in working order? This is a non-trivial problem, as the environment keeps changing. In the end it's all about $$, and I'm betting the p2p guys can make it cheaper for the ISPs to stop trying to block p2p (or whatever other traffic they decide they don't like).
I'm not going to tell you how, you have to guess and experiment.
You obviously have underestimated peoples tenacity at solving puzzles. The is FUN to a lot of people, and all it takes is one guy to find out your secret. but there is something much more obvious that identifies your traffic as p2p
I'm sure there is, and the P2P guys will work around that problem. Are you (the ISP) will to continue shoveling money into the companies that develop this, or would you rather just either buy more bandwidth, or establish real bandwidth usage limits? I'm betting on the latter. The war has to be worth fighting. The guys fighting the copy protection wars largely gave up 15+ years ago because they decided the cure was worse than the disease.
Encrypted BT traffic looks nothing like any other traffic, so it can still be picked out of the traffic flows and thrown into another QoS bracket.
Because nobody has bothered to make it look like other traffic yet. Using SSL for BT would also be stupid, because SSL(the key exchange in partciular) is computationally expensive.
That's funny, I don't recall my low powered computers having any trouble setting up an SSL connection. Usually when people talk about SSL being "computationally expensive" they're talking about it in a server environment that services tens of thousands of people every minute.
The underlying algorithms don't require that much computational power. My lowly 200mhz MIPS router can encrypt on the order of a megabyte or two a second using the same algorithms SSL uses. My several years out of date workstation could easily encrypt my several megabit data stream. Setting up the connection, while "computationally expensive" only has to happen once/connection.
I'll bet in the war against p2p, making p2p data look like normal "priority" data is going to be far easier, and far cheaper than the ISPs trying to identify and block/slow the data they don't like. Consider that hiding p2p data takes one person with a keyboard and some smarts. In a month this guy will work around any solution the $800K machine guys have put together, and the next machine will be 8 million dollars to do the same job.
Encryption? Just the first salvo. Others have pointed out that p2p makes a lot of connections. That's fine, just create a secure queuing system where people wait their turns (and don't have multiple data streams). Or, a repeater system where you get one or two data feeds in, and feed to one or two other people. There's no reason why a p2p system has to have 50 different connections to different people. Start looking at the data itself and see if it's http-like? Okee-doke, just create an http wrapper around your data so it looks like http. These are just the dumb ideas I came up with on the fly. Real solutions would be a lot better.
This kind of asymmetric "war" has been fought before, namely with copyright protection in the 80s. The result? Cracked programs are more valuable than non-cracked programs (oh, and all copyright protection schemes were cracked)
In a system with untrusted intelligent nodes, you can't really create a priority system without some people making their non-priority data look like priority data. The internet was designed for the end nodes to be smart, and the network to be dumb. (The exact opposite of the phone system). It seems to me this is just a basic design principle of the internet.
A state department laptop costs an average of $3000? That's completely insane!
I'm not sure I'd start jumping up and down just yet. You're basing this all one one minor fact that some dumb journalist likely got wrong, or took out of context. And as we all know, journalists never make factual errors except when you have personal knowledge of the story.
It is unlikely the common desktop (or even, for that matter, the common server) will see appreciable performance increase with it.
Disk sizes are going up. In a few years you'll see a terabyte on a single drive. I'd also say that features like undelete, and online de-frag are important to anyone.
So while you may not see any real performance increases, that's really beside the point.
People claimed that XP was a disaster when it first came out.
There's always "someone" who will claim every product release is a disaster. The difference between Vista and XP is that:
There's a massive amount of people saying it. (I hear it from everyone). It continues more than a year after Vista was released. Windows sales are down 20% from a year ago. XP offered major improvements over NT 4, and Windows 98 (which a lot of companies were still upgrading from).
All that adds up to Vista actually being a disaster, and not simply just talk.
Slashdot Mirror
Come on, is it
I'm not really sure what "bigness" of the lie has to do with anything. I will say this though, it's being something you're not. Why should anyone pretend to be religious when they're not? That seems a disgrace to both the religion in question, and the individual faking it.
Have you never been at a family gathering or some other function, like a baseball game or something, where they said a prayer and everyone was supposed to bow their heads and pray?
Of course. That happens frequently at weddings or funerals or whatever.
What did you do?
Sat silently without my head bowed while people did what they pleased. I'm not the only one who didn't bow and pray. I guess I'm not sure why you think the only alternative is acting like an ass. There's no reason to be disrespectful, but there's also no reason to be a sheep.
That's all you have to do in Scouts, too.
I have a problem with encouraging people to fake it. It's not a little thing, though I guess some people seem to think it is.
There is no correlation between a weak dollar and the strength or status of the U.S. in the world economy. A weak dollar is not inherently bad either as it makes our exports more attractive and competitive.
The big problem right now with a weak dollar any commodity traded on the world market will be expensive to buy for anyone buying in dollars. Like say, oil for instance. Other commodities are the same way (wheat has gone through the roof). This only leads to inflation, especially with something like oil which is such a basis for the United States economy.
High oil and wheat prices aren't completely because of a weak dollar, of course. Increased usage, decreased exploration, and speculation all drive up the price.
Honestly, how long do you think the open nature of personal computers is going to last?
Forever. How long do you think the open nature of lumber is going to continue?
The only reason personal computers have become as popular as the are is because of the open nature of them. Take that away, and the gravy train is over. Honestly, any market moves towards being MORE open and less proprietary as time goes on. 30 years ago you couldn't buy a non-AT&T approved phone and attach it to your phone line. People got tired of that, and AT&T eventually lost that battle. Do you think we'd ever go back to that kind of policy?
People have already tried those lock-in models with computers and internet. They didn't work. They're even less likely to work as computers become less and less expensive. 20 years ago lots of network providers tried to close off computer networks into proprietary ones (Compuserve, Q-Link, Prodigy, AOL). Those all failed to an open model. Trying to create a proprietary solution when an open one already exists is going to be near impossible.
The comparison to cell phones is rather poor. A cell phone is almost totally worthless without the service attached to it (and vice versa). The implication is the two are linked together, where the provider benefits by reducing a high barrier to entry (initial high cost).
A portable computer is tied to no such service. It's useful without any internet service in particular, and there's thousands of FREE places around the world to get free Wi-Fi internet. So tell me again why this bundled business model is going to take over?
If you want to make a comparison, compare it to banks giving away free junk, like a toaster. Hardly anyone that wants a toaster goes to open up the bank account just to get the toaster. I don't see why the ultra-mobile laptop is any different.
If you have lost DNS, game is over, you lose. A recipe if your system hits a compromised root server.
Unless you happen to have SSL enabled pop or imap.
A (revised) recipe for an SSL enabled mail host:
* You open up email to read todays email. You PC looks up pop3.yourisp.com.
* DNS returns the IP of evil PC to your PC which will connect to it.
* Evil PC returns a forged SSL certfificate claiming to be pop3.yourisp.com
* Your email client brings up an error message saying there's something wrong with this certificate (self signed, etc)
* You hopefully get suspicious, (this never having happened before), and don't click through.
* Attack fails.
If you don't get suspicious, and just click OK, you're right. But the situation isn't quite as dire as you make it out to be. I'd never connect to a non-secure host for something like email.
I know you are trying to be funny or whatever
-snip-
makes you appear pretty stupid.
I'd say that if you realize it was a joke, but then still try to make this into a serious, factual statement, that makes you look either stupid, humorless, or at best just a troll.
This must a definition of "clear" I wasn't previously aware of.
(oh, and BTW, endlessly repeating that you must meet ALL THREE of these unclear definitions of what "obscene" means doesn't make it more clear.)
I eat at gas stations, because here in the UK they provide a decent selection of food and it's convenient to be able to do both at once.
My point isn't to say some people won't choose convenience over quality, only that providing two vastly different products means that the quality of one of them is going to suffer greatly.
The idea that I'm going to be content putting "headhoncho_acme6@gmail.com" on my business card instead is laughable.
Who said anything about gmail.com? Google also provides DOMAIN based hosting of your email. i.e. headhoncho@acme.com can go to Google's servers.
If Dreamhost doesn't want to include email with their web hosting accounts (and it looks like this is the first step towards phasing it out), then they need to get out of the web hosting business
I very much disagree. Web hosting and email hosting have very little to do with each other. They both involve the internet, but beyond that, there's little crossover. Why not let each provider provide what they can do best? I don't eat at gas stations, even though driving across country often involves feeding myself as well as my car. Why should my website host try to also provide poor email?
Why did they remove the preemptable BKL?
I'm not a kernel developer, but I'd say it's because there's widespread belief that the preemtable BKL is "the wrong way forward". Statements like these lead me to believe this:
In any large software project there's always a path to get from where you are, to where you want to be. It sounds like any version of BKL is considered ugly and causes problems, and patching it just won't work. In other words, fixing this part of the kernel isn't really possible, so they need to start over and change any code that relies on it to rely on something different entirely.
The problem is that a lot of times, the buck stops with you and your reputation is on the line when someone else borks something.
I agree. But my point is that Sysadmins often will just want to say NO ACCESS NO ACCESS!! without considering any alternatives. This case is a good example of that.
In the "client wants SQL access" case, the sysadmin immediately has the "NO WAY!" reaction, and doesn't consider any alternative, and the larger business picture. Obviously you don't want to compromise the systems (and thus the business), but you also want to address the customers desires. It's good to take responsibility for the systems. Just don't think the ONLY way to protect a system is to lock it down.
This is the first intelligent reply I've seen.
There's too much of an instinct in IT to think of the systems as "yours", and protect your little kingdom. It's a computer, not your children.
The only thing I'd like to add is, if the customer wants this kind of access (and I'd agree about the replication system), then it's going to cost something. This kind of thing isn't cheap, and it should be free. Estimate some reasonable setup costs, as well as maintenance costs, add some kind of profit margin to each, and present it to the customer. Let THEM decide if it's worth the price.
This is a business decision. There's really no reason the technology can't provide you a level of protection from the customer access to the system. The difference is they have to be willing to pay for that access.
We successfully avoided letting the customer see how awful the design was until the contract ended (it was a fixed term job that could not be extended) by making the IP argument.
Heh. I'm sure you can fool a non-developer with a line like that, but anyone that knows anything about software development knows that schema is about worth nothing, and you're just trying to hide something.
If the Church cannot enforce this copyright, or chooses not to, then it is in danger of setting a precedent about its other copyrights
You're thinking about patent and trademark laws. Copyright has no such provision.
Having other entities pose as the LDS Church would certainly be damaging.
It would be. Nobody is doing that here, so I'm not sure why you're implying this is happening.
Please list here, for all to see, your full name, address, phone number, social security number, and bank account information.
You seem to have confused keeping something secret, with someone going and invading your privacy. If I _did_ post that information, I would have no right to try to silence others who repeated it. That's the difference.
I think they're simply enforcing a copyright they own - a perfectly legitimate pursuit.
Nobody tries to enforce copyright law just to enforce copyright law. That's not an end. People enforce copyright law to protect something, most of the time revenue. The question here is, what is the LDS trying to protect?
As a lawyer, I'm disappointed you fail to see the larger issues of copyright and ownership, which is the real issue here.
As a human being, I'm disappointed you fail to see the larger issues of "who gives a rats ass?", which is the real issue here. Lawsuits aren't just about "winning the case", the real issue is what's at stake, not "winning the case". The GP seems to have a better grasp of what's at stake here. The obvious copyright issues are beside the point.
The Masons protect the privacy of their rituals. Businesses keep private how a product is made.
What you're talking about are secrets. Secrets != privacy. Privacy is about a right to keep someone else from intruding on something that's private (like your naked body, your diary, your home). Privacy is more about something that's very personal.
A secret is a fact you try to keep from other people, like the things you just mentioned. Nobody has a right to secrets.
In this specific case, it isn't even a secret (someone pointed out that copies of this are freely available to LDS members, of which there are millions). This is neither secrecy, or privacy. The LDS just has some crazy notion that they can somehow keep this information from "getting out". Which is nuts. My guess is the centralized, small leadership of the LDS contributes to this.
What I'm pointing out is that some of the give-aways that label a stream as p2p traffic are not simple to fix. They impact download performance.
Does that really matter? Reduced performance is better than no performance.
the pool of people skilled enough to do it that think it is fun is shrinking rapidly.
Why?
btw I've never heard someone with so much religosity on the subject, outside of this bizarre context that is slashdot you would be quite scary
Thanks for the douche bag comment. I really don't see any reason to get personal here.
You are changing one of a million attributes of a dataflow. Somebody else is reading and estimating that attribute.
I nice theoretical assessment, but how well will it stand up to the real world? How much processing can you reasonably do to each data flow to find out if you like it or not? How many false positives are you going to identify as p2p? How much maintenance cost do you have to do the system to keep it in working order? This is a non-trivial problem, as the environment keeps changing. In the end it's all about $$, and I'm betting the p2p guys can make it cheaper for the ISPs to stop trying to block p2p (or whatever other traffic they decide they don't like).
I'm not going to tell you how, you have to guess and experiment.
You obviously have underestimated peoples tenacity at solving puzzles. The is FUN to a lot of people, and all it takes is one guy to find out your secret.
but there is something much more obvious that identifies your traffic as p2p
I'm sure there is, and the P2P guys will work around that problem. Are you (the ISP) will to continue shoveling money into the companies that develop this, or would you rather just either buy more bandwidth, or establish real bandwidth usage limits? I'm betting on the latter. The war has to be worth fighting. The guys fighting the copy protection wars largely gave up 15+ years ago because they decided the cure was worse than the disease.
BT opens sockets constantly, and the key exchange is the expensive part, not the AES that comes after.
I've used BT. It doesn't open/close hundreds of connections a minute. It might open tens of connections an hour. Big deal.
Even if it did, you'd just have to do a little re-design on the bittorent protocol.
Encrypted BT traffic looks nothing like any other traffic, so it can still be picked out of the traffic flows and thrown into another QoS bracket.
Because nobody has bothered to make it look like other traffic yet.
Using SSL for BT would also be stupid, because SSL(the key exchange in partciular) is computationally expensive.
That's funny, I don't recall my low powered computers having any trouble setting up an SSL connection. Usually when people talk about SSL being "computationally expensive" they're talking about it in a server environment that services tens of thousands of people every minute.
The underlying algorithms don't require that much computational power. My lowly 200mhz MIPS router can encrypt on the order of a megabyte or two a second using the same algorithms SSL uses. My several years out of date workstation could easily encrypt my several megabit data stream. Setting up the connection, while "computationally expensive" only has to happen once/connection.
I'll bet in the war against p2p, making p2p data look like normal "priority" data is going to be far easier, and far cheaper than the ISPs trying to identify and block/slow the data they don't like. Consider that hiding p2p data takes one person with a keyboard and some smarts. In a month this guy will work around any solution the $800K machine guys have put together, and the next machine will be 8 million dollars to do the same job.
Encryption? Just the first salvo. Others have pointed out that p2p makes a lot of connections. That's fine, just create a secure queuing system where people wait their turns (and don't have multiple data streams). Or, a repeater system where you get one or two data feeds in, and feed to one or two other people. There's no reason why a p2p system has to have 50 different connections to different people. Start looking at the data itself and see if it's http-like? Okee-doke, just create an http wrapper around your data so it looks like http. These are just the dumb ideas I came up with on the fly. Real solutions would be a lot better.
This kind of asymmetric "war" has been fought before, namely with copyright protection in the 80s. The result? Cracked programs are more valuable than non-cracked programs (oh, and all copyright protection schemes were cracked)
In a system with untrusted intelligent nodes, you can't really create a priority system without some people making their non-priority data look like priority data. The internet was designed for the end nodes to be smart, and the network to be dumb. (The exact opposite of the phone system). It seems to me this is just a basic design principle of the internet.
A state department laptop costs an average of $3000? That's completely insane!
I'm not sure I'd start jumping up and down just yet. You're basing this all one one minor fact that some dumb journalist likely got wrong, or took out of context. And as we all know, journalists never make factual errors except when you have personal knowledge of the story.
It is unlikely the common desktop (or even, for that matter, the common server) will see appreciable performance increase with it.
Disk sizes are going up. In a few years you'll see a terabyte on a single drive. I'd also say that features like undelete, and online de-frag are important to anyone.
So while you may not see any real performance increases, that's really beside the point.
Why exactly is it a "disaster" again?
I'd say a "disaster" is when consumers are worried they might day be forced to buy your product, and want to remain on the product they have now.
People claimed that XP was a disaster when it first came out.
There's always "someone" who will claim every product release is a disaster. The difference between Vista and XP is that:
There's a massive amount of people saying it. (I hear it from everyone).
It continues more than a year after Vista was released.
Windows sales are down 20% from a year ago.
XP offered major improvements over NT 4, and Windows 98 (which a lot of companies were still upgrading from).
All that adds up to Vista actually being a disaster, and not simply just talk.