And, um, you do realize that the antitrust suit was brought by the US government on behalf of US consumers
Um, actually, no. The antitrust suit was brought by the US government on behalf of the Democratic Party and the Clinton Administration. They didn't care one bit about US consumers; what they cared about was the Micro$oft was not making "enough" donations to Democratic candidates.
Back in the day, industry pundits commented often that the antitrust case was a bone-headed move by the Government when a far more effective method of reigning in M$' abuses would have been through an FTC (Federal Trade Commission for those readers outside of the US) action. It is sort of like an overzealous prosecutor trying to get an attempted murder conviction when an armed robbery conviction would have been easy to get, and would have done the job just as well.
But no-o-o-o, the Clinton administration just had to "punish" M$ for not making "enough" donations to Democrats, and look at what we have now: a monopoly that delayed the case long enough to buy a presidential election and get off scot-free.
Sigh. Well, now I guess the free market is going to have to take care of it because it's obvious that the US government isn't going to. Not that they ever intended to in the first place, but it would have been nice.
Get your facts straight to avoid sounding like an idiot.
Sorry, you're the one sounding stupid here. M$ made a lot of fanfare three years ago about Window$ 2000 working with Kerberos.
Kerberos is an open standard... or,was an open standard before M$ "embraced and extended" it....
Turns out that Kerberos on Window$ 2000 servers and workstations ONLY works if the KDC (basically, the Kerberos master server) is a Win2000 box. So it's not REALLY open.
Passthecrackpipe's analogy to Kerberos is about M$' treatment of "open" standards, not about the differences in the roles of Kerberos vs. XML. Zir* point is that M$ will likely do the same thing with XML.
I just came home from a meeting of security professionals and as soon as someone brought this up the whole room just busted out laughing.
Then somebody mentioned that M$ is probably the only entity in the world that doesn't "get" this joke.
Think of the scenes in "Austin Powers" where Dr. Evil watched all those heads of state laughing at him through the teleconferencing monitor after he made some stupid demand. Well, that's about what's happening to M$ right now.
...Brazil stops destroying the Amazon, one of the key sources of the oxygen in our air supply;
Bullshit. The majority of oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere comes from plankton in the oceans.
The notion that rain forests (or "ancient forests" or whatever the environmentalist cause du jour is at the moment) are being "destroyed" and it's going to affect Earth's oxygen balance is an outdated environmentalist myth.
Only some colleges have the Campus Agreement with M$ that allows them to sell copies of M$ software to students for $15. The one where I used to work was looking at this, but hadn't decided yet to do it when I left.
Congratulations for picking one of them as your alma mater.
Of course, that doesn't automatically make the other person a loser. It's possible that maybe -- just maybe -- the administration of his school chose not to become a Micro$oft whore....
PPTP's encryption algorithm was cracked years ago (in fact, about a month after it was introduced) by Bruce Schneier (sp?) et. al. and hasn't been considered safe ever since.
So now we have a buffer overflow exploit in a "VPN" product which was already known to be insecure. Another nail in PopTop's coffin, but little else.
At the time, Schneier referred to Micro$oft's clumsy attempts at do-it-yourself encryption as "Kindergarten Cryptography."
Nothing has changed much since then, except that maybe they've graduated to somewhere around Third Grade by now....
Heh. With his bald head and all, Ballmer already LOOKS like one of those TV "pro" wrestlers.
Ever watched one of those shows? (Yeah, I'll admit it... I was REALLY drunk one night....) Before the "fight" they're all yelling into the camera, "You better look out! I'm gonna stomp you all over the floor" and it goes on and on.
So now Ballmer is starting to sound like a "pro" wrestler as well as look like one. Next thing you know he'll be running for Governor somewhere....
For example, more and more are becoming homosexual.
We don't know that. There have never been any reliable statistics, now or at any point in the past (whether the recent past or the distant past) on just how many people are homosexual.
You may very well be right, but there is no way that we can actually know that.
Actually, that's my theory too: that no one has been curious enough to pay for the information and then release it.
Presumably, it would be news organizations that would do this. Most businesses that would be willing to pay for this information would not be inclined to release it to the public, where their competitors could then get it for free.
But a news organization would do it in a heartbeat if they believed this information would be a "scoop" of some sort. They would do it if they believed that people really want to know this stuff. What I don't understand is, why don't they think the public is interested?
I can't believe that I'm the only one who is curious about the horse race between Micro$oft and everyone else....
I've seen reports similar to this apples-and-oranges comparison (revenue from free software vs. proprietary) for the last couple of years, but the last figures I've been able to find that actually mean something (market share, or how many computers out there are actually running this or that OS) are for the year 2000.
That year, M$ server OSes had a 41% market share, with around 30% for Linux. It's interesting that no one has ever released the figures for 2001. Apparently IDC knows what those figures are, but won't say.
WHY DON'T ANY OF THESE SURVEY COMPANIES WANT TO TALK ABOUT MARKET SHARE??? Is it because M$ is going down the toilet and they're afraid it will start an investor panic if the word gets out? Is M$ PAYING them not to release the information? Is it just that nobody cares and no one wants to know?
I'm an inquiring mind, and I want to know....
Just in time for the US elections
on
What, Me Worry?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
This is George Bush's BIG CHANCE! He can declare a "war on asteroids," unite the whole country, and his party can ride the wave of popularity right into the fall elections!
These objects all orbit around an "axis of evil" that we must root out and destroy. We will make no distinction between asteroids and those planets that harbor them. If you are an asteroid and you are listening to this, hear me: You cannot hide behind ANY planet's moon or in any planet's rings. Wherever you are, we will find you, and we will blow you up.
My attorney general is drafting legislation right now giving our law enforcement agencies broad new powers to find the cells of asteroid sympathizers that are operating here on our planet. I ask all citizens of Earth to be on the lookout for any suspicous-looking rocks falling out of the sky that don't belong there.
In my experiece with managers it alomost seems like the logic is "It must be great, look at how much money they charge for it!".
Here's the one I was hit with at my last place of employment: "Well, ALL THOSE CORPORATIONS out there who are using IIS can't be wrong!" Another time he said, "Market share is all that matters, and since M$ has the highest market share that is what we're going to use."
What a moron. For several weeks after leaving there, I'd sometimes wake up after having a nightmare that I'd gone back to work there.
...what, in your view, was Gates's motivation then in grasping the security nettle so publicly the other day...?
I don't know Mr. Gates personally so I can only guess based on what I was told, by someone who does know him, in a conversation that occurred last winter.
My friend said that Gates finally "got it" about two years ago as far as realizing that security is actually important, but still did not realize that security is something that must be designed in to a technology from the very beginning. He described Mr. Gates as a visionary who likes to dream up new stuff and believed that security was something that could be added on to a technology later -- by low-level underlings. Kind of like believing that you could make the Corvair safe by simply adding air bags.
He also mentioned that BillG considered security to be more of a PR issue than a real one.
The "Trusted Computing" letter to which you refer is consistent with that view. Most of the letter is pure PR and most of the rest is consistent with a viewpoint that security can be obtained by simply having coders go back through source code looking for bugs.
I don't think Gates realized until just recently that he has literally built Windows on a very dangerous foundation (ActiveX, for one example) that CANNOT be made secure. I think that's what Palladium is about: yet another add-on by underlings (hardware designers, in this case) so that he does not have to admit that he made some very fatal errors several years ago when he designed the Win32 architecture.
Gates is a betting man -- he played a LOT of poker in his college days and usually won -- and it shows in the way he keeps "betting the farm" on his company's products and technologies. If the world ever figures out what he's done, he's going to lose it all.
So to answer your question, I THINK that he believes that he really is on the track to better security. I think he's starting to realize that it ain't really true, but I think he also believes that he can bluff his way out of this one just as he has no doubt done in countless poker games in the past.
It will be interesting to see whether that actually happens.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's what The Bible says about people who try Linux and then go back to Window$:
"As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly."
-- Proverbs 26:11
Not really. They actually have closer to $40 Billion in the bank now and they're accumulating at the rate of about $1 Billion a month.
Hold it. They're not accumulating wealth at the rate of $1B per month.
$1B per month is their income . From that, they must pay expenses.
They're still ridiculously rich and apparantly getting richer, but not THAT fast.
And, um, you do realize that the antitrust suit was brought by the US government on behalf of US consumers
Um, actually, no. The antitrust suit was brought by the US government on behalf of the Democratic Party and the Clinton Administration. They didn't care one bit about US consumers; what they cared about was the Micro$oft was not making "enough" donations to Democratic candidates.
Back in the day, industry pundits commented often that the antitrust case was a bone-headed move by the Government when a far more effective method of reigning in M$' abuses would have been through an FTC (Federal Trade Commission for those readers outside of the US) action. It is sort of like an overzealous prosecutor trying to get an attempted murder conviction when an armed robbery conviction would have been easy to get, and would have done the job just as well.
But no-o-o-o, the Clinton administration just had to "punish" M$ for not making "enough" donations to Democrats, and look at what we have now: a monopoly that delayed the case long enough to buy a presidential election and get off scot-free.
Sigh. Well, now I guess the free market is going to have to take care of it because it's obvious that the US government isn't going to. Not that they ever intended to in the first place, but it would have been nice.
Get your facts straight to avoid sounding like an idiot.
Sorry, you're the one sounding stupid here. M$ made a lot of fanfare three years ago about Window$ 2000 working with Kerberos.
Kerberos is an open standard... or, was an open standard before M$ "embraced and extended" it....
Turns out that Kerberos on Window$ 2000 servers and workstations ONLY works if the KDC (basically, the Kerberos master server) is a Win2000 box. So it's not REALLY open.
Passthecrackpipe's analogy to Kerberos is about M$' treatment of "open" standards, not about the differences in the roles of Kerberos vs. XML. Zir* point is that M$ will likely do the same thing with XML.
*Genderless 3rd-person pronoun. Replaces "his/her"
Wow, I was way off when I predicted that Microsoft would further obfuscate their Word format. This seems to be in all respects a Good Thing.
I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it. I seriously doubt that the M$ leopard has changed any of its spots.
It's safe to assume that M$ is still a carnivorous predator.
Oh, lighten up.
I just came home from a meeting of security professionals and as soon as someone brought this up the whole room just busted out laughing.
Then somebody mentioned that M$ is probably the only entity in the world that doesn't "get" this joke.
Think of the scenes in "Austin Powers" where Dr. Evil watched all those heads of state laughing at him through the teleconferencing monitor after he made some stupid demand. Well, that's about what's happening to M$ right now.
It'd be a damn shame if schools these days are admitting people who still can't tell the difference between "lose" and "loose".
Well, they are. My top student did it on a paper he submitted last year.
However, it was at a "Christian" college whose president cannot even spell. So I don't know how representative that place is of academia in general.
Hoo boy! Why am I not surprised?
... Micro$oft has just announced the availability of the Monopoly game for the Xbox.
Is this a new record?
I'd also like to see some proof that the Amazon rainforest does not contribute significantly to the oxygen content of the air.
Here it is:
http://www.nature.com/nsu/020408/020408-7.htmlNote that this is NOT from an anti-global-warming site. It's a site that promotes the notion that human activity is warming the planet.
Proof enough?
Bullshit. The majority of oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere comes from plankton in the oceans.
The notion that rain forests (or "ancient forests" or whatever the environmentalist cause du jour is at the moment) are being "destroyed" and it's going to affect Earth's oxygen balance is an outdated environmentalist myth.
Only some colleges have the Campus Agreement with M$ that allows them to sell copies of M$ software to students for $15. The one where I used to work was looking at this, but hadn't decided yet to do it when I left.
Congratulations for picking one of them as your alma mater.
Of course, that doesn't automatically make the other person a loser. It's possible that maybe -- just maybe -- the administration of his school chose not to become a Micro$oft whore....
Actually, I HAVE done my homework, and it appears that you have not done yours.
Among other problems, Micro$oft's implementation of IPSec uses weak encryption.
So which one of us is still in Kindergarten? (hint: Kindergartners don't do homework)
PPTP's encryption algorithm was cracked years ago (in fact, about a month after it was introduced) by Bruce Schneier (sp?) et. al. and hasn't been considered safe ever since.
So now we have a buffer overflow exploit in a "VPN" product which was already known to be insecure. Another nail in PopTop's coffin, but little else.
At the time, Schneier referred to Micro$oft's clumsy attempts at do-it-yourself encryption as "Kindergarten Cryptography."
Nothing has changed much since then, except that maybe they've graduated to somewhere around Third Grade by now....
Heh. With his bald head and all, Ballmer already LOOKS like one of those TV "pro" wrestlers.
Ever watched one of those shows? (Yeah, I'll admit it... I was REALLY drunk one night....) Before the "fight" they're all yelling into the camera, "You better look out! I'm gonna stomp you all over the floor" and it goes on and on.
So now Ballmer is starting to sound like a "pro" wrestler as well as look like one. Next thing you know he'll be running for Governor somewhere....
For example, more and more are becoming homosexual.
We don't know that. There have never been any reliable statistics, now or at any point in the past (whether the recent past or the distant past) on just how many people are homosexual.
You may very well be right, but there is no way that we can actually know that.
This guy is a fucking moron.
No, I'm not a "fucking moron." I'm a celibate moron, unfortunately... and hating every day of it... grumble, grumble....
Actually, that's my theory too: that no one has been curious enough to pay for the information and then release it.
Presumably, it would be news organizations that would do this. Most businesses that would be willing to pay for this information would not be inclined to release it to the public, where their competitors could then get it for free.
But a news organization would do it in a heartbeat if they believed this information would be a "scoop" of some sort. They would do it if they believed that people really want to know this stuff. What I don't understand is, why don't they think the public is interested?
I can't believe that I'm the only one who is curious about the horse race between Micro$oft and everyone else....
I've seen reports similar to this apples-and-oranges comparison (revenue from free software vs. proprietary) for the last couple of years, but the last figures I've been able to find that actually mean something (market share, or how many computers out there are actually running this or that OS) are for the year 2000.
That year, M$ server OSes had a 41% market share, with around 30% for Linux. It's interesting that no one has ever released the figures for 2001. Apparently IDC knows what those figures are, but won't say.
WHY DON'T ANY OF THESE SURVEY COMPANIES WANT TO TALK ABOUT MARKET SHARE??? Is it because M$ is going down the toilet and they're afraid it will start an investor panic if the word gets out? Is M$ PAYING them not to release the information? Is it just that nobody cares and no one wants to know?
I'm an inquiring mind, and I want to know....
This is George Bush's BIG CHANCE! He can declare a "war on asteroids," unite the whole country, and his party can ride the wave of popularity right into the fall elections!
These objects all orbit around an "axis of evil" that we must root out and destroy. We will make no distinction between asteroids and those planets that harbor them. If you are an asteroid and you are listening to this, hear me: You cannot hide behind ANY planet's moon or in any planet's rings. Wherever you are, we will find you, and we will blow you up.
My attorney general is drafting legislation right now giving our law enforcement agencies broad new powers to find the cells of asteroid sympathizers that are operating here on our planet. I ask all citizens of Earth to be on the lookout for any suspicous-looking rocks falling out of the sky that don't belong there.
Thank you very much, and God Bless Earth.
In my experiece with managers it alomost seems like the logic is "It must be great, look at how much money they charge for it!".
Here's the one I was hit with at my last place of employment: "Well, ALL THOSE CORPORATIONS out there who are using IIS can't be wrong!" Another time he said, "Market share is all that matters, and since M$ has the highest market share that is what we're going to use."
What a moron. For several weeks after leaving there, I'd sometimes wake up after having a nightmare that I'd gone back to work there.
I know people who work in the White House Office of Cybersecurity, and they tell me just the opposite of what you just said.
Just the opposite of what? That Gates once said that .NET could be secured with QOS?
We probably do not know the same people there.
By the way, congratulations on your GIAC certification.
I don't know Mr. Gates personally so I can only guess based on what I was told, by someone who does know him, in a conversation that occurred last winter.
My friend said that Gates finally "got it" about two years ago as far as realizing that security is actually important, but still did not realize that security is something that must be designed in to a technology from the very beginning. He described Mr. Gates as a visionary who likes to dream up new stuff and believed that security was something that could be added on to a technology later -- by low-level underlings. Kind of like believing that you could make the Corvair safe by simply adding air bags.
He also mentioned that BillG considered security to be more of a PR issue than a real one.
The "Trusted Computing" letter to which you refer is consistent with that view. Most of the letter is pure PR and most of the rest is consistent with a viewpoint that security can be obtained by simply having coders go back through source code looking for bugs.
I don't think Gates realized until just recently that he has literally built Windows on a very dangerous foundation (ActiveX, for one example) that CANNOT be made secure. I think that's what Palladium is about: yet another add-on by underlings (hardware designers, in this case) so that he does not have to admit that he made some very fatal errors several years ago when he designed the Win32 architecture.
Gates is a betting man -- he played a LOT of poker in his college days and usually won -- and it shows in the way he keeps "betting the farm" on his company's products and technologies. If the world ever figures out what he's done, he's going to lose it all.
So to answer your question, I THINK that he believes that he really is on the track to better security. I think he's starting to realize that it ain't really true, but I think he also believes that he can bluff his way out of this one just as he has no doubt done in countless poker games in the past.
It will be interesting to see whether that actually happens.
Forgive me, but I'm not grokking you here. To what event/speech/news item are you referring?