The article didn't consider that many people don't buy Windows - they have it pre-installed. Now, I suppose that hardware manufacturers could sell their computers with an ad-supported Windows for a lower price. And maybe it would catch on, but I doubt it. If the average computer still has something like 1024x768, even if the ads would be text only, they would take screen space. Now, I'm sure most people have no problem of ads taking some of the screen space, but when you start to have ads from the OS, ads from the browser, ads from the IM application etc. there will be a limit. People just have enough.
This idea has also some serious privacy and security implications. Will the average user care? Probably not. But if he knows that the operating system was free, he might go on and try out Linux. He won't consider losing money, if he never paid anything for it in the beginning.
Anyway, this ad-biz is getting ridiculous. What's next? Ad-supported games? Oh wait...
PS. I downloaded my Windows XP professional ISO for free from Microsoft. What do you mean you can't get legal Windows for free?
OS X supports up to 255 characters and can use the same characters as Linux, except for a colon (:). However, the Finder may have trouble with bizarre file names that can be created in the shell.
OS X supports colon on the command line. In Finder the colon will look as a forward slash. Why? Because OS X wants to support filenames with a slash eg. "sofa/car.jpg" (I believe this is a remnant from pre-OS X). Due it's *NIX heritage it cannot do that, so they chose to do this trick of showing colon as slash with Finder. Quite nice IMHO.
Summary:
colon is forbidden in Finder, but accepted on the command line
slash is accpeted in Finder, but forbidden in the command line
If you want to spell words the way they sound, you should learn Finnish. And BTW.
wuudn't it maek mor sens to spel wurdz the wae thae sound? should actually be:
vudunt it meik moor sens tu spel vöörds tö vei tei saund? from a Finnish standpoint. Doesn't that sound better? No? Okay then...
The term for this is challenge-response authentication. The server generates a random challenge and the client combines this with the password (hash) creating the reponse, which then will be checked at the server. The challenge is new each time, resulting a new response each time. Isn't this what you mean with "new hash for each transaction"?
Hashing a password and sending it over an unencrypted connection is completely stupid and provides no extra security. A hacker can use the hash just like he would use a password right now. What you really need is a challenge-response authentication like CRAM-MD5.
Having your eyes closed after the panic attack is something I do myself. However during the attack I think it is better to have the eyes open and try to fight unconsciousness and the feeling of loosing of control. By closing the eyes, I at least feel an increase of dizziness rather than decreasing. But if you feel better with closing you're eyes, I'm not going to argue with that. Not all panic attacks are the same, and one should find a way of handling that suits.
Absolutely don't close your eyes! If you are sitting on a chair, put your head between your knees and look down. If you are standing, try to sit down. Take slow deep breaths. Don't think! Just focus on breathing and you will soon see the panic attack end, although you will probably feel weak and sweaty and have a headache afterwards.
Panic attacks occur when your body is preparing for major physical activity. This means that your pulse will increase and you will start to breath faster. It is triggered in situations when you feel some sort danger. In the past this would mean a life-threatening situation where you would prepare yourself to defend yourself (like a bear attacks you or something). In the modern society however, this "feature" is pretty useless, but mostly harmless. The problem occurs when it is triggered by a false positive, a completely safe situation, like an exam.
You don't want more oxygen to your brain. Actually you want less oxygen. Do a test: sit down and start breathing faster than you normally would. This is called hyperventilation and this is what you normally do during panic attacks. After a while you will then see all the same symptoms that occur during panic attacks. This is a great way to create your own panic attacks, and learn how to handle in such situations. Become familiar with the symptoms and most of all, learn to breath slowly! (This is why some people recommend to breathe in paper bags, I've heard - to decrease the amount of oxygen in your blood)
PS. When I was still learning how to handle panic attacks, I always had a bottle of water with me. If I'm standing and can't sit down, I always try to move around (do physical activity). Your body is preparing for major physical activity, remember? It is feature, not a bug.
This didn't actually happen to me, but I have witnessed a similar problem. A brand new hard drive with sensitive information broke down. When asked for a replacement, the store insisted that they would only give a replacement if you handed over the hard drive. When asked what will be done with it, it was said that it would be sent over to diagnostics, presumably in a foreign country, and THEN destroyed.
Of course this wasn't satisfactory, as there would not be any way to confirm that the hard drive would be destroyed and the information would not be read. Consunier Office and Information Security Delegate was contacted regarding the matter, and the store got some warning (I don't remember the details), but eventually it didn't help. The store refused to give a replacement unless you gave away the broken drive, and they refused to destroy the drive with you present. So eventually the broken hard drive became your loss. (I believe most of the data was backed up, so that wasn't the big deal)
The problem in this case was that you simply could not wipe the stuff out from it, as the electronics on the drive broke down. Destroying the drive yourself would have destroyed the warranty. Using encryption before the drive broke down would have helped, but personally I'd much rather not give the hard drive away in that case either. You newer know if a bug like the one with in the clear password for FileVault on OS X are found... And besides, how many home users should be expected to set up encrypted drives, unless it was built-in and on by default?
I have always used the NT, 2k and XP as non-admin. It works somewhat in my experience, but not as good as in Mac OS X.
Microsoft Office works as it should and with Visual Studio you would maybe want to add your user to the Debuggers-group (or something like that). Otherwise Microsoft's own apps works in my experience.
To me most problems occur with large (non-Micorsoft) commercial applications, especially games. You have to hack around to get it running as non-admin, and when you finally get it running it crashes on some feature, like multiplayer in games. Stupid. If you only have a couple of such games/apps, you could use the "Run as" (administrator user) option with Windows. There are also some 3rd party applications that allow you to do a wrapper application/script to allow running as admin.
So in summary, I'd say that if you are mostly using Windows for web, e-mail and Office, non-admin is the way to go. If you are doing some other stuff too, you will most likely need at least some tweak in filesystem permissions with the bigger apps to allow write or read access. And if you play games, then there's a 50-50 chance that you need admin-rights or not... But you can always use "Run as", to be safe with other apps!
Summary on the screenshots: ugly as hell. Not that you could expect anything elegant from a company that used a candy-blue look for their newest desktop OS. Microsoft really should change their UI team... This looks just tasteless!
You should be paranoid in these days, and yes, the source code is provided. There is 1090 lines of source code including the Makefile, so I don't think it would take that much time to read it trough.
To answer the question how many people will really read it, I answer that I won't compile nor run it before I have read it.
Didn't Microsoft silently remove parts of the raw socket support in Windows XP service pack 2? But let's face it. Raw sockets isn't probably a feature most of the people need on their machines... Whether it is Windows, Linux or something else.
That is hardly going to happen any time soon. There is really no reason for them to stop supporting PPC, as there will be many PPC users still after 5 years. That being said, there will be a time when your PPC won't run the newest OS X anymore. Still, I am sure that the most recent version available will still be ahead of OpenBSD, when it comes to desktop use. If you are talking about servers, then you might have a point...
8 of 8 correct, meaning I'm a "safety guru". You guys just need to know better.:-)
Seriously talking, it's true that the quiz was bad. This is 2006. You shouldn't go to some random screensaver-site and run their downloads, unless you are totally sure. And you can't just judge a sites safety by looking at the design. If you can get infected by spyware by browsing around you should update or change your browser. Otherwise, just leave the downloading of stuff you don't know.
True. I absolutely love my 5 button optical Microsoft mouse and it's scroll-wheel. However, my wireless optical mouse from Microsoft suffers from two very annoying problems. First, the scroll-wheel jumps randomly up and down when scrolling upward (the scroll-wheel isn't anywhere as smooth as the one in the 5 button mouse). Secondly, the mouse wakes up my Mac from sleep by movement! Usually this should be done by the mouse buttons, as it does in all other mice, including the other (older) Microsoft mouse. It is particularly annoying when that happens in the middle of the night, with all systems starting up.
Actually, what you said about Google enabling SSL using https://gmail.com/ is false! The only GMail URLs I know of which will use a secure connection once logged in are:
Be sure to check out "continue" argument in the URLs. It uses plain HTTP for at least these URLs:
http://gmail.com
https://gmail.com
http://www.gmail.com
https://www.gmail.com
http://google.com/mail
Don't forget to use SSL if you use GMail RSS feed as well!
I'd like to point out that Steve Gibson (the guy claiming WMF was a backdoor) covered this in his Security Now! podcast episode #19 (search for GMail in transcript transcript). Maybe he isn't that bad after all... and what were the guys at Google thinking?
Thanks for the correction. Dropping Open Firmware in favor of BIOS might be wise if they want to ensure compatibility with existing i386 operating systems, but I that is mostly a transition time problem, which I doubt is big enough reason to convert to BIOS. That would leave us some kind of new system. But I leave the speculation here, as we will find out that sooner or later anyway.
Steve accidentally clicked himself into a slideshow he wasn't supposed to show. Would that have been when demonstrating Spotlight? I'm not completely sure. Obviously the ESC key didn't respond or something, so after he couldn't get out of the slideshow he switched machine. I don't think it was very clear if the slideshow actually locked up permanently or was it just slow responsiveness.
AFAIK Intel Macs won't have BIOS functionality, which means booting the kernel won't work the same way as on the common PC, i.e. current i386-compatible operating systems won't (most likely) boot of the shelf. It does not however prevent OS developers adding OpenFirmware support to their products.
I have yet to hear explanations for why temperatures actually DROPPED from the 1940s to the 1970s despite an increase in our use of automobiles and other gases.
There is a phenomenon called global dimming, which is basically about reduced sunlight on the surface of Earth due to particles in the atmosphere absorbing incoming sunlight. Reduced sunlight means lower temperatures. As filtering has become more common, the amount of small particles getting into the atmosphere has reduced. Global dimming has therefore slowed down, leading to faster global warming.
I have not used anything except iTunes (on a Mac) for quite some time now, and I can say I that there is nothing I would want to go away. It's not like having a web browser, mail client, IRC client and media player all in one. It sounds to me that you consider an app with more than one feature "bloat". So you want different apps for ripping, burning, listening, streaming etc.?
You know, that's fine by me, but *I* don't want to use dozens of apps to do different things with my music. I don't think that your statement, that only 10% of the features devoted to serving actual user, at least in the case of iTunes has any real facts behind it. Personally, I use pretty much all of the features it provides from Podcasts, iTMS to audio streaming, radio listening and iPod synchrozination. And yes, it does everything I want it to do.
Okay. So people have different needs. Use something else as you propably do. If you want to get rid of iTunes (on the Mac), throw it in the trash can. I have never seen a media player install break something.
I would be glad to hear some of your opinnions about features that should not be bundled and in what way you do you think the media players missbehave allowing you to compare it to Russian roulette.:-)
The iPod - I suppose you made sure it just didn't crash? Pushing on menu and play at the same time will make it reboot its software.
The iBook - Did you try to reset the power management unit (PMU)? It might have helped.
Anyways, sounds like you are against the odds... or then I'm just lucky (hardly possible). I have never had any major problems with Macs; one Apple Pro Mouse (the cord had a problem) and two iPod carrying cases broken. That's all I can think of right now. And oh, yeah. I once needed to reset the PMU of a PowerBook G3 once it had been unused for quite some time.
This applies to all projects, but I think it is biggest thing to consider in open source development. Many people here have said that you need to discuss about licensing, but it is really not that important that you would use more than one or two sessions about it. It is basically a one time choice.
What you need to do is talk about how to work together in open source development. I think this is the number one thing why open software fails. Working over distance, deciding tasks, handling bug reports, designing, implementation... there are quite a bit of things to consider. When you are going to work on a open source project you are more likely to have to consider these things from the scratch than working in a company.
It would also be good to introduce services like SF.net, other open source projects and how their development works and various channels where you might get help if needed.
Slashdot Mirror
The article didn't consider that many people don't buy Windows - they have it pre-installed. Now, I suppose that hardware manufacturers could sell their computers with an ad-supported Windows for a lower price. And maybe it would catch on, but I doubt it. If the average computer still has something like 1024x768, even if the ads would be text only, they would take screen space. Now, I'm sure most people have no problem of ads taking some of the screen space, but when you start to have ads from the OS, ads from the browser, ads from the IM application etc. there will be a limit. People just have enough.
This idea has also some serious privacy and security implications. Will the average user care? Probably not. But if he knows that the operating system was free, he might go on and try out Linux. He won't consider losing money, if he never paid anything for it in the beginning.
Anyway, this ad-biz is getting ridiculous. What's next? Ad-supported games? Oh wait...
PS. I downloaded my Windows XP professional ISO for free from Microsoft. What do you mean you can't get legal Windows for free?
OS X supports colon on the command line. In Finder the colon will look as a forward slash. Why? Because OS X wants to support filenames with a slash eg. "sofa/car.jpg" (I believe this is a remnant from pre-OS X). Due it's *NIX heritage it cannot do that, so they chose to do this trick of showing colon as slash with Finder. Quite nice IMHO.
Summary:
If you want to spell words the way they sound, you should learn Finnish. And BTW.
wuudn't it maek mor sens to spel wurdz the wae thae sound? should actually be:
vudunt it meik moor sens tu spel vöörds tö vei tei saund? from a Finnish standpoint. Doesn't that sound better? No? Okay then...
The term for this is challenge-response authentication. The server generates a random challenge and the client combines this with the password (hash) creating the reponse, which then will be checked at the server. The challenge is new each time, resulting a new response each time. Isn't this what you mean with "new hash for each transaction"?
Hashing a password and sending it over an unencrypted connection is completely stupid and provides no extra security. A hacker can use the hash just like he would use a password right now. What you really need is a challenge-response authentication like CRAM-MD5.
Having your eyes closed after the panic attack is something I do myself. However during the attack I think it is better to have the eyes open and try to fight unconsciousness and the feeling of loosing of control. By closing the eyes, I at least feel an increase of dizziness rather than decreasing. But if you feel better with closing you're eyes, I'm not going to argue with that. Not all panic attacks are the same, and one should find a way of handling that suits.
Absolutely don't close your eyes! If you are sitting on a chair, put your head between your knees and look down. If you are standing, try to sit down. Take slow deep breaths. Don't think! Just focus on breathing and you will soon see the panic attack end, although you will probably feel weak and sweaty and have a headache afterwards.
Panic attacks occur when your body is preparing for major physical activity. This means that your pulse will increase and you will start to breath faster. It is triggered in situations when you feel some sort danger. In the past this would mean a life-threatening situation where you would prepare yourself to defend yourself (like a bear attacks you or something). In the modern society however, this "feature" is pretty useless, but mostly harmless. The problem occurs when it is triggered by a false positive, a completely safe situation, like an exam.
You don't want more oxygen to your brain. Actually you want less oxygen. Do a test: sit down and start breathing faster than you normally would. This is called hyperventilation and this is what you normally do during panic attacks. After a while you will then see all the same symptoms that occur during panic attacks. This is a great way to create your own panic attacks, and learn how to handle in such situations. Become familiar with the symptoms and most of all, learn to breath slowly! (This is why some people recommend to breathe in paper bags, I've heard - to decrease the amount of oxygen in your blood)
PS. When I was still learning how to handle panic attacks, I always had a bottle of water with me. If I'm standing and can't sit down, I always try to move around (do physical activity). Your body is preparing for major physical activity, remember? It is feature, not a bug.
This didn't actually happen to me, but I have witnessed a similar problem. A brand new hard drive with sensitive information broke down. When asked for a replacement, the store insisted that they would only give a replacement if you handed over the hard drive. When asked what will be done with it, it was said that it would be sent over to diagnostics, presumably in a foreign country, and THEN destroyed.
Of course this wasn't satisfactory, as there would not be any way to confirm that the hard drive would be destroyed and the information would not be read. Consunier Office and Information Security Delegate was contacted regarding the matter, and the store got some warning (I don't remember the details), but eventually it didn't help. The store refused to give a replacement unless you gave away the broken drive, and they refused to destroy the drive with you present. So eventually the broken hard drive became your loss. (I believe most of the data was backed up, so that wasn't the big deal)
The problem in this case was that you simply could not wipe the stuff out from it, as the electronics on the drive broke down. Destroying the drive yourself would have destroyed the warranty. Using encryption before the drive broke down would have helped, but personally I'd much rather not give the hard drive away in that case either. You newer know if a bug like the one with in the clear password for FileVault on OS X are found... And besides, how many home users should be expected to set up encrypted drives, unless it was built-in and on by default?
I have always used the NT, 2k and XP as non-admin. It works somewhat in my experience, but not as good as in Mac OS X.
Microsoft Office works as it should and with Visual Studio you would maybe want to add your user to the Debuggers-group (or something like that). Otherwise Microsoft's own apps works in my experience.
To me most problems occur with large (non-Micorsoft) commercial applications, especially games. You have to hack around to get it running as non-admin, and when you finally get it running it crashes on some feature, like multiplayer in games. Stupid. If you only have a couple of such games/apps, you could use the "Run as" (administrator user) option with Windows. There are also some 3rd party applications that allow you to do a wrapper application/script to allow running as admin.
So in summary, I'd say that if you are mostly using Windows for web, e-mail and Office, non-admin is the way to go. If you are doing some other stuff too, you will most likely need at least some tweak in filesystem permissions with the bigger apps to allow write or read access. And if you play games, then there's a 50-50 chance that you need admin-rights or not... But you can always use "Run as", to be safe with other apps!
I used to have a quote in irssi's - the IRC client's - statusbar:
Excellent movie!Summary on the screenshots: ugly as hell. Not that you could expect anything elegant from a company that used a candy-blue look for their newest desktop OS. Microsoft really should change their UI team... This looks just tasteless!
You should be paranoid in these days, and yes, the source code is provided. There is 1090 lines of source code including the Makefile, so I don't think it would take that much time to read it trough.
To answer the question how many people will really read it, I answer that I won't compile nor run it before I have read it.
Didn't Microsoft silently remove parts of the raw socket support in Windows XP service pack 2? But let's face it. Raw sockets isn't probably a feature most of the people need on their machines... Whether it is Windows, Linux or something else.
That is hardly going to happen any time soon. There is really no reason for them to stop supporting PPC, as there will be many PPC users still after 5 years. That being said, there will be a time when your PPC won't run the newest OS X anymore. Still, I am sure that the most recent version available will still be ahead of OpenBSD, when it comes to desktop use. If you are talking about servers, then you might have a point...
8 of 8 correct, meaning I'm a "safety guru". You guys just need to know better. :-)
Seriously talking, it's true that the quiz was bad. This is 2006. You shouldn't go to some random screensaver-site and run their downloads, unless you are totally sure. And you can't just judge a sites safety by looking at the design. If you can get infected by spyware by browsing around you should update or change your browser. Otherwise, just leave the downloading of stuff you don't know.
That should make you pretty safe.
True. I absolutely love my 5 button optical Microsoft mouse and it's scroll-wheel. However, my wireless optical mouse from Microsoft suffers from two very annoying problems. First, the scroll-wheel jumps randomly up and down when scrolling upward (the scroll-wheel isn't anywhere as smooth as the one in the 5 button mouse). Secondly, the mouse wakes up my Mac from sleep by movement! Usually this should be done by the mouse buttons, as it does in all other mice, including the other (older) Microsoft mouse. It is particularly annoying when that happens in the middle of the night, with all systems starting up.
You non-Mac users have no taste! I'd much rather pay $80 for a pair of good quality jeans that I like, than some cheap $14 jeans I'd never wear. :-)
Actually, what you said about Google enabling SSL using https://gmail.com/ is false! The only GMail URLs I know of which will use a secure connection once logged in are:
Be sure to check out "continue" argument in the URLs. It uses plain HTTP for at least these URLs:
Don't forget to use SSL if you use GMail RSS feed as well!
I'd like to point out that Steve Gibson (the guy claiming WMF was a backdoor) covered this in his Security Now! podcast episode #19 (search for GMail in transcript transcript). Maybe he isn't that bad after all... and what were the guys at Google thinking?
Thanks for the correction. Dropping Open Firmware in favor of BIOS might be wise if they want to ensure compatibility with existing i386 operating systems, but I that is mostly a transition time problem, which I doubt is big enough reason to convert to BIOS. That would leave us some kind of new system. But I leave the speculation here, as we will find out that sooner or later anyway.
Steve accidentally clicked himself into a slideshow he wasn't supposed to show. Would that have been when demonstrating Spotlight? I'm not completely sure. Obviously the ESC key didn't respond or something, so after he couldn't get out of the slideshow he switched machine. I don't think it was very clear if the slideshow actually locked up permanently or was it just slow responsiveness.
AFAIK Intel Macs won't have BIOS functionality, which means booting the kernel won't work the same way as on the common PC, i.e. current i386-compatible operating systems won't (most likely) boot of the shelf. It does not however prevent OS developers adding OpenFirmware support to their products.
There is a phenomenon called global dimming, which is basically about reduced sunlight on the surface of Earth due to particles in the atmosphere absorbing incoming sunlight. Reduced sunlight means lower temperatures. As filtering has become more common, the amount of small particles getting into the atmosphere has reduced. Global dimming has therefore slowed down, leading to faster global warming.
I have not used anything except iTunes (on a Mac) for quite some time now, and I can say I that there is nothing I would want to go away. It's not like having a web browser, mail client, IRC client and media player all in one. It sounds to me that you consider an app with more than one feature "bloat". So you want different apps for ripping, burning, listening, streaming etc.?
You know, that's fine by me, but *I* don't want to use dozens of apps to do different things with my music. I don't think that your statement, that only 10% of the features devoted to serving actual user, at least in the case of iTunes has any real facts behind it. Personally, I use pretty much all of the features it provides from Podcasts, iTMS to audio streaming, radio listening and iPod synchrozination. And yes, it does everything I want it to do.
Okay. So people have different needs. Use something else as you propably do. If you want to get rid of iTunes (on the Mac), throw it in the trash can. I have never seen a media player install break something.
I would be glad to hear some of your opinnions about features that should not be bundled and in what way you do you think the media players missbehave allowing you to compare it to Russian roulette. :-)
The iPod - I suppose you made sure it just didn't crash? Pushing on menu and play at the same time will make it reboot its software.
The iBook - Did you try to reset the power management unit (PMU)? It might have helped.
Anyways, sounds like you are against the odds... or then I'm just lucky (hardly possible). I have never had any major problems with Macs; one Apple Pro Mouse (the cord had a problem) and two iPod carrying cases broken. That's all I can think of right now. And oh, yeah. I once needed to reset the PMU of a PowerBook G3 once it had been unused for quite some time.
This applies to all projects, but I think it is biggest thing to consider in open source development. Many people here have said that you need to discuss about licensing, but it is really not that important that you would use more than one or two sessions about it. It is basically a one time choice.
What you need to do is talk about how to work together in open source development. I think this is the number one thing why open software fails. Working over distance, deciding tasks, handling bug reports, designing, implementation... there are quite a bit of things to consider. When you are going to work on a open source project you are more likely to have to consider these things from the scratch than working in a company.
It would also be good to introduce services like SF.net, other open source projects and how their development works and various channels where you might get help if needed.