If I understand buffer overflow vulnerabilities correctly, they could be almost completely prevented if the computer architecture prevented execution from data areas and required special instructions to modify memory in executable areas. I think other kinds of vulnerabilities could be prevented with similar architectural changes, or perhaps even just changes in an OS kernel. Obviously I haven't thought this completely through, but surely research in this direction would produce more truly secure computers than initiatives like palladium.
Tell then to click on the red star/dinosaur rather than the "E" (I don't know which is worse a red star or and E...)
It's easier than that. Just do what I did for my wife -- use the equivalent microsoft icons for the launchers on the Linux desktop. Once they get comfortable, they can change it for themselves if they want to.
"Damaging to national security" is almost the exact phrasing used to describe a piece of data that is required to be classified. If the government really felt that it could be damaging, the windows source code would be classified, all MS employees that had access to it would require a security clearance, and there would be a host of other requirements to protect it from being disclosed. Since that hasn't happened, I don't think anyone really took that claim seriously.
There is a difference between freedom and anarchy. Freedoms must always be balanced for the greatest benefit. For example, if everyone had the freedom to kill without consequence, then our freedom to speak our mind without fearing for our lives would be greatly diminished.
The GPL takes some freedom from those who would embrace and extend without sharing in exchange for more freedom of fair competition for those who put in the bulk of the original work. The total balance of freedom remains constant, but I personally would rather lean toward the original creators, especially when they are competing with a strong monopoly.
I don't think anyone can honestly say that watching edited DVDs is not within the realm of fair use, especially if you do the editing yourself. What people object to is a company profiting from selling their derivative of someone else's work.
My proposal is this: allow companies to sell dynamic-edit capable DVD players. Also allow companies to sell software to create the edit files based on some open standard file format. They can still make money on the idea of clean movies without actually selling an illegal derivative work.
If the studio wants to sell an edit file for their movie, they can. If I want to edit certain content so my kids can watch, I can. If I want to email that file to my friends and family, I can do it. If I want to share that file with a few million of my closest friends on a P2P network, I can.
I'm glad to hear that you feel that way. I'll be making arrangments with your payroll department to get a certain amount deducted from your pay and sent to my bank account every month. Don't worry, it won't be a large amount, only $15 (about the price of a CD). I'm sure your payroll officer will agree because it is not theft since you will never see the money on your paycheck in the first place.
Thanks for the info on the part 15 devices. My 1 watt estimate was an upper bound.
According to Section 97.313, there is no license class restriction on the power output allowed on the amateur microwave bands, making the limit 1500 Watts regardless of whether you are a technician class or extra. However, it also states that you must use the minimum power necessary to maintain reliable communications. My 5 watt 2-meter handheld is perfectly sufficient if I am on a hilltop, and my 50 watt mobile is more than adequate on level ground. So a 100 watt limit is probably a reasonable expectation both from the minimum power rule and a technical point of view, unless you are trying to bounce your signal off of the moon.
Power and distance. Ham radio operators can transmit up to 1500 watts PEP and can have as big of an antenna as they want (limited only by FAA regulations and local zoning regulations). Part 15 devices are limited to 1 watt (I believe) and must use those teeny antennas that come with the device.
Since I regularly use Mandrake, I try to buy the distribution CDs for major upgrades. The price is well worth it, especially if you get the DVD. When I download the ISOs instead, I answer 50 or so support questions on mandrakeexpert.com for free. Since other people pay to ask the questions, this is a way I can indirectly support the product. My point is don't be a leech. If you use the product, find some way to contribute, monetarily or otherwise.
1) Where is this 5 years number coming from?
2) What will change in 5 years that will make people want to learn a new computer system, or will Linux behave exactly like Microsoft by then?
3) There are already Linux desktops that look and act so much like windows that it is scary. Check out Lycoris sometime.
4) Power users tend to appreciate a highly customizable interface like Linux desktops and window managers. They also tend to learn new things quickly.
5) Users don't have to throw out everything they know. Basic computer use varies only a little between linux and windows. The biggest difference is the names of the applications. How did I solve this on my wife's linux desktop? A big blue e icon opens mozilla for her. Once it is open, she couldn't care less whether she is using ie or mozilla. Administrators are the ones who have to throw out everything they know and they have to do it every couple of years anyway. 6) I have to give a little on the applications argument. I could switch to Linux at work today and have all the apps I need to do my job. The same goes for my previous jobs and most of the jobs of my family and friends. I also realize that there are many specialized applications people need that linux does not have yet. However, those apps would probably quickly become available if a large company said, "We are switching to Linux next year and need a Linux version of these applications." If someone doesn't ask, then these applications still won't be available in 5 years. A lot of special applications that businesses use are developed in house anyway. All it takes is for a few major corporations to make a leap of faith to put Linux on the desktop next year.
People who think that Linux isn't ready for the desktop haven't used it in on a desktop in a while. If you can use MS Office, you can use OpenOffice.org. If you can use Outlook, you can use evolution. What Linux isn't ready for is the average user installing and configuring it. It can be argued that Windows isn't ready for this either. Fortunately, most businesses don't require their employees to install and configure their own computers. And if look and feel is a problem, you can configure Linux to look and act almost exactly like Windows. As far as user's having to learn something new, my Mom learned to use Mandrake good enough to do her job (she works from home) with about a 5 minute lesson.
If you don't want to move all your users, at least look at which users might be easily able to move to Linux. At my job, I do all my work on a Sun machine through exceed, leaving my 1.2 GHz/256 MB RAM machine to act as a dumb terminal and email client. The developers could benefit greatly from a Linux machine on our desktop, but we are stuck with the same operating system that the administrative assistants use.
I agree with you completely about businesses (large and small). I disagree about the home user. Home user's have very different needs from a company. They have only a few files like their budget, the latest school paper they are working on, etc. that would be painful to lose. They don't need every revision of their work. And they don't work their hardware as hard. If their computer room burns down, the data on their drive is the least of their worries. Mirrors are an easy and appropriate solution for this kind of user.
I agree with you that it would be most convenient to just backup the whole computer. However, the whole point is that the size of today's hard drives makes this no longer convenient.
This is exactly why my parents have Mandrake on their computer. They don't know how to set things up anyway (on Windows or Linux), so I do it for them. What to backup is easy: their home directories. It's just as easy for them from a user's perspective (if not easier) than windows and they don't have to spend money for software upgrades. Since all the software they use is on the distro disks, a reinstall is easy. It's a far cry from the 10 cd switches and 15 reboots to completely reinstall a windows machine. Just a little slower than a full restore operation and you get the latest distro version as a bonus. And they don't have to worry about their grandchildren accidentally erasing their work files.
I like your test and have to admit that I fell for the trick. I have to disagree with your assessment of it as a pure intelligence test. However, I think it is an excellent test to find someone with great common sense who can "think outside the box." These are good qualities for a sysadmin, but your test would not necessarily qualify someone for any technical position. I'll explain why.
These are the type of tests that my wife almost always passes. She's a very intelligent woman and is extremely skilled at her job. She has good common sense and I often ask her advice when I am stuck in a paradigm, even when she has little background knowledge of the subject. She often finds a simple solution when I am struggling with a complex one.
However, she has difficulty with word problems and algorithms. She also has difficulty with solutions that require analysis and synthesis of many different pieces of information, while these things come easily to me. She can write a program if you give her an algorithm, but coming up with an algorithm is difficult for her. Debugging code and troubleshooting a new problem are also very difficult for her.
Remember, you would have to teach the amish farmer how to disable the features in the registry just as you had to teach the MCSE. I'm not very familiar with windows, so I don't know how trivial the problem should have been to a MCSE. I'm guessing about as trivial as modifying a config file in *nix -- easily done with some documentation but difficult with none. I do know that a truly intelligent person is aware of what he doesn't know and isn't afraid to ask questions. Your "lacky"[sic] probably had the choice of doing a little trial and error troubleshooting and risk really screwing up the registry or asking the question. I'd probably hate working for you because judging from your post you don't tolerate either. People either have to learn from their mistakes or from the experience of others.
At my work we deal with a lot of secret and/or export controlled material. There are areas at my work set aside for foreign customers that we aren't even allowed to run a wired LAN connection to. If you want to run some software over there, you have to put it on a floppy or CD and carry it over from your desk. This can be a real pain when trying to find an elusive bug. Maybe it was just easier than getting the security measures approved to connect the LAN.
If they have good reason at all to be that paranoid about a wired LAN, I think it won't take long for this "secure" wireless thing to come back and bite the NSA.
You are assuming that people need to back up their entire drive. I use only 2.6 gigs of my 20 GB disk at work and consider my installation disks to backup 2.5 of that. You are also assuming that the average user actually fills up their hard drive with crucial stuff. Most people that really need backups don't need a backup of their entire hard drive, but they only need a backup of a specific project. And projects fit pretty well onto a CD or even a floppy disk, especially personal projects. I'd rather backup my budget separately from my ogg collection separately from my personal programming projects anyway.
I agree with you about the ease and cost of using another hard drive for backup, though, as long as they are physically separated (at least not in the same machine, and the farther the better). I frequently copy files from my laptop to my desktop and vice versa. I also consider the local copy of my website to be a backup of the remote copy, and vice versa. I think most businesses nowadays use hard disks for most backups and only use tapes for old archived stuff.
You're probably right, but that won't keep me from trying. I've seen standalone MP3 players with processors around 10 MHz. Of course, those have separate mpeg decoder chips. 44.1 kHz stereo is 374 clock cycles per sample at 33 MHz. I'd say that brings it in the realm of possibility for an experienced C and assembly coder, especially with nothing else running. If worse comes to worse, I can do the decoding on another machine on my LAN and just stream the raw PCM over.
On the bright side, maybe extremely poor audio quality will convince my wife to let me spend some money on the hardware I really want. A new mini-itx system with dvd recorder for the all-in-one dvd player/ogg player/cd player/pvr/dvd recorder system I have in mind. Ah, I can only dream right now.
I have a 486SX/33 that I put Linux on a couple of weeks ago. I plan to eventually use this system for playing ogg files over my home stereo system. Now that tremor has been released I don't have to worry about not having a fpu.
I started with tomsrtbt on floppies, then installed it onto the hard drive. Once I had a working system I compiled a kernel with the sound card and network drivers and copied that over. Everything works great. There's something surreal about using a kernel that was just updated last week with hardware that hasn't been sold in almost 10 years.
I'm having trouble statically linking sshd, so I'm looking forward to the next installment. Shouldn't be too hard to set up dynamic libraries, but advice from someone who has done it already always helps.
I completely agree. Your 1/10th estimate seems to be appropriate for continuously upgrading the software rather than merely supporting it. Are upgrades included in your commercial estimates or are you planning for those to be included as part of "support"? I didn't notice any distinction made in the original post.
Also, you are going to need someone at your site supporting the software anyway. You can't just call commercial support, leave a message that it's broke, and have it be magically fixed the next day. You have to call the support line, explain the problem, go through troubleshooting with a technician who didn't actually write the software, and then apply the fix or wait for an upgrade and install it.
It may take a little time at first for a staff member to become familiar with an open source project, but he will then be able to fix the problem in as much time or less than he will spend on the phone.
I don't actively contribute code to any open source projects, but I once found a bug in some open source software I was using. I had never looked at the source before but was able to verify that it wasn't a known issue, find the bug, fix it, test it, and send a patch to the maintainer in about an hour. You wouldn't believe how grateful that guy sounded to get a patch instead of a complaint from a user. I'm sure he would have been helpful if I had further questions. If it had been a commercial product I would have spent that hour on the phone, only to be told that it would be fixed in the next service pack.
Bottom line is, don't overestimate what you actually get when you pay for "support".
That's a good point. This is getting a little tangential, but I'd be interested to know what you do for a living that makes this useful to you. Why VNC instead of individual made-for-PDA apps? Is it just not worth it to port or replace a specific proprietary app? Not trying to flame, I really am curious.
You've answered half of my question. The other half is why choose a tablet over a wireless-enabled PDA? In other words, can you think of a specific application that you need to "walk around" with that needs the extra screen space so badly that I would be willing to tolerate the extra weight and bulk of a tablet over a PDA?
What exactly is the appeal of a tablet PC? What tasks are they better suited for than a laptop or PDA? Does someone know? This seems like a classic example of cart before the horse innovation. These may be cool gadgets, but if they don't solve a problem better than existing solutions, they will never take off.
Slashdot Mirror
If I understand buffer overflow vulnerabilities correctly, they could be almost completely prevented if the computer architecture prevented execution from data areas and required special instructions to modify memory in executable areas. I think other kinds of vulnerabilities could be prevented with similar architectural changes, or perhaps even just changes in an OS kernel. Obviously I haven't thought this completely through, but surely research in this direction would produce more truly secure computers than initiatives like palladium.
"Damaging to national security" is almost the exact phrasing used to describe a piece of data that is required to be classified. If the government really felt that it could be damaging, the windows source code would be classified, all MS employees that had access to it would require a security clearance, and there would be a host of other requirements to protect it from being disclosed. Since that hasn't happened, I don't think anyone really took that claim seriously.
The GPL takes some freedom from those who would embrace and extend without sharing in exchange for more freedom of fair competition for those who put in the bulk of the original work. The total balance of freedom remains constant, but I personally would rather lean toward the original creators, especially when they are competing with a strong monopoly.
My proposal is this: allow companies to sell dynamic-edit capable DVD players. Also allow companies to sell software to create the edit files based on some open standard file format. They can still make money on the idea of clean movies without actually selling an illegal derivative work.
If the studio wants to sell an edit file for their movie, they can. If I want to edit certain content so my kids can watch, I can. If I want to email that file to my friends and family, I can do it. If I want to share that file with a few million of my closest friends on a P2P network, I can.
Finally a legitimate use for P2P!
I'm glad to hear that you feel that way. I'll be making arrangments with your payroll department to get a certain amount deducted from your pay and sent to my bank account every month. Don't worry, it won't be a large amount, only $15 (about the price of a CD). I'm sure your payroll officer will agree because it is not theft since you will never see the money on your paycheck in the first place.
No messing with EULA's or manuals and you get 100% off Microsoft rates.
Linux even offers a Charity license program where some discounts are up to half of the above rate.
It amazes me how many people working for schools and non-profits who don't know about these programs.
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
According to Section 97.313, there is no license class restriction on the power output allowed on the amateur microwave bands, making the limit 1500 Watts regardless of whether you are a technician class or extra. However, it also states that you must use the minimum power necessary to maintain reliable communications. My 5 watt 2-meter handheld is perfectly sufficient if I am on a hilltop, and my 50 watt mobile is more than adequate on level ground. So a 100 watt limit is probably a reasonable expectation both from the minimum power rule and a technical point of view, unless you are trying to bounce your signal off of the moon.
Power and distance. Ham radio operators can transmit up to 1500 watts PEP and can have as big of an antenna as they want (limited only by FAA regulations and local zoning regulations). Part 15 devices are limited to 1 watt (I believe) and must use those teeny antennas that come with the device.
Since I regularly use Mandrake, I try to buy the distribution CDs for major upgrades. The price is well worth it, especially if you get the DVD. When I download the ISOs instead, I answer 50 or so support questions on mandrakeexpert.com for free. Since other people pay to ask the questions, this is a way I can indirectly support the product. My point is don't be a leech. If you use the product, find some way to contribute, monetarily or otherwise.
Obviously, they are looking for opportunities to offer steep discounts to everyone!
1) Where is this 5 years number coming from?
2) What will change in 5 years that will make people want to learn a new computer system, or will Linux behave exactly like Microsoft by then?
3) There are already Linux desktops that look and act so much like windows that it is scary. Check out Lycoris sometime.
4) Power users tend to appreciate a highly customizable interface like Linux desktops and window managers. They also tend to learn new things quickly.
5) Users don't have to throw out everything they know. Basic computer use varies only a little between linux and windows. The biggest difference is the names of the applications. How did I solve this on my wife's linux desktop? A big blue e icon opens mozilla for her. Once it is open, she couldn't care less whether she is using ie or mozilla. Administrators are the ones who have to throw out everything they know and they have to do it every couple of years anyway.
6) I have to give a little on the applications argument. I could switch to Linux at work today and have all the apps I need to do my job. The same goes for my previous jobs and most of the jobs of my family and friends. I also realize that there are many specialized applications people need that linux does not have yet. However, those apps would probably quickly become available if a large company said, "We are switching to Linux next year and need a Linux version of these applications." If someone doesn't ask, then these applications still won't be available in 5 years. A lot of special applications that businesses use are developed in house anyway. All it takes is for a few major corporations to make a leap of faith to put Linux on the desktop next year.
If you don't want to move all your users, at least look at which users might be easily able to move to Linux. At my job, I do all my work on a Sun machine through exceed, leaving my 1.2 GHz/256 MB RAM machine to act as a dumb terminal and email client. The developers could benefit greatly from a Linux machine on our desktop, but we are stuck with the same operating system that the administrative assistants use.
I agree with you completely about businesses (large and small). I disagree about the home user. Home user's have very different needs from a company. They have only a few files like their budget, the latest school paper they are working on, etc. that would be painful to lose. They don't need every revision of their work. And they don't work their hardware as hard. If their computer room burns down, the data on their drive is the least of their worries. Mirrors are an easy and appropriate solution for this kind of user.
This is exactly why my parents have Mandrake on their computer. They don't know how to set things up anyway (on Windows or Linux), so I do it for them. What to backup is easy: their home directories. It's just as easy for them from a user's perspective (if not easier) than windows and they don't have to spend money for software upgrades. Since all the software they use is on the distro disks, a reinstall is easy. It's a far cry from the 10 cd switches and 15 reboots to completely reinstall a windows machine. Just a little slower than a full restore operation and you get the latest distro version as a bonus. And they don't have to worry about their grandchildren accidentally erasing their work files.
These are the type of tests that my wife almost always passes. She's a very intelligent woman and is extremely skilled at her job. She has good common sense and I often ask her advice when I am stuck in a paradigm, even when she has little background knowledge of the subject. She often finds a simple solution when I am struggling with a complex one.
However, she has difficulty with word problems and algorithms. She also has difficulty with solutions that require analysis and synthesis of many different pieces of information, while these things come easily to me. She can write a program if you give her an algorithm, but coming up with an algorithm is difficult for her. Debugging code and troubleshooting a new problem are also very difficult for her.
Remember, you would have to teach the amish farmer how to disable the features in the registry just as you had to teach the MCSE. I'm not very familiar with windows, so I don't know how trivial the problem should have been to a MCSE. I'm guessing about as trivial as modifying a config file in *nix -- easily done with some documentation but difficult with none. I do know that a truly intelligent person is aware of what he doesn't know and isn't afraid to ask questions. Your "lacky"[sic] probably had the choice of doing a little trial and error troubleshooting and risk really screwing up the registry or asking the question. I'd probably hate working for you because judging from your post you don't tolerate either. People either have to learn from their mistakes or from the experience of others.
If they have good reason at all to be that paranoid about a wired LAN, I think it won't take long for this "secure" wireless thing to come back and bite the NSA.
I agree with you about the ease and cost of using another hard drive for backup, though, as long as they are physically separated (at least not in the same machine, and the farther the better). I frequently copy files from my laptop to my desktop and vice versa. I also consider the local copy of my website to be a backup of the remote copy, and vice versa. I think most businesses nowadays use hard disks for most backups and only use tapes for old archived stuff.
Actually that scene was cut from the IMAX version to fit the movie into 2 hours.
On the bright side, maybe extremely poor audio quality will convince my wife to let me spend some money on the hardware I really want. A new mini-itx system with dvd recorder for the all-in-one dvd player/ogg player/cd player/pvr/dvd recorder system I have in mind. Ah, I can only dream right now.
I started with tomsrtbt on floppies, then installed it onto the hard drive. Once I had a working system I compiled a kernel with the sound card and network drivers and copied that over. Everything works great. There's something surreal about using a kernel that was just updated last week with hardware that hasn't been sold in almost 10 years.
I'm having trouble statically linking sshd, so I'm looking forward to the next installment. Shouldn't be too hard to set up dynamic libraries, but advice from someone who has done it already always helps.
Also, you are going to need someone at your site supporting the software anyway. You can't just call commercial support, leave a message that it's broke, and have it be magically fixed the next day. You have to call the support line, explain the problem, go through troubleshooting with a technician who didn't actually write the software, and then apply the fix or wait for an upgrade and install it.
It may take a little time at first for a staff member to become familiar with an open source project, but he will then be able to fix the problem in as much time or less than he will spend on the phone.
I don't actively contribute code to any open source projects, but I once found a bug in some open source software I was using. I had never looked at the source before but was able to verify that it wasn't a known issue, find the bug, fix it, test it, and send a patch to the maintainer in about an hour. You wouldn't believe how grateful that guy sounded to get a patch instead of a complaint from a user. I'm sure he would have been helpful if I had further questions. If it had been a commercial product I would have spent that hour on the phone, only to be told that it would be fixed in the next service pack.
Bottom line is, don't overestimate what you actually get when you pay for "support".
That's a good point. This is getting a little tangential, but I'd be interested to know what you do for a living that makes this useful to you. Why VNC instead of individual made-for-PDA apps? Is it just not worth it to port or replace a specific proprietary app? Not trying to flame, I really am curious.
You've answered half of my question. The other half is why choose a tablet over a wireless-enabled PDA? In other words, can you think of a specific application that you need to "walk around" with that needs the extra screen space so badly that I would be willing to tolerate the extra weight and bulk of a tablet over a PDA?
What exactly is the appeal of a tablet PC? What tasks are they better suited for than a laptop or PDA? Does someone know? This seems like a classic example of cart before the horse innovation. These may be cool gadgets, but if they don't solve a problem better than existing solutions, they will never take off.