The ACLU and civil rights movements should not find fault with the idea that the different races may not be equal, but I'm not holding my breath.
Here's the problem with that line of thought. There's greater variance between people of one 'race' than there is between the races themselves.
Minor speciation has obviously already happened; skintone and hair colour for example are largely traceable to geographic factors, along with predisposition to certain diseases such as sickle-cell anaemia and heart disease.
The problem is that people take very minor trends in a given population, and extrapolate that to apply to the whole race, especially to ensure that their race is 'better' than other races. Take the idea that black men are better athletes, and white men are better physicists, because you see more black runners, and more white scientists.
How much of that is down to 'race genetics', and how much down to available career paths, family preference, education opportunity, and many other non-genetic factors? Even if such traits were to be proved in long-term scientific studies, then the difference would be very slight, and it would be stupid to pull random black and white men off the street and assume that these slight traits automatically apply to the people you have in front of you.
Unfortunately, automatically assuming traits apply to individuals is prejudice, and is part of what is racism, and is very easy to do without thinking. Anything which has the phrase 'your people are' stuck on the front of it (or could have) is likely to be an example of this.
That's why I believe we are born equal, as equal implies equal rights and responsibilities, and have equal worth as people. We're not all born the same though, which is what I think you're driving at.
On that basis, can we take away WWW use from the US? After all, the protocol and first browsers were created in europe by CERN. Oh, and don't forget the european academic networks such as JANET that spawned the european infrastructure. Or are you claiming that the US paid for the infrastructure and name servers this side of the pond?
Grow up. The internet is too important to be under the control of any one government, especially one that's shown a propensity for screwing other countries over for US corporate benefit. Oh, I forgot. France wanting to want to stop the sale of nazi memorabilia is why they shouldn't have any say in what happens to the internet, but the US with mikerowesoft.com, sco's actions, amazon's patents and scientology lawsuits is a far better place with greater free speech. Got it.
God forbid the US government should start banning porn sites. Oh, they already have. Real bastion of free speech there, definitely such a paragon of virtue nobody else should worry about what they're going to use their power to ban next.
You write a biography detailing your life of sex and booze. You sell me a copy. Other copies end up in libraries. You later reform your life, and stop selling your book. However, you cannot now take my copy from me, or the library, or stop me selling my copy onto someone else. You definitely can't stop me reading the copy I already have. That's the doctrine of first sale. All you can stop me doing is printing up new copies, or passing off the book as authered by me (mainly - there are other rights, but those are the key ones)
Websites don't fall under either category completely, because by giving away my legally obtained copy of your work, it means other people are taking copies, which is illegal under copyright law. You don't have the right to take my copy out of circulation, I don't have the right to pass on new copies. Publishing a cached copy violates your rights; making me take it down violates mine.
We could really use clarification of the law as to whether cached copies of websites are allowed. If they're not, say goodbye to the internet archive, search engines, browser caches, and the 'save as' button on browsers. If they are, then anything on a website loses much of it's copyright protection. Tough call, if you ask me.
To be fair, realplayer 10 is a lot nicer than previous versions. It's based on the their opensource helix player, but with the proprietry real codecs added. No adware, spam, or popups.
Try changing the (failed) motherboard in a windows xp machine sometime, and see how it handles different ide controllers. Completely non-bootable.
In linux, if I've got the new drivers already part of the kernel (usual on most distros) I won't even notice. If I've tweaked my kernel to make it slimline, the worst I have to do is boot a livecd, recompile the kernel with the new driver, and i'm done.
With windows and different ide controllers, I need to reinstall over the top, or at worst, completely reinstall. (There are other methods if your old motherboard still works, but it still takes hours of work and doesn't work most of the time)
They would however allow the patenting of "Finding the posterior with one or both hands" and "Pouring urine from a piece of footwear" in a snap.
Re:To re-state Jeff Foxworthy's question...
on
How Ice Melts
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Well for a start, jelly (or jello for the US) is solid at room temperature, or what do you think comes out of the packet?
You dissolve it in hot water (which breaks up the bonds holding the gelatin together) then put in in the fridge to cool it back down quicker... BY stirring as it cools, the gelatin molecules get tangled again. The water is left trapped between the long gelatin strands once it returns to being solid. The water is what makes it wobble.
That's why such code usually ends up in libraries, under the LGPL so it can be used without being embedded into your current software.
Most GPL code I've seen that people wanted to use was complete apps, that they just wanted to use virtually lock stock and barrel, with a prettier frontend on it that melded with the rest of their code.
If you're not prepared to abide by copyright that the creator of the GPL'd work wanted, then why should I abide by copyright on your work?
We already pay a flat tax for BBC radio and TV in the UK. Many feel that this is worthwhile, and produces better content than the lowest common demomination pap that commercial companies often have to churn out (Fox news vs BBC news being an excellent example)
That's not to say the commercial system can't produce good shows, take (new) Battlestar Galactica and Firefly; oh, but firefly was cancelled because it didn't make enough money and didn't fit into a crappy schedule.
The answer isn't that we should just shut up and pay ever increasing prices (through subscription fees and ever increasing adverts) because our commercial lords and masters have bought laws that allow them to do so.
Perhaps the public should start charging the media companies for the air they use, the broadcast spectrum they take up, and the existing culture they repackage and sell to us over and over again.
I have a right of free speech to sing a song I heard, or retell a story, or even use my camera to take a photo of a building and give it away.
Copyright takes away my free speech, and the thing I'm supposed to get in return is a bigger, improved public domain culture after the orginial creator has had a period of exclusive profit. Not a permanent monopoly for the already wealthy.
Many countries already pay taxes to support art galleries, theatres and museums. Why should 'modern' culture not be organised along similar lines, where I pay a flat tax and get to share the results of that money as I choose?
We pay taxes for things that are of benefit to all (roads, defence, education) on the basis that it's more cost effective if everyone pays, even if some benefit more than others.
Why are culture, entertainment and education through the broadcast medium inherantly less important than other functions of government?
And no, private enterprise is not automatically better than government run organisations. They have a greater drive towards efficiency (theoretically) but they cream off a chunk of the income as profit for investors. Privatization of the rail network, of the phone system, of the electricity system, have all lead to a lot of money for a small number of people, and a worse service for the customers using it.
Me? I like having a system where people can create or report without worrying about the heavy hand of corporate sponsors cancelling anything that creates the slightest controversy, or that doesn't make a massive profit after 6 weeks.
Having worked in a variety of big, small and medium business (part of it as an outsourced IT support company, so I worked with a lot of CEO's) I'd have to say, management's knowledge of IT varies across all sectors.
You can get the CEO you describe in all size of companies, and you can get clueful ones who are especially hot on IT BECAUSE the business is small and if they're suffering a big problem their business can under very quickly.
I'd say being multiskilled, and more importantly, able to learn new things quickly, is becoming a key requirement if you want to go far in IT.
If you're looking for a server, go for debian (but then you run bsd, so why switch?) If it's a desktop, use ubuntu (or kubuntu for kde), as the package selection is more orientated for a desktop setup (and more often updated), but you can still use pretty much the full range of normal debian packages as well.
Another honourable mention goes to gentoo for the desktop, it's got a huge range of ebuilds and portage (package management program) is very similar to BSD's ports system. Plus, the advice forum and wiki's beat the hell out of every other distro i've run, wheras debian is pretty much the opposite.
I'd say the biggest problem is not the bundling of windows media player, but the bundling of the drm codecs.
Say you run a website offering music and video downloads. 90% of your customers are guaranteed to have WMA and WMV capability, complete with DRM. Why force your customers to jump through hoops installing some other codec, and have less 'protection' to boot?
Fast forward 5 years. Almost all media is WMA and WMV only. To play it, you need windows. Linux and mac users are locked out of this massive market. You can already see it happening, with only one major music store for the non-windows market, itunes (allofmp3 may not be illegal at the moment, but it probably will be soon)
So by bunding windows media player and its codecs with every copy of windows, they indirectly reinforce their OS monopoly via the media market.
That's illegal abuse of an existing monopoly, and why the EU tried to remove the link between windows and guaranteed availability of the DRM codecs. I suspect it's doomed to failure, but I'm stumped on how else they could have tried to prevent yet another market becoming illegally dominated by microsoft via bundling.
I did have a look at this about 18 months ago, and media player is a slippery little sucker to block; it's a bit like internet explorer in that the.exe is just a wrapper to the libraries, but numerous programs still rely on the.exe being runnable - and if you don't block the.exe but just hide the shortcuts (students have a mandatory fixed roaming profile they can't change, and they can't install software) it's still possible to fire it up from another app.
Still, as you say, group policies is probably the way to go and I will have another look at it. If the windows media player hooks still aren't remappable, then it rather defeats the EU objective of having a WMP free windows xp, so I guess I'll see how broken it is when I trial it.
I would, but a) we're using NT, not active directory, so the group policies are somewhat more primitive b) microsoft office and encarta, to name but two apps, rely on windows media player for media content so disabling access breaks them too in all sorts of nasty ways.
I'm really hoping I'll be able to use another media app to handle the media player hooks with windows xp N, but I won't know for sure until I try it.
I'll certainly be investigating installing this on our school network machines when we move to windows xp (we're now licenced, but running windows 2000 still as we've only recently upgraded the last of the legacy machines that only had win2k oem licences)
Right now, the students use windows media player, and the integrated search to constantly listen to online radio and browse lyrics etc, completely crippling our bandwidth. A lot of the material is not suitable for the pre-teen kids in the prep school, either. Add all the scripting vulnerabilities in WMP, along with the DRM, and I'd be very happy to get rid of it and its problems. Oh, and they're constantly filling up their userspace with music ripped in WMP from CD's and then trying to look all innocent when the quota system warnings run out and their account gets disabled.
Getting rid of WMP is really tricky on vanilla windows xp, and breaks all sorts of other things.
I for one will be testing windows xp n with media player classic and/or quintessential player as the alternative that still lets the computers be used for education, rather than the distracting entertainment boxes they usually end up being in lessons.
The fact that it might slow the massive growth of windows media player codecs only on music websites is no bad thing either.
I know. It's still not as secure as an all Linux environment. But, I'm curious. Does Linux have anything comparable? I honestly don't know and I'd appreciate it if anyone could let me know.
There's zenworks from novell/suse, and redhat network used to work somewhat similar for their enterprise distro - not used redhat for years though.
Still, with windows on the desktop, WSUS is definitely a big step forward, and a real improvement from SUS or just auto-update.
I have to admit, I've been running the wsus beta for a month or so, and it's a lot better than SUS.
Basically, you point the workstations at the server with a GPO or registry patch as before, but the server setup is much improved.
Machines are listed by name, and you can assign them to manually assigned groups on the server, or flag the group they should use on the machine itself.
You can approve individual patches by group, or individually if you wish, and can list the known applied patches and due patches by machine, as well as pull out other basic info like motherboard id, mac address, and windows version.
The nicest bits for me are: - That you can see at a glance how long since machines last reported their status, which can help identify an unreported dead or problematic machine in a large lab, and very out of date ones are flagged - reports listing what machines still need updates, or indeed what patches are still to be rolled out - whether there's unapproved updates that need attention; you can auto-approve different grades of patch if you so wish. - properly handles superceded patches - you can spot when a machine clone hasn't been reassigned it's correct name as the old one stops checking for updates, and you get a new machine with the 'wrong' random name.
As a school, we don't have a large budget for patch/machine management so WSUS adds some much needed patch management to our hand-rolled pxe clone system (based on pxe linux boot + partimage)
The only really annoying things are the windows 2000 server, ms-sql server or sqlde minimum requirements, and of course IE for management. I tend to just vnc into the server and run IE from there, as it's simpler than wine on my gentoo workstation.
Which is exactly what has happened with e-mail -- in certain cases it can behave in a very un-mail-like way. This behavior is being exploited to confuse users into doing the wrong thing. You can try to educate people into not doing the wrong thing, but as long as the underlying metaphor is "mail" it will be very hard to make significant progress.
Actually, I'd argue that email works in a very mail like way, even when it's being used against the recipient.
Say someone sends you a letter. You open it, read the pretty coloured card inside, and toss it in the bin. Thing is, you are now infected (through your skin and breathing ultra fine dust) with the infectious agent that was impregnated on the card. You now spread that virus to your family and friends by close contact (spreading on a lan).
Possible, but not likely, right?
Now imagine where 10%-20% of your letters are like this, and 60% more of them are the worst kind of fraudulent advertising and hardcore porn adverts. (numbers pulled from my server logs) Imagine that people can send you these virus infected letters anonymously, with virtually no chance of them being caught, and even if they are, there's virtually no law's against what they're doing. Oh, and make it so sending all this crap to you is free for the sender, and is paid for by the recipient.
Think our human friendly postal mail system would survive like that? Or would it start to collapse from fear of hidden viruses, and dead postman from carrying the huge sacks of junkmail to each door every day.
In the end of the day, it's not the over-trusting user, it's not the post system that allows anonymity, it's not the lack of enforcable laws from the government, it's not the low cost of sending that causes the problems - it's all of them combined.
Altering the user metaphor for the way they interact with their computers won't make the problem go away; we need a multipronged approach, and user education to not do bloody stupid things is part of that.
To draw a metaphor; sharp knives are dangerous objects. If an adult stabbed themselves in the eye with one, because someone left a post-it note on it telling them to do so, could we legimately blame the user for being a bloody idiot? (well, as well as the post-it note leaver).
I also work in IT, and when I install windows xp, I certainly have to install the video drivers (whether it's nvidia, ati or intel). I often have to install the wireless drivers. I regularly have to install various motherboard drivers, especially sound card drivers. SATA drivers I need to provide on floppy before I even boot. And don't get me started on windows update.
I can install a linux distro like SuSE, and it's all configured and ready to play, with the exception of wireless.
Fortunately, I whip up an XP ghost image with all the drivers installed whenever we buy new kit, so I don't often have to install windows off an OEM cd. But the idea that windows xp comes with all the drivers you need is laughable.
I can break into your house just by smashing a window. If you ever get burgled, I can just claim "Well, if he didn't want me breaking in he should have had steel shutters over his doors and windows with bank-grade locks." Then the police say "that's alright then, no law broken here, hhawk shouldn't have thought that a glass window was adequate protection against being burgled."
Would that be a nice society to live in?
Windows isn't very secure, which is a reason not to use it; but that's still not justification for people hacking into it, and getting away with it.
Which is precisely why media companies are starting trying to shut down the second-hand market.
One of the 'side effects' of DRM with registration is that it removes the right of resale.
Good example in the games world are Valve games using steam, like counter-strike and half-life 2, which force you to register your serial number permanently with an online account. Once that's done, you can't resell it. Windows, with it's number stuck to the side of the case and online activation make it impossible to resell just the software.
iTunes music store too; good luck trying to find someone able to resell a track from them, by making apple change the 'ownership' tag on the music.
In 20 years time, there won't be much of a second hand market left.
They're becoming increasingly common. I don't buy many DVDs for that very reason, but Master and Commander, Finding Neverland, Vera Drake and Shrek 2 all have them.
They're damned annoying. It's not just the increasingly lengthy theft 'warning' but literally about 5 minutes of unskippable ads every time you play them.
Same problem as always with market forces instead of regulation; it relies on an informed and interested public allowing the problem to affect their purchasing decision.
In this case, if your credit details get stolen from a dumpster, leading to identity 'theft'; how do you know which company in the last 6 months allowed your information to leak? Assuming you do find out, how do other people find out that information, since it's not exactly going to be large news?
(our lead national story today; joe bloggs lost $200 when company X put his credit details in the garbage, leading to identity theft and an extra charge on his credit card. Can company X survive this devastating blow to it's consumer confidence?)
So instead of putting a small burden on all businesses to buy and use a shredder for financial documents, we add a significant information gathering burden to all buyers to add to the rest of the information they have to find out about their business (do they harm dolphins? do they pollute more? do they hire third world children for virtually nothing? etc etc)
We're also assuming the business with bad business practises has effective and equal competition in it's area, which people can go to.
Market forces are useful for many things, but protecting customers from unethical business practises isn't one of them. Regulation is a far more effective method, as opposed to businesses dumping the costs that regulation would cause into an external cost on the rest of the economy. (time for customers, insurance costs for banks and credit institutions to cover fraud losses)
Anonymity is either something you have, or you do not.
It's only a day after one of the biggest anonymous sources finally outed himself after 30 years. Imagine if Nixon had had the power to find out the identity of Deep Throat, and the identity of the people who provided the information he confirmed at the time. How much would he have got away with then?
And that is why, on balance, complete anonymity on the Internet is not a good idea. I have no problem with being anonymous for routine use, but if you can't even be identified in the face of overwhelming evidence of a crime, backed by an order from the lawful authorities, something's wrong.
Who decides what is a legitimate use of anonymity? The government? If you don't like the Nixon example, pick any repressive and corrupt government, and give them the power to control or ban anonymous programs that people use for free speech - which is what you're talking about.
Such software (freenet being the best example) by definition allows the distribution of material that some people don't think should be published. This includes chinese dissidents, or operation clambake (the fight against scientology) - or copyright infringement.
Such is the nature of anonymity - you either take the bad with the good, or you try to get rid of anonymity altogether, and even then you'll just force people underground.
Copyright infringment is a good example of this, in fact. Large numbers of people do not feel the copyright laws are fair or legitimate, or they'd abide by them. Since governments are trying to crack down and enforce the laws, they just end up pushing the lawbreakers further and further away from enforcement. The government's only real option is to ban the software altogether, and thus allow people to be convicted for trying to be anonymous, regardless of what they were actually up to.
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The ACLU and civil rights movements should not find fault with the idea that the different races may not be equal, but I'm not holding my breath.
Here's the problem with that line of thought. There's greater variance between people of one 'race' than there is between the races themselves.
Minor speciation has obviously already happened; skintone and hair colour for example are largely traceable to geographic factors, along with predisposition to certain diseases such as sickle-cell anaemia and heart disease.
The problem is that people take very minor trends in a given population, and extrapolate that to apply to the whole race, especially to ensure that their race is 'better' than other races. Take the idea that black men are better athletes, and white men are better physicists, because you see more black runners, and more white scientists.
How much of that is down to 'race genetics', and how much down to available career paths, family preference, education opportunity, and many other non-genetic factors? Even if such traits were to be proved in long-term scientific studies, then the difference would be very slight, and it would be stupid to pull random black and white men off the street and assume that these slight traits automatically apply to the people you have in front of you.
Unfortunately, automatically assuming traits apply to individuals is prejudice, and is part of what is racism, and is very easy to do without thinking. Anything which has the phrase 'your people are' stuck on the front of it (or could have) is likely to be an example of this.
That's why I believe we are born equal, as equal implies equal rights and responsibilities, and have equal worth as people. We're not all born the same though, which is what I think you're driving at.
On that basis, can we take away WWW use from the US? After all, the protocol and first browsers were created in europe by CERN. Oh, and don't forget the european academic networks such as JANET that spawned the european infrastructure. Or are you claiming that the US paid for the infrastructure and name servers this side of the pond?
Grow up. The internet is too important to be under the control of any one government, especially one that's shown a propensity for screwing other countries over for US corporate benefit. Oh, I forgot. France wanting to want to stop the sale of nazi memorabilia is why they shouldn't have any say in what happens to the internet, but the US with mikerowesoft.com, sco's actions, amazon's patents and scientology lawsuits is a far better place with greater free speech. Got it.
God forbid the US government should start banning porn sites. Oh, they already have. Real bastion of free speech there, definitely such a paragon of virtue nobody else should worry about what they're going to use their power to ban next.
Let me give you another example.
You write a biography detailing your life of sex and booze. You sell me a copy. Other copies end up in libraries. You later reform your life, and stop selling your book. However, you cannot now take my copy from me, or the library, or stop me selling my copy onto someone else. You definitely can't stop me reading the copy I already have. That's the doctrine of first sale. All you can stop me doing is printing up new copies, or passing off the book as authered by me (mainly - there are other rights, but those are the key ones)
Websites don't fall under either category completely, because by giving away my legally obtained copy of your work, it means other people are taking copies, which is illegal under copyright law. You don't have the right to take my copy out of circulation, I don't have the right to pass on new copies. Publishing a cached copy violates your rights; making me take it down violates mine.
We could really use clarification of the law as to whether cached copies of websites are allowed. If they're not, say goodbye to the internet archive, search engines, browser caches, and the 'save as' button on browsers. If they are, then anything on a website loses much of it's copyright protection. Tough call, if you ask me.
To be fair, realplayer 10 is a lot nicer than previous versions. It's based on the their opensource helix player, but with the proprietry real codecs added. No adware, spam, or popups.
I have no trouble recommending it now.
Try changing the (failed) motherboard in a windows xp machine sometime, and see how it handles different ide controllers. Completely non-bootable.
In linux, if I've got the new drivers already part of the kernel (usual on most distros) I won't even notice. If I've tweaked my kernel to make it slimline, the worst I have to do is boot a livecd, recompile the kernel with the new driver, and i'm done.
With windows and different ide controllers, I need to reinstall over the top, or at worst, completely reinstall. (There are other methods if your old motherboard still works, but it still takes hours of work and doesn't work most of the time)
They would however allow the patenting of
"Finding the posterior with one or both hands" and
"Pouring urine from a piece of footwear" in a snap.
Well for a start, jelly (or jello for the US) is solid at room temperature, or what do you think comes out of the packet?
You dissolve it in hot water (which breaks up the bonds holding the gelatin together) then put in in the fridge to cool it back down quicker... BY stirring as it cools, the gelatin molecules get tangled again. The water is left trapped between the long gelatin strands once it returns to being solid. The water is what makes it wobble.
That's why such code usually ends up in libraries, under the LGPL so it can be used without being embedded into your current software.
Most GPL code I've seen that people wanted to use was complete apps, that they just wanted to use virtually lock stock and barrel, with a prettier frontend on it that melded with the rest of their code.
If you're not prepared to abide by copyright that the creator of the GPL'd work wanted, then why should I abide by copyright on your work?
We already pay a flat tax for BBC radio and TV in the UK. Many feel that this is worthwhile, and produces better content than the lowest common demomination pap that commercial companies often have to churn out (Fox news vs BBC news being an excellent example)
That's not to say the commercial system can't produce good shows, take (new) Battlestar Galactica and Firefly; oh, but firefly was cancelled because it didn't make enough money and didn't fit into a crappy schedule.
The answer isn't that we should just shut up and pay ever increasing prices (through subscription fees and ever increasing adverts) because our commercial lords and masters have bought laws that allow them to do so.
Perhaps the public should start charging the media companies for the air they use, the broadcast spectrum they take up, and the existing culture they repackage and sell to us over and over again.
I have a right of free speech to sing a song I heard, or retell a story, or even use my camera to take a photo of a building and give it away.
Copyright takes away my free speech, and the thing I'm supposed to get in return is a bigger, improved public domain culture after the orginial creator has had a period of exclusive profit. Not a permanent monopoly for the already wealthy.
Many countries already pay taxes to support art galleries, theatres and museums. Why should 'modern' culture not be organised along similar lines, where I pay a flat tax and get to share the results of that money as I choose?
We pay taxes for things that are of benefit to all (roads, defence, education) on the basis that it's more cost effective if everyone pays, even if some benefit more than others.
Why are culture, entertainment and education through the broadcast medium inherantly less important than other functions of government?
And no, private enterprise is not automatically better than government run organisations. They have a greater drive towards efficiency (theoretically) but they cream off a chunk of the income as profit for investors. Privatization of the rail network, of the phone system, of the electricity system, have all lead to a lot of money for a small number of people, and a worse service for the customers using it.
Me? I like having a system where people can create or report without worrying about the heavy hand of corporate sponsors cancelling anything that creates the slightest controversy, or that doesn't make a massive profit after 6 weeks.
Having worked in a variety of big, small and medium business (part of it as an outsourced IT support company, so I worked with a lot of CEO's) I'd have to say, management's knowledge of IT varies across all sectors.
You can get the CEO you describe in all size of companies, and you can get clueful ones who are especially hot on IT BECAUSE the business is small and if they're suffering a big problem their business can under very quickly.
I'd say being multiskilled, and more importantly, able to learn new things quickly, is becoming a key requirement if you want to go far in IT.
If you're looking for a server, go for debian (but then you run bsd, so why switch?) If it's a desktop, use ubuntu (or kubuntu for kde), as the package selection is more orientated for a desktop setup (and more often updated), but you can still use pretty much the full range of normal debian packages as well.
Another honourable mention goes to gentoo for the desktop, it's got a huge range of ebuilds and portage (package management program) is very similar to BSD's ports system. Plus, the advice forum and wiki's beat the hell out of every other distro i've run, wheras debian is pretty much the opposite.
And does it play WMA DRM'd files? no.
I'd say the biggest problem is not the bundling of windows media player, but the bundling of the drm codecs.
Say you run a website offering music and video downloads. 90% of your customers are guaranteed to have WMA and WMV capability, complete with DRM. Why force your customers to jump through hoops installing some other codec, and have less 'protection' to boot?
Fast forward 5 years. Almost all media is WMA and WMV only. To play it, you need windows. Linux and mac users are locked out of this massive market. You can already see it happening, with only one major music store for the non-windows market, itunes (allofmp3 may not be illegal at the moment, but it probably will be soon)
So by bunding windows media player and its codecs with every copy of windows, they indirectly reinforce their OS monopoly via the media market.
That's illegal abuse of an existing monopoly, and why the EU tried to remove the link between windows and guaranteed availability of the DRM codecs. I suspect it's doomed to failure, but I'm stumped on how else they could have tried to prevent yet another market becoming illegally dominated by microsoft via bundling.
I did have a look at this about 18 months ago, and media player is a slippery little sucker to block; it's a bit like internet explorer in that the .exe is just a wrapper to the libraries, but numerous programs still rely on the .exe being runnable - and if you don't block the .exe but just hide the shortcuts (students have a mandatory fixed roaming profile they can't change, and they can't install software) it's still possible to fire it up from another app.
Still, as you say, group policies is probably the way to go and I will have another look at it. If the windows media player hooks still aren't remappable, then it rather defeats the EU objective of having a WMP free windows xp, so I guess I'll see how broken it is when I trial it.
I would, but
a) we're using NT, not active directory, so the group policies are somewhat more primitive
b) microsoft office and encarta, to name but two apps, rely on windows media player for media content so disabling access breaks them too in all sorts of nasty ways.
I'm really hoping I'll be able to use another media app to handle the media player hooks with windows xp N, but I won't know for sure until I try it.
I'll certainly be investigating installing this on our school network machines when we move to windows xp (we're now licenced, but running windows 2000 still as we've only recently upgraded the last of the legacy machines that only had win2k oem licences)
Right now, the students use windows media player, and the integrated search to constantly listen to online radio and browse lyrics etc, completely crippling our bandwidth. A lot of the material is not suitable for the pre-teen kids in the prep school, either. Add all the scripting vulnerabilities in WMP, along with the DRM, and I'd be very happy to get rid of it and its problems. Oh, and they're constantly filling up their userspace with music ripped in WMP from CD's and then trying to look all innocent when the quota system warnings run out and their account gets disabled.
Getting rid of WMP is really tricky on vanilla windows xp, and breaks all sorts of other things.
I for one will be testing windows xp n with media player classic and/or quintessential player as the alternative that still lets the computers be used for education, rather than the distracting entertainment boxes they usually end up being in lessons.
The fact that it might slow the massive growth of windows media player codecs only on music websites is no bad thing either.
I know. It's still not as secure as an all Linux environment. But, I'm curious. Does Linux have anything comparable? I honestly don't know and I'd appreciate it if anyone could let me know.
There's zenworks from novell/suse, and redhat network used to work somewhat similar for their enterprise distro - not used redhat for years though.
Still, with windows on the desktop, WSUS is definitely a big step forward, and a real improvement from SUS or just auto-update.
I have to admit, I've been running the wsus beta for a month or so, and it's a lot better than SUS.
Basically, you point the workstations at the server with a GPO or registry patch as before, but the server setup is much improved.
Machines are listed by name, and you can assign them to manually assigned groups on the server, or flag the group they should use on the machine itself.
You can approve individual patches by group, or individually if you wish, and can list the known applied patches and due patches by machine, as well as pull out other basic info like motherboard id, mac address, and windows version.
The nicest bits for me are:
- That you can see at a glance how long since machines last reported their status, which can help identify an unreported dead or problematic machine in a large lab, and very out of date ones are flagged
- reports listing what machines still need updates, or indeed what patches are still to be rolled out
- whether there's unapproved updates that need attention; you can auto-approve different grades of patch if you so wish.
- properly handles superceded patches
- you can spot when a machine clone hasn't been reassigned it's correct name as the old one stops checking for updates, and you get a new machine with the 'wrong' random name.
As a school, we don't have a large budget for patch/machine management so WSUS adds some much needed patch management to our hand-rolled pxe clone system (based on pxe linux boot + partimage)
The only really annoying things are the windows 2000 server, ms-sql server or sqlde minimum requirements, and of course IE for management. I tend to just vnc into the server and run IE from there, as it's simpler than wine on my gentoo workstation.
Which is exactly what has happened with e-mail -- in certain cases it can behave in a very un-mail-like way. This behavior is being exploited to confuse users into doing the wrong thing. You can try to educate people into not doing the wrong thing, but as long as the underlying metaphor is "mail" it will be very hard to make significant progress.
Actually, I'd argue that email works in a very mail like way, even when it's being used against the recipient.
Say someone sends you a letter. You open it, read the pretty coloured card inside, and toss it in the bin. Thing is, you are now infected (through your skin and breathing ultra fine dust) with the infectious agent that was impregnated on the card. You now spread that virus to your family and friends by close contact (spreading on a lan).
Possible, but not likely, right?
Now imagine where 10%-20% of your letters are like this, and 60% more of them are the worst kind of fraudulent advertising and hardcore porn adverts. (numbers pulled from my server logs)
Imagine that people can send you these virus infected letters anonymously, with virtually no chance of them being caught, and even if they are, there's virtually no law's against what they're doing. Oh, and make it so sending all this crap to you is free for the sender, and is paid for by the recipient.
Think our human friendly postal mail system would survive like that? Or would it start to collapse from fear of hidden viruses, and dead postman from carrying the huge sacks of junkmail to each door every day.
In the end of the day, it's not the over-trusting user, it's not the post system that allows anonymity, it's not the lack of enforcable laws from the government, it's not the low cost of sending that causes the problems - it's all of them combined.
Altering the user metaphor for the way they interact with their computers won't make the problem go away; we need a multipronged approach, and user education to not do bloody stupid things is part of that.
To draw a metaphor; sharp knives are dangerous objects. If an adult stabbed themselves in the eye with one, because someone left a post-it note on it telling them to do so, could we legimately blame the user for being a bloody idiot? (well, as well as the post-it note leaver).
I also work in IT, and when I install windows xp, I certainly have to install the video drivers (whether it's nvidia, ati or intel). I often have to install the wireless drivers. I regularly have to install various motherboard drivers, especially sound card drivers. SATA drivers I need to provide on floppy before I even boot. And don't get me started on windows update.
I can install a linux distro like SuSE, and it's all configured and ready to play, with the exception of wireless.
Fortunately, I whip up an XP ghost image with all the drivers installed whenever we buy new kit, so I don't often have to install windows off an OEM cd. But the idea that windows xp comes with all the drivers you need is laughable.
I can break into your house just by smashing a window. If you ever get burgled, I can just claim "Well, if he didn't want me breaking in he should have had steel shutters over his doors and windows with bank-grade locks." Then the police say "that's alright then, no law broken here, hhawk shouldn't have thought that a glass window was adequate protection against being burgled."
Would that be a nice society to live in?
Windows isn't very secure, which is a reason not to use it; but that's still not justification for people hacking into it, and getting away with it.
I buy my entertainment "used" whenever possible.
Which is precisely why media companies are starting trying to shut down the second-hand market.
One of the 'side effects' of DRM with registration is that it removes the right of resale.
Good example in the games world are Valve games using steam, like counter-strike and half-life 2, which force you to register your serial number permanently with an online account. Once that's done, you can't resell it. Windows, with it's number stuck to the side of the case and online activation make it impossible to resell just the software.
iTunes music store too; good luck trying to find someone able to resell a track from them, by making apple change the 'ownership' tag on the music.
In 20 years time, there won't be much of a second hand market left.
They're becoming increasingly common. I don't buy many DVDs for that very reason, but Master and Commander, Finding Neverland, Vera Drake and Shrek 2 all have them.
They're damned annoying. It's not just the increasingly lengthy theft 'warning' but literally about 5 minutes of unskippable ads every time you play them.
Same problem as always with market forces instead of regulation; it relies on an informed and interested public allowing the problem to affect their purchasing decision.
In this case, if your credit details get stolen from a dumpster, leading to identity 'theft'; how do you know which company in the last 6 months allowed your information to leak? Assuming you do find out, how do other people find out that information, since it's not exactly going to be large news?
(our lead national story today; joe bloggs lost $200 when company X put his credit details in the garbage, leading to identity theft and an extra charge on his credit card. Can company X survive this devastating blow to it's consumer confidence?)
So instead of putting a small burden on all businesses to buy and use a shredder for financial documents, we add a significant information gathering burden to all buyers to add to the rest of the information they have to find out about their business (do they harm dolphins? do they pollute more? do they hire third world children for virtually nothing? etc etc)
We're also assuming the business with bad business practises has effective and equal competition in it's area, which people can go to.
Market forces are useful for many things, but protecting customers from unethical business practises isn't one of them. Regulation is a far more effective method, as opposed to businesses dumping the costs that regulation would cause into an external cost on the rest of the economy. (time for customers, insurance costs for banks and credit institutions to cover fraud losses)
Anonymity is either something you have, or you do not.
It's only a day after one of the biggest anonymous sources finally outed himself after 30 years. Imagine if Nixon had had the power to find out the identity of Deep Throat, and the identity of the people who provided the information he confirmed at the time. How much would he have got away with then?
And that is why, on balance, complete anonymity on the Internet is not a good idea. I have no problem with being anonymous for routine use, but if you can't even be identified in the face of overwhelming evidence of a crime, backed by an order from the lawful authorities, something's wrong.
Who decides what is a legitimate use of anonymity?
The government? If you don't like the Nixon example, pick any repressive and corrupt government, and give them the power to control or ban anonymous programs that people use for free speech - which is what you're talking about.
Such software (freenet being the best example) by definition allows the distribution of material that some people don't think should be published. This includes chinese dissidents, or operation clambake (the fight against scientology) - or copyright infringement.
Such is the nature of anonymity - you either take the bad with the good, or you try to get rid of anonymity altogether, and even then you'll just force people underground.
Copyright infringment is a good example of this, in fact. Large numbers of people do not feel the copyright laws are fair or legitimate, or they'd abide by them. Since governments are trying to crack down and enforce the laws, they just end up pushing the lawbreakers further and further away from enforcement. The government's only real option is to ban the software altogether, and thus allow people to be convicted for trying to be anonymous, regardless of what they were actually up to.