... err, identity, do they surreptitiously suck from the bones of my PC for the privilege of using it? How much of my psychology and behavior and preferences will they then know even before I do? Does this tasty little bit of video-ripping candy in any way suggest that this is no longer the same company whose majority shareholder was Lucifer?
Perhaps this means that the Amazon society of myth and cheesy science fiction can now take shape? Men won't be needed: women will simply select the DNA of Watson or Venter, add a little randomization from a palette of desirable eugenic traits, insert it into cloned sperm, and voila, one man-less designer baby coming up.
It's all a matter of degree (and perhaps intent). There is not, and never has been, any absolute. If this woman doesn't want her cat or books to be seen, then she shouldn't be so careless as to have a window in that wall to expose them.
Did anyone else notice that all of the promoted extensions but the last one seem to be the work of commercial enterprises, and apparently tied in some way to their for-profit motives? Is it possible that the author or security-hacks.com got some perks or quid pro quo for the journalistic promotion of these extensions and the commercial entities behind them?
I'm often too skeptical for my own britches, but that also why I do in fact pay attention to my bank's "sitekey" and why I don't these products to avoid phishing attacks. All but the last one just seem to be trading one form of ignorance - of phishing - for another - of capitalism.
If the user is "insecure", then so too will the browser be. Anyone who would update software from a public wi-fi connection is in dire need of an education and asking for trouble. As far as extensions go, LESS IS MORE, as in beer: the browser will load faster, be less prone to memory leaks and XUL conflicts, and as the article suggests more secure to boot. Considerable skepticism should be given to any extension not found at the Mozilla site; if it were me I wouldn't install it, for the reasons above and unless it is indispensable and I was completely certain of the integrity of the author and site.
"even Microsoft suggests that developers put that dreck in a folder in X:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data or \Local Settings."
A suggestion isn't much of a standard, even coming from Microsoft, is it? Especially not when developers have an economic incentive to continue using the Registry. Use of the Registry by applications makes less coding for devs and makes the apps harder to pirate or "migrate".
That last isn't talked about much, but think about it: if the entire app and all its dependencies was located in a single folder, "pirating" it would be as easy as copying that folder. Once upon a time, in fact, that's exactly what people did. Now we have this Registry and all these "shared" DLLs (which in fact are rarely shared) in./System32, and other dependencies randomly scattered in X:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data or \Local Settings.
That's exactly what Vertisoft's RemoveIt did, once upon a time, and did it remarkably well. Then Quarterdeck bought the company and dumped the product in the can so they could promote CleanSweep (another acquired product) instead.
That was amazing: parent's comment got modded-up as "insightful", even though the "insightful" comments he referenced were completely fictitious and meant to be funny. People moderating are just skimming the comments and not even fully investigating before they mod it this way or that?
I wish there were a relevant Snopes article I could quote.
You're missing most of the point here, which is not about failure and backups and recovery: it's about independence and flexibility. As I said, we *should* be able to pick up an app with its configuration and all our customizations and simply move it around, whether that's within the same OS and FS or to another system entirely. We *should* also be able to do that with UI and GUI customizations to the OS and OS utilities, as well.
It's precisely because of the Windows Registry and developers' utilization of and dependence upon the godforsaken thing that we can't do that. Once upon a time, pre-Windows 95, it actually was possible, and still is with other operating systems.
It's precisely because of this Registry stupidity that utilities like PC Magazine's COA and Vertisoft's RemoveIt (which actually had awesome app archiving and migration abilities) came into existence. In the absence of the Registry they wouldn't have even been necessary. They have no Linux equivalents at all.
You've been so blinded by the 30-foot-diameter Registry tree blocking your path that you've been completely missing the entire forest of possibilities beyond it.
"It's pretty easy to dump some keys from the Registry if you need to."
It's NOT easy, damned near impossible, if the OS is Windows NT/2K/XP/2003 and isn't bootable. Even if the file system and structure is fine and the Registry hive files are otherwise accessible, there's no means known to me that would allow extracting data from them.
I've had this happen to me more than once, where the OS got trashed, and I'd have rather just started from scratch, BUT I had a ton of customizations for apps and the OS buried in the Registry which was then inaccessible, and I wound up having to tinker with things to get that install running again. Were it not for the nature of the Registry, I should have been able to still get at all that data and simply migrate it over to a new install. In Linux I could do that with an app: just basically copy it with its config and customizations to another OS install. I *can* do that with a handful of renegade maverick anti-authoritarian apps in Windows, like Proxomitron, but they've become pretty rare over the years.
That is what I call truly monolithic, when even though a data file is accessible it's still useless to me unless a bunch of conditions have been met (by booting that OS Install). Even your DB analogy doesn't compare to this, because (assuming the DB is intact, not the issue here) it's always relatively trivial to move it around and extract data from it. Not so with the Registry if you haven't booted from it.
OTOH, if that same data was stored in READABLE files distinct for each application, then assuming the FS is okay it's trivial to copy the data out and migrate or back it up. Like in Linux and virtually every other sensible OS.
The Registry is monolithic, for one thing. The app config data that gets stored in it is not easily backed-up WITH the app and separate from everything else, whether to archive or migrate to another system. There are plenty of other reasons, but you seem experienced enough to already know what they are.
What you're talking about has little to do with the installation process, and much to do with the applications themselves: you're suggesting creating a configuration standard that doesn't use or depend upon the Registry, instead storing configuration and state data in something non-monolithic and independent like, oh I don't know, an INI or CONF file?
It's hardly a new idea; in the past I'd toyed with trying to start a grassroots movement I called Windindin (Windows Data Independence Initiative), that would push for Win32 developers to adopt standards that would deprecate use of the Registry and place config and state data and even user files in predictable standardized places, to make them easy to find AND easy to collectively back-up.
Sounds great, right? Not gonna happen, for a couple reasons: the de facto standards-setting ability of Microsoft and its overwhelming influence with commercial developers, and because the ONLY group it would truly benefit is consumers, the user. Where's the economic incentive if consumers don't even know they need this, much less come to the point of beating down doors demanding it?
The reason the Registry gained traction is because (a) Microsoft is the 800-pound OS gorilla and (b) it actually benefits software developers. The gorilla is still alive and kicking, and commercial software CxOs and project managers are greedy lazy bastards who won't do the right thing if it happens to make their job more difficult.
... was car theft such a huge problem as it is today? Model T's, remember, basically had NO complete enclosure and no security. Also remember that cars weren't so universal back then; not everyone had one. Did people steal them with the same frequency that cars are stolen today? Since they were open, presumably their owners were smart enough to take with them anything of remote value.
Is it possible that we need all this security for cars because the way we use them has changed? If we hadn't decided to give them glass enclosures and trunks and install in them "expensive" stereo sound systems, would we even have a significant theft problem? If we simply remade them back into basic transportation, rather than apartments on wheels, would we see a precipitous drop in the need for things like Nissan's I-Keys?
This post has a greater abundance of both poor grammar and spelling than I can recall in any post that I've read in at least the previous year. The grammar is so poor that one or two sentences are nearly unintelligible. Nice proofreading and editing, there, Mr. ScuttleMonkey.
... she won't be getting from radio stations. She won't see a dime of the royalty. It will all be siphoned off by the middlemen. The only dime she'll see is from getting paid by the RIAA and others to be their celebrity shill.
In spite of being a Mensa-smart guy, I couldn't comprehend exactly how this proposed process would work. I'm blaming it on a needlessly inept description by the author. The best I could visualize was something resembling a parity-bit reconstruction process.
I wish someone could translate this into a more comprehensible form.
Kyle Gann's blog article was interesting and insightful, but it was rife with so many abuses of spelling and grammar that I finally had to stop being helpful after the sixth paragraph; I had sent him e-mail when I found the first goof in the second paragraph, but after repeated follow-ups for each successive paragraph, I finally gave up. The man needs to have a proofreader for his blog, perhaps one of those who proofread his books?
If his blog article had been submitted to Wikipedia, it would have required considerable editing, though not for content and not by "cranks".
From the Top 20 Most Hotly Revised Articles (in the article):
1. Jesus 4. Nintendo revolution 10. Playstation 3
So Sony Playstations and Nintendo systems inspire almost as much evangelism as Jesus? Seems to me that both atheists and Christians ought to have a problem with that false idol worshipping.
... or clarify its service. Most significant, and luckily for Radu, is the fact that nowhere, on no page nor at any point in the process, do they warn or advise customers that their service will only function AS INTENDED from the Internet Explorer browser, and thus also by extension only from Windows. Further, the site also fails to clearly state what the actual intended method of use of their service is; nowhere is there any declaration prohibiting people from accessing or using the site in the manner(s) Radu has documented. None of that qualifying information is present anywhere on their site as of the date of this posting, 2007/05/21, 00:27 PDT. If I were Radu (or his lawyer), I would be archiving a current notarized copy of their site's relevant pages to document this fact.
IANAL, but I believe this might be a legal ace in the hole for Radu.
The message that people *should* be learning from the less-than-perfect transcription of speech recognition software, such as misunderstanding "I really admire your analysis" as "I really admire urinalysis", is that it's finally time for people to learn to SPEAK as well as write proper English, as opposed to speaking in ebonics or text-speak or some other hard-to-transcribe dialect. "Your" pronounced as "ur" is pretty damned difficult to interpret, without resorting to contextual analysis... which of course is the ONLY reason we humans can still understand each other at all. Does the story of the Tower of Babel ring a bell?
Nope, it's the treatment some pharmaceutical company is gonna sell me so that my GF has something to run her fingers through instead of giving me a scalp massage.
Slashdot Mirror
... err, identity, do they surreptitiously suck from the bones of my PC for the privilege of using it? How much of my psychology and behavior and preferences will they then know even before I do? Does this tasty little bit of video-ripping candy in any way suggest that this is no longer the same company whose majority shareholder was Lucifer?
Perhaps this means that the Amazon society of myth and cheesy science fiction can now take shape? Men won't be needed: women will simply select the DNA of Watson or Venter, add a little randomization from a palette of desirable eugenic traits, insert it into cloned sperm, and voila, one man-less designer baby coming up.
It's all a matter of degree (and perhaps intent). There is not, and never has been, any absolute. If this woman doesn't want her cat or books to be seen, then she shouldn't be so careless as to have a window in that wall to expose them.
Did anyone else notice that all of the promoted extensions but the last one seem to be the work of commercial enterprises, and apparently tied in some way to their for-profit motives? Is it possible that the author or security-hacks.com got some perks or quid pro quo for the journalistic promotion of these extensions and the commercial entities behind them?
I'm often too skeptical for my own britches, but that also why I do in fact pay attention to my bank's "sitekey" and why I don't these products to avoid phishing attacks. All but the last one just seem to be trading one form of ignorance - of phishing - for another - of capitalism.
If the user is "insecure", then so too will the browser be. Anyone who would update software from a public wi-fi connection is in dire need of an education and asking for trouble. As far as extensions go, LESS IS MORE, as in beer: the browser will load faster, be less prone to memory leaks and XUL conflicts, and as the article suggests more secure to boot. Considerable skepticism should be given to any extension not found at the Mozilla site; if it were me I wouldn't install it, for the reasons above and unless it is indispensable and I was completely certain of the integrity of the author and site.
"even Microsoft suggests that developers put that dreck in a folder in X:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data or \Local Settings."
./System32, and other dependencies randomly scattered in X:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data or \Local Settings.
A suggestion isn't much of a standard, even coming from Microsoft, is it? Especially not when developers have an economic incentive to continue using the Registry. Use of the Registry by applications makes less coding for devs and makes the apps harder to pirate or "migrate".
That last isn't talked about much, but think about it: if the entire app and all its dependencies was located in a single folder, "pirating" it would be as easy as copying that folder. Once upon a time, in fact, that's exactly what people did. Now we have this Registry and all these "shared" DLLs (which in fact are rarely shared) in
Wonderful layers of obfuscation.
That's exactly what Vertisoft's RemoveIt did, once upon a time, and did it remarkably well. Then Quarterdeck bought the company and dumped the product in the can so they could promote CleanSweep (another acquired product) instead.
That was amazing: parent's comment got modded-up as "insightful", even though the "insightful" comments he referenced were completely fictitious and meant to be funny . People moderating are just skimming the comments and not even fully investigating before they mod it this way or that?
I wish there were a relevant Snopes article I could quote.
You're missing most of the point here, which is not about failure and backups and recovery: it's about independence and flexibility. As I said, we *should* be able to pick up an app with its configuration and all our customizations and simply move it around, whether that's within the same OS and FS or to another system entirely. We *should* also be able to do that with UI and GUI customizations to the OS and OS utilities, as well.
It's precisely because of the Windows Registry and developers' utilization of and dependence upon the godforsaken thing that we can't do that. Once upon a time, pre-Windows 95, it actually was possible, and still is with other operating systems.
It's precisely because of this Registry stupidity that utilities like PC Magazine's COA and Vertisoft's RemoveIt (which actually had awesome app archiving and migration abilities) came into existence. In the absence of the Registry they wouldn't have even been necessary. They have no Linux equivalents at all.
You've been so blinded by the 30-foot-diameter Registry tree blocking your path that you've been completely missing the entire forest of possibilities beyond it.
"It's pretty easy to dump some keys from the Registry if you need to."
It's NOT easy, damned near impossible, if the OS is Windows NT/2K/XP/2003 and isn't bootable. Even if the file system and structure is fine and the Registry hive files are otherwise accessible, there's no means known to me that would allow extracting data from them.
I've had this happen to me more than once, where the OS got trashed, and I'd have rather just started from scratch, BUT I had a ton of customizations for apps and the OS buried in the Registry which was then inaccessible, and I wound up having to tinker with things to get that install running again. Were it not for the nature of the Registry, I should have been able to still get at all that data and simply migrate it over to a new install. In Linux I could do that with an app: just basically copy it with its config and customizations to another OS install. I *can* do that with a handful of renegade maverick anti-authoritarian apps in Windows, like Proxomitron, but they've become pretty rare over the years.
That is what I call truly monolithic, when even though a data file is accessible it's still useless to me unless a bunch of conditions have been met (by booting that OS Install). Even your DB analogy doesn't compare to this, because (assuming the DB is intact, not the issue here) it's always relatively trivial to move it around and extract data from it. Not so with the Registry if you haven't booted from it.
OTOH, if that same data was stored in READABLE files distinct for each application, then assuming the FS is okay it's trivial to copy the data out and migrate or back it up. Like in Linux and virtually every other sensible OS.
The Registry is monolithic, for one thing. The app config data that gets stored in it is not easily backed-up WITH the app and separate from everything else, whether to archive or migrate to another system. There are plenty of other reasons, but you seem experienced enough to already know what they are.
What you're talking about has little to do with the installation process, and much to do with the applications themselves: you're suggesting creating a configuration standard that doesn't use or depend upon the Registry, instead storing configuration and state data in something non-monolithic and independent like, oh I don't know, an INI or CONF file?
It's hardly a new idea; in the past I'd toyed with trying to start a grassroots movement I called Windindin (Windows Data Independence Initiative), that would push for Win32 developers to adopt standards that would deprecate use of the Registry and place config and state data and even user files in predictable standardized places, to make them easy to find AND easy to collectively back-up.
Sounds great, right? Not gonna happen, for a couple reasons: the de facto standards-setting ability of Microsoft and its overwhelming influence with commercial developers, and because the ONLY group it would truly benefit is consumers, the user. Where's the economic incentive if consumers don't even know they need this, much less come to the point of beating down doors demanding it?
The reason the Registry gained traction is because (a) Microsoft is the 800-pound OS gorilla and (b) it actually benefits software developers. The gorilla is still alive and kicking, and commercial software CxOs and project managers are greedy lazy bastards who won't do the right thing if it happens to make their job more difficult.
... was car theft such a huge problem as it is today? Model T's, remember, basically had NO complete enclosure and no security. Also remember that cars weren't so universal back then; not everyone had one. Did people steal them with the same frequency that cars are stolen today? Since they were open, presumably their owners were smart enough to take with them anything of remote value.
Is it possible that we need all this security for cars because the way we use them has changed? If we hadn't decided to give them glass enclosures and trunks and install in them "expensive" stereo sound systems, would we even have a significant theft problem? If we simply remade them back into basic transportation, rather than apartments on wheels, would we see a precipitous drop in the need for things like Nissan's I-Keys?
I frankly have never met a statue that did have an opinion, current or otherwise.
This post has a greater abundance of both poor grammar and spelling than I can recall in any post that I've read in at least the previous year. The grammar is so poor that one or two sentences are nearly unintelligible. Nice proofreading and editing, there, Mr. ScuttleMonkey.
... she won't be getting from radio stations. She won't see a dime of the royalty. It will all be siphoned off by the middlemen. The only dime she'll see is from getting paid by the RIAA and others to be their celebrity shill.
In spite of being a Mensa-smart guy, I couldn't comprehend exactly how this proposed process would work. I'm blaming it on a needlessly inept description by the author. The best I could visualize was something resembling a parity-bit reconstruction process.
I wish someone could translate this into a more comprehensible form.
Kyle Gann's blog article was interesting and insightful, but it was rife with so many abuses of spelling and grammar that I finally had to stop being helpful after the sixth paragraph; I had sent him e-mail when I found the first goof in the second paragraph, but after repeated follow-ups for each successive paragraph, I finally gave up. The man needs to have a proofreader for his blog, perhaps one of those who proofread his books?
If his blog article had been submitted to Wikipedia, it would have required considerable editing, though not for content and not by "cranks".
"... possibly define a false one?"
Duh: as ANY one.
From the Top 20 Most Hotly Revised Articles (in the article):
1. Jesus
4. Nintendo revolution
10. Playstation 3
So Sony Playstations and Nintendo systems inspire almost as much evangelism as Jesus? Seems to me that both atheists and Christians ought to have a problem with that false idol worshipping.
... or clarify its service. Most significant, and luckily for Radu, is the fact that nowhere, on no page nor at any point in the process, do they warn or advise customers that their service will only function AS INTENDED from the Internet Explorer browser, and thus also by extension only from Windows. Further, the site also fails to clearly state what the actual intended method of use of their service is; nowhere is there any declaration prohibiting people from accessing or using the site in the manner(s) Radu has documented. None of that qualifying information is present anywhere on their site as of the date of this posting, 2007/05/21, 00:27 PDT. If I were Radu (or his lawyer), I would be archiving a current notarized copy of their site's relevant pages to document this fact.
IANAL, but I believe this might be a legal ace in the hole for Radu.
The message that people *should* be learning from the less-than-perfect transcription of speech recognition software, such as misunderstanding "I really admire your analysis" as "I really admire urinalysis", is that it's finally time for people to learn to SPEAK as well as write proper English, as opposed to speaking in ebonics or text-speak or some other hard-to-transcribe dialect. "Your" pronounced as "ur" is pretty damned difficult to interpret, without resorting to contextual analysis... which of course is the ONLY reason we humans can still understand each other at all. Does the story of the Tower of Babel ring a bell?
... holographic storage will be soooo much better for saving pr0n.
... dead wrong?
Nope, it's the treatment some pharmaceutical company is gonna sell me so that my GF has something to run her fingers through instead of giving me a scalp massage.