Blocking the use of property is not legally the same as depriving someone of it (although, admittedly, practically-speaking it comes pretty close).
Quite the contrary.
Look into the doctrine of "Partial Taking". For instance: If a zoning change reduces the value of property, or rent control prevents a landlord from obtaining a fair rent, part of the value has been "taken" and the owner is entitled to compensation.
A part of the value of property is the ability to use or exchange it in a timely manner. Blocking that is a partial taking.
If this were a violation of the fifth amendment, so would the IRS putting a lien on someone's property for tax purposes.
Nope.
In the latter case the IRS is saying: "We claim this belongs to us. We have started the process of proving this in court and a judge agrees that we are likely to prevail on this claim. So you can't just run away with it (without substituting something of equivalent value) until the outcome has been determined."
Can add some hiss to what? To the perfect Hi-Fi quality you are expected to get out of a century old phonograph?
To the level of his that the recording itself actually contains.
Old recordings actually did a very good job of making a record of the actual sound. But dust on and damage to the surface produced artifacts in the output signal when played with a needle.
Optical techniques can identify the actual flat surface of the groove and ignore the artifacts. But digital approaches to performing this scan and/or encoding the result add errors from quantization and digitizer nonlinearity, which appears as added hiss - the amount depending on the resolution and quality of the converter and/or scanner.
I tried to use open Office 2.2 writer and calc at work as an office/excel replacement:
- Open Office broke hyperlinks in a design document. (Had to revert it and redo the edits in real MS office.)
- Open Office also didn't format and print correctly, making the boundaries of tables invisible in output. (So I couldn't even use it to just READ the document.)
- Calc seems to recalculate the entire spreadsheet when any change is made to any cell, rather than computing dependencies. This makes any edit on the document I was working on glacial - half a minute or more for EVERY change to render before it responded to keystrokes again.
- Calc also lost a bunch of labeling for graphs. (Gone from the spreadsheet for several updates before I figured out that it had happened.)
I would much prefer to use FOSS (and encourage the company to get away from spear-phishing targets). Instead I end up using true Microsoft office tools on a Windows server over the LAN via rdesktop. B-(
Get it fixed, guys.
(And I'm sorry, but I have too much work to do at the "day job" - long into the night - to fix it myself.)
Now in a future where you have wireless connectivity available to all what is their to stop a company from releasing a small gadget like an iPhone minus the phone. Instead of a "PHONE" you just have a simple hand held device that accesses the internet, you then use this device with some free service like a TeamSpeak to chat with all your buddies. With this method all you are paying for is wireless internet access,...
Welcome to "The Convergence".
And the nightmare scenario for the old telcos, wired and wireless.
But to get there we need two things:
- Companies providing wireless internet connectivity AND cellphone service must be prevented from blocking VoIP packets on the internet side of the service to force callers onto their extra-cost cellphone service.
- Companies providing Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) service to those who haven't made the jump must be required to connect phone calls to/from PSTN/VoIP bridges.
It's not clear from the article which of these disconnects T-Mobile is forcing onto Truephone. But at least the courts are on the case (pun intended) and so far coming to the correct decisions.
They're supposed to be setting up mechanisms for cooperation. But all too often they become political battlegrounds, where each member organization tries to warp the standard to make things easier for itself and to sabotage its competition.
Now we have Microsoft going a step further, not just trying to get its own stuff approved as a standard, but packing the committee just before the vote.
Imagine his wealth...if he had patented the virus.
His patent would have been challenged due to prior art. (One I know about is John Walker's "Pervading Animal" in 1975, although there are claims of earlier stuff.)
What's the point of electing people if you can't delegate to them some of the decision making.
1) On some issues elected officials, just by being elected officials, have (or perceive) a conflict-of-interest with the voters and thus have a strong incentive to vote in non-representative ways. (Example: Raising taxes.)
2) There are a large number of issues. It's often impossible to find (or elect) a candidate that has the same opinions on all the important issues as the people he represents. In that case the candidate is elected on the basis of some common set of very important issues. Then the electorate can override the legislature on those issues where the body as a whole is non-representative.
3) Sometimes there are important and divisive issues where the politicians don't want to take the flack for their own position or where the politicians know the makeup of the legislature is not representative. They can send these directly to the voters and take no personal flack, retaining their seats if they otherwise act in their constituents' interest.
The representatives do the bulk of the day-to-day stuff but when something close and important comes up or the legislature gets out of hand a direct poll is less of a "game of telephone" than having the representatives try to interpret the "will of the people".
Meanwhile, all this stuff is at the STATE level. The federal government doesn't have these mechanisms. (The closest they have is when they delegate important issues - such as constitutional amendments and interim legislative replacement appointments - to the state legislatures or governors.)
Then there was the time IBM instrumented a mainframe to determine what instructions were heavily used so they could focus their optimize-the-microcode effort on them.
They found one particular instruction that accounted for some exceedingly large fraction of the execution time. So they went to work on the microcode and doubled its speed. Then they deployed the new microcode and measured the application performance, expecting to see a big improvement.
It didn't change a bit.
After a little more research they discovered they'd optimized the idle task's wait loop.
= = = =
Collecting data can be useful. But making good decisions based on it requires wisdom and insight.
The project hopes to answer questions such as 'What is the typical monitor resolution of a GIMP user?' and 'Is the GIMP used primarily for photo editing or drawing?'"
Looks to me like they're about to fall into the fallacy that caused Daimler-Chrysler to do a redesign of the Jeep line that killed their market.
The marketing department looked at what fraction of SUVs were actually used off-road. They came to the conclusion that it was small. So they redesigned their line to be more comfortable on-road at great cost to its off-road performance.
Turns out that a significant fraction of their market was people who NEEDED the off-road capability - and had the resources to pay for it, reliably buying cars, year after year, through all economic cycles.
Jeep stopped being the car they needed and became another clone of the rest of the market: "Mall Terrain Vehicles" that LOOK like an off-road car but are really just a funny-looking small/high van that qualifies as a "truck" to escape the fleet mileage regulations. Their guaranteed market went elsewhere and they were in head-to-head competition with a slew of vehicles over which they had no advantage.
Similarly, Coke looked at all the people buying Pepsi, saw that they were younger and that Pepsi's main difference was that it was sweeter, and replaced Coke with New Coke, which was sweeter yet. Result: People who drank Coke because they liked a less-sweet drink switched to Pepsi.
And then there was the high-ranking officer in WW II who spent months counting all the bullet holes on the returning bombers, then did a big presentation on how those areas should have armor added. At the end of his presentation a lower-ranking officer asked "Shouldn't we, instead, add more armor to those areas that are only lightly holed? After all, this sample represents only the planes that came back."
= = =
I think the same thing could happen here: Paying attention to what people do a lot of just focuses on what you're already doing right - at the cost of ignoring the things that people do occasionally, or only some people do, but which they need to have. Further, the things they do rarely may be used rarely specifically BECAUSE they're hard to use and the interface needs improvement.
Is all this DRM on BlueRay and HD-DVD optional? Ie. if I were to release a movie...
On HD DVD, yes the DRM is optional. There have already been a few HD DVDs released without AACS.
On Blu-ray, no. The spec requires you to use (and pay big $$$ for) at least AACS in order to create pressed discs (although BD+ is optional)....
If that's correct it's the end of the format wars:
- A flood of low-budget porn is made for HD DVD. (Only high-budget stuff can use Blu-ray.)
- As happened in Betamax/VHS, the porn drives the purchase of players. HD DVD players become pervasive.
- HD DVD wins.
* execute native code, possibly to patch an otherwise insecure system.
But i have to think... If it has hardware access(or can run native code) what's to say someone wont make a disk that has a BD+ program that aids in the hacking?
They're building a player (and player software) that silently loads and runs executables from the DVD with sufficient authority to inspect the machine's guts and patch the OS. Then they're licensing (i.e. distributing) this technology to anyone who wants to make and sell Blu-ray content (and even if the content maker didn't license it, it will run any executables he installs on his disks).
Sounds like a Blu-ray version of the Sony Rootkit debacle is inevitable.
Not to mention counterfeit movies loaded with malware. (Crooks rarely stop at breaking just one law.)
= = = =
Unlike Microsoft, these people are explicitly building a product BASED on compromising the security of its users. Such misuse is readily foreseeable. I can just hear the lawyers gearing up for the product-liability suits.
This architecture raises "defective by design" to a whole new level.
however the test-hardwares of the other DB systems are somewhat different
Which makes the results pretty much useless.
Not necessarily.
It's essentially useless for separating out how much of the performance difference is the result of the software's design, implementation, and tuning versus how much is due to the platform differences.
But such tests CAN be used to examine the performance of competing ENTIRE SYSTEMS, to inform choices between them.
They say: "Oracle on does THIS well, PostgreSQL on can be tuned so it does THAT well on the same benchmark."
This lets administrators (presuming they have access to the hardware info) get a bang-for-the-buck comparison.
For the rest of us, the interesting point is that PostgreSQL, running on its team's idea of realistic hardware, can produce performance in the same ballpark as Oracle running on Oracle's choice of hardware.
(Whether the necessary remaining data (what are hardwares x and y? how was PostgreSQL tunde) is published now, later, or never, is a separate issue. B-) )
It wasn't the VT100... The 80-column limit comes from the size of an IBM punched card.
And a number of terminals before the Ann Arbor Terminals terminal and the VT100 (the two that became the ANSI standard) were 80 column wide as well.
And IIRC, generally the first 8 columns were used for sequence numbering, so you really had only 72 columns for coding.
Last 8, actually. While I don't know if the last-8-are-ID-and-sequence standard predates it, this was especially convenient for the IBM 70x(x) series, which had a 36-bit word. The console card reader was jumper-board programmed to read in the first 72 columns as 12 groups of 2 words and ignore the last 8.
Sequence numbers, of course, were vital for programs on punchcards -- if you dropped a tray of cards you had to have a way to put them back in order...
Yep. (Typically the first few columns were a deck ID in case more than one set of cards was in the tray, and the numbering might initially increment by 10 so you could insert lines without renumbering the deck (which meant copying it with some reader/punch/minimal-brain combo machine or a program).)
Imagine if Apple tried to copy the Xbox like they copied the Microsoft's smart phones. Their Apple hardware would be ripped off! Idiots.
You mean like how IBM's opening of the PC just as Apple closed theirs (with Lisa and the initial Mac)? And laughed all the way to the bank as the PC took over the world - with IBM selling "true blue" desktop hardware into the business market for years while the clones became the standard for home users.
The list of commands given make it sound more like a boot loader than a shell.
Yep. Sounds like a bootstrapping and image management firmware. (A pretty capable one, though. Not some minimalist system launcher.)
But isn't that what you WANT if you're trying to establish control of your machine? Why live within the old image's limitations if you can replace it?
Meanwhile this has lots of debugging and control tools suitable for tweaking and reverse-engineering the running image And that command list sure looks like it will let you load and launch a debugging tool that's more capable and give that tool even more control of the running system than is built into this firmware.
This machine is about to be opened, whether Apple likes it or not.
(I wouldn't be surprised if - at some level within the company - they really wanted it to be opened and only launched it in closed form so they could write contracts with networking companies and obtain FCC type approval. Plausible deniability at work.)
*i>Sorry, but your reasoning is flawed. A clock is right twice a day... because... the hours are always going to be between 1 and 12 or 24.
The same is not true of operating systems...
Agreed. And I had considered mentioning that, at the cost of diluting my point in the posting.
But I consider the chance Linux will fade away without EVER achieving enough desktop penetration that SOME year will be suitable for the appellation "Year of Linux Desktop" to be vanishingly small.
But once this percentage gets over, say 5-6%, linux will start having more traction, and will become more difficult/risky/costly to ignore.
IMHO Dell selling a Ubuntu-preloaded machine is not just a vendor having this epiphany, but also a force to promote it with other vendors.
People wanting to sell peripherals to users of Dell products now have a wakeup call about furnishing Linux support - along with a big-name company betting significant resources on a market being big enough to chase.
I hate to say it, but, some evidence suggests that obfuscation works if there is enough of it.
And it all depends on what is meant by "security".
The FCC could care less about how hard it is to recover the message or break the box. What they're concerned about is how hard it is to modify the box to operate outside their regulations.
It's a lot easier to modify the function of a peripheral if you have information about it - including commented source for the controlling driver - than if you don't. Don't believe it? Look how long it took - and still takes - to write blob-free fully-functional Linux drivers for winmodems, graphic accellerators, WiFi chipsets, etc. Listen to the cries for documentation from the driver and kernel development projects.
The FCC says "Thou shalt not publish the source code to the parts that control the radio." Since FOSS licenses REQUIRE the vendors to publish the source code, FOSS is thus effectively forbidden, since it would not be possible to abide by the software license and the FCC license simultaneously.
As for vetting the code, the FCC reserves the right to demand the source of ANY software - proprietary or not - used in a type-approved software-defined radio. They say they probably will rarely want to look, and will probably honor the company's request for confidentiality unless they have some reason not to, but they do demand it be forked over whenever they ask. So arguments that they can't vet it because it's closed are moot.
If your mainframe does ever fail (and surely more will as they get older), then you are truly screwed. By fail, I don't mean bits dropping here and there, I mean the mainframe falling over.
Mainframes have multiple instances of everything - including CPUs (and power feeds to them). They are designed so that entire running systems can be migrated off a failing or failed component and onto another. Depending on the company's configuration and disaster planning, the "other component" may be in another site rather than another part of the box or the computer room. Or the database may be coherently replicated across multiple sites and the applications designed so they can pick up where the crashed box left off. For less real-time applications a system at a backup site might be up the next work day with no penny unaccounted for.
Mainframe disaster recover scenarios generally include one or more where the entire city containing the primary system is effectively no longer there.
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Hmm, I wonder if I can paint my car with this and tell big oil to !$#@ off?
Nope. Not enough power.
But maybe if you paved a couple acres and painted THAT you could collect enough power to charge your car.
Blocking the use of property is not legally the same as depriving someone of it (although, admittedly, practically-speaking it comes pretty close).
Quite the contrary.
Look into the doctrine of "Partial Taking". For instance: If a zoning change reduces the value of property, or rent control prevents a landlord from obtaining a fair rent, part of the value has been "taken" and the owner is entitled to compensation.
A part of the value of property is the ability to use or exchange it in a timely manner. Blocking that is a partial taking.
If this were a violation of the fifth amendment, so would the IRS putting a lien on someone's property for tax purposes.
Nope.
In the latter case the IRS is saying: "We claim this belongs to us. We have started the process of proving this in court and a judge agrees that we are likely to prevail on this claim. So you can't just run away with it (without substituting something of equivalent value) until the outcome has been determined."
The language is ridiculously broad and does appear to violate the 5th amendment. ... This is absolutely begging to be abused.
It's an abuse on its face, regardless of any purported congressional authorization.
For some time the Democrats have been making noises about impeachment. This would appear to give them grounds.
Can add some hiss to what? To the perfect Hi-Fi quality you are expected to get out of a century old phonograph?
To the level of his that the recording itself actually contains.
Old recordings actually did a very good job of making a record of the actual sound. But dust on and damage to the surface produced artifacts in the output signal when played with a needle.
Optical techniques can identify the actual flat surface of the groove and ignore the artifacts. But digital approaches to performing this scan and/or encoding the result add errors from quantization and digitizer nonlinearity, which appears as added hiss - the amount depending on the resolution and quality of the converter and/or scanner.
I tried to use open Office 2.2 writer and calc at work as an office/excel replacement:
- Open Office broke hyperlinks in a design document. (Had to revert it and redo the edits in real MS office.)
- Open Office also didn't format and print correctly, making the boundaries of tables invisible in output. (So I couldn't even use it to just READ the document.)
- Calc seems to recalculate the entire spreadsheet when any change is made to any cell, rather than computing dependencies. This makes any edit on the document I was working on glacial - half a minute or more for EVERY change to render before it responded to keystrokes again.
- Calc also lost a bunch of labeling for graphs. (Gone from the spreadsheet for several updates before I figured out that it had happened.)
I would much prefer to use FOSS (and encourage the company to get away from spear-phishing targets). Instead I end up using true Microsoft office tools on a Windows server over the LAN via rdesktop. B-(
Get it fixed, guys.
(And I'm sorry, but I have too much work to do at the "day job" - long into the night - to fix it myself.)
Now in a future where you have wireless connectivity available to all what is their to stop a company from releasing a small gadget like an iPhone minus the phone. Instead of a "PHONE" you just have a simple hand held device that accesses the internet, you then use this device with some free service like a TeamSpeak to chat with all your buddies. With this method all you are paying for is wireless internet access, ...
Welcome to "The Convergence".
And the nightmare scenario for the old telcos, wired and wireless.
But to get there we need two things:
- Companies providing wireless internet connectivity AND cellphone service must be prevented from blocking VoIP packets on the internet side of the service to force callers onto their extra-cost cellphone service.
- Companies providing Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) service to those who haven't made the jump must be required to connect phone calls to/from PSTN/VoIP bridges.
It's not clear from the article which of these disconnects T-Mobile is forcing onto Truephone. But at least the courts are on the case (pun intended) and so far coming to the correct decisions.
And then when you're resuscitated or reanimated it gets restored from the last save. B-)
... which is war by another name.
They're supposed to be setting up mechanisms for cooperation. But all too often they become political battlegrounds, where each member organization tries to warp the standard to make things easier for itself and to sabotage its competition.
Now we have Microsoft going a step further, not just trying to get its own stuff approved as a standard, but packing the committee just before the vote.
And missing by one vote. Oops! B-)
Imagine his wealth...if he had patented the virus.
His patent would have been challenged due to prior art. (One I know about is John Walker's "Pervading Animal" in 1975, although there are claims of earlier stuff.)
What's the point of electing people if you can't delegate to them some of the decision making.
1) On some issues elected officials, just by being elected officials, have (or perceive) a conflict-of-interest with the voters and thus have a strong incentive to vote in non-representative ways. (Example: Raising taxes.)
2) There are a large number of issues. It's often impossible to find (or elect) a candidate that has the same opinions on all the important issues as the people he represents. In that case the candidate is elected on the basis of some common set of very important issues. Then the electorate can override the legislature on those issues where the body as a whole is non-representative.
3) Sometimes there are important and divisive issues where the politicians don't want to take the flack for their own position or where the politicians know the makeup of the legislature is not representative. They can send these directly to the voters and take no personal flack, retaining their seats if they otherwise act in their constituents' interest.
The representatives do the bulk of the day-to-day stuff but when something close and important comes up or the legislature gets out of hand a direct poll is less of a "game of telephone" than having the representatives try to interpret the "will of the people".
Meanwhile, all this stuff is at the STATE level. The federal government doesn't have these mechanisms. (The closest they have is when they delegate important issues - such as constitutional amendments and interim legislative replacement appointments - to the state legislatures or governors.)
Then there was the time IBM instrumented a mainframe to determine what instructions were heavily used so they could focus their optimize-the-microcode effort on them.
They found one particular instruction that accounted for some exceedingly large fraction of the execution time. So they went to work on the microcode and doubled its speed. Then they deployed the new microcode and measured the application performance, expecting to see a big improvement.
It didn't change a bit.
After a little more research they discovered they'd optimized the idle task's wait loop.
= = = =
Collecting data can be useful. But making good decisions based on it requires wisdom and insight.
The project hopes to answer questions such as 'What is the typical monitor resolution of a GIMP user?' and 'Is the GIMP used primarily for photo editing or drawing?'"
Looks to me like they're about to fall into the fallacy that caused Daimler-Chrysler to do a redesign of the Jeep line that killed their market.
The marketing department looked at what fraction of SUVs were actually used off-road. They came to the conclusion that it was small. So they redesigned their line to be more comfortable on-road at great cost to its off-road performance.
Turns out that a significant fraction of their market was people who NEEDED the off-road capability - and had the resources to pay for it, reliably buying cars, year after year, through all economic cycles.
Jeep stopped being the car they needed and became another clone of the rest of the market: "Mall Terrain Vehicles" that LOOK like an off-road car but are really just a funny-looking small/high van that qualifies as a "truck" to escape the fleet mileage regulations. Their guaranteed market went elsewhere and they were in head-to-head competition with a slew of vehicles over which they had no advantage.
Similarly, Coke looked at all the people buying Pepsi, saw that they were younger and that Pepsi's main difference was that it was sweeter, and replaced Coke with New Coke, which was sweeter yet. Result: People who drank Coke because they liked a less-sweet drink switched to Pepsi.
And then there was the high-ranking officer in WW II who spent months counting all the bullet holes on the returning bombers, then did a big presentation on how those areas should have armor added. At the end of his presentation a lower-ranking officer asked "Shouldn't we, instead, add more armor to those areas that are only lightly holed? After all, this sample represents only the planes that came back."
= = =
I think the same thing could happen here: Paying attention to what people do a lot of just focuses on what you're already doing right - at the cost of ignoring the things that people do occasionally, or only some people do, but which they need to have. Further, the things they do rarely may be used rarely specifically BECAUSE they're hard to use and the interface needs improvement.
Is all this DRM on BlueRay and HD-DVD optional? Ie. if I were to release a movie ...
...
On HD DVD, yes the DRM is optional. There have already been a few HD DVDs released without AACS.
On Blu-ray, no. The spec requires you to use (and pay big $$$ for) at least AACS in order to create pressed discs (although BD+ is optional).
If that's correct it's the end of the format wars:
- A flood of low-budget porn is made for HD DVD. (Only high-budget stuff can use Blu-ray.)
- As happened in Betamax/VHS, the porn drives the purchase of players. HD DVD players become pervasive.
- HD DVD wins.
* execute native code, possibly to patch an otherwise insecure system.
But i have to think... If it has hardware access(or can run native code) what's to say someone wont make a disk that has a BD+ program that aids in the hacking?
They're building a player (and player software) that silently loads and runs executables from the DVD with sufficient authority to inspect the machine's guts and patch the OS. Then they're licensing (i.e. distributing) this technology to anyone who wants to make and sell Blu-ray content (and even if the content maker didn't license it, it will run any executables he installs on his disks).
Sounds like a Blu-ray version of the Sony Rootkit debacle is inevitable.
Not to mention counterfeit movies loaded with malware. (Crooks rarely stop at breaking just one law.)
= = = =
Unlike Microsoft, these people are explicitly building a product BASED on compromising the security of its users. Such misuse is readily foreseeable. I can just hear the lawyers gearing up for the product-liability suits.
This architecture raises "defective by design" to a whole new level.
That should have read:
They say: "Oracle on {hardware x} does THIS well, PostgreSQL on {hardware y} can be tuned so it does THAT well on the same benchmark."
however the test-hardwares of the other DB systems are somewhat different
Which makes the results pretty much useless.
Not necessarily.
It's essentially useless for separating out how much of the performance difference is the result of the software's design, implementation, and tuning versus how much is due to the platform differences.
But such tests CAN be used to examine the performance of competing ENTIRE SYSTEMS, to inform choices between them.
They say: "Oracle on does THIS well, PostgreSQL on can be tuned so it does THAT well on the same benchmark."
This lets administrators (presuming they have access to the hardware info) get a bang-for-the-buck comparison.
For the rest of us, the interesting point is that PostgreSQL, running on its team's idea of realistic hardware, can produce performance in the same ballpark as Oracle running on Oracle's choice of hardware.
(Whether the necessary remaining data (what are hardwares x and y? how was PostgreSQL tunde) is published now, later, or never, is a separate issue. B-) )
It wasn't the VT100 ... The 80-column limit comes from the size of an IBM punched card.
And a number of terminals before the Ann Arbor Terminals terminal and the VT100 (the two that became the ANSI standard) were 80 column wide as well.
And IIRC, generally the first 8 columns were used for sequence numbering, so you really had only 72 columns for coding.
Last 8, actually. While I don't know if the last-8-are-ID-and-sequence standard predates it, this was especially convenient for the IBM 70x(x) series, which had a 36-bit word. The console card reader was jumper-board programmed to read in the first 72 columns as 12 groups of 2 words and ignore the last 8.
Sequence numbers, of course, were vital for programs on punchcards -- if you dropped a tray of cards you had to have a way to put them back in order...
Yep. (Typically the first few columns were a deck ID in case more than one set of cards was in the tray, and the numbering might initially increment by 10 so you could insert lines without renumbering the deck (which meant copying it with some reader/punch/minimal-brain combo machine or a program).)
Imagine if Apple tried to copy the Xbox like they copied the Microsoft's smart phones. Their Apple hardware would be ripped off! Idiots.
You mean like how IBM's opening of the PC just as Apple closed theirs (with Lisa and the initial Mac)? And laughed all the way to the bank as the PC took over the world - with IBM selling "true blue" desktop hardware into the business market for years while the clones became the standard for home users.
Yeah, what Idiots. B-)
The list of commands given make it sound more like a boot loader than a shell.
Yep. Sounds like a bootstrapping and image management firmware. (A pretty capable one, though. Not some minimalist system launcher.)
But isn't that what you WANT if you're trying to establish control of your machine? Why live within the old image's limitations if you can replace it?
Meanwhile this has lots of debugging and control tools suitable for tweaking and reverse-engineering the running image And that command list sure looks like it will let you load and launch a debugging tool that's more capable and give that tool even more control of the running system than is built into this firmware.
This machine is about to be opened, whether Apple likes it or not.
(I wouldn't be surprised if - at some level within the company - they really wanted it to be opened and only launched it in closed form so they could write contracts with networking companies and obtain FCC type approval. Plausible deniability at work.)
*i>Sorry, but your reasoning is flawed. A clock is right twice a day ... because ... the hours are always going to be between 1 and 12 or 24.
...
The same is not true of operating systems
Agreed. And I had considered mentioning that, at the cost of diluting my point in the posting.
But I consider the chance Linux will fade away without EVER achieving enough desktop penetration that SOME year will be suitable for the appellation "Year of Linux Desktop" to be vanishingly small.
Given that, my statement stands.
But once this percentage gets over, say 5-6%, linux will start having more traction, and will become more difficult/risky/costly to ignore.
IMHO Dell selling a Ubuntu-preloaded machine is not just a vendor having this epiphany, but also a force to promote it with other vendors.
People wanting to sell peripherals to users of Dell products now have a wakeup call about furnishing Linux support - along with a big-name company betting significant resources on a market being big enough to chase.
I just try to remember if there has been any year where this exact prediction has not been made ?
"Even a stopped clock is right twice a day." (Or once a day if it's a 24-hour clock.)
Some year the prediction will be correct.
Maybe this is the year.
I hate to say it, but, some evidence suggests that obfuscation works if there is enough of it.
And it all depends on what is meant by "security".
The FCC could care less about how hard it is to recover the message or break the box. What they're concerned about is how hard it is to modify the box to operate outside their regulations.
It's a lot easier to modify the function of a peripheral if you have information about it - including commented source for the controlling driver - than if you don't. Don't believe it? Look how long it took - and still takes - to write blob-free fully-functional Linux drivers for winmodems, graphic accellerators, WiFi chipsets, etc. Listen to the cries for documentation from the driver and kernel development projects.
The FCC says "Thou shalt not publish the source code to the parts that control the radio." Since FOSS licenses REQUIRE the vendors to publish the source code, FOSS is thus effectively forbidden, since it would not be possible to abide by the software license and the FCC license simultaneously.
As for vetting the code, the FCC reserves the right to demand the source of ANY software - proprietary or not - used in a type-approved software-defined radio. They say they probably will rarely want to look, and will probably honor the company's request for confidentiality unless they have some reason not to, but they do demand it be forked over whenever they ask. So arguments that they can't vet it because it's closed are moot.
If your mainframe does ever fail (and surely more will as they get older), then you are truly screwed. By fail, I don't mean bits dropping here and there, I mean the mainframe falling over.
Mainframes have multiple instances of everything - including CPUs (and power feeds to them). They are designed so that entire running systems can be migrated off a failing or failed component and onto another. Depending on the company's configuration and disaster planning, the "other component" may be in another site rather than another part of the box or the computer room. Or the database may be coherently replicated across multiple sites and the applications designed so they can pick up where the crashed box left off. For less real-time applications a system at a backup site might be up the next work day with no penny unaccounted for.
Mainframe disaster recover scenarios generally include one or more where the entire city containing the primary system is effectively no longer there.
On Windows / *nix this just isn't the case.
Bet it is on the mainframe versions of *nix.