If you are using this another way, thats groovy, just let me know.
Most definitely this. I don't think you would lie to me, though we might disagree. I have seen you write things here that I believe to be untrue, but I do believe you believe them.
Youve made good points about configuraed defaults, like open ports and autoplay (as Ive said). By similar configured, I mean in terms of features, what the product does. The more the features, the more the exposure. Dont compare a minimal configured Linux distribution with a maximally configured Windows one like Ultimate. More code means more exposure - the ratios may differ, but to the first order, this is they key thing.
You do know that mainstream Linux distributions come with an office package, three browsers, an image editor, various media players, multiple chat clients, games and toys, a package management system so replete with free software it needs its own search engine? It's actually useful on a bare install. They also come with a hypervisor that runs as many virtual machines as your hardware will support. And they support more hardware than Windows ever has. Yeah, they seldom need to step up from a CD based install to a DVD even with all that, but it's not because there's not a lot of functionality in there - it's because it's packed in there fairly tight. I would like to see it come with more example content like document templates, svg elements and stuff like that, but it does come with a lot of stuff.
I wouldn't compare Ultimate to minipentoo, but there are enough parallels with Ubuntu to make a useful comparison.
I respectively suggest you are dramatically underestimating Microsoft.
Yea, I do try and get some witty snark in. Sorry. 7 is looking better. Microsoft does have a huge installed base. I actually might buy it. I won't be running it on my main PC. I'll be securing it before it sees the network, and I definitely wouldn't consider using it to do online banking or shopping, but I'll probably be running it at home.
We're getting diminishing returns here. I don't have that much more to add to this.
About that $100B malware ecosystem number. That's both sides of the money - the criminals and their loot as well as the hardware and software and excess computing capacity and extra electrical power to defend against it, the costs of cleaning it up and the cost of lost data. It's easily that number worldwide.
It might amuse you to know I'm posting this from a Linux Mint VM. A few weeks ago I upgraded grandma to Ubuntu because her XP hosed up within 24 hours of her getting broadband and now Mom wants Linux so I'm test driving various distros in VMs. I'm still having trouble getting OpenFiler to work in a VM, but I know some VM engineers who can help me past the bridge network hurdle.
People absolutory, positively, want to watch DVD and Blue Ray content on their PCs.
Um, no. Three years ago I mastered an HD video on BluRay of the family picnic. I'm still the only person who's ever seen it in that format. You're still on "widgets and gadgets". People don't care about widgets and gadgets. They care about what they can do. If the gadgets and widgets empower them to do new things, most especially to record and share their lives with their families and friends, then they will buy them. Otherwise, it's just a passive method of watching what you want them to see. We can do better than that.
On a completely unrelated note... if you spend the $ to become a/. subscriber, you can read the back issues of my opinions back to my very first post. It's well worth the money.
But I would suggest this, an OS that ships with everything turned off wouldnt be one that customers wanted. I can make my family computer 100% secure, but then my wife wouldnt use it because it would not be connected to the net.
This is the truism you're looking for: "If you make a device even an idiot could use, only an idiot would want to."
I don't think you want to make that argument. You're not winning the usability wars, but you are losing the fitness for use stakes.
The size of the target is the first order determinant here, as is the users behavior. Linux distributions will face these same problems if/when they scale.
When I discussed the scale of Linux deployments you told me I was wandering from the topic. What do you want? Percent of top million servers? Machines exposed to the Internet? Like I would have that metric. Figures don't lie, but liars figure. Your surveys are currently off by the same measure that had enthusiastic Vista adoption, and the professionals who are guiding you are telling you what they think you want to hear. I've had that problem before. Who are you going to believe? Gartner, or your lying eyes? If you want to win you'll get a blind trust to hire analysts to tell you what's really happening without knowing who's writing their check. I would probably use several layers of lawyers, each of which knows no more than the one before, because information leaks but some lawyers are honest. Then you'll know, and I don't expect you to tell me what the answer was, but it will differ from what you're hearing now. The trick is that people who are lying for you will lie to you.
Now, you are just fooling yourself if you assume that somehow -- with a similarly feature set -- Linux, or OSX is inherently more secure than Windows, or that somehow Linux developer are smarter about security than Windows developers. This isnt a Microsoft problem, its an industry problem - often with web servers and client side browser code. Im sure you read this. ASLR is a Microsoft innovation. We also drove the implemention of the NX stuff in processors. There are vulnerabilities in many things such as Flash, Firefox, Safari, anything that can plug into the browser, any hacky ring-0 driver. All software can have security problems like this, this and these ( I know you know this, but some anecdotal examples are useful to make my point).
To the extent that you have a point about market penetration - and you do... and we've talked about the diverse target that Linux is...
With a similar feature set.. if you mean the same issues I've complained about - yeah, if you configure your Linux to do those stupid things you might be as exposed
I think he described the issues quite well over 160 years ago.
The principle of copyright is this. It is a tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers. The tax is an exceedingly bad one; it is a tax on one of the most innocent and most salutary of human pleasures; and never let us forget, that a tax on innocent pleasures is a premium on vicious pleasures. I admit, however, the necessity of giving a bounty to genius and learning. In order to give such a bounty, I willingly submit even to this severe and burdensome tax. Nay, I am ready to increase the tax, if it can be shown that by so doing I should proportionally increase the bounty. My complaint is, that my honourable and learned friend doubles, triples, quadruples, the tax, and makes scarcely any perceptible addition to the bounty.
Not being critical. I like your posts. I think we share an enthusiasm for manned spaceflight that is missed by most folk. I think if we inspire our kids properly we will win Darwin's game and our critics will not.
I'm all for this. Let's make it the life of the performer plus a million years, and the penalty death.
Then at least people will finally understand there is no limit to their greed; no work currently in the public domain they don't want to claw back into copyright protection; to them there is no punishment worthy enough to deter the pirate. They will not rest until cave paintings are protected intellectual property and you dare not recall your own speech without their permission.
Consumers by and large (e.g. when looked at in the aggregate of 100s of
millions) just want a system that works, e.g. they unboxed it, and it plays
BlueRay (today), and streams the content they want to day and tomorrow.
A Linux vendor or OEM could ignore this, but then they would be at a HUGE
competitive disadvantage compared to Windows or another distribution that did
support it.
Consumers want choice, and they're not stupid. If they want to watch a DVD they can buy a player with LCD display that runs on batteries and plays the hollywood stuff for $79. For $30, they can get one that looks lovely on their 40" LCD at home. They don't need that on their PC. Video for the computer is all about playing YouTube and Hulu and stuff you've archived to your home NAS box so the kids won't get peanut butter on the discs and you can watch it on any device that's free, including your iPod Touch. BluRay? I really don't think that's a winner. Time will tell. Sony has a tendency to screw up their execution on proprietary media. HD is just now hitting its stride, and nobody's implementing the SD card kiosk yet. Out here in the wild DRM'd content is a scant fraction.
Whatever Hollywood and Microsoft does, I'm not running the Hollywood DRM stack on my computer. It's not gonna happen. I just don't want the content that badly.
If you want to play a restricted DVD on your computer you can boot Linux Mint and have at it if you can't be bothered to click those other links I pointed out earlier. Soon, as you probably know, the computer will be evolved enough at low enough power to be embedded in the TV. When that happens, it'll be Linux and Java for the win.
I'm rambling. XP in a VM is a good way simultaneously break legacy support, which is desperately needed, while simultaneously mollifying the installed base of customers who just can't function without some legacy apps. Software vendors who were relying on Microsoft to drive sales to a new level are going to squawk, but it had to be done. I suggested it here three years ago and people called me crazy.
In short, you are playing the wrong game. You brought a badminton racket to an America football game.
Y'know, I could be wrong about all this stuff... or not. We'll see. Obviously we agree the field is not level, we just disagree about the direction of the slope.
... This and similar assumptions are just bogus.
I've commented about specific things I think are broken about Windows. I don't think any software is perfect. I do adamantly believe that there are some practices that are not best practices. Microsoft is not alone in employing some of these practices. Microsoft is alone in that their platform supports a malware ecosystem that's a $100B a year industry. That's not something to be proud of. We could go on and on about whether MSFT is evil. It's a corporation. It doesn't have feelings. I don't like the contents of the Halloween documents, or what they did to Sendo, or how they backchanneled the funding for SCO, to name a few things. The subversion of the ISO to put over the OpenDocument format destroyed what was once a credible and necessary body dedicated to adopting standards so that people the world over can work together. These behaviors continue to the present day and extend into the future and they have caused harm. So no, I'm not ever going to be fond of this corporation. But they could more clearly adhere to best practice, at least in the default. They could make it so that their software is reasonably performant on low power hardware, which indicates thoughtful deliberate design. They could do more in the field of security to prevent the spambots that flood my inbox and share my personal info around the world. If they did that I'd stop calling their products "crap" and we could move on to comparing the relative merits of sol
My posting suffers too when the littles want to bang on the keyboard. I understand that.
I was actually just using your post as a launching point for my own rant because it was neutral, short, and properly positioned. I barely read it. I'm sorry if I came off as too critical. Try not to take my post as a personal thing, because I really was being a bad person and not replying to the thread at all.
But it's beautiful prose, isn't it? C'mon - read it again.
The brave men who went up in 1969 had no idea whether they would even get there let alone whether they would get home. There was no record, no experience. There were over a thousand volunteers. They went and they came back, some of them several times. I don't doubt offered a return trip they would to a man abandon all that they hold dear without hesitation to blast off for far horizons.
A colony on the moon plus a colony on Mars plus self-sufficient habitats in Earth orbit and a pair of L5 orbits all together would cost less than TARP, the auto bailout and the Fed's increased balance sheet - and would pay better returns. If we gave a damn about the survival of the human race we'd have insured it by now.
Americans were once better Men.
But the good news is that the US Justice department is now a RIAA wholly owned subsidiary.
In 1961 the Apollo program was founded when US President John F. Kennedy announced a goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade. On July 20, 1969 it was accomplished when Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. It took eight years. I was four years old at the time they landed. I watched breathlessly each launch, each landing, and all the reports in between. I actually recall trying to convince some of the adults in my life the significance of these events. The Moon! That ball in the sky! Men are walking on it! I failed miserably. I lived in Watts at the time. They didn't care then and they don't care now.
It had never been done before. Practically none of the necessary materials science, engineering and physics were even understood at the time. They performed orbital vector calulations sometimes using computers, and sometimes using banks of people operating calculators.
40 years later we carry computers in our pocket that have more power than all the computers in the world at that time. Our cars have better navigational equipment. It has been done before. The problem has been solved - we've done it many times. The physics, mechanics and materials are well understood. But now we can't figure out a way to do this again in under a decade. It's over. We're officially sliding into decay.
Now I point to that ball in the sky for my son who's five, and I say "That ball in the sky! We knew how to get there once. My parents did it, but we forgot how when I grew up. If you study hard - if you really want it - you might go there too." And then we point the telescope at Mars.
If we were willing to spend the money, to dare the risk, America might one day find she has what it takes to get an American to the moon and return safely. What lessons we must learn from that mission: the physics, the materials science, the computer and communications technology might drive a surge in American eminence in science and engineering. Yes, it is not easy. We should go to the moon and do these other things not because it is easy but because it is hard. It is an opportunity to prove that we have the grit, the intelligence and the skill that others do not, and we'll reap the benefit of taking that journey for a generation.
Or maybe we could just get ILM to do it in CGI and save budget. Is Bruce Willis available? Think of the product placement opportunities!
You're in a Windows shop. You run Windows apps. It doesn't matter if Windows gets malware. You're Windows all the way, Ra RA! Good for you.
A pity for your customers, though. I hope they aren't processing my credit application. Or my medical records. Or my driver's license. Or anything else having to do with me.
And if the cost of production is above that amount, it will fade away.
When distribution of information required a million dollar printing press and an army of little boys to bring three day old text to the citizen who wanted to be informed, newspapers made sense. The value of a reporter who could weigh the issues and give a factual report only minimally slanted by his opinion and experience was proven. It was worth the effort to read between the lines of the reportage and the editing to find an understanding of what actually happened.
In an age where any twit with an iPhone can stream live coverage to be archived to YouTube, where the twitterati can disseminate hot issues, where the blogosphere can issue forth its opinion of the events first, second and third hand, where Google can weigh the merits of those opinions and link not only to them but to video of what happened - all within minutes of the actual events... not so much.
I have discovered that almost all of the computers infected with Conficker apparently come with a sticker on the front for ready identification. It has a flag shape divided into red, green, blue and yellow quarters. If you have this flag sticker you might be at risk!
Good admins realize that there is no such thing as perfect security, and no system that can't be broken in to. So the answer isn't the hunt for the perfect system, the answer is defense in depth.
Defense in depth includes not leaving in stupid defaults like services listening on the network and autorun. Somebody should fix those things. If there's no unhackable system, there's OpenBSD which is fairly close. At the other end of the spectrum is a box configured to allow remote desktop with a published guest account username and password, with administrator privileges, with a world-routeable IP address. Somewhere in between is Windows and the various Linux distributions. It's theoretically possible that Windows is waaay over there in the corner with FreeBSD all by itself... in sort of the same way it's theoretically possible that in any given moment all the molecules of air in your room will randomly happen to occupy your coffee cup instead of being more evenly distributed.
You don't want to admit that Microsoft is responsible for some of this pain by leaving in stupid defaults because they're popular. That's fine. More and more people are tired of having their computer cleansed on a regular basis. Microsoft is winning more converts to Apple and Tux every day. It's like a billion dollar marketing campaign that never stops.
Antivirus? Really? Of what purpose is an antivirus on a platform with no viruses in the wild? You might as well install some bigfoot repellent while you're at it.
wifey can install Windows and drivers. Daughter has been using a computer since before she could crawl. Neither of them gives a rat's ass about DRM.
Well if we're going to compare notes my three year old and five year old both like Noggin and Nick Jr. They both have their own computer, as I make them build one at 2. My Grandma had Windows until she got a cable modem. They installed it and her XP box was pwned to uselessness in 36 seconds. Mom tried to help her (Mom's a systems analyst with 20+ yrs exp) to to avail. I gave her Ubuntu with her fave apps (Picasa and Solitaire). 3 weeks with broadband and she's not Pwnd yet. She can print and share her pix without assistance. Mom wants me to come over and install Ubuntu now on her notebook when I have time.
/warm fuzzy mode=off
Lawful Good vs. Chaotic Evil. Best of three D20 rolls gets to pick which they are.
/obscure and confused dungeons & dragons reference misplaced. What did you mean here?
There are some things here that are not fair to you. Your company has been convicted of monopolistic behavior and so restrained from behaving in ways that might help you improve your product. To that I have no answer but: "if you can't do the time, don't do the crime."
Just kidding. I'll always read your posts. Others here won't. If they're Too Long; they Don't Read them. If your goal is advocacy you have to hit the point in 200 words or less. Our goal may be different here.
Here is a question for you; lets say were the Senior VP of development at Linux-Z,
the hot new Linux startup that is going to enable OEMs to sell Linux systems by
the train load - what would you do given the following constraints?
You're not going to like this answer. The only way to win this game is not to play.
About your assumptions: while I have some problems with how Microsoft sucks up to content owners in order to get a platform that plays their content I am not as incensed as the average/.'er because I know the problem will soon be moot. DRM is completely history in the audio field and about to go there in video. To go back to your "what would you do" question, I'd offer the MPEG group and the DVD forum $* for an eternal fully paid up non-reversible distributable license to their formats, encryption, patents and yadda yadda publicly. And then when they refused I'd publicly wash my hands of them. I think I'd buy a minute at the superbowl to say: "you see? I tried. But they wouldn't see reason." Physical media is about done anyway. Implicit in this is that I have a good repository system and have implemented APT URL. I post a warning about local liability and endorse a trusted third party repository located in a more reasonable jurisdiction. And I throw my lobbyist money in the opposite direction from eternal protection of Steamboat Willy to reasonable time limits and protection of the commons from clawbacks. After all, 17 years from first publication is long enough copyright protection for me. Nobody wants to infringe the copyrights of 17 year old software, and if they did, good on them. My programmers are hard at work implementing back issues of The Communications of the ACM and they're still not up to 1992 yet. If people copy them that means my engineers were forward thinking back then and that improves my fame long past the marketability of their output. I become the Hero of the People instead of the Goat.
Must work with cable card (my wife wants her NFL channel)
You must take care with the term "wifey". GIS with safesearch turned off for why, but not from work. This symbol is now definitely attached to something you probably would not prefer to be publicly associated with. Cablecard is a different issue, but my approach would be the same: air your dirty linen in public. Approach the cable providers and publicly offer them money for open drivers and when they decline back away waving your hands clearly saying "well, I tried. It's not my fault they wouldn't see reason." Whether you believe it or not the people you're negotiating with here perceive your willingness to accommodate them as a weakness in your position. They could not be more wrong.
Now about DRM: The problem with DRM is control. Control is the point of DRM. Content owners feel that in order to surrender their precious content they need the assurance of control of every device it plays on. They need the control to rescind permission any time they like if they're not sure the content is licensed. They need the control to license the media per play, per day, per customer or per speaker or what-the-hell-ever their cocaine-induced paranoia motivates them that day. They most especially need the media to expire periodically with content providers and encryption standards like Plays-For-Now so that they can keep selling the same listener the White Album for the 16th time because they know their more current product is utter crap on the level of "Glitter" and "Waterworld". Their desire for control includes the desire to monitor the use of media you've bought, other activities that occur on your computer, and they would like to leave tha
By that time my brain is finally convinced it's not going to get sleep until I get the answer I want and it starts integrating stuff holistically out of sheer self defense.
I'm getting old. The same answer used to be "after breakfast".
Slashdot Mirror
The technology environment is not likely to change more in the next forty years than it has in the last forty.
:-)
They'll be broke in only 40 years.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a minivan full of backup media.
If you are using this another way, thats groovy, just let me know.
Most definitely this. I don't think you would lie to me, though we might disagree. I have seen you write things here that I believe to be untrue, but I do believe you believe them.
Youve made good points about configuraed defaults, like open ports and autoplay (as Ive said). By similar configured, I mean in terms of features, what the product does. The more the features, the more the exposure. Dont compare a minimal configured Linux distribution with a maximally configured Windows one like Ultimate. More code means more exposure - the ratios may differ, but to the first order, this is they key thing.
You do know that mainstream Linux distributions come with an office package, three browsers, an image editor, various media players, multiple chat clients, games and toys, a package management system so replete with free software it needs its own search engine? It's actually useful on a bare install. They also come with a hypervisor that runs as many virtual machines as your hardware will support. And they support more hardware than Windows ever has. Yeah, they seldom need to step up from a CD based install to a DVD even with all that, but it's not because there's not a lot of functionality in there - it's because it's packed in there fairly tight. I would like to see it come with more example content like document templates, svg elements and stuff like that, but it does come with a lot of stuff.
I wouldn't compare Ultimate to minipentoo, but there are enough parallels with Ubuntu to make a useful comparison.
I respectively suggest you are dramatically underestimating Microsoft.
Yea, I do try and get some witty snark in. Sorry. 7 is looking better. Microsoft does have a huge installed base. I actually might buy it. I won't be running it on my main PC. I'll be securing it before it sees the network, and I definitely wouldn't consider using it to do online banking or shopping, but I'll probably be running it at home.
We're getting diminishing returns here. I don't have that much more to add to this.
About that $100B malware ecosystem number. That's both sides of the money - the criminals and their loot as well as the hardware and software and excess computing capacity and extra electrical power to defend against it, the costs of cleaning it up and the cost of lost data. It's easily that number worldwide.
Regards
Until you're paying royalties to the descendants of Sophocles for Oedipus, you have no moral standing.
And I'm not calling to the people. I'm echoing their screams. Can you not hear them? It's your head they want on a pike.
It might amuse you to know I'm posting this from a Linux Mint VM. A few weeks ago I upgraded grandma to Ubuntu because her XP hosed up within 24 hours of her getting broadband and now Mom wants Linux so I'm test driving various distros in VMs. I'm still having trouble getting OpenFiler to work in a VM, but I know some VM engineers who can help me past the bridge network hurdle.
People absolutory, positively, want to watch DVD and Blue Ray content on their PCs.
Um, no. Three years ago I mastered an HD video on BluRay of the family picnic. I'm still the only person who's ever seen it in that format. You're still on "widgets and gadgets". People don't care about widgets and gadgets. They care about what they can do. If the gadgets and widgets empower them to do new things, most especially to record and share their lives with their families and friends, then they will buy them. Otherwise, it's just a passive method of watching what you want them to see. We can do better than that.
On a completely unrelated note... if you spend the $ to become a /. subscriber, you can read the back issues of my opinions back to my very first post. It's well worth the money.
But I would suggest this, an OS that ships with everything turned off wouldnt be one that customers wanted. I can make my family computer 100% secure, but then my wife wouldnt use it because it would not be connected to the net.
This is the truism you're looking for: "If you make a device even an idiot could use, only an idiot would want to."
I don't think you want to make that argument. You're not winning the usability wars, but you are losing the fitness for use stakes.
The size of the target is the first order determinant here, as is the users behavior. Linux distributions will face these same problems if/when they scale.
When I discussed the scale of Linux deployments you told me I was wandering from the topic. What do you want? Percent of top million servers? Machines exposed to the Internet? Like I would have that metric. Figures don't lie, but liars figure. Your surveys are currently off by the same measure that had enthusiastic Vista adoption, and the professionals who are guiding you are telling you what they think you want to hear. I've had that problem before. Who are you going to believe? Gartner, or your lying eyes? If you want to win you'll get a blind trust to hire analysts to tell you what's really happening without knowing who's writing their check. I would probably use several layers of lawyers, each of which knows no more than the one before, because information leaks but some lawyers are honest. Then you'll know, and I don't expect you to tell me what the answer was, but it will differ from what you're hearing now. The trick is that people who are lying for you will lie to you.
Now, you are just fooling yourself if you assume that somehow -- with a similarly feature set -- Linux, or OSX is inherently more secure than Windows, or that somehow Linux developer are smarter about security than Windows developers. This isnt a Microsoft problem, its an industry problem - often with web servers and client side browser code. Im sure you read this. ASLR is a Microsoft innovation. We also drove the implemention of the NX stuff in processors. There are vulnerabilities in many things such as Flash, Firefox, Safari, anything that can plug into the browser, any hacky ring-0 driver. All software can have security problems like this, this and these ( I know you know this, but some anecdotal examples are useful to make my point).
To the extent that you have a point about market penetration - and you do... and we've talked about the diverse target that Linux is...
With a similar feature set.. if you mean the same issues I've complained about - yeah, if you configure your Linux to do those stupid things you might be as exposed
Here's some reading material.
I think he described the issues quite well over 160 years ago.
The principle of copyright is this. It is a tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers. The tax is an exceedingly bad one; it is a tax on one of the most innocent and most salutary of human pleasures; and never let us forget, that a tax on innocent pleasures is a premium on vicious pleasures. I admit, however, the necessity of giving a bounty to genius and learning. In order to give such a bounty, I willingly submit even to this severe and burdensome tax. Nay, I am ready to increase the tax, if it can be shown that by so doing I should proportionally increase the bounty. My complaint is, that my honourable and learned friend doubles, triples, quadruples, the tax, and makes scarcely any perceptible addition to the bounty.
Ooh. Well if this is a competition you'll find my son's picture on a tribute site to manned space travel that's named after SpacePort 1.
/because I am that kind of geek.
//He's a cute boy.
Not being critical. I like your posts. I think we share an enthusiasm for manned spaceflight that is missed by most folk. I think if we inspire our kids properly we will win Darwin's game and our critics will not.
I'm all for this. Let's make it the life of the performer plus a million years, and the penalty death.
Then at least people will finally understand there is no limit to their greed; no work currently in the public domain they don't want to claw back into copyright protection; to them there is no punishment worthy enough to deter the pirate. They will not rest until cave paintings are protected intellectual property and you dare not recall your own speech without their permission.
Y'know, I think I do agree with you about a lot.
Consumers by and large (e.g. when looked at in the aggregate of 100s of millions) just want a system that works, e.g. they unboxed it, and it plays BlueRay (today), and streams the content they want to day and tomorrow. A Linux vendor or OEM could ignore this, but then they would be at a HUGE competitive disadvantage compared to Windows or another distribution that did support it.
Consumers want choice, and they're not stupid. If they want to watch a DVD they can buy a player with LCD display that runs on batteries and plays the hollywood stuff for $79. For $30, they can get one that looks lovely on their 40" LCD at home. They don't need that on their PC. Video for the computer is all about playing YouTube and Hulu and stuff you've archived to your home NAS box so the kids won't get peanut butter on the discs and you can watch it on any device that's free, including your iPod Touch. BluRay? I really don't think that's a winner. Time will tell. Sony has a tendency to screw up their execution on proprietary media. HD is just now hitting its stride, and nobody's implementing the SD card kiosk yet. Out here in the wild DRM'd content is a scant fraction.
Whatever Hollywood and Microsoft does, I'm not running the Hollywood DRM stack on my computer. It's not gonna happen. I just don't want the content that badly.
If you want to play a restricted DVD on your computer you can boot Linux Mint and have at it if you can't be bothered to click those other links I pointed out earlier. Soon, as you probably know, the computer will be evolved enough at low enough power to be embedded in the TV. When that happens, it'll be Linux and Java for the win.
I'm rambling. XP in a VM is a good way simultaneously break legacy support, which is desperately needed, while simultaneously mollifying the installed base of customers who just can't function without some legacy apps. Software vendors who were relying on Microsoft to drive sales to a new level are going to squawk, but it had to be done. I suggested it here three years ago and people called me crazy.
In short, you are playing the wrong game. You brought a badminton racket to an America football game.
Y'know, I could be wrong about all this stuff... or not. We'll see. Obviously we agree the field is not level, we just disagree about the direction of the slope.
... This and similar assumptions are just bogus.
I've commented about specific things I think are broken about Windows. I don't think any software is perfect. I do adamantly believe that there are some practices that are not best practices. Microsoft is not alone in employing some of these practices. Microsoft is alone in that their platform supports a malware ecosystem that's a $100B a year industry. That's not something to be proud of. We could go on and on about whether MSFT is evil. It's a corporation. It doesn't have feelings. I don't like the contents of the Halloween documents, or what they did to Sendo, or how they backchanneled the funding for SCO, to name a few things. The subversion of the ISO to put over the OpenDocument format destroyed what was once a credible and necessary body dedicated to adopting standards so that people the world over can work together. These behaviors continue to the present day and extend into the future and they have caused harm. So no, I'm not ever going to be fond of this corporation. But they could more clearly adhere to best practice, at least in the default. They could make it so that their software is reasonably performant on low power hardware, which indicates thoughtful deliberate design. They could do more in the field of security to prevent the spambots that flood my inbox and share my personal info around the world. If they did that I'd stop calling their products "crap" and we could move on to comparing the relative merits of sol
[groucho marx voice] She's a better man than I am.
I agree with this post in every particular. I have no insight to add. The detail is outside the scope of my experience and training.
My posting suffers too when the littles want to bang on the keyboard. I understand that.
I was actually just using your post as a launching point for my own rant because it was neutral, short, and properly positioned. I barely read it. I'm sorry if I came off as too critical. Try not to take my post as a personal thing, because I really was being a bad person and not replying to the thread at all.
But it's beautiful prose, isn't it? C'mon - read it again.
The brave men who went up in 1969 had no idea whether they would even get there let alone whether they would get home. There was no record, no experience. There were over a thousand volunteers. They went and they came back, some of them several times. I don't doubt offered a return trip they would to a man abandon all that they hold dear without hesitation to blast off for far horizons.
A colony on the moon plus a colony on Mars plus self-sufficient habitats in Earth orbit and a pair of L5 orbits all together would cost less than TARP, the auto bailout and the Fed's increased balance sheet - and would pay better returns. If we gave a damn about the survival of the human race we'd have insured it by now.
Americans were once better Men.
But the good news is that the US Justice department is now a RIAA wholly owned subsidiary.
In 1961 the Apollo program was founded when US President John F. Kennedy announced a goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade. On July 20, 1969 it was accomplished when Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. It took eight years. I was four years old at the time they landed. I watched breathlessly each launch, each landing, and all the reports in between. I actually recall trying to convince some of the adults in my life the significance of these events. The Moon! That ball in the sky! Men are walking on it! I failed miserably. I lived in Watts at the time. They didn't care then and they don't care now.
It had never been done before. Practically none of the necessary materials science, engineering and physics were even understood at the time. They performed orbital vector calulations sometimes using computers, and sometimes using banks of people operating calculators.
40 years later we carry computers in our pocket that have more power than all the computers in the world at that time. Our cars have better navigational equipment. It has been done before. The problem has been solved - we've done it many times. The physics, mechanics and materials are well understood. But now we can't figure out a way to do this again in under a decade. It's over. We're officially sliding into decay.
Now I point to that ball in the sky for my son who's five, and I say "That ball in the sky! We knew how to get there once. My parents did it, but we forgot how when I grew up. If you study hard - if you really want it - you might go there too." And then we point the telescope at Mars.
/And it's Orion. Try and spell it write, ok?
If we were willing to spend the money, to dare the risk, America might one day find she has what it takes to get an American to the moon and return safely. What lessons we must learn from that mission: the physics, the materials science, the computer and communications technology might drive a surge in American eminence in science and engineering. Yes, it is not easy. We should go to the moon and do these other things not because it is easy but because it is hard. It is an opportunity to prove that we have the grit, the intelligence and the skill that others do not, and we'll reap the benefit of taking that journey for a generation.
Or maybe we could just get ILM to do it in CGI and save budget. Is Bruce Willis available? Think of the product placement opportunities!
/Co-channeling JFK and Spielberg.
You're in a Windows shop. You run Windows apps. It doesn't matter if Windows gets malware. You're Windows all the way, Ra RA! Good for you.
A pity for your customers, though. I hope they aren't processing my credit application. Or my medical records. Or my driver's license. Or anything else having to do with me.
And if the cost of production is above that amount, it will fade away.
When distribution of information required a million dollar printing press and an army of little boys to bring three day old text to the citizen who wanted to be informed, newspapers made sense. The value of a reporter who could weigh the issues and give a factual report only minimally slanted by his opinion and experience was proven. It was worth the effort to read between the lines of the reportage and the editing to find an understanding of what actually happened.
In an age where any twit with an iPhone can stream live coverage to be archived to YouTube, where the twitterati can disseminate hot issues, where the blogosphere can issue forth its opinion of the events first, second and third hand, where Google can weigh the merits of those opinions and link not only to them but to video of what happened - all within minutes of the actual events ... not so much.
I have discovered that almost all of the computers infected with Conficker apparently come with a sticker on the front for ready identification. It has a flag shape divided into red, green, blue and yellow quarters. If you have this flag sticker you might be at risk!
Good admins realize that there is no such thing as perfect security, and no system that can't be broken in to. So the answer isn't the hunt for the perfect system, the answer is defense in depth.
Defense in depth includes not leaving in stupid defaults like services listening on the network and autorun. Somebody should fix those things. If there's no unhackable system, there's OpenBSD which is fairly close. At the other end of the spectrum is a box configured to allow remote desktop with a published guest account username and password, with administrator privileges, with a world-routeable IP address. Somewhere in between is Windows and the various Linux distributions. It's theoretically possible that Windows is waaay over there in the corner with FreeBSD all by itself... in sort of the same way it's theoretically possible that in any given moment all the molecules of air in your room will randomly happen to occupy your coffee cup instead of being more evenly distributed.
You don't want to admit that Microsoft is responsible for some of this pain by leaving in stupid defaults because they're popular. That's fine. More and more people are tired of having their computer cleansed on a regular basis. Microsoft is winning more converts to Apple and Tux every day. It's like a billion dollar marketing campaign that never stops.
Antivirus? Really? Of what purpose is an antivirus on a platform with no viruses in the wild? You might as well install some bigfoot repellent while you're at it.
Because it's pointless? Any list of compromised webservers would be obsolete before you read it, as would any list of known hooks.
The network is untrusted. Windows gets malware. That is what you need to know.
wifey can install Windows and drivers. Daughter has been using a computer since before she could crawl. Neither of them gives a rat's ass about DRM.
Well if we're going to compare notes my three year old and five year old both like Noggin and Nick Jr. They both have their own computer, as I make them build one at 2. My Grandma had Windows until she got a cable modem. They installed it and her XP box was pwned to uselessness in 36 seconds. Mom tried to help her (Mom's a systems analyst with 20+ yrs exp) to to avail. I gave her Ubuntu with her fave apps (Picasa and Solitaire). 3 weeks with broadband and she's not Pwnd yet. She can print and share her pix without assistance. Mom wants me to come over and install Ubuntu now on her notebook when I have time.
/warm fuzzy mode=off
Lawful Good vs. Chaotic Evil. Best of three D20 rolls gets to pick which they are.
/obscure and confused dungeons & dragons reference misplaced. What did you mean here?
There are some things here that are not fair to you. Your company has been convicted of monopolistic behavior and so restrained from behaving in ways that might help you improve your product. To that I have no answer but: "if you can't do the time, don't do the crime."
I'm impressed. That said: tl;dr
Just kidding. I'll always read your posts. Others here won't. If they're Too Long; they Don't Read them. If your goal is advocacy you have to hit the point in 200 words or less. Our goal may be different here.
Here is a question for you; lets say were the Senior VP of development at Linux-Z, the hot new Linux startup that is going to enable OEMs to sell Linux systems by the train load - what would you do given the following constraints?
You're not going to like this answer. The only way to win this game is not to play.
About your assumptions: while I have some problems with how Microsoft sucks up to content owners in order to get a platform that plays their content I am not as incensed as the average /.'er because I know the problem will soon be moot. DRM is completely history in the audio field and about to go there in video. To go back to your "what would you do" question, I'd offer the MPEG group and the DVD forum $* for an eternal fully paid up non-reversible distributable license to their formats, encryption, patents and yadda yadda publicly. And then when they refused I'd publicly wash my hands of them. I think I'd buy a minute at the superbowl to say: "you see? I tried. But they wouldn't see reason." Physical media is about done anyway. Implicit in this is that I have a good repository system and have implemented APT URL. I post a warning about local liability and endorse a trusted third party repository located in a more reasonable jurisdiction. And I throw my lobbyist money in the opposite direction from eternal protection of Steamboat Willy to reasonable time limits and protection of the commons from clawbacks. After all, 17 years from first publication is long enough copyright protection for me. Nobody wants to infringe the copyrights of 17 year old software, and if they did, good on them. My programmers are hard at work implementing back issues of The Communications of the ACM and they're still not up to 1992 yet. If people copy them that means my engineers were forward thinking back then and that improves my fame long past the marketability of their output. I become the Hero of the People instead of the Goat.
Must work with cable card (my wife wants her NFL channel)
You must take care with the term "wifey". GIS with safesearch turned off for why, but not from work. This symbol is now definitely attached to something you probably would not prefer to be publicly associated with. Cablecard is a different issue, but my approach would be the same: air your dirty linen in public. Approach the cable providers and publicly offer them money for open drivers and when they decline back away waving your hands clearly saying "well, I tried. It's not my fault they wouldn't see reason." Whether you believe it or not the people you're negotiating with here perceive your willingness to accommodate them as a weakness in your position. They could not be more wrong.
Now about DRM: The problem with DRM is control. Control is the point of DRM. Content owners feel that in order to surrender their precious content they need the assurance of control of every device it plays on. They need the control to rescind permission any time they like if they're not sure the content is licensed. They need the control to license the media per play, per day, per customer or per speaker or what-the-hell-ever their cocaine-induced paranoia motivates them that day. They most especially need the media to expire periodically with content providers and encryption standards like Plays-For-Now so that they can keep selling the same listener the White Album for the 16th time because they know their more current product is utter crap on the level of "Glitter" and "Waterworld". Their desire for control includes the desire to monitor the use of media you've bought, other activities that occur on your computer, and they would like to leave tha
They act like they think they're running the US Justice Department. Oh, wait...
By that time my brain is finally convinced it's not going to get sleep until I get the answer I want and it starts integrating stuff holistically out of sheer self defense.
I'm getting old. The same answer used to be "after breakfast".