Now that you're getting into this slashdot posting thing, there are going to be some bumps. It's a nuisance at first that you can't go back and edit posts, but you'll be thankful for that before long. I'll try and be helpful and not as abrasive as when I was trying to get your attention.
The idea of copyright comes from the power and desire of "kings" to control the means of production and distribution of information. In an age where our contemporary equivalent of "kings" have no such power opinion is growing that how they feel about the matter is irrelevant, especially when their edicts like clawbacks from the commons are deemed unfair. After all, many works once in the public domain have now been stolen back into copyright protection. Was that right? Was that fair? They took that public intellectual property and made it private. Is it not fair that we take some back and make it public? The current duration of copyright is patently insane theft of the commons and the common man will have his due.
There's a growing movement to end copyrights and patents. The publishers and inventors had best take care how they sell the idea that their cause is fair and just. Brutal enforcement isn't going to work because it just motivates the common man to defy his oppressor. If you believe technology will solve this question by enforcing restrictions you should read up on Alan Turing's work - anything one machine will do, another machine can be built to do. For more direct matter I recommend you read the speeches of Thomas Macaulay. His analysis is spot on though the language is a bit obsolete being that he gave these speeches in 1841.
Ah, the classics. For when we forget history we are doomed to repeat it.
Others have pointed out that in a world with no copyright, the GPL has no force. This is true, but then in that world the GPL is unnecessary since its purpose is to protect the right of people to improve on what has gone before - a right which, believe it or not, used to be assumed.
And you're right: Since Microsoft is constrained to obey the law, it's not fair that others are permitted civil disobedience. But there it is. Every time Microsoft has served the interests of the content owners over the interests of the customers who pay them for product, they've been reviled and duly so. You can't have it both ways. That's why exactly 0% of 600 surveyed students planned to buy a Zune.
Whether people purchase their music or download it from the Pirate Bay or both is irrelevant to your Starving Artist problem. The Artists are being raped by the Record Companies where "a share of the net is a share of nothing". While they're in their naive stage they get indentured for studio time, then tour budgets, then marketing money. It's a timeworn path. It's an institutional tradition. Artists glean the fields of intellectual property. It should be no wonder that much of it is about anger and pain.
In the perfect execution of technology. If you please I'll put mine in a distributed network of highly redundant biological organisms each acting in his own best interest programmed by millions of years of evolution.
We're not just talking about one rock here. We could be talking about some rocks a mile or more across, some no bigger than a pea, and all the sizes in between in the standard distribution. For every rock the size of Mount Everest we'll see at peak a hailstorm of minivan sized rocks. If they're bodies foreign to the solar system they'll come in on hyperbolic tracks and we'll see each one only once, and only for a few months. A rock like that you don't have time to turn it - the only safe course is not to be where it's going. Or rather, not to be going through where it is. Each one will have its mass multiplied by far more kinetic energy than solar orbital velocities could give it. And the hailstorm will go on for a hundred thousand years.
I certainly hope somebody's tracking the frequency of visible rocks on hyperbolic tracks through the solar system so that we can see what direction they tend to be coming from (and hence, which direction we're moving in) and their frequency so that we may become duly alarmed when it's time.
So no, science is never going to solve this problem with any answer except to spread out the squishy bags of flesh far apart enough that no one thing could get them all at once.
We're still at the level of technology where we stare at them in awe after they've whizzed past. The solar system isn't all the mass in the galaxy. Apparently on a regular schedule the solar system's path through the galaxy takes it through clouds of rocks that are seen in multiples of about 60 million years. We last saw a major extinction event about that long ago. We don't have the technology to stop this. Somewhere out there in the dark doom patiently awaits our return.
The purpose to the universe may be to create a life form capable of propagating throughout it. We will do this or the universe will eventually wipe our slate clean and start over, as it has repeatedly done before.
To venture out into the great dark with course perilous and fate unknown, to almost certain death. Of hope none for return, and faint to survive to my dotage. With a prize no less than the survival of human life after the inevitable apocalypse?
if the user wants to watch the video, they will let the malware on the system - everyone is powned.
Um, no, that's not what I said. The instructions go to installing publicly audited sofware and enabling native features that render the vendor's malware unnecessary. The software comes from sources designated by the end user as trusted, not from the disc. If there's some disc so encrypted that it requires the installation of the publisher's malware we don't need it. Ultimately someone ethical would buy the disc and then download the bittorent. Someone less fussy would skip step 1. But nobody in their right mind would install mandatory software to overcome a media vendor's DRM. That's just crazy talk. Any media vendor that would ask that doesn't have the end user's best interest at heart and that makes them an untrusted source for software. We're all tired of reinstalling everything every time we make that mistake.
The whole issue will become moot soon anyway. It wouldn't occur to any of my kids to go to a store and buy media content on a physical disc, nor any of their friends either. They know better to buy content with DRM too. Somebody might sell them one video but as soon as they can't take that content somewhere and play it they're done with that source of content because their friends are laughing at them.
Office really is some pretty good stuff. It's the trialware nonsense I have a problem with, and you can't do anything about that in the general sense - that was settled in court. I suppose if other guys can do it, your team has to play that game too. It still bites, but there it is.
Crud. Apache slipped. It's only running on 2/3ds of the busiest million sites, which isn't even close to what I said but it's closer to what I meant to say. And some confused people run Apache on Windows too. Sorry about that. My info wasn't current and I didn't say what I meant to say. And Google's down to 3%. We all know what OS they run. I guess Linux really isn't popular after all. Maybe only 0.3% of people actually use Linux after all.
It won't run on the 915 because Intel dropped support for that and didn't develop WDDM drivers for it.
Like I said, Linux doesn't have a problem compositing on the 915 chipset. At the end of the day if you've got a framebuffer and a 2GHz processor you should be able to stuff frames onto the screen. 800,000,000 cycle per second system bus should be fast enough to get 360,000 pixels to the screen thirty times a second. Have you tried it on some distros? It works. It's not the best, but it does do the fancy effects and it will play video. I'll bet 7 will do it just fine when it's released too. It's just Vista that has this inexplicable problem and that's one of the reasons why it's perceived to be of poor quality.
What would the Linux community do here?
This is WRT Disney's stupid video player. I believe that if you have Ubuntu 8.10 you would click here to install the restricted formats (not to read about how to do it... to actually do it), click here to install the VLC movie player and paste the following line into a terminal to enable decss:
sudo/usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh
Two minutes, no listening services, no closed source software, and you're done. The instructions are different for different versions, and they're found here. But you didn't want instructions really, you just wanted to hold up the idea that this is hard to do or violates in some way the other things I said. It's neither. I do get that Microsoft can't do it this way for legal reasons. I don't think they can do anything about that stupid movie player that's borked every PC I've ever found it installed on, except not install it by default. I have no idea what hardware that thing works on, but I've never seen it actually play a movie. Which is sort of to the point -- instead of having a computer automatically install a player if it's inserted, you get the end result that inserting a DVD renders your DVD-Rom drive inoperable, your computer unbootable, eliminates your ability to burn a DVD or some other nonsense. So instead of the "Just watch movie" experience you get the "just hose up my computer any time I stick a disc in" experience. That's soooo much better. The whole way video content is hosed up with patents and lawyers and requirements that nobody can include a player that actually works is a load of BS. But that at least is not your fault.
You say "You can't win".
Er... I might have been a little over the top at that point. I do get so excited. It looks like the tide is starting to turn but it's early yet and there's a long campaign ahead. At the end of the day if you have to make your software better to compete, I can live with that. And if you can't, I can live with that too. Either way I'm going to get what I want, so it's all good.
You appear to have given my ravings some serious thought. That's a win. I've dragged some thoughtful and lengthy comments out of you and after your lurking on slashdot all these years I'll take that win too.
Unfortunately I haven't convinced you that services exposed to the network by default, that autorun or autoplay by default, are bad engineering design. That's a shame. I've taken the trouble to read some of your background and you used to be capable of good work. Maybe you've attended too many focus groups, or surrendered to marketing. It's a crying shame really. But unless you recognize that marketing does not improve engineering if the engineering is bad, your products will always be crap. They will always welcome the clever hacker to exploit the millions of 20%ers in the general population. Windows will ever be lifting up her skirt.
WRT group policies - you seem to be saying that because the feature is there at all (auto-run) that it's a big problem. If you turn something off with GP its off - there isn't any ambiguity....
Somebody has been lying to you. In the specific referenced case there has been a patch in the last six months. Look it up. And yes even if you could turn it off with GP it's still a problem. It might be mitigated somewhat if you could actually test that it's off on every client in the enterprise. With security it's not "trust but verify" - it's "Verify, then trust." It were better if the default for any security reduction feature were "off" so that a failure for a client to heed the GP would not decrease your security. This is called "default deny" thinking, and it's essential to creating effective security. That you managed to ascend to your position without knowing these essential facts is telling.
You mentioned bloatware several times in your post and I want to respond to that. By far the most offensive bloatware I've found on a system is "Microsoft Office - Trial". Not only is it nagware, but it won't uninstall completely. It can't delete all of its DLLs or unregister all of its keys. There's nothing you can do to completely remove it but install from an OEM OS CD which for some reason is no longer included in the box. Now why would they not include in the box the critical element you need to remove Microsoft Office Trial? What possible reason could they have?
WRT to performance on low spec systems:.... I could go on, and on, and on.
You don't really think that blaming the other guy is going to get you anywhere with me, do you? I've called your phone support.
For example you say "but then when popping out the high def window in Youtube the system would reliably reboot without warning"
I mentioned in the very same paragraph that it was a beta and that it was reasonable to expect it would be fixed in the release. You've got a pass on that one. Let it go.
About the Sony Root Kit...
Ok, I confess. I like to dig you guys a little more than I should. That doesn't mean you get a pass on the malware Disney includes on their DVDs in the guise of being a video player. Whatever can be done to prevent that crud should be done.
Now, about your comparison of Vista to XP - in many ways - its apples to oranges....
Um, yeah. We needed a better apple and you gave us a lemon. So a bunch of us bought more Apples anyway and the world became a better place just a little bit. Hey, maybe I'm completely off base. What you did, please do it again.
No seriously, composed desktop, yadda yadda. You're telling me that a dev mgr at the worlds largest software company can't find a guy who can write to a framebuffer 15 times a second using a 64 bit processor running at 1.6GHz. I'll quote a great American here: "LALALA I can't HEAR YOU". The reason I can't hear you is that those hobbyists your marketing people disparage s
Somebody modded my last one, so we're not completely alone here.:-)
do any operating systems you approve of install, by default, with all listening ports off?
By policy Ubuntu has not had open ports listening on the network in a default install for several years - I don't know if it ever has, or if it started with that policy. There could have been an exception made for zeroconf - there was some discussion about that for a while. OpenBSD has always been this way. Others do it too. Really, there's no reason for a desktop or a server to be listening to the network until it's told to do so - different users have different needs, but one need they all share is not to be exposed to vulnerabilities they don't need to be exposed to. I don't know what SuSe, RedHat or Mandriva do lately, nor OS-X. What I do know is that there isn't an army of millions of compromised zombies on the Internet attacking them so their users click links with gleeful abandon and purchase their MP3s from Amazon without a care in the world. But maybe it's just that they're not using Explorer.
Auto run is there because people want it. [....] Note, lots of business disables this using group policy , it's not hard.
Yes it is hard. For many the people neither the published manual method nor the group policy method of disabling this undesired feature worked reliably until recently and you know it. Does it now? Gee, is there some way to test that every client no longer performs this undesired behaviour in every circumstance? If you can't inspect it, you can't expect it. And as for people wanting it, well, I guess all the people who got Conficker this way have now decided they don't want it so badly. Many of them will be getting a Mac. But not the ones who don't know yet. Those people will be sending spam to you, me and everybody. Their computers will be shutting down legitimate businesses with denial of service attacks. They'll be used to store and forward the intimate details of millions of people to criminals who mean them harm - eventually probably including your details and mine. You never know what databases those millions of PCs were connected to. The "six degrees" rule makes it nearly certain that your banking information, credit report, medical history were all accessible from at least one of the myriad millions of machines that were compromised in the last five years, where those records exist in digital form. That they haven't been exploited yet is just dumb luck. Also, their zombies will become fast-flux hosts for "Bulletproof Hosting" to further exploit computers and defraud innocent netizens of many millions of dollars. All this because their users wanted Sony's rootkit to install when they put the CD in and you won't do the responsible thing and tell the children "No. You can't use the lawnmower until you can figure out how to start it yourself." I'm not saying the feature has to go away. It just shouldn't be the damned default! Let them turn it on, and then it's their fault. Until then, it's yours.
But, you are off the mark in many respects , Vista with well engineered drivers, a BIOS that has been well engineered, and lacking what some people call âoebloat wareâ will absolutely run acceptably well , the limiting factor is the HW not the OS or applications.
Ok, I cited a general case and made an assertion, you narrowed the scope and disagreed. Let's get a particular system like this one out and take it for a spin, shall we? Add 1GB of RAM, A DVDROM drive, a HDD and a decent monitor. With XP: quite adequate performance for a power efficient machine. Boots quickly. Full screen DVDs are no problem. With Flash installed
I feel a need to expound on this "no open ports" issue. Go ahead and ignore my ravings if you like.
Many a postdoc will be glad to show you his bulletproof method for running a service that can't be exploited. Signed code, insane encryption, public keys... It's all bullshit, and your marketing department knows this because they've got trolls on every board posting that "any software can be exploited - Linux and Mac OS-X aren't because they're not popular."
Look. This isn't rocket science. If you have an exposed service it will eventually be exploited. Even that Conficker jerk will get pwned in time, and his app only runs signed code. What's funny is that his services are more secure than your database connector, the second and third botnet owners are likely to compromise his network before you are, and none of the authors are over 30 years old. Any service that's available on the network can be exploited. You can't avoid it. What you can do is mitigate it to the point where someone had to deliberately open a service to the outside world to be vulnerable. Road Warriors ensure that some evil node will be on your network eventually. Therefore desktops must not have open ports by default, all servers must use secure authentication and report intrusion attempts. Even Intranet servers must be prepared for distributed slow password hacking. Expect attack and inspect what you expect. There is no defensive move that can't be countered except "don't be there when the attack happens." So let me quote President Madagascar: "Shut. Down. Everything!" This is an indirect reference to an online game called Pandemic 2.
Oh, and on a separate note, my humor may have been too subtle and for that I apologize. I make that mistake a lot. I don't work for Limited Brands. That was a Meme reference to your arrogance.
As long as I'm wasting my time, I might as well throw out some more not-in-your-department things: Exchange 2007 datastores. You guys do know that a gmail box is already 7GB, right? WTF are you thinking? This is an "enterprise" email solution? Oh, yeah: Sharepoint. Nuke it from orbit. Kill it with fire. That thing is heinous. The first time I saw it in the enterprise I right-clicked it closed in the task bar and waited two weeks to see if security would walk me out for accidentally clicking on an internal communication. When that didn't happen I realized they were serious. You might as well open up an ftp server on your root directory. Jeebus WTH is going on with Sharepoint? Is it supposed to be the enterprise web version of BearShare?
Again, this post is in the public domain. All rights reversed.
Y'know, they contacted the blogger directly, got the actual responsible engineers to listen directly to his concerns, duly investigated and promptly resolved the issue.
Yeah, they're somewhat restrained in their public communications. They're not PR types, they're engineers. That they've been let out of their cave to communicate with an individual member of the community is a big win, especially since they fixed it with a firmware patch. Let's not expect them to host the press conference too. That's too far outside the scope of their skillset.
The fix almost completely eliminates the value proposition of their premium -E line of drives, but they published it anyway. If Marketing were in charge that would not have happened.
I think it's time I bought me a couple of these -M drives.
You're right. That was rude and worse, unoriginal. Here, let me offer some helpful well known tips that escaped you, the managers you supervise, and the folks under them:
The network is untrusted. Install with no open ports by default - servers and desktops both. No listening services! Let the customers select the whiz-bang features they want. They still will but then it won't be all your fault when they join a botnet. This is best practice, what, 25 years now?
Mounted media are untrusted. Autorun and its ilk are the spawn of the devil. These also should be disabled by default. The control that enables it should have a "You look like you're trying to install a virus" wizard. And if for some godforsaken reason you won't disable the damned thing but choose instead to post instructions on how to disable it manually and through policy, make sure they frimping work flawlessly every time!.
If you're going to rewrite the network stack, testing should be very thorough. Rate limiting the network because audio is playing is just unforgivable.
If your OS won't run well on a 1.6GHz netbook with 1GB of RAM, we get to call it a pig that won't fly. Not that you're going to avoid that anyway, but at least it will be less fair. The market turned. No longer is "Moore Giveth, Microsoft taketh away" an acceptable answer. "Run well" does not mean "Show a desktop". It means "Do useful stuff like browse the Internet, play videos and edit documents."
My personal favorite peeve: If you're going to put "Add/Remove Programs" in every user's control panel, the damned thing should "Add Programs" with the default settings. This is a minor nit. I don't know why it bothers me so. Maybe I should get therapy. Still, you should see what other folks are doing to contrast with your own efforts in the software installation arena.
For every feature you add hire a guy and make it his life's mission to exploit it to the detriment of the end user. In fact go ahead and get yourself a battalion of those folks in advance. You need them. If you already have them, then fire them all and get new ones because the ones you have aren't gettin' 'er done. In fact, have HR actively recruit people who make fun of your stupid ideas and have one in every meeting. Nothing deters an idiot so much as open laughter. You definitely need people who are able to get a good belly laugh out of something ridiculous like Universal PnP.
If you're going to try and push your own deployment tools they should be no harder to install than Clonezilla, have more features than DRBL and run on XP and later. There's no excuse for the state of your OS deployment tools. They're worse than none at all. Do you not know that when you put out a package like that some large organizations make it a holy mission to make them work no matter how bad they are? Have a heart for the poor sods who get tasked to use this stuff and don't let them out until they're credible.
If you have Windows Server you should be able to PXE Boot to a thin desktop over the network from any PXE enabled PC. See the LTSP project for how this is done. Yeah, I know... you're not in servers.
Really you could fix all these things and I'd still not be interested in your products but at least the poor souls that must use them would have a little less of a horrid time. And I would get less spam. That's a benefit, right? Actually W7 isn't too horrid yet. We'll see how badly you munge it in the released copy. I expect to have a good laugh. In a recent survey 83% of IT pros say they've got no intention of even trying to deploy it for the first year. You lost that much credibility with Vista. You probably don't have too many more shots at this.
And if you're in patch-and-fix... if MS fixed the above stuff they could get away with patches once a month. As it is you should be streaming the damned things in real time.
You may use this post in any way you wish. I release it to the public domain.
Time was when England exiled their most violent felons to an island continent penal colony half a world away. Over time the definition for "violent felon" slid from rapist and murderer to pirate, then to treasonous conspirator, and so on until they landed at political dissident. For many years they exported these folk, only to discover later that this was their best and brightest; their free thinkers, their engineers artists and inventors, the folk who were brighter than their superiors. And what were left were Lords and serfs.
So now Australia breeds a more vital breed of men, having been selected from that filter, and England has lost control of them.
Such is as it is with Microsoft. Microsoft has bought into the theory that the top 20% of workers contribute 80% of the work that they've lost sight of how fungible those metrics are. Their 20%ers are folk who threaten the established structure, who are smarter than their bosses, who have scary ideas. It's only right that they migrate from there to Google. Google is Microsoft's Australia.
And no, I've never worked for Microsoft or Google and I still don't and I doubt that I would barring dire circumstance or rude incentive.
They just gave the ??AA a budget for their lobbyists of "more is better". They've killed the Internet.
There's no way that group wouldn't neuter the Bill of Rights for that kind of money, and there's no way our elected representatives won't sell out. It's over. It's been nice knowing y'all.
In five years let's get together on I2:The guerrilla mesh WWAN.
The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler.
The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages.
Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao.
But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it.
Unless the entire story has as much truth to it as the overwhelmingly enthusiastic Vista launch, the broadband density story, the Mojave Project, the "Get the Facts" campaign, and that old saw about ordinary Linux users needing to type on a command line and compile programs.
Because in that case this would be just another story about flackalysts retreading Microsoft press releases as organic opinion for pay, and some few innocent bloggers buying the routine when they should know better.
I think that frequent tazing would improve their response times faster, and more consistently. Slow cop! No donuDSXZTTT! Perhaps shock collars. That would be nice.
There might be some trouble getting the union to go along.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes. Or, in modern terms, NAS. Nothing replaces the obvious answer: Lend your NAS to a friend with equal quality standards for a few days, and let nature take its course. If that friend doesn't have your rip, back up the NAS to your media center and repeat until all your friends have offsite backups of each other's valuable media for disaster recovery purposes and you have what you want.
Not that I would advocate watching the backups of DVD's that you don't have purchased media for... oh, no. That would be immoral. Not quite as immoral as charging $16 bucks for Waterworld: Director's Cut or Glitter [4:3], but immoral still.
After all these years why are we even having this talk? Kids these days./lawn, onion, etc.
Since I'm already offtopic, I might as well go whole hog: using an old computer, the free OpenFiler app and a 4 port ESATA card you can turn 4 of these NAS+eSATA devices into RAIN: a Redundant Array of Independent NAS, for 27TB of massively parallel striped redundant hot swappable SATA goodness for about 6 grand served up as iSCSI. If you've been pricing that class of storage in the enterprise lately, you should now be going... wait, what did he say? Yes, I did say iSCSI SAN for $250/TB with redundancy, failover, striped performance and a scalable architecture that goes as big as you like. Yes it includes web management, clustering, unlimited snapshots, resizeable LUNs, static and dynamic replication and all the other SAN goodness. Though I'm not quite sure about data dedupe yet, at this rate for raw storage does it matter? Data dedupe is about making the most of that precious investment. If the investment is out of petty cash you don't need that kludge any more than you need Full Disk Compression, RLE, or any of those technologies built to get around the high cost of storage. Of course it runs in Linux, and of course it's available as a virtual machine, and naturally since the software is FREE there's no per-terabyte licensing. The license doesn't expire, run out, require keys or maintenance or accounting, it doesn't require a license server and when the array needs expansion or an upgrade in technology they can't tell you that you have to upgrade to the new version and buy licenses all over again. It's all about knowing what you're doing - a lot of the Top500 use OpenFiler to serve disk to their supercomputers.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that you're getting into this slashdot posting thing, there are going to be some bumps. It's a nuisance at first that you can't go back and edit posts, but you'll be thankful for that before long. I'll try and be helpful and not as abrasive as when I was trying to get your attention.
The idea of copyright comes from the power and desire of "kings" to control the means of production and distribution of information. In an age where our contemporary equivalent of "kings" have no such power opinion is growing that how they feel about the matter is irrelevant, especially when their edicts like clawbacks from the commons are deemed unfair. After all, many works once in the public domain have now been stolen back into copyright protection. Was that right? Was that fair? They took that public intellectual property and made it private. Is it not fair that we take some back and make it public? The current duration of copyright is patently insane theft of the commons and the common man will have his due.
There's a growing movement to end copyrights and patents. The publishers and inventors had best take care how they sell the idea that their cause is fair and just. Brutal enforcement isn't going to work because it just motivates the common man to defy his oppressor. If you believe technology will solve this question by enforcing restrictions you should read up on Alan Turing's work - anything one machine will do, another machine can be built to do. For more direct matter I recommend you read the speeches of Thomas Macaulay. His analysis is spot on though the language is a bit obsolete being that he gave these speeches in 1841.
Ah, the classics. For when we forget history we are doomed to repeat it.
Others have pointed out that in a world with no copyright, the GPL has no force. This is true, but then in that world the GPL is unnecessary since its purpose is to protect the right of people to improve on what has gone before - a right which, believe it or not, used to be assumed.
And you're right: Since Microsoft is constrained to obey the law, it's not fair that others are permitted civil disobedience. But there it is. Every time Microsoft has served the interests of the content owners over the interests of the customers who pay them for product, they've been reviled and duly so. You can't have it both ways. That's why exactly 0% of 600 surveyed students planned to buy a Zune.
There will always be those few who dare to do that thing that bothered you about TPB. In the end they may be the only people who matter.
Whether people purchase their music or download it from the Pirate Bay or both is irrelevant to your Starving Artist problem. The Artists are being raped by the Record Companies where "a share of the net is a share of nothing". While they're in their naive stage they get indentured for studio time, then tour budgets, then marketing money. It's a timeworn path. It's an institutional tradition. Artists glean the fields of intellectual property. It should be no wonder that much of it is about anger and pain.
It has nothing to do with the the Pirate Bay.
In the perfect execution of technology. If you please I'll put mine in a distributed network of highly redundant biological organisms each acting in his own best interest programmed by millions of years of evolution.
We're not just talking about one rock here. We could be talking about some rocks a mile or more across, some no bigger than a pea, and all the sizes in between in the standard distribution. For every rock the size of Mount Everest we'll see at peak a hailstorm of minivan sized rocks. If they're bodies foreign to the solar system they'll come in on hyperbolic tracks and we'll see each one only once, and only for a few months. A rock like that you don't have time to turn it - the only safe course is not to be where it's going. Or rather, not to be going through where it is. Each one will have its mass multiplied by far more kinetic energy than solar orbital velocities could give it. And the hailstorm will go on for a hundred thousand years.
I certainly hope somebody's tracking the frequency of visible rocks on hyperbolic tracks through the solar system so that we can see what direction they tend to be coming from (and hence, which direction we're moving in) and their frequency so that we may become duly alarmed when it's time.
So no, science is never going to solve this problem with any answer except to spread out the squishy bags of flesh far apart enough that no one thing could get them all at once.
We're still at the level of technology where we stare at them in awe after they've whizzed past. The solar system isn't all the mass in the galaxy. Apparently on a regular schedule the solar system's path through the galaxy takes it through clouds of rocks that are seen in multiples of about 60 million years. We last saw a major extinction event about that long ago. We don't have the technology to stop this. Somewhere out there in the dark doom patiently awaits our return.
The purpose to the universe may be to create a life form capable of propagating throughout it. We will do this or the universe will eventually wipe our slate clean and start over, as it has repeatedly done before.
To venture out into the great dark with course perilous and fate unknown, to almost certain death. Of hope none for return, and faint to survive to my dotage. With a prize no less than the survival of human life after the inevitable apocalypse?
Sign me up too.
I want the human race to survive if the Earth takes a big hit.
Did you mean to write "when" instead of "if" here?
Your answer looks something like this and my answer looks something like this. The difference is quite subtle but it's there.
if the user wants to watch the video, they will let the malware on the system - everyone is powned.
Um, no, that's not what I said. The instructions go to installing publicly audited sofware and enabling native features that render the vendor's malware unnecessary. The software comes from sources designated by the end user as trusted, not from the disc. If there's some disc so encrypted that it requires the installation of the publisher's malware we don't need it. Ultimately someone ethical would buy the disc and then download the bittorent. Someone less fussy would skip step 1. But nobody in their right mind would install mandatory software to overcome a media vendor's DRM. That's just crazy talk. Any media vendor that would ask that doesn't have the end user's best interest at heart and that makes them an untrusted source for software. We're all tired of reinstalling everything every time we make that mistake.
The whole issue will become moot soon anyway. It wouldn't occur to any of my kids to go to a store and buy media content on a physical disc, nor any of their friends either. They know better to buy content with DRM too. Somebody might sell them one video but as soon as they can't take that content somewhere and play it they're done with that source of content because their friends are laughing at them.
Office really is some pretty good stuff. It's the trialware nonsense I have a problem with, and you can't do anything about that in the general sense - that was settled in court. I suppose if other guys can do it, your team has to play that game too. It still bites, but there it is.
Crud. Apache slipped. It's only running on 2/3ds of the busiest million sites, which isn't even close to what I said but it's closer to what I meant to say. And some confused people run Apache on Windows too. Sorry about that. My info wasn't current and I didn't say what I meant to say. And Google's down to 3%. We all know what OS they run. I guess Linux really isn't popular after all. Maybe only 0.3% of people actually use Linux after all.
It won't run on the 915 because Intel dropped support for that and didn't develop WDDM drivers for it.
Like I said, Linux doesn't have a problem compositing on the 915 chipset. At the end of the day if you've got a framebuffer and a 2GHz processor you should be able to stuff frames onto the screen. 800,000,000 cycle per second system bus should be fast enough to get 360,000 pixels to the screen thirty times a second. Have you tried it on some distros? It works. It's not the best, but it does do the fancy effects and it will play video. I'll bet 7 will do it just fine when it's released too. It's just Vista that has this inexplicable problem and that's one of the reasons why it's perceived to be of poor quality.
What would the Linux community do here?
This is WRT Disney's stupid video player. I believe that if you have Ubuntu 8.10 you would click here to install the restricted formats (not to read about how to do it... to actually do it), click here to install the VLC movie player and paste the following line into a terminal to enable decss:
sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh
Two minutes, no listening services, no closed source software, and you're done. The instructions are different for different versions, and they're found here. But you didn't want instructions really, you just wanted to hold up the idea that this is hard to do or violates in some way the other things I said. It's neither. I do get that Microsoft can't do it this way for legal reasons. I don't think they can do anything about that stupid movie player that's borked every PC I've ever found it installed on, except not install it by default. I have no idea what hardware that thing works on, but I've never seen it actually play a movie. Which is sort of to the point -- instead of having a computer automatically install a player if it's inserted, you get the end result that inserting a DVD renders your DVD-Rom drive inoperable, your computer unbootable, eliminates your ability to burn a DVD or some other nonsense. So instead of the "Just watch movie" experience you get the "just hose up my computer any time I stick a disc in" experience. That's soooo much better. The whole way video content is hosed up with patents and lawyers and requirements that nobody can include a player that actually works is a load of BS. But that at least is not your fault.
You say "You can't win".
Er... I might have been a little over the top at that point. I do get so excited. It looks like the tide is starting to turn but it's early yet and there's a long campaign ahead. At the end of the day if you have to make your software better to compete, I can live with that. And if you can't, I can live with that too. Either way I'm going to get what I want, so it's all good.
You appear to have given my ravings some serious thought. That's a win. I've dragged some thoughtful and lengthy comments out of you and after your lurking on slashdot all these years I'll take that win too.
Unfortunately I haven't convinced you that services exposed to the network by default, that autorun or autoplay by default, are bad engineering design. That's a shame. I've taken the trouble to read some of your background and you used to be capable of good work. Maybe you've attended too many focus groups, or surrendered to marketing. It's a crying shame really. But unless you recognize that marketing does not improve engineering if the engineering is bad, your products will always be crap. They will always welcome the clever hacker to exploit the millions of 20%ers in the general population. Windows will ever be lifting up her skirt.
WRT group policies - you seem to be saying that because the feature is there at all (auto-run) that it's a big problem. If you turn something off with GP its off - there isn't any ambiguity....
Somebody has been lying to you. In the specific referenced case there has been a patch in the last six months. Look it up. And yes even if you could turn it off with GP it's still a problem. It might be mitigated somewhat if you could actually test that it's off on every client in the enterprise. With security it's not "trust but verify" - it's "Verify, then trust." It were better if the default for any security reduction feature were "off" so that a failure for a client to heed the GP would not decrease your security. This is called "default deny" thinking, and it's essential to creating effective security. That you managed to ascend to your position without knowing these essential facts is telling.
You mentioned bloatware several times in your post and I want to respond to that. By far the most offensive bloatware I've found on a system is "Microsoft Office - Trial". Not only is it nagware, but it won't uninstall completely. It can't delete all of its DLLs or unregister all of its keys. There's nothing you can do to completely remove it but install from an OEM OS CD which for some reason is no longer included in the box. Now why would they not include in the box the critical element you need to remove Microsoft Office Trial? What possible reason could they have?
WRT to performance on low spec systems: .... I could go on, and on, and on.
You don't really think that blaming the other guy is going to get you anywhere with me, do you? I've called your phone support.
For example you say "but then when popping out the high def window in Youtube the system would reliably reboot without warning"
I mentioned in the very same paragraph that it was a beta and that it was reasonable to expect it would be fixed in the release. You've got a pass on that one. Let it go.
About the Sony Root Kit...
Ok, I confess. I like to dig you guys a little more than I should. That doesn't mean you get a pass on the malware Disney includes on their DVDs in the guise of being a video player. Whatever can be done to prevent that crud should be done.
Now, about your comparison of Vista to XP - in many ways - its apples to oranges. ...
Um, yeah. We needed a better apple and you gave us a lemon. So a bunch of us bought more Apples anyway and the world became a better place just a little bit. Hey, maybe I'm completely off base. What you did, please do it again.
No seriously, composed desktop, yadda yadda. You're telling me that a dev mgr at the worlds largest software company can't find a guy who can write to a framebuffer 15 times a second using a 64 bit processor running at 1.6GHz. I'll quote a great American here: "LALALA I can't HEAR YOU". The reason I can't hear you is that those hobbyists your marketing people disparage s
Not that anybody else is reading this
Somebody modded my last one, so we're not completely alone here. :-)
do any operating systems you approve of install, by default, with all listening ports off?
By policy Ubuntu has not had open ports listening on the network in a default install for several years - I don't know if it ever has, or if it started with that policy. There could have been an exception made for zeroconf - there was some discussion about that for a while. OpenBSD has always been this way. Others do it too. Really, there's no reason for a desktop or a server to be listening to the network until it's told to do so - different users have different needs, but one need they all share is not to be exposed to vulnerabilities they don't need to be exposed to. I don't know what SuSe, RedHat or Mandriva do lately, nor OS-X. What I do know is that there isn't an army of millions of compromised zombies on the Internet attacking them so their users click links with gleeful abandon and purchase their MP3s from Amazon without a care in the world. But maybe it's just that they're not using Explorer.
Auto run is there because people want it. [....] Note, lots of business disables this using group policy , it's not hard.
Yes it is hard. For many the people neither the published manual method nor the group policy method of disabling this undesired feature worked reliably until recently and you know it. Does it now? Gee, is there some way to test that every client no longer performs this undesired behaviour in every circumstance? If you can't inspect it, you can't expect it. And as for people wanting it, well, I guess all the people who got Conficker this way have now decided they don't want it so badly. Many of them will be getting a Mac. But not the ones who don't know yet. Those people will be sending spam to you, me and everybody. Their computers will be shutting down legitimate businesses with denial of service attacks. They'll be used to store and forward the intimate details of millions of people to criminals who mean them harm - eventually probably including your details and mine. You never know what databases those millions of PCs were connected to. The "six degrees" rule makes it nearly certain that your banking information, credit report, medical history were all accessible from at least one of the myriad millions of machines that were compromised in the last five years, where those records exist in digital form. That they haven't been exploited yet is just dumb luck. Also, their zombies will become fast-flux hosts for "Bulletproof Hosting" to further exploit computers and defraud innocent netizens of many millions of dollars. All this because their users wanted Sony's rootkit to install when they put the CD in and you won't do the responsible thing and tell the children "No. You can't use the lawnmower until you can figure out how to start it yourself." I'm not saying the feature has to go away. It just shouldn't be the damned default! Let them turn it on, and then it's their fault. Until then, it's yours.
But, you are off the mark in many respects , Vista with well engineered drivers, a BIOS that has been well engineered, and lacking what some people call âoebloat wareâ will absolutely run acceptably well , the limiting factor is the HW not the OS or applications.
Ok, I cited a general case and made an assertion, you narrowed the scope and disagreed. Let's get a particular system like this one out and take it for a spin, shall we? Add 1GB of RAM, A DVDROM drive, a HDD and a decent monitor. With XP: quite adequate performance for a power efficient machine. Boots quickly. Full screen DVDs are no problem. With Flash installed
I feel a need to expound on this "no open ports" issue. Go ahead and ignore my ravings if you like.
Many a postdoc will be glad to show you his bulletproof method for running a service that can't be exploited. Signed code, insane encryption, public keys... It's all bullshit, and your marketing department knows this because they've got trolls on every board posting that "any software can be exploited - Linux and Mac OS-X aren't because they're not popular."
Look. This isn't rocket science. If you have an exposed service it will eventually be exploited. Even that Conficker jerk will get pwned in time, and his app only runs signed code. What's funny is that his services are more secure than your database connector, the second and third botnet owners are likely to compromise his network before you are, and none of the authors are over 30 years old. Any service that's available on the network can be exploited. You can't avoid it. What you can do is mitigate it to the point where someone had to deliberately open a service to the outside world to be vulnerable. Road Warriors ensure that some evil node will be on your network eventually. Therefore desktops must not have open ports by default, all servers must use secure authentication and report intrusion attempts. Even Intranet servers must be prepared for distributed slow password hacking. Expect attack and inspect what you expect. There is no defensive move that can't be countered except "don't be there when the attack happens." So let me quote President Madagascar: "Shut. Down. Everything!" This is an indirect reference to an online game called Pandemic 2.
Oh, and on a separate note, my humor may have been too subtle and for that I apologize. I make that mistake a lot. I don't work for Limited Brands. That was a Meme reference to your arrogance.
As long as I'm wasting my time, I might as well throw out some more not-in-your-department things: Exchange 2007 datastores. You guys do know that a gmail box is already 7GB, right? WTF are you thinking? This is an "enterprise" email solution? Oh, yeah: Sharepoint. Nuke it from orbit. Kill it with fire. That thing is heinous. The first time I saw it in the enterprise I right-clicked it closed in the task bar and waited two weeks to see if security would walk me out for accidentally clicking on an internal communication. When that didn't happen I realized they were serious. You might as well open up an ftp server on your root directory. Jeebus WTH is going on with Sharepoint? Is it supposed to be the enterprise web version of BearShare?
Again, this post is in the public domain. All rights reversed.
Y'know, they contacted the blogger directly, got the actual responsible engineers to listen directly to his concerns, duly investigated and promptly resolved the issue.
Yeah, they're somewhat restrained in their public communications. They're not PR types, they're engineers. That they've been let out of their cave to communicate with an individual member of the community is a big win, especially since they fixed it with a firmware patch. Let's not expect them to host the press conference too. That's too far outside the scope of their skillset.
The fix almost completely eliminates the value proposition of their premium -E line of drives, but they published it anyway. If Marketing were in charge that would not have happened.
I think it's time I bought me a couple of these -M drives.
You're right. That was rude and worse, unoriginal. Here, let me offer some helpful well known tips that escaped you, the managers you supervise, and the folks under them:
The network is untrusted. Install with no open ports by default - servers and desktops both. No listening services! Let the customers select the whiz-bang features they want. They still will but then it won't be all your fault when they join a botnet. This is best practice, what, 25 years now?
Mounted media are untrusted. Autorun and its ilk are the spawn of the devil. These also should be disabled by default. The control that enables it should have a "You look like you're trying to install a virus" wizard. And if for some godforsaken reason you won't disable the damned thing but choose instead to post instructions on how to disable it manually and through policy, make sure they frimping work flawlessly every time!.
If you're going to rewrite the network stack, testing should be very thorough. Rate limiting the network because audio is playing is just unforgivable.
If your OS won't run well on a 1.6GHz netbook with 1GB of RAM, we get to call it a pig that won't fly. Not that you're going to avoid that anyway, but at least it will be less fair. The market turned. No longer is "Moore Giveth, Microsoft taketh away" an acceptable answer. "Run well" does not mean "Show a desktop". It means "Do useful stuff like browse the Internet, play videos and edit documents."
My personal favorite peeve: If you're going to put "Add/Remove Programs" in every user's control panel, the damned thing should "Add Programs" with the default settings. This is a minor nit. I don't know why it bothers me so. Maybe I should get therapy. Still, you should see what other folks are doing to contrast with your own efforts in the software installation arena.
For every feature you add hire a guy and make it his life's mission to exploit it to the detriment of the end user. In fact go ahead and get yourself a battalion of those folks in advance. You need them. If you already have them, then fire them all and get new ones because the ones you have aren't gettin' 'er done. In fact, have HR actively recruit people who make fun of your stupid ideas and have one in every meeting. Nothing deters an idiot so much as open laughter. You definitely need people who are able to get a good belly laugh out of something ridiculous like Universal PnP.
If you're going to try and push your own deployment tools they should be no harder to install than Clonezilla, have more features than DRBL and run on XP and later. There's no excuse for the state of your OS deployment tools. They're worse than none at all. Do you not know that when you put out a package like that some large organizations make it a holy mission to make them work no matter how bad they are? Have a heart for the poor sods who get tasked to use this stuff and don't let them out until they're credible.
If you have Windows Server you should be able to PXE Boot to a thin desktop over the network from any PXE enabled PC. See the LTSP project for how this is done. Yeah, I know... you're not in servers.
Really you could fix all these things and I'd still not be interested in your products but at least the poor souls that must use them would have a little less of a horrid time. And I would get less spam. That's a benefit, right? Actually W7 isn't too horrid yet. We'll see how badly you munge it in the released copy. I expect to have a good laugh. In a recent survey 83% of IT pros say they've got no intention of even trying to deploy it for the first year. You lost that much credibility with Vista. You probably don't have too many more shots at this.
And if you're in patch-and-fix... if MS fixed the above stuff they could get away with patches once a month. As it is you should be streaming the damned things in real time.
You may use this post in any way you wish. I release it to the public domain.
Cool. I do mergers & acquisitions (corporate finance) for Limited Brands (Bath & Body Works, Victoria's Secret, etc).
BTW, has anybody here mentioned that your products suck?
Hopefully clicking this link will stand in for the "apt-get install apt-p2p"
Yep. This is going to be fun.
Time was when England exiled their most violent felons to an island continent penal colony half a world away. Over time the definition for "violent felon" slid from rapist and murderer to pirate, then to treasonous conspirator, and so on until they landed at political dissident. For many years they exported these folk, only to discover later that this was their best and brightest; their free thinkers, their engineers artists and inventors, the folk who were brighter than their superiors. And what were left were Lords and serfs.
So now Australia breeds a more vital breed of men, having been selected from that filter, and England has lost control of them.
Such is as it is with Microsoft. Microsoft has bought into the theory that the top 20% of workers contribute 80% of the work that they've lost sight of how fungible those metrics are. Their 20%ers are folk who threaten the established structure, who are smarter than their bosses, who have scary ideas. It's only right that they migrate from there to Google. Google is Microsoft's Australia.
And no, I've never worked for Microsoft or Google and I still don't and I doubt that I would barring dire circumstance or rude incentive.
You have no chance to survive make your time.
You're not a hot blonde.
They just gave the ??AA a budget for their lobbyists of "more is better". They've killed the Internet.
There's no way that group wouldn't neuter the Bill of Rights for that kind of money, and there's no way our elected representatives won't sell out. It's over. It's been nice knowing y'all.
In five years let's get together on I2:The guerrilla mesh WWAN.
The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler. The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages. Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao. But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it.
The Tao of Programming, Book 1, Verse 3.
Unless the entire story has as much truth to it as the overwhelmingly enthusiastic Vista launch, the broadband density story, the Mojave Project, the "Get the Facts" campaign, and that old saw about ordinary Linux users needing to type on a command line and compile programs.
Because in that case this would be just another story about flackalysts retreading Microsoft press releases as organic opinion for pay, and some few innocent bloggers buying the routine when they should know better.
I think that frequent tazing would improve their response times faster, and more consistently. Slow cop! No donuDSXZTTT! Perhaps shock collars. That would be nice.
There might be some trouble getting the union to go along.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes. Or, in modern terms, NAS. Nothing replaces the obvious answer: Lend your NAS to a friend with equal quality standards for a few days, and let nature take its course. If that friend doesn't have your rip, back up the NAS to your media center and repeat until all your friends have offsite backups of each other's valuable media for disaster recovery purposes and you have what you want.
Not that I would advocate watching the backups of DVD's that you don't have purchased media for... oh, no. That would be immoral. Not quite as immoral as charging $16 bucks for Waterworld: Director's Cut or Glitter [4:3], but immoral still.
After all these years why are we even having this talk? Kids these days. /lawn, onion, etc.
Since I'm already offtopic, I might as well go whole hog: using an old computer, the free OpenFiler app and a 4 port ESATA card you can turn 4 of these NAS+eSATA devices into RAIN: a Redundant Array of Independent NAS, for 27TB of massively parallel striped redundant hot swappable SATA goodness for about 6 grand served up as iSCSI. If you've been pricing that class of storage in the enterprise lately, you should now be going... wait, what did he say? Yes, I did say iSCSI SAN for $250/TB with redundancy, failover, striped performance and a scalable architecture that goes as big as you like. Yes it includes web management, clustering, unlimited snapshots, resizeable LUNs, static and dynamic replication and all the other SAN goodness. Though I'm not quite sure about data dedupe yet, at this rate for raw storage does it matter? Data dedupe is about making the most of that precious investment. If the investment is out of petty cash you don't need that kludge any more than you need Full Disk Compression, RLE, or any of those technologies built to get around the high cost of storage. Of course it runs in Linux, and of course it's available as a virtual machine, and naturally since the software is FREE there's no per-terabyte licensing. The license doesn't expire, run out, require keys or maintenance or accounting, it doesn't require a license server and when the array needs expansion or an upgrade in technology they can't tell you that you have to upgrade to the new version and buy licenses all over again. It's all about knowing what you're doing - a lot of the Top500 use OpenFiler to serve disk to their supercomputers.