Product activation in my experience too often gets in the way of non-infringing use. When I buy a new computer, or a just new hard disk, I want to reformat my old hard disk and reinstall all of my software on the new one.
Most pirates won't dare use pirated software for commercial purposes. They can lose it all if caught. And most non-commercial users aren't planning to buy photoshop in the first place. In this rare case, software piracy BENEFITS THE SOFTWARE COMPANY. The result is more people know how to use photoshop when entering a commercial environment, which is when they are most likely to make a purchase. Otherwise, there are many alternative products that amatuer users can get their hands on without a high initial investment, like Paint Shop Pro eval and the Gimp, and they will prefer those alternative products in the workplace.
Existing versions are pretty good. I see no need to upgrade unless they add some great new feature that turns the entire industry upside down.
Cease and desist letters aren't the right way to secure a product, expecially an electronic voting system. Good design and careful programming are the way. And the nature of their product creates a great need to know what's going on behind their closed doors. The security of our democracy depends on it. While I haven't tried their product, the flood of criticism makes it seem that Diebold has a lot of marketting expertise but is lacking people with the skill and talent to actually create the kind of secure, reliable voting system that they're trying to peddle. Snake oil comes to mind, especially if they're using Microsoft Access, and storing the audit log as plaintext in the same database as everything else is a big no no. And that 'You could probably get away with a batch file that prints "system test passed" for all I know.' comment is scary as well.
They're discussing security problems that any second year programming student should have learned to address in the design phase. It's not THAT hard to make an audit log that can be written once but cannot later be read without the private key or modified without destroying it or having knowledge of the initial state. And really they should be writing a copy of the encrypted log to something more permanent, so that someone can't just walk into a voting office of a district mostly favoring the opponent with a big electromagnet and degauss all the voting machines.
Relating to the article, currently there's really no good evidence that Microsoft is behind this. If they were, you know they could spare a lot more than $50 million if it they thought it could hurt Linux.
I put "Santa Cruz Operations" into an anagram generator and got back a four word "PIRATE ZAN, ASS CROUTON" among others, minus the comma. The only two word match was "TANZANIA PROSECUTORS".
I'm much taller than my older brother. But early in life, yeah, I was smaller than he was at the same age. He was a fat, fat, baby, which didn't last after I came along.
They're allowed to close off their network. They own it, and shouldn't have to pay for "alternative" clients that still connect to Microsoft's servers, stealing their bandwidth.
The thing I do have a problem with though is Microsoft's decision to make it a pain in the ass for inexperienced computer users to not use MSN Messenger. It tries to prevent users from disabling/removing it, depending on what version you have.
I've wondered about that slowdown for a while. My current suspicion is that it's built in to prevent using a single user version of windows as a server with third party software, based on my not noticing the problem on slower computers running 2000 server. I can't speak with any certainly on this though.
I blame the Windows Registry, and the Microsoft campaign to convince developers to switch away from the proven method of using ini (or similar) files located in the same directory as the program they belong to. The result is that most programs cannot be installed simply by copying them to disk, and often cannot easily be moved once they've been installed. Plus there's the problem of having all your eggs in one basket. You can't backup just a single program and its settings anymore.
A lot of distributed clients aren't that well behaved. An idle process can still slow a system down immensely, unless it completely shuts itself off when there's activity. I haven't tried seti@home, but I messed with some of the des & rc5 cracking clients long ago.
There still must be like 50 or more major sites that may be seen as violating that patent. I can't imagine none of them having had all those features in '96.
People are more or less trusted where I work, though occasionally I'll skim through the logs, mostly to look for suspicious traffic like adware. We do have some pornsters but they're too valuable to fire.
At another place I worked, I must say there's nothing quite like showing a new realtime log analyzer to your boss and seeing it pop up a bunch of suspicious animal porn (?) links during the first minute, after several days of rather uneventful testing.
The GPL only infects software that includes or is statically linked to GPL'd source code. So why is everyone upset about them withholding code that could very well not be infringing on the GPL? If it simply runs on top it's theirs. Certainly they could do everything found in those routers without modifying Linux itself. If they made drivers that only supports their proprietary hardware, and embedded them in the kernel rather than using dynamic linking, they may need release those, but everything else, like in house software that run atop of linux, is theirs to hide.
I use my right mouse button all the time, and laugh at Mac users who have to hold down two or three keys and click to get the same effect.
Making users go out and buy two button mice isn't a good marketting technique. And the uncertainty over whether or not the end user will have that second button results in a lot of Mac software not supporting it at all.
Re:Keep putting it off. Please !
on
Longhorn in 2006
·
· Score: 1
Thanks. I didn't know that.
Re:Keep putting it off. Please !
on
Longhorn in 2006
·
· Score: 1
One way to check is to open up the properties for the primary IDE channel. If it says PIO mode, when Ultra DMA is available, then that may be the problem.
It's only supposed to happen if there's a timeout, but it could also happen when coming out of standby. The patches for that should prevent it from happening again but don't undo it if it's already happened. I've run into a couple computers with that problem. If it happens again, even with the latest patches installed, hardware problems may be to blame.
Re:Keep putting it off. Please !
on
Longhorn in 2006
·
· Score: 1
Nothing's keeping them. They've done it, they're doing it, and they'll probably do it again.
After several patches, I found that regedit for Windows 2000 no longer supports all the data types found in the registry as it's supposed to. On one occasion I had to resort to importing.reg files to edit a string array that was causing crashes.
Plus there's a feature/bug in Windows 2000 that'll gradually step down the hard disk performance over time on many computers. And patching alone doesn't fix it. After installing the latest patches, you have to remove the hard disk controller from the device manager and let it redetect it on the next couple boots, resetting the stepdown counter.
I was programming in assembly about the same time that I was programming in qbasic back in middle school. I started moving away from assembly my freshman year of high school when I took a Pascal class, followed by C the next year, and C++ and Java my senior year. Now I mostly just use assembly when I want to get to special instructions, and I expect to use it in a compilers class I'm taking this term. Aside from that the benefits aren't worth the extra typing.
VB isn't too bad, if you're writing something cheap that you expect to throw away next year, and seriously hate gui programming in other languages.
Real programmers use whatever's best for the task at hand. Just ask Steve Gibson of Gibson Research.
If Windows 2003 is anything like previous versions, Microsoft makes it perform poorly on purpose to make their more expensive versions look better. A lot of their products insert delays when the number of clients exceeds the license limit.
"While Windows performance scales up well initially, it then drops off quickly as more clients access the server."
So I'd like to see more benchmarks too, and more details on the test setup. It's entirely possible that samba really is faster. NT file sharing is so slow that I'll sometimes use ftp (filezilla) over the lan for faster transfers.
1: Create DNC list, with steep penalties for violating it. 2: Make it extremely hard to obtain the list, and prohibit reselling. 3: Problem solved.
No doubt a lot of phones have been silent because of this, even those not on the list. God bless America. Now if we could only figure out how to do the same with spam.
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Product activation in my experience too often gets in the way of non-infringing use. When I buy a new computer, or a just new hard disk, I want to reformat my old hard disk and reinstall all of my software on the new one.
Most pirates won't dare use pirated software for commercial purposes. They can lose it all if caught. And most non-commercial users aren't planning to buy photoshop in the first place. In this rare case, software piracy BENEFITS THE SOFTWARE COMPANY. The result is more people know how to use photoshop when entering a commercial environment, which is when they are most likely to make a purchase. Otherwise, there are many alternative products that amatuer users can get their hands on without a high initial investment, like Paint Shop Pro eval and the Gimp, and they will prefer those alternative products in the workplace.
Existing versions are pretty good. I see no need to upgrade unless they add some great new feature that turns the entire industry upside down.
Cease and desist letters aren't the right way to secure a product, expecially an electronic voting system. Good design and careful programming are the way. And the nature of their product creates a great need to know what's going on behind their closed doors. The security of our democracy depends on it. While I haven't tried their product, the flood of criticism makes it seem that Diebold has a lot of marketting expertise but is lacking people with the skill and talent to actually create the kind of secure, reliable voting system that they're trying to peddle. Snake oil comes to mind, especially if they're using Microsoft Access, and storing the audit log as plaintext in the same database as everything else is a big no no. And that 'You could probably get away with a batch file that prints "system test passed" for all I know.' comment is scary as well.
They're discussing security problems that any second year programming student should have learned to address in the design phase. It's not THAT hard to make an audit log that can be written once but cannot later be read without the private key or modified without destroying it or having knowledge of the initial state. And really they should be writing a copy of the encrypted log to something more permanent, so that someone can't just walk into a voting office of a district mostly favoring the opponent with a big electromagnet and degauss all the voting machines.
How could I have missed this little gem:
"SATAN NAZI PROSECUTOR"
Relating to the article, currently there's really no good evidence that Microsoft is behind this. If they were, you know they could spare a lot more than $50 million if it they thought it could hurt Linux.
In Soviet Russia, Microsoft flamebait clamors for YOU!
I put "Santa Cruz Operations" into an anagram generator and got back a four word "PIRATE ZAN, ASS CROUTON" among others, minus the comma. The only two word match was "TANZANIA PROSECUTORS".
I'm much taller than my older brother. But early in life, yeah, I was smaller than he was at the same age. He was a fat, fat, baby, which didn't last after I came along.
That's $50 million more for them to lose in countersuits. And eventually, after lawyer fees, $5-$10 million back to the open source community.
They're allowed to close off their network. They own it, and shouldn't have to pay for "alternative" clients that still connect to Microsoft's servers, stealing their bandwidth.
The thing I do have a problem with though is Microsoft's decision to make it a pain in the ass for inexperienced computer users to not use MSN Messenger. It tries to prevent users from disabling/removing it, depending on what version you have.
Just to show some support, and to see if it's worth it and if they have my favorite artists. $20 is practically lunch money.
I'll probably also see what they offer in the way of music videos.
I've wondered about that slowdown for a while.
My current suspicion is that it's built in to prevent using a single user version of windows as a server with third party software, based on my not noticing the problem on slower computers running 2000 server. I can't speak with any certainly on this though.
I blame the Windows Registry, and the Microsoft campaign to convince developers to switch away from the proven method of using ini (or similar) files located in the same directory as the program they belong to. The result is that most programs cannot be installed simply by copying them to disk, and often cannot easily be moved once they've been installed. Plus there's the problem of having all your eggs in one basket. You can't backup just a single program and its settings anymore.
A lot of distributed clients aren't that well behaved. An idle process can still slow a system down immensely, unless it completely shuts itself off when there's activity. I haven't tried seti@home, but I messed with some of the des & rc5 cracking clients long ago.
There still must be like 50 or more major sites that may be seen as violating that patent. I can't imagine none of them having had all those features in '96.
People are more or less trusted where I work, though occasionally I'll skim through the logs, mostly to look for suspicious traffic like adware. We do have some pornsters but they're too valuable to fire.
At another place I worked, I must say there's nothing quite like showing a new realtime log analyzer to your boss and seeing it pop up a bunch of suspicious animal porn (?) links during the first minute, after several days of rather uneventful testing.
The GPL only infects software that includes or is statically linked to GPL'd source code. So why is everyone upset about them withholding code that could very well not be infringing on the GPL? If it simply runs on top it's theirs. Certainly they could do everything found in those routers without modifying Linux itself. If they made drivers that only supports their proprietary hardware, and embedded them in the kernel rather than using dynamic linking, they may need release those, but everything else, like in house software that run atop of linux, is theirs to hide.
It runs nicely on Windows 2000 from a network drive.
The company I work for uses an old dos accounting program called NewViews.
I use my right mouse button all the time, and laugh at Mac users who have to hold down two or three keys and click to get the same effect.
Making users go out and buy two button mice isn't a good marketting technique. And the uncertainty over whether or not the end user will have that second button results in a lot of Mac software not supporting it at all.
Thanks. I didn't know that.
One way to check is to open up the properties for the primary IDE channel. If it says PIO mode, when Ultra DMA is available, then that may be the problem.
It's only supposed to happen if there's a timeout, but it could also happen when coming out of standby. The patches for that should prevent it from happening again but don't undo it if it's already happened. I've run into a couple computers with that problem. If it happens again, even with the latest patches installed, hardware problems may be to blame.
Nothing's keeping them. They've done it, they're doing it, and they'll probably do it again.
.reg files to edit a string array that was causing crashes.
After several patches, I found that regedit for Windows 2000 no longer supports all the data types found in the registry as it's supposed to. On one occasion I had to resort to importing
Plus there's a feature/bug in Windows 2000 that'll gradually step down the hard disk performance over time on many computers. And patching alone doesn't fix it. After installing the latest patches, you have to remove the hard disk controller from the device manager and let it redetect it on the next couple boots, resetting the stepdown counter.
I was programming in assembly about the same time that I was programming in qbasic back in middle school. I started moving away from assembly my freshman year of high school when I took a Pascal class, followed by C the next year, and C++ and Java my senior year. Now I mostly just use assembly when I want to get to special instructions, and I expect to use it in a compilers class I'm taking this term. Aside from that the benefits aren't worth the extra typing.
VB isn't too bad, if you're writing something cheap that you expect to throw away next year, and seriously hate gui programming in other languages.
Real programmers use whatever's best for the task at hand. Just ask Steve Gibson of Gibson Research.
If Windows 2003 is anything like previous versions, Microsoft makes it perform poorly on purpose to make their more expensive versions look better. A lot of their products insert delays when the number of clients exceeds the license limit.
"While Windows performance scales up well initially, it then drops off quickly as more clients access the server."
So I'd like to see more benchmarks too, and more details on the test setup. It's entirely possible that samba really is faster. NT file sharing is so slow that I'll sometimes use ftp (filezilla) over the lan for faster transfers.
Yeah, just about everyone has one of those nowadays.
Here's mine, which crashes older IE and Mozilla browsers with the input type and fieldset bugs, and attempts to handle the rest with a popup flood.
1: Create DNC list, with steep penalties for violating it.
2: Make it extremely hard to obtain the list, and prohibit reselling.
3: Problem solved.
No doubt a lot of phones have been silent because of this, even those not on the list. God bless America. Now if we could only figure out how to do the same with spam.