In all seriousness, this is a perfect example of why (most) source code should be open-source. Closed-source software depends on "you can't see inside this black box"/"security by obscurity" measures that are vulnerable because they cannot be made more secure by the community.
The real issue here is that the "authoritative" (emphasis on the quotation marks) status of Wikipedia as THE place to go for information in the sense that it will in time be generally accurate. If Britannica is successful, Wikipedia's status will be diluted. Case in point: probably 90% or more of Slashdot users use Google for general web searches, while going to Wikipedia for encyclopaedia research, IMDB for movie research, Sourceforge for open source product research, etc.... We know better than to put up with a MSN or Yahoo query (unless the Google search came up unsatisfactory). If the Wikipedia results are unsatisfactory, we research and add to the article, making it more complete and authoritative. Are we going to feel compelled to verify that Britannica is correct as well? (keep in mind that Britannica would never have allowed free access, let alone editable content if it weren't for the success of Wikipedia). Do we really care that MSN and Yahoo perform poorly for most queries other than perhaps looking up the latest Katy Perry video or editorial content? This, of course, comes with a massive theoretical cost to freedom by concentrating the power with a small number of authorities (Google and Wikipedia, for example) but with the benefit of optimizing accuracy and reducing time required to "authoritate" the web.
I live in continental Europe in a country where everyone is expected to be able to identify himself to the police at any time, in a country where there's a central voter register and if you move, you are expected to register yourself with the local town inside of 3 weeks. That sounds like the total police state, doesn't it?
> It does. Identify thyself with the police at any time? Central voter register? Let me get to those two points:(from the point of view of someone living in Canada) a) Identifying yourself. I had a friend walking home from work late (11PM!) through a park, and a police officer approached him and asked for identification. My friend was well dressed and had nothing to do with the known drug dealing that the police do nothing about in this park. He challenged the officer as to why he needed identification, what he had done. Not being able to answer this, the officer asked again. My friend said "What is this? Nazi Germany? 'PAPERS PLEASE'?" The officer backed off, but not after an argument with my friend who managed to get his badge number. He was under review the next morning. 2) central voter register. Most of us don't vote (I do, as do most of the folks I hang out with.) and the main reason the government keeps track of us is to ensure we're paying taxes. By design, Stats Can, Revenue Canada (our version of the IRS) and Elections Canada databases are separate - I work in government database management and often have to act as a watchdog to ensure they're not sharing information, and I take them to task for what they try to do - by exposing them to the media.
As those official documents are quite important, forging those, getting those in wrong names or otherwise messing with them is taken very, very seriously by law enforcement. You don't mess around with your driving license just to get some beer before you should (which wouldn't be a problem anyway, once you get a driving license you're also considered old enough to get alcohol), that would send you quite quickly to jail. This improves the general trust in those documents.
>In the states most jurisdictions don't allow legal alcohol purchases and consumption until the age of 21 (!). Here in Canada, it's 19 most everywhere except Quebec, where it's 18. Which is still high, if you ask me. It also allows for and encourages _casual_ abuse of government-issued ID without thinking of the consequences. This gets people in the frame of mind for abuse at an early age, and also brings about a cottage industry dealing in these kinds of fake IDs (some of which are of excellent quality - no "McLovin"). Abuse is somewhat rampant. Because it's used for something so trivial as drinking age, it presents a huge societal disconnect. I think you make some very good points - that is, we are generally sheep looking for a place to eat and rest, not realizing the wolves are licking their chops choosing their next dinner.
What exactly is the estimated capacity for "all the world's [media]". This sounds like one heck of a bold statement when the numbers at the moment are unfathomable for holding a back catalogue of everything broadcast on network television and everything from blockbusters to B-movies from 1890 on, let alone net-generated videos, cable and alternative delivery methods.
I'm just as big a fan of HD over Blu-Ray as anyone, but cash incentives and coupons? From Microsoft? (OK, any big software monopoly with holds on the OS market..... wait... never mind). This is not right and this is not fair.
On Forbes, or Fortune, or The Robb Report..... but TIME?
I agree that Time always tries to be a little off-centre in their selection of Man of the Year (PC Man of the Year, etc...) but this is getting ridiculous. Plus, he's already been Man of the Year, when he most deserved it for his dominance (for better or for worse) in the emerging IT marketplace.
Historically, how do you measure the projected sales of music in a given market? There's no hard and fast science to it, it's a best guess based on so many factors it's ridiculous.
Perhaps there simply isn't that much new/good music out there at all and people aren't buying... how is the iPod REALLY affecting sales?
I personally think that music had a severe downturn in the late 90s, and upswing (which is now over) in the early 2000s. This is my opinion, but where are the really cool alt-rock bands going where no band has gone before? All the labels have jumped on a given bandwagon, trying to recreate success instead of nurturing new talent and new ideas.... and new music!
Bram is brilliant. BY not officially supporting (and indeed suppressing) the searching of "illegal" content from the official site, he maintains his common-carrier status, and simply tows the line for the rest of us. This is no different than alcohol companies urging you to drink in moderation, big tobacco supporting quit-smoking programs or major manufacturers of recording equipment mentioning in the manual that the hardware and software is "no intended for the duplication or dissemination of copy-protected matter". He supplies the software......... what people do with it is not his problem, and it has legitimated legal uses, perhaps overwhelmingly so.
If this were true... couldn't you see the collective heads of the MPAA and the RIAA shouting "KAHN!!!!!" while an overhead shot of their offices cuts higher and higher.....
"We are stronger than ever because we have a research lab in Cambridge, we have one now in China, one in India and that is where the top problems in computer science are going to be solved."
I'm not sure what Mr. Gates is implying here. But if I were on one of the U.S. campuses, I'd be pissed, and a little nervous. """""""""""""""""
I think the key word here is "stronger", not better. Just because more players arrive does not make a football team better, it makes them stronger. Able to draw on another's talent that wasn't there before. Mr. Gates is a gifted spin doctor, and knows (most of the time) how not to alientate his own minions.
Will it make it a blue field of death? Seriously... if MS is serious about putting their name out there in such a way that they boast about their own systems running the place, they'd better have some VERY, VERY talented people running the IT infastructure.
The real issue here is that someone has to step to the plate (Munich, State of Mass, etc...) in order for this type of testing to take place. Opponents of open-source don't realize that an open standard is just that: a standard. A standard is something that will be updated, and in this case will probably be something that will include backwards-compatibility as an important part of further development and ratifying of the new standard. Closed standards have little of this type of accountablility. Imagine if the OpenDocument 2 standard say 3 years from now indicated that there would be no backwards compatibilty. Huge uproar woudl arise, much dicsussion and pondering would take placeand commn sense would prevail. Now imagine what Microsoft has done in the past, and will continue to do in the future. Microsoft need a revenue stream to survive and will continue to develop products aimed at replacing, rather than complementing, their predecessors, rather than building on them and allowing for higher levels of interoperability and ease of transition.
Betamax WAS the superior format: picture quality, longevity of media, etc... This did not stop the rest of the industry from saying PFO to Sony and their licensing schemes and conditions. Now that it has been established that Sony has been trying to one-up everyone for years with their proprietary (but licensable) technologies/formats, it is clear where the market must go. I don't like the MS-Intel Wintel consortium because of the DRM conditions, but in this case I think it's a clearer jumping point than the Sony alternative. Besides.... Sony made some excellent VHS VRCs later in life. Also, unlike Microsoft, Intel cannot afford to alienate the Open-source/Linux crowd, even though they probably will.
I..... don't agree. Viruses are not generally written in machine or machine-specific code, they do the same as most Windows software does: call APIs that have flaws in them because MS does not write them robustly enough nor is there peer review to point out flaws that an originating team optimizing for flawless interoperability with another team's APIs and other code. In essence, open-source development is so sucessful in a security sense because such review (ie: how could a virus exploit this?) has already taken place in the development process in the wild.
A virus written for a Windows XP machine has at least a 90% chance of hitting a similarly protected Alpha running XP (OK, OK, let the flames begin....). Does the above comment infer that when Mac OS moves to i386 it will be more suceptible? This may be the case, for one or both of two reasons: 1) by then the focus will have moved from MS Windows attacks to Mac OS attacks because of market penetration, plus the added bonus of being a novelty like Windows virii have become. 2) the virus developers have learned tricks for machine calls and stops only pertinent to i386s; see the missing 10%.
That's one of the reasons I use Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, etc...
Security by obscurity is not essentially valid, but it can be useful.
The government can't force people to organize their thoughts or ideas written down on legal pads with sworn oaths as to dates & times, why should ANY information be handed to them. I run may trace eliminators, for this purpose. I encrypt my file system. If this is going to slow them down or prevent them from gathering evidence, it's done it's job. Just another reason not to buy into the Microsoft way. (I'm not being facetious, it's true: Microsoft has an agenda to be on the side of the law, they HAVE to be lobbying quietly to get stuff like this out and laws passed to enforce it.)
Microsoft is calling this threat "low-impact" or "moderate" is that they consider Windows 2000 to be a second-tier operating system at this point and that everyone (and I mean everyone and his dog or penguin) should be using XP. Good points made above for the "variant" aspect of this virus. I'm running XP on a customer's machine (that's my cop-out, anyway), and it's got botzor.exe in the registry.
The Shuttle has a great deal of maneuverability while in space both for rendez-vous with sattelite positions or the ISS, and for re-entry positioning. This was one of the design principles that allow for much more spontaneous (read, easier, not easy) reshcduling of re-entry and deployment. Even the Soyuz capsules seem to have some kind of retro-rocket design. The crew capsule nor the main booster seem to have (given the pictures on the NYT site) no retro-rockets visible. Any ideas on where they went, what they're doing instead or how they're going to steer that thing once it gets up there?
Slashdot Mirror
In all seriousness, this is a perfect example of why (most) source code should be open-source. Closed-source software depends on "you can't see inside this black box"/"security by obscurity" measures that are vulnerable because they cannot be made more secure by the community.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArVid
The ISPs rightly refuse... if this is what they're blocking this week, what will it be next and where will they be taking orders from?
One (or more) of the 'agencies' of the U.S.A.? Interpol? Local law enforcement? The PTA?
The real issue here is that the "authoritative" (emphasis on the quotation marks) status of Wikipedia as THE place to go for information in the sense that it will in time be generally accurate. If Britannica is successful, Wikipedia's status will be diluted. Case in point: probably 90% or more of Slashdot users use Google for general web searches, while going to Wikipedia for encyclopaedia research, IMDB for movie research, Sourceforge for open source product research, etc.... We know better than to put up with a MSN or Yahoo query (unless the Google search came up unsatisfactory). If the Wikipedia results are unsatisfactory, we research and add to the article, making it more complete and authoritative. Are we going to feel compelled to verify that Britannica is correct as well? (keep in mind that Britannica would never have allowed free access, let alone editable content if it weren't for the success of Wikipedia). Do we really care that MSN and Yahoo perform poorly for most queries other than perhaps looking up the latest Katy Perry video or editorial content? This, of course, comes with a massive theoretical cost to freedom by concentrating the power with a small number of authorities (Google and Wikipedia, for example) but with the benefit of optimizing accuracy and reducing time required to "authoritate" the web.
I live in continental Europe in a country where everyone is expected to be able to identify himself to the police at any time, in a country where there's a central voter register and if you move, you are expected to register yourself with the local town inside of 3 weeks. That sounds like the total police state, doesn't it?
:(from the point of view of someone living in Canada) a) Identifying yourself. I had a friend walking home from work late (11PM!) through a park, and a police officer approached him and asked for identification. My friend was well dressed and had nothing to do with the known drug dealing that the police do nothing about in this park. He challenged the officer as to why he needed identification, what he had done. Not being able to answer this, the officer asked again. My friend said "What is this? Nazi Germany? 'PAPERS PLEASE'?" The officer backed off, but not after an argument with my friend who managed to get his badge number. He was under review the next morning. 2) central voter register. Most of us don't vote (I do, as do most of the folks I hang out with.) and the main reason the government keeps track of us is to ensure we're paying taxes. By design, Stats Can, Revenue Canada (our version of the IRS) and Elections Canada databases are separate - I work in government database management and often have to act as a watchdog to ensure they're not sharing information, and I take them to task for what they try to do - by exposing them to the media.
> It does. Identify thyself with the police at any time? Central voter register? Let me get to those two points
As those official documents are quite important, forging those, getting those in wrong names or otherwise messing with them is taken very, very seriously by law enforcement. You don't mess around with your driving license just to get some beer before you should (which wouldn't be a problem anyway, once you get a driving license you're also considered old enough to get alcohol), that would send you quite quickly to jail. This improves the general trust in those documents.
>In the states most jurisdictions don't allow legal alcohol purchases and consumption until the age of 21 (!). Here in Canada, it's 19 most everywhere except Quebec, where it's 18. Which is still high, if you ask me. It also allows for and encourages _casual_ abuse of government-issued ID without thinking of the consequences. This gets people in the frame of mind for abuse at an early age, and also brings about a cottage industry dealing in these kinds of fake IDs (some of which are of excellent quality - no "McLovin"). Abuse is somewhat rampant. Because it's used for something so trivial as drinking age, it presents a huge societal disconnect. I think you make some very good points - that is, we are generally sheep looking for a place to eat and rest, not realizing the wolves are licking their chops choosing their next dinner.
Ha... so where's the "five nines" here?
They should be running at least the authentication servers on a flavour of Linux like the rest of their network.
What exactly is the estimated capacity for "all the world's [media]". This sounds like one heck of a bold statement when the numbers at the moment are unfathomable for holding a back catalogue of everything broadcast on network television and everything from blockbusters to B-movies from 1890 on, let alone net-generated videos, cable and alternative delivery methods.
A Caddilac.
A Caddilac Escalade.
Has the man no taste?
I'm just as big a fan of HD over Blu-Ray as anyone, but cash incentives and coupons? From Microsoft? (OK, any big software monopoly with holds on the OS market..... wait... never mind). This is not right and this is not fair.
Microsoft's doing their bit by including UPnP in new version of Messenger and encouraging people to use it.
Correction.... Bill has NOT been Man of the Year. My mistake.
On Forbes, or Fortune, or The Robb Report..... but TIME?
I agree that Time always tries to be a little off-centre in their selection of Man of the Year (PC Man of the Year, etc...) but this is getting ridiculous. Plus, he's already been Man of the Year, when he most deserved it for his dominance (for better or for worse) in the emerging IT marketplace.
Historically, how do you measure the projected sales of music in a given market? There's no hard and fast science to it, it's a best guess based on so many factors it's ridiculous.
Perhaps there simply isn't that much new/good music out there at all and people aren't buying... how is the iPod REALLY affecting sales?
I personally think that music had a severe downturn in the late 90s, and upswing (which is now over) in the early 2000s. This is my opinion, but where are the really cool alt-rock bands going where no band has gone before? All the labels have jumped on a given bandwagon, trying to recreate success instead of nurturing new talent and new ideas.... and new music!
Mommy! There's a bug in my burger!
Bram is brilliant. BY not officially supporting (and indeed suppressing) the searching of "illegal" content from the official site, he maintains his common-carrier status, and simply tows the line for the rest of us. This is no different than alcohol companies urging you to drink in moderation, big tobacco supporting quit-smoking programs or major manufacturers of recording equipment mentioning in the manual that the hardware and software is "no intended for the duplication or dissemination of copy-protected matter". He supplies the software......... what people do with it is not his problem, and it has legitimated legal uses, perhaps overwhelmingly so.
If this were true... couldn't you see the collective heads of the MPAA and the RIAA shouting "KAHN!!!!!" while an overhead shot of their offices cuts higher and higher.....
This is a good post.... someone please mod up?
"""""""""""""""""
And, finally, from the article:
"We are stronger than ever because we have a research lab in Cambridge, we have one now in China, one in India and that is where the top problems in computer science are going to be solved."
I'm not sure what Mr. Gates is implying here. But if I were on one of the U.S. campuses, I'd be pissed, and a little nervous.
"""""""""""""""""
I think the key word here is "stronger", not better. Just because more players arrive does not make a football team better, it makes them stronger. Able to draw on another's talent that wasn't there before. Mr. Gates is a gifted spin doctor, and knows (most of the time) how not to alientate his own minions.
Will it make it a blue field of death? Seriously... if MS is serious about putting their name out there in such a way that they boast about their own systems running the place, they'd better have some VERY, VERY talented people running the IT infastructure.
The real issue here is that someone has to step to the plate (Munich, State of Mass, etc...) in order for this type of testing to take place. Opponents of open-source don't realize that an open standard is just that: a standard. A standard is something that will be updated, and in this case will probably be something that will include backwards-compatibility as an important part of further development and ratifying of the new standard. Closed standards have little of this type of accountablility. Imagine if the OpenDocument 2 standard say 3 years from now indicated that there would be no backwards compatibilty. Huge uproar woudl arise, much dicsussion and pondering would take placeand commn sense would prevail. Now imagine what Microsoft has done in the past, and will continue to do in the future. Microsoft need a revenue stream to survive and will continue to develop products aimed at replacing, rather than complementing, their predecessors, rather than building on them and allowing for higher levels of interoperability and ease of transition.
Betamax WAS the superior format: picture quality, longevity of media, etc... This did not stop the rest of the industry from saying PFO to Sony and their licensing schemes and conditions. Now that it has been established that Sony has been trying to one-up everyone for years with their proprietary (but licensable) technologies/formats, it is clear where the market must go. I don't like the MS-Intel Wintel consortium because of the DRM conditions, but in this case I think it's a clearer jumping point than the Sony alternative. Besides.... Sony made some excellent VHS VRCs later in life. Also, unlike Microsoft, Intel cannot afford to alienate the Open-source/Linux crowd, even though they probably will.
I..... don't agree. Viruses are not generally written in machine or machine-specific code, they do the same as most Windows software does: call APIs that have flaws in them because MS does not write them robustly enough nor is there peer review to point out flaws that an originating team optimizing for flawless interoperability with another team's APIs and other code. In essence, open-source development is so sucessful in a security sense because such review (ie: how could a virus exploit this?) has already taken place in the development process in the wild.
A virus written for a Windows XP machine has at least a 90% chance of hitting a similarly protected Alpha running XP (OK, OK, let the flames begin....). Does the above comment infer that when Mac OS moves to i386 it will be more suceptible? This may be the case, for one or both of two reasons: 1) by then the focus will have moved from MS Windows attacks to Mac OS attacks because of market penetration, plus the added bonus of being a novelty like Windows virii have become. 2) the virus developers have learned tricks for machine calls and stops only pertinent to i386s; see the missing 10%.
Good.
That's one of the reasons I use Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, etc...
Security by obscurity is not essentially valid, but it can be useful.
The government can't force people to organize their thoughts or ideas written down on legal pads with sworn oaths as to dates & times, why should ANY information be handed to them. I run may trace eliminators, for this purpose. I encrypt my file system. If this is going to slow them down or prevent them from gathering evidence, it's done it's job. Just another reason not to buy into the Microsoft way. (I'm not being facetious, it's true: Microsoft has an agenda to be on the side of the law, they HAVE to be lobbying quietly to get stuff like this out and laws passed to enforce it.)
ME was less of an OS than 3.0. :)
Microsoft themselves virtualy deny the existence of ME in most cases.
Microsoft is calling this threat "low-impact" or "moderate" is that they consider Windows 2000 to be a second-tier operating system at this point and that everyone (and I mean everyone and his dog or penguin) should be using XP. Good points made above for the "variant" aspect of this virus. I'm running XP on a customer's machine (that's my cop-out, anyway), and it's got botzor.exe in the registry.
The Shuttle has a great deal of maneuverability while in space both for rendez-vous with sattelite positions or the ISS, and for re-entry positioning. This was one of the design principles that allow for much more spontaneous (read, easier, not easy) reshcduling of re-entry and deployment. Even the Soyuz capsules seem to have some kind of retro-rocket design. The crew capsule nor the main booster seem to have (given the pictures on the NYT site) no retro-rockets visible. Any ideas on where they went, what they're doing instead or how they're going to steer that thing once it gets up there?