UEFI will only load a cryptographically signed bootloader. It doesn't care about your disk hardware.
If UEFI is mandatory on your system, this means that only people who have the private signing keys for the public key blocks in your BIOS will be able to produce a bootloader image that your BIOS will load. Microsoft will of course have one of these keys.
Even if UEFI is only the default and you can disable it, it has a chilling effect. People will not just be able to shove a LiveCD into their computer and try it out, unless the Linux distributor somehow manages to get a signing key into that UEFI EEPROM and sign their LiveCD bootloaders with it. Explaining to people that they just need to stick in a LiveCD or USB stick is easy. Perhaps you might get them to push F8 or whatever the key is to choose a boot volume. But get them to rummage around in the BIOS settings, and disable an option which probably has a red label saying "ooooo scary, security risk, don't do that!"? Much too much hassle for the average Joe.
The sad thing is, it's a useful tool. It IS useful for protecting against rootkits. It's probably a good thing for the average user that MS is pushing it. But it's dangerous to our freedom to do what we will with our computer, for exactly the same reason as it's useful - it serves to prevent unauthorized code running on your machine.
The question is, who holds the keys for the authorization? Even if you can load new keys into your UEFI, you obviously need a trusted OS to do it (or it would be a pretty worthless security feature). At it's simplest, you could type them into a BIOS screen (a block of checksummed text, perhaps). But if manufacturers don't roll this feature into their BIOS setup, then it's left to an OS that boots from storage. And of course, only a *signed* OS can do that in secure mode. Which means the people with signing keys in your BIOS get to control whether you can add more keys. So you may end up owning a copy of Windows just so you can "bless" your machines with a key for your chosen Linux distro... if this is permitted at all.
Only in the server room. Which MS is unlikely to want - they'd have no chance of converting Linux boxes to Windows. Workstation hardware will continue to be designed with Windows in mind.
Or manufacturers provide an override
This is more likely. Manufacturers do not like being told by software and content companies what can and cannot be done with their hardware, particularly when it means they won't get a sale - just look how most DVD players have hidden menus that disable region locks, for example.
Or windows will get exploited to load Linux.
Not an acceptable solution - you'd have to install Windows first to install Linux. Which means one or more of - breaking the law, risking some dodgy pirate download, paying MS for the privilege of using a Free operating system.
And windows 7 is here to stay for the next decade.
OEM Windows licenses state in the EULA that they apply to a single machine. Retail licenses have NO WARRANTY ; including no statement about what hardware they will run on. The vast majority of Windows purchases are pre-installs.
Besides, Microsoft will be here for at least a decade. They are playing the long game. If only half of computers are replaced with secure booting UEFI machines in the next decade, unless overrides are present, or bootloader signing is possible for other operating systems, that still reduces the count of alternate operating systems by a half. Instead of growing, the Free OS usebase will be shrinking, which will harm the one thing that it depends on - community - a great deal.
The GPL does not prohibit you charging to distribute software, it explicitly permits you to do so. What it prohibits is preventing you from distributing further copies, and distribution of binaries without source (or the offer of source).
Not such a stretch - B&N would lose face amongst the geek community if they settled a patent deal with an NDA with Microsoft. The geek community buys ebook devices, and is known for expressing their beliefs with their purchasing power, refusing to buy from the likes of Sony. Therefore they would be less likely to buy Nook devices and services from B&N. Therefore B&N would be at an actual disadvantage from harmed consumer reputation and reduced sales if they were to sign such an agreement.
It is sad that the Maemo / MeeGo project was canned at Nokia. Even after everyone gave rave reviews to it's successor, the N9 - Nokia sabotaged this phone good and proper by keeping it out of any markets that could have embraced it. They're releasing it in Kazakhstan, and Australia, avoiding Japan, Canada, Sweden, Germany, the U.K. and the U.S. - they couldn't be any clearer if they put a leaflet in the box that said "We hate this product and we want it to fail. The only reason you can buy it at all is because otherwise we'll be sued by our shareholders for wasting money on dead-end projects."
Nokia should have climbed onto the shoulders of the Android while they still could. They could still differentiate on their great hardware, principally their great antenna tech. Now they can only differentiate on being the the major-league phone company that's Microsoft's bitch.
The display will ultimately condense down into a head mounted display of some sort - hopefully something that could be mistaken for a pair of reading glasses (or "phenomenoscopes" as Neal Stephenson would have it), with full AR integration.
I don't think I'd want to give up a full-size mechanical keyboard though. I guess I'll have somewhere to store a LOT of redundant battery pack in my Model M or Cherry.
It's totally on purpose. Microsoft have really bent over for the media cartels - the whole "Protected Media Path" gubbins is about this. You can't get an unsigned driver to load (outside of debug mode), which means you can't, for example, write a video driver that just dumps frames to disk.
I'm not a "whiz" with Office by any stretch, simply because I avoid it whenever possible, but I know enough to know that F1 Is Your Friend.
They'd be much better off learning how to learn. Programming is actually an excellent start for that - you're teaching a very stupid pupil how stuff gets done. The teacher learns more than the student.
Hell yes, we had Latin classes at school. The history was interesting, but shit, what a waste of time learning the language. I used to piss the teacher off something rotten because he'd set a test, and I'd fail it. Then I'd study for 20 minutes and pass it verbally outside the teacher's common room. He was annoyed because it was obvious I had the ability to learn his subject, I just didn't give a shit because it was so useless.
I would have loved some proper IT classes instead. I would have probably been far ahead of the curriculum, because I was one of those children who was obsessed with the things, but it would have been nice to have a subject where I could make no effort and get As instead of make no effort and get... well, nothing. I gave up Latin as soon as it was no longer compulsory, so I don't even have a GCSE qualification in it.
My main reason for disliking VB.NET is I don't want to wreck my VB6 skills.
While I wouldn't voluntarily want to go back to VB6 development... well, it's something to fall back on. There's so much VB6 software out there, that it's the COBOL of the future - people are likely to be wanting skilled VB6 developers and they are probably going to have to pay through the nose for them. A nice little pension plan.
VB.NET is close enough to VB6 in syntax, but different enough to ruin my memory of VB6. So I have avoided it as much as possible. As another poster points out, it's essentially C# with some different syntax sugar.
Agreed - modern smartphones are MUCH more powerful than the 8-bit computers we started with as a kid.
The N900 has a video out, so you can plug it into your television. Add a couple of Bluetooth input devices and you've got the equivalent of the 8-bit computer revolution - without the software. This is the space the Raspberry Pi is trying to aim for. Even though the Pi is much cheaper than a smartphone, the extra utility of the smartphone may make it a "necessity" where the Pi is a luxury.
The thing that got us hooked on computers was necessity - you had to learn something, to use them at all. Once you learned something, you developed an appetite for more. The availability of user-friendly GUI is what stunts this instinct these days.
Sounds like they should have a Dutch auction for these things - just drop the price of a patent license slowly until the first bidder is willing to pay it.
The bandwidth problem is in the "last mile" between the ISP and it's customers, and in the wireless spectrum. The ISPs designed for a "consumer" network where you download content like their digital TV offerings. Unfortunately for them (and us), they got a "peer serving" customer base, where everyone shares with everyone else.
There's no problem with transatlantic bandwidth. A large amount of existing optical fibre is dark anyway, and we're constantly figuring out new tricks to cram more data through what we have already.
It does add some redundancy, but that's about all it's value to the common man. Given that bandwidth on this cable is going to charged at a premium, it may be unlikely that you'll see traffic from consumer ISPs crossing it.
They are really charging for the low latency - in bandwidth terms it's probably going to be undersubscribed. They might sell excess capacity while reserving some channels for low-latency comms, but they'd have to build in some kind of store-and-forward artificial latency buffer or any idiot will be able to get their premium services.
A number of the other comments indicate that this is what is actually happening, with companies paying a premium to rent co-located server space in exchanges close to trading centres, or even in the actual server racks of the NYSE.
Producing a foodstuff like that which was still a gel composition would be hard. Dietary needs are complex and to keep the food as a gel would mean leaving things out.
There's a place for iron rations, like pemmican, but they are no substitute for a varied diet.
Aside from the purely nutritional aspect, the psychological aspects are also important, especially on an arduous mission in a dangerous and confined environment. Each astronaut has an input into what goes on his menu because this is recognised as important for preserving their morale. Even the Matrix gets this right - you don't want to be eating the same "bowl of snot" for every meal, even if it is nutritionally complete.
And the whole smug "the Russians used a pencil" thing - well, floating, conductive graphite fragments in an environment full of vital electrical equipment doesn't strike me as a good idea.
There are other considerations for astronaut menus, like favouring food that does not crumb readily to stop floating crumbs clogging instruments (although possibly not so much these days). In addition, the zero gravity environment means your nasal membranes swell, which reduces your sensitivity to flavours, meaning that they season the food more heavily - it would probably veer to the other side of palatable here on earth.
If you learn of the legislation through your government contacts, that's equivalent to insider trading - I'd consider it unethical and on the stock market that kind of thing is considered illegal.
HFT leverages the same foreknowledge - instead of the advance notice being provided by insider knowledge, the advance notice is provided by just being so damn fast. While the individual advantages are small, when you do it thousands of times a second, they add up. Just because something is not illegal, does not mean it's not harmful.
They should just have two quantum RAM blocks consisting of entangled qubits. When you set a bit at one end, the bit at the other end also flips. Literally instantaneous transmission, meaning that from a relativity point of view, the London exchange hears about events in NY before they actually happen.
It's sad to think that if this tech is ever invented, this will be among the first things it is used for....
Depends on what you define as "unreasonably expensive", but this outfit : Synctus will ship you a pair (or cloud) of pre-configured self-syncing, NAT traversing NAS boxes.
I met the guy who sells them at a geek social and he knows his stuff ; if you know enough, sure, you can produce an equally functional setup for lower hardware costs, but if your time is valuable the price is probably within the bounds of "reasonable" given that it includes the hardware, software, and service.
The NHS had, until recently, an enterprise-wide license agreement for Office. We employ just shy of 1.2M people. Imagine what could be done for LibreOffice with some small fraction of the cost of a few hundred thousand Office licenses.
Yup, here in the bosom of the NHS IT programme I can tell you we are using Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Python, Bazaar, Git, Subversion, Trac, Eclipse, etc.
For internal tooling projects I'll use essentially any open-source licensed code that I can lay my hands on to do the job, rather than shell out for commercial components that inevitably don't quite fit our needs and don't provide great support. To be honest... by the time you go through the utterly barmy procurement process for these things - you could have spent the same effort getting things running with an OSS library, and ended up with both something that works well AND the valuable accumulation of extra knowledge and skills. I once waited 13 weeks for a tool purchase (VB6 code analysis tool, alas, no open equivalent) - by the time it arrived, I'd done most of the work manually.
Our commercial partners tend to be rather cagy about copyleft licenses like GPL, but they all like BSD-style licensed code (not least because they can just take our splendid efforts and sell them back to us in their shiny new products...)
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UEFI will only load a cryptographically signed bootloader. It doesn't care about your disk hardware.
If UEFI is mandatory on your system, this means that only people who have the private signing keys for the public key blocks in your BIOS will be able to produce a bootloader image that your BIOS will load. Microsoft will of course have one of these keys.
Even if UEFI is only the default and you can disable it, it has a chilling effect. People will not just be able to shove a LiveCD into their computer and try it out, unless the Linux distributor somehow manages to get a signing key into that UEFI EEPROM and sign their LiveCD bootloaders with it. Explaining to people that they just need to stick in a LiveCD or USB stick is easy. Perhaps you might get them to push F8 or whatever the key is to choose a boot volume. But get them to rummage around in the BIOS settings, and disable an option which probably has a red label saying "ooooo scary, security risk, don't do that!"? Much too much hassle for the average Joe.
The sad thing is, it's a useful tool. It IS useful for protecting against rootkits. It's probably a good thing for the average user that MS is pushing it. But it's dangerous to our freedom to do what we will with our computer, for exactly the same reason as it's useful - it serves to prevent unauthorized code running on your machine.
The question is, who holds the keys for the authorization? Even if you can load new keys into your UEFI, you obviously need a trusted OS to do it (or it would be a pretty worthless security feature). At it's simplest, you could type them into a BIOS screen (a block of checksummed text, perhaps). But if manufacturers don't roll this feature into their BIOS setup, then it's left to an OS that boots from storage. And of course, only a *signed* OS can do that in secure mode. Which means the people with signing keys in your BIOS get to control whether you can add more keys. So you may end up owning a copy of Windows just so you can "bless" your machines with a key for your chosen Linux distro... if this is permitted at all.
Linux hardware and windows hardware will diverge
Only in the server room. Which MS is unlikely to want - they'd have no chance of converting Linux boxes to Windows. Workstation hardware will continue to be designed with Windows in mind.
Or manufacturers provide an override
This is more likely. Manufacturers do not like being told by software and content companies what can and cannot be done with their hardware, particularly when it means they won't get a sale - just look how most DVD players have hidden menus that disable region locks, for example.
Or windows will get exploited to load Linux.
Not an acceptable solution - you'd have to install Windows first to install Linux. Which means one or more of - breaking the law, risking some dodgy pirate download, paying MS for the privilege of using a Free operating system.
And windows 7 is here to stay for the next decade.
OEM Windows licenses state in the EULA that they apply to a single machine. Retail licenses have NO WARRANTY ; including no statement about what hardware they will run on. The vast majority of Windows purchases are pre-installs.
Besides, Microsoft will be here for at least a decade. They are playing the long game. If only half of computers are replaced with secure booting UEFI machines in the next decade, unless overrides are present, or bootloader signing is possible for other operating systems, that still reduces the count of alternate operating systems by a half. Instead of growing, the Free OS usebase will be shrinking, which will harm the one thing that it depends on - community - a great deal.
Their F91W watch is one of their cheapest lines, but the ultimate in terrorist chic. I got my daughter one to wear on the plane to Florida.
The GPL does not prohibit you charging to distribute software, it explicitly permits you to do so. What it prohibits is preventing you from distributing further copies, and distribution of binaries without source (or the offer of source).
Not such a stretch - B&N would lose face amongst the geek community if they settled a patent deal with an NDA with Microsoft. The geek community buys ebook devices, and is known for expressing their beliefs with their purchasing power, refusing to buy from the likes of Sony. Therefore they would be less likely to buy Nook devices and services from B&N. Therefore B&N would be at an actual disadvantage from harmed consumer reputation and reduced sales if they were to sign such an agreement.
It is sad that the Maemo / MeeGo project was canned at Nokia. Even after everyone gave rave reviews to it's successor, the N9 - Nokia sabotaged this phone good and proper by keeping it out of any markets that could have embraced it. They're releasing it in Kazakhstan, and Australia, avoiding Japan, Canada, Sweden, Germany, the U.K. and the U.S. - they couldn't be any clearer if they put a leaflet in the box that said "We hate this product and we want it to fail. The only reason you can buy it at all is because otherwise we'll be sued by our shareholders for wasting money on dead-end projects."
Nokia should have climbed onto the shoulders of the Android while they still could. They could still differentiate on their great hardware, principally their great antenna tech. Now they can only differentiate on being the the major-league phone company that's Microsoft's bitch.
The display will ultimately condense down into a head mounted display of some sort - hopefully something that could be mistaken for a pair of reading glasses (or "phenomenoscopes" as Neal Stephenson would have it), with full AR integration.
I don't think I'd want to give up a full-size mechanical keyboard though. I guess I'll have somewhere to store a LOT of redundant battery pack in my Model M or Cherry.
Management sayeth - "But we can't use a GPL email server.... we'll have to release all our emails under GPL!!!!!"
*humorous trolling ends here*
It's totally on purpose. Microsoft have really bent over for the media cartels - the whole "Protected Media Path" gubbins is about this. You can't get an unsigned driver to load (outside of debug mode), which means you can't, for example, write a video driver that just dumps frames to disk.
Beggars belief, doesn't it.
I'm not a "whiz" with Office by any stretch, simply because I avoid it whenever possible, but I know enough to know that F1 Is Your Friend.
They'd be much better off learning how to learn. Programming is actually an excellent start for that - you're teaching a very stupid pupil how stuff gets done. The teacher learns more than the student.
Hell yes, we had Latin classes at school. The history was interesting, but shit, what a waste of time learning the language. I used to piss the teacher off something rotten because he'd set a test, and I'd fail it. Then I'd study for 20 minutes and pass it verbally outside the teacher's common room. He was annoyed because it was obvious I had the ability to learn his subject, I just didn't give a shit because it was so useless.
I would have loved some proper IT classes instead. I would have probably been far ahead of the curriculum, because I was one of those children who was obsessed with the things, but it would have been nice to have a subject where I could make no effort and get As instead of make no effort and get... well, nothing. I gave up Latin as soon as it was no longer compulsory, so I don't even have a GCSE qualification in it.
My main reason for disliking VB.NET is I don't want to wreck my VB6 skills.
While I wouldn't voluntarily want to go back to VB6 development ... well, it's something to fall back on. There's so much VB6 software out there, that it's the COBOL of the future - people are likely to be wanting skilled VB6 developers and they are probably going to have to pay through the nose for them. A nice little pension plan.
VB.NET is close enough to VB6 in syntax, but different enough to ruin my memory of VB6. So I have avoided it as much as possible. As another poster points out, it's essentially C# with some different syntax sugar.
Agreed - modern smartphones are MUCH more powerful than the 8-bit computers we started with as a kid.
The N900 has a video out, so you can plug it into your television. Add a couple of Bluetooth input devices and you've got the equivalent of the 8-bit computer revolution - without the software. This is the space the Raspberry Pi is trying to aim for. Even though the Pi is much cheaper than a smartphone, the extra utility of the smartphone may make it a "necessity" where the Pi is a luxury.
The thing that got us hooked on computers was necessity - you had to learn something, to use them at all. Once you learned something, you developed an appetite for more. The availability of user-friendly GUI is what stunts this instinct these days.
Sounds like they should have a Dutch auction for these things - just drop the price of a patent license slowly until the first bidder is willing to pay it.
The bandwidth problem is in the "last mile" between the ISP and it's customers, and in the wireless spectrum. The ISPs designed for a "consumer" network where you download content like their digital TV offerings. Unfortunately for them (and us), they got a "peer serving" customer base, where everyone shares with everyone else.
There's no problem with transatlantic bandwidth. A large amount of existing optical fibre is dark anyway, and we're constantly figuring out new tricks to cram more data through what we have already.
It does add some redundancy, but that's about all it's value to the common man. Given that bandwidth on this cable is going to charged at a premium, it may be unlikely that you'll see traffic from consumer ISPs crossing it.
They are really charging for the low latency - in bandwidth terms it's probably going to be undersubscribed. They might sell excess capacity while reserving some channels for low-latency comms, but they'd have to build in some kind of store-and-forward artificial latency buffer or any idiot will be able to get their premium services.
A number of the other comments indicate that this is what is actually happening, with companies paying a premium to rent co-located server space in exchanges close to trading centres, or even in the actual server racks of the NYSE.
Producing a foodstuff like that which was still a gel composition would be hard. Dietary needs are complex and to keep the food as a gel would mean leaving things out.
There's a place for iron rations, like pemmican, but they are no substitute for a varied diet.
Aside from the purely nutritional aspect, the psychological aspects are also important, especially on an arduous mission in a dangerous and confined environment. Each astronaut has an input into what goes on his menu because this is recognised as important for preserving their morale. Even the Matrix gets this right - you don't want to be eating the same "bowl of snot" for every meal, even if it is nutritionally complete.
And the whole smug "the Russians used a pencil" thing - well, floating, conductive graphite fragments in an environment full of vital electrical equipment doesn't strike me as a good idea.
There are other considerations for astronaut menus, like favouring food that does not crumb readily to stop floating crumbs clogging instruments (although possibly not so much these days). In addition, the zero gravity environment means your nasal membranes swell, which reduces your sensitivity to flavours, meaning that they season the food more heavily - it would probably veer to the other side of palatable here on earth.
I think he just described how HFT causes mini bubbles, and called it "liquidity".
If you learn of the legislation through your government contacts, that's equivalent to insider trading - I'd consider it unethical and on the stock market that kind of thing is considered illegal.
HFT leverages the same foreknowledge - instead of the advance notice being provided by insider knowledge, the advance notice is provided by just being so damn fast. While the individual advantages are small, when you do it thousands of times a second, they add up. Just because something is not illegal, does not mean it's not harmful.
They should just have two quantum RAM blocks consisting of entangled qubits. When you set a bit at one end, the bit at the other end also flips. Literally instantaneous transmission, meaning that from a relativity point of view, the London exchange hears about events in NY before they actually happen.
It's sad to think that if this tech is ever invented, this will be among the first things it is used for....
Depends on what you define as "unreasonably expensive", but this outfit : Synctus will ship you a pair (or cloud) of pre-configured self-syncing, NAT traversing NAS boxes.
I met the guy who sells them at a geek social and he knows his stuff ; if you know enough, sure, you can produce an equally functional setup for lower hardware costs, but if your time is valuable the price is probably within the bounds of "reasonable" given that it includes the hardware, software, and service.
The NHS had, until recently, an enterprise-wide license agreement for Office. We employ just shy of 1.2M people. Imagine what could be done for LibreOffice with some small fraction of the cost of a few hundred thousand Office licenses.
Yup, here in the bosom of the NHS IT programme I can tell you we are using Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Python, Bazaar, Git, Subversion, Trac, Eclipse, etc.
For internal tooling projects I'll use essentially any open-source licensed code that I can lay my hands on to do the job, rather than shell out for commercial components that inevitably don't quite fit our needs and don't provide great support. To be honest... by the time you go through the utterly barmy procurement process for these things - you could have spent the same effort getting things running with an OSS library, and ended up with both something that works well AND the valuable accumulation of extra knowledge and skills. I once waited 13 weeks for a tool purchase (VB6 code analysis tool, alas, no open equivalent) - by the time it arrived, I'd done most of the work manually.
Our commercial partners tend to be rather cagy about copyleft licenses like GPL, but they all like BSD-style licensed code (not least because they can just take our splendid efforts and sell them back to us in their shiny new products...)