Your argument is pretty lame - that because there are some bad commercial vendors, then all commercial software should be avoided. Let's turn that around.
Wow, I can't even imagine how you possibly read that from my response, which was actually that F/OSS does indeed differentiate itself. Since you are inventing an argument to respond to, there's not much point continuing this.
I'd like to know though - do you seriously believe what you are saying, or are you aware that it is propaganda?
I don't "believe" it, I've experienced it. I've installed commercial apps whose license managers barfed long after the fact, I've seen numerous examples of "phoning home", etc. I've also used a F/OSS workflow that provides a lot of benefits to me. Example: I am working on a long-ish document with lots of figures, equations, tables, references, etc., and I'm using LaTeX to write it. I noticed that kdvi was a bit slower rendering the whole thing when all the figures are there, so I decided to make an equivalent document with only blank space for all of the figures. I create a small blank image, and a parallel directory tree for the document with all of the.tex files symlinked to the original and all of the image files symlinked to the blank figure. Now I can make edits to the main document and rebuild everything in the "blank" directory and see the changes quickly without kdvi having to render the images as it goes along. Precisely what I wanted, and took about 10 minutes to set up. This a trivial example, but things like this are quite easy with Unix + LaTeX. I have no idea if there are any commercial tools not derived from TeX that approach the power of LaTeX that can do this.
Because if you seriously believe it, you musn't have much experience with commercial software at all. Have you simply been using FOSS for so long, that you believe the worst stereotypes perpetrated by slashdot, and haven't actually used commercial software?
I used to use a commercial stack in the early to mid 90's, mainly Borland C++, MS Visual Studio, WordPerfect, MS Office (especially Excel and Access), IBM DB2, Internet Explorer, Adobe Photoshop, and the occasional vertical-market package like AutoCAD and Remedy, all running on Windows of course. I've developed some pretty complicated Access applications, written a Win16 game and ported it to Win32, and a Win32 DirectX game. I have also written some networking code under Solaris and AIX, and done quite a bit of work with DB2 on AIX, Windows, and Linux. So I've got some experience with commercial applications.
In 1999 I moved to a Linux desktop as my primary desktop, and I haven't regretted it. The apps weren't as feature-rich sometimes, and early versions are often unstable, but over the last 8 years those issues have become far less common. I now have a system with real virtual desktops (not the buggy kind like the MSVDM Power Toy), a good command line for automating repetitive tasks, network clients and servers out of the box, DVD players that actually let me skip the stupid FBI warning and previews, compatibility with just about every network protocol and filesystem out there, really good general desktop applications (K3b, Kmail, Amarok, and GAIM in particular), the ability to tweak it to match my habits and fix the occasional bug, and probably the largest repository of instantly-installable software in the world. Outside of vertical-market applications, for me commercial offerings have little advantage over what is available from synaptic.
Since you've defined multiple classes of code merely "information management", you've essentially defined all of computer science / IT to be nothing more than moving bits around, which you've further decided is not "innovative". Good luck now finding innovation in ANY software project, open source or not.
Open source has been built on clones of commercial software from the very beginning.
Really? What was Emacs a clone of? How about TeX? X11? Kerberos? Mosaic? NCSA HTTPD? Perl?
Sometimes commercial software got there first, and sometimes it didn't. And for quite a few years before the age of the PC commercial software always shipped the source, making it de facto open source even if not legally so.
The problem is just exacerbated in open source since there's no motivation of differentiate yourself from the competition.
The F/OSS software I tend to use differentiates itself by simply doing what I need it to do and nothing else. It doesn't "phone home", sacrifice performance for bling, limit important features to a higher-cost "pro" version, store data in undocumented formats, or require re-activation every X months. THAT certainly differentiates F/OSS to me.
But "UNIX" doesn't rebut TFA, it reinforces it! The article's whole point is that OSS has done little besides copy the work of closed-source innovators,
Unix's source was available from the beginning, and directly impacted the creation of BSD, whose source was mixed into Unix later down the road. Linux copying Unix is thus a modern officially-Open-Source-licensed(tm) project copying an earlier unofficially-open-source project.
Yes, the courts could have checked the last-modified filestat, but that can be tampered too.
They would actually check the file creation time, not the modification or access time. If it was created before the service call, it's probably the customer's data.
I'm administaer WSUS 3.0 in my company and the desktop search app was not auto approved or autoinstalled. As I've said in other posts, if WSUS released the patch, it's the admins fault, pure and simple.
I would say that if there are a lot of admins who have been using WSUS successfully for a long time and yet saw this problem, AND if their WSUS installations would have done the right thing if configured correctly, AND if they were in fact incorrectly configured, THEN the problem might be one of faulty documentation and/or training on Microsoft's part.
We are so quick to say that the "RTFM newb!" attitude from Unix gurus is the fault of the gurus and not the new users, shouldn't the same standard prevent us from blaming these Windows admins who got burned?
Being able to play HD-DVD / BluRay is nice for end users, yes. Having an operating system that aggressively enforces the restrictions that particular movie studios want such that the enforcement technical mechanisms are complex, buggy, and slow is not nice for end users. And even if the bugs are nearly completely fixed, the infrastructure is STILL not benefitting users of general-purpose computers who don't care so much about the HDDVD/BluRay titles from those particular movie studios. That seems to be Gutmann's claim, and I agree with it.
To support his claim, he has mentioned a lot of technical details from Microsoft's documentation and pieced together an outline of how the enforcement mechanisms interact with the rest of the system. He has made some specific assertions based on the documentation of negative outcomes from the spec -- and to refute these assertions in detail would require knowledge beyond the published spec, i.e. to be able to fill in the missing details of how a specific interaction can behave differently from how the published spec infers it should. (The link you provided mentioned some specific claims here, but I did not see those claims in his latest slides.)
He has also quoted many people with many use cases who have experienced problems with the content protection mechanisms. I'm only at slide 20 of 80 and I've seen half a dozen use cases that put the onus on the user to prove that their hardware is compliant and to block the content otherwise. That shows harm. Then he has a large section about drivers and hardware designs that must be changed to be compliant, and that all of these will be passed on to the users. Both of these kinds of items continue to support his point, that the content protection is both harmful and costly to users.
Gutmann is a researcher, and this presentation could be considered a summary of some research (specifically an informal literature review), but it clearly is not in the realm of the provable mathematics and rigorous models one normally assumes when they hear "a researcher is claiming blah blah blah". And though Gutmann's thesis remains the same ("Vista's DRM costs money"), his supporting claims are also evolving. Yes, that's not perfectly fair, but that's also common in real life, and Gutmann's purpose is not to report numbers and correlations but to spread an idea ("Draconian DRM costs real money, people don't like it, and it's destined to be broken anyway so companies should avoid doing this in the future"). So it's kind of mistaken for Mr Ou at ZDNET to knock out 3 items and then say the thesis is broken. Mr Ou would instead need to canvas some hardware manufacturers for quotes that they were able to deliver Vista's content protection without raising cost or lowering performance when compared to the devices they could have delivered in the same time frame that didn't have the content protection features; quotes from regular users who can verify that degraded mode happens more often than blocked content and that their own premium content is not adversely affected; quotes from EE's that the encryption requirements on the various buses can be achieved and draw the same power as non-encrypted buses; and quotes from users who are happy that Microsoft prioritized protected content over the other features they could have worked on. Those are the main areas Gutmann addresses, and only by addressing most of them can Mr Ou make a compelling counter-argument.
Finally, in case you weren't around for it, content companies have been forced several times to change in response to the market. Vista's content protection is not a hard requirement for HDDVD/BluRay playback; if Microsoft had refused to develop it Hollywood would have backed down. (Gutmann addresses this point too in the slides.) So in the end the one benefit to having all of this is temporarily legitimate access to some movies, when illegitimate access could likely become the norm in the future (just as MPlayer ushered in the era of automated DVD CSS key cracking).
So now that I've actually dug into more than I ever wanted to, I *still* find ZDNET unreliable and Gutmann mostly talking sense. Go figure.
Why not criticize based on facts instead of claiming bias?
Because citing ZDNET as a source for facts regarding a Microsoft product of any kind is like citing ExxonMobil for facts regarding global warming. There is a chance that real facts are in there somewhere, but given the history one is absolutely required to go somewhere else to verify that the facts ExxonMobil / ZDNET use are actually true.
And also because:
1) I only use Windows inside Parallels/VMWare to get to one particular ActiveX-based web site, and I am not tasked with supporting Windows, hence I don't really care to go read a bunch of blogs about this.
2) I skimmed the Gutmann paper at one point and it looked pretty reasonable, in the sense that he had decent citations for what he claimed. Since I can't rely on the traditional industry "media" to report honestly on the issue, it would take way too much of my time to figure out on my own.
3) I've used Gutmann's code before (CryptLib, PGP 2.x, SFS) and found both its reliability and engineering quite sound. I tend to trust what he has to say unless I get a compelling reason not to, and some articles in ZDNET are not compelling given ZD's history.
Skimming the paper again, it appears that the claims are NOT "easily verifiable" in the sense that perfectly falsifying them requires either a) knowledge of trade-secret implementation details of particular graphics drivers, b) knowledge of the Vista source code. Just having a Vista computer and creating and then playing a HD-DVD is not enough to say the paper is FUD, one has to actually test the various combinations of protected and nonprotected content and output paths to see what was actually implemented in Vista. One of Gutmann's supporting claims is that some combinations of hardware that *should* play do not play (for whatever reason), and it only takes one example to make that supporting claim stick.
But Gutmann's fundamental thesis -- that this content protection stuff is costly and provides no genuine benefit to end-users -- is still true even if there exists a Vista computer that executes Microsoft's new spec flawlessly.
If you care to read the sequence of articles on ZDNET, it's obvious that Guttman's spreading FUD and is being disingenous.
Ah, well that settles it! Ziff-Davis has always been an impartial observer of the industry, with no real history of pro-Microsoft bias (*cough* PC Magazine circa 1990-1998 *cough*), so we can be sure their smackdown of a noted academic cryptography researcher is quite sound.
Maybe software lock in is enough for some not to switch to hardware and software lock in? Just a thought.
I was under the impression that the Mac APIs have already been duplicated by the GNUStep project and that they are still actively tracking changes to the APIs. And of course, coding to the POSIX standards means it will run on Linux, BSD, etc.
What other Mac software lock in are you referring to?
The government our founding fathers intended is a government that would protect the borders and otherwise keep the hell out of our way.
It also had no concern for civil rights, women and blacks voting, workplace safety, food and drug safety, building codes, emergency services, primary education, universities, or environmental protections. Its main provisions were contract enforcement, crime punishment, and military action.
Governments like the original Constitution still exist today, but you probably wouldn't want to live under them.
Assuming what you say is true, the Democrats need to do it and make them snap.
Let me get this straight: you are willing to turn mainland USA into a war zone so that at most a few hundred regular people won't go to jail while a dozen or so executives *might* go to jail. You're willing to let hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of old people starve for this. You're willing to shut down the public schools, the university system, the hospitals, the civilian police forces, and let National Guard units roll tanks through the major cities for this. Is that right?
The republicans have the stones to shut down the government to stop an entitlement program but the dems cant muster the will to fight over our civil liberties? whats the problem here?
The problem here is that the Republicans will shut down the federal government if the Dems don't give them what they want. They did it in 1994. They already break the law with impunity, how much more would it take for them to throw out the entire Constitution in order to keep their power? Add in the fact that one Democrat is actually a Republican (Lieberman): the minute the Democrats actually have a good chance of beating the Republicans in Congress then Lieberman switches and it's game over until 2008 anyway.
Maybe I'm not making myself clear: the Republicans are willing to destroy the government if they don't get their way. The Republicans are like a foreign country with nukes; you can try to negotiate, but if that doesn't work you still have to back down. They are the drug dealer in the neighborhood that has already bought off the cops; they are that batshit crazy stalker walking right through the restraining order.
Maybe this doesn't play nice with your "we've got the power!" narrative going in your head, but oh well. Our government is designed to halt on major disagreement, back in 1789 that was a feature but now it's a bug. If the Social Security checks stop flowing, or gas prices jump past $7/gal, or Walmart's shelves go empty, and every Republican goes on TV to blame the Democrats, people will blame the Democrats too. The only alternatives to a non-functioning federal government are Martial Law and revolution, and odds are the American people will accept Martial Law long before they risk their families for some lofty notions of civil rights no one really used anyway.
Huh? Thats like saying if a cop (Democrats) sees a man beating his wife (Bush and the Constitution) hes not at fault for standing by and doing *nothing*..
Actually, it's more like a cop sees a man beating his wife in the middle of a cheering crowd who are all packing machine guns. You can try to stop the assault but there's a good chance you're going to go down too, or you can wait for backup. In this case, the backup is still a year away.
I think the Dems are pretty spineless too, but even in their weakened state the Republicans are still more powerful because they've got the Executive and the Judicial wrapped up. Dems impeach Bush? Martial Law. Dems threaten to suspend funding for Iraq War? Soldiers DON'T come home, instead Senate Republicans shutdown the government entirely until Dems capitulate. Dems try to hold Verizon/ATT/etc. accountable? Republicans threaten to shutdown the entire government in response. Dems want to expand a welfare program to include lower middle class people? Republicans threaten to shutdown the entire government in response.
Because the Democratic Party is made up of a bunch of spineless, undisciplined pansies who run in fear at the slightest threat of a showdown, even when in a position that should give THEM the power?
Given their history of trashing rights and the social safety net throughout the 90's, yes, they are spineless. "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", "The End of Welfare as We Know It", bankruptcy "reform", student loan "reform", etc.
But they are also triangulating for 2008. They are allowing the current status quo of trashing the Constitution and Executive/Judicial corruption to continue in the hopes of winning big next November.
Imagine for a bit what would happen if they DID actually stand up to the Republicans. If they refused to fund the war, the Republicans in the Senate would let the rest of the government shut down and promptly go on the news to blame the Democrats. Really, the Republicans don't care if Social Security checks stop going out, or if the EPA has to shut down, or if IRS employees are forced to find other employment for lack of paychecks. If Democrats actually tried to impeach, what is the real likelihood that the country would go under Martial Law? Not since WWII has the country been this close to that.
I'm beginning to understand why the Dems are so powerless. The truth is that the real choice right now for America is a little more bullying for one more year followed by some cleanup legislation resulting in only a few hundred more civilian lives ruined, or the real loss of our entire republic with millions of lives affected and the risk of violence via a totalitarian Republican state ala 1984.
As spineless as the Democrats have been, they are nowhere near the level of outright fascism as the Republicans have been. The Dems want only to make some money and fame and retire in luxury, and they will compromise their constituents a little to get it; the Republicans OTOH are willing to burn the entire nation to the ground if they don't get what they see as owed to them.
Windows 2003. Theres a few years of support left on that. Far enough into the future for me not to be able to predict or worry too much.
And then? In 2010-ish, when Windows 2003 support has finally lapsed, are you just not going to use a general-purpose computer?
Obviously, I'm going somewhere with this...
Back in 1998 I understood finally that I would be where you are at now someday, that Microsoft would eventually release a system that I found too strange or hostile to use and eventually the way *I* like to work would be forcibly obsoleted. So I committed to breaking out of the Windows paradigm before that day came.
As a physical engineer, I wonder: how does one compute this "surface area to attackers"? What is the ratio between the Solaris surface area and the XP surface area?
Hey, I can put Windows on a machine, and watch a movie after it is installed.
Oh cool! So which version of Windows did they finally put DVD playback in out of the box?
Becuase I've installed up to XP sp2 and it never worked, I always had to install some 3rd-party DVD playback software before WMP would finally play the movie...
Oh please. Turn on computer, it says "insert disc", you insert disc and wait a while.
I wish the pre-installed Vista "experience" that came with my friend's new HP Pavillion laptop was that simple. Instead, it was:
1) Boot up. Wait a LONG time to enter name. Wait a VERY LONG time to get to desktop.
2) Immediately see "Warning! Your computer might be at risk!" popup from taskbar.
3) Wait for flash video from HP to load long enough to close it.
4) Select "Register Later" on a *different* HP popup form.
5) Select "No Thanks" on Norton Internet Security 60-day trial nagware screen.
6) Select "Get Connected to Internet" on a *third* HP popup dialog.
7) Connect to wireless.
8) OMG FOUR programs want to update RIGHT NOW! HP "Computer Care" something or other wants an nVidia update, Windows Update wants updates, Java wants updates, and Norton Internet Security trial version wants updates.
9) Did I mention that this computer was running slower than a 386/16 MHz running Windows 95? Turns out defrag has been running since the first boot because it is scheduled to run every Wednesday night and it is ridiculously late getting to it.
16) Uninstall MS Office product agent purchase/activation thing (yes, it is left over after uninstalling MS Office). UAC. Reboot.
17) Disable "HP Computer Care" from loading at startup. Disable UAC. Disable Windows Defender anti-virus monitoring nagware.
From a pre-installed Vista to a "clean" desktop (which still has a bunch of crapware trial installers left over in C:\Program Files) takes about 3 hours minimum. If "mums and dads" could bypass all that with a clean installer that lets them NOT choose to install gigs of nagware they would be far better off than what they get now.
This is an interesting week to have this thread come up because it was the week of the Engineering Career Fair here at Texas A&M University. 250+ companies, about half oil and gas but many famous names in the mix (AMD, Intel, Microsoft, BOEING, Samsung, Dupont, Dow, Chevron, ExxonMobil), all looking for candidates majoring in mechanical/chemical/electrical/industrial engineering, physics, computer science, oceanography, geological science, and many others.
So there I was, walking around the arena floor along with hundreds of other students, most in the 19-25 year range (I am a tad older), nearly all in business casual attire and many in suits and business skirts. The male to female ratio is tilted a bit towards male, but there are still hundreds of female students coming in to make contacts. What I found both amazing and sad is this: I could tell at a glance who the computer science majors were, particularly the male comp sci students. The few females sporting comp sci nametags I saw were all international students; the males were both international and domestic. Every domestic student who was dressed just a little shabbier than the rest (jeans instead of pants), or who had inappropriate facial hair (long unkempt goatees or completely shaven heads), EVERY one of them was a male comp sci major.
And the worst booth of the bunch? Microsoft. Two really young guys with laptops next to some huge poster with this "Hey Genius!" thing on it (see http://www.hey-genius.com/). It was LAME. They had very few people coming to talk to them even though they have hired directly from A&M before.
I've got a BS in comp sci. I worked in several places with a well-known large multinational and was fortunate NOT to have had the "geek subculture" surrounding me 24/7. Now I'm back in school for a MS in engineering, and in my discipline (at two different schools I've been to) the male to female ratio is within 2:1 and it makes a huge difference. Teamwork is valued, the overall output is higher, and the social culture is far more inclusive. One can still be the quiet and shy type and succeed, but one can also be the extroverted socialite without being labeled an idiot. Male engineers in my program often as not have girlfriends, active social lives, and can work with female and international colleagues without pissing them off. Our program is also branching out to nano and bio and is going to be right in the middle of the next technology revolution. But my discipline is sort of special: due to geo-political reasons it has a strong need for a diverse workforce, and as such the major universities have made a strong effort to make the discipline more inclusive. Due to their work to make this an inviting place for everyone, we now have a pool of quite decent engineers who can compete globally.
This is Berners-Lee's point: if the IT industry wants that kind of globally competitive workforce, they need to stop tolerating this male geek bullshit (which BTW is really just a repackaged version of while male redneck except with computers instead of NASCAR) that drives women*, POC, and many international students** away from the discipline.
* - To everyone who insists that they are really meritocratic and they treat women the same as they treat men and women need to suck it up, the way you treat men IS the behavior women keep complaining about. "Joking", "ribbing", "teasing", "punching": these are stupid behaviors appropriate to a schoolyard, not a workplace. Furthermore, this behavior is in fact aggressive and it is only non-threatening if the other party is capable of being equally aggressive in their response; women in general are penalized in numerous ways if they respond to this kind of aggression with their own aggression. The solution is not to insist that women become more aggressive in their response, but rather for the subset of men who engage in this aggressive behavior to find a way to be both productive in thier work and socially inclusive
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Your argument is pretty lame - that because there are some bad commercial vendors, then all commercial software should be avoided. Let's turn that around.
Wow, I can't even imagine how you possibly read that from my response, which was actually that F/OSS does indeed differentiate itself. Since you are inventing an argument to respond to, there's not much point continuing this.
I'd like to know though - do you seriously believe what you are saying, or are you aware that it is propaganda?
.tex files symlinked to the original and all of the image files symlinked to the blank figure. Now I can make edits to the main document and rebuild everything in the "blank" directory and see the changes quickly without kdvi having to render the images as it goes along. Precisely what I wanted, and took about 10 minutes to set up. This a trivial example, but things like this are quite easy with Unix + LaTeX. I have no idea if there are any commercial tools not derived from TeX that approach the power of LaTeX that can do this.
I don't "believe" it, I've experienced it. I've installed commercial apps whose license managers barfed long after the fact, I've seen numerous examples of "phoning home", etc. I've also used a F/OSS workflow that provides a lot of benefits to me. Example: I am working on a long-ish document with lots of figures, equations, tables, references, etc., and I'm using LaTeX to write it. I noticed that kdvi was a bit slower rendering the whole thing when all the figures are there, so I decided to make an equivalent document with only blank space for all of the figures. I create a small blank image, and a parallel directory tree for the document with all of the
Because if you seriously believe it, you musn't have much experience with commercial software at all. Have you simply been using FOSS for so long, that you believe the worst stereotypes perpetrated by slashdot, and haven't actually used commercial software?
I used to use a commercial stack in the early to mid 90's, mainly Borland C++, MS Visual Studio, WordPerfect, MS Office (especially Excel and Access), IBM DB2, Internet Explorer, Adobe Photoshop, and the occasional vertical-market package like AutoCAD and Remedy, all running on Windows of course. I've developed some pretty complicated Access applications, written a Win16 game and ported it to Win32, and a Win32 DirectX game. I have also written some networking code under Solaris and AIX, and done quite a bit of work with DB2 on AIX, Windows, and Linux. So I've got some experience with commercial applications.
In 1999 I moved to a Linux desktop as my primary desktop, and I haven't regretted it. The apps weren't as feature-rich sometimes, and early versions are often unstable, but over the last 8 years those issues have become far less common. I now have a system with real virtual desktops (not the buggy kind like the MSVDM Power Toy), a good command line for automating repetitive tasks, network clients and servers out of the box, DVD players that actually let me skip the stupid FBI warning and previews, compatibility with just about every network protocol and filesystem out there, really good general desktop applications (K3b, Kmail, Amarok, and GAIM in particular), the ability to tweak it to match my habits and fix the occasional bug, and probably the largest repository of instantly-installable software in the world. Outside of vertical-market applications, for me commercial offerings have little advantage over what is available from synaptic.
Since you've defined multiple classes of code merely "information management", you've essentially defined all of computer science / IT to be nothing more than moving bits around, which you've further decided is not "innovative". Good luck now finding innovation in ANY software project, open source or not.
Open source has been built on clones of commercial software from the very beginning.
Really? What was Emacs a clone of? How about TeX? X11? Kerberos? Mosaic? NCSA HTTPD? Perl?
Sometimes commercial software got there first, and sometimes it didn't. And for quite a few years before the age of the PC commercial software always shipped the source, making it de facto open source even if not legally so.
The problem is just exacerbated in open source since there's no motivation of differentiate yourself from the competition.
The F/OSS software I tend to use differentiates itself by simply doing what I need it to do and nothing else. It doesn't "phone home", sacrifice performance for bling, limit important features to a higher-cost "pro" version, store data in undocumented formats, or require re-activation every X months. THAT certainly differentiates F/OSS to me.
But "UNIX" doesn't rebut TFA, it reinforces it! The article's whole point is that OSS has done little besides copy the work of closed-source innovators,
Unix's source was available from the beginning, and directly impacted the creation of BSD, whose source was mixed into Unix later down the road. Linux copying Unix is thus a modern officially-Open-Source-licensed(tm) project copying an earlier unofficially-open-source project.
Yes, the courts could have checked the last-modified filestat, but that can be tampered too.
They would actually check the file creation time, not the modification or access time. If it was created before the service call, it's probably the customer's data.
The WOT has not changed how I live my life in the least.
So did you never fly before 9-11, or did you never fly after?
Airports are a LOT different now, some take 2+ hours just to get through the check-in + security gates where before it took only 20 minutes.
I'm administaer WSUS 3.0 in my company and the desktop search app was not auto approved or autoinstalled. As I've said in other posts, if WSUS released the patch, it's the admins fault, pure and simple.
I would say that if there are a lot of admins who have been using WSUS successfully for a long time and yet saw this problem, AND if their WSUS installations would have done the right thing if configured correctly, AND if they were in fact incorrectly configured, THEN the problem might be one of faulty documentation and/or training on Microsoft's part.
We are so quick to say that the "RTFM newb!" attitude from Unix gurus is the fault of the gurus and not the new users, shouldn't the same standard prevent us from blaming these Windows admins who got burned?
OK, let's try this again...
Being able to play HD-DVD / BluRay is nice for end users, yes. Having an operating system that aggressively enforces the restrictions that particular movie studios want such that the enforcement technical mechanisms are complex, buggy, and slow is not nice for end users. And even if the bugs are nearly completely fixed, the infrastructure is STILL not benefitting users of general-purpose computers who don't care so much about the HDDVD/BluRay titles from those particular movie studios. That seems to be Gutmann's claim, and I agree with it.
To support his claim, he has mentioned a lot of technical details from Microsoft's documentation and pieced together an outline of how the enforcement mechanisms interact with the rest of the system. He has made some specific assertions based on the documentation of negative outcomes from the spec -- and to refute these assertions in detail would require knowledge beyond the published spec, i.e. to be able to fill in the missing details of how a specific interaction can behave differently from how the published spec infers it should. (The link you provided mentioned some specific claims here, but I did not see those claims in his latest slides.)
He has also quoted many people with many use cases who have experienced problems with the content protection mechanisms. I'm only at slide 20 of 80 and I've seen half a dozen use cases that put the onus on the user to prove that their hardware is compliant and to block the content otherwise. That shows harm. Then he has a large section about drivers and hardware designs that must be changed to be compliant, and that all of these will be passed on to the users. Both of these kinds of items continue to support his point, that the content protection is both harmful and costly to users.
Gutmann is a researcher, and this presentation could be considered a summary of some research (specifically an informal literature review), but it clearly is not in the realm of the provable mathematics and rigorous models one normally assumes when they hear "a researcher is claiming blah blah blah". And though Gutmann's thesis remains the same ("Vista's DRM costs money"), his supporting claims are also evolving. Yes, that's not perfectly fair, but that's also common in real life, and Gutmann's purpose is not to report numbers and correlations but to spread an idea ("Draconian DRM costs real money, people don't like it, and it's destined to be broken anyway so companies should avoid doing this in the future"). So it's kind of mistaken for Mr Ou at ZDNET to knock out 3 items and then say the thesis is broken. Mr Ou would instead need to canvas some hardware manufacturers for quotes that they were able to deliver Vista's content protection without raising cost or lowering performance when compared to the devices they could have delivered in the same time frame that didn't have the content protection features; quotes from regular users who can verify that degraded mode happens more often than blocked content and that their own premium content is not adversely affected; quotes from EE's that the encryption requirements on the various buses can be achieved and draw the same power as non-encrypted buses; and quotes from users who are happy that Microsoft prioritized protected content over the other features they could have worked on. Those are the main areas Gutmann addresses, and only by addressing most of them can Mr Ou make a compelling counter-argument.
Finally, in case you weren't around for it, content companies have been forced several times to change in response to the market. Vista's content protection is not a hard requirement for HDDVD/BluRay playback; if Microsoft had refused to develop it Hollywood would have backed down. (Gutmann addresses this point too in the slides.) So in the end the one benefit to having all of this is temporarily legitimate access to some movies, when illegitimate access could likely become the norm in the future (just as MPlayer ushered in the era of automated DVD CSS key cracking).
So now that I've actually dug into more than I ever wanted to, I *still* find ZDNET unreliable and Gutmann mostly talking sense. Go figure.
Why not criticize based on facts instead of claiming bias?
Because citing ZDNET as a source for facts regarding a Microsoft product of any kind is like citing ExxonMobil for facts regarding global warming. There is a chance that real facts are in there somewhere, but given the history one is absolutely required to go somewhere else to verify that the facts ExxonMobil / ZDNET use are actually true.
And also because:
1) I only use Windows inside Parallels/VMWare to get to one particular ActiveX-based web site, and I am not tasked with supporting Windows, hence I don't really care to go read a bunch of blogs about this.
2) I skimmed the Gutmann paper at one point and it looked pretty reasonable, in the sense that he had decent citations for what he claimed. Since I can't rely on the traditional industry "media" to report honestly on the issue, it would take way too much of my time to figure out on my own.
3) I've used Gutmann's code before (CryptLib, PGP 2.x, SFS) and found both its reliability and engineering quite sound. I tend to trust what he has to say unless I get a compelling reason not to, and some articles in ZDNET are not compelling given ZD's history.
Skimming the paper again, it appears that the claims are NOT "easily verifiable" in the sense that perfectly falsifying them requires either a) knowledge of trade-secret implementation details of particular graphics drivers, b) knowledge of the Vista source code. Just having a Vista computer and creating and then playing a HD-DVD is not enough to say the paper is FUD, one has to actually test the various combinations of protected and nonprotected content and output paths to see what was actually implemented in Vista. One of Gutmann's supporting claims is that some combinations of hardware that *should* play do not play (for whatever reason), and it only takes one example to make that supporting claim stick.
But Gutmann's fundamental thesis -- that this content protection stuff is costly and provides no genuine benefit to end-users -- is still true even if there exists a Vista computer that executes Microsoft's new spec flawlessly.
If you care to read the sequence of articles on ZDNET, it's obvious that Guttman's spreading FUD and is being disingenous.
Ah, well that settles it! Ziff-Davis has always been an impartial observer of the industry, with no real history of pro-Microsoft bias (*cough* PC Magazine circa 1990-1998 *cough*), so we can be sure their smackdown of a noted academic cryptography researcher is quite sound.
Maybe software lock in is enough for some not to switch to hardware and software lock in? Just a thought.
I was under the impression that the Mac APIs have already been duplicated by the GNUStep project and that they are still actively tracking changes to the APIs. And of course, coding to the POSIX standards means it will run on Linux, BSD, etc.
What other Mac software lock in are you referring to?
The government our founding fathers intended is a government that would protect the borders and otherwise keep the hell out of our way.
It also had no concern for civil rights, women and blacks voting, workplace safety, food and drug safety, building codes, emergency services, primary education, universities, or environmental protections. Its main provisions were contract enforcement, crime punishment, and military action.
Governments like the original Constitution still exist today, but you probably wouldn't want to live under them.
Assuming what you say is true, the Democrats need to do it and make them snap.
Let me get this straight: you are willing to turn mainland USA into a war zone so that at most a few hundred regular people won't go to jail while a dozen or so executives *might* go to jail. You're willing to let hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of old people starve for this. You're willing to shut down the public schools, the university system, the hospitals, the civilian police forces, and let National Guard units roll tanks through the major cities for this. Is that right?
The republicans have the stones to shut down the government to stop an entitlement program but the dems cant muster the will to fight over our civil liberties? whats the problem here?
The problem here is that the Republicans will shut down the federal government if the Dems don't give them what they want. They did it in 1994. They already break the law with impunity, how much more would it take for them to throw out the entire Constitution in order to keep their power? Add in the fact that one Democrat is actually a Republican (Lieberman): the minute the Democrats actually have a good chance of beating the Republicans in Congress then Lieberman switches and it's game over until 2008 anyway.
Maybe I'm not making myself clear: the Republicans are willing to destroy the government if they don't get their way. The Republicans are like a foreign country with nukes; you can try to negotiate, but if that doesn't work you still have to back down. They are the drug dealer in the neighborhood that has already bought off the cops; they are that batshit crazy stalker walking right through the restraining order.
Maybe this doesn't play nice with your "we've got the power!" narrative going in your head, but oh well. Our government is designed to halt on major disagreement, back in 1789 that was a feature but now it's a bug. If the Social Security checks stop flowing, or gas prices jump past $7/gal, or Walmart's shelves go empty, and every Republican goes on TV to blame the Democrats, people will blame the Democrats too. The only alternatives to a non-functioning federal government are Martial Law and revolution, and odds are the American people will accept Martial Law long before they risk their families for some lofty notions of civil rights no one really used anyway.
Huh? Thats like saying if a cop (Democrats) sees a man beating his wife (Bush and the Constitution) hes not at fault for standing by and doing *nothing*..
Actually, it's more like a cop sees a man beating his wife in the middle of a cheering crowd who are all packing machine guns. You can try to stop the assault but there's a good chance you're going to go down too, or you can wait for backup. In this case, the backup is still a year away.
I think the Dems are pretty spineless too, but even in their weakened state the Republicans are still more powerful because they've got the Executive and the Judicial wrapped up. Dems impeach Bush? Martial Law. Dems threaten to suspend funding for Iraq War? Soldiers DON'T come home, instead Senate Republicans shutdown the government entirely until Dems capitulate. Dems try to hold Verizon/ATT/etc. accountable? Republicans threaten to shutdown the entire government in response. Dems want to expand a welfare program to include lower middle class people? Republicans threaten to shutdown the entire government in response.
Because the Democratic Party is made up of a bunch of spineless, undisciplined pansies who run in fear at the slightest threat of a showdown, even when in a position that should give THEM the power?
Given their history of trashing rights and the social safety net throughout the 90's, yes, they are spineless. "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", "The End of Welfare as We Know It", bankruptcy "reform", student loan "reform", etc.
But they are also triangulating for 2008. They are allowing the current status quo of trashing the Constitution and Executive/Judicial corruption to continue in the hopes of winning big next November.
Imagine for a bit what would happen if they DID actually stand up to the Republicans. If they refused to fund the war, the Republicans in the Senate would let the rest of the government shut down and promptly go on the news to blame the Democrats. Really, the Republicans don't care if Social Security checks stop going out, or if the EPA has to shut down, or if IRS employees are forced to find other employment for lack of paychecks. If Democrats actually tried to impeach, what is the real likelihood that the country would go under Martial Law? Not since WWII has the country been this close to that.
I'm beginning to understand why the Dems are so powerless. The truth is that the real choice right now for America is a little more bullying for one more year followed by some cleanup legislation resulting in only a few hundred more civilian lives ruined, or the real loss of our entire republic with millions of lives affected and the risk of violence via a totalitarian Republican state ala 1984.
As spineless as the Democrats have been, they are nowhere near the level of outright fascism as the Republicans have been. The Dems want only to make some money and fame and retire in luxury, and they will compromise their constituents a little to get it; the Republicans OTOH are willing to burn the entire nation to the ground if they don't get what they see as owed to them.
and if you want a graphical SSH then kssh is pretty much identical to PuTTY
Or they could just run the Unix version of PuTTY itself.
Windows 2003. Theres a few years of support left on that. Far enough into the future for me not to be able to predict or worry too much.
And then? In 2010-ish, when Windows 2003 support has finally lapsed, are you just not going to use a general-purpose computer?
Obviously, I'm going somewhere with this...
Back in 1998 I understood finally that I would be where you are at now someday, that Microsoft would eventually release a system that I found too strange or hostile to use and eventually the way *I* like to work would be forcibly obsoleted. So I committed to breaking out of the Windows paradigm before that day came.
OK, so you LOVE Windows but hate Vista, and you want to send a message to Microsoft to give you a Windows with the features you want in it.
But what if Microsoft doesn't do it? What if Vista SP1 is still just as slow/unfriendly/whatever as Vista, or maybe even more so?
What are your real options?
such a large surface area to attackers
As a physical engineer, I wonder: how does one compute this "surface area to attackers"? What is the ratio between the Solaris surface area and the XP surface area?
Hey, I can put Windows on a machine, and watch a movie after it is installed.
Oh cool! So which version of Windows did they finally put DVD playback in out of the box?
Becuase I've installed up to XP sp2 and it never worked, I always had to install some 3rd-party DVD playback software before WMP would finally play the movie...
Oh please. Turn on computer, it says "insert disc", you insert disc and wait a while.
I wish the pre-installed Vista "experience" that came with my friend's new HP Pavillion laptop was that simple. Instead, it was:
1) Boot up. Wait a LONG time to enter name. Wait a VERY LONG time to get to desktop.
2) Immediately see "Warning! Your computer might be at risk!" popup from taskbar.
3) Wait for flash video from HP to load long enough to close it.
4) Select "Register Later" on a *different* HP popup form.
5) Select "No Thanks" on Norton Internet Security 60-day trial nagware screen.
6) Select "Get Connected to Internet" on a *third* HP popup dialog.
7) Connect to wireless.
8) OMG FOUR programs want to update RIGHT NOW! HP "Computer Care" something or other wants an nVidia update, Windows Update wants updates, Java wants updates, and Norton Internet Security trial version wants updates.
9) Did I mention that this computer was running slower than a 386/16 MHz running Windows 95? Turns out defrag has been running since the first boot because it is scheduled to run every Wednesday night and it is ridiculously late getting to it.
10) Cancel Windows updates, allow nVidia update, allow Java update, cancel Norton updates. Reboot.
11) Uninstall Norton. This takes 20 minutes to complete with nothing else happening. Reboot.
12) Uninstall Real player. UAC. Reboot.
13) Uninstall Wild-something-or-other gaming package. UAC. Reboot.
14) Begin Windows updates. UAC. UAC. UAC. Reboot. UAC. UAC. UAC. Reboot.
15) Uninstall Office 2007 trial edition nagware. UAC. Reboot.
16) Uninstall MS Office product agent purchase/activation thing (yes, it is left over after uninstalling MS Office). UAC. Reboot.
17) Disable "HP Computer Care" from loading at startup. Disable UAC. Disable Windows Defender anti-virus monitoring nagware.
From a pre-installed Vista to a "clean" desktop (which still has a bunch of crapware trial installers left over in C:\Program Files) takes about 3 hours minimum. If "mums and dads" could bypass all that with a clean installer that lets them NOT choose to install gigs of nagware they would be far better off than what they get now.
A computer without an OS is like a car without an engine nor brakes or even less.
Actually it's more like an MP3 player without a demo song.
This is an interesting week to have this thread come up because it was the week of the Engineering Career Fair here at Texas A&M University. 250+ companies, about half oil and gas but many famous names in the mix (AMD, Intel, Microsoft, BOEING, Samsung, Dupont, Dow, Chevron, ExxonMobil), all looking for candidates majoring in mechanical/chemical/electrical/industrial engineering, physics, computer science, oceanography, geological science, and many others.
So there I was, walking around the arena floor along with hundreds of other students, most in the 19-25 year range (I am a tad older), nearly all in business casual attire and many in suits and business skirts. The male to female ratio is tilted a bit towards male, but there are still hundreds of female students coming in to make contacts. What I found both amazing and sad is this: I could tell at a glance who the computer science majors were, particularly the male comp sci students. The few females sporting comp sci nametags I saw were all international students; the males were both international and domestic. Every domestic student who was dressed just a little shabbier than the rest (jeans instead of pants), or who had inappropriate facial hair (long unkempt goatees or completely shaven heads), EVERY one of them was a male comp sci major.
And the worst booth of the bunch? Microsoft. Two really young guys with laptops next to some huge poster with this "Hey Genius!" thing on it (see http://www.hey-genius.com/). It was LAME. They had very few people coming to talk to them even though they have hired directly from A&M before.
I've got a BS in comp sci. I worked in several places with a well-known large multinational and was fortunate NOT to have had the "geek subculture" surrounding me 24/7. Now I'm back in school for a MS in engineering, and in my discipline (at two different schools I've been to) the male to female ratio is within 2:1 and it makes a huge difference. Teamwork is valued, the overall output is higher, and the social culture is far more inclusive. One can still be the quiet and shy type and succeed, but one can also be the extroverted socialite without being labeled an idiot. Male engineers in my program often as not have girlfriends, active social lives, and can work with female and international colleagues without pissing them off. Our program is also branching out to nano and bio and is going to be right in the middle of the next technology revolution. But my discipline is sort of special: due to geo-political reasons it has a strong need for a diverse workforce, and as such the major universities have made a strong effort to make the discipline more inclusive. Due to their work to make this an inviting place for everyone, we now have a pool of quite decent engineers who can compete globally.
This is Berners-Lee's point: if the IT industry wants that kind of globally competitive workforce, they need to stop tolerating this male geek bullshit (which BTW is really just a repackaged version of while male redneck except with computers instead of NASCAR) that drives women*, POC, and many international students** away from the discipline.
* - To everyone who insists that they are really meritocratic and they treat women the same as they treat men and women need to suck it up, the way you treat men IS the behavior women keep complaining about. "Joking", "ribbing", "teasing", "punching": these are stupid behaviors appropriate to a schoolyard, not a workplace. Furthermore, this behavior is in fact aggressive and it is only non-threatening if the other party is capable of being equally aggressive in their response; women in general are penalized in numerous ways if they respond to this kind of aggression with their own aggression. The solution is not to insist that women become more aggressive in their response, but rather for the subset of men who engage in this aggressive behavior to find a way to be both productive in thier work and socially inclusive