It's different primarily because there's more than su. Most user-friendly distros, along with KDE itself, have been moving towards a system somewhat like OS X; ie, when necessary you're prompted for the root password. There's even a nice "Konqueror File Manager (Admin)" on the desktop for some distros. Add to that things like sudo and ksu, and it's a lot more than simply su.
Having said all that, su is still better than RunAs. Why? Because Linux distros that demand you use su don't hide from you the configuration program. It's not a question of running "rundll32..." at some point. And while getting root X programs to securely run on the desktop is not trivial, there's a lot of command-line programs that never touch X and for which su is perfectly capable of doing its job. With Windows, which is so GUI centric, not having a GUI interface to RunAs is blatantly obviously bad. Just like if there was only a GUI interface to su in *nix.
MS is stupid for including sockets without thinking about the problems they would cause, and MS is stupid for blaming the TCP/IP protocol for their problems. Regardless of how broken the TCP/IP protocol might be, if MS designed their OS such that virtually no one ran as Admin and it was virtually impossible to become Admin through an exploit, then placing raw socket access into the Admin account would be really safe. But a step above that, ISPs should really be blocking all packets who have a src IP address that's not in their domain block.
If MS had good security, then raw sockets would be a non-issue. Even if MS pointed out that ISPs should be doing a better job (something which I'd assume their software or MSCE monkeys isn't designed/trained to do), MS would still be in the wrong. Now if MS were pushing to fix their problems *and* push ISPs to properly block invalid src IP packets, that'd be a whole other thing and would be quite good. Any chance MS is going to take some of the blame and try to fix the actual problem? Or are they going to stick with neutering the software?
Actually, RunAs isn't the answer for two reasons. One, RunAs (far as I'm aware) doesn't allow you to msi components or explorer to do some tasks. Two, it's a "huge" security vulnerability to run Admin and non-Admin processes on the same desktop. This is because in Windows you can access all the controls on a desktop, so it's possible to fill a text buffer with code and then exploit a local vulnerability to execute it; do note that this is technically possible to do in X too, but it's a lot less trivial given that you can't directly input code into a text field and instead have to send events to the proper area of the window and hope that the programs doesn't filter out "invalid" data. The real answer is to switch between desktops using cool switch or the like. At least XP includes that.
The point is that Linux, BSD, and any other OS that's open source can actually be examined. If you're paranoid, you have to audit all the code yourself and hand-write the base assembler to assembly the quasi-compiler; refer back to the thought experiment of the bugged compiler which would infect compiler and login program to propagate itself. Even further, you'd want to use an open system where you can verify all the firmware, including the BIOS, to make sure no hooks are in place to compromise your security. And even further than that, you need to validate all the chips and processors in your system that they're not bugged either.
So, for one who claims he's really paranoid, he's very much a far way off from real paranoia. He's not even taking the basic step of validating his operating system.
The simple answer is yes. Commodity software sells hardware. More freedom for software would only make the hardware makers happier. More software used means the want/need to buy more hardware. This is precisely why Sun, IBM, HP, DEC, and Apple all did and do make software. Hardware is the long term money maker. It appears that service can be too.
Microsoft is the abberation. All Linux and BSD have shown is that the real price of software is merely the cost to distribute and support it. So long as more software needs to be written, either for the niche of a company or for the general public to have yet another reason to splurge cash on new hardware, the openness of software is no barrier to the market; closeness is but the temporary hoard of a doomed design. Even Microsoft seems to notice this, with their shift to support contracts and trying to rent software.
Windows is being replaced. The market demands it. I wouldn't begin to claim that such is remotely a loss for the top minds of the next generation. The real ideas of the next generation involve computers and needs we can't even begin to imagine (otherwise we'd already be working on them). If science has shown us anything, being open only speeds up that process.
Enter the Japanese Salaryman, who doesn't have enough time in his day to wait to get home to look at porn. It's not unheard of for people to read just about anything on the subways in Tokyo. Besides, what business of yours to be looking over some guy's shoulder to even know they're look at Hustler on their PSP? I find it pretty creepy to think you're staring at other people like that.
On a side note, an even wider idea that might fit well in Japan would be to have something like Netflix for manga; ie, pay a monthly fee to a network of manga vendors and have out up to three memory cards at a time. I'm pretty sure the cost to you would be cheaper to supporting this trade in system than the current one of printing up manga in bulk. Instead, vendors could "burn" copies as needed and pay the manga author based on percentage of income.
The government would never do that. Why? Two basic reasons. One, the government needs you to believe that it does all the work; otherwise, you'd be even more upset about taxes. Two, the majority of people don't want to have to lift a finger to fight crime or terrorism. When it comes to the "dirty" jobs, they're much happier to have taxes collected and used to run a more inefficient system than to have do such work themselves. For the government to not placate people but instead tell them to "protect yourself" would be political suicide. Notice how after 9/11 Bush had such a high approval rating for his reactionary behavior? If 9/11 was stopped, he'd never have gotten that. So, if he had known about the details of the attack, as a politician he'd have very little motivation to stop it.
I want to tell you a little hypothetical story about a friend of mine. He had a favorite pop artist who would dance all the time. The artist gave him a free music video, so he could watch it at home. But the artist forbad him from dancing, to protect his work you know.
Well I came over to his house one day, and watched the video as it was on. And I started dancing because having seen it I wanted to use it in my own song. But then the artist found out, and through my friend told me to stop. But I kept dancing, the artist took the tape, and now my friend is pissed off.
The lesson, if any, that can be learned from this little tale is that some friends are friends and some artists are asshats. Personally I'd rather have the friend than the free video over such a ridiculous requirement that magically is transfered over to my friends.
Are you being forced to do all your internet access via those truck stop wifi hotspots?
If not your analogy fails at the 7th word.
I'm sorry. I meant to include "at those truck stop wifi hotspots" in the first sentence. I wasn't speaking of internet privately paid for.
Having said that, my second sentence is possible still not a proper analogy. Goggles and headphones would be analogous to a dynamic filter, which I'm not sure they use. If they only use a static filter, then a better analogy would be putting up opaque fences around any building that has material the government does not like. Of course, governments effectively do that in the real world a lot of the time, both in zoning laws to restrict where sex-oriented stores are placed to what and where they're allowed to display--another post in these comments points out the penal code about advertisement/display of sex toys as being obscene (something defined as not Constitutionally protected).
Do you think the government has a right to dynamic or static filtering on content on public land as such land is a "service" to the people? The whole point of government is to serve the people. If you believe they have some right to abridge speech on services they provide, then the first amendment means nothing.
So if the state were to force everyone to wear special goggles to block out things they don't like while online, it'd be okay? Well, why not require everyone on public land to wear headphones to not hear things they don't like and special goggles to censor their lips so it's impossible to lip read? I mean, you can still speak whatever you want. If you can't tell, I think both ideas are ridiculous, and I can't really grasp how selective filtering on content could be seen as *not* abridging freedom of speech.
And one other minor point. If one truck stop is not provided wifi service, for technical or financial reasons, then I agree most courts wouldn't consider it a free speech issue. They'd likely see it as discriminatory, however, if a compromise wasn't reached to provide the service somewhere close by in the area to overcome the technical/financial limitation.
Technical barriers can be overcome with better design or placement. And financial barriers shouldn't really occur in any one place, since government isn't supposed to favor certain areas with better service because it pays more money; that's what private citizens/companies do. So, government will just have to provide a type of round-robin or some other scheme to overcome financial barriers.
WinFS has nowhere near such little goals as Spotlight (remember Spotlight is desktop utility, while M$ is trying to make WinFS client/server capable).
Client/server capable? Do you mean sending around meta data? If so, realize that even in the mid-90s, when people were dying for long file names, it still took a few years before long file names were standardly supported in most applications on the x86 PC. Assuming meta data is a hit (which I doubt), it'll again be a few years for such support to be widespread in programs, especially as a lot of protocols will have to be rewritten to support it.
Now, you may ask why I think meta data won't be a big hit. In simple terms, meta data fails for two primary reasons. One, most people are too lazy to fill in every bit of information on a file; this means it'll primarily be the paid-for products and the warez products that'll be tagged. Two, since this meta data is primarily for searching, there's no known way to compute context to really make good use of the meta data; you basically need to know the filename already to search. Google only works well because it uses references. Spotlight probably has the same failings I mentioned above as WinFS meta data, unless it's using a frequently updated synonym/relationship database for the words entered/matched against.
And just a small FYI, the idea of extra meta-data is pretty old (OS/2 v3 had extended attributes in '94). Of course, searching it was another matter. But locate/updatedb are copyright 1989-2005, so the idea of at least some metadata (filenames) being easily accessible isn't a new idea either. The only things Cairo seems to be is a joining of the two ideas, which seems pretty obvious. It's so obvious I really question if Cairo was the first to suggest it. So far, BeFS is the only filesystem I've heard of that actually implements all this.
You're not stripped of many of your rights for the rest of your life in all places for commiting a felony. I personally don't belief felons should be stripped of their right to vote or right to free speech.
Both are rights that should not be able to harm others. If a vote is able to harm another, then our constitutional republic is either too fragile to the whim of the minority or there is such an outstanding majority who wants to cause harm that there's little that can be done regardless of if a felon is in prison. And speech should not be able to harm another, for short of yelling into someone's ear or trying to stab someone with a pen there's nothing about speech itself that's harmful; only the instrument of speech can harm others, and that's really more a point of properly prosecuting battery.
I've looked around online, and I've yet to see an SNES/SFC clone; sure, there are NES/FC clones that look like SNES, Playstation, or whatever. Could you perhaps point to one? Legal cloned game systems (ie, ones without pirate games built-in) interest me.
Ya, and if I can convince anyone to open a HTML file or look at a JPeG, the silly fool deserves what they get, right? It's a fucking DOC file. If you can get malicious code run from opening a non-executable file it is a big fucking problem.
I agree and I disagree. One, HTML files can contain javascript. By design such are on web pages and should be immune from malicious actions as the opener is most often not the original person. Two, JPG files are images. They do not contain any scripting/macro language, and should not be able to commit malicious action being inert data. Three, doc files contain macros, and until doc files were being distributed everywhere, macros were chiefly used within an organization, paramount to "the original person" being the only one to see.
So, I'd say that doc files were a different category of file than the other two you mention. While most certainly there should have been various security considerations made for doc files, there originally was never any need since doc files were never designed to be given out to people (ironic considering how much Word was pushed for interoperability between businesses). With all the macro viruses that sprung up from this fact, doc files should have been dropped as a "safe" type, and a new format should have been created to be HTML like in its "view everywhere safely" requirement. Assuming any doc file is safe was, and still is, naive.
Having said all that, a buffer overflow is a very bad exploit and should be fixed. But seeing that one realizes that doc files are unsafe, one shouldn't actually open doc files they don't trust. So, that should mitigate the risk.
Well, a bunch of searching leads me to believe the patent is trivial. Having stated that, it's worth mentioning that another patent (search for Stac on the page), 5,016,009, was also involved in the case, but I can't seem to find an actual copy of the judgement (it's probably on Lexis Nexus) to know how much basis it had on the ruling.
So, Microsoft never had a hold on the patent. It just happened to reinvent for a fourth time time (Waterworth, Ross, Gibson/Graybill, and Microsoft) the same idea. That's a pretty good clue that that patent shouldn't exist or be a basis for why Stac won. If you have any more information, I'd be glad to hear it.
This is the first I've heard about MS gaining a patent on the technology they used in Doublespace. My understanding was they cozied up to Stac because they weren't planning to make their own disk compression software, and when it became clear that Stac wasn't going to go along with getting no royalties that Stac gave up. It's not entirely clear how much info Stac gave to MS, though at least one draft talked about the patent MS violated. Overall, I'm amazed that MS didn't get punished with punitive damages since it seems that MS went into the relationship expecting to get something for free, and when they couldn't get it they just copied them to try to beat them hoping to not get caught.
Imagine you hired a mechanic to fix your car. The only requirement was that you couldn't watch the mechanic fix his car, as he wanted to keep how he does things a trade secret. Now, imagine that it turns out that both you and another guy, your friend, who wants to learn the mechanics trade secret work at the same company. You're paying to fix the car with company money, but your friend is standing around trying to watch the mechanic in his spare time.
Now, the mechanic notices your friend is watching him and is clearly trying to learn how he does his work. Knowing you two work at the same company, he contacts your company to tell your friend to stop watching him. Your friend ends up leaving the property, for whatever reason around this time. But, he ends up coming back a bit off the property with a telescope. Watching someone on public land, the mechanic's shop is effectively public land as a place of business, is perfectly legal. But seeing your friend still watching him, the mechanic says, "That does it." and stops working on the car.
Now, obviously there's various flaws with this analogy (trade secrets, paying actual money to get something, and the use of a telescope is not really accurate (but was added for more believability given the "mechanic" didn't right away stop)). Now, the mechanic can do whatever he wants, you can too, and so can your friend. Really, the only core issue in all this is the point that the mechanic seems like an asshole to try to protect things, and it seems incredulous to act like it's okay to be upset at the guy who in his spare time and under no obligation, except the threat of being fired, would somehow be stopped from this.
I mean, imagine if Tridge hadn't worked for the OSDL in any way. Would McVoy still have cut off the license to Linus for Tridge using Linus' Bitkeeper to reverse engineer against? Would he have taken the step to inform Tridge's employer first, who would likely be a Linux-related company, to "encourage" Tridge to stop? The fact is, the only ones who were at all guilty of anything was Linus, assuming he allowed Tridge to use his Bitkeeper copy to play off (it was only Linus who was under the license). And if Linus didn't, then Tridge committed, in some very perverse interpretive sort of way, unauthorized computer access.
The fact is, though, that Tridge committed as much unauthorized computer access as one could say any program does which is not perfectly crafted to work with a protocol and accidentally could do something bad; in that regard, entirely valid software commits such all the time, including IE which doesn't properly follow the TCP protocol (though that's the bad design of trying to make things faster, not the bad design of ignorance). To that end, if anything the only way I'd be upset with Tridge is if he did something malicious to mess up Linus' Bitkeeper database. Anything else is really the bad design of Bitkeeper to break on what otherwise should be safe fiddling and the inadvertent destruction of data that will likely occur later on in the process.
And to that end, a final note that the latter stages of reverse engineering basically require someone to ignore the license to successfully reverse engineer the protocol: the person likely has a user account and almost certain leaves tell-tale signs that they're brute force searching for a way to access the whole protocol; to simply ignore this would be paramount to being an accessory to reverse engineering, which would be a violation of the license. The only other way possibility would be if a lot of places were offering free access to create accounts and the actual blockings for using invalid commands too much/too often occurred slowly enough (fat chance given the arms race to block brute force scanning, and the simple steps necessary to increase the width of the command space to leave tons of unused holes). So, all in all, this post is just rambling. Sorry. But I'm having a really hard time being upset with Tridge.
This is why I hate Hollywood films. 90 minutes of blood and gore, and then at the very end some incredulous and inconsistent plot line like the guy getting resurrected occurs and it's all of a sudden a happy ending. Please, stop! </sarcasm>
As it stands now, businesses have to know where the person they're talking to is talking and the time of year (plus conceivably what county you're in in Indian, which is obviously bad) or that person has to include the timezone (and that resolves it for most places, but not places in Indiana that switch by 30 minutes with DST).
The answer seems to be to just use UTC everywhere and be open 24/7. For local businesses unwilling to do this, they can progressively decide by 30 minute or one hour increments to be open with overlap as you go east to west.
There's no sound logic for why every place on the globe has to be open from 9-5 or 7-3 every day, except maybe Sunday/Saturday, in their "local timezone". It doesn't make it much easier for people near or far to know if the business is open in a set timezone because few places actually are still open just 8hrs/day. Noon can still be noon. And work can still be flexed around dawn in the area. But trying to make some vague numbers for vast regions which change during certain times of the year really don't help anyone.
So all MS has to do is dress up a group of people like RMS, get them chanting about how evil MS is and how great Open Software is, then throw the equivalent of fake blood on people? Well, if it worked for the Republicans...
I know it's a small nitpicking, but no government has any rights. It only has the privileges bestowed upon it by its people. That's why the Constitution is a list of powers, not a list of restrictions. To some extent, I wish that the Constitution had required all states to be a republic constitutional government, for then any attempt to limit speech, religion, drug use, etc would require a change to the state constitution. Of course this is all rather fantasy because clearly after prohibition they ignored that they'd need an amendment to stop the use of specific chemicals.
It's a sad reality when the government commits repeated illegal acts (any power not under the constitution that the government performs is by definition illegal) and the people, including me, are unwilling to rise up and reform it. I don't know how much hope there is to reverting this government to what it was designed to be in the beginning, but I have hope that at some point change will come, by some means, as enough people realize just how perverted our government has become.
Technology people that I know are generally for it,
I'm a hoosier, and I'm against it. If the root of the "problem" is people keeping their lights on at night, the obvious solution is to minimize the amount of energy used. This clearly, to me, would indicate shifting the standard work time to night. That way businesses, which apparently are better at being efficient than people (otherwise DST would be pointless because everyone as individuals would have already solved these problems), would be able to minimize energy usage. Not only that but getting off of work when the sun comes out would mean 8 to 12hrs of sunlight, so most people would only need their lights on the brief period before they head to work.
There's a lot saner ways to save energy. Maybe we should consider those before deciding to try to change everyone's clocks.
The only "legit" part of their thinking is as a company that doesn't think it's done anything wrong, deserves being punished, or is being punished. A large part of opening the API to *everyone* is for the purpose of making it impossible for MS to unfairly extend itself further by allowing everyone clear access to the underworkings of what they're doing. The only reason, I assume, the EU didn't just make MS give out all their APIs freely is because then enough companies/people could hypothetically bankrupt MS in a DDoS attack, which the legal system wouldn't deem as just. Obviously MS isn't trying to just cover its own shipping&handling fees. It's trying to ensure that access to its APIs is a new revenue stream. Hopefully the EU will realize this and just slap on a fixed shipping&handling fee and tell MS to be damned if a DDoS attack does succeed against it.
If the EU declared that MS Europe was now a separate country and all assets held of MS Europe in any EU country were now totally under MS Europe control, don't you think they'd be able to find someone in MS Europe to be the new President? I mean, after all, MS is a monopoly in Europe and the US. If MS US were blocked out of the EU and MS Europe got to do as it pleased, they'd be almost certainly willing to fork over a little bit of access if nothing else for the nice pay checks they'll get until MS Europe is no longer a monopoly and is actually competing with other companies.
All the countries in the EU certainly have the power to confuscate all assets of MS Europe and hand them over to MS Europe in a way to ensure that MS US and MS Europe won't work together, if nothing else for the greed of the new CEO. And certainly it'd be hard for MS to claim that somehow their copyrighted was violated by a part of themselves containing ownership rights to its own code. The only real stickler is the amount of actual collaboration that'd have to go into making sure all of the EU went along with this plan and the US not trying to do some sort of blockade against EU for trying to pull this off. It'd be an interesting case for globalization and where the boundaries of justice lie.
I remember this same argument circa 1994/1995 with the OS/2 & Win95 battles, and on the fence were the DOS/Desqview and Win 3.1 users crying foul and raising all sorts of bloody hell.
And if you don't think it was Win95 offering cheaper, and better, DOS [Game] support along with Win 3.1 support that was a major deciding factor in why Win95 was chosen over OS/2...then I'd guess you'd have to believe that it was all the Win95 lock-in. In that case, it's only a question of MS pushing OEMs to stop selling 32-bit machines by greatly jacking up the price of Win XP while dropping the price of Win XP X64 low enough to compensate for the price difference of the hardware. Of course with that, all MS really has to do is not piss off too many people.
Instead of bitching about what it doesn't support, why not embrace the technology and be a part of helping it move forward?
For all of MS's history of being behind maintaining backwards compatibility to keep people hooked on their products, to now act like they can arbitrarily drop support and we should not be upset about how this is degradation in quality because of advances in technology sounds like an argument that MS can do whatever they want and we should bow to their wishes solely on the basis that technology improves. That argument is silly because technology always improves. We should be allowed to judge components, both hardware and software, for their quality alone. If one component, Windows, happens to interfere with the quality of the product as a whole, we sure as hell can just buy another OS. I hear Linux has good support for x86_64.
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It's different primarily because there's more than su. Most user-friendly distros, along with KDE itself, have been moving towards a system somewhat like OS X; ie, when necessary you're prompted for the root password. There's even a nice "Konqueror File Manager (Admin)" on the desktop for some distros. Add to that things like sudo and ksu, and it's a lot more than simply su.
..." at some point. And while getting root X programs to securely run on the desktop is not trivial, there's a lot of command-line programs that never touch X and for which su is perfectly capable of doing its job. With Windows, which is so GUI centric, not having a GUI interface to RunAs is blatantly obviously bad. Just like if there was only a GUI interface to su in *nix.
Having said all that, su is still better than RunAs. Why? Because Linux distros that demand you use su don't hide from you the configuration program. It's not a question of running "rundll32
MS is stupid for including sockets without thinking about the problems they would cause, and MS is stupid for blaming the TCP/IP protocol for their problems. Regardless of how broken the TCP/IP protocol might be, if MS designed their OS such that virtually no one ran as Admin and it was virtually impossible to become Admin through an exploit, then placing raw socket access into the Admin account would be really safe. But a step above that, ISPs should really be blocking all packets who have a src IP address that's not in their domain block.
If MS had good security, then raw sockets would be a non-issue. Even if MS pointed out that ISPs should be doing a better job (something which I'd assume their software or MSCE monkeys isn't designed/trained to do), MS would still be in the wrong. Now if MS were pushing to fix their problems *and* push ISPs to properly block invalid src IP packets, that'd be a whole other thing and would be quite good. Any chance MS is going to take some of the blame and try to fix the actual problem? Or are they going to stick with neutering the software?
Actually, RunAs isn't the answer for two reasons. One, RunAs (far as I'm aware) doesn't allow you to msi components or explorer to do some tasks. Two, it's a "huge" security vulnerability to run Admin and non-Admin processes on the same desktop. This is because in Windows you can access all the controls on a desktop, so it's possible to fill a text buffer with code and then exploit a local vulnerability to execute it; do note that this is technically possible to do in X too, but it's a lot less trivial given that you can't directly input code into a text field and instead have to send events to the proper area of the window and hope that the programs doesn't filter out "invalid" data. The real answer is to switch between desktops using cool switch or the like. At least XP includes that.
The point is that Linux, BSD, and any other OS that's open source can actually be examined. If you're paranoid, you have to audit all the code yourself and hand-write the base assembler to assembly the quasi-compiler; refer back to the thought experiment of the bugged compiler which would infect compiler and login program to propagate itself. Even further, you'd want to use an open system where you can verify all the firmware, including the BIOS, to make sure no hooks are in place to compromise your security. And even further than that, you need to validate all the chips and processors in your system that they're not bugged either.
So, for one who claims he's really paranoid, he's very much a far way off from real paranoia. He's not even taking the basic step of validating his operating system.
The simple answer is yes. Commodity software sells hardware. More freedom for software would only make the hardware makers happier. More software used means the want/need to buy more hardware. This is precisely why Sun, IBM, HP, DEC, and Apple all did and do make software. Hardware is the long term money maker. It appears that service can be too.
Microsoft is the abberation. All Linux and BSD have shown is that the real price of software is merely the cost to distribute and support it. So long as more software needs to be written, either for the niche of a company or for the general public to have yet another reason to splurge cash on new hardware, the openness of software is no barrier to the market; closeness is but the temporary hoard of a doomed design. Even Microsoft seems to notice this, with their shift to support contracts and trying to rent software.
Windows is being replaced. The market demands it. I wouldn't begin to claim that such is remotely a loss for the top minds of the next generation. The real ideas of the next generation involve computers and needs we can't even begin to imagine (otherwise we'd already be working on them). If science has shown us anything, being open only speeds up that process.
Enter the Japanese Salaryman, who doesn't have enough time in his day to wait to get home to look at porn. It's not unheard of for people to read just about anything on the subways in Tokyo. Besides, what business of yours to be looking over some guy's shoulder to even know they're look at Hustler on their PSP? I find it pretty creepy to think you're staring at other people like that.
On a side note, an even wider idea that might fit well in Japan would be to have something like Netflix for manga; ie, pay a monthly fee to a network of manga vendors and have out up to three memory cards at a time. I'm pretty sure the cost to you would be cheaper to supporting this trade in system than the current one of printing up manga in bulk. Instead, vendors could "burn" copies as needed and pay the manga author based on percentage of income.
The government would never do that. Why? Two basic reasons. One, the government needs you to believe that it does all the work; otherwise, you'd be even more upset about taxes. Two, the majority of people don't want to have to lift a finger to fight crime or terrorism. When it comes to the "dirty" jobs, they're much happier to have taxes collected and used to run a more inefficient system than to have do such work themselves. For the government to not placate people but instead tell them to "protect yourself" would be political suicide. Notice how after 9/11 Bush had such a high approval rating for his reactionary behavior? If 9/11 was stopped, he'd never have gotten that. So, if he had known about the details of the attack, as a politician he'd have very little motivation to stop it.
I want to tell you a little hypothetical story about a friend of mine. He had a favorite pop artist who would dance all the time. The artist gave him a free music video, so he could watch it at home. But the artist forbad him from dancing, to protect his work you know.
Well I came over to his house one day, and watched the video as it was on. And I started dancing because having seen it I wanted to use it in my own song. But then the artist found out, and through my friend told me to stop. But I kept dancing, the artist took the tape, and now my friend is pissed off.
The lesson, if any, that can be learned from this little tale is that some friends are friends and some artists are asshats. Personally I'd rather have the friend than the free video over such a ridiculous requirement that magically is transfered over to my friends.
Are you being forced to do all your internet access via those truck stop wifi hotspots?
If not your analogy fails at the 7th word.
I'm sorry. I meant to include "at those truck stop wifi hotspots" in the first sentence. I wasn't speaking of internet privately paid for.
Having said that, my second sentence is possible still not a proper analogy. Goggles and headphones would be analogous to a dynamic filter, which I'm not sure they use. If they only use a static filter, then a better analogy would be putting up opaque fences around any building that has material the government does not like. Of course, governments effectively do that in the real world a lot of the time, both in zoning laws to restrict where sex-oriented stores are placed to what and where they're allowed to display--another post in these comments points out the penal code about advertisement/display of sex toys as being obscene (something defined as not Constitutionally protected).
Do you think the government has a right to dynamic or static filtering on content on public land as such land is a "service" to the people? The whole point of government is to serve the people. If you believe they have some right to abridge speech on services they provide, then the first amendment means nothing.
So if the state were to force everyone to wear special goggles to block out things they don't like while online, it'd be okay? Well, why not require everyone on public land to wear headphones to not hear things they don't like and special goggles to censor their lips so it's impossible to lip read? I mean, you can still speak whatever you want. If you can't tell, I think both ideas are ridiculous, and I can't really grasp how selective filtering on content could be seen as *not* abridging freedom of speech.
And one other minor point. If one truck stop is not provided wifi service, for technical or financial reasons, then I agree most courts wouldn't consider it a free speech issue. They'd likely see it as discriminatory, however, if a compromise wasn't reached to provide the service somewhere close by in the area to overcome the technical/financial limitation.
Technical barriers can be overcome with better design or placement. And financial barriers shouldn't really occur in any one place, since government isn't supposed to favor certain areas with better service because it pays more money; that's what private citizens/companies do. So, government will just have to provide a type of round-robin or some other scheme to overcome financial barriers.
WinFS has nowhere near such little goals as Spotlight (remember Spotlight is desktop utility, while M$ is trying to make WinFS client/server capable).
Client/server capable? Do you mean sending around meta data? If so, realize that even in the mid-90s, when people were dying for long file names, it still took a few years before long file names were standardly supported in most applications on the x86 PC. Assuming meta data is a hit (which I doubt), it'll again be a few years for such support to be widespread in programs, especially as a lot of protocols will have to be rewritten to support it.
Now, you may ask why I think meta data won't be a big hit. In simple terms, meta data fails for two primary reasons. One, most people are too lazy to fill in every bit of information on a file; this means it'll primarily be the paid-for products and the warez products that'll be tagged. Two, since this meta data is primarily for searching, there's no known way to compute context to really make good use of the meta data; you basically need to know the filename already to search. Google only works well because it uses references. Spotlight probably has the same failings I mentioned above as WinFS meta data, unless it's using a frequently updated synonym/relationship database for the words entered/matched against.
And just a small FYI, the idea of extra meta-data is pretty old (OS/2 v3 had extended attributes in '94). Of course, searching it was another matter. But locate/updatedb are copyright 1989-2005, so the idea of at least some metadata (filenames) being easily accessible isn't a new idea either. The only things Cairo seems to be is a joining of the two ideas, which seems pretty obvious. It's so obvious I really question if Cairo was the first to suggest it. So far, BeFS is the only filesystem I've heard of that actually implements all this.
You're not stripped of many of your rights for the rest of your life in all places for commiting a felony. I personally don't belief felons should be stripped of their right to vote or right to free speech.
Both are rights that should not be able to harm others. If a vote is able to harm another, then our constitutional republic is either too fragile to the whim of the minority or there is such an outstanding majority who wants to cause harm that there's little that can be done regardless of if a felon is in prison. And speech should not be able to harm another, for short of yelling into someone's ear or trying to stab someone with a pen there's nothing about speech itself that's harmful; only the instrument of speech can harm others, and that's really more a point of properly prosecuting battery.
I've looked around online, and I've yet to see an SNES/SFC clone; sure, there are NES/FC clones that look like SNES, Playstation, or whatever. Could you perhaps point to one? Legal cloned game systems (ie, ones without pirate games built-in) interest me.
Ya, and if I can convince anyone to open a HTML file or look at a JPeG, the silly fool deserves what they get, right? It's a fucking DOC file. If you can get malicious code run from opening a non-executable file it is a big fucking problem.
I agree and I disagree. One, HTML files can contain javascript. By design such are on web pages and should be immune from malicious actions as the opener is most often not the original person. Two, JPG files are images. They do not contain any scripting/macro language, and should not be able to commit malicious action being inert data. Three, doc files contain macros, and until doc files were being distributed everywhere, macros were chiefly used within an organization, paramount to "the original person" being the only one to see.
So, I'd say that doc files were a different category of file than the other two you mention. While most certainly there should have been various security considerations made for doc files, there originally was never any need since doc files were never designed to be given out to people (ironic considering how much Word was pushed for interoperability between businesses). With all the macro viruses that sprung up from this fact, doc files should have been dropped as a "safe" type, and a new format should have been created to be HTML like in its "view everywhere safely" requirement. Assuming any doc file is safe was, and still is, naive.
Having said all that, a buffer overflow is a very bad exploit and should be fixed. But seeing that one realizes that doc files are unsafe, one shouldn't actually open doc files they don't trust. So, that should mitigate the risk.
Well, a bunch of searching leads me to believe the patent is trivial. Having stated that, it's worth mentioning that another patent (search for Stac on the page), 5,016,009, was also involved in the case, but I can't seem to find an actual copy of the judgement (it's probably on Lexis Nexus) to know how much basis it had on the ruling.
So, Microsoft never had a hold on the patent. It just happened to reinvent for a fourth time time (Waterworth, Ross, Gibson/Graybill, and Microsoft) the same idea. That's a pretty good clue that that patent shouldn't exist or be a basis for why Stac won. If you have any more information, I'd be glad to hear it.
This is the first I've heard about MS gaining a patent on the technology they used in Doublespace. My understanding was they cozied up to Stac because they weren't planning to make their own disk compression software, and when it became clear that Stac wasn't going to go along with getting no royalties that Stac gave up. It's not entirely clear how much info Stac gave to MS, though at least one draft talked about the patent MS violated. Overall, I'm amazed that MS didn't get punished with punitive damages since it seems that MS went into the relationship expecting to get something for free, and when they couldn't get it they just copied them to try to beat them hoping to not get caught.
Where I'm getting this info (I'd love to hear proof of this double-patenting): "Complaint for Patent Infringement" "Demand for Jury Trial" from Stac.
The best analogy I can think of is as follows.
Imagine you hired a mechanic to fix your car. The only requirement was that you couldn't watch the mechanic fix his car, as he wanted to keep how he does things a trade secret. Now, imagine that it turns out that both you and another guy, your friend, who wants to learn the mechanics trade secret work at the same company. You're paying to fix the car with company money, but your friend is standing around trying to watch the mechanic in his spare time.
Now, the mechanic notices your friend is watching him and is clearly trying to learn how he does his work. Knowing you two work at the same company, he contacts your company to tell your friend to stop watching him. Your friend ends up leaving the property, for whatever reason around this time. But, he ends up coming back a bit off the property with a telescope. Watching someone on public land, the mechanic's shop is effectively public land as a place of business, is perfectly legal. But seeing your friend still watching him, the mechanic says, "That does it." and stops working on the car.
Now, obviously there's various flaws with this analogy (trade secrets, paying actual money to get something, and the use of a telescope is not really accurate (but was added for more believability given the "mechanic" didn't right away stop)). Now, the mechanic can do whatever he wants, you can too, and so can your friend. Really, the only core issue in all this is the point that the mechanic seems like an asshole to try to protect things, and it seems incredulous to act like it's okay to be upset at the guy who in his spare time and under no obligation, except the threat of being fired, would somehow be stopped from this.
I mean, imagine if Tridge hadn't worked for the OSDL in any way. Would McVoy still have cut off the license to Linus for Tridge using Linus' Bitkeeper to reverse engineer against? Would he have taken the step to inform Tridge's employer first, who would likely be a Linux-related company, to "encourage" Tridge to stop? The fact is, the only ones who were at all guilty of anything was Linus, assuming he allowed Tridge to use his Bitkeeper copy to play off (it was only Linus who was under the license). And if Linus didn't, then Tridge committed, in some very perverse interpretive sort of way, unauthorized computer access.
The fact is, though, that Tridge committed as much unauthorized computer access as one could say any program does which is not perfectly crafted to work with a protocol and accidentally could do something bad; in that regard, entirely valid software commits such all the time, including IE which doesn't properly follow the TCP protocol (though that's the bad design of trying to make things faster, not the bad design of ignorance). To that end, if anything the only way I'd be upset with Tridge is if he did something malicious to mess up Linus' Bitkeeper database. Anything else is really the bad design of Bitkeeper to break on what otherwise should be safe fiddling and the inadvertent destruction of data that will likely occur later on in the process.
And to that end, a final note that the latter stages of reverse engineering basically require someone to ignore the license to successfully reverse engineer the protocol: the person likely has a user account and almost certain leaves tell-tale signs that they're brute force searching for a way to access the whole protocol; to simply ignore this would be paramount to being an accessory to reverse engineering, which would be a violation of the license. The only other way possibility would be if a lot of places were offering free access to create accounts and the actual blockings for using invalid commands too much/too often occurred slowly enough (fat chance given the arms race to block brute force scanning, and the simple steps necessary to increase the width of the command space to leave tons of unused holes). So, all in all, this post is just rambling. Sorry. But I'm having a really hard time being upset with Tridge.
This is why I hate Hollywood films. 90 minutes of blood and gore, and then at the very end some incredulous and inconsistent plot line like the guy getting resurrected occurs and it's all of a sudden a happy ending. Please, stop!
</sarcasm>
As it stands now, businesses have to know where the person they're talking to is talking and the time of year (plus conceivably what county you're in in Indian, which is obviously bad) or that person has to include the timezone (and that resolves it for most places, but not places in Indiana that switch by 30 minutes with DST).
The answer seems to be to just use UTC everywhere and be open 24/7. For local businesses unwilling to do this, they can progressively decide by 30 minute or one hour increments to be open with overlap as you go east to west.
There's no sound logic for why every place on the globe has to be open from 9-5 or 7-3 every day, except maybe Sunday/Saturday, in their "local timezone". It doesn't make it much easier for people near or far to know if the business is open in a set timezone because few places actually are still open just 8hrs/day. Noon can still be noon. And work can still be flexed around dawn in the area. But trying to make some vague numbers for vast regions which change during certain times of the year really don't help anyone.
So all MS has to do is dress up a group of people like RMS, get them chanting about how evil MS is and how great Open Software is, then throw the equivalent of fake blood on people? Well, if it worked for the Republicans...
I know it's a small nitpicking, but no government has any rights. It only has the privileges bestowed upon it by its people. That's why the Constitution is a list of powers, not a list of restrictions. To some extent, I wish that the Constitution had required all states to be a republic constitutional government, for then any attempt to limit speech, religion, drug use, etc would require a change to the state constitution. Of course this is all rather fantasy because clearly after prohibition they ignored that they'd need an amendment to stop the use of specific chemicals.
It's a sad reality when the government commits repeated illegal acts (any power not under the constitution that the government performs is by definition illegal) and the people, including me, are unwilling to rise up and reform it. I don't know how much hope there is to reverting this government to what it was designed to be in the beginning, but I have hope that at some point change will come, by some means, as enough people realize just how perverted our government has become.
Technology people that I know are generally for it,
I'm a hoosier, and I'm against it. If the root of the "problem" is people keeping their lights on at night, the obvious solution is to minimize the amount of energy used. This clearly, to me, would indicate shifting the standard work time to night. That way businesses, which apparently are better at being efficient than people (otherwise DST would be pointless because everyone as individuals would have already solved these problems), would be able to minimize energy usage. Not only that but getting off of work when the sun comes out would mean 8 to 12hrs of sunlight, so most people would only need their lights on the brief period before they head to work.
There's a lot saner ways to save energy. Maybe we should consider those before deciding to try to change everyone's clocks.
MS's thinking is quite legit
The only "legit" part of their thinking is as a company that doesn't think it's done anything wrong, deserves being punished, or is being punished. A large part of opening the API to *everyone* is for the purpose of making it impossible for MS to unfairly extend itself further by allowing everyone clear access to the underworkings of what they're doing. The only reason, I assume, the EU didn't just make MS give out all their APIs freely is because then enough companies/people could hypothetically bankrupt MS in a DDoS attack, which the legal system wouldn't deem as just. Obviously MS isn't trying to just cover its own shipping&handling fees. It's trying to ensure that access to its APIs is a new revenue stream. Hopefully the EU will realize this and just slap on a fixed shipping&handling fee and tell MS to be damned if a DDoS attack does succeed against it.
If the EU declared that MS Europe was now a separate country and all assets held of MS Europe in any EU country were now totally under MS Europe control, don't you think they'd be able to find someone in MS Europe to be the new President? I mean, after all, MS is a monopoly in Europe and the US. If MS US were blocked out of the EU and MS Europe got to do as it pleased, they'd be almost certainly willing to fork over a little bit of access if nothing else for the nice pay checks they'll get until MS Europe is no longer a monopoly and is actually competing with other companies.
All the countries in the EU certainly have the power to confuscate all assets of MS Europe and hand them over to MS Europe in a way to ensure that MS US and MS Europe won't work together, if nothing else for the greed of the new CEO. And certainly it'd be hard for MS to claim that somehow their copyrighted was violated by a part of themselves containing ownership rights to its own code. The only real stickler is the amount of actual collaboration that'd have to go into making sure all of the EU went along with this plan and the US not trying to do some sort of blockade against EU for trying to pull this off. It'd be an interesting case for globalization and where the boundaries of justice lie.
I remember this same argument circa 1994/1995 with the OS/2 & Win95 battles, and on the fence were the DOS/Desqview and Win 3.1 users crying foul and raising all sorts of bloody hell.
And if you don't think it was Win95 offering cheaper, and better, DOS [Game] support along with Win 3.1 support that was a major deciding factor in why Win95 was chosen over OS/2...then I'd guess you'd have to believe that it was all the Win95 lock-in. In that case, it's only a question of MS pushing OEMs to stop selling 32-bit machines by greatly jacking up the price of Win XP while dropping the price of Win XP X64 low enough to compensate for the price difference of the hardware. Of course with that, all MS really has to do is not piss off too many people.
Instead of bitching about what it doesn't support, why not embrace the technology and be a part of helping it move forward?
For all of MS's history of being behind maintaining backwards compatibility to keep people hooked on their products, to now act like they can arbitrarily drop support and we should not be upset about how this is degradation in quality because of advances in technology sounds like an argument that MS can do whatever they want and we should bow to their wishes solely on the basis that technology improves. That argument is silly because technology always improves. We should be allowed to judge components, both hardware and software, for their quality alone. If one component, Windows, happens to interfere with the quality of the product as a whole, we sure as hell can just buy another OS. I hear Linux has good support for x86_64.