How convenient that the $670 edition should be the one that remains available.
I can only think of three explanations for this:
1. MS are quite happy to put some of the revenue from Office to paying damages, provided the revenue is from the most expensive version. 2. They're holding back on making the cheaper versions compliant intentionally to see if only having the expensive version available dramatically affects sales. 3. They're not as well organised as I'd like to believe - packaging every different edition of Office is a major undertaking which requires a lot of work.
No, there certainly is such a thing. I hate to be one to preach how great mac and Linux are, but they are 'Inherently resistant'(Combination of obscurity and the lack of the porosity leading weak points to be mainly the user, and even then defending him/her from his/herself). There is a huge difference between that and immunity though.
You are aware that the great majority of Windows malware in the last 5 or 10 years has been taking advantage of either the weak point between the keyboard and the chair or unpatched client software to install and spread?
Neither of which are exactly unknown on other platforms.
Part of my job description is making sure the company is up to scratch with their licensing. So I have to read the licenses - and I do.
I have concluded that software licenses are written expressly to trip up customers. Even when they're relatively straightforward, they often contain clauses which would be considered absurd in almost any other commercial contract.
For instance, the only license that allows you to roll out Windows using an imaging system (eg. Ghost) is one of the volume licenses - and for the most part they include a clause which states "You will buy a license for every PC-compatible computer in your organisation". Now you know why so few companies are taking Linux seriously on the desktop. I have no idea how enforceable such a clause would be, but I can't see many companies wanting to challenge Microsoft in court.
Today it's the one which gets trotted out every time - and leaves me thinking that there simply isn't another high profile migration story on the planet. Hardly a ringing endorsement.
Computers almost need to be treated as magical boxes possessed by evil spirits which might stop working if you anger the computer gods.
As an IT person myself, if your computers aren't treating you as a god that's prone to anger, you're doing it wrong. If I wanted to negotiate, beg and plead with systems under my control I'd be running Windows '95.
How about MMX? I like confusing other people by reusing acronyms. Even better if I could walk around with a slot 1 Pentium and wave it in front of IT staff while mentioning it...
You'd certainly confuse people doing that. Early Pentium IIs used a slot, Pentiums used sockets.
Dates are really, really horrible. If you have not had the privilege of writing an international application, worrying about different date and time representations, simultaneity across different time-zones (and the date line) - well, it's an adventure, and even careful testing may not catch everything. Gratuitous real-world example: WinXP allows users to set date-separators and the like in a way that makes unambiguous date/time parsing impossible.
Which is why you don't do that. You let standard library functions (which were mostly written years ago and have been tested far more extensively than any of your code is likely to be) handle it.
And where this is impossible, you don't even attempt to parse dates. You work purely on something like "number of seconds since the epoch" and only turn it into a human-readable date just before you show it to a human.
Really, the cases in which you're likely to need to parse a date in the real world are few and far between.
In that case, why doesn't the all-clear command include the AES key used to decrypt the data as derived from the passphrase?
If there's any encryption happening on-key at all (which I doubt), I wouldn't be even remotely surprised if it's something like a simple XOR cipher. TBH, I think you're ascribing competence to government departments where precious little evidence of such competence exists.
TBH, I think it infinitely more likely that the manufacturers considered true hardware AES encryption far too expensive and it's actually a vanilla flash drive with just one difference - it doesn't make the data available until it receives a special instruction generated by the proprietary software. The AES encryption, if it exists, applies to how they secure the stored password in the Windows app.
Short of taking the top off it and examining under an electron microscope, there's no easy way to prove this. (That is assuming it's a single chip on there. If the flash is separate from the controller, I guess you might be able to very carefully unsolder it and connect a normal controller to the chip).
In any case, if my second supposition is correct, I would dearly love to know what the certification process is because it clearly isn't worth a damn. Not only that, (if this is correct) I have trouble figuring out how any manufacturer attempting to get such a product certified is NOT attempting to defraud the certifying organisation.
No, it's actually encrypted. The problem is that the command to unencrypt the data is always the same. In other words, a small little widget can sit between the password program and the encrypted disk, and just send the right command string, regardless of what password was entered. Instant decryption.
But still - why do something like try to reinvent crypto, when there's an open format? The license for Truecrypt even allows for commercial use.
If it was properly encrypted, the decryption would be carried out on the device using a key supplied by the host PC and the device wouldn't be physically capable of decrypting it without the key. As it stands, the most charitable reading of this is that it IS using AES encryption, but it always uses the exact same key regardless of what the enduser does in the software.
They have KVM access and forcibly reboot the server, and when it comes back up, they enter it in single-user mode. They've done this at least 3 times before, while I was logged into it, and when the server came back up about 15 minutes later, the lastlog for my own login was missing from the logs. They attempted to clean up the logs to hide their own activities.
And yet you persist in keeping the contract? Will your boss not allow you to move to a different hosting provider or something?
No, you can solve that problem with a fairly simple ceremony.
Though it usually winds up becoming an all-day affair involving elderly relatives that you haven't seen in twenty years because you can't stand the sight of them.
A bit late now, but you could always put all interesting data in a partition of its own (one that isn't needed for bootup) and encrypt just that partition. A single line in your boot script can email you to say that the system's just been rebooted, prompting you to login and re-mount the partition.
I remember when Jobs unveiled the first iPhone in Jan. 2007. For laughs, he showed a modified iPod with a rotary dial instead of the click wheel before he showed the iPhone. Really if it's one thing that we've learned from Apple is that nothing is true about their upcoming products until Apple announces it.
ICBW but IIRC the first iPod had a rotary dial. Perhaps he was saying "Look how far we've come"?
Or we could cut lose and use the big weapons and see if any survivors still want to fight.
Are you serious? The big problem with declaring a war on terrorists is that you wind up declaring war on a group that a lot of people will identify with - and reaction to deaths doesn't tend to be "what a shame, s/he shouldn't have been a terrorist". Neither is the general reaction "What a shame, s/he was obviously in the wrong place in the wrong time". The reaction tends to be "What a bunch of bastards! They want to fight, let's fight back!".
We in the UK had this with the Irish troubles. A lot of Americans have Irish roots (even if they haven't been there in generations) and a lot of Americans helped finance IRA activities. Closer to home, friends and family of people killed provided human resources. Frankly, the only reason there haven't been a whole lot more attacks on American soil is because it's comparatively difficult to get a significant number of people from a desert in the arse end of nowhere to US soil without arousing suspicion. Had the terrorists been Canadian or Mexican, there would have been far more attacks on US soil by now.
I rather think we may be talking at cross purposes. I know full well you can browse a sharepoint repository in Firefox, and you can download/upload documents (rather than rely on the integration with Office).
The point I'm driving at is that Microsoft are (IMO) trying to push their customers into using the Office integration features to essentially obsolete a simple SMB fileshare and replace it with a Sharepoint server - thus making migration from a Microsoft platform that much harder.
My gf claims she needs a 250hp (at the rear wheel) V6 in her commuter car so she can "get on the highway easier." She compared 0-60 times for Honda Accords and Toyota Camrys.
What in the name of God are the Americans doing with their cars that they need a 250hp V6 for decent acceleration?
Have you got SharePoint to work with Apache's HTTPD Server? You probably just use IIS and Windows Server 200X instead of using Linux and Apache HTTPD. Just go to Dice and look for SharePoint jobs, there are tons of them and there's no way to migrate away from it easily.
There's no easy way to migrate away from most database-driven web applications.
The big difference about Sharepoint - and to be fair it's an inspirational move on Microsoft's part - is the sheer depth to which sharepoint winds up integrated in a company - not just as an application platform but as a document management system. Not only do you need Microsoft's product to read any documents stored on Sharepoint (pushing aside OO.o's ability to open Office documents, if you want near-100% compatibility you have little choice), you need their product to even bring up an interface to the documents.
Remember the old internal memos that talked about "de-commiditising protocols"? That's basically what they've done - they've de-commoditised SMB file shares by obsoleting them in many companies.
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How convenient that the $670 edition should be the one that remains available.
I can only think of three explanations for this:
1. MS are quite happy to put some of the revenue from Office to paying damages, provided the revenue is from the most expensive version.
2. They're holding back on making the cheaper versions compliant intentionally to see if only having the expensive version available dramatically affects sales.
3. They're not as well organised as I'd like to believe - packaging every different edition of Office is a major undertaking which requires a lot of work.
but xXxXx_BuBbLe_PrInCeSs_1987_xXxXx@ is going to find its way to my trash folder very, very quickly.
"Bubble Princess" born in 1987? That can only be an FBI agent.
Bubble Princess born in 1987 would be 22-23 years old now. Unlikely to be an FBI agent.
No, there certainly is such a thing. I hate to be one to preach how great mac and Linux are, but they are 'Inherently resistant'(Combination of obscurity and the lack of the porosity leading weak points to be mainly the user, and even then defending him/her from his/herself). There is a huge difference between that and immunity though.
You are aware that the great majority of Windows malware in the last 5 or 10 years has been taking advantage of either the weak point between the keyboard and the chair or unpatched client software to install and spread?
Neither of which are exactly unknown on other platforms.
Bad news: What operating system or BIOS doesn't? You even have to register your Linux distro.
I have over a dozen Debian servers that beg to differ.
Whyever not? Nintendo did it for the original Game Boy Advance.... oh yeah.
PostgreSQL users tend to shut up and get on with it quietly and efficiently.
MySQL users tend to indulge in all sorts of public willy-waving.
Much like the databases they use, in fact.
Seriously, anyone?
Part of my job description is making sure the company is up to scratch with their licensing. So I have to read the licenses - and I do.
I have concluded that software licenses are written expressly to trip up customers. Even when they're relatively straightforward, they often contain clauses which would be considered absurd in almost any other commercial contract.
For instance, the only license that allows you to roll out Windows using an imaging system (eg. Ghost) is one of the volume licenses - and for the most part they include a clause which states "You will buy a license for every PC-compatible computer in your organisation". Now you know why so few companies are taking Linux seriously on the desktop. I have no idea how enforceable such a clause would be, but I can't see many companies wanting to challenge Microsoft in court.
BSA are not law enforcement. They just behave like it sometimes.
That was an interesting story - 8 or 9 years ago.
Today it's the one which gets trotted out every time - and leaves me thinking that there simply isn't another high profile migration story on the planet. Hardly a ringing endorsement.
Most Unix applications can be installed in ~/bin and can be told to look in places other than /etc for their configuration.
There is a huge number of Windows applications that simply won't work if you try and do anything analogous on Windows.
Computers almost need to be treated as magical boxes possessed by evil spirits which might stop working if you anger the computer gods.
As an IT person myself, if your computers aren't treating you as a god that's prone to anger, you're doing it wrong. If I wanted to negotiate, beg and plead with systems under my control I'd be running Windows '95.
How about MMX? I like confusing other people by reusing acronyms. Even better if I could walk around with a slot 1 Pentium and wave it in front of IT staff while mentioning it...
You'd certainly confuse people doing that. Early Pentium IIs used a slot, Pentiums used sockets.
Dates are really, really horrible. If you have not had the privilege of writing an international application, worrying about different date and time representations, simultaneity across different time-zones (and the date line) - well, it's an adventure, and even careful testing may not catch everything. Gratuitous real-world example: WinXP allows users to set date-separators and the like in a way that makes unambiguous date/time parsing impossible.
Which is why you don't do that. You let standard library functions (which were mostly written years ago and have been tested far more extensively than any of your code is likely to be) handle it.
And where this is impossible, you don't even attempt to parse dates. You work purely on something like "number of seconds since the epoch" and only turn it into a human-readable date just before you show it to a human.
Really, the cases in which you're likely to need to parse a date in the real world are few and far between.
In that case, why doesn't the all-clear command include the AES key used to decrypt the data as derived from the passphrase?
If there's any encryption happening on-key at all (which I doubt), I wouldn't be even remotely surprised if it's something like a simple XOR cipher. TBH, I think you're ascribing competence to government departments where precious little evidence of such competence exists.
TBH, I think it infinitely more likely that the manufacturers considered true hardware AES encryption far too expensive and it's actually a vanilla flash drive with just one difference - it doesn't make the data available until it receives a special instruction generated by the proprietary software. The AES encryption, if it exists, applies to how they secure the stored password in the Windows app.
Short of taking the top off it and examining under an electron microscope, there's no easy way to prove this. (That is assuming it's a single chip on there. If the flash is separate from the controller, I guess you might be able to very carefully unsolder it and connect a normal controller to the chip).
In any case, if my second supposition is correct, I would dearly love to know what the certification process is because it clearly isn't worth a damn. Not only that, (if this is correct) I have trouble figuring out how any manufacturer attempting to get such a product certified is NOT attempting to defraud the certifying organisation.
No, it's actually encrypted. The problem is that the command to unencrypt the data is always the same. In other words, a small little widget can sit between the password program and the encrypted disk, and just send the right command string, regardless of what password was entered. Instant decryption.
But still - why do something like try to reinvent crypto, when there's an open format? The license for Truecrypt even allows for commercial use.
If it was properly encrypted, the decryption would be carried out on the device using a key supplied by the host PC and the device wouldn't be physically capable of decrypting it without the key. As it stands, the most charitable reading of this is that it IS using AES encryption, but it always uses the exact same key regardless of what the enduser does in the software.
They have KVM access and forcibly reboot the server, and when it comes back up, they enter it in single-user mode. They've done this at least 3 times before, while I was logged into it, and when the server came back up about 15 minutes later, the lastlog for my own login was missing from the logs. They attempted to clean up the logs to hide their own activities.
And yet you persist in keeping the contract? Will your boss not allow you to move to a different hosting provider or something?
No, you can solve that problem with a fairly simple ceremony.
Though it usually winds up becoming an all-day affair involving elderly relatives that you haven't seen in twenty years because you can't stand the sight of them.
A bit late now, but you could always put all interesting data in a partition of its own (one that isn't needed for bootup) and encrypt just that partition. A single line in your boot script can email you to say that the system's just been rebooted, prompting you to login and re-mount the partition.
I remember when Jobs unveiled the first iPhone in Jan. 2007. For laughs, he showed a modified iPod with a rotary dial instead of the click wheel before he showed the iPhone. Really if it's one thing that we've learned from Apple is that nothing is true about their upcoming products until Apple announces it.
ICBW but IIRC the first iPod had a rotary dial. Perhaps he was saying "Look how far we've come"?
Or we could cut lose and use the big weapons and see if any survivors still want to fight.
Are you serious? The big problem with declaring a war on terrorists is that you wind up declaring war on a group that a lot of people will identify with - and reaction to deaths doesn't tend to be "what a shame, s/he shouldn't have been a terrorist". Neither is the general reaction "What a shame, s/he was obviously in the wrong place in the wrong time". The reaction tends to be "What a bunch of bastards! They want to fight, let's fight back!".
We in the UK had this with the Irish troubles. A lot of Americans have Irish roots (even if they haven't been there in generations) and a lot of Americans helped finance IRA activities. Closer to home, friends and family of people killed provided human resources. Frankly, the only reason there haven't been a whole lot more attacks on American soil is because it's comparatively difficult to get a significant number of people from a desert in the arse end of nowhere to US soil without arousing suspicion. Had the terrorists been Canadian or Mexican, there would have been far more attacks on US soil by now.
replying to undo an accidental "redundant" mod.
I rather think we may be talking at cross purposes. I know full well you can browse a sharepoint repository in Firefox, and you can download/upload documents (rather than rely on the integration with Office).
The point I'm driving at is that Microsoft are (IMO) trying to push their customers into using the Office integration features to essentially obsolete a simple SMB fileshare and replace it with a Sharepoint server - thus making migration from a Microsoft platform that much harder.
This is /., so we need some car comparisons...
My gf claims she needs a 250hp (at the rear wheel) V6 in her commuter car so she can "get on the highway easier." She compared 0-60 times for Honda Accords and Toyota Camrys.
What in the name of God are the Americans doing with their cars that they need a 250hp V6 for decent acceleration?
Have you got SharePoint to work with Apache's HTTPD Server? You probably just use IIS and Windows Server 200X instead of using Linux and Apache HTTPD. Just go to Dice and look for SharePoint jobs, there are tons of them and there's no way to migrate away from it easily.
There's no easy way to migrate away from most database-driven web applications.
The big difference about Sharepoint - and to be fair it's an inspirational move on Microsoft's part - is the sheer depth to which sharepoint winds up integrated in a company - not just as an application platform but as a document management system. Not only do you need Microsoft's product to read any documents stored on Sharepoint (pushing aside OO.o's ability to open Office documents, if you want near-100% compatibility you have little choice), you need their product to even bring up an interface to the documents.
Remember the old internal memos that talked about "de-commiditising protocols"? That's basically what they've done - they've de-commoditised SMB file shares by obsoleting them in many companies.