Most even remotely modern TVs sold in Europe support both PAL and NTSC - mine certainly does. Though as I said it's a fairly old CRT set so doesn't have all the fancy TV guide features.
The cable box, OTOH, does and that is on all the time....
It's not really something that's studied in enough detail to garner a great deal of evidence, but you don't really need to do such studies to understand that there's no technical reason for the lack of malware.
Most Windows malware doesn't really need administrative privileges for installation - it can either run quietly with the same privileges as the user that installed it (works but is fairly trivial for most AV to defeat) or it can seek out and take advantage of a local privilege escalation hole and run with exactly the same privileges as the AV that's trying to remove it (much harder for AV to defeat).
Note that neither of these things are intrinsically difficult to achieve on Linux. The days when you had viruses that spread by adding their code to every.exe on the system are largely consigned to history, and these are the things Linux geeks are talking about when they say "Linux is immune to viruses!"
Right now, I'm running Fedora 10, with 27 days up uptime. My sister uses Ubuntu, and hasn't rebooted in well over a month, because Ubuntu isn't as bleeding-edge as Fedora is.
Bless. I'm not even trying for uptime:
09:29:10 up 112 days... and it's only that low because the system was physically moved 112 days ago.
Watch a typical Windows user who doesn't really know what they're doing for an hour or two. For best results, choose someone who doesn't much use a PC. Give them a few things that they have not done before - simple things like "print out a photo that's on a digital camera", "scan in an image" or "copy a few files to/from a USB flash drive".
Don't help them, don't say a word, don't touch the keyboard, don't do anything. Just watch.
I bet you anything you like that by the end of that hour the person has failed to do at least a couple of the fairly simple tasks, taken five times longer than necessary to do the others, sworn a few times under their breath and shown every sign of being very frustrated. They'll have seen innumerable dialogs come up that may as well be written in Swahili and ignored almost every one of them.
Note in particular that they're not enjoying it - they're trying to achieve a task that they know should be fairly simple but the computer seems to be blocking everything they try to do like an overbearing school teacher dealing with a recalcitrant child. They can't even take the USB drive out without the computer telling them off!
This is how most adults learn to use their computer, and for many the experience is still relatively fresh in their minds. If you say "Linux is an alternative which works differently and you'll need alternatives for most of the software you're used to", this will be interpreted as "Remember all that fun you had learning to use a PC? How do you fancy doing it all again?"
I mean light patterns still reach the retinas, and can still trigger signals, depending on the state of the neurons there. How long was that salmon dead?
At least a couple of days, I'd imagine, seeing as they bought it from the fish counter at the local supermarket.
There was a clue in what I originally posted - in the UK
The US average car engine is over 2 litres.
Yes, I've been meaning to ask someone from the US about that. The average car engine in much of Europe is 1.3-1.6 litres.
When you consider that lots of manufacturers selling cars in the UK are able to get well over 200bhp from an engine in the 1.4-1.8l range, with 0-60mph times in the order of 7-8 seconds and top speeds around 140mph (and more than one of those cars has a diesel engine), I'd love to know what you're doing in the US that necessitates such large engines. Is the fuel lousy quality or something?
I think we all deserve better TVs frankly and I think it is fair to say that the TV industry as a whole has failed to step up. We still have brand new TVs which draw almost as much power "off" as they do turned on with the sound blazing...
I don't know if the manufacturers are shipping vastly different sets to the US compared to the UK, but I tested my own cheap & nasty 6 year old CRT set and it draws hardly anything on standby compared to when it's running.
only the beta build supports it, and I've already had serious (all data lost) crashes twice.
Get real. There's no earthly way I'm putting anything important onto a system for which a caveat like that exists, and I won't until that caveat's been gone for at least 18 months - 2 years.
Oh yes, I know that. I'm pretty sure the A5000 and later machines did natively.
But the machine in the photo looks more like an A400 series to me - not sure which vidc they used but I'm not sure it was a huge improvement over that in the A300 series and that drove a TV-resolution monitor.
Pick was used extensively by a UK insurance broker until 2004 (running on top of Linux and AIX), when their parent company predicted the imminent death of insurance brokers and closed them down.
Rumour has it Currys/Dixons used to use it - no idea if they still do.
This is simply a case where a specialized processor designed for highly integrated and mobile uses is trying to break into the mainstream Personal Computing market.
ITYM break back into the mainstream Personal Computing market. Desktop personal computers (in the personal sense, rather than the IBM PC Compatible sense) based on ARM chips have existed before:
(I do like the way the photograph shows a computer from about 1988 with an LCD monitor on top. It looks completely out of place - I'm pretty sure the computer that it's sat on didn't have a 15-pin VGA output)
There is a project that integrates WINE with QEMU, but I don't know its status. This would (in theory) run the app in QEMU, but every call to WINE stubs would be proxied to the native WINE libraries so code inside WINE would run the native versions (including things like DirectX)....This would be fast enough for all but the most CPU-intensive Windows applications.
That I very strongly doubt.
The only reason modern PCs do such a good job of emulating older computers is that they are literally 100 times faster. The 5-10x speed loss you typically see through emulation suddenly becomes a non-issue. But in this case you wouldn't be trying to emulate something that used to run 100 times slower than your native CPU, you're trying to emulate something that runs at the same speed.
By the time you put in hardware to do that (and your idea has existed for years - you used to be able to buy a 486 chip on a card to stick in your Acorn Archimedes and you could run Windows 3.1 in a window on RISC OS. Software emulation at the time was only able to run DOS. Slowly.), you'll find that it's cheaper simply to build a straight x86-based netbook.
Great. There's only one minor problem I can see with this.
All the millions of cheap no-brand freeview boxes which are produced with a different chipset and firmware from one week to the next and the manufacturer lost any interest in supporting it years ago. I know the DVB standard allows firmware updates to be sent over the air, but how often does that happen with the cheap & nasty boxes?
Anything which requires the user to do any work will take a fantastically long time to see any uptake. Particularly as most ISPs run on razor-thin margins, so the level of discount they could afford to offer would be pennies.
Why not make it compulsory to get networkable devices certified to be malware-free every year just as cars need to go through statutory vehicle inspections? If bandwidth is such an important resource, shouldn't we consider networkable devices to be potentially dangerous and perhaps consider the idea of requiring a license for ownership?
Considering that with a suitably uneducated user the average time from "put on the Internet" to "compromised so thoroughly it'll be quicker to rebuild the damn thing" is probably measured in weeks (at best) and minutes (at worst), I'm not quite sure how an annual test will help.
Having said that, if education was ever going to work it would have done so around the time of the Anna Kournikova worm.
Meh. It's been the case for years - those who are even remotely technically capable push end-user contact to the helpdesk, gave them a fairly moronic script to follow and didn't think to include any exception processing in the script.
An ISP I used to use insisted that the IIS error messages I was getting were not generated by a system within their their IIS-powered proxy cluster but instead by Google. (Yes, apparently Google, RedHat and Sun were all using IIS). It wasn't until I informed them precisely which IP address in their cluster was broken and asked the tech to try changing proxy settings on their own PC that they listened.
If their techs PC had been locked down such that they couldn't change the proxy settings I'll put £20 on the table right now which says that they'd have carried on losing systems from the cluster and not even think to look at it until the entire damn lot had gone.
Well, quite. It doesn't help that Microsoft have conditioned people to ignore these warnings as being totally unimportant, and at the same time have worded them so badly that most people never even try to understand them, they just hammer away trying to find a way to do what they want without the warning coming up.
I've actually met IT professionals who seem to think that doing this is the correct way to troubleshoot a problem. Shoot me now...
90% of security holes that have been exploited in the last few years are sitting on the chair in front of the computer. Even if Windows were to evaporate overnight and everyone using it were magically switched to a Mac or to Linux, inside a few weeks you'd see malware pop up which has Apple logos and Linux penguins and makes reassuring noises while insisting it really does need your password.
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Most even remotely modern TVs sold in Europe support both PAL and NTSC - mine certainly does. Though as I said it's a fairly old CRT set so doesn't have all the fancy TV guide features.
The cable box, OTOH, does and that is on all the time....
1) Have you got any evidence for that
It's not really something that's studied in enough detail to garner a great deal of evidence, but you don't really need to do such studies to understand that there's no technical reason for the lack of malware.
Most Windows malware doesn't really need administrative privileges for installation - it can either run quietly with the same privileges as the user that installed it (works but is fairly trivial for most AV to defeat) or it can seek out and take advantage of a local privilege escalation hole and run with exactly the same privileges as the AV that's trying to remove it (much harder for AV to defeat).
Note that neither of these things are intrinsically difficult to achieve on Linux. The days when you had viruses that spread by adding their code to every .exe on the system are largely consigned to history, and these are the things Linux geeks are talking about when they say "Linux is immune to viruses!"
Right now, I'm running Fedora 10, with 27 days up uptime. My sister uses Ubuntu, and hasn't rebooted in well over a month, because Ubuntu isn't as bleeding-edge as Fedora is.
Bless. I'm not even trying for uptime:
09:29:10 up 112 days ... and it's only that low because the system was physically moved 112 days ago.
Watch a typical Windows user who doesn't really know what they're doing for an hour or two. For best results, choose someone who doesn't much use a PC. Give them a few things that they have not done before - simple things like "print out a photo that's on a digital camera", "scan in an image" or "copy a few files to/from a USB flash drive".
Don't help them, don't say a word, don't touch the keyboard, don't do anything. Just watch.
I bet you anything you like that by the end of that hour the person has failed to do at least a couple of the fairly simple tasks, taken five times longer than necessary to do the others, sworn a few times under their breath and shown every sign of being very frustrated. They'll have seen innumerable dialogs come up that may as well be written in Swahili and ignored almost every one of them.
Note in particular that they're not enjoying it - they're trying to achieve a task that they know should be fairly simple but the computer seems to be blocking everything they try to do like an overbearing school teacher dealing with a recalcitrant child. They can't even take the USB drive out without the computer telling them off!
This is how most adults learn to use their computer, and for many the experience is still relatively fresh in their minds. If you say "Linux is an alternative which works differently and you'll need alternatives for most of the software you're used to", this will be interpreted as "Remember all that fun you had learning to use a PC? How do you fancy doing it all again?"
I mean light patterns still reach the retinas, and can still trigger signals, depending on the state of the neurons there. How long was that salmon dead?
At least a couple of days, I'd imagine, seeing as they bought it from the fish counter at the local supermarket.
I'd build my own theme park. With blackjack and hookers.
In fact, forget the theme park.
And where are you located ?
There was a clue in what I originally posted - in the UK
The US average car engine is over 2 litres.
Yes, I've been meaning to ask someone from the US about that. The average car engine in much of Europe is 1.3-1.6 litres.
When you consider that lots of manufacturers selling cars in the UK are able to get well over 200bhp from an engine in the 1.4-1.8l range, with 0-60mph times in the order of 7-8 seconds and top speeds around 140mph (and more than one of those cars has a diesel engine), I'd love to know what you're doing in the US that necessitates such large engines. Is the fuel lousy quality or something?
I think we all deserve better TVs frankly and I think it is fair to say that the TV industry as a whole has failed to step up. We still have brand new TVs which draw almost as much power "off" as they do turned on with the sound blazing...
I don't know if the manufacturers are shipping vastly different sets to the US compared to the UK, but I tested my own cheap & nasty 6 year old CRT set and it draws hardly anything on standby compared to when it's running.
only the beta build supports it, and I've already had serious (all data lost) crashes twice.
Get real. There's no earthly way I'm putting anything important onto a system for which a caveat like that exists, and I won't until that caveat's been gone for at least 18 months - 2 years.
Oh yes, I know that. I'm pretty sure the A5000 and later machines did natively.
But the machine in the photo looks more like an A400 series to me - not sure which vidc they used but I'm not sure it was a huge improvement over that in the A300 series and that drove a TV-resolution monitor.
Pick was used extensively by a UK insurance broker until 2004 (running on top of Linux and AIX), when their parent company predicted the imminent death of insurance brokers and closed them down.
Rumour has it Currys/Dixons used to use it - no idea if they still do.
This is simply a case where a specialized processor designed for highly integrated and mobile uses is trying to break into the mainstream Personal Computing market.
ITYM break back into the mainstream Personal Computing market. Desktop personal computers (in the personal sense, rather than the IBM PC Compatible sense) based on ARM chips have existed before:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes
(I do like the way the photograph shows a computer from about 1988 with an LCD monitor on top. It looks completely out of place - I'm pretty sure the computer that it's sat on didn't have a 15-pin VGA output)
There is a project that integrates WINE with QEMU, but I don't know its status. This would (in theory) run the app in QEMU, but every call to WINE stubs would be proxied to the native WINE libraries so code inside WINE would run the native versions (including things like DirectX)....This would be fast enough for all but the most CPU-intensive Windows applications.
That I very strongly doubt.
The only reason modern PCs do such a good job of emulating older computers is that they are literally 100 times faster. The 5-10x speed loss you typically see through emulation suddenly becomes a non-issue. But in this case you wouldn't be trying to emulate something that used to run 100 times slower than your native CPU, you're trying to emulate something that runs at the same speed.
By the time you put in hardware to do that (and your idea has existed for years - you used to be able to buy a 486 chip on a card to stick in your Acorn Archimedes and you could run Windows 3.1 in a window on RISC OS. Software emulation at the time was only able to run DOS. Slowly.), you'll find that it's cheaper simply to build a straight x86-based netbook.
Purely out of curiosity, what applications will this recompiled version of Windows run?
That'll be news to the folk that have been using computers with ARM processors since the very early 1990s.
Correction: Late 1980's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes#Early_models
Great. There's only one minor problem I can see with this.
All the millions of cheap no-brand freeview boxes which are produced with a different chipset and firmware from one week to the next and the manufacturer lost any interest in supporting it years ago. I know the DVB standard allows firmware updates to be sent over the air, but how often does that happen with the cheap & nasty boxes?
Anything which requires the user to do any work will take a fantastically long time to see any uptake. Particularly as most ISPs run on razor-thin margins, so the level of discount they could afford to offer would be pennies.
Why not make it compulsory to get networkable devices certified to be malware-free every year just as cars need to go through statutory vehicle inspections?
If bandwidth is such an important resource, shouldn't we consider networkable devices to be potentially dangerous and perhaps consider the idea of requiring a license for ownership?
Considering that with a suitably uneducated user the average time from "put on the Internet" to "compromised so thoroughly it'll be quicker to rebuild the damn thing" is probably measured in weeks (at best) and minutes (at worst), I'm not quite sure how an annual test will help.
Having said that, if education was ever going to work it would have done so around the time of the Anna Kournikova worm.
Meh. It's been the case for years - those who are even remotely technically capable push end-user contact to the helpdesk, gave them a fairly moronic script to follow and didn't think to include any exception processing in the script.
An ISP I used to use insisted that the IIS error messages I was getting were not generated by a system within their their IIS-powered proxy cluster but instead by Google. (Yes, apparently Google, RedHat and Sun were all using IIS). It wasn't until I informed them precisely which IP address in their cluster was broken and asked the tech to try changing proxy settings on their own PC that they listened.
If their techs PC had been locked down such that they couldn't change the proxy settings I'll put £20 on the table right now which says that they'd have carried on losing systems from the cluster and not even think to look at it until the entire damn lot had gone.
Well, quite. It doesn't help that Microsoft have conditioned people to ignore these warnings as being totally unimportant, and at the same time have worded them so badly that most people never even try to understand them, they just hammer away trying to find a way to do what they want without the warning coming up.
I've actually met IT professionals who seem to think that doing this is the correct way to troubleshoot a problem. Shoot me now...
Corollary: Any systems admin who lets their machines get infested with malware in the first place is not worth they lunch they bring in every day.
That doesn't mean it has to be.
There's no reason why malware can't be installed using local exploits in the application or social engineering.
Oh come on.
90% of security holes that have been exploited in the last few years are sitting on the chair in front of the computer. Even if Windows were to evaporate overnight and everyone using it were magically switched to a Mac or to Linux, inside a few weeks you'd see malware pop up which has Apple logos and Linux penguins and makes reassuring noises while insisting it really does need your password.
I suspect the the law of unintended consequences will mean that we'll end up with ISPs that provide access only to http and https.
You ever looked at any ISP's own online help or tried contacting one lately?
Certainly here in the UK, most ISPs seem to think that's all they do anyway.