IIRC it was Marc Andressen who first hit on this tactic for competing against Microsoft, when Netscape launched the Mozilla Foundation in 1998. It took a few years of fumbling around before that took fruit - probably because the Navigator/Communicator code was so badly written - but that turned out to be a masterstroke of business tactics.
Microsoft's innovations stand on their own. Their accomplishments with active directory, for instance, are wonderful. I'd like to see the open source community come up with anything like it.
Despite the "Funny" mod, there is actually one very good point in there.
Yes I know Active Directory is nothing more than a kerberized LDAP server with a fancy schema. But I also do not know of any F/OSS mechanism to automatically get all sorts of software packages, configuration and policy settings from an LDAP server. Given the number of Linux distributions that exist and the sometimes only slight resemblance between any two in terms of configuration, I suspect that such a product isn't really practical right now.
There are things like cfengine but by and large all they provide is a toolkit which any half-competent sysadmin could re-implement with cron, shell scripts and SSH anyhow. AD, on the other hand, provides a pre-cooked list of configuration settings and it's just a matter of ticking the appropriate boxes.
Depending on how you define secure then no, Hushmail is not.
Personally if I want to send encrypted mail I will do so on a PC I have direct control over, I will carry out the encryption before the email goes anywhere. And depending on the type of encryption used, I might even carry out the encryption on a terminal which has no network connections etc and after encrypting the mail will shutdown the PC and leave it shutdown for a while - this setup would have no swap partition etc, or if it did it would be a minimum of baseline encrypted.
You still need to guarantee that the person on the other end will take similar precautions.
Furthermore, the government doesn't necessarily need to read your email to know that you're of interest to them - being in regular communication with someone else who is of interest is often quite enough.
Why do you think most successful terror organisations are formed of loosely-organised cells with little communication between them?
Re:no encryption that YOU didn't write is safe
on
Is Hushmail Still Safe?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Holy freaking tinfoil hat! Or maybe the poster above me has an entire tinfoil raydome surrounding the immediate 10 feet around him?
There are plenty of countries in Eastern Europe and Western Asia full of people who haven't forgotten a repressive government and what it can do when it's sufficiently organised.
For all we know, DaedalusHKX may come from one such country - and history tends to repeat itself partly because humans as a race are very bad at learning from it.
So how did that crude obscenity filter come into place when he spoke to people at Verizon... multiple times?
I once had the misfortune to be a customer of an ISP with such an attitude. They'd essentially installed an obscenity filter on all their staff and if you said anything which tripped the filter, they'd put the phone down on you.
What made this particularly galling was that the service they were selling was filtered internet access for the benefit of the sort of organisation that wants one - schools, mainly. So you ring them up to say "There's a problem with your filter - it lets me visit www.hotteensluts.com" and they've hung up on you before you can finish the sentence.
Still a strange error to make, what if it doesn't match anything? Like:
switch( os ) { case win95/98/me:// CODE break; case win2000/xp/vista:// CODE break; default:// CODE }
Did they put an empty "case linux: break;" in there? Or did it lack a default section at all?
That's not far from the truth. The ACPI table in the released BIOS was only useful if you were running Windows XP or Vista (possibly also 2000, can't remember now).
When I finally gave them a try is when I realized that the Image I had of Apple was actually being espoused by people who hadn't used a Mac in years, if ever. I made the switch because I don't have to fight with the OS.
THANK YOU.
As a systems admin, I've been saying for years that a system you have to fight with in order to accomplish a given task is never the optimal solution. It's seldom a particularly good solution.
The only thing that surprises me is that this approach is so rare. So many people seem to think it's perfectly acceptable to have a system which offers features A, B, C and D but requires you to go the mental equivalent of 12 rounds with Tyson to achieve C and D.
Why 1000 bits? I wasn't aware copyright has any restrictions on length. Why does it have to be "meaningful" in any human context? In the digital world, every single bit is "meaningful."
And in the human world, the word "the" is meaningful. It doesn't mean that you or I can claim that we hold a copyright on it and sue every other author who writes in English.
When everyone can accurately 3d-print objects, does getting the design for, say, a type of chair then 3d-printing it without paying, count as theft? After all, you're not depriving anyone else of the model chair the 3d specifications were based on.
Compared to churning them out on an assembly line in China that produces 10,000 a day, it's very unlikely such printing will be cheaper. So the likes of Ikea probably don't have to worry yet.
Be interesting if you were copying the chair of some fancy designer company that does fantastically expensive chairs though. I suspect what will happen is something similar to what a lot of photo labs do today - unless you're already known to them as a designer (photographer), they won't print out anything that they think is a copyright violation.
The racist troll has a point there. Every damn singer or band out there seems to think they ought to be entitled to tax my income just because they once recorded a few songs, even if I don't listen to them. I'm still trying to figure out exactly why I'm supposed to care so damn much about the artists and the music executives. They wouldn't give a crap about me even if they knew me, so to hell with them for my part.
Not strictly true.
Every damn record label out there seems to think that because they've made money in the exact same way for many years, this state of affairs must continue - be it by making anything which threatens it illegal or by taxing it so they get a cut of the money.
AFAICT, most of the artists they've recruited to the cause fall into one of a relatively limited number of camps:
In a similar position to the record executives. Making reasonable money off CD sales, probably because they're successful enough to be able to negotiate a half-decent contract. (Think the Cliff Richards of this world).
Heavily dependant on the music industry as it stands to promote them. Much easier to sell all the concert tickets if your potential audience has at least heard a few of your tracks on the radio recently and knows you're still performing. (Think more-or-less anyone whose work is being played to death on the radio).
Believes the music execs who say "You die if we die".
Note that there are plenty of very talented individuals and bands who are reasonably successful but for one reason or another don't fall into any of the above categories. They're the people who you hear saying "You know, I may be a musician but I don't think I'd miss large chunks of the music industry if it were to disappear tomorrow". Think Courtney Love.
Microsoft taking down the DRM servers and TOTALLY screwing their customers does not require an admission of guilt. It's a smoking gun. Bloody hands. Their spooge all over the crime scene, etc., etc., etc.
This is Microsoft we're talking about. If you showed video footage of a board meeting in which every single executive explicitly agreed that WMA with DRM was never going to work and the only sane thing to do was cut their losses and shut down the DRM servers, they'd accept that the footage was genuine and still deny that there was anything wrong with their DRM.
There's no such thing as an inferior OS these days - it's all in the applications and, to a lesser extent, peripheral support.
I've heard it said - and there is a glimmer of truth to it - that Unix makes difficult things possible; Windows makes easy things difficult and Apple make difficult things $19.99.
Nope, I haven't. I've used VPNs plenty to at least understand their issues from the user side. Anyway, a server on the LAN in this case does not involve VPN, which is intended for secure linkage over internet. If you're doing VPN, you're going to need another solution.
Yes I know.
But what I was thinking was, if you're doing all the hard work for your business on a server on your LAN, you're likely to want a VPN for staff who aren't always in the office so they can connect to the server.
And such a solution would have two major problems off the top of my head:
"I can't get on the VPN" translates into "I can therefore do literally nothing useful" (rather than just being a minor annoyance)
In an enterprise environment, a network-based OS doesn't necessarily need *internet* access, it just needs *network* (LAN) access. The master server can be located within the building. Only a catastrophic failure with a network switch would cause problems with the network OS from running. Of course, this is conjecture about how M$ will model "Midori", and brings to argument the thin client failures over the years.
You've obviously never tried administering and troubleshooting VPNs for large numbers of users.
That's not proof the opposite happened, that's circumstantial evidence suggesting that you can't be sure it happened. I already said you can't be sure one way or the other, so you really didn't counter my point.
There are a *lot* of factors that could be involved.
I'm not sure what sort of evidence wouldn't be considered circumstantial.
MSDOS was miles behind more-or-less everything else that existed in the personal market - particularly in terms of UI and ease of setting up. This remained the case for its entire life.
Now, I can't produce evidence of this without spending an inconvenient number of hours going into the history of personal computing, but if you're prepared to seek a little for yourself, I suggest you look up the Amiga, the Atari, the BBC Micro, the Acorn Archimedes - all sold into the personal market in the 1980s.
Industries where a killer application was really important tended to stick to a particular type of computer with little regard for what was popular outside of their industry. Sibelius, a music notation and composition program, started life on the Acorn Archimedes and was a killer app at the time - plenty of musical types bought Acorn computers purely for Sibelius. (Sibelius was later ported to the PC, but not until most of the IT industry had given up the Acorn RISC-range of computers for dead)
Similarly, DTP applications were for years streets ahead on Mac OS and, IIRC, the Atari. The Atari and the Amiga also had some damn good musical sequencing applications - indeed the MOD file format originated on the Amiga.
Yet today, none of these systems survive. I would consider it fair to infer from this that being the best tool for the job is not enough for a given piece of technology to survive.
Speaking personally, I don't really care what any group believes as long as they don't try and impose their beliefs on me or use them as an excuse to cause harm to me or anything I feel strongly about. I certainly have better things to do than try and convert them to atheism.
I don't really see how your "you are deluded and I will keep on telling you this until you agree with me" attitude is fundamentally different from Jehovah's Witnesses knocking on doors and asking if the occupants have found God.
I *challenge* you to take a person who has never used a Mac to the Apple store and ask them to use a Mac to do any standard task. Actually listen to what they say. If they don't mutter "how the hell do I..?" in the first 5 minutes you've found a genius. It is not intuitive. You're told it is intuitive and you believe it, but have you actually tested it?
Mr. (or Miss or Mrs, for that matter) MG, you appear to have a great deal of anger about OS X and how intuitive or otherwise it is.
Why? Why does it matter to you what OS anyone elects to use? More to the point, how is it any of your damn business? Everyone is entitled to their opinion, surely?
I'm wondering if I could buy stock in Sony and sue the CEO for devaluing the company's assets. After all, if downloading really does cost several hundred thousand dollars per infringer, why are they settling for a few thousand?
IANAL, and nor am I a music executive, but I can think of an answer to that one easily enough.
Because otherwise they'll have to spend just as much on lawyers which they're unlikely to get back; even if awarded costs you can't get a man whose total assets amount to $100,000 to give you $200,000.
Apple 'just worked' and had a GUI from the 80s (pre-os X), and now just works and has a modern GUI.
It happens that that OS X is also when the masses really started using Macs again.
Now, there are *A LOT* of factors that changed in that timeframe - marketing, GUI, features, etc. However, is there any proof, one way or the other, that that the 'just works' is enough without a flashy GUI?
There's plenty of proof of the exact opposite, as it happens. Clever marketing can sell a product which is otherwise running about 2-5 years behind everything else in the marketplace.
Witness MS-DOS and the rise of the IBM PC compatible at a time when Apple had a much larger market share than they have ever since.
People try them because they are told they "just work" and they pay highly for the privilege.
TBH, I bought a Mac because I'd had enough of issues with hardware (both under Windows and Linux) which didn't do what it said on the box.
Which is not to say there isn't the occasional issue - if I'm buying a peripheral I need to ensure it's not some Windows-only POS but to be honest I'd have avoided such things in the Windows world as well because IME Windows-only peripherals are Windows only because the manufacturer decided to shave a bit off their costs and do the legwork in the driver rather than on the chip. And seldom do you find a product in which corners are cut but is still produced to half-decent quality.
But (and again, this is purely my experience, YMMV etc etc), describing all Apple users as a bunch of brainwashed cult members is generally only done by people who have either never used OS X or never used it for more than an hour or so.
Including interfacing to the actual car via a diagnostic port.
Now that is something that desperately needs to exist in a standardised form. The only part of car audio that's even remotely standard is ISO headunit size (and many modern cars don't have ISO size headunits fitted in the factory - some even link functions like the alarm to the radio so you can't easily replace it). A port into which you could plug an MP3 player, mobile phone or satnav and have the steering wheel controls so common on modern cars do everything would be great.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC it was Marc Andressen who first hit on this tactic for competing against Microsoft, when Netscape launched the Mozilla Foundation in 1998. It took a few years of fumbling around before that took fruit - probably because the Navigator/Communicator code was so badly written - but that turned out to be a masterstroke of business tactics.
And look how well Netscape's doing today.
Microsoft's innovations stand on their own.
Their accomplishments with active directory, for instance, are wonderful. I'd like to see the open source community come up with anything like it.
Despite the "Funny" mod, there is actually one very good point in there.
Yes I know Active Directory is nothing more than a kerberized LDAP server with a fancy schema. But I also do not know of any F/OSS mechanism to automatically get all sorts of software packages, configuration and policy settings from an LDAP server. Given the number of Linux distributions that exist and the sometimes only slight resemblance between any two in terms of configuration, I suspect that such a product isn't really practical right now.
There are things like cfengine but by and large all they provide is a toolkit which any half-competent sysadmin could re-implement with cron, shell scripts and SSH anyhow. AD, on the other hand, provides a pre-cooked list of configuration settings and it's just a matter of ticking the appropriate boxes.
Man it'll be worth watching the stupid finally get theirs, just like I'm sure the Titanic was worth watching sink.
Apart from the knowledge that there were still hundreds of innocent people on board going to their deaths, maybe.
In any case, you wouldn't want to have been on it when it did.
Depending on how you define secure then no, Hushmail is not.
Personally if I want to send encrypted mail I will do so on a PC I have direct control over, I will carry out the encryption before the email goes anywhere. And depending on the type of encryption used, I might even carry out the encryption on a terminal which has no network connections etc and after encrypting the mail will shutdown the PC and leave it shutdown for a while - this setup would have no swap partition etc, or if it did it would be a minimum of baseline encrypted.
You still need to guarantee that the person on the other end will take similar precautions.
Furthermore, the government doesn't necessarily need to read your email to know that you're of interest to them - being in regular communication with someone else who is of interest is often quite enough.
Why do you think most successful terror organisations are formed of loosely-organised cells with little communication between them?
Holy freaking tinfoil hat! Or maybe the poster above me has an entire tinfoil raydome surrounding the immediate 10 feet around him?
There are plenty of countries in Eastern Europe and Western Asia full of people who haven't forgotten a repressive government and what it can do when it's sufficiently organised.
For all we know, DaedalusHKX may come from one such country - and history tends to repeat itself partly because humans as a race are very bad at learning from it.
So how did that crude obscenity filter come into place when he spoke to people at Verizon... multiple times?
I once had the misfortune to be a customer of an ISP with such an attitude. They'd essentially installed an obscenity filter on all their staff and if you said anything which tripped the filter, they'd put the phone down on you.
What made this particularly galling was that the service they were selling was filtered internet access for the benefit of the sort of organisation that wants one - schools, mainly. So you ring them up to say "There's a problem with your filter - it lets me visit www.hotteensluts.com" and they've hung up on you before you can finish the sentence.
Still a strange error to make, what if it doesn't match anything? Like:
switch( os ) { // CODE // CODE // CODE
case win95/98/me:
break;
case win2000/xp/vista:
break;
default:
}
Did they put an empty "case linux: break;" in there? Or did it lack a default section at all?
That's not far from the truth. The ACPI table in the released BIOS was only useful if you were running Windows XP or Vista (possibly also 2000, can't remember now).
When I finally gave them a try is when I realized that the Image I had of Apple was actually being espoused by people who hadn't used a Mac in years, if ever. I made the switch because I don't have to fight with the OS.
THANK YOU.
As a systems admin, I've been saying for years that a system you have to fight with in order to accomplish a given task is never the optimal solution. It's seldom a particularly good solution.
The only thing that surprises me is that this approach is so rare. So many people seem to think it's perfectly acceptable to have a system which offers features A, B, C and D but requires you to go the mental equivalent of 12 rounds with Tyson to achieve C and D.
Why 1000 bits? I wasn't aware copyright has any restrictions on length. Why does it have to be "meaningful" in any human context? In the digital world, every single bit is "meaningful."
And in the human world, the word "the" is meaningful. It doesn't mean that you or I can claim that we hold a copyright on it and sue every other author who writes in English.
I turn pink and grow roses out of my ears
You should join a circus.
Ummm... Isn't that practically what McDonalds is doing with the new "McCafe" or whatever it is called? Sure it isn't the same recipe
Hot water, ground coffee, optional milk/cream (depending on where you are in the world).
Sounds like the same recipe to me.
When everyone can accurately 3d-print objects, does getting the design for, say, a type of chair then 3d-printing it without paying, count as theft? After all, you're not depriving anyone else of the model chair the 3d specifications were based on.
Compared to churning them out on an assembly line in China that produces 10,000 a day, it's very unlikely such printing will be cheaper. So the likes of Ikea probably don't have to worry yet.
Be interesting if you were copying the chair of some fancy designer company that does fantastically expensive chairs though. I suspect what will happen is something similar to what a lot of photo labs do today - unless you're already known to them as a designer (photographer), they won't print out anything that they think is a copyright violation.
The racist troll has a point there. Every damn singer or band out there seems to think they ought to be entitled to tax my income just because they once recorded a few songs, even if I don't listen to them. I'm still trying to figure out exactly why I'm supposed to care so damn much about the artists and the music executives. They wouldn't give a crap about me even if they knew me, so to hell with them for my part.
Not strictly true.
Every damn record label out there seems to think that because they've made money in the exact same way for many years, this state of affairs must continue - be it by making anything which threatens it illegal or by taxing it so they get a cut of the money.
AFAICT, most of the artists they've recruited to the cause fall into one of a relatively limited number of camps:
Note that there are plenty of very talented individuals and bands who are reasonably successful but for one reason or another don't fall into any of the above categories. They're the people who you hear saying "You know, I may be a musician but I don't think I'd miss large chunks of the music industry if it were to disappear tomorrow". Think Courtney Love.
If you repel the sharks, the lasers will go too.
I don't know about spray, but I've got this rock that keeps sharks at bay.
I've had it on my desk for months and in that time I don't think I've seen a single shark come anywhere near it.
Microsoft taking down the DRM servers and TOTALLY screwing their customers does not require an admission of guilt. It's a smoking gun. Bloody hands. Their spooge all over the crime scene, etc., etc., etc.
This is Microsoft we're talking about. If you showed video footage of a board meeting in which every single executive explicitly agreed that WMA with DRM was never going to work and the only sane thing to do was cut their losses and shut down the DRM servers, they'd accept that the footage was genuine and still deny that there was anything wrong with their DRM.
There's no such thing as an inferior OS these days - it's all in the applications and, to a lesser extent, peripheral support.
I've heard it said - and there is a glimmer of truth to it - that Unix makes difficult things possible; Windows makes easy things difficult and Apple make difficult things $19.99.
Nope, I haven't. I've used VPNs plenty to at least understand their issues from the user side. Anyway, a server on the LAN in this case does not involve VPN, which is intended for secure linkage over internet. If you're doing VPN, you're going to need another solution.
Yes I know.
But what I was thinking was, if you're doing all the hard work for your business on a server on your LAN, you're likely to want a VPN for staff who aren't always in the office so they can connect to the server.
And such a solution would have two major problems off the top of my head:
In an enterprise environment, a network-based OS doesn't necessarily need *internet* access, it just needs *network* (LAN) access. The master server can be located within the building. Only a catastrophic failure with a network switch would cause problems with the network OS from running. Of course, this is conjecture about how M$ will model "Midori", and brings to argument the thin client failures over the years.
You've obviously never tried administering and troubleshooting VPNs for large numbers of users.
That's not proof the opposite happened, that's circumstantial evidence suggesting that you can't be sure it happened. I already said you can't be sure one way or the other, so you really didn't counter my point.
There are a *lot* of factors that could be involved.
I'm not sure what sort of evidence wouldn't be considered circumstantial.
MSDOS was miles behind more-or-less everything else that existed in the personal market - particularly in terms of UI and ease of setting up. This remained the case for its entire life.
Now, I can't produce evidence of this without spending an inconvenient number of hours going into the history of personal computing, but if you're prepared to seek a little for yourself, I suggest you look up the Amiga, the Atari, the BBC Micro, the Acorn Archimedes - all sold into the personal market in the 1980s.
Industries where a killer application was really important tended to stick to a particular type of computer with little regard for what was popular outside of their industry. Sibelius, a music notation and composition program, started life on the Acorn Archimedes and was a killer app at the time - plenty of musical types bought Acorn computers purely for Sibelius. (Sibelius was later ported to the PC, but not until most of the IT industry had given up the Acorn RISC-range of computers for dead)
Similarly, DTP applications were for years streets ahead on Mac OS and, IIRC, the Atari. The Atari and the Amiga also had some damn good musical sequencing applications - indeed the MOD file format originated on the Amiga.
Yet today, none of these systems survive. I would consider it fair to infer from this that being the best tool for the job is not enough for a given piece of technology to survive.
Speaking personally, I don't really care what any group believes as long as they don't try and impose their beliefs on me or use them as an excuse to cause harm to me or anything I feel strongly about. I certainly have better things to do than try and convert them to atheism.
I don't really see how your "you are deluded and I will keep on telling you this until you agree with me" attitude is fundamentally different from Jehovah's Witnesses knocking on doors and asking if the occupants have found God.
I *challenge* you to take a person who has never used a Mac to the Apple store and ask them to use a Mac to do any standard task. Actually listen to what they say. If they don't mutter "how the hell do I..?" in the first 5 minutes you've found a genius. It is not intuitive. You're told it is intuitive and you believe it, but have you actually tested it?
Mr. (or Miss or Mrs, for that matter) MG, you appear to have a great deal of anger about OS X and how intuitive or otherwise it is.
Why? Why does it matter to you what OS anyone elects to use? More to the point, how is it any of your damn business? Everyone is entitled to their opinion, surely?
I'm wondering if I could buy stock in Sony and sue the CEO for devaluing the company's assets. After all, if downloading really does cost several hundred thousand dollars per infringer, why are they settling for a few thousand?
IANAL, and nor am I a music executive, but I can think of an answer to that one easily enough.
Because otherwise they'll have to spend just as much on lawyers which they're unlikely to get back; even if awarded costs you can't get a man whose total assets amount to $100,000 to give you $200,000.
I'm not so sure.
Apple 'just worked' and had a GUI from the 80s (pre-os X), and now just works and has a modern GUI.
It happens that that OS X is also when the masses really started using Macs again.
Now, there are *A LOT* of factors that changed in that timeframe - marketing, GUI, features, etc. However, is there any proof, one way or the other, that that the 'just works' is enough without a flashy GUI?
There's plenty of proof of the exact opposite, as it happens. Clever marketing can sell a product which is otherwise running about 2-5 years behind everything else in the marketplace.
Witness MS-DOS and the rise of the IBM PC compatible at a time when Apple had a much larger market share than they have ever since.
Macs don't "just work".
People try them because they are told they "just work" and they pay highly for the privilege.
TBH, I bought a Mac because I'd had enough of issues with hardware (both under Windows and Linux) which didn't do what it said on the box.
Which is not to say there isn't the occasional issue - if I'm buying a peripheral I need to ensure it's not some Windows-only POS but to be honest I'd have avoided such things in the Windows world as well because IME Windows-only peripherals are Windows only because the manufacturer decided to shave a bit off their costs and do the legwork in the driver rather than on the chip. And seldom do you find a product in which corners are cut but is still produced to half-decent quality.
But (and again, this is purely my experience, YMMV etc etc), describing all Apple users as a bunch of brainwashed cult members is generally only done by people who have either never used OS X or never used it for more than an hour or so.
Including interfacing to the actual car via a diagnostic port.
Now that is something that desperately needs to exist in a standardised form. The only part of car audio that's even remotely standard is ISO headunit size (and many modern cars don't have ISO size headunits fitted in the factory - some even link functions like the alarm to the radio so you can't easily replace it). A port into which you could plug an MP3 player, mobile phone or satnav and have the steering wheel controls so common on modern cars do everything would be great.