So now they are hardheadedly "embracing" open source. If they manage to get some people to stop developing Linux for "open source support" from Microsoft, they can move on to "extend" where they begin tagging on features to these projects or requiring these features to be implemented for Windows development. It will fall short there. Not sure about that one.
There's lots of web applications which will only run with MySQL as the database backend because they depend on MySQL-specific behaviour - even though it really isn't difficult to remain reasonably database-agnostic provided you consider it from early on in the development process.
It isn't too much of a stretch to imagine PHP applications which expect the underlying system to be Windows (even with simple things like expecting all paths to start with a letter, followed by a colon, followed by a bunch of backslash-separated directory names) to the point whereby getting the damn thing to work on Linux is an uphill struggle.
No, just no. It's a mystery to me why MS hasn't done this sooner. There's a lot to be gained for end users by throwing out the old code and starting from scratch with a set up which is designed for modern processors. Except that nobody has done that in 20 years or more. It's really not necessary - unless, perhaps, you're Microsoft.
How come other every other OS vendor can build on a perfectly good codebase (Unix) and not wind up with a fragmented, unsupportable mess which requires tricks like WinSxS?
OK, it sucks to be an application vendor and have to recompile your application when the new OS comes out - but testing under the new OS has been necessary with every new OS release on every platform in the whole of history.
For the vast, vast majority of software that supposedly needs admin rights, some simple investigation using Process Monitor (regmon, filemon) and some group policy enforced ntfs and registry acl tweaks solves it. Depending (heavily) on the organisation and the software vendor, this may not be as easy as you believe.
More than one vendor I've worked with has engineered their support scripts to find a way to wiggle out of having to do anything. ISPs are the best at this, but there are plenty of others. Something like "does the end user have admin rights?" I can easily see being the first question they ask - and even if you can prove beyond any doubt that this isn't even remotely related to the matter at hand, that doesn't help you much if you won't get support unless/until that user does have admin rights.
I can imagine plenty of organisations would work their own processes to give people local admin rights when necessary and then deal with any fallout (such as making PCs reasonably disposable with careful imaging) rather than argue whether or not local admin rights are the cause of an issue.
Now, understand that I'm not condoning this - it's obviously not the way things would work in an ideal world - but it's the way things quite often do work in the real world.
Following that logic, that 64-bit machines are necessary in order to get more than 2^32 bytes of memory, one may assume that 8-bit machines were able to address only 256 bytes of memory. IIRC, my C64 had 64k without 16-bit CPU. Not always that simple. My BBC had 32K of memory and an 8 bit CPU (a 6502, as it happens, which I think is very similar to the CPU that went into the C64), but I suspect you'll find that the address space and the size of the registers are often two different things. Certainly the 6502 it was based on would have had a 16-bit program counter and virtually everything else 8 bit.
Discretion isn't hard. It just doesn't get them reelected. The whole point is to attract media attention. Unlike in the US, we in the UK don't elect the majority of people in public office. Certainly not our police chiefs or our senior judges - generally we only elect those who directly represent us on a local and national level.
On a similar note, a paediatrician moved into a new area and was promptly forced to move out. Apparently, any word with the syllable "paed-" at the beginning marks you out as a child molester:
I was specifically talking about heroin, as you acknowledged. But two out of the three items you mentioned are a result of illegality and the expensive supply. I'm not sure which two you're referring to.
But I am fairly sure that even in a society which legalised hard drugs, the cost would be non-zero, and hence the user would require money in order to obtain them.
However, if (and I concede it's a fairly big assumption) the effects of drugs render the drug addict just as unemployable in a society which allows them as one which condemns them, I wouldn't expect the level of petty crime to change much.
Now, bear in mind I'm in the UK and shootouts between rival drug gangs are still relatively rare here. However, in a society where such events are more common (and hence so is innocents getting caught in the crossfire), then I can appreciate that there may be some benefit. But I can't see many people signing up to be in the area where it's first trialled.
I have the exact same problem. As soon as I know what's needed on the developer build, it changes.
I'm not really sure how best to deal with this. Vista's installation and rollout procedure is supposed to help quite a lot, but it requires you to throw out any existing rollout procedure and start again more-or-less from scratch - and of course, it requires Vista.
Really what's needed is an equivalent of apt for Windows. I know Windows already has a perfectly good packaging system with MSIs and all that, but IME every single Windows application management system I have ever seen has been half-assed insofar as seemingly simple tasks like "Silent install. No, really, silent. I don't want you to tell me what a pleasure it was to install, I don't want to know about the readme.txt and I don't want a loud voice saying "Hey, Mr. Beeblebrox, was that OK for you?" after you've completed." don't always work.
i don't think he's referring to current 3-D printers and prototype fabricators and such.
we're talking objects-like-files, star-trek-style replication. right-click, copy, paste, and you've duplicated a car from random atoms, at near-zero cost. post-scarcity. Thanks for the clarification - that's exactly what I meant.
Sometimes I wonder how another industry would react if a magical technology dropped in their lap that made duplicating their product instantaneous and nearly free (people already pay their ISPs) to nearly instantly deliver it to customers. What would an automaker think of something like that? They would probably rejoice and drop their pricing to pennies on the dollar.
I've already suggested something a bit like this as a thought experiment some time ago - essentially, a 3-dimensional photocopier which costs very little to run. Original in one end, as many identical copies as you like out the other.
I suspect it's more likely the inventor would be quietly encouraged to commit suicide and his invention destroyed. Every single Western country's economy depends on such a machine not existing, if only for the fact that you could use it to reproduce your own currency. While it's nice to imagine a utopia in which society changed overnight to accommodate the idea that suddenly, material goods need no longer be scarce, society doesn't tend to change that quickly.
I can drive a nail into a piece of wood with a wrench, but when people point out why an hammer would be better I wouldn't say "Fuck You" If you were the kind of person who would use a wrench to drive nails into wood, I imagine "Fuck You" would be one of the more eloquent replies you were capable of.
Unfortuantely we don't have a developer image for our team.
Then your IT department should have a developer image for your team.
(Says me who's spent the last 2 years trying to get a straight answer to the question "What do you need on your image? Tell me or you'll be rebuilding your environment from scratch every time you need a new PC")
I'm not going to debate whether or not what you said was true - nor am I going to debate the prevalence of such bootlegs in the Western market.
What I will debate, however, is the wording of the laws which get written to enforce this.
If the aim is to put the organised gangs who are producing thousands of copies of the latest Hollywood blockbuster out of business, why do the laws get not get worded that way? "Posession of a pirated movie" : fine of up to $200. "Posession of pirated movies with intent to supply" (intent being a reasonable assumption if you're caught with over, say, 20 pirated movies all on separate DVDs and they're all in the back of a van or a warehouse rather than the DVD rack in your lounge) : fine of up to $500,000 and prison time.
The side-effects of heroin are constipation and the risk of overdose.
I've lived with a drug addict (OK, it was crack rather than heroin) and I can tell you you missed a few side effects out.
These include:
1. Turning into the most god-awful wanker who nobody in their right mind would hire to clean the toilets in the local McDonalds. 2. Discovering (as a result of 1. above) that you have no money but a burning need for more drugs. 3. Lying, cheating, stealing and scamming to get money in order to buy more drugs.
None of these would be resolved by making heroin legal.
Anyway, someday when I'm the administrator I'll do it this way, or try to at least.
Let me know how you get on when your job description includes "Keep the company from running illegal software and keep the network secure".
It may work in tech-savvy companies and departments, and it may work if the real work is done on a managed system (say a web application or even something like Terminal Server) but there are plenty of examples where it probably wouldn't.
To me, it sounds more like an excuse to cut IT department budgets.
While the amber may be easy enough to sell in the local museum, I cannot shift the feeling that persuading parents to shell out for the millions of dollars of machinery needed to create a model from the insect contained within will be an uphill struggle.
Unless you know enough about Brazilian law to say for definite one way or another if he's running afoul of IP laws, then you're just another mindless AC.
Is this a not-so-subtle move by Creative to cripple Microsoft?
No, it's a not-so-subtle move to sell you a new soundcard because the features on your old card which worked perfectly fine in XP aren't supported in Vista.
But number of colours at a particular resolution isn't a function of the monitor, it's a function of the graphics card. And more specifically, a function of the RAM available on the graphics card.
(Though I still understand the point you're driving at - seeing as practically every graphics card produced in the last 5-6 years has had sufficient RAM that you're no longer expected to choose between resolution and colour depth means that it seems perfectly reasonable to assume that they're talking about the screen itself. After all, nobody's selling graphics cards with 2MB of RAM anymore, are they?)
No, but intercepting and tunnelling the modem traffic would require an FXS-card equipped PC - not exactly common, cheap consumer hardware - to defeat.
In this day and age, it's probably easier and rather less risky to just download what you want to watch through torrents. Though that probably wasn't the case when Sky Digital first came about.
Fair enough. I was just outlining what could be done using a very little knowledge - what is done is something else altogether.
AIUI people who live in military-owned houses have caller ID disabled on their line and it can't be re-enabled - presumably they can't have multi-room?
1. It has a built-in modem and uses an analogue phone line. You'll need to set up a box with an FXO port to defeat it; it's not as simple as firewalling ports on your router. 2. It refuses to operate if it can't phone home for any length of time.
These things have been properly thought through, y'know.
Or, we have thought of it, it's just not as easy as you think. The problem is that the decoder has to have the key, otherwise the paying client can't watch TV. A pirate reverse engineers the decoder to find the key. The defence against this type of attack is to try and hide the key - one solution is to hide the key in hardware - the smartcard option. Another is to hide the code in software, using code obfuscators, virtual machines, whiteboxes. The final option is to obtain the key from a server, using two-way comms.
Don't modern Sky digital boxes have a telephone connection?
I reckon a nice easy partial solution would be to tie the smartcard's key with the serial number of the box in a database back at head office. Then if two boxes reported different serial numbers but the same smartcard, you disable it.
Forces the attacker to attack the box as well as the smartcard.
Slashdot Mirror
There's lots of web applications which will only run with MySQL as the database backend because they depend on MySQL-specific behaviour - even though it really isn't difficult to remain reasonably database-agnostic provided you consider it from early on in the development process.
It isn't too much of a stretch to imagine PHP applications which expect the underlying system to be Windows (even with simple things like expecting all paths to start with a letter, followed by a colon, followed by a bunch of backslash-separated directory names) to the point whereby getting the damn thing to work on Linux is an uphill struggle.
How come other every other OS vendor can build on a perfectly good codebase (Unix) and not wind up with a fragmented, unsupportable mess which requires tricks like WinSxS?
OK, it sucks to be an application vendor and have to recompile your application when the new OS comes out - but testing under the new OS has been necessary with every new OS release on every platform in the whole of history.
More than one vendor I've worked with has engineered their support scripts to find a way to wiggle out of having to do anything. ISPs are the best at this, but there are plenty of others. Something like "does the end user have admin rights?" I can easily see being the first question they ask - and even if you can prove beyond any doubt that this isn't even remotely related to the matter at hand, that doesn't help you much if you won't get support unless/until that user does have admin rights.
I can imagine plenty of organisations would work their own processes to give people local admin rights when necessary and then deal with any fallout (such as making PCs reasonably disposable with careful imaging) rather than argue whether or not local admin rights are the cause of an issue.
Now, understand that I'm not condoning this - it's obviously not the way things would work in an ideal world - but it's the way things quite often do work in the real world.
On a similar note, a paediatrician moved into a new area and was promptly forced to move out. Apparently, any word with the syllable "paed-" at the beginning marks you out as a child molester:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/901723.stm
But I am fairly sure that even in a society which legalised hard drugs, the cost would be non-zero, and hence the user would require money in order to obtain them.
However, if (and I concede it's a fairly big assumption) the effects of drugs render the drug addict just as unemployable in a society which allows them as one which condemns them, I wouldn't expect the level of petty crime to change much.
Now, bear in mind I'm in the UK and shootouts between rival drug gangs are still relatively rare here. However, in a society where such events are more common (and hence so is innocents getting caught in the crossfire), then I can appreciate that there may be some benefit. But I can't see many people signing up to be in the area where it's first trialled.
I have the exact same problem. As soon as I know what's needed on the developer build, it changes.
I'm not really sure how best to deal with this. Vista's installation and rollout procedure is supposed to help quite a lot, but it requires you to throw out any existing rollout procedure and start again more-or-less from scratch - and of course, it requires Vista.
Really what's needed is an equivalent of apt for Windows. I know Windows already has a perfectly good packaging system with MSIs and all that, but IME every single Windows application management system I have ever seen has been half-assed insofar as seemingly simple tasks like "Silent install. No, really, silent. I don't want you to tell me what a pleasure it was to install, I don't want to know about the readme.txt and I don't want a loud voice saying "Hey, Mr. Beeblebrox, was that OK for you?" after you've completed." don't always work.
we're talking objects-like-files, star-trek-style replication. right-click, copy, paste, and you've duplicated a car from random atoms, at near-zero cost. post-scarcity. Thanks for the clarification - that's exactly what I meant.
The ex-Googler recently stated it is a 'poor business model to sue your customers. I don't think that's a sustainable strategy.'
Well, with an attitude like that I don't think he'd have gotten very far applying for a job with SCO.
I've already suggested something a bit like this as a thought experiment some time ago - essentially, a 3-dimensional photocopier which costs very little to run. Original in one end, as many identical copies as you like out the other.
I suspect it's more likely the inventor would be quietly encouraged to commit suicide and his invention destroyed. Every single Western country's economy depends on such a machine not existing, if only for the fact that you could use it to reproduce your own currency. While it's nice to imagine a utopia in which society changed overnight to accommodate the idea that suddenly, material goods need no longer be scarce, society doesn't tend to change that quickly.
Unfortuantely we don't have a developer image for our team.
Then your IT department should have a developer image for your team.
(Says me who's spent the last 2 years trying to get a straight answer to the question "What do you need on your image? Tell me or you'll be rebuilding your environment from scratch every time you need a new PC")
I'm not going to debate whether or not what you said was true - nor am I going to debate the prevalence of such bootlegs in the Western market.
What I will debate, however, is the wording of the laws which get written to enforce this.
If the aim is to put the organised gangs who are producing thousands of copies of the latest Hollywood blockbuster out of business, why do the laws get not get worded that way? "Posession of a pirated movie" : fine of up to $200. "Posession of pirated movies with intent to supply" (intent being a reasonable assumption if you're caught with over, say, 20 pirated movies all on separate DVDs and they're all in the back of a van or a warehouse rather than the DVD rack in your lounge) : fine of up to $500,000 and prison time.
The side-effects of heroin are constipation and the risk of overdose.
I've lived with a drug addict (OK, it was crack rather than heroin) and I can tell you you missed a few side effects out.
These include:
1. Turning into the most god-awful wanker who nobody in their right mind would hire to clean the toilets in the local McDonalds.
2. Discovering (as a result of 1. above) that you have no money but a burning need for more drugs.
3. Lying, cheating, stealing and scamming to get money in order to buy more drugs.
None of these would be resolved by making heroin legal.
Anyway, someday when I'm the administrator I'll do it this way, or try to at least.
Let me know how you get on when your job description includes "Keep the company from running illegal software and keep the network secure".
It may work in tech-savvy companies and departments, and it may work if the real work is done on a managed system (say a web application or even something like Terminal Server) but there are plenty of examples where it probably wouldn't.
To me, it sounds more like an excuse to cut IT department budgets.
Sell them as hobby kits in the local museum.
While the amber may be easy enough to sell in the local museum, I cannot shift the feeling that persuading parents to shell out for the millions of dollars of machinery needed to create a model from the insect contained within will be an uphill struggle.
So, he is running afoul IP laws.
He lives in Brazil.
Unless you know enough about Brazilian law to say for definite one way or another if he's running afoul of IP laws, then you're just another mindless AC.
Is this a not-so-subtle move by Creative to cripple Microsoft?
No, it's a not-so-subtle move to sell you a new soundcard because the features on your old card which worked perfectly fine in XP aren't supported in Vista.
But number of colours at a particular resolution isn't a function of the monitor, it's a function of the graphics card. And more specifically, a function of the RAM available on the graphics card.
(Though I still understand the point you're driving at - seeing as practically every graphics card produced in the last 5-6 years has had sufficient RAM that you're no longer expected to choose between resolution and colour depth means that it seems perfectly reasonable to assume that they're talking about the screen itself. After all, nobody's selling graphics cards with 2MB of RAM anymore, are they?)
Incidentally a guy (Mac user) on our forums ran some tests on his Thinkpad and found that it does indeed have an IPS display.
Do you have a link to those tests? I'd be interested in trying them myself on a few screens.
No, but intercepting and tunnelling the modem traffic would require an FXS-card equipped PC - not exactly common, cheap consumer hardware - to defeat.
In this day and age, it's probably easier and rather less risky to just download what you want to watch through torrents. Though that probably wasn't the case when Sky Digital first came about.
Fair enough. I was just outlining what could be done using a very little knowledge - what is done is something else altogether.
AIUI people who live in military-owned houses have caller ID disabled on their line and it can't be re-enabled - presumably they can't have multi-room?
Two things I am fairly sure of:
1. It has a built-in modem and uses an analogue phone line. You'll need to set up a box with an FXO port to defeat it; it's not as simple as firewalling ports on your router.
2. It refuses to operate if it can't phone home for any length of time.
These things have been properly thought through, y'know.
Or, we have thought of it, it's just not as easy as you think. The problem is that the decoder has to have the key, otherwise the paying client can't watch TV. A pirate reverse engineers the decoder to find the key. The defence against this type of attack is to try and hide the key - one solution is to hide the key in hardware - the smartcard option. Another is to hide the code in software, using code obfuscators, virtual machines, whiteboxes. The final option is to obtain the key from a server, using two-way comms.
Don't modern Sky digital boxes have a telephone connection?
I reckon a nice easy partial solution would be to tie the smartcard's key with the serial number of the box in a database back at head office. Then if two boxes reported different serial numbers but the same smartcard, you disable it.
Forces the attacker to attack the box as well as the smartcard.