That's exactly what you've got with most modern cellphones.
And from an end users' perspective, what's the noticeable difference between "turning off the phone" and "turning off the screen and setting the ringer to silent"?
Very true - though I'm sure I've heard of a case where something very similar to that happened to someone and he successfully argued that it should be treated as one continuous offence rather than the lots of smaller offences the speed cameras see it as.
I accept that this is a part of innovation. "If I have seen farther than others..." and all that.
But the original ideas, the ones which really push new boundaries in technology - things like dbase, Lotus 1-2-3 - Microsoft has never been behind any of them.
In any case, you have to admit that Gamer Points are pretty innovative. A pointless, useless number that increases the amount of time (some) people play your video game with nearly no effort. Microsoft gave those insane game completionists exactly what they wanted, in a publically-visible system-wide form. That's never been done before.
That's a pretty accurate definition of a pinball machine with a high score table. All Microsoft have done is added "on the Internet" to it.
Oh, there's plenty of Linux server exploits. Most depend on specific applications (eg. bind, sendmail), misconfigurations or both.
The other thing you have to look out for is web applications - which of course tend to be exploitable regardless of what OS is running the website. These are notorious for providing holes. If you're lucky, all that happens is your website is replaced with a single page which says "pwn3d! l053rz!".
If you're unlucky, you get to announce to the world that you've lost the credit card details of 20,000 people.
(This, by the way, is not drastically different from the current state of security in Windows Server. A careless administrator is probably the biggest security hole known to IT).
Finding decent staff is damn hard at any level - because at every level you have timewasters, fools, people who are applying for something they're way underqualified for, people who are applying for something they're way overqualified for and former HP executives.
Out of that list of people you really don't want to hire, a certain number can probably bluff their way through the interview process. Every company of any decent size has hired at least a few staff who they've wished they didn't.
Nobody's saying "Everything Microsoft produces is crap". (Or they shouldn't be, because it's not true).
What is true is that Microsoft do not - indeed have never - innovated. They've taken existing ideas, either bought them or copied them then marketed the hell out of the result.
Examples:
Flight Simulator - bought from SubLogic. (You said this yourself!)
FoxPro - Originally produced by Fox Software, which was bought out by Microsoft in 1992.
Outlook/Exchange - Lotus Notes was a groupware product well before then.
Access - Originally plagiarised from Borland Paradox.
Excel - Plagiarised from Lotus 1-2-3. The two were basically playing leapfrog in feature sets before 1-2-3 bit the dust.
Word - Plagiarised features from WordPerfect. Won the battle primarily by being sold to the boss rather than the secretary who was actually typing the letters.
Windows - Most graphical operating systems of the 1980's-1990's were shamelessly taking ideas from each other. The bar across the bottom of the screen, for instance, was seen in RISC OS and CDE long before Windows '95 hit the shelves.
XBox Live - the PS2 offered online play, but Sony never really exploited this. Frankly, it was a little early because it predated ubiquitous broadband.
In fact, Microsoft can't even innovate at the very simplest level.
Microsoft Paint (yes, that crappy little paint tool which has come free with Windows since the Windows 3.x days) - Take a look at this. It's PC Paintbrush for DOS - developed by a company called ZSoft.
I was using OLVWM in Solaris in 1997 which boasted virtual desktops. It was getting pretty elderly then.
Re:Why fix bugs when the bugs worked better than t
on
IE 8 Passes Acid2 Test
·
· Score: 1
Directly opposite me there works a man who is tasked with making a web page on an embedded system run on any browser he can think of.
He has tested various versions of Firefox, Opera, Safari and all versions of IE since 4 on various operating systems. He has also tested on a number of other devices - a Wii, an iPod Touch, an HTC Touch (Windows Mobile based smartphone) and a Nintendo DS.
He was delighted to discover that he had to make virtually no changes to his original design - it was reasonably standards based and all the browsers rendered it in a broadly similar fashion. Until, that is, he started using Microsoft browsers - particularly the smartphone based ones.
A fully CSS2-compliant browser, when faced with CSS3, will see it as incorrect code
Doesn't matter. If it's fully CSS2 compliant, the behaviour when it sees something it doesn't recognise is to ignore it.
From the CSS2 specification (I've cut the examples for the sake of brevity, the full spec is at http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/):
To ensure that new properties and new values for existing properties can be added in the future, user agents are required to obey the following rules when they encounter the following scenarios:
* Unknown properties. User agents must ignore a declaration with an unknown property.
* Illegal values. User agents must ignore a declaration with an illegal value.
* Malformed declarations. User agents must handle unexpected tokens encountered while parsing a declaration by reading until the end of the declaration, while observing the rules for matching pairs of (), [], {}, "", and '', and correctly handling escapes.
* Invalid at-keywords. User agents must ignore an invalid at-keyword together with everything following it, up to and including the next semicolon (;) or block ({...}), whichever comes first.
Ditto for an HTML4 browser looking at HTML5 or XHTML1.
It'll see the DOCTYPE, recognise that this isn't something it supports and do its best to fail gracefully.
I think it would be nice if browsers continued to fix spaghetti, but also showed a message somewhere that indicated that the page was buggy. Not a pop-up or anything, but a small, unobtrusive icon that was green and happy for a good page, or red and frowny for a bad. If IE had this by default, I think there would be a lot less bad pages on the internet.
I disagree. If you're going to try and "encourage" web developers to write standards-compliant HTML/XHTML, you need to be a lot more forceful.
I would suggest a tub full of thermite built into the keyboard of every web developer. When their browser loads and renders a non-compliant page from within the local network, the thermite charge is set off.
Once the first few charges have burnt straight through the desk onto the lap of the web developer, we'll start seeing much better HTML. And the asbestos underpants industry will experience a massive jump in sales.
HP and IBM have contributed things other than hardware support to Linux.
Big things, like LVM and JFS. Generally, these items have been ported across from some other system which offered such facilities.
Dell, OTOH, has done little beyond basic hardware support. But they don't have some huge legacy midrange Unix OS which they could port features from. It would be nice to see them add some real value rather than "added the PCI ID for our latest rebranded LSI SAS card to the kernel", but I don't think it'll happen.
When you're designing a system which absolutely MUST NOT fall over under any circumstances (or it will cost more in downtime than the entire contract is worth...), you architect the whole lot to be as resilient as possible.
So there's no such thing as "1 of..." anything. At least two sites, HA hardware, software architected so that parts of the cluster can drop out with little or no warning and the system continues more or less as normal.
One or two Linux boxes falling over won't really matter. Where things get interesting is whether or not the application is designed to survive such things happening - and a poor application can fail horribly on any operating system.
In this case, I imagine they already had a bunch of legacy Unix applications which they knew worked, and worked well. Hmm, tough choice. They want to move to a more modern OS on x86 hardware, rewrite the whole lot for Windows or port it to Linux?
Don't forget that a US gallon is rather smaller than an imperial gallon. According to Google. 1 US gallon = 0.832673844 imperial gallons.
By my reckoning, that means a car that manages 45 miles/imperial gallon (perfectly common in Europe, and in fact a bit on the low side if it's a diesel) is getting 37.47 miles/US gallon.
Even if you're in IT or support, then setting yourself up in such a way that there is a need for any specific person to be available 24/7 is asking for trouble.
What if that person's in an accident?
Taken sick? Or a relative is taken sick? Until recently, UK hospitals banned mobile phones for fear of interfering with life support equipment.
Is that person never allowed to visit the cinema outside of work hours? (you've got to turn your phone off in a cinema, some are even installing jamming equipment).
Are they allowed to do anything which involves going up in the air? I don't know about other countries, but in the UK the Civil Aviation Authority bans mobile phones even in things with no significant electronic equipment like hot air balloons.
Erm.... nmap always reported the webserver as being IIS, because the nature of Akamai's service is that the webserver reports itself as being whatever's really running on the other side of their network.
The thing that causes the confusion is if you do an nmap -O, and it guesses the host operating system to be Linux despite running IIS on the web server.
I remember when the Internet was just starting to catch on, and everyone and his dog wanted to get on it. Then the BBC started announcing television shows and tie-in internet courses to "make the complicated technology simple".
Suddenly, there was a whole class of people who previously wanted to get on the Internet but had seen these announcements and thought "oh - it's complicated and I'd need training - stuff that then".
"And no software can give you the ability to encrypt boot partitions."
Quite correct. (Unless you implement it at a BIOS level, but I'll gloss over that because it's not exactly commonplace).
However, the theoretical decrypting hypervisor (which I accept is a boot partition) would allow you to have any OS boot from an encrypted partition, while hiding itself from the OS.
Obviously you don't store the encryption keys on the disk itself (duh!).
The net result would be while the boot partition itself is unencrypted, that does not really matter as the boot partition doesn't do anything apart from decrypt the partitions which contain the interesting information - and it can't do that without the key.
Safe storage of the keys is another matter altogether.
Slashdot Mirror
a software off button
That's exactly what you've got with most modern cellphones.
And from an end users' perspective, what's the noticeable difference between "turning off the phone" and "turning off the screen and setting the ringer to silent"?
Very true - though I'm sure I've heard of a case where something very similar to that happened to someone and he successfully argued that it should be treated as one continuous offence rather than the lots of smaller offences the speed cameras see it as.
;)
Net result: he got to keep his license
The UK has more speed cameras than a place with a lot of speed cameras.
Break the limit in the wrong place and there's a fine and 3 penalty points in the post before you've even got home.
I accept that this is a part of innovation. "If I have seen farther than others..." and all that.
But the original ideas, the ones which really push new boundaries in technology - things like dbase, Lotus 1-2-3 - Microsoft has never been behind any of them.
In any case, you have to admit that Gamer Points are pretty innovative. A pointless, useless number that increases the amount of time (some) people play your video game with nearly no effort. Microsoft gave those insane game completionists exactly what they wanted, in a publically-visible system-wide form. That's never been done before.
That's a pretty accurate definition of a pinball machine with a high score table. All Microsoft have done is added "on the Internet" to it.
Oh, there's plenty of Linux server exploits. Most depend on specific applications (eg. bind, sendmail), misconfigurations or both.
The other thing you have to look out for is web applications - which of course tend to be exploitable regardless of what OS is running the website. These are notorious for providing holes. If you're lucky, all that happens is your website is replaced with a single page which says "pwn3d! l053rz!".
If you're unlucky, you get to announce to the world that you've lost the credit card details of 20,000 people.
(This, by the way, is not drastically different from the current state of security in Windows Server. A careless administrator is probably the biggest security hole known to IT).
That might work for the average /.'er on a single PC on its own.
/.'ers grandma.
It doesn't work in an office full of people, and it doesn't work with the average
Finding decent staff is damn hard at any level - because at every level you have timewasters, fools, people who are applying for something they're way underqualified for, people who are applying for something they're way overqualified for and former HP executives.
Out of that list of people you really don't want to hire, a certain number can probably bluff their way through the interview process. Every company of any decent size has hired at least a few staff who they've wished they didn't.
It doesn't matter if the browser sees it as incorrect code because it will simply ignore it.
(Yes I'm aware that's not quite what tends to happen in the real world).
Nobody's saying "Everything Microsoft produces is crap". (Or they shouldn't be, because it's not true).
What is true is that Microsoft do not - indeed have never - innovated. They've taken existing ideas, either bought them or copied them then marketed the hell out of the result.
Examples:
Flight Simulator - bought from SubLogic. (You said this yourself!)
FoxPro - Originally produced by Fox Software, which was bought out by Microsoft in 1992.
Outlook/Exchange - Lotus Notes was a groupware product well before then.
Access - Originally plagiarised from Borland Paradox.
Excel - Plagiarised from Lotus 1-2-3. The two were basically playing leapfrog in feature sets before 1-2-3 bit the dust.
Word - Plagiarised features from WordPerfect. Won the battle primarily by being sold to the boss rather than the secretary who was actually typing the letters.
Windows - Most graphical operating systems of the 1980's-1990's were shamelessly taking ideas from each other. The bar across the bottom of the screen, for instance, was seen in RISC OS and CDE long before Windows '95 hit the shelves.
XBox Live - the PS2 offered online play, but Sony never really exploited this. Frankly, it was a little early because it predated ubiquitous broadband.
In fact, Microsoft can't even innovate at the very simplest level.
Microsoft Paint (yes, that crappy little paint tool which has come free with Windows since the Windows 3.x days) - Take a look at this. It's PC Paintbrush for DOS - developed by a company called ZSoft.
I was using OLVWM in Solaris in 1997 which boasted virtual desktops. It was getting pretty elderly then.
Directly opposite me there works a man who is tasked with making a web page on an embedded system run on any browser he can think of.
He has tested various versions of Firefox, Opera, Safari and all versions of IE since 4 on various operating systems. He has also tested on a number of other devices - a Wii, an iPod Touch, an HTC Touch (Windows Mobile based smartphone) and a Nintendo DS.
He was delighted to discover that he had to make virtually no changes to his original design - it was reasonably standards based and all the browsers rendered it in a broadly similar fashion. Until, that is, he started using Microsoft browsers - particularly the smartphone based ones.
Doesn't matter. If it's fully CSS2 compliant, the behaviour when it sees something it doesn't recognise is to ignore it.
From the CSS2 specification (I've cut the examples for the sake of brevity, the full spec is at http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/):
Ditto for an HTML4 browser looking at HTML5 or XHTML1.
It'll see the DOCTYPE, recognise that this isn't something it supports and do its best to fail gracefully.
I think it would be nice if browsers continued to fix spaghetti, but also showed a message somewhere that indicated that the page was buggy. Not a pop-up or anything, but a small, unobtrusive icon that was green and happy for a good page, or red and frowny for a bad. If IE had this by default, I think there would be a lot less bad pages on the internet.
I disagree. If you're going to try and "encourage" web developers to write standards-compliant HTML/XHTML, you need to be a lot more forceful.
I would suggest a tub full of thermite built into the keyboard of every web developer. When their browser loads and renders a non-compliant page from within the local network, the thermite charge is set off.
Once the first few charges have burnt straight through the desk onto the lap of the web developer, we'll start seeing much better HTML. And the asbestos underpants industry will experience a massive jump in sales.
HP and IBM have contributed things other than hardware support to Linux.
Big things, like LVM and JFS. Generally, these items have been ported across from some other system which offered such facilities.
Dell, OTOH, has done little beyond basic hardware support. But they don't have some huge legacy midrange Unix OS which they could port features from. It would be nice to see them add some real value rather than "added the PCI ID for our latest rebranded LSI SAS card to the kernel", but I don't think it'll happen.
Go forth, my brother, and touch more.
Be careful of the advice you give. You can get arrested for that.
Ron Paul would want to abolish.... the IRS
Now, I'm not American and I don't pretend to understand US politics.
But abolishing the people who collect taxes - this sounds like a most unusual move by any government. Any chance he could export this idea to the UK?
Nintendo has been doing this since the very first days of the NES.
For over a year post release?
It's not just that though.
When you're designing a system which absolutely MUST NOT fall over under any circumstances (or it will cost more in downtime than the entire contract is worth...), you architect the whole lot to be as resilient as possible.
So there's no such thing as "1 of..." anything. At least two sites, HA hardware, software architected so that parts of the cluster can drop out with little or no warning and the system continues more or less as normal.
One or two Linux boxes falling over won't really matter. Where things get interesting is whether or not the application is designed to survive such things happening - and a poor application can fail horribly on any operating system.
In this case, I imagine they already had a bunch of legacy Unix applications which they knew worked, and worked well. Hmm, tough choice. They want to move to a more modern OS on x86 hardware, rewrite the whole lot for Windows or port it to Linux?
Don't forget that a US gallon is rather smaller than an imperial gallon. According to Google. 1 US gallon = 0.832673844 imperial gallons.
By my reckoning, that means a car that manages 45 miles/imperial gallon (perfectly common in Europe, and in fact a bit on the low side if it's a diesel) is getting 37.47 miles/US gallon.
Even if you're in IT or support, then setting yourself up in such a way that there is a need for any specific person to be available 24/7 is asking for trouble.
What if that person's in an accident?
Taken sick? Or a relative is taken sick? Until recently, UK hospitals banned mobile phones for fear of interfering with life support equipment.
Is that person never allowed to visit the cinema outside of work hours? (you've got to turn your phone off in a cinema, some are even installing jamming equipment).
Are they allowed to do anything which involves going up in the air? I don't know about other countries, but in the UK the Civil Aviation Authority bans mobile phones even in things with no significant electronic equipment like hot air balloons.
Erm.... nmap always reported the webserver as being IIS, because the nature of Akamai's service is that the webserver reports itself as being whatever's really running on the other side of their network.
The thing that causes the confusion is if you do an nmap -O, and it guesses the host operating system to be Linux despite running IIS on the web server.
The media doesn't help here.
I remember when the Internet was just starting to catch on, and everyone and his dog wanted to get on it. Then the BBC started announcing television shows and tie-in internet courses to "make the complicated technology simple".
Suddenly, there was a whole class of people who previously wanted to get on the Internet but had seen these announcements and thought "oh - it's complicated and I'd need training - stuff that then".
I've noticed that in Utah, too. And people really are clueless.
Well, it is the home state of SCO.
You originally said:
"And no software can give you the ability to encrypt boot partitions."
Quite correct. (Unless you implement it at a BIOS level, but I'll gloss over that because it's not exactly commonplace).
However, the theoretical decrypting hypervisor (which I accept is a boot partition) would allow you to have any OS boot from an encrypted partition, while hiding itself from the OS.
Obviously you don't store the encryption keys on the disk itself (duh!).
The net result would be while the boot partition itself is unencrypted, that does not really matter as the boot partition doesn't do anything apart from decrypt the partitions which contain the interesting information - and it can't do that without the key.
Safe storage of the keys is another matter altogether.