True. Now if only you'd stop selling nuclear technologies to Iran, and help the UN Security Council actually condemn the US for the warn in Iraq to help embarass us into cleaning up the mess, I'd be prepared to come over and buy you a beer.
Seize their assets in each EU member country. We're talking office buildings, development centers, and the bank accounts that pay thousands of employees. We're also talking about showing up at the Swiss bank account offices with subpoenas and bank accounts listed in the paperwork of the seized office buildings.
At that point, investor money and partnerships with vendors and manufacturers in the EU start becoming very hard to find.
And that's just what they're waiting for with the EU. Or did you think Mr. Gates was hiding his money over in a huge non-profit for no reason? It protects his bank accounts, it makes a bunch of people grateful, and it gives him a great way to "hint" that Microsoft should be treated nicely to encourage support from the new Gates foundation.
Cheap storage is one thing. Having all the features a particular site wants, such as LUN's in your case, or NFS in others, or Active Directory authenticated CIFS for others, or high-performance streaming, or single partitions over 2 Terabytes for others, are another set of things altogether.
Also beware the controllers. Good file servers have good quality RAID chipsets, like Adaptec or 3Ware. Cheap file serversz have those awful Promise or other low-end chipsets, with lots of wildly touted NEW! EXCITING! FEATURES! but extremely poor performance and reliability.
When you add up the costs of good components, and testing them together in a stable configuration, and getting a service contract in place for a critical service, a good-quality commercial NAS for $3000 for for 2.0 raw Terabytes starts to look very reasonable, compared to the time and work of building up your own.
Amen. I use it for file recovery of trashed systems all the time. But with a usable NTFS *write* capability, it can even incorporate something like the "chntpw" tool, used to reset passwords on Windows boxes with its own bootable CD.
Even better, this new NTFS writing capability will allow us dual-boot users to safely put our grub or LILO created boot record for dual-boot machines into a file on the NTFS boot partition that allows easy use of the Microsoft boot loader to slect operating systems. That way, if we have to scrub our Linux partitions, we don't have to go nuts trying to restore Microsoft's boot loader. It will also allow us to put files on the NTFS partitions for casual storage when we run out of space on our Linux partitions, for things like downloading music or DVD images or CD's. (Only ones we legitimately own, of course!%B1!)
I'd count the NT Workstation licensing restrictions as "breaking compatibility": they were clearly not based on limitations of NT Workstation itself, since Workstation was in fact the same as Server with just 2 registry differences.
IE, I see your point, but IE's unremovability breaks vendor's ability to install the browser of their choice. It came up, harshly, in their more recent anti-trust lawsuit in front of Judge White.
The ODF issue is also one where I see your point. It's more a reflection of Microsoft's insistence on proprietary technology, rather than actively beaking what used to work for someone else.
Kerberos, however, was pretty blatant. It completely fractured the use of Kerberos with anything but Microsoft-based releases by misusing a reserved field for their own "extension" purposes. That can't be accidental. It caused a real pain for vendors of network based storage and for maintainers of Kerberos networks who wanted their UNIX or Linux and Microsoft systems to use a single sign-on system, and it helped cause a real corporate push over to Active Directories and its version of Kerberos at the expense of interoperability. Fortunately, the MIT and other Kerberos developers were able to publish patches to work around the brokenness, but it wasted a lot of time and caused a very serious lawsuit with MIT.
This one is worth pursuing. Not only is FUSE amazingly useful for NTFS, it's handy for remote mounting filesystems via SSH, which is a very useful trick.
No, Microsoft deliberately breaks compatibility. I suggest you look at the old FreeDOS lawsuits, and the Netscape lawsuits where Microsoft tried to pretend that NT Workstation couldn't work as a Netscape server, the oddness of Internet Explorer and their refusal to make it removable, and the weirdness they did to Kerberos that MIT sued them successfully over, and even take a look at what Active Directory does to DNS, and the current lawsuits about ODF in Massachusetts, and the recent EU lawsuit whaere Microsoft refused to document their software, instead publishing deliberately obfuscated and unusable documentation.
They *tried*. WinFS is XML based, with a stack of Microsoft patents. If WinFS had turned out to work in Vista, they would have released it and started breaking every Linux repartitioner or password changer or image changer they could manage to screw up.
Fortunately, WinFS seems to have been scrubbed. But very minor changes in NTFS, labeled as "enhancements", could still be integrated into Vista or the next OS release. It's certainly a potential problem that shouldn't be ignored.
Hardware drivers. The support for newer hardware just isn't there in the old OS, whether the new hardware is bigger disks, new mediat technologies, ew recording devices, new video drivers, new network devices, and even core functions like DNS and SMTP. There's surprising stability for many of those, but overall, if you expect to be using the same physical platform in 5 years, you're usually doing something wrong.
Actually, they did morph out from under. The pace has accelerated, but even the BSD of 1985 was unlikely to operate on the new hardware of 1990, even though I tried. The same applied to the Windows world, where core systems had to be repeatedly ported to new OS releases to operate on new hardware.
Some parts of the systems remained consistent, but there have been very serious changes in all those core OS's and API's, enough to maek enterprise level hardware require a serious re-write at least once if not 4 or more times over the course of any software that even approaches 20 years of age. If you don't believe me, I suggest that you take a look at basic utilities like tar,/bin/sh, and man in the UNIX or Linux world.
No sane modern "Enterprise Application" has a lifespan of 20 years. The hardware and underlying OS are far too likely to morph out from under you and become unsupportable within 5, unless you luck out and manage to select one of the few technologies that wound up with lots of spare parts and were the only way to do the job.
That 30 days is a polite guideline: but given Microsoft's strong history of ignoring some very deep holes, for months if not years, groups that collect such vulnerabilities and report them are in a very bad position. CERT, for example, has at least 3 severe vulnerabilities, at least 6 months old, that I read copies of the reports for when submitted. They can't publish because they won't publish without Microsoft's approval, so the holes remain unacknowledged and probably unpatched.
It's more like publishing the names and addresses of child molesters: the molesters don't want you to publish their names, the police often don't want to publish the names because it can screw up their pending court cases or prosecutions, but leaving the molesters alone will certainly not stop them or protect anyone.
I agree with you. Skype, due to its central corporate authentication of the RSA keys for customers, is ripe for law-enforcement mandated man-in-the-middle attacks. Without publising their protocol and any safeguards they've embedded in it, such as a public RSA key repository similar to those used by many GPG users, it's technologically easy for them to authenticate a centralized key upon request for NSA, CIA, FBI, or my aunt-Matilda-if-she-asks-them-nicely tap in the center of any conversation connection.
For all such transactions, whether they are SSL, SSH, or some proprietary technology like Skype, you have to trust the site that holds the server keys or the people that write the software not to embed backdoors or fake keys to allow tapping. There are even technical reasons to permit such forgery: web-proxies for high-availability banking transactions, for example, may want to have their SSL keys multi-hosted. I've sat in on discussions about exactly that sort of approach and its security consequences.
Anyone who assumes that Skype conversations is immune from a legal wiretap order or even an unconstitutional Patriot Act order that Skype dare not publish due to the Patriot Act's nature is engaging in wishful thinking. If you want real end-to-end encryption, you have to have personal control of the key exchange. In fact, that's how PGPphone used to work, if you can still lay your hands on a copy of it. It just never got broadly enough deployed, or provided the convenience and computer->cheap telephone call services that Skype provides.
And use it for other sites: People often only change their password at the site where they're forced to, but leave it intact elsewhere, begging to have their accounts invaded on those other machines.
This works until your machine gets rootkitted and the attacker notices a file called "passwds.txt". It's particularly fun for people who store their passwords and SSH private keys on USB keychains "for security", then leave them behind while traveling.
Passwords that are infinitely strong against guessing will instead be monitored when even a careful person accidentally uses it for FTP, telnet, or an unencrypted IMAP or POP connection, or when some exploit gets put in place on the servers to report other people's passwords.
If you don't believe that this happens, you don't remember the SSH crack that happened some 5 years ago, where companies all over the world had their SSH daemons replaced with one that logs and reports user's local passwords.
Integrating drivers for hardware that "isn't on the market yet", with a company like Intel, is not part of anybody's typical support contract. That's a developer partnership, and working through one of *those* for high-level technical access is a whole different matter.
Mind you, I may have had better access to RedHat developers than you because they've seen my work in the open source community, and I know they've used some of my tools in-house.
Because you need a working Bugzilla system to report the frequent catastrophic wedging of the Oracle systems, especially as their huge memory usage and memory leaks start making them swap to death in ways never seen under the light load testing of the original configurations.
For most core components, such as the kernel itelf, it seems to be simply recompiled from RedHat Enterprise SRPM's. But they seemed to be ahead on various hardware hardware integration, such as webcams and DVD handling software, in ways that RedHat is not.
That's what finally knocked Cyberpromo off the air: not the lawsuits from other abused companies, not the out-of-court settlements they made with AOL and other victims of their spam, not the incensed public, but a bunch of irritated script kiddies who knocked down the router connection sold to them by Agis and kept it off the air.
In fact, such keys are currently strong signs that the ad is, in fact, spam. They're far too easy to buy or steal from other people's machines, often by installing spam zombie software on the machines of unsuspecting and innocent people.
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True. Now if only you'd stop selling nuclear technologies to Iran, and help the UN Security Council actually condemn the US for the warn in Iraq to help embarass us into cleaning up the mess, I'd be prepared to come over and buy you a beer.
Seize their assets in each EU member country. We're talking office buildings, development centers, and the bank accounts that pay thousands of employees. We're also talking about showing up at the Swiss bank account offices with subpoenas and bank accounts listed in the paperwork of the seized office buildings.
At that point, investor money and partnerships with vendors and manufacturers in the EU start becoming very hard to find.
Please don't send us beer from Italy and hookers from Germany. Just.... don't.
And that's just what they're waiting for with the EU. Or did you think Mr. Gates was hiding his money over in a huge non-profit for no reason? It protects his bank accounts, it makes a bunch of people grateful, and it gives him a great way to "hint" that Microsoft should be treated nicely to encourage support from the new Gates foundation.
That's how this game is played, folks.
Cheap storage is one thing. Having all the features a particular site wants, such as LUN's in your case, or NFS in others, or Active Directory authenticated CIFS for others, or high-performance streaming, or single partitions over 2 Terabytes for others, are another set of things altogether.
Also beware the controllers. Good file servers have good quality RAID chipsets, like Adaptec or 3Ware. Cheap file serversz have those awful Promise or other low-end chipsets, with lots of wildly touted NEW! EXCITING! FEATURES! but extremely poor performance and reliability.
When you add up the costs of good components, and testing them together in a stable configuration, and getting a service contract in place for a critical service, a good-quality commercial NAS for $3000 for for 2.0 raw Terabytes starts to look very reasonable, compared to the time and work of building up your own.
Agreed. I've used that extensively myself. It's not as workable under other operating systems, but for Linux this is an amazingly useful trick.
Amen. I use it for file recovery of trashed systems all the time. But with a usable NTFS *write* capability, it can even incorporate something like the "chntpw" tool, used to reset passwords on Windows boxes with its own bootable CD.
Even better, this new NTFS writing capability will allow us dual-boot users to safely put our grub or LILO created boot record for dual-boot machines into a file on the NTFS boot partition that allows easy use of the Microsoft boot loader to slect operating systems. That way, if we have to scrub our Linux partitions, we don't have to go nuts trying to restore Microsoft's boot loader. It will also allow us to put files on the NTFS partitions for casual storage when we run out of space on our Linux partitions, for things like downloading music or DVD images or CD's. (Only ones we legitimately own, of course!%B1!)
I'd count the NT Workstation licensing restrictions as "breaking compatibility": they were clearly not based on limitations of NT Workstation itself, since Workstation was in fact the same as Server with just 2 registry differences.
IE, I see your point, but IE's unremovability breaks vendor's ability to install the browser of their choice. It came up, harshly, in their more recent anti-trust lawsuit in front of Judge White.
The ODF issue is also one where I see your point. It's more a reflection of Microsoft's insistence on proprietary technology, rather than actively beaking what used to work for someone else.
Kerberos, however, was pretty blatant. It completely fractured the use of Kerberos with anything but Microsoft-based releases by misusing a reserved field for their own "extension" purposes. That can't be accidental. It caused a real pain for vendors of network based storage and for maintainers of Kerberos networks who wanted their UNIX or Linux and Microsoft systems to use a single sign-on system, and it helped cause a real corporate push over to Active Directories and its version of Kerberos at the expense of interoperability. Fortunately, the MIT and other Kerberos developers were able to publish patches to work around the brokenness, but it wasted a lot of time and caused a very serious lawsuit with MIT.
This one is worth pursuing. Not only is FUSE amazingly useful for NTFS, it's handy for remote mounting filesystems via SSH, which is a very useful trick.
No, Microsoft deliberately breaks compatibility. I suggest you look at the old FreeDOS lawsuits, and the Netscape lawsuits where Microsoft tried to pretend that NT Workstation couldn't work as a Netscape server, the oddness of Internet Explorer and their refusal to make it removable, and the weirdness they did to Kerberos that MIT sued them successfully over, and even take a look at what Active Directory does to DNS, and the current lawsuits about ODF in Massachusetts, and the recent EU lawsuit whaere Microsoft refused to document their software, instead publishing deliberately obfuscated and unusable documentation.
They *tried*. WinFS is XML based, with a stack of Microsoft patents. If WinFS had turned out to work in Vista, they would have released it and started breaking every Linux repartitioner or password changer or image changer they could manage to screw up.
Fortunately, WinFS seems to have been scrubbed. But very minor changes in NTFS, labeled as "enhancements", could still be integrated into Vista or the next OS release. It's certainly a potential problem that shouldn't be ignored.
Hardware drivers. The support for newer hardware just isn't there in the old OS, whether the new hardware is bigger disks, new mediat technologies, ew recording devices, new video drivers, new network devices, and even core functions like DNS and SMTP. There's surprising stability for many of those, but overall, if you expect to be using the same physical platform in 5 years, you're usually doing something wrong.
Actually, they did morph out from under. The pace has accelerated, but even the BSD of 1985 was unlikely to operate on the new hardware of 1990, even though I tried. The same applied to the Windows world, where core systems had to be repeatedly ported to new OS releases to operate on new hardware.
/bin/sh, and man in the UNIX or Linux world.
Some parts of the systems remained consistent, but there have been very serious changes in all those core OS's and API's, enough to maek enterprise level hardware require a serious re-write at least once if not 4 or more times over the course of any software that even approaches 20 years of age. If you don't believe me, I suggest that you take a look at basic utilities like tar,
No sane modern "Enterprise Application" has a lifespan of 20 years. The hardware and underlying OS are far too likely to morph out from under you and become unsupportable within 5, unless you luck out and manage to select one of the few technologies that wound up with lots of spare parts and were the only way to do the job.
That 30 days is a polite guideline: but given Microsoft's strong history of ignoring some very deep holes, for months if not years, groups that collect such vulnerabilities and report them are in a very bad position. CERT, for example, has at least 3 severe vulnerabilities, at least 6 months old, that I read copies of the reports for when submitted. They can't publish because they won't publish without Microsoft's approval, so the holes remain unacknowledged and probably unpatched.
It's more like publishing the names and addresses of child molesters: the molesters don't want you to publish their names, the police often don't want to publish the names because it can screw up their pending court cases or prosecutions, but leaving the molesters alone will certainly not stop them or protect anyone.
I agree with you. Skype, due to its central corporate authentication of the RSA keys for customers, is ripe for law-enforcement mandated man-in-the-middle attacks. Without publising their protocol and any safeguards they've embedded in it, such as a public RSA key repository similar to those used by many GPG users, it's technologically easy for them to authenticate a centralized key upon request for NSA, CIA, FBI, or my aunt-Matilda-if-she-asks-them-nicely tap in the center of any conversation connection.
For all such transactions, whether they are SSL, SSH, or some proprietary technology like Skype, you have to trust the site that holds the server keys or the people that write the software not to embed backdoors or fake keys to allow tapping. There are even technical reasons to permit such forgery: web-proxies for high-availability banking transactions, for example, may want to have their SSL keys multi-hosted. I've sat in on discussions about exactly that sort of approach and its security consequences.
Anyone who assumes that Skype conversations is immune from a legal wiretap order or even an unconstitutional Patriot Act order that Skype dare not publish due to the Patriot Act's nature is engaging in wishful thinking. If you want real end-to-end encryption, you have to have personal control of the key exchange. In fact, that's how PGPphone used to work, if you can still lay your hands on a copy of it. It just never got broadly enough deployed, or provided the convenience and computer->cheap telephone call services that Skype provides.
And use it for other sites: People often only change their password at the site where they're forced to, but leave it intact elsewhere, begging to have their accounts invaded on those other machines.
This works until your machine gets rootkitted and the attacker notices a file called "passwds.txt". It's particularly fun for people who store their passwords and SSH private keys on USB keychains "for security", then leave them behind while traveling.
Passwords that are infinitely strong against guessing will instead be monitored when even a careful person accidentally uses it for FTP, telnet, or an unencrypted IMAP or POP connection, or when some exploit gets put in place on the servers to report other people's passwords.
If you don't believe that this happens, you don't remember the SSH crack that happened some 5 years ago, where companies all over the world had their SSH daemons replaced with one that logs and reports user's local passwords.
Integrating drivers for hardware that "isn't on the market yet", with a company like Intel, is not part of anybody's typical support contract. That's a developer partnership, and working through one of *those* for high-level technical access is a whole different matter.
Mind you, I may have had better access to RedHat developers than you because they've seen my work in the open source community, and I know they've used some of my tools in-house.
Because you need a working Bugzilla system to report the frequent catastrophic wedging of the Oracle systems, especially as their huge memory usage and memory leaks start making them swap to death in ways never seen under the light load testing of the original configurations.
I've actually done this.
For most core components, such as the kernel itelf, it seems to be simply recompiled from RedHat Enterprise SRPM's. But they seemed to be ahead on various hardware hardware integration, such as webcams and DVD handling software, in ways that RedHat is not.
That's what finally knocked Cyberpromo off the air: not the lawsuits from other abused companies, not the out-of-court settlements they made with AOL and other victims of their spam, not the incensed public, but a bunch of irritated script kiddies who knocked down the router connection sold to them by Agis and kept it off the air.
Eventually the peasants will revolt.
In fact, such keys are currently strong signs that the ad is, in fact, spam. They're far too easy to buy or steal from other people's machines, often by installing spam zombie software on the machines of unsuspecting and innocent people.