My impression (which could be wrong) is that MS is pushing hard for VoIP collaboration tools.
So it's not just that you'd embed a "dialto:" url (or whatever) in a document. Instead, if you're working on something with other people, you'd be able to call them up, and have them talk with you and see the document at the same time.
It sounds like useful tech, but it's not clear to me why that stuff should go into the office suite, and not into some other layer of the software stack.
To me, the issue isn't whether more or fewer people use firefox. The issue is whether or not all of the big browsers follow standards.
As long as that's the case, I can run my browser on linux, and I'll have access to the web.
I think that people tend to downplay the value that open source products have as disciplining forces for prorprietary companies.
Firefox is forcing IE to improve on features and security, and by all accounts the next version is going to be much better on standards. That's the victory.
I used to have a blog that I recently shut down because no one read it.
No one read it, but I got a ton of hits -- all from indexing services. WordPress pings a service that lets lots of indexing systems know about new posts. Some of them -- Yahoo, for example, were contstantly going through my entire tree of posts, and hitting links for months, subjects, and so on.
It didn't bother me, because the bandwidth wasn't an issue, and it wasn't like they were hammering my vps or anything. It mostly just made it really hard to read the logs, because finding human readers was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
But bandwidth is cheap, and RSS is really useful, so it seems at least as good of a use for the resource as p2p movie exchanges.
This is sort of off topic, but are USB2 drives more solid under FreeBSD than they are under Linux?
I find that if I really pound on a USB2 drive under linux, it will fail. It will run pretty well, but if you copy a lot of data to it all at once, it will die. The same drive plugged into the same computer in exactly the same way works fine under windows.
I use a linode.com vps to handle my email. I don't know that it's not a great solution for a company, because it's got a bit of a kludgy feel to it, but for a person with a vanity domain, it's pretty good.
I use my domain registrar's DNS servers, use a SMTP server on the vps to catch mail for my domain, and forward it from there to two places -- a pop account provided by my cable company, and a gmail account.
Gmail is nice because you can configure the "reply-to" address, so outgoing mail acts as if you're sending it from your own domain.
It sucks to pay $20 a month to forward email, there's no doubt about that. But you do have a server -- if you want to do anything with php and mysql, you can, or you can run a vpn, or whatever.
You can also do whatever you want with spam handling, etc.
What does Microsoft gain from working with Linux? Or to put it another way, how does your job add value to the company?
My impression is that the Linux lab is about developing some in-house expertise in open source so that the company will have people who understand a trend that looks like it will probably become more important as time goes on. Is that a reasonable take?
The other popular conceptions of the lab, I think, are that it's somehow aimed at disrupting linux (which I don't believe, if only because it probably wouldn't work), or that it's about fostering interoperability between open source and MS products. This last explanation is hard to buy into wholeheeartedly because it doesn't seem like a rational strategy for MS.
Can you give us a description of what they want you to accomplish that will dispell some of the paranoia, and that will be pluasible to someone who believes that MS is looking out for #1?
Whether or not allowing the sites to stay up for the intelligence info was probably a hard choice all along, and after the recent bombings, they probably just changed their minds.
The article talks about lots of problems that leap seconds cause with software.
The problems don't come from the complexity of the underlying problem of adding leap seconds, but rather because leap seconds are added so infrequently that the code to handle the leap seconds isn't well tested.
So the real question here (to me, at least) is this: what do the leap second problems tell us about how software is developed?
Are people not thinking about leap seconds when they write code? Or are they thinking about them, but not testing the leap second cases properly? What's going on?
And how does the emergence of really big collections of APIs affect this? I mean, if people use standard routines for calendar functions, and if people keep their tools up to date, shouldn't these problems be mitigated? Shouldn't we be able to have some hard core calendar geeks solve the problem once in the API, and carry the rest of us?
If that doesn't work, why not?
We can solve this particular problem by changing the calendar. But what if we couldn't, and we had to try to address it with engineering practices? How would we proceed?
This is a great talk, and I really enjoyed it, but I'm not sure I buy it.
I haven't really digested the talk, so maybe that's why. But this is my gut reaction against what he's saying.
I don't think that geeks fully acknowledge the role of what I think of as bibliography in the web ecosystem.
I was an English major. Let's say that you want to learn about Faulkner. If you go to the card catalogue, and search for books about Faulkner, you get a lot of hits -- more books than you could ever read. It's essentially useless.
What you really need is a bibliography -- something written by a Faulkner scholar who says "these are the really important and groundbreaking books about Faulkner." That's one of the cool things about Encyclopedia Brittanica -- at the end of their articles, they tend to give you a run down of some of the key books on the subject.
So if you want to read a biography of George Washington, EB will let you find the right one. That's important, because there are so many biographies of George Washington out there.
That's my key point. If you go to a university library and use the catalogue to do a mechanical search for books about George Washington, the results aren't very useful. But if you read the bibliography at the end of the Encyclopedia Brittanica article, it's extremely useful.
I'm trying to draw a distinction between mechanical searches, on one hand, and selections based on human judgement on the other.
Google is useful in larege part, I think, because page rank lets you find what are essentially good bibliography pages. You use a dumb mechanical search to put you in touch with people who know their subjects and who have good judgement (hopefully).
The other day, for example, I was thinking about an old programming language called APL. I searched for it, and found a couple of pages that seemed to have collected just about everything APL -- anecdotes, personal histories, tutorials, implementations, pictures of the goofy APL keyboards, etc.
The Google powered web is cool because it combines the mechanical and the bibliographic so well. Google gets me to the bibliography -- it pulls that needle out of the haystack. But it's the bibliography that lets me drill down.
This is important. The really good stuff I read about APL didn't come directly from the actual google result page. There was a link in between -- the google result page took me to the APL bibliography page, and from there I was able to hit the meat of the matter.
We've seen, over the past decade, an explosion in which mechanical searching can do. Because it's been getting so much better so quickly, it's dominating the way we think about how we find information. It's causing us to give bibliography -- the judgement of experts -- short shrift.
But bibliography is absolutely key to the google ecosystem.
My problem with attempts to impose more structure on data is that it always breaks things. It's beefing up mechanical searches, which are already very good, and it does it at the expense of bibliography.
I buy the argument in this lecture more than the guy making it does. He complains about heavier structures, and how the complexity will prevent people from producing and consuming information. I think that almost any move away from what we have now will do the same thing. The more you structure information, the harder it is for people to provide bibliography.
The point is that the ideal medium for bibliogrphy is free form -- one person saying, "this is what I think" to another.
The genius of google is that page rank gives you a mechanical way to uncover the best bibliographies. The best ones tend to show up at the top of the results.
In the old days, there was alta vista, and there was yahoo. Yahoo used human beings to categorize data manually. They'd put sunglasses next to the best sites in many categories -- flag something as a "cool site". Alta vista was pure mechanical searching, with no human judg
I'll probably get flamed, and rightfully so, because I'm really uninformed on this topic, and I'm going to shoot off my mouth anyway. I'm just a dilletante. But I don't think that rails is much of a competitor.
Rails is more about rapid and agile development, and these big application servers are more about running big heavy duty enterprise apps.
I have the feeling that most apps that run in these containers are speced out pretty completely, developed in concert with layers of management, etc. And then there are all of the java APIs, that do just about everything you'd want in an enterprise app.
I sort of see rails as occupying a middle ground between PHP and a java app server. You get the structure of a java framework with the ability to know stuff out of PHP.
But there's more of a learning curve than you have with PHP, and you don't get the really robust admin tools of a good app server and the fabled java APIs.
So I think that they're really different tools for different kinds of jobs.
Some people have suggested that a lot of UFO stuff is the result of a government disinformation program.
They pump up the nets with fake information, and the noise those guys make gives them cover for more down to earth research projects and military activities.
Some of the things he's saying he found in this interview make me think the government did, in fact, do exactly what you're suggesting. He claims to have found ship transfer orders for spacecraft.
Either he's lying, or delusional, the alien conspiracy is real, or he found a honeypot similar to the one you've described.
I'd like to try that because it would be interesting, but I'm sure that what you say is correct.
I don't dispute that they're letting some things through, and that the decisions they make about what gets through aren't always in the end user's best interest.
I don't have a lot of experience with spyware, because I mostly run linux, and on windows I find that it's not too hard to avoid it in the first place. I'm not an expert. But the other day I had to clean off someone else's machine that was infect with the IBIS toolbar.
I couldn't get rid of it with spybot or ad-aware. They'd find a bunch of junk and clean it off, but you'd reboot and it would come back.
When I ran the MS tool, it found more than 500 files and registry entries for it, and it cleaned them off. When I rebooted, it didn't boot cleanly (missing files were being referenced in the registry), and I thought "oh no, here we go". Then I started to get pop up windows about things trying to make changes. It told me to rerun the scanner. I did, rebooted again, and it was clean.
This is speculative on my part, and I could be wrong -- so people, please don't yell at me too much if I am, I'm aware I'm on shaky ground here -- but I had the impression that the MS tool was tagging things as spyware *because* they were trying to change registry entries and hijack the browser.
In other words, they weren't just using a file name, or a signature of a file to tag something as spyware, they were looking at the behavior of the thing. If a process tries to do something nasty, they follow it back to the source, and nuke it.
If that's what it's doing (and again, I think, but don't know, that it is), it's a big innovation. It's a good way you to fight spyware that generates lots of random files with randomized data and random names to reinstall itself.
MS, for all of their flaws (and they have plenty, I don't want to be an apologist) has vast resources and a lot of smart people. Their tool lets people report back on infestations automatically. They can throw people at the problem and code for new problems almost as soon as they arise.
They understand the OS better than anyone, obviously, and can use that knowledge to track down the source of reinstalls more effectively than comparatively small outsider shops.
That doesn't take away from the negativity of their deals with the devil. That sucks, they shouldn't do it, and they're really shooting themselves in the foot over the long run by making those deals, because no one has a bigger stake in making windows solid and trustworthy than MS, and this crap really undermines that effort.
But if you have IBIS, and you need to get rid of it, their tool is terrific. If you have that problem, don't let the fact that they've decided to be deliberate bad at ISTsvc removal prevent you from using it for IBIS. That's really all that I'm saying.
Don't stop running spybot or ad-aware. But add the MS tool to your arsenal. It does a lot of good stuff.
I will try to run your expiriment so I can learn more about this... thanks for posting about it.
I'll probably burn some karma here, but I'm a big fan of the MS anti-spyware product.
There are really two issues. The first is the catalogue of what's spyware and what isn't. I don't know if MS's program is good at that, and the stories we're reading are sort of disturbing. I buy all of that.
But the second issue concerns the product's ability to remove nasty stuff on your machine. And their anti-spyware app is very good at that.
It's much better than spybot or ad-aware, in fact -- especially with the stuff that scatters hundreds of files and registry entries around your system and reinstalls itself after you try to clean it with another program.
There's nothing that will prevent you from running another program to clear off the stuff that MS's product doesn't get rid of. So don't let this situation prevent you from running this software to get rid of other stuff. It's good at it, and it's free.
What kinds of problems would you solve with a prolog type system?
I've read about prolog, going back for years (it was a scare, a long time ago, in the '80's, I think -- the japanese were spending government money on prolog type logic systems, and they were going to bury us), but I've never really understood how it plugs into the real world.
I mean, if you're doing something practical, what does it do for you?
Even this question is pretty vague... I don't have any idea of what the poster wants the thing to do.
I know this is pretty cynical, but Microsoft can't change China. I think it's unreasonable to expect them to burn all their bridges there in a futile attempt to change things that they can't.
As a nation, we (the US) have decided to look the other way about whatever problems China might have, in exchange for money. A huge proportion of the stuff at Wal-Mart is made in China. We swallow our principles and take the cheap prices.
Why should MS be better than anyone else?
China is really big and really powerful. They're so big and powerful they can tell MS to shove it. And they can tell the US to shove it. If or when China changes, it will be because Chinese people do it. No one is going to push them into doing anything they don't want to do.
Conspiracy whackos who believed that the "face on mars" was being covered up got them to reimage the sites (at the expense of other sites that were bumped).
It happened because of Art Bell's radio show, and the deluded ravings of a specific guest, Richard C. Hoagland.
Of course when the pictures showed natural formations, the whackos said that NASA was covering up the real data. So rerouting the imaging mission didn't even satisfy them.
Space tends to attract a lot of whackos, and I'm not sure too much direct public input would be a good thing. The craziest people would shout the loudest.
Let's say you have a machine that's running MS-SQL server. It's a big machine, and client machines are hitting it from various parts of your on-site LAN.
Now let's say, for argument's sake, that you have two databases in the engine. One is supporting some developers, who are working on new code for customers, and the other is supporting clerical users who are runing an app that helps them provide customer support.
From the point of view of a systems administrator, there is a win to be had by partitioning the processes into the server into two containers. Each container is a virtual system. You let the developers have theirs, and you let the admins who keep the in house app up and running keep theirs.
The point of virtual machines isn't just to run linux and windows at the same time. It's to create containers that deliver administrative wins.
It's very much like using a folder in a file system. When you have all of your files in one sack, they're hard to manage. When you put them into folders, you can copy folders, you can delete them, you can tweak protections on groups of files all at once -- etc.
That's what virtual computing containers do for admins. You can do things at the container level that make life a lot easier.
Sun is embracing this philosophy. If you have a server, and you want to provide some remote shell access, a database engine, and a web server, you can keep them all in different containers.
It's a big win to keep shell access in a different container from the db engine -- good for security, good for management. Sun is also giving people tools to move containers from one physical machine to another. Again -- a big win for systems administrators.
MS is telling people -- if you want to use these containers, that's fine -- but for each container, you need a new license. You can have this great tool, but if you want to use it, you'll have to pay 4x as much (or whatever, based on how many containers you have).
I'm not talking about running Linux as the host and Windows as the guest. I'm talking about an all Windows machine, with the hypervisor managing a bunch of instances of the same OS.
People who run Xen don't usually run a kazillion different OSs. They run multiple instances of the same OS, and use Xen's tools to manage them more effectively, and to get more mileage out of their HW.
MS's problem isn't technical. There are 3rd party tools from VMWare that address the technical problem. MS's problem is licensing. It's too expensive to put different things in different containers.
The problem that you have with Microsoft and virtualization is licensing.
Do you have to buy a new $800 server license every time you create a new VM? If not, is someone going to bother to tell the online activation system about this?
Let's say you have an ISP, and you want to sell hosting with IIS and MS-SQL to your customers. It would be great if you could use virtualization software to partition the machine -- it would make it easier to manage and more secure.
All the tools you need to do this now are available -- VMWare will do it.
But you can't, because you'd go broke. You have to buy a copy *per customer*.
Meanwhile, I can buy an account at a vps provider (mine is linode.com) for $20/month, and run my own web server and database engine just fine.
They have to address the licensing, or it won't fly.
I don't play games, and that's why. When I was a kid, you'd drop a quarter in a tempest machine, and you could play without making much of a committment. Now you have to buy expensive hardware and dedicate 40 hours to learning how to play.
The other side of the argument, though, is that there are obviously plenty of people who like games the way they are -- they're certainly making a ton of money.
I'd like to see the public sector do it -- they should offer free computer disposal, and fine people who just toss their machines.
Almost everyone uses computers now, and they're integral to the economy. So even if some people end up subsidizing others, it wouldn't be horribly unjust -- it would be defensible on the same grounds that other kinds of economic supports for business would be.
The advantage of the system I'm proposing is that it would probably get computers out of the landfills. It would work. Most people would drop a machine off if they knew where to go and it didn't cost anything.
Bittorrent just lets average people publish large files to big audiences.
The big media people are really saying that they don't want people to be able to do that. If bittorrent is bad, then letting average people publish to large audiences is bad.
I can understand why the media companies are saying that. Piracy is a big problem for them, and they have business models that depend at least in part on being able to control distribution.
But I think we have to stand firm on the idea that letting average people publish things to large audiences is a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
My impression (which could be wrong) is that MS is pushing hard for VoIP collaboration tools.
So it's not just that you'd embed a "dialto:" url (or whatever) in a document. Instead, if you're working on something with other people, you'd be able to call them up, and have them talk with you and see the document at the same time.
It sounds like useful tech, but it's not clear to me why that stuff should go into the office suite, and not into some other layer of the software stack.
To me, the issue isn't whether more or fewer people use firefox. The issue is whether or not all of the big browsers follow standards.
As long as that's the case, I can run my browser on linux, and I'll have access to the web.
I think that people tend to downplay the value that open source products have as disciplining forces for prorprietary companies.
Firefox is forcing IE to improve on features and security, and by all accounts the next version is going to be much better on standards. That's the victory.
I used to have a blog that I recently shut down because no one read it.
No one read it, but I got a ton of hits -- all from indexing services. WordPress pings a service that lets lots of indexing systems know about new posts. Some of them -- Yahoo, for example, were contstantly going through my entire tree of posts, and hitting links for months, subjects, and so on.
It didn't bother me, because the bandwidth wasn't an issue, and it wasn't like they were hammering my vps or anything. It mostly just made it really hard to read the logs, because finding human readers was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
But bandwidth is cheap, and RSS is really useful, so it seems at least as good of a use for the resource as p2p movie exchanges.
This is sort of off topic, but are USB2 drives more solid under FreeBSD than they are under Linux?
I find that if I really pound on a USB2 drive under linux, it will fail. It will run pretty well, but if you copy a lot of data to it all at once, it will die. The same drive plugged into the same computer in exactly the same way works fine under windows.
I use a linode.com vps to handle my email. I don't know that it's not a great solution for a company, because it's got a bit of a kludgy feel to it, but for a person with a vanity domain, it's pretty good.
I use my domain registrar's DNS servers, use a SMTP server on the vps to catch mail for my domain, and forward it from there to two places -- a pop account provided by my cable company, and a gmail account.
Gmail is nice because you can configure the "reply-to" address, so outgoing mail acts as if you're sending it from your own domain.
It sucks to pay $20 a month to forward email, there's no doubt about that. But you do have a server -- if you want to do anything with php and mysql, you can, or you can run a vpn, or whatever.
You can also do whatever you want with spam handling, etc.
What does Microsoft gain from working with Linux? Or to put it another way, how does your job add value to the company?
My impression is that the Linux lab is about developing some in-house expertise in open source so that the company will have people who understand a trend that looks like it will probably become more important as time goes on. Is that a reasonable take?
The other popular conceptions of the lab, I think, are that it's somehow aimed at disrupting linux (which I don't believe, if only because it probably wouldn't work), or that it's about fostering interoperability between open source and MS products. This last explanation is hard to buy into wholeheeartedly because it doesn't seem like a rational strategy for MS.
Can you give us a description of what they want you to accomplish that will dispell some of the paranoia, and that will be pluasible to someone who believes that MS is looking out for #1?
I'll bet they were doing that.
Whether or not allowing the sites to stay up for the intelligence info was probably a hard choice all along, and after the recent bombings, they probably just changed their minds.
The article talks about lots of problems that leap seconds cause with software.
The problems don't come from the complexity of the underlying problem of adding leap seconds, but rather because leap seconds are added so infrequently that the code to handle the leap seconds isn't well tested.
So the real question here (to me, at least) is this: what do the leap second problems tell us about how software is developed?
Are people not thinking about leap seconds when they write code? Or are they thinking about them, but not testing the leap second cases properly? What's going on?
And how does the emergence of really big collections of APIs affect this? I mean, if people use standard routines for calendar functions, and if people keep their tools up to date, shouldn't these problems be mitigated? Shouldn't we be able to have some hard core calendar geeks solve the problem once in the API, and carry the rest of us?
If that doesn't work, why not?
We can solve this particular problem by changing the calendar. But what if we couldn't, and we had to try to address it with engineering practices? How would we proceed?
This is a great talk, and I really enjoyed it, but I'm not sure I buy it.
I haven't really digested the talk, so maybe that's why. But this is my gut reaction against what he's saying.
I don't think that geeks fully acknowledge the role of what I think of as bibliography in the web ecosystem.
I was an English major. Let's say that you want to learn about Faulkner. If you go to the card catalogue, and search for books about Faulkner, you get a lot of hits -- more books than you could ever read. It's essentially useless.
What you really need is a bibliography -- something written by a Faulkner scholar who says "these are the really important and groundbreaking books about Faulkner." That's one of the cool things about Encyclopedia Brittanica -- at the end of their articles, they tend to give you a run down of some of the key books on the subject.
So if you want to read a biography of George Washington, EB will let you find the right one. That's important, because there are so many biographies of George Washington out there.
That's my key point. If you go to a university library and use the catalogue to do a mechanical search for books about George Washington, the results aren't very useful. But if you read the bibliography at the end of the Encyclopedia Brittanica article, it's extremely useful.
I'm trying to draw a distinction between mechanical searches, on one hand, and selections based on human judgement on the other.
Google is useful in larege part, I think, because page rank lets you find what are essentially good bibliography pages. You use a dumb mechanical search to put you in touch with people who know their subjects and who have good judgement (hopefully).
The other day, for example, I was thinking about an old programming language called APL. I searched for it, and found a couple of pages that seemed to have collected just about everything APL -- anecdotes, personal histories, tutorials, implementations, pictures of the goofy APL keyboards, etc.
The Google powered web is cool because it combines the mechanical and the bibliographic so well. Google gets me to the bibliography -- it pulls that needle out of the haystack. But it's the bibliography that lets me drill down.
This is important. The really good stuff I read about APL didn't come directly from the actual google result page. There was a link in between -- the google result page took me to the APL bibliography page, and from there I was able to hit the meat of the matter.
We've seen, over the past decade, an explosion in which mechanical searching can do. Because it's been getting so much better so quickly, it's dominating the way we think about how we find information. It's causing us to give bibliography -- the judgement of experts -- short shrift.
But bibliography is absolutely key to the google ecosystem.
My problem with attempts to impose more structure on data is that it always breaks things. It's beefing up mechanical searches, which are already very good, and it does it at the expense of bibliography.
I buy the argument in this lecture more than the guy making it does. He complains about heavier structures, and how the complexity will prevent people from producing and consuming information. I think that almost any move away from what we have now will do the same thing. The more you structure information, the harder it is for people to provide bibliography.
The point is that the ideal medium for bibliogrphy is free form -- one person saying, "this is what I think" to another.
The genius of google is that page rank gives you a mechanical way to uncover the best bibliographies. The best ones tend to show up at the top of the results.
In the old days, there was alta vista, and there was yahoo. Yahoo used human beings to categorize data manually. They'd put sunglasses next to the best sites in many categories -- flag something as a "cool site". Alta vista was pure mechanical searching, with no human judg
I'll probably get flamed, and rightfully so, because I'm really uninformed on this topic, and I'm going to shoot off my mouth anyway. I'm just a dilletante. But I don't think that rails is much of a competitor.
Rails is more about rapid and agile development, and these big application servers are more about running big heavy duty enterprise apps.
I have the feeling that most apps that run in these containers are speced out pretty completely, developed in concert with layers of management, etc. And then there are all of the java APIs, that do just about everything you'd want in an enterprise app.
I sort of see rails as occupying a middle ground between PHP and a java app server. You get the structure of a java framework with the ability to know stuff out of PHP.
But there's more of a learning curve than you have with PHP, and you don't get the really robust admin tools of a good app server and the fabled java APIs.
So I think that they're really different tools for different kinds of jobs.
Some people have suggested that a lot of UFO stuff is the result of a government disinformation program.
They pump up the nets with fake information, and the noise those guys make gives them cover for more down to earth research projects and military activities.
Some of the things he's saying he found in this interview make me think the government did, in fact, do exactly what you're suggesting. He claims to have found ship transfer orders for spacecraft.
Either he's lying, or delusional, the alien conspiracy is real, or he found a honeypot similar to the one you've described.
I think that's because changing the home page is something a hijacker does fairly often.
That's probably a real problem, though. I wouldn't be surprised if installing things like java are a pain as well.
I had done my tweaking before I installed the tool, so I didn't see that stuff.
I'd like to try that because it would be interesting, but I'm sure that what you say is correct.
I don't dispute that they're letting some things through, and that the decisions they make about what gets through aren't always in the end user's best interest.
I don't have a lot of experience with spyware, because I mostly run linux, and on windows I find that it's not too hard to avoid it in the first place. I'm not an expert. But the other day I had to clean off someone else's machine that was infect with the IBIS toolbar.
I couldn't get rid of it with spybot or ad-aware. They'd find a bunch of junk and clean it off, but you'd reboot and it would come back.
When I ran the MS tool, it found more than 500 files and registry entries for it, and it cleaned them off. When I rebooted, it didn't boot cleanly (missing files were being referenced in the registry), and I thought "oh no, here we go". Then I started to get pop up windows about things trying to make changes. It told me to rerun the scanner. I did, rebooted again, and it was clean.
This is speculative on my part, and I could be wrong -- so people, please don't yell at me too much if I am, I'm aware I'm on shaky ground here -- but I had the impression that the MS tool was tagging things as spyware *because* they were trying to change registry entries and hijack the browser.
In other words, they weren't just using a file name, or a signature of a file to tag something as spyware, they were looking at the behavior of the thing. If a process tries to do something nasty, they follow it back to the source, and nuke it.
If that's what it's doing (and again, I think, but don't know, that it is), it's a big innovation. It's a good way you to fight spyware that generates lots of random files with randomized data and random names to reinstall itself.
MS, for all of their flaws (and they have plenty, I don't want to be an apologist) has vast resources and a lot of smart people. Their tool lets people report back on infestations automatically. They can throw people at the problem and code for new problems almost as soon as they arise.
They understand the OS better than anyone, obviously, and can use that knowledge to track down the source of reinstalls more effectively than comparatively small outsider shops.
That doesn't take away from the negativity of their deals with the devil. That sucks, they shouldn't do it, and they're really shooting themselves in the foot over the long run by making those deals, because no one has a bigger stake in making windows solid and trustworthy than MS, and this crap really undermines that effort.
But if you have IBIS, and you need to get rid of it, their tool is terrific. If you have that problem, don't let the fact that they've decided to be deliberate bad at ISTsvc removal prevent you from using it for IBIS. That's really all that I'm saying.
Don't stop running spybot or ad-aware. But add the MS tool to your arsenal. It does a lot of good stuff.
I will try to run your expiriment so I can learn more about this... thanks for posting about it.
I'll probably burn some karma here, but I'm a big fan of the MS anti-spyware product.
There are really two issues. The first is the catalogue of what's spyware and what isn't. I don't know if MS's program is good at that, and the stories we're reading are sort of disturbing. I buy all of that.
But the second issue concerns the product's ability to remove nasty stuff on your machine. And their anti-spyware app is very good at that.
It's much better than spybot or ad-aware, in fact -- especially with the stuff that scatters hundreds of files and registry entries around your system and reinstalls itself after you try to clean it with another program.
There's nothing that will prevent you from running another program to clear off the stuff that MS's product doesn't get rid of. So don't let this situation prevent you from running this software to get rid of other stuff. It's good at it, and it's free.
That's actually pretty helpful, and a good illustration.
Thanks very much for taking the trouble.
I understand that (sort of), but could you give an example of a specific problem that fits this type of solution?
What kinds of problems would you solve with a prolog type system?
I've read about prolog, going back for years (it was a scare, a long time ago, in the '80's, I think -- the japanese were spending government money on prolog type logic systems, and they were going to bury us), but I've never really understood how it plugs into the real world.
I mean, if you're doing something practical, what does it do for you?
Even this question is pretty vague... I don't have any idea of what the poster wants the thing to do.
Is zfs included?
I know this is pretty cynical, but Microsoft can't change China. I think it's unreasonable to expect them to burn all their bridges there in a futile attempt to change things that they can't.
As a nation, we (the US) have decided to look the other way about whatever problems China might have, in exchange for money. A huge proportion of the stuff at Wal-Mart is made in China. We swallow our principles and take the cheap prices.
Why should MS be better than anyone else?
China is really big and really powerful. They're so big and powerful they can tell MS to shove it. And they can tell the US to shove it. If or when China changes, it will be because Chinese people do it. No one is going to push them into doing anything they don't want to do.
Conspiracy whackos who believed that the "face on mars" was being covered up got them to reimage the sites (at the expense of other sites that were bumped).
It happened because of Art Bell's radio show, and the deluded ravings of a specific guest, Richard C. Hoagland.
Of course when the pictures showed natural formations, the whackos said that NASA was covering up the real data. So rerouting the imaging mission didn't even satisfy them.
Space tends to attract a lot of whackos, and I'm not sure too much direct public input would be a good thing. The craziest people would shout the loudest.
I don't think you're getting my point.
Let's say you have a machine that's running MS-SQL server. It's a big machine, and client machines are hitting it from various parts of your on-site LAN.
Now let's say, for argument's sake, that you have two databases in the engine. One is supporting some developers, who are working on new code for customers, and the other is supporting clerical users who are runing an app that helps them provide customer support.
From the point of view of a systems administrator, there is a win to be had by partitioning the processes into the server into two containers. Each container is a virtual system. You let the developers have theirs, and you let the admins who keep the in house app up and running keep theirs.
The point of virtual machines isn't just to run linux and windows at the same time. It's to create containers that deliver administrative wins.
It's very much like using a folder in a file system. When you have all of your files in one sack, they're hard to manage. When you put them into folders, you can copy folders, you can delete them, you can tweak protections on groups of files all at once -- etc.
That's what virtual computing containers do for admins. You can do things at the container level that make life a lot easier.
Sun is embracing this philosophy. If you have a server, and you want to provide some remote shell access, a database engine, and a web server, you can keep them all in different containers.
It's a big win to keep shell access in a different container from the db engine -- good for security, good for management. Sun is also giving people tools to move containers from one physical machine to another. Again -- a big win for systems administrators.
MS is telling people -- if you want to use these containers, that's fine -- but for each container, you need a new license. You can have this great tool, but if you want to use it, you'll have to pay 4x as much (or whatever, based on how many containers you have).
I'm not talking about running Linux as the host and Windows as the guest. I'm talking about an all Windows machine, with the hypervisor managing a bunch of instances of the same OS.
People who run Xen don't usually run a kazillion different OSs. They run multiple instances of the same OS, and use Xen's tools to manage them more effectively, and to get more mileage out of their HW.
MS's problem isn't technical. There are 3rd party tools from VMWare that address the technical problem. MS's problem is licensing. It's too expensive to put different things in different containers.
The problem that you have with Microsoft and virtualization is licensing.
Do you have to buy a new $800 server license every time you create a new VM? If not, is someone going to bother to tell the online activation system about this?
Let's say you have an ISP, and you want to sell hosting with IIS and MS-SQL to your customers. It would be great if you could use virtualization software to partition the machine -- it would make it easier to manage and more secure.
All the tools you need to do this now are available -- VMWare will do it.
But you can't, because you'd go broke. You have to buy a copy *per customer*.
Meanwhile, I can buy an account at a vps provider (mine is linode.com) for $20/month, and run my own web server and database engine just fine.
They have to address the licensing, or it won't fly.
I don't play games, and that's why. When I was a kid, you'd drop a quarter in a tempest machine, and you could play without making much of a committment. Now you have to buy expensive hardware and dedicate 40 hours to learning how to play.
The other side of the argument, though, is that there are obviously plenty of people who like games the way they are -- they're certainly making a ton of money.
I'd like to see the public sector do it -- they should offer free computer disposal, and fine people who just toss their machines.
Almost everyone uses computers now, and they're integral to the economy. So even if some people end up subsidizing others, it wouldn't be horribly unjust -- it would be defensible on the same grounds that other kinds of economic supports for business would be.
The advantage of the system I'm proposing is that it would probably get computers out of the landfills. It would work. Most people would drop a machine off if they knew where to go and it didn't cost anything.
Bittorrent just lets average people publish large files to big audiences.
The big media people are really saying that they don't want people to be able to do that. If bittorrent is bad, then letting average people publish to large audiences is bad.
I can understand why the media companies are saying that. Piracy is a big problem for them, and they have business models that depend at least in part on being able to control distribution.
But I think we have to stand firm on the idea that letting average people publish things to large audiences is a good thing.