Now it suddenly all makes sense. All those ackward dialogs with completely non-sensual default settings. If they actually do those fees every little click the user has to do sums up to thousands of dollars for Microsoft.
Seriously they could do anything. Nobody who is using Microsoft Office will switch to any other package. People who use office software, no matter from which vendor, typically don't care about costs or efficiency. Otherwise they would use more efficient ways to do work.
Well just look at a realistic solution. Your leak prints out the documents and just hands them to the customer. It's trivial. And even if you monitor all printers (which is moderately easy), people will still be able to photograph it off the screen.
The only thing you _can_ do is to make it a bit harder to copy it. For example by completely ditching the traditional "personal computer" idea and moving to terminals. On those you can just log all the trafic and find everybody who accessed the document fairly easily. Plus as people don't have direct access to their files, it's hard to just download and store them on an USB device or something. You could, at most connect a PC with terminal emulation and then log the connection yourself.
1. Interface standards: Every programm looks different depending on the year is was made. Some things don't even make sense, unless you take the history behind it into account.
2. Of course you can modify a Windows machine to be user-friendly and managable, but that takes days of work. And even then you'll still need to manually restore it. A typical Ubuntu installation is done in less than an hour and you already have a fairly optimal system. I mean Windows doesn't even come with Firefox!
I also seriously recommend Ubuntu. It's got all software you need and installing new software is simple. If they have a problem, you can either log in remotely, or dictate commands over the phone.
Plus you can easily make the icons larger. The people won't be bothered as much with useless questions like "Machine 123.232.124.122 has repeatedly tried to access port 2343 UDP service svrhost.dll [Yes, No, Abort, All, Apfelstrudel]".
If you want to give them a machine that "just works", get some flavour of Ubuntu. If they are still mentaly able to use a computer (my father unfortunately isn't anymore) they will find a computer they can use.
Seriously, Apple had far bigger problems then DRM. They had $1200 laptops which broke far more often than $400 ones, (logic board failure) but thanks to MacOS 10.2 were even far slower.
Apple users are mostly fanatics. And fanatics typically don't care about such things.
So seriously, Apple could start selling bricks instead of iPhones and users will still buy it. I mean they even start petitions insteadt of not buying that stuff!
People care about DRM, but Apple fanatics care more about their brand.
Well there are different kinds of users out there.
And seriously you cannot compare a good unixoid shell to the crippled one comming with Windows. The Windows one really is barely usable. Microsoft did a great job at scaring people away from comman lines by crippling them to death. Microsoft even goes a lot further, by also crippling the GUI. Just try to load 10 comma seperated text files written by a version of Exel from another language version into Exel. It asks you the _same_ questions over and over again. It doesn't even try to make guesses like that it's improbable to have the period as a 1000-seperator when you already have it as a decimal seperator.
Windows just is unusual for the power user, but people have just gotten used to wasting their time with bad software.
OK, this one refers more to the command line, but might be cool anyhow.
You have 2 buttlers, one Linux, the other one Windows.
The Linux buttler just follows orders to the best he can, if you tell him what to do. (like a command line) The Windows buttler is more like a like a puppet, you have to actually move it for it to do something. (like a GUI) Punchline: Windows won't do something, because that feature is not availiable under the current licence, please buy an upgrade.
Today people don't buy multi-screen setups because they are multi-screen. They buy them in order to get more pixels. There used to be times when you had a high resolution monochrome display and a low resolution colour one, but those times are over.
So if you want to make something usefull, make the rims as thin as possible. And _please_ make it symmetrical. At that price I would expect a little piece of mechanics which automatically extends the sidescreens when you open the laptop.
Uhm, most dot-matrix printers are left running at their default font for their entire life. Sure they could do a lot more, but for filling out a form it's more than enought.
Many Laser printers support a toner save mode in which they automatically reduce your picture to an outline. It would be much simpler to just activate that function.
They complain that Congent doesn't pay for peering so the other company has to pay anything. But seriously they probably have to pay more to route that trafic through another company.
The costs usually are neglectable. A port at an exchange point only costs a few hundred to thousands dollars a month.
Companies should stop caring about all that business stuff when it comes to peering and just peer!
Well I guess by then, the main problem will be memory bandwidth. So it doesn't matter how fast the single core is, it's the memory bandwidth which is the bottleneck.
General purpose CPUs just are cheaper as you can also use them for general purpose computing.
If Microsoft now steps on the feet of all those malware removal providers maybe they'll stop claiming that MSes products are completely secure and any remaining security problems will surely be fixed soon.
I mean seriously, get Ubuntu and look how software installation is handled there. You'll stop understanding why Windows doesn't have a propper package manager.
I mean seriously, how can you proof that someone at IP-Address X offered a file.
The typical way is that they show a screenshot of some programm as well as someone claiming under oath that it's real. Well let's see where someone evil could modify that information to blame someone else:
1. the application: It can display any IP-Address it wants, even random numbers
2. the video card driver: It gets commands to write strings. It's trivial to exchange strings here and most video card manufacturers refuse to provide the source for their drivers.
3. many routers can simply do some kind of "NAT" to change the address. This could be done, in principle for certain ports and fully transparent.
4. the operating system: Of course that's the easiest place for changing any information going into the application and going out of it.
5. the font: Yes, this is obscure and might be noticed, but if I make a font which makes 8s look like 1s and 1s look like 8s, It will seem as if there is a different IP-Address on the screen.
So, there is no possible way they can actually proof anything. Plus they have a motif to modify their system in one of those ways.
As long as we don't have true trustworthy computing, which would mean we have to cut down the software stack of our computers to less than a kilobyte, it's hard to proof anything with a computer. Should we get TGC-style trusted computing, there will be _no_ proof a computer has been modified.
Finally they are making repositories of software so people have at least some chance to find out if it's malware or not.
Finally Microsoft might get a package manager and people could install software without having to type "programmname free download" into the next search engine, and probably getting malware with the first 10 links.
That is, unless Microsoft messes it up which they will probabaly do. My guess is that they will not open it to "free" software or the whole system will be horribly insecure. Probably nobody will trust Microsoft and therefore they all will stay at the old, horribly insecure system.
I always wonder how many people claim to provide IT, when in fact they only provide intelligent typewriters.
Do propper IT, if e-mails need to be processed by hand, you are doing something wrong. A company with IT barely needs anybody else, as computer can be programmed to do most business tasks people do in day to day business.
I don't think there's anything gained if they continue to do it like before, selling licenses or giving them for free to companies. I think there is a lot more potential for this.
I would use it as a meshed network, free to use by everybody who wishes to, owned by it's users.
Essentially you would have to do the following:
1. Develop a fault-tolerant meshed routing protocol maybe based on IPv6 which can scale efficiently to a billion nodes. Current systems like OLSR are limited to a few thousand nodes. Maybe you need something based on geography.
2. Sell the needed routers at stores. The hardware should come down in price quickly and there probably still is quite some profit to be made. Allow device manufacturers to include the router into their products. Keep the router design as free as possible.
3. Allow companies to sponsor the network by putting such devices onto their roofs or providing links. There are a lot of companies interrested in more people getting faster and cheaper internet connectivity.
Of course such a network would be completely insecure, but that is already the case with the Internet. So just encrypt and sign everything you transmit over that network and you'll be fine.
But if they try, why don't they manage to do it? Install Ubuntu 7.10 onto a modern laptop, and it'll run just out of the box. Do the same with Vista and you'll have to get lots of extra drivers. That's especially problematic when your network card doesn't work, because it's missing a driver.
Why can't Microsoft just package the most popular drivers with their OSes anymore?
I don't think the certification causes the quality of drivers to raise even the slightest bit. If they actually wanted to have better drivers, they'd just write them themselves, or offer substancial help in writing those drivers. For example they could have published free testbenches which test the whole API of the driver.
Actually Microsoft used to provide a decent drivers database with it's operating systems. Back in the Windows for Workgroup days it would recognize (virtually) every network card automatically. I think it even managed to support soundcards in Soundblaster mode, right out of the box. And of course virtually every dot matrix or laser printer.
The real question is, why aren't they doing it now? I believe they simply became more arrogant. They now not only don't write the drivers, they make it deliberately hard to write drivers thanks to useless signatures you need to get drivers running under Vista 64Bit.
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Seriously, there are far better free software solutions availiable other than Microsoft Office.
In the first half year after switching to Linux I have learned more than during the years using different versions of Windows.
Now it suddenly all makes sense. All those ackward dialogs with completely non-sensual default settings. If they actually do those fees every little click the user has to do sums up to thousands of dollars for Microsoft.
Seriously they could do anything. Nobody who is using Microsoft Office will switch to any other package. People who use office software, no matter from which vendor, typically don't care about costs or efficiency. Otherwise they would use more efficient ways to do work.
Well just look at a realistic solution. Your leak prints out the documents and just hands them to the customer. It's trivial. And even if you monitor all printers (which is moderately easy), people will still be able to photograph it off the screen.
The only thing you _can_ do is to make it a bit harder to copy it. For example by completely ditching the traditional "personal computer" idea and moving to terminals. On those you can just log all the trafic and find everybody who accessed the document fairly easily. Plus as people don't have direct access to their files, it's hard to just download and store them on an USB device or something. You could, at most connect a PC with terminal emulation and then log the connection yourself.
1. Interface standards: Every programm looks different depending on the year is was made. Some things don't even make sense, unless you take the history behind it into account.
2. Of course you can modify a Windows machine to be user-friendly and managable, but that takes days of work. And even then you'll still need to manually restore it. A typical Ubuntu installation is done in less than an hour and you already have a fairly optimal system. I mean Windows doesn't even come with Firefox!
I also seriously recommend Ubuntu. It's got all software you need and installing new software is simple. If they have a problem, you can either log in remotely, or dictate commands over the phone.
Plus you can easily make the icons larger. The people won't be bothered as much with useless questions like "Machine 123.232.124.122 has repeatedly tried to access port 2343 UDP service svrhost.dll [Yes, No, Abort, All, Apfelstrudel]".
If you want to give them a machine that "just works", get some flavour of Ubuntu. If they are still mentaly able to use a computer (my father unfortunately isn't anymore) they will find a computer they can use.
Seriously, Apple had far bigger problems then DRM. They had $1200 laptops which broke far more often than $400 ones, (logic board failure) but thanks to MacOS 10.2 were even far slower.
Apple users are mostly fanatics. And fanatics typically don't care about such things.
So seriously, Apple could start selling bricks instead of iPhones and users will still buy it. I mean they even start petitions insteadt of not buying that stuff!
People care about DRM, but Apple fanatics care more about their brand.
Well there are different kinds of users out there.
And seriously you cannot compare a good unixoid shell to the crippled one comming with Windows. The Windows one really is barely usable. Microsoft did a great job at scaring people away from comman lines by crippling them to death.
Microsoft even goes a lot further, by also crippling the GUI. Just try to load 10 comma seperated text files written by a version of Exel from another language version into Exel. It asks you the _same_ questions over and over again. It doesn't even try to make guesses like that it's improbable to have the period as a 1000-seperator when you already have it as a decimal seperator.
Windows just is unusual for the power user, but people have just gotten used to wasting their time with bad software.
OK, this one refers more to the command line, but might be cool anyhow.
You have 2 buttlers, one Linux, the other one Windows.
The Linux buttler just follows orders to the best he can, if you tell him what to do. (like a command line) The Windows buttler is more like a like a puppet, you have to actually move it for it to do something. (like a GUI)
Punchline: Windows won't do something, because that feature is not availiable under the current licence, please buy an upgrade.
Today people don't buy multi-screen setups because they are multi-screen. They buy them in order to get more pixels. There used to be times when you had a high resolution monochrome display and a low resolution colour one, but those times are over.
So if you want to make something usefull, make the rims as thin as possible. And _please_ make it symmetrical. At that price I would expect a little piece of mechanics which automatically extends the sidescreens when you open the laptop.
I agree. I recently brought in an electronic computer to my workplace. It _really_ improved my efficiency a great deal.
Other points, especially in programming, is good education and the freedom to choose the right tools for the job.
Uhm, most dot-matrix printers are left running at their default font for their entire life. Sure they could do a lot more, but for filling out a form it's more than enought.
Many Laser printers support a toner save mode in which they automatically reduce your picture to an outline. It would be much simpler to just activate that function.
They complain that Congent doesn't pay for peering so the other company has to pay anything. But seriously they probably have to pay more to route that trafic through another company.
The costs usually are neglectable. A port at an exchange point only costs a few hundred to thousands dollars a month.
Companies should stop caring about all that business stuff when it comes to peering and just peer!
Well I guess by then, the main problem will be memory bandwidth. So it doesn't matter how fast the single core is, it's the memory bandwidth which is the bottleneck.
General purpose CPUs just are cheaper as you can also use them for general purpose computing.
Seriously, if the coding quality is the same as with Microsoft's MPEG4 decoder, we can expect alternative software 3D engines to get _way_ faster.
If Microsoft now steps on the feet of all those malware removal providers maybe they'll stop claiming that MSes products are completely secure and any remaining security problems will surely be fixed soon.
I mean seriously, get Ubuntu and look how software installation is handled there. You'll stop understanding why Windows doesn't have a propper package manager.
Well after all, you need to format the harddisk and copy all operating system files to it on each boot. That simply takes time.
I mean seriously, how can you proof that someone at IP-Address X offered a file.
The typical way is that they show a screenshot of some programm as well as someone claiming under oath that it's real. Well let's see where someone evil could modify that information to blame someone else:
1. the application: It can display any IP-Address it wants, even random numbers
2. the video card driver: It gets commands to write strings. It's trivial to exchange strings here and most video card manufacturers refuse to provide the source for their drivers.
3. many routers can simply do some kind of "NAT" to change the address. This could be done, in principle for certain ports and fully transparent.
4. the operating system: Of course that's the easiest place for changing any information going into the application and going out of it.
5. the font: Yes, this is obscure and might be noticed, but if I make a font which makes 8s look like 1s and 1s look like 8s, It will seem as if there is a different IP-Address on the screen.
So, there is no possible way they can actually proof anything. Plus they have a motif to modify their system in one of those ways.
As long as we don't have true trustworthy computing, which would mean we have to cut down the software stack of our computers to less than a kilobyte, it's hard to proof anything with a computer. Should we get TGC-style trusted computing, there will be _no_ proof a computer has been modified.
Finally they are making repositories of software so people have at least some chance to find out if it's malware or not.
Finally Microsoft might get a package manager and people could install software without having to type "programmname free download" into the next search engine, and probably getting malware with the first 10 links.
That is, unless Microsoft messes it up which they will probabaly do. My guess is that they will not open it to "free" software or the whole system will be horribly insecure. Probably nobody will trust Microsoft and therefore they all will stay at the old, horribly insecure system.
I always wonder how many people claim to provide IT, when in fact they only provide intelligent typewriters.
Do propper IT, if e-mails need to be processed by hand, you are doing something wrong. A company with IT barely needs anybody else, as computer can be programmed to do most business tasks people do in day to day business.
I don't think there's anything gained if they continue to do it like before, selling licenses or giving them for free to companies. I think there is a lot more potential for this.
I would use it as a meshed network, free to use by everybody who wishes to, owned by it's users.
Essentially you would have to do the following:
1. Develop a fault-tolerant meshed routing protocol maybe based on IPv6 which can scale efficiently to a billion nodes. Current systems like OLSR are limited to a few thousand nodes. Maybe you need something based on geography.
2. Sell the needed routers at stores. The hardware should come down in price quickly and there probably still is quite some profit to be made. Allow device manufacturers to include the router into their products. Keep the router design as free as possible.
3. Allow companies to sponsor the network by putting such devices onto their roofs or providing links. There are a lot of companies interrested in more people getting faster and cheaper internet connectivity.
Of course such a network would be completely insecure, but that is already the case with the Internet. So just encrypt and sign everything you transmit over that network and you'll be fine.
Can't they just make that "online install" work for drivers? I mean there's an option for that.
But if they try, why don't they manage to do it? Install Ubuntu 7.10 onto a modern laptop, and it'll run just out of the box. Do the same with Vista and you'll have to get lots of extra drivers. That's especially problematic when your network card doesn't work, because it's missing a driver.
Why can't Microsoft just package the most popular drivers with their OSes anymore?
I don't think the certification causes the quality of drivers to raise even the slightest bit. If they actually wanted to have better drivers, they'd just write them themselves, or offer substancial help in writing those drivers. For example they could have published free testbenches which test the whole API of the driver.
Is there another desktop OS on the market?
Actually Microsoft used to provide a decent drivers database with it's operating systems. Back in the Windows for Workgroup days it would recognize (virtually) every network card automatically. I think it even managed to support soundcards in Soundblaster mode, right out of the box. And of course virtually every dot matrix or laser printer.
The real question is, why aren't they doing it now? I believe they simply became more arrogant. They now not only don't write the drivers, they make it deliberately hard to write drivers thanks to useless signatures you need to get drivers running under Vista 64Bit.