Many reading these comments will end up being members of a loosely defined group that sees this kind of thing as, among other things, a huge waste of legislative time.
The problem with most of this Right-Thinking Fellows Club is that it is a similar kind of thinking/acting as the freaks that wasted their time on the legislation and (no doubt) political pressure being applied in the University.
Did you see what I did there by name-calling?
I don't know how, but somehow their crazy world view needs to be redirected so they stop wasting everyone's time. A giant screen TV in every home and *severe* economic stress doesn't seem to be refocusing them at all.
By studying successful people without some external reference, one is able to pick and choose traits as one pleases to define success.
In the business world, I would argue access to capital and no compassion, regard for others, and absence of a sense of guilt are the best indicators. See this vague definition of sociopathy http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.html
In the entertainment world there are **LOTS** of musicians putting in this hypothetical 10,000 hours. Practice/performing only takes one so far. Most of this mythic "10,000 hour club" end up as music teachers.
Bottom line: grouping "successful people" is a values-driven specifically unscientific exercise.
here are bozos out there willing to commit paying customers and their websites to an endless, costly, non-standard nightmare in exchange for nothing!
That's not exactly true. Microsoft clearly pays for the privilege of locking out their competitors. As an example, they landed the deal with the IOC to broadcast streams from the Bejing Olympics. And yet the rumor was that Yahoo! had more Olympics-related visitors.
Common sense would suggest the IOC would re-think it, but Microsoft will probably continue to pay dearly just to *associate* Silverlight with the Olympics and lock-out their competitors.
I noticed you casually disregard the fact that a 2008 license for my employer is ridiculously expensive. We don't use retail crack-pipe licenses.
Here we go with more hyperbole....NET integration, for instance, is killer for shops that use.NET.
We've got.net apps runnning no one in there right mind would rewrite for an upgrade.
The ability to completely maintain IIS via config files is an even better feature. OK, maybe but we've been getting along for years without it.
A whole new host of command line tools are also new, not to mention Powershell support.
Casually ignoring Microsoft's destructive tendency to launch something then not support it doesn't help your case. How many of these "new" toys will be actively developed going forward? Batch files anyone? Perl and Python are more than enough glue that work across *many* operating systems, widely supported, huge base of libraries.
I agree with the parent. I work in an MS shop running 2003 enterprise for our applications. We evaluated 2008 and found the following:
1. Very little new anything with clustering. By all appearances, I'm still completely hosed in some failure scenarios.
2. It looks like most of the 2008 'features' are meant to enhance the same old hostility to mixed Microsoft environments. Same old crack-dealer scheming and continuing small-business customer contempt.
3. IIS GUI has changed, but feature-wise it looks about the same. How long will this new scripting thing last before it's.Netified or abandoned? It's not a glue-like solution at all.
License fees have risen to astronomical levels for the Enterprise license we would, in theory, purchase. Management would look ridiculous even mentioning the numbers. Contrast this with hardware purchases that are quite easy to justify even in these times.
Management is *very* open to platform alternatives as a result of Microsoft's perceived reskinnng 2003 and calling it new.
Reasoning like this is weak and has nothing to do with the actual argument of who produces the best engineers.
Having worked for and with Eastern European/Formerly Soviet satellite State people, the story goes that Education was thought to be the Great Way Forward for their society. The result was a society with many more legitimately educated people with few opportunities.
I generally agree with this notion as the ones I have met that migrated to the U.S. are pretty damn smart. Furthermore, some of the best OCR software I've *ever* seen is out of a Russian software company. Abbyy.com
Anecdotal evidence to be sure.
The point being, let's get the discussion back on track by modding down political history comments filled with American propaganda.
And what would be the alternative to privatization? Let some government agency do the transaction processing and personal data warehousing. Like, let's say, the NSA?
That would be against the law. Which is why letting a commercial entity do the work of collecting/processing and then working with the collected data is perfectly legal and standard operating procedure.
Parent post is *exactly* right. The strategy described is excellent business practice for everyone in IT. If you are so valuable to a company, then make them pay cash, today.
**EVERY** other kind of offer usually has some kind of timing scheme behind it. The offer made to the author of the article is a timing scheme and nothing else.
What do I mean by "timing scheme?" Equity offers like the article mentions exploit the notion that these equity stakes will somehow make an individual rich at some future date. The officers know that that future date will never come. If the day actually ever came whereby there was a payout, it would be pennies or less of the original discussed offer.
Today's lesson: Make money. Get paid. Today, not tomorrow.
Recent processors have very nice virtual machine support. KVM and qemu are great. From there on out it's clonezilla to the rescue.
You've got XP licenses, why not use them until the organization can migrate off windows and onto Linux? KVM will certainly get you there or even let you run your old app inside a vm. I did this for a guy that still uses a dos-based Real Estate application. He was stunned and supremely thankful.
Get involved in local politics. It is the best cure for your distaste for politicians. After that:
1. Change at the executive level is slow no matter what. An aircraft carrier doing a U-turn is nimble in comparison. 4 years is very, very little time to affect much change.
2. The notion that this administration will act more lawfully than the last is a matter of interpretation. Bush #43 acted lawfully. They started with the notion that the Office of President has unlimited powers, so everything they did was "within the law." Every administration has their own interpretation of "lawful." Don't pin your vague notions of lawfulness on the current administration. It will only lead to disappointment.
It will only be a matter of time before any group wanting to discredit the current Administration finds an issue that will provoke outrage and foster disaffection. You would do well to keep that in mind.
This has been a likely scenario for quite a long time. The transactional data cooperation most likely predates Bush #43. It is the simplest reason for the decades of wanton privatization of transaction processing and personal data warehousing.
The collective shrug of the shoulders in Congress should surprise no one. Most of all, it should come as no surprise to anyone hanging around slashdot.
The notion that your daily life is somehow private should have died about 15 years ago.
It deserves praise and support previously reserved for deities. I'm only overstating this a little.
The benefits of CoreBoot are many: 1. Cheaper motherboard manufacturing. TPM chips are expensive components when mass producing motherboards.
2. CoreBoot gives hardware manufacturers a viable market that Microsoft and Apple cannot touch.
3. Keeps the hardware open for all operating sytems and devices. This simple fact cannot be stressed enough. As the world slowly migrates to 64-bit everything. Microsoft has locked hobby driver developers out of Vista in 64-bit land.
TPM BIOS modules have the capacity to lock out unapproved operating systems, devices, etc. Are they widely implemented? No. Is it possible to the point of being well documented? Yes.
Sales is the issue. The adverts do little without Sales closing deals.
Ubuntu needs enough sales capital to spend on the hookers and blow required to close large deals. If they start eating Microsoft's lunch, then there will be, most likely, a litigation carpet bombing by one or more of Microsoft's proxies.
What's Mark's next move though? Will he try to take it public? At some point, Ubuntu will "jump the shark." Thank Dog for Debian.
I'll add there is no media market for objective reviews. Please, don't mention consumer reports. That's a single, non-specific source.
Here's an idea that I wish would happen. Have a writer buy something off the shelf and then review it. The costs of which are shared by X number of people. For their contribution, they get to define what to write about in the review and get first dibs on the review content complete with Q&A. The Internet makes this possible, but no one really wants to do it.
InfoSec in nearly all corporate environments breaks down into a couple of basic facts.
1. Do just enough, at the lowest possible price to maintain compliance and then everyone does their best to ignore it because it's all messy overhead costs.
2. Have someone in IT to blame. This is especially true if your title has something to do with infosec.
1 and 2 are a special kind of evil circular logic where the exec blame-shifts to the IT guy for their "buggy" porn-riddled trojaned corporate laptop. In the exec's circle it is always IT's fault.
Switch to Mac? Nope, too expensive. Besides, no one else in corporate culture uses Macs. Linux? What?? Weird people use it, not self-important execs like me. What do you mean there's no IE7? I can't possibly waste time on linkedin and facebook without IE7!!!
* Focus on widgets, while omitting to consider the importance of maintaining accountability.
This basically means having lots of things for admins to click on and make reports with. None of which actually improve security. IE7's "security" features and Microsoft's UAC are two good examples.
You, and the no-doubt +5 Insightful modding to follow will lead to crushed expectations.
1. This poor bloke doesn't stand a chance against the telco's lobbying. His years running VC are not comparable to years running government, defending attacks from the Telcos and Cable Co's.
2. Government changes very slowly. This is part of the human condition more than anything else. One guy, even with the temporary backing of an Administration doesn't have much to work with.
3. The political system we have will create a great deal of friction preventing it from changing. Telco's and cable co's will screw this guy out of a job if he runs too far afield of their goals to capture the media distribution market.
One of the primary reasons Vista has slow adoption has been the tiers and pricing.
Microsoft is a price maker. (look it up on wikipedia) They can charge whatever they want. Charge too much and some regulator/law enforcement authority will have to pretend to do something, eventually.
They don't have to charge too little because it's just throwing money away. No one else will capture the value, so it's their loss.
Discounts are a bad, bad thing. Like coupons, discount shoppers are your worst customers.
Hell sell it for 59.99 and they would move 100 million the first year. Everyone on Vista will move over, as would people holding out on XP.
They will get the XP customers eventually. They intentionally charge a little more (after adjusting for inflation) for each release to make up for the small number of customers they lose each release. Most of those charges the consumer can't quite calculate on their own because they get passed onto the reseller. Comparing a similarly spec'd Dell Linux/Windows machine is a good estimate. Last time I did it, a Vista machine was $240(USD) more.
The price maker lowers the volume of computers manufactured and sold and raises the prices we pay for all of the technology inside the average PC.
Bottom line: The customer getting screwed the most is the long-time Microsoft customer. The rest of us are getting screwed anyway.
Post is exactly right. The ASICs are already out there and in use by pretty much everyone for their COTS routers.
When one gets into the carrier-scale equipment I don't have a clue how that stuff goes. But I've seen enough low-end ( $10,000) routers taken apart to know that AC's comments are accurate.
Seriously. Wherever this way of thinking came from, you should stop it now.
How do I tell if any of my projects while attending classes will be co-opted by my professors or the university itself and taken away from me?
Do the same boring stuff and get an A. With all of your spare time go out (as in outside, to a new place) with friends new and old, meet and date as many girls as possible.
Oh, and finally, the Next Big Thing is usually built on top of a waste heap of NextBigThing business failures and copycats the size of a small mountain anyway.
Work on something ordinary and boring, make it extraordinary then maintain it as a GPL project. The old way of "wood shedding" just doesn't work out in the U.S. If it is by extraordinary chance a novel idea it'll be copied in 1/5 the time somewhere else in the world and/or litigated into oblivion.
Vonage is a good example of what happens to a good idea in the U.S. these days. They had a boring idea, "cheap phone service" and made it good enough. They were then patent litigated into oblivion by the telcos ridiculously vague and not-unique telco patents.
Imagine instead a decentralized (bittorrent-like) VOIP network of Free components with your name at the head of the project. It's a great calling card and the telco's can't possibly keep the genie in the bottle with that model.
Blah. Too many words, too many ideas. Get a life first.
Specifically, layoffs are being used as a way of culling the bottom 10 or 20% of performers in order to improve the overall performance of the company.
Haha. If only that were true.
First to go is the bottom 10-20% wage-earners. What's left are a few people who work, and the vast unwashed masses of people who pass their work onto others, look busy, blame others for failures and take credit for the slightest whiff of success of something nearby.
Bottom line: way more aggressive workplace politics, less productivity.
This is the human condition and Microsoft's organization is not immune to it.
The summary is full of *very* misplaced expectations regarding wireless service.
A. There was never an expectation that the service would ever be plain old telephone service (POTS) quality. Thinking otherwise just sets you up for disappointment. Telco's pretty much hate POTS because it was designed and regulated to be extremely reliable. Get a POTS line and move on.
B. ATT doesn't care if individuals go without service. A few hundred thousand users having downtime for hours is nothing because it can be blamed on an "act of God." They care if they have to go before their regulators because that costs campaign contributions.
C. I have a bank of dial-up modems as the very last line of defense in our NOC for just this reason. We deal with messages, so it would work in a bad situation. Not ideal, but I'll take it and our customer's PHB's are generally pleased we think that carefully.
This is obviously true, and not just for Vista - it applies equally to Linux, OS X, and pretty much any other OS out there.
Huh? No. Insisting otherwise is just pretending. UAC seems like a faith-based thing for you.
"Vista makes tradeoffs between security and convenience, and both UAC and Protected Mode IE have design choices that required paths to be opened in the IL wall for application compatibility and ease of use,"
Sudo? No such thing. Unless of course you want to continue to pretend sudo does these things.
Because the boundaries defined by UAC and Protected Mode IE are designed to be porous, they can't really be considered security barriers, he said. "Neither UAC elevations nor Protected Mode IE define new Windows security boundaries," Russinovich wrote. "Because elevations and ILs donâ(TM)t define a security boundary, potential avenues of attack, regardless of ease or scope, are not security bugs."
So, Vista is silently exposes root privileges on a system that has the appearance of security, but IL's are not security boundaries.. Sudo? Linux has very clear, well-defined security boundaries. Sudo selectively and transparently elevates privilege.
That is, unless you wish to continue pretending. Saying otherwise won't make it different.
BTW, I'd like to uninstall UAC. Where's the Control Panel button to get rid of it? Where's the config file to change it's behavior?
Slashdot Mirror
Many reading these comments will end up being members of a loosely defined group that sees this kind of thing as, among other things, a huge waste of legislative time.
The problem with most of this Right-Thinking Fellows Club is that it is a similar kind of thinking/acting as the freaks that wasted their time on the legislation and (no doubt) political pressure being applied in the University.
Did you see what I did there by name-calling?
I don't know how, but somehow their crazy world view needs to be redirected so they stop wasting everyone's time. A giant screen TV in every home and *severe* economic stress doesn't seem to be refocusing them at all.
By studying successful people without some external reference, one is able to pick and choose traits as one pleases to define success.
In the business world, I would argue access to capital and no compassion, regard for others, and absence of a sense of guilt are the best indicators. See this vague definition of sociopathy http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.html
In the entertainment world there are **LOTS** of musicians putting in this hypothetical 10,000 hours. Practice/performing only takes one so far. Most of this mythic "10,000 hour club" end up as music teachers.
Bottom line: grouping "successful people" is a values-driven specifically unscientific exercise.
here are bozos out there willing to commit paying customers and their websites to an endless, costly, non-standard nightmare in exchange for nothing!
That's not exactly true. Microsoft clearly pays for the privilege of locking out their competitors. As an example, they landed the deal with the IOC to broadcast streams from the Bejing Olympics. And yet the rumor was that Yahoo! had more Olympics-related visitors.
Common sense would suggest the IOC would re-think it, but Microsoft will probably continue to pay dearly just to *associate* Silverlight with the Olympics and lock-out their competitors.
I noticed you casually disregard the fact that a 2008 license for my employer is ridiculously expensive. We don't use retail crack-pipe licenses.
Here we go with more hyperbole... .NET integration, for instance, is killer for shops that use .NET.
We've got .net apps runnning no one in there right mind would rewrite for an upgrade.
The ability to completely maintain IIS via config files is an even better feature.
OK, maybe but we've been getting along for years without it.
A whole new host of command line tools are also new, not to mention Powershell support.
Casually ignoring Microsoft's destructive tendency to launch something then not support it doesn't help your case. How many of these "new" toys will be actively developed going forward? Batch files anyone? Perl and Python are more than enough glue that work across *many* operating systems, widely supported, huge base of libraries.
I agree with the parent. I work in an MS shop running 2003 enterprise for our applications. We evaluated 2008 and found the following:
1. Very little new anything with clustering. By all appearances, I'm still completely hosed in some failure scenarios.
2. It looks like most of the 2008 'features' are meant to enhance the same old hostility to mixed Microsoft environments. Same old crack-dealer scheming and continuing small-business customer contempt.
3. IIS GUI has changed, but feature-wise it looks about the same. How long will this new scripting thing last before it's .Netified or abandoned? It's not a glue-like solution at all.
License fees have risen to astronomical levels for the Enterprise license we would, in theory, purchase. Management would look ridiculous even mentioning the numbers. Contrast this with hardware purchases that are quite easy to justify even in these times.
Management is *very* open to platform alternatives as a result of Microsoft's perceived reskinnng 2003 and calling it new.
This is a good distro for netbooks. Easy Peasy has gone to some effort to create a desktop that accomodates such a small monitor.
Reasoning like this is weak and has nothing to do with the actual argument of who produces the best engineers.
Having worked for and with Eastern European/Formerly Soviet satellite State people, the story goes that Education was thought to be the Great Way Forward for their society. The result was a society with many more legitimately educated people with few opportunities.
I generally agree with this notion as the ones I have met that migrated to the U.S. are pretty damn smart. Furthermore, some of the best OCR software I've *ever* seen is out of a Russian software company. Abbyy.com
Anecdotal evidence to be sure.
The point being, let's get the discussion back on track by modding down political history comments filled with American propaganda.
And what would be the alternative to privatization? Let some government agency do the transaction processing and personal data warehousing. Like, let's say, the NSA?
That would be against the law. Which is why letting a commercial entity do the work of collecting/processing and then working with the collected data is perfectly legal and standard operating procedure.
Parent post is *exactly* right. The strategy described is excellent business practice for everyone in IT. If you are so valuable to a company, then make them pay cash, today.
**EVERY** other kind of offer usually has some kind of timing scheme behind it. The offer made to the author of the article is a timing scheme and nothing else.
What do I mean by "timing scheme?" Equity offers like the article mentions exploit the notion that these equity stakes will somehow make an individual rich at some future date. The officers know that that future date will never come. If the day actually ever came whereby there was a payout, it would be pennies or less of the original discussed offer.
Today's lesson: Make money. Get paid. Today, not tomorrow.
Recent processors have very nice virtual machine support. KVM and qemu are great. From there on out it's clonezilla to the rescue.
You've got XP licenses, why not use them until the organization can migrate off windows and onto Linux? KVM will certainly get you there or even let you run your old app inside a vm. I did this for a guy that still uses a dos-based Real Estate application. He was stunned and supremely thankful.
Get involved in local politics. It is the best cure for your distaste for politicians. After that:
1. Change at the executive level is slow no matter what. An aircraft carrier doing a U-turn is nimble in comparison. 4 years is very, very little time to affect much change.
2. The notion that this administration will act more lawfully than the last is a matter of interpretation. Bush #43 acted lawfully. They started with the notion that the Office of President has unlimited powers, so everything they did was "within the law." Every administration has their own interpretation of "lawful." Don't pin your vague notions of lawfulness on the current administration. It will only lead to disappointment.
It will only be a matter of time before any group wanting to discredit the current Administration finds an issue that will provoke outrage and foster disaffection. You would do well to keep that in mind.
This has been a likely scenario for quite a long time. The transactional data cooperation most likely predates Bush #43. It is the simplest reason for the decades of wanton privatization of transaction processing and personal data warehousing.
The collective shrug of the shoulders in Congress should surprise no one. Most of all, it should come as no surprise to anyone hanging around slashdot.
The notion that your daily life is somehow private should have died about 15 years ago.
It deserves praise and support previously reserved for deities. I'm only overstating this a little.
The benefits of CoreBoot are many:
1. Cheaper motherboard manufacturing. TPM chips are expensive components when mass producing motherboards.
2. CoreBoot gives hardware manufacturers a viable market that Microsoft and Apple cannot touch.
3. Keeps the hardware open for all operating sytems and devices. This simple fact cannot be stressed enough. As the world slowly migrates to 64-bit everything. Microsoft has locked hobby driver developers out of Vista in 64-bit land.
TPM BIOS modules have the capacity to lock out unapproved operating systems, devices, etc. Are they widely implemented? No. Is it possible to the point of being well documented? Yes.
To appear on ~1M mobile phone bills.
Sales is the issue. The adverts do little without Sales closing deals.
Ubuntu needs enough sales capital to spend on the hookers and blow required to close large deals. If they start eating Microsoft's lunch, then there will be, most likely, a litigation carpet bombing by one or more of Microsoft's proxies.
What's Mark's next move though? Will he try to take it public? At some point, Ubuntu will "jump the shark." Thank Dog for Debian.
Parent post is exactly right.
I'll add there is no media market for objective reviews. Please, don't mention consumer reports. That's a single, non-specific source.
Here's an idea that I wish would happen. Have a writer buy something off the shelf and then review it. The costs of which are shared by X number of people. For their contribution, they get to define what to write about in the review and get first dibs on the review content complete with Q&A. The Internet makes this possible, but no one really wants to do it.
InfoSec in nearly all corporate environments breaks down into a couple of basic facts.
1. Do just enough, at the lowest possible price to maintain compliance and then everyone does their best to ignore it because it's all messy overhead costs.
2. Have someone in IT to blame. This is especially true if your title has something to do with infosec.
1 and 2 are a special kind of evil circular logic where the exec blame-shifts to the IT guy for their "buggy" porn-riddled trojaned corporate laptop. In the exec's circle it is always IT's fault.
Switch to Mac? Nope, too expensive. Besides, no one else in corporate culture uses Macs. Linux? What?? Weird people use it, not self-important execs like me. What do you mean there's no IE7? I can't possibly waste time on linkedin and facebook without IE7!!!
* Focus on widgets, while omitting to consider the importance of maintaining accountability.
This basically means having lots of things for admins to click on and make reports with. None of which actually improve security. IE7's "security" features and Microsoft's UAC are two good examples.
You, and the no-doubt +5 Insightful modding to follow will lead to crushed expectations.
1. This poor bloke doesn't stand a chance against the telco's lobbying. His years running VC are not comparable to years running government, defending attacks from the Telcos and Cable Co's.
2. Government changes very slowly. This is part of the human condition more than anything else. One guy, even with the temporary backing of an Administration doesn't have much to work with.
3. The political system we have will create a great deal of friction preventing it from changing. Telco's and cable co's will screw this guy out of a job if he runs too far afield of their goals to capture the media distribution market.
Don't be disappointed when it doesn't go well.
One of the primary reasons Vista has slow adoption has been the tiers and pricing.
Microsoft is a price maker. (look it up on wikipedia) They can charge whatever they want. Charge too much and some regulator/law enforcement authority will have to pretend to do something, eventually.
They don't have to charge too little because it's just throwing money away. No one else will capture the value, so it's their loss.
Discounts are a bad, bad thing. Like coupons, discount shoppers are your worst customers.
Hell sell it for 59.99 and they would move 100 million the first year. Everyone on Vista will move over, as would people holding out on XP.
They will get the XP customers eventually. They intentionally charge a little more (after adjusting for inflation) for each release to make up for the small number of customers they lose each release. Most of those charges the consumer can't quite calculate on their own because they get passed onto the reseller. Comparing a similarly spec'd Dell Linux/Windows machine is a good estimate. Last time I did it, a Vista machine was $240(USD) more.
The price maker lowers the volume of computers manufactured and sold and raises the prices we pay for all of the technology inside the average PC.
Bottom line: The customer getting screwed the most is the long-time Microsoft customer. The rest of us are getting screwed anyway.
Post is exactly right. The ASICs are already out there and in use by pretty much everyone for their COTS routers.
When one gets into the carrier-scale equipment I don't have a clue how that stuff goes. But I've seen enough low-end ( $10,000) routers taken apart to know that AC's comments are accurate.
Seriously. Wherever this way of thinking came from, you should stop it now.
How do I tell if any of my projects while attending classes will be co-opted by my professors or the university itself and taken away from me?
Do the same boring stuff and get an A. With all of your spare time go out (as in outside, to a new place) with friends new and old, meet and date as many girls as possible.
Oh, and finally, the Next Big Thing is usually built on top of a waste heap of NextBigThing business failures and copycats the size of a small mountain anyway.
Work on something ordinary and boring, make it extraordinary then maintain it as a GPL project. The old way of "wood shedding" just doesn't work out in the U.S. If it is by extraordinary chance a novel idea it'll be copied in 1/5 the time somewhere else in the world and/or litigated into oblivion.
Vonage is a good example of what happens to a good idea in the U.S. these days. They had a boring idea, "cheap phone service" and made it good enough. They were then patent litigated into oblivion by the telcos ridiculously vague and not-unique telco patents.
Imagine instead a decentralized (bittorrent-like) VOIP network of Free components with your name at the head of the project. It's a great calling card and the telco's can't possibly keep the genie in the bottle with that model.
Blah. Too many words, too many ideas. Get a life first.
Specifically, layoffs are being used as a way of culling the bottom 10 or 20% of performers in order to improve the overall performance of the company.
Haha. If only that were true.
First to go is the bottom 10-20% wage-earners. What's left are a few people who work, and the vast unwashed masses of people who pass their work onto others, look busy, blame others for failures and take credit for the slightest whiff of success of something nearby.
Bottom line: way more aggressive workplace politics, less productivity.
This is the human condition and Microsoft's organization is not immune to it.
The summary is full of *very* misplaced expectations regarding wireless service.
A. There was never an expectation that the service would ever be plain old telephone service (POTS) quality. Thinking otherwise just sets you up for disappointment. Telco's pretty much hate POTS because it was designed and regulated to be extremely reliable. Get a POTS line and move on.
B. ATT doesn't care if individuals go without service. A few hundred thousand users having downtime for hours is nothing because it can be blamed on an "act of God." They care if they have to go before their regulators because that costs campaign contributions.
C. I have a bank of dial-up modems as the very last line of defense in our NOC for just this reason. We deal with messages, so it would work in a bad situation. Not ideal, but I'll take it and our customer's PHB's are generally pleased we think that carefully.
POTS is good. Long live POTS.
This is obviously true, and not just for Vista - it applies equally to Linux, OS X, and pretty much any other OS out there.
Huh? No. Insisting otherwise is just pretending. UAC seems like a faith-based thing for you.
"Vista makes tradeoffs between security and convenience, and both UAC and Protected Mode IE have design choices that required paths to be opened in the IL wall for application compatibility and ease of use,"
Sudo? No such thing. Unless of course you want to continue to pretend sudo does these things.
Because the boundaries defined by UAC and Protected Mode IE are designed to be porous, they can't really be considered security barriers, he said. "Neither UAC elevations nor Protected Mode IE define new Windows security boundaries," Russinovich wrote. "Because elevations and ILs donâ(TM)t define a security boundary, potential avenues of attack, regardless of ease or scope, are not security bugs."
So, Vista is silently exposes root privileges on a system that has the appearance of security, but IL's are not security boundaries.. Sudo? Linux has very clear, well-defined security boundaries. Sudo selectively and transparently elevates privilege.
That is, unless you wish to continue pretending. Saying otherwise won't make it different.
BTW, I'd like to uninstall UAC. Where's the Control Panel button to get rid of it? Where's the config file to change it's behavior?